Thursday, October 12, 2006

Post 2: Who's the crime boss of all lizards?

The iguanadon.

Many of you may have heard the story I was quite fond of telling regarding Singapore and tourism. The place has a bit of a reputation for being boring and quite "square". This is something of an issue for such a tourism-oriented country. When asked to comment on this situation, one former minister said "We need to take this accusation of not being fun very, very seriously". I think this sums up Singapore very nicely. As Grainne said, it's not not fun, but it definitely isn't fun either.

So to make up for the perceived lack of fun, we decided to fly to Borneo via the Man Utd sponsored Air Asia (or maybe the relationship is vice-versa, I'm not sure). This meant a trip just over the Singapore-Malaysia border to the town of Johor Baharu from where we would fly some 300 miles over the South China Sea to Borneo.

The fun duly began as it appeared that we were incapable of budgeting our time as well as our money. The bus took us to the border where you have to get off with all your stuff and reboard on the other side. The time issue being what it was, we ignored the bus and flagged down a taxi. When he heard that we had to be at the airport in 45 minutes he laughed at us. Not a good sign. Nevertheless thanks to his road skills (driving right up on the bumper of any car in front that wouldn't get out of the way), we just about caught our flight.

The flight seemed normal at first - as I said before, just like Ryanair except that the air hostesses had slightly more risque uniforms. However as Grainne became engrossed in her book, I became engrossed in the light show going on outside. It was smooth going as we were above the cloudline, but the lightning going on all around us outside was a trifle worrying. I did the noble thing and kept this info to myself as James Ellroy kept Grainne distracted. However the thunderclouds were impossible to ignore once we were due to land as we we had to fly through them. I like to think that I've done a fair bit of air travel in my time, but I've never experienced anything like this. We were shunted all over the place - it felt like we were in some huge arial tumble-dryer. What was most unpleasant though, was the thick cloud rushing by right up against the window, conveniently lit up by the wing lights of the plane. It served as an uncomfortable reminder of how bloody fast we were travelling as we were being shook all over the place.

Everyone else on the plane (locals to the last one) couldn't care less and the kids were all screaming with delight. My ego took a bit of a hit with that one.

Nevertheless, we go down in one piece and made it to Kuching, the cat city (I'm not sure whether this "cat" is a noun or an adjective). We've been here two days and - backpacker cliche to follow - everyone is remarkably friendly. Like the elderly Indian gentleman who stopped us for a chat and, upon finding out that we were from Ireland, gleefully told us how shit our football team is (and their manager - "Staunton - the Liverpool player"). That really made my day. You'd like to think you could escape such painful home truths in rainforest islands halfway accross the world. Unfortunately not - I drowned my sorrows in "pints" of Guinness as we watched WWF in the local bar.

Having seen the orangutans, we're off to national parks and beach resorts for a combination of exertion and relaxation. Should be out of the loop for the next while, so y'all can be thankful that there won't be another post for a while.

1 comment:

lukeab said...

Hey guys.. I saw at some stage, a photo of Naoise decked out on his back on the salt plains, Where's that photo gone? Amazing looking shot.
Checked the photo's on flickr, bebo and facebook.
anyway, I also started a blog, for a laugh, and to maybe as revenue source from all the billions of visitors i'll get, but i stuck you on the blogs link list, www.ashebrowne.com
I'm a terrible writer so don't slag me.