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The LISTENup podcast series returns, with a sensuous foray into the Sumatran jungle, before catching a tortuous getaway bus out. Ant gets up close and overly personal with the People of the Forest, before sampling the rich palette of colours which make up this mystical Indonesian island.

Dear Readers,
Regulars to the site will have realised I’ve been off the radar recently, while I’d love to say it’s due to oodles of travelling it is, alas, due to the irregular shifts I’m being forced at knife-and-fork point to work, while here in Wellington.

Believe me when I say, if there was any way I could escape and run naked and wild through the forests of mispronounced words — I would.

Please accept this humble podcast by way of respect for your loyalty during this time.

Yours,
Ant

006 LISTENup: The Flirt of the Forest is a post from Trail of Ants.

Consider visiting my travel blog to explore a wide variety of travel related articles, and score yourself a 7% discount on your next travel insurance policy with my World Nomads promotional code.

I stare at the newspaper. It wasn’t me. I gawp at the television. It wasn’t me. I trawl through the internet. It wasn’t me! I listen to the radio, podcasts, and conversations on the bus. It WASN’T me! At least — I hope it wasn’t me?

I didn’t know much about Asia before I scribbled over her ancient lanes. I thought it was a factory to stock my English necessities. Indeed, my local fish and chip shop, newsagent, petrol station, pizza shop and Chinese takeaway were all owned and operated by cheery Asians.

It’s only now, as I’m sat in as-safe-as-safe-can-be New Zealand, that it’s sunk in. I’ve left a trail of destruction in Asia. I tell myself every day it wasn’t me, but there’s a residual inkling; that it was.

I believe in the butterfly effect — that a butterfly can fart in Blackpool and lift the skirt of a Cornish virgin. So could it actually be possible, that I inadvertently contributed to some of the most iconic headlines of the past two years?

Perhaps the day I fell asleep in Moscow’s Gorky Park, I missed the chance to quell the August 2008 invasion of Georgia? I’ll never know, I’d quickly fallen asleep on a round-city recce because Moscow had swiftly bored me. However it’s not just the invasion of gritty Georgia that has me looking over my shoulder.

In July 2007 I arrived in Mongolia. The Mongols were in full on party mode; it was the annual Nadaam Festival and everywhere I looked small horses jerked fancy young jockeys around the beaten green Gobi. Gers sprang up; a hundred pickpockets tried their luck; I was cruelly threatened in a local nightclub; and I heard of one backpacker being kidnapped, and another who was raped.

Though shocking, none of this deterred me — I was in Mongolia. I was living a dream I’d dreamt for years. A year later — July 2008 — and Ulaanbaator became the stage to escalating violence as protestors rallied against suspected election fraud, and a year later a flood temporarily swallowed the capital. This was amazing; not least because Mongolia is one of the emptiest expanses of land I’ve ever seen. The devil had hit the bull’s-eye.

China’s also suffered. I spent three fascinating months there in late 2007 and ever since it’s been hailing horror. First of all, hundreds of thousands of my beloved Chinamen were affected by the worst snowstorms in decades. Then the warm up to the forthcoming Olympics became the catalyst to a massive anti-China uprising, resulting in my cherished Tibetan skies being splattered with the worst violence in Lhasa for twenty years. As if China hadn’t taken enough of a pounding in my absence, the Sichuan earthquake then culled tens of thousands and not to be outdone, the north-eastern Xinjiang region imploded in another round of ethnic violence. I won’t even mention their milk.

Brimming with innocence, I entered the Kingdom of Nepal. Word had already reached me of the Maoists — a terrorist group — demanding money off stoic foreign hikers in the mystical foothills of the Himalayas. Undeterred, I dodged my way around Kathmandu, spluttered down the river, clambered through bushes looking for tigers and rhino and snuck in and out of Buddha’s old place.

Other than a few spontaneous (yet peaceful) protests, I was confident things were running smoothly. Then I left — and a trio of bombs rippled the terai. Before I knew it the headlines told me the terrorists were in government and soon after they levered the monarchy permanently off their thrown. What had I done? The Kingdom had fallen.

India was never short of controversy during the four months I spent there — that’s one of the reasons I love it so. But nothing of the scale that happened after I left. First off, forty-nine people were slain by a series of bombs in Ahmedabad, and a few months later the sickening news came through that Mumbai had suffered a similar fate, with four times as many losing their lives to hereditary violence.

If all of this wasn’t bad enough, the next country I forayed into was Sri Lanka. I’m almost thankful that when I first stepped foot on the Venerable Island, it was already in the throes of civil war. It meant I couldn’t be the catalyst. The Sinhalese government pulled out of a six-year peace deal the week I arrived. I stayed for two months, fearlessly venturing to the war-torn east coast before looping around and back to India. Then the government accelerated its stance, fuelling the climax to a bloody feud. Maybe my many inquisitive questions were misplaced?

