Bigger and better!

After six months on the road living in hotels, guesthouses or wherever we could find a bed and two months living in shoebox in Auckland's trendy Newmarket, we finally moved on to bigger and better places!

We just couldn't resist. The temptation of having four bedrooms, a dining room, lounge, an entrance hall bigger than our previous flat and not one, not two but THREE fireplaces was too much for our travelled out minds to turn down.

So here we are.... Moved into our own villa with Kyle and are slowly but surely making it homely. That takes some time considering all we had two months ago were two backpacks filled with dirty clothes, but we're getting there.

And with Kyle as a flat mate and Johnny as our temporary house guest we never feel lonely. Even Mister Puss adds to the bliss when we enjoy a glass of wine at night by the fireplace.

Home sweet - choice, bro, cuz - home!

And so to Auckland....or Ākarana for our Maori hosts. The end of one great adventure but the start of another. It seems like yesterday we were last here. Seven years has flown by. Little has changed. And the world's largest Polynesian city is as cool as ever.

Departed customs with a "good luck" from our charming immigration officer. Two minutes later we were emptying our stinking bags in front of an over vigilant environmentalist. New Zealand, you see, is very anal with what's allowed in. Dirt on boots, for example, is a definite no no. So, in our efforts to avoid a hefty fine - people have been hit for $500 for forgetting to declare innocuous items like apples! - we simply declared everything and sat back while it was all scrubbed and polished. Bonus!

First few nights were spent downtown. We quickly came down to earth with a bump. Accommodation here is not as affordably priced as Asia. In fact it's bloody expensive - $50 a night for a double room. Still needs must! Set about visiting a few old haunts and exploring what is a really cool city. Karangahape, known to locals simply as "K", Road takes the biscuit. Easily the funkiest street in Auckland, bristling with off-beat cafes, ethnic restaurants and chic bars. Ponsonby Road too is great - Auckland's premiere "eat street". Down by the newly developed waterfront you're treated to a fantastic mish-mash of bars, restaurants, clubs and designer shops. All the above are a million light years away from the downbeat, dare we say boring, thoroughfare that is Queen Street. Auckland's answer to London's Regent Street is dull. Packed solid with banks, offices, Vodafone outlets and flight centres. Avoid it like the plague!

Greater Auckland, in the north of the North Island for those without knowledge, is the largest urban sprawl in the world - bigger in area than Los Angles - and home to some 1.3 million, a little under a third of the country's entire population. It's beautifully located. Flanked on the west by the Waitakere Hills and on the east the Hauraki Gulf and surrounding islands, including Waiheke and Rangitoto. North is Devonport and the North Shore. South is Manukau and its habour. It's strange too, that only a couple of miles of land separate the Pacific from the Tasman. A strong cricket arm would clear it on a clear day!

We were lucky to be guests of Femke and Richard. Fem is a friend of Marit's aunt. We'd never met but they were fantastic. Living in the heart of Devonport we were given a room of our own and initiated "Operation: Get a Job!" For days we scoured the newspapers and websites. Signed up with temps. And hammered out countless covering letters! At night we made our hosts the guests - cooking up some real treats. Roast lamb! Oh was it heaven. Think we average lamb three times a week. Our lamb and mint burgers washed down with an ice cold Monteiths Golden. Perfect start to the weekend. Sorry, we digress. Fem and Richard were superb. Their house was our house. They drove us here, there and everywhere. Introduced us to their daughter who introduced us to her friends. It was all good.

Then the house. After ten days of Devonport we found a place in Newmarket. A wee studio on the edge of Broadway, Auckland's shopping central. Unfortunately the vast majority of the outlets are designer and thus we never enter! But there's a "Warehouse", the kind of place where you can kit out your entire flat for 270 bucks. Noice! Five minutes walk from the train station, surrounded by cool bars and restaurants, ten minutes walk from the 50m pool (yes can you believe we're exercising again!) and The Domain - a beautiful parkland topped by botanical gardens and museum. With a view across the harbour. Noice! Shame to part with Fem and Richard but the chance of being so central was not to be missed.

The taxman's come back with our numbers. The bank manager's welcomed us with open arms. They always do don't they. And with the fakest of smiles. Bastards. Actually, to be fair, the lad that set us up was superb. Had everything done for us in minutes. Even our new cards were handed to us then and there. No ten day wait for pin and card to arrive separately. All we needed was that friggin job. And then, just like that, the phone started ringing.

