A couple of weeks ago Sue heard that her good friend Keith was seriously ill in hospital and unlikely to survive.  He died a few days later on 12 January 2015. His life-long partner Steve died in early 2014, a fact we only learned from the same friend that told Sue how ill he was. He came to visit us in Borneo in 2012; this is a picture of him posing with bananas during a walk in the Saratok rice paddies.  We were worried about him then as he was drinking a lot and seemed frail and depressed. I especially remember one afternoon during his visit.  We were staying at our favourite hotel in Kuching and I was on the walkway outside our first floor room enjoying the view over the hotel's tropical grounds.  I looked down and saw Keith standing by the pool looking up at me.  He quickly shifted his gaze as if I'd somehow caught him out.  Which in a way I suspect I had, because at that moment  I thought I saw in his eyes a deep longing and sadness. ...

Sue had to spend a couple of weeks in Kota Kinabalu ("KK"), the capital of what was once British North Borneo and is now the Malaysian province of Sabah.  Over the weekend we decided to travel to Sandakan on the far side of Sabah to visit her fellow Project Manager Suzanne and her friend Mindy.  Sue took a plane and I hired a 150cc motorbike from the good people at "Gogo Sabah" http://gogosabah.com/transportation/ . I had a great 300 kilometre blast up winding mountain roads to Mount Kinabalu National park then down the other side on a road that became straighter and dominated by palm oil trucks pumping black diesel fumes as they laboured to the nearest mill.  The town itself is a charmless frontier outpost at the arse end of Malaysia facing the Philippines, which it eyes suspiciously.  The Sabah hotel does however have one of the finest views in the world from its bedroom windows. It rained for most of our two-day stay which we spent failing to get into the...

After Christmas we drove back to Miri, stopping in our little town of Saratok for a few days en route.  Morgan, the British Council mentor who now rents the house that was our home for two years, kindly let us stay there while she was away for the holidays.  It was lovely to catch up with teachers Sue worked with and some of my old students.  While out walking around the rice paddy and palm oil plantations by the river, this lovely man gave me a bunch of the most tasty lychees I've ever eaten.  Kind of sums up the kindness and generosity of the locals. Back in Miri our friend Kerry made the excellent suggestion of going to the beach to watch the sunset.  This we did accompanied by Kerry and Iain, another of Sue's mentors working in Miri.  Shortly after sunset we were joined by Iain's partner Sian, (another mentor) and their lovely daughter Ixsora.  Kerry also brought beer and wine and best of all a large bag of salt and vinegar crisps. Whil...

For Christmas we decided to drive down from Miri to Kuching and stay at one of our favourite hotels - the Basaga.  It's an old colonial house away from the touristy riverfront with beautiful gardens which make it a green oasis amid the mouldy concrete of Kuching, which oddly means "cat" in Malay. On Christmas day morning I went for my customary run, which took me along the riverfront as far as this culvert and then inland back in the direction of the Basaga.  On the way I passed St Thomas' Cathedral, Anglican I think.  It was packed with worshippers, including an overspill standing on the steps outside, all singing carols.  All these people devoted to a church that originated in England made me feel a little embarrassed to be an English atheist.  If they had known I guess most of them would have been terribly shocked. Mostly in this society I keep my beliefs to myself, not because I feel scared or intimidated by people's faith, be it Christianity, Islam...

Sue left yesterday afternoon for meetings in Kota Kinabalu and Kuching, leaving me with an empty apartment and a new car to explore with.  I started my day with a run in the opposite direction to my first run two days ago. I headed towards the bridge that links the peninsula to the centre of Miri, passing en route a large and completely deserted housing estate owned by Shell.  I ran into the estate, saying hello to several patrolling "auxiliary" policemen en route.  None of them challenged my right to be there - old white blokes seem to have a free pass. The estate is in idyllic pine woodland next to a palm-fringed and empty beach and is perfectly maintained - roads swept and hedges trimmed, although no one lives there anymore. Shocking when I think of how many people in Sarawak live in tumbledown shacks.  But then multi-nationals like Shell have the money to do what they want and they always look after their assets. On the return leg I ran into the Boa...

Seventeen days after getting a dawn bus for Rome in Locorotondo I finally arrived in Miri with Sue yesterday. This morning I pulled on my running shoes and went for an exploratory jog around the strange peninsula where Sue's apartment is located.  You can see from the map that Miri has a river which snakes inland and creates a long tongue of land between the main city centre and the sea.  This tongue is home to a bizarre combination of smart apartment complexes, like Sues, a golf course, a fishing village, an idyllic but rubbish-strewn and sandfly infested beach and the moorings for literally hundreds of oil rig service and supply vessels, some the size of largish oil tankers. I ran around the edge of the golf course to the tip of the tongue, where I spotted a couple of paunchy expats finishing a hole while a tanker the height of a four-story building slid slowly down the river behind them.  Then I turned around and ran back up the tongue before stopping to take t...

When I go out running in a strange place water draws me to it like a magnet.  On our last full day in Phnom Phenh I got up at 6am and headed for the Tonle Sap, a tributary of the Mekong.  After two days in the city I'd got used to the traffic, which behaves more like a crowd of people than vehicles.  When we first arrived we took ages waiting for a clear space to cross the road, until we realised you just have to launch yourself into the flow and vehicles weave around you like water in a rocky stream. Dawn is a good time to see the city as lots of people come out in the cooler air to stroll, run or take part in group exercises to pop music, doing a kind of cross between yoga, tai chi and line dancing in slow motion. When I reached the river embankment in the city centre I ran along the wide promenade and headed for the pleasure boat dock.  I carried on along the river back out of the city centre, past increasingly grubby workshops and shophouses until I reach...