Asia 2008-09

I'm posting from Kota Bahru, just south of the Thai-Malaysian border. It is the capital of Kelantan, once one of the poorer states in the Federation, now the richest - oil. There are some palaces in the suburbs but the city itself does not display its wealth. In the first few hours here it has been dispiritingly wet and dry: wet, because it has rained all the time; dry, because this is the most Muslim state in Malaysia, and few places sell alcohol. Indeed, it calls itself Kota Bahru Islamic City, if I have got it right, which must make the Chinese feel welcome.

Most restaurants in Malaysia do not serve pork. (The Chinese, who can’t live without it, are an exception.) Where a pork-like substance is necessary, ‘chicken ham’ and ‘beef bacon’ are substituted instead. So Burger King does not serve bacon, and the Bacon Double Cheeseburger is just a BK Double Cheeseburger. And so the greatest invention in the history of fast food is lost to Malaysia.

Similarly, the only place to find beer in KB is in the Chinese restaurants, so I shall be eating Chinese for a while. I crave whisky or brandy, simply because I know I can't find any.

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The only accommodation in Kinabalu National Park is run by Sutera Sanctuary Lodges, who charge monopoly prices. I visited their offices and, upon being told that the accommodation up the mountain was full until 31 August, paid through the nose to obtain a place through my guesthouse. I shopped in a hurry: two jackets, gloves, a hat, long johns. One of the jackets was a steal at £4. None of these is usually necessary in the tropics, but, at 4,095 metres on the most recent geodesic, the summit of Kinabalu is cold. (A reasonable rule of thumb is to subtract ten degrees Celsius for every thousand metres in height.)

The following day, having inadvertently set my alarm clock for 6 pm, I overslept and packed in a panic. Thus my rucksack contained three books, a change of trousers, sandals and a lens cleaning kit, but no Ventolin, hat or socks. It weighed around fifteen kilos, which I regretted for all fifteen hours or so of the climb.

Although the path up the mountain is clear – 30,000 attempt the climb each year, and much of the route is stepped, fenced or roped – a guide is obligatory. At Park HQ I am duly assigned a guide, Azuwan. He is even older than me, and he climbs the mountain but twice a week; some of the guides climb it thrice, with one day off. Some have climbed it 5,000 times, which must be very dull.

I was expecting to be in a group, but actually I’m on my own at first, which is boring. Asuwan is not over-talkative, and nor am I for that matter. But there are a number of covered rest stations on the route, and after the first I ended up in a group with others from the UK or thereabouts: Anne, Helen and Jeremy.

We walk up through low montane (oak-laurel) forest then high montane and then the trees become stunted and rhododendrons and mosses start to take over. By that time we are above the sparse clouds. Kinabalu is home to a huge number of plant species, many of which are endemic. The park is thought to host over 1,000 species of orchid and 600 species of fern.

Kinabalu is also known for its pitcher plants (genus Nepenthes), which eat insects. Unlike Venus fly-traps, say, they are passively carnivorous; that is, they do not move to catch their prey. They merely emit an alluring scent. Their leaf-tips fuse to form a tall cup or ewer. The lip of the ewer is slippery, so that any insect that lands on it falls in, there to be broken down in a pool of digestive fluid. The fluid only analyses the dead; frogs and tadpoles can live in it comfortably.

Each pitcher has a lid to prevent the abundant rainwater from diluting the contents of the pitcher. The largest pitcher plant, N. rajah, is reputed to have a capacity of over three litres.

They are climbers. The pitcher forms on the floor, where it is fat. As the tendrils climb, the pitcher becomes elongated and bottom-heavy, so that it remains vertical.

Above 2,500 metres we saw a few pitchers. The first, N. villosa, is fairly small.

The others were N. kinabaluensis, the second-biggest plant.

There are also a fair number of animals in the park, but the trail is busy, and most keep out of the way. An exception is the mendicant ground squirrels loitering at rest stations.

