So! That's it. How to finish up writing about a month-long trip of a lifetime? I can't believe it's been two and a half months already since I came home. Three months ago I was on the way to Sydney. A whole quarter of a year. I remember looking out the window of the car as we left Cairns the morning we arrived, feeling so excited and happy, thinking how wonderful it was to be there, and not quite believing I had an entire month of it. Time flies. It's achingly depressing. Of course, the fact that experiences are limited in time only makes them more special - if they were to go on forever we wouldn't enjoy them so much...
At the end of the trip, after a month of doing something every day, and a week of oppressive heat and humidity, I was worn out. Although I loved Singapore it had been a bit of a struggle to make myself get out and explore even as much as I had in the last couple of days. Part of me was glad to be returning home, to my own bed and the cooler weather and the English countryside. But I was also very sad.
Singapore was stunning. When someone asked me, just after I had got home, if I would go back there, my response was that I didn't know – part of me wanted to, but I really didn't like the climate in that region and found it difficult to be there, I'm not really interested in going anywhere else in south-east Asia at the moment and it's a long way to go to just spend a few days in a city. Now, however, I've kind of forgotten how bad it was and I would like to go back one day. Perhaps I'd find it easier to handle the weather if it's just for a few days or so, rather than a month. It's such a cool place, I was impressed with so many things there, even the safety videos on the MRT. I'd like to spend more time at Gardens by the Bay, visit the Singapore City Gallery, go to a museum or two and learn more about the city's history, visit some temples, eat more of that delicious food, wander into Chinatown and not just skirt the edge of it, go over to Sentosa, perhaps go to the Raffles Hotel and have a Singapore Sling (haha), maybe even try some durian (a fruit which smells so bad that the MRT even has signs up saying "No food or drink. No smoking. No flammable goods. No durian.").
Bali wasn't my kind of place. While I enjoyed the things I did there – the cooking class, the sessions at the Yoga Barn – I can't say I liked the place itself; at least, not Kuta and Ubud. I may have enjoyed other, less urban, areas more. After I left, my sister and her friend went to the island of Nusa Lembogan, which is the real tropical island paradise that Bali is made out to be, with beautiful clear turquoise waters (rough seas though), white sandy beaches, stunning colourful coral reefs, MANTA RAYS!!!! (very jealous of them seeing those up close)… I would have liked it there, for a little while. Someone asked me if, despite not really enjoying Bali, I was glad I went. I can be very pernickety with the words I use and to me the word "glad" implies pleasure and happiness - so the answer to that question is no. But I recognise that it was a positive thing that I did go, that I went out of my comfort zone and faced my fear of the unknown, and learned for sure, from experience, that Bali and other similar places aren't for me, or I for them.
But Australia... I loved the rural Atherton Tablelands, especially the area around Lake Tinaroo, it's beautiful. I had such a lovely time at my aunt's, and only regret that I didn't get up to go for the 6am dog walk at least some mornings while we were there. There's a reason why she moved there, why so many people choose to move to Australia and New Zealand: the lifestyle. It is enviable. Yes, people still have to work full-time, have to pay rent or mortgages, have responsibilities and problems and fears, etc. But it's more easy-going than here in the UK, the work-life balance is easier to achieve, people make it more of a priority. There's a culture of community too; people are friendly, they get to know their neighbours and look out for each other. Health and safety isn't so ridiculous over there, people just use common sense and it serves them fine, but they're very strict on understandable, sensible things like speed limits and sun protection. And because there's so much land you can get more for your money than over here. With the money they got from selling their regular, two-bedroom terraced house near Salisbury, Tracy and Rob were able to buy an acre of land in a lovely rural location near a huge lake and design and build a stunning home. Of course, the downside is that it's so far away. And the heat. And the typhoons. And crocodiles. And all sorts of nasty spiders and bugs and creepy crawlies. We're very sheltered here in the UK, we don't have any dangerous animals, natural disasters or such severe weather. Still, I wish it wasn't so far away.
Experiencing a place from a local's perspective, or being shown round by a local, is something every traveller wants. I was fortunate enough to have that for a lot of this trip - at my aunt's, a little in Sydney, and on my first day in Singapore. I've been on tours run by locals in places before, but as part of a group of other tourists. Experiencing and learning about a place, the history, the food, the culture, etc., from a local who is a friend or family member you know well and who knows you, makes it infinitely better, so much richer, more wonderful, the memories stronger and more precious. I am ever so grateful that I was able to go on this trip.
Highlights? Well, the entire time at my aunt's. The skydive. The day where it was just me and my aunt. Sydney. The first day in Singapore. Last evening in Singapore. ...That's quite a lot, haha. But it was amazing, and it's made me rethink a little about how I want to travel in future.
I don't really know how to finish this up. I guess... so where next? Lots of people have asked me that. The only one I have planned at the moment is, thanks to generous family, a few days in Vienna at the end of March, around my birthday. I usually go on a little trip around then anyway, and one of my favourite musician/composers is performing in Vienna on the day itself. I'll spend some time in the city, which is meant to be lovely, but I'd like to get out into some more rural places, too, to the mountains if I can. I am a little nervous, though, seeing as I'll be flying out there literally two days after Brexit, haha... :/
For anyone who has read every post so far, thank you :) I know it's taken me a ludicrously long time to finish writing about this trip, with weeks in between posts since I got home, so thank you for keeping interested. Now, it's back to trying to think of things to blog about! I have some ideas. So, until the next post - byee!
November 10, 2018
November 05, 2018
Summer 2018 big trip - day 26
Wednesday 22nd August
The hostel doesn't serve breakfast, and this was a public holiday so most places were closed, but eventually I found a modern, trendy café where I had shakshouka (eggs baked in a spicy tomato sauce) for a late breakfast, with a warm chocolate muffin and a lemon-and-ginger juice drink. Yummm! As I was finishing it started pouring down with rain, so I lingered a while. I was tired and it was raining so I decided to go back to the hostel, do a load of laundry and write a blog post or two on one of the computers they had there. (I hadn't taken my laptop on the trip, just my Kindle tablet, which is annoying to write on and kept switching itself off anyway.)
By the time the washing had gone through the tumble-drier
it was around 2pm, the rain had cleared and I headed out… although a bit
reluctantly. I was loving Singapore and wanted to go out and see as much as I
could, but I was also worn out and the oppressive weather made being outside
difficult. Anyway, I got the MRT to Clarke Quay, an area of riverside
restaurants. Little was open and I wandered along a bit further to Boat Quay, opposite some of the first British colonial buildings, where I eventually had a late lunch at an Italian restaurant. Walking along, I
had fancied pasta, and the sausage pasta dish I ordered sounded good (homemade Italian pork sausage and mushrooms sauteed in light cream), but when
it came out I was a bit disappointed and wished I had gone to an Indian or
Chinese place. Oh well! (The day after I got home, I went for lunch at a little
Indian restaurant, and the day after that went for dinner at a Thai place and
had sweet-and-sour. Prolonging the good food a bit longer… haha!)
After lunch I carried on walking along the river, looking
at the old colonial buildings nestled in front of the modern city. I wondered
what it must have been like for the wives and daughters of the men who came
over here (and went to Australia, for that matter) back in the 19th
and early 20th centuries, before air con was invented and when women
still had to wear the clothes they wore in chilly England – corsets and petticoats
and long, possibly heavy dresses. Did any of them have a choice? How did they feel? I'm
sure some of them were excited at the prospect and happy to go, but others
wouldn't have been. Did any of them speak out and say how they felt? Did any of
them fully rebel and refuse to go, or refuse to stay and returned home? When I was younger it was often said I
was born in the wrong era, and while there are some aspects of previous times I would like, I no
longer agree with that. I'm very lucky and grateful to be living in the 21st
century and in a developed country where women are free and pretty much equal
to men nowadays, where I can live my life almost as I please. I can get a full
education, study subjects that interest me, get a job and earn a wage working
in safe conditions, live independently, choose who and when (and indeed if) to marry, choose to
not have children, go out and meet my friends, express my opinion, travel, etc.
(Not to mention other modern benefits like decent healthcare, safe water,
hygiene standards, air conditioning, central heating, refrigeration, etc.)
