Hear Ye! Since 1998.

Summer Holidays 2006/07

Trip to Paris, Istanbul, Dubai and Krabi.
13
Dec 06
Wed

EOY 2006/07

Itinerary for the end of year trip has been finalised. Due to airline industry pricing practices, a round-the-world ticket works out to be cheaper if you ever want to stop by more than a couple cities overseas. Unfortunately, the same tickets impose a circumnavigation condition on travel, which has necessitated a rather arduous journey to Paris flying the long way around the globe… and consuming over 30 hours of time. We leave on Christmas Day, so while eking out an existence in economy is not an ideal way to spend Christmas, fares are about 15% cheaper than Christmas Eve fares.

Looking forward to going rock climbing in Krabi. Coincidentally, we met a Singaporean holidaying in Sydney while indoor rock climbing last Sunday. She told us she’s been to Krabi about half a dozen times, lots of routes for people at our level… if these photos hadn’t whetted my appetite sufficiently, her descriptions did. Eric claims he’ll be joining us in Krabi despite getting totally smashed by Hong Kong’s insane PCLL curriculum.

Changing topics to The Amazing Race, another season has come to an end. As usual, the Race proved unpredictable and I got all my predictions wrong. A pretty ho-hum last episode, didn’t have any team I particularly disliked. Next season is an All Stars season, so I am very, very much looking forward to that.

31
Dec 06
Sun

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! As always, Sydney is one of the first cities to enter the New Year and the cable networks are awash with clips of the fireworks over Sydney Harbour. It’s still a couple of hours until Istanbul follows. Turkish TV, evidently not as squeamish as CNN or BBC, has been showing uncensored clips of Saddam’s execution.

We flew in from Paris this afternoon. Paris was overcast and dreary, but despite the grey pall, it still had loads of charm. I managed to visit a few extra places this time around. Saint-Chapelle (just around the corner from the Notre-Dame Cathedral) was particularly spectacular. It’s a small Gothic chapel split into two levels. Soaring stained-glass windows form the walls of the upper level and the effect is amazing, even in the murky Winter light. The Arc de Triomphe has many imitators around the world, but like the city it resides in, none really comes close. Incidentally, l’Arc is second in size only to the Triumphal Arch in, of all places, Pyongyang. The North Koreans intentionally constructed their arch to be slightly larger than its Parisienne counterpart in the early 1980s to commemorate Dear Leader Kim Il Sung.

As for Turkey, only been here for a couple hours, but I like it already.

5
Jan 07
Fri

An update

I think I need a t-shirt that reads, “I’m not Japanese or Korean” in as many languages as possible.

While walking through the Spice Bazaar (encumbered with several kilos of lokum), every 30 seconds a shopkeeper would intercept me with a konichiwa, ohayo followed by a stream of unintelligible gibberish which I can only assume is Japanese (or its Korean equivalents). This now familiar scenario plays out thusly:

“I don’t understand. I’m not Japanese.”
“Oh. Where you from?”
“Australia.”
Pause. “Ow-stra-lee-a?”
“Yes.”
“Originally, where you from?”
“Australia.”
“Ow-stra-lee-a?!” will come the reply, a little more emphatic in its bewilderment. “No… originally? You understand this word, ‘originally’?”
“Yes, I was born there.”
This is not the answer they expect and more often than not I walk away at that point, leaving them speechless in what is either a state of confusion or disbelief or both.

Tonight at the fish markets we were confronted by another tout. After trying the Japanese and Korean greetings, he finally settled on Ni hao. We kept saying hello, but that only made him cycle back to the Japanese and Korean greetings. Despite the fact that neither I nor my parents are native Mandarin speakers (in fact, mum is the only one that speaks it), we resigned to being pigeonholed as mainlanders. Which led to quite a peculiar one-sided conversation.

