Hokkaido Summer Cycling Slideshow

I made a little video slideshow of the bike trip which looks a bit like this.

Hakodate

Hakodate was the start of this little peddle around Hokkaido and now it`s the end. But last week i was in a different city.

Sapporo was good. It`s laid out on an easy grid of north-south east-west streets that seem to idle through the day waiting for sunset so it can enjoy itself under the neon again. Every other building seemed to house a bar or restaurant. People told me i should go back in winter. "It`s a different city in winter" they`d say. Day and night, cold and warm, four cities in one. It would be very easy to go to Sapporo for a week and still be there a few years later.

But i only managed to stay for a couple of nights before the tyres were rolling again through more headwinds, rain, sunshine and scenery west through Otaru and then south through the beautiful mountains of Niseko which upped the sweat levels to saturation point. The tyres have also rolled past quite a bit of crap on this journey which i would never have seen if i was in a vehicle. I guess i`ve never given it too much thought before (never had to) but the side of the road is where everything gets washed up; litter, furniture, a lonely shoe, crushed cans, mushed newspapers, car crash leftovers and plenty of dead animals from insects to deer with all your regular domestic pets along the way too. You never notice when you glide past in an air conditioned box at murderous speeds but trust me, all the shit that you throw out of the window or squash under your tyres is all there waiting to greet the long distance cyclist, driftwood for the world of wheels.

After Niseko i took stock a little bit and wasn`t too pleased with the results. The tent has a couple of holes in it. The camping mattress has a bulge in the middle of it the size of a rugby ball whenever i inflate it. The lenses of my glasses are scratched so badly that everything looks slightly frosted. My mobile phone battery is dead. My odometer reset itself so that i have no idea how far i actually travelled. The bike is buggered. I`ve met people who`ve cycled around the world for months and years at a time. How do they do it?

And camping itself had got a little tiresome. I`d gone through what i`ve subsequently called the Three Stages of Over-Camping.

Stage One: You think to yourself, "I`d love to sleep in a bed." Thoughts of duvets and pillows and blankets occupy your mind at sunset.

Stage Two: You think to yourself, "I`d love to sleep in a room." Beds are no longer important at this stage. Four walls, a ceiling and a floor would be just lovely, thank you.

Stage Three: You think to yourself, "I`d love to sleep...well, yeah, i`d love to sleep". That`s all. You no longer care where and on what that sleep occurs. On a beach, in a storm, on a bed of nails, in hell, on a wild bear, you don`t care as long as you get multiple hours of it continuously. I didn`t reach a Stage Four. I can only assume that would be a combination of murder and suicide.

Hakodate is a cute little city but i`ll leave tomorrow heading back to Tokyo and work and normality and a bed. It`s been a thoroughly good journey that`s disappeared into the past faster than most, the ending crept up on me even though i could see it clearly on a map getting closer. But there`s something about the rhythm of the peddles and the barely perceptible sound of your own movement that makes you crave more. For all the sweat and rain and sunburn and malfunctions, this morning as i set off into more scenic hills for the last time i thought, "Yeah, i could do another week of this."

Keep moving. See you soon.

Sapporo

It`s been a while. I`ve peddled 2200km around Hokkaido in the last five weeks(ish) and i`m not quite finished. My legs may never forgive me.

I went along the south coast of Hokkaido through more fishing villages and farming towns dodging roadkill (there`s lots of that) and being dodged by trucks and cars (quite a few of them too) until i reached Cape Erimo which sticks out of the coast and into gale force winds. It was probably the windiest place i`ve ever been. Houses slanted. Dogs walked at angles. Birds took off and never came back. It was like riding through sand.

My guide book highlighted beautiful scenic coastal roads that would be perfect for motorbike or cycle touring but it started raining and it didn`t stop for days and so the scenery was submerged in three horizons of wet, damp and fog, ably accompanied by a shit load more wind. Camping isn`t an adventure when everything you own is wet and there isn`t a shower and you`ve just spent the best part of a day peddling downhill into a head wind. Things were in danger of slipping into the negative end of the fun scale but Nemuro came to the rescue.