The river ended at Merlion Park, where it lets out into Marina Bay. The Merlion is Singapore's mascot
and has the body of a fish, which represents the city's origin as a fishing village, and the head of a lion, which represents Singapore's original name Singapura, meaning "lion city". The park is directly opposite the Marina Bay Sands complex, the
Singapore Flyer (a giant Ferris wheel) and the lotus-shaped ArtScience
Museum, so was packed. There are several cafes and restaurants and kiosks around, and on
seeing one place I immediately wished I'd carried on and
found that instead of settling for lunch on Boat Quay. It sold traditional
Singaporean things like kaya toast and chicken rice, which I soon wouldn't have
the opportunity to have anymore. I was full up from the pasta, but got myself a cold drink. They had sour plum ones which sounded good, but my friend had recommended trying bandung,
a drink made with evaporated or condensed milk and rose cordial syrup. (Evaporated and condensed milk are often used in drinks in Singapore, especially in tea and coffee... it seems they have a very sweet tooth over there.) The bandung was a bright pink, very sweet
thing that tastes like Turkish Delight. It was nice, but very unusual, and
there was a lot of it, so I drank it slowly. As I left and carried on round, I heard one kiosk blasting out, to my astonishment and wonderfully unashamedly, "We're All In This Together" from High School Musical. Haha! That made me laugh and put a big grin on my face. Fab :D
As I said at the end of my previous post, I had come to Marina Bay Sands the evening before, and had been blown away, had stood looking up and around literally with my mouth open. The MRT station is underneath the complex and to exit you can either go up into the shopping centre (The Shoppes) or through a tunnel underneath and exit at Gardens by the Bay. I went up into the mall before heading to the Gardens. The Shoppes mall alone is amazing - being part of a luxury resort, it's the kind of place where everything is very aesthetically pleasing, oozes class, sophistication and luxury, that is full of designer boutiques and has a canal running through the middle of it. Above a circular pool in one part of the canal is the Rain Oculus, a piece of art/water feature that is basically a large transparent basin in the plaza above/outside the centre, from which collected rainwater is sent at intervals in a downward whirlpool into the canal below. That's cool. There is also a beautiful tea shop (well, as they call it, a tea salon and boutique), full of colourful, pretty, old-fashioned tea tins, which I had a wander round. I'm not a fan of tea, but there were a few blends which smelled very nice. I did buy two bite-sized treats from the counter: a black-tea-and-blackcurrant macaron, and a chocolate truffle flavoured with black tea, sesame and honey. Can't say I appreciated the flavour of the tea, haha.
As cool as Marina Bay Sands is, a shopping centre is a shopping centre, and Gardens by the Bay is much more me. This is a huge, 101-hectare (nearly 250-acre) nature park which is largely free and open till 2am. There are numerous smaller parks and gardens, some of them themed, two large conservatories - Flower Dome and Cloud Forest - and the Supertrees.
I wandered through some of the park, an area with little Heritage Gardens themed around the cultures of the major Sinagporean communities (Chinese, Malay, Indian), to get to the Conservatories. The main park area is open and free to enter, but you have to pay to go into the conservatories. It is expensive, but I couldn't not go in, I love those kind of places, the Gardens was one of the reasons I came to visit this country. Last entry to the domes was at 8pm, for a 9pm close, and it was gone six-thirty by this point. I had no idea how long it would take me to go round either one of them so I went in the Flower Dome first, because I love flowers.
Fleurs!!!!!! I walked in to see a hall full of flowers, and gasped and grinned and giggled in excitement like a little girl. Love it! The main display area in the centre of the building, which changes every few months, is the Flower Field, and the theme when I was there was the local Peranakan culture so the place was awash with lovely orchids. So preeeeeeetttttttyyyyyy. Hehe. I love places like this, where there are huge displays of flowers. The Flower Dome replicates the "cool-dry" climate in the Mediterranean and semi-arid regions, and the rest of it is made of several smaller gardens based on various cool-dry geographical regions around the world (the Med, South Africa, California, South America, Australia, etc.). In each of these gardens are wooden sculptures in amongst the plants, of animals from each region, like antelope and giraffes in the South African Garden and an owl in the Olive Grove. Part of the Succulent Garden had an "Aloes in Wonderland" display and there were sculptures of Alice in Wonderland figures, which was cute. My favourite of all was the dragon overlooking the entire conservatory from the Baobob Garden at the top.
Just before 8pm I left the Flower Dome and went over to the Cloud Forest, which replicates the "cool-moist" climate of tropical mountain regions. (The "cool" temperature in the domes is relative to the average outside temperature of Singapore and the equatorial region, which never really falls below 25 degrees Celcius. The domes are around 23 degrees.) The zones of this mist-shrouded Conservatory are different levels within a 35-metre-tall 'mountain' covered in lush vegetation, the world's tallest man-made waterfall, and a couple of elevated walkways. I wish I had known before I went that this dome was more educational/scientific, as I would have made more time to spend there; I wasn't much interested in information about the plants to be honest, but the Crystal Mountain zone was basically the geology section (I find it interesting), and the little Secret Garden was nice. The final section at the bottom of the mountain structure, and the one I liked most, was the Cloud Forest Gallery and Theatre. This was an impressive interactive exhibition about the (unofficial) current geological age, the Anthropocene - Age of Man - and how humanity's overpopulation, continued population growth and resulting overuse of resources has impacted the planet. I'm passionate about this kind of thing, and the exhibition was really really good, giving information not just about the issues but also about possible solutions - and actually explaining the latter, giving examples and telling you how they work, so people can go "Oh, that's really cool!" and hopefully some are inspired to get into that work and continue to find solutions. It's a real shame I could only spend literally five minutes in there.
So - 8:45pm on my last night in Singapore. My flight home was at 9am the next morning. One last thing to see before I left: the Garden Symphony, a music and light show held twice every evening in the Supertree Grove. The Supertrees are spectacular, wonderful, the most iconic and instantly-recognisable feature at Gardens by the Bay. There are 18 of these vertical gardens around the park, between 25 and 50 metres tall, and 12 are clustered together in the Supertree Grove. It's an amazing place to be, especially at night when the trees are lit up and the lights slowly shift from colour to colour. I had absolutely loved it straight away when I first visited the night before, and it was a great place, a very me place, to end the entire trip. The Garden Symphony was fantastic, the lights on the trees synced to fifteen minutes of classical music.
I lingered a while after it finished, sitting at the base of one of the Supertrees, gazing up and around. It was gone 9pm, full dark, very cloudy and threatening to rain. A big thunderstorm skirted the city and many people had left, although there were still quite a few still about. I could have stayed there for a long time, but after about half an hour semi-reluctantly started heading back to the hostel to go to bed - there was every possibility I wouldn't be able to sleep for the next four days. I dragged myself away from those marvellous structures, stopping to look back one last time. I would very much like to go there again one day.
October 18, 2018
Summer 2018 big trip - day 25
Tuesday 21st August
It does sound unusual - eggs, soy sauce, toast and sweet jam. Eggs, soy sauce and toast sounds fine, it's not that much different to dippy eggs with Marmite soldiers. But with jam too? I was definitely intrigued when I read about it. While I'm perfectly happy to mix sweet and savoury foods (put fruit in curries or have pineapple on pizza, for example), I do think that toast with something like strawberry jam or marmalade on, dipped into eggs with soy sauce and pepper, would be weird. But somehow with kaya jam it works, it's really good. Perhaps because it isn't as distinctly fruity as traditional western jams. I don't know. Hmm... I wonder if something like apricot jam might work, as it's sweet but not as fruity in taste, milder. Or pear and ginger jam. I'll have to try! :D
While I'm not vegetarian, I do enjoy vegetarian food and had researched (i.e. looked n Tripadvisor) the best vegetarian Indian restaurants in the city, and the best-rated was Gokul Vegetarian Restaurant in Little India, so I went there for a late lunch. It was just a regular, unassuming restaurant, nice but, happily for me, nothing fancy or posh. It did have a little motto, though, "Be Healthy, Wealthy, Wise", which I quite liked - both the motto and the fact that it had one, haha. Anyway, I ordered a mango lassi to drink, and a paneer makhani with a roti. I hadn't heard of a makhani before, but it sounded nice. It's from the Punjab region in the north of India, and the smooth, mild, slightly sweet sauce is made with tomatoes, butter and either ground cashew nuts or cream; it's very similar to, if not the same as, butter chicken, which is murgh makhani - 'makhan' is 'butter'. Paneer is a type of cottage cheese, soft and mild, and cutting open the little cubes in amongst the sauce means you're presented with the wonderful sight of little squares of pure creamy-whiteness contrasting delightfully against the lovely orangey-red of the sauce. (Also, I should have ordered a naan rather than a roti - rotis are thin like tortilla wraps, and there was lots of yummy sauce to mop up! I just had to use my spoon for most of it, haha.)
A typical Singaporean dish, usually had for breakfast
or a snack, is kaya toast, and the best place in the city to have it, apparently, is Ya Kun
Kaya Toast, a little place in Chinatown only a ten-minute walk from my hostel. I made my way there late morning.
Kaya toast is basically two slices of bread sandwiched with knobs of butter and kaya jam (made from coconut milk, eggs and sugar), toasted, and usually served with soft-boiled eggs dropped into a bowl (the whites only slightly set) and drizzled with soy sauce and ground pepper. You break the toast apart, dip it into the eggs, and eat.
Yum!
It does sound unusual - eggs, soy sauce, toast and sweet jam. Eggs, soy sauce and toast sounds fine, it's not that much different to dippy eggs with Marmite soldiers. But with jam too? I was definitely intrigued when I read about it. While I'm perfectly happy to mix sweet and savoury foods (put fruit in curries or have pineapple on pizza, for example), I do think that toast with something like strawberry jam or marmalade on, dipped into eggs with soy sauce and pepper, would be weird. But somehow with kaya jam it works, it's really good. Perhaps because it isn't as distinctly fruity as traditional western jams. I don't know. Hmm... I wonder if something like apricot jam might work, as it's sweet but not as fruity in taste, milder. Or pear and ginger jam. I'll have to try! :D
I left as the area started to fill up with office workers on their lunch break and, from Chinatown, headed up to Little India. It was quite cool, with the smells of spices and Indian food and loud Indian music playing out of many shops and stalls. I loved all the grocery shops, others displaying huge sacks of nuts, pulses and dried chillies, and the flower stalls - those bright, colourful flowers and garlands that are bought regularly for use in Hindu rituals and offerings. I wish traditional grocery shops and flower stalls were more widespread in the UK, it's a shame they're not everywhere anymore. The shops were relatively thin width-wise but went back a long way. It made me think of London, and areas of many cities, with lots of shops selling the same sorts of things. When I go to areas like that I always wonder both how they all make enough money to stay in business, and what businesses or shops were there fifty or a hundred years ago, if they were all as similar or if there was a lot more variety. ...I also passed the Abdul Gafoor Mosque, which was a beautiful building.
 |
| Abdul Gafoor Mosque in Little India |
After slowly savouring and thoroughly enjoying that delicious meal, I went to find the Sri Veeramakaliamman Temple. It's one of the oldest Hindu temples in the city, dedicated to the goddess Kali, and is very visually distinctive and impressive because the top part of the front of the building is covered in hundreds of brightly painted little statues. It was cool, but I couldn't hang around and properly look at and appreciate it for as long as I would have liked, because it was so crowded outside and right on a main road, there's no space to sit or stand and look up at it.
