Author Archives: James

The Return of the Anti-Completist (or: Heffalumps!)

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OK, so the title may need a little explanation. Heffalumps, of course, require no explanation whatsoever. Assuming, of course, that you are English and have been brought up on a sensible diet of weak tea, buttered crumpets and Winnie the Pooh. If, however, you are deep in the wilds of Myanmar talking to a highly educated local doctor with an inquisitive mind and persistent manner then referring to a passing elephant as a heffalump requires a half hour discourse on A.A. Milne, the beauty and wonder of childhood, the geography of the 100 Acre Wood and the gender of piglets. It also leads to difficult questions like “How can you be sure that the heffalump was an elephant?” and “What is the role of the donkey? And what was he doing in the hole?”.

Hang on, elephants? Anti-completism? What?

We are still in Myanmar, and it is before Christmas. We are on the point of turning for home, and our travel has taken on a certain character. We started the trip many moons ago in May, happily sightseeing everything in our path, making sure that we wrung the very best from each place we saw. It was amazing, it was enlightening, it was deeply satisfying, and it was exhausting. More recently, we have become a little … anti-completist. The mantra of the anti-completist is: “what is it about this specific place that we cannot see anywhere else?” It’s not pure laziness, although this has a little to do with it. It’s more that, having seen thousands of Bhuddas, hundreds of temples, dozens of endangered and endemic species at arms’ length, various tribal gatherings, the world’s highest point, deepest canyon, weirdest industrial accident, fattest tourist and best leaving party, we are becoming – erm – a little harder to impress.

So, heffalumps. Oh yes.

Having shunned a few gold-encrusted temples (blah), the last of the anti-completist must-dos in Myanmar was a trip to a working elephant camp in the teak forests near Taungoo, where we were shown round by the above mentioned local doctor – tour guide by profession, free clinic provider and general all round saint in his spare time. The photographs below will tell the story better (and certainly more succinctly) than I could. Let’s just say that waking in a rangers’ hut on the edges of the jungle, tramping through the bush on the back of a working elephant, cutting down a huge teak tree and hauling the thing back on chains to base camp was a real privilege. Consider us impressed.

Favourite Places

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Well, everyone asks. In fact, it is just about the only thing that many people ask – what was your favourite of all the many places you have seen on your trip around the world?

Well, we have a few. Depending on who is asking, we sometimes give different places so we can add some healthy variety to the tall tales we tell. In truth though, it will be hard to beat the side of the gas crater in Darvaza where Lucy agreed to marry me.

It’s not my best video, or my best edit (or indeed my best Prodigy remix), but it gives half an idea of the grandeur of the place. The government is drilling for gas in the region to try to extinguish the crater as they think that an industrial accident still burning after 50 years is bad for the image of modern, thrusting Turkmenistan. Life is short – go while you still can.

Sweet Cravings

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This is going to be a little hard to explain, so please bear with me.

Our plan for the trip included a certain amount of “flashpacking”. Loosely defined, this involves slumming it for most of the trip – sleeping on floors, taking overnight buses, finding interesting backpacker haunts in the high mountains and on white sand beaches, spending next to nothing in awe-inspiring and remote places. The flash part is then taking the money we have saved as a result and checking into the occasional lovely hotel – we aren’t students any more after all, and there are some beautiful hotels in the world where we hoped to benefit from cheap third world prices. Our plan was to check in, unpack the collared shirts and high heels, hand our filthy backpacks in toto to the laundry, hop in the shower and drink shockingly cheap cocktails until everything comes back clean and we can head back into the wilderness. And it hasn’t really worked.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, our “slumming it” turned out to be shockingly expensive: beer might be cheap in parts of the world, but petrol isn’t (OK, so it’s free in Turkmenistan, but that’s another story). A large part of our budget has been taken up by internal flights in countries where there is no other option. Cars and buses to take us to the out-of-the-way places on our itinerary don’t come particularly cheap either. And Papua New Guinea showed us that even $180 hotel rooms come complete with filthy sheets and cockroaches. Secondly, hoteliers are no fools, and a beer in an international standard hotel costs pretty much the same all around the world no matter what the base price of the beer is in that country. Hotel laundries worldwide play the same game: I have written about this before, but hotel prices for washing clothes make me angry and I refuse to pay them on point of principle, in Vanuatu as well as in Vegas. As a result, we have done some flashy things (hopefully not unforgiveably so) but we haven’t ever checked into a nice holiday resort and lapped up luxury for a few days.

