New Zeland - North Island

Auckland!!
Auckland is the first place I’ve seen that nestles. Lookingat the city from a vantage point like Mt Eden, the way that the buildings crowd round the edges of the city’s many green volcanoes reminds me of the way a cat rubs the back of his neck against your leg; Auckland positively embraces its peaks. Some of the cones even have cows grazing on them: there can’t be many other non-Hindu cities that have cows in their very midst.

How worrying, then, that the volcanic field that Auckland sits on is ‘dormant’ – for which read ‘could wake up at any time’. The most recent addition to Auckland’s igneous family is Rangitoto, a wide, forbidding peak that suddenly appeared in the middle of Auckland harbour some 600 years ago, and whose activities only stopped about 200 years ago; it’s pretty untouched by
humans, and its looming slopes – which always look dark, even in bright sunlight – dominate the view. My hostel was situated right at the bottom of the biggest cone in the city area – Mt Eden, a luscious, green hill with a huge crater in the top – and although most sane people wouldn’t consider living in a dormant volcanic field, it’s water off Aucklanders’ backs.

‘It’s no more dangerous than driving a car… actually, it’s considerably safer,’ a local friend told me. He was right, of course, but when you hear that the most likely spot for the next eruption is Takapuna, home to some of the most expensive houses in Auckland, it makes you wonder how bad the casualties will be when it finally happens. New Zealand is a time bomb waiting to go off, but you’d never know from looking at it.

Initial Explorations
My arrival in Auckland was made considerably easier by the wonderful hospitality of Doug, the director of the computer company Acorn New Zealand, his wife Raewyn and their two daughters, who put me up in their house and gave me a job at Acorn on the technical support team, starting straight away. This job would endup funding most of my Asian travels, but first I needed to sort myself out with a roof over my head.

It wasn’t long before I’d settled into my own room at the Berlin Lodge in Mt Eden, a rather pleasant suburb only 20 minutes walk from Acorn’s office. When I moved in it seemed that the hostel was full to the brim with loads of incredibly friendly people from Bangladesh, who appeared to have bulk-booked the place. It was rather refreshing; the place was being run by a German, it was
full of strange accents, languages and smells, and it didn’t seem to be full of the normal backpacker crowd, thank goodness. I loved it.

I spent my first weekend exploring Auckland with a middle-aged American called Paul1, who proved delightful company and a source of top-notch travel advice. Auckland is a tiny place, with only a million inhabitants, and it’s simplicity itself to explore. There are trees everywhere, the air is clear, the traffic problems are minimal, and you can walk almost everywhere with ease, like most small cities in this part of the world.

Holiday in Malaysia - Pre-Malaysian Apathy

On the morning of Monday 24th November I hopped on the bus to Johor Bahru, across the Causeway, leaving Singapore behind. Planning a trip through Malaysia isn’t that easy: well, it’s not when you’re sitting in a penthouse suite in Singapore, TV and hi-fi within infra-red range, fridge bristling with beer, clothes drying on the line. Never before have I read a guidebook and been so utterly uninspired. Take this description of the Perhentian Islands, a gorgeous
spot off the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia: ‘As far as things to “see and do” go, it’s a simple case of lazing around watching the coconuts fall.’ Aaargh! It’s full of stuff like this, places that would have sounded great to me two years ago, and which sound simply terrible now. Have I lost the point? Or the Cameron Highlands, one of the most popular backpacker spots in Malaysia: ‘Jungle walks are the thing to do here…’ Jungle! If I never see jungle again, I shan’t be sorry1. From my scouring of the book, Peninsula Malaysia has nothing I want to see, and eastern Malaysia is still full of bloody smoke from Kalimantan. Shit. So do I skip a whole country because it sounds boring? Of course not, but I won’t hang around if it turns out to be as crap as it sounds. The man in the Singaporean park said
Malaysia was pretty much exactly the same as Indonesia: if that’s the case, I’ll go through Malaysia faster than a Bali burger goes through an Englishman.
Something else bugs me, too. I look ahead, and whatever my plans, I feel apathy. Travelling – at least at the moment – has lost its sparkle: it started halfway through Indonesia, and hasn’t evaporated like most chemical depressions. So what the hell happened? I think it’s this: I now know I can cope with anything, go anywhere, explore any park, survive in forest, desert, ocean, mountain, river, cope with cultural challenges, language barriers, health
problems, sourcing money… what else is left?

