Entering China

I'm just about to step on board my flight from Macau to Guilin, mainland China. My understanding is that the Great Firewall of China doesn't allow access to Blogger. I probably won't be able to update this blog.

Edit: Scratch that. I'm in Guilin now and everything seems to work fine.

Hong Kong & Macau

I don't think I've ever had a greater culture shock than flying from semi-rural Cambodia to Hong Kong. I'm not sure culture shock is the right word, more "wealth shock". Cambodia is an extremely poor country - ruined by the Indochina War and years of endemic corruption - and Hong Kong is one of the richest places on the planet. What stands out to me is the efficiency of the place. Everything works, is on time, and is sparkling clean. There's very little crime. It's sort of like New York but minus the sense of fun.

I only had two nights in Hong Kong. The hostels there are terrible so I opted for a hotel instead, and not knowing anyone there, there's only so much flying solo you can do. On the Sunday afternoon I went to a nearby bar called Laguna. All the Filipino maids in Hong Kong (there are a lot) get Sunday off and legend has it some of them hit clubs and are keen to talk to Western guys, presumably because they would be good options for husbands. However what I found when I went to Laguna was an entire bar full of hookers. I guess when a place has a reputation like that it's not going to be long before hookers move in and take over. I did enjoy the other nightlife in the area though. I'm reserving judgement on Hong Kong - the hugeness of the city and the diversity of people make it a tough place to come to grips with.

On Monday I caught the TurboJet hydrofoil to Macau, accidentally buying a business class ticket for the second time this trip (the first was my Bangkok - Koh Samui flight). You're going to be hearing a lot more about Macau in the coming decades. Just like Hong Kong, it's a small region of China formerly owned by a European colonial power. In this case it's Portugal, not Britain, and the land was given to them by the Chinese (as reward for stamping out piracy in the region) as opposed to conquered (Hong Kong having been annexed by the British during the Opium Wars). Macau is now (also like Hong Kong) a Special Administrative Region of China, which means it makes its own decisions about everything except national defence and foreign policy. From a tourist point of view, it's a separate country.

Gambling is legal here and not in neighbouring Hong Kong or mainland China. As a result, this place is developing into the Las Vegas of the East. There are virtual carbon copies of big Vegas casinos - The Venetian, MGM Grand and Wynn so far - and even Vegas entertainment institutions like Cirque du Soleil are starting to move in. There's also a couple of original casinos such as the Grand Lisboa, a huge golden monstrosity towering above the city. I can't decide whether I like or hate the look of it.

What I don't get is that there are virtually no bars or pubs. This may reflect different priorities on the part of the clientele - the mainland Chinese are not big drinkers and a lot of them simply want to gamble.

I played poker at the Wynn last night - $HKD 25/50 NL, which is slightly less than $A 5/10 NL. I lost about $A 350. The game wasn't particularly good - there were a couple of moderately poor players on the table, but it's harder to exploit them 9 handed and I had a very good and aggressive Swede to my left. If it had been a table online I'd have left and sat elsewhere. Also of note is that none of the players at the table, as far as I could tell, were from anywhere in China (HK and Macau included). I guess this is all to be expected on a Monday night. There were some pretty big games going on for a Monday - $HKD 200/400, which is close to $A 35/70 NL. I would probably be willing to sit those games as I doubt the quality of play is any better, but if I withdraw enough money to play those big games, then I'm going to have to carry it around for the next month, which would be pretty bad.

Tonight I'm going to go play poker again, but not until a bit later. Liverpool v Arsenal is on at 3am here - a big game which is virtually must-win for Liverpool if they want to retain any serious hope of winning the Premier League. I'm going to find out where I can watch that (I hope the only answer isn't "in my hotel room") and then go and play poker until just before it starts. I might play in Grand Lisboa this time and see what that's like.

Angkor What?

That terrible pun doesn't originate with me; actually it's the name of the first ever pub in Siem Reap. It's still there, scribbled notes from travellers all over its walls.

