mum's the word

after leaving hong kong (cœur blessé), a sobered ondrej flew to shanghai to meet his maker. mum and i teamed up for a three week power-tour of china's finest.

i'll try and put more pictures in this entry, and let them do the talking. it's fascinating to see china again for the first time through mum's eyes and realise just how many things i've come to view as completely ordinary - how many things i'd stopped seeing. who would have thought two years ago that my mind would neutralise deep throat spitting, yelling at the top of your voice to the person standing next to you (even pondered the irony in the name of the children's game 'chinese whispers'?) or public toilet floors so covered in piss and shit that you actually have to skate in and out?

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mum had a great taste of the real china on our first day when we stumbled upon the back exit of a chinese tea garden in the shanghai old town. surrounding us, a chinese tour group made up exclusively of old, red-hatted, blue-jacketed, five-foot-nothing village women decided they couldn't be bothered going around the front of the tea house to pay entry, and linked hands to charge through the exit, the guard, and half a dozen other people blocking their way. i rode the wave of oldies through the gates, but mum got caught in a rip and was tossed to the side. one foot wrong in that crowd and you'd be quite literally trampled under mao-slipper.

.from shanghai we popped into a water town ('when you see its beautiful canals and ancient buildings, how can you not but fall into a reverie?' asked one advertisement), before heading to hangzhou to check out the legendary west lake..

. .there are 36 'west lakes' in china, but hangzhou's is the one from which all the others got their name - the original. originality in china?! (i hear you cry in disbelief) nay! well, it's true. a 3km x 3km body of water filled with man-made islands, surrounded by drooping weeping willows on a backdrop of pagoda-topped mountains. despite the hype, the lake was stunning, strolling its shores and islands really was peaceful (i couldn't help but fall into a reverie) and even the surrounding tourist shopping precincts were (and i never thought i'd say this of china): tasteful. at night a series of water jets on the east bank squirted water in arcs over coloured lights to the rhythm of some unknown 80's western music. sounds trashy? wasn't a dry eye in the house.
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.mum and i hauled our ever-fatter arses up to suzhou to bliss out in the UNESCO world heritage listed gardens (reverie) and sample various types of transport and food (in that order). some of the gardens date back more than 1000 years, and make amazing use of light and space, which i've been unable to adequately capture in my photos. mum and i were positively transported to another level.
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and so ended the first leg of mum + bondy's tour de chine. tune in next time to find out why being shot in your sleep is better than an 18-hour train ride across central china. until then: zai jian.
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pics 1 - mum and i on the bund across from the oriental pearl tower in the must-have nothing shot.
2 - a drop of character
3 - relaxing in the park
4 - mum takes a break in (5) a shanghai garden
6 + 7 - zhouzhuang the water town. beware the reverie.
8 - some of the gardens surrounding west lake

9 - what i'm going to look like if i don't curb these obsessive eating habits.
10 - china's version of pisa - the leaning pagoda at tiger hill, suzhou
11 - simple - just join the line and buy a ticket.
12, 15, 16, 17 - gardens in suzhou
13 - ondrej sitting in the 'with whom shall i sit pavilion'.
14 - loved the sign

just as bad as the rest of them

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the conte de fée continues as ondrej leapfrogs his way to thailand via hong kong and back again for a well deserved 5 day holiday from his holiday. centre stage is the evil french frog protagonist gerard who plays with the innocent boy's heart, and also involved is the princess sarah, who comes to bask in the sun and share in the fun.

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after a night in bangkok, the trio made their way to koh samet, a small beach-paradise in the gulf of siam, several hundred kilometres south east of the sprawling metropolis.

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surely the pinnacle of human invention is the motorbike. what else combines function with so much fun? along the potholed, sandy and rocky roads of koh samet, i made a new discovery: why drive responsibly, when you can drive irresponsibly? shall we assume lotus position again? there's no other word for it people: i hooned. you know those annoying western tourists who burn around foreign countries on motos at top speed with those revolting self-satisfied 'i'm all that' expressions on their faces? well that was me baby: all the way.

