December 16, 2008

There's snow limit

When you're spending 15 days driving across Tibet, you naturally want to listen to music quite a lot.  Our driver was quite happy to listen to the same 10 hindi songs on his mini-mp3 player that plugged into the cigarette lighter, but our tolerance for repetition was somewhat lower so we spent a lot of time wearing headphones and gazing out of the window at the stunning scenery.


This scenery, which was of course wonderful, presents the iPod owner with some problems.  What can you possibly listen to in order to do justice to the landscape you're looking at?  Much as I love Ol Dirty Bastard, this wasn't the time or the place. I did have a whole bunch of Chopin piano music, but that would have been a cop-out.  Instead the challenge I set myself was to find techno that sounded good in Tibet.

We got off to a flying start with "Jurassico" (Prins Thomas miks) which with its trancey electric guitar build-up followed by epic freak-out felt appropriately humongous in scale.  As the first whooshy noises came in, we crested a pass to be greeted by dramatic snow-covered peaks, and were then lost in prog-disco heaven for the next ten minutes or so.  However I couldn't maintain such great form and the next thing on the playlist was Kathy Diamond's "Another Life" which is an attempt to match the glories of classic italo-disco by a contemporary artist that, in this harsh crucible, sounded hopelessly synthetic and cloyingly saccharine.  It was a bit like eating pop rocks in between bites of sashimi.

Much like the seeming majority of current DJs and critics, when faced with a lack of better inspiration, I reach for classic Detroit.  Therefore next up was Aril Brikha's "Groove La Chord".  For those less caught up in this stuff than me, this track is a universal touchstone that pretty much everyone likes.  And indeed it's classiness shines through in that for the first 16 bars or so it sounded pretty good.  But in the Tibetan context, it's simply too repetitive and physical, lacking the majesty and grandeur I was looking for. 

There followed a spate of thematic listening with Solomun's "Feuer und eis EP" (way too cheesy and heavy-handed with the strings - yuk!); Echospace's "The coldest season"  (not at all jarring but too cramped and attenuated to match the visuals) and Mountain People's "Mountain 04" (a little too pounding and lacking in inspiration).  More successful was Guy Gerber and Shlomi Aber's "Sea of sand" which is something I would never normally listen to (indeed would probably never enter a club if this were playing) but whose very thin-ness and lack of balls actually made it sort of fit the inhuman landscape.  Indeed anything with a hint of sex to it sounded wrong, and the more pastily caucasian the melody, the better it seemed to fit.

Perhaps more pleasingly, we had a very good time listening to Omar-S' "Psychotic Photosynthesis" whose slow unfolding matched the way that every turn in the road revealed more of Tibet's geography, none of which was staggeringly different from what went before but was more a pleasing variation on the general theme. 

Conclusion?  Difficult to draw much of one, other than mountains cause your tastes to change.  However due to my improvising a cable to connect the iPod to the car stereo we did definitively discover that our driver hates the Rolling Stones and minimal techno, but quite likes Booka Shade and "Heart of the Congos".  More on the driver later...

December 12, 2008

Kites: the next generation

After Super Schopie and the Flying Monkey I'd been counting the days until kite construction could begin again. The time came when we spent a few days in the charming and only mildly ruined by tourism village of Baisha. The days were long and sunny without being sweaty and there was lots of open space ideal for kite-flying.

I decided, thanks to this page, to build a box-kite.  A few hours trying to make a scale model out of chopsticks convinced me it was possible, although tricky, in other words the perfect sort of challenge to fill our lazy days in Baisha.

First step was to obtain some materials.  This is Jane from our guest house helping me get string, paper and glue from the shop.  I initially tried to pictograms and enthusiastic gestures to ask for these items but it didn't get me anywhere.

Jane also found me this disused bamboo pole.  Bamboo is essential for kite building although I did have something a bit smaller in mind.  However this was a good opportunity to test out my bamboo splitting skills, as learnt at Pun Pun.  It was also a good opportunity to provide amusement to the villagers for whom the sight of me carrying a stick seemed to be the crowning height of comedy.

