Kuala Gandah elephant sanctuary

Yesterday I visited the Kuala Gandah elephant sanctuary. This is a place that I’ve heard many people raving about, but had never been to. My friend Kate had her sister’s family staying, so we had six excited children with us to make the trip worthwhile.

Unfortunately, there was no information given by the elephants’ keepers, although there may have been some on display somewhere. It all had something of a feel of a circus, with “Next activity, feeding the elephants!” announced over the PA system. The elephants were all chained to the ground by at least two of their ankles, with only a couple of inches of movement allowed. However, hand-feeding them with fruit proved a big hit with the children and the keepers kept an eye and showed the kids what to do.

The largest two elephants were then taken off to give rides to visitors, the keepers sitting on their necks steering by poking them in the backs of their heads with narrow metal sticks. This horrified me, as it is quite possible to lead such a tame elephant by a rope. The rides lasted all of about twenty seconds, but again the children were delighted, especially those who had never been here before.

The final activity proved a bit too daunting for all except Anna – riding an elephant into the river then being dumped into the water as it plunged for a swim or a roll. To keep Anna company, I joined in with this one, but to be honest, the highlight was swimming in the river rather than sitting on the poor elephant. All of the Anna’s brothers and cousins joined us and we spent a wonderful hour or so swimming and playing in the brown water of the jungle river.

My initial feeling was that this place was offering little to the elephants. However, a bit of research has shown me that the foundation is mainly concerned with removing elephants from areas where their natural habitat has been destroyed and transferring them to national parks and reserves. Unfortunately, this wasn’t made clear at the time. Nor was the future of the elephants who were resident at this sanctuary, seemingly with the sole purpose of entertaining tourists. It set me to thinking about the David Sheldrick elephant orphanage I visited near Nairobi. There, keepers stand with the animals, explaining how they look after them, how the programme of care changes as the elephants mature, how they are eventually released into reserves or a protected and limited (but large) area, in which they can live wild. Everyone loved watching the youngest being bottle fed and enjoyed looking in on the bedrooms where the keepers slept with them. I think there may have been an opportunity to pat the babies on their heads, but that was about it. Yet the place was teeming with visitors. It isn’t necessary to make a circus there. However, my real sadness was not from the activities at Kuala Gandah but from the way the elephants were chained, prodded and yanked about. Yes, I know this was essential for visitor safety, but without such close proximity it wouldn’t have been necessary at all.

The organisation’s website isn’t particularly endearing, as it rants about “the world's 10 BIGGEST CULPRITS that keep on warming up the fragile world and yet blames Malaysia for supposedly cutting down all the forests.” I had heard that a past volunteer had caused problems, but didn’t expect to see this on the website:
“all volunteering & internship opportunities have since been stopped for an indefinite period as a result of various problems caused by an insensitive, ignorant & " ugly " North American.” The authors are also at great pains to make us appreciate how “thankless” and dangerous the work of the sanctuary is. Too see more, take a look at http://www.myelephants.org/ .

I had a wonderful day out, thanks in great part to the company, but I would only recommend this to families with children. Adults might have to put their gut feelings aside, but it’s definitely better than a zoo and it's quite an experience to get so up close and personal with these amazing animals. I'm glad I went to see it for myself and very grateful to my lovely friends for taking me along.

The sanctuary was further than I expected from KL, but the last few kilometres were bliss, giving me a view of the Malaysia I love and have missed – the narrow roads winding through the lush greenery, wooden houses with children playing outside, the rich smells of the earth and leaves and flowers, fruits and fried things for sale at the roadside, insects chirruping, the warm humid air soft and sweet, enveloping us as we arrived.

Comments please!

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Kuala Lumpur

Stepping out of the airport building, the hot thick air hit me. It always does, without fail, wherever you have come from. I find it at once both stifling and comforting.

All week I enjoyed being back, pottering about and spending time with the friends I have missed. On Sunday evening I stood at the edge of the night-market, watching. And the sensation that had been nudging at me all week became clear, a reality: this is no longer my home. What made me see this was the other matsallehs, the expats. How they, despite being as foreign as me, belong here. There was a purpose and certainty in the mundaneness of their evening that I will never have again.

Edinburgh - Heathrow - Entebbe - Nairobi - Dubai - Kuala Lumpur

A lot of flying.

