Dog days

I’m not sure if it’s just because I live next to one of the largest parks that there is in Singapore, but Katong where I live is inundated with a plethora of pet shops. On a mile strip of East Coast Road I counted four alone. Maybe Singaporeans are super pet friendly or maybe it’s just that my habitual locale makes for a suitable place to pitch to the pet loving fraternity who are often seen taking Fido for regular walks.

Even more odd is the choice of dog I seem to see the most. Singapore is a hot and humid place for the majority of the year so you’d expect to see small dogs or those that cope with the heat well, such as miniatures or the less hairy breeds. Nope not in Singapore. I just keep seeing endless numbers of Siberian Huskies trotting up and down the place - which is probably the most unsuitable dog you can imagine for a climate like this. For a dog you normally expect to be sat lolling in front of a roaring fire after overdosing on the aroma of too much fondue in an Austrian ski chalet it’s a tiny bit odd seeing it pull a tanned roller-blading girl in hot-pants down the park path. Typically being pulled on the wrong side of the track going against the flow of traffic, but that’s a different story altogether.

What is it that makes people buy a dog with the thickest and most efficient heat absorbent coat and plonking it in a climate where people only own one sweater? I am a little perplexed to be honest. Now a husky is a lovely animal and I’m a dog person (I was going to say lover but it sounds a bit dodgy) as much as the next but I would certainly be asking myself the question of “is this the most suitable dog I can really think of buying here?”

Not to perambulate around the bush but it does make you think that the thought process has not been too well walked through.

For me it’d be easy to choose a dog like that as I used to watch the TV show Due South as a growing kid and always wanted to have a dog like the immensely cute and perversely talented Diefenbaker when I was grown up. This was the kind of dog that had attitude, selective hearing and made Lassie look like she’d be better off at home assisting in some delicate baking rather than saving little Jimmy from down the disused mineshaft. I’d still love one, but my track record in temporarily abandoning my two cats in London for a while along with living fifteen stories up in a house a third smaller than my house in London does not make me the ideal candidate for having one. It does seem a little bit wrong having one in the least snowy climate that you can possibly find but the ones I have seen seem happy enough panting away happily up and down by the beach.

You do see a lot of smaller handbag type dogs too. I say handbag as you generally see them being carried inside handbags but predominantly the dog I see over and over again is the Husky. Maybe it’s a fashion trend that I have not picked up on. A quick google of ‘Singapore, Husky puppies’ gives quite a few cute looking hits which are surprisingly cheap compared to puppies back home. Sadly though, you do see quite a few dogs around 12-18 months old looking to be re-homed probably after the owners have realised that the maid has been swallowed or something.

Maybe at home these dogs are being kept in sub zero condo conditions which makes them feel slightly more at home. Sat shivering away in some arctic tinged high rise stalactite ridden apartment where the children are huddled around the dog in the evening as if to draw off the heat they've absorbed from a day basking under the palm trees might be what goes on. Friends of mine missing the winter season had such a party last year. Inviting friends around for a winter fondue party in full hat, gloves and winter parker. All the windows were closed, every AC unit turned onto the coldest setting and the frost free freezer door opened for good measure.

Brr – make me cold thinking about it. Maybe it’s my trip to London next week and the onward trip to Utah which is making me think of cold thoughts again.

A fortnight back in London via Utah for some snowboarding is lined up. It is going to be nice to be back in London briefly, if nothing else but to stock up on things that I have actually found are impossible to buy in Singapore:-

Namely muesli, good sun lotion (as in not emulsion paint)and good handmade shoes that are less than $1000.

The thought of getting to wear not just a sweater, but a coat some gloves and a scarf for the first time in nearly 8 months is giving me the chills just thinking about it. From 26 degrees in the shade to minus 20 in my thermals is going to be a bit of a shock to the system.

Maybe I should try and get invited around somewhere to huddle up with the dog in preparation.

Speaking in code.

My day to day job is based around ecommerce working for one of the banks here in Singapore. Let’s call it ShiezerBank Corp to keep some anonymity here. Our financial competition is formed of the usual suspects of Mighty Yank Bank, Shittybank and Briecrap, all of which have great towering offices here.

Working in IT and especially banking IT everyone talks in acronyms for reasons I’ve never really understood. Perhaps it’s because were a bit lazy and can’t string full incondite sentences together using the proper words. Perhaps it makes us sound a little bit more clever or in a unique clan using three abbreviated letters when those around us have absolutely no idea on what is being discussed. I put it down to people having too much to say and not enough time to say it so using them gets the maximum amount of information expended into the air with the minimal amount of conversational dexterity. Of course it could simply be that people in banking IT are complete twats.

