Asia 2008-09

Four months ago I posted a batch of photos of the bird park in Kuala Lumpur, and then forgot about the rest. Here are the others, for my Aunt Jane. Be well.

Macau.

Great white pelican.

Greater flamingoes.

Sacred ibis.

Yellow-billed stork.

Cattle egrets. Wherever there are paddies, there are egrets.

Brahminy kite.

Musicians at the Sunday Market.

• **

I have put together a job application or two (male model and president for life of Uzbekistan, since you ask). Reviewing my old CVs, I am encouraged to discover that I invented penicillin, the safety pin and the internet and brought peace to millions.

To the west of the old city is a wildly eccentric museum called Insect World. It is run by Manop Rattanarithikul, who is in his mid-seventies. It all started when he was employed as a collector, paid 12 baht a day, for the Malaria and Filariasis Control of Thailand project, run by the US Army. In time he grew to like mosquitoes. He would catch them by allowing them to land on his arm; when they had to be kept alive, he would keep them in a box with holes that were small enough to prevent escape but large enough to allow the mosquitoes to feed on his arm. Not surprisingly, he has had malaria many times.

He went to university in Bangkok, where he met his wife Rampa. She too became a mosquito taxonomist and then a medical entomologist. They both spent the summer of 1965 at the Smithsonian Institue in DC as mosquito taxonomists. Manop eventually went off to practise law but Rampa remained a taxonomist and has, since 1961, identified 436 mosquitoes in Thailand, including 18 new species. There are about 3,000 species in the world. She completed a PhD at Kobe University in 1996.

The entrance is crammed with wooden objects carved by the action of water or by termites. It’s not hugely interesting. The room at the back is devoted to mainly mosquitoes, and partly to butterflies and beetles. Manop loves mosquitoes to well beyond the point of lunacy. “The mosquito bites to remind you of good spirits relations,” he says. “She wishes everybody to love and care for each other.”

He says she, of course, because the males do not suck blood. They live instead on tree sap or flower nectar. He is at pains to emphasise that only ten of the 436 species are disease vectors. The diseases spread by mosquitoes include malaria (by genus Anopheles), dengue fever (by Aedes species), Japanese encephalitis (by genus Culex), and Filariasis (by species of the genus Mansonia). Filariasis is also known as elephant foot, and produces extraordinary swelling of the lower limbs and often of the external genitalia. Nasty. Fortunately the chances of someone in good health developing the disease after being bitten are 1 in 500,000.

Only three hundred people a year actually die of malaria in Thailand, which is nothing from an African perspective. The government’s longstanding malaria prevention project has been fairly successful. On the other hand, in 2007 there were 58,836 cases of dengue fever in Thailand.

They have examples of the mosquito species pinned behind glass – although there are also a lot of live, hungry mosquitoes in the museum. I have been much bothered, in Indonesia especially, by a fairly large mosquito which flies swiftly enough that it is difficult to smack. It bites repeatedly in one meal and the bites swell a fair bit. Its limbs are striped black and white like Cat in the Hat’s stovepipe hat (except that’s red and white). I couldn’t find it in the collection.

Manop also paints, in a common Thai style, using garish Hyde Park Corner colours. Mosquitoes are in all of the paintings, often feeding on humans. He is on the mosquitoes’ side.

Upstairs there is a rather more orthodox collection of insects, mainly butterflies, moths and beetles (estimates vary enormously, but there are thought to be 180,000 species of Lepidoptera and 290,000 of Coleoptera, so they are the two largest orders of insects). The beetles and butterflies of southeast Asia, as Wallace found, are truly outlandish. (This is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Wallace’s esteemed colleague Charles Darwin.) There are hundreds of specimens of his longhorn beetles in the museum. These are scarabs.

This is a weevil that much resembles a weevil illustrated in The Malay Archipelago.

