-
7NNT25: Day 37 – Singapore & home
Soundtrack: anything and everything by Lady Gaga; “Without a Trace”, Soul Asylum “Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,Do not go gentle into that good night.” — Dylan Thomas Figured I’d mix up the quote, as I know I tend to use the opening from Sylvia Plath’s “Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea” at the end of trips a fair bit. I’m writing this from the relative comfort of my home, over a day after arriving back in Noongar Boodjar, a contented dog snoring softly beside me. I say “relative comfort” as, after 5 weeks…
-
7NNT25: Day 36 – Singapore & Monsterville
Soundtrack: “The Edge of Glory”, Lady Gaga Today is the most important day of the trip, because today I had laksa. Noodle 13: Katong Laksa (Sungei Road Laksa) Right or wrong, I’ve always considered laksa to be more of a malay/indonesian dish, so have not had it in Singapore (despite Singapore’s malay heritage, yeah, I know, I never said I thought everything through) but today I decided to change that. After reading several lists of the best laksa in Singapore, I found a place within walking distance of my hotel that is claimed to do some of the best laksa around. There’s no menu, all they do is laksa, though…
-
7NNT25: Day 35 – Singapore
Soundtrack: “Holiday”, Madonna Waking and checking social media, it turns out that if I’d stayed in the basement parking lot of the first venue for another hour or so, I’d have spent all that time sweating and queueing but at least seen Lady Gaga, who turned up and did a few minutes in the club. I still probably wouldn’t have got in, but I could have done the star spotting thing. Oh well. My body really didn’t like waking up today, but I’d arranged to meet Singaporean-native pal D and have lunch and catch up so out I went. Lunch was at Pizza Express, the Singaporean version of a UK…
-
7NNT25: Day 34 – Singapore
Soundtrack: “Hotel Womb”, The Church While my last few days in Singapore were still fairly active, they weren’t nearly as exciting individually as the rest of the trip for at least a couple of reasons: it’s my 5th time here, so there’s less of the novel experiences to be had; and after close to 35 days living out of the same suitcase, the same 5 or 6 days’ worth of clothes, I was feeling a bit fatigued. I’m beginning to think there’s a pattern, where once my mind knows I’m in the last place before home, all of the energy reserves that I’ve been running on start to deplete, and…
-
7NNT: Day 33 – Singapore
Soundtrack: First full day in Singapore, and first priority is sorting laundry so I have enough clean clothes to get me through. I failed to find a laundry service nearby (a mall might have one but I walked around it and couldn’t find the place, I did find a second hand bookshop to check later). Instead I headed for a coin operated DIY facility, it’s sad that it’s come to this, no option to just hand my bag and some money to someone else, this load was all on me. Being Singapore, the coin laundry was clean, everything worked, there was a coin change machine, and the washing machines dispensed…
-
7NNT25: Day 32 – Macau to Singapore
Soundtrack: “Departure”, R.E.M. Of course I was up before the alarm, at least an hour before. The whole travel day body clock thing is good, I guess, but when I’m setting an alarm to give me more time than I need, and then a second alarm in case anything goes wrong with the first, surely I’ve got enough conscious measures in place I don’t need my unconscious joining the party. I was showered, packed, heading out the door and down to the hotel breakfast at around about the time the alarm would have gone off. I’m not looking to dump on the hotel breakfast, I mean there are some really…
-
7NNT25: Day 31 – Macau
Soundtrack: “Money Changes Everything”, Cyndi Lauper (and any other song with money in the title really) Macau for a full day. I’m sure there are people for whom Macau is their favourite place in the world. Some of them might even be from outside of Macau, who visited and found this former Portuguese colony to be all they’ve ever looked for in a holiday destination. I’m not one of them. I gave it a good shot, but it just possesses a level challenge that doesn’t mesh well with my style of travel. Today didn’t start well. My goal was to get a shave, as it’s humid and I’m getting a…
-
7NNT25: Day 30 – Hong Kong to Macau
Soundtrack: “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, U2 Today was probably my least prepared border crossing ever (I’m ignoring Schengen Zone crossings, because they don’t even feel like you’re in a different country, those ones are like, oh, we just drove around a roundabout and have now been in 5 countries: if I don’t have to stop and show someone my passport it doesn’t count). With no flights to catch, and ferries every 30 minutes, I could take my time packing, grab breakfast, and get a taxi to the terminal pretty much whenever I wanted. While I said yesterday I was trying not to only go to the…
