The Houses of Parliament, as seen from the South Bank

The first instinct of many tourists staying in central London hotels is often to head straight for the city’s Underground network when setting out to explore the capital. But while the colourful tangle of ‘tube’ lines and exotic station names (Swiss Cottage, Elephant and Castle, Seven Sisters) is undoubtedly a good way of getting around, it’s easy to forget just how much of the city can also be seen on foot.

Of the many great walks in and around central London, perhaps one of the best, in terms of the sheer number of sights that can be seen in one go, is the South Bank trail.

The South Bank of the River Thames was historically outside the boundaries of the City of London, which meant that lots of activities that were heavily-regulated within the city walls – gambling, drinking, theatre-going and fun-fairs, to name but a few – flourished here. Today the South Bank retains something of that air of artistry and merriment, with some of the biggest and best theatres, cinemas, music venues and art galleries in the country clustered together along the river front.

Start your walk at the Houses of Parliament (Westminster Underground station) and cross the river for a proper view of Big Ben in all of its morning (or evening) glory. Turn left and walk along the Thames Path, past the ever-popular London Eye and on to the The Royal Festival Hall, the National Film Theatre and The National Theatre, impressive but rather brutalist blocks of concrete that grew up in preparation for, and in the aftermath of, the Festival of Britain in 1951.

The London Eye

If you wander out into the middle of Waterloo Bridge, which crosses the Thames right above the National Film Theatre, you’ll be rewarded with some pretty nice views along the river in both directions.

Continuing along the South Bank, you’ll then need to take a brief diversion inland at Blackfriars Bridge (at the time of writing a small section of the Thames Path is closed here because of construction work) before re-emerging by the Tate Modern, a cavernous former power station now converted into Britain’s foremost contemporary art gallery. If you wander inside into the central Turbine Hall (admission free), you’d be very unlucky not to find a huge, often specially-commissioned piece of artwork staring you in the face. Past Turbine Hall exhibits have included a series of giant spider-like sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, a whale-sized elongated tulip/trombone by Anish Kapoor and, most recently, a installation made up of millions of hand-crafted ceramic sunflower seeds by the dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

Stepping back out onto the river bank, you’ll see the slim, elegant figure of the Millennium Bridge jutting out across the river to the North Bank. Now is as good a time as any for some nice mid-river views: if you walk out onto the bridge you’ll see the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral to the north, the top of Norman Foster’s iconic ‘gherkin’ building at 2 o’ clock and, most impressively perhaps, Tower Bridge and the blinking, triangulated summit of the Canary Wharf Tower off in the distance to the east.

The Millennium Bridge and the dome of St. Paul's

Continuing along the South Bank, you’ll soon come to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, a modern reconstruction of the Elizabethan building in which many of the Bard’s plays had their debut. Then, following a twisty, cobbled path under Southwark Bridge and past The Clink Prison Museum, you’ll find yourself by Southwark Cathedral, next to London Bridge.

Southwark Cathedral is, I think you’ll agree when you see it, pretty small as cathedrals go. The building that we see was constructed between the 13^th and 15^th Centuries, but the site has been used for Christian worship since at least the 11^th Century, and this area of the South Bank has a long, continuous history. Very near here, for example, is the site of the tavern from which Chaucer’s pilgrims set off in The Canterbury Tales.

Look skyward and you’ll see the more modern face of the South Bank, in the shape of The Shard, a new glass-fronted residential and commercial building currently under construction. Already dwarfing the surrounding skyline, The Shard is set to become Western Europe’s tallest building and is due for completion in 2012.

Next, follow your nose from the Cathedral to Borough Market next door, one of London’s busiest and, it has to be said, most tourist- and visitor-infested food markets. On sale you’ll find everything from farm-reared ostrich burgers to a nice selection of stinky cheeses. It’s not cheap, and it can be hideously crowded, but the sights and smells are always interesting, and I can recommend the little Lavazza kiosk on Stoney Street for a good Italian-style coffee.