So as I was flaneuring down the road the other day in a taxi the local radio DJ was reading out the local travel bulletin and it caught my ear. Funnily enough, even the DJs here have that mid-Atlantic nasal sound like UK DJ’s did back in the 90’s. He was reading out the travel bulletins and they are the same as you’d expect everywhere else. Too many cars, too many pillions having altercations with other peoples bumpers and the odd thoroughfare or byway being blocked by bumbling bystanders.
The one thing that stood out though was the sheer number of acronyms being used in the delivery. The entire bulletin must have been less than 30 seconds and he must have dropped in about 20 between words like avoid, sunny, overturned and flabbelation. Ok I’m lying about the last one but it’s a great sounding word and if you heard that on a travel bulletin you’d probably crash through excitement and end up in the next bulletin.

After being here almost a year, I’ve picked up that Singaporeans love acronyms. They just can’t get enough of them. Everywhere you go, from the banks, to the roads, to your personal status to the food you eat - it’s all using acronyms.

Now in the travel bulletin – I worked out about half of what was being said seeing as a lot of them are traffic related to the many highways and expressways that spider out in all directions over the island.
The funny thing is, you end up picking them up and regurgitating them when you least expect it.

Since I arrived I’d come in via SIA on an EP visa hoping to get my PR from the MOM. Working hard all day saves me enough money to think about buying a HDB near the CBD, hopefully close enough to the MRT as it’s too damn expensive paying the ERP going on the PIE when the ECP is backed up. It’s not as if I can even afford the car COE as a what’s left in my DBS and UOB accounts after my CPF an SPG took anyway. Still I better not complain too much as the PAP might not be AOK with it.

There’s a small game there to see how many you can get right.

It takes a while to pick up the patois of the local pericombobulation being spouted in a tonal splurry of shortened words. I’m still very confused half the time and I’m often saying to myself - WTF?

When you intermingle it all together with bit of Singlish it makes for an interesting conversation, even if you really don’t have much of an idea of what is being said – Ken?

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Yes it’s happy Chinese New Year to all this week. It’s been quite an exciting week for me as it’s my first real experience of CNY here in Singapore as I arrived last year just after the end of it. This year I was quite prepared to make the most of seeing the celebrations here which started off rightly with a trip to Chinatown on new years eve.
It was packed as you’d expect and all manner of red and gold ornaments, charms and decorations were being sold from the makeshift stalls in the rammed streets to starry eyed passers by looking for that last bit of useless crap that everyone from nearly every culture ends up buying at celebration time.
I got sucked in by the mind bending tractor beams of one eager salesman and came away a few dollars lighter with some Chinese scriptures and a bag full of sweeties to help assist my expanding waistline through the proceeding year of the rabbit. Being a rabbit myself as far as Chinese astrology goes, it should be a fruitful year for me, so lets just see shall we.
Chinatown on any normal night is a veritable feast of bargaining and browsing the numerous stalls which range from the buy 5 get 5 free fridge magnet type to the somewhat moderately tastefully looking antiques shops which are probably not all that antique.
On new years eve, it was like the very fabric of society was about to unravel and the only way to save yourself was to buy up more food than you could possibly eat in a year and just for good measure buy up a few extra fridge magnets just in case. It was lots of fun though and I ended up having some of the most amazing oyster omelette I’ve ever had. It’s exactly what it says and is just oysters cut up and mixed into an omelette. It is mind blowingly good and as with most hawker food it was gorgeous to gulp down with an ice cold Tiger and have a bit of a laugh with the passing waitress who was keen to try and teach me some additional Mandarin other than the very rude swear words that I’d been taught by a couple of my local friends here. There was a good reason to this as I’d been very kindly invited to spend Reunion dinner with one of my good friends family so it was going to be handy if I could turn up and say a few words and not look like I had a bad case of Tourette's.

My good friend R was kind enough to invite me to her cousins condo to experience a proper CNY family dinner as she thought it would be good for me to see. I was overjoyed at the prospect so spent the next few days trying to muster up some basic Mandarin and learn a few bits about some of the Chinese customs and general do’s and don’ts. The Chinese are probably some of the most superstitious and ceremonial people I’ve ever met and all sorts of strange and quaint peculiarities come into effect at this time. Not owing money to people, cleaning the house on a certain day, wearing the right coloured clothing. It’s a minefield of potential faux pas for a lumbering Ang Mo like myself to fall into so I spent a day or two trying to find out as much as I could so I’d look less like the clumsy grinning idiot that I often do at functions where I’m the odd one out. I actually do quite enjoy being in new situations but only when I’ve got something to contribute and if spouting a bit of Gong Xi Fa Cai was going to raise a smile or the odd "What's he saying??" eyebrow or two then so be it.
So off I trotted up to the north of the island on my trusty Hog (i.e not so trusty after developing yet another funny rattle and a spuriously odd sounding horn) with my bag full of mandarin oranges and sweaty palms clutching a few post-it notes with enough polite gestures scribbled down to get me through most dinner related conversational situations.

