Asia 2008-09

I'll be spending Christmas, mostly, at Changi Airport. Here is a Christmas photo.

It is one of the loud geckoes, known in Indonesian as tokek , in Thai as tokay, in English as a tokay gecko and in Latin as Gecko gecko. This one was at Labuanbajo. Locals like them, as they eat some of the more irritating insects, and in Thailand it is auspicious to be born within the sound of a calling tokay.

• **

The big wheel in Singapore, known I think as the Singapore Flyer, got stuck yesterday for a few hours. I took some photos of it during this time, but failed to notice.

Ah. Actually that's the London Eye. The two are quite similar, although the Singapore version is 30 metres taller.

• **

This is the opening paragraph of a piece by AA Gill in The Times yesterday.

Apparently, one in five affairs starts in the workplace. Which makes you wonder about gravediggers and deep-sea fishermen: “Olaf, you great halibut of a man, put my plaice on the slab and fillet.” Do doctors pull sickies? Any office you walk into, two out of 10 of them are going to be up each other. Which is, frankly, hard to imagine in most hardware stores, but perfectly believable in most bookshops. There are certain places where I assume everyone has everyone, and there are those where nobody’s getting any. MPs plainly hump each other like labradors on ecstasy, whereas the House of Lords rarely fingers the ermine. I’m certain that all call centres are gallivanting, open-plan orgies. I could swear that the last time Shani-Lee called me from Vodafone to ask if I was happy with my service, she was on all fours getting her 3G-spot charged up, downloaded and broadbanded. I just know that traffic wardens are all parking in each other’s residents’ bays. Actors famously can’t stop rehearsing their parts, however small. But I suspect that ballet dancers fail to see the pointe. And for all their promise and pert, pulchritudinous provocation, models hardly ever smudge the maquillage. They think love is best squandered in handbags. Accountants do it, actuaries don’t. Butchers do, bakers don’t, and candlestick makers burn it at both ends. Plumbers plumb, carpenters join, brickies lay. Scaffolders whistle for it, IT wonks control, command and escape. Van drivers deliver, cabbies ask for something smaller. Vacuum-cleaner salesmen suck, waiters spoon, panto dames are behind you. Mimes do it up against invisible walls, tailors fit nicely, publishers make advances.

Brilliant.

Singapore is one big Chinatown, of course, but south of the river there is also a place called Chinatown. There have been Chinese in the city since the British town was founded in 1819.

(In 1819 there was a small Malay village on the river, population 150 or so. Singapore is strategically located on the trade route between India and China, which has been passing through the Melaka Straits since the fifth century. Temasek flourished in the fourteenth century, when it probably came under the influence of the Javanese Majapahit kingdom. But from the early fifteenth century Temasek had been overtaken by Melaka. Trade continued in Singapore until the seventeenth century at least, but in 1613 the Portuguese burned the settlement as part of a campaign against the descendants of the Melaka sultanate, and Singapore fell into obscurity until the British came. Raffles obtained permission from Abdul Rahman, the village head, to establish a trading station, but the grant was ultra vires, since the power resided with the Sultan of Johor, who owed allegiance to the Dutch. Raffles concluded a treaty with the Sultan's brother instead. In 1824 the British bought the entire island, and the Dutch recognised British sovereignty.)

The first to Chinese to come to the British trading post were rich merchants, invited over from Melaka and the Dutch East Indies. The first junk to come from China came from Amoy in 1821. Most immigrants came from the southeast of China, and the two largest groups were the Hokkiens and Teochews.

Most Chinese immigrants came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, driven by famine, the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion and sundry civil wars. They took a risk: in Imperial China, attempted migration was punishable by decapitation. But they came in such numbers that Singapore is culturally Chinese.

It was an expensive trip. By junk, it took a month to sail to 'Si Lat Po'. By the end of the nineteenth century the steamship had taken over, reducing the journey to a week.

For a subscription, the new arrivals joined clan associations, kongsi. The first association was formed in 1822. The clan associations grouped together people from the same district, those speaking the same dialect and/or those with the same surname. There were four very common names above all: Lin, Guang, Zhang and Zhao.

The societies provided a crèche for those with children, undertook charitable work, offered a place to learn and to practise dancing, martial arts, music and opera. They were job centres, guesthouse, schools, and the focal points of worship, festivals and marriages.

