H.J. Hampson's Blog, page 2

I like it here…

This blog was originally posted on the Elsewhere Studios blog where you can also read a blog by my fellow resident Melanie Reese and see her fantastic paintings.

“I like this place, and willingly could waste my time in it.” – Celia, As You Like It

I was taking some time out from working on my novel, willingly wasting time reading Shakespeare when I came across this quote. Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone the clown have escaped the vanity and pomp of the court and are have arrived in the magical forest of Arden. I’ll be leaving Elsewhere and Paonia in a few days and reading these lines almost brought a tear to my cynical, English, crime-writer eyes.

It’s not that people come to Elsewhere to waste time at all – my time at Elsewhere has been very productive, but Elsewhere – and Paonia – are places you come to escape the pomp and vanity of the modern day court and return to nature, good food and community.

I didn’t know what to expect at all… I arrived in Paonia after travelling the world for nine months, and although I’ve been to a lot of places, there is nowhere quite like Paonia.  I was installed in the Gingerbread House, a cute, lopsided little cottage at the back of the main Elsewhere building and, once I’d mastered the art of chopping wood and lighting the stove, I found that it was the perfect working environment. I soon settled into a routine and, sitting at my desk, with the occasional company of Tomato the cat, I rattled through a redraft of a comedy screenplay and the first draft of my new novel, a crime caper provisionally titled ‘The Head of Charity Lane’.

Whilst it was great to get so much work done, for me the best part of the stay was the fun I had with my fellow residents, Rose, Molly and Melanie. Whether going out for pizza, dancing like lunatics in the studio to Bohemian Rhapsody, or getting to know the locals, I feel like I’ve made three new friends and will leave with many happy, funny, unforgettable memories.

Rose Molly and I, all being writers, were honoured to read our work on Tara Miller’s KVNF radio show, One Woman’s Perspective, and we were all touched by the number of people who attended our final presentation.

Some less enlightened people would think spending a month and a half in Colorado writing was a waste of time, and they might say some people who live in Paonia are wasting their time pursuing lifestyles which don’t involve an office job and a mortgage because time is money in the West, but, I willingly could waste my time a little longer in this modern day Arden. I am sad to leave but, alas, I must go to the court of vanity, otherwise known as LA, and then return to the court of pomp, otherwise known as London.

I’d just like to say thank you to Karen and Willow for the hard work they’ve put in to make Elsewhere such a great place, thanks to my fellow residents for being such great company, and thanks to all the Paonians who have made us feel so welcome in their community. Oh, and thanks to Tomato for being the friendliest cat ever.

HJ Hampson

www.hjhampson.com

Twitter: heatherjhampson

Melanie, Rose, me and Molly





Me and Tomato hanging out in the Gingerbread House.

Tokyo Story

What to make of Tokyo? My first impression was that I had never been

Tokyo subway/ metro map

anywhere more confounding. The metro, after a long day/night of travelling all the way from Medan, via Bangkok, via Shanghai and no sleep and several time zones, the Tokyo metro map seemed like a nonsensical tangle of colours. I managed to get to Asakura where my very stylish but very expensive hostel was located, but no one was very friendly and a cup of tea was about $6. I went for a walk up to a nearby temple and to look for food, but to my alarm, no menus were in English and none of the plastic example meals displayed in the windows looked vegetarian and I can’t speak Japanese. I walked through the gauntlet of Edo shops selling kimonos, painted fans, Japanese shoes but there were no other western tourists and no-one tried to sell me anything or even lure me in to look at their merch. To add to this, the streets were deserted. I was missing gaudy, loud Bangkok, the tackiness of Koh-San Road, Pat-Pong market with the ladyboys trying to sell knock-off Prada bags, I was even missing the traffic jams and I was worried I was going to spend four days starving. I suppose the culture shock comes from the fact that they don’t bother to pander to the West here, we don’t impress them, and they don’t need to translate everything into English.

It got better though. To be sure, Tokyo is a strange place, clean to the point of almost being sterile, quiet to the point of being creepy, and yet bigger and more manic, seedy and kitsch than even Bangkok, but by the end of those four days I had fallen a little bit in love with it, although I did have to resort to eating tofu, badly cooked in the hostel kitchen every night and bland egg sandwiches or plain rice from Seven Eleven for lunch. But there is something comforting in the cleanliness and the order and the little apartment blocks.

Once you decipher the metro and subway and work out the ticket machines, you find that Tokyo has the most efficient public transport system in the world, zipping you from one little mini-city to the next within this mother-of-all-metropolises. My favourite mini-city was Shinjuku. Like many other places, you emerge from the subway to find yourself amongst shopping malls, but here also was the red light district of Kabukicho, the epicentre of the cleanliness-seediness clash: all cartoon faces, flashing pink lights around the doorways with unsavoury plastic curtains to hide the dark deeds going on inside. I heard Stay Together by Suede blasting out from within one of these strip joints, but that’s Tokyo for you, always cool.

I went up the government office buildings twice in a day, in light and darkness to look at the sprawl of the city from the 45th floor, even there, you can’t really grasp how big Tokyo is.

Tokyo Story screenplay

It was good to be back in the world of culture though. I went to an art gallery, and the National Film Centre in well-to-do Ginza, where they had the original screenplay of Tokyo Story and a very cool display of Czech film posters. I succumbed to the shopping – who can’t with all those malls? – I almost spent a lot of yen on some glittery silver shoes, but in the end spent a bit less on a polka dot handbag, and on the last day, before my flight to Los Angeles, I went to ‘cat cafe’.

