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Back home
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
I am finally back for an extended stay at my home town of Northampton. Apologies for lack of blogging recently, it seems that now I have finished my travels I just don't do as much! I have managed to do a few things though.
For the late May Bank Holiday here in the UK I headed to the amazingly picturesque town of Arundel in the very south of England near to the coastal city of Brighton, or London by the sea as its also known. Arundel is very much what a traveller to England would imagine a small English town to look like, there is a castle, grassy riverside banks to have picnics on and a traditional high street with old Victorian buildings, traditional pubs and a small square. Its one of my favourite towns in the UK and was a good place to spend a few days.
My reason for visiting was that I have couple of friends who live in Arundel and one of them was celebrating their 40th birthday and had hired out a barn on the outskirts of the town for a Barbecue and party. The location was superb and the party was good fun in some unusually decent British weather!
It also gave me a good chance to catch up with some of my old school friends most of them I haven't seen since returning from my travels, and some that I haven't seen in a very long time. Most of my friends were staying in small B&B's or hotels in the area, but being unemployed at the moment I opted to save a bit of cash and pitched a tent in a nearby campsite! Good thing I love camping, and also a good thing as my accommodation only cost me £9.50 compared to the hotels charging around £50 a night! It was a good couple of days but as usual was over way too soon.
I also managed a trip to London to discuss wedding plans with my mate Ian who is marrying his girlfriend in Bali in a few weeks. For some reason (I'm going with default!) he has made me best man. At first I was a little concerned about having to spend a fairly considerable sum of money on flights and hotel accommodation for the wedding, but now having been back in the UK long enough to want to leave again, I am really looking forward to going. Looking forward to the best man speech a little less though!
After catching what must be the oldest train in existence for part of the journey, I actually found getting the train to London to be pretty good and with the stupid price of petrol in this country not too bad value for money either. Once in London we settled down into a tough weekend of shooting terrorists and watching the final club game of the season - the FA Cup final. I hate the summer weekends as they have no football... My mate Matt also came down on the Saturday and it was good to get out of Somerset for the weekend and just do pretty much nothing with a couple of mates.
Since then it has been a half-assed effort to find work that doesn't really exist, signing on at the dole office with the other knuckle draggers looking for work that doesn't exist and to try to cope with the chaos at being at my sisters house with noisy kids and the rest of my family. Its not been too bad, the weather has been nice so I have got in a few hikes on the Mendip hills (my sister lives in an amazing location), but the need to have my own space again meant I looked forward to getting home for this week.
So currently I am house sitting at my mates Heather and Ed's place while they take a much needed vacation on the coast of Norfolk. Its been fairly quiet and allowed me to catch up with people a bit more and also gave me the chance to call in at my old employers to see what work they might be able to offer me.
Sadly they weren't in a position to offer me anything immediately due to the hopeless economic conditions caused by a useless chancellor of the exchequer who now is an even more incompetent prime minister. Although I don't want to say too much on here they did stress that there might some opportunities at a new office they want to establish in Clevedon, some 10 miles from where my sister lives. This leaves me with a dilemma, as much as I want to work and knowing that this is a good opportunity, I am slightly reticent as I left the west country some 16 years ago and vowed never to return. Whilst I admit my life back here in Northampton has got slightly predictable during the past few years, one of my reasons for travelling in the first place was to experience things that I just wasn't getting to experience any more by living here, Northampton is still where I consider home to be and it would be very difficult to have to leave it to live in a part of the world that although I know very well, just doesn't hold as many good memories for me.
Its a tough decision and I am finding the job search to be far more of a challenge and far less fun than working out my next destination and accommodation when I was travelling! I look forward to my week in Bali and getting away from it all more and more each day.
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Job Search
Friday, 22 May 2009
Being home in the UK is not much fun. For starters until two days ago its done nothing but pour with rain! Also when you are travelling not having a job just doesn't seem to be an issue unless you actually run out of money. Also things seemed to cost less for some reason. Probably because things in the UK do cost a bloody fortune, but that's another story! This has meant that I have been looking for work, even though I am still not sure what I want to do.