In 1822 a committee convoked by Raffles drew up a town plan that divided the city’s ethnic groups into districts. Arabs, for example, were to live in Kampong Glam, where they still reside. Tamils, known as Chulia, congregated near the south bank, in Kampong Chulia. A second wave of immigrants, mainly Sikhs and Gujaratis, came from the north of India in the late nineteenth century, and settled on High Street. The European enclave was on the north bank of the river, where the old government buildings are. Immigrants from Teo Chew were placed in a district by the river; the Cantonese in Kreta Ayer to the southwest; the Hokkien in the south and the Hainanese in the north.

Some of the clan associations inevitably degenerated into criminal gangs. They competed for territories and levied protection money. They joined who needed to: gamblers, the unemployed and opium addicts. Most addicts were coolies straight off the boat from China. William Farquhar, the first Resident, sold licences for opium, gambling and spirits, which provided most of the government’s income. Until the 1920s the opium trade was run by the government. The trade was banned only in 1946 and there were opium dens in Singapore until the 1950s.

From 1870, brothels had to be registered. Prostitutes came from all over; British prostitutes alone were barred. Brothels were banned in 1930. Apparently prostitution is again legal in Singapore, unlike chewing gum. To a Briton this is strange, but a cold analysis of the side-effects of criminalisation of prostitution and of the externalities of gum might well justify the Singaporean approach.

The first bank to open in Singapore was the Bank of Calcutta, in 1840. Since trade took off from the beginning, factoring business must have gone on before then. Money-lending was initially dominated by Chettiars, clearing houses by the Chinese. (Although the Indian population of Singapore was not much caste-bound, the Chettiars were an exception. They were a money-lending and trading caste from Tamil Nadu. In those days they shaved their heads. They established their businesses along Market Street. They provided microfinance before the term was invented, lending to small businesses and small traders who could not obtain finance from banks.)

In Singapore there are large numbers of the shophouses of the type seen in Melaka and Penang, especially in Kampong Glam and Chinatown.

In front of the shophouses, as in Malaysia, are five-foot ways.

In Hội An, the old commercial buildings were preserved because the port went downhill fast and there was no money to build new stock. Newly independent Singapore rushed to knock down old buildings and modernise. More recently, once the accidental city-state had got rich, it needed a history as fast as it could buy one, and Chinatown was preserved – knocking out much of the soul of it, naturally.

It is close to the central business district, and a convenient spot for lunch.

Nevertheless Chinatown, spruced up and yuppified, is a most interesting place, and more impressive than Melaka. Like any Chinese enclave it is a red place. Red brings luck: it scares a monster that eats people. Loud noises scare it too, so red firecrackers are especially lucky. New Year will be very loud and red.

On Pagoda Street is a Chinese Heritage Centre, which is very much worth a visit. It occupies three buildings that were originally tailors’ shops. There I learnt about the Mooncake Festival, which takes place in mid-Autumn.

Apparently the Earth used to have ten suns. One day they all appeared at once – bad news. Hon Yi saved the day by shooting down all the suns but one, and was naturally made Emperor. But he became tyrannical, and when he decided to steal the Elixir of Life, his wife Chang Er drank it to save the people. (Or so she said.) She floated to the moon, so it seems one of the Elixir’s ingredients is Red Bull. The event is celebrated with mooncakes and lanterns. In the fourteenth century the Han patriot Zhu Yuan Zhang used messages hidden in mooncakes to organise a rebellion against the Mongolians. The rebellion succeeded and Zhu founded the Ming dynasty (1279-1368). He is worshipped during the festival too.

There are a couple of art deco landmarks on Eu Tong Sen Street. One is the Majestic Cinema.

Next door is the Great Southern Hotel, Chinatown’s Raffles. It was built in 1927, and there was a cabaret, a restaurant, a performance area suites for gambling and opium smoking. For a long time it was the tallest building on town, and so it was the only place in town for suicides.

Now it is the Yue Hwa emporium. I saw on sale on the ground floor, at the medicine counter, deer antlers, spatchcocked lizards, deer tails, and roots galore. Some items fetch fantastic prices: S$800 for the deer tail, S$250 for something that looked like a dried caterpillar (but was probably the dried penis of some near-extinct species, although it might have been ginseng).

