roganjosh

So I got myself an iPhone, which I’m bothering to mention on here not because I want to show off but because I’m using the wordpress iPhone app to write this post! The third party apps you can download are one of the best things about the phone actually, along with the fantastic touch screen and being able to check my email without having to wait five minutes for my laptop to boot up. Everything else is a bit of a mixed bag though. As a phone it’s very awkward, and far less usable than my old Sony. How come I can’t be reading a text message and then click on the person’s name to call them? And how come only some of the apps let you turn the phone sideways to use the larger keyboard? There’s a real lack of consistency with all the apps really, but maybe apple will start listening to their customers at some point and sort it all out.

The screen is great though, and I think the app I’m getting the most use from is the ebook reader. Now that the wordpress app actually let’s me connect to my blog though I’m hoping it’ll be a handy thing to have on my travels! Right then, let’s see if I can publish with this thing.

I came home from my travels a couple of months ago for my mate Joe’s wedding, which was a lot of fun! With quite a few other weddings coming up over the summer I decided the best thing to do since I was stuck in the country would be to get a job, and so I’m back at the bank - but in an unusual twist my first week of employment has been spent in Hong Kong attending a video conference being given by a guy in New York! I’ve really not got to see much of the place what with taking the metro to work and staying in the Marriot, but it seems like a good place to visit - Somewhere between being a dirtier version of Singapore and a cleaner version of Bangkok. It’s all storms and skycrapers today, and in a couple of hours I’ll be flying back to London again. Good times!

So my time in Thailand has been pretty elephant heavy so when I heard that there’s a giant, three headed, 250 ton elephant statue in Bangkok, inside of which there’s a Buddhist shrine I figured I had to go and check it out! The Erawan Museum was only completed a few years ago, and it doesn’t seem that that many tourists have heard about it yet. Plenty of Thais have though, partly because it’s a holy shrine, but also because of a rumour that a woman who prayed there won the lottery the next week! The statue itself is incredible - perched on top of a pagoda it’s 43 metres tall, and looms over the freeway next to it, all three heads saluting the traffic. If three heads seem somewhat excessive for an elephant it’s worth bearing in mind that this elephant is the vehicle for the Hindu god Indra, and is sometimes depicted with 33 heads! I think that would have been a bit fussy really, but the statue as it is seems reassuringly balanced as you gaze up at the enormous trunks hanging over you. To reach the shrine inside you walk up a spiral staircase in the right leg, or you could get the lift in the left. The shrine itself feels quite small compared to the size of the statue, but it’s still pretty cavernous. In the event of an emergency there’s a fire exit in the tail…

Apart from all my elephant adventures I’ve finally made it down to Bangkok after plenty of bus and train journeys. I decided to break the travelling up by going to visit the old ruined city of Sukhothai, which has a nice Indiana Jones feel to it as you walk around the temple walls and look at the Buddha statues. Handily they’ve put in plenty of paths too so it’s easy to cycle around. The most impressive sight there was another enormous statue, this time of a seated Buddha at Wat Si Chum. The statue’s hand was taller than me, and worshippers had mostly covered the fingers in gold leaf as an offering.

And so now here I am in Bangkok, which is typically hot and humid, getting ready to do some last minute shopping before I head back to snowy old England! You can look forward to me sticking several thousand pictures on a website sometime soon!

I had a great time in Chiang Mai, mainly because I ended up staying in a really fun hostel. Lots of trips were organised, lots of bottles of Singha were drunk! Anyway, life was starting to get a bit too comfortable, so after I’d extended my stay for third time I resolved to actually head off and go somewhere new. Browsing around a few websites it turned out that the King’s cup international elephant polo championship was due to start in Chiang Rai at the end of March, and it sounded sufficiently daft for me to want to check out!