I met a girl called Jacquie the first night there and we agreed to get up before dawn the next day so we could get to the temples and watch the sun rise over Angkor Wat. I naively imagined that doing this would avoid the crowds, but I don't think this would be the case even normally and certainly not during Khmer New Year. After getting up at 5am and getting a tuktuk there, we discovered we were in the company of around 100-200 people. I took a bunch of photos but due to the low light it was hard to get good ones. Also I don't think the scale of the place really came through. What you should bear in mind looking at these photos is that the main towers are a fair distance back from the front of the building.




Aside from the iconic Angkor Wat, there was one other really impressive temple called Angkor Thom. It's covered with huge numbers of towers bearing slightly different stone faces on each of their four sides. From what I could glean from the Japanese-authored information boards (the Japanese have a team there doing the reconstruction work) nobody exactly knows why they're there, but the prevailing theory is that having recently been shocked by an invasion from a neighbouring people, the Khmer built a temple that called upon the power of all four religions which they knew about. Pascal's Wager writ large.




After Angkor Thom, the rest was diminishing returns, featuring progressively less impressive temples. By 10:30am (which to be fair was 5 and a half hours after we left the hostel) Jacquie and I had both had enough and we left. I didn't ever head back. I'm glad I saw them but I didn't need more time. I didn't do anything else major in Siem Reap. I wandered the town looking at the local markets and so forth, I entered a quiz night with a couple from the hotel - we came 3rd out of 6 or 7 teams which was a pretty good effort considering we only had three - other teams all had five or more. One day I went out bike riding with a Californian girl going by the very American name of "Betsy". We didn't make it far as it was viciously hot that day, 36 degrees, humid, and mostly clear skies with a very hot sun belting down. Luckily the hostel featured not only a pool, but $1 pints of cold beer. Good times.

Bienvenue au Siem Reap

The trouble in Bangkok seems to be calming down a bit, but in any case I made it to Siem Reap without a hitch. Maybe fittingly, the name literally means "Siam (i.e. Thailand) defeated". First impressions are that the signs of French colonisation are everywhere. For instance, they drive on the right here, as opposed to on the left in Thailand, although they actually simply drive on both sides in both countries. A lot of the signs here are labeled in Cambodian first, then French, then English. There seemed to be quite a few French visitors on the plane too. Even so, people seem to know a lot more English here than anywhere I visited in Thailand. General impressions of the city are that it isn't a city, just a town that has had money shoveled on it as if by helicopter. On the outskirts, tacky luxury hotels built with a faux-temple architecture sit almost comically side by side with fields containing grazing water buffalo. Nothing in town is over three stories high. Officially the Cambodian currency is the riel, but in practice it's the US dollar. I may go and make a cigarette later out of this 500 riel bill I was given. I'm unlikely to be able to do anything else with it, given that I'm told that 1000 riel is around 25 US cents.

The hostel looks great and there seems to be quite a bit to do over and above seeing Angkor Wat. I may end up staying here longer than I had intended. Anyway, anti-malaria medication: check. Letting my loved ones know I wasn't shot by rampaging redshirts: check. Beer: check. Time to hit the pool (yes, the hostel has a pool).

Koh Samui

Man, where to start? I'll skip the neverending plane rides and get straight to Bangkok, where we spent one night before heading down to Samui. Seeing as how I've been traveling with a group of complete degenerates, it should be no surprise that our night in Bangkok was spent on a tour of the red light districts. They were pretty impressive. That's all I have to say about that. Bangkok itself was crazy, like a big city taken, mixed around and beaten with a hammer a bit, and then scattered with giant billboards. The traffic was both slow and frightening, with most road rules considered only guidelines. I think stopping at red lights was the only rule I didn't see violated, and that's because even by Thai standards running a red would be suicide.

Next day we headed out to Koh Samui, an island just off the coast of the southern province of Surat Thani. "Samui" is, by coincidence, the Japanese word for "cold" and I can't help making the association every time I see the name, but it's anything but cold here - it's stinking hot and humid. Samui is a pretty touristy place but not in the league of say Phuket. The main backpacker and tourist hangout is Chaweng Beach, but we were headed to Lamai Beach, a relatively quieter area of the island. Especially now it's low season, a lot of the people here either live here or are staying here long term. Even so, tourism is the only game in town, the rest of the population being made up almost entirely of workers in that industry (sex workers included).