So the conversation (when it happened) didn’t take either of us by surprise. We were sleeping on (yet another) floor, this time on a two day trek through local villages to Inle Lake in Myanmar. The trek was nice, but nothing extraordinary, and we both decided that (i) we are just too old to sleep on floors anymore and (ii) we have perhaps had just a little too much of it on this journey. We will always make exceptions for exceptional things – take us to Rwanda to see gorillas, for example, and we’ll happily sleep wedged in the fork of a tree if we have to – but as a way of life, we would like a comfortable bed and our own bathroom, please.

So yes, for the next few weeks at least, screw the honorable ruggedness. I’d like a Mai Tai and a chilled bottle of water please – you’ll find us by the pool.

Perfectly nice accommodation, although the see-through walls, the lack of bedding and the smoky fire under the floor could perhaps be improved on

Perfectly nice accommodation, although the see-through walls, the lack of bedding and the smoky fire under the floor could perhaps be improved on

Somewhat better accommodation – although our private balcony over the lake was perhaps a little shady, and it was a long walk to the bar(!)

Somewhat better accommodation – although our private balcony over the lake was perhaps a little shady, and it was a long walk to the bar(!)

James & Lucy Turn For Home

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A slightly out of sequence blog post, seeing as how this happened yesterday, and we normally run a week or more behind. The timing is relevant, however…

The last of the elephants disappeared up the hill in the bright sunshine, dragging a one-ton teak log behind it on long rusty chains. We had been up since before dawn, waking up in a forest rangers’ hut before heading out into the jungle to track down the elephants which had been feeding overnight. There is another blog post coming on the teak logging camp; the relevance of the moment I describe is that logging with elephants is our last must-do in Myanmar, and therefore the end of this activity is the moment that we turn for home. We have been on the road for nearly seven months – the next formal stop on the itinerary is a cruise in Antarctica, but before that we have ten days at home with family for Christmas. Home. Family. Christmas.

To say we are looking forward to it is an understatement. We are loving our travels, but there is something strong to be said for knowing where the light switches are. So we are heading home, even if only for a few days before we fly off again. Our trip’s furthest point from home in terms of absolute remoteness was halfway up a volcano on a remote island in Vanuatu. Myanmar, on the other hand, is relatively well connected so all we need to do to get home is:

  • Back of a truck to Taungoo (mattresses laid out in the open air – sunbathing and snoozing most of the way)
  • Back of a motorbike at dawn to the bus station (actually, the back of two motorbikes, but who’s counting?)
  • Bus to Yangon (stopping for dinner in the best restaurant in Myanmar, obviously)
  • Short flight to Bangkok (picking up various items of tailoring and a cocktail or two on the way)
  • Slightly longer flight to Hong Kong (and an evening with our friends Kean and Nyree in their new apartment)
  • 16 hours of heavy drinking in new pyjamas courtesy of Cathay Pacific on the way to London
  • Lucy is then home (for a long-delayed engagement party with the family – hooray!)
  • For me, there is then a cross channel trip on Eurostar, a taxi across Paris, a further French train ride and 45 minutes in the back of my parents’ car to go.

So, seven full days of travel. It says something about the slightly schizophrenic nature of our trip that getting home includes both riding on the back of a tiny motorbike wearing 20lbs of rucksack and seat 1A on a Cathay 747. We wouldn’t have it any other way!

From Elephants…

From Elephants…

… to Home

… to Home

 

Myanmar Money Madness

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Ah Myanmar.

Well, it’s actually rather nice. In fact, to those of us recently arrived from North Korea and the “Tibetan Autonomous Region”, Myanmar looks like a paragon of personal freedom and cheerfulness. There is a much longer post expanding on this somewhere in my somewhat lackluster literary lobes, but I may leave that for another time. What I want to talk about here is money.

Given we are traveling for such a long time, we have a few failsafes money-wise. Travelers cheques, a few snippets of the major reserve currencies here and there, debit cards on a number of different networks from a number of different banks in a number of different countries and the occasional credit card that we try not to use. All of these are, of course, useless in Myanmar. What you need in Myanmar is cash.

And not just any cash. Specifically (in case you are wondering) what you need in Myanmar is high value US dollar bills, printed after 2006 (big heads, not small heads, and with color on the notes) and excluding certain reputedly-commonly-counterfeited serial numbers. These bills also need to be utterly clean – as good as new, no tears, no folds, no marks of any kind. And it really matters.

