Singing along...

In the last few days in Singapore I have thrown myself enthusiastically into the kind of activities that Londoners could only dream of. Pub quiz, aquarium, drinking, shopping etc. It's just a different world out here. Tonight we might even go to the cinema.

For all its western tendencies, Singapore has a major difference from London... it works. Trains don't break. The cleaners clean. Taxis arrive when you book them. Things get built, on time and on budget. No fun in other words.

The benevolent dictatorship that runs Singapore (or at least they would see themselves thus) has decreed that everything has to be unashamedly kitsch. Plastic animals roam plastic beaches. It only dawned on me the extremes that they went to when we walked past 'Clinic bar'. The distasteful hospital themed bar took this phenomenon to new levels with wheelchair seats lit by dental chair lighting. Seriously.















At the aquarium there is a killer whale, which you can see here eating me. A thoroughly frightening experience for all concerned. Apart from the whale, I guess. It's blurry because of the speed of the attack.















And worst of all, people don't walk up or down elevators. Which is annoying.

Overriding any negatives about Singapore - the lack of heart, the lack of chewing gum, the slow people on elevators and the whale attack...there's a shop called Wanko. Need I say more.

Skepticism and feet

This week I have done quite a lot of thinking, which I can see many of you remarking is quite a first. Not all of these thoughts were my own original thoughts, but by definition the fact that I have thought and recorded them makes them mine. Perhaps.

I was considering the nature of evolution and the fact that within human potentiality comes the power to mutate positively (known more commonly as evolution). I have been considering the evolution of fish into human beings.

Imagine the first fish that grew feet. Must have been a) quite useful and b) pretty surprising. I wonder whether this fish was an outcast from the fish community or a trailblazer for fish kind.

What would this fish think if he could think forward however many billion years to the time of Jesus. If the fish could see Jesus having a nail put through his feet, the very feet that this fish provided him with. And this nail through his feet coming as a punishment for having a schizophrenic discourse with a God, who was created by man to explain the existence of feet in the absence of the knowledge of the existence of the evolution of the fish. It's all pretty crazy (albeit somewhat fishy) stuff.

Character assassinations

The group in which I have been placed for the last ten days has been great. All friendly people enjoying their various travels and maximising their life experiences. However, with my usual gossip network removed, I have become increasingly in need of a forum to gossip on. So I have decided to tell you about three things and people that have really driven me to distraction over the past ten days. I hope you find them as amusing as I have found them infuriating:

1) Firstly, my sometime roomate, let's call him C (his name is Craig, but C sounds more mysterious). C is a man of incredibly nervous dispoistion. Coming from someone who panics at the smallest incident, this may seem hypocritical, but you'll have to trust me - C is a nervous man. C doesn't like to be late. Therefore he will wake up two hours before the time that is strictly necessary, in order to ensure punctuality. Even when we had to start trekking at 2.45, he was alive and kicking by 1.30. Which some people might find annoying. Additionally, C has a fascination with making sure everything is contained within plastic bags. Incessantly rustling plastic bags and unnecessarily early mornings make for a frustrating combination.

However, the thing that I find most disconcerting is C's lack of discretion in the bedroom. One might expect a nervous man to have certain issues with flaunting his (unattractive, it must be said) body. But not C. C will happily walk around completely naked, even after a bout of particularly loud diarrhoea. My gaze has been, and will continue to be, averted.

2) Swedish honeymooners. There was nothing wrong with the Swedish honeymooners in our group. They were lovely people with a dry, typically Scandinavian sense of humour. They took part in all the activities willingly and kept their clothes on at appropriate moments (take note, C). However, my issue is that they were honeymooning on a GAP adventure. With me. Would you want to honeymoon with me (calm down ladies, this is not a proposal via blog)? Me and 12 other mainly twentysomethings. I can understand the desire to step away from a beach if this does not excite, but I struggle to comprehend the desire to re-create a GAP year feel when enjoying wedded bliss for the first time. Each to their own, I guess.