The walk to Laban Ratah, where climbers spend the night, took four and a half hours. Laban Ratah perches at 3,270 metres above sea level. Above 3,000 or so I started to notice the poverty of the air. I’ve walked to 4,200 before, on the Inca Trail twenty years ago. There I only perceived the thin air above 3,800 metres or so; but then we had acclimatised in Cusco. Here, most people come from Kota Kinabalu, on the sea. Some get altitude sickness. I just got a headache, which is very common. Helen vomited a couple of times.

But overall the climb is not hard, and certainly not technical, and the views are wonderful. We are vastly fortunate with the weather: not a drop of rain over the two days. Annual rainfall in the park averages 4,000 mm.

When we arrive in mid-afternoon the thermometer reads 16 degrees. When I retire – shortly after seven – it reads 9 degrees, but the wind takes it below freezing. The dormitory has no heating, but three layers of clothes and two blankets are enough.

I arrange to meet Azuwan at 2.30 am, after breakfast, but oversleep again. No breakfast, and a rush: not a good start to a climb. It’s dark, of course – that’s the point – but there is a snake of torch-bearing pilgrims to follow. Progress is very slow, which is not inconvenient; there doesn’t seem to be much air around. It’s no big deal, you just have to go slowly. Soon we are above the tree line, and we ascend, bent forward, over slippery granite. The trail is steep. Much of the time it is necessary to hold on to fixed ropes; some of the time you’re on all fours.

It takes much longer than I had expected – 160 minutes – to trudge to the peak. In the dark, there is no view to divert attention from corporeal complaints. As with most climbs, peak fitness is not required, just a modicum of willpower. In the rain, though, the mental demands would be significant.

Eventually, just as dawn breaks, I achieve the summit, where twenty or so climbers already huddle like wintering penguins. Soon there are eighty or a hundred. Most people who attempt the climb make it, the only exceptions those in heels, those hit by altitude sickness and the wobbliest of lardbutts.

Azuwan prudently waits below, in the lee of a strong and icy wind. And soon I realise why: after a couple of fruitless snaps, I lose the use of my gloved fingers. It is perishingly cold, and there is none of the elation usually seen at a summit. Most look glum. Few can stand it for long.

However, fifty metres below the peak and out of the wind, the view is easy to appreciate, and as the sun comes up the view improves. There even seems to be more oxygen around. Just across the way from Low’s Peak is St John’s peak, named after the unfortunate who first ascended the mountain to find himself at a local maximum, a tragic metre lower than the true peak. Between the two peaks, diving near-vertically, is Low’s Gully, inaccessible outside El Niño years.

On the left as we descend, the Abdul Rahman peak, the Ugly Sister and the Donkey’s Ears.

On the right, South Peak, an oddly familiar view. It’s on the one ringgit note. (All the other notes carry proud but ugly pictures of industrial Malaysia, rivalling the euro notes for uninspired ugliness.)

Climbing in the darkness to see the sun rise seems to me a mistake: much better to walk up in warmer daylight and enjoy the scenery all the way. The entire head of the mountain is unearthly: bald granite, scoured long ago by glaciers. I have never been anywhere like it; it’s harshly beautiful.

Unlike any other descent in my experience, going down took as long as going up. We stopped for an hour or so for another breakfast at Laban Ratah, but all in all we were on the move for around eleven hours on the second day.

We have all been warned that the descent is as bad as the climb, but it is much worse. The descent from Laban Ratah covers six km horizontally and 1,900 m vertically, and takes nearly five hours. Well before the end of it, with jelly quads, we are walking like puppets or drunks. That’s when it’s better to be in a group.

And at the end of it, as I mentioned in the last post, I’m not sure what the point of it was. I can feel a mild pride in having climbed it; but I’ve done that sort of thing before and am well acquainted with my mental and physical strengths and weaknesses. You’re not supposed to say this, but, company excepted, I think I might have enjoyed it more if I had stayed on the lower slopes looking at bugs and enjoying the scenery.

