Dear reader of this Blog

This is the last message I will post on this Blog dedicated to my time in Vanuatu and subsequent travels.

As from 2 February 2008 I am working as a VSO in Malawi. I am also writing a Blog about my 'adventures' overthere, which you are welcome to read. However, as I sometimes felt inhibited writing this blog in the knowledge that anyone in Vanuatu might read and possibly take offense to what I wrote, I have 'protected' my new Blog a little bit. This does not mean that I do not want as many people as possible to read my posts. Just not, roughly speaking, anyone living in Malawi.

So if you would like to read my new Blog "The Land of the Lake" please do not hesitate to send me an email and I will immedeately add you to the readers list of the new Blog, which will enable you to access it whenever you want. You can find my email address by clicking on the "View my complete profile"-link on the right.

Thank you for reading my Blog in the past year, and hopefully I will see you in The Land of the Lake as well!

Warm regards, Caroline

No shit?

Taipei is nice. Very modern and very Chinese. I must admit I was quite nervous before I got here: how would I deal with the enormous language difference? Well, so far it has been fine. Street names and signage at stations (including the very handy metro system0 are also in English and make navigating Taipei rather easy. How this will be once outside Taipei I will find out tomorrow, when I start my Tour the Taiwan. I am sure it will involve asking English speaking people (who are far and wide between) writing things on pieces of paper in Chinese to present to other people. Only just now I asked someone at the tourist information booth "Can you write 'a one-way ticket to Fulong please?' for me, please?" Thankfully the Taiwanese are very friendly and very helpful indeed. For instance:
A few days ago I went to the City God Temple. Once there I discovered that not only was this temple home of the City God, the matchmaking God also had his residence there! What a golden opportunity. I decided to buy some stuff to offer to this deity; some paper money and inscence. While I was buying this a woman appeared by my side and said:' I will help you. I once lived overseas and I know it can be complicated finding your way around a strange environment". Gratefully I accepted her help and once I explained my purpose it turned out that the set I just bought was only the beginning of an intricate ritual to ask the assistance of the matchmaker. There was a special matchmaker kit and rituals to perform with it. So with the help of Sophia and a temple attendant I made a tour around several deities in the temple, praying, bowing, introducing myself to the Gods, offering insence and sugar, drinking tea and eating engagement cookies and wedding cake. To finish it all I received two lead coins tied together with red string and a pink pouch to keep this in. After I waved the pouch three times clockwise around the inscence burner the ritual was finished and the matchmaker is now busy finding me the exact right partner. Once I get engaged and married I have to send some of my engagement cookies and wedding cake to the temple to give thanks to the matchmaker. These in their turn will be used for the ritual of other people! What a lovely thought. Just like the sugar someone offered the day before was used to sweeten the tea I drank.

Here are Sophia and me after the event, when she told me that 2 years ago she had done the same thing and, actually, her boyfriend had proposed to her just last week... Spooky! Surely this meant extra luck for me!
I must say that I really like the Chinese temples. Not only are they beautiful to look at, but there is always stuff going on. Very serious stuff, but at the same time they seem quite informal to me. People are walking in and out all the time, burning inscense and offering food to the gods. This can be anything, it seems fruit, a bottle of 7-up, a loaf of bread, chocolate bicuits, some snacks, rice, whatever you think will please them.
You can even buy specially prepared high protein 'breakfast trays' with some raw meat, a few eggs, tofu etc:
And ofcourse there is always an old lady hiding behind a temple door, a photograph waiting to happen...
Apart from visiting temples I have of course paid other tourist sites a visit, such as Taipei 101 (until recently the highest tower in the world, but now overtaken by Dubai), the Royal Palace Museum with one of its most important exhibits: a jade carving of a paksoi cabbage - I am not kidding! I also went to see/hear a piano recital at the National Music Theatre which was in fact so boring that some-one behind me fell asleep and started snoring! I felt like joining him.