Now, this was one of the main things I wanted to do in Tokyo, but it wasn’t exactly what I imagined. I located the ‘cafe’ on the sixth floor of a regular apartment block. After paying $8 and swapping my shoes for slippers, I was ushered into what was basically a regular apartment. I sat in the cheerful Japanese woman’s living room and tried to attract the cats, all of whom were obese, but none of them were up for a mauling. In fact, the cheerful lady explained, they didn’t really like being stroked, just patted on the rump. Hmm… weren’t they all supposed to be friendly kitties who liked a cuddle? I felt a bit dirty when I left, cheapened by the whole thing. The night before, I’d encountered a wild-looking man in a darkened underpass who had a cart on which several fat ginger cats were asleep on, and one fat white cat on a lead. This was all a bit too weird for my liking. I didn’t stay for my full allocated hour in the cat cafe but made a hasty retreat after about forty minutes of rump patting.

As I walked back to the hostel, a troop of ladies in Kimonos walked down the other side of the road, a much more pleasant Tokyo encounter. It had been a strange few days, but I had, by the end, adjusted to the Japanese way. Denver Colorado, where I arrived forty-odd hours later on the same day, was the exact opposite of Tokyo and an equally big culture shock.

Kimono ladies

An encounter with the orangutans

I was already thinking this jungle trek wouldn’t be quite like my rainy ordeal in Cambodia. It was the night before we set out into the jungle near Bukit Lawang, Sumatra, to see the semi-wild orangutans and we were sitting in the guest house bar, drunk on dodgy Indonesian vodka and singing along loudly and badly to Hotel California. Our Guide, Eddy, had already told us he was bringing a kilo of ‘wacky backy’ on the trek, and, hey, it wasn’t raining! I’d met my drinking friends, Aussie Callan and Germans Martina and Chris on the bus here from Medan, which is a dump of a city but they did serve very nice Gado Gado at the Podonk Angel Guest house.

The next day I had to procure a pair of one dollar, comically ugly rubber shoes in which to trek in as my hiking boots got wrecked in muddy Cambodia. The Indonesian guides all wore them and they actually turned out to be comfier than my hiking boots, but still, they looked bloody awful and I was feeling pretty bloody hungover as we headed off into the one remaining Sumatran forest where orangutans live. On our two day trek we only hiked around the edges of this forest and the orangutans we would encounter were semi-wild – they have been rehabilitated, or some have been born in semi-captivity. The truly wild orangutans live deeper in the forest and are much shyer.

It wasn’t long before we came upon another gaggle of tourists, all stood still looking up into the trees, and sure enough, there was that fiery orange fur, and there was a mother with a tiny baby, and a bigger youngster, nonchalantly staring back at us. The guides produced bananas and the orangutans began to trapeze down the branches towards us. Because they are semi-wild they will accept food from humans. I wasn’t sure of the ethics of this, as surely the best thing is to make these beautiful creatures as scared of us evil humans as possible, but I couldn’t resist taking a turn and giving a piece of banana to the youngster who was holding his black hand out. We briefly touched as he took it. His skin was rough, like an old person’s hand, and was freakishly human-like. It felt as epic as Michelangelo’s God’s finger touching Adam’s though and it’s an encounter I’ll never forget. I thought we were lucky to see the mother, baby and youngster, but we encountered many more of the little orange ‘people of the forest’ as we trekked on. It was amazing to watch them doing their topsy-turvy acrobats through the trees. But I also have to say, we also encountered many more touristy people of the backpacker type as well. Bukit Lawang has made a whole industry out of these orangutan treks and sometimes it feels like you’re not really in the wild jungle, so populated are the routes with other people. The forest here though is well populated with lots of other primates. We also saw a young gibbon who had ventured down from the canopy to watch a raucous rabble of Leaf Monkeys who were

David Beckham Monkey

playing around on the ground. These monkeys are also nicknamed the David Beckham monkey as they have little quiffs like their less-intelligent namesake once sported.

There’s a notorious female orangutan here called Mina who has a penchant for biting tourists – understandable as we’ve destroyed almost all her jungle and replaced it with palm oil plantations, but the funniest part of the trek was when Mina was allegedly spotted and the whole tour party began to move as fast as we could away whilst the suspected ape lazily watched us whilst chomping on some pineapple. I don’t know if it was the real Mina, but she’s a bit of a celeb-spot if it was, as she is so famous she’s mentioned in the Lonely Planet and the Indonesian girl I sat next to on the plane out of Sumatra asked if I’d seen her.

In the late afternoon reached out camp-site by the river, which we were all very grateful to take a dip in. No one dared smoke too much of the wacky backy. Then the guides produced a full-on Indonesian banquet of spicy curries, rice and nibbles, then a huge plate of fruit. It was a bit strange having to bed down in a polythene long house next to everyone else in the tour group, but we were all so tired no one minded. In the morning we awoke to the all-too familiar sound (for me at least) of heavy rain, and we had to wait until it cleared before we could ‘tube’ back down the river to Bukit Lawang. I have to say, I wasn’t that keen on the tubing and I’m convinced that whilst I was screaming with fear as we careered around the rocks protruding from the fast-flowing river, I ingested some bacteria-infested water which subsequently led me spending most of the night throwing up back at the guest house. I’d been travelling seven months, and this was my last stop in occasionally-hygenicly-challenged South East Asia, so I knew I was going to get ill. It was sod’s law.