Choose Travel:

Choose travel. Choose a country. Choose a trip. Choose a top heavy stranger for a shag. Choose a fucking cheap bar. Choose beaches, waterfalls, mountains, and diving with big scary fish. Choose bad health, heaving lungs and piss smelling sweat. Choose twenty hour journeys on puke stained buses. Choose a budget airline. Choose your travel mates. Choose cheap threads and matching backpack. Choose a six bed dorm on cheap low season rate in a variety of fucking hostels. Choose weed, hashish or charis and wonder who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting in that dorm watching stinking dreadlocked wankers – often Israelis, stuffing cold fucking McDonald’s into their mouths. Choose wasting away at the end of it all, shitting water in a sorry disgrace of a public loo, nowt more than a dirty, smelly embarrassment to the fuckwit public servants who berrate travellers and declare “we paid for it all”. Choose your own path. Choose travel.... But why would I want to do a thing like that?

Nanny State

There’s a reason why Singaporeans are so efficient, so meticulous and so fucking straight – it’s coz they live in a nanny state!

Since its foundation in 1954, Lee Kuan Yew its godfather and long serving Prime Minister, the socialist People’s Action Party has strived to industrialise – westernise is more befitting – an island severely lacking in natural resources. More than half a century on the same party continues to live out a kind of socially engineered dream – British textbooks on social ideology are to blame, apparently – through strict rules and regulations that seemingly strip Singaporeans of all independence and identity. Hence its reputation, and rightly so in our opinion, as a nanny state!

Sure it’s a safe country with negligible crime, but who’d want to fall foul of the law when such harsh punishments are dealt out. Is it any wonder – no! – why the place is so clean? Smoking in a public place carries a penalty of $500. Get caught littering and you should expect to be hit with a $1000 fine (now we know where the anal British council’s get it from). Christ, you can’t even buy a pack of chewing gum – it’s outlawed!
And the list goes on. Decide to partake in a spot of jaywalking and you’ll be clobbered, on the spot, with a $200 fine. There’s no point in cycling to work, most of the thoroughfares are bicycle free and to break the law is to break the bank - $500. Only the stupid, or perhaps suicidal, should consider smoking a joint with the possession of any drugs resulting in instant death – the gallows would you believe!

Yet, for us anyway, the most outrageous of rules is the one that prevents Singaporeans from snacking on that well loved Asian fruit Durian. For to expose others, while travelling on the city’s metro, to this weird smelling fruit carries a bank busting fine of $2000! Whoever said fruit was good for you?

Singapore

And so there we were. Six months after falling onto an Airbus bound for Mumbai – Dad, Hol, Zo, Simon, Mark and Mark, you know you’re at fault for that “one for the road” – we were down to the last weekend of our trip. How time flies eh. But one thing was for certain, regardless of the states we found ourselves in Tioman, we were going out with a bang – this is Singapore after all!



Ditch the image of a Singapore as boringly sterile – sure its laws are absurd – as far as we’re concerned this city/country ranks highly on our “top ten cities to get pissed in before you die”! Sure it’s expensive, but isn’t everywhere these days?! But this place oozes class, far more so than Amsterdam, Bangkok or London.


The clubs are breathtaking, each with their own theme (we particularly liked “The Clinic”, its chill out lounge decked out like a morgue – stiffs not included). Zouk seemed to epitomise Singapore’s clubbing scene, its post 1am playlist littered with some of Europe’s biggest DJs and rooms boasting everything from hip-hop to techno. Liquid, surely the city’s most progressive club, is a tiny place, but don’t let that put you off – f**k no! Ah, the list is endless, and we haven’t even mentioned the bars!

Despite high bar prices the drinking scene is huge! Given that most Singaporeans aren’t built to wallop down ten jars of Tiger the booze menus boast more pages than a Parisian restaurant. Cocktails, mocktails, beers, shorts, shots....need we go on!? To attempt a pub crawl in Singapore is like signing a suicide note – just don’t do it! Best off staying in one of the countless “districts” and exploring it for what it’s worth. The best bars, we believe, can be found down at Boat Quay and Clarke Quay. Here the night starts early and finishes late, very late! The Pump is worth a good drink (it’s a micro brewery after all) and it’s within staggering distance of The Highlander – never in my life have I seen more whisky, or whiskey, under one roof – magic, pure magic!


Shit, we could go on all day raving about this place. But there’s so much more to tell. I mean if you think the bars and clubs are good wait till you hit the restaurants! Sure this is Asia so there’s a Maccy Ds or Burger King on every other corner (it’s all about real estate with these two as globally all their restaurants are franchised, but enough of the nerdy stuff) but forget fast food – unless you’re in Chinatown or Little India where the quick eats the hawkers serve up are as good as anything in their respective countries – the restaurants is where it happens!