Nemuro is a town on the far south east corner of Hokkaido that is frozen solid for most parts of the year and as a consequence nobody there really knew what to do with the summer sunshine and t-shirt temperatures. People walked about looking at the sky expecting snow to fall from it and looking at the ground in slight disbelief as it wasn`t covered in a layer of ice or snow. I slept in a bed, washed and dried everything and ate a bucket load of sushi.

Up the east coast there was the Shiretoko Peninsular which is a stunning looking place dripping with mountains and trees. A winding road of only 18km took me two and half hours to climb such was the gradient and temperature but the 13km on the other side only took about 15 minutes. There was a lot of sweat, swearing and photograh taking on Shiretoko.

The most entertaining times have been when things have gone wrong. Heading east instead of west and then finding out your mistake and shrugging and carrying on east anyway until you find a campsite near a beach with a drunk old man who basically lives in a tent near a beach and won`t stop talking to you or waving at you when you walk across the campsite heading to the toilet and makes you wish you`d gone west just like you planned.

Or when the wind and rain become so stong and pain-in-the-arse-ish that you actually physically shake your fist at the sky and shout obsenities at it only to realise that there`s a car full of people behind you trying not to look and laugh as they overtake.

I`ve met plenty of other people on cycling or motorbike tours and as a consequence ended up in a hostel one night with a group of lads thrown together in the middle of nowhere. They all chatted away agreeing with each other and nodding vigourously while i sat on the edges listening in trying to catch any words that seemed recognisble which were mainly difficult, easy, wet, hot, tired, delicious, cheap, expensive (i deduced that they were either all talking about their interetsing journeys or they`d all visited one hell of a brothel) all the while we ate bbq fish as the mosquitos ate us and the crows tried to get to the leftovers in the rubbish bins and the local cat stalked the birds. Not sure who wins that food chain.

Mounatins, beaches, lakes, rivers, dirt tracks, gravel, roads, rain, fog, sun, sun burn, sun tan, sodden feet, sweaty clothes, dirt, baths, cities, running repairs, incomprehensible conversations, laughter, anger (hang on, this sounds like i`ve been to war)and being just on the correct side of lost, Hokkaido and a bicycle have given me too much. Well, almost too much. I`ve got two weeks left yet.

Tomakomai

Apparently there`s some sort of big sporting event currently going on in London and apparently GB are doing pretty well. And, apparently, i`ve chosen this time to be cycling round Hokkaido with a tent. You`re not even reading this are you? You`re watching judo or table tennis or something.

I started in Hakodate last week and met two English guys on the train from Tokyo who had bikes and were spending two weeks cycling around Japan`s northern island as well (see, it`s not just me missing London 2012). We stayed in a guesthouse that i knew from last year and went our different routes the next morning. That day i went 50km through little fishing towns and villages that were drying out seaweed in the sun. After getting my legs sunburnt i arrived at a a campsite near a mountain and met a 70 year old man cycling around Hokkaido for the tenth time. "I`m crazy" he happily told me and then started a conversation with himself about the Royal family of Japan and the UK as if to confirm the point.

Seaweed seems to be a major industry in southern Hokkaido and i guess it must make enough money for the people who live next to the ocean there. There can be no other reason to force that smell upon your local communinty. Still, it wakes you up in the mornings peddling through it. I strayed off the coast and headed to Mount Kamogotake and found cow farms and so the drying seaweed smell was replaced by manure. Southern Hokkaido stinks. I bumped into the 70 year old man again that day around lunch time. "What is the puprose of your trip? he asked. "Is it spiritual enlightenment? Personal fulfilment?" I didn`t really have the heart to say, "Erm, i`m avoiding work, responsibilty and joining the human race for as long as i can get away with it."

Mount Kamogotake is a beautiful twin peaked volcano sat next to a lake. The busy main road that i rode on for most of the next day heading north made it seem more attractive and remote as i spent most of the day being passed by trucks and buses whilst the occasional old restaurant or decaying building would sit lonely at the side of the road with a tree growing out of it and overgrown plants covering it, long deserted and forgotton by a bubble that burst a few decades before. And then i arrived in Oshamambe.