If during the day I was ever in need of saying “I’ve lost my passport” or “ “Where is the chemist?” then I was truly equipped with the right vocabulary. Anything else and I was going to be winging it.

The mandarin oranges are presented to the householder as a good will gesture as they represent abundance and good fortune. You give two to the host – and you get two back, which you then continually recycle as you visit other homes. For a nation that does absolutely bugger all in terms of recycling (something which I find odd given the organisational side of things) it’s the best example of use and reuse you’re likely to see here.
Cunningly I’d gone with an entire bag of spare oranges just in case I cocked up something and ended up being an orange down, but it seemed to go to plan and I left with the requisite number of fruits. I did spend the next few days having mandarin orange smoothies which was another plus side to my over exuberance at filling up my fridge magnet and fruit armageddon stockade.

When I arrived I was warmly greeted by R’s family who were all super friendly and made me feel at home. As customary at these kind of occasions a paper plate was thrust in to my palm (slightly obscuring my now streaking “Do you have an extra pillow” translation) and was then instructed to fill my boots with as much homemade food as possible. Mrs R was happy to point out all the things that they’d made which I confess were all delicious. I think my favourite was the little jellies in the shape of animals of which I must have been around 12 years old when I had last had it without Tequila in it.
I ate so many of them I started getting an odd look from a passing 5 year old which was something of a look of "How many of MY jellies are you actually going to eat Mr??". I backed away at this point to the slightly more grown up food of chicken wings giving my most polite smile that is actually possible with a mouth full of jelly.

It was really fun to meet generation after generation of family members and it made me think about Christmases at home long ago when I was younger when aunts, uncles and grandparents all used to gather around and generally remark on how much I’d grown up since the last time they’d seen me. Ha – I’m now 6ft 4’. No more growing required!
One of the great traditions here at this time is the red packet giving or Hóng Bāo. The custom is for the more senior folks to give red envelopes of money to those that are younger and unmarried as a symbol of property, good luck and also to ward off evil spirits. In the envelope there is a small wad of notes which will add up to an even number, again another good luck sign. I never really expected to get any red packets at all as I was after all a complete stranger in the house and not exactly a spring chicken these days but some of the elders were quite curious about me and demanded R to have me dragged over and to duly have a little packet thrust in to my mitt.
Now being invited around to someone’s house for a special occasion and being fed till you drop with jelly and then being paid for it is my idea of a good day out.
I left it to the next day to actually open one and inside was a bunch of crisply folded brand new two dollar notes. R giggled a lot at my expression on receiving my first as I was quite surprised about it to be honest and secretly chuffed to bits.

My favourite bit of the day was the tossing of the Yusheng fish salad.
Yusheng is a fish based salad which originates from the 1960s in Singapore. It’s another sign of prosperity and good health to have this. It’s a very brightly coloured dish made up of carrots, pickles, peppers with salmon strips mixed into it. It’s then drenched in a mountain of crackers and sesame seeds until it looks like a food version of Mount Vesuvius that is just about to go off if even another morsel of food is added to its crater like peak.
The best bit about this though is that everyone gathers around it with chop sticks and decimates the thing in to a frenzy of salad tossing - throwing it higher and higher whist yelling out phrases of prosperity. The higher you toss the salad the more prosperous your year ahead is supposedly going to be. Step back kids – the 6ft 4 fella is coming through.
After getting a bit carried away I ended up nearly having to wipe my salad out of the ceiling fan - although it certainly appears that my year ahead might actually be quite prosperous given the amount of vertical my little bit of salmon took.
After everyone has had a go at mixing the salad it’s served into small bowls and eaten with chop sticks. It’s actually quite tasty and one of R’s uncles was adamant that I have second and third portions whilst making sure I had a good fill of the yummy salmon which was pretty fantastic.

After dinner it was time for some family photographs which was cute and nice to see a whole range of family generations sitting together whilst desperately trying to keep a front row of 7 year olds still long enough to get a couple of shots for the family album. After dispersing and for a brisk walk around the condo gardens it was time to listen to Mr R sing some traditional Chinese folk songs, mostly from around the communist era I believe. Here my Mandarin phrasebook was sadly lacking I’m afraid. I believe communist folk songs are in the next edition.
Now the Chinese love a good sing song but Mr R was actually pretty damn good and it was really nice to watch and listen to. He was good enough to explain some of the meanings but it was nice to just listen and see some of the places that he’d been invited to sing at in China which set me off thinking of all the places that I’d like to go and visit there in the coming year. All in all it was a really interesting day and I was really grateful to have been invited along. It’s exactly why I’m here and being able to experience it was lots of fun. Big thanks to R and family!

