Category: Travels for Fun
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THE WATER DOES THE WORK
Selangor – 24 March 1978 We went out in the university bus, eighteen of us, on a day the programme had billed as a look at Malaysia’s oldest industry. It turned out to be three stops that told a single story backwards: a working tin mine, the Sultan’s palace, and a pewter factory. We started in the mud. What I remember first is the sound. Not machinery, exactly – a hiss, steady and enormous, like standing beside a waterfall that never varied. It came from the monitors: iron nozzles bolted to…
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BEFORE THE SUN
Kota Bahru – March 1978 Kelantan sits in the far northeastern corner of the Malay peninsula, up against the Thai border, with the mountain spine of the country between it and everywhere else. I left on a bus from Kuala Lumpur at half past six in the morning and arrived in Kota Bahru twelve hours later. The crossing felt like passing through a membrane. The west coast was tin and rubber and Chinese shophouse towns. Kelantan in the east was rice fields and fishing boats and kampongs, over ninety per cent…
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THE JOURNEY TO THE (ALMOST) ANTIPODE
If you started digging a hole in the middle of the Capitol Rotunda in Madison, Wisconsin and passed straight through the centre of the Earth, you’d come out in a patch of open water in the southern Indian Ocean. There’s no land there at all. The nearest is a pair of French specks, Île Saint-Paul and Île Amsterdam, home to little more than a research station. But if you went looking for the furthest place from Madison where people actually live, you’d have to shift your hole angle slightly to come…
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THE STOPPING PLACE
Kuala Besut and Pulau Perhentian – February 1978 I lay on the floor of Jaafar’s house with a map of Malaysia spread out in front of me, and let my eye wander north. Jaafar took in travellers at his home, half a kilometre back in the jungle behind the fishing village of Beserah – no electricity, no plumbing, a big room and a row of mattresses – and the days there had a way of dissolving into nothing much at all. That was the point of the place. But a map…
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THREE EMPIRES, ONE AFTERNOON
Malacca, Malaysia – 17 February 1978 Malacca felt like a different country. Kuala Lumpur was concrete and traffic and the muezzin’s call; Malacca was crumbling laterite and Dutch gravestones going soft in the rain. I found St Paul’s first – walls without a roof, the sea showing clean through empty window frames where glass had never been replaced. Inside, Dutch tombstones lay flat against the walls, their lettering worn but legible if you crouched close: Dutch names, Dutch dates, a life and a death recorded three centuries before mine in a…
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THE YEAR OF THE HORSE
Kuantan and Beserah – 3–8 February 1978 The yellow book did it. Tony Wheeler’s South-East Asia on a Shoestring – the traveller’s bible, already dog-eared and coming apart at the spine – beckoned me to the east coast, away from the ordered calm of the Universiti of Malaya campus in Kuala Lumpur and toward what I was convinced was the real Malaysia. Ten days of Chinese New Year holiday stretched ahead of me. It was the Year of the Earth Horse; the New Year fell on the seventh of February. I…
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TARZAN NEVER MADE IT TO THIS JUNGLE. BUT I DID.
My earliest perception of a jungle came from the old Tarzan movies – Johnny Weissmuller re-runs, then all the other bare-chested muscular guys who followed on the big screen and television. I gathered that jungles were full of swinging vines, chimps and elephants. I didn’t know at the time that those “jungles” were mostly Hollywood sets. So I found myself in genuinely unfamiliar territory when I explored my first real jungle – a tropical rainforest in Malaysia in 1978. The real jungle looked a whole lot more chaotic than the ones…
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THE SAFARI LESS TAKEN
My neighbour from Aleppo, Syria and mate for 35 years, Scott Christiansen, and I were in Tanzania last month for a consultancy. It was a Sunday, and we had Bambara groundnut and sweetpotato leaves growing out of our ears. So we decided to get out of Dodge. When in Tanzania the thing to do is to go on a safari. But the Swahili word ‘safari’ simply means going on a journey. Scott and I decided to take a safari in Tanzania … but just not the type you’re thinking of. I’m…
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KARIJINI
If you’re a redophile then I’ve got just the place for you. Head to the Pilbara region of in the north central part of Western Australia. Iron ore country. The landscape glows with deep reds and earthy ochres. Iron deposits layered over 2.5 billion years. The red ancient banded iron formations are among the oldest rocks on Earth. The red of the Pilbara isn’t just pretty to look at. It’s pretty to cash in at the bank. The Pilbara is a global powerhouse in iron ore production. Pilbara mines export nearly…
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