From there, I walked for maybe twenty minutes to nearby Kampong Glam, also known as the Arab Quarter. It's the city's oldest urban quarter, allocated in 1822 to the Malay, Arab and Bugis communities, and is now a colourful, trendy area. (FYI, kampong means 'compound' in Malay, and glam is thought to derive from the name of a particular tree.) I came to a street with brightly-coloured shophouses and an ornate Middle-eastern/Arab archway through which you come to a pathway lined with beautiful, colourful murals - one end of Muscat Street. The archway, its twin located at the other end of Muscat Street, and the murals, were all created in 2002 as a joint project between Singapore and Oman. The images on the murals symbolise the early trading and maritime connections between the two countries.
I really liked this area straight away, probably partly because of all the Middle-eastern/Arab/Muslim architecture, which is beautiful, and the pedestrianised areas. There was another mosque, the impressive Masjid Sultan, and of course a lot of Turkish/Lebanese/Middle-eastern restaurants (what a shame I wasn't hungry!), shops selling those lovely colourful glass lamps, Turkish carpets, the obligatory tourist stuff ranging from dresses to woven bags, and - wonderfully - a couple of aromatics shops. These sold alcohol-free perfumes, essential oils and other fragrances, and the windows were filled, like the back wall of an old chemist shop, with displays of miniature bottles made of coloured glass. So lovely! And in amongst all this, there was, to my surprise, a Swedish bakery!
Eventually I came across Haji Lane. Now this was very cool - full of quirky shops, boutiques, trendy bars and cafes, with all sorts of music escaping from each place (I loved the 1940s/50s swing-jive). I wandered up and down, loving it. The boutiques were the quirky, shabby-chic treasure trove kind where there are bare floorboards, pairs of shoes lined up along the walls on top of old suitcases, and clothes rails almost overflowing. I spent a long time in one of them wishing I was more stylish, and trying to decide whether to let myself splash out on a gorgeous dress I knew I'd almost never get the chance to wear.
After buying the dress (and another...), I went and sat down at one of the tables outside a cafe/bar with brightly-painted walls. It was dark by this time, and a musician was performing on the other side of the lane; just a guy on a stool with an acoustic guitar and a mic, and he was actually really good. All the bar's juices were named after famous classic actresses, and I ordered an Audrey Hepburn - i.e. an apple, ginger and lemongrass juice - and some baklava. It was lively and busy, but not crowded. Usually I don't go out in the evenings in cities because, well, it's crowded and I'm often not comfortable, but this was fine, and I sat there very happily for about an hour, listening to the music, enjoying the juice and the baklava, and enjoying being there, being out on an evening for a change. :)
...That seems like a natural way to finish, a nice way to end the post. But, that wasn't the end of my day. Despite the fact that it was around 9pm by the time I left Haji Lane, which is late for me to be out by myself, instead of getting the MRT back to Chinatown to return to the hostel and go to bed, I stayed on a few more stops and got off at Bayfront, where Marina Bay Sands and the Gardens by the Bay are located. I was planning to go there the next afternoon and evening, but Singapore is a very safe city to walk around at night and I wanted to take the opportunity to see them twice instead of just once. Because I did go there the following afternoon and evening, I won't talk about them in this post, but I just wanted to mention it. Staying out a bit longer was a good thing for me, not something I usually do, and I'm glad I did, both for that reason and because they are absolutely amazing places, beautiful, incredible, very impressive examples of architecture and design. As I said, more on that tomorrow - but photos from that wonder-filled first impression below.
From there, I walked for maybe twenty minutes to nearby Kampong Glam, also known as the Arab Quarter. It's the city's oldest urban quarter, allocated in 1822 to the Malay, Arab and Bugis communities, and is now a colourful, trendy area. (FYI, kampong means 'compound' in Malay, and glam is thought to derive from the name of a particular tree.) I came to a street with brightly-coloured shophouses and an ornate Middle-eastern/Arab archway through which you come to a pathway lined with beautiful, colourful murals - one end of Muscat Street. The archway, its twin located at the other end of Muscat Street, and the murals, were all created in 2002 as a joint project between Singapore and Oman. The images on the murals symbolise the early trading and maritime connections between the two countries.
I really liked this area straight away, probably partly because of all the Middle-eastern/Arab/Muslim architecture, which is beautiful, and the pedestrianised areas. There was another mosque, the impressive Masjid Sultan, and of course a lot of Turkish/Lebanese/Middle-eastern restaurants (what a shame I wasn't hungry!), shops selling those lovely colourful glass lamps, Turkish carpets, the obligatory tourist stuff ranging from dresses to woven bags, and - wonderfully - a couple of aromatics shops. These sold alcohol-free perfumes, essential oils and other fragrances, and the windows were filled, like the back wall of an old chemist shop, with displays of miniature bottles made of coloured glass. So lovely! And in amongst all this, there was, to my surprise, a Swedish bakery!
Eventually I came across Haji Lane. Now this was very cool - full of quirky shops, boutiques, trendy bars and cafes, with all sorts of music escaping from each place (I loved the 1940s/50s swing-jive). I wandered up and down, loving it. The boutiques were the quirky, shabby-chic treasure trove kind where there are bare floorboards, pairs of shoes lined up along the walls on top of old suitcases, and clothes rails almost overflowing. I spent a long time in one of them wishing I was more stylish, and trying to decide whether to let myself splash out on a gorgeous dress I knew I'd almost never get the chance to wear.
After buying the dress (and another...), I went and sat down at one of the tables outside a cafe/bar with brightly-painted walls. It was dark by this time, and a musician was performing on the other side of the lane; just a guy on a stool with an acoustic guitar and a mic, and he was actually really good. All the bar's juices were named after famous classic actresses, and I ordered an Audrey Hepburn - i.e. an apple, ginger and lemongrass juice - and some baklava. It was lively and busy, but not crowded. Usually I don't go out in the evenings in cities because, well, it's crowded and I'm often not comfortable, but this was fine, and I sat there very happily for about an hour, listening to the music, enjoying the juice and the baklava, and enjoying being there, being out on an evening for a change. :)
...That seems like a natural way to finish, a nice way to end the post. But, that wasn't the end of my day. Despite the fact that it was around 9pm by the time I left Haji Lane, which is late for me to be out by myself, instead of getting the MRT back to Chinatown to return to the hostel and go to bed, I stayed on a few more stops and got off at Bayfront, where Marina Bay Sands and the Gardens by the Bay are located. I was planning to go there the next afternoon and evening, but Singapore is a very safe city to walk around at night and I wanted to take the opportunity to see them twice instead of just once. Because I did go there the following afternoon and evening, I won't talk about them in this post, but I just wanted to mention it. Staying out a bit longer was a good thing for me, not something I usually do, and I'm glad I did, both for that reason and because they are absolutely amazing places, beautiful, incredible, very impressive examples of architecture and design. As I said, more on that tomorrow - but photos from that wonder-filled first impression below.
October 07, 2018
Summer 2018 big trip - day 24.2
Monday 20th August, part 2
I have a friend in Singapore. We became friends about eleven years ago through a very small online forum we were both members of in our mid-teens, and kept in touch when it drifted out of existence, but we've never met. So when I knew I was going to go there, I asked if she'd like to meet up – she did! She met me at the MRT station closest to the Pinnacle, and we took the bus (air-conditioned!) to the Alexandra area, again away from the city centre.
Before the trip she had sent me an online article listing 30 foods to try in Singapore, and asked me to pick some I'd love to try while I was there. Laksa - a spicy noodle soup made with coconut milk and prawns/seafood or chicken - was one, so first of all we headed to a shopping centre she knew had a food stall that did really good laksa. It was a tiny place, arranged a bit like a sushi bar where there are benches round the outside facing inwards and the food prep and cooking happens in the middle, in front of you. Nothing fancy at all, just plonked in the middle of a regular shopping centre in a normal, non-touristy area.
We got a bowl of seafood laksa and a plate of chicken curry to share, plus a lemon juice drink and some barley water. The latter was a thick white beverage full of the soft grains of cooked barley, and slightly sweetened. It was surprisingly good! I've since read that barley water is a traditional (and nutritious) drink in various parts of the world, including Britain - hence the 'Fruit & Barley' squash drinks. I'll have a go at making it one day soon! Anyway, the drinks and the food were all very tasty. I worried the manager/head cook a bit by having only a few spoonfuls of the laksa before trying the curry - she came over and spoke in Chinese to my friend, who replied and then, as the woman walked away, said to me that "Auntie asked if you didn't like the laksa." (I like this custom, too, of calling people auntie or uncle or grandfather or grandmother or brother or sister, as a sign of respect. In the west, we'd just gesture and say "she..."). It was only a handful of women running this stall, all busy and hectic and, it seemed, perfectly organised, they knew what they were doing and got on with it with practised efficiency. It was fast food, but really good fast food.