As in Singapore, commercial activities in Malaysia have always been dominated by the ethnic Chinese. Ever since independence in 1957, the Malaysian government has operated pro-Malay (in principle but not always in practice, pro-bumiputra), pro-Muslim policies. Another way to put it is that there are anti-Chinese and to a certain extent anti-Indian policies. Bumis are supposed to enjoy a discount when buying real property; it is easier for them to get into university and to obtain government posts; at least in Sabah, there are financial incentives to convert back to Islam; and as I mentioned before, Muslim Filipino immigrants are tacitly tolerated because of their religion.

Malays may have been economically underprivileged fifty years ago, and the orang asli still are. But surely a state with pretensions to modernity – as symbolised in Warisan 2020 - should, like Singapore, ignore the religious beliefs and ethnic origin of its citizens and offer colour-blind assistance to those in need. When a government officially regards a portion of its citizenry as being of less worth than another portion, private citizens are free to follow.

Oh, and Israeli passport holders are not permitted to enter Malaysia. Or, more strictly, Israeli citizens are required to apply for special approval from the Ministry of Home Affairs to enter. This places Malaysia with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Sudan. Reciprocally, Israel does not recognise Malaysian passports. Perhaps there is a sound reason for this of which I am unaware, but it seems disgraceful.

In Malaysia sodomy is a criminal offence, for which there is no right of bail upon arrest, punishable upon conviction by up to twenty years in custody. Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy prime minister, spent six years in prison for sodomy; everyone knows that this was a politically-motivated conviction, sodomy merely being the convenient accusation (he was convicted of corruption at about the same time, but the conviction was quashed on appeal several years later). And he has recently been arrested and charged again; again, it’s convenient, since his opposition coalition has won 49% of parliamentary seats and could take power if there were a few defections.

Malaysia has been governed by the Alliance/Barisan Nasional since independence, so it is a Japanese-style non-democracy democracy. It may be an industrialised high-middle income country, but it has the politics of a banana republic.

Prosecutions are also used as a political tactic in Thailand. There, the best way to get rid of a troublesome foe is to bring a prosecution for lèse majesté. Since the king is revered, this is a very serious offence. The fact that the king himself has said clearly that he is not above criticism doesn’t stop the prosecutions.

And while we’re talking buggery, it’s no real surprise that homosexuality is very common here. The same phenomenon exists throughout the Middle East, where women are at least as unavailable (although they enjoy far greater civil rights in Malaysia except in the field of family law, where Muslims fall within the jurisdiction of the sharia courts). And (although it’s not the same thing) I have met more people here of whose gender I am completely uncertain than in Thailand, land of the ladyboy.

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At last I have a plan, although I don’t yet know whether it’s feasible. I have a reasonable idea how I want to spend the next six weeks. To that end I have spent most of the day at the Indonesian Embassy. Visa sections around the world share the property of being the most inefficient agencies conceivable. It’s as if all the telephone receptionists from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy have come alive. Giggling cretins sit there stroking their little hard-ons at the vast power they wield. They demand three photocopies of your last-but-one tax bill, two of your appendix. Nowhere are the requirements set out; you have to intuit them before arriving. Payment in cash; the Indonesian government does not possess a bank account it seems; that would be one reason why, despite its natural resources, the country is poor.

I spent the time between embassy visits at the post office sending parcels in an effort to reduce the weight I’m carrying. It is fairly cheap, but it took even longer than it did in Vietnam. And I have had a haircut, so it really has been a day full of things I don’t like much.

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One of my objectives is to eat interesting things, and for the last month or so I have failed. I just haven’t seen enough unusual stuff in Malaysia. Yesterday I had dim sum: fish maw dumpling; steamed shrimp dumpling; dried oyster dumpling; carrot cake and red bean pudding and that was probably the most unusual. Pathetic. Hopefully there will be interesting things in Indonesia.

