Fish Tales, Tall Sails and Jumping Whales

"Only two things are infinite; the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former"
- Albert Einstein


Reader Warning: The following text has been vetted by experts, who judged it to be nothing more than thinly disguised nonsense padding out an overlong anecdote about a fish. Readers of a sophisticated nature may wish to skip over this entry to something written by Cara.



Cara insists that Cape Town is her favourite city in the world. Personally, I find this very difficult to believe as she has visited Leyland on several occasions and had more than sufficient opportunity to change her mind. This was my second visit to the city and, whilst I do like Cape Town, I haven't formed the kind of attachment to it that Cara evidently has. By the way, Cape Town is so called because it is a large town situated on the Cape of Good Hope. Very imaginative.

After making it out of Cape Town airport, we made our way into the city centre to a hostel that had been recommended to us by Ashleigh and Philip from Bangkok. We usually prefer places that have been recommended by friends, as this nearly always reduces the amount of time required wandering the streets with our bags, checking different accommodation options. We seemed to strike it lucky on this occasion too, as the hostel was in a great location on Long Street (possibly so named because it is a street and it is quite long) and the room was clean and comfortable. Unfortunately, we had handed over cash and unpacked by the time we realised that the hostel was built atop several nightclubs and bars. The music thumping through the floor until 4am was so loud that the bed shook and I lost two fillings. Luckily, we had realised what would happen and sedated ourselves heavily at one of the bars prior to going to bed. That, coupled with the jetlag, allowed us to sleep through the furore, save for the odd occasion when a particularly heavy bassline would vibrate Cara's earplugs right out of her head and tip me onto the floor. On the one evening the music finished early, we discovered the girl in the next room was a bit of a screamer, so it still turned into a boisterous night. Despite the pounding bass and headboard, Carnival Court Hostel still turned out to be a great place to stay. Just don't expect much sleep.

Over the course of the next few days, we ploughed through the usual tourist itinerary. We visited the waterfront and took the cable car to the top of Table Mountain (possibly so named because it is a mountain that has a flat top, like a table. Spot a pattern?). We even spotted a meditating monk atop a rocky outcrop. I'm not sure if he was there to attain enlightenment or to offer us a good photo opportunity, but he added a dash of colour to the proceedings and for that we are grateful. The weather was fantastic, hot and sunny without being oppressive, and we enjoyed walking the streets of the city. The food in Cape Town is great too, although you have to remember that I consider the chip to be the ultimate achievement of humanity, so always take my advice with a pinch of salt (and a splash of vinegar).

Sunday morning we took a walk up the hill to a small restaurant that had been recommended to us for breakfast. By some bizarre freak of nature, Arnold's Restaurant was able to provide us with a substantial and tasty fried breakfast for less money than it takes to operate a kettle for 10 seconds. Somewhat more bizarrely, we noticed that had we arrived between 7am - 7.30am, we could have enjoyed the same thing for five kettle seconds, but why would we ever consider getting up at that time? The place was packed and we sat at an outdoor table, watching the world go by and munching on eggs, bacon and ostrich sausages. After several months of scoffing rice and noodles, this cholesterol-laden, greasy, treat was very welcome.

On my previous visit to Cape Town, some years ago, I had travelled down the coast to the small fishing village of Gaansbai. There is nothing remarkable about the town itself, yet people flock here from all four corners of our round, cornerless planet. The cause of all this flocking lies just a few miles offshore, in the waters around Dyer Island. You see, Gaansbai is perhaps the world's most popular destination to get up close and personal with great white sharks. Hmmm, deliberately jumping into water you know to contain large numbers of the world's biggest, marine predator. Surely this can be considered the stupidest activity on earth? After blowing up your own head, obviously. These huge fish have been protected in the waters around South Africa since 1991 and the growing population of this migratory hunter regularly hunt the seal colonies around Dyer Island. The best time to sea them, unfortunately, is in the winter, when food resources are low and they can be easily attracted to the boat. During the summer months, specifically now, the sharks show a sneering disdain for all things boat-like and seldom stick around for long. Despite the poor odds, both Cara and I wanted to give it a try and see what would happen. The last time I was hear, a large, intimidating shark tried to stick his snout into the cage a matter of inches from my head and a second shark managed to tear the cage door from its hinges while two young men cowered inside it. I had my fingers crossed for a repeat performance. I don't think Cara was feeling the same way.

