Australia: alien no more!

Arriving in Melbourne was easy. So beautifully easy. No signs to translate, no screaming announcements in foreign languages, no Benny Hill runarounds looking for lost bags when they've just been put on a different carousel to the rest of the flight just because. It was just so easy. The bus had wifi, the tram had clear maps, and the hardest thing to comprehend was how on earth to respond to "how ya goin' mate"! I could navigate, pavements had people on them rather than motorbikes, and before I knew it I was reunited with my beautiful and generous Aussie friends from ENP, Beca and Laura! It was all just so easy.

I'm not weird. That's contentious, but let me explain. In Asia I'm easy to pick out as a foreigner. I wanted nothing more than be seen as a walking dollar sign and then open my mouth and shock people by being able to speak their language! Hopefully one day I will do that, but given my Khmer is limited to food and my Thai is mostly apologising for being lost, I was just the walking dollar sign. My skin, my hair, my assumptions - everything about me is a neon sign of "different" when I'm in SE Asia. I had to learn the culture from the outside in, go to museums and temples and people watch without them noticing I was there because as soon as an alien comes in behaviours unconsciously change. In Australia you could put me in a line up and there's no way of knowing if I am local or not. Blending in means I can absorb the culture because my mere presence is not changing anyone's behaviour, it's not being talked about, and it's not being avoided. I even blended in well enough to get heckled by a homeless man for being a shit lazy student who couldn't be bothered with lectures and was wasting the state's money. Swings and all. 

As much as it's lovely to blend in, I am still me which means still a bit of a plank. It did take me a week to figure out that CBD meant central business district, and to not cross the street as soon as I heard the bleeps going from any set of traffic lights within a 50m radius, but compared to everywhere else I've been so far, I'm not a physical alien anymore. 

My favourite thing about Melbourne is that nearly everyone's got the time of day. People are nice, people will help, people run after you when you drop a 20 on the ground - I know you get those people in every city, but it's just SO prevalent in Melbourne it's incredible. Fitzroy is gorgeous and I absolutely fell in love with all the street art which coats the suburb six layers thick, the Melbourne museum which unashamedly takes on really difficult topics, and the sheer number of quirky little restaurants and bars all over the place. Australia is expensive compared to the UK for sure, but with that comes some amazing deals: $2 pintxos at Naked for Satan every lunchtime, $4 pizza at Bambinos, free tasters on every street corner - YES BUDDY! 

Australia is also quite strange though. Booze isn't sold in supermarkets, you have to go to special liquor shops for that. Timtams are a religion, and everyone is addicted to camping. Makes sense, sure, but still. Community wifi is a thing, and public squares will just have free open connections for anyone to use! Absolute highlight of strangeness though has to be walking through town and hearing one of my favourite bands playing a free gig in the square and just eating cold cheesy pasta in front of The Cat Empire! Just too much, too much. 

Melbourne is definitely a very happy place for me! 

Ground rush 2.0

Ground rush 2.0 hit in Bali and it hit hard. I was between a rock and a hard place: excited to get to Australia and see my Aussie friends from ENP, learn to dive, and visit Uluru, but also terrified that I was halfway through my trip and I wasn't actually experiencing it. Being so focused on figuring out the immediate (what am I eating, where am I sleeping, where is my bus going to, how can I get to where I need to be, etc) had left me completely numb to what was coming up or what I was doing at the time. I was absolutely buzzing for diving, of course! But first I had to figure out how the Greyhound busses worked, how am I getting to Uluru, where should I be staying in Cairns, etc. It's all pretty peesy if you have unlimited time because you can just see what comes your way, but having a schedule made it pretty imperative to be on top of it all. It's hard to take the advice to "live in the moment" - as much as I truly wanted to, if I did that then I'd have nowhere to sleep and no way to get where I needed to be.  I think that's another thing of travelling alone. If you have someone to share he organisation then it's much easier to keep an eye on the big picture whereas all I'm seeing is one puzzle piece to the next to the next. After a couple of days on the beach I figured that I needed to compromise: stop trying to plan ahead for the things that can't be planned yet, and figure out what can be and leave it at that. I still hate the phrase "it is what it is" with a passion, so let's go with "that's what we can do for now, so enjoy what we've got". 

One week in Bali - volcanoes, beaches and the dreaded bedbugs!

Between South East Asia and Australia I planned to have Bali as a decompression period. I needed to change my travelling style from totally crazy everything everyday and constantly on alert to a much more chilled outlook because finally in Melbourne I wasn't going to be alone, so everything could be a lot more relaxed. Bali kind of worked out as planned... But mostly not quite!

Ubud was the dream. Temples, palaces, rice terraces, monkeys, mountains - everything! I took in an evening performance of traditional Balinese dance at the Royal Palace which was such a highlight. The costumes, the dancing, the gamelan, everything had been crafted to create a bubble of intensity and excitement within the palace courtyard. Balinese dance specialises in contorting the face and the hands in order to mimic animals and convey stories so expressively it's an incredible experience to watch. Just spectacular! The costumes are so bright and detailed and the music is so absorbing that somehow you've been sucked into a whole new world for an hour and a half before you even realise 5 minutes has passed.

