Travelling in Sri Lanka

While travelling around Sri Lanka we used just about every mode of transport except a bullock cart.

The prize for the most uncomfortable goes to the no. 27 bus from Wellawaya to Unawatuna.  It was the only way to get from the tea-producing hill country down to the coast without hiring a car and driver.  The start of the journey was fine, we were taken by tuk-tuk from our guest house in Haputale to the local bus station and escorted onto a spacious local bus to Welawaya down in the foothills.  Within a few minutes of arriving in Welawaya we were hot, stressed and hassled by lots of locals wanting a piece of us and giving confusing information about where and when the buses for the coast left.  I've finally learned something that Sue has known for years about these situations, which is don't get infected with other people's sense of urgency - if you're feeling hassled just stop and say "no thank you", find a cafe if possible and sit down and have a drink.  This we did and after about half an hour we got the no. 27.  The next five hours passed in conditions not unlike a crowded London Underground train in the rush hour, except that the temperature was thirty-five centigrade and Sri Lankans have practically no sense of personal space.  We squeezed our way out at the other end hot, sweaty and exhausted, though to be fair the conductor and our fellow passengers had all done what they could to make us feel comfortable within the constraint that if you leave a one-centimetre gap on the seat next to you someone will try to wiggle at least one bum cheek onto it.  I even got a Facebook friend out of the experience - nice to meet you Tensin!

Probably the best way to get around is to use the Sri Lankan railway network.  Our most picturesque trip was from Kandy to Haputale.  For this journey we booked the first class observation car, which is rather like travelling in a 1930s cinema complete with faded green plush velvet seats.  This is a four-hour journey which winds its way up into the tea plantations to a height of about two thousand metres.  The train labours its way through increasingly green and lush countryside past picture book railway stations complete with hanging baskets and flower beds with the station name picked out in border plants.  At times the train seems to almost double back on itself as it climbs a steep hill before crossing a cast iron bridge spanning a ravine.  The observation car has a large picture window facing the rear of the train and through this one can see the railway line instantly reinstated as a footpath, as tea-plantation workers and others file back onto the track which they had just left to allow the train to pass.



At the end of our holiday we had a very different rail journey from Galle to Columbo.  We couldn't book seats and there was no first class available and so we bought tickets for second class.  When the train pulled into Galle it was already packed and in the end we had to force our way into a third class carriage where we managed to find standing room and seat space for half a person, which Sue and I shared for the three-hour duration.  I guess this was the closest we came to the experience of most working class Sri Lankans who need to get from A to B.  The carriage was not just packed, but the isle was used by a steady stream of vendors and beggars literally climbing over and under the people to market their wares.  The most disturbing was a poor woman hideously deformed by leprosy.  One enterprising guy selling cheap balloons wore a multi-coloured frizzy wig, which immediately put a smile on everyone's face and had the kids tugging at their parents' arms to buy them one.  It was a relief to get out at Columbo even though this meant being assaulted by various con-men and main-chancers.

To add to the transport collection we also hired a scooter for a day and bicycles for a couple of days.  Both are great ways to get around, not least because they provide immunity from being stopped by tuk-tuk drivers and render one less visible to hawkers, who expect to see tourists on foot and travelling at three miles per hour.  On one occasion in Galle I managed to overtake a bus on a bicycle with only one working gear and received a loud cheer from the queue at a nearby bus stop.

Despite the discomforts, travelling around Sri Lanka was generally a pleasure, because most of the people we met were friendly and helpful and around every turn one's senses are assaulted by an eclectic mix of sights, sounds and dazzling light and colours.

"You Want Tuk-tuk?"

One of the first things to strike me about Sri Lanka was the sheer number of tuk-tuks, the tiny three-wheeled taxis which are such a familiar sight in most of Asia.  As we roamed the island we found even the smallest towns and villages would have droves of them, mostly parked, often with the driver taking a nap inside or passing the time of day with his fellow drivers.  I suspect they provide a sense of purpose to men who would otherwise be unemployed.  They are the bottom end of the transit market, moving people and goods to the spots inaccessible to trucks and cars as they wheedle their way through the tightest traffic jam and the narrowest alley, guided by a cheap and ever chirruping mobile phone.