Lake Toba

The five hour journey along Sumatra’s bad roads to Lake Toba the next day was not pleasant at all, even though Martina had given me a lovely German tablet called ‘Vomex’. It was dark by the time we reached Tuk Tuk on Samosir Island on the lake and I was so grateful to find you could get a decent room with hot water for very little money. The lake is massive, Samosir island itself is as big as Singapore, and it was really beautiful, although the rainy season had caught up with me again and it rained most of the time I was there. Still, there was some great Indonesian food to be had in the deserted restaurants. It was the end of the season and sometimes felt like you were in a weird film where something ominous was about to happen. I’d decided to spend a few days there anyway in order to work on my novel, but Callan, Chris and Martina and other Europeans we’d befriended left after a few days, so the place felt even more deserted. I was glad to get back onto the mainland by the end of it, even though I ended up spending a night in the worst hotel ever in Parapat. My Indonesian trip was far too short and I don’t feel like I saw much of this fascinating, diverse country at all, but I had a flight back to Bangkok and then onwards to the big bright lights of Tokyo.

Malaysia: The End of the Road

About travelling about 13,181 miles over this great land mass, from the London Eurostar terminal, I’m feeling a little guilty as I roam around Kuala Lumpur’s Low Cost Carrier Terminal waiting for my Air Asia flight to Medan, Sumatra. I’ve got about two weeks left in Asia and I researched the short ferry ride from Melaka, Malaysia to Dumai in Sumatra. That sounded great, but then I read about the fourteen hour coach ride on the other side and I thought, sod it, I’m going to buy a flight for the first time in this journey. I had intended to come as far as a Thai island overland/ sea, so I suppose getting to Kuala Lumpur by train, bus and boat is pretty good going, but still, it feels like cheating, flying. And it is so much more stressful than hopping on a train, but maybe I’m forgetting how horrid that overnight bus ride in Vietnam was, or how stressful it was getting over the Russia – Mongolia land boarder was. Hmm, still, a nice comfy night train bunk then arriving right in the city centre is much more appealing than a cramped seat on a cheap airline that deposits you at some airport far out of the city.

Anyway, I felt like I had to get out of Malaysia. For some reason I just wasn’t

A good cuppa in Tanah Rata

really ‘feeling’ the place. I’d arrived here from Chumphon, Thailand, on the overnight train which terminated at a bus station in Butterworth that seemed to be on the edge of a giant industrial estate. My bunk mate on the train, a German lady called Christanne was going to teach in Malaysia and had been there before so she was a massive help when I was trying to find a bus to the Cameron Highlands. Sitting in the bus station, I was fascinated by the ethnic mix here – Muslim girls in head scarves, trendy Chinese kids, Indian ladies in saris. Sadly, the Cameron Highland themselves were less interesting. The guidebook did warn of intensive agriculture, but I was still expecting a

Tea, glorious tea!

quiet little village nestled amongst the tea plantations. Sadly, it was more like a large town nestled amongst fields and fields of greenhouses, fertiliser shops, machinery depots. The only quaint thing was the tea rooms, offering tea and scones. I went to the Lord’s Café, where I ordered the Lord’s scone with cream and jam. What can I say? It wasn’t quite as heavenly as a real Cornish cream tea. The tea though! They make a bloody good cuppa in Tanah Rata though and the Indian food was absolutely delicious and very veggie friendly.

After I’d checked out the tea plantation – miles and miles of the lovely green stuff, I headed to the Perhentian Islands, where I’d signed up for four more dives. As I loitered in the dive shop, waiting to fill out the forms that remind you how dangerous scuba diving is, I again questioned what the hell I was doing, but this dive school was much more chilled out than the one in Koh Tao, and by the end of my forth dive, I had become a little bit addicted. The sea was clearer here and we dived in some amazing sites and even saw a big Hawksbill sea turtle just chilling on the reef. But Perhentian Island Kecil offered little more – just a few bars and restaurants on the beach and an insipid bit of

Coral Bay, Perhentian Kecil

jungle. I started to get bored, so decided to head back to the mainland, but didn’t really have a plan of where to go. I ended up staying in a couple of really crap guest houses, taking the much hyped Jungle Railway, of which the jungle in question was no way near as impressive as the scenery on the Bangkok to Chang Mai line, and then a bus to Kuala Lumpur, where I caught a quick glimpse of the Petronas Towers while heading across the city to the delightfully named Low Cost Carrier Terminal, and here I am. Two things on this journey towards the airport made me think maybe I should have given Malaysia more of a chance to impress me. The first was the kindness of a lovely Chinese man working in a computer shop in Jerantut who printed out my boarding pass for me, and the second was the fact that there was a cheap, vegetarian Indian restaurant right outside the airport terminal. But it was too late, I was at the airport now and had exchanged my Ringgits for Indonesian rupiahs. The orangutans of Sumatra were calling me.

Some Islamic tinsel for Eid

Living the Koh Tao dream/nightmare

It was just before three a.m when the night train rolled into Chumphon, not a minute too late, of course. This was the one time I would have been grateful for the Thai railways’ typical tardiness, but no, I had to camp down on a bench like a tramp and wait out the hours until seven when the ferry left for Koh Tao. It wasn’t as bad as I thought, apart from the ear-splitting bell that had to be rung every time a train came in. The ferry was over-crowded – of mix of suitcase-weilding ‘tourists’ who’d come for a two weeks in the sun, and the scruffier backpackers, sporting the fake Ray Bans and friendship bracelets they’d picked up on the South East Asia Lonely Planet trail. Almost everyone was young and beautiful.

I spent the whole journey talking to Luca, an Italian with a hatred for drunken

Sairee Beach, Koh Tao

Brit backpackers. I comprehensively agreed with him that these young Brits who down the buckets of booze and get rowdy are an embarrassment, unbeknown to me, that a few days later at some small hour of the morning I doing just that. Well, it is Koh Tao, isn’t it?

