overlap

I've learned a few things on my recent travels, and there's now two
different flickr streams showing stuff from the two parts of the trip.
One flickr account you may already know, and one I've just set up in
the last few days - ask if you need directions.

One thing I learned was that a better class of accommodation or
transport does not necessarily guarantee a better class of punter -
I'm thinking of the guy flying business class who went a long way out
of his way to complain about his crackers not coming with a postage
stamp sized piece of cheese. To the point of telling the poor air
steward guy he was 'really not happy about this' on his third go.
Blimey but life's too short, and I bet the guy working on the plane
doesn't get paid enough to put up with much of that sort of nonsense
either.

Something else that seems to be inescapable fact is that some people
will never be happy wherever they are. And as with the guy on the
plane, some fabulous surroundings are wasted on some people who are
determined that everything is a problem that requires being
extraordinarily pissy with people.

Another thing I learned is not to be too trusting of people who say
they are going to do something if you can't stand there and watch them
do it. There are gradual signs of progress from my insurer and the
airline on looking for and I hope eventually paying up for the
contents of my lost luggage, but it's certainly not going to get
sorted out overnight, and it's a bit of an inconvenience in the
meantime.

Despite the aggravation, I met some great people too and took a couple
of thousand photos of all sorts of things and places, so on balance I
had a pretty good time. And I'd never seen a tarantula before either!

* Hey Jack Kerouac is a 10,000 Maniacs song. I have just been to Sarawak.

After some time out in the wilderness of no network access, it's good to have been able to have the first bath in maybe a month and slap on a little make up to even out the sun damage on my skin. Still four flights and a few thousand miles between here and home, but I'm already up to date on my email, and making a start on knocking together a few pictures from my trip. By the time I get home and unpacked and so forth, it'll be the middle of the week though, I reckon. In the meantime, here's what sunset over the South China Sea looked like this evening.

I guess it's no stranger than going for a Chinese or an Indian in
western europe, but coming this far round the globe to end up in a
restaurant called "Italianni's" still feels a little questionable.
Especially to the sound of "buona sera, I'm your waiter and my name is
Ken..."

Then again, I only ended up there on my way back from the local M&S to
see if they had any food, so who is the joke on now? It amused me
greatly to see the minimal amount of stock in M&S includes more than
one pair of pretty shoes that I have back home, and I think they were
made in Vietnam so they have travelled rather less far to get here
than me.

* a line from Mick Thomas' song The Cap Me Granda Wore, a song about
faux "Irish" pubs, and the paraphernalia of Irishry.

One week in, and nearly done with the work stuff, I've had a fairly
productive day. After minimal sleep, I was up through all the early
morning hours, had some laundry done, crucially bought some of the
food items I have really been missing, had a couple of hours sleep and
went on a three hour guided trip to see a whole load of stuff I would
not have seen by myself, nor understood. Here's hoping I can get a
whole night's sleep, because I damn well need it!

I know this is a long way from home, but the focus on security arrangements is also something else. You can't go inside anywhere - shops, office building, the hotel - without having your bag searched, which I guess is fair enough. Round every corner is another armed security guard, some with what look like shotguns hanging round their necks but I'm not planning on getting close enough to ask.

There's some sort of incongruity with that against the opulence of the hotel, where there's hot and cold running 'good morning, sir', 'have a great day sir', 'how are you today, sir?' everywhere you go. Just when you think you've run the gauntlet of the lobby staff, it's 'good morning sir' from the security guard in the car park, and then again from the security guard with the very serious dog. And then I end up in the lift with one of our transatlantic cousins who joins in and wishes them 'have a great day' back. This may be a certain kind of normal if you come to this sort of place anywhere, I don't know, but when I'm rather more used to the 'what-choo-lookin'-at' style of address, well it's a very noticeable difference.

Maybe it's a contrast, or maybe they actually belong together and I've just never considered it that way, but among all the security paranoia I can also see signs for Vuitton, Prada, Gucci and Vulgari [sic!] from my hotel window. In any case it doesn't feel like a natural combination to me.

The mix of utterly banjaxed body clock and the incentive to get the work done so I can get off to somewhere rather more interesting instead means I have so far seen very little beyond the hotel and the office, and the ten or thirty minute between the two - the variance is based on prevailing levels of heat and\or rain. I need to try to get a little further away, as time is short.

At the same time as my investment in this netbook is proving a great means of staying in touch, I've been wondering whether the easy online access to familiar places and people means I'm much less likely to be in touch with whatever's going on locally. By this time next week, I'll be in a different country again, with substantially reduced levels of luxury, and that may no longer be an issue as I am not going all the way out into tropical jungle to spend as many hours a day online as I normally do, and I'm not expecting that to be such a ready option there anyway.

This whole alien culture thing is quite something. My body clock is so far out of whack it's not true, and being in this hotel is a whole other world of bizarre. I'm really not accustomed to an environment where I can get half a dozen goes at 'how are you, have a great day!' in the twenty yards between the lift and the front door. Where a guest with a birthday gets six or eight staff approach their table in the restaurant, rattling a tambourine and singing 'happy birthday', and gets it more than once. Perhaps it's after every course, I don't know.

Leaving aside the obscene way that just four nights here more than covers my mortgage for a month, and the total cost of my trip will equate to eight or nine months' mortgage, and all because getting rid of my job will save a few quid. It does seem rather arse-backwards.

The wall of heat effect is noticeable, and it is easy to understand that the equator is not that far away. I know I live in a place where rain is common, but this is something else. I could see the torrential rain outside from the airport when I landed, but on roads where it seems all bets are off and flashing your headlights at anything and getting within inches of every other vehicle appears to be the norm, whole lanes inches deep in rainwater is beyond my experience!

I guess there's some kind of perverse pleasure in doing work at 5am because I have already been up a couple of hours, but today I am staying up in the hope I will be so knackered by this evening I can't help but sleep. Meanwhile I've established that the plane lost off Brazil is the same model I was flying on the day before. Which is reassuring!

* 'look at me here overseas' is from The Wonder Stuff song 'Ten Trenches Deep'