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we snorkeled, we swan, we hooned around on the motos, we lay on the beach drinking coconut milk, we oggled passers-by: we enjoyed. pad thai, banana pancakes and slurpees made up 90% of our diet. at one stage gerard and i stumbled onto what i can only imagine was a gay beach, replete with groups of thai boys draped in rainbow flags limp-wristedly jumping for joy in the sand infront of their camera-clicking comrades. i felt like i was in an allan hollinghurst novel. we swam out to a floating platform populated exlusively by gorgeous young males for some diving practice. every time i pulled myself up onto the boards, wet bathers clinging, it was a case of 'those aren't my eyes'. it was all very well and good, but before i knew it there was an unfortunate incident involving myself and three young thai boys with a penchant for wrestling, and i became quite permanently damaged.

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there's something about thai society that is just better. perhaps it's the high level of inter-personal acceptance and mutual respect that sets it above the rest. nothing symbolises that better than the wai (palms held together infront of the head as a greeting). let's introduce it into australian society and see what happens. the wai, nightly dancing in the public spaces with the local grannies, mandatory cuddling on sunday afternoons, and unlimited supplies of white rabbit milk lollies. could there be a more comprehensive recipe for happiness? i've got it all worked out people: ondrej for president.

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i'm back in hong kong for a few days before i meet up with mum in shanghai this weekend. can't wait. my life is being pushed and pulled in directions i wouldn't have thought possible only a fortnight ago. opportunities masquerading as magic doors are opening all the time, none closing, for me the question at the centre of all this confusion is: could this really be what life is like?

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wow. (with a french accent).

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pics

1 - dinner on the beach

2 - catch a boat to this little restaurant

3 - requisite coconut sucking shot

4 - hello moto

5 + 6 - chaisse-longues and a few ugly dogs on the beach

7 - protection from the bangkok monsoon :)

all my love and thoughts with sarah and carolyn.

super-sock saves vagina

i always seem to be leaving beijing. doesn't matter where in the world i am or what i'm doing, i close my eyes for one second and the next thing i know i'm leaving the big B. in a few days i'm doing it yet again.
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my past is a novel i read once and then forgot. the present is intensely so. one day does not seem to be related to the next, and last week may well have been someone else's life. i couldn't have hoped for more. not long ago i found myself lying on a table at midnight with a blind lady giving me a full-body massage (to think what some people can do with their elbows!). but the point is: it took me 48 hours and two and a half packets of oreos to get home after that. i live for that sort of thing.
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when i moved into my apartment several weeks ago, it was the definition of squalor. an inch of dust covered every surface, my bedroom door had no handle, cigarette butts and empty beer bottles littered the floor in every room, and the bathroom and kitchen were covered in matted hair and slime. nursing the grandmother of all hangovers, i scrubbed the sweet baby jesus out of every surface, removed truckloads of garbage, and neutralised all suspicious stains and viscous substances.
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the following day, two chinese girls moved into the apartment's two other rooms. one is really nice, but the other housemate never speaks, so i don't even know her name. i suspect she doesn't have one. how do you say cretin in chinese? there are at least two other voices i hear in the house on a regular basis, but have never seen the bodies they should be attached to. bodyless entities. perhaps they are the souls of the discarded clumps of matted hair seeking their former vessels. it's china after all.
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to get the apartment i brokered a deal with an evil pseudo-landlord middleman who goes by the new name of 'the fat prick'. on one occasion i returned home to find that everything i owned had disappeared, and a group of nameless and faceless people were milling about inside the house. days after that fiasco, after a handle and lock set was installed on my door and my things returned, i found the fat prick inside my locked room going through my things, demanding to see my beijing residents' card. i don't have anything of value to steal, but what a wanker. the saga continues.
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let's talk about the weather. the first two weeks that i was here were FREEZING. some days the maximum temperature only just got above zero. as a long-term tourist with a mobility problem, i try to keep my pack light, so i only have one pair of shoes, one pair of pants, one jumper...you get the picture. as a result, i had to wear everything i owned on every single day. whenever i washed my clothes at night, i had to wait the following morning in my sleeping bag until everything had dried so i could put it back on. but this isn't really a problem: beijing is the driest place in the universe. any water particles are hunted down and eliminated as soon as they enter the city limits, often sent to far-off country areas in the south west for re-education. so much moisture has been sucked out of my own body that i have been reduced to a mere concept. of interest, the concept that i have become is that of the unforseeable circumstance, in its plurality. i am unforseeable circumstances. which concept would you become after beijing had sucked you dry?
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i have been studying and not-so-studying. i have taken to night-time wanderings, oreos dipped in hot chocolate and giving myself up to the mysteries of human nature. i have taken up residence in a cafe that serves vegetable sandwiches you would kill for. i have developed a strong affinity for my slavic brothers and easy games of sudoku. i have a chinese teacher obsessed with blood groups, have not been cleanly shaven for 3 months and have held my breath all the way to the 15th floor. i have electrocuted myself with a double-A battery. i have disturbing palpitations after drinking coffee, an aversion to raw onion on the side of my plate, and a pseudo-premontion that i will die at the age of 36. peace.
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pics - (1 - view from my apartment - 2 - cafe hump - 3 - haven't had a photo of bastion and i together so i thought i'd just chuck this one in - 4 - my room - 5 - dj dog)