The first night there, Liverpool were playing Chelsea in the Champions League, an important clash. I proceeded to get riotously drunk before the game and even drunker as Liverpool lost 3-1 at home. Somewhere in there I used an ATM, which turned out to be the first ATM I've ever used where you get the cash first, then your card back. I only figured this out the next day when I opened my wallet and my credit card wasn't there. I'll spare you the details of how I got it back, suffice it to say it took a few days and a fair bit of hassle.

I woke up with a headache next day, which cleared in time for me to consider what I was doing for the Full Moon Party on adjacent Koh Phangan (Pa-Nyan) that night. I had booked accommodation on the island, but I discovered there are speedboat ferries running all night in between the two islands. I had to get back early the next day to try and sort out my credit card woes, so I decided that would be a good option. I was booked for the 8pm boat and at about 6 talked to the owner of a local Aussie expat bar called Outback. When I mentioned that I was going on the speedboat he said I was crazy, that one of them had buried the bow and drowned everyone on board a couple years back (because they were over capacity and the driver was pissed) and that there was a danger stormy weather would come up, building a stormy sea. I had actually heard the capsize story before but was told that they were more regulated these days. Anyway, he concluded with "it's up to you mate, but you wouldn't get me on one of those fucken things". This was exactly the sort of thing I'd promised my Mum I wouldn't do (sorry Mum!) but I decided to go down and check the operator out before making a decision. I figured if it looked dodgy, I wouldn't get on and would just get a lift back to Lamai. When I got to the port though, the boat looked dependable, they were running them well under capacity, there were lifejackets on board and the sea didn't look too bad. I decided I'd chance the 20-minute trip. As it turned out the trips there and back were uneventful. I only stayed until 12:30 for a combination of reasons (needed to sort out cc next day, was tired, wind was starting to come up) but had a great time. The beach party attracts around 10,000 people and is like an old school outdoor rave, with the bars along the beach playing a support role for people who are tired of dancing and watching fire-twirlers. It absolutely poured for probably 45 minutes but nobody cared. Great atmosphere and I'd like to go back again at a time when I'm not worried about lost credit cards and what my chances are of dying at the bottom of the tepid South China Sea.

I also discovered why I'd got so drunk the previous night: I had only 5 Chang beers at the party, which shouldn't do a lot to me even at the advertised 6.4%, but I got fairly drunk. A word to locals the next day confirmed what I suspected: The labeled 6.4% is conservative to the point of being a lie. Batches actually range between that and as high as 12%. I suspect the ones I had were close to the 10% mark. The locals here call what happens after a night on Chang a "Changover". I've been treating the stuff with more respect for the rest of my trip.

So back on Samui and... man, the party was Thursday, it's now Monday, what the hell did I do all that time? I remember the beach. And watching football. And drinking beer. This place does that to you, the oppressiveness of the air lends itself to lying back, sipping beers, and generally not doing or thinking much. While I haven't done anything I also haven't been bored. It's relaxing I guess, in a strange way because the nightlife is still pretty loud.

Quite a bit of our drinking has been at the "beer bars", which make up the majority of the watering holes here. For the uninitiated, "beer bars", as opposed to just "bars", are typically small, unenclosed bars staffed mostly by sex workers who solicit the customers as well as serving the drinks. If you want to take one home, you pay a "bar fine" which goes to the establishment (typically ~$A25), plus a fee to the girl herself, which is privately negotiated - typical is ~$A60. If you're not interested, you can just sit and drink. Usually the bar girls will want to play two-player games with you; this enables them to flirt with you in a non-verbal way, necessary given the poor English skills of most of them. I've been enjoying providing them with better Connect 4 competition than they get from their typical drunk and slack-jawed customers; the other day I won something like 10 games in a row and the girl looked ready to kill me.