“Ah, China! I am from [unintelligible].”
“Where?”
“[Unintelligible]. You know Caucus?”
“What?”
“Caucus. You know Azerbaijan…”
“Oh, Caucausus!”
“Yes, I from [unintelligible]… er… Georgia.”
“Oh, Georgia!”
“I like China. Mao Tse Tung, Chiang Kai-Shek, Sun Yat Sen, yes? I study back in Georgia. I like Mao Tse Tung, he is good man. When Soviet Union not socialist anymore, China don’t want to have anything to do with that so I like him.”
“Uh…”

Hence, the t-shirt idea (if you can translate the sentence into another language, please leave a comment!)

As far as cities go, Istanbul is a little more distinctive than most. It is unique in that it straddles two continents – Europe and Asia, separated by the Bosphorus. It is one of the world’s handful of megacities, with a population somewhere around 15 million. It also has a varied past stretching over two and a half millennia. Originally named Byzantium by its founder Byzas, it eventually became the eastern capital of the Roman empire and after the death of Emperor Constantine, was renamed to Constantinople. Constantine was baptised a Christian on his deathbed, and during the same period Christianity had planted its roots in that region of the world. Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in the 15th Century and the city was ultimately renamed Istanbul (though the Greeks today still persist in calling it Constantinople). Throughout the years, the Christian demographic of the city changed to become predominantly Muslim. The Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923 by Ataturk who converted Turkey into a secular state, despite being a Muslim himself.

One of Istanbul’s most famous monuments, Ayasofya (Hagia Sofia or Sancta Sofia in Greek and Latin respectively), mirrors the change in control of Istanbul over the years. It was originally a church. When Constantinople was conquered by the Ottomans, they couldn’t bring themselves to destroy the church, so they just plastered over its Christian artworks and coverted the building into a mosque. When Ataturk founded the Republic, he converted the mosque into the museum it is today. Restoration works have seen the original Christian art adorn the walls once again, and it is strange seeing the mix of Christian and Islamic art/symbols on the same structure.

Despite its population being overwhelmingly Muslim (ubiquitous mosques, the azan periodically sounding throughout the streets, the absence of pork from any menus, etc – though alcoholic raki seems to be readily available), Turkey interestingly prohibits by law the wearing of religious headwear and other “theo-political symbolic garments” for both genders in government buildings, schools, and universities. This parallels similar developments in Western European countries.

We took a daytrip to Ephesus, sold to us by our guide as the “largest excavation site on Earth”. Formerly a huge Roman city of 300,000, its harbour silted up over the years, turning the port into a muddy marshland. This attracted Malaria-carrying mosquitos and forced the residents of Ephesus to retreat to what is now the modern day town of Selçuk. Meanwhile, the shoreline retreated 8 kilometres out and left Ephesus high, dry, and deserted. Ephesus was never resettled, and so unlike other sites of ancient cities (Rome, Athens, etc), there was nothing above the city ruins except dirt. Ephesus is well worth the visit and it is surprisingly easy to imagine how it was a bustling and cosmopolitan city a couple millennia ago. The façade of the Library at Ephesus is world-famous, but more interesting to me was the fact that it was built directly opposite a brothel (perhaps seen as more socially acceptable given that the patron deity of Ephesus was Artemis, goddess of fertility?) Some enterprising men built an underground tunnel connecting the library with the brothel, so a man could use the justification of visiting the library as a convenient cover story for a quick “tribute to Artemis” along the way (the library was only open to men, so it wasn’t as if women could check up on their husbands).


Carpet sales


Library of Celsus

Paul passed through Ephesus on his evangelical travels and Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians is attributed as having been addressed to the Christians in Ephesus. John and Mary (Jesus’ mother) are also considered to have settled in Ephesus, and the house of the Virgin Mary is a popular site for visiting Catholics and Muslims alike. The setup of the house seemed somewhat tacky and idolatrous to me. (For instance, there’s a wishing board there where people write their wishes to Mary on napkins, tissues and the like and tie them to the board. Slightly less reverential, there’s also a tree stump next to the wishing board on which people have been sticking their wads of chewing gum for years.)

One more day here, then it’s off to Dubai on Sunday.