I must have made a good enough impression as I got my invite back for next year. I think some of that might be to clean off the remaining Yusheng that is still stuck in the ceiling fan but we’ll see.

January happenings.

This last week I was back in Borneo doing some more technical diving courses that I’ve been meaning to do, just so that I can start doing some longer mixed gasses on the rebreather. For those that don’t know what a rebreather is, it’s a device that sits on your back a bit like a suitcase and closes the breathing circuit so that exhaled gas goes back into a unit on your back which then messes about with it so that you can breathe it again.
It just means you dive for hours and potentially deeper without having nasty decompression stops for hours at a time.
It’s a bit more complicated than that in reality – but that’s the 101 lesson. If you want to know more - hey – I’ll teach you ;)

It was a cool course although harder than I imagined to master and a little bit scary to be honest when going through some of the disaster drills. Still a way to go before I can teach it - but not a bad start until the point when I got a bloody great cold half way through the week and had to stop diving. I pushed it a bit and now I’m deaf in one ear for the next two weeks whilst it sorts itself out. Not too clever.

I flew back a few days early in the end as I was getting bored silly of Malaysian TV (only 5 channels) and one of those is an all day repeating cycle of MacGyver, Remington Steele and Matt Houston. It’s the channel where shitty detective TV series never die. I’ll pop back later in the year after I get back from the UK/US in March once I need my fix of Murder She Wrote.
The entire week was a bit of a disaster as I broke my iphone by taking it diving, I broke my hearing through the cold – and whilst there I also had the third ID fraud in the last two years, this time on my iTunes account. Not a very good week really.

Since arriving in Sing I’d been missing doing the cultural activities that I used to do in London so at Christmas I booked myself some tickets for Carmen which was in town and playing at the Esplanade Theatre.

This was great, as I’d fancied seeing the Esplanade up close for some time. The building, like most grand theatres is quite a spectacular sight glistening away on the Singapore horizon. The building from the outside is quite remarkable and is not dissimilar to the shape of two halved Durian fruits. As long as it doesn’t pong like one thank you.
Durian for the uninitiated is a fruit of truly nauseating properties. You either love it or hate it. Some say you’ve only really got Asia in your blood once you’ve accepted the fruit. I’m not so sure about this. The great thing about Durian is all the various guises it comes in.
Durian chocolate, crisps, moon cakes, ice cream – you name it. If you can get it – you can be damn sure there is a Durian flavoured hybrid of it.

It’s hard to really describe the Durian smell in words which don’t make it sound totally foul. It divides opinion into equally as hostile encampments as Marmite can. Personally, I’m not a big fan of anything that smells like old socks full of smelly cheese that’s been festering in the boot of the car on a hot and humid day. But that’s just me.

Maybe it’ll grow on me in time.

Anyway, after grabbing the tickets and settling down in the surprisingly big seats I sat back and took in the show. The theatre was basically a carbon copy of a traditional Shaftsbury avenue theatre. The classic horse shoe design on a slight slope, with four tiers offering elevated seats all not too far away with pretty good views. I’d prompted for tenth row stall seats as I quite fancied a good view and was not disappointed.
I’d never seen Carmen before, although I did know the story and was aware it was a relative smorgasbord of classics and ditties that you pick up with relative ease. What was unusual was watching a majority Chinese cast sing a Spanish themed opera in French. It was all done pretty well and the screens at the side translating into Mandarin and English made it all the more easy. The English, not the Mandarin obviously.
For those that don’t know the story of Carmen – here is my slightly abridged version.

Girl working at Lemonade factory starts drinking far too much of the local produce and goes a bit loopy on it and has a bit of a rough and tumble at the office with one of the other girls over the merits of fruit based drinks counting as one of the required five-a-day. The ensuing altercation is split up by the local shop steward, Mr Jose – who subsequently decides that Carmen is the best thing since R. Whites was invented and promptly decides that she’s the one that he want to make juice with from now on.
Carmen tries to persuade Mr Jose into running off to the hills to start off their own Organic Lemonade business with the possibility of resurrecting Panda Cola. He finds this a bit hard to believe and decides that nobody would want to buy Panda Cola, particularly in the hills of Seville, so goes back to the factory shaking his head in disbelief.
Carmen being a slightly more fiery Spanish women clobbers Mr Jose over the head and drags him off to the hills where she dreams of making ice cream floats. Mr Jose starts coming around to the idea of this as a sound business idea just as Carmen bumps in to the local prized flower arranger Mr Hyacinth. She realises she can only have true happiness with a world champion flower arranger and decides that Panda Cola was truly an awful business proposition and that eighties based cola drinks was a ridiculous idea. Mr Jose is swiftly consigned to the back room and is no longer considered as a viable entity which peeves him somewhat.
Mr Jose having just invested everything into this takes this ever so slightly badly and decides that it’s in the best possible interest to kill everyone, which he goes about doing.