I had an interesting chat with Wardy last night. We went to a bar owned by a friend of his who lives here. The bar had one girl serving drinks, who I don't think was a sex worker (you can tell by the clothing) and no bar girls. Puzzled, I asked Wardy what the deal was. Why were there no girls and how could the bar get any customers without them?

The first thing was that the bar didn't get any customers. The owner didn't care. It cost him $A 15,000 to buy the place and not much to run it. In return he gets to claim he is "working" in Thailand, thus obtaining a residency visa. Quite a few of the bars here are unprofitable, but are being run by rich farang (foreigner, same connotations as Japanese gaijin) who don't care.

The other thing was the girls. Why weren't there any? Wardy explained that the turnover of bar girls is really high. A surprisingly high number of them achieve their aim of getting taken out of the country by some rich foreigner. Rural Thai women regard marriage a bit the same as we regard jobs: You have to have one, or you're a loser in life. If you happen to have one you really enjoy, that's great, but it's a bonus. That seems tragic to us in the West, but it's the way marriage works in probably the majority of the world, where arranged marriages and so forth are still the norm. Anyway, the beer bars owned by Thais are restocked with girls they recruit from their home towns back in the provinces; farang owners don't have any contacts and find it hard to get new girls.

Some bar girls don't want to get married though. Some just want to make money. Wardy told me about a girl he talked to who had been a bar girl for one and a half years and had made ~$A400,000. I didn't see how this was possible, but he explained that she had something like ten "boyfriends" - i.e. suckers - living overseas and sending her money. Typically they will have some sob story like needing to provide for their child, who may or may not actually exist. Each "boyfriend" thinks he is the only one and will send amounts like $A1,000 per month, which as you can imagine really adds up when you have ten of them. $A400,000 is an enormous amount of money here - enough to buy an exceptionally good house plus mean you never have to work again. I think it's amusing that bar girls, who many would say are being exploited, frequently end up turning the tables and viciously exploiting naive Western guys.

Anyway enough about the economics of that industry I guess; I found it interesting though.

Amusing story time: Last night I headed up to my hotel briefly in the middle of being out drinking. I walked into my room, shut the door, and sat in the middle of the edge of the bed, which promptly snapped in half. When I looked under the bed, the central support struts hadn't been put up properly; typical of this country, where half-assed is always good enough. That left the fibreboard side to take all the strain, something it had no hope of doing. There was a list of charges on the wall for broken items: "Bed" was listed at 7,500 baht (~$A 300). At this point I was fuming. It was their own fault the bed was broken, but I knew I couldn't explain that to them without a Thai interpreter. They would demand I pay and if I refused, the police might get involved, and would always side with the Thais against the farang. I walked back down to Wardy to see if he knew anyone who spoke Thai, and after I explained the situation, this was our conversation:

Wardy: So you haven't paid a deposit or anything?
Me: No, I just paid for the room, in cash.
Wardy: Oh dude, that's easy fixed then. Just get up at like 7am, leave the keys in the room, and move to a new hotel across town. Don't pay. It's just extortion anyway, the bed doesn't cost them that much and it's their own responsibility if it breaks under normal use. I mean you weren't even shagging on it.
Me: What if the cops get involved?
Wardy: How are they going to find you? You're here one more night, they have no idea where you are.
Me: They have my passport number and home address in Australia.
Wardy: Pfft, yeah, so they're what, going to call the Australian Embassy and tell them some bloke broke their bed?
Me: Good point.

So it was that at 7am I woke up, warily peeked at the front desk to see if anyone was there to witness my escape, then wandered about half a km across town to a new, more upmarket hotel. I've never been a fugitive before and I'm kind of enjoying it.