14
Jan 07
Sun

Apple iPhone

Well, the holiday’s almost over. I’m sitting in the lounge at Singapore’s airport having just watched Jobs’ iPhones keynote presentation. I want one now. Unfortunately, Australian mobile carriers have given it a “lukewarm response” and we won’t see anything until 2008 anyway. Boo. From what I’ve seen, Apple has hit the spot on a mobile device that gets just about everything right. It certainly stops phones like Nokia’s N series dead in the water.

5
Feb 07
Mon

Climbing Railay

Railay Beach is normally accessed from Krabi via boat. After arriving on a flight from Bangkok on a plane on which Eric and I were the only Asians on board apart from the crew, we hired one of the licensed taxis to take us to Ao Nang Beach.

The taxi deposited us as this ramshackle pier where we paid 50 baht each for a longtail boat into Railay. Longtails, so called because the boat’s means of propulsion consist of a naked engine attached to a long, rusty, metal shaft with a propeller down one end and the driver’s steering hand (or, in the case of our longtail, the driver’s groin) on the other.


Interesting steering technique

Railay has two beaches – the mangrove-ridden East Beach and the slightly more genteel West Beach. It turned out that our taxi had actually taken us to Ao Nam Pier on the East side of Railay instead of Ao Nang on the West side. Luckily we arrived on the East Beach at high tide, saving us the lengthy trudge across the beach necessary for those arriving during low tide when the sea retreats several hundred metres out.

Most people come to Railay for the rock climbing. It has a large number of limestone cliffs which characterise the region, many of which are climbable. The four of us had been climbing for about a year beforehand, but that was all indoors “top rope” climbing. Outdoors climbing was something entirely new and we also wanted to learn how to lead climb (I’ll explain the jargon soon).

Every third shop in Railay is a rock climbing shop offering gear rental, guides, climbing lessons – whatever you need. The prices are actually fairly uniform, so it can be difficult to pick which shop to go with. We spent an evening doing the rounds, trying to find a place that looked decent.

Everyone in Railay is very relaxed – both tourists and locals. There are no touts on the island at all, save for the longtail boat drivers who will hopefully parrot “Boat? Boat? Boat?” if you walk past their hangout on the West Beach at any time of day or night (we were once asked if we needed a 45-minute boatride to Krabi town despite it being midnight and pitch dark on the water). So we weren’t all that surprised to come across one rock climbing shop manned by a staff member smoking some weed on its front step.

Being a group of 3 lawyers/lawyers-to-be and a risk analyst, we were interested to see if these climbing places were insured, and if so, by who and for how much money. In Australia when you climb indoors you have to sign all these waivers, disclaimers, go through safety checks and so on, but in Thailand – as to be expected – paperwork was simply unheard of. The most paperwork you’d get out of any of them was a rag with a number and date scrawled on it proving you’d paid. So when we asked the rock climbing shops who they were insured with, they stared at us like we were the first people to ever ask them that question. On hindsight, we probably were the first people to ever ask them that question.

But anyway, back to the shop manned by the guy that was high. We walked past him and into the store. He didn’t follow, but let us sit inside for several minutes while he finished his joint. As I said, all the locals are relaxed and none of them are in any particular hurry to take our money – which is kind of refreshing in a South-East Asian country. Finally, the man eagerly bounded in, “So, you want to go climbing? Let’s go!”

The wind visibly went out from his sails when we popped the question about insurance.

“Insurance? Yeah we got. Let’s go climbing!”
“Can we see the policy? You know – the paperwork?”

He hesitated and looked at us strangely. When he realised we were serious, he spun around to confront the rack behind him which was laden with folders and paper. He made a half-hearted attempt of flicking through one folder, becoming increasingly flustered. About five seconds later, he abruptly slammed the folder shut and barked at all of us: “Too busy for insurance!!”

He stormed out of the shop and promptly lit up another joint.