On the drive down from Cape Town, we stopped in a picturesque little seaside town called Hermanus for a spot of whale-watching. During the summer months, southern right whales congregate in the large bay to breed and the males can often be spotted leaping out of the water in what are probably the cetacean equivalent of juvenile pissing competitions. Mothers with young calves tend to stay closer to the shore as they like to pose for photographs with the little ones. It has been documented that southern right whales are notoriously proud parents. If we ever discover a way to communicate with these fish, I'm sure each parent would tell us how little Eric was very bright for his age.

Despite arriving in early summer, the waters around the Cape coast were very, very cold. I usually make a point of not taking a dip in anything less than 28 degrees centigrade, but this was much lower. It was cold enough to make a grown man do a chimpanzee impression without feeling self-conscious, and we were expected to spend a good time in the water. After chugging out to what the skipper considered a good spot, we moored up and a crew member chummed the water with some fish heads and arse-cheeks to attract in the sharks. We didn't have long to wait for a very big fish to arrive. It kindly cruised alongside the boat, just to give us a good sense of scale, and I remembered Roy Scheider's immortal words from the first Jaws film, "We're gonna need a bigger boat!". The first fee-paying sharkbait donned their wetsuits and flopped into the now flimsy-looking cage. The skipper tried his best to draw the big female toward the boat, but the shark was not really interested and just stuck around to see if one of us was foolish enough to fall into the water. We weren't and it eventually lost interest and left. Thus began the pattern of the day. The folks in the tin can soon became tired and cold and clambered out for a cup of tea and a biscuit (Oh, I can feel the tension building!). It was our turn.

My wetsuit looked like two dogs had fought over it and smelled like the winner had marked his territory in the traditional manner. My mask was cracked, it bent my nose into my eye socket and mould was growing on the inside of it. As I eased myself into the water, the patchy wetsuit flooded and made my eyeballs roll back in my head. How cold was it? I was going to tell you that my scrotum contracted so quickly it catapulted by balls into my armpits, but that would be in poor taste, so I won't. Despite all this, there was nowhere else on the planet I would rather have been at that minute. But there you go; I always was a shark geek.

As the minutes passed, we all concentrated on staving off hyperthermia. The previous shark had definitely left the building and nobody else had yet taken to the stage. I knew that I could keep going on sheer enthusiasm alone. In fact, they would probably have to drag me out of the water by the earlobes when it was time to leave, or maybe just leave me behind. Cara was fairing pretty well, too. Apart from the loud chattering of teeth and wide-eyed, what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-in-a-cage-waiting-for-great-white-sharks-to-open-it-like-a-tin-of-sardines expression she was wearing, obviously. We made ourselves comfortable and settled in for the duration.

All of a sudden nothing happened, and I could actually hear the willpower of our caged colleagues crack and tumble into the frigid waters (although it could have been a fart in a wetsuit. I'm no expert). Nothing continued to happen, repeatedly. The others exited the cage to make way for more enthusiastic fools looking to dissipate body heat. Cara and I stuck to our guns and stayed where we were. We had come for great white sharks and sharks we would have. By this stage, nothing was happening so frequently that when something did happen, we almost missed it. I was engrossed in a particularly long period of inactivity when suddenly the skipper yelled for us to get under the water. By some freakishly anti-Darwinian reflex action, I had filled my lungs and plunged into the murky water before the sentence was even out of his mouth. With my eyes fixed on the green haze before me, my frozen fingers fumbled with the buttons of the underwater camera housing.

