A 40,0075km journey in search of sustainable backpacking

Responsible tourism video from wildasia.org

2011-09-11T22:32:00.001-07:00

When the weather turns, it's time to get out

2011-08-25T12:32:00.000-07:00

The word ‘August’ was coined by the Roman Emperor Augustus, from which the French take the word Langoustine and the English, Lobster. In England the patron saint of August is, for no obvious reason, the Greek god of wine Bacchus, who come Britain’s darkest hour - many Britons believe - will follow King Arthur into battle swinging an empty retsina bottle shouting: “Come and have a go, if you think you’re hard enough!”

The English celebrate all this by taking an annual pilgrimage to the Costa del Sol to spend two weeks getting drunk and going red.

But as much fun as all that probably was August is almost over, there was a distinctly autumnal feeling to the bus stop this morning and even the plane ticket I've got burning a hole in my pocket isn't going to keep me warm through a European winter so...

Monday. Heathrow. Terminal 3...

How I got eaten on the night bus to Yogjakarta

2011-01-13T05:38:00.000-08:00

As I sat down four of the bed bugs in my seat woke up, stretched, smacked their lips and thought, 'What's for breakfast?'
"I quite fancy French today." said one as they made their way out through a hole in the seat behind my cushion.
"What's wrong with local food?!" said the elderly bug, his cane making no sound at all on the blue nylon upholstery.
"Oh you know, a change is as good as a rest."
"Vive la difference!" said an overweight young bug in Billy Bunter glasses, panting as he tried to keep up. "I wouldn't mind a bit of that little Spanish kid we had a couple of weeks ago."
"Oh yes! Tapas! Don't get that as much as I'd like."
It had been a long day and I was asleep by the time they reached the bit of my lower back where my t-shirt had ridden up.
"So let's see what we've got" said the elderly bug, taking a tentative nibble. "Ooh, English!"
"What is English exactly?" asked Billy, tucking in.
"Country cooking mostly. Game-y, lightly seasoned."
"It's quite more-ish, isn't it?"
"Did you know the English actually invented creme brulee?" said the old one between mouthfuls. "It was called Cambridge Cream originally."
"Not a lot of people know that." said one of the younger bugs in a silly voice.
"Who was that supposed to be?"
"Michael Caine."
"Sounded more like Jamie Oliver."

By the time the bus stopped for a toilet break the first wave of bugs were leaning back among the fibres of my seat smoking cigars. Billy was lying on his back, legs akimbo, breathing heavily.
"Anyone fancy seconds?"
"Couldn't. I'm stuffed."
"We could see what they're serving in seat 11."
"Well," said Billy, trying to roll over. "Maybe just a little."

The Balinese woman in the seat next to mine had had the good sense to wear several layers of clothing and was wrapped up against both the air-conditioning and the insects and by the time our bugs got back word had got round that there was an English buffet in seat 10 and a crowd had gathered. A few enterprising bugs were pushing drinks trolleys around selling pre-dinner aperatifs and hastily assembled menus. Some of the older diners had dressed formally and a number of dinner jackets and dress uniforms led in fashionably dressed debutantes to the sound of 'Lovely to see you Rear-Admiral' and 'Old enough to be her grandfather!'

The elderly bug held court regaling newcomers with tales of dinners past. "I can't have been more than a few weeks old the first time I had English." he said to admiring coos from the crowd (the life expectancy of a bed bug being around 6 months).

As my weight sank into the seat and my body heat wafted over the assembled throng - the bed bug equivalent of the dinner gong - a cheer went up and I was served.

Between scratching, wishing I'd worn long trousers and socks and wondering why I could switch off neither the a/c vent nor the speaker playing Indonesian country and western - both of which were directly above my head - I didn't get much sleep and arrived in Yogjakarta exhausted.

I'd been told by several Balinese that the Javanese were an entrepreneurial bunch and although it was only 8.30 in the morning they weren't being proven wrong. I was approached by Loxman, who owned an art gallery, an old woman who made batik sarongs and several taxi drivers squatting by their cabs who, when they saw me walking down the road with my backpack stood up and said "Leaving?"
"Arriving." And they sat back down again.

Bali was, well... Bali was Bali. Good. Simple, fact-based statements are comforting this close to New Year's Eve. We like them. Year's of listening to Tony Blair's soundbites has taught us to like them (the fact bit was optional but he had the 'hand of history' on his shoulder so who are we to argue).

The rest of Indonesia is... I'm tempted to say Indonesia but I've only just got here so I'm not going to stick my neck out at this early stage.

Indonesia is big, that I know. And well populated - something in the region of 200 million. The people are Muslim, unless they're Hindu or Buddhist, but mostly they're Muslim. 17,508 islands make up Indonesia. I didn't know that, I just read it but it's a lot; enough for seventeen and a half dressings.

My Guidebook to Indonesia is in Swedish

2011-01-13T04:31:00.000-08:00

Apparently there's a guest house in Jakarta called 'Hurdy-gurdy-gurdy'... Sorry, that was rude; whatever the Muppets may tell us the Swedish don't sound like that...much.

I wanted to get away from the inevitability of checking my guidebook to see where I should go next yet still have access to the backpacker trail (I'm writing a book about it you see) and the maps that are always (generally) handy. So over breakfast this morning I flicked through a Swedish Eyewitness guide to make some notes for my trip to Indonesia. I don't speak Swedish. I know a lullabye in Norwegian but I'm not sure what it means - something about goats. My Swedish is restricted to 'Hey!' which means hello and smorgasbord, which means I was born in the 70s.

Back in Luang Prabang I'd bumped into the French guys I'd met in Huay Xai and saw James, the Irish guy from Chiang Mai there too. Hayley and Abi, two English girls who'd stayed in the room next to mine in Luang Prabang were in the same hotel as me in Vang Vieng. I went tubing in Vang Vieng with the Dutch couple I'd met on the bus up to Chiang Mai from Bangkok. When I got down to Don Det Hayley, Abi and James had already been there a few days and introduced me to Ben, who I ran into later in Kampot. When I arrived in Sihanoukville Hayley, Abi and James were on the beach and Reg, who I'd met in Kampot was staying in my guesthouse.

It's not surprising because the route through South-East Asia is well-trodden one and we're all using the same book to navigate it. If we'd all started reading War and Peace at the same time we'd probabably be on about the same page by now.

Carrying the same guidebook as everyone else does mean you'll keep bumping into them along your route, but if you're stepping off a bus at 11pm in a town you don't know it's nice to have the name of a hotel you can ask the becak driver to take you to.

Package tourists take Jeffrey Archer novels and survivalists take 'Guns 'n Ammo'. TV's current adventurer-in-chief Bear Grylls travels with a four man camera crew and military training. I have no camera crew and an A-level in Art History. I'm taking a guidebook.

The first known guidebook, the Periplus of the Etythraean Sea - produced somewhere between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD - was a guide to the Roman trade routes out through the Red Sea to the coast of India and on up the Silk Route to Eastern China. It was intended for merchants but also included advice on where to stay and sights along the way and was very popular with that class of Roman who could afford to pop the family in the trireme, sail to Arsinoe to visit Great Aunt Vibia and spend their vacation building sandcastles and shopping for servants.

Despite the Crusades, Marco Polo's ghost-written 'What I did on my Summer Holidays' and European empire building it wasn't until Baedeker's Rheinreise in the 19th century that a new publishing industry was born and Baedeker became the guide of choice for chinless wonders on their Grand Tour and anyone in a Merchant Ivory film.

Possessing that German attention to detail, and following the Allied carpet bombing of Lubeck in World War II, Nazi propgandist Baron Gustav Braun von Sturm announced that the Luftwaffe would work its way through the Baedeker guide to England. The subsequent 'Baedeker Raids' of 1942 targetted Norwich, Exeter and Canturbury and destroyed the Bath Assembley Rooms and York's Guildhall. Stonehenge only escaped because the parking was so expensive.

In 1970 the first BIT guide to the overland trail appeared. BIT was an offshoot of the underground newspaper the International Times. IT regularly recieved letters with requests for information on everything from squatters rights to where to buy Nepalese Temple Balls and BIT was created in 1968 as a clearing house for information based in Notting Hill. Volunteers manned phones and were able to answer pretty much any question the counter-culture might have - particularly the one about Nepalese Temple Balls. They also received enquiries from people heading out on overland trips and got up-dates from the road with the latest on what was happening on the hippy trail.