Currently I have applied for three different roles, all of which I am perfectly qualified for and I even have the experience for. Truth is though, even when I was applying for them I kind of knew it was unlikely I'd get any of them. I may get an interview, but I doubt the final decision will result in me getting the role. Ho-hum. Apologies for the negativity, but the job market is really squeezed here in the UK, thanks in no small part to the appalling and abysmal government. This means that companies are unwilling to take a chance on employees at the minute, as if they make a mistake and employ someone unsuitable they'll lose money, which could mean losing the company in this current climate. Therefore companies are all employing people in-house, and only posting adverts outside of the company to fulfill some kind of equal policy criteria. Still you never know!
One thing I have discovered since coming home is how much I like my own space. Currently I am staying at my sisters house in Cheddar, Somerset. Its close to the village where I grew up and where my dad currently lives and is a very pretty slice of British rural life. However, I am used to my life in the Midlands where my friends live and I had a cool little flat. I am not used to sharing a place with family members, small children and my mother calling in every day.
Last night me and my sister watched a fairly entertaining film on Sky Movies called "Dan in Real Life". It starred Steve Carell and centred on his attraction to his brothers girlfriend while on a massive family get-together up in just fantastic looking Rhode Island in north-east USA (next trip methinks!). There were the mum and dad, sisters, brothers and all their partners and billions of kids.
My sister was saying how amazing it was seeing the whole family unit together including the extended family. I thought it looked like hell, and I know if I had to go to something like that I'd be the one skulking off at every opportunity, PSP in hand to shut myself off from the nightmare. I am not close to any of my extended family, save my Aunt Hillary and her family in the US, and to be honest I am not massively close to my immediate family. I get on with my sister and brother-in-law and enjoy playing with ny niece and nephew, but at the end of the day me and my sister are very different people. She complains that my remoteness is weird, but I am just one of those people who enjoys his own company.
This may seem perverse after spending a year travelling and sharing a room with up to 20 people at any one time, but if you travel by yourself as I did you do get as much time to yourself as you need - just not when you go to sleep! I don't think me and my sister will ever see eye to eye on this issue, and its not meant as a swipe at her family as I am eternally grateful for them putting me up until I can sort out a job and get my own place back, its just that after my long year away, now I just long for my own flat again. Fingers crossed it won't be long!
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London & Northampton
Tuesday, 12 May 2009
After arriving back at Heathrow very early in the morning after my final flight with the ever useless British Airways (Cathay Pacific were by far the best airline I flew with, closely followed by LAN) I waved goodbye to my mother and step-dad and headed into London on Heathrow Connect. This service links Heathrow with Paddington Station alongside the more expensive Heathrow Express. On my way towards central London I got my first views of the country I had left behind nearly a year ago. I wasn't exactly impressed by what I saw. Apparently the chavs still have the country by the balls and swarmed onto the train at each stop. Also as the train followed the line to Paddington used by First Great Western I got to see the amazing rolling stock offered by one of the UK's biggest train operators - wow, trains from over 30 years ago!
Imagine you are a Japanese tourist used to racing across Japan on the 300+ km/h shinkansen bullet trains. Modern, clean and most importantly, fast. Then you arrive at Heathrow, probably from a Japan Airlines plane with those fancy toilets that violate you. You grab a ride on the Heathrow Express, it sounds fast, in the mind of a Japanese tourist it may even sound like it might even use some fancy new technology like Maglev or be some kind of futuristic monorail or something. Then he steps onto a fairly standard, although admittedly clean Heathrow Express train before crawling into Paddington alongside trains that were only modern before Mrs Thatcher even climbed to power. And then when he climbs onto the aging London Underground he probably just thinks he has stepped through a timewarp back into Victorian London! The last comment is possibly a little unfair - its practically impossible to upgrade the aging London Underground to match the more modern subways I found dotted throughout the world as it was indeed built at the end of the Victorian era.