le papillon se réveille

nimen hao!

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first, some apologies: my head detached from my shoulders at some stage last week and tumbled away, somehow defying the earth's gravitational field and assuming a geostationary orbit some 35,786km directly above the surface of the earth (at the equator). i'm doing well without it, but this entry might be a bit of a shambles.

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hong kong was something of a fairytale. has anyone heard the one about the butterfly who kissed the frog only to find that he was already a prince? or was that perhaps a queen? who knows. bottom line is: i'm returning to hong kong (with a smile on my face) at the end of the month to see what happens with this menagerie.

i spent a few hours in guangzhou where i was approached by a man who groped me aggressively in the street, claiming that china was 'open now'. he repulsed me, but he did illustrate a point: china isn't just opening its doors to new ideas, new ways and new people: it's blowing the fucking house down. let me take this opportunity to predict that china will be one of, if not the most, liberal countries in the world within the next decade or so in term of social, inter-personal acceptance. those who have been here recently will know exactly what i'm talking about: go china! the political situation i'm not qualified to comment on.

an overnight train later (a train that somehow boarded a ship and crossed a strait without my noticing it), i found myself in the bustling little city of haikou, capital of hainan island in the south china sea, where sibastian has been teaching aviation english for the last 6 months. highlights included a weekend away at a beachy resort type place to chew beetelnut and eat dogmeat, drinking lots of coconut milk straight out of the coconut, stuffing myself so full of baozi i almost died, and a watermelon crash diet that has left me spinning. the best thing about hainan, however, is bastion: rather than 42, hello_ondrej reports that being with people you love is the meaning of life. hello everyone i love.

i tomorrow sit flying machine go beijing. this is so that i can focus on my chinese for a few weeks in a place where they actually speak it. back to beejays - who would have thought? i love a life where plans change at the drop of a hat. if it were any other way i'd be reaching for my pistol.

life's just so damn big. peace.

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pics - 1 - watermelon of love, 2 - le beau grenouille se rase, 3 - get that betelnut india, 4 - bastion in paradise, 5 - sabine and i go CRAZY for dogmeat.

PRC SAR HK

i've arrived in the people's republic of china special administrative region hong kong, and my god it's good to be back in asia!

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the circumstances surrounding my stay in hong kong put me in mind of a murakami novel (the good bits) so i won't go into it all in this entry (i need to think about things in retrospect). i'll just talk about bangkok.

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i've only been to bangkok once before, and again it was for a 24 hour transit, which, though is a very short time, encourages one to milk 60 seconds worth of juicy experiences out of every minute.

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it was chinese new year, so i headed straight to chinatown, the heart of old bangkok. despite the tasteless food in africa, i had stacked it on, and am now sporting a repulsive new pot belly. about half of it came away last week when i did a really big fart, but the rest simply won't shift. i wanted to start a starvation diet, but when i rocked up in chinatown, and saw delicious food stalls lining the streets as far as the eye could see, i started eating...and couldn't stop.

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in fact i would rate it up there as one of the top three out of control eating experiences i've had in my life (the worst occurring last year in yangshuo in what i call the 'sweet and sour pork incident' in which a plate of meat so enormous it could have fed the people's army

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was served with a rice in a wooden bucket you'd think they'd stolen from the community well, and for some reason i forced my self to devour every last grain. the agony and nausea that i experienced while crawling home that night...i wouldn't wish it on anybody.

