20 June 2006 Georgetown, Malaysia Wandering around Chinatown Waking up on the train, I met Alex and Teresa, and English couple, and wasted an hour and a half watching The DiVinci Code on their portable DVD player. Probably the worst Tom Hanks movie since his last one, The Terminal. Movies are so overrated as far as constructive pastimes are concerned. More constructively, I read most of The Postman, a novel Kevin Constner turned into a passable but financially disastrous movie. Naturally, the book was far better then the movie. Upon arrival at Butterworth, best known in Australia as having once been the home of our only overseas airforce base, we jumped on the ferry to Penang and arrived at Georgetown forty minutes later. The hotels ranged from very basic and dirty to very basic and clean, ... read more

I finally finished and am now eating, after seven days of famine. POST FAST They say what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger, but I fail to see how I could possibly be stronger after seven days of starving. But my energy is up and I’m looking forward to watching Australia thrash Brazil tonight. My co-fasters asked me the usual questions on my last day: “Is much stuff still coming out?” “Do you have much dark rubbery gunk in your colander?” (I don’t usually use a colander, but other fasters do and pick through it with chopsticks to see what came out.) “What was the most interesting thing that came out?” Some of you may be squeamish, so I won’t publish my answers here. Let's just say God had a few funny ideas about creation. ... read more

Even though we were all pretty templed out at this stage, we loved the stupa garden in one of the villages. The pagodas date back several hundred years and are generally in pretty good shape, although many have recently been restored to a pristine characterless white or gold. Others are slowly losing the battle with nature, although the local caretakers are fighting on their side. One of the caretakers we met had been doing the job since before anyone I know was born! At 90, he's still looking good and seems pretty sharp, although I don't think he'll be helping the stupas much against nature. The shame here is that many of the stupas have been restored and the dirt and grass has been cemented. Great for people using the stupas in the wet season for ... read more

The market we visited was one of the many on a five day rotation which caters for the locals and, inevitably, the tourists. Rather than being one of the "floating markets", which are a great tourist draw if noting else, this was on the edge of the lake to enable commerce between the lake people and the local inland and mountain villages. The boat park was pretty chaotic but it was the organized chaos of people who do this every day, including several floating souvenir stalls that pulled up to us on the way in. Our pier was at the closest corner of the market and we had a space reserved for us; in fact, there was space reserved for all tour boats at that particular corner because it was closest to, yup, the souvenir stalls ... read more

Inle Lake is a pretty shallow 20km long puddle in the Shan State at about 850m elevation. Enroute from Bagan I met first Marion, a Dutch girl, and then another Peter, another Dutchman. Cool customers and great company both, we pooled our resources and concentrated on doing nothing. Books and travelers' tales kept us busy for the first day and a half spent mostly in the courtyard of our hotel. The elevation kept the heat down to a slow bake and we maintained our fluid levels with beer and prevented the alcohol from dehydrating us by drinking copious amounts of water. That may not make medical sense, or even common sense, but at the time it seemed perfectly logical. Reading was probably the best pastime given that the alternatives were pretty awful: cycling in the heat, ... read more