I hadn’t come here just to party, I’d come here to learn to scuba dive too. It seemed like a fun thing to do, but from the first day of my SSI Open Water course, I found that fun was the least appropriate word I would associate with it. I panicked when we were going through the basic underwater skills and I had to remove my mask, I floated up to the surface, colliding with a startled swimmer, it was cold, my ears hurt, I felt freaked out that there was all that water above. By the morning of the second day I was convinced I was going to die as we had to repeat the skills at twelve metres down. Looking back, I’m not quite sure why I was so convinced I was going to die, but anyway, I was praying for an ear infection or some other ailment that would give me a get out clause from putting on the dreaded tank, but my prayers went unanswered and so down into the depths I went again and this time realised that it wasn’t so bad removing the breathing regulator or the mask underwater and I survived day two with a little more enthusiasm for my new sport. But still the highlight of my day was a little black cat brazenly coming into my hut and deciding to bed down under my Koh Tao map.

By day three I was sort of liking it and finally beginning to master keeping myself buoyant in the water. I was even managing to look at the fish rather than concentrating on not colliding with fragile coral reefs now. So, Niki, our strict but very capable German instructor passed me and I am now an Open Water licensed diver!

It’s like nothing else I’ve ever experienced, being in that underwater world. I suppose it’s the further we can get from our terrestrial lives other than going into space. Proper scuba divers seen to be obsessed with seeing the big fish, but for me what was amazing was the little fish in all their wonderful colours. How did this one fish evolve to be so vibrant yellow and with contrasting violet stripes and intricate detailing around the eye, like some beautiful post-modern object d’art? Of course, the ‘Nemo’ fish (Clown Fish) hiding in their little reefs were so cute too! At least by the end of it I was thinking “I could give this another go,” rather than wishing I’d spent my 9000 Baht on something less terrifying.

With the course finished, there was only the partying to do, something which I took to much better and have a certain knack for, if I say so myself. It started with drinks with the dive school and gigantic tequila shots. Then some fellow dive students from India invited me to accompany them to the ladyboy cabaret. Who could say no? I downed a few gin and tonics whilst the very glammed-up ladyboys pranced around and lip-synched, Priscilla Queen of the Desert Style, to ‘All That Jazz’ and other cheesy classics. It was utterly brilliant. Somehow, after the cabaret I ended up at a party on the beach and from there, a party around a swimming pool which I decided it was a really good idea to jump into fully clothed when a cute French guy within it started chatting me up. Maybe I was thinking it would be like Clare and Leo in Romeo + Juliet after she’s just done the balcony speech. The illusion was lost when we were ordered out of the pool by weary Thai bar staff who were closing the party.

I woke up gone two the next day and stumbled around the town with my fake Ray Bans firmly glued to my face hence I should see anyone from the night before. Then I found a bar that was blasting out ‘Black Hole Sun’ by Soundgarden, the most perfect song for a Koh Tao hangover ever, I think.

Well, that was the Thai party island scene and I felt I had sufficiently embraced it. But I felt relieved to leave, that was until I was boarding the ferry and found someone coming or going before me had spilt gold glitter on the gangplank and something about the sight of it made me feel a pang of sadness to be getting off the god-forsaken isle. It was back to Chumphon for the night train into Malaysia. Thailand, maybe you are too touristy now and not so cheap anymore, but you sure are a hell of a lot of fun.

Bangkok and back again, plus elephants

Thailand knows how to fake it like no other country. I’ve just had my hair cut in a salon owned by a very glamorous lady-boy who minced around in stilettos and a sequin miniskirt and earlier inspected the ‘MAC’ cosmetics on sale on the stalls in the MK Centre. The lipsticks look and smell like the real thing, but they’re selling them for only 100 Baht. Outside, on a stage between the shopping malls, a band of young Thai guys is doing a pretty good cover of a Linkin Park song, cheered on by teenage boys in space-age get up and pastel-coloured wigs. I didn’t think I’d like Bangkok but this sprawling metropolis where they sell eggs painted pink has a strange attraction, despite the snarling traffic jams and the soulless Siam Square shopping malls. They have the thing in some of them: Chanel, Marc Jacobs and the like, but down on Patpong market you can still buy the fakes, along with almost anything else.

I was staying way down Sukhumvit road, well away from the infamous backpacker gauntlet of Kao San, so I’m sad to say I didn’t get to sample the legendary Bangkok night-life. These were my first days in Bangkok and I spent most of the time in between visiting temples and markets, trying to decide where to go next: head north for elephants and the jungles of Laos or south for diving and the tea plantations of Malaysia? My decision was determined by what train tickets I could get – Thailand’s trains are busier than China’s and there were no tickets to Koh Tao at all for the next few days and only seats on the twelve hour day train to Chiang Mai in the north. I had to keep moving so the day train to Chiang Mai it was. This, though it stretched to thirteen hours, wasn’t so bad as it passed through some lush jungle and you got refreshments like rolls filled with pastel pink cream (they do like pink things here).

Pink refreshments on the Bbk-Chiang Mai train

My stay in Chiang Mai included a night out at a Thai reggae bar where I shared my first bucket with Georgia, a cool Aussie girl I met in the hostel, then almost throwing up before the next day’s early morning departure for an excursion to the overrated Golden Triangle, which was necessitated by my need to renew my Thai visa stamp by nipping over the Burma border and back. The excursion was crap and trying with a hangover so I can’t even be bothered to write about it. The bit of Burma I saw was a mirror reflection of the knock-off market on the Thai side – fake Ice watches, Ipad accessories, blokes selling boxes of fags. I’m sure all of Burma isn’t like this though.

