Exploring Thailand

Even having been blessed to have been based in a place where there’s so much to see and where other people pay to visit, I couldn’t completely do justice to Thailand. But I made a pretty good effort, I feel.

It all started with a couple of weekend trips to beaches south of Bangkok. My first foray was to Hua Hin, around three hours’ drive away. There I found a holiday resort complete with skyscrapers but with a cute town in its own right. The beach was large and pleasant, although the sea was by no means clean – Bangkok is such a huge city and inevitably the ocean is massively polluted. There are a couple of good markets including the eclectic Cicada night market bursting with handicrafts, and lots of lovely bars and places to eat, and overall it’s a perfectly nice place for a weekend escape.

Pattaya was a different kettle of fish entirely. I’d been here 30 years ago and found it depressing beyond belief. I’m not entirely sure why I went back. Possibly it was the proximity to Bangkok, a mere two hours by minibus. I was staying in the quieter end of the resort, Jomtien, and unfortunately I didn’t realise that my bargain public minibus dropped folk off on demand on the main expressway rather than the beachfront road, and that Jomtien was by no means the final stop.  By the time I did, I was some distance beyond my destination, which meant I had to first traverse an enormous dual carriageway, then traipse along a very long road with not a taxi in sight, flanked either side by building sites spawning new condos and resorts until I finally reached the coast. Despite this I actually rather liked Jomtien, not only because I could sit on the grubby beach for a couple of hours – the water here is an even muddier brown than at Hua Hin. I did however make the error of venturing into Pattaya to become depressed at the blank faced prostitutes, at least five deep, on the shoreline road.

My third sojourn to the beach, however, hit the jackpot. Koh Samet, which is more or less the closest island to Bangkok, a mere hour or so past Pattaya, did not raise my expectations as I was expecting more brown water, ugly developments and sex tourists. As a result I’d deliberately chosen what appeared to be the quietest part of the island, the very southern tip. We were staying at Ao Pakarang beach, a tiny bay flanked by bungalow type accommodation and a restaurant. I’m not sure if anything else is within easy reach, because in the three days that we were there we never moved from this blissful spot. To get there, we caught a public bus from Bangkok to Rayong followed by a speedboat which zoomed its exhilarating way through crystal blue waters straight from a holiday brochure past a succession of cute cottage-style resorts perched on tiny beaches. This was more like it! It reminded me of Koh Samui, where I’d stayed in 1989 in a rustic thatched beachfront cottage.

The speedboat dropped us off on a floating platform, complete with seats and a parasol, where we were winched into shore like Lord and Lady Muck. It was a little part of paradise, just us, the brightly-coloured lizards, fruit bats, cute zebra doves and a pacific reef heron for company, along with a mere couple of other holidaymakers. It was blissful indeed, with very little to do apart from watch the rise and fall of the tide, drink beer and eat food.

Closer to Bangkok, accessible as we did in a single day trip, is Amphawa train market. Admittedly, it’s a bit of a tourist trap, but I loved it. It’s basically your average, bustling local Thai market, selling mostly fruit and vegetables, fish, cooked foods but also clothing, material and so on. Except for reasons best known to the people who planned the commuter railway line running from Bangkok to this bustling community, the train tracks run straight through the middle of the market. Thus, several times a day, a huge train slowly edges its way towards the station. Shortly before it arrives, the stallholders, with an admirable lack of haste, pull back their wares which are displayed on trollies on their own little tracks enabling them to glide safely out of the way of the oncoming train, whilst pulling back their tarpaulin canopies like so many umbrellas. No sooner than the train has passed, mere inches from the produce and the spectators, then the little trollies get pushed back and the awnings unfolded again and all is swiftly as if the train had never been.

Slightly further afield is Kanchanaburi, towards the west of Thailand and close to the border with Burma. This quaint little town, perched on the Mae Klong river, is the site of the very famous bridge over the river Kwai. The bridge and the railway beyond it, the so-called ‘Death Railway’, were constructed by Prisoners of War, mainly from the UK, Australia and USA in 1942 when Japanese forces wanted to open up a supply chain into Burma. As many as 12,000 POWs died during the construction period and, staggeringly, it’s calculated that 90,000 local paid labourers also perished. The death railway itself is still functional, and we caught a clickety clackety train that trundles over several impressive viaducts and bridges. At Hellfire pass, there’s a lovely – if sweaty – walk on the old railbed, with chisel marks in the rocks at either side of the track speaking of the blood, sweat and lives that went into the making of the railway.

My final foray out of Bangkok involved a flight, as I was returning to Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand, after another gap of 30 years. Chiang Mai has not changed a great deal. The relaxed atmosphere, low-rise buildings, markets and funky restaurants were much as I remembered them. The main reason I came to Chiang Mai was not, however, for retail or food therapy, but because I wanted to see elephants.  After a lot of research, I’d chosen the Elephant Nature Park, run by Save Elephant Foundation, which acts as a retirement home for abused elephants. The sad side of the elephant circus shows and elephant painters which tragically still attract visitors is the shockingly cruel way in which the elephants are forced to perform tricks totally contrary to their natural behaviour. It’s worth remembering too, that it’s pretty damaging to an elephant’s spine to carry a human on its back, so any park worth its salt will not offer elephant rides. Aside from visiting and supporting the park itself, the Elephant Nature Park has begun branching out into the community, offering local tribespeople a good income from tourists, providing their elephants are treated with respect. In turn this puts in motion an education process that teaches that ethical elephant ownership can reap rewards. Otherwise, elephants will often be hired out to unscrupulous circuses and the like.

The five elephants we interacted with – feeding them vast quantities of bananas and sugar cane, bathing them, slapping mud on them and walking them down to the river to wash it all off – had come to the tribe from the circus, in the case of the younger elephants, or from the logging industry, in the case of the older ones. It was a great privilege to spend time with these magnificent and sensitive creatures, which despite the horrors they had endured, were still gentle and trusting. It was a privilege to spend some time with these noble creatures.