Upstairs they sell gorgeous teapots. They should be gorgeous. Some price tags: S$15,800, S$8,800, S$18,000, S$85,000, S$48,000, S$36,800. (Multiply by 0.44 to get sterling. Sterling has depreciated from S$2.70 in July to about S$2.15 now.)

They sell some great vases too: S$1,666, S$2,380 (black and gold with dragons), S$4,800 (elephant head handles), $$2,380 (red and gold with dragons), etc. Agate and jade figures retail for up to $10,000.

(At least the chopsticks are cheap. I feel poor in Singapore – and I am, because Singapore is very rich and I don’t have a job. It is an aspect of the human condition to look to the future, and already much of my consciousness is dominated by the idea that when I return to London I shall be unemployed. It is starting to affect my enjoyment.)

If you still have too much cash, wander round the corner to the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple and buy yourself a place in the Ancestral Prayer Chamber.

The temple was officially opened during Vesak 2007, and consecrated in May this year, so it is spanking new. You can buy a tablet with space for five names at the back wall for S$40,000. Or, at the sides, two names on a smaller tablet for S$8,000. This is Avalokitesvara.

Then go to Sago Lane. This was known as Sey Yan Kai in Chinese: the Street of the Dead. The street specialised in death houses, where people were left to spend their last days. When they were done, there were professional mourners, paid to cry loudly (the Romans had the same). The death houses were abolished only in 1961.

On the way back diving in Ambon Bay our boat was flagged down by the police. We were boarded by two armed policemen.

Travelling around poor countries it is wise to be cautious about contact with policemen. The more corrupt the country, the higher the proportion of their income public servants derive from bribery and fines, often levied at the point of a gun.

But they weren’t after tourists. ‘No problem, mister,’ they said to us. They were on the trail of smugglers. Presumably they had a tip-off, as they knew exactly which boat they wanted. We rounded the headland and approached a fishing vessel, which the policemen boarded.

After ten minutes’ searching in the hold, they found two petrol cans, each filled with a palm distillate known in the Moluccas as sopi. The police confiscated the cans, but did not take the further actions you might expect, like fining or arresting the hooch-runners.

From the cans there drifted a fruity alcohol aroma reminiscent of that in a bodega in Jerez. I had seen a bamboo sopi still in the Siwa Lima museum outside Kota Ambon and wanted to try some. I wondered whether it would be pushing it to buy the contraband from the policemen.

But it wasn’t necessary. As payment for the use of the boat, we received a bottle of sopi. One of the dive guides took it. (All of the guides at Maluku Divers were Muslim, but some more than others.) One of the policemen took my water bottle. I thought I was getting a share too; actually he was just borrowing my bottle. Indefinitely.

We three divers – the others were from Hockenheim - tried it. ‘Very strong’ pronounced the locals. Under 30% abv, concluded the tourists. It was OK, but still by far the best rice wine or palm wine I have tasted was in Kim Sơn in northern Vietnam.

• **

Singaporeans are among the most myopic people in the world. There are lots of opticians, but they are as expensive as those in London. Lasik eye surgery is a big business here. You see Lasik clinics in the shopping centres, and procedures are advertised at less than S$1000 an eye.

I have thought about having it done myself, and looked into the details of the procedure. There is nothing terrible about it, although I don’t much like the idea of being able to smell my burning eyeball during the procedure. But you also need periodic check-ups afterwards, and that is not practical while I’m travelling.

• **

I still don’t feel like travelling, however. I still haven’t decided where to go next, and that’s partly because I don’t really want to go anywhere or travel around Christmas. It’s also down to ignorance, as I don’t know anything about Thailand outside Bangkok. I’ve spent the afternoon trying to find a good bookshop in central Singapore, without success.

• **

Kota Ambon seems to specialise in hairdressers. The males are flamboyantly gay, often plastered in make-up. My barber was dressed in a tight t-shirt with pink hearts, which highlighted his paunch.

Generally speaking, Indonesians are a different build from people in Indochina. They are no taller, but are much stockier, putting on both muscle and fat easily like Samoans. The average Vietnamese man probably weighs 50 kg, while many Indonesians weigh as much as me. The bigger men look just like Oddjob from Goldfinger.