Volunteer Ron Crust described the office as "...open every day of the year from 10am to 10pm (telephone 24 hours) and we give free help and information about anything to anyone who wants it. Dirty, untidy office; friendly, sometimes exuberant atmosphere, inefficient staff, confused clientele, aggressive cat. Free information, free bogs, free bath, free duplicator and typewriter, free kittens and puppies, free clothes - cheap at other times but free if you're really starving, free people to talk to, free alternative library, free day-room to freak out in or sleep in, free crashpad, lots of other free floor space depending on the season, free optimism, free ecstacy, free lots of other things plus expensive travel guides to pay for it all."

'Expensive' at the time was 50p for half a dozen pages (and one staple) of travel advice. Geoff Crowther, who later worked for Lonely Planet, writing their first guide to India among other titles, worked on BIT guide's 1972 edition and says "Arriving at BIT to write my first edition I was confronted with over 200 letters from travellers which had accumulated in the overflowing files, the scruffiest "office" I'd ever seen before - or since, several sleeping bags full of snoring human beings on the floor [and] an arthritic IBM electric typewriter which frequently threw fits..." but in three weeks they had a 100 page guide - Overland to India and Australia - (still with only one staple and no cover) and the BIT staff were terribly apologetic that the price had gone up to £1.

At around the same time Tony and Maureen Wheeler were leaving England to drive across Asia in a car they'd bought for £150 and in 1973 published Across Asia on the Cheap from Sydney. The success of that first Lonely Planet guide allowed them to research and publish South-East Asia on a Shoestring. Tony Wheeler had a business degree and while the first LP guides may have lacked the Wikipedia-like joie de vivre of the BIT guide, one thing it didn't lack was staying power; in 2010 LP published its 100 millionth book to go with their TV production company, photo library, magazine and website,

Rough Guides first appeared in 1982 when founder Mark Ellingham wrote his guide to Greece and the series very quickly made a sizable dent in Lonely Planet's market share. The difference between the two guides was once described as 'Lonely Planet is written by travellers who write, Rough Guide by writers who travel.'

BIT closed its doors in 1980 but Crowther wanted to continue the BIT travel guide saying "If the day ever does arrive when it ceases to be a mirror of travellers' experiences and an exchange of information then we'll lay it down to rest and leave you in the hands of the strictly commercial boys." That 1980 edition was BIT's last but the 'commercial boys' went from strength to strength. Rough Guides was bought by Pearson Group (publishers of the Financial Times & The Economist newspapers among many others) in 1995 and in 2007 the Wheelers sold 75% of Lonely Planet to the BBC for £36 million.

Guides have in recent years become more niche with titles being published for gay and lesbian travellers, women travellers, people travelling with children, disabled travellers and a guide published by an expat in Bangkok detailing exactly what your obligations as the 'boyfriend' of a Thai bar girl are (Appendix A: Spending Money takes up 90% of the book).

In 2007, shortly before a Malaysian orthopaedic surgeon, Shaikh Muszaphar Shukor, was due to head into space, the Malaysian government produced an 18-page guide for Muslims in space. Entitled Guidelines for Performing Islamic Rites at the International Space Station, the booklet contained tips on performing ablutions, finding Mecca and fasting in space. The booklet was produced after the first Muslim in space, Saudi Prince Sultan bin Salman had reported that while he could pray and fast, he had had some trouble kneeling down.

The question of whether we should carry a guidebook or not is a moot one, not least because when anyone says 'don't' everyone else laughs. The maps are not always 100% accurate and they could be updated more regularly than their publishing schedule allows (typically 6 months from commissioning to publication) but 20 minutes before landing in India for the first time it's comforting to know the name of the guesthouse your heading for and to have a map which tells you vaguely where it is.

Putting our guidebook down occasionally and seeing what happens usually results in our most interesting travel experiences (or at the very least some good horror stories) but if we're going to use them, we should take the right ones - and use them more.

On this bit of the trip I'm carrying South-East Asia on a Shoestring. It's the compact version of the larger guides Lonely Planet publishes for each of the countries in the region and covers everywhere from northern Myanmar to Eastern Indonesia 6000kms away. Well, not everywhere. The Laos section (a country the same size as the UK) is only 70 pages long. 70 pages for 236,000 sq kms. The Time out guide to London is 414 pages long. For one city. No wonder we all end up in the same guesthouses. If I'd been carrying the full 372-page guide to Laos I might have had more opportunities to get 'off the beaten track'.

But I did meet some nice people, and James's Facebook status says he's going to be in Sydney when I get there.

The Trials of Travel

2011-01-13T01:41:00.000-08:00

I lost my flip-flops on Kuta Beach. It wasn't my fault, a wave took them. Maybe I shouldn't have been swimming in the sea off Bali at 7am on New Year's Day but then, maybe I should have. That's what the sea was invented for after all. All that fishing and sailing and the precipitation diagram you remember from your geography GCSE is just a by-product. The only time fish in the sea should surprise you is when one brushes your leg while you're swimming and you scream like a girl and churn the water to butter.

And where would you expect to see a boat? No, the sea was invented (by the Chinese as it happens) to give people something to do as the sun comes up over a particularly good party.

There's nothing particularly wise about jumping into the ocean seven hours after someone's said 'Anyone fancy a flaming sambuca?' but neither is there much wisdom in flaming sambucas. You should never go swimming on a stomach full of alcohol and there are some wicked rips around Bali that will have you floating past Western Australia before you can say 'skinny dipping!'. The view from the Indian Ocean of Western Australia is stunning but you'll be at the bottom of it where the view is less good.

Such thoughts are far from your mind after 10 hours of New Year's Eve and if a rogue wave makes off with your flip-flops you have no one to blame but the Chinese.

However much fun that night may have been I did have to buy some new flip-flops. Flip-flops, or any other item of clothing you may have lost in the surf, are readily available in Bali but breaking in a new pair of flip-flops is a painful business.

I was attached to my flip-flops, and they were attached to each other via me. Maybe they are still together, floating side by side out into the Pacific. Or maybe after all these years they went their separate ways; one headed south to the Antarctic, the other riding the currents towards the coast of Africa to start a new life on a beach somewhere with a local flip-flop and their little rubbery children.

Either way I now have to break in a new pair and have two very painful blisters between my toes.

Are YOU a sex tourist?

2010-12-20T02:35:00.000-08:00

Bangkok, Thailand

Sitting at the next table over breakfast were a middle-aged French couple. In an effort to practice my French I said hello. They'd been in Bangkok for a week or so and were happy to recommend places to go and things to see.
"And tonight," said the husband "we're going to les rues chaudes."
"Les rues chaudes?"
"Patpong." said his wife. "The red light area." Patpong is a district in the heart of Bangkok featuring wall-to-wall bars with names like the Topless Beer Bar and Super Pussy A-Go-Go. You'd have seen it if you made the mistake of renting Bangkok Dangerous. This is one of the places you think about when someone mentions sex tourism.

But when I think of sex tourism a middle-aged couple from the Jura with comfortable shoes and backpack containing antihistamine cream and a plastic mack in case it rains generally isn't part of my mental image.

The Lonely Planet contains a section on Patpong - as a 'deterrent guide...for puritanicals' (sic) and as a result tourists of all stripes head down there to gawk at the girls, take photos and have a beer while watching a floor show in one of the more respectable clubs. It's a walk on the wild side, a taste of the orient. Harmless fun.

Right now in any city that's heard of Christmas, lights and decorations line the streets to draw in shoppers. The lights don't directly contribute to the department stores' coffers but they are paid for by the shops because there's a good chance we'll spend money at the same time. People may go to see the spectacle but it's provided so they'll do some Christmas shopping while they're there.

The floor shows in Patpong serve the same purpose; the bars find girls for their floor shows based on the good probability that customers will drink (a lot) and buy drinks for the bar girls at inflated prices. Customers may make 'arrangements' with the bar girls (of which the house takes a cut) but the sale of booze is what enables the bars to hire the girls and put on the floor shows that draw the customers in so they can make their money on beer.

And they make a lot of money. A couple of girls from London I met had gone down to Patpong and were told that entrance to a ping pong show was 100 baht ($3.50). They ordered a diet coke each, watched the show (if you don't know what a ping pong show is watch Priscilla: Queen of the Desert) and on leaving were presented with a bill for 3000 baht - each. It turned out the entrance fee didn't include watching the show and the doormen were there to make sure they paid.

Bar girls earn between 2100 baht ($70) and 7500 baht ($250) a month based on quotas they have to meet. They are expected to have sex with four to ten clients a month (with the bar taking 50%) and get customers to buy 80-100 drinks a month from the bar. If the girls don't fill these quotas they are fined - typically 500 baht for each missed client and 30 baht for each missed drink. They also have to wear the outfits given to them by the owners, only get two or three days off a month (though not on weekends or public holidays) and if they test positive for a sexually-transmitted disease, they lose their salary completely.