Bangkok 30 Years On

I’m not entirely sure why was affronted that Bangkok had changed. After all, hasn’t everywhere – and everyone – changed since 1987?

It’s been a while since my last blog post, largely because being posted to Croydon, south London, didn’t inspire my creative juices. But this summer, I was fortunate enough to be posted to Bangkok, capital city of the land of smiles. Not only is it an excellent jumping off point for all sorts of destinations I was itching to visit – more on these in a later post – but Bangkok itself, being a city of over 5 million inhabitants, is a fantastic place to live for a while. I was staying right in the heart of shopping-mall land, sleek silver skyscrapers popping up like mushrooms, cranes littering the skyline. The only reminders of what used to be there are pavements curving round to where once was a road, and a network of tiny lanes on Google maps, showing were whole communities have been gobbled up to build the latest smart condominium. I fear that the city is losing its character, becoming like every other high rise Asian city. But who am I to decree that the good citizens of Thailand, with their considerable buying power, be denied their swanky malls, rooftop restaurants and squeaky new serviced apartments?

There are still echoes of the Bangkok of thirty years ago to be found. The traffic is still crazy, despite the very efficient sky train, and tuc tucs still ply for fares – expensive ones, as they’re really only for tourists now. Locals hop on the back of a motorbike taxi, the ladies sitting side-saddle as they weave perilously through the traffic. Street food vendors still line some of the pavements, smells of chicken and pork wafting along with the stomach turning eggy smell of durian. These stalls are a feat of ingenuity, packing utensils, parasols and even chairs and tables into what are little more than barrows. The food is always very fresh, such is the popularity and turnover of these stalls. I love Thai cuisine, with its fearsome tongue-biting chillies, along with a background of lemon grass, holy basil and coconut. The king of Thai dishes has to be Pad Thai, with its own squeeze of lime and sprinkling of crushed peanuts.

I did find a little bit of the Bangkok I remembered when I visited Koh San Road, where I had stayed in a hostel as a fresh-faced backpacker all those years ago, and it hasn’t changed a great deal. There is not a high-rise in sight, instead lots of laid-back restaurants, and the odd hippy wanding about, stuck in a previous decade. Although folk nowadays tend to be engrossed in their phone screens rather than chatting to each other and reading airmail letters from home.

The Chao Phraya river at Bangkok became my favourite place. There are several different boats that ply up and down and it’s a challenge figuring out the right one. Orange flag boats take you anywhere you like for 15 baht (35p) and were in my opinion the best, crammed with tourists, locals and monks. The boat operator is armed with a shrill whistle, screaming at high volume to everyone to move down the boat until they’re packed like sardines and the boat lies alarmingly low in the water. These boats don’t hang around, and many a person has missed their stop from being unable to fight their way off through the tightly-packed passengers in time.

Of course, tourists come to Bangkok for good reason. Temple fatigue came early to my life, in 1987 to be precise, so I allowed myself just one temple – Wat Po, containing the splendidly reposing reclining Buddha, complete with mother-of-pearl feet and marvellous toes. Even if I’d wanted to visit the Grand Palace I couldn’t have, owing to the then impending cremation ceremony of the hugely popular King Rama IX Bhumibol Adulyadej. He remained on the throne for an incredible seventy years until he passed away at 88 years of age just over one year ago. Thailand was been in official mourning for the following year, culminating in the month-log run-up to the ceremony when solemnity was stepped up. During this time, Thais wore only either black or white, which are both the colours of mourning, with buildings adorned with black and white silk. Bangkok became a sea of yellow chrysanthemums, yellow being the colour of Monday, the day the King was born. Haunting oboe music filled the air in shopping malls and on public transport. Huge advertising hoardings showed monochrome pictures of the King or a black and white montage of his life, and those that did still carry their original adverts did so in strangely muted colours. A staggering 12 million people visited the palace over the past year to pay their respects, waiting in line for many hours in order to do so. The golden funeral pyre – an ornate, extravagant affair, took a year to construct, and the funeral ceremonies themselves lasted a full five days.

Even though it’s an urban metropolis, Bangkok is still home to a surprising amount of wildlife. White egrets stalk around the edges of canals. The comical birdsong, so definitely meaning I’m in a tropical country, never fails to make me smile. The birds always have plenty to feed on, as there’s always tasty titbits to be stolen from the tiny Buddhist shrines dotted about every neighbourhood.  It’s not uncommon to see an enormous, lumbering monitor lizard, prehistoric in appearance, clambering round the banks of a klong or peddling like a miniature crocodile in the fedit water.

My stay coincided with monsoon season in Thailand. Of course it was hot – but also at times it was very, very wet. One minute the sky would be a bright clear blue, the next, menacing clouds would roll in followed by an ominous clap of thunder. Fast on its heels came the rain, ramrod straight, as if someone had turned on a shower. Give it half an hour, though, and the rain would clear and people would emerge back out onto the steaming pavements from under umbrellas and ponchos, with the air deliciously cooler.

Above all, Thais are lovely folk. Polite, always smiling, and with a great sense of humour. Even the packed sky train at rush hour is characterised by long, orderly lines.  Usually, taxi drivers switch on their meters. My grasp of Thai language stuttered and stopped after approximately three words but despite this, I was welcomed to this fast-changing city with a quite staggering hospitality. Bangkok, you will be missed.

Chennai revisited

I thought I was tired of India. Then I went to Mumbai. After Mumbai, thought I’d seen all of India that I wanted to. Then I was sent back to Chennai. I didn’t want to return – there’s a big wide world out there waiting to be explored. I done Chennai, surely?

I was wrong.