For the tuk-tuk driver it's always open season on tourists.  They will peremptorily ditch an existing passenger or errand and do a suicidal u-turn across a busy main road just to get a tourist on their rear bench, because tourists equal serious cash.  Even when you drive round in circles and fail to deliver the perspiring white person or couple to their desired destination, cash will still be forthcoming from their bulging wallets before they alight.  It's impossible to walk anywhere in Columbo, well anywhere in Sri Lanka really, without being accosted every fifty metres by a hopeful driver saying "you want tuk-tuk?"

After days of serious harassment we accidentally got our revenge on the tuk-tuk tribe in Kandy.  We were in the city centre, it was hot and neither Sue or I had our reading glasses.  We were looking for the Botanical Gardens on the map and I had mistaken them somehow for the Bogambara Stadium, a rugby venue, some five kilometres from our desired goal.  Navigating our way on the map to the Stadium it was not surprising that we couldn't find the Gardens.  I hit on the wonderful idea of instructing the inevitable tuk-tuk that stopped to take us to "the Botanical Gardens" while pointing emphatically on the map to the Bogambara Stadium which was actually about thirty metres from where we stood.  The driver, understanding little English and following my insistent finger pointing at the Bogambara Stadium on the map, said optimistically "three hundred rupee?"  This is about £1.50, practically nothing to a hot and bothered tourist and outrageously expensive to a local.  I decisively said "OK" and Sue and I jumped in.

The driver now had a problem - our destination is looming behind us thirty metres away and he can't really take us there direct without the fare looking much too big.  So he takes us on a wide circuit of the roads around the Stadium.  He stops at one point to show us a view of the rubbish strewn, but otherwise deserted, pitch in a gap between two dilapidated stands.

"Bogambara!"  He exclaims proudly.
"What?"  We reply, puzzled and cranky with dehydration.

The circuit continues with me getting more and more irate about our failure to see any sign of any botanical gardens.  Finally, he delivers us back to more or less where we started, at which point I get out, incandescent with rage and refuse to give the driver his three hundred rupee.  Eventually I give him  a fifty rupee note which he grudgingly accepts with a sense of injustice equal to my own.

Sue then persuaded me to hunt for my spectacles and having found them I study the map again and realise my mistake, prompting a fit of hysterical laughter from both of us.  No doubt the driver will have his own tale to tell about the loony old tourists who insisted on doing a circuit of the Bogambara Stadium and then went completely mad and refused to pay him.

On the Ramparts at Galle

I'm a sucker for old harbours like Galle.  Mainly built by the Dutch then taken over by the British, it is a wonderful mixture of european architecture and asian culture.  We visited several times while staying at Unawatuna beach, five kilometres down the coast.  The old town is walled in by Dutch fortifications and inside is a grid of narrow streets filled with the kind of buildings you would see in a traditional English or Dutch market town, including churches, eighteenth century shops and townhouses and a few art deco gems.  The place is being tarted-up rapidly and renovation work is going on everywhere to create more and more boutique hotels and craft shops.  Of an evening locals and tourists alike spill out onto the ramparts to stroll and watch magnificent blood-red sunsets.  They are accompanied by hundreds of crows, who line the walls and stare indifferently at the pearl-coloured sea.

Despite the gentrification, there remains a large indigenous, mainly muslim, population.  This creates an interesting tension with the tourist development, with some of the smart new cafes making it resolutely clear that they do not serve alcohol.  One evening Sue and I dined on a rooftop terrace and ate curry and drank beer while the faithful were being called to prayer to the mosque opposite.  Sipping my drink I felt like a naughty schoolboy.  In the background we could see the insistent pulse of the town's lighthouse, adding to the surreal and strangely peaceful atmosphere.  The great thing about muslim communities is that the people are polite and reserved and generally leave you alone, unlike in most of the rest of Sri Lanka.


Yes, I think I could retire to Galle and spend my days sat on a rooftop terrace, dressed in cool linen, sweeping the horizon with my battered brass telescope and tottering down of an evening to a nearby hotel for a Tiger beer and a fish curry.