Not much more than an arms length outside the cage, a dark shape appeared out of the gloom and resolved itself into a bulky white shark. The body was grey and smooth, fat with the bodies of young seals and fish. The black, humourless eye regarded us with a predatory, primitive stare, a bit like Cara with a credit card and a shoe catalogue. It glided impressively in front of us and toward the bait line. Within just a few seconds it was gone, returned once more to the murky deep. We bobbed back to the surface and sucked in the air hungrily, even though we had only been underwater for about four seconds (I need more exercise!). I checked the camera to see what shots we had taken, but found only some photos showing a blank green space and a technically adept video of Cara's left armpit. Not technically what I was hoping for, adept or otherwise.

We had been in the water so long that I had lost all sensation between my knees and nipples. This may sound unimportant, but for a guy, any area of numbness which incorporates the genital region demands your immediate attention. I was becoming concerned that any future Michael Junior was about to turn into Frosty The Snowman. Then I remembered that we had mortgaged the rights to our first born child to partly finance this trip, and that any behavioural difficulties brought about by refrigerated gonads would be somebody else's responsibility. After that I relaxed a little. No more sharks appeared that afternoon, so we took a quick tour around nearby Seal Island to better catch a whiff of their overpowering poo, then headed ashore to formulate our boastful anecdotes about fending off enormous sea monsters. By the time we arrived back in Cape Town, we were both ready for a pint.

One benefit of staying on the busy Long Street was that our hostel was immediately above an Irish pub. Drinking ice cold draught Guinness for less than thrumfty pennies a pint ensured that we rarely strayed far away in the evenings. We even dined there on a few occasions. The food was mediocre at best, but after dropping in for a few pints 'on the way past', we lacked the compunction to keep moving and planted ourselves in a corner table for the duration of the evening. On the Sunday evening, a live jazz band was playing. Although the music was a bit 'zibbedy dooh wah, bazabaddy bow wow bink' for my liking, we still had a great night and the atmosphere was excellent. There are few post-pub experiences more pleasurable than standing up on wobbly legs after too many beers and realising that you only have to walk four yards home.

The next morning we took a trip over to Robben Island, the former penal colony where many of the Apartheid-era political prisoners were kept. After a ninety minute ferry ride, we were transferred to a bus and driven around the island to see the various buildings that made up the prison, during which time a disinterested lady gave us a capsule commentary on what each building was used for and how it was being utilised today. After our whistle-stop tourbus ride, we were shown into the former maximum security compound and given a very interesting tour by a former political prisoner, whose name I won't attempt to spell. After showing us around the various parts of the complex, our guide talked about the daily life of the the prisoners, and it did not sound pleasant. At the end of the tour, our guide made a point of telling us all that despite the incarceration, forced hard labour, starvation and torture, he and his fellow prisoners no longer held grudges against their former captors, and wished to keep the prison open as a museum out of a spirit of reconciliation. At this point I wondered whether he truly felt that way, or if maybe that was just the politically motivated spin being put on the face of New South Africa. I'm fairly confident that if it were me in his shoes, I'd be looking to bang some heads together by now. But maybe that's just me. I'm sure their sentiments are sincere!

We managed only a couple of pints that night as we were heading off early the next morning for Windhoek in Namibia, a mere 25 hours away by bus.

Mik

P.S. I know whales are not fish, so please don't write to correct me. I was also lying about the evidence of their parental pride, too. You just can't trust a word that comes out of my mouth, can you?

P.S.2. - Despite mentioning in the opening paragraph that Cape Town is not my favourite city, I still managed to write several thousand words of bollocks about the place. Still, I had to somehow justify the three months it took to write

3rd time even luckier

Singapore - again!

We were catching our flight to South Africa from Singapore so we visited it for the third time and once again took advantage of Rob's hospitality. We also made sure we were there for a Sunday as we wanted to visit one of the Sunday Brunches run at the large hotels. Rob booked us into one at the Hyatt which served a buffet brunch washed down with as much Taittinger champagne as you could drink! Bring it on.

It was a huge splurge for us and Rob had to keep reminding us what a bargain it was in the non backpacker world. We did however want to get our money's worth and were there at 11.30am for the start.

I don't really know where to begin, oh yes I do, we were seated and within 3 seconds a waiter appeared and asked us if we would like some champagne. Silly question. Being our cynical selves we had assumed we would have to be calling waiters over and waiting ages for our glasses to be topped up. This wasn't the case. In fact, every time we took a sip the man appeared and filled our glasses. Brilliant!