Anyway, once I got into Paddington I headed over to Greenwich and to my mate Ian's flat to catch up on some much needed zombie / terrorist shooting on various video game consoles. Awesome. Despite all the video game violence and swearing (House of the Dead Overkill recently got a Guinness Record for the most swear words in a video game!) we also managed to sort out some wedding details for his wedding in July, sort out a replacement O2 SIM card and see Star Trek at the IMAX (its a damn good movie by the way). All this with horrendous jet lag too.
From here it was back onto the aging UK public transport system and on to my hometown of Northampton to see my good friends Heather & Ed and their expanding family. When I left they had one daughter who had yet to fully speak sentences and another one on the way, one year later and they have a talkative daughter and a rapidly growing son. It was great to stay there, especially as it was Ed's birthday which meant barbecued meat and tasty cake! It was also nice as Northampton is still where I consider home to be so it felt like I had finally stopped travelling.
After a weekend of over-eating, spending way too much time sat in front of a laptop screen and then some more eating and enjoying the family chaos that is the Jakeman house unfortunately I had to leave Northampton due to the small problem of not having a house of my own to live in there anymore. This meant a trip on the ever reliable UK public transport system once more, this time to Somerset to stay in the spare room at my sisters house. Things started shakily, turned out I had bought a day return from London to Northampton, instead of an open one (stupid confusing UK train ticketing system) so that cost me another £22 (grrr). The trip to London was OK, but slightly late with the usual lack of information, and I got back to Heathrow easy enough.
From there the plan was to take the cheaper option of National Express bus to Bristol, simple right? No. This is the UK where nothing is simple. The bus broke down several times before it even left the airport, and then staggered onto the M4. It managed to make it to Reading for the first stop, but then let out a sorrowful groan and conked out for good. Luckily I managed to grab a commuter bus full of grotty and noisy school kids across to Reading train station and then caught the previously mentioned 30 year old rolling stock to finish the mammoth leg of the days travel. Thankfully the aging trains were on-time for once and I managed to meet my brother-in-law for a lift to their house. At only another £38 cost to me!
Now I am staying at my sisters house at Cheddar with two more noisy kids to entertain me / tire me out (I'll get one of my own one day I guess!) until I can accept the fact that its really all over and I have to get a job like the rest of the UK population - although in the current UK climate that may be slightly tricky. Its still seems pretty weird to be in the UK again, and it was good to see my friends I had to leave behind when I left the UK in May 2008, but I can't help but think that it already feels like I had almost not been away.
Sadly being away means you manage to get some perspective on exactly what the state of the country you leave behind is like. Before I left on my travels I had seen very little of the world other than a few places in Europe. Having seen so much more of the world now it saddens me to see the sorry state of my own country. Other than the unreliable, expensive and pretty ancient public transport system there are many other things that now stand out which make me question whether the moniker "great" really applies to Britain anymore.
Were people always this fat? Compared to Asian people British people seem ginormous and a visit to Abington Park made me wonder if there are any attractive women left in the UK anymore. Was there always this much graffiti? The US aside it seems you can't go anywhere in this country without seeing some un-intelligent moron scribbling their ill-informed comments over everything. Why are kids here so cocky and obnoxious? The little sods have all the power these days and they know it. Was everything always this expensive? Well, yes they were to be honest. Why are there so many unemployed people these days? It seems that everybody I know knows someone close to them who has been made redundant in the past six months, not good for somebody returning to the UK who needs a job. Why can't I get a job where I am paid just to surf the Internet? OK, not the UK's fault this one!