Our Sri Lankan Garden

For the last week of our trip to Sri Lanka we have been staying in a smart guesthouse in the southern beach resort of Unawatuna.  It's a tasteful spot after the some of the more basic places we have been in - a kind of camp and tropical St John's Wood.  But the chief glory is the garden, which has been designed with great care as a habitat for the guesthouse's dogs and the local wildlife.  Every morning we linger over breakfast with the other guests with our cameras at the ready and have rarely been disappointed.


Most dramatic are the monkeys, which you can hear crashing through the nearby woodland as they approach the garden for mangos and papaya left out especially for them and the other visitors.










Staying here has at least taught me that you can have too many photos of monkeys, but that it's almost impossible to stop taking them anyway.

There's also a small breed of local squirrel which is especially attractive.  Fast moving with a stripe up its back which makes it look a bit like a chipmunk.  Unusually I managed to snap this one in the split second before it decided to disappear up the next tree.

The British Garrison Cemetery, Kandy

Today, while taking a morning stroll along the lakeside in Kandy, Sue and I were approached by a German tourist.

“Excuse me. I have a recommendation for you. You must go and see the British Garrison Cemetery. It is not far and the light right now is fantastic.”

He seemed very moved and to have need to share what he had seen, so we thanked him and followed his directions. We took a path uphill, not far from the Temple of the Tooth and found the cemetery in a secluded spot behind a set of wrought iron gates. It comprises one or two acres and looks like an idealised version of an English country churchyard. The graves and paths are immaculately maintained and the only other people there were two workers armed with brooms and wheelbarrows.

Although near the centre of this crowded and noisy city it’s a peaceful spot on a hillside surrounded by woodland. On the slope above, the white dome of a Buddhist temple can be seen. From time to time the silence is broken by the cry of some exotic bird. Troops of monkeys patrol the general area and are probably the most frequent visitors.

The graves, of which I am told there are 163, are mainly of young men and women, children and babies, many carried away by disease or wild animals. The Attendant walked over and drew my attention to an anonymous looking plot. “This is the grave of the seventh and last Englishman to be killed by a wild elephant during the British era” he says in precise English.

The cemetery lay neglected for many years after the British pulled out of Ceylon in 1948 and was renovated about fifteen years ago and the Attendant has worked here ever since. As we were leaving he beckoned us into his little office, which also serves as a small museum containing photos, records and a plan of the cemetery. I suspect that for him the fact that British people visit the site from time to time helps give him a sense of purpose in preserving this small fragment of colonial history.

My feelings are mixed. There is a melancholy beauty to this little spot, commemorating as it does people who are largely forgotten and who served an Empire on which the Sun definitively set in 1948. At the same time I feel uncomfortable that so much effort has been put into preserving these corpses when countless thousands of their contemporary fellow islanders, people most of them would have seen as their inferiors, have no such memorial.

At the end of our visit I tightly rolled up a thousand rupee note and forced it with difficulty into the tiny hole in the donations box reserved for paper rather than coins and thanked the Attendant. Then Sue and I made our way back down into the tourist throng.

Something Special

This is a photo of Sue and Jenifer, one of the teachers she works with.  It's a great picture of her I think and quite special when you know the circumstances in which it was taken.

The photographer is a little lad with learning difficulties.  He's in a regular class where the other children look out for him, but where he doesn't make much conventional progress.  One day Sue gave him her camera and the affinity between him and the device was instinctual and immediate.  He took several photos of Sue and the teachers, each time waiting with intense concentration until the right moment to depress the button.

Most of the time, I guess, we try to take photos that are a window on the world, in which the subjects are not too self-conscious of the person with the lens.  But all too often we end up recording dull and stilted poses for posterity.  In this picture something quite different is going on.  The subjects are very aware that a photograph is being taken and the picture is essentially recording their response to the young photographer:  delight that he is doing something which is giving him a real and rare sense of achievement; encouragement, willing him to take a good photo and; there's no other word for it, love.

Looking at this picture gives me a warm glow inside, because it's about three people who were at that moment completely in their element.