But there are good things here. Belacan is a kind of chilli and shrimp paste. Sambal is a chilli paste. The curries are good. Nyonya food is excellent. And the salted broad beans are fantastic.

And how can you tell a shrimp from a prawn, by the way? Answer at the bottom of the page.

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In Vietnam they eat noodle soup for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Vietnamese cooking has plenty of variety, but every day phở, or variants of it, comprises at least half of the meals eaten in Vietnam. I found it particularly unpalatable for breakfast, and would be happy never to eat it again. (A truly delicious exception is cau lầu in Hội An. The rice for the square-sectioned noodles is soaked in water from the Bá Lễ well and lye made from the ashes of the tro tree from nearby Cham island. You can’t make them anywhere else. You make stock from pork bones and add char siu, pork crackling, garlicky croutons, bean sprouts, water mint, coriander and chives.)

I can’t remember what they eat for breakfast in Thailand. In Malaysia I’ve been hooked on roti canai: roti with a spicy dal dip. But the classic breakfast dish is nasi lemak. It’s a pile of rice, with peanuts, ikan bilis, spicy potato, boiled egg and spicy meat. (Ikan bilis is spicy dried anchovy.) It’s eclectic, but it works. Presumably it was invented when someone got home after a bibulous evening and put everything he had in the house on his plate. I’ve invented some nauseating dishes that way.

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I recently read that the grilled critters on sale in Bangkok are farmed in Isaan. Isaan is the poorest region of Thailand – the best career option for Isaan women is prostitution – and insect protein forms a significant fraction of protein in the diet; cricket contains more protein than the equivalent weight of beef or chicken. The insects are transported to the Klong Toey market in Bangkok, where the trolley-cooks buy them. The price at the market is 140 baht for a kilo of silkworms, 350 baht for a kilo of grasshoppers and 2,000 baht for 500 beetles.

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When you are in a shop in Malaysia, a shop assistant follows you around. Perhaps they’re just being polite, but I find the attention burdensome, as if being followed by a store detective. They don’t exactly assist.

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In the interests of research, I bought a packet of Bornean cigarillos. I tried one and it tasted horrible. But then I don’t smoke, so this is not an informed review.

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A shrimp has two pairs of claws and no rostrum.

I have not yet found a good place to stay in Kota Kinabalu, but the Summer Lodge is the best I have tried so far. Its only flaw is that it sits opposite an open-air bar with a stage. Until last night I thought that the nightly noise pollution was karaoke. (I'm no Pavarotti, but the singing is effing ineffably bad.) But no: they are making a living missing every note by a quartertone. It's exquisitely painful. Nearly as painful as my thighs: I don't think I've experienced such soreness since first running around St James's Park at the age of twelve.

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In Kuala Lumpur, within the grounds of the Lake Gardens, is a bird park. It claims to be the world's largest, and the claim is credible; certainly the netting seems to cover acres. It is supposed to hold over two hundred species. Most are behind bars, some wander ad libitum within the netting. I was there for three or four hours and it wasn't enough.

Here is the first batch of photos. Indian ring-necked parakeet.

Great hornbill.

White-crowned hornbill.

Spotted wood owl.

Fischer's love bird.

Rainbow lories.

Yellow-streaked lories.

Sun conure.

Western-crowned pigeon.

Blue peacock.

I’m just back from climbing Mount Kinabalu, at 4,095 metres the highest mountain in, well, all of Borneo actually. (That's not such a mean statistic: Borneo is the third-largest island.) There are three higher mountains in southeast Asia.

The ascent was hard, the descent harder. I have no idea why I did this thing; I thought I’d grown out of peak-bagging. Today I am stiff as a stiff and have a horror of stairs.