Anyway, the main reason I visited Chiang Mai was to go to the Elephant Nature Park, a centre for elephants rescued from the illegal logging trade or the tourist industry. It was scary at first, being so close to these majestic beasts, but by the end of the day, when our little tour group was standing knee-deep in a river, splashing water over them, we were all pretty comfortable being around them. Some of them had been terribly abused, like the female elephant Jokia, who was blinded by her captors for refusing to obey their orders. When she arrived at the park she was instantly adopted by an older female elephant and the two are now inseparable. Such kindness to each other is just one interesting facet of elephant behaviour. At the end of the day we were shown a video of an elephant being ‘crushed’, the traditional ‘taming’ procedure where a wild elephant is captured, trapped in a tiny cage and beaten and stabbed with nails until it learns to obey human commands. It was heart-breaking to know many of these gentle giants had been through that, and they say an elephant never forgets, but hopefully with the care and affection they receive at the Elephant Nature Park, the physical and psychological wounds will heal.

That evening I took the night bus (as there were no train tickets) back to Bangkok. It was better than the horrid night bus in Vietnam but I do wonder why they thought it was a good idea to show Oblivion starring Tom Cruise at alternate times loudly dubbed in Thai, at times loudly in the original English, then with the sound so quiet I couldn’t tell what language it was in, meaning no one could watch it and it just disturbed everyone. Back in Bangkok I decided to track down a showing of Only God Forgives, Nicholas Winding Refn’s follow-up to Drive. I’d been waiting for this all year and as it is set in Bangkok, I was excited about seeing it here. I trekked all the way to a cinema in the Bangkok suburbs and, well what can I say, I was really disappointed. Some plot would have been nice, for starters.

Nor had I been that impressed with Thai food so far – but one of my favourite

Pink taxis in Bangkok

moments in Bangkok was stumbling into Lumpini Park. There was some event going on, so I went over to have a look and found myself being ushered towards some food stalls where friendly Thai people were plating up various dishes for free! Imagine my delight when I discovered one stall was totally vegetarian too. There was a guy on the stage singing melodic Thai music and everyone seemed to be in great spirits, waving Thai flags and enjoying this hospitality even when it threatened to rain. I never found out what that was all about, nor why there were stalls outside whose sole product was Guy Fawkes-style masks, but it was good fun. I think parks in Asian cities are one of the best places to see local life happening and taking a walk around this one I saw old people practicing Tai Chi, health fanatics jogging past me and one very nimble man pulling all kinds of contortionist positions on a gym mat he’d set down by the lake. In this lake there was scary-looking lizards like small crocodiles. I think they must have been some species of non-dangerous cayman but it seemed unwise to get close. As the evening set in and the tall office blocks and sky rise hotels began to light up above us I headed back to my minuscule room in a guest house near Chinatown. The next evening I was heading to Chumphon for the ferry to Koh Tao… my train was to arrive there at the totally ridiculous time of three a.m. Find out how I learned to scuba dive and party Thai island style in the next instalment!

From the jungle to the Big Mango

I’m sitting on the balcony of my hostel off the Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok, no sound but that of the traffic buzzing and growling past down below, the hot pink taxis, motorbikes, occasional shiny 4x4s. I think this is the closest I’ll ever come to feeling what the American G.Is felt when they returned to Saigon for R&R after a tour in the jungle, for I too have been in the jungle and though there was no active combat, it was indeed an arduous mission.

Yesterday I made the long journey from the back of beyond in Cambodia, over the border to the Big Mango. It took over twelve hours all in all and the bus finally chucked us off at the infamous backpacker ghetto of Kao San Road. That was miles and miles from where I was supposed to be staying and at this hour of the evening I didn’t fancy a challenging trek across the city, navigating greedy taxi drivers and alien public transport networks, so I let a strange European woman take me to a cheap hotel where I rented a single room and was reminded, for the second time of this trip, of Alex Garland’s The Beach. I didn’t hear any weirdo whispering about a paradisical retreat in the night, but maybe he was drowned out by the Motown tunes coming from the bar below.

It’s a relief to be here though, where there are grilled cheese sandwiches and gin and tonics and big shopping malls and metro systems and wifi and decent coffee. It’s terrible to admit it, but after three days in the very rural Cardamom Mountains, I’ve come to accept I like cities and home comforts.

In the Cardamoms I had been staying in the village of Chi Phat where a community-based eco-tourism scheme has been set up. Getting there was enough of an ordeal. It was supposed to be a simple moto ride, but the heavy rains had caused the river to burst its banks. The moto driver stopped and said said ‘water’ and pointed to his abdomen. I just smiled and nodded but a few yards down the road I realised what he meant as we came to a small, recently formed lake in the road.

“Erm…” I said as I watched, aghast, as the villagers waded through, carrying their bags and boxes above their head as they became more and more submerged in the not stomach- but breast-high terracotta coloured water. There was nothing for it. I couldn’t turn back as we were in the middle of nowhere and there was nowhere else to go, so, with a couple of guys to help me with all my bags, in I went. In wasn’t that bad, though the current was, I thought at this point, strong in places. I picked up another moto when I emerged form the lake, but a little further along the road, there was another expanse of water. Not quite as deep this time, but it was still too much for a motorbike to drive through.. They pushed them through instead and at the other side, no one could get their bikes started. I stood there, dripping wet, choking on the petrol fumes, as they hauled their bikes up vertically to pour the water out of the exhausts and then tried again and again to get the things going. Finally, my guy got his engine running and after a boat over a real river I eventually arrived in Chi Phat.

Carnivorous Pitcher Plants!