The Same But Different

"They all look the same to me."  How many times have I heard that remark spoken by a racist or xenophobe?  So often it is used to imply that an ethnic group are somehow less individual, less important and somehow less human than the speaker and their chosen audience.  And yet, I have to admit to a practical cognitive difficulty.  When I first arrived in Sarawak I felt myself to be in a sea of Chinese and asian faces and I found it very hard to tell people apart.  To a degree people did "look the same to me".  When I started teaching I used name labels for the first three weeks even in classes of three or four students to be sure I didn't make a mistake.  After this initial period I was still paranoid about getting a name wrong and left little notes to myself in the files for some classes like "'X' has glasses" to make sure I didn't confuse her with 'Y'.

Then the strangest thing happened.  A phenomena familiar I'm sure to many teachers.  Teaching requires one to study students' faces very closely and after a few weeks it was as if the students' personalities started to leap out at me through the mask of their faces.  In quite a short space of time I began to see them as individuals rather than as Chinese people.  Now the idea that my students are Chinese rarely occurs to me at all.  "Thian" has become a determined and serious thirteen year old with strong views about life and English and is no longer the Chinese girl called "Thian".  Oddly, I've spent so much time among different ethnic groups that I've started to see myself as a foreigner.  Now I look in the mirror and sometimes I see this strange pink-skinned old man with a high forehead, a big nose and a long square chin.

I think the reason this happens is not because we are bad at reading faces, but because we are actually extremely good at it.  Our vision is not like a radar which sweeps the surroundings with a uniform frequency, it's more like a missile guidance system which rapidly scans the environment before "locking on" to the smallest detail.  We are so attuned to reading faces that we can see powerful feelings communicated in minute changes to our expressions lasting a fraction of a second. Naturally when we are surrounded by people who have small ethnic differences to their facial topography it takes us a while to "tune up" our highly sensitive equipment.

I guess travel really does "broaden the mind", but often in the most unexpected ways.

John Hartley - on Praise

John Hartley was a big man in every sense of the word.  A man with a big appetite for life, lunch, booze and cigarettes.  He was my acting tutor at drama school in the early nineties.  John would sit, chain-smoking in the rehearsal room at East 15 watching our attempts at Chekhov with an expression both intense and inscrutable.  On one occasion one of us fluffed a line and John exclaimed exultantly:

"At last something f*****g interesting's happened.  Just for a moment I actually got the impression that you weren't reading from a f*****g script!"

John could be a harsh critic, although I think he saw it as being kind.  Acting is a brutal profession and if you can't embrace criticism and carry on in the face of near constant rejection you are dead.  He was especially eloquent on the subject of praise:

"Praise f***ks you up darlings."  (Pause to take a deep drag on cigarette and exhale filling the room  with a yellow smog).  "Criticism you can use, but praise is like poison.  I had a mate who got a fantastic review in 'the Times'.  It said his performance was remarkable for the quality of his "silent pauses".  (Pause for dramatic effect and another deep drag on cigarette, more yellow smog).  You know for the next six f*****ing years all the poor bastard could play were silent f*****ing pauses.  Destroyed his f*****ing career."

Surfing the internet recently I learnt that John died in 2002 of a heart attack.  I hope he was having a good time, sat in front of an enormous curry, surrounded by friends and admirers, a beaker of wine in one hand and a fag in the other.

What Next?

If the Hilton hotels chain needed to send an executive into exile they would almost certainly chose Batang Ai.  This massive Longhouse Resort on the edge of a reservoir in the middle of nowhere is slowly dying on its feet.  It was built for hundreds of guests, but usually accommodates only a handful.  The fact that you have to get a ferry across the reservoir to reach it adds to the sense of sleepy isolation. It has however become a kind of country club for British Council mentors in need of peace, quiet, club sandwiches and an "international" buffet.

For local people the idea of going to Batang Ai is insane, why go to a fake longhouse when you can get the real thing for literally a fraction of the cost?  But for mentors it's the tourist ambiance that is so attractive, because it makes no demands and can make you feel for a while that you are one with the pink kneed, camera bejewelled holidaymakers that roll up from time to time.

Last weekend we went there to celebrate some birthdays with a crowd of mentors.  It was fun, everyone did a lot of talking and drinking and lounging by the pool.  And, for the first time since I've been here there was a lot of talk of home and "what next?"  The project now has less than a year to go and so people are thinking "this is the last time" I do this or that.  The end of school atmosphere is reinforced by the fact that some mentors are already leaving and a large tranche have contracts which expire at the end of January.

