Tuesday, December 29, 2009

I´m in Cuba, can anyone hear me?

The internet apparently does not further the cause of socialism. Hard to come by. Talk more when we get home. Aye Carumba!

Cerveza bueno, as are daquiri, mojitos and ChaCheChera, the sun is hot, the sea is calm, the system is broken, and we are happy.

See you back in capitalist land.

Chao.

Tig´n´pat

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Cuba -bound

Hola amigos. Been a while since I rapped at you.

Tig and Pat are finally back on the road. After an eventful year, two job changes, a couple of trips to the Kootenays, two trips to Vegas (I'd of blogged them..but you know the saying, what happens in Vegas...), and now we are finally off for vacation again.

The plan is to fly our Christmas Eve to Havana, travel around Cuba staying in casa particulares and eating at paladares until we get through to 2010, then 7 days at an all-inclusive beach resort. Should be a whirlwind.

I have no idea if this trip will be bloggable, I have no idea what the quality/quantity of internet connectedness is in Cuba, but I'll put in the effort.

Stay tuned.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

on the subject of Markets.

Since we have returned, many people have come to us and asked about the shopping. Bear in mind that Tig and I are reluctant shoppers at the best of time, avoiding it at any cost. Few things cause me less pleasure than time spent in a Mall, except maybe time spent in a grocery store. However, apparently there is a segment of the population who see "shopping" as leisure activity, and seek to include this leisure activity in their vacation plans. This sounds like dentistry tourism to me, but to each their own. Seeing how we were in Bangkok (a noted shopping destination, I am told) and spent four days on an island made a tax haven to specifically encourage this type of leisure activity... I guess it is a fair question.
First with the familiar. There is a funny mix of "Western" retailers in Thailand. Curiously, 7-11 stores are ubiquitous. Every neighbourhood and small town was apparently build around an orange, green, &blue striped and phosphorescently-lit anchor with great hours, exorbitant prices, and unmotivated employees. Slurpees uber alles.
There is a general lack of McDonalds, enough that it was notable when we saw one. But the marketing force of McDonalds is obviously respected:


Although it was common in Thailand, I was not prepared for the total market saturation enjoyed by Colonel in Malaysia. Malays are rarely outside of the reach of his benevolent gaze:


And of course, Southeast Asians, like the rest of the world's free citizens, are never far away from a frosty can of the Universal Solvent:


The worst ravages of Big Box retailing do not appear to have yet mortally injured the mom-and-pop operation in Thailand. There are some multi-acre stores out around the edge of major towns ("Big C", a division of the French company Groupe Casino and "Tesco", a division of the British Tesco Lotus), but the Big W isn't here yet. The dominant form of retail we observed were small, street-side (or commonly middle-of-the-street) family-run, businesses.
And Amway.


Which brings us the the subject of Public Markets. We visited many of them. Remember, "modern" Malaysia was founded as a European stronghold to control trade through the Straits of Malacca, which for you Geographically-challenged, is the shortest water route linking China and the Spice Islands to India, the Arabic world, and Europe beyond. Thailand's old capital of Chiang Mai was just a river crossing on a broad, fertile plain on the Mongol trade routes between the Ganges and China. In several cities on our travels, there were markets that had been there for several hundred years, at times more than a millennium!



What does a thousand years of tradition have on 60 years of post-war invisible hand and globalization? Not much apparently. In Bangkok we visited the sidewalk stalls lining miles of the Sukhumvit and the Chatuchack market; in Chiang Mai we toured the Night Bazaar in the Islamic section and the food market near the Chinese Gate; in Malayisa we saw the Tax Haven of Kuah on Langkawi, and the gargantuan yet claustrophobic Chinatown market in Kuala Lumpur. In the end, they were all depressingly the same.



Anything unique or interesting that may have existed in any of them has been replaced by endless rows of baseball caps emblazoned with Harley Davidson and Callaway Golf logos, Nike Swooshes, handbags, watches and belts carrying the names of an unlikely array of European designers, and several orders of magnitude more Ray Ban sunglasses than Ray Ban has ever produced. I can't help but feel something has been lost in this.



Which raised the question of why? Who the hell is buying all these fake Gucci handbags? Surely they cannot all be sold. Have all these merchants invested their live savings into crappy knock-off consumer goods? Is there some sort of second-level MLM scam going on? Is this like SPAM, where the only money being made is the people making the handbags and selling them to these stall merchants under promise of unlikely profit (considering there are another 47 booths within a hundred-foot radius selling the same crappy knock-offs)? Is this what the race to the bottom looks like? In this environment Amway starts to look pretty good.
Any fans of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy will recognize this as harbinger of the "Shoe Event Horizon" - The point every society reaches where the production of completely useless products (i.e: stiletto heels, "Texas Kicks Ass" belt buckles, Chevrolets) becomes so profitable, that is becomes economically impossible for any responsible corporation to to produce anything useful (i.e: penicillin, affordable housing, food).
Still, Tig picked up a nice pair of "Ray Ban"s.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Back home safe and sound

Got home to a very snowy Vancouver. What the hell has been going on around here? I had to shovel my walk and driveway!?