Apart from being full of Starbucks-type coffee shops (who would have thought?) Taipei also has a lot of foor massage/reflexology shops. This afternoon I decided to give it a go and see what the fuss is all about. What can I say? It was both painful and nice at the same time. A lovely lady expertly tortured my feet for 30 minutes in a friendly and professional manner.
There was good news and bad news. The good news is that my head is alright. (Nothing new here, as far as I'm concerned!) The bad news is that my lower back and abdomen need serious attention. She told me that I have been eating and drinking too fast and therefore my lower intestines are blocked, making it difficult to shit. I was amazed she could tell all this from just squeezing my feet: it was all true! The solution is to drink more - and more slowly - and to chew my food better so I will shit more easily. You can imagine the non-verbal communication involved in transferring this information, seeing that she did not speak English, nor I Chinese! Needless to say we had a good laugh as well and parted the best of friends.

Tour de Philippines

Well, only a slight change needed in the profile on the right: I am back in Manila after a small 'Tour de Philippines.' A lot of impressions richer, and unfortunately one camera poorer: it got stolen last week! So no pictures from my hand to illustrate this post. My apologies. Nevertheless, my mood has improved tremendously since I have been wandering around the Philippines. The country is gorgeous and the people friendly.

It seems that I have come to the Philippines in the right month. October: disaster month! Typhoons, rains, landslides: every year the Philippinos breath a big sigh of relief when this month is over, especially in the North where I went after Manila. A few typhoons had been brewing both above the mainland and off the northern coast, causing enormous storms and rains in the mountain regions, which in its turn led to landslides all overthe place. When there are really really big landslides that swallow whole villages, these may end up in the Western news. But smaller landslides are a normal part of everyday life during this time of year. Blocking roads, washing away farmland, devastating infrastructure such as electricty cables. This made my trip to the Cordilleras region just a little more adventurous than I first imagined, but nothing out of the ordinary for the local population. The Cordilleras are a mountain range north of Manila with some of the most stunning scenery I have seen since New Zealand. Rugged mountain peaks, waterfalls every where and lots of rice terraces in between. For instance in Sagada where I spent three relaxing days. It was sunny in the mornings when I wenmt hiking and it rained in the afternoons 'forcing' me to read, nap eat. This is a good thing as I haev a tendency to do far to much, which is not good when traveling for 5 months! The most famous rice terraces were a few hours west from Sagada in a place called Batad and they have been declared a Unesco World Heritage site. Not difficult to see why, huh? I spent a great day hiking overthere and again was very lucky with the weather.


After this I left the disaster prone province of Luzon to move to another disaster area, Mindanao: Abu Sayaf country! At least the very east, which is where I planned NOT to go. I wanted to go and visit another old VSO colleague in a place called Illigan, but I think some inter-cultutal communication got in the way of us meeting up. Once I got to Illigan my colleague was so evasive and reluctant to meet, that in the end I left without seeing him. I was quite upset, because in our previous communications arranging my visit to his home-town he had not given any indication that he'd rather I did not come. He did send me a text message apologising profusely, but still no explanation. Ah well, just one of those things, I guess. Instead of meeting me himself he had set me up with a friend who works for an organisation that strives to improve the livelihoods of women She took me to visit one of her projects, a group of women working together in a cooperative to make and sell little bags of banana chips. It was a lovely morning and a nice and hopeful thing to see.

After Iligan I traveled to the south of Mindanao. The bus trips I have taken here are one of the best things I have done as the views are just stunning. Unfortunately due to the past troubles with the extremists the tourist infrastructure is not as well developed in Mindanao as elsewhere. So it is quite difficult to find places to stay in scenic areas, go hiking etc. So apart from watching the scenery from the bus I had a look at the cities of Malaybalay and Davao, and quickly moved on to an area called the Visayas: lots of white beach islands. First however I had to go to the capital of this area, Cebu, to extend my visa at the regional immigration office. A strange experience. I mean the visa extension is pretty straight forward, but waiting around for an hour or so in the immigration office gave me plenty to look at. More particularly gray middle aged Westerm men with very young Philippino partners/wives and sometimes a baby. A very embarrassing sight, I think. I wonder what the Philippinos themselves think of this. However, the immigration office did not seem the right place to start a conversation on this particular topic, so I took a raincheck. Other than the immigration office there was nothing much of interest in Cebu so I quicky moved on to the island of Negros. Another beautiful trip through stunning scenery of mountains and sugarcane plantations.
Everybody said that when visiting the Philippines you really have to try to visit a festival. Every city or village has its yearly festival honouring one saint or another, and that is the time to visit. In the Negros town of Bacolod one such festival took place last weekend: Masskara. Three days of streetdance competition with all participants wearings colourful costumes and elaborate masks, live music everywhere and all kinds of other activities (such as pickpocketing tourist cameras...).