The university that i worked at near Tokyo has a campus in Oshamambe. Some of the students i was teaching had to spend a year in the town and would always complain about how boring it was. "There`s nothing there," they would say, wide eyed. "Nothing!". They weren`t wrong. It wouldn`t be so bad if it was nice to look at but it`s ugly as well. Empty buildings and disued houses. Grey communist style blocks of nothing. It had derelict fish processing factories that smelt like, well, like derelict fish processing facotories and nearby by volcanic springs that smelt of sulphur mixed in the air. A year? I spent a night at the campsite and headed north. Oshamambe is a hole.

The next few days were spent doing more cycling through green valleys and forests and camping by lakes and volcanoes with other holidaying people and families escaping the heat of the the south. The campsite i stayed at last night was on the beach of a lake. I asked the guy at the office if there were showers. "No". Is there an onsen or public bath near? "Six kilometres". Hmmm. "Use the lake," he offered. Fair enough.

I`m　in Tomakomai now. It`s a non-descrpit town in between more beatiful scenery and interesting smells. I`m heading east from here to find more campsites with ensuite lakes and more tourists escaping the south. I`ve met quite a few people here who are cycling around, as well as guys on motorbikes who are touring the island and casually wave as they glide past my peddling sweat. There are surfers who happily declare their ocupation as "NEAT" and hang out of belching vans, grinning as they lurch past more of my peddling sweat. Apart from the summer holiday making familes who take over campsites it would seem, on first glance at least, that Hokkaido is where Japan comes when it`s had enough of being Japanese. Long haired men and tattoed women, drifters and job quitters, bike riders and bums all floating around in the summer wind and being very happy not rushing around in Kanto or Kansai being pushed about and into line with everybody else.

Still, i wonder if they`ve managed to see any of the Olympics?

Mount Fuji

The last few months have involved almost no travelling - just working, eating and drinking and not always in that order. I’ve done a couple of small hikes and bike rides but nothing too strenuous or different. On Saturday i went to Mount Fuji with two friends and climbed it. People always talked about the view from the top and that it’s a fantastic once in a lifetime kind of thing to do. But things don’t always go according to plan though, do they?

The most popular way to climb Fuji is, strangely, at night presumably because everybody wants to watch to a sunrise on the roof of Japan whilst being utterly knackered and completely sleep deprived at 4am. This didn’t seem like much fun (i’ve seen the sunrise before and i quite enjoy sleeping) so me and two friends got a train to a small city called Gotemba near the mountain. We wanted to stay the night there, hike up on Sunday, see the view and be back in Tokyo that night. We arrived in Gotemba at 6.30pm. We went to four hotels. They were all fully booked. A nice man working in the fourth one we tried told us that there was a “formula race” taking place and there wasn’t a free room in the whole city. We had a choice – get the train back to Tokyo or climb at night.

After quickly buying some torches and inhaling some sandwiches we got the bus to the start of the Subashiri trail – one of four that goes up Fuji. The weather was good, spirits were high, the trail was busy. Busy with people who looked like they were prepared for a long war in Antarctica. Headlamps, ski-masks, walking poles, boots, water-proof gaiters, wind-proof hats, bullet-proof gloves. It looked like a North Peak fashion show. We found out why.

The lower parts of the trail were great. We walked through a forest out of the tree line and into a grey lunarish landscape. The sun had set but the horizon was still glowing from greater Tokyo that was busy enjoying Saturday night on the other side of the hills. The further up the mountain we ventured the cloudier, windier, colder, wetter and steeper it became. The wind became a relentless howl; gusts would threaten to throw you off balance and they would always be accompanied with a few handfuls of rain, freezing cold and sandy volcanic ash that would take route in your ears and nostrils and teeth.