The women who work in brothels have similar quotas but have to live in houses owned by the brothel (for which they pay rent) and are not allowed to go out unattended if they fall behind on their quota and 'owe' the brothel. They are also responsible for paying their own bribes to the police. Many come from poor rural areas in Thailand, particularly the north east. They are promised jobs in the hotel industry, a higher wage than they could earn at home and somewhere to live. The reality in Bangkok is that those who refuse to dance or have sex with clients are subjected to abuse ranging from beatings to rape until they become obedient - and profitable - sex workers.

Ignoring for a moment the absurd argument that anyone chooses to become a prostitute (what would the circumstances of YOUR life have to be for you to end up in either of the situations described above?), for every prostitute who turns her experiences into a series of best-selling books like the writer of 'Belle du Jour: Diary of a London Call Girl', there are millions of women from poor backgrounds who are forced into prostitution by kidnapping, trafficking or by the need to buy drugs, food or to support their families. There may well be women who can earn £300-an-hour as Belle du Jour claims she did but they certainly don't work in Patpong.

The majority of Patpong's customers are men but even the most apparently benign visit - in the form of a married couple from France taking a stroll down the street to take some photos to show their friends - is a form of sex tourism. Like all tourism they are there to see something they couldn't see at home and the bars are very happy to provide the spectacle and sell them a drink while they're there.

Visiting Patpong is not the same as seeing the Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat or Uluru. Watching girls being pawed by drunk men is not a colourful bit of local culture. The floor shows are not the only bit of 'entertainment' that tourists' money goes to supporting and the baht tourists spend on beer also goes to trafficking girls to brothels across Asia.

And saying 'But it's the oldest profession in the world!' is just an accepted way of saying 'So what?'

As long as we continue to see Patpong and other red light areas on the backpacker trail as a tourist 'sight', even if we are simply going there to 'have a look' and take some photos to post of Facebook, we are providing the possibility of money and encouraging bar and brothel owners to find more girls, by whatever means. Just by visiting we are sex tourists.

I met the French couple at breakfast the following morning.
"How were les rues chaudes?" I asked. They explained that they had been disappointed by Patpong.
"We got there too early" they said. "It was just a market like anywhere in Asia. The women outside the bars were old! All over 40! And ugly! No young girls anywhere. Maybe it's better at night when they switch the lights on."

How Prostitutes Keep You Up

2010-12-18T22:02:00.000-08:00

Serendipity Beach, Sihanoukville, Cambodia

Sihanoukville, Cambodia

At breakfast three British backpackers were enjoying a 'night bus beer'. The night bus beer is the beer you order at 7am after another 12 hours of having your arse spanked by an Asian B-road and is one of those beers that you feel you've really earned. I hadn't been on the night bus but after the night I'd had I thought I'd earned one too.

Through no fault of my own I hadn't slept much the night before. I'd had a couple of drinks with Reg who'd just got in from Kampot but was in bed by midnight with my alarm set for 6.30am so I could have some breakfast before catching the bus to Phnom Phen. All very sensible.

My room was a 'room' in the same way a knotted handkerchief is a 'hat' - it did the job but you wouldn't fancy its chances given a high wind. The entire wing was built out of bare wooden planks and was raised on stilts about 3 metres above where the staff parked their scooters. It had a bathroom with a mirror and a TV with a remote control and there were more floorboards than gaps between the floorboards so you didn't fall through to the courtyard below (though a waitress arriving for work would get a nasty shock if she looked up while I was coming out of the shower). It shook when someone walked down the corridor and rocked from side to side if the wind got up. The walls were so thin you could hear the occupant of the next room tying his shoelaces. Or having sex.

The occupant of the next room brought the two prostitutes home at about 2am. I was woken by him slamming the door then banging the wall then putting some music on.

I'm not usually such a light sleeper.

I don't know if the music - which was the kind of Euro-techno that sounds just perfect when played through a mobile phone - was meant to mask the noise he intended to make or the financial negotiations the girls had already started but seeing as I might as well have been in the same room as them it didn't make much difference from where I was lying - staring wide-eyed at the ceiling.

It's amazing how much you can hear through 5mm of plywood. They all had showers - apparently seperately given the number of times the pipes creaked - so they were presumably sharing his complimentary towel when he joined the negotiations.

Judging by his voice my neighbour was in his early 20s, German, possibly Swiss German or Austrian and spoke passable English. One of the girls had a level of English which was limited to numbers (dollar amounts & numbers of hours) though her technical vocabulary suggested she'd done her Biology GCSE and she translated for the other girl who was less of a linguist (cunning or otherwise). Having taught some English, and despite the hour, the next 30 minutes was a fascinating masterclass in communication breakdown - albeit on a subject that would be a little difficult to introduce to students.

The girl's limited vocabulary meant she stuck to the specifics so was pretty easy to understand and the first ten minutes was all about how much for how long. My neighbour's English on the other hand was peppered with the sort of idiomatic language learned on holiday or by watching movies and which goes totally over the heads of Khmer prostitutes.

After a protracted and rather confused discussion the financials had been agreed upon and just as our randy backpacker thought they might finally get down to business the chief Khmer negotiator announced that her friend wanted to have an hour's sleep before they reached the last item on the agenda. Our eager punter wasn't having any of this and in a tone of voice which even his phone couldn't compete with said 'At six o'clock you'll be free but now you have to work!' All the Khmer girl heard was 'work' and 'free' at which point negotiations broke down completely and the Khmer team walked away from the (bedside) table. After a quick rustling of hotpants and tight t-shirts the door opened, closed and two sets of high heels disappeared down the corridor.

The room was silent except for the mobile phone which hadn't seemed to notice what had happened and was still banging out happy house.

After 10 minutes the music stopped, the door opened and closed again and the building shook slightly as a pair of Germanic flip-flops headed back out into the night.

I lay there for a few minutes musing on how a job in a bank on your gap-year couldn't possibly be as interesting as what a bit of travel can offer you and drifted off to sleep.

At four o'clock our friend came home again with the same door-slamming, wall-banging, music-playing enthusiasm he'd exhibited 2 hours earlier though this time the high heels that joined him came with better English and a no-nonsense attitude to negotiation that suggested this new girl had done quite a bit of it.

I lay there for the next hour trying to work out what the various noises I could hear might be (don't look at me like that, you would have too) while his exuberant little mp3-player entered into the spirit of things and prevented me from getting any sleep.

There was a worrying moment when she gave him the benefit of her experience explaining that while 'Beer make you horny but no good for...' The music drowned out the rest but after 20 minutes or so her experience seemed to be enough for both of them and she gave him lots of positive reinforcement.

The apparent climax of the evening turned out not to be and after a conversation which didn't involve global politics he found another $20 in the back pocket of his jeans and they were off again. I gave up trying to sleep and switched on the TV. BBC World borders on the the surreal with the soundtrack the next room was providing. Thank god Moira Stuart isn't presenting it anymore.

I cancelled my alarm clock about 15 minutes before it was due to go off, had a shower, packed my bag and left; her bought-and-paid-for 'Yes, yes, Yes!' and his mobile phone's 'tss, tss, tss' receding into a tired memory behind me.

A night bus beer seemed a bad idea given I was about to spend the day sitting on a bus without a toilet and I had a cup of tea instead. As the bus pulled away from the kerb my eyelids started to close but our caring driver, knowing a long-distance bus journey can be a bit boring, put on a karaoke video to keep us all entertained, bless him.

We arrived in Phnom Phen five hours later. I had two beers.

Why plastic bags are a GOOD thing

2010-12-16T19:23:00.000-08:00

Yo!

Con Tho, Vietnam

Anything can be decanted into a plastic bag; soup, iced tea, rice and everything else required for a bus journey through Vietnam. Your plastic cup of iced coffee goes in one, your spam sandwich in another, your bottle of green tea goes in a third and your noodle soup in a fourth. Your chilli sauce, fish sauce and condensed milk have their own little plastic bags and the whole lot goes in a larger plastic bag to carry on to the bus. Once on the bus the driver will give you your complimentary bottle of water, an individually-wrapped, cologne scented handy wipe and another plastic bag for you to throw up in.

On any given journey here at least one passenger will be quietly, unobtrusively and comprehensively sick. It's usually an elderly woman though the young woman at the front of this bus had gone through four bags within an hour of leaving the bus station starting with a quantity of rice that she couldn't possibly have eaten at one sitting and finishing with a bag of what looked like reasonably filtered water. Each bag was handed down the bus to where one of the male passengers opened a window and dropped it out onto the road.