The next country I dared to step foot in, was tiny Singapore. Rumours were strife that a woman in her twenties was brutally cursed for crossing the road without being escorted by a little green man. And then, if that wasn’t shocking enough, I was told off for taking too long to order noodles. I’ve got my eye on Singapore, if only to see if anything interesting ever happens.

From Singa’ to the Indonesian archipelago. A two-month jolly around Sumatra, Java and bountiful Bali proved to be one of the most exhilarating periods of my life. I left full of admiration for a country of simple brilliance. Four months later the government executed the infamous Bali Bombers, which seemingly acted as little deterrent — eight months later, central Jakarta reverberated to the blasts of two of its iconic hotels.

A year in Australia ensued, for the most part I was safe in the haven of Melbourne sipping stubbies and perusing antipodean quirks. Then one Saturday I dropped Reb and her dad at Avalon airport, and the radio began to crackle through the news that became known as Black Saturday; bushfires left 173 dead and levelled lives in the worst natural disaster in Australia’s history.

All of the above lays in my wake. Battered and torn, broken and bruised. Lives inextricably twisted, love curtailed, and communities eternally altered.

Perhaps it’s true, that you only really know a country and its people once you’ve been there — once you’ve spent time laughing with its children. But perhaps it’s also true, that you only get to know a place, once you’ve left?

Trails of the Unexpected is a post from Trail of Ants.

Consider visiting my travel blog to explore a wide variety of travel related articles, and score yourself a 7% discount on your next travel insurance policy with my World Nomads promotional code.

In almost every country I’ve visited in Asia there is a town where artisans almost outnumber tourists. Undoubtedly talented, you can find the most amazing local and international art at guilt-pecking prices. In China it’s Lijiang. In India it’s Cochin. This image could have been anywhere, but it’s from the Balinese town of Ubud.

These days Ubud is a true tourist Mecca. From its roots as a sleepy village it has heaved itself up to become an internationally renowned centre for arts (the downfall being its no longer a sleepy village). Ubud also has the wonkiest pavements in history and it can resemble a Himalayan hike walking along some streets. If you’re planning on visiting Ubud on a budget I can recommend the Wayan Family Guesthouse on Hanuman Street, spacious rooms with breakfast included (some days curiously green kaya pancakes).

The image in question is not manipulated in anyway other then to ‘Polaroid’ it. It shows the familiar faces of Buddha. One eyes opened. One eyes closed. There is a significance to do with this, I believe it has something to do with him being dead or alive but instead of rushing to Google I’ll leave it to you, my trusty commenteers to complete the riddle for everyone else.

Has this weeks Reprint image hit a cord? Let me know about it via the comments panel, or for more imagery from along The Trail take yourself over to the stills gallery.

The Reprint: ‘Split Personality’ is a post from Trail of Ants.

Consider visiting my travel blog to explore a wide variety of travel related articles, and score yourself a 7% discount on your next travel insurance policy with my World Nomads promotional code.

Zoom in a bit, in a bit more, more, more, out a bit, a touch more. Now focus. Slowly does it. Breath. Easy on the trigger. Look around the frame. Zoom in a bit. In a bit. In a bit. Breath. And. Wait for it. Shoot! Snap? Click? Damn it. Turn it on. Refocus. Pan right a bit. Easy on the trigger. Breath in. Breath out. Perfect. Count down from three, two… get out of the way! Three, two, one. Snap. Click. Whirr. You beauty!

And so the beat goes on. Time after time after time. You’ve seen the Taj Mahal a thousand times. There are men who find employment at the Taj by walking you around the fifty or so most photographic angles. You follow them unknowingly. You take the photo. You’re pleased. You pay them. They’re not pleased. You pay them some more. Now their friends not pleased.

The Taj Mahal doesn’t have a bad angle. I don’t honestly believe you can go wrong. This particular shot was taken from a rooftop restaurant and is the epitome how you should view the photographic world – with your eyes wide open.

I should of shot a whole series from up there in hindsight, but my battery was waning and monkeys were gathering around my saag aloo. Man shouldn’t be made to make such decisions; get the shot, lose the food or eat the food then… wait a minute… get the shot? Hindsight is a wonderful thing. But there it is; a big fat clue, to just one unique view.

Has the marvel in marble wet your appetite for a meander through North India? Worry not young ranger, you’ll find a remedy of reminders in my album of imagery from this glorious region.

The Reprint: ‘Taj. You’re It.’ is a post from Trail of Ants.

Consider visiting my travel blog to explore a wide variety of travel related articles, and score yourself a 7% discount on your next travel insurance policy with my World Nomads promotional code.