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In Semporna I stayed at the Dragon Inn, also called the Floating Hotel. It doesn’t float, but it is built on barnacle-encrusted stilts in the shallow sea. (Barnacles are crustaceans, by the way, not molluscs. The only way to tell is to observe their larvae.) It is in effect a small water village, of which there are many in Sabah. Some are quite large and have their own mosques.

It is entertaining to take a shower and watch the water drain through the gaps in the planks into the sea. My room was at the end of a pier and kingfishers hung around and argued noisily.

In the shallow water below, clouds of needlefish.

And every now and again the call to prayer floats over the water.

The seafood is fresh.

While in Semporna I dived in the Celebes Sea at Sibuan, Mabul, and twice at Sipadan, while qualifying as an advanced open water diver. That doesn’t make me a good diver.

The weather was not great, and excepting Sibuan the visibility was not very good. But the diversity of marine life at Mabul and Sipadan compensated.

At Mabul’s artificial reef we saw painted frogfish, giant frogfish, lionfish, trumpetfish, scorpionfish, spadefish and nudibranchs, as well as metallic jackfish schooling in large numbers.

The frogfish are also known as anglerfish. They are usually immobile and always hideous.

The red and white common lionfish has large spiny dorsal and pectoral fins, and some of the spines are venomous.

Nudibranchs are hermaphroditic sea slugs with external gills, hence the name.

At Awas we saw a cuttlefish, cleaner shrimp, another lionfish, a hermit crab and a black-finned snake eel half-buried in the sand.

The cleaner shrimp run the crustacean equivalent of a car wash. Fish stop at the station and the shrimp emerge to pick parasites off them. Groupers love them. (Cleaners are essential: when the cleaner wrasse disappear, so do the fish on the reef, presumably because the incidence of disease becomes too great.) So we stopped off for a manicure and some free dental hygiene.

Groupers, incidentally, are born female. They become male later in life. A bit like the ancient Greeks.

We also saw a couple of green turtles, a moray eel and a great barracuda (huge), and the deeply weird crocodile flathead. The last sits latex-lipped on the sandy floor and watches the world with swivelling bulbous eyes.

At Froggy Lair we saw another crocodile fish, a green turtle and a hawksbill turtle. Everywhere we saw, among others, angelfish, butterflyfish, snappers and seaperch, squirrelfish, boxfish, goatfish, filefish, triggerfish, surgeonfish, groupers, pufferfish, bannerfish, razorfish, trumpetfish, unicornfish, spadefish, parrotfish. Among invertebrates, nudibranchs, sea squirts, sponges, anemones, hydroids, echinoderms and corals soft and hard. Reefs host an abundance and diversity of animal species that even rainforests cannot match. This is the xanthic (yellow) form of a flutemouth.

I rented a camera for the day, which is why I have photos of some of these. It’s not easy to float absolutely motionless: when taking a photo I naturally hold my breath to concentrate, and if you do this underwater you shoot upwards. I also did a fish identification option on the course, but still haven’t a clue what I am seeing most of the time. This is but one of many examples. [Actually I think it's a juvenile snapper.]

This, however, is a black-saddled toby.

Sipadan, Malaysia’s only true oceanic island, rises 600 metres vertically from the ocean floor. Mushroom-shaped, it is topped with coral reefs. So you dive to the sand at five metres or so, and then step off into an abysm that is for practical purposes endless. It’s quite a thrill: like stepping out of a plane or abseiling over a cliff, except with neutral buoyancy. Looking up the wall from the deep, past schools of fish, is also a buzz.

Sipadan is well known for the abundance of larger creatures: turtles, barracuda and sharks. Numbers of divers are limited and you have to pay for a permit.

At Sipadan we dived to 30 metres and used a lot of air to see absolutely nothing. At Barracuda Point, where there are strong currents, we did a drift dive and saw a white-tipped shark, about seven feet long, several green and hawksbill turtles, and an enormous school of chevron barracuda, each a four-foot-long dead-eyed predator. As I held on to a rock against the current, the barracuda swam very slowly past and just above me against the current, barely moving a muscle. The closest came within about six feet, and it was very exciting. I stopped trying to count; there were several hundred of them.

