Let's go to the movies

We've been dying to go to the cinema for weeks now. Before we came, I had grand plans that we'd visit a cinema in every town we went to and make a geek's log of every location.

It all started going wrong in Mumbai, when after a hot midday trek round Colaba, we could only find the new Bond movie at the Regal. It's an iconic cinema and all, marooned in the middle of one of those impossibly anarchic Mumbai roundabouts but Dan had seen the film, didn't think much of it, and my appreciation of Bond movies only stretches to the theme tunes. (Nancy Sinatra singing You Only Live Twice is my favourite, followed by Burly Chassis singing Goldfinger, should anyone be interested. Trivia mentioned in an effort to lighten the tone of often too-serious blog).

We went on another random mission south of the Colaba causeway on our last afternoon in India, to find an art deco movie palace that some guidebook had promised was unmissable. Guidebook lying again as we only found internet cafes and mobile phone shops. A visit to Mumbai and no Bollywood, not even a little Hollywood? Dereliction of duty, surely.

From then on we only managed one little cinema jaunt in Singapore - to see the Sony cartoon Open Season in a shiny multiplex off Orchard Road. Have little recollection of the movie itself - it was fun and silly and satisfied our craving. The audience - mostly under tens from the sounds of things - had a high old time and squealed and guffawed so much some of them had to break off from their mobile phone conversations. A good afternoon out - thanks to Nick and Caroline for being brilliant hosts and taking us poor movie starved creatures to get a well-needed fix.

We've made do with countless low grade American movies since then courtesy of hotel satelite tv and luxury tour bus DVDs all the way from Bangkok to Hanoi. It's been a blur of Vin Diesel and Kate Hudson, studied ditsy, schmaltz and no-brained action. We watched a totally senseless Xmas flick with Jamie Lee Curtis and Tim Allen at the end of a really long day in Hanoi just before Xmas Eve to get us in the festive spirit. Neither of us had the energy to reach for the off button so we watched the actors hurtle to career oblivion (surely, if there's any justice in the world?), our humbug rising exponentially.

Our most recent bus ride back from the island of Ko Tao to Bangkok provided us with a new viewing experience. From our luxury reclining seats in their prime location over the engine, we could barely hear the dialogue from the monitor half way down the aisle. This made viewing You, Me and Dupree somewhat problematic, but that may well have been a blessing. I slept through a similarly audio-challenged showing of The Pink Panther, waking up in time to witness only the end of Steve Martin's on screen humiliation.

This all sets the scene for yesterday when we ventured into Bangkok's shopping district and from the Skytrain, spotted the bright and shiny holy grail, at the top of the brand new mall-to-end-all-malls Central World Plaza - a cinema! Only 11.30 in the morning so by our reckoning, time for one, if not two films, shopping, food and back home to Banglamphu all in time for a goodbye Asia beer. Dan was practically dizzy with excitement, and once I'd been fed, I let myself succumb to the sweet idea of a movie in the middle of the day. First up was Eragon, one of those fantasy adventure movies where rash young heroes and skinny young heroines do battle with hammy old thesps and all the budget goes on dodgy SFX and sweeping helicopter shots of lush forest and mountainside. But it was blissful to sit in the high tech cineplex - only open for a day or two, and to curl up in our two seater sofa seat in the air-conditioned cool and watch a proper movie on a big screen.

It was so blissful, we did it all over again two hours later. This time, we tried a big rococo cinema, with swirling carpets and complicated plaster cornicing where they were showing A Night at the Museum. Another enjoyable yarn, particularly for someone who's spent a few evenings stalking round a supposedly empty natural history museum, and watched again from a big two-person sofa. Before both movies, we experienced some of the Thai people's unconditional devotion to their king when we were all expected to stand during a romantic montage of images illustrating his benevolent reign. Everyone does it, assuming reverent attitudes until the very last bars of the rousing Thai music. In this state of patriotic bliss, ear ringing from all that rousing noise and eyes misting over, you settle with your popcorn and coca cola, ready to believe anything that's shown before you.