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hand washing facilities in these stalls are non-existent, so i was hoping to be struck down and washed out by some virulent faeculent parasitic infestation, but i was thwarted yet again: it turns out that in my short 26 years, i've put so many different kinds of food and fomite in my mouth that it seems i'm now immune to everything :( (paging dr freud)

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rather than have a sleazy night (as the name of the city suggests), i spent it at a boxing stadium watching muay thai (thai boxing), in which two perfect specimens of male youth (and i mean perfect - 0% body fat, thin as rakes, but rippling with muscles) battle each other with fists, elbows, feet and knees in 3 minute rounds. if there were rules, i had no idea what they were, and though i abhor violence in all its forms, i found myself getting excited when things turned ugly, and thinking evil thoughts like 'kick him again' or 'hit him harder'. it was an interesting night.

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the great paradox of muay thai is this:

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whilst you wouldn't want to meet any one of those boys in a dark alley, you'd want to meet every single one of those boys in a dark alley.

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let's all assume lotus position and ponder that until next time.

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love live his majesty king bhumibol rama IX!

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pics (i took no pictures in thailand)

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1 - ondrej in front of the world's largest bronze statue of a seated mcbuddha, hong kong.

2 - shaolin monks perform kung fu at po lin monastery. more on that later.

3 - thought it couldn't get any more tacky? an enormous display of hello kitty weds dear daniel at central station, hong kong. alright - i loved it too.

5 - his majesty king bhumibol rama IX - a monarch you can't help but worship.

gong xi fa cai!

a happy spring festival to you all! gong xi fai cai (i hope you become rich!)

and so my adventures in kenya have come to an end. i have seen life, i have seen death, and i have seen a rhinoceros. in a few hours i will be walking through the airport turnstile sideways. good bye east africa! (hello ondrej!)

mama josephine's medical clinic

so what exactly have i been doing since phuong abandoned me?

after languishing for some days on lake naivasha and being forced to endure the sounds of nightly exorcism 'practice' in the adjacent church, i was ultimately driven out by an inconvenient sleeping arrangement and into what i can only fathom was a brothel attached to a nightclub in the nearby slum town of naivasha (with unusually splendid views of the lake and nearby rubbish tip)


i managed to scale the summit of a volcanic crater (longonot) during a thunderstorm (making the experience that much sweeter), but to get home, i had to wait for some time flagging down potential transport vehicles in the rain on a nearby road, only to discover that one week earlier, in that location almost exactly, two american tourists had been shot in the head by bandits while parked on the side of the road.


i then undertook a journey of epic proportions: a bus to nakuru, matatu to kericho and then to kisii, another matatu to an un-named location at the side of the road where i was transferred into another van headed for homa bay, and from there an old bus down a dirt road to the frontier town of mbita. it was there, after taking off my shoes and running through shallow water, that i just managed to scramble aboard a long boat being pushed out into the waters of lake victoria. an hour or two later, i arrived on mfangano island - a remote part of kenya with no running water, no electricity, no cars and no good reason for a tourist to be there.


it was here on mfangano island that for one week, ondrej became a primary school teacher.

was it one of those amazingly positive, eye opening, life changing experiences? yes and no. yes in the sense that as a self-confessed experience junkie, my cup definitely ranneth over. no in the sense that one week later, i was pretty happy to jump back on the boat at the crack of dawn and get the fuck out of there.

every morning and afternoon, as i walked between my place and the school, younger kids would lie in wait, ambushing me as i passed and battling for the privelege of holding my hand. usually i had 3 on each side - a thumb or two fingers each - and though i have been known to publicly denounce children as 'sub-mammalian', i must admit that my little heart of stone did melt somewhat. alright fine - it gushed.


on one occasion, however, the children got out of hand and chased me right down the street and to the door of the cell where i lived, which i closed in their faces and cowered behind while they stood outside chanting what i could only imagine were words to the effect of 'little pig, little pig, let us in'. it was most disquietening.

lessons were quite difficult until i realised i was getting dumped with the dud class (number 7) all the time, and when i changed i had some really awesome teaching experiences.