Teaching English is a nomadic, low-paid and insecure life and for some, really big questions loom.  Questions like "should I retire?"  "Where shall I live?"  "Where is home?"  "Should I carry on with this life?"  Being a nomad in your twenties is fine, but when you reach your thirties and forties it can begin to feel like you're pushing your luck.  Also, many mentors came to Borneo on the run from something, I suspect, and so now they must decide whether to turn and face their demons or just keep on running.



There are worse places to reflect on these things than sat in a lounge chair on the deck at Batang Ai watching the Sun set spectacularly over the reservoir, as it always seems to do.

Stuff

This is what I believe:

1. We are born, some time passes and then we die.
2. Death is what makes us who we are.
3. Death teaches us to tell the time.
4. Death shows us how to live and love.
5. Without death we could not tell a story or make a journey.
6. The last thing on our CV is a death certificate.
7. Death makes life a precious commodity.
8. Death is proud, mighty and dreadful.

Now I am getting old I’ve come to feel that my purpose is to come to terms with death and thus wring the most out of life. I’ve got a long way to go. I want to be a funeral celebrant, so I can help people face death and value life and make progress on my own journey.

Some people call death “god” and worship it. I don’t agree, but I can see where they are coming from and I’m happy to be on the journey with them, provided they don’t try to force their beliefs on me or insist that their sacred writings are anything more than beautiful allegories.

The older I get the more I see people as either “real” or “monstrous”. Real people are humble in the face of death, often at a sub-conscious level. Monstrous people run from death and the further they run the more monstrous and cruel they become.

I’ve run into a few monsters this week, in the flesh, in emails and and on Facebook and I feel upset and angry about it. I should be more calm, but like I said, I’ve got a long way to go.

Watching the Great Apes

Borneo is famous for being the home of the orang-utan and last Saturday I finally got round to seeing some.  Semenggoh Wildlife Centre, outside Kuching, is a shelter for injured, orphaned and kidnapped orang-utans, where they are rehabilitated to go back in the wild.

We gathered at the Centre in the morning with maybe fifty other tourists and, after a briefing, walked a couple of hundred metres through the jungle to the feeding station.  As we filed down the path, cameras in hand, the orang-utans made their way through the forest canopy.  We could hear the odd crash above us and every now and then see a wise, hairy, quizzical face looking down at us through the foliage.  Orang-utans move very slowly.  They hang from one branch then carefully test the next before swinging across and stopping to check out their next handhold.  Sometimes they will test a rope or a creeper several times before trusting their weight to it.  They eat lugubriously, like an absent-minded old man chewing on a sandwich while reading a newspaper.

At the feeding station we bald apes worshipped in silence, raising our cameras and Ipads in supplication to our new god - experience.  All of us eager to capture something of the moment to take home and show our friends.  Snap, snap, snap we went.  Most of us know we are only going to see orang-utans in the wild, or semi-wild, once in our lives, so we do our best to make the most of it and fight off the inevitable feeling of anti-climax.  After I'd had my fill of taking pictures of the orang-utans I took some more of the humans taking pictures, desperately trying to get that perfect David Attenborough shot and never quite succeeding.

I wonder what the orang-utans make of it all.  One moment their home is being smashed down and torched by crazed bald apes and the next they are being petted, looked after and photographed reverently.  No wonder they look puzzled and a bit sad.

Into the Rainforest

"Rainforest" is such an emotive word.  In ecospeak it's collocated with "depredation" and "global warming".  Seemingly it contains all that's good, including a few naked, pot-bellied humans, so wise they hide from the rest of humanity, apart from the odd photo opportunity with Sting (by these standards I must be very bad, liking humanity and only wanting to hide from Sting).  Apparently, chopping rainforest down is a wholly evil act, akin to rape, worse even than plagiarism, in the minds of middle-class western liberals.

Before I got to Borneo I learned that it has one of the largest areas of rainforest in the world and also one of the fastest shrinking.  Since I arrived I've kept my eye out for it, not sure exactly what I'm looking for.  It's so warm and humid here everything that isn't dead is green and if you concentrate hard enough you can actually see things grow.  Can these trees next to the main road be rainforest?  Surely not, they look too much like a copse in Surrey.  What about on that ridge over there?  Nah, I can see a JCB and a track and a patch of ground that looks like the Somme in 1916, maybe it was rainforest once, but not now.  Like when Sue and I were cruising in our yacht, rainforest is as elusive as the perfect bay, always over the next ridge or round the next headland, but never here.