If I was beginning to regret then coming here in the rainy season, over the next two days I would be cursing myself, for I undertook a trek through the jungle with a guide named Jat and a young chef. Within the first half hour of walking, I’d stepped in sinking mud and my boots were waterlogged and filthy. Then we reached the jungle, where the path had become a stream and the leeches were out in force. I’ve never experienced leeches before, and it was not a pleasant experience. It began to chuck it down but we trudged on and I half thought about calling the whole thing off. Lunch, when they finally got the damp wood lit and could cook it, revived me though. In the afternoon the leeches launched a full-on offensive. “We have one more stream to cross” said Jat. When we got to it, I exclaimed “that’s not a stream, it’s a fucking river,” for it was: about six metres wide and flowing faster than any other river I recall seeing. I watched as the chef waded through and struggled against the current. If this young Cambodian was struggling, what chance did I have? Even when they ingeniously managed to string a vine across for me to hold onto I had visions of drifting off down the river until I came to a fatal waterfall and my body washing up somewhere in the jungle for disgusting things to feast on. Jat and the chef were both on the other side now, but I was still standing there, blood dripping down my legs from the leeches, crying out that I couldn’t do it. Again, there was no way back though. Jat came back across and took my backpack, so I took a deep breath and in I went. The currant probably wasn’t, as I exclaimed when I was in the middle of it, strong enough to break your leg, but it was pretty damn strong. I got to the other side though. I think they were impressed I’d done it, “I think you are strong woman,” Jat would tell me at the end of the trek.  Might I add I was also suffering from a cold through all of this.  Anyway, after the river, it was relatively easy going. We reached our jungle

Campsite for the night

camp site and after a delicious dinner of cabbage and egg soup and fried bamboo shoots (which they’d earlier picked from a grove we passed though) with rice, I slept soundly in my hammock that night.

The next day was just as muddy and it rained even more, but there were fewer leeches and no raging rivers to cross. I did half-fall through one of those wooden bridges you see in films that always threaten to collapse, but thankfully it was over the bank rather than in the middle of it. Bruised, bloody and filthy, I was so relieved to arrive back in Chi Phat. I wanted a hot shower and pizza, but had to make do with a very cold shower and yet more rice. My hiking boots were wrecked, so no more jungle treks for me, not that I could bear another one anytime soon. I’m off to Kao Tao to learn to dive and drink cocktails on the beach: I think I’ve earned it.

The darkness and the glory of Cambodian history

After a few days in Saigon, of which I can’t really think of any interesting to say, I took the bus over the Cambodian boarder. My first impressions weren’t positive – the bus driver insisted he fill out of the visa form, charging an extra $5 to do so, and while I was in a strop about this I whacked my shin on a bit of protruding metal on the seats in the boarder office, so my first few minutes in Cambodia were spent in agonising pain.

I didn’t know what to expect of Phnom Penh, out of all the places I’ve been to or am going to, Cambodia seemed to me like the most lairy place – I’d heard the stories of the horror of the Killing Fields, the stories about drinks being spiked and theft, there was the grinding poverty, the malaria risk, but Phnom Penh seemed pretty, well, quiet. I was slightly alarmed when I got to my guest house to find not one but three posters up on the walls of my room warning me not to go with prostitutes because they’ll probably mug me, not to bring locals back to the room because ‘they will probably expect payment’ and letting me know that child prostitution was illegal. It was unnervingly surreal, seeing this poster above the childish mat outside the bathroom, featuring Disney’s Snow White and Cinderella. There were a few lone middle aged men who would hang around the guest house restaurant. One in particular looked like a neo-Nazi and another was stupendously obese. You might accuse me of making assumptions but I did actually see one of these guys looking at a Cambodian women ‘dating site’. I’ve not seen that anywhere else in Asia – yet  - and it lent an unsavoury air to the place.

Tuol Sleng prison, pictures of genocide victims incarcerated here.

I made a day trip out to Tuol Sleng prison and the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. Terrible, terrible things happened in these places not that long ago. They say one in four Cambodians were murdered by the Khmer Rouge, butchered in the most brutal ways. It’s incomprehensible that so many other Cambodians could be complicit enough to let Pol Pot’s regime get away with this and his absurd plan of agrarian communism, and also that the international community was, in a way, complicit as well. I’ve learnt about a lot of awful things on this trip – Auschwitz, the terror inflicted on Eastern Europe, the Vietnam war, the devastation in the Balkans, and there were many things about this genocide that were depressingly familiar, the way the humans seem to so easily embrace evil and rejoice in cruelty against each other.

But then I came here, to Siem Reap, to explore the temples of Angkor Wat, testament to the human races creativity, passion and team work. The

Ta Prohm, the Tomb Raider

guidebooks all swoon over the ancient temples, and they are right to do so, it’s not over-rated. I bought a three day pass and then hired a battered old bike for $1 and set off around the ‘Big circuit’: a series of ‘smaller’ outer lying temples that the guidebook doesn’t even have time to go into in detail, but would be the star tourist attraction of any other country. I slightly underestimated how long this big circuit was and was pretty knackered after cycling about 35km in the heat, but it was worth it. I even went off the main drag and found a couple of deserted ruins just sitting there in the Cambodian countryside.

On this Big Circuit, Ta Prohm is the main draw. It’s the one that was used in Tomb Raider and has been reclaimed by nature, trees  hundreds of years old themselves fusing with stone, the routes oozing over the archways of the temple. It’s strange to think of these temples standing here deserted in the centuries after the mighty Khmer Empire had fallen , being slowly encroached by jungle.

On the cycle home I came across a troop of very brazen monkeys, and then I checked my emails and found that Vanity Game, the French edition of my novel has been short-listed for the Prix Jules Rimet. I am so thrilled, and it was a fantastic end to a perfect day!