It's Songkran yesterday and today - the New Year festival. Everyone wandering the streets gets sprayed with water by revellers. There's no escaping it. I joined in the fun yesterday, but today I don't want wet clothes because I have to fly tomorrow and it's a pain. So I'm hiding out in my hotel, which is why I had time to write this giant novel of a post. The water-throwing ends after dark, so I should be able to venture out soon. Tomorrow I am, I hope, flying to Siem Reap, Cambodia, via Bangkok. I say "I hope" because as you've probably seen, Bangkok is in flames at the moment, with anti-government riots. The latest I've heard is that the military will be mobilised to secure the airport, which sounds good to me. Hopefully my flights will go off without a hitch. I'm a bit sick of this place - the seediness was intriguing at first but it's starting to grate. I need to get back to backpacker culture, and the hostel in Siem Reap looks great so I'm looking forward to it!

Perth

I decided to create a blog, not sure if I'll keep updating it all trip. I'm currently at Wardy's house with nothing to do until our flight tonight at 9:30, so I figured I'd post about my time in Perth.

On the Wednesday I essentially did nothing other than head down to the Chinese consulate and put in my visa application, then later watch Australia v Uzbekistan. I did check whether Wikitravel had any suggestions about what to do in Perth. In the "Do" section, the first four suggestions were "Take a walk", "Swim", "Cycle" and "Catch a movie". As you may have noticed none of these things actually require being in Perth. That was my first hint that there isn't a whole lot to do in this town.

On Thursday, after wasting most of the day, I met up with Glenn and Cat (uni friends) in the city for a few beers, then later dinner and more drinking with Lynsey and her boyfriend. On the way home, on a footbridge thing over the railway tracks, this girl came sprinting past me followed by two guys. I stared for a sec, then started chasing after them thinking the girl was maybe in trouble. Just as I started to move though, another girl came running past and said "It's OK, nothing major". Since it was a girl I chose to believe her and slowed back to a walk. Next minute all three of the chasers come back up the stairs at the end carrying the girl they were chasing, who is now apparently unconscious. I stop and stare again and as they walk past one of them yells out "It's OK mate, we're police". I then notice he has a walkie-talkie strapped to his belt which is making police-type noises, so I shrugged and moved on.

Friday I picked up my shiny China visa and moved to a new hostel a couple of streets away (I wasn't able to get all 5 nights in one hostel). Then I caught up with Kyla for lunch and chatted to her about a few things including what exactly had happened with her brain surgery - a pretty amazing story which I guess I shouldn't repeat here! After getting back to my new hostel I wandered round for a while frowning because it didn't look like there was anything happening despite it being Friday night. How wrong I was. Eventually a group of mostly British backpackers moved from their hidden location out behind the kitchen into the courtyard. After that it was on. It was one of their birthdays and they were going completely mental, playing a drinking game which they called Ring Of Fire and which I knew as Kings. I joined in for a while, but they seemed to have a pretty serious headstart on me. One of them, a Welsh guy, was so drunk that when the hostel closed the courtyard and we moved on to the next pub, he only made it as far as a nearby gutter, whereupon the cops descended on him and he was taken to hospital with alcohol poisoning. Apparently later one of the others was mugged by local Aborigines, but was so drunk that he didn't remember it happening the next day. I also witnessed a guy take on bouncers in a fight and win, then managed to hook up with an Irish backpacker in the first pub we went to, thus completing the full range of authentic Northbridge experiences.

Saturday I vegged out for most of the day again and then met Glenn and Cat again for a trip down to the Little Creatures brewery/pub down at Fremantle. I'd expected a winery-restaurant type atmosphere but it was more raucous, just basically a factory/warehouse type place into which they had piled a kitchen and an enormous number of tables. It was packed out and they were making an absolute killing. I enjoyed the atmosphere of the place and the food was good too.

Sunday I went on a wine tour of the Swan Valley. Not much to say, pretty nice and diverse group of people. Pretty terrible wine across the board, but good fun all the same. That night I had intended to watch the Premier League but was so tired that I crashed out at around 10pm.

Monday morning I woke up, checked out and did some laundry, then caught public transport down to Scarborough where Wardy picked me up and now here I am. The beach looked great but given I'm going to Thailand I think I'll get plenty of beach time over the next few weeks. It's just past 4pm now and the flight is at 9:30, so not much time to kill before we head to the airport, have dinner, and check in.