the adults on the island were a mixed bag. though they were invariably super-friendly and went out of their way to make me feel welcome, the situation on the island is dire: abject poverty, wide-spread drug and alcohol abuse, and HIV rates among the highest in the country (38%), so i couldn't shake the feeling that at any one time i might be violently robbed (or else thrown into the nearest body of water and violently baptised).

i wasn't just a primary school teacher, however:


1) i can't deny my background, so it was with some pleasure that i skipped class on one day and went and saw patients at a local clinic. it was called mama josephine's (centre of excellence), and consisted of one room with a cupboard full of out-of-date, out-of-use medications. highlights included seeing malaria for the first time!

2) i helped concrete a floor of one of the classrooms at the school. highlights included putting my back out.


3) i attended a seventh-day adventist church service under an enormous tree on a saturday morning. for even the most hardy among you, you'd have to agree that i a five hour service is not just ad nauseum, but ad vomitareum. highlights included sitting on a hard wooden bench. in fact, i almost left after 4 hours secondary to genuine concerns about sustaining bilateral ischial tuberosity stress fractures. in layman's terms: i almost broke my arse.


i gradually made my way back to nakuru (basking for a few days in the gorgeous tea plantation-filled countryside around kericho on the way), and it is here that i will spend my last few days in kenya.


pic 1 - mama josephine's centre of excellence
pic 2 - longonot crater peak
pic 3 - washing on the shores of lake victoria (bilharzia)
pics 4, 5 + 6 - wolves in sheep's clothing
pic 7 - sorting the night's catch
pic 8 - dawn from mfangano
pics 9 + 10 - workers picking tea near kericho
pic 11 - just couldn't get enough of those tea fields!

this brother of mine

not even sunrise from uhuru peak compares to the shadow of how good it was to have done it all with the big P. i love you phuong!

there will always be two cups at my table.

pre-abandonment

we'd seen enough of tanzania, and it was time to get the hell out.

we boarded an early morning bus and made our way to a shanty border crossing with kenya at some un-named location. the whole place had the feel of a cheap movie set, and rather than process visas, seemed purposely built to explode in the background of a b-grade hollywood car chase.

the bus continued on to nairobi, and phuong felt nauseated the whole way there. but rather than nairobbery's reputation as one of the most dangerous cities in the world provoking anxiety and fear in his heart (as it did mine), phuong claimed that it was my socks that were 'setting him off'. i tried to prove his folly by stuffing them into his face at irregular intervals with limited success.

*(diversion!) let me pause now to explain one of most common forms of transport in kenya - the matatu. take a standard white van with bald tyres and no shock absorbers, gut it, pack in fifteen seats, add twenty-one people and all their luggage, travel at high speed down a road so full of potholes that all your sphincters give out simultaneously, and what do you get? pure exhiliration. how do you say that in swahili? matatu.

we travelled by matatu to a YMCA on the southern shores of lake naivasha for our last supper together. phuong took bread, broke it, and said "eat this, it is my body..." whoops. hang on. i'm getting my stories mixed up.

the following morning we took some mountain bikes and headed over to hell's gate national park. unlike the previous 5 days of craning our heads out of the back of a safari van to check out the animal action, in hell's gate you go solo - walking or cycling through fields of grazing gazelle and zebra, or plonking yourself down in front of a corps of giraffe and just watching.

we saw lots of big-cat footprints, but none of the predators themselves. being attacked by a lion is a distinct possibility at hell's gate, but as phuong was having trouble with the gears on his bike and couldn't get moving as fast as i could, he thankfully provided the more obvious target. (i promised him that if he were to be eaten alive, i would take awesome photos of his priveleged wildlife experience).

but the day ended early, and everything fast-forwarded to a snapshot in time of phuong's smiling face in the rain as he waved goodbye and boarded a crowded matatu back to nairobi and home.

in a month that never sees rain, locals were astounded when it poured for almost 48 hours following phuong's departure.

pic 1 - border town
pic 2 - heading down the main gorge in hell's gate
pic 3 - still life with zebra
pic 4 - a tower of giraffe and a zeal of zebras
pic 5 - phuong takes a tumble while a lion licks its lips (off camera)
pic 6 - P+O at the end of their adventure together