Here’s a test for you: open your wallet, get out all the notes in it and take a really, really hard look at them. You would be surprised at the proportion of bills that have some kind of mark and are therefore considered useless for these purposes. By the way, if you actually carry properly pristine dollar bills around in your wallet, they will be too creased and folded to be usable in next to no time. I have good friends who have been reduced to ironing money to get the creases out on trips to Myanmar (we tried it, and it didn’t work so well – possibly because we didn’t use a steam iron).

All sorts of people deface money in tiny ways for some reason or other. People write notes on them. Banks put counting marks on them. They get stained in people’s pockets. There is a drop zone I know of in the States that was bored of the locals complaining that skydivers were a bunch of good-for-nothing layabouts, went to the bank with a big empty box and started offering visiting jumpers change for their $23 jump tickets in $2 bills. They also stamped these incredibly-rare-but-yes-actually-legal $2 bills with a small aeroplane to show where they come from. The logic being that every time one turned up in a local’s cash register it would be clear that the money had been brought into the local economy by the drop zone (which is all the bloody time – a busy DZ rakes in cash like nobody’s business). It’s slightly surreal, this little island of lightly defaced $2 bills down in Florida, but it’s a nice (and true) story. Just don’t bring the bloody things to Myanmar.

So, we spent a good few days banging around Bangkok trying to get enough clean dollars for a three week trip to Myanmar. No problem, thought we: we bank with Citibank, and there are real life Citibank branches in Bangkok. Let’s just say that Citi continued their gleaming run of international customer service excellence (couriering a replacement bank card to Lucy care of a branch in Hong Kong, only for the local Citibank branch manager to refuse to accept the envelope because Lucy wasn’t there in person; taking quarter of an hour to pre-authorize a bank advance with me on the phone from Uzbekistan at $2 a minute, and then cutting my card off anyway “as a security precaution”). Citi, we hate you.

It took us a few days and naturally ended up a race against time. We got some dollars in Cambodia; we cashed our travelers cheques; we withdrew Thai Baht on all of our cards and converted it back to dollars; we begged and pleaded for the local bank to swap some of our very lightly marked US dollars for pristine ones; we used the US dollar ATMs that are only allowed airside in major Thai international airports (seriously, wtf?). We budgeted, we counted, we safety margined and we packed all the notes secure in card or plastic and put them safely away in our luggage. And we breathed a huge sigh of relief…

…So picture our surprise and joy when we bumped into a working ATM in Yangon, very happily connected to the international ATM network, that took our cards, thought about it, cheerfully pumped out a chunk of local currency and looked at us as if to say “what?”.

————————————————–

Information, for anyone who stumbles across this blog looking for actual Myanmar travel advice rather than vague distracting amusement:

  • The ATM in question belongs to CB Bank. CB has accepted Mastercard since November 2012, so the branch staff told us. The one we used was on the Eastern side of Bogyoke Aung San Market, CB Bank’s ATM locator is here http://www.cbbankmm.com/atmlocator.php.
  • You will hear a lot of people telling you to get your US$ for Myanmar in Bangkok. Thailand actually has pretty strict currency controls – you are only allowed to withdraw Thai Baht on your international debit / credit cards, you then have to convert this to US$, suffering FX margins (twice) on the whole amount. You also have to do this on a weekday, and before 3:30pm, when the foreign exchange desks are all forced to close. There are US$ ATMs in the Suvarnabhumi international airport (BKK), but we passed through a few times before we noticed that these are only airside. If you come off your plane, stroll unawares through immigration and try to get US$ from an ATM while waiting for your luggage you are stuffed. Also, be aware that Air Asia flights to Myanmar (the cheapest and most regular, when we looked) do not go from Suvarnabhumi Airport, but from Don Muang International Airport (DMK).
  • If we were having our time again we would have got US$ in Cambodia (where there are US$ ATMs seemingly everywhere in tourist areas). If we were on holiday to Myanmar rather than on a bloody long trip our advice to ourselves would be to GET YOUR DOLLARS AT HOME! Seriously, be old fashioned about it, go to an actual branch of your own bank, tell them what you are up to, even preorder the notes if you have to. It’s a whole lot easier than getting the things on the road.
  • The purpose of all these dollars is to convert them into Myanmar Kyat (although many tourist hotels take or prefer dollars). There is a whole bunch of advice in guide books and on the internet about how you need to convert dollars with illegal money changers in the market as they give you the best rate etc. This is true in Uzbekistan, but not so in Myanmar – there seems to have been some kind of civilizing currency / banking reform whereby the banks actually offer the best rates, rather than the worst. Lonely Planet – keep up!
  • Not so much information as such, but for those of you who want to visualize our currency fun in more detail, reread the second paragraph of this information section, and imagine finding out every single fact in that paragraph, by trial and error, one at a time, in 35 degree heat and 100% humidity. Joy.