After a few hours of this Jessica, one of my friends, had had enough, didn’t fancy going any further and decided to spend the night at one of the stations/hostels that are on the routes up the mountains and are open for the two months of summer when it’s possible to get up Fuji. Me and Dave continued along with thousands of other people wedged onto a single path that zigzagged its way through the volcanic ash and rocks upwards towards the summit. It was so busy that as we got closer to the top, and therefore colder, wetter and more tired, the slower we were able to walk which meant the colder and wetter and more tired we became. Neither of us had weather proof gloves or rain proof socks or, well, any item of clothing suitable for climbing Mount Fuji at night time in a storm. At 3400m we took a rest and tried to get out of the wind at one of the stations/hostels. A foreign guy (it turned out he was from Iceland) walked past in shorts and a woolly jumper with his hands in his pockets as if he was walking in the park. Sat next to me was a woman wearing thousands of dollars worth of clothing breathing in a can of pure Oxygen. It was the last time i smiled until we reached the top.

The next few hundred metres up were hell. It was late night/early morning, the rain invaded every pore i own, cold covered my bones in a layer of frost and the wind was a never ending brutal bitch. I was a soggy tired mess and Dave wasn’t much better as we trudged single file for what seemed like hours until eventually we arrived at the summit of Mount Fuji. We stood on the top of Japan and celebrated by finding the first piece of shelter out of that fucking wind. Immediately at the top there are a couple of little buildings which were huts serving noodles and coffee for ridiculous prices. We grabbed a corner, sat down, ate drank and giggled at ourselves. We were spent. It was 3.30am. We started the hike at about 8.45pm. I was too tired to figure out how long that was.

We didn’t see the sunrise. 4am duly came and went and the cloud, wind, cold and rain slowly turned from black to white. There was a hint of light blue for a few minutes but that was about as once-in-a-lifetime-amazing as my Fuji summit sunrise got. Visibility was about 10m and wasn’t going get better anytime soon. The wind still hadn’t stopped and the cold and rain seemed equally up the fight. Me and Dave weren’t. We got as dry and warm as we could, stayed in the noodle/coffee huts for a few hours and started back down.

Well, we ran back down actually. We were so desperate to get out of the cold gale force rain that we skipped and jogged down most of the trail bypassing the descending North Face catwalk with ease. The landscape was covered in volcanic ash and stones that had been there for centuries. My feet were sliding over crumbled remains of a volcanic explosion that occurred hundreds of years ago, feeding the Earth with more earth in a wonderful geological exercise in recycling. I didn’t give a shit. I didn’t even stop to take a picture. All i wanted to do was get off fucking Fuji.

Me and Dave got split up but i figured it didn’t matter as we’d both be pretty happy to be out of the clouds and rain and approaching acceptable temperature levels considering our clothing. I met Jessica at the start of the trail as she’d gone back down that morning. But, surprisingly, there was no sign of Dave. We waited. And waited. We got something to eat. And waited. After a while we started to worry. Where was he? Did he get lost? Was he injured? He didn’t have a phone so i couldn’t call him. Four hours later we asked a nice woman at the tourist information if she could help us make some phone calls to the station/hostels to ask if they’d seen him. She took us straight to a little police station where two policemen who looked genuinely excited by the prospect of somebody being lost on Mount Fuji started asking questions. They got out maps, asked where i’d last seen him, how he was feeling, what he looked like, what was he wearing, names, addresses, phones numbers, work, mother’s maiden name, fathers inside leg measurement, they made phone calls, got answers and started making plans for a search. But, they asked, was it possible that he took the wrong trail and then just went home from one of the other four start points? No, definitely not, we assured them. Dave, me and a few other teachers all live in the same apartment block. I called another mate and asked if Dave was back there. He said he’d call me back if he was. We waited. They started a search mission. Two guys disappeared in a four wheel drive. We’d been in the police station for an hour sorting stuff out, writing things down and giving information. Jessica looked worried. The nice women from the tourist office told me that this would probably be in the news. They gave us biscuits. They look worried.

My phone rang. “Hey, Dave’s right here. I’m looking at him. You wanna speak to him?”

Erm, yeah, sorry Mr Policeman and Miss Nice Tourist Woman but you were right. Dave just took a wrong turning and went all the way back home by himself...Yeah, just arrived, got the train and everything...I’m so sorry...Really sorry...Erm, i guess those two search and rescue dudes can come back down now...Uh-huh...Yeah, it would appear that our small little journey up Japan’s highest mountain has turned into a complete clusterfuck...Yeah, yeah...Thanks for your help...Bye.