The men are never sick, but neither the quality of the road nor the speed or comfort of the bus seems to make any difference to the women. It's almost a point of honour. An hour or so into any journey you'll hear a discrete 'bleugh' and the sound of a window sliding open.

Should you ever find yourself walking along a country road in Vietnam do not, however badly you may be in need of a plastic bag at that particular moment, do not pick one up from the hard shoulder. The rice in it has already spent a brief period inside a Vietnamese woman who would have done better to skip breakfast given she had a bus journey ahead of her.

I was supposed to be in Cambodia three days ago but spent an extra night in Saigon because it was so nice and another night in Can Tho to break up what would otherwise have been a very long journey through to Ha Tien on Vietnam's southern border with Cambodia.

The staff at my guesthouse told me that the two daily buses from Can Tho to Ha Tien left at 7am and midday. Seven seemed a little previous so I opted for a 1030 moto taxi to the bus station so I could get a ticket to be guaranteed a seat. I bought a ticket for what turned out to be the 1300 bus and found a cafe to while away the two hours until I left. At 1220 I wandered over to the toilets in the bus station where the attendant pointed out the Ha Tien bus. Although it was only 1230 the bus looked a little full so I thought I'd better grab a seat. The bus pulled out of the station the moment I sat down.

Bus seats here are designed, not surprisingly, for South-East Asians and not for Europeans whose shoulders take up a seat and a half and whose knees leave sizeable dents in the back of the passenger in front. I spent the journey sandwiched between two Vietnamese teenagers (which admittedly would be a sandwich where the filling was considerably larger than either slice of bread and I felt that same pang of guilt as when I sit down in a cinema and hear a voice behind me say 'Oh, brilliant') but Vietnam is a country where anyone with a sense of 'personal space' is considered to be ignoring the rather obvious facts and as we pulled out into the traffic a quiet resignation had descended on the minibus.

Bus drivers here tend to belong less to the 'drive from A to B' school than the 'aim at B and put your foot down' school. This particular bus driver had also spent a semester at the school where they train helicopter pilots to fly under artillery fire.

The road between Can Tho and Ha Tien is flat and smooth - if viewed from about 5 miles away. When viewed from the inside of a bus doing 100kms a hour it is as rutted as a particularly pretty doe in spring time. I closed my eyes and found it quite easy to imagine the bus was stationary but caught in an earthquake.

After a couple of hours the minibus made one of its semi regular stops at a gas station so the driver could replenish the supple of plastic bags and the passengers could use the toilet and buy food from the small army of women who appear from nowhere and invade the bus selling edible unidentifiables to women who should really know better. The men meanwhile leaned against the petrol pumps smoking and stubbing out their cigarettes on the 'CAUTION! HIGHLY INFLAMMABLE!' signs.

As the bus driver pulled the minibus out of the station, which had miraculously failed to go up in a fireball, I wedged my knees into the seat in front and tried to manoeuvre myself into a position which would require the minimum of adjustment when he shouted 'Brace, Brace, Brace!'

After almost four hours of what I'd been told was a four-hour journey we pulled into a town but was it the town where I was supposed to get off? Should i be putting my shoes on? In the absence of anyone who wasn't either asleep or trying to keep their plastic bag still I went to the shop signs.

Like many places the shops in Vietnam usually have their addresses printed on their fascias. Not speaking Vietnamese I have ho idea what any of it means but it's an address so there will generally be a number, a comma, some words, a comma and some other words. It's the words at the end we're interested in and if you see enough of the same words on enough different signs you can reasonably assume that that's tha name of the town you're in. As we careened through what I'd worked out was Ruck Gai, the last major town before Ha Tien on the map. It occurred to me that the border I planned to cross might have 'opening times' and after a quick consultation of my guidebook it further occurred to me that I might need to be thinking about 'closing times' too. The border was due to close at 5.30pm and it was already 5. 'But we're past Ruck Gai' I thought, 'How far can it be?' The answer, it turned out, was 'Enough'.

I arrived in Ha Tien with 4 minutes to make the ten minute journey to the border and checked into a hotel instead. I dropped my bag in the room and went straight out to find a restaurant. The moment I opened the menu I was joined by Thien, Hong, Dung, Cuong, Tran, Phuong and Yo who after a few introductions took me to a karaoke bar where I spent my last night in Vietnam eating crab, drinking beer and singing karaoke (Sam and Dave's 'Soul Man' and Burt Bacharach's 'This Guy's in Love' - because they like syrupy ballads - in case you were wondering) - and when the evening came to an end they wouldn't let me pay a penny.

If there was an international 'Who's got the friendliest people?' competition Vietnam would kick India's arse, throw Thailand's school books onto the roof of the bus shelter and give Laos a wedgie without breaking a sweat. You often hear tourists say the Vietnamese see you as a 'walking wallet' and there are lots of angles here - this is the country economists get all misty eyed over after all - but once you've spent some time getting past simply being a potential customer, and despite the enormous weight of history, the Vietnamese practice a form of hospitality which is among the most genuine I've found anywhere.

I'll go to Cambodia tomorrow. Definitely. Absolutely. Probably.

Beware the Food Police!

2010-11-24T02:09:00.000-08:00

Vietnamese food?

Nha Trang, Vietnam

I take back everything I said about the benefits of not speaking the local language. Have you ever tried to buy food in Vietnam? It is impossible. My introduction to this important piece of information (which had somehow failed to make its way into my Lonely Planet) came when I was still in Laos in a one-horse town called Attapeu near the Laos/Vietnamese border. The name of the town in Laotian translates as 'buffalo shit' which is probably why everyone there speaks Vietnamese and no one speaks English.

I arrived in time for dinner and after a protracted conversation with the owner which involved me picking up some chopsticks and pointing at his food then pointing at myself (then pointing at the kitchen so he didn't think I wanted his food) I was served a plate of boiled chicken and some rice. The Israeli couple I'd been talking to the day before said the gastronomic highlight of their trip had been Vietnam but they must have used a different border crossing.

Having temporarily forgotten the Vietnamese for 'I'm terrible sorry to bother you but would you happen to have something with a sauce and perhaps some vegetables?' I ate what I was given and went to bed.

After an early, breakfast-free start the following day I crossed the border and arrived starving in Kon Tum at around 5pm and checked into a guesthouse. The tables and chairs set out in a covered area in the garden with pots of chopsticks and trays of condiments on the table turned out not to be a restaurant (silly me) and I was told (motioned, gestured) to try outside.

The first place I tried was a simple affair with a concrete floor, a single 1000-watt light bulb, low tables and plastic chairs they'd apparently stolen from an infants' school but there were several locals sitting around finishing bowls of 'food' so I went in. I pulled out my notebook. Before leaving the hotel I'd written down the words for rice (com trang), soup (pho), vegetables (rao song), chicken (thit ga), pork (thit heo) and noodles (mi). 'That should cover dinner' I thought and sat down. A woman came over and looked at me.
"Com trang?" I said. She kept looking at me so I got up and walked over to where they were preparing the food and had a look. I'm not a fussy eater. I know what I like but if that's not available I'll have what there is. Sometimes you just have to walk into a kitchen, point at whatever's stopped wriggling and have that. If you end up spending the occasional day on the toilet well, that's travel for you. On this occasion there was nothing wriggling because there was nothing left.
"Tommorow" said the woman. That didn't bode well. It was only 6pm. Did everyone eat dnner early here or was that just the end of the lunchtime sitting?

The next place I tried was laid out like a restaurant but I'd been fooled twice already so I walked up to the woman behind the counter and said "Food?" I wasn't feeling particularly proud of myself at this moment and although as I've said it's nice to learn a few words of the local language I'd been in the country four hours and was working with what I'd got.

The woman looked at me.
"Food?" I said again. She led me to the back of the restaurant and handed me a bottle of iced tea.
"No. Food." I did a sort of eating-with-chopsticks type motion.
"Cigarettes?"
"No," I did the chopsticks thing again and patted my stomach for emphasis. "Food!"
"Coffee?"

Over the next 30 minutes I had a version of that conversation four times and had covered about four blocks of the city centre. Did everyone eat at home? I was about to give up and buy a bag of crisps when I turned a corner and found the town market in full swing. Food! Tons of food! Chicken, pork, fish, vegetables, fruit and mountains of rice and noodles! Unfortunately no one was cooking it. Or serving it. They were just selling it and you were supposed to cook it yourself. In your kitchen. At home. Walking back to the hotel I passed a woman selling sandwiches made with spam garnished with a slice of cucumber. I bought two and a packet of crisps.