Well, last Wednesday on Tioman island I found some.  Tioman starred as "Bali Hai" in the film "South Pacific" and the location hunters knew what they were doing.  It's a holiday island, but the numbers are limited by the fact that it has only a small airfield and the ferries from the mainland take about two hours, leave at random times and occasionally sink with all hands.  Apart from the tourist resorts on the coastal fringe the island is a forest covered rock rising to about two thousand feet.

Last Wednesday I walked across the island on one of its few roads then back along a forest trail.  Now I know.  Forest is to rainforest what a small parish church is to a cathedral.  In ordinary woodland the dominant plane is still horizontal, but in rainforest the vertical takes over, with massive hundred metre plus trees, like the pillars of a cathedral knave, supporting a high green canopy.  Monkeys are perfectly adapted to it, shinning up creepers like ratings on an eighteenth century ship of the line.  Rainforest is not jungle, you don't need to hack your way through it - so little light filters down to ground level that very little grows there and you walk on a soft, deep-pile carpet of dead and rotting matter which has fallen from above.  The cathedral metaphor is very persuasive, like in a cathedral it inspires a hushed awe, but unlike one it goes on and on, extending before you as you walk, inviting you to become profoundly lost.

At the end of my walk I emerged back on the coastal strip, blinking in the sunlight and feeling all of a sudden very exposed to the gaze of humans and other predators.

I may not have found the perfect bay, but I do now have a picture in my head of the rainforest.

Singapore

Tell a malaysian you've been to Singapore and you always get the same response - "ah Singapore, it's so clean."  This is said with an approving nod, but there is something at the back of the eyes that betrays a different emotion, something like "how the hell do you keep a country that clean?"  For malaysians going to Singapore is like visiting the home of an obsessive and domineering housewife, where you are scared to sit down in case you ruffle the cushions.  The feeling is definitely mutual - try reading the reviews on "trip adviser" of malaysian hotels by singaporean visitors, they are usually patronising and plaintive - "the room was dirty", "the service was poor", "there was mould in the bathroom", etc, etc.

Sue and I spent a few days there last week before travelling on to the malaysian island of Tioman.  I wanted to go more for its connection to the British Empire than for the shopping.  Singapore was the asian jewel in the crown dominating the Straits of Malacca, the throbbing artery of East-West trade.  The fall of Singapore in 1942 sounded the death knell of the Empire, because in the space of a few weeks the aura of white invicibility simply evaporated.  The british dropped "the white man's burden" like a shot on the quayside and elbowed their way onto the departing ships, leaving chinese militiamen to throw off their british uniforms and run home in their underwear for fear of being caught by the japanese.

Singapore is certainly clean and well run.  The parks are manicured and the underground trains hiss smoothly into the stations behind protective walls of perspex.  The downtown malls have all your favourite shops from Prada to Marks and Spencer and the streets are alive with the throaty roar of Lamborghinis.  Raffles Hotel is still there, perhaps more as a brand than in spirit and the whole place is a banker's paradise.  And yet, there is something of a siege mentality, a bit like I imagine existed in West Berlin.  Logically Singapore should be part of Malaysia and the singaporeans threw themselves enthusiastically into the Malaysian Federation in 1963, only to be given the bum's rush in 1965, for being too socialist and too chinese.  Since then it's been a city state with something to prove, the size of the Isle of Wight with a population of 4.5 million, economically interdependent with peninsular Malaysia, but forced to eye its bigger and poorer neighbour nervously across the Straits.

Waiting for our bus out of Singapore at 6.00am in a tatty edge of town mall we got to see a different side of the city.  We ate our rice and noodles cheek by jowl with hungover johns and exhausted hookers, some with remarkably big feet and adam's apples, and many with the distinctive twitch of the regular drugs user.  But then I guess in this city of traders and bankers, people are just one more commodity.

Sorry Facebook

I said in my last post I was on a steep learning curve when it came to using the internet for teaching.  I was obviously not as far up the curve as I thought.  As I started making friends with my students I began to feel less and less comfortable about the amount of information that it gave me about these young peoples' lives and Sue made it clear that she had serious misgivings about the way I was going about things.