We hiked out to this fallow rice paddy with a nice view of the mountains, and while Pearl read "The Magus" and munched on Naxi treats I split some bamboo by hammering a wedge-shaped rock into the end with another rock.  This was extremely satisfying.  Subsequent more delicate splits were made using the Leatherman but this lacked the Iron John vibe of the rock tools.  Once I had 7 long, thin sticks it was time to start lashing them together.   Kite-making, it has been previously noted, attracts the attentions of anyone with a Y chromosome in the vicinity.  Hence the cowherd in the next picture.

The observant will notice that this kite is fucking huge and the critical will observe that the sticks were too thick.  However it's the building process that counts not the eventual success, and as the villagers of Baisha will attest, the work-in-progress box kite was rather impressive looking.  After about 5 hours work I had a complete skeleton and all that was left to do was attach the sails.  We tried using paper but there were issues with the materials available so a tactical withdrawal to the guest house was made, and the arduous task of stitching cloth sails onto the frame began.

Like some Dickensian aunt, I sat stitching this thing by the light of candles and braziers and suchlike, eventually finishing at about 1am.  The box kite seemed a bit of a risky endeavour, though, so I also constructed a more straightforward kite, of the design known as "The Malay".  In a piece of PAP-worthy racial integration this was to be decorated with a Chun Yu by the redoubtable Mr Yang, who offered calligraphy services in the cafe next door to our guest house.

"One road, one wind" in near-extinct Naxi pictograms.  How could it not fly?

This picture shows the kite not flying, which is mostly what it did.  Eventually, in order to preserve Mr Yang's handiwork I stopped trying to fix it and moved on to the Box kite.

Flying the box kite involved a lot of running...

 

We ran and ran (Pearl having been temporarily dragged away from John Fowles) and were rewarded by a glorious ten minutes of flight in front of the snowy Himalayas. 

It couldn't last, however, and the kite eventually came crashing to earth, never to rise again.  Top construction learnings from this experience were that linen is not a good construction material and that even box kites need to be light.  But it still seemed like a victory.

December 08, 2008

New albums are up! More detailed posts to follow...

We're also now in Delhi (after having been viciously duped by a shiny-panted, wide-smiled Indian fronting a fake travel agency in the border town of Sunauli), and our India no. is +91 9711125617.

November 21, 2008

Not easily contactable

Quick note to say we're currently in Tibet, where our mobiles don't work, and where we've only got infrequent access to internet so it's not easy to get in touch (or to blog) but don't worry normal service will be resumed when we get to Nepal on the 29th, including (hopefully) photos of a successful kite flight in Yunnan...

November 12, 2008

Some nice people we met in China

We arrived in China on the 31st and it's been a very different experience from my previous business trips to Shanghai, or Pearl and my visits to Hong Kong.  In order to allay the impression you might gain from the captions on our photographs (that I don't like China) I thought a post describing some kind, helpful Chinese people would be in order.  Later on we can have the pleasure of describing the particular awfulness of some Chinese people, but for now all is sweetness and light.

First up are the tea people:

Kunming 020

On our first night in Kunming we wandered into this temple/teahouse structure and spent a pleasant few hours fulfilling all sorts of romantic fantasies about China: to whit sitting amidst tiled roofs, talking about tea and listening to a fur-clad maiden plucking some kind of harp.  The tea master was very nice and explained all about tea to us, including describing how the tea we were drinking was cured only by moonlight and never saw the light of the sun.  He was assisted by a young Naxi girl, who to Pearl's delight, called her "Jie Jie" (big sister) and who told us we were the only nice people she'd met in Kunming. 

One of our urgent requirements in Kunming was to sort out our Tibet trip.  Key to this enterprise was Mr Chen:

Kunming 021

Mr Chen resided in a room of our hotel.  We went to knock on his door at around 11am and he answered it wearing bedclothes and with sleepy grit in his eyes.  What dedication!  He slept inthe office!  We gave him a few minutes to put on some clothes and then went in.  He breakfasted on cigarettes and proceeded to explain, in a most amusing fashion, all about how he had been organising trips to Tibet for 8 years and knew all there was to know.  His desk was covered in books about Tibet and Yunnan and he briskly made all the arrangements for our rather ambitious itinerary.  Cheers to Mr Chen!