On arrival in Nha Trang I discovered that there is food in Vietnam, which came as something of a relief, and I was in the mood for something fatty that came with chips. I'm a big fan of listening to my body when it comes to food. Sometimes it says 'salt', other times it says 'vitamins' occasionally it'll say 'I've no idea what I fancy right now, let's go to the pub while I figure it out.' Given the incredible variety of food on offer in South East Asia and the sheer pleasure of eating with chopsticks you don't want to spend your entire trip only eating things that come with chips but if sometimes you fancy a burger, have a burger. After 48 hours of soup, spam sandwiches and crisps I wanted a burger that needed scaffolding to keep it from toppling over.

The restaurant was full of food police, sensible shoe-clad travellers diligently munching their way through dishes of whatever their guidebooks had told them to try. The two ladies at the next table, who had been very friendly up till then pointed out that if I didn't want to try local things I should have stayed at home. With a mouthful of burger I politely suggested that if they'd wanted to have continued our conversation they should have left their attitude in Munich.

The Blissful Tower of Babel that is Travel

2010-11-07T00:56:00.000-07:00

Chiang Mai, Thailand

Thai is the linguistic equivalent of learning to tie your shoe laces. It has its roots in Chinese and like Chinese it's a tonal language. T.O.N.A.L. is an acronym standing for 'Give Up Now You Don't Stand A Chance.'

In tonal languages the meanings of words change depending on the pitch of your voice. There are five tones; low, high, mid-tone, falling and rising. According to my guidebook the low tone comes at the relative bottom of the vocal range and the high tone at the relative top, But relative to what? Darth Vader? Maria Callas? Mid-tone indicates the middle of the vocal range, a flat tone possibly something like the way you say 'Coffee' the morning after your birthday.

The other two tones are falling and rising. The falling tone is handily described in the guide as 'like calling a friend from afar' though it doesn't say how far away your friend is or whether you have to wave while saying it. The rising tone 'sounds like the inflection used by English speakers to imply a question'.

But then how do you ask a question with a word that doesn't have that rising inflection? The Thai word for beer is bia. Bia is a mid-tone word. After a tough day's sightseeing in the sun when you collapse into a chair in a bar and the waiter asks you what you want to drink your pronunciation will be perfect. but what if a Thai-speaking friend joins you? When you ask him if he wants a 'Bia?' with a rising tone he might think you're offering him a hot toddy or a quick game of tennis and he'll say 'No, I've been sightseeing in the sun all day and I just want a beer.' And the waiter will understand him perfectly and bring him just that.

Travelling alone is an excellent test of my misanthropy but there's no understating the blissful cocoon of ignorance an inability to learn languages can offer you. It's always handy to pick up a few words of the local language of course but you don't want to go too far because you might start understanding conversations overheard and as we all know people are idiots who generally talk nonsense.

A couple of weeks ago I was on a city bus in Bangkok sitting behind two middle-aged Thai women in colourful blouses and appropriately short hair who were animatedly discussing something that sounded very important. A more cynical and less linguistically-challenged man than I might have pointed out that the conversation was based on 'Did you see what happened on Thailand's Got Talent! last night?!' but I didn't understand so it wasn't and I spent a pleasant twenty minutes listening to them share neua nam tok recipes and swap solutions to the Middle East crisis.

Working once in England I used to get the same bus every day and the same two women would sit in the same two seats every morning. They'd cross their arms over bosoms made of babies and chip fat and tut about how every single morning the traffic got blocked up at exactly the same spot and the one by the window would nudge her friend and roll her eyes at how every single morning someone in a BMW or Audi would fail to respect the unwritten filter system at the junction of Granham's Road and the A1301 (one car from this queue, one car from that queue) and her friend would crane her neck to see and say 'No manners.' Every single morning.

Not being able to understand someone may not make them any cleverer, but it certainly doesn't make them any dumber.

What did the Romans ever do for us?!

2010-10-12T23:13:00.000-07:00

Mumbai, Maharashtra

The privatization of the British public transport system was a huge success and now every alternate third Sunday after Easter - without fail - Stagecoach sends a minibus to villages across England to see if anyone wants to go to work.

Mumbai's buses are run by BEST, and they're better. They're cheap and, given that they only give way to bigger vehicles, surprisingly fast but there is a slight problem with overcrowding. There may be lots of buses but there are LOTS of people and Mumbaikers are used to spending their commute in each others' armpits. Now BEST Workers' Union boss Sharad Rao has called for a maximum of ten people standing on city buses which would mean, by one journalist's estimation, an extra two and a half hours added to the average journey time. I was on a bus the morning this news hit the stands. Some of my fellow passengers were laughing so hard chai came out of their noses.

The bus dropped me at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Asia's busiest train station. CST is an imposing pile of Gothic, Hindu and Islamic domes, spires and buttresses and somewhere inside was my train to Rajasthan.

An Indian sleeper class train is like a cross between a 1960s kitchen and a troop ship. Chipboard partitions divide open compartments of six bunks upholstered in inoffessive blue PVC.

All the seats are full and many of the passengers have tickets. Of those who have tickets some have reservations. When you buy a ticket it might just be a 'journey' ticket, which will put you on the waiting list for the next train with an available berth. If you decide to travel with your 'journey' ticket, rather than a 'journey cum reservation' ticket you'll have to seat hop until the ticket collector catches up with you. If you're lucky he'll come up with a 'price' for finding you a seat. If you're unlucky you'll find yourself standing on a deserted platform searching through your guidebook for a station in a town where the signs are only written in Bengali.

Despite all the people a 2nd class sleeper carriage is actually quite organized once all the gesticulating has stopped. The first few minutes of the journey are spent squinting at seat numbers and pointing at tickets and telling people to move. There may at first seem to be too many people for the seats but after a bit of jostling and shouting and wondering whether it's appropriate for your face to be that close to an Indian housewife's bum while she manhandles her suitcase under the seat opposite everyone settles down and pulls out tiffin boxes of lunch and suddenly everything is very civilized. It's like throwing a handful of confetti in the air and watching land in six perfect piles.

The berths themselves are comfortable and, compared to British trains, which are designed for Legomen, quite roomy - even if you're my height - and there's a constant stream of people walking up and down the aisle making sure no one's hungry or thirsty. You wouldn't expect anyone to be hungry or thirsty at four in the morning but they'll wake you up just to check. They care that much. Tea, coffee, cold drinks, hot food, fruit, vegetables and plastic toys. Everything the discerning traveller should need on a 19-hour cross-country train ride.

The windows only get closed at night. Same goes for the doors, which is nice because a) there's a decent breeze flowing through the train and b) you can sit in the open doorways and watch as the train rolls across India. The windows have bars on them, which is less good if the train rolls into a lake but at least it stops any marauding band of dacoits from climbing in during the night and, I don't know, stealing your Lonely Planet or something.

Whatever book you happen to be deeply engrossed in there's always someone who fancies a chat on an Indian train. I had a lunch with a group of teenage girls on their way back from a chess tournament in Pune. I learned all about their hopes, dreams and aspirations, their plans for university and their vision of India's future. I am also now a world authority on Justin Bieber.

Chai Masala. What else?

2010-10-06T05:44:00.000-07:00

Aurangabad, Maharashtra

'INDIA' screams the guidebooks, 'IS A COUNTRY OF CONTRASTS!' Rich and poor, hot and cold, hilly and not so hilly. Some indians are short and some are fat, others are both and some are neither. Confusingly enough for new arrivals some taxis are old and some are more new. In one part of the country you can see tigers and in another, YOU CAN'T! What's going on there?! One minute you'll be waking along in the sunshine then suddenly it'll start raining and then after a while it'll stop raining and, no really, and the sun will come out again! What are you supposed to wear in a country like that?! Crazy!!

The guidebooks have to use that sort of hyperbole to outsell each other and while I'm sure India doesn't like being called crazy any more than Grandma Ethel did, in a country this size you're bound to find a few 'contrasts'. But it's important to remember that everything in India is done for a reason - even if it's just to give someone's nephew a job.

As I mentioned a couple of blogs ago the form you have to fill out when buying a train ticket requires not just the train name and number but your age and sex too. This is so you'll be in a carriage with your peers. Foreigners often find themselves sitting with other foreigners, families likewise. Women travelling alone will find their seat in the 'Ladies' carriage. All very sensible so far.

The 'name and address' section of the formmight appear surplus to requirements as might the 'telephone number' but the woman behind the window told me it was "In case of accident". Presumably some poor clerk has to go through all the forms informing next of kin.

'Mrs Stevenson, your son expired in a fireball when the Jan Shatabdi Express missed a signal and collided with the 2.30 from Mumbai. Indian Railways sincerely apologises for any inconvenience and we hope you'll be travelling with us again soon.'