Curries, bunnies and pheasants at Borough Market

If you want to continue the walk, then you’ll need to climb the steps from the Cathedral gardens up to the bridge, cross the road, then go down the steps on the other side to rejoin the river path. From here, it’s around 10 minutes’ walk to Tower Bridge. On the way you’ll pass the ageing hulk of HMS Belfast, a decommissioned Royal Navy cruiser now pressed into service as a floating museum, and the modern, slightly-drunk looking City Hall, seat of the London Assembly.

From Tower Bridge, where traitors’ heads used to be mounted on spikes, you can either walk across to the North Bank and the Tower of London, or head back towards London Bridge and catch a river boat back upstream to Westminster.

For more details on accommodation near Tower Bridge, check Hotelclub.

Prayer wheels at the Tsug Lakhang Temple

It was getting on for quarter past two, but at the bus stand in McLeod Ganj everything had ground to a halt. A dozen or so local travellers stood around the ticket office, waiting patiently for it to re-open. We joined them, doing our best to find the back of the queue then, realising that there was no queue, slotting ourselves into the crowd as best we could.

The ticket office was closed. No sign had been put up and no blinds had been drawn, but still, there was no doubt about it: the ticket office was definitely closed. On a hard wooden table behind the counter, in full view of the waiting customers, lay the sleeping figure of the ticket wallah. His features were strangely peaceful, the only sign of movement being the occasional twitch of his moustache. Although well over fifty, his hair was bright henna red, in stark contrast to the muted greys and browns of his tiny workplace.             

At two fifteen he awoke, sat up and, brushing the creases out of his uniform, began to move unhurriedly back to his post. On the other side of the window the crowd, until now somewhat listless, became suddenly animated and started to push forward.

“Now, who’s next?”

Of course, he didn’t say that at all. This being India, a queue of any kind was out of the question. When there are tickets to be bought there’s no “This lady was before me”, no “No, no, after you”, just a scrum of determined individuals surging forward, each shouting and waving a handfuls of rupees.

The Ganj

We were in McLeod Ganj on the first stage of our trip into the Himalayas. The Ganj, as probably no-one calls it, perches on a series of high ridges above the town of Dharamsala. It was founded as a British hill station in 1848 but today is noted more for being the home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile than it is for its colonial past.

The view from our hotel room was easily the best hotel room view I’ve ever had. From our balcony we watched eagles circling over the valley below while, in the near-distance, huge Himalayan peaks revealed then hid themselves again in an ever-shifting, shrouding fog. But then again, a good view isn’t hard to find in McLeod Ganj.

Nor is Tibetan culture hard to find. Émigré Tibetans now outnumber Indians in the town, and their religion, art and food can be found everywhere. Strings of colourful prayer flags flutter on hillsides, prayer wheels spin outside temples and crispy momo dumplings are cooked in tiny roadside dhabas all over The Ganj.     

On our first night in town we tried some Tibetan cuisine in one of the town’s many vegetarian restaurants. Compared with Indian food, Tibetan food is a little on the bland side; a result I suppose of having to work with the limited ingredients available on a cold, dry plateau. The momos were nice enough (think Chinese dim sum) but the thantuk – thick, dry noodles – were a bit of an under-flavoured disappointment. I’m also told that Tibetans drink a tea made from rancid yak butter but unfortunately we didn’t have the chance to try that (and I was so looking forward to it too…).

Monks in the rain

At the northern end of town is the Tsug Lakhang Temple, the focal point for Tibetan Buddhism in McLeod Ganj. A monastery forms part of the temple complex, as does the Dalai Lama’s residence. Inside are statues of various figures including Sakyamuni, the historical Buddha, and Avalokitesvara, the Buddha of Compassion. Amongst the offerings that had been left for the latter was a packet of Hob-Nobs.   

Outside the temple, as we were examining the prayer wheels, I was stopped by a group of five Sikh tourists who each wanted their photo taken with me. Maybe they thought I was Richard Gere…

In fact, we were asked to pose for photos rather a lot in India. For all of its diversity, and despite the huge number of tourists who visit the country, it seems that there are still plenty of parts of India where the locals never see a white face (or a black one for that matter). When these locals go on holiday – to McLeod Ganj for example – and run into foreigners like us, they’re genuinely interested, and not a little star-struck.   