It was a good day for the movies and we were so happy with our lot that we managed to stave off our daily 3 o'clock row until at least 7pm. When we got home, we watched Lords of War on HBO - food for thought but far too heavy for this blog, although I've made a mental note to treat all the gun runners I come across in future with extreme caution.

Happy Christmas!

Ko Tao - Xmas 2006

It's technically boxing day, but am still full of Xmas spirit and several beers, a strawberry daiquiri and a mojito. We've had a lovely, strange Christmas, exploring Ko Tao, trying to a find a beach for some sunbathing and eating lots of good, expensive food. We've given ourselves three days grace from the budget which we're undoubtedly tripling by the day. Our resort is practically the most expensive on the island. I feel like an interloper in all this supposed luxury and Dan is determined to prove it isn't value for money. We get free jasmine tea every afternoon which wins me over every day, despite the fact that there is no hot water. We've spent lots of time being peaceful, then ruining it by talking nonsense, looking at the sea, singing Fairy Tale of New York on Xmas eve on our balcony (Dan was a reluctant Shane Mcgowan, I was a very enthusiastic Kirsty Macoll)

The resort is called Sensi Paradise Resort, and paradise was hard won after the two-hour infernal journey to the island by jet cat. The gulf of Thailand is swimming in excess water at the moment after a late monsoon and the typhoon that hit the Phillipines recently. A funny little man warned us about the swell in Bangkok (i've really got to avoid these presagers of doom that make a beeline for us as we're about to embark on big journeys). We watched the dawn break from the pier on the mainland and saw the most beautiful, calm pink sea. Within minutes of setting off the wretched catamaran was bouncing around like a fairground ride. Worse than the Mexican hat, or even the waltzers, but with the same insistant fear of certain death. I thought I could cope.

They played a movie - the senstively chosen Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift - to distract us from our purgatory at sea and I tried to concentrate on the high speed races. Then the men on board started to vomit (it's always the men first, it really is) and whimper and moan. I can cope, I've been on more Brittany Ferry rides than Judith Chalmers and I have earned my sea legs in mamouth maritime drinking parties on several French exchanges - I was feeling almost cocky. Then I looked at Dan, who looked back with such terror and gripped my hand in the same way I grip his when I'm on a plane. We were a pitch and roll away from becoming a shark's breakfast. It took two hours more pitching, rolling, smashing waves, horizon corkscrewing in and out of focus and Dan joining in with the Mexican wave of sickness (that he so vividly describes) for us to reach the island shore. Paradise is hard won, I can tell you. And no amount of free jasmine tea in the afternoon or Christmas song-singing will take away the nagging thought that to get back to the mainland, and oh one day, home, we'll have to get on that devil's craft and give ourselves up to the gulf of Thailand once more.

But it is amazing what a daiquiri does for the soul and the bravery it endows. The more unlikely it seems that we'll get home (the daiquiri also responsible for outlandish thoughts) the more lovely home seems and everybody in it. Rang Mum yesterday and got a really strong rush for it and would have swapped the beach and the warm sea for a rainy Exeter Christmas in a second. Another daiquiri might sort that out. I do hope everyone's, healthy and happy, that family and friends don't miss us too much, that all the babies about to be born will be as beautiful and lovely as their mothers, that little brothers in the company of bearded men look after themselves and get home safely. Happy Christmas and Happy New Year!!

I shop therefore I am

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Ripping through our cash at an alarming rate. Most of our money goes on food, but a growing amount is being diverted to feed the shopping habit we're both developing. Even Dan, who spends most of his life espousing monk-like values of spartan living has been shopping up a storm. His prize purchase is foulest pair of underpants imaginable - chocolate brown airtex horrors that induce him to dance around singing the lambada whenever he wears them. He thinks they are hilarious. I think they could lead to some sort of common law divorce.