As it turned out they didn’t mean the city of Chiang Rai, which would have been relatively easy to get to, but rather the region or Chiang Rai, and more specifically the Golden Triangle right up in the north on the border of Myanmar and Laos. This meant an early morning start to catch a rickety, and non-air-conditioned local bus for the 5 hour journey up to Chiang Saen. That got me to the closest town from which I took a cruise along the Mekong river the next morning (with a brief touristy stop in a Laos to send a few postcards) up to Sop Ruak, and the Golden Triangle. The triangle is the center of the former opium fields grown in the three countries, but production has fallen sharply in the last couple of decades reducing the only remnants of opium to the Opium House Museum. The exhibitions there stressed the cultural and historic uses of opium so much I was surprised you couldn’t buy any in the shop at the end! Maybe you could, if you asked the right person…

Anyway, from Sop Ruak I was just a confused walk, followed by a lift on a scooter away from the elephant polo, that was being held at the Anantara resort. The resort is incredibly plush, as you would expect from a hotel that is going to be housing some very posh polo players. One night at the Anantara would cost more than the amount I’ll spend on food and accodomodation in three weeks in Thailand! (I’m not including booze). I arrived in time for the opening parade and was greeted almost immediately by a marching band playing “The Final Countdown”! In front of them thai dancers and another band of drummers were stationed, and bringing up the rear were the elephants!

There were a lot of them, since in Elephant polo each elephant only plays one of the 7 minute chukas (of which there are two in each match). They were all provided by the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre, the charity that the event was supporting. Last year they raised enough money to supply them with an elephant ambulance (a truck) and after the parade down to the pitch all the dancers, bands and elephants lined up for the handover of the keys.

Now, I’d never seen elephant polo before and I have to admit in my head I was expecting it to be ridiculous. Elephants are huge, and putting guys on top of them with very long sticks and then having them all charge around trying to hit a tiny ball seemed absurd. The exhibition match that afternoon though was between two teams of the best players, all of them experienced horse polo players, and it was incredible to watch! The elephants were surprisingly nimble, and their mahouts had them spinning and charging around the pitch like football players! The polo guys were equally impressive, able to hit a polo ball with a two metre long stick dead-on from on top of a moving elephant! There were chips, lobs, huge strikes, shots from between elephants’ legs - it was end to end stuff! Those guys were the best though, and the next day I went back to see the first two matches of the actual championship. In the first match a team of novices were stuffed by the pros 14-4, and the 4 goals had been awarded to them at the start of the game to help out. With less experienced players elephant polo is indeed absurd, and becomes a bit more like elephant rugby, as the massive beasts form a scrum over the ball and the humans desperately wave their sticks around! The second game was much the same, but ended in a 1-1 draw. Even so it was excellent fun to stand on the banks of the Mekong, G&T in hand watching elephants charge around and enjoy themselves.

Yesterday I got to hang out with 30 elephants at the thai elephant nature park outside of Chiang Mai. All of the elephants have been rescued - some because they were too abused or injured to work in the logging or trekking industry anymore, some because they were orphaned. The stories of where the elephants have come from are pretty sad, but the park itself is fantastic and all the elephants seem to be happy to have the free run of their new home. Every day tourists and volunteers turn up to meet and feed the elephants, who are remarkably fussy eaters! You can hand a piece of pumpkin to one of them, who’ll curl their trunk around the food, chew it a little and then toss it aside to reach out for some delicious watermelon or cucumber!

The feeding was pretty hands (and trunks) on, but the highlight of the day was when we followed all of the elephants down to the river to wash them! We splashed in to where the elephants were lying down, threw buckets of water over them and then started scrubbing them down with brushes. After enjoying that for a while the elephants haul themselves out of the water and back up the banks to get good and dirty again in the mudbath! The mud keeps them cool though, and acts as a sunscreen for them. The younger elephants are just like enormous puppies, jumping on each other and barging their way around the pool. The elephants are so quiet when they’re walking, and we were so close to them, that if you concentrated too much on taking a photo you’d suddenly here someone saying “look out” and turn around to see a one ton elephant about to brush past your shoulder.