It’s always less daunting, but much safer and to my mind a bit boring, to return to a place one has already been. But I doused my itchy feet in a bucket of financial realism and off I went. It had been three years since my last trip to South India, and I wondered if Chennai would have changed. It has, in part. But then so have I. India has taken on a normality after spending a quarter of every year there since. No longer do I notice the noise, the hooting, the traffic, the stares, the haphazardness and lack of personal space. I barely even notice the smells.

So, what had changed? The metro line which had resulted in multiple road closures and traffic chaos had at least been slightly finished, and it could be that I’m a bit immune to Asian traffic but the melee on the roads didn’t seem quite as bad. The car:motorbike:tuc-tuc ratio had definitely increased. There were some shiny new pavements, the rubbish dump I used to clamber over on my way back from work, vanished. Starbucks had arrived. A couple of organic health-food stores had appeared. More cafes, with decent coffee easier to find. The Mall had even spawned a wine shop, with proper doors, not just an illicit-looking hatch.

One thing is for sure, though, I’d done the sights of Chennai on my last visit and they didn’t really tempt me again. One could unkindly say that one of the great things about Chennai is the ease by which one can escape it. Easter weekend was looming, and it seemed a fine idea to use those extra days off to discover the tea stations in the hills around Ooty. Properly called Ootacamund, the town was set up by the British as a respite from the sweltering summer in the city. At 7350 ft above sea level Ooty is about twice the height of the top of Mount Snowdon, and it certainly seemed that way as we wound our way up the twisty narrow road up, up and away, narrowly missing brightly painted lorries and buses which regularly performed standoffs at narrow junctions, forcing all other traffic to a standstill. It was good to get up into the clean mountain air.

Tea plantations and fabulous views aside, the highlight of the weekend had to be the ‘Toy Train’, a narrow gauge railway that puffs (or in our case toots – the steam loco in only used on the first train of the day, so ours was a diesel) up the mountain past utterly gorgeous scenery. As with everywhere else that Easter weekend, the train was immensely popular, and we were ever so grateful that we’d succeeded in bagging some first class tickets.

Ooty even boasts a chocolate museum – an exhibition of handmade artisan chocolate - and of course, tea producers. Sadly the visit to the tiger reserve, which was signposted as being 37km away, took rather longer than expected owing to a sneaky diversion taken by our driver, on a minimum km payment and keen to exceed it. The safari on offer once we had finally arrived rewarded us with the sight of a couple of slightly uninteresting deer but, obviously, no tigers…or anything really. We insisted our driver take the shorter route on the way back, which he wasn’t keen to do, and we soon found out why as the road became one hairpin bend after another with the hapless man unaware of the correct gear required. When he inevitably stalled with a sheer drop behind him, he was unable to execute a hill start and announced that the handbrake wasn’t working. Cue much frantic leaping out of the car.…

Another weekend offered up a jaunt to Pondicherry. I’d been before, but the affectionately-named Pondy is a place worth revisiting, if only for the lack of traffic in the peaceful French quarter and a plethora of lovely courtyard restaurants, not to mention the car-free promenade at night, best experienced with an Italian gelato. En route we stopped off at The Farm, an organic farm/restaurant where a tour introduces the free range chickens, the buffalo (for the mozzarella) and the organic gardens, growing palak (spinach), bitter gourd, chillies, beans and mangoes. A lovely place.

Just down the road from Pondy is Auroville, It’s difficult to describe what Auroville actually is, but it made for an intriguing morning. It’s a kind of commune, made up of folk of many different nationalities co-existing in a self-sustaining community. The entire place was reclaimed from barren scrubland, and now produces its own organic food, candles, incense (of course!), medicinal herbs and clothing, which are all sold in the rather flashy and faintly incongruous large shop near to the visitor’s centre. For a community that does not believe in trading with money it seems to be making rather a lot of it. The concept of Auroville was conceived - naturally - in the 1960’s, by a lady known as ‘Mother’ whose portrait, perched on a lotus flower, smiles beatifically down from every wall, much in the manner of the Pope in Rome. She took up with a fellow called Sri Aurobindo who is described as a spiritual visionary and she was the driving force behind Auroville. ‘Mother’ rather autocratically decided its principals and ideals. She was the author behind the creation of the Matromandir, a huge golden golf ball type globe which is used for meditation and rather resembles the spaceship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, so incongruous is its positioning. Aurovillians do not practise religion, stated the visitor’s guide, yet the God-like lifestyle prescriptions of ‘Mother’ made us wonder where this life philosophy ended and religion began. I did muse whether the huge golden dome rounded up any stray Aurovillians intent on escaping the place, little like the big round ball in ‘The Prisoner’. Food for thought indeed.

Further afield, a weekend trip out of the state of Tamil Nadu led to a few days in Calcutta, where Bengal and Hindi replace Tamil. The city boasts superb colonial architecture including some leafy wide roads reminiscent of New Delhi, the splendid marble Victoria memorial, dedicated to the memory of the late monarch; and the Park Street cemetery full of ornate tombs, largely commemorating British notables from the late 1870s, most of whom had perished very young. Calcutta itself is buzzing, restaurants serve alcohol, food and market stalls dominate and the traffic is crazy, from iconic yellow ambassador taxis to hand-pulled rickshaws, gaudy horse-carriages and even trams. On our first day we passed the shocking remains of the collapsed flyover where sixty-nine people had been killed just a couple of weeks previously, just a gaping hole remaining where a road – and many people’s lives – should have been.

The highlight of Calcutta for me was most definitely Mother Theresa’s house. A simple little, free, museum displayed her knick-knacks, from her leather sandals, grey sweater, walking frame and prayer books, along with an incongruous and amusing display for children involving Barbie Dolls (and even a Ken) dressed up to represent scenes from her life. Barbie dressed up as a nun is certainly a sight to behold, but the scenes depicting Mother Theresa’s early life, with the young religious Albanian girl dressed in a sparkly Barbie outfit sporting long golden hair, did make her subsequent life choices somewhat difficult to comprehend. Next to the museum was her tomb and her bare little bedroom, a very moving place even for an agnostic like me.