Night Train Chiang Mai to Bangkok

When I was figuring out how to get from one end of Thailand to the other I couldn't find any recent info, so here's a 2016 reference for anybody else searching for how to get from Chiang Mai to Bangkok overnight. 

I have loads of photos to illustrate this, but they've gone walkabout... Bear with for a month and they'll be up to help!

The station is located about an hour's walk out of the city centre. I would not recommend walking this journey with 25kgs of backpacks in 38 degrees and blazing sunshine, unless you are looking to rock the look of the lobster just pulled out of the boiling pan. If you do walk it, download the map when you have wifi at some point before you set off so you can check street names without using any data, otherwise you may follow my footsteps and get to know the other side of Chiang Mai very well... However you get there, get there in good time to collect your tickets from the hotel opposite the station and then head straight to the cafe just outside the station - they do a legendary banana split with comes with with toppings including happiness, dreams, and world peace.

Melbourne Street Art

The art in Melbourne really made my day when wandering around - it's beautiful, fun, political, and public. I love this stuff, so here are a few of the hundreds of snaps I took of the street art in Melbourne:

Using Elephants for Human Benefit - Is There a Line?

The very first tales of human history, oral and written, describe animals being used for human benefit. Durga rides on the back of a lion, Mary and Joseph ride a donkey to Bethlehem, Indian kings observe war on elephants, Inuits strap huskies into sleds to travel. Literal or metaphorical, we are taught through through these kinds of stories that humans have the ability to use animals to make our lives easier and better. Adding this to the belief that humans are the most intelligent and powerful animals on the planet, it seems a natural step of convenience and resourcefulness: to discover the potential usefulness of surrounding organisms and to use them to personal advantage.

Surrounded by relief carvings of war elephants, majestic animals carrying courageous warriors into the battlefield with the best vantage point possible, Angkor Wat is a perfect monument of animal and man working together to victory. Throughout Asia there are festivals which dress elephants in glorious lights and costumes, painting them beautifully so they can be admired and revered with awe by the millions of spectators who turn out to watch them pass. In China, millions of people gape at their skill and balance to be able to lift their entire form into a headstand, engulfed by the carnival atmosphere of circus lights and sounds for an incredible evening of entertainment and wonder. People pay eye watering amounts of money to have a painting by an elephant as a document of their accuracy and socio-emotional intelligence to appreciate art and colours. Paying to see these spectacular sights supports the elephants, keeps them fed, celebrates their intelligence, and ensures generations after us can see these incredible animals doing incredible things.

I visited India in 2013 (did I mention...?) and at the very end of my trip I adventured over to Jaipur to see the famous Amber Fort. The monument is incredible: a huge mass of orange stone with floating gardens and one straight slope leading directly into the Fort accessible only (seemingly) by elephant. Those huge ellies were so happy! They had leftover paint on their trunks from a festival a week or so before, they were draped in colourful cloth to protect them from the sun, and they walked with the baskets on their backs so gracefully and with such ease. They weren't swaying, they weren't stomping - they seemed perfectly content with their tasks. I'm only little, as was my basket partner, so there's no way we made any difference to the elephant - it's like wearing a backpack to a human! The ride was very short, 5-10 minutes, and the elephants all walked in a long line so they're with their herds and their friends all day long. To be honest, the ride was lumpy and uncomfortable, but I rode on the back of an elephant and that's awesome right! It's such a must-do experience, and that's great!

3 years later I paid attention when somebody showed me more.

Meeting the hero I didn't know I had

Hidden under an oversized purple flannel shirt and cowboy hat strides a tiny Thai woman, wellies up to her knees and long black plait swinging from shoulder to shoulder as she makes her way through rich green fields. Suddenly she stops dead in her tracks and disappears from view altogether. "Watch this," comes a voice from the grass, her eyes sparkling above her incredible cheekbones with a mischievous smile. A heavy second passes and the wavelength is tapped. Trunks and tails scrape the clouds as sturdy feet silently carry round, grey bodies towards the intensely relaxed, cross legged figure in front of me, racing forwards with absolutely no indication of slowing down.

Small but mighty

 

Nope not slowing at all

I first learnt about Lek Chailert through National Geographic when my thumb struck a glossy photo of a woman coiled up inside an elephant trunk. "Ooh, nice photos... Hm, that's sad," goes the thought process, "that's a needle in a haystack job" - and on went my day. Refugee crises, famines, despot dictators running countries into the ground, and I had a clarinet lesson in 15 minutes and I still couldn't find my best reeds. Up I jumped and down the mag fell, taking with it the weight of the world's problems and all thoughts of the other side of the mountain.