Déjà vu: a flash flood of familiarity bursting through the secret sluice between our worlds. I’m sitting on a tiny tropical island that wears a golden ring of sand engraved by faint footprints being slowly blotted out by the sapphire of the ocean. I know this island well. I know where the sun sizzles the horizon at the end of play and I know where she washes the sleep from her morning eyes. I know its highest point, its longest route and its shortest way. Then this, is surely déjà vu? Non, Madame, Monsieur. I just believed my heart, and bullied my head to bring her here.

To cut a long story short (as is always the case with The Trail); I’d flown to Singapore, picked up a new credit card and priced up a bus ticket into Malaysia to start a foray around Asia’s south-eastern playgrounds. Then an email pinged through that read “…prove it x”. 36 hours later I completed the u-turn and landed back on the island of Bali. I slipped and slithered through the usual patter of questions from immigration about my new passport (that now appear to revolve around my photo showing a bright-eyed impish face framed by styled hair and the complexion of a geisha girl, whereas now I’m more akin to a scraggily haired, blistered beachcomber). I’ll come back to the roundabout account in a sentence or two, I just need to get something off my chest.

During the routine “where you from, where you go” Q&A session, the young stern-faced Balinese immigration officer was scribbling notes to aid my ‘here we go again’ thought process that I foretold would see me doing the walk of shame passed colourful troops of tourists to the dark office in the corner, but then he handed me the note and smiled the kind of smile that could kick-start an impromptu musical and softly spoke the words “if you need anything, call me, ok”. It was a familiar play. My time in Indonesia is captioned by approaches from my less-favoured variety; always I hasten to add in a respectful manner such as this. My mobile phone barely contains its excitement when an effeminate fellow named Richson texts me, his “…little boy”. Another point in motion was just prior to leaving Bali to catch the aforementioned flight to Singapore. I was threading a scooter through the ebb and flow of city traffic when an intent beau targeted me. He followed me through traffic as though attached by an elastic band to my screeching rear tyre, “where you go bulé boy, I liiike you! Where you go? Come back, ohmigod, come baaaaack!” That Scooter Suitor tracked me between no less than seven traffic lights before I accidentally-on-purpose cut suicidally across three lanes of traffic and into the salvation of a forgotten side road. Maybe word of the potential of my passport photo got out, who knows, but that’s just a select handful of episodes.

This could be the real reason I came back, for Reb – because I’ve barely let her out of my sight since ‘…I proved it x’. This travel blog, or travelogue, (or to the majority, I’m learning just ‘literary fog’) is at what you may call a pubescent stage. The raw essentials of travelling, I now understand; respect, patience and respite. In a year, The Trail has become a real thing, not just a route for my existence. When I rotate my eyes through my memories, I get a distinctive taste at the back of my throat. Bitter does not mean bitter, nor does sweet mean sweet. My gullet secretes what I can only presume is a marinade of moments. My inner head, also, experiences a unique sensation. I don’t associate my inner head with my mind as the feeling is outside my mind but inside my head (could you send me a literary fog horn?). No, seriously ohmigod, listen! A curtain seems to come down in my inner head, as if trapping the travel memories there so my system can marinade them in sensations. Yes, that’s it! The Trail – or at least its residue – is therefore physical in every sense. I hear it. I see it. I feel it. I smell it. I taste it. It’s like the excitement I find in sadness and the sorrow I seek in euphoria. I’m not crazy; it’s real. Shhh. Shudder.

The Return to Bali signalled the Downfall of Playtime. Southeast Asia, and my reunion with the beautiful Buddha are stored in the ‘to do’ tray of my life. Regular readers already know my route there (or anywhere) was never really assured, and after a chapter of cuddles and cocktails my plans have magnetised to those of Reb’s. Melbourne beckons for a sojourn of routine. If truth be known, my budget isn’t dictating that I go and earn the Sunshine Dollar, but nor does my budget allow me to doss in costly Australia – it’s a compromise. The plus sides are; it will stop my drift; it should fence me in enough to stimulate the desire to push on; and allow me time to learn fresh skills either through the infrastructure for research or the occupation I indulge in (note to the literary world, I’m a free agent). I’ve recently realised the benefit of having an address and contact number, so I’ll be utilising this novelty to the full, and my mum won’t stop telling me how much she and dad enjoyed the library in Melbourne. I should point out, that we are not what you would call an academic family, and to my knowledge we have never been active members of a library, but I will appease my mother by visiting her shrine of spines, and probably reading a book or two on the cultures and customs of faraway lands. This is something I’ve become quite terrified of; that there’s not enough time to know everything.