My hotel room here in Aurangabad has a TV and hot shower - normally you don't say 'hot shower' when you're travelling in case you break the spell but having spent the morning watching Bollywood movies I'm feeling full of gay abandon. Indian daytime TV is very, very silly. Indian advertising is sillier.

French advertisers use nipples to sell everything from shower gel to worming tablets. India frowns on that sort of thing (in public anyway) and while Indian marketers will still try to convince you that the pretty girl on the Delhi Metro will fancy you if you use heartburn remedy A, or that the speccy kid with the bad hair wilted that poor girl's roses because he didn't use chewing gum B, any other tat you need to sell can be sold with the help of... Bollywood!

George Clooney's self-deprecating smile may have flogged some Nespresso machines but all of Clooney's wiles are nothing compared to just one of Amitabh Bachchan's raised eyebrows.

Shah Ruck Khan, multi-millionaire Bollywood aristicracy - a man who probably buys a new Ferrari every time the old on runs out of petrol - is currently doing an excellent job of convincing the country he's in love with the kind of nippy, easy to park, 'fun' city runabout English public schoolgirls get for their 17th birthday.

Then there's Salman Khan, presenter of India's version of Big Brother, BIGG BOSS! (sic), and all round Bollywood hardman. He may look like a cross between Stevens Seagal and a pro wrestler in a 'I'm not very clever but I can lift heavy things' kind of way, but my God he can sell toothpaste!

In the absence of a Bollywood 'face', pseudo science is just as effective here in India as it is back home.

My 'Proudly Indian' bottle of Oxyrich mineral water is based on a 'patented process' which enables them to add '300% more oxygen!' to the water. Oxygen is obviously important in water because without it you'd have a bottle hydrogen which probably wouldn't be very thirst-quenching.

Presumably the process means there's also 300% more hydrogen because if you didn't maintain the H2O balance you'd just have a big bottle of oxygen with a little water at the bottom, which probably wouldn't sell well.

So if my complete lack of scientific training is right and they've raised all the properties of the water by 300%, I'm quite impressed that they got such a lot of water in such a small bottle. And I do feel quite oxygenated. Though that might be because I'm breathing.

Hello Sir! Remember me?!

2010-10-01T04:47:00.000-07:00

Anjuna, Goa

I stepped off the bus to the sound of Goa; the gentle crash of surf on an incoming tide, the distant sound of trance music calling the faithful to evening drinks and...

"You want see my shop? Where you from?"
"England."
"Come and have a butchers, mate. Cheaper than ASDA!"

Some things in Goa haven't changed.

When Vasco da Gama arrived in Goa in the 16th century he thought it was "wicked", took all their pepper and killed some people. When the hippies arrived 450 years later they thought it was "far out" and started a chain-reaction that now sees 2.5 million people descend on Goa's beaches every year in search of the hedonistic freedom to party, smoke charras and pour money into the local economy.

Although modern Goa would be unrecognisible to the first overland travellers, the northern beaches of Baga, Calangute and Anjuna, and Palolem in the south still appear to cling to a business model very much along backpacker lines - locally-owned beach shacks and backpacker-style hostels surrounded by restaurants, internet cafes and bars advertising '3rd beer free!'.

There is a state-wide ban on smoking in restaurants in Goa though every table has an ashtray on it. Baksheesh is a one-off bribe to make that speeding ticket go away or help a local official renew a visa, but hafta is a fixed regular payment to local police or other officials to turn a blind eye to laws imposed by Delhi or the state capital, Panaji. The beach traders who spend their days walking up and down the sand selling jewellery and lungis (sarongs) pay a daily hafta of between 100 and 600 rupees depending on which policeman catches them at it and the restaurant owners pay to allow smoking and to get round the ban on music after 10pm.

It seems the more prohibitive the law, the more the police must rub their hands together in glee and police officers wishing to cash in pay large amounts of baksheesh to get themselves transferred to a station next to a beach where the rich pickings are.

The beach traders who, at best, are a nuisance are not Goans but come from Hampi around 300kms away in the state of Karnataka. They spend between 6 and 9 months in Goa during the 'season', wandering the beach trying to sell their wares to tourists who try to ignore them.

19-year-old Govita lives with her 22-year-old husband, Laxman and their 2-year-old son, Naqil in a 6 sq/metre shack with a blue tarpaulin roof which they rent for 1000 rupees ($22) a month from a local shop-keeper. The floor is smooth, hard mud (as long as the tarpaulin keeps the monsoon rains out) and they have a wood-burning fire for cooking and a petrol burning stove though Govinda only uses the stove for making chai (tea) as "petrol is expensive". This is her fourth season in Anjuna. Neither she nor her husband has ever been to school.

Govita laid a lungi out on the floor for me to sit down and she made chai. She poured it into stainless steel cups which she handed to Laxman and I and poured some into a plate for Naqil, adding some biscuits which he mashed up and smeared over his hands, face and a good portion of the floor.

Govita gets the goods she sells on credit from dealers in Hampi and every week someone comes up to collect the money. If they can't pay because they haven't sold enough the goods are taken back. Unlike many of the traders Govita has chosen not to have her name tattooed on the inside of her forearm to help tourists remember it.

But the traders are anything but helpless. When I mentioned I wanted to buy a gift for a friend she whipped out a tupperware box and after a second cup of chai I left several dollars under-budget. There is a lot of money to be made on the beach and their skill at parting tourists from their rupees (based in most cases on their tenacity) is what makes both the tourists fear them and the locals resent them. Despite Laxman saying there was no money to send home to his family at the end of the month there is a hefty mark-up on what they sell. They make a living, but it's a precarious one.

Lying on the beach the next day a young girl came over with her plastic box of necklaces and bangles. I asked her her name and where her family was; "They're in Hampi." she said "I'm here with my auntie and uncle." She pulled her sari up over her head to shield her eyes from the sun and gave me a broad smile.
"You want buy something?" she said.

Raika was 12 and this was her first season in Goa.

11 Standing

2010-09-26T01:52:00.000-07:00

Palolem Beach, Goa

'Queueing' in India is a very flexible concept. People queue here, quietly, patiently, but joining the queue can apparently be done anywhere, including at the front. The Reservations Office at Madgaon train station is a long, low-ceilinged and fan-less room with a dozen windows down one side behind which efficient bureaucracy lies in wait for unsuspecting backpackers like myself.

Poor Anjuna was looking a little punch-drunk after 40 years of charras and I'd decided to head down to Palolem Beach for a few days before catching the train north to Pune. I woke early, had some breakfast and caught the bus to Mapusa, then I caught the bus to Panaji, then I caught the bus to Margao and took a moto to the station to buy my ticket.

After 10 minutes wondering if sweat could make your fingers prune one of my fellow queue-ers reminded me I had to fill out a Reservations 'form' to book a ticket and offered to watch my backpack for me while I went to the Enquiries window to get one. From my new queue I watched the old queue shuffle forwards until my bag was sitting by itself in the middle of the Reservation Office floor.

The woman behind the Enquiries window handed me an A5 sheet of paper requesting the kind of personal information you'd usually want privacy settings for but like the seasoned pro I am I filled out the 'Name', 'Age', 'Sex', and 'Phone number (if any)' sections and tried to work out from the two large hand-painted tables on the wall what my 'Train Name', 'Train Number' and 'Departure Time' might be. The guy behind the Reservations window was bound to know so I joined the queue again.

After a further 10 minutes of watching my form being passed from hand to hand along the queue; train names and numbers being filled in only to be crossed out by the next piece of helpful advice I decided to head back to the Enquiries window to see if the form was now filled out correctly.

It was all the woman could do to fill out a fresh form in crayon for me before telling me to go to the Special window - which just about summed me up - and apart from a guy who engaged me in an enlightening theological discussion on the benefits of Islam the rest was simple. I handed over my form, paid my 264 rupees and on the 28th I'll be on the overnight train to Pune. Inshallah.

My last bus from Margao to Palolem filled up with people, then with school children. I gave up my seat to an elderly woman who had teleported into it and fallen asleep before I could say, "Would you like to sit..."

I spent the hour long journey standing in the aisle sandwiched between Year 10 and a man with something in his pocket. There was a sign at the front of the bus saying '11 Standing' but it didn't say which eleven.

Taxi to Goa!