People also seem obsessed at the moment with asking me what my plans are now I am back home. The simple answer is that I just don't know. I thought that a year away would help me work out exactly what it is that I want to do by the time I arrived back in the UK. Sadly I am no closer now to working out what I want to do than when I left one year ago (except that I do know that I never want to climb up another bloody chimney as log as I live!). While I try to work things out though I'll keep posting on this blog and keep you informed if I ever do work it all out... Any ideas?!
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Twitter
Thursday, 7 May 2009
Argh! For some reason I have signed up to Twitter - yet another internet social network thingy to take up my time when I guess I should be looking for work....!
Anyhoo, check it out at spunky9474 and drop me a tweet or whatever it is the kids do these days.
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Singapore
Wednesday, 6 May 2009
From Kuala Lumpur I caught the night train to Singapore, my final destination. The train was pretty similar to my previous overnight excursions, although not as nice as the Canadian and Chinese trips though. In between the noisy fat person snoring loudly and the rattle of the diesel engine I think I got a bit of sleep, although it was soon ended by customs boarding the train at the Malaysia border to check documents and then having to actually leave the train once I had entered Singapore for customs on that side of the border. Slightly bewildered by this method of entering a country I headed for my final accommodation once off the train.
As this has been my last stop on what suddenly seems an incredibly short year my mother and step dad were flying out to meet me for the last week. After finding my hotel (not five stars but after so much time in dorm rooms a welcome oasis of privacy!) I had a little time to explore Singapore before their arrival. I headed down to Orchard Road, the main shopping street and mooching around a few shopping malls I was suddenly stopped in my tracks by a heavy thunderstorm. Situated at the southern end of the Malay peninsula, Singapore is possibly even more hot and humid and gets some amazing storms. Most nights here have seen lightening and thunder rumbling with one night sounding like the building itself was a victim of a lightening strike. Certainly it set the alarms off, not much fun at 2am!
It was good to catch up with my family after so long, although my mother hasn't coped as well with the heat and humidity as my step-dad! Hailing from deepest, darkest Somerset they seemed slightly ill at ease in such a huge city with its new fangled subway systems and the like! Going from a village with just 4000 people to a city with over 4.4 million people was a slight culture shock!
Having them with me for the last week and staying in a hotel has basically meant that this has been a holiday and after almost a year of continual travel a most welcome one at that. It also meant that I have pretty much done all the tourist attractions Singapore has to offer including the cable car to Sentosa Island (great cable car, awful island with fake beaches and thousands of people), a boat ride along the Singapore River, Chinatown, Colonial District, visiting the excellent toy museum, enjoying a Singapore Sling at the famous Raffles Hotel long bar, riding the Singapore Flyer and just hanging out in the many restaurants the city has to offer eating food as varied as Thai to Spanish to Mexican.
Near to the hotel is the pretty amazing Singapore Botanic Gardens, which are not only a good place to wander in the heat, but also cater for their visitors with several restaurants. For some reason though we ended up in the extremely expensive French restaurant there where the food was expensive, but the portions small. I'm glad I didn't pay for that meal. It was an excellent dinner though, although it was something I won't do more than once a lifetime! In between our main courses the waiters delivered bite size morsels to keep the meal going. The first of these was a quails egg with three small snails (I did say it was a French restaurant after all!). I had the egg, but I drew the line at eating mollusc's. Thankfully the bite size section after the main course was a much tastier chocolate selection and just incredible Madeleine's. Must learn how to make them...
I have managed to grab a bit of exercise in amongst all the sightseeing, there are two hills in Singapore – Mt Faber at a dizzy 105m high, and Bukit Timah Summit at a staggering 186 metres! The latter of these spiralling summits is the centre of the Bukit Timah nature reserve where you can while away the humid hours hiking in one of the last remnants of ancient Singapore rainforest surrounded by monkeys, monitor lizards and about a million insects who happily enjoy chomping down on human flesh.