After a few days in Kunming, during which it rained constantly, we decided to catch a train to Dali.  The train was rather interesting - it was a sleeper train, but because it was daytime, there were four stickers above each bed reading "A, B, C and D" indicating where you were supposed to sit.  We shared our cabin with these three ladies:

Pearl Pics 003

On the right can be seen a deeply formidable auntie.  When she entered she was yelling invective into her phone with an expression of deep displeasure.  After a while she handed the phone to her daughter (the one on the far left) who appeared to resolve the situation.  It turns out that the person on the phone was her son, who was refusing to go to school.  The other girl, in the middle, was the daughter's schoolfriend and they were both tour guides in Kunming.  Some of the things we were asked about during the trip: do European men beat their wives?  How much did we earn?  Was it possible to get rich cooking noodles in Singapore?  Upon arrival in Dali they took us under their wing, escorted us via public transport to a guesthouse and then ensured, much to the chagrin of the owners, that we paid the "local rate" for our room. 

Last and by no means least is Mr Ou Yang - possibly the most upright man I ever met, and a gentleman fighting a lone battle against the unscrupulous tourist trade in his home town of Shaxi.

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This is Mr Ou Yang pouring tea for us in his guesthouse courtyard "because that is Chinese hospitality".  He did this for all his guests despite his having no English and their having no Mandarin.  Normal procedure on entering a guesthouse in Yunnan is for the owners to name a flagrantly extortionate price and for there then to follow a protracted and formulaic renegotiation.  Not so with Mr Ou Yang who straightaway named an entirely reasonable price.  He tutted with displeasure when the unpleasant Mr Wu charged us far too much for horseriding, and his wife sold us homemade slippers.  It was entirely TOO charming, darling.  As we left, he saw us on our way with a chun yu: "yi lu shun feng".  Here he is with his family:

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More photos of China can be seen in the albums "Kunming", "Dali", "Higherland Inn" and "Shaxi".  The observant may notice that the blog has now been reformatted to put the albums in chronological order...

November 03, 2008

Laos it, blud - a cursory examination of Lao nightclubs and popular music

We heard snatches of Lao music throughout our stay in the country but the soft traditional sounds played in Luang Phabang restaurants didn't make much of an impression.  The moment we truly became conscious of Lao music was the bus from Phonsavanh to Vientiane.

This bus left 3 hours late and arrived even later, having caught a flat en route, and stopped at every godforsaken hamlet on the outskirts of Vientiane.  There was a very nervous hill tribe looking grandmother literally quaking in her seat at the front, and a delightfully neat and cheerful old man with a large assortment of tools.  The seats were broken and made out of sweaty pleather but all of these discomforts paled in comparison to the music. 

The driver had installed special huge karaoke speakers in the luggage rack.  I was seriously considering either cutting the wires or "accidentally" spilling my water bottle over one of them.  Why?  Because for virtually the entire trip they blasted out music at such volume that even with iPod on full blast I could still hear it.

And what music!  As Pearl described earlier, they like their cowbell in Laos.  The standard song structure began with a softish intro, then a blare of synthesized accordion would ring out signalling the inevitable arrival of the cowbell.  The cowbell is played four times per bar, on the beat.  Without fail.  After 8 bars there would be a little militaristic snare roll, another blare of accordion and then off into the cowbell again.

Sad songs, happy songs, male or female vocal, this virtually never varied.  Occasionally there would be a song when the cowbell was only on the offbeat, but otherwise the formula was rigid.  I speculated that there was one single solitary copy of Fruity Loops in Laos, and it was owned by a very lazy producer.

This bus wasn't the first time we had encountered this music- the first time was actually quite enjoyable.  When we first got off the bus in Phonsavnh we were met by a group of men waving boards with pictures of guest rooms on them.  This was a familiar experience - these guys had been in every city.  Being grumpy I tried to avoid them, but Pearl chatted to them and scored us a free ride into town.  The boss man was a diminutive chap called "Incey" with a curtains haircut (shades of early 90s Aaron Kwok) and a penchant for oversized white shirts.  He was very friendly and organised a tour of the plain of Jars for us.

