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.  ...

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 y...

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,...

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 it...

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 ...

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 bein...

"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 ...

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).  "Critici...

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 cel...

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 eith...

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 a...

"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?  Sure...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 sa...

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 w...

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 F...