Poetic Justice

Readers who are easily sickened are advised to look away now. That includes you, Mum, because you will worry.
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Ever since I put up that April Fools' post something like this has been bound to happen. I also feel I should apologise to Dan for mocking his paranoia about the whole flies/eggs/amputations thing.

So let's start about a week ago. I dropped the pingpong table on my foot. It bled a lot. I used the usually-effective traveller solution of Savlon and Micropore. Unfortunately the Savlon reacted with whatever fungi was living on the adjacent toe, which had a domino effect leaving my toes weeping pus and frequently sticking together. I believe that this is known as "Insectopia"; the flies were loving it. I was pretty paranoid about this to the extent of employing an orphan as a foot flyguard (anyone who thinks that I'm not self-indulgent enough to spend my time in an orphanage whinging that my feet feel like they're eating a Madras, is clearly overestimating my altruism).

Unfortunately (/ ironically you can choose the adverb whether you want this to be a comedy or a tragedy) this meant I neglected my head.

I cut myself shaving a few days back, it was a tiny nick so I didn't really think about it. Then, two days ago, a big, hard, bony lump appeared on the back of my head: most people would probably start worrying at this point; I didn't. I pointed it out to Casey as an "isn't it weird what happens to your body in the Tropics" anecdote.

I woke up in the middle of the night in a lot of pain with a big thick tender line leading from my new lump to the shaving cut, which now looked positively Pinatubu. That's when I went to the hospital.

Nou speaks enough English to explain my symptoms to the Doctor and to tell me what the Doctor said to do (which is to take more drugs than a touring funk band, I'm not kidding. Ten pills a day!) but she couldn't explain what was wrong with me. This is probably a good thing as it means I can tell you that I've got a nest of worms mutating in my brain whilst telling myself that it's pretty much nothing. In reality it's probably somewhere between the two.

Twenty-four hours in now. Head has stopped hurting. Foot has stopped leaking. Now all I've got to do is try and sort out this Russian Visa...

Naey Krum

The good news is it was ridiculously easy to get a Chinese Visa. The whole Russian Visa thing seems to somewhat less straightforward. First visit to the Russian Embassy and I got told that I had to have a three month Cambodian Visa and the original of the invite letter. To me neither sounds like something that's going to make any difference to anything in Russia.

On the plus side I did manage to get a night out in Phnom Penh. To say that The Rock is the weirdest night club I've ever been to in no way does it justice. To be fair I don't think any words will do it justice. Let's just say that when I'm an international rockstar I'll probably have the Cambodian leg of my world tour there.

I also finally found a picture of Naey Krum. He's a Khmer comedian who the kids have been telling me I look like. From what I could work out the guy is in his fifties, didn't have a shaved head and is Cambodian. How could I look like him? Turns out I don't really. Problem solved.

The Verb "To Klang"

When I first got off the moto in Takeo I heard a shout of "Petta" and found the girl from the local shop running towards me, looking surprisingly happy. I wasn't sure if this was indicative of how much I'd drunk that someone who I'd bought beer from two months ago remembered my name. Given that I've since been invited to dinner by the family who own the launderette I think it's probably more of a Khmer hospitality thing.

So yeah, I'm back at the orphanage. I was greeted by a hail of "Where's Dan?"s and two innocent-looking, young girls trying to put a toad down my t-shirt, I assume that, because they hadn't dismembered it first, they were relatively pleased to see me.

There's only one other volunteer here at the moment, so gone are the Klang nights of July. It does mean that I have had a chamnce to explore more of Takeo properly: it turns out that there's a whole area of formerly-grand, colonial promenades that I'd been completely unaware of. I didn't even know that Pol Pot had lived here for a bit.

I dropped a ping-pong table on my foot the other day. Since then I've been doing what I believe is technically called "A Bondy" and being constantly paranoid about flies laying eggs in the wound.

Deep Fried Frogs

I'm drinking Klang, listening to Khemerak Sereymon and an old lady is deep-frying frogs on the pavement outside: welcome back to Cambodia.

Had to spend another night in Kuala Lumparto get here, 'though. I've not been to any other city that has such an impact on my mood and I've been to some pretty ropey cities in my time. As an aside, I got munched by bedbugs which didn't make me like the city any better.

The end of my Filipino time was quite cool. Went to one of their malls, you can tell that they were occupied by the Americans, I tell you. Makes our malls look positively Third World. Starbuckstastic.

Manila Icecream

You know that layer of grime that you get if you spend a day wandering around London? Well in Manila you can see it forming; it's like you're wearing a wetsuit.

I wasn't going to come to Manila, I'd heard all kinds of rumours, the whole "it's so sleazy it would make Bangkok blush" thing. It's not. Well it is but it's sleazy in a tongue-in-cheek way rather than an in-your-face way (and I completely appreciate that I'm making light of a whole host of other really rather serious social issues by saying that). It's pretty much how I'd thought Bangkok would be.