On the last dive we saw a very large pufferfish, some comical unicornfish, and huge numbers of turtles, some very large. Sipadan is said to have one of the largest populations of turtles in the world. Unlike at Mabul, they seem to be used to divers, and you can get close to them. They find themselves turtle-sized niches in the cliff wall and lie there to rest. Green turtles are larger; they reach a respectable speed simply by waving their forelimbs very slowly in the water.

This is a hawksbill.

We also saw three white-tipped sharks. Two dozed on the sand. White-tips can pump water over their gills while stationary.

Most of Sipadan is a military base, off limits to civilians. On the short stretch of accessible beach the sand is made of shells and lumps of dead coral. The shells move; they are occupied by small hermit crabs. Their left front claws are bigger than their right. If you pick them up they will eventually come partly out of the shell and pick at your fingers. If the front claw grasps the epidermis, it is difficult to get them off.

They have to switch shells as they get bigger; perhaps they will grow into stalk-eyed monsters like this.

While we had a packed lunch on the island a soldier in fatigues struggled to stay awake next to his mounted machine gun. The soldiers may be there to protect against pirates; some divers were kidnapped from Sipadan a few years ago, and there have always been pirates in these waters.

I'm back on the South China Sea - first glimpsed four months ago - in Kota Kinabalu, wondering what to do next. In theory I am here to climb Mount Kinabalu. But a dodgy ankle, sustained in a pratfall off the pavement in Semporna, while embarrassingly sober, casts that into question. As the first post made clear, I haven't had a plan since arriving in Bangkok. While that affords complete flexibility, sometimes I would like to have a better idea of what I'm here for. There is a constant tension between the intensive and the extensive: should I stay in a place and try to understand it a little, or see as much as possible? At the moment the latter strategy is more attractive. Without a plan I'm also likely to criss-cross around more than I need to.

So where next? In Borneo I have been looking at animals and diving - nothing cultural at all. It has been very enjoyable. I feel like more of the same, which rules out Java for the moment. The Philippines have great diving, but it is very wet season now (most seasons are the very wet season in the Philippines). Bali and Lombok also offer good diving, but it is peak season. There is interesting diving in Sulawesi and in Timor, but I want a prescription mask first, and may not be able to get one outside of KL, Singapore and Bali. Peninsular Malaysia has KL, the Perhentians, Kota Bahru, Rendang, Rantau Abang, Tioman and Taman Negara National Park. But August is the school holidays and it's busy; and I know I'll want to go east again afterwards. And the Olympics and then Ramadan are approaching. There seem to be too many constraints. Grateful for ideas.

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There were very few Italians in Vietnam, but Sabah is full of them. In Semporna I dined and dived with Italians. It was fun trying to speak Italian (it didn't work too well, but most of them spoke even worse English). There are also a surprising number of Nordics and Scandinavians.

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This blog has had 20,000 site visits. Keep them coming.

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The short flight from Tawau to KK had plenty of interest. The area around Tawau is supposedly less logged than, say, Sandakan. But as we lifted off, oil palms stretched to the horizon. The only primary rainforest left in Sabah seems to be in protected zones, which cover only a fraction of Sabah. Around the Kinabatangan I had been wondering why they were planted square, when they could fit more in by planting hexagonally. Perhaps it's something to do with transporting the heavy palm nuts? Well, around Tawau they do plant hexagonally.

A very large proportion of the cumulus clouds on Borneo tower miles upwards, perhaps because the air at low level is so warm, which would create strong convection currents. There are a lot of thunderstorms too, of course.

I have seen the end of the rainbow, and it's just oil palms. From the plane I saw a double rainbow. One was the brightest sky-arc I have ever seen; I somehow expected to be able to see more than just the usual seven colours. The rainbows ran vertically from the ground to the clouds.