We settled with the place a few doors down (incidentally, they were insured by New Hampshire Insurance). Actually, all the climbing stores are licensed, and one of the requisites to being licensed is being insured, so we needn’t have worried. We hired a guide for one day. We had brought along our own harnesses and shoes but all the shops there are fully stocked with gear that can be rented.

Our guide was called Boy (his name is probably better transliterated as Boi, but we’ll stick with Boy for now). We were a little dubious at the start when we asked if he enjoyed rock climbing and he told us that he was getting bored of it (he was 23 years old). He turned out perfectly capable however in showing us the ropes. Amusingly, when he was 16 his parents sent him to school in South Africa to learn English. When he arrived there, he went to school for one day, decided it was boring and never went back. He spent a great deal of the next three months watching English movies. Actually, he only watched one movie over that three months, and of all the ones to watch to cut his teeth on, he had to pick Conspiracy Theory. But three months on, it finally clicked and he understood what was going on.

We learnt more that day than in the year we had spent indoor climbing. The form of rock climbing people are introduced to in indoor centres is called “top roping”. This is because the rope has been looped through an anchor point at the top of the climb. The climber is attached to one end of the rope via their harness, and the belayer (the person who will arrest the climber’s fall in the event they come unstuck from the wall) is attached to the other end. As the climber climbs, the rope slackens, so the belayer pulls the rope tense and, via a locking device attached to their harness, locks the rope in place. If the climber falls, the climber will only drop a few centimetres (the distance the rope stretches, plus any slack the belayer has failed to remove). You can belay someone who weighs a little heavier than you because if the climber falls, some of their weight is borne by the anchor point at the top of the climb – although of course if the weight imbalance is too much, the belayer will go shooting off the ground which is not good for anybody.

Top roping is fine indoors where all the walls routes are pre-roped, but in the outdoors it wouldn’t be safe to leave ropes out exposed to the elements, and especially not by the seaside. So, how do you get the top rope up there safely in the first place? This is where lead climbing (also known as sport climbing) comes in. Climbing walls may have a number of routes up them which someone has “discovered”. Along these routes, people have driven bolts into the rockface – small loops of metal which offer a climber protection and peculiarly are referred to as “protection” (as in “hook yourself into that bit of protection”). These metal loops are spaced several metres apart up the rockface. Apparently the steel loops at Railay kept getting corroded away by the salty air, so it was a comfort to learn that titanium loops were gradually replacing the steel ones.


Cath heading up the wall

Lead climbing is called lead climbing because the climber leads the way up the wall with the rope trailing behind. The lead climber carries a set of quickdraws, which are pairs of carabiners attached by a short length of fabric. When the climber reaches a point of protection, they clip one end of a quickdraw into the protection, and clip the rope into the other end. Falling while lead climbing is a fair bit more scarier than falling while top roping because you fall twice the distance to your last point of protection, plus the rope stretch distance and any slack (and there is invariably going to be slack because as the climber moves up the wall, the belayer needs to feed slack rope through to the climber to allow them to continue up the wall – unlike top roping where the belayer needs to take up the slack). You can end up falling several metres which is a bit of a shock to the system.

When you get to the top of the route, you then have to feed a rope through an anchor point (normally a solid metal ring). The trick here is to safely pass the rope attached to your harness through the ring to form a top rope. Of course, you can’t simply untie the rope from your harness, pass it through the ring and then tie yourself up again. Not unless you have a deathwish. So, climbers have evolved what is a rather intricate procedure involving quickdraws and knot tying to enable a lead climber to safely set up a top rope. Well, it’s not that intricate, but for a novice, there is a set of about half a dozen steps to follow involving clips, knots and rope which is pretty intimidating because the first time you do it, no one’s up there to help you and there’s a distinct uneasy feeling that you’re going to untie the wrong knot and plummet to a messy end. It doesn’t help that you use both hands to do the work so you’re not actually hanging on to the rock at all at that stage. Also, during the procedure there’s several carabiners and lengths of rope interwined into your harness, so figuring out which carabiner was safe to unclip, or which rope was safe to untie was a bit like figuring out whether to cut the green wire or the red wire. But with experience you get used to it, though you always have to be alert!

