Almost There (Kampung Air Batang - "ABC", Pulau Tioman, Malaysia)

My goal on this trip is to find a place to live for $5 CAD a day. I want a room with acceptable cleanliness, 2 drinks, a half hour of Internet (which might not exist in this fabled land), 2 meals and to smoke a few cigarettes, drink some water, eat some street vendor snacks / etc. Its cheap here, but I'm going to have to get farther south to get where I want to go. It may not exist and I'll be happy with $10 mostly as a personal comparison, as this is what I used to spend on coffee each day while in Toronto (and I don't drink anything fancy). A day here costs: RM30 for a room (last couple nights I paid RM25 for no fan / screens / net, but needed to upgrade for a fan as it was oppressive). Beer during happy hour is RM6 for two, Internet is 4, plain rice with chili sauce and a coffee for lunch is 2.50 and a dinner treat of a BBQ'd squid, a stingray, hunk of barracuda, tuna or marlin with stir-fried vegetables and fresh chili peppers costs 13. Incidentals for the day run about 5. All told its about RM60 (20 CAD). You can get a decent curry here for RM4 ($1.30), but I haven't quite killed my addiction to seafood and I'm not willing to give up plentiful, high quality hunks of fishy goodness for the extra $2-3. [If you ever eat a stingray, pull perpendicular from the cartilage backbone. If not, you end up with firm "bones" that are soft enough to be edible, but makes the meat a little tougher than it should be. Not my favorite fish, but good enough to have again]. Its a lounge in a hammock and read a book kind of place, but I feel like I am only half way there somehow [and the substantial ant infestation on both of my beds so far isn't allowing me to get the beauty sleep that I so desperately need - this new place has a mosquito net and I have one of my own so I'm going to try and lie on one and put the other over me to see if I can make a Mike sandwich to get some peace. They are small and fast though - we shall see. I am writing this now and I can see about a dozen or so of them climbing all over me and my laptop]. Its good to not be in Singapore though.

Labour day is an anniversary of sorts for me and I am going to do something positive to mark the day. I used to be a big proponent of doing "stuff" but aside from a stint of recreational rock climbing, I haven't done anything good for my body in my adult life. As such, I'm going to spend another couple of days here and then go to Indonesia (through Kuala Lumpur) to see if I take to surfing. If that doesn't stick I'm going to check into a kickboxing camp for a month or so. I'll try and not write something every time my plans change, as it will get tedious for everyone involved, but the only for sure thing is that I am going to go surfing in Indo for a bit (gotta start talking hip :). I have this picture of me in a 30 foot reef break - can't wait to be snuggling to get my ass up on a 2 foot "monster" wave.

The book I'm reading (my book report will be following shortly, the dog ate it - I swear), is a call to recovering workaholics (or soon to be burnouts). He talks about how reality is negotiable, about the dangers of a "deferred-life plan", that the opposite of love is indifference and the opposite of happiness is boredom. I used to actually be a big fan of the "sacrifice today" and "live tomorrow" idea. Did you know thats a total bullshit way to live?

I realized that I have spent all this time being introspective on the past and the person that I wanted to become during this trip, but I wasn't spending any time on building tools to make sure that I don't slide into the abyss when I go back. I was in Toronto for 5 minutes before my mind was angling on how to make cash and potential opportunities. This is who I am I guess. I won't be lying on the beach for the rest of my life as much as I have the romantic vision that I should. SO, I better get my head around how I will balance it all out and be efficient and smart in how I work and create. The book was a first step of sorts. It wasn't all nuggets, but a lot of what he talks about applies to me and I have taken a silly amount of inspiration from it.

"After years of repetitive work, you will often have to dig hard to find your passions, redefine your dreams, and revive hobbies that you let atrophy to near extinction. The goal is not to simply eliminate the bad, which does nothing more than leave you with a vacuum, but to pursue and experience the best in the world."

True. Sad but true.

Singaporean in the rain. (Little India, Singapore)

SO I have been on a little bit of a style strike of late. I wear the same t-shirt every day and when I don't, I am right Back in Black as soon it has been washed or is dry. I only put deodorant on when I am not wearing it (this is a total lie, I've put deodorant on less than ten times since March, but it sounded good). I desperately need a shave and a haircut and I only have one pair of shorts and they are ugly. I'm a troll really, but I'm living out of a backpack and I'm trying to burn some of my consumerisms away. Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4BC - AD65) said "These individuals have riches just as we say that we 'have a fever' when really the fever has us." and "Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: 'Is this the condition that I feared?' [both quotes from the book I am reading]. I am living in luxury compared to billions and billions of people on earth and if I see a Starbucks I tend to get a good solid dose of caffeine. However, I think these quotes are saying a lot to me right now, at least during those days of comparative thought. Besides, when I put on something shiny and new I feel a little bit like an impostor (always have, apparently since the day I was born). Its been good for my mind and when I haven't used something in my pack for a while I throw it out or give it a way (although I am running out of things to do this with). This is SO not who I was a year ago. Can't wait to purge once I am home again.