• **

In Bangkok large numbers of middle-aged men are walking around with Thai girls or boys. They are not all married. A large proportion of tourists travelling from Europe to Thailand come for sex, and they go to Bangkok and Pattaya. Or so I thought. But Chiang Mai is also full of such temporary couples.

I went to the Night Market last night and on the way I saw where these couples meet. The street leading to the market is lined with bars and restaurants. The girls sit out the front of the bars and greet every male passerby. You can’t go into one of these bars for a quiet drink. There are also a couple of gogo bars with shows.

I assume they are girls, anyway. You can never tell in Thailand. On Saturday night I saw lots of ladyboys out on the town and dressed to kill. As is often observed, they have great legs.

I didn’t find the market especially interesting. There are lots of stalls selling items largely of limited quality, as at home. I’m not in the market for cushion covers, woven cloth bags or wooden boxes. It would be different if were a girl or collected knick-knacks. It’s a sign that I have been to too many markets.

As in Bangkok, tiny Hmong (or Yao?) women wander around trying to sell wooden objects that make a noise like a frog.

• **

My blog has now had 45,000 visits.

• **

The day before visiting the Museum I attended a cookery course at the Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School. It was very well organised, as it needed to be with 19 of us (the school operates seven days a week, and at that rate makes weekly revenues of £2,700, which goes a long way in Thailand).

There were three demonstrators, who took turns, and owner and TV chef Sompon Nabnian. We cooked and ate six dishes and got a recipe book at the end of it.

There is nothing difficult about Thai cookery, but I have not cooked a thing in over nine months and found it difficult even to put together a phad thai (the only boring dish in Thailand, which all the tourists eat). We also made tom yam gung, gaeng kheo wan gai (green curry), laab gai, tord man plaa (fish cakes) and tab tim grob (water chestnuts in coconut milk). Lao cookery is almost identical – Isaan and Lao cultures are much the same – but on the Lao cookery course we used MSG, or chicken stock as a substitute. Here we used palm sugar instead, which as well as tasting sweet and slightly spicy, contains glutamates. It’s a better solution.

• **

Dhammachakra flags and votive pendants at a wat in Chiang Mai.

And an alien.

I wrote about Chinatown a little while back. Here are some pictures of the rest of Singapore.

Much of the east end of the centre is reclaimed land. This is an old tradition; indeed the Central Business District is built on swampland drained in the 1820s.

This is the Merlion, a rather naff symbol of Singapore, combining the sea (Singapore’s lifeblood) with the lion that gives the city its name. The statue is situated on reclaimed land near the Fullerton Hotel.

Behind the Merlion is the Fullerton Hotel, built in 1928, which was until recently the GPO.

Across the bridge is also reclaimed land – it’s well to the seaward side of Beach Road – and it has, among other things, the Esplanade and Suntec City.

This is Raffles City. The tower is a hotel, designed by IM Pei, an undistinguished building in my view.

Under the same bridge from which the photograph above was taken is an installation called Lightlines, installed for the Singapore Bienniale last year (2008).

This durian skin clothes the Esplanade Theatres, built from 1996 and opened in 2002.

Outside the Asian Civilisations Museum is a ceremonial pole from Sarawak.

Like the National Museum, this museum is worth at least one visit. The tribal collection is inherited from the old Raffles Museum. It dates from the early twentieth century.

Here is a Pejeng-style bronze drum from East Java, 600-300BC. It is about five feet long. The production and trade of bronze drums almost defines southeast Asian culture. This drum is clearly influenced by Ðông Sơn originals (named after a culture that originated in northern Vietnam and introduced wet rice cultivation and metallurgy all over southeast Asia), which were produced around the same time.

Ðông Sơn drums have been found in Yunan; Kon Tum; two places in southern Vietnam; all over southern Laos and northeastern Thailand; Kanchanaburi; Terengganu; Selangor; Kakhon Si Thammarat; southern Sumatra; all over Java; Sumbawa; Flores; Roti; Wetar; Buru and Papua.