I turned twenty-six on Thursday, on the same day last year I was sweeping through the shadows of the Great Wall of China, this year I dovetailed my girlfriends hand and strolled around Ubud, the spiritual pupil at the centre of Bali’s gold and green eyes. The evening of my day of birth saw a rare return to western ways, candlelit cuisine beside a bottle of Chilean Merlot. There was a new experience for me here also; a “Happy Birthday to You…” dedication from the entire staff of the restaurant, which faded to a crescendo of applause from a capacity crowd. The next day however I was cramped with Bali Belly (which should not take away from my delight that evening) and the irony that my body had rejected the rich food. I’d tricked it into thinking I was Asian, that I could live on spiced vegetables, tofu, tempe and crackers while filling myself with steamed rice or fried noodles and washing the whole horrific thought down with sweet hot tea. Ha, can you imagine! No siree, I need pastas and pestos and fish and chips and pie and mash and sausages and gravy, I need five slices of stodgy bread and steaming-but-not-boiled baked beans and a mug of Yorkshire ‘like things used to be’ Tea. I could go into the finer points about the baked beans inclusion, I could go all the way to the point that I’ve been considering opening a Baked Bean Café and that Ubud would not be too horrid a place to not boil the (Heinz) beans.

So there it is, you’ve waited nearly three weeks for me to tell you that I’ve spent the last nearly three weeks going round in circles evading come-ons and considering baked bean cafes. But as it’s taking me so long to complete the Big Circle, I think it’s fitting that I should from time to time complete some smaller, slightly quirky ones. I know not where this site of literary fog will take us over the coming months, your guess is as bad as mine. Australia is a faraway land to me after all – in fact as faraway, as away can be – crouching in the corner of our world, lays this vast continent of curious, canny kinds who I will endeavour to relay to you from a space, that for once I can call my own.

Turning Circles is a post from Trail of Ants.

Consider visiting my travel blog to explore a wide variety of travel related articles, and score yourself a 7% discount on your next travel insurance policy with my World Nomads promotional code.

I’d seen him from a short distance, twelve months previously, he travelled alone aboard a plane to Moscow. He wore a dark tracksuit top zipped over a light t-shirt, and loose pale green shorts covered the knees he cradled by his chest. His hair sprayed out in loose brown curls beneath a khaki cap, highlighted by scribbles of grey. His pale thin lips lined a shallow smile, and his early morning eyes seemed glazed with relief. As his homeland slipped beneath a thin veil of cloud, he lifted his cap and ran his fingers through his hair, his lips parted just once to release his farewell thoughts: Let the journey begin, my friend. Today, he lay upright on the rippled white sheets of a double bed, in a simple, homely room on the island of Bali.

His hair was shorter, still a familiar fiesta of curls and slashed with new grey. His face was slimmer, his pale skin had darkened and his spirit was now windowed by black-framed glasses. His khaki cap lay upturned nearby, a tide of sweat had set a shade in the rim and it was filled with worn foreign coins. His loyal backpack leaned tiredly, resting its bruises and scars against a bamboo table. He lay shirtless, wearing chequered grey shorts between a half empty packet of Marlborough and a swollen blue notebook. Ambient music moulded around his quiet thoughts, and I watched in silence as his eyes circled the motionless ceiling fan. He lay in the path of a mirror, reflecting the figure of a proud and mortal curio. Though he sometimes heard me, I sensed he never saw me.

He recalled how he’d left Moscow, slipping east through Siberia to the rhythmic beat of a Mongolia bound train. It was five days before he set foot in Ulaanbaatar. While he absorbed the strength of the mighty Mongol race, he followed the whispers through the kitsch of their annual games. He described the grace of wrestlers, the poetry of archers and the fear that pecked at the calmness of preteen jockeys. Asia mesmerised him instantaneously. He looked musingly at the ceiling fan, he found its will to spin tremendous. After a short time living with local nomads in their ger and exploding dust clouds with the hooves of horses, he journeyed onward to Beijing. The Mongolians, he declared have a degree in simplicity, their eyes hang like painted canvases in a dusty exhibit of Untold Beauty. His arrival in Beijing was infamous, he writhed in agony for three days. At moments he became so dehydrated he had to use his fingers to pry his swollen tongue from the inner of his cheek. China was kind after this initiation, and even in the cruellest moments he learned patience, compassion and conviction.