The housebound of you will answer, ‘The travelling is left; now you’ve got an experience where you don’t have to worry about the logistics, ’cos you know you’ll cope. Just go out and enjoy the experience!’ So why do I keep thinking that I can’t be bothered, that it’s all a little bit too much effort to go and see Malaysia, Thailand and so on? Not for the first time in my life I’m at a total loss: my lifestyle for the last two years is becoming normal, everyday, almost mundane. It’s no longer a challenge, and this is exactly why I left my job in the first place. Am I destined to have to screw up my life every two years just to keep the variety intact? I bloody hope not…

One thing that does keep me going is reading other travelogues, though. For example, I spent some of my Singapore trip reading Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent, one of the few books in this world that actually makes me laugh out loud (the other being Terry Pratchett’s Mort). When I read book reviews that contain lines like ‘tears ran down my face’ I normally squirm at the blatant lie, but seriously, I laughed out loud at The Lost Continent. Buy it. It’s a hoot.

The Best of Tokyo

Describing Tokyo to someone who has never been there is a formidable task. After all, how do you describe a city that—as one of my friends visiting Tokyo for the first time put it—seems like part of another planet? To be sure, Tokyo is very different from Western capitals, but what really sets it apart is its people. Approximately 12.5 million people reside within Tokyo’s 2,100 sq. km (811 sq. miles), and almost one-fourth of Japan’s total population lives within commuting distance of the city. This translates into a crush of humanity that packs the subways, crowds the sidewalks, and fills the department stores beyond belief. In some parts of the city, the streets are as crowded at 3am as they are at 3pm. With its high-energy, visual
overload, Tokyo makes even New York seem like a sleepy, laid-back town. And yet, despite its limited space for harmonious living and some of the crime inherent in every major city, Tokyo remains one of the safest cities in the world. No matter how lost I may become, I know that people will go out of their way to help me. Hardworking, honest, and helpful to strangers, the Japanese are their country’s greatest asset. With Tokyo so densely packed, it comes as no shock to learn that land here is more valuable than gold. Buildings are built practically on top of each other, shaped like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle to fit the existing plots of real estate. More than perhaps any other city in the world, Japan’s capital is a concrete jungle, stretching on and on as far as the eye can see, with a few parks but not many trees to break the monotony. Fires, earthquakes,
wars, the zeal for modernization, and the price of land have taken their tolls on the city, eradicating almost all evidence of previous centuries. It’s as though Tokyo was born only this morning, with all the messy aftermath of a city conceived without plan and interested only in the future.

Thus, first-time visitors to Tokyo are almost invariably disappointed. They come expecting an exotic Asian city but instead find a megalopolis, Westernized to the point of drabness. Used to the grand edifices and monuments of Western cities, visitors look in vain for Tokyo’s own monuments to its past—ancient temples, exquisite gardens, Imperial palaces, or whatever else they’ve imagined. Instead they find what may be, quite
arguably, one of the ugliest cities in the world.

So, while Tokyo is one of my favorite cities, my appreciation came only with time. When I first moved here, I was tormented by the unsettling feeling that I was somehow missing out on the “real” Tokyo. Even though I was living and working here, Tokyo seemed beyond my grasp: elusive, vague, and undefined. I felt that the meaning of the city was out there, if only I knew where to look.

With time, I learned that I needn’t look farther than my own front window. Tokyo has no center, but rather is made up of a series of small towns and neighborhoods clustered together, each with its own history, flavor, and atmosphere. There are narrow residential streets, ma-and-pa shops, fruit stands, and stores. There’s the neighborhood tofu factory, the lunchbox stand, the grocery shop, and the tiny police station, where the cops know the residents by name and patrol the area by bicycle. There are carefully pruned bonsai trees gracing sidewalks, and wooden homes on impossibly narrow streets.Walk in the old downtown neighborhoods of Asakusa or Yanaka and you’re worlds apart from the trendy quarters of Harajuku or the high-rises of Shinjuku. Neighborhoods like these make

Tokyo lovable and livable.
What’s more, once visitors get to know Tokyo better, they learn that you can’t judge Tokyo by what it looks like on the outside, for this is a city of interiors. Even those concrete monsters may house interiors that are fascinating in design and innovation. In the basement of that drab building could well be a restaurant with wooden beams, mud walls, and thatched ceiling, imported intact from a farmhouse in the Japan Alps; on its roof could be a small Shinto shrine, while the top floor could house a high-tech bar or a tony French restaurant with dreamy views over the city.

And beneath Tokyo’s concrete shell is a thriving cultural life left very much intact. In fact, if you’re interested in Japan’s performing arts as well as such diverse activities as the tea ceremony or sumo, Tokyo is your best bet for offering the most at any one time. It is rich in museums and claims the largest repository of Japanese art in the world. It also gets my vote as the pop-art capital of the world, so if you’re into kitsch or anime (Japanese animation), you’ll be in high heaven. And if you’re into style, you’ll find Tokyo a mecca for cutting-edge fashion and innovative design. While Tokyo isn’t representative of all of Japan, just as New York isn’t representative of the entire United States, it’s a fairly good barometer of where the country is heading, if not the world. I can’t imagine being bored here for even a minute.