I will post more over the next couple of weeks, as there are many parts of the trip I didn’t have time or energy to write about while they were happening, so check back.

By the way, anyone can comment, you don’t have to sign up or put your name in the BigBrother---uh mean Google--- database, just hit the “anonymous” button on the bottom of the comment form, fill in some random nickname, and Bob’s yer Uncle.

Monday, January 12, 2009

And what a night is was...

We were staying at a boutique hotel out by the Airport, a good 30km from town, so we took a taxi to the closest station, SkyTrain to the waterfront, and a commuter boat up the river to the Kho San area.

On the way we ran into a Canadian couple we had met on the ferry to Ko Jum. We were on completely different routes, but our paths crossed twice, 3 weeks apart.

Anyway, Koh San is tourist central, and we kind of avoided it last time we were in town. After a couple of cocktails at some faux-Irish bar, we waded through the backpackers and drunk Aussies, past the Americans (so this is where they all were!), and noted a Mexican food restaurant with a familiar owner.

Guy is a guy who Tig and I know from our SFU days. Although he was in Business and he was quite younger than us, we met because he was a relative of a good friend (He reminded me last night that the first time he ever got drunk was at a kegger at my house, yikes!). We knew he was in Thailand, but through confusion or miscommunication, we thought he was in Phuket. Surprised to see him we were. Guy is running a restaurant with his Thai girlfriend, and after handing the store keys off to his staff, they took us for a tour of some seedier parts of Bangkok.

Aye Carumba. It was all going OK until the lady-boy introduced hermself by giving my testicles a friendly handshake. Not in Kansas anymore.

We got a cab home shortly after, about 3 hours before our wakeup call. Very hungover flight home. We are currently in Narita airport in Tokyo, where the toilets have more buttons than the Apollo moon capsule. Be home soon.

One night in Bangkok

5:40 pm. Soi 5, Sukhumvit, Bangkok.

We have to catch a plane home in 25 hours, and we have to burn through a few thousand Baht (hate to lose the value exchanging it back). I am currently blogginmg from a bar.

See you all soon.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

KL is Spectacular


Petronas towers, dusk.

Kuala Lumpur is turning out to be a great city.


View from out hotel, later at night.

We have been through Little India, through Chinatown, out to the suburbs to see a Hindu temple built into Karst caves, into bars full of Ex-Pats, up the second-tallist building on earth and the fourth-tallest tower in the world (both with big views), past colonial buildings and mosques, on transit buses, on Monorails, walking, eaten Chinese, Malay, and Thai food: we have seen as much of this city as we could in two days. Tig wants to move here.


A cloudy day around the Petronas Towers.


for all my bike-geek friends, check out the rod-actuated brakes on this beauty

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Kuala Lumpur

Lots to do here, no time to blog. Minor flash-card-related issues may also cost us some pictures.

Went to an aviary, went up the Petronas Towers, walked amongst incredible architecture, ate spicy food, drank Tiger Draft, risked hyperthermia...

We both love this city.

All is well. Three days before we are home. Not counting the International Date Line one.

Friday, January 9, 2009

To Kuala Lumpur

Todays travel itinerary:

Taxi: Actual car this time. Get to the bus station Early enough for a coffee... Wait, Starbucks opens at 10:00am!?! how do these people get up in the morning?

Bus: we splurged and spent the extra $5 for "VIP" seats during this 5-hour ride. Ride featured a drive across "one of the longest bridges in the world", ends up it is ranked 29th. That's like saying Canada is "one of the best Soccer playing countries in the world".


Pat. rolling it, VIP style. I wanted to take the seat home with me. The colour matches my eyes...no?

Light Rail: Like Skytrain, but 40 cents.
Monorail: also 40 cents, but it was a monorail!
All that to get us deeply immersed in Kuala Lumpur.

First impressions of KL: forget what I said about Georgetown, THIS is a city. Lots going on.

More Georgetown

We spent a lot of time doing walking tours and wandering through Little India (amplified Bangra music, air thick with cardamom) ...


...and China town (less music, more people, food stalls on the street). Immersion.



mmm... tastes like Gastroenteritis...


Our accommodation are in the converted mansion of a former rubber trader, about 100 years old, but apparently the climate is tough on human structures...
it has seen better days, and we are pretty sure we were the only guests. The disco next door managed to keep Tig awake for two nights. So that was fun.


Overall, the range of architecture in Georgetown, pan-asian and western, colonial and art-deco and modern, from gleaming to completely decrepit, all pressed cheek-to-jowl together, was remarkable.














Thursday, January 8, 2009

Georgetown

It's a real city alright.


We spent a day flirting with hyperthermia and wandering by foot around the old part of town (now a UNESCO heritage site). The natural place to start was the original fort, built in the late 1700's by a Brit, with the noble goal of opening up the Straits of Malacca area to trade. None of this explains the presence of 12' thick brick walls festooned with very large cannons.


