Sabah Here I Come

I'm sat in our friend Jess' house in Sibu with some spare time before getting the plane for Kota Kinabalu in Sabah.  Two weeks ago I was offered a volunteer Finance Officer role with Raleigh International and despite the short notice I decided to go for it.  I'll be there for three months working at the charity's base in KK where they keep tabs on a variety of community and adventure projects for young Brits.

Right now I'm thinking "why at the age of 57 am I still doing this stuff?"  I'll be sleeping in a dorm and working with people who will mostly be less than half my age.  I feel old and anxious and a little bit excited.  I said goodbye to Sue yesterday afternoon when she dropped me off at Jess' place and I'm going to miss her.  When I finish with Raleigh I will only have 2-4 weeks left in Borneo, which will be taken up with packing and organising our return to Italy.

The plus side is that it gets me some hands on experience of international development work which might come in handy if Sue gets another contract overseas after she finishes her Masters.  But how much can a CV take?  Ah well, time to load my bags into the car.

Old in Georgetown

After our pilgrimage to Singapore Sue, Rosemary and I flew off to Penang for a few days, where we had booked two rooms on a "Clan Jetty" on the edge of Georgetown.

The place took us about half an hour to track down, but was for me perfect - a secluded spot on the edge of the busy city looking out over the straits between Penang island and the mainland.  Georgetown is my kind of place - run down, noisy, cosmopolitan and full of amazing places to eat, from cheap and crowded hawker centres to upmarket restaurants so the price of a good meal can range from a couple of pounds to twenty quid or more.

Just about everyone has been through Georgetown in the last few hundred years, including the Portugese, the British and the Chinese and they have all left their mark on its culture and cuisine.  It is home to the fascinating sino-european fusion that is the Straits Chinese community and was one of the main departure points for muslims undertaking the Haj.  Maybe Georgetown is where the unfortunate pilgrims in Conrad's novel "Lord Jim" embarked on the "Patna" for its voyage across the Indian Ocean.  Today it has thriving Chinese and Indian communities and the narrow streets are dotted with mosques, churches and Hindu and Buddhist temples.

Before I go mad on the travelogue however, we didn't have quite such a good time as I'd hoped for.  Sue and I did not have fun in Bali and we arrived in Georgetown stressed and tired.  On top of this both of us found the walking hard on our hips and knees and for the first time, lying in bed at night with my left hip and knee throbbing, I really began to feel my age.  Because the walking was hard going at times the sights of Georgetown seemed peculiarly elusive as I walked ahead of Sue and Rosemary anxiously searching for the next point of interest or the next likely restaurant and hoping it was not too much further for our aching legs to carry us.

But then journeys are a metaphor for life and this one is closer to its end than its beginning.

Ernest Froggatt RIP

We had one full day in Singapore to visit the war memorial at Kranji with our friend and my ex-wife Rosemary.  Her grandfather Ernest Froggatt has his name carved there and her mum was keen for her to pay her respects.

Kranji is on the opposite side of the island from Singpore city, facing the Straits which separate it from Malaysia.  It was here that the British and Commonwealth troops retreated in January 1942, after the Japanese had pushed them back through the Malayan peninsula.  The memorial commemorates not just those that were killed defending Singapore, but all the commonwealth soldiers who died in Southeast Asia in the Second World War, many in Japanese prisoner of war camps.

We took the metro to the station nearest Kranji, then walked the last kilometre in blazing midday heat.  Rosemary and I separated nearly twenty five years ago after being together for fifteen years.  Not having much family of my own she feels like my nearest relative and so in visiting this place I felt a family connection too.  It's a large site on a hill, but has a secluded and peaceful atmosphere.  Like everywhere else in Singapore the grounds are beautifully maintained by unobtrusive gardeners and there were only a handful of visitors.

We found Ernest Froggatt's name and his entry in the register with little difficulty.  Rosemary explained that he had joined the Territorial Army before the war so he could learn to drive and this effort at self improvement had led to him to be called up and shipped off to Southeast Asia.  He drowned in 1943 in a ship transporting prisoners of war to Japan which was sunk by a US submarine.  In fact there were many survivors, some of whom ended up witnessing the dropping of the atom bomb on Nagasaki.