Seeing the elephants playing with each other and their mahouts was fantastic, and so much more fun than going on an elephant ride where your only interaction with the elephant is to be sitting on them. Most of the elephants have suffered some major trauma in one way or another, but it’s great that the park’s founder, Lek, has managed to find a place where they can enjoy life and they’re cared for. Visiting for a day was great but I think next time in Thailand I’ll be signing up for a week’s volunteer work! It’s hard to think of a better day out!

(Chang is thai for elephant)

I had so much fun in Bellingen that I’m now a year older than I was! I spent my birthday wandering around a rainforest, which was a novel celebration, and the rest of the time just swinging around in a hammock or floating down Bellingen river on an inner tube. It was nice to get out of the city for a bit, and see some countryside - and there was plenty of it on the 8 hour trip north!

Took the overnight train back down to Sydney and I’ve been betraying my backpacker credentials by staying in a posh hotel on Coogee beach. The beach is lovely - much smaller then Bondi and much more laid back. Nice to get up in the morning, shuffle down to the sea and go for a swim in the rock pool before breakfast. The beach side living has got to be the reason so many people love living in Sydney - I think they built the harbour bridge and the opera house just to keep the tourists off the coast.

Speaking of the opera house I went to a performance of Verdi’s “A Masked Ball”, mainly just so I could get a good look around inside. Of course you can do that if you just go on a tour of the building, but I figure if they went to the trouble of building an opera house then it must be worth seeing some opera inside it! Trouble is, opera is, well… silly! People throwing their arms around and melodramatically glowering at each other while tra-la-la-ing their hearts out. This opera seemed particularly daft, with a plot against the King, a fortune teller, the King’s best friend’s wife trying to find a herb that will make her forget her love for the King. It all ended with some stabbing though, which was VERY DRAMATIC, and the music was good. Being inside the opera house is pretty cool too, sat up high looking down you get the feeling that you’re inside a shell. Why the people sat next to me felt the need to send text messages during the performance is beyond me though! These seats weren’t cheap!!

So that’s pretty much that for Australia - I’m heading for the airport this afternoon, then a flight to Bangkok, a night in an airport hotel, and another flight in the morning to Chiang Mai! I really should pay more attention when I’m booking these things.

So it turns out that they’ve built an airport and resort near to Uluru now, so there was no real need for me to fly to Alice Springs and then travel on a bus for four hours there and four hours back, but I actually enjoyed visiting Alice so everything worked out. It’s a strange town, properly in the middle of nowhere, populated by aboriginals, australians and tourists, none of whom seem to notice the existence of the others. It’s like three different ghost towns laid on top of each other. The atmosphere was a bit edgy on the whole, but I had a pleasant evening there when I arrived, and saw a beautiful sunset from Anzac hill.

The next day I was up at 5am to meet my tour bus for the epic drive out to Uluru. It’s well worth the trip! The rock is just awesome. This enormous boulder just erupts out of the surrounding, flat landscape; so smooth that you’d think it was a sculpture. It curves and flows like it’s melting in the heat, but it is just enormous - and old. At sunset it changes from a brilliant orange to a greyish purple, and standing around watching it do this while drinking champagne was very pleasant!

So after my brief visit it was back on a plane to Sydney, which I can’t quite get a handle on. It’s a beautiful city, the weather is fantastic and everyone is laid back, but I’m not entirely sure what there is to do here when you’re just visiting. It has shops, and art galleries and all that, not to mention the bridge and the opera house, but I’ve seen them before! I have been having fun though. Spent yesterday exploring the graffitied walls of Newtown, followed by a visit to the Sydney Dr Sketchy’s, and today I went to the Archibald prize at the art gallery of New South Wales. The Archibald is the national portrait prize of Australia and on Wednesdays the art gallery is open late, and it’s always nice to see the mixed crowd of art lovers that the offer of late night opening and a bar draws out.