Yao's Second Flight

Yao’s first flight had been earlier that morning, to Nairobi where I came across him at the transfer desk. Half an hour into our conversation, our boarding passes arrived and we discovered that we would be sitting together on the flight to Dubai.
“God is good,” he said.

He was on his way to Osaka to attend a month long training course. He was a teacher, deputy head and French teacher at a secondary school in Cote D’Ivoire, further up the ladder than me, yet until today he had never flown before. Flying is something I take for granted. He told me how he’d miss his students and daughter while he was away.

It wasn’t until we were in the air that his ‘novice flyer’ status came up in conversation and then it quickly explained his blank reception of the bags containing blanket and headphones, his sharing of my video screen in preference to using his own and other minor uncertainties. But still his calm assurance threw these things into a stark contrast. He professed no fear of flying and most refreshingly, had no fear of appearing uninformed or inexperienced.

At dinner time, he asked advice about what to eat first and, “Is it alright to eat the bread with this?” I realised what an inadequate model of etiquette I was, as constrained by space I forked food one-handedly into my mouth, inelegantly juggling and stacking the containers on the over-full tray. We talked on and off, explored the in-flight entertainment (on both screens by now) and the time passed all too quickly.

He was enchanted by the night-time view of Dubai on our approach to landing, delighting in identifying roads by their strings of orange lights, then individual cars and later the tall buildings of the city. I have never lost that sense of wonder, viewing the world from above. I hope he doesn’t.

As we taxied, seemingly for miles, I told him that Dubai was a much bigger airport than Nairobi.
“I’d never seen anything like Nairobi airport before,” he replied. I knew he was in for a shock. Nairobi is a typical developing country airport, small for a capital city, slightly shabby and decidedly dull. Dubai glitters with opulence, shops overflowing with unnecessary and expensive goods, floors gleaming, lights twinkling, the whole place looking much like a top-end shopping mall. We walked around together, Yao so quiet that I couldn’t tell whether he was overwhelmed or simply unimpressed. I tried to see it through his eyes, this movie-set of an airport, the likes of which he had never seen before. How far apart our worlds must be, yet however much I told myself this, all I could see how similar we were, but for the accidents of our homelands and the experiences they’d given us. And now we were just two travellers in a place that was no place and at no time.

With hours yet to go, our gates were not yet displayed, but Yao was uneasy with my nonchalant assurance that they’d appear in an hour or two, so he went to make enquiries. I walked him to his gate, where he wanted to wait and promised to return once I’d done the things I needed to do. Realising he’d have no currency, I took him a Coke – and writing this I remember the similar kindness I received here back in March– and we said our goodbyes again.

Over the months, I’ve met many people who’ve asked me to return or visit them in the future, but none has struck me as more sincere than Yao, nor has made me want to do so as much. I had found a friend in the nationless sky.

Stranger in a strange land

A lot has changed in the five years I've been away from the UK. Little things. Every now and then I found myself feeling much as I imagine a stranger would feel, or an old person who suddenly finds they haven't kept up.

In London I tried to board a bus only to find I should have bought my ticket from a machine behind the bus shelter. In a shop I tried to pay with Switch, then panicked when I saw that my card no longer bore the Switch logo. This was alright though, but then the cashier pointed me to a card reading machine on my side of the counter. Only on my third attempt did I get it in the right way round, then was asked to enter my PIN. "Is that the same as the one I use in the ATM?" I had to ask. It struck me as funny, but I've a feeling I just appeared rather stupid and confused.

Luckily I was taken step-by-step through the self-check-in process by a charming young man at Heathrow - see, now I even sound like an old dear. The new security measures in the airports were easier to deal with, as there were plenty of instructions for the uninitiated.

Nobody had told me that mobile phones were 'locked' into one network. And that was after I'd remembered not to call it a handphone. And so on. There I was, old before my time, a stranger in a familiar land.