For a kind of dessert we also got muah chee, little balls made from glutinous rice flour and covered in crushed peanuts. They were soft, smooth, chewy... I can't think of anything to compare the texture to, perhaps a little like soft Turkish Delight without the flavour? The word 'glutinous' comes from its glue-like tendencies, rather than meaning it contains gluten, so things made from glutinous rice flour tend to be stretchy. It was good though!
I have a friend in Singapore. We became friends about eleven years ago through a very small online forum we were both members of in our mid-teens, and kept in touch when it drifted out of existence, but we've never met. So when I knew I was going to go there, I asked if she'd like to meet up – she did! She met me at the MRT station closest to the Pinnacle, and we took the bus (air-conditioned!) to the Alexandra area, again away from the city centre.
Before the trip she had sent me an online article listing 30 foods to try in Singapore, and asked me to pick some I'd love to try while I was there. Laksa - a spicy noodle soup made with coconut milk and prawns/seafood or chicken - was one, so first of all we headed to a shopping centre she knew had a food stall that did really good laksa. It was a tiny place, arranged a bit like a sushi bar where there are benches round the outside facing inwards and the food prep and cooking happens in the middle, in front of you. Nothing fancy at all, just plonked in the middle of a regular shopping centre in a normal, non-touristy area.
We got a bowl of seafood laksa and a plate of chicken curry to share, plus a lemon juice drink and some barley water. The latter was a thick white beverage full of the soft grains of cooked barley, and slightly sweetened. It was surprisingly good! I've since read that barley water is a traditional (and nutritious) drink in various parts of the world, including Britain - hence the 'Fruit & Barley' squash drinks. I'll have a go at making it one day soon! Anyway, the drinks and the food were all very tasty. I worried the manager/head cook a bit by having only a few spoonfuls of the laksa before trying the curry - she came over and spoke in Chinese to my friend, who replied and then, as the woman walked away, said to me that "Auntie asked if you didn't like the laksa." (I like this custom, too, of calling people auntie or uncle or grandfather or grandmother or brother or sister, as a sign of respect. In the west, we'd just gesture and say "she..."). It was only a handful of women running this stall, all busy and hectic and, it seemed, perfectly organised, they knew what they were doing and got on with it with practised efficiency. It was fast food, but really good fast food.
For a kind of dessert we also got muah chee, little balls made from glutinous rice flour and covered in crushed peanuts. They were soft, smooth, chewy... I can't think of anything to compare the texture to, perhaps a little like soft Turkish Delight without the flavour? The word 'glutinous' comes from its glue-like tendencies, rather than meaning it contains gluten, so things made from glutinous rice flour tend to be stretchy. It was good though!
We went next to Alexandra Food Village, just a few minutes' walk away. Oh the choice of dishes to be had! We wandered round and my friend made lots of suggestions for the things I should try; in the end we got bak kuh teh, a broth made from pork ribs, and a bowl of braised peanuts, which were soft and amazing. My friend gave me a little lesson in using chopsticks properly; the bottom stick goes in the vee of the hand between the base of the thumb and the forefinger, about a third of the way from the top, and doesn't move, and the upper stick is held a bit like a pencil, resting on the ring finger and moved using the middle and forefingers. I kind of got it eventually! Obviously need practice though, haha.
On the way out I bought an avocado milkshake to go, and a few minutes later we passed a little bakery where I got a few kueh. Kueh or kuih is a fairly broad term that covers a range of bite-sized snacks or desserts which we would variously call cakes, biscuits, pastries, etc. One was a little green chiffon cake coloured with pandang leaves, one was kueh dadar, the same as the delicious coconut-filled green pancake I'd had at the cooking class in Bali, and one was kueh lapis, a slice of colourful, firm, steamed layered 'cake' made from glutinous rice flour (lapis means 'layers' in Malay). Despite being stuffed and not really wanting to eat anything else, I ate them back at the hostel, and drank most of the avocado milkshake, because I didn't know where the fridge was or if they'd keep! Honestly, I probably would have enjoyed the cakes more if I wasn't so full up - but the pancake was nice, and the avocado milkshake was goooooooood! Still, I did only manage about half of it, if that. I'm glad I tried them, though.
On the way out I bought an avocado milkshake to go, and a few minutes later we passed a little bakery where I got a few kueh. Kueh or kuih is a fairly broad term that covers a range of bite-sized snacks or desserts which we would variously call cakes, biscuits, pastries, etc. One was a little green chiffon cake coloured with pandang leaves, one was kueh dadar, the same as the delicious coconut-filled green pancake I'd had at the cooking class in Bali, and one was kueh lapis, a slice of colourful, firm, steamed layered 'cake' made from glutinous rice flour (lapis means 'layers' in Malay). Despite being stuffed and not really wanting to eat anything else, I ate them back at the hostel, and drank most of the avocado milkshake, because I didn't know where the fridge was or if they'd keep! Honestly, I probably would have enjoyed the cakes more if I wasn't so full up - but the pancake was nice, and the avocado milkshake was goooooooood! Still, I did only manage about half of it, if that. I'm glad I tried them, though.
What a brilliant day! Usually, I find solo city trips exhausting and - not being the sort of person to be sociable and make conversation with others in the hostel or to go out to bars and clubs - will happily go to bed at 9pm. But here I didn't get back to the hostel until half ten, eleven perhaps, and wasn't massively tired, despite having been awake since 4am. Well, no, I was tired and ready to sleep, but in a good way; I wasn't drained. It had been an energising day, rather than a tiring one, which was great. And of course, finally meeting my friend was really nice, it was lovely spending time with her, chatting and eating and wandering around, I really enjoyed it and am grateful I had the opportunity :)
October 04, 2018
Summer 2018 big trip - day 24.1
Monday 20th August, part 1
Our last stop was the ‘Pinnacle@Duxton’, in the
Tanjong Pagar area. This is an amazing modern HDB building, consisting of seven
50-story blocks linked by two 500m-long sky gardens on the 26th and
50th floors. Uniquely, for this project the Housing and Development
Board decided to hold a worldwide competition for its design, which attracted
more than 200 entries. The sky gardens are terraces surrounding the whole
structure, so you can wander round and get amazing views over the city in every
direction. It's kind of like a park, on top of a building; there isn't any
grass, but there are plenty of plants and trees, and a few seating areas. Looking south you can see some islands across the water, and to the north you can see some skyscrapers beyond the distant hills - Indonesia and Malaysia respectively, both so close. We had 45 minutes there, to wander at our leisure, before the tour ended and we all left.
Singaporesingaporesingaporesingaporesingapore! Singapore. Yaaaaaaaaaaaay! Finally. Now I was very excited
to be here, I had been looking forward to it for months.
Apart from the few days in Sydney, I had spent the whole
trip in the Tropics – the latitudes between the two Tropics of Cancer and
Capricorn – so it had been very hot and very humid in both Queensland and Bali.
But this city-state is smack bang in the centre of the Tropics at just 88 miles
north of the equator and my goodness
do you know it when you step outside. The airport and the MRT (metro) trains
and stations are air-conditioned, so when I exited the station at Chinatown,
where my hostel was, I just hit a wall
of heat and humidity like nothing I've experienced before. Thankfully, a lot of
the pavements are covered, so you can get some respite from the sun at least,
and every building is air-conditioned.
On trips, if I'm by myself, I always go on a free guided
walking tour on my first or second day in a new city, and had booked onto a
five-hour one (!) for the afternoon of my first day here. My flight was due to
land shortly after 9am and the tour wasn’t until 1pm, but my flight was delayed and
then it took longer than expected to get to my hostel in Chinatown, so I didn't
arrive till about 12:30. I called the tour company and asked if there was
somewhere I could meet the group as I wouldn't get to the starting point in
time; thankfully they said I could meet the group at a hotel in Chinatown where
they'd be taking a short break. I left my bag at the hostel as I couldn't check
in yet, and found my way to the hotel. After 45 minutes of standing outside getting
increasingly concerned (and hungry, as I hadn't had a chance to have lunch), I
was relieved when the group turned up, led by a bright and cheerful Singaporean woman whose English name was Priscilla.
The tour was excellent, the best I've been on anywhere. It
was in the downtown core area but completely off the tourist trail. There were only six of us in the group,
too, which was nice. The hotel I met them in started life as a Chinese temple;
there's a low little wall several inches high across the doorway which you need
to raise your feet to step over, which acts as a flood barrier, a symbolic
threshold from the mundane to the spiritual, and has the function of making you
do a little bow as you enter (in the act of stepping over something relatively
high, you naturally lean forward as you put your foot down). It then became a
museum, and is now a heritage-listed building, so the hotel has to let the
public in to wander round the ground floor, where it's still a small museum.
After a break sitting in the air-conditioned lobby, we went back outside and
Priscilla led us to a traditional Chinese bakery. It's one of those with the
open store-fronts, and lots of boxes with bags of biscuits and things in. The
tour included some food tastings, so here we got the first one of some tapioca
wafers (large thin circles, brightly coloured) and black sesame caramel sticks.