Me and Jessica took the bus back to Gotemba. We wanted to take the express bus from there back to Tokyo but it had been in an accident so we had to take the trains again which took longer and cost extra. More luck. I got off the train at Tokyo Station and stubbed my toe on an escalator which oozed blood all over my flip-flop and the dripped on the platform. It’s a rare thing on a Sunday evening to think to yourself, “I can’t wait for Monday.”

Fortunately, Monday was a national holiday and this week is the end of term and the end of another work contract teaching English. I’m heading to Hokkaido for six weeks at the end of July with a bike, a tent, a map and, hopefully, more luck than last weekend.

Kuala Lumpur again

I'm sat in an internet cafe surrounded by kids playing World of Warcraft wasting time before my flight back to Japan. This is the end of the little trip which has been fun.

I went to Melaka which is the old capital of Malaysia which was filled with Dutch and Portuguese traders and then British colonialists long before KL was even a city. It also has Chinese and Indian influences as well which makes it full of history and culture with grand old European buildings serving package tours to bus loads of tourists. For some reason amongst all the history and grand old architecture somebody, somewhere decided that the best way to experience all of this would be on a trishaw (a bicycle with a side car for two) which are then coloured pink or yellow or red or every colour there is. And decorated with plastic flowers and lights and umbrellas. And music. Dance music. Loud Dance music. So, there you are walking amongst old Churches and colonial villas and independence memorials to be greeted by Boom Shake Shake The Room rattling your ears as three or four of these luminous bicycle taxis roll past with some tourists on them. It's all a bit incongruous. A bit like been shown around Stonehenge by a clown. Fortunately Melaka also has some fantastic night markets, amazing food, friendly people, a very laid back style and an outdoor, open-air, cheap-beer-serving, big screen Saturday night football venue.

I got a bus from Melaka to Singapore. Well, i thought i got a bus from Melaka to Singapore but i guess the driver was in a rush as he just left us at the Singapore side of the border after we'd cleared immigration. With no Singapore dollars and no idea i ventured out into the rain storm. Welcome to Singapore.

I'd heard mixed things about Singapore. Some say it's the best city in Asia. Some say it's dull and bland. It's neither. You can tell it's a planned city from the moment you start walking down the streets. In fact, at times it feels planned to the point to being stage managed. As if the taxis and pedestrians were meant to be in those places at those times, being directed there and following orders. It's not very organic. All shiny and new and engineered. There's the CBD area which could be anywhere in the world with global banks, global shops and global people all working and playing by the river at the quays. And there were lots of fat western people jogging around the quays as well for some reason. Then there's Little India which is a wonderful place to get lost in with its knots of streets and smells, sights and sounds making it almost authentically Indian. All that's missing is some cows ambling down the streets holding up traffic. Chinatown, with it's usual Chinatown shops and restaurants and coughing men and haggling women, seemed to complete the centre of Singapore. The West, China and India all in one city but all separate and engineered for your own personal flavour and preference. Outside of that is the rest of the place which seems to be filled with apartment blocks, shopping malls and people speaking a weird indecipherable language that is a mix of English, Chinese and who knows what else. If Singapore was a person it would probably have some kind of multiple personality disorder or at least be seeking therapy for an identity crisis.

I got back to Malaysia last night content at seeing a brief glimpse of an interesting little country. I've walked down streets here that have Hindu temples, Buddhist temples, Mosques and Churches. All on one street and everybody's fine about it. How do you do that, Malaysia? And why do you insist on outdoor karaoke at sights of extreme natural beauty or historical significance? Who designed the Melaka Independence Memorial and can you get you money back? Which idiot decided to completely privatise your bus network? Turning up at a bus station to be greeted by 10 different bus companies going to 25 different destinations at 4 different prices at various different times isn't better for anybody, is it? What makes your taxi drivers so happy and chatty? And how can we convince the rest of the world to use as much cucumber in their cooking as you do?

