I really had no idea how much sweat my body was capable of producing until I came to Borneo. It's mind boggling, really. I mean, I don't want to turn this into a big philosophical thing, but there's a certain zenful rite of passage that everyone travelling through the tropics must undergo. You go from furiously wiping your brow, your neck, your upper lip and any other part of you that's publicly acceptable to wipe, to just letting the sweat slide gracefully off your chin (sometimes into your dinner); from being completely disgusted with the smell of your sweaty, rank body to recognizing that smell but accepting it as your own. eau de you.
It doesn't take much to get you all hot and bothered in Borneo. It could be as simple as getting a bad seat on the bus. Walk a few steps and you sweat. Walk a lot of steps and you're fucked.
I found this out early, as I started my time in Borneo with a trek. Every hour or so, at a rest point, the guys (it was 4 dudes and lil old me) took off their shirts and wrung them out. About half a beach pailful of sweat. Disgusting. Me, I just carried all that sweat with me (which no doubt made me heavier) and tried to admire the prettiness around me through my fogged up glasses (humidity percentage sits in the high 80s throughout the day). And my, was it pretty...
Ok, I must pause here to rant a bit about Malaysia and the Sabah government. Everyone comes through these parts to hike Mount Kinabalu, which sits some 4000m over the region, a tempting peak to bag. Unfortunately, the Sabah government has sold all the accomodations in their public national park to one private enterprise, Sutera Lodges. In the past few years, this monopoly has quadrupled the price of accommodations in the park, making the climb ridiculously expensive, something in the region of 700RM, or over $200CDN for a 2-day climb. Ridiculous. The mountain hut that every hiker is obligated to stay in costs over $100CDN a night. Ridiculous.
So I said "fuck
that." I found a guy on a travel forum who freelanced as an adventure tourism guide. He was testing out a new trail and needed guinea pigs, so I signed up. The 3-day hike took us through rivers and meadows, along mountain ridges, and into the jungle. At night, we camped in villages dotted along the foothills and ate, drank, sang and danced with our gracious hosts (well, for the first night anyway. The second night we were sort of accosted by a drunk villager who just wouldn't shut up...) Anyway, it was nice.
So here's a plea to all the backpackers en route to KK: don't do the summit trek. Tell the Malaysian government they can't sell off their public parks and expect people to shut up and pay out. If you put up with it, the price'll just keep going up. Besides all that, there are prettier mountains to climb, tougher peaks to bag. Don't do it for the bragging rights. It ain't worth it.
Onwards.
After the trek, I headed to Poring Hot Springs to chill. The hot springs themselves weren't that exciting (no hot springs will ever be the same after Lisong...), but I did have my first close encounter with a wild orangutan. Well, semi-wild. Her name was Jackie and she came down from the jungle every day to pick up various edible goodies from the park rangers. I was totally awed by how human her facial features were...
Posted in
borneo,
dromomania,
hiking
There was a plan. The Plan was to hike into Batad, a small rice terrace village only accessible by foot, and then spend a few days going further afield, staying in remote villages and traveling deep into the valley before popping back out onto the main highway.
The Cordilleras in Northern Luzon is a beautiful stretch of eye candy; a mountainous region shining an unreal neon green. What's most amazing about this place is that its beauty is entirely man-made. Thousands of years ago, the Ifugao people of the region started hacking into the hills surrounding them and planting rice. They devised an ingeneous irrigation system and in the process created hill after valley after hill after valley of terraced neon green fields.
The Plan did not start well. On my way into Batad, I became aware of a certain "flippity flop" sound coming from my feet. I look down to find that the front of my precious Vibram soles (
both of them) were no longer attached to my boots. I pulled out my trusty duct tape and did an emergency patch job. My muddy wornass 8-year-old boots now donned a swanky, stylish,
nouveau moderne silver glean that pleased me immensely. I felt like a cosmonaut...
They lasted the first half hour of a 4-hour hike. We tried salvaging the situation by wrapping plant vines and various other miscellania around the duct tape, around the flopping sole... but to no avail.
Somehow, I made it to the wedding. Did I mention there was a wedding? In keeping with Ifugao tradition, the merry couple invited the entire village and all the neighbouring villages (basically anyone willing to walk hours on end for free food and rice wine- which is, as it turns out, a fuck of a lot of people) to partake in the festivites. They drank, danced and were merry.
Back to the boot fiasco. On our way home, I rashly decided to rip the flippity-floppity soles off and I spent the last hour of the hike sliding downhill along the slippery muddy trail. RIP Merrells. It was then that I decided to abandon the Plan.