Some would say that Singapore’s mouth watering food scene is its biggest draw card – we prefer pubs – but that’s down to the individual. Yet there’s no denying that this city plays host to a mind-boggling variety of dishes, non light on the wallet and all heavy on the stomach! You only have to pick up one of the numerous “what’s on” guides to realise that any chef who wants to make it big in Asian cuisine is heading for Singapore, their signature dish in tow. So where to eat? F**k knows! It’s all good. African, American, Australian, Brazilian, Chinese, French, Indian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Peranankan, Spanish, Thai, Vietnamese....shit, then there’s the fusions!

Don’t get us wrong though – there’s far more to Singapore than stinking hangovers and shitting triplets! This home to 4.2m isn’t known as the “garden city” for nothing. Greenery punctuates every street corner. Contemporary architecture holds hands with colonial, and in such a perfect way a simple strole is blighted by double takes. Sure, Singapore is a city of shopping malls and high rise splendour. No more so than around the CBD where city banks have taken penis envy to a level only surpassed by KL. Yet British colonialism – Rule Britannia! – lives on. Buildings are magnificently maintained. By night these 200 year old edifices are illuminated with such welcoming subtlety that Sir Christopher Wren would approve.

But Singapore boasts, and might well it do! The biggest this, highest that. Shit, you name it this city can trump it. The “Fountain of Wealth” – world’s biggest. DHL Balloon – world’s highest. They’re even in the midst of building a feress wheel twice the size of London’s! 23,000 taxis roam the city. $10,000 a day is spent on road cleaning. More than $1m was spent on trees lining the spotless expressway, each flown in from Indonesia and hand planted.

The world’s most efficient airport, Changi International (it’s a dream come true to travellers). And, can you believe, no residential building is more than ten years old – a cunning way of keeping the economy ticking over and keeping thousands in work.

So where does all end? In Raffles of course – it’s a Singapore institution. Hard to believe this regal edifice started life as a ten room bungalow. It epitomises colonial luxury ($700 a night and it’s easily worth it when compared to the faceless hotels that blight the vast majority of western cities) with its timber floors, lofty ceilings and countless bars. The place even offers its own dentist, doctor, florist and tailor. Not to mention the fact its spawned countless shopping arcades and sister hotels – all way out of the league of the average tourist. Still, where there’s a will there’s way. It’s worth calling in to crack a few nuts and slurp a “Singapore Sling” – a bargain at $20 a pop. Well, a beer’s $18 a half so you can forget that!

South Pacific - Tioman

It was always our intention to end six months of endless roaming on a beach and given Tioman's reputation among Malaysians as the most impressive of the east coast islands it wasn't a difficult decision to plonk ourselves here for a week's relaxation.

The boat ride, 51km east into the China Sea, was notable for two reasons: dramatic change of scenery between the mainland (jump off point Mersing) and the small outcrops we pierced heading out into the deep blue and the obscenities muttered by Marit - head between knees - as she struggled with motion sickness brought on by the high rolling waves.

For those of you familiar with the flick South Pacific, it was the remote sandy coves of Tioman that formed the setting for the mythical Bali Hai. Later, in the 1970s, Time magazine proclaimed Tioman one of the world's top ten "most beautiful islands" (it's not difficult to see why!) since when numbers have been on the rise. Fortunately - tourism, as we all know, has a down side in that it eats up and shits out everything in its path - the geographical make-up of this island has deterred development and allowed it to remain relatively untouched since Hollywood producers stumbled upon it in the 1950s.

The island's most northern beach, Salang, was our choice. Popular with divers - step off the beach into the water and immediately you're surrounded by stunning coral - and travellers alike Salang is a world away from other Malaysian islands, like Penang and, to a degree Langkawi, where at times the concept of being on an island is wholly unbelievable. Tioman's means its flora and fauna are markedly different from mainland species. Indeed, on arrival, we spotted several metre-long Monitor lizards - "crocodiles" as Marit so eloquently put it - roaming the shoreline, more than we'd seen during our entire stay in Taman Negara!

After a long hard week lugging backpacks it was inevitable that Ina and Bernard would be overjoyed with the sight of sea and sand. You should have seen their faces! It was as though a huge burden had been lifted from their shoulders! Ina was first into a bikini and onto the beach, where she remained all week long! Bernard meanwhile took to the clear waters, clutching a mask and snorkel, from where he seldom returned - when he did it was to buy a bottle wine and kick back in a hammock during sunset.

