Bill Murray's Blog, page 61
May 9, 2018
Trump & Brexit, Remarkable. Now Comes Malaysia
92 year old, gnarled and weathered old and retired Mahathir Mohamad, the country’s Prime Minister from 1981 to 2003, has been elected Malaysia’s Prime Minister again after having been sent to his dotage fifteen years ago.
Unusual. But more surprising is his electoral path to victory: he allied with Anwar Ibrahim, who was his deputy prime minister in the 1990s, before Mahatir jailed Ibrahim on trumped-up sodomy charges.
The Sydney Morning Herald calls it “Incredible.”
This one caught me napping. Has Mahatir returned to politics in order to pave the way to power for a colleague-turned-rival whose career he publicly and very intentionally ruined? Why?
The SMH reports:
“The prime minister-elect has promised to stand aside for Anwar (who is serving the final days of a jail term on specious sodomy charges) to become prime minister.
Mahathir confirmed the plan in the early hours of Thursday morning.
“‘We will work on his [royal] pardon, once he is pardoned he will be eligible to become prime minister.’
That would take place as soon as possible, he said, though Anwar would first have to win a seat in Parliament again.”
Is this whole thing for real? I’ve always understood that Anwar Ibrahim has been in jail for much of his adult life because of a mean-spirited political vendetta by Mahatihr.
This is all out of left field, to lay a useless American baseball analogy over Malaysian politics. Clearly, your correspondent hasn’t visited KL for too long.
Anybody?
•••••
Malaysia photos from EarthPhotos.com.
Photographer Recommendation: Nice work from Vietnam
I think Vietnam is a fabulous, fun and utterly exotic travel destination for westerners. From the CS&W archives, here’s a story from a few months back, Driving in Vietnam, about getting around in the Mekong Delta. There are also 445 photos from all over the country in the Vietnam Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
But besides that, I want to share with you some terrific work I’ve found by a 27-year-old photographer named Jean from France. His website is TravelOpening.com. Spend a little time there if you can. He has strong technique, interesting subject matter, and style. The photos that caught my eye are these, in his Hanoi gallery. Good stuff.
May 8, 2018
Guess These Ten City Skylines
A third installment. Here are the previous two: 1, 2. See how many of these cities you can guess. Answers at the end. Yes, some are impossible.
IMPORTANT: You can click to enlarge them for a better look, but there will be a caption at the bottom that gives you the answer. Careful.
Good luck.
Answers:
1. Riga, Latvia
2. Sydney, Australia
3. Buenos Aires, Argentina
4. Lucerne, Switzerland
5. Greater Muscat, Oman
6. La Paz, Bolivia
7. San Salvador, El Salvador
8. Dublin, Ireland
9. Bratislava, Slovakia
10. Montreal, Canada
There are 1153 more photos in the Cities and Urban Life Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
May 6, 2018
New Series: Africa Vignettes #1
Let’s kick off a new series, one that I think might last the summer.
With time, perseverance and good fortune, after a couple more trips to cover a little more ground in Africa (which is not a country), I hope to finish up a new book that will be a mix of travel vignettes and sciencey wildlife stuff.
For now let us start with a dozen or more short bits that I mean to post every Monday, and we’ll see how it works. I welcome your feedback. Just a series of short clips here, like this one from Botswana.
•••••
Gradually, sandy ground gives way to traces of green below. It’s the end of the rainy season but so far this year it hasn’t rained. It’s been seven years since a good, healthy rainy season.
By now the channels should be full and wildlife ought to be thriving and dispersed. Instead it’s dry as any dry season, which is good for game viewing because the game tends to concentrate around what water there is. It’s awful for the game, though, and a disaster for the people of Maun.
Over 5800 square miles the delta’s height varies only about six and a half feet. The ground is at 3100 feet. We cruise at 6500 feet, first due north, to land at Shinde Island Camp. We are carrying a man named Shorty who is bound for there. I search in vain for any landmark. Ron must be flying by experience, or the compass, or just the seat of his pants. Endless channels and water spits meander to nowhere.
Search as you will, there are just no roads, no landmarks. But after 40 minutes we angle toward a dirt strip where a lone elephant stands and flaps his ears in mock charge. Doesn’t bother Ron.
A Land Cruiser waits in a clutch of trees. Shorty leaves for Shinde camp.
“How do you find places like this?” I shout over the engine at Ron.
“You just get somebody to show you what to look for,” he shouts back, “then practice.”