But Incey's time to shine was when he took us to the H'mong nightclub.  Incey was H'mong and wanted to show us how superior H'mong culture was to Lao culture.  He told us he'd been to a nightclub twice in his life, and that both times it had been this one.  He also told us he ddn't like beer but he really liked Pepsi (everyone in Laos seems to love Pepsi).

The nightclub was 20 minutes outside town and consisted of a bar, a stage, a dancefloor, a bunch of sofas and a liberal sprinkling of fairy lights.  It was, to be fair, a lot cleaner and nicer than the Lao nightclub we'd been to the night before (the one featuring a "Hip Hop Paty DL").  We bought Incey a Pepsi then he rushed over to talk to his 'girlfriend' - one of the hostesses.

We were a highly novel item in the club and everyone either stared fixedly at us or yammered excitedly and clinked glasses with us.  Then the music started up, played by one man and his casio keyboard.  It was the same synthesized cowbell, accordion and military band combo except we weren't so attuned to it yet.  For each song the (exclusively  male) clientele would pair up with a hostess each and slow dance. 

We got up and danced with our rudimentary waltz style, spiced up with twirls et al.  Wearing hiking boots.  So it was not a picture of grace.  However the club was agog.  Incey told me I had to dance with his girlfriend later (luckily he forgot about this).  Next up was Pearl singing a song.  It was supposed to be Carpenters but ended up being Richard Marx.  Nobody was dancing.  But a white knight arrived in the form of a very muscly farmer in a singlet, who took my hand in a firm grip and we proceeded to twirl each other around the dancefloor while he did some rather disturbing hip-wiggling movements.  Pearl's honour was saved!

Our final encounter with Lao music came in the form of a cabaret show in a rather down-at-heel hotel near our guesthouse in Vientiane.  We were expecting a dirty show, to be honest, but got something entirely different and more charming.

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It was a shabby place full of nappy red velvet and pleather and full of far more waiters than customers.  But the old man singing on the stage with his greasy-jacketed band exuded an old-world courtliness that completely transcended the seediness of the venue.  We bought beers and settled down to watch the show.  They had a succession of performers, singing mostly Lao songs, many of which featured the time-honoured formula (a hostess would sometimes come on stage to play the cowbell).  There was one lady, very tall, very immaculately put together, who did a duet with a doddery man with an unfortunate mullet, who had an extraordinarily good voice.  It seemed like she'd once had high hopes of stardom but was realizing she was now too old and was stuck with this cabaret show, but still putting her best foot forward.  The man she was partnered with was a hopelessly inadequate foil for her, and she completely drowned him out.  We imagined her whacking him around the head backstage, but to be honest she was far too ladylike for that.

Occasionally there would be a showcase.  This took two forms - the first was that a couple would come out and whirl around the dancefloor in very professional ballroom style with all sorts of fancy moves.  He: Korean looking, Chino clad and so expert a dancer that he looked half asleep while performing tricky footwork.  She: tiny Lao hostess type in incredibly unflattering mini-shorts/dungaree/halterneck thing.  The second was that six girls in traditional Lao garb would come out and do that opening and closing hands dance common to Lao and Thailand.  These girls were clearly hostesses, but what was fantastic was that they were so modestly dressed and doing such a polite dance despite purpose of the whole thing. 

We were, throughout, overwhelmed by the decorousness of it all.  Despite the fact that there was probably all sorts of nastiness happening in the back rooms, in the main hall it could have been the dining room of the Titanic, albeit a budget version.  Ultimately this was probably the nicest thing about Lao - whether it was the simple peasant folk in Incey's h'mong club or the old-school version of urban sophistication we encoutered in Vientiane, there was a delightful straightforwardness and politeness to the whole place.  Sure it was grubby and the people somewhat lackadaisical in their attitude, but the manners on display would put the stiffest upper lips of Chipping Sodbury or the brightest dental charm of Georgia diner waitresses to shame.

Our numbers in China...

Jacob: 13238712570

Pearl: 13238712572

November 02, 2008

H'mong H'mong H'mong, love's the greatest thing

After Luang Phabang, we went to Phonsavanh to check out the Plain of Jars.  Full details of the jar-related activities plus our adventures in h'mong minority night clubs will be posted here later.  For now, please refer to "when is a rock not a rock" for photos and brief commentary.