Took a break from the city yesterday, I went to Mount Taal to see the crater lake within the crater lake (you know, just climbing another active volcano, yawn).

Rice Rice Baby

Not enough mazes are set in rice terraces. So ridiculously hard to find your way around and all the locals laugh at you because you're getting visibly confuzzled, then they run past you up a non-existent set of steps whilst balancing five planks of wood on their head and dragging a pig on a lead.

So yeah, I've spent the last 24 hours giving my Jap. Enc. inocculation a test in the rice terraces at Batad. It's a funny place, Batad; the only way to get there is 12km on an unmade track, then an hour down a footpath. Which probably makes it quite problematic for the locals to do their week's shopping. The rice terraces were pretty incredible. They're something like 3,000 years old and still using the same irrigation system. Well better than the Incas.

The Philippines seems to be challenging my acceptable-ways-to-travel preconceptions. I'd always assumed that you shouldn't travel an hour down an unmade road on the roof of a bus, turns out I was wrong. Not the most comfortable hour of travelling, mind.

Sagada, Familiar?

I'm not sure i get the Philippines. I like them, but I'm not sure I "get" them. They just seem to be a big hodge-podge of contradictions: it seems eerily familiar, although I have never been to anywhere even slightly like it; just about every sign is (only) in English but not that many people seem to understand me; they have better quality TV adverts than anywhere else I've been on this trip (New Zealand included) and far worse roads (Bolivia included); the bus station shops In Baguio were the kind of market stalls you would expect from a developing country, except for an unfeasibly shiny Dunkin' Donuts.

Possibly most confusing of all, last night the place I was staying in Baguio was pretty close to an all-night karaoke place ("pretty close" in that I could hear out of tune [pot.kettle.black] the singers were with a pillow pressed to my ear; "all-night" as in it was still going on when I got up to get a bus this morning) whereas Sagada, where I'm staying now, has a 9pm curfew.

Sagada's tiny and in a pretty setting, up in the agricultural mountains. It would be great if it wasn't raining quite so hard. Guess that's why they call it "rainy season".

Just Another Tropical Island

I'm still in KK. I like the city but I'm still getting frustrated by Malaysian people's apparent inability to interact in crowds. Or indeed within any kind of public sphere. I've also noticed that more people have missing teeth here than anywhere else I've been. I can't help but think that these two things might be linked.

I spent yesterday snorkling on (or rather just off) Mamutik Island. Pretty fishes but you couldn't see them because of the waves and the sea and the sand and that. I didn't step on a sea urchin so it's all good.

Orange-flavoured Beasties

Found them.

Okay so I cheated, I went to the Sepilok Orangutan Factory. As a conservation project the rehabiliation centre seems top notch. As a tourist attraction it was somewhat dispiriting. By which I mean hellish. Umpteen coach tours kicking out their punters for feeding time as two apes are handcuffed to a tree and forced to do magic tricks for the crowd's entertainment. Some of that is made up but you get the point, right?

Away from feeding time hysteria the park wasn't too bad - They had walking trails into the jungle. I wandered haplessly into a family of monkeys, which big daddy monkey took exception to. I turned around when I started finding leeches nestling in between my toes.

From Sepilok I spent a night in Sandakan - which probably wasn't worth the visit - and am now back in Kota Kinabalu. How satisfying is that to say? Still can't get my tongue around it. I keep calling it Kota Kinalubu which, let's be honest, is even more satisfying to say.

From the Wilds of Borneo...

At last, proper jungle. It's only taken three jungle trecks to get the optimum cliche one, you know staying in the middle of the jungle in a hammock rather than a log cabin (it was a bit weird, with the mosquito net, kind of claustrophobic. I felt like I was a cup-a-soup), the kind of jungle where you have to shake out your shoes in the morning, the kind of jungle where you actually see, shock horror, animals.

But before that, obviously there's an element of weirdness.

We'd been recommended a place on Kinabatangan River and tried to find our way there on a bus. The bus driver said he knew where we wanted; we trusted him. He dropped us off on the side of the road near the edge of the jungle and pointed to Batu Puteh, an unfeasibly village under the viaduct. Turns out we weren't where we wanted to be but we did find Mescot Community EcoTour programme, which was run by the villages late-teens and twenty-somethings to stop them moving to the Cities, which seemed to be all worthy (am I becoming a hippy? Orphanages? Community Programmes? If I look like I'm about to turn vegetarian can someone please hammer a steak through my heart?), so we signed up and spent that night in a homestay.

Then comes the jungle bit. Proper animals and exotic stuff. Crocodiles, monitor lizards, otters, hornbills, snakes, five different species of monkey but, let's be honest, if you're in Borneo there's only one thing that you want to see and it's big, tastes of jaffa cakes and doesn't have a tail. Get thee behind me macaques, and take your pigtails with you.