•••••
May 4, 2018
Snapshot: The American South, 2018
My wife and I live in the state of Georgia, USA. I know that people read CS&W from all over, and I think it might be revealing to folks who don’t live in the USA to see this currently-running ad, from a candidate for Governor of our state.
You really ought to watch it a couple of times and study the set design.
This is politics in the USA, 2018.
In response to criticism, the Washington Post says Kemp Tweeted ““I’m conservative, folks. Get over it!”
Weekend Reading
Here is a collection of interesting articles or just plain nice writing you may have missed this week. Enjoy a lazy weekend just hanging around.
India’s struggle for the soul of the Indo-Pacific by Samir Saran and Abhijit Singh at the Lowy Interpreter, on the state of New Delhi’s Indian Ocean diplomacy
The Man Who Invented the Pop-up Ad on the Original Sin of Advertising by Noaj Kulwin in New York Magazine
Time for a New U.S. Foreign Policy Narrative by Ian Bremmer & Joe Kennedy III in Foreign Affairs (register for one free article a month)
McMaster and Commander by Patrick Radden Keefe in The New Yorker
Since 2016, Half of All Coral in the Great Barrier Reef Has Died by Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic
Gå Fram by Kelsey Camacho in Nowhere Magazine, on Svalbard
May 3, 2018
Book Excerpt: Climbing Mt. Kinabalu
Here is a chapter from my first travel book, Common Sense and Whiskey, about climbing the highest summit is southeast Asia, Mt. Kinabalu, in Malaysian Borneo.
•••••
A fine young man with a Yesus Kristus medallion bouncing around beneath his mirror drove us the seven or so kilometers into Mt. Kinabalu park, through the sleeping village of Kundasang. Farmers congregated at a warren of tin-roofed stalls along the main road. It looked like a good day for green tomatoes, potatoes, and cabbage.
They hauled us all in bas minis from the ranger station to the trailhead. From there, a six-kilometer trail led up to our destination, the Laban Ratah guest house, at 11,000 feet. At 13,432 feet, Mt. Kinabalu’s summit, in Malaysian Borneo, is the highest point in Southeast Asia.
The first kilometer (the trail was marked at each 1/2 kilometer) popped by in 23 minutes. We were flyin’, and all that stuff about how hard this would be was just talk. The first kilometer, we only stopped long enough to shed our wraps.
Just at first the trail led downhill, charming, to a cool, wet place called Carson’s Falls. On the way down the mountain, conversely, having to climb at the end was just one last kick in the butt on the way out the door.
Still before 8:00 a.m. no sunlight had fought its way to the forest floor. The air was downright chilly once our shirts turned sweaty. And they did — at the first K marker they weren’t soaked through, but a breeze blew down the rise and chilled our damp skin.
We were cocky, jaunty, making tracks, and unappreciative of the flora, except the little violet flower of the Kinabalu Balsam, which was shaped more like it had a beard than lower petals.
The massif stood silent and still, the only sounds birds or a rustling squirrel. There are no monkeys on Mt. Kinabalu. They live nearer the sea, to the east.
The Summit of Mt. Kinabalu, 13,435 feet.
Our guide Erik was a volcano of phlegm at first, hacking, spitting, coughing, exercising all facial cavities. He was a little guy, as these highland people were, but with the strong, imposing legs you’d imagine.
He guided once a week, reckoned he’d done the climb fifty times. His personal record to the top — a place called Low’s Peak — was about three hours.
The rest of the week he helped his parents haul their produce to the Kundasang market, where you cain’t make no money. Erik said a kilo of cabbage brought fourteen U.S. cents.
•••••
Grim realization set in during kilometer two. I felt my pack with every step, even though all it held was a camera, a towel, a dry t-shirt, bread, cheese and water.
We appreciated the moss, ferns and banana trees and searched for these particular birds who sang in two notes, but a little more grimly, a little less buoyant, quieter. Still, we made two kilometers in 58 minutes, and there were only six, total. We fed the squirrels some of the tiny peanuts Mirja had bought. Still cool and still, the entire third kilometer. Dark, thick, jungly, even almost cold, and about an hour and a half after we’d set out, at two minutes to nine, we marked halfway.
•••••
In the fourth kilometer, blazing red running shorts caught my gaze. I looked up from the path and it was a Japanese fellow, smiling. He made the summit, turned, and passed us on his way back down before we’d made four and a half K. I just couldn’t believe that.
They do this run as competition. The winner last year, Ian Holmes of the U.K., did 21 K up to the peak and back in 2:43:20, trailed by fellow Brit Simon Booth at 2:43:22. Poor Simon Booth.