Many of the older buildings in the city centre are the traditional dwellings called shophouses: terraced buildings two or three stories high with a shop or
other business on the ground floor and living quarters above. In the city's
early days, poverty was rife and these buildings were full to bursting with
families, living conditions were awful. Many also have "five-foot-ways" out
front, generally along the length of the street. These are five-foot-wide
covered walkways, built for shelter against the frequent rain and hot sun. The buildings can be quite colourful and pretty, and some shops have little shrines outside the door on the walkway.
We visited Thian Hock Keng Temple, a beautiful Chinese
Taoist-Buddhist temple on the edge of Chinatown. It started in the early 1820s as a
small waterfront joss house, built by immigrants from the Hokkien region of
China and dedicated to the sea goddess Ma Zu, where sailors and settlers could go to give thanks for their safe arrival. Nowadays it's a large, elaborately
decorated proper temple with several buildings or pavilions centered around a
courtyard. There are several large shrines, like chapels in a church – one to Ma Zu, one Buddhist, one
Confucian, one for ancestral tablets, and a few others. Priscilla showed us how
people pray there and explained a bit about the different shrines and the faiths. I've
never been to a temple before, and this one was amazing, so beautiful and interesting,
I loved it. The back wall of the temple, outside on the street, was decorated with a mural about the history of the city's Chinese population, and the designers of the modern building opposite the front of the temple included two large eye-shaped holes in the top of it to 'watch over' the temple and keep it safe.
Due to the limited amount of land in Singapore, the vast majority of people live in high-rise subsidised public housing apartment blocks, built by the Housing and Development Board and so referred to as HDBs. Most if not all of them have a market (basic shops like grocers, hairdressers, bank, a small bakery perhaps) and food centre, or hawker centre, either as part of the building or nearby. Hawker centres are a bit like food courts with a variety of places to choose from and lots of tables, but are open-air (roof but no walls) and the stalls are run by independent hawkers (no chain places). They began to spring up in the 1950s and '60s as a more sanitary version of streetside mobile hawker stalls, where hygiene wasn't always great. The food is generally simple, very cheap (on average a couple of Singaporean dollars a meal) and can be very good. I've since found out that there are even a couple of stalls in the city that have been awarded Michelin Stars!
 |
| Not a good photo, but you can see the mural and the 'eyes' at the top of the glassy building. |
Due to the limited amount of land in Singapore, the vast majority of people live in high-rise subsidised public housing apartment blocks, built by the Housing and Development Board and so referred to as HDBs. Most if not all of them have a market (basic shops like grocers, hairdressers, bank, a small bakery perhaps) and food centre, or hawker centre, either as part of the building or nearby. Hawker centres are a bit like food courts with a variety of places to choose from and lots of tables, but are open-air (roof but no walls) and the stalls are run by independent hawkers (no chain places). They began to spring up in the 1950s and '60s as a more sanitary version of streetside mobile hawker stalls, where hygiene wasn't always great. The food is generally simple, very cheap (on average a couple of Singaporean dollars a meal) and can be very good. I've since found out that there are even a couple of stalls in the city that have been awarded Michelin Stars!
We stopped at Maxwell Food Centre for a proper break and Priscilla bought us a sugarcane juice drink to try. It was delicious! Lovely and sweet and ever so refreshing. For food, we got to try two typical Singaporean dishes: carrot cake, and chicken rice. Carrot cake in Singapore is not carrot cake as we know it – it’s basically an omelette filled with chopped radish. Very tasty though!
Now - chicken rice. Chiiiiickeeen riiiiice! Widely considered to be Singapore's national dish, it is now one of the dishes that I love because it is so simple and yet so delicious, if done well. Basically: poached chicken, rice cooked in the stock from the chicken, and a bowl of chicken broth. Omigod. Wow. Big smile!
Now - chicken rice. Chiiiiickeeen riiiiice! Widely considered to be Singapore's national dish, it is now one of the dishes that I love because it is so simple and yet so delicious, if done well. Basically: poached chicken, rice cooked in the stock from the chicken, and a bowl of chicken broth. Omigod. Wow. Big smile!
After half an hour or so, Priscilla returned and we left to continue the tour, stopping next at the Singapore City Gallery, where there is a
giant scale model of the island on the ground floor, which was really cool. On the same floor was an exhibition about this year's President's Design Award, which was about "Creating a better world by design"; the entries were designs for things that would provide solutions to a range of issues like homelessness and environmental
damage. The first panel was about a special tent, based on those used
in the military and extreme-condition explorations, which could provide privacy and security for women living in refugee camps, or decent shelter for other homeless people. Reading a small summary online, apparently the gallery is about how Singapore came to be, how the city was planned to be able to fit a large population onto a relatively small island (approx 50km/31 miles east-west, 27km/17 miles north-south), and how city planners continue to plan sustainably. I would have liked to have gone back to the gallery and had a proper look round all of it, but didn’t have time/didn't prioritise it on this visit.
I love how 'green' and environmentally-aware Singapore is. Everyone always says it's the cleanest city in the world, and it is very clean, it's probably true, it's great... but it's also a small island that has no natural resources of its own and is now completely urbanised, so it's had to develop very good waste-recycling systems, make use of renewable energy sources, and make a sustainable future an absolute priority. Apparently it's the only country to have green building regulations in its legislation. Priscilla told us that, by law, a building developer has to re-plant the same amount of land it built on, and on a horizontal plane. So if a new building takes up twenty square metres of land on the ground in the city, the developer has to fill twenty square metres of land somewhere else with plants (though that doesn't necessarily have to be in Singapore) - it cannot cover twenty square metres of the building facade with plants (as good as that is, too). I love that! Many more cities and countries need to learn from them and follow suit, ignore the selfish interests of Big Business such as fossil fuel companies, look to the long-term wellbeing of the planet and all of its inhabitants (not just humans), and stop acting as if sustainability, conservation and protecting the environment are at odds with economic development.
September 29, 2018
Summer 2018 big trip - days 22 and 23
Saturday 18th August
To say we had an early start would be a big understatement. In fact, it was so early it could still, sort of, be classed as 'late'. We got picked up from the hotel at 2am for a pre-dawn hike up Mount Batur, so we could watch the sunrise from the summit.
The volcano lies in the north-east of Bali, in the centre of two concentric calderas (basically enormous sinkholes formed after an eruption). After picking up two more people and driving for about 45 minutes, we stopped at a roadside coffee place for a small breakfast of banana pancakes and a hot drink. There were so many people there, dozens of groups brought in by different drivers. It's obviously a massive business. It was weird, actually; if you're up and out in the dark hours of the morning it's usually still and quiet and peaceful, so it was strange to be somewhere so busy and surrounded by the buzzing of lots of people talking.
After that breakfast stop it was another 45 minutes or so in the car. We arrived at a large car park and our driver introduced us to Jordan, the young man who would be our guide up the mountain. After taking the last opportunity for the next five hours to visit the lavatory (squat toilet! This morning was the first time I'd come across them, hadn't even known they existed, so it was quite amusing!), we, along with at least couple of thousand other people (I'm not exaggerating), started along the road towards the mountain. Jordan told us it would take a couple of hours to climb.
It was pitch black and freezing cold, and our way was lit only by torchlight. After a while the paved road ended and became a dirt track, leading into fields where we had to move into single file, and eventually started climbing upwards as a narrow rocky path which quickly became steep and strenuous. In such darkness, you have no idea what's either side of you, or what's ahead, or really what's behind, which in a way is a good thing, as you don't have a choice to do anything other than look at the ground in front of your feet, and focus on where you're putting them. You're also part of a very long queue of people, so you have to be aware of those in front of and behind you too, you can't really go at your own pace. The hike isn't tough, but it is a challenge and your leg muscles most certainly protest.
At various points along the route, locals had set up chairs or little stalls and were selling water and hot drinks and chocolate bars, having made the trek up here themselves, something they probably do everyday. It was still pitch black when we arrived at the top, and Jordan led us to one of a few little picnic tables where he said we'd get a great view. It wasn't quite the summit - that would take another half hour of clambering up a steep slope, and we could see an unbroken line of torchlights up there already - but none of us minded at all. It did mean sitting down in the freezing cold for 45 minutes though, which was not fun, although it finally gave me a chance to look up at the amazing stars for a few minutes. Jordan disappeared to the guide huts, and after a while he brought us out another small breakfast of a banana sandwich and a hard-boiled egg each. The latter were still in their shells and hot from the pan and we just held them in our hands for a while! The arrival of the food also meant the arrival of some very cute puppies!
In the pre-dawn grey light it was very foggy, and we were worried we wouldn't actually get to see anything. Thankfully it did start to break up and, as the sky changed from inky blue to pink and orange, we were able to see the view spread out below: an area of damaged landscape from an old eruption, the villages, the lake, and, on the opposite side of the water, Mount Agung - a sacred mountain, the highest point on the island, and another volcano which erupted at the end of last year.