After this it was time to visit one of the small white beaches at the neighbouring island of Guimaras, famous for growing the bestt mangoes in the Philippines. Four days of reading, eating, more reading and petting one of the resorts seven lovely dogs, one of which, my favorite, a young 'uncut' Doberman pincher with endearing floppy ears and tail.

Today I am back in Manila, picking up my new glasses and generally lazing about getting ready to fly to Taipei tomorrow... The next post will be in Chinese!

Manila

As you can see from the profile on the left I am currently in Manila, the Philippines. On 25 September 0.30 a.m. I left Indonesia. I must say, I was not too sad to leave Indonesia behind. Eventhough the natural features of the country are quite stunning at places, in the end I got completely fed up with the people, that is to say the people in and around the tourist industry, which unfortunately are the ones you have to deal with a lot of the time. Or perhaps better put: they would like to deal with you! And to this end they approach you a) everywhere and b) all the time. An example: When staying in Yogjakarta I took a trip to the Borobudur, the largest Buddist temple in Indonesia, to watch the sunset from the top of this monument. After the sun had gone down I climed down the steps, still relishing the peaceful experience, to return to the coach that would take me back to Yogja. This is what I saw:

Each and everyone of these 25 people is holding some (mostly useless) merchandise and is shouting at you to buy it from them. Each and every one of them will follow you for at least ten metres trying to persuade you to buy their things. As a white person, everywhere you go, people are trying to attract your attention in order to sell you stuff. It does not matter if you are on the other side of a busy street, or if they have tried to sell you the same thing 10 times before. Anyone who starts a chat with you - some one sits down next to you when you are eating a snack at a street stall, some one starts to talk to you when you are looking at something in the street - is trying to get you to spend money. Either by selling you something directly or by luring you to some friend's business. And perhaps it would not be so bad if they were offering a useful service at a reasonable price. But this they don't. Invariably they will quote you ridiculous prices, be it for transport, batik, food, anything. Don't get me wrong, I do not mind bartering for goods as is the norm in Indonesia. I just mind being approached all day long as a potential rip-off victim. Imagine you are walking on a street in the centre of your home town and some-one approaches you to buy, let's say, a set of 6 picture postcards. You say 'no thanks' and keep on walking. But they follow you and keep talking to you and worn down you stop and say: "All right then, what are you asking for them?". And they say:"30 euros!". I mean, get real! And this does not happen to you once, but potentially 500 times a day - this is no exaggeration. Big sigh...! It thouroughly spoiled my mood a lot of the time. I guess traveling alone means that the outside world has a bigger influence on how you experience a country than when you are with friends. When you are with others it is easier to shut out or shake off annoying and negative experiences than when you are by yourself, because you are more exposed physically and mentally. One of the few places that offered a break from all this nonsense was Jakarta, of all places. I spend one day there before I flew out and it was wonderful to be able to submerge myself in the relative anonimity of a big noisy dirty messy city. Left alone at last!

On 26 September I met my former VSO colleague Redento and his wife Jennifer in Manila. Redento was based in a different province in Vanuatu and did work similar to mine, with similar obstacles. For instance, the Secretary General of his province used all the money meant for the rural economic development initiative in 2006 to build a wall around the provincial offices, instead of on community projects... When I met him Redento was about to fly back to Vanuatu again, as the province had requested that he extended his contract for 6 months. Luckily I arrived just in time for a mini-reunion. He and Jennifer took me out for a wonderful Philippino meal at one of the most enormous shopping malls I have ever seen called the 'Mall of Asia'. Apart from a cazillion shops, tenthousand restaurants and an I-max theatre, the mall included an Olympic size ice-skating rink, complete with alpine mountain backdrop!