He recalled a southwest mountain village where he’d sat and eaten beside a loyal friend, whose name, when he spoke it, started the percussion in his eyes. Following a humble feast they shared cigarettes and baiju with a decade or more excitable locals, who later produced a segment of bee larvae. After a pregnant pause, he swallowed the first of the pale grubs, beginning a long evening of song and dance, laughter and merriment. It says a lot about the Chinese, they’re xenophobes who roll out their welcome mats with a courtesy offered to queens. He shuffled on the bed, and then I listened as he rolled his memory onto the Tibetan plateau. He visited Lhasa, spending two weeks watching the evolution of monks, and the perseverance of pilgrims. He thought highly of the Tibetans. Lhasa radiates beneath a sky so alive, so pure, so blue. It mainlines your veins, and suddenly you’re as wise as the ocean, as blameless as boys, and as boundless as her eyes. He left the Forbidden City in a failing van. He drifted in and around whitewashed monasteries and indigo lakes, vast pale dunes and rich red forts, sought all the while by scores of grubby faced youths. As the traveller’s tale ascended to the base camp of Mount Everest, I picked up the thrill in his tone. He told of being caught out in tumbling temperatures beneath a canopy of curious stars. After a slow 10km hike he recoiled and spent several hours shivering uncontrollably beneath a stack of blankets, his eyes still retained that frozen glaze.

The resilient city of Kathmandu became the stage to a fond farewell, to the girl whose name he chased around the orchards of his mind. He cast his eyes on his cigarettes before confessing it had taken many moons before he realised the feeling seeping from the Kathmandu shadows, was loneliness. The Kingdom of Nepal played stage to my coronation. The day I lost my queen preceded the month I found my Kingdom. It was there, in Nepal, that he first encountered Hinduism. He found sense in aspects of its tradition, Buddha had nudged him on an educational level, but Hinduism and all the myth and colour of its ways and words earned a place in his heart in ways he’d never permitted. He doesn’t believe in mortal gods, or the dictatorship he sees in other religions. The real Hindu takes strength from everything, and gives weakness to nothing. He looped around Nepal, taking to the rivers, roads and jungles before riding on the roofs of buses through the southern terai, stopping by the birthplace of the Indian Prince, Buddha before lowering himself over the border and into the heart of Hindustan, to India.

He smiled, as if trying to expel the gross history of this journey. His first night in India, he told me how drunk he’d gotten, attempting to forget the inward journey that choked him with anger, and drenched him in desperation and blood. I learned later that that aching anger would bind itself with love. He travelled the cities of the north with his parents. Together they took in the holy Hindu city of Varanasi; the glorious Mogul white cliffs of the Taj; the Golden Temple, home of the Sikhs; and the Buddha’s classroom of Sarnath. Between these, they fought with forts and took trains to temples before the three speared their way over rails to the southern, largely Christian city of Pondicherry. North India is crass and callous. You’re soul is robbed, your spirit burned and your destiny is devilishly realigned. Christmas was spent sowing seeds of kisses on that girl, she’d drifted on his whispers to bloom beneath the shadows of festivity and friends. He stopped his story for a moment to sip a sassy smile, though its cause would remain a private pleasure.

He then told me of the month of Janus, who opened a door to new beginnings on the isle of Sri Lanka. The surf and sands of southern Ceylon bore him the fruit of countless new friends, each was true, each loyal and distinct. One day, he fell upon the tragedy of two Sri Lankan brothers, whose family business, a turtle farm was destroyed “the day the sea is coming”, along with almost their entire family. I didn’t have to hear Nimal and Ruwan’s tragedy, I could see it in their eyes and feel it in my heart, and without words I knew she felt the same, we had to help. I listened to his thoughts on Sri Lanka, the gaps he left I figured were small parts of his self that he left in the sands to recover another day. The tea plantations, national parks and holy pilgrimages he spoke so sweetly of, sat beside his firsthand accounts of an island in turmoil, at war.

His return to India was more instinct than desire. He tore himself away from an island he loved and threw himself at the mercy of her southern states. He found shanti the day he rented an Enfield Bullet motorcycle, and found comfort from the loving arms wrapped around his waist. He described the thirty day journey in magnificent stages, from the temple strewn lands of Tamils, up and over the Western Ghats before descending their coats of grit and grim into the green glory of Kerala. All along their way they sipped hot sweet chai and snacked on wadis with a hundred, no a thousand locals. They pinched rice and sweet, spicy curries with their fingers from banana leaves and when their clocks chimed for their ‘hour of need’ it took just a shy passerby, or a hidden onlooker to attract a gaggle of intrigue and set them on their way once more. To thread a passage through India in this way, sweetened bitterness with bliss and spliced cruel with kind. Our path was scribed with poetries of passion, and slow ballads of awe and brilliance. The conclusion however, also brought a sequel to the Toodle-oo of Kathmandu, to his pillion, his equal and his muse. This time born of logic, laced with tears but remembered in gratitude.