There’s a bit of singing and dancing involved in all of this and everyone seems to have a jolly good time about it, until of course when they all die.

That’s my slightly shorter version of the story but I think it captures the prevalent parts of the story and portrays the layered and complex messages of love, lemonade making and not to mess with Latino women. On the whole, it didn’t have the complete magic or energy that you’d get in a London theatre, but it was a great substitute and I’d love to go again sometime in the future.

I’ve finally figured out the local theatre circuit now, so should be planning a few more trips as the year progresses.

Two wheels best.

A new year brings new hopes, new challenges and for some reason a whole bunch of paperwork and admin.
This week it seems like my letterbox has been carpet bombed with flyers, letters, forms and just about every product under the sun.
I’m thinking of having my letter box Feng Shui’d to ward off evil Pizza delivery letters and Real Estate offerings for properties that I can neither afford nor desire.
Some quite pleasing letters that have arrived are my appointment letters for the Ministry Of Manpower (see previous posting for the MoM) so that I can apply for my Permanent Residency (or PR as it’s know). PR basically changes my employment status over from a temporary resident (i.e 2 years) to a visa that has a few more practical benefits and also opens the door to me perhaps buying a house and becoming more of an long term member of society. There are some disadvantages to this as well for some expats, but on the whole it’d be a good thing for me to have especially as I hope to stick around for a while which is kind of handy as my company has renewed my contract to stay for another year which is jolly fine with me. Like most forms in Singapore, it’s a doddle to fill in and hopefully in the coming months I’ll be getting a Welcome To the Club! letter back. I do go on about Singaporean efficiency a lot but when it’s good it’s very very good, and when it’s bad, it’s not actually all that bad at all. It’ll take a few more forms and a few more months to sort out but it’s a step in the right direction.

Being the new year and with a Christmas void of family and friends from home there was no Christmas tree, no baubles and certainly no Escape To Victory playing on ITV2. To make up for this I did what any self respecting guy would do and went out and decided to buy myself a big f*ck off present. This came in the shape of a 1996 Harley Davidson Fatboy Softail motorbike. Having being declined entry on to this island of my beloved Ducati 996 I’ve been enviously looking at bikes passing me since I arrived. This being Asia I did the only thing that you can do and bought an American bike. I’m told that more HD’s are sold in Asia than in the USA which given the number I’ve seen scooting about could be a very reliable statistic.
I’ve never been a HD fan, but my dream bike is stuck in a garage at home so anything else would be second best to that, apart from maybe a 1198 in matt black, but I’m hardly going to spank 70K on a bike that I can’t ride anywhere on without hitting the sea in 15 minutes. Singapore is only 70ks from the widest points so it’s not going to take long to get from the sea to the sea.
I’ve fancied the idea of doing a bit of road touring in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia next year so when I saw this beauty up for sale, at a price that seemed ok, it was an offer I could not refuse.

After picking the bike up and realising it’s not the quietest ride in town I soon discovered that it’s also not the lightest nor has the best stopping distances. I’m used to riding Italian racers which you can stop with your little finger on a penny. This thing needs a hand like an Olympic lifter and the foot brake being pressed with some vigour to stop it’s hulking mass from becoming intimate with the vehicle in front. I’ve never ever used a foot brake to stop a bike before so as the first set of red lights approached my heart started to race a little as they got closer and closer as my little pinky feathered the three pound brake leaver. Only when firmly pressing a good portion of my size eleven on the foot long brake pedal did the beast come to a standstill. After a little wipe of the brow, we moved on having learnt my first lesson of American brakes.
I’m being a bit harsh here as my Ducati has six pot callipers on two twelve inch galvanised discs just on the front. That’s the kind of stopping power the space shuttle utilises when they realise a crucial bit has been left off on a trolley in the hanger and they decide to abort take off. The HD has a bar of soap and some sort of heavy anchor you throw off the back to slow you down string as far as I can see.
It really is a fun ride though and I can see the attraction with Hogs and why people rave about them. If you need to drive a sofa to work and back there really is no other choice. Apart from actually putting some wheels on a sofa and sticking some chrome bits on the side I suppose.

I’ve managed to get a few of the guys in the office geed up so we’re all off up to Central Malaysia in a few weeks to have a bit of a boys road trip which I’m looking forward to very much and I’m sure will give me some stories to wax lyrical anecdotally.