I’m glad I had a second chance to visit Chennai.

Abu Dhabi

Writing a blog in retrospect has its advantages, notably the ability to put initial impressions into the perspective of familiarity, but it does have its drawbacks. The novelty of a new location pales into the background once it starts to feel normal and to feel like home. The time that this happens, for me, is usually halfway through a posting. Routines and surroundings take on a familiar rhythm and previously unseen details become noticeable. So it was with Abu Dhabi.

I will attempt to transport myself back to those first impressions. Stepping out of the airport to a wall of heat - a bit like walking into the fallout from the exhaust of a bus. The cloying heat takes your breath away and, strangely for somewhere surrounded by desert, the humidity drenches you within seconds in a dripping layer of sweat. My first few weeks in Abu Dhabi saw me wringing wet and red faced as I tried to negotiate the city on foot, the wide pavements totally deserted as the majority of the population wisely sheltered either miles away in cooler climates, or indoors in air-conditioned coolness. On occasion I thought it was raining, which happens only once or twice a year in the UAE and when it does, the streets flood immediately - why bother building drains when they're used so infrequently - only to discover it was just sweat steadily dropping from my sopping wet hair. Mind you I could be forgiven since Abu Dhabi had the dubious distinction of being the hottest place in the world as the mercury soared past fifty degrees with 98% humidity.

So, back to the airport and that wall of heat. My first impressions were of expensive cars covered, mostly, with a thin layer of desert sand, massive modern buildings and traffic that more or less obeyed road regulations with hardly a car horn to be heard. The first time a car stopped at a zebra crossing for me I thought they had broken down. How very different to India.

The city is still being built and on a grand scale. Ambitious projects for tower blocks, marinas and resorts all pepper the landscape. Money - on the face of it - appears little object. The city itself is practically embryonic and dates largely from the 1970s - in many people's living memories - at which time it was little more than a collection of rustic buildings in a desert landscape, with camels wandering around. First fresh water was discovered, followed by oil, and the rest is history. This history is charmingly explained in Abu Dhabi's fort museum, the building of which was originally the Sheikh's palace which, along with a nearby mosque and adjacent British Embassy, comprise practically the only original buildings in Abu Dhabi. The city exists in the shadow of its larger more brash neighbour Dubai, but Abu Dhabi is much more personable, smaller and easier to get around, at least once I'd sussed out the public transport. Taxis are a dream in Abu Dhabi, marvellously cheap, with drivers who generally know where they're going, always switch on the meter and even have seatbelts. If a driver speeds, a tinny female voice pipes up from the sat-nav: ‘slow down, you are crossing the speed limit'.

Cheaper still with a flat fee of around 40p are the buses. They're a bit slow but they go most places and, endearingly, had a metal tin at the front like a child's piggy bank where you pop in your fare - no tickets or checks, just an honesty system. The amusing aspect to this procedure is that ladies sit at the front of the bus whilst men, without exception, must sit at the rear. There's only one honesty box so male travellers need to feed the box with their fare then sprint round to the rear bus doors before they swing shut in order to get on again. And swing shut they often did, leaving many a paid-up male passenger mouthing helplessly as the bus pulled away. Sadly by the time I left Abu Dhabi this quaint system was being phased out in favour of an oyster card system. The buses suffer from extra sensitive brakes, frequently pitching passengers hither and thither, including an apologetic lady who ended up being launched forwards out of her seat opposite me and landing bodily in my lap, black robes flapping and her surprised face just inches from mine.

Once I'd sussed out the layout of the city which involved getting lost many, many times, I needed to find something to do. Abu Dhabi has plenty of malls which are great places to cool off from the heat but shopping holds limited appeal to the author of this blog. Add to this I'd inevitably get lost in any mall, wandering aimlessly past Boots, New Look and Costa Coffee trying to find the appropriate exit. Happily there are supermarkets on every street corner and the disparate population of the city - native Emirates make up only about 15% of the population - makes even the smallest store a global cornucopia of groceries from the UK, USA, Australia, India and the Philippines.  I underwent a perpetual battle in any given store, since as my shopping whizzed off down the conveyor belt there was a guy at the other end packing it in plastic carrier bags. So I constantly tried to reach him before my shopping did in order to get him to pack it in the plastic carrier bags I'd brought to the store. Recycling is a foreign concept in Abu Dhabi and i was regarded as if i was a crazy woman producing all these second hand plastic carrier bags to reuse. 'No plastic?' they’d say sadly, shaking their head in bewilderment. Environmental awareness doesn't figure highly in UAE psyche, surprisingly. It's common to see cars completely empty, abandoned outside shops or restaurants, engines merrily idling in order that the air-con keeps them cool for their owner’s eventual return.  The UAE does nod to sustainability however with the development of Masdar City, a rather surreal place miles from anywhere which we discovered following a tortuous bus ride from Abu Dhabi. Rather grandly referred to as a city, it is rather a complex of academic buildings used for studies of climate change and the like, which when we visited were eerily empty. The only thing to see really was a sort of wind tower which is used to cool down the ambient air by means of drawing the hot air upwards and thereby creating a cooling breeze – simple yet ingenious. So we pottered about a bit, had  lunch and almost returned to Abu Dhabi before realising we’d missed he prime (some would say sole) attraction of Masdar City, that of the electric driverless cars rather grandly referred to as the Personal Rapid Transit System. We had a bit of trouble finding them - incredible really as Masar City is so small - before we realised that they ran underground, ferrying people to and from the city and the car park. We hadn’t arrived by car but we still caught one of the dinky podule type driverless vehicles to the car par in a very space age manner.