They appear along the old trade routes, and they were indeed traded as very valuable luxury goods. On the top and the upper sides are depicted ritual life (music, rice-processing); boats; houses; and lots of birds, particularly crane, herons and egrets. Frogs are usually found around the rim, too.

Here are a couple of Ðông Sơn drums from the History Museum in Hanoi.

Indonesia has 6,000 inhabitants [I meant to say inhabited islands!] and 500 tribes. The Nias islanders, near Sumatra, were famous for their goldwork. But there is no gold nearby. They obtained gold by trading slaves, first with the Malay sultanates, and then with the Dutch. The gold ornaments were used in ceremonies, and their sacred power could only be harnessed by ritual sacrifices of slaves.

This is a Khmer lintel, Banteay style, made in Cambodia in the 12th-13th century. It depicts Yama riding a buffalo. A kala disgorges a two-headed simba (lion).

This is all rather confusing. In Hindu mythology, Kala is supposed to be a another name for Yama, or Time. Time is the source and ruler of all things; Brahma existed in the form of time. I do not know what this means.

In Mahayana Buddhist tradition, there is a king of the same name. I don't know whether they are related. (Avalokitesvara, a male bodhisattva, is typically depicted in Vietnam and China as a goddess of mercy.) From the China gallery, this is one of a series of ten paintings depicting the courts of hell (or, more accurately, purgatory). The soul of the deceased goes through ten courts before it is reborn. King Yama is the presiding judge of the fifth court. Late Qing dynasty, 19th century.

And here is a representation of the same judge from the National Museum in Hanoi.

This is a Dayak shield from Borneo.

At the moment there is a temporary exhibition called 'Neither East Nor West'. It consists of photographic portraits, mainly of Asians in London about a century ago. This is the Maharaja Jam Sahib, photographed in London in 1920.

It is perhaps not the best photo in the exhibition, but cricket nuts will recognise him. His full name is Maharaja Jam Sahib Ranjitsinghji Vibhaji of Nawanagar, known to the British public as Ranjitsinhji. He was one of the greatest batsmen of his era, playing 15 Tests (for England, naturally) against Australia, averaging about 45. He lost an eye in a hunting accident in 1915 and went on to represent India at the League of Nations.

This was in Chinatown, I think. It looks like a cutout of the sky, Magritte-style.

And finally to Changi Airport. As most people know, it is a top airport. There are places to relax and to take a shower, a pool, and free movies. Free internet terminals are dotted around the place. There is wifi everywhere and electrical sockets are provided. There is a food court and a few small islands of green. For example, there is a fern garden, with signs giving information about the ferns, and Kohaku, Showa, shiro utsuri, ku matsuba, tancho, hi utsuri, shusui, and pearl koi in a pond.

There are three terminals, not counting the budget terminal, and you can travel between them both before and after entering the departure lounge. So you can visit a camera store in Terminal 2 and a butterfly park in Terminal 3, and fly from Terminal 1, as I did. (Singapore and Malaysia have 1,000 species of butterfly.) I became completely engrossed and had to run across the entire airport to board my plane.

Enough displacement activity already.

As I mentioned a week ago, I have returned to the land of wais and smiles, and popular protests against democracy. I had expected that the trouble in Bangkok, the temporary closure of Bangkok’s airport, and the negative travel advice from foreign ministries around the world might have reduced the number of tourists, but I cannot see any fall. There are more tourists in Bangkok and in Chiang Mai than in the whole of Indonesia, bar Bali.

Anyone who knows me will realise that there is no danger of being my caught in a fire in a nightclub, thank goodness. I am back in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, in a pleasant café called Daily Delight. I was here for a night back in March, but never got to enter the old town. First impressions of Chiang Mai are merely moderate. It seems like Khao San Road but with nicer cafes. So far, I would say Ubud is far classier; but I haven’t been to the museums yet.

