Forget Starbucks
4 - 7 Jan, Ian
I could, I think, write a decent book about
planning an extended vacation. If I ever did I'd include a chapter about
getting on line. If you want more than a crummy terminal session, don't expect
to find anything useful on the topic in Lonely Planet. For the last few days
I've been enjoying one of the best wifi spots that I've stumbled across this
year:
If the virtual office ever becomes a reality I may park mine here for a while. An on-line wireless hour together with a beer large enough to last through it costs three of four quid, and if you stayed for longer you could negotiate a better rate.
This is a kilometre or two from where we stayed and if I came again I'd probably stay right here instead. The wifi is indicative of facilities that are good enough to pull in all of the American visitors to the island, and this is an island that westerners visit. Our little resort may have had more charm and although we may not have had any Americans we did get some Europeans. The first such guy I spoke to was a Brit who, like me, was reading Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation on the covered terrace. I was delighted to have someone to talk to about the book, and to find that he was enjoying it as much as I am. The more I read of this book the more I become convinced both that Fisk's analysis is indisputable and that a majority of readers will take exception to it. While I have the foresight to see this it leaves me totally perplexed - if you have any insight on the matter let me know.
Last time I promised to report on whether or not the resort is beautiful: in the full sun looking across the deserted ochre beach and clear calm sea to the jagged green islands rising along the horizon it unquestionably is. But it isn't perfect. For a start, the usual tropical army of bugs and midges seems especially diverse here. As we sat down having a drink on our first night Nui, our guide, pointed to one of the ants scurrying across the table and told us, "Those ants are bad." Seeing our eyebrows raised questioningly she elucidated, "Their bite is very poisonous, like a scorpion." The showers were rubbish, too. In the last blog I put this in the context of the difficulty of having a place to stay that boasts modern comforts without destroying the idyll that it draws us to it. But the Black Sheep Inn in Ecuador manages to provide excellent showers in an area that seems more constrained for water, and the most remote places we visited in Africa also all managed to supply a good head of water in their rudimentary shower blocks.
The final complaint I can offer to make you feel better in your miserable winters concerns the wedding party that they had at the resort the other night. The cook got married and the resort hosted the reception. Kindly, but also necessarily, they invited us to the party, which featured a sit down dinner followed, it transpired, by Thai karaoke. I was curious about the musical sensitivities of a people who have 22 vowels and five tone levels that can change the meaning of any word. (I checked and the Thais have no word to translate "monotone".) Judging by the performance of the wedding guests the tonal variety of the language renders singing unmanageable. The background music was such as you might expect to find in the ante room of a funeral parlour for pets, but this was almost irrelevant as their mewling rarely pegged itself onto the actual notes. One of the singers was so bad that she was almost good, in the manner of Polly Styrene from X-Ray Specs. They went on until after midnight and in our cabins, which were the closest, we heard it all. Maybe there is a musical conservation law that demands that the sublime concert of polyphonic choral music in Calvi cathedral six months ago had to be offset somewhere along our way.
Yet again I wished that I had my entire music collection on my iPod as I was driven to a strong desire to listen to Mirror Star by the Fabulous Poodles. I doubt that I can even listen satisfactorily to this when I get home as I seem to recall that my rare pink pic-cover single is warped. I've checked - while sipping Singha in the hot hotspot - and, predictably, the UK iTunes Music store carries nothing by the Fab Poos. My iPod has, though, been enriched recently with a couple of new albums. Since Christmas I've been listening to Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor - our present to me. I'm a big fan. On the aeroplane from Australia I'd accidentally knocked my iPod to repeat individual songs and Hung Up, the first track, looped round for about half an hour before I turned it off. It has a Dr Who-style intro and sent me into a trance.
The wedding party was less hypnotic and followed a style known here as T.I.T., an acronym for This Is Thailand, which has the same bathos as Blair's embarrassing Islington-hatched slogan, Cool Brittania, which is like an I Am Trendy badge without the irony. It lasted until 12:20, at which time I was strolling around the grounds in Boden cotton trousers (great buy for a trip like this - another note for the book!) looking at Mars. Mars has been with us everywhere now at least since Maine, and I wondered whether this wasn't an implausible, almost Biblical duration for a planet to hang over us in the night sky. Back in the room to purge my mind of T.I.T. I devised a formula for the longest run of time for which Mars might be visible in the middle of the night. In the morning I evaluated this to 212 days, and this would be interspersed between a cycle of about 568 days in which the planet is only visible for a period before dawn or after dusk, if at all. The figure of 212 jives with the time of about 150 days since I first blogged about seeing Mars in the dead of night; the 568 figure sounds more suspect. If anyone knows the astronomical facts and/or wants to check my trigonometry I'd be grateful. For world travellers the planets can be our constant companions as their orbits are coplanar with that of the earth, protecting their visibility from changes in latitude.