I'll be back in Tokyo tonight hopefully finding more unanswerable questions that nobody gives a toss about. Keep moving.

Melaka

I've got a weekish left in Malaysia and then i'm back in Japan.

I was in Khoto Bharu waiting for a Saturday night and a game of football at the city stadium but it turned out that the local team was playing in Borneo that day so i never got to sample the delights of top flight Malaysian professional football. The next day i went to an island just off the east coast called Pulau Perhentian. My guidebook, and almost everybody else i'd met who'd been there, told me that it was a tropical paradise so i hopped on a bus and then a boat and headed out to the island.

The boat was a small speed boat thing with a small roof driven by a large man with a big grin and just two other passengers. Speeding out of the harbour and over the sea we could see the island looming large on the horizon. Unfortunately there was a storm just behind it heading towards us and the horizon turned a dark grey colour, the wind picked up and the rain started lashing down so hard i could actually taste it. It looked like we were sailing into the apocalypse. Waves splattered into the boat and we all got completely sodden. We arrived at the jetty and i wandered down the beach in the rain and found a place to stay.

I set out at finding paradise. It was raining hard. I was wet. The guesthouse didn't have electric during the day. The two main beaches were packed with little guesthouses and restaurants that had bright plastic tables and chairs covering the upper part of the sand. Everybody else seemed to be a fat hairy European, a kid, a loud Chinese man, a JCB digger or a suntanned, long-haired, hippy-looking diving instructor. I sat on the beach between rainstorms drawing looks from complete strangers with my lobsters-for-arms fax-machine-paper-for-a-body t-shirt suntan. Paradise.

The guesthouse was owned by Muslims so they didn't serve beer. I watched Man United get a lucky win. Horrid karaoke drifted down the beach after sun set from one of the resorts as everybody sat on plastic chairs eating burnt bbq fish and getting attacked by mosquitoes. Yeah, paradise. But i did find some nicer parts to the place, went for a swim, read two books, did bugger all and managed sunburn other parts of my body other than my forearms so it could've been worse.

After the beach i went to the jungle. A train from Koto Bharu took me through the dense green of the north east which was occasionally peppered with the odd corrugated iron shack or colourful town. I stayed a couple of nights near Taman Nagara rain forest which is the oldest in the world at 1.3M years. I met a couple of people on their holidays and travels and went on a canopy walkway during the day and a night hike after dark within the jungle itself where we saw more weird insects than you could imagine, deer, a mouse deer (i'm still not sure what that was) and, amazingly, a wild elephant. Good fun.

As hiring a guide and hiking through more of the jungle was about the same price as a second hand car, i got a bus to Melaka yesterday instead. I wondered around this morning to see a China town and Indian restaurants and cheap bars and a market and pollution and beepbeeping taxis and all the other stuff that comes with humid, busy, south east Asian cities. Paradise.

Kota Bharu

I started this week in Kuala Lumpur which is home to quite a few night market hawkers selling fake everything, men sleeping on park benches and alley ways in the middle of the day and, surprisingly, a hell of a lot of trees. I escaped a few monsoon-like rain storms in the air conditioned Islamic Art Museum and the massive National Mosque and also spent a sweaty afternoon at the fantastically named Lake Titiwangsa (it's ok, go on, giggle, i did) where you can get a fine view of the KL skyline through the mist and pollution. Oh, and if you ever get the chance to visit the National Art Gallery don't go there around lunch time as the place is like a fucking creche, half-filled with little snot machines running around the place turning it into some kind of post modern parenting exhibition.

I got an 8 hour bus to the north west corner of the country to Kota Bharu a few days ago. Malaysia's default colour is green. Once you're out of a city all you can see is endless amounts of trees and jungle clambering over every peak and into every valley. Kota Bharu is a nice enough little city not far from the Thai border. It's an Islamic place with mosques scattered around between quiet shops and billboards advertising watches and mobile phones that me and you can't afford, let alone the woman waiting tables in the half empty cafes. The occasional rat scuttles about in the shadows, stalked by the stray cats and at sunset the birds go a bit mental for half an hour as a lightening storm usually rages on the horizon or, if you're really unlucky, over head. Nobody is in a rush and everybody seems perfectly happy and content with the languid pace of life and easy going days. Why wouldn't they be?