Unfortunately, the second time Kev went up there a couple things went wrong and he was stuck up there for about 20 minutes. “What am I doing wrong?” Kev yelled down at one stage. “Everything!” was Boy’s comforting reply. Eventually, unable to see what Kev had done (a bit hard, given he was 20 metres up) Boy had to climb up another route and talk Kev through the process – which it turns out that he had followed except for one step. Compounding the problem was a case of equipment failure – the carabiner on the safety sling wouldn’t lock.

Lead climbing, though a bit nerve-wracking at first, is quite fun. It involves a lot more thought than top roping – you have to plan your route more carefully because you have to place your protection, and of course there’s this whole anchoring business up the top.

There is also a form of climbing called traditional climbing, or “trad climbing” for short. This enables a climber to lead climb a wall without any pre-placed protection. A trad climber brings up their own protection, for example in the form of spring-loaded camming devices (though there are a lot of other widgets available). The climber pulls a trigger on a cam to make it contract, then places the cam into a crack or other space in the rock. When the trigger is released, the cam expands to jam itself into the space. The climber then clips themself into the device for protection and continues climbing.

This is a lot more scary because you have to trust that the cam is reliable, and that you have placed it in a suitable location on the rock face. Boy claims to have bought several cams some time ago, but never got around to trying out trad climbing because he just didn’t trust the cams. One benefit of trad climbing is that because the protection is temporary, the rockface is not marred. You can see James Bond doing some trad climbing in For Your Eyes Only (although he hammers pitons into the rockface for protection).

You can also climb without any protection and any belayer in what is known as free soloing. Crazy stuff.

Finally, there’s a newish form of climbing called Deep Water Soloing, which is like free soloing, except you climb over a body of water so if you fall and land correctly, you don’t die. This is what it looks like when done by one of the world’s best climbers.

Lead climbing was more than enough fun for us. We even went back again a couple days later for more. We hired Boy again, but before any climbing had begun, he unfortunately had managed to disable himself by whacking his eye with the rope while he was unfurling it on the ground. Luckily, our replacement guide was equally as able.

We spent all of our time on three novice walls – Diamond Cave, Muay Thai and the ever popular One Two Three wall.


Kev leading


Eric leading on the Muay Thai wall


Tying myself in


Me leading through a jungle of top ropes


Kev leading again


The One Two Three Wall


View from 30m up, 1-2-3 wall


View from 30m up, 1-2-3 wall


It got a little dark, but that didn’t stop us


An Asian version of Cpt Jack Sparrow? One of the climbing guides

We also hired a boat one day and went fishing and snorkelling. We went past the island where The Beach was filmed, but unfortunately we didn’t get a look at the beach itself.


Fish


There’s also another one of Eric and Kev bouldering in budgies but I won’t inflict that upon you


Relaxing


Mmm… roti!



The ski fields of… Dubai

The Mall of the Emirates is one of Dubai’s many shopping malls. There’s something strange, however, about the architecture of the place. It has a large tubular structure sticking out of its roof like some malformed appendage. This structure houses “Ski Dubai”, a ski slope in the middle of the desert. I found the sheer novelty value irresistable and gave it a go.

Ski Dubai is basically one big fridge, maintained at -1°C during the day, and about -7°C during the night when they turn the snowmakers on. Apparently the place consumes something in the order of 3000 barrels of oil a day. The slope is about 400 metres long, comes with a quad chairlift, a cafe at the midway point and a run they’ve overrated as black(!). It’s truly bizarre. You get up to the top of the run and there’s a door marked as a fire exit off to one side. They hire out all the gear you need (clothing, boots, skis, stocks and snowboards) – A$55 will buy you two hours on the slope. You get given this card which you swipe at the turnstiles just before the chairlift. It takes about 30 seconds to ski from top to bottom. It takes about 30 minutes before the novelty starts to wear thin.


The view from the top of the run


The view up the “hill”