2010-09-23T23:52:00.000-07:00

Panaji, Goa

I used the prepaid taxi stand inside Goa Aiport. The one outside would have been cheaper but you can't put a price on quality and my driver, Rama, was obviously concerned about getting me to my hotel in quick time. After we'd stopped by the side of National Highway 17 so he could have a wee we dove into the rush hour traffic overtaking everthing in our path though sensibly he chose only to pass cars on those corners where there was probably nothing coming the other way.

Like most Goans, and despite his name, Rama was a good Catholic and had a banner across the top of his windscreen to prove it. Whereas 20 years ago it might have said 'Rama and Shazza', it now said RATSINGER and there was a plastic shrine on the dashboard with enough LED lights to be a serious impairment to night vision.

The rain was coming down in sheets but the windscreen wipers gave us a clear view of the oncoming headlights every ten second or so and Rama was following the HIghway Code like he was married to the second cousin of a woman who had once met a guy who'd seen the man who wrote it on TV.

On Indian roads you give way to the larger vehicle and when an oncoming truck took priority on a narrow bridge Rama obliged, locked his wheels and we slid twenty metres towards a river. With a sheepish grin into the mirror Rama charged back into the traffic but he switched the shrine on; just to be on the safe side.

India - Arrival

2010-09-23T06:51:00.000-07:00

Heathrow Terminal 5
Ordered queuing on the polished stone floor of the Terminal 5 departure lounge; Indians for check-in, Nigerians for tax rebates, Australians for pints. Laden baggage trolleys waltz silently between cafes and bookshops, bureau de change and duty-free. The temperature hovers so delicately on the right side of comfortable that the breeze when someone walks past is a pleasent diversion from the inoffensive warmth you hadn't noticed was there.

Mumbai
The pilot had said it was 24 degrees on the ground but I think he was talking about the ground somewhere else. There doesn't seem to be any difference between the temperature inside my arm the and the air around it. As anyone will tell you India smells of jasmine, saffron and the enticing aroma from a wood-burning tandoor. Except it doesn't. Here outside the arrivals hall of Mumbai airport India smells of petrol.

On quieter streets, where women tend sheekh kebabs on skewers and the chai wallah pours steaming glasses of "Garam Chai! Garam Chai!" India is scented with cardomom and cumin. The mountains of Kashmir after a rain storm smell of fresh pine. In Goa the Arabian Sea hangs on the breeze to mix with red snapper being cooked in a rich xacuti sauce and at breakfast time the restaurants of Mysore send out clouds of chilli from spicy potato masala waiting to be wrapped in wafer-thin dosa.

But in the mid-afternoon heat of Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport the heaving buses, ancient taxis, clattering auto-rickshaws and wave after wave of scooters swim through a pall of diesel fumes which the sun bakes into the paan-stained pavement and underneath everything is the musty decay of a country succumbing to the heat and humidity of the monsoon season.

But that smell, that gasoline smell; it smells like...India!

How do Australians feel about backpacking?

2010-08-26T10:49:00.000-07:00

For every press release from the Australian Tourism Commission (ATC) promoting the benefits of backpacker tourism to Australian businesses, there are ten newspaper articles, invariably featuring a retired colonel in a Sydney suburb, complaining about "hoards of young idiots" getting pissed and looking at his petunias.

But if they're going to ask us to come, what responsibility do local people, businesses and governments have to encourage us to travel more sustainably?

Unlike the government of Botswana, which believes that hoards of unwashed travellers turning up and hanging out are of "little net benefit to the country", Australia and New Zealand realize that because we stay longer (an average 73 nights in Oz) and spend more (an average US$7,894 each while there - "almost double the spend of other international visitors" - ATC), it might actually be worth encouraging us to visit.

But Australia faces something of a dilemma. 599,000 twenty-somethings in search of a holiday descending on your suburban tranquility is likely to get a few backs up.

And if we might occasionally crack open a beer while the sun's up (or rising), the hostels' websites don't to much to discourage us. Many include at least one photo of a bikini-clad girl with a beer in one hand and an obscene gesture in the other.

Nomads World, one of the largest backpacker outfits out there will sell you their MAD loyalty card. Crazy! And New Zealand is currently trying to get backpackers from the Northern Hemisphere to not just stop in Australia but to 'Go all the way!"

Australia spends millions every year promoting itself as a backpacker destination and the backpackers obligingly turn up and inject billions into the Australian economy.

But when backpackers turn up in search of the fun promised by the industry's websites and start enjoying themselves, Australians write to their local papers and complain about them.

Sorry Australia. You can't have it both ways.

Give a man a fish...

2010-08-20T03:52:00.000-07:00

When I was 18 I called Oxfam to ask how I could volunteer on one of their projects.

"What can you do?" the woman on the phone asked. "Are you a doctor? An engineer?"
"Er, no. I'm doing my A levels."
"Well we need professionals. People with skills."
"Well is there something else I can do like...dig a well or build something?"
"We can give a local person a wage to do that. Call us back when you've finished your degree."

With which she put the phone down. And rightly so. What use was I to them? I had no skills, no training.

I couldn't teach anyone to 'fish', as it were.

Organisations like Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) and the Peace Corps have been sending young westerners off to the Third World (now known as the 'developing' world - whether it is or not) to build schools, teach English and work on conservation projects for decades.

But as more people have become interested in development issues and 'doing their bit' following events such as Live 8, Drop the Debt and Prince Harry spending his summer holidays in Lesotho a new breed of volunteering organisation has appeared to cater to this rapidly growing market and now you can teach English in Kenya, build homes in India and do 'community work' just about everywhere...for a fee.

But where VSO requires two years professional post-graduate experience in a necessary skill before it will give you a placement of minimum one year; Irish company i-to-i offers a 27-day tour of Vietnam finishing with two weeks 'helping build wells' for US$1860 (excl. flights) - no well-building experience necessary.

It's called voluntourism.

The focus of voluntourism companies' websites is usually more about the benefits to the volunteers' CVs than to the people they are heading out to help. The blurb on each 'package' tends to inform the prospective voluntourist about how they'll learn 'life-skills' and gets all excited about how they'll feel when they see the smiles on the orphans faces once they've finished painting their new toilet block. And then when the hard work's over they can hit the beach!

But does voluntourism really benefit the local community or is it just another tourism 'product'?

Do the companies that sell volunteering opportunities to young people tend to focus on those nations they know we want to go to such as Thailand and South Africa? How are the projects chosen and how are they audited?

What happens if a placement proves unpopular with their European market? Are links to that community or project severed?

Would local people benefit more from training and jobs rather than a foreign company making money out of supplying free labour?

I'm sure the people at i-to-i believe in what they're doing and have the highest of intentions with every volunteer they dispatch, but what i-to-i doesn't mention on its website is that in 2007 it was bought by First Choice Holidays which in turn is owned by Tui, Europe's largest holiday company.

www.ethicalvolunteering.org publishes an excellent guide to the questions we need to ask before signing up to a voluntourism program.

Should we visit Myanmar?

2010-08-14T03:29:00.000-07:00

The military government of Myanmar (Burma) has announced a general election to be held on 7th November this year.

In the same way that Iranian clerics select which candidates can run for president before the Iranian people get to vote for them, Myanmar's ruling junta can feel pretty confident their guy will win because they control the media, anyone with a criminal conviction is barred from running (which includes most pro-democracy campaigners) and 25% of parliamentary seats are reserved for the military anyway. One opposition party has already complained of intimidation.

Since 1996's 'Visit Myanmar Year' the government has been working hard to encourage tourism and Sunday papers regularly feature ads for cruises up the Irrawaddy with names like 'The Road to Mandalay'. Growing numbers of tourists are heading there to follow in George Orwell's footsteps.

There are numerous reports of forced labour being used to build hotels and other infrastructure and poured concrete and bathroom tiles being used to 'restore' the temple complex at Pagan (a practice UNESCO has called 'archaeological blitzkrieg') - none of which is mentioned in the 'What you need to know' section of one of the cruise operators' websites, preferring to inform tourists that there is a 'cultural' lecture in 'the Lounge' on sailing days and smoking is allowed on the top deck only.

Every visa applied for, every night spent in a government-controlled hotel and every cruise booked further lines the generals' already bulging pockets. Many believe tourists should boycott the country until there are free and fair elections.

Others, including Lonely Planet, which publishes a guide to the country, say it is possible to "keep the bulk of your money in private hands" by staying in locally-owned hotels and only buying from local people, and that the Burmese benefit from contact with the outside world.

The Lonely Planet's chapter on the pros and cons of visiting Myanmar is informative and, though clearly in the anti-boycott camp presents both sides of the argument. (It could be argued that they're in favour of you visiting because they want to sell you a guidebook but LP is 75% owned by the BBC, which is a non-profit organisation, except they're actually owned by BBCWorld which is the profit-making arm of the BBC. Even informing yourself is fraught with difficulties!)