Also within the walls of the monastery is the Tibetan Museum. Here, a series of simple, yet eloquent displays is used to make some powerful points about the destruction of Tibetan culture under Chinese occupation. Most of the Tibetans in Dharamsala and McLeod Ganj fled their home country by crossing the Himalayas on foot, risking the twin perils of Chinese border patrols and a harsh, unpredictable climate. The lucky ones arrived with frostbite; many more have died attempting the journey. Some of the refugees’ stories are told here.

As you leave the museum, you can read the Dalai Lama’s thoughts on the future of Tibet. Despite decades of Chinese intransigence, he is clear that the only way forward lies in trying to find a peaceful compromise with Beijing: an admirable and courageous stance. They don’t hand out those Nobel Peace Prizes for nothing, you know. 

Monkeys in the rain

On our third day in town, we heard that the Dalai Lama was due to be teaching at the temple. Tickets for the session had already been allocated to local monks and nuns and a few interested foreigners, but we were told that if we waited in the courtyard below the temple we might be able to catch a glimpse of the great man. Accordingly, we braved the understandably tight security (a metal detector and a vigorous frisk at the temple gate) and arrived outside Tsug Lakhang twenty minutes before the meeting was due to start.

Two sets of steps led up from the courtyard to the temple. Both were guarded by security personnel, but one had a cordon across it and a group of elderly Tibetans sitting cross-legged nearby, fingering their prayer beads. ‘A-ha,’ we thought. ‘Exclamation mark,’ we thought. ‘That must be where His Holiness is a-fixing on doing his walking-past.’ And so we settled down with the elderly Tibetans and waited.

At the forefront of my mind was what I would say to the Dalai Lama if, by chance, I came face-to-face with him and he decided to stop for a chat. I’d been thinking about this for several days now. Should I attempt to pose an important question – “What should I do to be a better person?”; “Who would win in a fight between you and the yeti?” – or should I just say how glad I was to meet him and try not to make a tit of myself? 

I was still pondering this when I became aware of a commotion outside the building opposite. The Dalai Lama appeared, smiling and clasping his hands together, and made straight for the other side of the courtyard and the other set of steps. Those elderly Tibetans had got it all wrong!

The faithful rushed forward, all the while bowing and trying to keep on their knees. His Holiness bowed back, grinning and stopping to chat with a few lucky well-wishers.

Following the lead of the elderly Tibetans we made our way hurriedly but respectfully (a difficult combination to carry off) to the far side of the courtyard, all the while keeping our hands pressed together and our heads slightly bowed. But it was too late. The distant red-and-yellow robed figure of the 14^th Dalai Lama had already passed up the staircase and into the temple.

A minute or so later, the familiar bass rumble of his voice, serious now, signalled the start of the prayer meeting, and it was time for us to leave. 

Prayer flags and a house in the hills

Jama Masjid

Day One

“In India, everything is difficult,” says Rosie, who’s been here before. I have to admit that at first I don’t believe her. After all, I’ve survived Bangkok and I’ve survived Hanoi: how much more ‘difficult’ could Delhi be? 

By the time we leave the airport at 6 AM it’s already warm. At our taxi driver’s request, we wind down all the windows in his little car as he pulls away into the early morning traffic. As we enter Delhi the roads gradually become narrower and more chaotic. With a little honk here and a little honk there, we weave our way among rickshaws, bicycles, pedestrians, scavenging cows and tatty-looking dogs, sometimes with just an inch or two of clearance. 

After having a sleep at our hotel in Paharganj we decide, for some reason, to have an afternoon stroll to nearby Connaught Place. Big mistake. As we turn right by the open-air pissoir at the end of our alleyway we’re besieged by a gang of auto-rickshaw drivers who take a very keen interest in where we’re going. We tell them that we’re just going for a walk. “Ah Connaught Place. Down that way,” they say, pointing helpfully.

There then follows a chase lasting several kilometres in which a succession of touts, either working together or against each other (they badmouth each other, but that could be part of the act) follows and misdirects us, trying to talk us into going to one or another “official” tourist bureau. The touts keep disappearing then reappearing: “Oh, I’m just walking this way,” they’ll say. “Let me show you where to go.” One of the rickshaw drivers from earlier accosts us. “I’ll take you to Old Delhi. Ten rupees! Five rupees!” he shouts. He doesn’t seem to believe me when I tell him that I like to walk.