But as has probably become obvious to any reader of this blog, my first love is walking.  Once it started to cool down a bit I began walking with gusto.  There are pavements all over Abu Dhabi, but a mystifying ongoing programme of works which appear to involve lifting the pavement slabs and putting them back down again in exactly the same condition meant the pavements often stopped dead, necessitating a walk in the road dodging the traffic.  Crossing the road anywhere other than at one of the interminably slow pedestrian crossing is not just frowned upon but incredibly difficult because invariably there’s a central reservation and a fence in the way, meaning the only option is to walk – sometimes half a mile or more – to find a crossing place or pedestrian underpass.  Cars have the same problem, as there are rarely right or left turns possible off major roads, instead the driver has to drive a not inconsiderable distance to do a U turn in order to turn down a side street. A lovely walk, particularly in the evening, takes one along the Corniche which is the seafront promenade. It’s called a sea but is in reality a bay, with man-made beaches at intervals, and a paved tree-lined walkway set back from the road with views of proper desert dunes on the opposite side of the bay. In the daytime it’s pretty deserted on account of the heat, towards evening it comes alive with power walkers, joggers, Segway riders and cyclists.  The Emirate Government is forever trying to encourage its citizens to keep fit so there are often exercise classes on the beaches or in the public parks. A scary statistic quoted some 30% Emirates commonly suffer from diabetes and a further 30% are pre-diabetic.

Of course Abu Dhabi has plenty of money and does like to show it off. The shopping malls have their fair share of designer stores only the Emirates can afford.  Touts on the street offer the latest I Phone 6’s and unsolicited text messages offer to value your gold rather than PPI refunds.  During my first weekend in Abu Dhabi I strolled to the Emirates Palace Hotel (not an easy task as nobody arrives at the hotel on foot – absolutely everyone arrives by taxi) – which is an ostentatious confection of a building, built originally as a palace for the ruling Sheikh.  For ostentatious read vulgar.  Dripping with chandeliers and over-the-top decorations, the famous gold bar vending machine was sadly out of order when I was there.

It’s safe to say that my first impressions of Abu Dhabi were of a city bereft of culture, but I did try hard to discover its charms, which are much more evident when the city creeps out of its summertime torpor. The little backstreets off the main thoroughfares repay exploration with plenty of cheap eats and stores catering for the Indian and Phillippino population.  As for culture there is the Sheikh Zayed Mosque, the largest in the world and admittedly stunning with its startling white marble, splendid carpet and huge chandeliers. The complex is huge, meaning another taxi journey as it’s impossible to walk there and beyond being huge, is pretty much like any other mosque, as blasphemous as that may sound. It took me such a long time to kit myself out with the my black nylon abaya, not helped by the fact that I’d forgotten my ID and there was a concern that I might run off with my lovely cloak, no doubt in case I wanted to go to a fancy dress party as Darth Vader. So late was I that I missed the free tour so I just wandered about for a bit, underwhelmed. I can’t deny that I was expecting Abu Dhabi to be far more conservative than it appears to be, and I wasn't expecting to see girls wandering about in shorts and sleeveless tops but it wasn’t out of the ordinary at all. The traditional Emirates dress is a splendidly-named long white robe or dishdash for men teamed with a white head dress called a keffiyeh secured by a black cord known as an agal. On the other hand women wear long black abayas with a headscar or hijab.  Here is not the platform for a discussion on the merits or otherwise of hiding 50% of the population away behind black material, but I can tell you now that it’s incredibly hot and during my time wearing one I did not feel in the slightest bit comfortable.

Of course every visitor to Abu Dhabi has to take a desert safari, a highly organised trip out to a ‘traditional’ Bedouin camp in the middle of the desert, with slightly naff activities like camel and horse rides and a tedious film extolling the virtues of UAE, however the trip was worth it alone for the sight of a proper, real camel train – wild camels just plodding around in the slightly unreal, proper, red desert.  Interesting was the falcon display – I say display but it was deemed too hot to fly the bird so we just witnessed it eating a bit of chicken, but we did hear about traditional  relationship between man and bird.  Falconry in the UAE goes back a long way, when falcons were used for hunting by nomadic Bedouin tribes.  Traditionally falcons were caught at the start of autumn and trained whilst living with the family 24/7. At the end of winter they would be released as they cannot tolerate high temperatures so would then fly off to the mountains only to be recaptured – most likely by a different family – the following year.  As Abu Dhabi grew and the Bedouin lifestyle ceased to be, so people still liked to keep falcons however by now the falcons’ natural prey, the houbara bustard, had become so overhunted that it was a threatened species and as a result it is now illegal to hunt using birds in the UAE.  So what happens now is that the birds are transported overseas by plane to hunt.  They travel on a special perch and take up an airline seat just like any other passenger, and as long as they have their little hoods on their heads they are as contented as can be. Nowadays all birds are bred in captivity as catching wild birds is not officially allowed. Since they’re not out and about perching on trees their claws get too long, so two to three times a year they are booked into the falcon hospital for a pedicure and a beak trim.  The hospital also mends feathers – if a bird breaks or loses a feather, it cannot fly properly and therefore cannot hunt as well.  With these birds costing as much as £90,000 apiece that’ s a worry for their rich owners so the feathers are ingeniously mended using spare feathers that have been moulted off other birds, bits of cocktail sticks and superglue.