Did I mention it was raining? Boo global warming, because it rained every goddamn day. From noon to night (the only way to beat it was to get up every morning at 7am to enjoy the few precious hours of sun) And I'm not talking about a light drizzle, I'm talking monsoon. Which doesn't go well with hiking. With anything, for that matter.
I thought that the monsoon was only restricted to the mountains, so having abandoned my Plan, I wanted to escape to the beach. A sunny beach. A beautiful sunny deserted beach with turquoise waters and a few friendly fisherman...
Now, these are a dime a dozen in the phils, so I picked one that was relatively close (8 hours from Manila) and off I went... without checking the weather report. On the way down, I had a foreboding sense of dread... because it was
pouring. And it turns out Bicol is
not 8 hours from Manila. The entire stretch of road was undergoing perma-construction, so was reduced to a one-lane highway. Kids were out in droves carrying red and green flags but not knowing how to use them so traffic got pretty fucked up. The bus driver got really impatient. After we got through slow zones, he started driving really fast. And so we got into a car accident.
I have to say, I am a lucky lucky little girl. I was in the front seat and it was a head-on collision. Had the bus not been built like the Hulk, I'm positive my leg would have snapped off (I raised it when I realized we were about to collide- which uh, probably isn't what you're
supposed to do).
Because it was one-lane traffic, we effectively stopped traffic dead. Everyone was alright, but shaken. A new bus was on the way, but couldn't get through the traffic so after about an hour- and I think this part was WAY scarier than the accident- we DROVE our mangled bus another half hour to go meet it. The front windshield was busted and cracked glass was shaking in the wind as we drove, the door was so fucked we had to squeeze our bodies through it while someone else propped it back, and nobody even
tested the bloody thing- you know, to see if the gears and brakes worked.
After this, I gave up. I went back to Manila 5 days before my flight and did nothing. I stayed at my friend's house and let her maids pamper me. I played a lot of frisbee. I rode the MRT. I
shopped... Oh, and guess what? Sunny. Every day that I was in Manila, it was freakin beautiful. But I didn't bite- I knew I was weather cursed, I knew as soon as I made a plan- climb a mountain, go to Lake Taal- I knew
that day it would rain on me.
So. Let me recount my lifetime travel woes: I've been robbed, I've gotten a tropical disease, I've had flight disasters, I've broken up with friends, I've been hit by a motorcycle, and now a car accident! Happy day, I think I've almost done em all. I should write a book.
Posted in
dromomania,
hiking,
philippines
This was never meant to be a travel blog. Even the
pretentio-title of the blog doesn't refer to travel in the literal sense. But alas, I've been doing a lot of traveling lately, so posts have fallen into a kind of routine. I have a childish aversion to routine. I'm sick of listening to myself tell all these "and then and then" stories, so I've drudged up a stray thought, circa New Years 2009.
A few friends and I went down south and stayed with my friend's relatives in Changhua. Her cousins were in their early 20s and we had some interesting conversations. Us Western folks are have completely spoiled ideas of "the country". In Taiwan, "the country" doesn't consist of beautiful pastoral fields with rolling green hills abound, it's more like lonely looking mansions and industrial buildings and abandoned factories sitting atop dying grass scattered across Nowhere. It's, in a word, ugly.
And all this ugliness, well, it does a Body no good... Here's basically what Cousin Larry had to say:
Country Cat
he said that young people in the country had no power. That there were too many old folks dusting their coffins, shuffling around him in slow motion, made him dizzy. he said the air tasted dead. Everyone was dying or waiting to die, and the stillness seeped into him, slowed him down. He had to drive everywhere and driving made him tired, everything made him tired. Young people in cities don't have this problem, he said. There were lots of them, enough to fight the tired sickness. Enough to push past the haze of boredom and dead air. Enough to do, make, dream, take....
Power in numbers.City Dog
he said he didn't want to live abroad because it was too calm, too relaxed, and that was dangerous for a person like him, someone who lacked ambition and was prone to laziness. He needed to live somewhere fast, driven, pressurized, a place that would make him do better, be better, where ambition was in the air, he hoped to inhale it, use osmosis to attain it, that pop and bang of dreams that would signal the start of his life...Living abroad is too easy, he says. Save that for when I'm 60. For now, I wanna live. Live hard.
Posted in
taiwan
So I said "fuck that." I found a guy on a travel forum who freelanced as an adventure tourism guide. He was testing out a new trail and needed guinea pigs, so I signed up. The 3-day hike took us through rivers and meadows, along mountain ridges, and into the jungle. At night, we camped in villages dotted along the foothills and ate, drank, sang and danced with our gracious hosts (well, for the first night anyway. The second night we were sort of accosted by a drunk villager who just wouldn't shut up...) Anyway, it was nice.