The walls and cannons now protect a very tidy little gift shop, enforcing the strict 3 ringgit per person entrance fee.

We stopped at the "Christian" cemetery. Graves from the 18th and 19th centuries suggest life was rather tougher in the Malaria Belt 200 years ago. Example: of the twelve nuns who arrived from Europe to set up the "Church of the Holy Infant Christ" around 1800, the vast majority got much closer to Jesus before their 40th birthdays, the last apparently turning tail back to France. I also noticed life had a different time scale back then:






(click the pictures to zoom in and read the inscriptions)

Although there is a Cathedral and an Anglican Church in town (colonials...all about the Jesus), there are many more Mosques, both modest:


...and Large


...along with Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Krisha, and Sikh temples. The restaurant we visited offered "Jane" food (If you don't know about them, look that shit up!). A real crossroads of Asia.

The most interesting temples, of course, were the Chinese clan temples, dedicated to, for lack of a better term, "self-worship". These seem obliquely related to a "Clan Deity", but in essence are a family-clan's opportunity to brag. they are the most ornate temples by far, with intricate bas-relief wood and rock carvings, and a lot of gold leaf.



One room is dedicated to the ancestral tablets, essentially telling the family history, one ancestor at a time. Another has panels extolling the academic virtues of clan members.



I will go on more about Georgetown later. In the meantime here is a picture of Tig defending the Straits of Malacca:

And one of her defending her good name:




Interesting note: the Malay word for "Water" is "Air". Potential marine-rescue-confusion implications aside, that's pretty cool. Still doesn't explain the "deep fried water" we saw on a strangely-translated menu once.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

on to Penang

We met some fun people last night in the best restaurant in Langkawi (based on out limited experience), the bartender and a couple of travellers were all Dutch, so we ended up staying out quite late, generally making fun of Germans and Americans. So our departure from Langkawi was a little slow today.


We spent most of yesterday getting all we could out of the beach out front of our hotel. Just another beach, but of course, there were also some spectacular Silurian turbidites (mostly Bouma bcd, some cd, not much for traces) with some really well expressed folds.


OK, from now on. No more Geology.

Our travels today included a shockingly small array of conveyances. A taxi and a passenger ferry. From the outside the ferry looked very smooth and sleek, and it was pretty fast.


From the inside, it was nothing short of a fiberglass tomb, with a paucity of impossible-to-access emergency exits and the water line distressing close to the sealed, plexiglass windows, waiting to take an entire load of passengers to the bottom of the Straits of Malacca at the slightest provocation...


Shiver me timbers!
...which brought us to Georgetown, on the island of Penang. This is a ~300 year old trading area, one of the first beachheads of western imperialism (or "opening of trade routes"). It has a funky mix of colonial buildings and uber-modern highrises. It is fun to be back in a real city again.


A couple of day here before heading to KL. (We already decided last week that Singapore was no longer in the plans, and it looks like KL will be as far south as were get before we fly back to Bangkok.) Yikes! thinking about home already!












Monday, January 5, 2009

Krabi - Redeux.

I hate to skip back too far, but Krabi was great, and is worth another mention. It might be my favorite place in Thailand. It is a fun town on an estuarine river shore, with a great vibe. The city is on one bank of the river, and mangrove swamps dominate the other. Lots more muslem influence here that further north (but not as much as we are noticing now that we have moved further south).


view from our hotel in Krabi.

We did a day trip up to a Wat (Buddist Temple) on a hill. The access was via 1267 steps, leading to the highest buddah we have seen yet.


Buddah at about 1200 feet
It was quite the climb. don't think "grand staircase", it was more like a concrete-on-limestone "Grouse Grind" (Hi Jenny!). A distessing number of the steps were higher than they were long, meaning the slope was generally greater than 100%. Tig was hammering up them, full-on workout style, as is typical.



The view from the top was...Thailand.


Langkawi - Geopark

As I said, Pulau Lankawi is home to a UNESCO "Geopark", actually three separate park areas totalling over 500 sq.km. One features lower Paleozoic clastics (mostly Sandstone, mid-Cambrian lacustrines through upper Cambrian marginal marine and marine rocks); one featuring Silurian-Devonian limestones, capped with galcial marine deposits (Gondwanaland ice cap!?!); and the third with more Paleozoic seds and a bunch of Mesozoic granites. Cool.

We visited the Cambrian stuff yesterday (may as well start at the beginning... or only 4 billion years after the beginning, depends on how you look at it). We rode a cable car up a 600m mountain of Cambrian sandstones, only to see the ripple marks at the top.



The little intoerpretive centre had a small but remarkable collection: when is the last time you saw Arenicolites and Condrities in a museum, and labelled as such?


The view from the top ws also notable.




Then we were of to a pretty nice beach:


but the best part of the beach was that it was surrounded by more Cambrian clastics, with ripples and loading structures (pillows, flames) preserved, and some familiar honeycomb weathering.



Today, we went to another beach. Less cool geology around (karst everywhere...), but it was hard to complain, as the sun was out and, well, look at this beach!


do I have to come home?