It's hard not to shop when you sleep yards from one of the busiest shopping districts in Ha Noi. I am trying not to succumb but every two metres there's a silk shop or an ethnic bag shop or a man selling Chinese stamps on the roadside, and all for such little money... Dan spent 15 whole dollars on shoes today and I had to catch up (having only spent 5 dollars so far in Ha Noi on a fetching pair of fake Nike sports sandals) and bought a beautiful pleated silk skirt. I'm kidding myself that as everything is significantly cheaper here, I can legitimately spend a fortune on things i don't need. I was so proud that i managed to reduce my packing to the minimun and now I'm ruining this lean backpacker lifestyle with all the extra fripperies I'm collecting on the way.

Hoi An, pictured above, was the ultimate destination for all-consuming tourists. We've talked to so many people who have loved this coastal merchant town and it's a little jewel, preserve under the auspices of UNESCO's benificent World Heritage Site umbrella, but I suspect the endless opportunities for consumption of one kind or another go some way to making these happy memories. We arrived at 6am one rainy morning, and by 4pm we'd ordered four shirts and a pair of sandals, eaten three meals and had more beer than we've had in weeks. The following day was much the same. Other tourists staggered through the streets under the weight of their purchases, pursued by touts and street vendors, dizzy with the thrill of all this attention. I might try and take some photos of the Hoi An purchases (maybe not the brown underpants). We liked it so much, we even made a plan to come back for Dan's 40th and get married here. But don't get too excited. We were a little tipsy from afternoon drinking and had just clinched a particularly good deal at the market and were a little drunk with the excitement.

Ha Noi looks like Paris to me. Everywhere we been to looks like somewhere I've been to before. Phnom Penh looked like a French resort on the Atlantic Coast. Mui Ne felt like Minorca. Mumbai nights felt like humid Roman nights and our hotel in Colaba was exactly like the one we stayed in near the Termini station.

I think this is a coping mechanism, so I feel comfortable wherever I am. Yes there are many many strange and wonderful differences to discover, but often its the similarities, or the not-quite similarities which strike you the most and unsettle you. Christmas trees in bright sunlight. BBC World and not BBC One - that sort of thing. Sweet lipton tea with milk rather than milky Earl Grey. You're bolstered by all your preconceptions to face the exotic and the weird ways of other places but are less prepared to see some things as they are at home with all the self-evaluation and sometimes criticism that this leads to. I've walked past a basket full of jumping, skinned frogs in a Phnom Penh market, and felt horrifed, yes, but with a sense of recognition or confirmation of my elaborate imaginings of foreign cultures. But still I can't help myself seeing familiar landscapes everywhere. We rode through some amazing Vietnamese deserts last week and we thought of spaghetti westerns and fake Mexican landscapes.

And then there's the holiday mentality I've developed, the languid, reflexive attitude of the drifting backpacker whose only concerns are how much do I have to pay and when can I eat. Or the habits I've rediscovered from childhood holidays like always having coca cola from the bottle with a straw, or reading a book as the defaul daily activity. My skin has that dry, tanned holiday quality and every night I marvel at the tan lines on my toes, on my wrist where my watch sits. My hair is turning yellow in the sun, I wash it less and less as it becomes strawlike, unruly.

I would like to say that I'm travelling with a healthy dose of the qualities that made great travellers and philosophers of men like Montaigne, for whom travel was an ongoing excercise in understanding not just the other worlds you travel through, but your own, seeing yourself in the faces of other peoples. This is not the case. I can't wait to read a copy of Heat magazine, am obsessed with finally getting a tan (not working, at all) and my biggest daily preoccupation (other than the primeval search for cheap food) is where are all the pretty clothes I can buy today. I've succumbed to that awful navel-gazing attutide of those who have little to do with their day but walk and look and consume. I'm having a wonderful time drifting in this way, don't get me wrong, and am more than happy to wander through the streets of Ha Noi in search of another shop/restaurant/museum with the lovely memory of Paris stalking me like a shadow. We'll see what Ha Noi has to offer and if in ten years time I'll wander through the streets of Paris and see this city instead.