Tomorrow I’m off to the countryside up north for a bit, to a place called Bellingen. Hopefully there are some adventures to be had up that way! see ya.

I’ve been kicking around in Perth for a little over a week now, did some snorkelling on Rottnest island, had a few barbeques, celebrated some birthdays. Yesterday I went down to Cottesloe beach to take a look at some sculptures by the sea - a yearly art exhibition of statues set up in and around the sand. Wandering around appreciating art while schoolkids learn to surf and people laze around in swimming costumes is much more fun than being inside the white walls of a gallery somewhere. Some of the sculptures were amazing, and my favourite was maybe a line of tall thin mirrors set up in front of the sea, and offset slightly so that standing in front of them you couldn’t see your reflection, but as you walked away you might catch a glimpse of yourself. As with most works of art the fun was in watching other people’s reactions to it, as they tried to sneak up on themselves. It confused the hell out of the seagulls too, who would attack and then cower from their mirror image.

If you stand still for too long though you might never start moving again, so today I’m going to be flying in to Alice Springs for two nights. Just enough time for a day trip out to Uluru before jumping back onto a plane and flying to Sydney! So, I’ll see you on the other side…

A lot of people say about London that, although it seems to be this sprawling metropolis, once you get to know the place it’s really just a load of little villages that have all squashed together. Camden is distinct from Spitalfields which is a world away from Clapham or Stratford. The same is true of Tokyo, except that in Tokyo’s case each of the little villages that make up the city is itself a vast urban world of skyscrapers and neon that makes London look pokey and quaint in comparison. And while, like London, the Tokyo metro shuts down at midnight the city itself really does never sleep. I’ve walked around Holborn at 11 o’clock of an evening and not managed to find a place where you could get a drink. In Tokyo the bars wouldn’t think about closing till 5, and even then it’s just a polite request that maybe, once you’ve finished your drink, you might like to move on to the next place.

Also like London, and countless other cities around the world now, Tokyo has a Dr Sketchy’s night, a life drawing class in a bar featuring burlesque models! Drawing clothes is always tricky when you’re more used to classic life drawing, but luckily the models tend not to wear too much. I’ve been to a couple of the classes in London which are on a Sunday afternoon, when most of the people involved are hungover, but the session in Tokyo took place on a Tuesday evening in Shibuya - in fact my last evening in the city, which was lucky because it should have been held on the Wednesday, but the venue was booked up. There was plenty of drinking, drawing and chatting and it’s the most sociable art class you could ever go to! I even won a prize for one of my drawings, but since the prize was two shots of tomato juice, tequila and tobasco I would have been happy for my good fortune to have been shared. Still, you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and it was a top evening out! I recommend The Pink Cow in Shibuya to any future travellers.

So what else did I get up to in Tokyo? I met up with my Fijian-wife Annette (When I was in Fiji it ended up that we were the only two people staying in the dorm accomodation, so everyone assumed we were together on honeymoon) who now lives in Sendai, but pops down to the big city when she can. We drank the night away in Yokohama and checked out all the love hotels in Shibuya looking for the ones with Hello Kitty themed rooms (We didn’t find any!). I laughed at the girls in Harijuku, all dressed up as punks or nurses or goths and posing for photographs with tourists. I found Godzilla!*. I saw Mount Fuji from the Fuji building in Odaibo - That mountain is huge! It just looms over the city on a clear day, even though it’s maybe 100 kms away. I even managed to go to the Studio Ghibli museum before leaving Japan, which was a little bit disappointing, but probably amazing if you’re a kid. The bulding was very cool at least, lots of bridges, spiral staircases and child sized doorways. Apart from that I was mostly just wandering around, eating great food, gawping at stuff. The usual activities!

So I flew to Australia the other day, and it was a full fifteen minutes from leaving the airport before I head Men At Work’s “Land Down Under”, so I guess my plane must have landed early. I flew Qantas which was okay, but I had to ask for a beer three times before they remembered to bring me one, and then it was a Fosters! Is this really the spirit of Australia?! Anyway, I’m here at my cousin Tom’s getting used to the heat (it was 37 degrees the other day) and trying to work out what I’m going to do next! I’ll let you know how I get on.