3) Failings in the Australian educational system. For some of you, the phrase 'Australian educational system' might in itself come as a shock. However, I'm reliably informed that it does exist, although it appearantly has fatal flaws. The four Aussies in my group were all great people, typifying the Australian fun mentality. However, there was one specific comment that I found hard to comprehend. We were at a war memorial commemorating the death marches that the Japanese forced upon POWs during WW2. Only 6 survived in one of the most infamous and horrendous cases of torture that I have ever heard of. As we were leaving, an Aussie (she will remain nameless, for the sake of her entire nation) piped up "My grandpa escaped from a POW / Concentration camp, but I can't think which one". We then proceed to name the most famous camps. None of these ring a bell. She then exclaimed: "oh yes, that's it.. it was called the Holocaust". Which left me as bewildered and dumbfounded as you are now.

Apart from blog writing and hoping that no-one from my group reads this, I have today been snorkeling and lazing on a tropical paradise island. As far away from Finchley as one could imagine.

Entering the pantheon..

One experience this week - the climbing of Mount Kinabalu - the highest mountain in South East Asia has, I feel, placed me in a league with some great British sportsmen.

Paula Radcliffe, Jimmy White and Tim Henman are three names that spring immediately to mind. Radcliffe has won numerous titles, sports personality of the year, pooed by the side of the road and still won the London Marathon. Jimmy White, the cockney geezer, has moved from a highly successful snooker career to become world poker champion and one of the world's leading pool players (as well as changing his name to Jimmy Brown in a bizarre promotional tie-up with HP Sauce, although that isn't strictly relevant here). Henman is loved by all as the epitomy of fighting spirit, a true whiter-than-white British champion. He is now a popular commentator and mentor to our younger tennis players.

So what, you may ask, have they got in common? And what has Rafi got in common with these revered names? The answer, of course, is a complete lack of bottle when it comes to the key moments. How many Olympic medals has Radcliffe? (0) How many world titles defeats has White (Brown?)? (6) How many Grand Slam semi-final defeats has Henman? (several, 7 I reckon although this may be wrong) When it comes to the crunch, these elite British sportmen were never able to keep their nerve, to last it through and achieve their ultimate goals.

After 8km straight up on day one and a further 1.5km straight up starting at 3am, I was left with 1.7km to go (that's just over 1 mile in Brit-speak). The final straight of the mountain. A final push. But I choked. I couldn't do it. Altitude sickness and an affinity to British sporting heroes past and present took over and I stopped and came back. And I was still sore the next day.

The story has a happy ending in that everyone who did make it to the top got absolutely zero view due to clouds (although I'm guessing their sense of achievement is slightly greater than mine). Like Henman's commentary, Radcliffe's popularity and White's lucrative sponsorship, I have prevailed against adversity despite a failure of nerve at the crucial moment.

This week I have also:

• Got bitten by a leach - Having received detailed instructions of exactly how to take it off, squish it and flick it away, I screamed like a girl and made the tour guide take it off
• Seen elephants and orang-utans. I can now relate to the story of dumbo in a way that I always struggled to when I was a kid. Once you see an elephant flying, it's quite a spectacular site
• Wondered why people are so obsessed with taking photos. They are simply capturing an 'experience' that they are simply not experiencing. It's a bizarre facet of postmodernity that I will leave you to ponder

Some bad news... and some good

I hate to disappoint. I really care about everyone reading this blog. Dearly. But unfortunately for the next week I will be unable to blog, as apparently up mountains and in jungle they don't have internet. I told them that that was pure selfishness, depriving my readers of their daily fix, but they would not budge. Therefore, this is the last blog for a week.

However (and at this point you can quickly dry your eyes...) I have come up with a list of 10 things that you can do and ponder until the next blog. Perhaps you can do one a day and a couple on the weekend and one when you are feeling a little low and missing me especially. Or you may want to do them all at once. Or you may want to do 5 now and 5 later. It's a bit like a cream egg of a list - how do you read yours?!

1. work out what this is...