October 29, 2008

Luang Phabang

You can't fault Luang Phabang for scenery.  It's a town of beautiful old buildings, whether they're ancient temples and monasteries or graceful colonial shophouses.  The guidebooks and UNESCO don't lie in that regard.  However the guidebooks and UNESCO have also contributed to the fact that Luang Phabang, like Venice, is now an attraction not an actual living breathing town.  The centre is completely dominated by restaurants selling Pizza and Lattes, travel agents offering elephant treks and street markets selling mass-produced "local crafts and antiques". 

Despite this the town still manages to be charming, and you can, if you try hard enough catch glimpses of actual Lao people living their daily lives.

This is me sitting at a roadside noodle stall. These are pretty hard to find in the centre of Luang Phabang, as that area is entirely given over to restaurants for tourists, with residents eating in the outskirts or at home. For reasons of pride and budget we were determined to seek out local fare, and this stall was the result. The Pho they sold wasn't terribly appealing:

Shortly after eating this, in a tale that will delight all those scoffing Pizza on the main street, I had to run for the loo. I'm not sure whether to blame this Pho, or the fact that I spent the previous day scoffing sticky rice on the slow boat with my hands, which had been washed in the Mekong, but the resulting food poisoning was at least fairly mild and two of Nice Doctor Ho's immodium pills sorted it out completely - so completely that I didn't need to go to the toilet again for another 3 days.

The most enjoyable bit of Luang Phabang was actually not in the town itself, but across the river in Xiang Men, a small village complete with temple and reachable via a "rustic" boat.  We arrived at the temple to hear a choir chanting and were basically the only people there.  Not content with that level of intrepidness, we then went to look at the caves.  Once I visited a cave in Vietnam called "the amazing cave".  This cave in Xiang Men should be called "the arduous cave".  It's an obstacle course of pitch darkness, steep and slippery floors and a limited supply of oxygen.  Our guide didn't tell us any of this before we went in, and once we were in his commentary was limited to "Buddha.  Stalactite.  This one looks like an eagle."  We emerged drenched and panting and then had to tip the little bastard in order to add insult to injury.

While recuperating outside the cave we spotted a sign pointing to another temple 1.5km away and decided to walk to it.  It was two hours through deep jungle, on tiny paths barely a foot wide, and we would probably have turned back if not for encountering various random farmers on the path, who when asked "Wat?" pointed ahead on the path and nodded encouragingly.  It was worth it, because once we got to the Wat, on top of a hill and miles from anywhere (or so it seemed) we discovered these particularly gruesome frescoes warning the nearby villagers to behave:

For more photos and commentary see the album "Luang Phabang Bang Rock and Roll"...

Life and travel things are happening all around at a speed that defies detailed chronological reports, but suffice to say, it's been pretty enlightening!

5 Life Improving Things We Are Currently Attempting
1) Sleeping before 11pm and waking before 7am
2) Eating fresh fruit and vegetables (a wholly new and not completely disagreeable experience for me)
3) Morning exercises dictated by a deck of playing cards - all black cards represent however number of sit ups, red hearts represent push ups and red diamonds squats (we have not completed a deck yet)
4) Forgoing makeup (this one's tough, but I suspect a little tougher on Jacob, ha ha)
5) I can't think of a fifth... yet

5 Things I've Learned in Laos
1) Leeches are horrid, there are loads in the Lao jungles, and they WILL GET YOU
2) 'Cowbell Hero' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlqLLZQLNiA) should be adopted as a Lao national song. Seriously. Just get on any bus in Laos with a robust hi-fi system wired into it and I promise you will have flashbacks for the rest of your life.
3) Hmong club hostesses apparently come from some of the poorest villages in the country, look about 13, and earn about 500,000 kip a month (approx USD60)
4) Lao Karaoke means shouting into a mic over a pirated hip hop CD track. Hmong Karaoke means being invited on stage to sing "any English song you like", which inevitably ends up being the only English song they know how to play, which is Richard Marx's 'Right Here Waiting'
5) The worst bit of a bout of food poisoning will usually pass after the third day