He paused, then silently walked barefoot to his porch, as he sat down he drew his knees to his bare chest and lit a cigarette. The plumes of smoke moved thinly through the still, warm air of our Bali night. He stared up into the dim porch light, watching in wonder his self-made spectacle of careless wisps. He extinguished the cigarette slowly, drew a deep breath and continued his memoires, carrying his thoughts over the moss-covered rocks that surrounded a small hidden lawn. He recalled the three weeks of long days that followed her departure when he’d ventured into the state of Andhra Pradesh, going nowhere fast while thinking things over slowly. I knew it was time to leave India, when I was denied entry to a night train. My bribes fell on hollow ears, my begging fell on careless eyes and my will was spirited away on a feather, to a passive plateau. I’d lost the will to fight; I knew right there, right then that my time – for now – was up.

He took to Singapore, a city he knew was a contrast to India, the homeland of humble heroes and fantastic villains. He drank and shopped and laughed and sighed, he ate and walked and talked. Singapore – for the visitor at least – is as neutral as Asia gets with the West. She’s loyal, where others are scheming, and she’s tender where others are tough. He stopped to watch an ant, struggle under a prized crumb of toast, and then from nowhere there were two, then three, and then four to help carry their loot awkwardly away. Touché. He continued, explaining how he flew to Sumatra, an island of Indonesia and one he discovered to be inlaid with treasures. He mounted volcanoes, dipped his weary body in lakes and his finale was attended by the fire-red, pendulous orang-utans. He took an onward flight to Jakarta, capital of the neighbouring island, Java, and en route he lost his prized possessions; his passport, and wallet of critical cards. Corruption in Indonesia was not beautiful, nor welcome. It’s a crime of the coward. If this nation weren’t so soft and sweet in other ways, I’d instil you with its sour side and stench. He spoke of other islands ringed with golden beaches, and cultures descended through lineages of lore.

It was here on Bali that I heard these nibs of his enchanting year in Asia. I listened for over an hour, in awe. I thought I knew the definition of my emotions, I thought I’d felt them all. Though the depths of those in Asia almost reduced my prior sentiments, to mere essence. Even in the shaves of silence I heard the enigmatic echo of his epic. I see his friendships in the constellations of his ebony eyes; I feel his compassion in the warmth of his palms; I feel his excitement in the nape of his neck; I see his astonishment in the furrows of his brow; I sense his caution in the flare of his nostrils; and I’ve heard his story, a thousand glorious times. A thousand glorious times.

A Thousand Glorious Times is a post from Trail of Ants.

Consider visiting my travel blog to explore a wide variety of travel related articles, and score yourself a 7% discount on your next travel insurance policy with my World Nomads promotional code.

I concluded it was time to leave the city when a gay man insisted I meet his girlfriends back at his hotel room; It quickly transpires I’m in a brothel, one of the ‘staff’ sits her four year old son on my knee to act the puppet for her inquisitive line of questioning – read sales pitch. ‘Aldy, say: where’s you girlfriend?’, Aldy’s eyes find me like blameless beacons in the seamy smog ‘where’s girlfwend?’ he recites brightly through his chubby smile, ’are you maweed?’ ‘Howold are you?’ ‘Are you my daddy?’ I answered his questions with tickles, and a smug smile toward his mother. As I sat on the foot of the bed, I listened to my whereabouts for the last week of nights retold from a room full of ten strangers. ‘You were in this bar’, they said. That bar. Early night, that night. Shop. Internet. You spoke to her, shook his hand. Aldy’s hugs and handshakes were my only escape from the tumbling reality, so I smothered him with attention. He was polite and his hand was warm with innocence, in an inescapable environment that drifted on a river of love, but respect among kith was the ragged survivor of the rivers rapids. It had a story to tell.

It wasn’t this random occurrence that saw me skipping over some of Java’s most coveted cultural offerings. I realised in those Jakarta days that I was exhausted. I’m urbaned out. The Trail is a working week away from its first year anniversary, it’s taken me through an intense cycle of emotions and terrain (I’ll sum this up in more detail in a coming post) and it was in Jakarta, while replacing my passport and starting processes to replace my credit cards and driving licence, that I caved in. I looked at the guidebook with probable plans rang in my ears. You must go here, they said. You must go there. You must do this, eat this, think this, be this, care for this, ignore this, drink this, do it like this, see this, and stay in this. It can give the softest of travellers more stress than any office they’ve ever known. A couple of years ago, I was in a pub at home with one of my best mates, Jeff while we watched Arsenal versus Newcastle. Newcastle fielded a player named Scott Parker, a dynamo, and an old school stalwart that we (Arsenal) targeted at every given chance. Late in the second half he fell with a clatter under another glorious challenge, and stayed face down in the turf. After a pregnant pause he lifted his head to look at his manager on the sideline, his eyes were screaming with defeat and with his palm faced down, Parker swayed his right hand from side to side, no more, no more, I’m done and then planted his head back in the grass and prayed his manager would heed his plea, and he did. That’s exactly how I felt in Jakarta, I sat on my pokey bed, in my pokey room and looked at my pokey bags and let the truth descend like a comforting winter blanket. No more, no more, I’m done.