Abu Dhabi is the capital of the UAE but there are actually seven emirates – Dubai, Sharjah,Fujairah, Ajman, Ras al-Khaimah and Umm al-Qaiwain. A couple of hours outside of Abu Dhabi is this Emirate’s second city Al Ain, which grew up on account of being a leafy green oasis in the middle of the desert – a perfect place for an amble on a hot day. A bus ride away through flat vast red desert, Al Ain is very different to Abu Dhabi. It is all low rise buildings and has a much more local feel. It has a fantastic, bustling market, piled high with spices, vegetables, fruits and locally produced honey.  It’s also home to the camel market – camels are utilised for milk, meat, racing and working in the UAE. The folk in Al Ain are more often to be seen in traditional dress, the men sporting the familiar checked headscarves, the women in black Abayas but often also sporting a kind of black and white mouth covering confusingly known here as a burqa, which is thought to have been used initially in order to keep out the desert sand.  We collared a local taxi to take us up the winding road to the top of Jebel Hafeet, a vast rocky promontory in the middle of the desert overlooking on one side the atypical greenness of Al Ain and on the other, the deserts of Oman. It was a welcome break from the city.

So why a retrospective blog I hear you ask?  Well, the Emirate authorities take great care to monitor social media communications so unless I was to give the country a positive whitewash I wasn’t going to risk mysteriously disappearing on account of an ill-advised blog comment.  After all, this is a country which has a Ministry of Misinformation – a Python-esque phone line one can call in order to ascertain whether a statement seen on social media is true or a misinformation.  Startlingly hilarious but ultimately fascinating.

Going tripping

Mumbai was a treat, but it was nice to be able to escape the city once in a while, and where better to escape to than Goa? It was a short flight away and somewhere I’d always fancied going.  We arrived almost at the end of the busy period, since although the monsoon doesn’t kick in until the end of June, the season is more or less over by mid May.  We had booked a beach chalet in Palolem beach, a couple of hours’ slow drive from the airport, slow not so much on account of the traffic, but due to the fact that the driver couldn’t seem to bring himself to shift out of second gear.  Still, it gave us ample time to gaze at the beautiful, brightly coloured Portuguese-inspired villas that line the route, many of them slowly crumbling yet still magnificent. 

When we finally arrived at our destination it was dark and we were led by or driver down an unlit sandy footpath and over a load of rocks (me, rather comically, with wheelie bag in tow) wondering what on earth we had let ourselves in for, until we arrived at a tiny cove backed by idiosyncratic wooden bungalows amidst the coconut palms.  Our home for the next two nights was Green Park resort, right at the end of the beach nestled on the foreshore of a tiny bay.  The bungalows were what could be described as basic – in these circumstances the sentence is usually followed by ‘but clean enough’ – which wasn’t really the case either, but the location more than made up for it.

It being so close to the end of the season the restaurant at Green Park resort was closed but fortunately a short rock clamber away there were many more to choose from, so our first evening saw us dining well on Kingfish and, it must be admitted, a plethora of extremely inexpensive alcoholic drinks including a vicious local spirit distilled by Sonny, the laid back owner of the place who appeared to do nothing other than watch cricket twenty four hours a day.

The view from our hut in the light of the following morning was sublime – to lie in bed and peer through the mosquito netting to see waves silently lapping on the shore just metres away was rather special, despite my tender cranium. It was a slow start but we managed a walk down Palolem beach, passing fishing boats, multitudinous beach dogs, sarong sellers and hundreds of places offering yoga and massage – Goa still lives up to its hippy reputation.  The beach huts lining the sandy beach look fairly substantial, yet incredibly are all carted away lock stock and barrel in advance of the monsoon season, to be built up once again the following year.  The monsoon is so fierce the huts would otherwise never survive.  We’d had quite a surprise come daylight upon stepping into the bathroom in our beach bungalow to find that it didn’t have a roof, just a bit of dark muslin.  Luckily no rain was forecast.  It was quite unnerving but also quite marvellous to shower with the treetops swaying above you, hoping that no-one had shinned up them to collect coconuts.  The basin was interesting; the water ran straight out onto the floor, lapping around your feet. It didn’t do to dwell too long on the state of the electrical wiring…

At the end of the beach we stopped for some caffeine and noticed how incredibly laid back the Goan people appear to be.  It seemed to be a lot of effort to take our order, even more effort to go and make the coffee, and a step too far to give us our bill.  But it’s done with a disarming half smile, a shrug and a complete lack of concern.

Sunday saw us heading out in one of the fishing boats for a dolphin-watching trip.  We weren’t really expecting to see any and it was just very pleasant to be floating about past the stunning coastline, no buildings in sight, just rocks and scrub falling down to the blue sea.  We had almost given up looking when suddenly we spotted them, rather larger than expected but most definitely dolphins, doing their dolphiny thing. 

Our second trip away from Mumbai was to colourful Rajasthan, and was a weekend of contrasts.

Our main aim was the search for the elusive Sumatran tiger at Ranthambhore National park, although our journey began – and ended – in Jaipur. Kicking off our weekend of two halves was an overnight stay at the Umad Mahal hotel in Jaipur, a confection of a building adorned inside and out with frescoes, mosaics, heavy, elaborately-carved oak furniture and other paraphernalia worthy of any museum.  It also had a rather splendid rooftop bar and a nice line in Spanish white wine. We were up early the following day for the three-hour drive to Ranthambhore, a 1334 square kilometre of wilderness, originally a Maharaja’s hunting ground, which since 1970 has been a Government controlled National Park providing refuge to a total of 61 tigers.  The long drive abounded with colour. In The ‘Land of Kings’, colours bear deep significance, and exotic colours are celebrated everywhere, a maelstrom of vibrant hues. Women are clad head to toe in saris of fluorescent orange, electric blue and canary yellow, whilst men sport saffron yellow, orange or pink turbans, all denoting their place in society. Tractors trundle down the long straight roads adorned with sparkling tinsel and gaudy plastic flowers, music constantly blaring.  Lorries are painted a myriad of colours and patterns, all displaying the command ‘horn please’ which our driver obeyed with gusto.