So, I started to do some more extensive reading about Facebook's policies and their advice to educators.  I had not even realised that Facebook require you to be at least 13 years old before you can set up an account.  Many of my students ignore this by making themselves out to be older.  This also has implications because Facebook restrict the access people can have to the timelines of children aged 13-17, so by making yourself, say, eighteen when actually you are twelve, you over-ride all this stuff.

Anyway I've put my own house in order by deactivating my new Facebook account and all the friendships that went with it and making it clear to students that they must by over thirteen to join my Facebook English group.  I will also advise parents that I have set the group up and offer them a veto on whether their child can be in it.  Now things seem to be on a much better footing, my students are starting to use the site to communicate in English, but I am not their friend and know nothing about their lives that they don't disclose to the group as a whole.

I am still suspicious of Facebook and its motives, but I can also see that its rules and policies on setting up accounts and being who we say we are do serve a valid purpose.

Lost in cyberspace

I started a new experiment in my teaching career this week by setting up a Facebook group for my English students and it's been a steep learning curve.

My first task was to create a new Facebook identity in simple English which would be open to my students to look around.  Facebook doesn't like you doing this, they want you all in one place so they know who and where you are.  As a result, they don't make it simple or give you any help.  Anyway, having created my new identity, I then started to get quite a few "friend requests" from people I'm already friends with on my existing account.  It was at this point it struck how much Facebook behaves like a virus, albeit a largely consensual one.

Going through the process of creating my group it also hit me how insidious the Facebook model really is.  They want to keep us in their world and they make it subtly difficult to break out into the rest of the world wide web.  For all the talk of people like Mark Zuckerburg, they're just a highly commercial outfit with an aggressive and monopolistic edge.  Because they are trying to corral us all into their pen, one day Facebook will fall and its fall will be mighty and swift, for the simple reason that they will never be able to find enough inducements for us to stay.

Moralising about the internet aside I have now set up my group, leading to more interesting issues, the most pressing being, how do I know someone is my student when I get a friend request from someone whose name is in chinese script and whose image is a teddy bear?  I am slowly starting to recognise them, in many cases by looking at their photo albums, which in turn is giving me some interesting insights into the lifestyle of chinese teenagers in Sarawak and how whacky and culturally diverse it is, from my perspective at least.  What a strange world we live in and how much the better it is for all these people madly finding out about each other.

To the Longhouse

The area where Sue's schools are located is predominantly malay and therefore muslim, but around the Kabong area are dotted a number of iban longhouses whose children also attend the local primary schools.  At one school the iban children have invited Sue to visit their longhouse and yesterday she decided to take them up on the offer.

We hitched the bikes to the back of the car and drove down to the school, which is in a remote and truly idyllic location by a beach facing the South China Sea.  The longhouses have been vaguely described to Sue as being "further up the beach".  But, such is the segregation of the communities here that none of the mainly malay teachers have ever visited them.

We unloaded our bikes and set off up a track running parallel to the beach.  We were soaked with sweat in just a few minutes in the afternoon heat and humidity.  The coast is wild and remote and apart from the coconut palms the atmosphere is not unlike the dunes and salt marshes of East Anglia.  After about three kilometres we ran across a group of pupils from the school piled onto a motorbike.  They greeted us with a delighted "hello Madame Sue" and guided us another five hundred metres to their longhouse.

The longhouse is a ramshackle wooden building on stilts with a corrugated iron roof.  A few faces, some quizzical, some suspicious look down at us from the windows.  We smile up at them and say "hello" and most of them smile back.  I can understand their reticence, they can't see strange faces here very often and when they do it won't necessarily be good news.  One of the adults, a middle-aged woman, comes down to greet us when it is clear that we have some reason to be here.  She speaks to us in good English.  There are about 160 people living in the longhouse and she takes us for a walk around the perimeter and along a path to the beach.  We are followed by ten or twelve children and an inquisitive dog.