That's pretty much it for Singapore really. Although it might sound like a short piece for a whole week, its been pretty hectic at times, although this has been helped by the times when it wasn't so hectic! Such as when we went to the pub for lunch next to the river (at least three times), or when we just sat by the pool at the hotel and had a nice swim (tropical temperatures means the pool was just perfect). Overall though it has just been a nice relaxing week buzzing about Singapore on its excellent subway system (the UK is so far behind the rest of the world its embarrassing) and not having to worry about sorting out accommodation, transport, food and all the other things a traveller usually has to deal with on a daily basis. Plus, having a bedroom and a bathroom to myself for the first time in a while has been extremely pleasant.
I have missed the fun parts of hostelling though. Staying in a hotel there just isn't the travellers camaraderie that you get from hanging out in a common room sharing traveller stories over far too many cans of beers. Sitting here typing this in the last of the evening sunshine before heading off to the airport to get my final flight back to London I just can't believe that the year has gone so quickly, but at the same time I am looking forward to seeing my friends again as its been tough not being able to see them over the past 12 months. The UK is going to seem a whole lot smaller now though.
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Penang
Monday, 27 April 2009
Despite the dorm room containing 12 beds, it was a large room and never felt cramped and the air-con kept it cool. It helped that for the first two nights the room wasn't full, and even on my third night when it was I never felt like I was hemmed in. A window would have been nice though! The hostel itself was pretty new, having just opened its doors to world-weary travellers about five months ago. That meant everything still just about had a new shine to it and the Ikea furniture was comfy and homely. The flat-screen telly and satellite TV helped matters too!
I did go out of the hostel though, I went out to an amazing Indian restaurant called Kapitan twice (it was also cheap!), the chicken tikka masala was just amazing. Located near one the corners that led into Little India, the area was colourful and noisy with Bollywood films being played in shops and Bhangra music blasting out. Do I still need to go to India now?!
The town of Georgetown itself is originated from the old British colonial settlement, with grand administrative buildings and the fairly well preserved Fort Cornwallis - the old British military encampment. It was a grand testament to the once mighty British Empire and served to remind me just how powerful an influence the UK once had on the globe. I think now we have a few islands...
Penang Hill to the west of the city comes as a welcome relief from the heat of Georgetown, at the summit the temperature is at least five degrees cooler than in the city and the humidity is noticeably reduced. To reach the summit I took the funicular railway which takes two trains and about 30 minutes climbing up steep hillsides to reach the top station. After admiring the views of the city and the suspension bridge that links Penang to the mainland (reputedly the longest bridge in Asia) I walked back down the hill towards the Botanical Gardens. The track was very steep in places and I was glad I was going down. On the way I saw loads of monkeys, including several mothers with small babies clinging to them, just an incredible sight. A warning to anyone else who goes to see the monkeys though, do not feed them as this carries a large fine, and also don't get too close to the mothers with babies as the male gets a little irate and these buggers probably carry rabies!
As for nightlife, Penang is pretty chilled and traveller friendly. I spent one night hanging out at the hostel watching a couple of DVD's - The Transporter starring Jason Statham was a highlight, although the scene where he strips to his waist and covers himself in engine oil and fights lots of goons is quite possibly one of the most homo-erotic scenes in any movie I have seen in a long time.
The next night a couple of girls from the hostel asked if I wanted to come along to the Sikh New Year festival taking place at Fort Cornwallis. It was a fantastic exposure to one of the many cultures that makes Malaysia its home, the event had lots of food and traditional and more modern dancing. Despite the lack of alcohol at the event (!) I was glad to have seen the spectacle. The irony that an old British fort was being used as a centrepiece for the Sikh community wasn't lost on me either. We finished off the evening having a beer in one of the many little cafe's and bars along the main Chulia Street near the hostel. It really began to feel like my trip was coming to an end.
After Penang I caught the bus back to Kuala Lumpur and checked into a different hostel in the same area as my previous one. The hostel is also pretty new, and is very clean and Ikea furnished again! I spent the evening doing what I have now done so many times on my travels, hung out at the hostel enjoying their cheap beers and chatted nonsense to all the other travellers. Tonight I catch the sleeper train down to Singapore and my time in hostels will be over for now. I think I'm going to miss them.