But the food is good here. I haven’t written about food in a while. A lunch in Bangkok, on the banks of the Chao Praya river: fried rice with crispy fish, spring onion and galangal and a salad of cold oysters, prawns and squid with slices of raw garlic and a lime and chilli sauce. Nothing extraordinary, but very nice. Lunch on the banks of the same river in Ayutthaya, crispy catfish and mango salad, and pickled Thai sausage. Lunch yesterday: a creamy curry noodle soup called khao soi, followed by hot bananas in coconut milk. There is a lot of variety in Thai food: the curries and soups are familiar, but the stir-fries and spicy salads are less so. And the raw, fermented sausages entirely so.

I have decided to stop here for a while. There is plenty to do – wats, cookery courses, trekking – but more importantly I need to put a CV together and start applying for jobs, and this is as good a place as any. The process of reviewing my 'career' and completing application forms is extremely aversive, and I have been indulging in lots of displacement activities, such as uploading photos to flickr.

The Thais have their own (lunar) new year, but they also celebrate our Gregorian Tết with enthusiasm. (Incidentally, the original meaning of Tết in Vietnamese is a growth notch in a bamboo stem, and it can be applied to any festival.) Fireworks play a big role, of course – not least because there are plenty of Chinese people in Thailand – but there is one lovely tradition that I have not seen before.

People carry large transparent plastic bags to the banks of the old town’s moat. When opened out they are squat cylinders with the bottom end open. To the open end is affixed a candle, and once the air in the sac has expanded, the balloon ascends. Releasing them is a silent act, individually meaningless but beautiful in aggregate, a far more refined tradition than our own crass, pet-torturing, look-at-me-fuck-you technicolour squibs.

The miniature Montgolfier machines drift slowly heavenwards, reaching hundreds of feet or more. Those near the ground are clouds of amber jellyfish. Upon rising they shrink to points, and last night the celestial hemisphere had new, ever-shifting constellations of orange orbs. The Chinese no doubt see dragons everywhere; I saw the cities of the northern hemisphere in polar projection.

(I later spoke to some tourists who had been in Luang Prabang over the new year, and that said that they do the same thing there.)

• **

A less wonderful tradition is one of many Asian viruses, karaoke. In my room in Chiang Mai my ears were assailed by the worst singing I have ever heard – two women who manage to miss the correct notes, and each others', by every possible margin, including the maximum (probably a fifth, if you think logarithmically).

As the old year died I was watching Quantum of Solace on my laptop: a fairly poor movie with a poor title (Fleming's own), but Daniel Craig was terrific.

• ***

One of the relatively few tourists I met in the Bandas was a French-Pyrenean who went by the name of Ganesh. He imports goods from India and sells them in markets. He has tattoos of Ganesh, but he looks more like Rasputin.

Anyway, he is very well travelled, and he told me that Muslim women in Indonesia undergo “female circumcision”, which is against the law in many western countries.

I was not sure whether to believe it, but sure enough the Ulema Council of Indonesia said in 2006 that female circumcision is “necessary” for Muslims. It “cleans the filth from the genitals” said a spokesman, H Amidhan. According to this article in the New York Times, 96% of Muslim women in Indonesia have been cut. It’s amazing. Most people know that many African women are circumcised, but fewer know what happens in Asia. It’s important to note that apparently circumcision in Indonesia is a ritual, er, prick with a needle or removal of the prepuce only, but one of the aims is apparently to reduce libido, which presumably works by making intercourse painful.

• **

A last reading list of 2008:

The Last Templar, Raymond Khoury. Sub-Brown: very bad in every way.
Un Uomo di Altri Tempi, #115 in the series 'Julia: Le Avventure di una Criminologa', by Giancarlo Berardi. A noir (giallo) comic series; discovered, surprisingly, in Banda.
Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd.
The Book Thief, Markus Zusak.
The Daughters of Cain, Colin Dexter
Indonesian Banda, Willard A Hanna
Empire of the Sun, J G Ballard.
Festival for All the Dead, Colin Dexter.
Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, Penguin Classics edition
Ever After, Graham Swift.
Disco for the Departed, Colin Cotterill. Third in the delightful Dr Siri series.
Mr Clarinet, Nick Stone.