The time I spent in Jakarta did enable me disprove popular belief that Jakarta is a squalid city of chaos and crime. I found it as modern, safe and clean as any developing nations capital. Travellers who find Jakarta to be defeating, should in no way go to India whose cities are perfumed with squalor, charmed by chaos and so elegantly laced in crime they make Jakarta look like a crèche. There is a certain charisma in Jakarta’s crumbing curbs, and (like Singapore) it does have a bar culture of leering expat men and the locals friendliness is somewhat gruff compared to elsewhere in the country. But. As the eleventh largest city in the world, already bursting the seams of every utility possible, in a nation frequently rocked by natural disasters and curtailed by corruption, in a world of wagging fingers – I think it has an air of nobility. I didn’t see the sprinklings of monuments, museums or other tourist ghettos due to spending the entire week ‘in the office’ but in many ways I’m glad. I grumbled and groaned, and looking back, that’s the way it should have been.

I stuffed my mind with memories of lessons learned and boarded the plane to Bali, proceeded by a three day stagger over land and sea to Lombok’s Gili Islands. A trio of tiny islets ringed by sand, inlayed with easy bars and restaurants, devoid of dogs, cars, motorbikes (and seemingly anyone over the age of fifty) and overlooking turquoise seas of coral and carefree marine life. Since I’m still credit-card-less my budget has crash landed to alarming lows, meaning most of the nightlife was off limits and my bartering skills found me in a humble home beside the racket of the mosque and a choir of cockerels. For the first two days, I found a secluded nook on a rarely visited beach and let my thoughts dissolve deep into the sand while rays of unblemished sun enfolded me like the starfish on the coral graves. The following week was pegged with new friends who I led into the sea and followed up the beach. They regaled stories of ‘shroom (magic mushroom) fuelled hilarities, drunken unions and he-said-she-said-then-he-said epics while I relayed my night in the local restaurant before chomping chapters from my book and scribing nuisance in the notebook. The days switched from snorkelling off sarong swept beaches to strolls around the island in time to watch the sun lapping at the sweet orange seawaters.

As I shuttled my way back to Bali, I watched the island of Lombok drift by and away knowing my budget couldn’t find an excuse to stop and sample its quiet lifestyle. I needed to return to Bali before the cash dries up and I became stranded. The path onwards is unknown; I left England almost a year ago, with no idea of where I’d go from the moment I arrived in Beijing a month later but The Trail was seemingly inlaid with fate, a fate I rarely will to change. The tentacles of my mind find the lure of SE Asia unflattering, though I am persuadable; the long allure of Japan is more flirtatious than ever before; the vast panache of Australia blooms, before wilting in a wisp of why; the splatter of New Zealand’s islands arch like a faraway bow, armed with arrows of desirable adventure and I have offers and urges to u-turn and lose myself in conflicts of culture in the Middle East. The Trail is descending from the blizzard of India to the foothills of my travelling ambitions, South America. From the tiny island of Bali, I’m realising just how big the world is and just how long it could take to traverse. There are doubts in my mind that I can achieve this alone, and protect my long-term sanity. But alongside the doubt, lays drive, and every step I take twists zests of opportunity, possibility and reality into my spirit and ultimately I’m prepared for each eventuality that those steps produce. They say the hardest thing in travel is to leave in the first place. I now believe the hardest thing in travel is simply knowing when to stop.

A Harlot and a Holiday is a post from Trail of Ants.

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Back when I was a boy – when war was settled by Thundercats, when all we had to play with were a Commodore 64, Sega Megadrive, a Spectrum ZX and a Gameboy, when Eclipse jeans meant u waz kool and Timmy Mallet got kicks out of striking the dumb kids with a big hammer – I stuck a pin in a map and announced to Chucky (my plastic-faced ventriloquist doll) that ‘I’m going to Java’. ‘Really? That’s great, I hope you have a wonderful time in Java’ we said ‘I will, Chucky’ I promised. In the years following my declaration, hair began to grow in strange places and my redheaded friend rarely uttered a word. The truth is, he became the victim of a number of violent beatings at the hands of my fiendish teenage friends and me, and in 1999 he was cruelly doll-napped and fatally run over – twice – on the quiet country road to my house by a friend’s Vauxhall Nova. Nine years since his assassination, I’ve made it to the Indonesian island of Java and in a cruel twist of fate, Chucky’s pinned me with revenge.