Just so as the champagne wouldn't go straight to our heads we tried a few bits (code for 'everything') from the buffet. And I know we talk about food a lot but this was spectacular. Sushi, fresh oysters, lobster, prawns, French cheeses, Japanese tepanyaki, Chinese stirfry and roast lamb and beef complete with yorkshire puddings! Who knew champagne went so well with Aunt Bessie's finest.

But that was not the end. They also had a huge range of desserts but I knew where I was headed - the chocolate fountain! I was straight in there with my strawberries and marshmallows. Unfortunately I was getting a little full by this stage so I didn't do the desserts justice. We all did, however, do justice to the champagne, and drank more than the cost of the brunch alone. We were also the last to leave having made sure we got our final top up just before they stopped serving. What a fantastic way to spend a Sunday. Being old codgers we then headed home and went straight to bed for a nap. Rob however went straight out to a party.

The other other different thing we did compared to our other visits was to hook up with Jake and Catherine. These were the friends we had stayed with in Saigon at the very beginning of our trip. They had recently relocated to Singapore and it was great to catch up with them and their daughter Lily Mei, a Vietnamese orphan they adopted just after we left Vietnam last year. What a cutie.

The day after we went out for dinner with them we bid our final farewells to Rob and caught our flight to Cape Town. Cheers Rob.

And what a flight that was.....!
It started at take off when the plane shook and made so much noise that I convinced myself we wouldn't make it higher than 20 feet. In fact I hoped we wouldn't as I didn't have a lot of faith in the plane. But we kept climbing and eventually the shaking stopped.

Then we hit the turbulence and this lasted for approximately 80% of the flight. To the extent that once, when I had managed to fall asleep it woke me and had Mik reaching over to tell me everything was going to be alright. I have definitely become a very poor flier over the years. Still, Singapore Airlines do have a fantastic in-flight entertainment system so although I didn't get much sleep I did watch a few films.

All this was made worse by the fact that an elderly man sitting just 2 rows behind me was suddenly taken very ill. I turned around when I heard a commotion and saw him. To be quite honest, I thought he had died. He hadn't, and luckily (as always seems the case) there were doctors on board who could help. They even called doctors on the ground to try and work out what they should do. I then checked the flight path map and realised we were over the middle of the Indian Ocean and that the nearest land mass was Mauritius. I was convinced we would be landing there. We didn't and the man made it through the flight. Unfortunately for him we heard that he had no travel insurance as he was over the age limit. This was the first question the medical staff asked once we had landed in Cape Town. Poor guy.

I was delighted to get off that plane. We'd made it to Cape Town. What a relief.

Cara

Tioman : Much better than the f*@king Philippines

Tioman Islands, South East coast of Malaysia

"Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer"
- Mark Twain

Our ferry from the mainland dropped us at Air Batang (ABC) beach just as the sun was setting. At least, I assume the sun was setting. The sky was a roiling mass of murderous black cloud, and the sun was relegated to a dull smear on the distant horizon. We shouldered our bags and set off along the narrow strip of concrete to the northern end of the beach. We were looking for ABC Chalets, which had been recommended by friends and occupied our favourite end of the price bracket. After what felt like three hours trudge through unforgiving jungle (but was actually just eight minutes stroll along a pleasant path. We really need to lose some cargo from these backpacks!) we found the place. The owner offered us the choice of a lovely, spacious, air-conditioned bungalow with sea views for 150 ringit, or a bamboo shoe-box with termites and a dubious odour for just 35. For once, I'm proud to say we took the cheap option, and booked ourselves into Casa Del Shithole for the next two weeks. It wasn't so bad. The plumbing worked, although the toilet cistern needed to be filled by hand(!), and the well constructed walls kept out everything bigger than a goat. Home, sweet home. A place like this would fly off the market in some parts of Burnley.