So from two wheels with an engine to two wheels without. This weekend I indulged in my other big passion which is cycling. I bought myself a Trek road bike a few months back with a view to using it to keep a bit fit by cycling to work every other day or so, but also to explore a bit of the island upon. I’ve always been more of a mountain kind of guy, but as most of the hills here resemble small mole hills there is not much choice in vertical.
I’m really enjoying the road riding so a few of the guys from work and I ventured off to Bintan in Indonesia for a days riding the pristine roads there. We set off at 5am to cycle to the ferry terminal in the east and took the 50 minute ferry over the waters to Indonesia.
We coined ourselves the affectionate and slightly deprecating name of Mamils. Middle Aged Men in Lycra to you and me.
I’d been to Bintan once before but only on a luxury spa weekend so was quite looking forward to seeing what the real place is like beyond the ringed fences of the spa compounds that scatter the place.
The riding and roads where epic. It’s the most pristine island of islands and is surprisingly bigger than Singapore by a fair bit - and the roads, hills and scenery is unparalleled. I’d ridden a bit in Borneo the year before and it was certainly on par with that, if not better for road riding.
We did a 90k loop of the north west part of the island which is used as a stage run for the Tour De Bintan cycle race held yearly in October. I’d not done it the year before as it’s a bit of a killer event, but it’d be something I’d be keen to do this year after seeing the layout.

The three of us set off on our pristine bikes with the combined street value of a Porsche 911 and swiftly started to sweat our own bodyweight as the first of many rolling hills and king of the mountain stages started to loom into sight around gorgeous traffic free bends.
After not riding a hill for over a year and after 90ks of ups and downs I can safely say I had nothing left in the tank at the end. So much so that when I came to stop outside the police station at the end of the ride I promptly got cramp in my dismounting cleat foot and landed in a heap with Trek’s finest on top off me with it’s wheels spinning.
The local constabulary thought this quite funny and gave me an inspiring round of applause whilst I tried to look a bit like I knew what I was doing. It’s a bit hard trying to look anything other than a total dick when you’re strapped to a bike by your feet whilst your head is in a ditch. After scrabbling out from under the bike and dusting off my lycra we got our bearings and headed off back to the ferry for some well earned Satay and copious Bintang beers.
All the way around the island we were greeted and waved at by the most friendly school kids and people you could hope to meet. Being smiled and at and cheered by a sea of gappy toothed kids out by the roadsides in the brightest of school uniforms made the day go by brilliantly and made us all feel very special. I can’t wait to go back and spend a few days exploring more of the routes and seeing more of the island. After doing it, you can really see why people do these amazing trips on bike over extraordinary distances in the most remote of places. There really is nothing quite like appreciating friendly inquisitiveness than getting amongst the people than on a bike and I’ve found.
Planning has commenced to go back with with a bigger group for the 156Km stage ride in late February with a well deserved stay in the spa in the evening to tend to our battered and bruised bodies.
I just need to take the padded shorts next time and get some more practice in as my backside feels like it’s been riding a razor blade today.

New Year message

As the new year beckons I look back fondly on the last few months since I arrived in Singapore and some of the great experiences I’ve had, some of the great people I’ve met and most of all some of the wonderful things I’ve learnt since I arrived with a couple suitcases full of stuff that I thought you could not buy here. Turns out the snowboards, sweaters and puffa jacket have not seen the light of day since I unpacked them and I’m already on my third pair of flip flops so it gives you an idea of the weather I'm used to. Going back to the snowdrifts of the UK does not seem like a good prospect. Even more interesting, I've had one day of being ill since I arrived and that I suspect was down to some rather dubious satay that I'd polished off one evening.

So as I look back, what have I garnered about this new land?

I’ve learnt that everything and anything can be bought in Singapore, apart from Muesli.
I’ve discovered that you can buy over 100 different types of Chilli Sauce at the most basic supermarket. The wall of chilli I’ve coined it.

I’ve figured out that you can reserve a table place from the massing hordes in a public place with nothing more than an elaborately folded business card.
I’ve worked out that the most valuable and often rarest item amongst friends is a serviette in a hawker centre.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Singaporean deserts whilst looking like they’ve come from Mars are actually quite nice once you brave them and give them a go.

I’ve just noticed that these all seem to be food related... Maybe I’m just a bit hungry.

It’s not just been all about food though. I’ve been enriched culturally and potentially emotionally since I’ve arrived and that was always the goal above any positive of warm weather, low taxes and a clean city which are the things you hear most of the people comment on when they describe why they like it here.


Some of the things I’d like to achieve this coming year include....

The damn four tones of Mandarin. Erggg – Arghh – Urghh – ZzzUgg is all it sounds like to me. Mandarin does actually make a little bit of sense when you deconstruct it but the tones – they’ve got me stumped.

Convert ten people to give up eating Shark Fin. For every one I convert the ripple effect will continue. I’ve managed it with 2 people so far with not so much effort, so it can be done. Granted, they’ve now switched to Tiger penis so I might need to perfect my cross over technique but it’s the thought that counts.