Walking down was tough! Walking down a steep hill is always harder than going up, because you're bracing yourself and trying not to slip, and this took maybe an hour and a half. It was great to be able to see the wonderful views, though, if only through quick glances upwards, and the warm sunlight was very welcome! As we reached the flatter land and paved road again, we were surrounded by little farms, small fields of different types of crops. I was struck by just how basically the people here lived. That is, how poor it was. Their homes were just little huts, shacks made from combinations of breeze blocks, corrugated metal sheets, sheets of wood or plywood, tarpaulins, things like that; present-day versions of the 19th-century miner's hut at Herberton in Queensland. And there we were, thousands of tourists just walking past at our leisure, going back to hotels and forward travel to other holiday destinations or back to comfortable homes and fairly easy, well-paid jobs which give us money to spend on luxuries. It was a bit uncomfortable, which is a good thing. We're so cocooned and fortunate and take a lot for granted. I know there are places where poverty is much, much worse, but even here I can't imagine what life must be like, what an average day is like for the people who live and work in those fields, it's so different to my own. How many are content, accepting their way of life with grace and doing the best they can, and how many scream out for more?
It hasn't really struck me till now, even though I'm writing this over a month later: I climbed a mountain. A small one, yes, which may have only taken a couple of hours to hike, but it was a mountain, it was a bit of a challenge and something I haven't done before. I climbed a mountain. Cool! I didn't fully appreciate that fact when I was there doing it. I was focusing on where my feet were going and then was so cold sat at the top that I didn't actually try to stop my thoughts and just pause, observe what I had just done and where I was. Mindfulness is another skill, habit, I'd like to cultivate. Doing the hike reminded me that, for a few weeks several months ago, I wanted to climb Snowdon one day... then completely forgot about it! During this hike, I thought "Ah, this is tough enough, this'll do, this can count as a mountain climb instead of Snowdon!" But now, it being in the past and not something I'm physically struggling with at this moment, maybe I will make myself do Snowdon one day!
We got back into Ubud around 10, and my sister's friend promptly went to sleep for the rest of the day. After a few hours of doing nothing much, my sister and I went out for a late, light lunch to a place we had passed on Thursday, which had a pretty view of the rice paddy out back. Then at 5pm I went to the Yoga Barn for a salsa class, which was great fun! I put on the one nice dress I'd brought with me, a light blue, slightly floaty, knee-length pretty summer dress, thinking - it's a salsa class on a Saturday night, dress up a bit! Very quickly wished I hadn't, haha. That's not the kind of dress people wear around Ubud, and the others in the class were wearing ordinary clothes or yoga-wear. Oh well! The teacher was an exuberant, enthusiastic young Cuban with a colourful oversized shirt and a thick accent we struggled to understand. Somehow this somewhat effeminate young man was one of the most masculine men I have ever encountered, probably perhaps because it wasn't in a stereotypical way. He wasn't at all butch, but was strong and lean, and gave off a vibe of just knowing himself and being perfectly comfortable and confident in all aspects of himself. Plus he could dance, and dance well. This isn't to say I was attracted to him, it's just an objective, appreciative comment. Anyway, I had wanted to try salsa dancing for a long time, and it was good fun, I'm definitely going to look for some classes I can go to at home.
The volcano lies in the north-east of Bali, in the centre of two concentric calderas (basically enormous sinkholes formed after an eruption). After picking up two more people and driving for about 45 minutes, we stopped at a roadside coffee place for a small breakfast of banana pancakes and a hot drink. There were so many people there, dozens of groups brought in by different drivers. It's obviously a massive business. It was weird, actually; if you're up and out in the dark hours of the morning it's usually still and quiet and peaceful, so it was strange to be somewhere so busy and surrounded by the buzzing of lots of people talking.
After that breakfast stop it was another 45 minutes or so in the car. We arrived at a large car park and our driver introduced us to Jordan, the young man who would be our guide up the mountain. After taking the last opportunity for the next five hours to visit the lavatory (squat toilet! This morning was the first time I'd come across them, hadn't even known they existed, so it was quite amusing!), we, along with at least couple of thousand other people (I'm not exaggerating), started along the road towards the mountain. Jordan told us it would take a couple of hours to climb.
It was pitch black and freezing cold, and our way was lit only by torchlight. After a while the paved road ended and became a dirt track, leading into fields where we had to move into single file, and eventually started climbing upwards as a narrow rocky path which quickly became steep and strenuous. In such darkness, you have no idea what's either side of you, or what's ahead, or really what's behind, which in a way is a good thing, as you don't have a choice to do anything other than look at the ground in front of your feet, and focus on where you're putting them. You're also part of a very long queue of people, so you have to be aware of those in front of and behind you too, you can't really go at your own pace. The hike isn't tough, but it is a challenge and your leg muscles most certainly protest.
At various points along the route, locals had set up chairs or little stalls and were selling water and hot drinks and chocolate bars, having made the trek up here themselves, something they probably do everyday. It was still pitch black when we arrived at the top, and Jordan led us to one of a few little picnic tables where he said we'd get a great view. It wasn't quite the summit - that would take another half hour of clambering up a steep slope, and we could see an unbroken line of torchlights up there already - but none of us minded at all. It did mean sitting down in the freezing cold for 45 minutes though, which was not fun, although it finally gave me a chance to look up at the amazing stars for a few minutes. Jordan disappeared to the guide huts, and after a while he brought us out another small breakfast of a banana sandwich and a hard-boiled egg each. The latter were still in their shells and hot from the pan and we just held them in our hands for a while! The arrival of the food also meant the arrival of some very cute puppies!
In the pre-dawn grey light it was very foggy, and we were worried we wouldn't actually get to see anything. Thankfully it did start to break up and, as the sky changed from inky blue to pink and orange, we were able to see the view spread out below: an area of damaged landscape from an old eruption, the villages, the lake, and, on the opposite side of the water, Mount Agung - a sacred mountain, the highest point on the island, and another volcano which erupted at the end of last year.
Walking down was tough! Walking down a steep hill is always harder than going up, because you're bracing yourself and trying not to slip, and this took maybe an hour and a half. It was great to be able to see the wonderful views, though, if only through quick glances upwards, and the warm sunlight was very welcome! As we reached the flatter land and paved road again, we were surrounded by little farms, small fields of different types of crops. I was struck by just how basically the people here lived. That is, how poor it was. Their homes were just little huts, shacks made from combinations of breeze blocks, corrugated metal sheets, sheets of wood or plywood, tarpaulins, things like that; present-day versions of the 19th-century miner's hut at Herberton in Queensland. And there we were, thousands of tourists just walking past at our leisure, going back to hotels and forward travel to other holiday destinations or back to comfortable homes and fairly easy, well-paid jobs which give us money to spend on luxuries. It was a bit uncomfortable, which is a good thing. We're so cocooned and fortunate and take a lot for granted. I know there are places where poverty is much, much worse, but even here I can't imagine what life must be like, what an average day is like for the people who live and work in those fields, it's so different to my own. How many are content, accepting their way of life with grace and doing the best they can, and how many scream out for more?
It hasn't really struck me till now, even though I'm writing this over a month later: I climbed a mountain. A small one, yes, which may have only taken a couple of hours to hike, but it was a mountain, it was a bit of a challenge and something I haven't done before. I climbed a mountain. Cool! I didn't fully appreciate that fact when I was there doing it. I was focusing on where my feet were going and then was so cold sat at the top that I didn't actually try to stop my thoughts and just pause, observe what I had just done and where I was. Mindfulness is another skill, habit, I'd like to cultivate. Doing the hike reminded me that, for a few weeks several months ago, I wanted to climb Snowdon one day... then completely forgot about it! During this hike, I thought "Ah, this is tough enough, this'll do, this can count as a mountain climb instead of Snowdon!" But now, it being in the past and not something I'm physically struggling with at this moment, maybe I will make myself do Snowdon one day!
We got back into Ubud around 10, and my sister's friend promptly went to sleep for the rest of the day. After a few hours of doing nothing much, my sister and I went out for a late, light lunch to a place we had passed on Thursday, which had a pretty view of the rice paddy out back. Then at 5pm I went to the Yoga Barn for a salsa class, which was great fun! I put on the one nice dress I'd brought with me, a light blue, slightly floaty, knee-length pretty summer dress, thinking - it's a salsa class on a Saturday night, dress up a bit! Very quickly wished I hadn't, haha. That's not the kind of dress people wear around Ubud, and the others in the class were wearing ordinary clothes or yoga-wear. Oh well! The teacher was an exuberant, enthusiastic young Cuban with a colourful oversized shirt and a thick accent we struggled to understand. Somehow this somewhat effeminate young man was one of the most masculine men I have ever encountered, probably perhaps because it wasn't in a stereotypical way. He wasn't at all butch, but was strong and lean, and gave off a vibe of just knowing himself and being perfectly comfortable and confident in all aspects of himself. Plus he could dance, and dance well. This isn't to say I was attracted to him, it's just an objective, appreciative comment. Anyway, I had wanted to try salsa dancing for a long time, and it was good fun, I'm definitely going to look for some classes I can go to at home.
My sister and her friend met me after the class and we went to the same hotel restaurant from Thursday. I had a beef curry this time, which was again very nice but I didn’t enjoy it as much as the yellow vegetable curry before. There was a performance of traditional Balinese dance. The costumes were brightly colourful and elaborate, with headdresses and a lot of make-up. There must be some meaning behind all the movements, but because I didn't know what they are, to be honest it was just a bit bizarre. I probably could have appreciated it a bit more if there wasn't head-jerking and weird creepy eye movements. But I'm glad I got to see some traditional Balinese dancing!