While in Buôn Ma Thuột, in the central highlands of Vietnam, I spent a long day travelling 170 km on the back of a motorbike. The first stop was Yok Ðon National Park. We rode past coffee plantations towards the Cambodian border. They also grow cashews, beans, maize, capers and salad leaves in the area. The landscape was not truly highland, more like Oxfordshire.

We passed stilt houses made by Ê Ðê, M’nong and Lao people. Many are beautiful wooden houses that would not be out of place on the prairie. Since each people has its own language, the people around here all speak three or four languages.

My driver, Gob (pronounced Yop), was Ê Ðê. He said that his people came from Indonesia. It is credible. The Austronesians got everywhere at one stage, even to Madagascar, and the Chams traded chiefly with Java. Certainly the aborigines of Vietnam were Austronesian. He says he can understand 80% of Indonesian words. Later waves of immigrants from China, including the Viet, pushed them into the hills, like the Celts in Great Britain.

At Yok Ðon I kicked off with an elephant ride. To get there we crossed the Serekot, a branch of the Mekong. It flows into Cambodia and then back into Vietnam.

The elephant was female, 38, and flatulent. Her name was Ylôm, which does not sound Vietnamese. We travelled through forest completely different from that at Cúc Phương. Cúc Phương is rainforest, extremely dense, the canopy invisible. Here the forest is deciduous and mixed, and much more sparse, often like an orchard. There are fewer birds, but they are visible. The trees at Cúc Phương could not survive at Yok Ðon, where there is a long dry season. When I visited we were already a month into the wet season, but the ground was still parched. In the dry season there are forest fires, and many of the trees have fire-resistant bark.

Elephants eat about 10% of their body weight every day. Ylôm eats 200 kg, I was told. At the national park they have five elephants; they work for six days and then have 20 days off (although that doesn’t add up).

Our mahout prodded the pachyderm by patting it continually with a heel. It’s an ancient profession, but not entirely so: while driving he made a call on his mobile.

Riding an elephant again was a mistake. I had forgotten just how uncomfortable is its locomotion. You have to cling on for dear life and you go about half as fast as if you walked. I ended up with a bruised back again.

After the elephant ride I went for a walk with the guide assigned to me, Nĩa. We head for a 13 km walk and the pace is fast, so there is less opportunity to take all those photos of insects and flowers.

But here is a stick insect. It is not easy to see.

We disturb a flock of noisy green parrots. There are a lot of parrots and macaws in the park. Then, a hundred yards off to the right, we pass a couple of ponds. Standing in the ponds are immense waterbirds. Nĩa says they are very rarely seen. They are dark on top with white undersides, have enormous pickaxe beaks, stand well above a metre tall, and their wingspans exceed two metres. They are lesser adjutants, huge bald storks.

Birdwatchers come to the park to see woodpeckers, of which there are several species. The most common are large and pheasant-brown. Oddly enough, though, I didn’t hear the usual sounds of joinery.

The avian highlight: an eagle, immense - amazing that it can fly through the forest.

Thirteen kilometres, even on largely flat ground, has the same impact on the body as a walk of twice the length, or more, in the UK.

On the way back across the river the ferryman had to bail out for five minutes before we could move. He will have to find another job next year, as they are building a bridge on his beat.

Then we headed a long way to the Dray Sap waterfalls. Dray Sap means ‘smoke falls’ in Ê Ðê. The Vietnamese call the falls Tháp Gia Long, since Emperor Gia Long built a bridge here. I may have said before that a waterfall is just a waterfall, but this is better: a 20-25 foot vertical drop and perhaps five cables wide. A mini-Niagara, complete with water vapour.

• **

Since the last post I have been to Bangkok and Ayutthaya, and have just arrived in Sukhothai. I am eating extremely well.