Learn some Asian cooking – I do miss cooking and cooking for 1 is nowhere near as much fun as for a bunch of folks. So, I’d like to go and learn to make a few dishes and make use of some of the great local produce out here . Starting off with figuring out the local wet market.... I need to find some unwitting test subjects to try out experiments on and now I’ve finally got a dining table it’s something I’d like to try out.

More travel. It’s hard to know where to start with the travel options ahead this year. China, Japan and some road trips on my new steed around Malaysia and Indonesia are top of the list and a couple more diving trips that I’ve got my eye on in Sipadan, Sulawesi and a a few of the more eastern Indonesian islands. Who knows what opportunity will arise with work as well. My trip to India this year was very interesting and somewhat humbling and was a place I’d love to go back and be able to explore some more.

So as the year closes to an end I’m quite excited about the year ahead and what may, or may not be. Even better is that I can say this all again in February as it’s Chinese New Year then!

Happy new year to everyone and hopefully I’ll see some of you this way in the coming year.

I’ll keep you posted on the continual search for muesli and the progress of my Ergggs and Arghhs.

In the meantime as I stock the fridge full of Tiger for the friends and festivities that tomorrow brings I bid you Xīn Nián Kuài Lè!

Christmas in the Philippines

Christmas day this year was a little bit different than any I’ve spent before. Not being able to go back to the UK for the seasonal break as had most people I decided that a few days diving somewhere exotic would be a good idea. So after a little bit of planning myself and three other dive buddies set course to Puerto Galera in the Philippines to spend a few days either side of Christmas day doing a bit of lounging around with the occasional diving thrown in.
PG is a quaint little place in the province of Oriental Mindoro (which is a very cool sounding name) which is about 100ks drive south of Manila. Having never been to the Philippines before and facing the prospect of having my turkey on the beach I was quite looking forward to this mini excursion.
Once you reach the coastal town of Batangas, a jump on a little bum boat across the Manila Channel for an hour’s sail and you’re plonked down on the sandy beach of Sabang which is the main heart of the bay where most of the cafes and bistros (spelt Bistrot oddly) are perched.
It’s a sleepy enough little place and I’d expected it to be rammed at peak season but mostly down to the credit crunch, snowfalls in Europe and other unknown factors the place was oddly quiet. I’ve no problem with this at all and it made the place feel all the more quaint without hoards of European tourists clogging the place up. The Philippines is a great location to spend the festive period as the majority of Filipinos are Christian so Christmas (or Cleese-maaass!! – as I now find myself pronouncing it ) and the shenanigans that go with it are celebrated in gusto.
The minute we arrived in Batangas, a flurry of bargaining, payment of taxes, bribes and backhanders commenced at a rate that I’ve never seen before in all of my travels. From unloading of my dive gear from the taxi in the ferry terminal car park to setting sail on the bum boat we must have paid 5 different taxes and paid off 3 or more people looking for a quick peso or two. It’s a bit daunting at first to have such a full on frontal of people looking to make a quick buck off you, but once you’ve figured out that it’s done in a friendly and non menacing way, you quickly get into the spirit of it all and go with the flow. Ian, my half Chinese mate had a field day bargaining and negotiating everything from his bags being carried to the environmental tax and even the price of a cup of coffee. I just sat back and watched and took it all in. My top tip for anyone doing this is to carry a wad of low denomination peso notes around and give them out like they are going out of print.
The amount that Filipinos earn and the poverty level is strikingly low so I wasn’t going to begrudge giving a few of my dollars away to people who needed them a lot more than I did. It’s hard not to give a few pesos to a wide toothy grin smiling back at you in people that just want a few pesos for helping you out in any way that they can. There is not a lot of paid work to be had so anything that can lend itself to a bit of income is fair game.