Paharganj

We resort to hiding in banks to take a sneaky peek at our map. Outside it’s hot and dusty. By the time we find our way to Connaught Place, what should have been a twenty minute walk has taken the best part of an hour. The place itself is far from spectacular. There’s a busy road, new air-conditioned shops, hotels, restaurants and, at the centre, a circle of green parkland. Rosie has a look in some of the shops and I tag along. The touts have disappeared. All seems to be well.

I suggest that we cross the road and take a walk across the small park, seemingly an island of verdant calm in the heart of this noisy, jumbled city. No sooner have we set foot on the grass than a group of three local men walks over to us. (Maybe wearing my straw cowboy hat was a mistake). One of the men is carrying a shoeshine box, which should have set off alarm bells but didn’t. After his friend has tried to re-direct us towards one of the “official” tour offices, the shoeshine fellow suddenly looks down and gasps theatrically. “Oh sir, you have shit on your shoe!” he says. “I’m a shoeshine man!”

Sure enough, a big dollop of bird pooh has been squirted onto my right shoe while my attention was elsewhere. I’d heard about this scam earlier, so I’m as annoyed at myself for falling for it as I am at the men around me. “Well… I like shit on my shoe!” I say rather weakly, and march off before he can charge me for cleaning it off. He laughs, pleasantly enough, as if we’re the best of friends and I’ve just made a joke about the hot weather. Once we’re out of sight, I wipe the avian evacuation from my shoe as best I can with a tissue.

We cross the road to walk back to our hotel and are immediately set upon by a group of ladies collecting money for ‘charity’. Before we can utter a word of protest, Indian flags have been pinned to our lapels and the words “children” and “sick” have been used in a vague sort of way by the leading tin-rattler, who, suspiciously, carries not a tin but a roll of bank notes. By this stage, I’m feeling pretty cynical about my fellow man, so I shove a measly ten rupees at the women and, ignoring their protests, walk away. (I hope they weren’t really collecting for sick kids.)

Things pick up a bit in the evening. Having only large banknotes, we opt for dinner at a hotel rather than a roadside dhaba. On the rooftop terrace of The Metropolitan in Paharganj we enjoy lamb tikka, black daal and curried brinjal (aubergine), washed down with a much-needed cold beer.

Day Two

After yesterday’s events, we decide that it might be a good idea to have some sort of a schedule. By this time, we’ve realised that there’s a Metro station ten minutes’ walk from our hotel, which links us conveniently to much of central Delhi including, erm, Connaught Place (d’oh!). The Metro is a crowded but quick and cheap way of getting around town and, more importantly, it’s air-conditioned.

We take the train to the Red Fort (Lal Quila) and, ignoring the efforts of various rickshaw drivers to enlist our patronage, pass through the metal detectors and security pat-downs to go inside.

Built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in the 1640s, the Red Fort was sacked first by the Persian Emperor Nadir Shah in 1739, then by dear old Blighty in 1857 following the Indian Mutiny, or the First War of Independence as it’s called here. Because of this, the interior of the fort is not really as spectacular as you might imagine. Encrusted jewellery and metalwork has been stripped from the various palace buildings and the famous Peacock Throne carted off to Tehran.

Rosie at the Jama Masjid

In the afternoon heat, with sweat stinging our eyes, we head to the Jama Masjid, India’s largest mosque, also built by Shah Jahan. Ignoring the rickshaw driver who tells us that it’s closed (today is a Friday), we climb the main steps just as the lunchtime prayer crowd is leaving. It’s certainly a spectacular building, with huge marble domes and a vast courtyard, big enough to contain 25 000 people. A line of mats is laid out over the paving slabs in the courtyard, and we soon find out why. Without shoes (which have to be removed at the entrance) the slabs, which have been baking in the heat since dawn, are pretty damn toasty. I spend much time hopping around trying to take photos.

Rebuffing the attempts of a random hanger-about to give us a tour (“That is a minaret”; “This is the courtyard”) we climb to the top of the mosque’s tower for a good but dangerous view out over the narrow, crowded alleyways of the city’s Muslim Quarter. On a rooftop nearby, three men fly kites.