Oh, and although the curry wasn't as wonderful as the one I'd had before, the pudding I ordered was wonderful. Super simple - deep fried bananas - but gorgeous! The batter was sweetened with delicious palm sugar and was thin and light and crisp, and the fruit inside was warm and soft but still with some bite. Hmmm :)
Sunday 19th
Another early start, this time to go our separate ways. My sister and her friend were staying in Bali for another week and a half, and left early on the 8:30am shuttle bus for Seminyak. I spent a couple of hours writing some blog, pottered around, and went out to buy a nice dress I'd seen the day before. (Came out of the shop with two nice dresses. The owner was very happy that she'd sold two items to her first customer of the day, and went round the shop touching the money to everything else, as a blessing and good luck charm.) I got the 12:30 shuttle bus to the airport, then a taxi from the airport to my nearby hotel, as my flight to Singapore was at 7am the next morning.
The hotel was lovely, modern and purpose-built, and I just stayed inside very happily, listening to music, unpacking and repacking my suitcase, a bit of writing. Around six I went downstairs to the empty restaurant, where dinner was okay but nothing special. They had MTV playing on the TV screen, and I enjoyed listening to the songs, it was oddly comforting for some reason. Although I had brought my iPod on the trip, I hadn't listened to it at all. I often feel like that on trips, like not listening to music, partly because it acts as a reminder of normal daily life, where I'll sometimes listen to music during my commute. I don't want to bring that to mind when I'm on holiday. After dinner I washed my hair so I didn't need to in the morning, then got an early night. Shortly before 11pm I woke up to the bed wobbling a bit. I didn't know if it was my half-asleep brain still in dreamland, or if it was an earthquake. It stopped about ten seconds later, I couldn't hear or see people outside and nobody came to the door so I just stayed in my room and went back to bed. I thought it probably was an earthquake, due to the ones in nearby Lombok in previous months, so it was quite weird, ever so slightly disconcerting. But I was fine. Shortly afterwards a message from my sister confirmed my assumption. Her hotel had been evacuated and she was very shaken up, but otherwise okay. (If anyone's curious, as I was - magnitude 6.3, depth just 16 miles down, epicentre roughly 100 miles away.) I went back to sleep easily enough and woke up at 4am.
The hotel was lovely, modern and purpose-built, and I just stayed inside very happily, listening to music, unpacking and repacking my suitcase, a bit of writing. Around six I went downstairs to the empty restaurant, where dinner was okay but nothing special. They had MTV playing on the TV screen, and I enjoyed listening to the songs, it was oddly comforting for some reason. Although I had brought my iPod on the trip, I hadn't listened to it at all. I often feel like that on trips, like not listening to music, partly because it acts as a reminder of normal daily life, where I'll sometimes listen to music during my commute. I don't want to bring that to mind when I'm on holiday. After dinner I washed my hair so I didn't need to in the morning, then got an early night. Shortly before 11pm I woke up to the bed wobbling a bit. I didn't know if it was my half-asleep brain still in dreamland, or if it was an earthquake. It stopped about ten seconds later, I couldn't hear or see people outside and nobody came to the door so I just stayed in my room and went back to bed. I thought it probably was an earthquake, due to the ones in nearby Lombok in previous months, so it was quite weird, ever so slightly disconcerting. But I was fine. Shortly afterwards a message from my sister confirmed my assumption. Her hotel had been evacuated and she was very shaken up, but otherwise okay. (If anyone's curious, as I was - magnitude 6.3, depth just 16 miles down, epicentre roughly 100 miles away.) I went back to sleep easily enough and woke up at 4am.
September 24, 2018
Summer 2018 big trip - day 21
Friday 17th August
My sister and her friend left early for a day of white-water rafting and quadbiking in the jungle. I lounged around, worked on the blog a bit, went to the Yoga Barn for a 'Gentle Yoga' class late morning. It was gentle, but because I don't practice, getting into and/or holding some of the positions was hard! Haha. I found out what bolsters are for, though, and used one this time. Much more comfortable! Makes it easier to sit upright. As with meditation, part of me would like to build up a habit of daily yoga practice, even if it's just five or ten minutes of simple stretches when I wake up or go to bed.
I'd booked onto a cooking class for the afternoon, with Periuk Bali. I was picked up from the hotel at 2:30pm and taken to a family compound just outside Ubud, where we were met by a young woman named Wayan, who got us back into the vans and took us to the nearby rice paddies, where she explained the traditional system. Fields are owned by families, and there are little shrines dotted about in the corners of some to mark the boundaries, essentially. They practice crop rotation, otherwise the waterlogged soil would lose its nutrients and rice would eventually not grow. So they grow rice one year, then dry the fields and grow root vegetables the next year, then do rice again, and so on. Seeds are planted in a top corner of the field, then when they've grown a certain amount they're moved into the field itself, and water is let through. Wayan told us a lot more than that, but I can't really remember it. It was interesting, though, and it was nice to be somewhere rural for ten minutes, see some lush green fields.
Back at the compound, Wayan's father, also named Wayan, came out to greet us and gave a little talk about some aspects of Balinese culture, particularly the traditional family compound. Traditional compounds have an outside wall, and have a number of small buildings within the walls, linked by paths - bedrooms/living spaces for different members of the family, a kitchen or two, an open one generally in the centre. There generally aren't dining rooms, people just bring their food out and sit on the steps of one of these little buildings. We were also given "herbal tea", a very refreshing and absolutely delicious iced drink made from ginger, lemongrass, cinnamon, and black tea (apparently, anyway - I couldn't detect a tea taste, happily), finished off with a little honey and a squeeze of lime. Definitely making that at home! Might leave out the tea, though...
A side note on Balinese names. Most Balinese, though not all, are named according to the order in which they are born, and regardless of gender. The firstborn is called Wayan ("why-an"), second Made ("mah-day"), third Nyoman, and fourth Ketut. If there's a fifth, the cycle would start again and there would be two siblings named Wayan. These days couples are restricted to only having one or two children, I can't remember which, so that isn't really a thing anymore. The Balinese also don't have such things as shared family names. They might have a name, instead of or in addition to the traditional first/second/third/fourth, which indicates the caste, or social class, they belong to. They might be given a second or third Hindu name. They might use a nickname. And when using their full names they add a prefix to indicate gender: "I" for men and "Ni" for women. It seems complicated, but isn't too hard to understand I guess, and it works for them.
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| Wedding decorations at the compound opposite |
I'd booked onto a cooking class for the afternoon, with Periuk Bali. I was picked up from the hotel at 2:30pm and taken to a family compound just outside Ubud, where we were met by a young woman named Wayan, who got us back into the vans and took us to the nearby rice paddies, where she explained the traditional system. Fields are owned by families, and there are little shrines dotted about in the corners of some to mark the boundaries, essentially. They practice crop rotation, otherwise the waterlogged soil would lose its nutrients and rice would eventually not grow. So they grow rice one year, then dry the fields and grow root vegetables the next year, then do rice again, and so on. Seeds are planted in a top corner of the field, then when they've grown a certain amount they're moved into the field itself, and water is let through. Wayan told us a lot more than that, but I can't really remember it. It was interesting, though, and it was nice to be somewhere rural for ten minutes, see some lush green fields.
Back at the compound, Wayan's father, also named Wayan, came out to greet us and gave a little talk about some aspects of Balinese culture, particularly the traditional family compound. Traditional compounds have an outside wall, and have a number of small buildings within the walls, linked by paths - bedrooms/living spaces for different members of the family, a kitchen or two, an open one generally in the centre. There generally aren't dining rooms, people just bring their food out and sit on the steps of one of these little buildings. We were also given "herbal tea", a very refreshing and absolutely delicious iced drink made from ginger, lemongrass, cinnamon, and black tea (apparently, anyway - I couldn't detect a tea taste, happily), finished off with a little honey and a squeeze of lime. Definitely making that at home! Might leave out the tea, though...
A side note on Balinese names. Most Balinese, though not all, are named according to the order in which they are born, and regardless of gender. The firstborn is called Wayan ("why-an"), second Made ("mah-day"), third Nyoman, and fourth Ketut. If there's a fifth, the cycle would start again and there would be two siblings named Wayan. These days couples are restricted to only having one or two children, I can't remember which, so that isn't really a thing anymore. The Balinese also don't have such things as shared family names. They might have a name, instead of or in addition to the traditional first/second/third/fourth, which indicates the caste, or social class, they belong to. They might be given a second or third Hindu name. They might use a nickname. And when using their full names they add a prefix to indicate gender: "I" for men and "Ni" for women. It seems complicated, but isn't too hard to understand I guess, and it works for them.
We were shown how to traditionally make coconut oil, which is the main oil used there. Basically you grate mature coconut (the ones with the dark brown husk), then in a bowl keep squeezing the pulp over and over, releasing the milk. You do this until you've got all the milk you possibly can out of the pulp, then leave the milk for 24 hours to separate. The cream will sink to the bottom, leaving the solidified oil sitting on top. It takes something like 20 coconuts to make one litre of oil. I wonder if people knew, were really aware, how much of something was used to make or do something, if they would use so much, take things for granted, be so wasteful.