* The small statue of Godzilla that is, which for some reason no-one ever reveals the precise location of when they describe it. I think the search is an integral part of it, so suffice to say it’s in Ginza, near Hibiya park, next to some people having a cigarette break

So, in my rush to describe the madness of the Hadaka Matsuri I missed out a couple of stops I made on the way. After Hiroshima I spent two nights on the island Shikoku, firstly in Matsuyama and secondly in Takamatsu. Matsuyama is apparently famous for being mentioned in a book about turn of the century Japan called Botchan, and according to the tourist information the city is attempting to be a living museum to the age in which the story is set. This involves having trams that look like steam trains, restoring lots of historic buildings and making a big deal about Dogo Onsen - the oldest onsen in Japan. A nice little city to visit, but I think that having people standing around in period costumes so you can have your picture taken with them is taking things a bit far. Cool trains though, and the Dogo brewery beer is excellent!

On the way from Matsuyama to Takamatsu I decided to hope off the train in Saijo, home of the Asahi brewery in the area. My guidebook had told me you needed to phone in advance for the tour, but since I was only planning on stopping at the beer garden for lunch I didn’t bother. Arriving at the train station though I realised that Saijo isn’t much of a tourist destination - no tourist information, no signs in English, nothing that hinted at how to find the brewery. I was feeling a bit stumped until an Asahi logo-ed minibus showed up and the driver and I had a very tortured conversation in Japanese. The upshot was that he phoned the brewery to book me in for the tour, but I was told that there were no English guides available. I figured following a Japanese tour group around would be okay so long as I made it to the beer tasting at the end, so I went along with the plan and the minibus took me to the brewery where I signed in. By not phoning ahead I had obviously upset the system a little, but when I arrived I was told that one of the receptionists was going to show me the brewery, and so I got my own personal tour! Unfortunately all the machinery was closed for cleaning that day, so there wasn’t much to see, but once I got to the otherwise empty beer tasting room there was a little table set up with my name and a union jack on it! I got to try three of the different Asahi beers and was even giving some snacks to nibble on. All this for the grand total of - nothing! They didn’t charge me a penny! Needless to say I’ve been drinking as much Asahi as possible to recompense them.

Takamatsu was a fairly unpromising city. The only accomodation I could get was a business hotel near the railway line. I nearly left the city straight away the next morning to get to Okayama early, but train schedules were a bit erratic. Just as well they were though because I would have missed out on visiting Ritsurin Park if I had skipped out early. Apparently Ritsurin Park isn’t one of “top three” Japanese gardens but if that’s the case then the others must be very, very good! Japanese gardens are designed to reveal different views as you walk around them and Risturin is full of lakes, herons, red bridges, pine trees, plum trees - pretty much every view of japan that’s ever been painted onto a plate can be found around some corner or other. Nice way to spend a sunny morning, before it starts to snow on the way back to the train.

Okayama was the naked man festival, but also a city with another nice castle and a pleasant place to stay. After Okayama I managed a lunctime stop over in Himeji to see Japan’s most famous castle, but I’d reached castle overload at that point and wasn’t too impressed, and then carried on to Kyoto! Didn’t actually get up to much in Kyoto, but it’s a nice city to just hang around and watch the world go round. I’d seen most of the touristy things last time I was in the city but going to the Fushimi Inari Shrine was really good - thousands of torri gates covering paths leading up into the hills. I didn’t know about the hill at the time, but it was a really cool place to walk around, and I’m sure my legs will recover at some point!