•••••
I thought of Beck Weathers on that famous ill-fated Everest expedition, who was left for dead, but stumbled, frostbitten, back to camp. He said mountain climbing, really, was simple. All you had to do was be in shape and then not let your mind defeat your body. One foot in front of the other, he said, it’s all just endurance.
But by now I was grim, unhappy, soaked-through wet. I used Weathers’ advice and eventually thought I’d achieved a sort of runner’s high. I had a little bounce back, but I was hiking sloppy — lurching, and, when there was something to grab on to, I hauled myself up by it. Still, I was sure for the first time since Carson’s Falls that we would make it. I turned cocky.
We stopped to enjoy Mirja’s chocolates and tiny peanuts, like they sell in Nuwara Eliya, back in Sri Lanka. We sat there steaming. Our own personal dew points produced our own, individual, self-generated clouds of steam, our shirts purely drenched through.
•••••
Porters made good money — six ringgits per kilo — but that work’s just too hard, Erik thought, and I was sure he was right. A typical load was ten to twelve kilos (twenty max) and that’d bring you twenty bucks — then you had to haul the trash back down from the top.
Erik liked guiding.
U.S. twenty was real money. The park required we have a guide and took a fee for him, so that Erik made about eight bucks for his day, probably as good as a porter if he got a right-tipping foreigner — and no taking out the trash.
The porters plied the path up and back, right alongside us, low to the ground and bent, exchanging local-language intelligence with Erik on the way, usually hauling rice bags full of supplies for the restaurant and guest houses up above, held by straps across their foreheads. Or sometimes they’d be laden with daypacks and duffels of tourists.
Twice we passed Japanese girls in flip-flops, and the last one was really hobbling, on her boyfriend’s arm. Mountain climbing may involve stepping over rocks. Apparently they were not told.
•••••
Erik commanded pretty good English.
Had he ever been to K. L. (Kuala Lumpur, the capital)? I asked.
“No, but when I get money I take my baby.”
186
It’s a big city, you know, tallest building in the world (at the time)….
“Oh, no!” Scornful reply. He was aiming high. “Maybe one day I get 10,000 ringgits I go around the world!”
•••••
I spent long minutes anticipating the sun, by which to energize. We were still deep within the forest at the two- hour mark, and again I had begun to flag. It was damp, I was wet, and the path stretched only straight up.
Twenty or thirty meters of steep steps would lead to a bend, and you’d yearn for a stretch that didn’t lead straight up, but time after time after time after time after time, you’d reach the bend and see even crueler steps beyond. And then you’d do it again. And then again.
•••••
At first the sun would hit the forest floor in this odd spot or that, then as we rose (so slowly) up the hill you’d see sun more often than not, and by 10:00 in the morning we stood at the Layang Layang staff hut, on a little plateau flooded by sunlight. I drenched my head under a water pipe.
Up to now there were few on the mountain with us except the runner and a couple of porters. Now groups of overnight campers passed us bound for the bottom, but no one but Malay boys climbed (in fact, we were the first to set out, and first to arrive at Laban Rata).
Eric was constant. Mirja and I waxed and waned at intervals, and kept one another going. At the four K mark, I hit my stride one last time. It was 10:08, only two K to go. I fairly strode ahead. The sun was out now, but we’d ever be ducking into a crook in the trail that led through shaded forest.
Here was a sign, “NEPENTHES VILLOSA areas 9000-10,300 ft.” by which they meant those curious pitcher plants were about, and we spied several in the woods, the biggest the size of two fists.
The curious pitcher plant.
A big Chinese contingent slid downward, all chatty. Along about here my recently found vigor ran out and I resented their being able to breathe. Like Mirja said, on the way up it’s your heart and lungs, on the way down it’s your legs, and I began to get an ugly payback for my cocky “hitting my stride” bit, as I could hear my heart pounding in my head.
We stopped (it was an excuse to stop) to watch a green bird, the “Mt. Kinabalu Blackeye.”
•••••
Now this was terrible. Stretching above us we had to begin some scrambling. It was just damned hard. Mud. I saw myself closed off now, thinking only of where my next foot would go (except I had this vague “What the hell were you thinking!?” notion bouncing around my head, too).
I seized upon a mantra. I said to myself, over and over, “Mt. Kinabalu blackeye.” Over and over. Now, whenever we’d spy anyone above us on the trail, we’d (“graciously”) stop to let them slide by.
One fifty-something Japanese fellow laughed at himself how he’d taken eight and a half hours to the summit. Hell, we weren’t even going to the summit and we weren’t laughing. Yeah, but anybody can laugh and climb down, I thought.