Lush Cambodian countryside

This photo was taken driving back from the last of the temples we visited near Siem Reap. Our tuk-tuk driver Baby had just rescued a couple of distressed tourists who we found on the roadside. They'd hired electric bikes to visit the site and had run out of juice in the middle of nowhere. With the girl's bike strapped to the front of the tuk-tuk carriage and her man riding along beside us, grabbing hold of the tuk-tuk's armature, using its momentum to keep him going, we made our way back to town. The road was typically pot-holed, packed with impatient motor cyclists, van drivers, luxury car and coach dirvers, and the cops would have had Baby's hide had they caught him with the extra load. But we made it back to town without too much in the way of frayed nerves.

We missed the sunset, but we drove so slowly I got some great pictures of the paddy fields in late afternoon. We were making our way back to town just as the workers were making their way home for dinner. Vans passed us full of men and women in conical hats, grubby from a day in the fields. A crocodile of bicycles passed us, all piled with grasses.

People were lighting fires for the evening in front of their homes. Much of life is spent outdoors in these villages. Many houses are built on stilts, even the new frou-frou affairs of the newly rich, the ones with the finials and gaudy paint. Sleeping quarters are well above ground level to keep people dry when it rains, when the rivers burst their banks, and when the deltas flood. But cooking and sitting and working takes place in the open air, often by the roadside. It's easy for passing tourists in tuk-tuks to be nosy.

Cambodian epiphany

The journey from Bangkok to Siem Reap in Cambodia was always going to be interesting. Siem Reap is the nearest town to the Angkor temples, and if there's one thing you do in Cambodia, it's the Angkor temples. We bought a ticket from our Bangkok guesthouse for a bus to the Thai border with Cambodia then onward transport to Siem Reap. 12 hours on the road, and from all the reports we'd heard, it would be a bumpy road in terrible transport.

So, we boarded our luxury coach at 7.30am on Thursday feeling extremely clever. The sun was bright and everything felt exotic and worthwhile, even crawling through the busy morning streets. we pushed on through Thai countryside, taking advantage of those smooth Thai roads, until Aranyaprathet, the border town on the Thai side. Decanted into a pick-up truck (pick up trucks are a typical way of getting from the border to Siem Reap), we were then taken to a roadside cafe whilst others in our group got visas. Phew! no 6 hour pick-up journey for clever us! an hour of hanging around in the heat then back in the pick-up for the border crossing.

Having never crossed a land border on foot before, this was pretty entertaining. Feeling like evacuees, we followed our guides - a sequence of interchangeable busy men - to Thai immigration. Then came the weird litter-strewn hinterland between the two countries, where people live in eye-watering poverty just yards from huge duty free malls and casinos. On to Cambodian border control where there was much precise stamping of passports and photos, another session in front of a tiny spy cam, some nodding and thank yous. Then through to our first Cambodian bustop, where we watched our group re-assemble and the busy men marked us with and a sequence of coloured stickers to divide and subdivide us for the ongoing journey. Some hours later, Dan and I were selected for a special bus with a few others, under the aimiable watch of our man Luonn and we were driven across a wild-west landscape to the bus station in Poipet, the Cambodian border town. There, our chariot awaited, our transport for the 150km journey to Siem Reap, a tiny blue bus, dusty, rickety and from the seventies if not before; air-conditioned, just.

It was a bone-shaking journey but I enjoyed it more than any of the bus journeys I've taken before. The road to Siem Reap is shocking - a dirt track, littered with huge potholes, that you negotiate at not much more than 20 miles an hour. The vehicles that thump along everyday - the rubbish buses dwarfed by the huge 4x4s that ply the road - kick up a thick red dust that gets under your skin, under your tongue, in your luggage. The rumour is the airlines that run planes into Siem Reap have paid the local authorities not to improve this road to encourage tourists to visit by plane. It does seem particularly peverse when you finally enter Siem Reap and see lot upon lot of luxury hotel, glitzy behemoths of prosperity, and many many more under construction, that the investment should not have reached the road to the border. But air tourists miss the opportunity to cut through the villages, the paddy fields, to see the families that line the roadside, and to stop at the road-side cafes and run the gauntlet of the many, many children that swarm around the tourist buses asking for coins from England. They also miss Luonn, the super guide with an irrepresible line in monkey jokes and a determination to practice his English on all foreign tourists, be they English themselves or indeed, Swedish or German.