• **

On the way from Bitung to Manado I had an interesting chat with Sami, a retired teacher from Malaysia. Sami is ethnically Tamil and told me at great length about Malaysia’s discriminatory policies. He says that it is a requirement that bumis must own at least 30% of the equity of any private business; the best primary and secondary schools are reserved for bumis; Petronas is run by Malays for Malays; the bumi discount on property prices applies not just to the poorest band of properties, but to all; etc.

He also lamented the rise of conservative Islam in Malaysia. He says that article 4 [actually article 11] of the Malaysian constitution – which was drafted by the Reid Commission in 1957 - protects freedom of religion. But article 153 states that Malaysia is a Muslim country. The courts and government cite the latter article frequently, and never the former. [In fact, article 153, as amended in 1963, gives to the king the responsibility of safeguarding the special position of the Malay and other indigenous peoples of Malaysia. Inter alia, it permits the use of quotas for entry into public education and the civil service. It was originally intended to be reviewed in 1972, but the review never took place. Under article 160, a Malay who converts from Islam loses his bumi rights.]

He also says – although I don’t believe it at the time – that non-Muslim publications are not permitted to use the word Allah. Instead they use other words, like Tuhan (Lord). It turns out that he was telling the truth. The government has said that use of the word Allah by non-Muslims would confuse Muslims. The government and the National Fatwa Council must think that Malaysian Muslims are very stupid.

Fresh from this triumph, the Malaysian National Fatwa Council has prohibited Muslims from practising yoga, because elements of Hinduism would corrupt them. More recently, after protest and derision, the PM clarified that practising yoga is acceptable so long as the person does not chant religious mantras. The Indonesian Ulema Council, which follows Malaysia, is now investigating the practice.

[By the way, how many ordinary British citizens could quote articles from the constitution of the UK? A trick question of course, since we do not have a written constitution.]

I have passed a couple of ordinary English days at home, reading The Economist, listening to things like Pomp and Circumstance Nos. 1 and 4 and Radio 4 podcasts, deleting photos, surfing the Amazon and blogging. On this trip, though, these are extraordinary days. When I say ‘at home’, I mean at the apartment of Tassos, a friend of mine from Cambridge who ensures he is out of the continent when I visit Singapore. It is in a somewhat higher-rise version of Surbiton (Urbiton, presumably), to the east of the centre. It is lovely being able to potter about a place with a kitchen, a washing machine… Although Tassos forgot to mention the cats. I am confined to the bedroom; if I stayed in the sitting room I would be dead within a few hours.

The money I am saving on hotels I have spent in Carrefour. The night before last I had my first taste of an English beer in nine months: a bottle of Young’s London Ale. I have never heard of it, and perhaps it is export only – it weighs a whopping 6.4% abv. It was simply better than any beer I have drunk while travelling. Last night I had a Fruit Défendu, also not bad, and a spicy Peranakan meal as a nice change.

For lunch yesterday and today: French country (style) bread, a coarse terrine, Roquefort, Gruyère, St Félicien, and a glass of chilled (yes) Wolf Blass red. OMG.

I am wasting time, but I think it is important to do so. By the end of my time in Indonesia the small irritations had started to get to me; a few days in Singapore and I’ll be ready to travel again, although I don’t yet know where: Thailand, New Zealand, Micronesia? The first step is to decide where to stop over Christmas: take the sails down and point into the wind. Half the shop assistants in Makassar (the Christian half) were wearing Santa hats by the time I left. Christmas is a big festival in Singapore, although not as big as Chinese New Year. I ate on Orchard Road last night and the place was heaving with Christmas shoppers, much like Oxford Street (but much nicer).

• **

An interesting - and needed - article in The Economist on the deep-seated problems in Thai politics.

• **

The Competition Commission has ruled that BAA must sell Gatwick and Stansted. Quite right, and not before time. Since it was privatised as a monopoly, BAA has consistently and massively underinvested in the London airports – an outcome entirely predictable from the flawed market structure. In ten years time, with a bit of luck, we may have large airports in London that are not a national disgrace.

Asia, meanwhile, possesses most of the airports regularly voted the world’s best. Even Jakarta Soekarno-Hatta is nice. I am now in a good position to judge, having taken off – and landed – twenty-five times in the last six months.

(This is Gate 1 at Makassar Airport.)