Night bus to London

Edinburgh, 10pm, and Princes Street is teeming with half-naked children tottering about on stillettos. These girls are so young that the boys with them are still at the age where they're smaller than the girls. Nobody looks over thirteen, many look slightly drunk. Cheery barrel-chested policepersons stand in twos, flourescent yellow beacons attracting tourists who ask for directions or photos. More kids continue to carry each other, squealing with laughter, up the Waverley Steps from the station, spitting themselves onto the street, before slipping back into cool and mooching across to McDonalds. Suddenly I feel very old, and feel that I have been away for a very long time. Finally, I feel relieved to see at last the UK I have always known was lurking here, beyond, behind and within all the lovely places I have been to.

Compared to a bus trip in Africa, it was a doddle, but I have to say I expected it to be comfortable rather than just bearable. I will save the details for the letter I'm writing to Megabus and just tell you that I arrived dazed and delirious at Victoria at about six-thirty on Saturday morning.

The Falkirk Wheel

This is a really fascinating piece of engineering. The Falkirk Wheel is a rotating boat lift linking the Forth and Clyde canal with the Union canal near Falkirk, as you might have guessed. The canals have been reopened and renovated fairly recently, but the flight of eleven locks that previously joined them had mostly been destroyed and built over, so this boat lift was created to replace the locks. Apparently it used to take a whole day to navigate the entire flight of locks, but the new method takes less than twenty minutes.





Mum, Dad and I went for a look, read up a little in the information centre, then watched the wheel in operation. We declined the opportunity of a boat trip up and down again, and instead watched the workings which would not have been visible from the boat. The upper canal has been built out from the hillside, through which it has passed in a tunnel, onto an aqueduct that juts out over a large pool beside the lower canal. The boats enter the wheel area, which is then completely sealed before the wheel rotates, bringing one boat up to the top while another comes down.


We walked up to and through the tunnel and along the canal a little way, passing a couple of locks and a pair of very cheery lock-keeper types who chatted about this and that. I thought briefly about walking back all the way to Edinburgh along the towpath, but instead opted for a ride in the car, including a stop off and Marks and Sparks where we indulged in an orgy of biscuit buying. A grand day out.

Aberdeen

Aberdeen is a strikingly attractive city. Perched on the edge of Scotland, stacked full of grand granitic architecture, it gleamed in the sun. Big business-like ships somehow managed to dock right in town next to the bus station, and a ferry waited to set sail for Shetland. The grey North Sea bravely sparkled when it could, dog-walkers strolled along the beach, even the big oil-related installations sat benignly on the harbour front. Out by the beach the city gives way to a tiny old fishing village of tinier houses, small and bright like beach-huts. Walking the narrow paths between them felt like walking through private gardens, amongst the barbecues, potted plants and washing.


Of course, I'm sure Aberdeen has rougher edges, but everywhere I went was simply the epitomy of couth.
In honour of the city's grandeur, I have penned a wee poem with some help from the famous poet, Adrian Mole:

Oh, Aberdeen!
I had never seen
you before.
Your granite glistened grandly
in the Scottish summer sun.
So did the sea,
till it rained.

I had only gone to spend a couple of days with my friend Shona and her family. Then somehow managed to stay there a week. In fact, it was so nice I'm surprised I'm not still there now. In all the time I was travelling, there was always the issue of "Going home" - an issue that I had trouble dealing with, as I had and have no home. The home I pictured as I travelled was the flat in KL that is no longer mine. But at Shona and John's, I found myself at home.

It was great to chat, or relax with a book, or a glass of wine, fun to do homework with the kids, walk along the railway line, and specially to go and watch Maxwell play his rugby match. And that's despite the shock of being reminded that I am old enough to be mistaken for the parent of a 13 year old! I even braved my way through Lucy's seventh birthday party - possibly a rather more contraceptive experience.

This was not only a lovely slice of Scotland, but also a lovely slice of family life. Not to mention a wonderful chance to catch up with people I haven't seen for a year. Now I'm just trying to work out why I decided not to apply for that job there...

All roads roam to leeds

Mum, Dad and I headed to Leeds to see Simon and Ping. So here we all are, apart from Mum who must have been taking all the pictures. Small niece is Sophie, aged about 3. Smaller one is Catherine, who has been around for about a year. They live somewhere near Leeds, and we took an afternoon walk from their house, past the sewage works to some scenic village which is home to the Woolpack pub of 'Emmerdale' fame:

Now that I have met these new relations, I can disappear again to distant continents, safe in the knowledge that everyone needs an elusive aunt.