And as we came to KK, Mount Kinabalu appeared on the right. It rises sharply and majestically out of a sea of cloud. There are hills nearby, but no real mountains, so Kinabalu is a singleton, like Fuji or El Misti. It looks craggy and enormous - another reason to think twice about climbing it.

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Anyway, I have a feeling that blogs about enjoying oneself are less interesting than the converse. (At the opening of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy famously claimed that happy families are all alike, unhappy families unhappy in their own way. It is an impressively portentous opening sentence, but I suspect it's false.) So let's go back three months to Vietnam.

In Ninh Bình I pedalled to Bich Ðọng and Tam Coc and was couriered to Vân Long, Ðông Vân Trình and Kênh Gà.

Bich Ðọng was a pleasant surprise. It is a pagoda built within a limestone cave. Actually there are three pagodas, each on a different level. There are hordes of tourists, 99% of them Vietnamese or Chinese. There must be a lot of French people in Ninh Bình because everyone calls me ‘Monsieur’ or ‘Madame’.

Tam Coc is billed as ‘Hạ Long Bay on the rice paddies’, because the same limestone crags burst vertically out of the fields. Tourists come to Tam Coc to be rowed along the river admiring the landscape. The paddies start at the edge of the river and it is difficult to say where the river ends and the fields begin.

The river passes through three caves. The view is slightly spoiled by signs with slogans such as ‘the marvellously of mountains and rivers’ and ‘let’s protect our natural landscape’. Well, yes, you could start by not planting signs everywhere.

All tourists who visit Ninh Bình go to Tam Coc. The jetty is surrounded by tacky souvenir shops and you can’t walk a step without people shouting at you.

As such it is a good example of how to ruin a good spot. Ten years ago it would no doubt have been a lovely experience. In Vietnam many of the big tourist experiences leave a bitter taste. Those making a living from tourism at the sites cannot just give you a service, but do their best to leave you feeling shit at not setting them up for life. I thought I was lucky, at first. My rower, Hong, and I chatted a bit in Vietnofrench. I bought him a can of beer at the far end.

Like many Vietnamese men, he wore a pith helmet.

But on the way back, the hard sell began. In Tam Coc they push embroidery. Ancient women transfer from boat to boat selling to conscience-stricken tourists. Hong duly opened a box and handed me a pile of embroidery. I looked and did not like; it’s hardly my thing. I declined to buy, and then received the full story: you buy, I have family, babies, give me $10. Well, fuck off. As if it's my problem. As if no-one else in VN is in that situation. And then he asked for a tip. I gave him all the small change I had – 15,000 dong – and he paddled away looking sour.

While I walked around the paths over the paddies barking came from the water all around: frogs.

When I next parked my bike near a temple, the guy tried to charge me a dollar. I had just heard him say 5,000 dong to someone else in Vietnamese. I corrected him and paid him; then he tried to give me the wrong amount in change. This is sadly common.

After that I saw Thai Vị temple, a monument to the 14 Tran kings, beginning with the guy who defeated the Mongols at Bạch Ðâng. A nice temple beneath the outcrops, originally thirteenth century but much restored, with an old wooden bell-tower.

A Chinese-looking guy with a long wispy beard, looking like a caricature from a 1930s movie, gave me a limited explanation and received a limited donation.

The following day I visited Vân Long and Kênh Gà on the back of a motorbike driven by Cương. These are both better places to visit than Tam Coc because they have not yet been ruined. Before we set off Cương reassured me: I have been driving for two years. That’s OK then. I was worried for a second.

Vân Long is a beautiful wetland reserve with karst features. Again, the visitor is rowed around it. The boat is woven and tarred bamboo. It can be punted and rowed. The rowlocks are of rope.