We dined that night in the attached restaurant, which had been cleverly constructed to resemble a large, drab, lump of concrete. We made our choice from the wide selection of fried rice, fried noodles or mashed potato with fried egg, then sat back to let the cool inshore breeze blow away our cares and usher us once more back into island life. The food was unremarkable to the degree that I can't remember if I had fried noodles or the mashed potato with fried egg, but they made every effort to take your mind off what you were eating by showing live Premiership football. Cara was in seventh heaven.

We were up and out of bed bright and early the next afternoon, and set off to explore the village. ABC is approximately two miles long and thirteen feet wide, and the beach stretches all the way to the sea along its entire length. There are no roads of any description, although it is still possible to get run over by a moped on the single concrete path that runs the length of the beach. Every few hundred yards or so, there would be a few tourist bungalows squatting along the edge of the dense jungle, which covers 99.999999993 percent of the island. The village also has a couple of modestly stocked stores, or 'mini-markets' as they were ambitiously called. All these shops seemed to carry the same selection of necessities, such as roll-on deodorant and T-shirts depicting people being chased by sharks, but luxury western goods such as mosquito repellent and food were noticeable by their absence. Their pricing policy was a little dubious, too. It was necessary to buy bottled mineral water, on account of the fact that the local tap water had the colour of George Hamilton and the health risks of George Bush, but all the shops on the beach charged three or four times what you would pay for the same bottle on the mainland. Nothing too surprising there, as a captive audience of western tourists can work miracles on your gross margin. But inexplicably, items such as cigarettes and beer (hmmm, tasty beer) were much cheaper than on the mainland. I offer no explanation, just a heartfelt thank you to the people of Tioman for their lifestyle enhancing approach to free market economics. The situation was made all the more confusing when we spotted a large sign by the jetty informing us that any Muslim caught buying, selling or consuming alcohol would be shot, or sent to prison, or shot and then sent to prison, or worse. I still remember the difficulties I experienced acquiring a hangover in the Perhentian Islands last year, so I was more than pleasantly surprised to see every establishment on the beach happily selling beer, wine and bathtub gin at, for Malaysia, bargain prices.

The actual sand part of the beach wasn't too impressive at first glance. It was quite rocky for much of its length, and it didn't have the bright hue and sweeping expanse of some of the places we have been to. Without wanting to sound like a pompous dick, we have been fortunate enough to visit some pretty spectacular beaches on our travels, so we can afford to be snooty in our assessments. But I am happy to say that after a few days of lazing on the beach and snorkelling around the small coral pinnacles that fringed the shore, I was as happy here as I could have hoped for. The only down side was the food.

We had entered Malaysia soon after the start of Ramadan, and with the exception of the restaurant at ABC Chalets, every other eating establishment was closed during the day. Perhaps thinking they had hit upon a good thing, most of the restaurants stayed closed in the evenings aswell. Subsequently, our day's culinary adventures went thus; skip breakfast (as it is for sissies and people with a 'balanced diet', whatever that is), lunch at ABC choosing from their tasty offerings, finishing off with dinner at Nazri's restaurant a few yards walk down the path. This restaurant was always busy in the evenings, although being the only open restaurant offering more than three dishes might have helped.

Nazri's Place was great. It was organised, the staff were friendly, the food was good, cheap and plentiful, and best of all, everybody's dishes arrived at the same time, almost. They also had a menu the size of Afghanistan written up on a huge whiteboard, including everything from mutton vindaloo to roti canai to chicken cordon bleu (whatever the hell that is). I'm not ashamed to say we ate there every night except for our first.

Eventually, we stirred ourselves from our lazy beach slumber and organised some diving with a company called B.J. Dive Centre. This was quite an ironic title, because the owner was one of the biggest wankers I have met on my travels, and he's had some stiff competition, no pun intended. I won't go into the details of why he was the biggest wanker we have thus far met, but if you put me in front of an infinitely long line of wankers, I could pick him out in about a second. That is how big a wanker he was. Enough said.