I can tell you that from a foot away it looked pretty intimidating

2. Abolish slave labour. I think migrants in Britain are treated appalingly. Southern Europeans have the worst paid, most degrading jobs and they are not even allowed to move around simply to better themselves, to move up in the world, to make a meagre living for themselves and their family. So come on, let's Free Christiano.

3. Give Phil Muncaster a job. Since I have started travelling, news has surfaced of the tragic decline of IT Week. Phil Muncaster, the erstwhile section editor is now on the dole, begging any tech publication that will take him that very niche tech IT is something that he should be employed to write about. It may not excite everyone, but give him a break. Employ Phil.

4. Ponder the demise and subsequent rise of Jeremy Beadle. No one finds cats falling into ponds funny. They never did. Beadle was mocked but then he did the one thing that could restore his reputation. Died. Now he is seen as a charity-loving former 'funnyman'. There is hope for us all.

5. Shut Gareth Barry up. He's only in the England team cos he's got a left foot. I've got a left foot too. He's not very good. I'm not very good too. I'll give anyone who can arrange his sale in the next week a percentage of the transfer fee to shut him up. I have these kind of powers. This also applies to any other mind-numbing summer transfer saga - Berbatov, Keane etc.

6. Measure the orangeness levels in this picture of me snorkling... I'll give you a clue, it's very high!

7. Decide whether you'd rather be a one hit wonder or a one album wonder. Chesney Hawkes vs Alanis Morrisette. Whigfield vs The Verve (I know... but come on, who really cares about the rest..). I think one hit wonder because you get known as a one hit wonder which has a retro-cool, as opposed to being considered a failed pop star, or even worse, a failed Canadian pop star.

8. Tell me when it's going to rain in Kote Kinabalu. It's likely to be 3pm and 9pm from my experience. But if someone could send me some kind of warning signs I'd be appreciative and stop getting so wet. Thanks.

9. Create world peace. Or at least peace between Jews and Arabs. Here's a stolen ditty that will start you off...

You don't eat pigs, We don't eat pigs, It seems it's been that way forever.

So if you don't eat pigs, And we don't eat pigs, Why not, not eat pigs together?

10. Worry. This especially applies to my parents although close friends, colleagues etc are encouraged to worry to. I'm doing something VERY DANGEROUS. I'm climbing a mountain and then going into the jungle where any number of things could happen. So please feel free to spend the next week pacing from one end of the room to the other awaiting the next entry. It would make me feel better and inevitably it will sooth your nerves. It is the most important of the ten.

A massive thank you...

Sometimes you need things to be easy. 20 hours into a trip from London to Kote Kinabalu is one of those times. Sitting in my 6 hour break I wanted something convenient and Starbucks provided necessary sustenance. But 20 hours into my trip I was also in desperate need of some comedic banter. I didn't believe that the most generic of eateries would provide that too. As I looked through the menu I found the usual options ranging from Mocca Frappacinnos to croissants. Starbucks of course has built itself on global consistency. Until my eyes wandered to see an option that I had not seen before...




















Yes, that's right. An ugly chicken puff. Which I thought was absolutely hilarious, until I saw...






















An uglier chicken puff. Starbucks in Soho would be so much more entertaining with these kind of options. After 20 hours of flying, this comedic gift was necessary so I'd like to thank Starbucks for handing it to me (almost literally) on a plate.


Apart from that, I'm in Kote Kinabalu, which is remarkably unremarkable. It's the Finchley of South-East Asia. There's nothing to do except visit the Islands (which I'll do tomorrow). There are no islands in Finchley. That's where the main difference lies. And it's a bit more humid than Finchley. Apart from that...

Much love to all..

xx

Absolutely stunning

The sun is shining, birds are singing and there is fantastic wildlife everywhere. Finchley is looking pretty good nowadays. My travels start tomorrow, flying from London to Kote Kinabalu via Singapore. I will write blogs progressively for the next two months (and maybe beyond, depending on the popularity), letting everyone who cares know how I'm doing.