Bayon, Persona-style

The next day I went to the eerie Bayon temple which features 216 faces bearing a resemblance to the king who built it, Jayavarman VII. Every doorway you step out of, you find one staring calmly back at you. To have been one of the old explorers, discovering this for the first time by chance, totally ignorant of the history must have been so cool and rather frightening. In our shrunken, globilised world of instantly served knowledge and Starbucks in every city, it’s a feeling none of us, apart from maybe astronauts, will ever experience, which is rather sad. Bayon was my favourite temple, it was just so bloody weird and fantastically gothic.

The next day I joined the dawn stampede of tuk-tuks, cars and bicycles up to Angkor Wat for sunrise. Well, just like when I climbed Tai Shan in China, the sun failed to show. I’m giving up on that kind of thing. What was great though was going into Angkor Wat as soon as it opened. Almost all the sunrise watchers headed back to their hotels, so it was so quiet… I walked

No sunrise

down empty corridors, past carvings and inscriptions made over a millennia ago, nothing but the sound of my Converses on the stone floor. I had a feeling that I wasn’t supposed to be there, which is, I guess, the closest it’s possible to get these days to the wonder of the old explorers. I stepped out the back of the temple and looked out in the early morning mist, the dew heavy on the grass like it is in England, but the sounds of the jungle beyond completely exotic. Nothing stirred, not even a bird, pretty magical. Suffice to say, I feel like giving up on crime and turning to adventure novels! How could anyone not after that?

I was so glad not to be in the UK to witness the vacuous, fawning news coverage of Kate Middleton and William whatshisface’s baby. Sod our meek kingdom, when they build a city of wonderous temples that lasts over the thousand years, then I will be impressed.

The darkness and the gory of Cambodian history

After a few days in Saigon, of which I can’t really think of any interesting to say, I took the bus over the Cambodian boarder. My first impressions weren’t positive – the bus driver insisted he fill out of the visa form, charging an extra $5 to do so, and while I was in a strop about this I whacked my shin on a bit of protruding metal on the seats in the boarder office, so my first few minutes in Cambodia were spent in agonising pain.

I didn’t know what to expect of Phnom Penh, out of all the places I’ve been to or am going to, Cambodia seemed to me like the most lairy place – I’d heard the stories of the horror of the Killing Fields, the stories about drinks being spiked and theft, there was the grinding poverty, the malaria risk, but Phnom Penh seemed pretty, well, quiet. I was slightly alarmed when I got to my guest house to find not one but three posters up on the walls of my room warning me not to go with prostitutes because they’ll probably mug me, not to bring locals back to the room because ‘they will probably expect payment’ and letting me know that child prostitution was illegal. It was unnervingly surreal, seeing this poster above the childish mat outside the bathroom, featuring Disney’s Snow White and Cinderella. There were a few lone middle aged men who would hang around the guest house restaurant. One in particular looked like a neo-Nazi and another was stupendously obese. You might accuse me of making assumptions but I did actually see one of these guys looking at a Cambodian women ‘dating site’. I’ve not seen that anywhere else in Asia – yet  - and it lent an unsavoury air to the place.

Tuol Sleng prison, pictures of genocide victims incarcerated here.

I made a day trip out to Tuol Sleng prison and the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. Terrible, terrible things happened in these places not that long ago. They say one in four Cambodians were murdered by the Khmer Rouge, butchered in the most brutal ways. It’s incomprehensible that so many other Cambodians could be complicit enough to let Pol Pot’s regime get away with this and his absurd plan of agrarian communism, and also that the international community was, in a way, complicit as well. I’ve learnt about a lot of awful things on this trip – Auschwitz, the terror inflicted on Eastern Europe, the Vietnam war, the devastation in the Balkans, and there were many things about this genocide that were depressingly familiar, the way the humans seem to so easily embrace evil and rejoice in cruelty against each other.

But then I came here, to Siem Reap, to explore the temples of Angkor Wat, testament to the human races creativity, passion and team work. The

Ta Prohm, the Tomb Raider

guidebooks all swoon over the ancient temples, and they are right to do so, it’s not over-rated. I bought a three day pass and then hired a battered old bike for $1 and set off around the ‘Big circuit’: a series of ‘smaller’ outer lying temples that the guidebook doesn’t even have time to go into in detail, but would be the star tourist attraction of any other country. I slightly underestimated how long this big circuit was and was pretty knackered after cycling about 35km in the heat, but it was worth it. I even went off the main drag and found a couple of deserted ruins just sitting there in the Cambodian countryside.

On this Big Circuit, Ta Prohm is the main draw. It’s the one that was used in Tomb Raider and has been reclaimed by nature, trees  hundreds of years old themselves fusing with stone, the routes oozing over the archways of the temple. It’s strange to think of these temples standing here deserted in the centuries after the mighty Khmer Empire had fallen , being slowly encroached by jungle.

On the cycle home I came across a troop of very brazen monkeys, and then I checked my emails and found that Vanity Game, the French edition of my novel has been short-listed for the Prix Jules Rimet. I am so thrilled, and it was a fantastic end to a perfect day!

Bayon, Persona-style

The next day I went to the eerie Bayon temple which features 216 faces bearing a resemblance to the king who built it, Jayavarman VII. Every doorway you step out of, you find one staring calmly back at you. To have been one of the old explorers, discovering this for the first time by chance, totally ignorant of the history must have been so cool and rather frightening. In our shrunken, globilised world of instantly served knowledge and Starbucks in every city, it’s a feeling none of us, apart from maybe astronauts, will ever experience, which is rather sad. Bayon was my favourite temple, it was just so bloody weird and fantastically gothic.

