Paradise Recounted and Addendums

So my journey is over. At least, the part where I travel around aimlessly is over. Now, I’m going to be getting down to business, doing some work on my Chinese. I went through four countries (unless you count Holland, where I had a four hour layover) and the one feature that has unified them has been that they all drove on the left side of the road, a weird coincidence. Unfortunately, I didn’t quite make it to Singapore. Instead, I chose to go to a little island paradise about three hours away from Singapore. Still, I’m pretty sure that I’ll be traveling around southeast Asia some in the upcoming year, so I’ll get there.

This island paradise was pretty sweet. I’ve heard its where they filmed the movie “Blue Lagoon,” but I’m pretty sure that’s not true. Still, it was fairly unspoilt, having some guesthouse bungalows along the three or four miles of beach, along with a small town in the middle. The rest was mountain jungle and sweet snorkeling beaches. It felt kind of like living in a zoo with all the animals we saw. There were Monitor Lizards, these big lizards with long claws that grew up to about 10 feet long, half of that tail. There were lots of bats hanging up in the pine trees lining one of the beaches near the town. At night they would swirl around me while I read outside my bungalow, swooping in to catch bugs hanging out at the florescent light. Pythons hung out in the trees, and monkeys jumped around on some of the ships harassing tourist and going crazy when one of the Monitor Lizards approached them.

We also did some snorkeling, which is what the island is known for. It was some of the best snorkeling that I had ever done, which surprised me because we originally thought it was just a place for lame Malaysian families to put on life jackets and wade out into the ocean. But when we got in there, there were some giant fish coming right up to the beach. All colors, all sizes just swarming around you. Some of the Malaysian tourist were feeding the schools of fish entire loafs of bread, causing them to swarm around the dock. Out away from the Malaysian tourist, there were some small reefs along a point, and smaller but more colorful fish darted in and out between the rocks and coral.

All and all it was a pretty cool place, and I’m glad I skipped Singapore to go there.

If you want to see the pictures from the island and the rest of the trip, check out:

http://mapvivo.com/journey/8746

As for the addendums, I wanted to mention a couple of things I had forgotten or had intentionally left out of the other emails.

The first was when I was discussing what was wrong with India, I mentioned the fat main in the black jacket who worked for the railway as bad case of Indian bureaucratic no-think. I have a better example. When we were hanging out in Varanasi, the holy city on the Ganges, we wanted to store our bags in the train station’s left luggage office, but they had a regulation: you had to put a little lock on the main opening of your luggage. Of course, Robby and I had hiking backpacks, so you can’t really lock them. We argued with him for a little while, explaining that they wouldn’t be held responsible if anything was stolen from the bag, but that they were responsible if the bag was gone. He refused to comprehend the logic that the little lock on the bag would not prevent someone from walking out with the bag. We debated for about fifteen minutes until he signaled he wouldn’t help us. I was getting pretty annoyed, and since he wasn’t going to help us, I decided to send him a little message: I took a ruler on his desk and broke it in half. I gathered my bags up quickly and left.

Take that Indian bureaucracy. For the rest of the trip, Robby and I argued over whether my violent protest at the bureaucrats stupidity was right or wrong. Let me know what yall think.

The other thing was about the Nepalese government. I mentioned that the communist had abandoned the government after trying democracy for a year. The communist leaving the government was more than an article in the newspaper for us. Coming into Nepal, our bus got caught in the tail end of some protests after the son of a communist leader was run over. I meet a British guy who said he had been there for six hours just sitting. But get this: Nepal is so dependent on tourism (I think 70-90% of its GDP comes from tourism), that the communist protesters agreed to stop and allow tourist buses through during the middle of the day but continued to dam up Nepalese traffic. Later that night, as we ploughed through the darkness towards our destination I noticed a fire burning in the middle of the road up ahead. I was worried. The bus slowed down and pulled off to pass it. As we went by, I saw teenagers standing around the fire looking agitated and wearing red clothes. The watched us go by but didn’t do anything. I asked one guy if that had to do with the communist, but he said he didn’t know.

Anyways, it was a really cool trip. Learned a little, saw a lot and had fun along the way. Glad to be back in China where they drive on the right side of the road.

Best,
Lee