Looking around with Rosemary and Sue, taking all this in, I felt very stirred up.  There I was with these two very important women in my life and all of us connected together in a tapestry of historical events involving our relatives (Sue's Dad did his National Service in Malaya and mine spent many years in the navy in this region too) and Britain's empire and its aftermath, which is still reverberating on and on and all of the more recent history personal stuff between us as well.  All of this there in the atmosphere, like background radiation, but not things you can really talk about in a rational way, but more like an echoing chord of great depth and complexity, which goes on and on until it fades into a silence where you think you can still hear the chord and then into a total silence.  And then you look around and say something dull and meaningless like:

 "Well, what do you think?  Are we about done here?  Shall we head back to the station?"

I like Singapore

After Bali it was a relief to touch down at Changi Airport.  I like Singapore, I really do.  I know this is an uncool opinion for a traveller to have and that I should prefer the so-called "real" Southeast Asia that comprises maimed jungle, crumbling and damp-stained shophouses and the smell of mould and dead fish rotting in open drains, but I don't.  Years of working in the public sector in the UK has made me a connoisseur of good public services and walking around Singapore you can see the effect of years of good governance.  They say "nothing works in Calabria" and by contrast everything works in Singapore.  The metro runs on time and is clean and the doors slide open and shut with a regular and reassuring hiss.  The vista from the carriages is of manicured parkland, well pruned trees and crisply painted high rise blocks in shades of pastel.  OK, so the blocks have numbers not names and everything is regimented and maybe a bit boring and there are a lot of rules, but they're sensible rules and the cops have name badges.  This may sound like a small thing, but when you meet a cop with a name badge, even if they are armed and wearing blue combat fatigues, you are somehow reassured that they are a person, employed by the State and accountable, not a faceless tool hiding behind a uniform.

Above all Singapore is a hymn of praise to a concept that public services in the rest of the world seem to have lost touch with - planned maintenance.  The noble art of painting things before, not after they start to peel and repairing stuff before it crumbles and falls down.  Singaporeans know that this is common sense and that in the long run it is cheaper.  No wonder travellers from Singapore are always complaining about Malaysia on Trip Advisor - the service was poor, the bathroom was mouldy, Singapore is just better than almost everywhere else.

On my first morning in the City I went for a run and found myself, after about a kilometre, trotting round a purpose-built sports stadium with lots of other folks of all shapes, races and ages.  In the centre of the running track was a large group of elderly Chinese men and women doing Tai Chi.  At the track side was a sign advising people that when the light was flashing they should go inside to avoid the risk of a lightning strike.  Chaos and squalor may well be exciting and make good photographs, but this is how to a run a city that is good to live in.

Bali Expectations

In a desperate search to find something good in Bali we hired a car.  Our first stop was Ubud, the "spiritual capital" of the island.  This was a tiresome bumper to bumper crawl through what seemed like an endless strip development of temples, stonemasons and furniture shops.  Ubud was OK and the temple monkeys were as honest as the other locals in wanting to get something from the stream of tattooed Australian tourists.

On our last day I took a drive further afield to the rice fields around Jatiluwuh.  By this stage Sue was in bad need of some quality beach time, while I still wanted to find the Bali that I feared existed only in my head.  It was a long drive through the strip developments until I broke into more open country and saw a complex jigsaw of small rice paddies, houses and coconut groves in rolling and unbelievably green hills and valleys.  On the road I passed columns of brightly dressed local women balancing large bowls on their heads.  I stopped at a tourist cafe in the heart of the Jatiluwuh rice paddy fields and photographed the scene.  On the table opposite was a large loquacious Australian lady of a certain age and a bored and polite young Balian man.

"This is my thirty second trip to Bali, always at the same home-stay near Ubud.  Kuta? If you want my opinion they should have exploded more bombs in that shithole." she snarled.

After six days we were glad to get the plane to Singapore, but why was Bali such a disappointment?  I suppose because I had "expectations", not something I'm usually too burdened with.  Partly these were a product of the song "Bali Hai" from the musical "South Pacific", which actually has nothing to do with Bali but sounds as if it does.   "Bali Hai, Bali Hai, your own special island, come away, come away …".  Bali is also associated with the ethereal sound of the gamelan orchestra, which to my ears is the music of the spheres.  Finally, years ago, maybe at the time of the Bali bombings, I saw a clip of a Bali news programme with two presenters dressed in brightly coloured gowns and turbans, like captains making a broadcast to "the Enterprise" from an alien starship and from that time on the idea of Bali as an impossibly exotic and unreachable paradise was fixed in my mind.  Sadly, the real Bali has banished this fantasy and I wish I had never gone there.