The day after the party we took another longtail boat, this time out to an attraction known as the emerald cave. The Robert Fisk reader and his group sailed alongside us in another boat to the same destination. "Emerald" denotes the colour of the sea at the mouth of the cave, which was truly a rich green. The cave opened into a rock face rising from the sea and we snorkelled into it in line wearing life vests and holding on to the person in front. This seemed a little over-cautious at first, but less so once the cave became pitch black. There was a sharp tangy odour, which the Fisk man conjectured may have come from bats, but since the sea also tasted bitter I'd guess that a more likely explanation lies in the geochemistry of the rocks. More ominous than the blackness was a constant deep rumbling that must have come from the motion of the sea along the cave's passageways; but I've never heard a sea sound like it. We exited the cave on a little beach and then could see that we had swum into the crater of a volcano, maybe 100m in diameter. Bushes and trees grew all the way up the tubular walls to the sky. The Fisk reader and then his brother-in-law with his son joined us inside. His party, I had learned, comprised his family and that of his wife's sister. I enjoyed chatting with both of the guys. Tellingly, both families had emigrated from England over the past few years. The brother-in-law's family had moved to France about three years ago after looking at the natural alternatives (Sydney - too far; San Francisco - too expensive; Vancouver - too unknown). The Fisk man's family moved to Sydney six years ago after the BBC had sent him there for the 2000 Olympics. Chatting to him inside the volcano I discovered that he was someone I'd heard on Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent many times before he upped sticks and quit the Beeb (Nick Squires, if you're also a listener). Both families were delighted with themselves for making their moves. What is it about England that makes everyone feel this way? The more I travel the more I can see its attractions as a homeland, but we can't shake off the palpable sense of dissatisfaction any more than we can fairly pin it on Blair and Thatcher, culpable as they are for many other evils. Sadly for me the wider Fisk family was leaving our island early in search of electricity, which they find necessary to run their two year old.
After the emerald cave we had lunch on a different tropical beach and then moored up over some decent coral for snorkelling. Unfortunately, unseasonal rains that have otherwise not affected us too directly had brought in swarms of small jelly fish. Although their stings were less irritating than the bugs of land and air we soon gave up and retreated to the boat. How spoilt we are this year that we so quickly forego the chance to swim amongst tropical fish. The sea itself was uniquely, beautifully green and clear, but we belted back to our own jellyless beach and swam there instead. For completeness, though, I have to add that the sea around our island contained lethal snakes. We were, Nui told us, safe so long as we were out by the early evening. One late afternoon I was having a beer and wifi session at the beach along the coast when a snorkeller splashed across to his friends sitting nearby and reported a sea snake sighting. After that I encouraged the girls to spend more time in the kayaks.
But our little island paradise served its purpose of giving us a spot for our gentler R&R. Even on the day when we had nothing planned Nui took the girls round to a local school where a batik artist helped them to create large colourful handkerchiefs. The Thai government is educating some of the women in this craft in the idle times in their rubber-making day. It's seems to make sense: it's cheap to set up, they can add to their income and it's more attractive to tourists than the malodorous rubber operations. You could easily spend more time here and find things to do, if you can forego chocolates on your pillow.
Now we're heading north, overnighting again in Trang. This evening after pancakes, Thai coffee and Jasmine tea at a small stall down the road we're lounging around in the same hotel rooms that seemed shoddy when we stopped on the way south but that have now come to seem swanky: hot showers, satellite TV (we watched Top Gear) and robust walls.
Finally, in the last entry I claimed - correctly - that the most expensive place on our journey, measured on a daily basis, is The Galapagos Islands. Even before I posted that I'd charted the number of photo's that I've taken per travel-pound spent in each place, on the grounds that the number of photos serves as a credible proxy for how memorable somewhere will be (can you think of a better one?). Interestingly, most of the places we've visited have a similar "value" rating on this chart, and the one that's an order of magnitude higher - clearly the best value according to this metric - is again The Galapagos.