After that demonstration we were taken to where the cooking class would take place in a specially-built area at the back of the compound. It was on the slope of the hill and faced out over the jungle-filled valley, which was misty and slightly drizzly. There was a raised dining area with a long table (there were twelve of us in the group), a prep area down a little set of stairs next to that with tables covered in baskets of great ingredients, and a cooking kitchen next to that. All open-air but under shelter. There was also a little shrine, and we were shown how to make the simplest of the numerous Balinese daily offerings, the little trays of flowers you see everywhere - on pavements outside a home or shop, on shrines in the street, in car windows. You make a little square tray out of a piece of dried palm leaf, then fill it with little flowers in four different colours, to represent four different Hindu gods, and put a pinch of shredded pandang leaf in the middle. There's something about symbolically offering mind, body, heart and soul to those four gods, too, or something like that, but I can't remember. The sacrifice for this offering is simply the time and effort taken to make it - although it's only women who do the making and offering, on behalf of themselves and the men in their family.
After a brief talk about what we would be making and the ingredients we'd be using, we were put into pairs and started chopping, crushing, grinding and bashing ingredients in massive pestle-and-mortars, for the pastes of the four sauces we'd be making: yellow curry sauce, peanut sauce, sweet chili sauce and spicy chili sauce.
After that demonstration we were taken to where the cooking class would take place in a specially-built area at the back of the compound. It was on the slope of the hill and faced out over the jungle-filled valley, which was misty and slightly drizzly. There was a raised dining area with a long table (there were twelve of us in the group), a prep area down a little set of stairs next to that with tables covered in baskets of great ingredients, and a cooking kitchen next to that. All open-air but under shelter. There was also a little shrine, and we were shown how to make the simplest of the numerous Balinese daily offerings, the little trays of flowers you see everywhere - on pavements outside a home or shop, on shrines in the street, in car windows. You make a little square tray out of a piece of dried palm leaf, then fill it with little flowers in four different colours, to represent four different Hindu gods, and put a pinch of shredded pandang leaf in the middle. There's something about symbolically offering mind, body, heart and soul to those four gods, too, or something like that, but I can't remember. The sacrifice for this offering is simply the time and effort taken to make it - although it's only women who do the making and offering, on behalf of themselves and the men in their family.
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| The shrine with our offerings on |
After a brief talk about what we would be making and the ingredients we'd be using, we were put into pairs and started chopping, crushing, grinding and bashing ingredients in massive pestle-and-mortars, for the pastes of the four sauces we'd be making: yellow curry sauce, peanut sauce, sweet chili sauce and spicy chili sauce.
I found out what that mystery ingredient with the nutty texture in the delicious yellow curry I'd had the previous evening was! Tempeh! Tofu is made from soybean milk, and tempeh is made from the solid beans, which are cooked, shaped into oblong patties or loaves and fermented. The end product can be sliced and you can see the whole beans. Like tofu, it's pretty tasteless itself so you have to use it with other things or have a sauce.
So, on the menu was:
- Sup ayam - Balinese chicken soup
- Sayur urab - Balinese vegetable salad
- Nasi putih - Steamed rice
- Sate tusuk ayam - Chicken satay
- Pepes ikan - Steamed fish in banana leaf
- Kari ayam - Balinese chicken curry
- Tempe manis - Deep fried tempeh in sweet soy sauce
- Dadar gulung - Rolled pancake with coconut and palm sugar
We didn't cook the rice ourselves, but Wayan's relative Made demonstrated and explained the traditional cooking method to us. It takes hours, as you have to soak, rinse, re-soak, re-rinse, cook, cook a second time... nowadays people just have rice cookers, it's much quicker and easier! It was great, the women not only showed/told us what to do but also explained things, so we learned about the culture and traditions and the ingredients we were using, too. There's a big culture of respect there and in many other places in Asia, which I think more Western, English-speaking cultures could learn from; they're just nice gestures. They call everyone auntie or uncle or sister or brother, and pass things to people with both hands a lot of the time, or at least the right hand. The left hand is considered unclean.
I've never made a curry paste, or any really decent sauce, from scratch before, which I want to change. I liked it, it was easier than I thought and I liked the kind of connection with the ingredients, the knowing exactly what the sauce contains and so having a slightly better understanding of the dish. I've only ever had curries using a sauce from a jar, or just shop-bought generic 'curry powder' with some water, or from a restaurant or takeaway where obviously I have no idea how it's been made. That doesn't really bother me, those things are perfectly tasty (well, not my version of the water-and-curry powder mix... but my dad used to be able to make it work), but I do like the idea of knowing how to make a paste, and therefore the whole dish, from scratch with fresh ingredients, as it would be so much better. That's true for a lot of things, there are lots of things I'd like to learn to make rather than buy...
After a couple of hours, when we in the group had done everything we could and there were just a few things left that only the women teaching us could do, we went up to the dining table and sat down. There was a long buffet table at one end of the room and they brought up all the dishes we'd made, so we could serve ourselves from the large bowls lined with banana leaves. First, though, they brought us individual bowls of the sup ayam, chicken soup, which was wonderful, full of these delicious flavours that were still new to me.
So, on the menu was:
- Sup ayam - Balinese chicken soup
- Sayur urab - Balinese vegetable salad
- Nasi putih - Steamed rice
- Sate tusuk ayam - Chicken satay
- Pepes ikan - Steamed fish in banana leaf
- Kari ayam - Balinese chicken curry
- Tempe manis - Deep fried tempeh in sweet soy sauce
- Dadar gulung - Rolled pancake with coconut and palm sugar
We didn't cook the rice ourselves, but Wayan's relative Made demonstrated and explained the traditional cooking method to us. It takes hours, as you have to soak, rinse, re-soak, re-rinse, cook, cook a second time... nowadays people just have rice cookers, it's much quicker and easier! It was great, the women not only showed/told us what to do but also explained things, so we learned about the culture and traditions and the ingredients we were using, too. There's a big culture of respect there and in many other places in Asia, which I think more Western, English-speaking cultures could learn from; they're just nice gestures. They call everyone auntie or uncle or sister or brother, and pass things to people with both hands a lot of the time, or at least the right hand. The left hand is considered unclean.
I've never made a curry paste, or any really decent sauce, from scratch before, which I want to change. I liked it, it was easier than I thought and I liked the kind of connection with the ingredients, the knowing exactly what the sauce contains and so having a slightly better understanding of the dish. I've only ever had curries using a sauce from a jar, or just shop-bought generic 'curry powder' with some water, or from a restaurant or takeaway where obviously I have no idea how it's been made. That doesn't really bother me, those things are perfectly tasty (well, not my version of the water-and-curry powder mix... but my dad used to be able to make it work), but I do like the idea of knowing how to make a paste, and therefore the whole dish, from scratch with fresh ingredients, as it would be so much better. That's true for a lot of things, there are lots of things I'd like to learn to make rather than buy...
After a couple of hours, when we in the group had done everything we could and there were just a few things left that only the women teaching us could do, we went up to the dining table and sat down. There was a long buffet table at one end of the room and they brought up all the dishes we'd made, so we could serve ourselves from the large bowls lined with banana leaves. First, though, they brought us individual bowls of the sup ayam, chicken soup, which was wonderful, full of these delicious flavours that were still new to me.
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| Taken at the end of prep... I thought I took a photo of what we were served but must not have pressed the button hard enough! |
Dessert was a pancake, the batter coloured green with pandang leaves, filled with a mixture of coconut and palm sugar. Ohhh, it was so good! Really yummy. We were served two each, on a plate decorated with a smiley face made from some lovely sweet sauce. Come to think of it, perhaps it was a caramel made from palm sugar... Palm sugar is delicious in itself. You buy it in solid little blocks which are dark brown in colour, and you have to shave or grate bits off to use. It's intensely sweet, and has a slightly different flavour to the brown sugar we're used to.
We had time to linger at the table and chat for a while after finishing eating. I had chosen a seat at one end of the table before most other people had sat down and ended up being surrounded with the other young people in the group, a few couples; all Brits in their late twenties/early thirties, but I couldn't join in the conversation and they didn't try to include me. I always find it easier to join in with older people, but they were at the other end of the table. So I sat in silence, looking past the people opposite me to the plants behind them and the darkness of the valley beyond that. I've gotten more used to this kind of thing over the years, but it's never comfortable. So it was with some relief for me when 7:30pm arrived, it was time to go and we were taken back to our hotels.
Well I'm quite surprised at how long this post has turned out to be, haha! I very much enjoyed the cooking class, it was a very very good one, run by instinctive cooks who know the food from a lifetime of cooking in their own home for their family, and which had other interesting aspects apart from the actual cooking. And of course the food was amazing. We were given the recipes, so I'll definitely be giving some of them a go at home!
We had time to linger at the table and chat for a while after finishing eating. I had chosen a seat at one end of the table before most other people had sat down and ended up being surrounded with the other young people in the group, a few couples; all Brits in their late twenties/early thirties, but I couldn't join in the conversation and they didn't try to include me. I always find it easier to join in with older people, but they were at the other end of the table. So I sat in silence, looking past the people opposite me to the plants behind them and the darkness of the valley beyond that. I've gotten more used to this kind of thing over the years, but it's never comfortable. So it was with some relief for me when 7:30pm arrived, it was time to go and we were taken back to our hotels.
Well I'm quite surprised at how long this post has turned out to be, haha! I very much enjoyed the cooking class, it was a very very good one, run by instinctive cooks who know the food from a lifetime of cooking in their own home for their family, and which had other interesting aspects apart from the actual cooking. And of course the food was amazing. We were given the recipes, so I'll definitely be giving some of them a go at home!
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