Happy Bloggy Birthday!

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Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Around the World with James & Lucy, happy birthday to you! Hurrah!

A strange thing to celebrate, perhaps, but today our little blog notched up its 10,000th view. Like finger paint daubings sellotaped to the fridge door, our work may not be the Mona Lisa, but it’s ours and we are rather proud of it. Thanks to everybody who has subscribed, read, flipped through the photos, commented (either on the site or in person) and generally kept us blog motivated through all the tough, dreary days of our round the world trip (ahem…). We couldn’t have done it without you.

Now, technically, this is its 10,000th hit (excluding spam and our own page views) since I worked out how to operate the blog’s statistics package in July, but who’s counting anyway? Interestingly, while we are on the subject of statistics packages (no, seriously, go with me here), the one we are using allows us to see what search terms people enter into google to reach our blog. And it makes rather surprising reading – here are four rather special days’ data that we have saved, from around the time we were blogging about Vanuatu and their dignified, ancient ceremonies…

Seriously?

Who searches for “audio sound track of Lucy gets trapped”? Who are all these dancing people? Where are all their clothes? Why is the internet so obsessed with dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark? What the hell were all the “encrypted search terms”, given what the unencrypted ones were? The mind boggles.

It took travelling all the way around the planet to discover this, but the world is full of deeply weird people, I tell you.

In With the Outlaws

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Or rather, out with the in-laws. For last week I had my first family holiday with Lucy’s Mum and Dad. And very nice it was too!

This being Round the World With James & Lucy, and this being the Garrett family, we didn’t spend our first holiday together going somewhere nice and sensible. Oh no. Instead of, say, hiring a nice cottage in the countryside, or perhaps heading off to the beach somewhere, we arranged to … meet up in a rooftop bar in Cambodia and do the rounds of Angkor Wat together. Result!

It was a truly excellent four days. We soon settled into the holiday routine – up not too early for a good breakfast; hop two by two into our motorbike tuk tuk contraption driven by our trusty driver; off temple bashing until we wilted from the extraordinary humid heat; a long lazy lunch, rounded out by fresh spring rolls and fresh coconut juice; more temple bashing in the afternoon (or maybe a sneaky snooze); then glad rags on for a fortifying gin & tonic or two; and off for a delicious dinner in one of the best restaurants in town. It was tough, I tell you.

More on Angkor Wat / Siem Reap later – it isn’t known as one of the best temple sites in the world for nothing and we may have taken a picture or two. For now, picture us on a happy holiday, with not a sleeping-on-the-floor, a scary man with a machete or a pit toilet in sight!

Backgrounds – Mostly Japan

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We have recently been hit by an attack of Le Artistique. I blame the extraordinary colours of autumn in Japan … and the surrounding hordes of Chinese tour groups laden down with photographic equipment – we are still nothing if not competitive!

Yup, Kyoto actually looks like this in autumn. We also visited it one spring, when it was bright pink with cherry blossoms. Jason, book that ticket!

Qu’est ce que c’est, l’artistique? C’est L’art, mais avec du stique.

The Silver Temple. So called because the owner once intended to cover it in silver, but then didn’t. By this logic, I intend to rename myself Mr SixPack.

Taken at the top of a bloody steep hill, mostly to give me an excuse to catch my breath. Not bad, eh?

You have no idea how many similar photos to this we have. Let’s just say it was a rather wonderful few days driving through the mountains.

Fat bottomed men, they make the rocking world go round.

…although I probably wouldn’t say that to their faces. Or comment on their rather, erm, “flamboyant” aprons!

“What you lookin’ at?”

…and the “Almost Japan”. A final sunset shot of the mountains of Nepal. Pointy and intrepid, like us. Or something.

 

Fish!

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Fish fish fish, fishy fishy fish!

FISH!

Tokyo baby, yeah!

Yup, it’s early morning and we are at Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. A huge warren of stalls piled high with every conceivable kind of seafood, and a few others besides. Squat men in wellington boots stride around with single-bladed sashimi knives as tall as they are, committing astonishing acts of butchery on the vast swarms of equally vast tuna fish that flood through here every day. Cabinets full of wildly expensive sea urchin roe, banks and banks of humming aquariums, crab claws, crab sticks, live crabs by the dozen dozen. Red fish, silver fish, black fish, grey fish, white fish and their eggs besides. Whelks, clams, oysters, octopuses (-pi?) and squid of every size and colour. Seaweed, dried and fresh. If it comes out of the sea, it’s here. And it’s probably still alive.