 And now here I am in Tokyo again! I’ll let you know what fun things I find…

Last night I went to Saidaiji-eyo, an ancient Japanese holy tradition that is also known as Hadaka Matsuri, or more recently - the naked man festival. Thousands of men wearing loincloths descend on the Saidaiji temple for a purification ceremony/contest that involves them wading into the freezing water of a temple pool near the river, then praying at the shrine before marching around the temple, under some ropes and then back into the water to repeat the praying and marching one more time. Once this has been completed the men start to gather in groups on the front of the temple waiting for midnight, when the lights are turned out and the priests throw shinji sticks into the crowd. The men who manage to grab the sticks and make it out of the temple are said to be guaranteed good fortune for the coming year. Over the years the competition has become quite organised, with groups of men developing strategies on how best to make sure that one of their number is the man; so that as you watch the writhing mass of bodies that are pressing themselves up the temple steps and into the main part of the building it starts to look like some weird combination of sumo and american football, only played by hundreds of teams on a pitch about the size of a tennis court.

The first groups of men were starting the washing and marching when I turned up at about 9pm, but it wasn’t until about 11:00 that people started to mass on the temple and then there was still an hour of waiting while the build up commenced. As more and more bodies threw themselves in the crowd would bulge, and teeter on the edge of falling down the steps. People would faint, and the massed ranks of the security teams would surge into the crowds leaving a corridor of guards to pull the unfortunate to safety. Some of the competitors were so drunk that their friends were having to hold them up, despite the warnings being given out in English about how no naked men were allowed to take part who were under the influence of liqour. Although most people were wearing white loincloths there were a few people to be spotted wearing black ones, and the considered opinion of people in the crowd seemed to be that they were yakuza! This was serious stuff, and dangerous at that. Quite a few drunken gaijin (foreigners) were joining in as the night progressed, but this was not a Japanese tradition I’d want to be a part of - and I very much doubt that my insurance covers me for acts of lunacy!

So the crowd gathered, and security dived in every once in a while, and the spectators stood in their spots for hours waiting until finally it was midnight - the lights went out and the naked men roared as the sticks were thrown in, and then… well, I have no idea! The sticks seemed to leave the temple pretty quickly, and bubbles of activity spilled out of the temple with them as teams protected their man, or sought to get the sticks off someone else. Scuffles broke out amongst the naked men, and also in the crowd of spectators. Within five minutes it appeared to be over, or to at least to have reached the point where making sense of anything going on was impossible. And that was that - I pushed my way out and followed the stream of other people leaving, naked men running to the changing areas around us, and made my back to the station and back to my warm hotel room in Okayama, not entirely sure what to make of the evening!

I’ve put some blurry photos of the whole thing here. Ladies of a sensitive disposition be warned, buttocks are visible!

I went to Hiroshima, which is by necessity a very modern city. The peace park at its centre is full of trees and crowding around it are hotels, office blocks and shopping malls. It would be incredibly hard to make the connection between the destruction of Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on it in 1945 and the city that it is today if it weren’t for the A-bomb dome; The skeletal remains of the concrete and metal building sat on the bank of the river next to the peace park, unchanged since it was gutted. In wartime Hiroshima, as in most Japanese cities, the majority of buildings were made of wood. Pictures taken a few months after the bombing show only a handful of concrete buildings left standing, while all around them are the charred remains of rubble and tree stumps. The A-bomb dome is instantly recognisable in those pictures, and I think it’s lucky that the city held onto it in its current state when people wanted to tear it down and move on.

Modern day Hiroshima is an incredibly friendly city, and I enjoyed my two nights there. Aside from the peace park and museum I made an excursion to nearby Miyajima island, home of the famous floating torri gate, which is the second of Japan’s most beautiful/photographed scenes that I’ve now visited - only one more and I’ve got the complete set! Miyajima is stunning, with wild deer, pagodas and temples everywhere you turn, and the famous gate sitting in the bay. I’ve moved on to a larger island now - Shikoku - the smallest of the major islands that make up Japan. Going to be spending a couple of nights here before seeing if I can make it to the naked man festival in Okayama! I’ll keep you posted…