You do a lot of this journey after dark. Some spurious sources have suggested that the boys who run the buses eke out the journey to ensure you arrive shattered and in the dark in Siem Reap. You'll be much more likely to take a room in their best friend's guesthouse this way, even though there is a high probability you'll be sleeping with bugs and there's no hot water. But an evening journey affords you a glimpse of the local people cooking dinner, and kicking back in the evening as you creep past. You get a beautiful sunset on the way. And for those used to Western skies, lurid and orange with light pollution, it gives you the chance to see more stars than you could imagine in an inky black expanse that is terrifying when the sun disappears.

As we bumped through the night, we saw a storm to our east, raging behind a big plume of cloud, concentrating its force in this one area. The lightning lit the sky with amazing violence and great forks hit the earth every few seconds, but the full might of the storm was hidden from us by that plume of cloud. We heard no thunder at all. We followed this strange storm for several hours with the plume of cloud slowly dissipating, stretching out to form a dragon-shape with the yellow full moon as an eye, and the storm still raging in its tail.

We arrived in Siem Reap at eleven. Sure enough, Luonn did have a friend with a guesthouse, conveniently situated in a small industrial estate to the north of the town. There were no bed bugs, so we had to sleep on our own, and no hot water either. But, this didn't seem to matter as it was a welcoming place and you could drink cheap beer and practice English and Cambodian for ever with your new friends. And this is where we met Baby, our Tuk-Tuk driver, who took us round the temples over the next few days.

It was a long, day, but a good day. Cambodia is a surprsing place - beautiful and incredibly sad. The violence of its past, and it's a very recent past, and the obvious repercussions - the ongoing poverty, the weird demographics, land mine victims all over the place - is like a huge gash running through everything, through so much kindness, and happiness and so much natural beauty. It's a like a big ugly monster in the corner, you want to ask everyone about it, but you don't want to break the spell. We're going to the Foreigh Correspondants Club bar now to mull it all over.

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Mumbai

Back to the city. We're prepared for a bit of a bumpy ride after the slow pace of Kerala. Things get off to an edgy start when two fellow air passengers warn us to take care in the city and to on no account get on the public transport system. Great, a taxi it is! There's been lots of disturbance in the city and elsewhere in the last few days with rioting from some parts of the region's Dalit populations (dalit is the more pc term for untouchable) in the slum areas. Something to do with the defacement of a statue by supporters of one political faction or another. difficult to work out what exactly has happened and the BBC is keeping quiet about it. Two train carriages were incinerated by an angry mob and a line of women from one of the slums brought one of the expressways to a standstill. The morning paper reports that they were still wearing their nightclothes, as if this is more shocking than the burning down of railway property, with railway customers presumably not long gone from the premises.

Out hotel is in Colaba, more or less the tip of Mumbai and the other side of town from the airport. Naturally, this scares the living daylights out of me and i scour the crowd at Mumbai airport for signs of terror and confusion. No signs of either but then maybe they all live north of Mumbai. At the pre-paid taxi rank I scrutinise the man at the desk for signs that our trip south of the airport might be dangerous. He barely looks at us, bored to the point of misanthropy, but he charges us 750 rupees (we'd expected 350) - the extra 400 must be danger money for the taxi driver. Why didn't we stay another night in sleepy, fluffy tourist friendly Kerala and cut out the big, bad city? The man who walks us to the taxi seems a bit nervy, walks us up to a 4x4 taxi complete with bull bars or whatever they are. is it that bad in downtown mumbai? But we walk past to a cab with blackened back windows and get in ready for the ordeal.

Of course, we sail through Mumbai with not a rioter or a protesting lady in her nightdress in sight. And I'm not disappointed, oh no,not at all. Just embarrassed all over again by my lily-livered constitution. A few minor squabbles with the cab driver who tries to make us pay all over again for the cab, then gets totally lost, can't find the hotel at all, not even the main road in Colaba, and then scrapes the cab's undercarriage on the curb when he eventually does make it to Bentley's Hotel.