Vân Long is much more peaceful than Tam Coc. The only sounds are birdsong, frogs and the splashing of oars. For the first half hour I saw one other boat.

My rower, Dung (pronounced like a psychoanalyst), is 30 and the mother of children aged 13, 8 and 4. She speaks three words of French, and tries to sell me nothing. We pass a man punting a little coracle; he is after crabs.

One border of the wetland is a main road on a dike. As I watched, a truck driver knocked a man off his overloaded bike, ran out, picked him up, got back in the truck and drove off. Presumably it happens a lot. Just down the road, an enormous belching cement factory, one of very many in Vietnam. Like its northern neighbour, Vietnam has an infinite appetite for cement.

Attached to every vertical object in the reserve are small pink lentil-like objects. They are snails’ eggs. They pop like caviar but the contents are much stickier.

The largest birds on view are white, with long beaks. They are called chim cò and are probably storks or egrets.

It began to drizzle steadily. We took refuge in a cave every bit as large as the largest at Tam Coc, and there came upon a sheltering group of Korean tourists in boats. One sang a Korean song, very loudly. He had a very good voice and we all applauded.

In the afternoon I went to Kênh Gà: chicken village. I was irritated to be asked to pay 80,000 dong for two tickets. But for that I chartered a whole boat, 25 or 30 feet long, powered by an engine, for three hours. Because of the engine, the trip was nowhere near as peaceful as Vân Long.

Despite its name, Kênh Gà is a fishing village that has turned into a town. Women occupy boats in pairs. One lounges back and rows slowly with her feet, one oar at a time. They even feather. The other repeatedly drops a basket to the riverbed and raises it again by rope. Each time a bucketful of sand and snails pours on to the floor. Again, there are snails’ eggs everywhere.

It’s productive fishing, and when they have done with that they harvest the leaves that grow in the river. Leaves play a big role in many Vietnamese dishes. They don’t cook with Thai basil very much, which is a shame, but they do use mint to great effect.

Naturally, the Hoang Long river (named after a dragon, of course) is the town’s aorta. People work in it and wash in it (it’s silty and unappetising). Children play in it, boys on one side, girls on the other.

There are also surprisingly big cargo boats on the river, eighty to hundred feet long and more. Families live on them. They can’t be transporting fish. My guess is that they’re transporting sand and aggregates in one direction and cement in another. It’s surprising that they can navigate the river when laden.

Many, if not most, villages in Vietnam specialise. One will make a certain kind of crockery, another fireworks, another paper, another silk, another ink, another embroidery. It is a demonstration of the advantages of clustering. There must be economies of scale, perhaps from spillovers of specialist skills and from distribution costs. Retailers in the cities also cluster. One street will sell only paint, another only DVDs. This is, of course, an ancient pattern: the streets in the Old Quarter of Hanoi are still called Silk Street, Paper Street, Coffin Street etc. If you want to find a pharmacy you have to travel.

At the far end of the trip I got out to walk a mile or so a cave, Ðông Vân Trình. A cave is a cave and I have seen a few, so I was unenthusiastic, but it turned out to be worth a walk. There are mites and tites by the score. The main cavern is perhaps 90 metres across and twenty metres high, like something dwarvish from Tolkien.

Everywhere are gothic organ pipes, fans, car radiators, melted wax, baleen. There are no guides, no railings and few lights; these long-exposure photographs exaggerate the available light.

The visit is marred (very slightly) only by the persistent attentions of a chainsmoking group of Vietnamese tourists. They don’t mean to harass, but one of them follows me around trying to communicate by repeating himself and speaking loudly –as so many Brits do when talking to Johnny Foreigner.

The bike ride back was great fun, too, as we travelled through dramatic landscape along a half-finished road. No ‘road closed’ signs, no cones, no contraflows. People just drive on the drivable bits past the workmen. And we finished with two litres of bia hơi for 20,000 dong at just about the only pleasant spot in Ninh Bình, by a lake.