As the window in the taxi became smeared with the late night cityscape of Java’s infamous capital, Jakarta, I was revelling in Martynas and Juste’s (my Lithuanian comrades) proud defence of the tawdry Eurovision Song Contest. Twenty kilometres from the airport we’d just left, I rightly abandoned my support for the recent UK contestants and turned the conversation to Lithuanian comedy, but as I listened, my mind opened the creaking door to my memory. In an astonishing moment, my eyes widened, my head jerked upright and a pair of arrows seemed to pierce me with panic, one struck my larynx while the other carried it’s twang deep into my stomach. I knew well before the completion of a scrambled search of the taxi that I’d left my neck-wallet on the plane. I’d taken it out of my bag to pay for a drink, and during the transaction some turbulence put me back in my seat and the neck-wallet would remain forgotten in the pocket in front of me. It contained my wallet, which was carrying my only valid credit card, my driving license, Rp2.4m (£130) and perhaps the most valuable item, a playing card of Donald Duck playing the jester that I’d been gifted on my 21st birthday whilst travelling in Norway. The neck-wallet also contained my passport; the maroon book full of official squiggles and smudges from my many journeys over the past four years. By 11pm we were back at the airport and I was calmly using my taxi driver as an interpreter to communicate with the slovenly manager of the Lost & Found office who was in the throes of a grossly deep massage from one of the male cleaning staff, it quickly became obvious this act wouldn’t be dropped for a mere bule (westerner) and over the coming days it became clear the lot was gone.

It was a weekend, but over the following few days I phoned US-based Visa ‘we are going to help you sir’ International, HSBC (UK), I visited the local no-speaky-English police and nagged the massaged at the abysmal airport office. On Sunday I emailed Mandala Air’s CEO, and I spent Monday morning at the British Consulate before making sense of it all during an afternoon in the HSBC (Indonesia) Premier Lounge (which I proudly blagged my way into), while scoffing down complimentary fruits and slurping coffee beside a plasma screen in my leather sofa. The graft paid off, four days after Chucky’s vengeance I had a fist full of crispy Greenbacks and assurance from a Welshman that a new flexible friend will be waiting for me at HSBC (Singapore) when I return in July, and on the Thursday morning, I picked up a brand spanking new passport to begin a two day anti-corruption stance at the Immigration Office. Along the line, there was inevitable slack in the process (and a thief), but overall I tip my hat to a bunch of commendable attitudes and systems in place at HSBC (UK) and the WTC branch of HSBC (Indonesia), I thank the British Consulate in Jakarta for their straight forward solution, I chastise Mandala Air’s Lost & Found sluggard, and their overall lack of after sales service and abhor the Immigration Office farce. Mostly, I thank Martynas and Juste who came to my aid unprompted, whose emotive response was backed-up by fresh thinking.

The other twist in this tale goes back to that fateful night, when Chucky stole my wallet. After arriving in Jakarta’s hotel district, Jaksa, past midnight, I thanked Juste and Martynas for their understanding and they took the taxi on to a Couch Surfing host. It took me a further two hours to find a vacancy at a dismal hostel that would inevitably become my home during a week of formal address requests. At 3am I rest my head on the fusty pillow in my cell-like room and reviewed my loss to the sound of a clattering table fan. At 7am my peaceful ignorance was torn and shred by a tremendous mechanical noise from the outside my butter-coloured door, the whirr was followed by wisps of careless smoke sifting through the windows mosquito screen. I flung the door open to face a dense fog of silver-grey smoke, as I moved my hand slowly forward a few inches my fingers vanished, giving the illusory feeling of another world, an invisible and tempting world. I crouched low to the floor and felt my way down the narrow stairs, patting my way through the dusty nooks of a residence I barely knew before emerging onto the street in a fit of coughs that jarred water from my stinging eyes. ‘Oooh, sorry-sorry’ three unfamiliar ladies laughed along with Chucky, ‘what is it?’ I demanded, ‘fume for insect killing’ one informed me. ‘You could of fucking killed me! I’ve got asthma’ I lied – and regrettably, yes I swore – before a more convincing crow of ‘oooh sorry-sorry’ produced a stool and a brew of sweet tea.

In this situation, it would have been dishonest to smile. The gloomy memory of the ignorant airport office beat its drum and formed a vision of that sunken face jammed onto that clammy neck, those drooping nipples undulating with every knead of that saggy back – and I vented nonsense for five minutes, until my finger wagged tellingly. They succeeded in fumigating an angry Ant, but after just four hours of restless sleep I wasn’t ready to face seven days on the phone and in the necessary offices of Jakarta. Chucky, old friend you’ve dished up a cold and cruel revenge, now forgive me, I’m sorry.

Chucky’s Revenge is a post from Trail of Ants.

Consider visiting my travel blog to explore a wide variety of travel related articles, and score yourself a 7% discount on your next travel insurance policy with my World Nomads promotional code.