If the virtual office ever becomes a reality I may park mine here for a while. An on-line wireless hour together with a beer large enough to last through it costs three of four quid, and if you stayed for longer you could negotiate a better rate.
This is a kilometre or two from where we stayed and if I came again I'd probably stay right here instead. The wifi is indicative of facilities that are good enough to pull in all of the American visitors to the island, and this is an island that westerners visit. Our little resort may have had more charm and although we may not have had any Americans we did get some Europeans. The first such guy I spoke to was a Brit who, like me, was reading Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation on the covered terrace. I was delighted to have someone to talk to about the book, and to find that he was enjoying it as much as I am. The more I read of this book the more I become convinced both that Fisk's analysis is indisputable and that a majority of readers will take exception to it. While I have the foresight to see this it leaves me totally perplexed - if you have any insight on the matter let me know.
Last time I promised to report on whether or not the resort is beautiful: in the full sun looking across the deserted ochre beach and clear calm sea to the jagged green islands rising along the horizon it unquestionably is. But it isn't perfect. For a start, the usual tropical army of bugs and midges seems especially diverse here. As we sat down having a drink on our first night Nui, our guide, pointed to one of the ants scurrying across the table and told us, "Those ants are bad." Seeing our eyebrows raised questioningly she elucidated, "Their bite is very poisonous, like a scorpion." The showers were rubbish, too. In the last blog I put this in the context of the difficulty of having a place to stay that boasts modern comforts without destroying the idyll that it draws us to it. But the Black Sheep Inn in Ecuador manages to provide excellent showers in an area that seems more constrained for water, and the most remote places we visited in Africa also all managed to supply a good head of water in their rudimentary shower blocks.
The final complaint I can offer to make you feel better in your miserable winters concerns the wedding party that they had at the resort the other night. The cook got married and the resort hosted the reception. Kindly, but also necessarily, they invited us to the party, which featured a sit down dinner followed, it transpired, by Thai karaoke. I was curious about the musical sensitivities of a people who have 22 vowels and five tone levels that can change the meaning of any word. (I checked and the Thais have no word to translate "monotone".) Judging by the performance of the wedding guests the tonal variety of the language renders singing unmanageable. The background music was such as you might expect to find in the ante room of a funeral parlour for pets, but this was almost irrelevant as their mewling rarely pegged itself onto the actual notes. One of the singers was so bad that she was almost good, in the manner of Polly Styrene from X-Ray Specs. They went on until after midnight and in our cabins, which were the closest, we heard it all. Maybe there is a musical conservation law that demands that the sublime concert of polyphonic choral music in Calvi cathedral six months ago had to be offset somewhere along our way.
Yet again I wished that I had my entire music collection on my iPod as I was driven to a strong desire to listen to Mirror Star by the Fabulous Poodles. I doubt that I can even listen satisfactorily to this when I get home as I seem to recall that my rare pink pic-cover single is warped. I've checked - while sipping Singha in the hot hotspot - and, predictably, the UK iTunes Music store carries nothing by the Fab Poos. My iPod has, though, been enriched recently with a couple of new albums. Since Christmas I've been listening to Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor - our present to me. I'm a big fan. On the aeroplane from Australia I'd accidentally knocked my iPod to repeat individual songs and Hung Up, the first track, looped round for about half an hour before I turned it off. It has a Dr Who-style intro and sent me into a trance.
The wedding party was less hypnotic and followed a style known here as T.I.T., an acronym for This Is Thailand, which has the same bathos as Blair's embarrassing Islington-hatched slogan, Cool Brittania, which is like an I Am Trendy badge without the irony. It lasted until 12:20, at which time I was strolling around the grounds in Boden cotton trousers (great buy for a trip like this - another note for the book!) looking at Mars. Mars has been with us everywhere now at least since Maine, and I wondered whether this wasn't an implausible, almost Biblical duration for a planet to hang over us in the night sky. Back in the room to purge my mind of T.I.T. I devised a formula for the longest run of time for which Mars might be visible in the middle of the night. In the morning I evaluated this to 212 days, and this would be interspersed between a cycle of about 568 days in which the planet is only visible for a period before dawn or after dusk, if at all. The figure of 212 jives with the time of about 150 days since I first blogged about seeing Mars in the dead of night; the 568 figure sounds more suspect. If anyone knows the astronomical facts and/or wants to check my trigonometry I'd be grateful. For world travellers the planets can be our constant companions as their orbits are coplanar with that of the earth, protecting their visibility from changes in latitude.