The National Park could not have been more of a contrast. The scrubby, rocky landscape adorned with stunted trees, occasional waterholes and rocky canyons was more reminiscent than the African savannah than the India I was familiar with. We spent a fantastic few hours bouncing along in an open topped jeep haring after possible sightings of big cats.  Did we see a tiger? Well, a safari park it is not, and whilst there are plenty of jeeps roving round, the park operates on a quota system whereby a defined number of jeeps are allocated into a certain zone in order to avoid overcrowding the animals. This, combined with the lack of radio contact between the various guides inevitably lessens the chance of seeing a tiger but in turn reduces any impact on the wildlife. So no, we did not see a tiger. As compensation, the landscape was hugely beautiful, particularly at the waterholes and most especially when the driver turned off the engine and we were enveloped in the still quiet, punctuated by the shrill mew of a peacock, an ever-present cuckoo, the staccato bark of a deer or the comical chattering of a lapwing. To discover such stillness and quiet in India is a rarity. We did however spot jackal, wild boar, a crocodile, storks, a golden oriole, an iridescent kingfisher and lots of other birdlife too exotic to identify.

Back in Jaipur were plunged back into the frenzy that is more usually associated with India. The return drive had been equally colourful, with herds of sheep in the road, cows walking serenely down the middle of dual carriageways without turning a hair, camels pulling wooden carts, and finally brightly coloured lorries laden to bursting with rice, trussed up in oversized, bulging fabric bags that dwarfed the body of the lorry and took up almost all of the road.

Jaipur is popularly known as the Pink City, owing to the fact that rather bizarrely in this land of riotous colour, its buildings are painted a demure salmon pink. Pink symbolises welcome, and the city was painted thus on the occasion of a visit from the Prince of Wales back in 1878. Aside from being aesthetically pleasing, the colour serves a practical purpose too as the matte pink colour reduces the glare from the sun off the buildings.

As hot as it was, we wandered around and saw the Hawa Mahal, the Palace of the Winds, an elaborate building in the turrets of which the royal concubines used to sit  away from lascivious eyes in order to view the royal processions in the street below.. We saw the City Palace – from the outside at least, and we saw the inside of a fair few shops, soon coming to the conclusion that everything is cheaper in Rajasthan.  It was hot, it was tiring, and we felt exactly like a jar of honey surrounded by wasps. I loved it.

A month in Mumbai

So, where did April 2015 go, exactly?

It was admittedly with not just a small amount of trepidation that I headed off to India once more. Mumbai was to be the third Indian city I’ve lived in - after unsophisticated, friendly Chennai, and powerful, aggressive Delhi, Mumbai is a different animal again.  Mumbai has only been Mumbai since 1996, but it has an identity of its own quite different to the rest of India. 

Mumbai is the Bollywood capital of India and I’m fortunate enough to be living in swanky Bandra, right in there where the celebs live and on the shores of the Arabian Sea – in fact my hotel room on the 20^th floor overlooks the ocean, with tiny boats bobbing about on the tide and the ubiquitous red kites swooping hugely past my window. This area of Mumbai at least is savvily sophisticated and cosmopolitan. One of my favourite things to do is to walk along Bandra seaway – Hove seafront it may not be but it’s pretty special; the corn sellers and coconut vendors on the rocks; the public doing their laundry; the smells and the oppressive heat of India tempered by the cooling breeze; torpid dogs lounging in the shade; guys selling bhel puri from little carts; all intermingled with the lycra clad power walkers and joggers and loved-up couples sitting in the shade.

Mumbai is such an easy place to live. People are so laid back here it’s as if hassle is  way too much bother – even the tuc-tuc drivers put their meters on for a foreigner like me. Mumbai is justifiably described as he foodie capital of India and you can get pretty much any food here; take for an example the menu at my personal favourite the Palli Village Cafe includes none other than a Quinoa Formation – manna for a healthfood nut like me.

I say you can get pretty much anything, well yes you can as long as it’s not beef. Pro-Hindu President Pranab Mukherjee has banned the sale of meat from cows on religious grounds, which hasn’t gone down that well with the Muslim population, reigniting fears of a replay of the riots of 1992 which saw 900 people die after the destruction of a mosque in a move supported by the Government at the time.

My first weekend in Mumbai saw us embark on a tour around one of the most famous slums in a city that it is renowned for its slums – Dharavi.  This was led by a young guy who used to live in the slums himself and was an utterly fascinating insight into this city within a city, with its myriad interconnected businesses and residential quarter housing half a million people. Depressing it was not, but an eye opener it certainly was.  Everyone in the slum is gainfully employed and the living spaces although cramped, were not in any way squalid.  Dharavi slum is where a huge proportion of Western countries' recyclable waste ends up, from plastic bottles to paint tins.  The plastic is sorted – (pity the poor guys whose job it is to separate the needle bit from the plastic syringes sourced from hospital waste, no gloves worn) and melted down to little plastic nuggets which, depending on the purity, can be worth a fortune.  Paint tins are cleaned and used to make shacks.  Aluminium cans are melted down at ridiculously high temperatures by a man with a huge ladle, no mask, no shoes and inadequate gloves and recast into aluminium bars a bit like gold nuggets, Many of the workers sleep in their workplaces, fumes radiating into their lungs 24/7.  It’s tempting to think that recycling is great for the environment, and who doesn’t feel virtuous as we sling away our old plastic bottles and food cans but in reality it’s a dirty, smelly, polluting business – although a lucrative one.

Dharavi slum is where part of the film ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ was filmed, and if you look carefully in the film you’ll see briefly in the background an early 1980s Space Invader’s machine, the slum’s must-do attraction for the kids; or at least it was when we saw it and at one rupee a pop actually quite pricey.