The next day I joined the dawn stampede of tuk-tuks, cars and bicycles up to Angkor Wat for sunrise. Well, just like when I climbed Tai Shan in China, the sun failed to show. I’m giving up on that kind of thing. What was great though was going into Angkor Wat as soon as it opened. Almost all the sunrise watchers headed back to their hotels, so it was so quiet… I walked

No sunrise

down empty corridors, past carvings and inscriptions made over a millennia ago, nothing but the sound of my Converses on the stone floor. I had a feeling that I wasn’t supposed to be there, which is, I guess, the closest it’s possible to get these days to the wonder of the old explorers. I stepped out the back of the temple and looked out in the early morning mist, the dew heavy on the grass like it is in England, but the sounds of the jungle beyond completely exotic. Nothing stirred, not even a bird, pretty magical. Suffice to say, I feel like giving up on crime and turning to adventure novels! How could anyone not after that?

I was so glad not to be in the UK to witness the vacuous, fawning news coverage of Kate Middleton and William whatshisface’s baby. Sod our meek kingdom, when they build a city of wonderous temples that lasts over the thousand years, then I will be impressed.

Waking up with the gibbons in Cat Tien Park

At 4:45am the stars are still vivid in the sky and the jungle is alive with the sounds of millions of insects and birds buzzing, clicking, chirping and making all sorts of other indescribable noises. No doubt there are more sinister things out there lurking around at this hour that keep silent as well. The gibbons, though, are not awake yet, but I am and aim of get to their patch of the forest before they do. I am doing the Wild Gibbon Trek in Cat Tien National Park. Me, our guide and two Swedish people set out at this thoroughly ungodly hour, venturing only a little way into the jungle, though in the pitch darkness with only the guide’s torchlight, it is scary enough.

Female gibbons. Image from Wikipedia as my camera is not that good.

We set up hammocks under the park’s famous, majestic 600 hundred year old tree. We lie in the hammocks for a while, listening to the incredible sound of the jungle’s day shift waking up and the night shift going to sleep, and then we hear them – at first it is a quiet descending whistle – a bird I initially think, but the guide beckons us out of the hammocks and we follow him through the trees in the half light of the morning. Then the gibbons burst into full song. It reverberates through the trees, comprehensively dwarfing ever other sound. I have never heard anything like it in my life, it is both terrifying and amazing at the same time. The closest thing can compare it to, being a pale kid from suburban England, is a load of arcade machines all going off at once, but a thousand decibels higher than even the most noisy arcade in Blackpool. Then we see them swinging nimbly through the delicate branches way up above us in the forest canopy, the golden yellow females and the black males, just fleeting glimpses, like ninjas escaping from a steal, and then they are gone again, into the thick foliage.

The amazing 600 year old tree

Gibbons live in small family groups and sing like this to tell others that this is their territory. But they don’t have an alpha male who lords over a harem of females like other primates. Gibbons are actually more or less monogamous. I say more or less because, I was surprised to learn, the females sometimes have a fling with randomly roaming males, an idea it seems the human species is only just getting it’s head round. This kinky discovery was made by Marina Kenyon who helped to develop the Dao Tien Endangered Primate Endangered Species Centre at Cat Tien. I was shown round the centre by Education Officer Stephanie and volunteer Tim. Stephanie did a great job in educating me about the depressing illegal wildlife trade and the fantastic work the centre is doing to rehabilitate rescued gibbons, loris and other species. Their aim is to release the rescued monkeys back into the wild, or the semi-wild environment they have created on an island in the national park.

These primates were captured in the wild, mostly when they were young (often the poachers kill the mother to steal her baby) and sold as pets or used as tourist attractions. Stephanie pointed out one poor female gibbon who had been kept in a small cage in a petrol station for eighteen years. Not only was there obvious psychological problems but her digestive system was messed up from being fed a diet of junk food. She is now around twenty five years old (gibbons live around thirty years) and though she may never be able to be released into the wild, she is doing well and was swinging around the bars of her large cage. Even though she, like most of the gibbons in early rehabilitation, are kept in a cage of their own close to the others, she must be glad to hear that raucous singing once again.

The centre has many success stories, including the they-should-sell-the-rights-

A black shanked douc

to-Disney story of the birth of a baby to two of the first douc monkeys to be released after going through rehabilitation. But it’s an ongoing fight as the illegal wildlife trade is still going strong. In particular, the plight of the pygmy loris is very depressing. Thanks, in part, to the popularity of some inane YouTube videos, the pygmy loris is currently one of those fashionable niche pets. But these little creatures are not suited to being pets at all. No animal that has been captured from the wild (and even some bred in captivity) is ever going to be a suitable pet, but pygmy loris are actually quite aggressive. To boot they actually have a poisonous bite. So, the criminals who capture and sell these animals have come up with the

The pygmy loris

barbaric solution of cutting their teeth out. This means the loris are totally defenceless and so basically grab onto anything they can stay there, very stressed out. In the YouTube videos they look docile, but they’re just shit-scared. The loris pet trade in doing particularly well in the USA and Russia. I think I can imagine just the type of stupid, rich, spoilt American or Russian who would go for this – the kind who has got bored of the chihuahua they bought because Paris Hilton had one. But who knows,whoever hey are, they are no doubt ignorant of the terrible ordeal their new pet has been through and will continue to go through.

But there is hope, the centre is doing some great outreach work with the local Vietnamese population, educating kids and adults about the suffering of the primates and trying to deter people from becoming poachers. I hope that everyone who comes to Vietnam will consider visiting the beautiful park and the centre, and even getting up to go and see and hear the world’s most amazing acrobats in their natural habitat.

You can find out more about the work of the centre on the Go East website. There is also information about the Wild Gibbon Trek in the relevant Lonely Planet guides.

And if you can’t visit Vietnam, you can always go to Monkey World Ape Rescue Centre in Dorset – Monkey World helped to set up Go East.