And we’re hungry.

It’s our last morning in Japan. The coffee man (er, that’s me) went out to Starbucks for a seasonal gingerbread latte first thing, but otherwise we are empty (by the way, apparently having the whipped cream topping “on the side” is Against The Rules in Japan. But I needed to separate it from the hot coffee to stop it melting away before I could carry it up 24 floors to a snoozing Lucy. So I had to resort to sleight of hand, trickery (and, er, cup thievery) – result! Anyway, I digress.) We are looking for our favorite sushi restaurant, possibly in the world. And we found it. Of course we couldn’t remember the name, but we remembered the eel grilling station (complete with mini portable flamethrowers) from our last trip, and we found our seats with serious anticipation.

Breakfast. As much sushi as you can possibly eat (and we were trying very, very hard). Include multiple rounds of the most expensive top quality sea eel and the extraordinary fatty tuna. Also Uni (sea urchin) which is so expensive and hard to get right that we had previously thought we were only going to bother with it when we were physically in Hokkaido where the best stuff comes from. All this, plus the usual soups and salads and two big beers. We rolled out of there stuffed to the gills and walking on air. My god it was SO good.

And the damage? £30 a head.

Incidentally, the three tier sushi restaurant test I mentioned a while ago? Try the standard tuna (which is safe and not too expensive) and if it’s really good have the mackerel (which is harder to get right, is horrible when poor quality but when done well is extremely good) and if this is really good try the uni (which is expensive, almost impossible to find done well and frequently disgusting, but a real delicacy when good). So there you are. Happy eating!

Metrics to Live Your Life By

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Classic Tom Jones in his pomp. Perhaps a touch random for this post, but a storming tune nonetheless

 

Everyone measures their lives differently. I have a friend who swears that highest form of human achievement is business; I have another friend who swears that highest form of human achievement is poetry. A question that has been on my mind recently is how to compare experiences and how to measure “success” when you are travelling. (jumping straight to the answer, I think the fact that Lucy and I are able to do it at all is already success enough for me, but let’s not allow that to get in the way of this post, eh?). In the meantime, how’s about this for some travel-appropriate metrics:

First, the classic Boston Consulting Bull*** two-by-two matrix, plotting those two well known orthogonals “Epic” and “Comfortable”.

This splits experiences down quite nicely:

  • Night buses? Long flights? Traipsing round dark towns looking for your hotel? Bottom right!
  • Camping in Tibet in double down sleeping bags? Eagle hunting on horseback in Kyrgyzstan? Cocktails under a huge animatronic singing frog in Las Vegas? Top left, yeah baby!
  • The classic James & Lucy blogtastic “it may have shortened my life by several months, but … holy crap it was amazing!”. Volcano trekking in Vanuatu, boat tripping on the Sepik – top right all the way!

To me, the art of enjoying travel involves balancing interesting and new experiences against the level of perceived discomfort involved. I think this is the reason Lucy and I are traveling reasonably quickly this time around, and why we end up at gentle odds with the gap year students we meet. After all, sleeping on floors palls pretty quickly once you are past 30, and we are familiar enough with the simple mechanics of travel to take the shine off, say, long train journeys. Perhaps we also now need a higher level of stimulation to make all the travel worthwhile – not for us the sitting on a beach for weeks at a time having a nice holiday and, like, finding ourselves man.

It was in contemplating the bottom left sector – the nice holiday – that I came up with the second travel metric: blog density. Now, we don’t live our lives for the blog, although we do greatly enjoy writing it (most of the time!). For the last couple of weeks we have been having a very nice time, but it has felt a little more like a holiday than the type of travel worth taking time out of life for. It has been the hardest, grittiest experiences that have stuck in our minds and ended up making their way onto the page. Recently, a lovely week in Nepal passed by in a single blog post; two active weeks in Japan has been condensed into half a dozen; whereas Papua New Guinea left us feeling pretty battered but with the urgent need to write down what we had witnessed every day and more.

Anyway, it’s a nice theory (even if meta blog posts have less pretty pictures than some of the others). To test it in practice, we have three days in Bangkok sorting out visas, a few days with Lucy’s Mum and Dad at Angkor Wat and after that it’s off to Burma. Stay tuned!