After a plane, car and ferry ride we arrived in Sabang and decamped our stuff, wacked on the dive gear and promptly set about exploring some of the local reefs and dive sites that were on offer. The diving in PG is scattered around the many coves and pocket beaches which make up the coastline. It’s mostly accessible by small boat as the rugged coastline is fragmented with big rocky outcrops which are simply stunning to look at.
Behind and right up to the white beaches the thick jungle encroaches all the way back up to the mountainous ranges of Mindoro. It would have been great to do some exploring of this and do some trekking of the interior, but that would have to wait for another time. PG being one of the top diving destinations in the Philippines which is what we were here to do.
The first couple of dives where a little uneventful, but by day two we were in the thick of some good diving on the some of the more advanced sites. PG really does have a great variety and health of corals which is easily on par to that of Komodo which I was at a few months before. The visibility is not as great but it’s pretty acceptable and coupled with some great drift dives in a some quite strong current made for a great couple of dives on Canyons and Fish Bowl.
I had to laugh at the Fish Bowl name. I must have dived in over 20 places with dive sites of the same name. I’m going to start a campaign for more creative dive site naming. Surely there has to be a better and more interesting method than taking a fish or animal name and appending it with a topographical noun. Shark Reef, Coral Garden and Crystal Point are getting a bit repetitive to see on dive maps. I’ve decided that I’m only going to dive sites that have more interesting names next year, that or just rename them myself as something more descriptively accurate. Sounds good in principle but I’m sure not many people will want to go diving with me to “Swampy quagmire” or “Nowt at all to see bleached mound”
If you do like drift diving though, some of the sites here are pretty good for that and I can see myself going back at some point to do some more of the more technical 60-70mtr channels and canyons that are within easy reach of the main beach.
As a place to go out PG is quite a lot of fun as well. The beaches in Sabang are not much to write about as the influx of cafes and dive shops has spoilt the idyllic feel of the main bay coupled with quite a large selection of girly bars to frequent in the evening which gives it a more of a Patong feel than Mediterranean infused hideaway. What it lacks for in being rough around the edges it more than makes up for in exuberance. You can easily spot the folks that have arrived more for the pleasure of the bar girls than the diving but hey, this is Asia after all and I’m no prude. The beaches further along the coast which are pleasant boat ride away are simply stunning. If ever you wanted to see a place that has been hardly touched by man and to have your own beach for the afternoon with a glass of Chablis or two, then this is the place. Get dropped off, crack open the vino, swim around on your own beach and get picked up later by your own little boat.

But this still being Christmas eve we were duly required to have our Christmas lunch or something as close to it as we could find. In the end, it was not difficult to find a decent lunch as most of the hotels had laid on buffet style dinners with salmon, turkey, lamb and all the trimmings of cranberry jam and accoutrements that one could wish for. It really was pretty good although sadly no Christmas pudding and a tawny port to wash it down afterwards.
As far as Christmas dinner was concerned, it was my first in Asia, my first by the beach and my first away from friends, family and loved ones. It was really enjoyable though and as I looked out over sea watching the colourful hanging lanterns swinging in the sea breeze I gave a little toast to those far away in distance, but not very far away in thoughts.

In the evening I made my way into the locals end of the bay and got talking to a bunch of young local guys and some girls who were back from overseas visiting their families for the celebratory period. In the Philippines, it’s a big thing to come back and see your family and spend time together at this time of year as they are very family orientated.
After a few drinks of some of the local fire-water which consisted of pure gin and lime juice fused together in some magical swirling concoction followed by copious amounts of Red Horse, the local 7% beer, we were all hugging and singing Filipino party songs like I was one of the family, albeit a slightly taller and more pale version.
Speaking of beer, it took me a few days to work out this little peculiarity of napkins being wrapped around the heads of the beers. At first, I’d thought it was some polite hygiene thing or to keep the condensation at bay like in humid Singapore, were your beer will be sat in a pool of water within seconds of leaving the fridge. After watching a few locals wipe the rim upon opening the bottle my curiosity got the better of me and I gave in and asked. It was explained to me that the bottle tops of San Miguel rust for some reason and occasionally make the neck go a rusty colour, which is to be wiped off. So, every single bottle of San Miguel comes with a little hat napkin to wipe it, rusty or not. My inquisitive mind was satisfied at last.

As we all sat out by the family house by the bay the local band in the bar next door were belting out local renditions of Let it Snow when clearly it could be seen that it was anything but snowing and no amount of letting would be likely to change that meteorological forecast. As we all danced around I was made to feel at home in a way that you’d never see anywhere else in the world. Allowing a complete stranger into your home, into your lives and at the most important family time of the year and making them feel like part of the furniture was something that I’ll remember for a long time. The world really does have some good people in it.

After being invited into their home in the early hours for yet more traditional local food (the goat curry looked a bit odd but was amazing) we had some more drinks and I got to ask lots of questions about the Filipino way of life and I was probed, climbed on and giggled at by the small children about what it was like in England at Christmas time.
No TV or Playstation to be seen, no family bickering, no expensive gifts being exchanged but a simple and enjoyable get together with anyone who was sober enough to be able to still speak coherently. Man, I can tell you Filipino know how to drink!
In the early hours as I walked back to the hotel along the beach I sat down on the harbour steps and looked out to the mainland wondering what was going to be in store for the year ahead. Certainly some new adventures, certainly some new friends to be made. As the firecrackers and fireworks subsided I picked myself up and started the short walk home just to be greeted by a grin of one of the young kids I’d been chatting to. “You are coming for New Years Andy?” was the question. “You should really see us party then!!” he smirked.
I smiled to him and replied maybe. For sure, it’ll be a place I do end up going back to one day. I just need to let my liver relax a little before then.