As Redento explained, 75% of Philipinos are still living under the poverty line so that/while the elite has time to practise their cherry-flips...

The rest of the time I have just been sight seeing in Manila, watching people - and cats - on the street...

Taking a very entertaining walking tour with as its theme 'Imelda Marcos'... going to the ballet at the Cultural Center of the Philippines... and playing a little chess in the park...

(The friendly guy I play against is Guillermo. He told me he cane to Manila after his high-school exams to find his fortune, but -unfortunately- he did not find it. He found chess instead. He had a job as a janitor of the park where this 'Chess plaza' located, but when he got addicted to chess he was dismissed from his job. He now challenges passers-by to a game or two, both of which I lost eventhough Guillermo helped me a lot ... free of charge. The man in black was just some guy who jumped into the picture when he saw the camera.)

Today I have bought a new pair of glasses to replace the ones I lost in Sumatra: I hope they will turn out alright. As the exchange rate is in the Westeners favour they were quite cheap. Let's wait and see what the quality will be like... Tomorrow I am off to the north to explore the mountains and some old 'Spanish' towns. As I make my way through the country I hope to visit more old VSO volunteers. One of them composed a whole list of things that I have to do or see or eat. I am particularly looking forward (NOT!) to trying a Philippino favourite called 'balut': a duck foetus boiled in the shell and eaten whole, occasional feathers included... Yummy!

Kiva

Always wanted to join the wonderful world of international investment banking? My friend Piet Bakker sent me an interesting link to a site where you can become a true-to-life micro-finance banker. Check it out! (I have added it to the list of links on the right side of this page).

Caro goes colonial

As a logical sequel after having learned how to surf (one of the essential life skills for the modern woman over the age of fourty), I decided to go and climb a volcano in Lombok. As you do. Or do you? I have discovered that some of the things you do as a tourist, you really only do because you can. It's there. The opportunity presents itself so ... let's!
I have never been a 'let's climb to the top of this mountain' kind of person, but with volcanos it's more or less the (only) thing to do. And it was great. I joined a lovely Australian couple on a 3 day hike and I could not have wished for nicer company.


Also, we were quite evenly matched in age, attitude and ambition: my body had only just recovered from the surfing lessons and they had just run 10 k's in the Lombok marathon the day previous. So nobody was in a hurry. Or was there? In order to enter the National Park and climb the volcano you are obliged to hire a guide. Here, as in the orang utan park, the guides' only real concern is money. The rest they just want to get over with as quickly and with as little effort as possible. So our guide practically ran ahead of us most of the time, a speck in the distance on a track (luckily) so clear even a blind person could have followed it. Except on the second morning when we set off at 3 a.m. to reach the top of the mountain in time for the sunrise. Here we were, on a mountain where people have died, scrambling in the dark, sheer drops left and right, the wind howling and our guide nowhere to be seen. That is, until we stumbled over him lying on his back in the middle of the path, sleeping! He had actually run ahead so he could have a snooze! Anyway, once the sun had risen the views were great. However, as far as I am concerned this watching a sunrise from the top of a mountain is rather overrated. It just gets light slowly and then -miracle of miracles?- you can see everything you also could have seen had you climbed up in broad daylight. What is the big deal? I guess I am not romantic enough for this kind of thing. The rest of the day we spent at the beautiful crater lake, soaking our sore bones in the hot springs. One of the good things about the trek was that all the camping gear and all the food was carried up - and prepared! - by porters. I have great admiration for the way they manouvre themselves up and down the mountain with their loads without cracking so much as an egg!


The last day we climbed out of the crater to the rim and descended back to the village where we started. Here is me having a snack just before the final descent:


Climbing a perfect cone up 3000 metres, 'sleeping' (i.e. lying awake half the night) on super thin mats is pretty tough stuff. I had planned to go back to Bali straight away, but there was no question of that: I could barely even walk when I got up the next morning. I decided to get some rest at one of the little Gili islands just off the coast of Lombok. Here I settled down in a lovely little hut just 20 metres from the beach to the serious business of lying in a hammock on my veranda all day.