For much of the week we all did very little. On a couple of occasions we disappeared on kayaks to explore neighbouring coves or travelled out into deeper waters to swim with exotic fish and turtles. Kris and Bernard attempted some of the rugged trails inland - the sight of Bernard standing naked on Monkey beach, hand on hips, with tackle swaying in the afternoon breeze was truly memorable for all the wrong reasons - while mother and daughter swept through the pages of countless books.

As beautiful as Tioman is during the day it's when the sun disappears below the horizon that the island really kicks into life. Locals - who drift ashore in droves clasping nets teeming with fish - make it near impossible to say "no" to a sea life supper that, in our case, was always accompanied with more wine than the average vineyard could produce in a season - Bernard's side-to-side stagger became a nightly joke to us all!

And, with the "drunken oldies" tucked up in bed (though sleep was the last thing Bernard hinted towards during his late-night sways), it was left for us to check out the island's bar scene! Here big "hellos" go out to Scott and Suzanne, Emma and Beck, Phillip and Jeannette et al...great times, real great times! Thanks also go out to staff, if we can call you that you drunken bar stewards, at Fours and BB! Can't believe you can house so much booze under a thatched roof!

Malaysia's top tourist destination, Taman Negara:

Taman Negara jungle spans more than 4300 sq km across the states of Pahang, Kelantan and Terenganu and is viewed by many as Peninsula Malaysia's top tourist destination. Unfortunately there are times when you have to be honest and admit that places really don't live up to their billing (Melaka was still fresh in the mind!). This jungle proved to be anothern prime example.

Knew the trip north to this 130 million year old expanse of wilderness (accounts on age are conflicting with some suggesting it's actually more than 150m) would be a toughie - and so it proved. A 5am taxi swept us from the steps of our Melaka hostel and dropped us smack bang in the heart of KL well ahead of morning rush hour. There we boarded a bus, for a four hour run to Jerantut, that seemed to house more Dutchies than the country itself. A three hour boat ride - another upturned tree - up the Temberling river proved to be the day's highlight. But even then the luxury of life-jackets posing as cushions couldn't resucitate our numb cheeks!

Now this place is not wide open savanna as in African game parks, nor has it the diversity of jungle in Borneo. Indeed the jungle is so bloody thick a ten foot tall beast could pass right before you and yet you'd never know!

That aside this environment remains as it always has done, untouched by ice ages, one of the world's most pristine primary rainforests. On the promise of catching many exotic and rare animals in their habitats we signed up for a late night jeep safari. Regrettably the only thing we saw during two hours of bone crunching in the back of a three cyclinder skip were a few cows, a monkey and a spider. Oh, and there was a snow leopard too - so we were told!

The four of us holed up in the village of Kuala Tahan, a 20 second punt across the river from the jungle, Marit and I grateful that we'd been talked out of plumbing for a bog standard hut by Ina. A/C really is necessary such is the humidity and intensity of mosquitoes - this is of course their domain! Little to do at night except stroll down to the riverbank for a plate of locally cooked rice and swig back a few cans of beer - redeemed from the only resort in the immediate area for astronomical rates.

There were highlights of course such as the canopy walkway (the only activity other than eating we managed as a group) a system of ladders and wooden planks suspended 25m above the ground between century old trees. Daring each other to "go first" we eased our way around the jungle's ceiling before the swaying and creaking proved too much.

While the Robens opted for a cool down period Kris, his normal defiant self, stuck two fingers up at the humidity and, rather stupidly, opted to climb up to Bukit Indah in search of the stunning panoramic views it casts over the entire jungle. Tough but rewarding.

Such is the intensity and density of the environment it is easy to get lost. While trekking one trail we were besieged by 20m high vines and took to swinging through the undergrowth as if auditioning for a part in the next Tarzan film. Our fun, however, was cut short upon noticing that our legs were alive with leeches.

Much screaming and shouting ensued as we first tried to burn, then opted to pull, the buggers off our bleeding skin. No sooner had one been removed than another, bigger blood sucking bastard was working its way inside our boots. Needless to say paranoia set in and our pants were soon round our ankles as we embarked on the necessary crotch checks!


Bedbugs were the last straw - this was after all supposed to be a relaxing two final weeks. The four of us agreed unanimously to cut short our stay to allow for an extra day on Tioman, an idylic island - 50km off the south east coast - in the South China Sea.

This, however, meant an overnight stop in Kuantan which we soon came to realise, as soon as we'd clocked the Negeri state mosque, wasn't going to be the best place for an overnighter!

After hours of aimless walking - it was India all over with everyone pointing us in different directions - the four of us resigned ourselves to soft drinks and yet more rice as we joined a party of "ninja turtles" for their sunset slap up