Singapore doesn't mix well with trolls. There has never been a more disgusting orgiastic display of the five C's "cash, credit, car, condo, club" (thanks Piyush) in the history of time. Seriously, this entire place from end to end is an open air shopping mall. Not sure what I was expecting, but I was taken aback by whats going here. It is clean (depending on where you go), it does have very strange rules (there really is no chewing gum and people do die here within 48 hours of arrest for things like possession of drugs... in your blood), everyone speaks English to some extent (and most gooder than me), all of the signs are in English, the people are extremely friendly, it has a really well designed transit system (called SMRT, but I still get lost in rapid succession - I somehow ended up at the airport twice and at Tanah Merah station three times shortly after getting off the plane) and really vibrant ethnic quarters (although these aren't the cleanliest places on earth). Travelling is Easy with a capital E, its Expensive with a capital E and its boring with a capital BORING. If you lived here you could find a lot of interesting things to do I am sure (art openings, music etc.), but if you are a guy who doesn't like to shop (this is key) and is just passing through because of a seat sale with Tiger Airways, then its easy to wish you were moving on. Its not reminiscent of Papeete, but not really where I want to be right now. This would be more of a centre to hit at the end of a long trip, if you wanted a break from hard traveling, or at the beginning of a trip for someone who wants to get their feet wet in Asia. I am not at the end, I haven't been traveling particularly hard, and I had my break in Toronto and with Corina and Jay in Thailand. I'm not a traveling expert by a long shot, but all of the things that this place has to offer is lost on me right now.

I had to go out and buy a pair of jeans and a nice shirt. It was pretty tragic, but I wanted to go out to some bars and see what a country obsessed with western culture puts forth in a "club". I might of been able to rock out with my ACDC tshirt, but my shorts had to go on vacation and my long pants that I brought with me had somehow grown a black mold. Boy did I ever love shopping! Especially the prices, given that I had just left cheapland (insert sage advise on planning).

I went out two nights. One was a massive entertainment complex in Clarke Quay (Disneyland for clubs). It was... strange. I got ushered through the lineup, was forbidden from paying cover and generally had the run of the place all night. I kept trying to push my luck and walking through all manners of side rooms and anti chambers that seemed to be roped off. I was in this super posh area at the top of the place and the bouncer just came up and asked why I was up here and not downstairs, as this place was closed. It wasn't a "get out of here" sort of thing, just a "why are you choosing to be in this place and not listening to the fine live music" sort of thing. Maybe this was just the way the place ran, but Singapore seems to have a love affair with western culture and I think it spills over into how they treat people who are obviously "not from around here". I'm not sure how to describe this, but I'm not used to the fairer sex paying unsolicited attention to me. I'm not even talking about the working girls (who you can see a mile away, but who did not have a lack of "company" from what I could see - I wonder if those guys think they have somehow landed an overtly sexual, extremely hot, scantily clad local by some sort of alignment of the stars and a sideways glance?). Strange. If picking up was suddenly on your mind here, I think you would have to be an idiot not to succeed.

As I was walking home at 5am, I said "Mike my good friend, you're an idiot. Clubs and madness is not why you are here. Don't blow it." Sage words super ego. Sage words.

I stayed at a hostel in Little India. It was clean and comparatively cheap (S$20 - about 14 CAD). Aside from the random snoring from 20 strangers every night, it was a pretty good (chill) place to be. Little India was the "rawest" quarter that I saw in Singapore and my O my was the food deelectalicious. I was old in comparison to everyone (well.. aside from that _really_ old guy that was there). It's an odd feeling to take advice from a 19 year old on how to travel through Burma. He had been traveling for about a year and although he was a bit of a dick, he was surprisingly worldly and had some pretty hard core experiences to his credit including killing someone (I don't want to kill anyone so this experience didn't really do anything for me, but I DO really want to go to Burma so that's good. Or he's lying - who cares?). A woman there was on the tail end of a trip all over Asia studying a trade union, which I believe is seriously bucking the trend in some of the countries she went through. I can't imagine the old boys network who pulls the strings behind a trade union in a communist country (not Singapore but others). I liked her. She was brave, had a good sense of humour, liked to make shit up, got lost more than me, and did cute things like correct herself when she said "substantially" instead of "substantively" (like any good, soon to be lawyer would). She's 24. I am old old old.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: In retrospect and given my performance here in KL, I think its safe to say that nobody gets lost more than me]

Our partners in crime for the time I was there were a twenty something guy from London who used to own 2 bars there before burning out and managing a small resort in Malaysia. A guy from a neighboring hostel who regaled us with stories of one of his friends going to jail erroneously in Singapore (theft over) and a guy and girl from London and some other random flotsam. We all watched the world go by, drank beer, went out to another club (saw another Filipino cover band) and I did tonnes of walking and went to the aquarium on Sentosa which was quite exceptional.

Not a terrible place, but time to move on. Malaysia here I come.