Backpackers are visiting Myanmar and a percentage of what they spend does go to the military. At present that percentage is tiny compared with what package tourists leave behind and the tourism industry as a whole is dwarfed by revenue gained from companies interested in Myanmar's gas and oil, Total and Chevron among others, with political support from the Chinese seat at the United Nations.

But as can be seen in Australia, as our numbers grow, our collective impact grows and in Myanmar's case this means that backpackers will not only provide much needed contact with the outside world for the Burmese people but increasingly contribute economically to both privately-owned businesses AND the junta's oppression of its own people.

Read both sides of the argument at www.day12.com/debates

Making plans...

2010-08-09T10:01:00.000-07:00

What does the tourism industry think about backpacking?

2010-08-06T04:41:00.000-07:00

I've just found an interesting quote from Richard McLeod, founder of Australian tourism company Nomads World.

Nomads World is one of a new breed of Australian tourism companies who are well aware of how much money backpackers spend annually (See 'It's all about NUMBERS!' July 27, 2010).

It operates hostels and other services for backpackers in Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Vaunatu and sells travel products to backpackers (including flights, insurance, working holiday visas and even volunteering 'packages' - 2 weeks' conservation work in Melbourne, Perth or Cairns from $749!) through a network of travel agents in 40 countries.

But something McLeod said in an interview a few years ago highlights the disconnect between the 'image' we have of 'independent' travel and the tourism industry's desire to find the most efficient way of herding us together so they can part us from some of the US$4 billion we spend in Australia every year.

"We make young people believe they are intrepid adventurers blazing a virgin trail - in fact we provide everything on a plate.

"We have to be very careful how we market our products - it must be their decision and not seen as a package holiday - we make them think they are being independent."

So, who are we following on our journeys?

Marco Polo? Leonardo DiCaprio?

Or Richard McLeod?

Why I love travel.

2010-08-01T00:09:00.000-07:00

When I was 14 Dad took my brother and I out of school for a couple of months to go and visit family in New Zealand. Sitting on the beach on Christmas Day I realised that travel is a lot more fun than whatever it was you were supposed to be doing.

I should probably say something noble and deep about learning from other cultures, communicating across boundaries and broadening my mind.

And that's all part of it, of course, but being jostled by commuters in Mumbai's Victoria Station is also a lot more fun than trying to elbow your way onto London's Central Line every morning. Having lunch at a street stall in Cambodia wondering what exactly they stuff the frog with is far more interesting than standing in a sandwich shop wondering which of the fillings you haven't had too recently.

And sitting back in your chair as the sun sets over the city, watching the street outside the cafe fill with people as the heat relaxes its grip, the shops re-open and the evening's serious business of gossip and hand gestures begins, and wondering what to have for tea while the Muezzin calls the faithful to evening prayers is just... well, better.

Voila, mon passport!

2010-07-29T04:37:00.000-07:00

Our website www.day12.com features 38 phrasebooks full of useful phrases for our journeys such as 'Yes', 'Can I have another beer?' and 'Is that a ghost?!'

But I'm missing three languages for this trip, namely, Vietnamese, Laotian and Khmer. If you know any Vietnamese, Laotians or Cambodians who could help out, I'd love to hear from them because last year in Laos a woman in a street market offered me some delicious, barbequed, stuffed frog on a stick. But I didn't know the words for barbeque, or stick. Or frog.

Thank you (or as they say in French, 'Le singe est dans l'arbre!')

It's all about NUMBERS!

2010-07-27T07:05:00.000-07:00

Every year the Australian Tourism Commission (ATC) publishes its 'Snapshot' of backpacker activity in the country and the latest figures - for 2008 - make for interesting reading.

According to the ATC 599,000 backpackers visited Australia in 2008, up slightly on the year before.

The average spend of an international (rather than domestic) backpacker during their (on average) 73 nights in Australia was AUS$7,894 (US$7,131 or 4,616 quid!).

So, if you multiply one figure by the other you should get the total value of backpacking to the Australian economy in 2008, which was...er...AUS$4,412,746,000 - or just under US$4 BILLION!

That's a lot of Fosters!

For a mature economy like Australia's this doesn't present much of a problem but it's not simply a question of how much we spend. What happens when we start to multiply EVERYTHING we do by the number of us out on that well beaten track?

How many water bottles do we get through every day? Two? That's over a billion empty plastic water bottles a year in Australian landfill sites!

How many people buy a Kaori wood souvenir when they're in New Zealand? How many Kaori trees is that?

All along Goa's beaches each evening tens of thousands of backpackers share a joint while they sit and watch the sun go down. Where does all that grass come from? And where does the money go?

Weighing up the pros and cons of backpacking is a complicated business and I'll get to that in a later (and longer) blog, but sustainable backpacking - and More than footprints - is all about NUMBERS.

What happens when you multiply what YOU do, by the number of other backpackers who are carrying the same guidebook?

Read the full Australian Tourism Commission report.

In Praise of Nalgene Bottles!

2010-07-26T05:01:00.001-07:00

It's not often you'll find me enthusing about plastic bottles - it's one of the only things me and the de Rothschild family agrees on. But Nalgene bottles... little, plastic, recepticles of screw top usefulness...

I came a bit late to the Nalgene party. An Aussie friend recommended them to me last year and as usual when someone recommends some 'travel technology' to me I tend to go on a "But it's really expensive and Laurence of Arabia didn't have a bloody quick-dry Colombia shirt, did he?!" rant. And I'm usually right, too.

But Nalgene changed my washkit. Why carry two huge bottles of shampoo and shower gel down the track behind the bungalow to the little shower room next to the long-drop toilet, when you can pop a couple of these little beauties in your washbag and leave the big bottle at the bottom of your backpack for when the little ones need filling up?

They're also tough enough to be infinitely reuseable so it'll be years before they end up in a landfill next to the hundreds of millions of plastic water bottles we backpackers get through every year!

Over the years I've picked up some useful tips and found a few solutions to problems myself and if you have a look at The Perfect Kit! you'll download an Excel checklist of ideas that I'm using to put my own kit together for this trip and while I'm not about to tell you how many pairs of pants I'm packing, you might find some nice ideas for your next trip.

Please let me know if you've got any ideas I can add to it.

Back on the road again....

2010-07-22T10:03:00.000-07:00

Hi, I'm Martin. I'm £1783 lighter, the proud owner of a Round-the-World ticket and in 8 weeks I'm heading off on a 5-month, 40,075km journey through India, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, Fiji and the US in search of sustainable backpacking.

What's wrong with backpacking?! (you may well mumble through your banana pancakes)

Well, at a personal level not much; independent, budget travellers leave home with the intention of getting closer to local people and learning more about the local culture. And we tend to stay in locally-owned hostels rather than the kind of big package resorts which siphon local water supplies away from surrounding villages to fill their swimming pools.

Unfortunately, in recent years backpacking has grown way beyond its hippy origins when a few happy stoners jumped into a VW Combi and went in search of enlightenment, mind-altering drugs and someone with a compatible star sign.

In 2007 566,000 backpackers visited Australia and spent US$2.5 billion between them, which is neither 'independent' nor 'budget'.

For decades "Take only photographs, leave only footprints" has been sound advice for travellers wanting to have a minimal impact on the places they visit. But the world has changed. Backpacking has become an 'industry'. Most backpackers are following in the footsteps of Leonardo DiCaprio rather than Marco Polo, and our combined economic, social, cultural and environmental impact is enormous.

Our numbers mean we can't just tip-toe through those places we visit leaving behind nothing but good intentions and a few poorly pronounced Namaste's. We're all following the same guidebooks and spending our money in the same places.

If we're buying a souvenir made from a local tree we can be sure there are thousands of other backpackers about to reach the same page in their Lonely Planet. That's a lot of trees. And it's not just one backpacker sitting on the beach in Goa smoking a joint while watching the sun set. There are thousands of backpackers doing exactly the same thing while watching the same sun go down. What impact does that kind of demand have on the local community?

I'm heading out on this trip to see how our increasing numbers are changing the backpacker trail and to talk to local people and NGOs to find out if we can try to engage more with those places we visit, have a more positive impact on the places we love to travel to, and leave 'More than footprints?' behind us.

I'm going to be posting all my preparations and research in the run up to the trip and blogging the whole journey here and posting my photos on Flickr. There's a Facebook group if you fancy joining that and leaving a comment or giving me the benefit of your travel advice.

There's also lots more information on the project plus phrasebooks, travel writing and information on sustainable backpacking at the project's website Day12.com.

See you on the road.

Martin