Notwithstanding the constant hopping, my carbon footprint is bound to be smaller than yours (although the concept is useless in my opinion, since it ignores the productivity or otherwise of the carbon-burning activities). Travelling in the tropics I do not drive; take public transport everywhere; never use heating, eat food locally sourced (except in Singapore) and rarely use aircon. The UK government should subsidise me.

• **

According to an article in Ecology Letters (my nightly reading, ahem) in 2006, up to 73 million sharks are killed each year for the fins alone. Live sharks have their fins and tails removed and are then thrown back into the sea. In some places, the livers are also removed, but not in the Moluccas. (Needless to say, I didn’t know this when I ordered shark’s fin soup in Malaysia.)

At auction, fins from a shark of average size sell for $500. Yet the value of a living shark at dive resort destinations is estimated at $10,000-$20,000 a year. (I do not know the method used to estimate this, however. And is it an average value or a marginal one? In fact I do not find this figure credible.)

There is also an ecological cost. When large sharks disappear, there is an increase in the population of small sharks and rays. These, in turn, may be voracious predators of commercially valuable species such as scallops in North Carolina. The absence of large sharks may also allow other undesirable predators such as crown of thorns starfish to grow in number.

• **

Silly animals to eat, Part VIII: Napoleon wrasse. Napoleon wrasse, also known as giant humphead wrasse or Maori wrasse, are a favourite of divers. They are three feet long or more, green with blue marbling. They weigh up to 20 kg, and are a favourite dish among the Chinese, who eat it for, well, the usual silly reasons.

Fishermen in the Philippines and Indonesia spray reefs with sodium cyanide, the substance used to execute Texans. This stuns the wrasse, which can then be transported alive to Hong Kong and Singapore. (Hong Kong eats its way through 15,000 tons of reef fish a year.) While it stuns the wrasse, the cyanide kills anything smaller, so every time a Napoleon is eaten, hundreds of reef fish have died.

• **

Companies all over the world – with a few exceptions I suppose, such as Iran and North Korea – like to advertise with snippets of English. In Indonesia, Wings Air says “fly is cheap”. Lion Air boasts “we make you fly”, which seems unnecessarily coercive.

• **

A few months ago I dived in Tulamben, on the east coast of Bali. It is known for its wreck, the USS Liberty. Divers are delivered to a car park next to the beach in the van from the dive shop. The gear is carried to the beach by local women. They are all members of a cooperative, Sekar Baruna. As with many businesses in the area (laundries, shops), the business was started with a microloan.

More than 75% of microloans go to women. The average loan is about $180 and the repayment rate is about 95%, which compares with credit cards.

• **

On the Java-Bali-Lombok tour we spent a night at Sengigi. It is an unremarkable port, except for its beach, which is composed entirely of forams. The group Foraminiferida, belonging to the phylum Sarcomatigophora, are single-celled organisms with chambered shells. They range in size from 100 micrometres to several centimetres. Like hard corals, and coralline algae, they have calcium carbonate skeletons, and like many corals, and some clams and nudibranchs, they host symbiotic algae. It has been estimated that 50% of the Earth’s calcareous sedimentary rock formed on sea beds is made up of forams. Much of Kent, for example is chalk: forams in rock form.

The largest lizard, known locally as the ora, lives on four islands to the west of Flores and on the western fringes of the mainland. The four islands are Komodo, Rinca, Gili Motang and Gili Dasami, and the reptile is the Komodo dragon. There were rumours of dragons in the area for centuries, but the first scientific description arrived only in 1912. The informal name was given in 1926.

The second-largest monitor, Varanus salvator, grows to 25 kg. The largest, V. komodoensis, grows up to five times that or more, partly because it is much chubbier. The heaviest recorded weighed 160 kg, and the average adult weighs 90 kg. The average adult male is 3.1 m long. (The longest lizard is V. salvadori, which lives in New Guinea.)

The dragon may be a descendant of an Australian lizard, Megalania prisca, aka V. priscus, which grew to seven metres in length and lived until humans arrived. (This is a slightly roundabout journey: the genus Varanus originally came from Asia.)

The dragon used to be more maritime than it is today. It used to swim between the islands of Nusa Tenggara, although during the last Ice Age it could walk or take a taxi. But now the currents between the islands are very strong, and the dragon swims only reluctantly.