Now came a section where you had to haul yourself up by rope. Now the trees were small, dwarfed and gnarled by the wind, cold and thin air. They were small, but Erik said some were hundreds of years old.
At 10:58 we stood on the five K marker. Someone coming down asked if this was our first time and Mirja peremptorily replied, “And the last.”
We could see the South China Sea from here, 52 kilometers to the north. And our hotel, the Perkassa, high on its hill overlooking Kundasang town, was an insignificant little speck below. We stopped every third or fourth step for the last kilometer, which took 50 minutes.
At 11:48 we reached the top.
Which wasn’t the top. The Laban Rata guesthouse was built 15 years ago to support summit seekers. At 11,000 feet, it has 20 tables, bunks and a grocery with Milo, old batteries, candy bars, Carlsbergs and a kitchen serving up fried rice, sweet corn soup and coffee. The bulletin board admonished, though, that today we had no: cream of chicken soup, Maggi chicken, chicken, lemon or chicken curry. Cursed porters.
So we had lunch – fried rice – and climbed down. Four hours twenty minutes up, 3:10 down. On the way to the bottom we passed a mere boy carrying a 40 kg coil of rope. Impossible. Weak as I was by now, I couldn’t even lift it, but he hoisted it through two loops onto his back and it would take a day and a half to haul it up there — for 63 dollars in ringgits.
We were both thoroughly hobbled by the last two K down, Mirja and me, our brakes having given out, both of us gripping the handrails when there were any, noticing all too clearly that Eric just ambled on down the hill ahead of us the way he had ambled up. We went home, ate a table full of dagingredang and papadums with a side of fiery red chopped chillis, and slept hard by eight o’clock.
•••••
More photos in the Malaysia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
Common Sense and Whiskey is a series of short stories about travel around Lake Baikal, Greenland, Papua New Guinea, Bhutan, The Trans-Siberian Railroad, Burma, Chilean Patagonia, Guangxi Province, China, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Tibet, Paraguay, Borneo, Malawi and the Southern Caucasus. It’s available here or on your country’s Amazon, and the audiobook is available here.
April 29, 2018
April 28, 2018
Our Staffs Are Very Good at Communicating in English
Got this from Frank last night:
Dear Sir/Madam,
My name is Frank, I’m Operations Manager for TenDa Plastics CO., Limited. located in DongGuan City China . I am very glad to see your company web and writing to you to explore the possible cooperation with you .
TenDa Plastics is a professional moulds . injection molding .Assemble with Packaging manufacturer. Our products include UAV Parts. UAV Filter. automobile . Medical . household items. industrial. electrical appliances. Display. etc. we’ve won high reputation from our customers all over the world. if you want know more for our Company , please visit our website.
Our staffs are very good at Communicating in English.
April 27, 2018
Weekend Reading
Thank you for staying with me through a couple of relatively quiet weeks, as I’ve been tending to stuff around the farm.
Busy world, eh? Witness the two Koreas’ summit earlier today.
[image error]
(Credit: Getty Images via news.com.au)
Apparently those concrete-looking blocks between the two men mark the border between countries. I found video of the two leaders stepping back and forth over them arresting.
Not one for ad hominem attacks (unless, perhaps obliquely implied) I’ll decline to note my wonder whether Mr. Kim would make it through all that theatrical, symbolic walking around without becoming winded before he finally made it to the guest book table. Here is a Korea reading list from earlier this week.
•••••
Just now I’m working through three worthwhile books on the same theme. They are The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder, The End of Europe by James Kirchick and After Europe by Ivan Krastev.
Kirchick’s and Krastev’s books are about a year old and Snyder’s is new this year.
For my money, Snyder is brilliant. Just have a look at some of his work. Krastev has become a bit of a trendy opinion maker from his unlikely perch in Sofia, Bulgaria. About Kirchick I’m less sure. He has a bit of a controversial past.
Just the same, they’re all engaging and I hope I’ll have something to say to synthesize the three authors’ ideas before long.
Meanwhile, there was a wealth of engaging shorter-form material to read this week, including:
– An Apology for the Internet – From the Architects Who Built It by Noah Kulwin in New York Magazine
– What Cape Town learned from its drought by Piotr Wolski at thebulletin.org
– The Faroe Islands by Porter Fox at nowheremag.com
– What will the next war look like by Christopher in The Spectator
– How Neoliberalism Changed the World by Patrick Iber in The New Republic
See you next week.