It turned out that I am actually very, very good at this. A natural even: I barely left my hammock, except to eat and drink and go to bed, for two days straight! The next two days were spent walking around the island (this took all of one and a half hours, after which back to the hammock!) and going on a snorkeling trip.
Thoroughly refreshed and restored I got ready to travel to Ubud in Bali. During my last meal of BBQed black snapper in a beach-side restaurant on the little island I started talking with a middle aged American woman. I had seen her around before; apparently she had been staying there for a while, she even had a lovely little cat and a dog with her - obviously the reason why we struck up a conversation. As we were chatting away she told me she was an artist and lived in Ubud. It is not quite clear to me what kind of artist. Her business card reads:
"Andrea Brae: singer, writer, sob sister, dilettante-at-large, and...karaoke!"
Andrea told me she has a house in Ubud but wanted to escape until the end of the year. Sadly her housekeeper had been kind of lonely since she had been away. Would I be interested in renting the place for a week...?
"Well" I thought "it is a bit unusual, but why not?"
We agreed on a price and a time and place that the housekeeper would pick me up, and now I am staying in a lovely funky house with all mod-cons right-bang in the middle of Ubud! For the same price I would have been happy to pay for a nice room. With a housekeeper, Nyomen, who comes in every morning to cook me breakfast and do a little cleaning. I must say, it feels a little bit colonial! This is her in the semi-outdoor kitchen:


And this is the sleeping area where I sleep during the night and where during the day sleeps - an absolute bonus - a sweet talkative ginger cat. Home sweet home.


PS: 'Lonely housekeeper' turned out to be a eufemism for 'been left uncertain about steady source of income while employer temporarily relocated'. The rent I am paying now provides for a little income again. Talk about colonial...?

Board babe

(This post and the next one have been sitting in 'draft' for a while because I wanted to add pictures before posting it, but has been Blogger refusing for weeks now. Also I cannot send the pictures to my brother like I did when in Vanuatu because Gmail (also a Google product) has the same problem. So I am posting them without, I hope in future I will have a chance to add them.)
+++++++

On my first day of my 'holiday from traveling' I went looking for a nice place to stay. In the past weeks I have been staying in some pretty basic places, mostly with only a bucket of cold water and a plastic scoop for a shower. This time I decided to go way over budget and treat myself to some really nice lodgings. I found a lovely quiet garden with lots of frangipani trees in which were set bungalows which had enormous rooms, with beautifully carved four-poster beds and a bathroom with not only hot water, but a real bath as well! Wowee, what bliss! For the first couple of days I did nothing but sleep, lay on the beach and read. However, after a few days I realised there is only so much relaxing non-stop reading one can do, before one gets just a teeny bit bored. Plus I realised I could use some rigorous exercise to try and get rid of some of the adrenaline and frustration still coarsing through my body from the previous weeks. So I signed up for a series of three surfing lessons! This is Bali after all: apparently one of the best places in the world to learn how to surf.
1
(From left to right: surfboard, me)

Surfing is not an easy skill to master, but it is not quite as difficult as I had feared. This is me during the second lesson: a bona fide board babe!
2
Okay, so the board is bigger than the wave, but who cares, I am actually surfing! It was great fun. (I do not understand that in biblical times Abraham and Jesus insisted on walking through or on water. How boring, when they could have just grabbed a board and rode the waves! Now that would have seriously been cool)
In the third lesson we were going to learn how to do backflips and inverted summersaults from the board while riding in on waves the size of towerblocks, but that did not sound all that interesting to me. Especially as I had something much more important to do: nursing my sore muscles and lots of cuts and bruises from the first two lessons... The surfboard was covered with a strange non-slip material that gave me 'carpet burns' on my knees, the tops of my toes and all my fingertips. Adu! (This is Indonesian for 'auch!') Fortunately, nothing that a couple of hours in my lovely bath with a beer did not solve...