The day after the party we took another longtail boat, this time out to an attraction known as the emerald cave. The Robert Fisk reader and his group sailed alongside us in another boat to the same destination. "Emerald" denotes the colour of the sea at the mouth of the cave, which was truly a rich green. The cave opened into a rock face rising from the sea and we snorkelled into it in line wearing life vests and holding on to the person in front. This seemed a little over-cautious at first, but less so once the cave became pitch black. There was a sharp tangy odour, which the Fisk man conjectured may have come from bats, but since the sea also tasted bitter I'd guess that a more likely explanation lies in the geochemistry of the rocks. More ominous than the blackness was a constant deep rumbling that must have come from the motion of the sea along the cave's passageways; but I've never heard a sea sound like it. We exited the cave on a little beach and then could see that we had swum into the crater of a volcano, maybe 100m in diameter. Bushes and trees grew all the way up the tubular walls to the sky. The Fisk reader and then his brother-in-law with his son joined us inside. His party, I had learned, comprised his family and that of his wife's sister. I enjoyed chatting with both of the guys. Tellingly, both families had emigrated from England over the past few years. The brother-in-law's family had moved to France about three years ago after looking at the natural alternatives (Sydney - too far; San Francisco - too expensive; Vancouver - too unknown). The Fisk man's family moved to Sydney six years ago after the BBC had sent him there for the 2000 Olympics. Chatting to him inside the volcano I discovered that he was someone I'd heard on Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent many times before he upped sticks and quit the Beeb (Nick Squires, if you're also a listener). Both families were delighted with themselves for making their moves. What is it about England that makes everyone feel this way? The more I travel the more I can see its attractions as a homeland, but we can't shake off the palpable sense of dissatisfaction any more than we can fairly pin it on Blair and Thatcher, culpable as they are for many other evils. Sadly for me the wider Fisk family was leaving our island early in search of electricity, which they find necessary to run their two year old.
After the emerald cave we had lunch on a different tropical beach and then moored up over some decent coral for snorkelling. Unfortunately, unseasonal rains that have otherwise not affected us too directly had brought in swarms of small jelly fish. Although their stings were less irritating than the bugs of land and air we soon gave up and retreated to the boat. How spoilt we are this year that we so quickly forego the chance to swim amongst tropical fish. The sea itself was uniquely, beautifully green and clear, but we belted back to our own jellyless beach and swam there instead. For completeness, though, I have to add that the sea around our island contained lethal snakes. We were, Nui told us, safe so long as we were out by the early evening. One late afternoon I was having a beer and wifi session at the beach along the coast when a snorkeller splashed across to his friends sitting nearby and reported a sea snake sighting. After that I encouraged the girls to spend more time in the kayaks.
But our little island paradise served its purpose of giving us a spot for our gentler R&R. Even on the day when we had nothing planned Nui took the girls round to a local school where a batik artist helped them to create large colourful handkerchiefs. The Thai government is educating some of the women in this craft in the idle times in their rubber-making day. It's seems to make sense: it's cheap to set up, they can add to their income and it's more attractive to tourists than the malodorous rubber operations. You could easily spend more time here and find things to do, if you can forego chocolates on your pillow.
Now we're heading north, overnighting again in Trang. This evening after pancakes, Thai coffee and Jasmine tea at a small stall down the road we're lounging around in the same hotel rooms that seemed shoddy when we stopped on the way south but that have now come to seem swanky: hot showers, satellite TV (we watched Top Gear) and robust walls.
Finally, in the last entry I claimed - correctly - that the most expensive place on our journey, measured on a daily basis, is The Galapagos Islands. Even before I posted that I'd charted the number of photo's that I've taken per travel-pound spent in each place, on the grounds that the number of photos serves as a credible proxy for how memorable somewhere will be (can you think of a better one?). Interestingly, most of the places we've visited have a similar "value" rating on this chart, and the one that's an order of magnitude higher - clearly the best value according to this metric - is again The Galapagos.
Posted: Sat - January 7, 2006 at 06:33 PM
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Published On: Jan 08, 2006 12:52 PM
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Published On: Jan 08, 2006 12:52 PM