Rinca is slightly nearer to Flores than Komodo, so I went to Rinca on a day trip with a couple resident in New Zealand. The chartered boat took a good three hours to get there at a slow plod, so we had plenty of time to look at the islands off the coast.

They look brown and dry (it’s the driest place in Indonesia, in fact, with average annual rainfall of 650 mm); not a place where anything would live. But they do: to name just mammals, there are goats, monkeys, wild pigs, deer and buffalo on the islands.

The dragon is at the top of the food chain. It will eat anything else that lives on the islands: insects, lizards, snakes, birds, deer, boar, monkeys, turtle and megapod eggs, juvenile dragons, and even buffalo. It usually eats carrion, including human corpses, but is happy to hunt. In an article in Nature in 1987, Jared Diamond (of whom more in a later post) proposed the theory that in prehistoric times it may have lived off pygmy stegodonts - small elephants, now extinct - which lived in Flores. It has even killed small humans and attacked large ones. Dragons can stand on their hind legs to attack tall prey, on which occasions it must seem at though Godzilla has attacked.

They can eat up to 80% of their body weight in a single meal (often in a single mouthful – a goat can be swallowed whole). And they have very slow metabolisms, so they can go for a month between meals.

Their saliva carries many kinds of bacteria, and is so poisonous that even a small wound will kill a buffalo in a few days by septicaemia or gangrene. They are happy to wait.

As the lizard moves it flicks the air with its forked yellow tongue, like a snake. The scent particles that stick to the tongue are passed through openings in the mouth into the Jacobson’s organs in the nose, where they are analysed. It can smell carrion from six miles away.

Not surprisingly, the population is small, estimated at 4,000 in 1990. It is protected under CITES Appendix I and is officially vulnerable. Unlike other monitors it is active throughout the year. During the dry season (most of the time) it displays bimodal activity: that is, it moves around in the morning and evening. In the middle of the day a dragon will find some shade and flop into it, limbs any old how. If it doesn’t want to move, it won’t. The dragon is afraid of nothing. If it doesn’t like where you are standing, it will issue a sibilant, unvoiced exhalatory admonition, at which point you get out of the way fast. If it does attack, it moves very swiftly.

We disembarked at a small jetty and walked through a parched mud flat to a hut that marked the entrance to the national park.

After paying a large amount to enter, we were assigned a ranger and set off walking. We walked through sparse low woodland and scrub. But we saw most of our dragons at the beginning and end of the walk. There is a set of cabins on stilts – you can stay the night in a cabin – and the space under the cabins offers convenient shade for the dragons. We saw perhaps half a dozen in this way. You could get fairly close, because once parked, they did not want to move.

As we walked towards the wood, a fairly large dragon walked towards us, and then past us across the volleyball court.

It moved reasonably swiftly, without in any way displaying haste, and lay down in the shade next to a favourite football.

When they want to hunt, the dragons lie in wait. You can’t see them. But for our guide, Paul and I would have walked straight into a two-metre ora without ever seeing it.

Courtship and mating take place between May and July; the male uses one of its two hemipenes to enter the dragon. Egglaying occurs between July and September. They use abandoned nest mounds of orange-footed scrubfowl, of which we saw several pairs on the island. Incubation takes eight months. Females are capable of parthenogenesis, producing male offspring thereby, like Mary. (This could be observed in two ways: when females without male company give birth in a zoo; and by DNA fingerprinting.)

We saw a juvenile moving cautiously through the brush. It was dark with green spots; the adults are a dusty brown. Juveniles are arboreal. They have to be: adult dragons get a tenth of their calories by eating juveniles. Sometimes juveniles must approach a corpse, after their seniors have eaten, and before doing so they will roll in shit to deter cannibalism.

After an hour’s walking we reached a dried up creek with a few small mud pools in it. Here a few water buffalo had congregated. Thirty metres away, in another pool, a dragon rested, arms podgy as a baby’s.

But there were long claws at the ends of the fingers.

It lifted its head every now and then to look at us, without every really displaying any interest.

A buffalo walked past. It had a bloody wound at the top of its tail from a dragon attack. The wound would soon kill it; it was a dead cow walking. It walked straight past the dragon, but the dragon still did not move; perhaps it could smell the wound.