The opposite side of the slum is given over to housing as well as industries such as pottery and food production.  We watched one strong–armed young lady rolling out endless balls of poppadom dough with a tiny rolling pin and draping the resultant discs over a wicker dome to dry in the sun.  Once she has produced 1kg of these paper-thin poppadoms which takes her about a day, her wage is 100Rs, roughly £1. Apparently a fair bit of Mumbai food is produced in the slums, although it will never say on the wrapper that it’s made in Dharavi, otherwise few people would buy it.  Hopefully some of the food produced is a bit more hygienic than the poppadoms, as the backdrop to the rolling out was a young girl having a poo on the pavement…

She could be forgiven however as there are only two sets of public toilets in Dharavi, which means there is often quite a wait, and costing 2Rs a go, a big wedge out of the poppadom lady’s daily wage.  The slum is massive, but it is not allowed to expand any further by law, which means that the early slum dwellers have much more space, and their houses are far more substantial and roomy than the later arrivals, who basically could lay claim to less and less space.  The slum is more or less full to bursting now so people are now reduced to sleeping on the streets outside.  The Indian Government is calling for the demolition of the slums, to be replaced by tower block housing, and a couple of such blocks were erected a few years ago but proved unpopular when the residents discovered after they had moved in that living in a  tower block, even one that had toilets and a kitchen meant that they had nowhere to carry on their businesses and therefore no income, Add to that a bizarre law in Mumbai which dictates that if one lives in a place long enough – and I mean as few as 10-15 years – you then end up automatically owning it.  Thus it’s not in the landlord’s interest to have tenants stay long term so they basically fail to carry out any repairs.  It’s this which explains the beautiful but sadly neglected and crumbling mansions all around my neighbourhood in Mumbai.

As a complete contrast to the slum, our next stop was the Taj Palace in Colaba, The hotel stands near the Gateway of India and was one of the targets of the Mumbai terrorist attack along with nearby Leopold’s café, a backpackers’ hangout.  People go there, now, to gape at the bullet holes which still dot the walls, but to my mind 2008 is not very long ago and whilst lightning rarely strikes twice, I found the whole place quite sobering. A total of 173 died in the attacks, and I remember the whole thing very clearly.

The third item on our agenda that particular day was Dhobi Ghat, where the men (on one side) and the woman (on the other) wash their clothes in what is a an open air laundry. If you’ve seen Slumdog Millionaire, it’s where Jamal’s mother is killed.  Seemingly even commercial laundry is washed here at the Ghat with hotel sheets and towels fluttering in the polluted Mumbai breeze.

The other Friday after work we decided to make a trip to swanky Juhu, a beach suburb about 20 minutes north of Bandra. It’s the haunt of celebrities apparently, who often jog along the beach flanked by their minders.  Not that we saw any celebs amongst the throngs on the beach, splashing about in the filthy water and playing endless games of beach cricket. It’s a curious thing about the Indian psyche, as it was a large beach and either end was relatively quiet, but everyone chose to bunch together in the middle.  In a country where personal space is so limited, it must be strange to be on your own.

Passing time in Istanbul

As always when living in a big city the passage of time led to an intimacy with the place, with the result that finer and finer details were gradually noticed in familiar districts, a bit like peeling away the layers of an onion to reveal hitherto unseen aspects.  So it was with Istanbul. Every day I noticed new things, like oversized street dogs fat from chips and kebabs lounging listlessly on the pavements, pedestrians literally stepping over them; the small boy or old lady tenderly placing a handful of cat biscuits on a street corner; the shoeshine men; the elderly woman sitting on the cold floor of the underpass selling her hand knitted woollen socks ready for winter; the immense cruise ships like apartment buildings moored on the quay, the rubbish boats sucking up the debris from the Golden Horn, the Syrian beggars with their sleeping babies huddling by the air-vents to keep warm, the ever-present riot police strutting pompously, guns cocked and water cannon at the ready. Such was the tapestry of life in Istanbul.

As ever though, it was refreshing to get out of the city.  So one weekends in October we decided to visit the Black Sea coast.  Only a little over an hour out of Istanbul by a combination of metro and bus, our destination was Rameli Feneri, a seemingly insignificant fishing village where the Bosphorus empties into the black sea overlooking a harbour shielding the fishing boats from the choppy Black Sea waters. We found a Turkish coffee in a cafe and gazed at the tankers trundling back and forth.  The town played a fairly significant role in history, the lighthouse being built by the French during the Crimean war – there is a separate lighthouse on the opposite side of the Bosphorus – to guard this strategically important access to Istanbul.

The coast is rugged and reminded me of North Cornwall with rocky headlands backed by sandy pine forests.  Our plan was the walk along the coast, a plan which was thwarted slightly by the fact that the road led through a beach resort – private and, in autumn, stubbornly closed.  Rows of empty chalets, forlorn sports pitches and unused beach umbrellas brought to mind the holiday parks popular in 1960s Britain.  Undeterred we forged off on forest paths to find an inland route to our destination, Uzunya beach where miraculously the restaurant was open for lunch, overlooking the chilly sea and the coarse sandy beach.  It’s worth adding that the forest was deserted and beyond the firebreak tracks, impenetrable, and even if it seems unbelievable that an hour out of a city of 14.6 million people that there could be wolves or bears living in the forest, I would still like to know what left a paw-print a good six inches in length…..

Back in Istanbul, one weekend saw me visiting the intriguing Museum of Innocence.  Fans of the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk will know this as the title of his most famous book and the museum occupies the former home of the man who was the inspiration for this book.  The author tells the story of this man’s obsession with a young Turkish girl, which led to him collecting items such as pepper pots or spoons pilfered from the family home, along with the butts of every cigarette she ever smoked in his presence – which are all preserved in the museum.  No doubt it may have made more sense to have read the book first, but as a microcosm of life in Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s it is a veritable time capsule, not to mention a slightly spooky and unsettling place.