Our first few days were spent doing some very enjoyable dives, prior to meeting the wanker. Our dive guide was a Belgian guy called Chris. He didn't have a lot of experience, but he made up for it in enthusiasm, although Cara thought he spent a bit too much time trying to chat me up. On our dives we saw lots of fish and water and rocks and eventually we started to get the hang of using the underwater camera. From this point forward, the only photos you will see of our trip will be underwater shots of brightly coloured frilly things and crinkly critters with shells.

While we were in Kuala Lumpur, we had received an email from Kori and Chad, the Texan couple we met in Borneo, telling us they were heading back to the Tioman Islands for a bit of quality beach time after utterly hating the Philippines. They arrived after we had spent our first week there and they moved into one of the fancy bungalows at ABC Chalets. We had since moved from Casa Del Shithole into a different room closer to the beach. It was the same price, but it had eighteen cubic inches of space more, and the holes in the eaves wouldn't let in anything larger than a dachshund. Needless to say, we spent evenings supping beer on their balcony. They had air-conditioning and a fridge, and the longtail macaques didn't jump up and down on their roof for fun, as they did at our room. This is probably because they were frightened away by the loud "Fucking Philippines!" that could regularly be heard above the sound of the jungle. This also seemed to work effectively on the mosquitoes, as Kori and Chad were bitten far less frequently than us. Any budding inventor should note that all you would need to construct an effective new repellent device is a sound recorder, a small speaker and a disenchanted Texan.

We had a fantastic week. It was great to meet up with them again and Chad made me laugh so hard that beer came out of my nose. They were even polite enough to smile at all the one-liners I plagiarised from Blackadder, which is a lot to ask from someone you don't know that well. One distinct advantage for Kori and Chad of having only one restaurant to choose from was that I didn't make them walk for miles every night looking for a restaurant that no longer, or never, existed, like we had done in Kota Kinabalu. Saying that, we were sitting in the bar opposite Nazri's one evening when the chef, already pickled drunk, came and sat down with us. We had only finished eating a few minutes earlier, so he clearly had the skills to turn out a good calamari and chips even with a bottle of rum inside him. He had one of the most infectious laughs I've ever heard and he was happy to share with us his valuable nuggets of wisdom, such as women turn you around and life isn't worth a shit. At that point he started flipping between crazy funny and crazy delusional so we bid him good evening and retired to Kori and Chad's balcony to annoy their neighbours with loud banter until the late hours.

After a few more dives with BJ, the four of us decided to do a shore dive on the house reef in front of the dive centre. It was only in a few metres of water, so we could make the air last forever and enjoy a leisurely dive around the bay for an hour and a half. A few minutes into the dive, I saw a large dark shape move in front of us, but too far to see what it was. Rather carelessly, I finned after it to see what it was. I couldn't find anything, so turned back to join the others, intending to fin back in the direction from where I had come. It didn't work and I was soon lost. At pretty much the same time as I disappeared, Kori was viciously attacked by an enormous deep sea leviathan called a 'sea urchin'. With her hand pissing blood like a garden hose, she headed back to shore at top speed to get it looked at, and Chad, seeing her predicament, chased after her to make sure she was okay. This left Cara, who prior to looking at an interesting piece of coral was surrounded by three other people, and when she looked up was all alone. Wondering what the hell was going on, she spent a minute or so searching around to find out where we could all have disappeared to, before she wisely surfaced to try and find us. At almost the same time, I surfaced thirty metres away and Chad, who had caught up with Kori and decided she would live to dive another day, surfaced on the other side of Cara. Under the current UK obscenity laws, I am not permitted to print the words uttered to me by Cara when she saw me on the surface. We soon regrouped and continued the dive, where we eventually found a turtle who didn't mind us watching him eat for fifteen minutes.

Soon after it was time for Cara and me to leave. I have to say, I wasn't overly impressed with the island on first inspection, but with every day that passed it grew on me and I admit I had a great two weeks there. It certainly helped that we were there with friends. After listening to my incessant bollocks for the last eighteen months, Cara appreciated too.

So all you need to remember is this; bring your own mozzie repellent (or a Texan), avoid the BJ's and the wankers, don't let those women spin you around and most importantly, keep your eyes open for any fast moving sea urchins. Even on land.

Mik