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Kuala Lumpur
Thursday, 23 April 2009
Did I mention the heat and humidity? Damn Malaysia is unbearably hot. Even at night it barely gets below 30C, and the humidity? Around 90% all the bleeding time. But other than that its another amazing country in my continuing journey around amazing countries. And Australia.
After a visit to an English pub I spent most of the following day sorting out some accommodation and transport to take me to the end of my trip in Singapore. I then went to Borders and almost wept at the size of their manga collection - all of it in English too! Best part was the prices were just pennies above the prices I'd pay at Amazon so I grabbed a few tankobons to catch up with the series I've been collecting.
But before the readers of this blog start uttering comments of derision about spending time on my hobby and not travelling matters (I am sure some of you have hobbies that to other people seem odd, manga and anime is just happens to be my hobby that's all) I did finish the day off with more than a few beers. After trying some Malaysian cuisine (very tasty) me and a mate from the hostel headed to the Sky Bar in the Traders Hotel. The bar is on the 33rd floor of the hotel and not only does it have a swimming pool in the middle of the bar, it also has just the most amazing view of the nearby Petronas Towers. The beer wasn't even any more expensive there than in the rest of KL's over priced bars. On the way back we stopped at several more bars (I am sure most of the women in them were hookers) and ended up at a different hostel where somebody who was staying at our hostel previously had moved on to. It was here I had a very interesting "debate" with an American over the state of the US verses Chinese economy. This guy refused to accept that China had long ago not only taken over from the US as a global economic superpower, but that it had taken over and ground the US economy into the ground. He steadfastly believed that the US was still dominant despite me pointing out how pretty much everything these days is made in China. Americans, give it up, your cars are shit, that's why not even Americans buy them anymore, and not even the mighty Barack Obama can return the US to its once burgeoning financial position.
Anyway... After awaking with a fuzzy head and then proceeding to lounge about the hostel I finally made it out to the Bukit Nanas Rainforest park in central KL. This is the only remaining section of native forest left in the city and it offers people a break from the busy city with trails and interpretive walks. And monkeys. I was really pleased to see monkeys in the wild, although I was a little concerned when I thought one threw a stick at me. Not a small stick either! The park was pretty cool, and surrounded the base of the KL Tower which as the fourth tallest tower in the world offered views all over the city. At least I imagine it does as I was too tight to pay the 38MR to go up it. Instead I headed to the Petronas Towers in daylight, although I was too late to get a free ticket to visit the sky bridge between the two towers sadly. There was a pleasant enough park here too, so I wandered around that instead and took photos of the second tallest buildings in the world.
After a deserved night in and with no more alcohol my final full day in KL involved more lounging about before I headed to another park in the city, the Perdana Lake Gardens, close to the central train station and central mosque. The mosque was fairly large, impressive and imposing (slightly better than Northampton central mosque for those that know it!) but I wanted to get on to the park - which took ages down winding roads. Eventually I found it though and I enjoyed the greenery and still hated the heat. The deer park nearby was pretty cool if a little small and best of all it was all free!
I stopped in again in the evening, partly due to the heat and partly due to my finances, and got a relatively early night as I actually had to get up early to catch the bus to Penang. By early I meant the alarm went off at 8:30. I was still sound asleep though!
That meant today was spent riding the air conditioned bus up the peninsula and across the short stretch of water that divides Penang from the mainland. It was a fairly boring journey although some of the scenery was pretty spectacular. I finally got to Penang to find it hot and humid. Big surprise. The hostel was easy to locate and is in a great location, surrounded by many restaurants and other travellers. Thankfully the 12 bed dorm is air conditioned even though it has many beds! Tomorrow I'll sort out anything that needs doing and then get out and visit the old colonial city.
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