Yesterday was Friday so everything was shut apart from the mosques and the 7-11s so i rented a bicycle and headed off to a beach out of town to the north. Along the journey half the people i passed seemed to want to say hello. Kids waved, teenagers on scooters zipped past shouting greetings and giggling at my insufficient speed. As a consequence of being sucked into this happy-go-lucky sunshine atmosphere i neglected to recognise that i was wearing a short sleeved shirt and i'm now the proud owner of bright red forearms and pasty white body. Sexy. I've spent today at the War Musuem (don't ask), hiding my arms from sunlight and generally just killing time before the Kota Bharu football team plays a home game tonight. Apparently they're the champions of Malaysia and according to the guys who work in my hostel the standard of football is "a bit shit". Should be fun. Tomorrow i'm heading to an unpronounceable island with a beach for a few days to try and make the rest of my body the same colour as my arms. Then maybe a train or a jungle. Or both. Or something.

Thanks for reading. I'll try and write some more guff next week.

Kuala Lumpur

I'm in Malaysia. I have a month between jobs in Japan so April is free, the plane ticket was cheap and i'm currently sat in a dank internet cafe avoiding the sweaty afternoon downpour.

Kuala Lumpur is a former British colonial city with Chinese, Indians, Malays, Muslims, tourists and probably everybody else scurrying around it. There's noodles and naan, Chinatown and Little India, headscarves and miniskirts, baseball caps and suits, smelly markets and air conditioned malls, Buddhist monks and mosques. It's a fantastic cultural mess all wrapped up with the usual south east Asian blend of thick pollution, thick traffic and even thicker air.

I wandered around all of this yesterday and somehow ended up at the Petronas Towers, the twin sky scrapers that loom over the city from almost every angle meaning that you keep catching glimpses of them through gaps in buildings or through the monotony of construction sites or between metro tracks over head. It seems a little bit weird (or apt) that that the most photogenic and famous landmark here is a essentially an office block for an oil company. Still, it's worth seeing close up and has a massive shopping centre in it filled with stuff that i couldn't really afford and is mainly home to people walking around escaping the heat trying to figure out how to pronounce BVLGARI and why they charge so much for handbags.

Last night was spent on the rooftop bar of my hostel swigging beer and chatting to people telling stories about traveling around Asia as the smell of sizzling food and wet cement and belching buses and humid fug floated up from the city below, ably accompanied by the sounds of people laughing and scooters beeping and music blaring and kids running. This is, essentially, why i don't have a job and a mortgage in England. I tasted all this a few years ago, drank lots if it in but somehow never really slaked my thirst. I probably never will.

Myoden and 2012

I haven't written on here for ages which is a bit rubbish of me. Then again i haven't really done any travelling and i've been messing about with flags (see below) and conversations (see right).

New Year was a fun ordeal in navigating my way through thousands of people to see a couple temples. Everybody here seems to enjoy queuing for hours to get into a shrine or temple and then spend five minutes in it praying for family health and happiness and then paying for a New Year's fortune that you don't believe in anyway. I guess everybody does stuff at that time of year not because they like doing it but because it's just become a tradition.

Another winter tradition is skiing which, in Japan, is awesome. The snow i've experienced so far is the finest powdery substance i've ever been on. It's like skiing on dandruff. You can hardly hear the skis as they turn through the snow and get tangled together and send you head first into the stuff reminding you of the dandruff comparison quite abruptly. Winter has been unusually cold and it's claimed dozens of lives in the north as houses have collapsed under the weight of the snow and people have been injured or worse clearing tons of the white stuff from their roofs. Last month there was one metre of snow overnight in Niigata prefecture. The trains are still running though.

Hopefully this year i'll have some travelling to write about. I finish my job at the end of March and then i'll be spending April travelling around Malaysia. I'll be working back at a university somewhere from May and then the summer should include a bicycle, a tent and Hokkaido. Autumn and winter will be back teaching again somewhere in Tokyo. It'll be next year soon...

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