-
7NNT25: Day 29 – Hong Kong
Soundtrack: “Kong Foo Sing”, Regurgitator Monday, time to wander, eat, shop. I’m not sure when the last time I managed close to 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep on this trip, but last night my body got the memo and came to the slumber party. I still felt tired when I work, but less tired than some mornings, maybe it was all the sichuan pepper coursing through my veins. I was alert enough this morning that breakfast was a no-brainer, and I chose a different place a little further away from the hotel that was similarly reviewed. I think it’s a travel dilemma: do you go to the same place again…
-
7NNT25: Day 28 – Hong Kong
Soundtrack: “Sunday Morning”, The Velvet Underground Sunday, day of rest, day of recovering from two very long days with late nights. Despite hoping that my body would step up, do the right thing and grant me many hours of sleep, it didn’t, and I was awake again and thinking about breakfast earlier than I hoped. It shows how tired I was, as it took me at least 10 minutes to work out what I should have for breakfast. Hmm, what do folks eat for breakfast in this part of the world? When the Hong Kong Dollar finally dropped, those two words fell into the part of my brain I could…
-
7NNT25: Day 27 Cebu to Hong Kong
Soundtrack: [intentionally left blank] I don’t know how, given the time my head hit the pillow, that I was awake before the alarm. Possibly the magic of travel brain, that just kicks in to make sure I don’t oversleep and miss a flight (even when I also set two alarms to make sure). I’d given myself plenty of time to negotiate any traffic in getting back to the airport, but there wasn’t much, sparing me a good few minutes of easy listening radio. The Phillipines and easy listening radio. I don’t know if it’s something that drivers do when they’re picking up tourists, but pretty much every car I’ve taken…
-
7NNT25: Day 26 – Cebu
Soundtrack: “Personal Jesus”, Depeche Mode; “All Around the World”, Lisa Stansfield; “Abracadabra”, Lady Gaga (again) Cebu, one of the central islands of the Philippines. For thousands of years inhabited by folks who generally seemed to mind their own business, and who otherwise spent a chunk of their time perfecting the cooking of pork. Then one day a Portuguese/Spanish guy named Ferdinand Magellan turned up on their shores, hung out with the locals, and told them all about Jesus. He also got involved in local politics, which meant folks from the neighbouring island of Mactan didn’t join his fan club, instead deciding to kill him when he showed up to either…
-
7NNT25: Day 25 – Angeles City to Cebu
Soundtrack: “Danger Zone”, Kenny Loggins Not the most exciting of days, basically a get up, pack, check-out, check-in, pass security, wait for flight, wait more for flight, squeeze into plane, squeeze out of plane onto bus, get luggage, get car, check-in, walk, get dinner, sleep. That’s the 30 or so word version — am writing this in Wordpad as my ISP has temporarily broken the server slowlyandloudly lives on, so I don’t have a word count function handy. Last morning in Angeles City, so I headed out and grabbed a toasted ham and cheese sandwich and coffee at the same cafe as yesterday. I think I’m at that point where…
-
7NNT25: Days 23 & 24 – Angeles City
Soundtrack: any bass-heavy party track from the last 30 years. Angeles City is just down the road from Manila, less than 100km, so only about 2-3 hours to drive if the traffic is normal. It seems to have three claims to fame: the food is awesome; they know how to party; and there used to be a really big US air base here (now converted to an international airport). I was hoping I could use it as a base to do the Mt Pinatubo trek, but sadly that was not to be. When picking accommodation options, I stumbled across a hotel too swanky to really be true, at a price…
-
7NNT25: Day 22 – Manila
Soundtrack: “In These Shoes?”, Kirsty MacColl Shoe day. Older folks, such as myself, will remember legendary First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, who in western media at least was portrayed as liking the luxuries in life, including shoes. When the Marcos dictatorship was ended, the western media was full of stories of the hundreds and hundreds and thousands of custom and designer shoes she owned, this was part of the claims of excess that the ruling family indulged in. Successive Philippine governments used the shoe collection, among other things, for their own marketing/propaganda purposes until earlier this century, when a part of the collection was put on display in…