The ambience is squalid, purposeful and profoundly beautiful.  These people really live in their environment and draw all they need from it and they are surrounded by the tools and junk of their everyday lives.  Nets hang under the longhouse and there are chickens everywhere, running free and in cages.  From somewhere I can hear the squeal of pigs.  Down on the beach, which is in a sheltered muddy inlet, there are small wooden boats tied up.  Our guide tells us that there are many crocodiles this year, she has never seen so many.  But my sense is that crocodiles are seen as just another community - iban, malays, crocodiles, they all have their territory - and sometimes there is conflict.  I have my camera with me, but I take no photos although I'm sure if I ask they will say "yes".  I know if I take pictures they will be admired by friends as "interesting" and "picturesque" and this will in some way be a discourtesy to the iban who are proud of where they live and of their lives.

We are invited to stay and eat fish, but the evening is drawing in and we say thank you, but we must get home, promising to return.  We cycle back up the track to cries of "goodbye Madame Sue" and we incline our heads and wave back.  As we cycle I realise that Sue, as well as having wanted to see the longhouses, is also making a point and I respect her for this.

Sarikei Karaoke Okey Cokey

Another birthday has whizzed past.  Fifty-seven and counting.  I spent this one with Sue and a group of her mentor colleagues at a karaoke bar in Sarikei, our nearest largish town, where we go to buy things like yoghurt and margarine, when there is none to be had in Saratok.  You enter the place through an anonymous door in the high street and go up a flight of stairs to a single large room with a bar and some beaten up tables, chairs and sofas. It's the latest happening place where the coolest dudes in town hang.

The attraction for us English speakers is that they have a grainy selection of English language karaoke videos.  These mainly comprise people with 1980s clothes and hairdos singing songs we've never heard of whilst walking around middle European towns.  Still we did manage a passable version of "dream, dream, dream" to the backdrop of a black and white film of the Everly brothers and "don't cry for me Argentina" supported by someone who I would guess was called Elaine von Paige.

Sarikei being a mainly Chinese town there was plenty of beer to be had and most of us ordered lamb and chips for the sheer novelty of seeing it on the menu.  To paraphrase Doctor Johnson "it was like a dog walking on his hind legs. It was not done well; but we were surprised to find it done at all."  Actually the lamb was done well, so well it was almost inedible.

The locals politely applauded and cheered our efforts, then got down to the real business in hand - singing sentimental Chinese pop songs.  Everyone seemed to be having fun and one could recognise the regulars - the ones who dream of making it in the next series of "Sarawak's got talent".

We left early and in my case slightly the worse for wear and made our way back to our cars.  The streets were dark and empty, apart from the odd emaciated cat chewing determinedly on a desiccated fish head.

Happy birthday old man!

Little Visitors

It was Sue's birthday on Tuesday and she got home in the afternoon with leftover cake from a surprise birthday party at one of her schools.  In the evening I had my regular class of nine year-olds and little Ivy brought yet more cake.  Sue cut it and brought slices into the classroom for the kids as we worked on making pictures of "beautiful clean" and "ugly polluted" beaches.  The nine year-olds are a delight to teach and my relationship with them is becoming more and more relaxed as I get used to being around little ones and they get accustomed to being taught by a big pink old man.  I was especially impressed with Qian Hui's "ugly polluted beach", which included a rabbit on its side with its eyes closed, obviously dead and a mysterious lump with some squiggly lines emerging from it, helpfully labelled "smelly vegetable".

Yesterday evening Sue invited our neighbours' children to come into the house and play.  Jasper, Jason and Felicia are charming and full of life, though Shelley seems less content and cries a lot.  They have a different attitude to personal space than we do and for a while tried to get into our house at every opportunity.  Sue manages the situation by setting clear rules about when they can and can't visit us and lets them in to play and draw every now and then.  For a period, every time we came home Jasper, (on the left of picture), would rush up to our gate and ask in perfect English "are you free?"  On one occasion we were watching TV in the evening when we heard a snigger from behind the sofa, only to find three little ones hiding there.  Their delight in the game was so obvious it was hard to be angry with them.  Now they sit and draw contentedly for an hour or so before going to the front door and putting on their shoes and pattering back home.

Once, coming back from doing the shopping, I found a row of tricycles parked on our drive and three tiny pairs of shoes on the steps, which made me smile as I prepared to open the front door and say "hello" to Sue and our little visitors.