Let's go fly a kite...

Day Three

Day Three starts with a definite plan. We’ll take the Metro, which we know quite well by now, to Central Secretariat Station, at the end of the line. From there we’ll take a short walk down to Rajpath, the long boulevard that connects the Colonial-era India Gate monument to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, or parliament building. From there we’ll nip down to the nearby Nehru Museum, take a look around, and be back at our hotel in time for chai and scones and the 4.30 bus to Dharamsala.

As usual in Delhi, things don’t quite run to plan. It’s another hot and dusty summer’s day. As we stagger, sweating, down the Rajpath in the direction of India Gate, we’re plagued by rickshaw drivers who seem to appear from nowhere on the formerly stately and serene boulevard. It’s too far to walk, we’re told, even though we can see the imposing bulk of the monument rising on the horizon less than a kilometre away.

We’re offered ‘free’ rides; we’re offered tours of the city. A simple “no” doesn’t get us anywhere and neither do our attempts to lie ourselves free (we have to meet a friend in 45 minutes, we’ve already seen all the main sights). The only thing that works is to carry on walking and repeating the word “no” until the driver gets bored or finds someone else to follow. The four Indian tourists who are following us towards India Gate on foot soon overtake us and, unmolested, arrive at the monument a good ten minutes before us.

India Gate

India Gate looks, basically, like the Arc de Triomphe. It was erected to commemorate the deaths of both Indian troops and British troops from Indian regiments during the First World War. Busloads of domestic tourists cluster around and take photos while another ‘charity’ collector mutters the words “babies” and “hospital” and tries to pin a flag on me. This time I’m too quick for her though, telling her that I’ve already donated in Connaught Place.

The Nehru Museum proves to be further away than we’d thought. After some top-hole haggling on Rosie’s part we take an auto-rickshaw there. The museum is based in the house that Nehru lived in while he was Prime Minister. It stands on a wide, leafy street a few kilometres from the parliament building, amidst the huge high-gated mansions of today’s elite.

There’s hardly anyone there when we visit, which is a shame, as there are some pretty interesting exhibitions on Nehru, Gandhi and the independence struggle. You can also see the rooms where a young Indira Gandhi slept and where an old Nehru died. The chief attraction of the place however is its aura of shady calm. After the noise and chaos of Delhi, the house and grounds are a peaceful place to rest and gather one’s thoughts. I’m reluctant to leave, but leave we do, our rickshaw bearing us back, past chai wallahs and shoeshine boys, past families sleeping on the pavement and cows chewing on plastic bags, into the racing heart of the city.

Bayon Temple, Angkor Thom

How many pigs can you get on the back of a motorcycle? The answer, it seems, is three. At least, that’s the largest number of porkers that we saw being given a spin around the back roads of Cambodia. Recently slaughtered and stacked neatly behind the driver, their legs swayed loosely each time the vehicle went around a corner, giving the alarming impression that at any moment they might come wriggling and squealing back to life.

And it’s not just pigs either. The Cambodians, perhaps even more than the Vietnamese, love their motorbikes and use them to transport everything from sacks of rice to huge bunches of bananas to families of five. As we bussed, boated and cycled our way around the country we could only shake our heads in wonder each time one of these two-wheeled loads went past, and keep our fingers crossed that it wouldn’t tip over at the next corner. (It never did.)

After spending a few days in Phnom Penh, we travelled to the north-western city of Siem Reap. The main reason we were here was to see the temples and palaces of the Angkor period, built between the 9th and 13th Centuries, when the Cambodians carved out a huge and prosperous empire for themselves that encompassed much of present day Vietnam, Laos, Burma and Thailand.

Dozens of temples and other buildings from the heyday of Angkor’s power are spread out over an area of more than 100 square kilometres around Siem Reap. Many of the most famous and most impressive ruins  are fairly close to town though, so we decided, at least for our first couple of days there, to see the sights by bicycle.

Rosie pursued by hawkers at an Angkor temple

On our first day, having risen at 5.30 AM to avoid the heat and torrential downpours of the afternoon, we cycled to Angkor Wat which is 5km or so from the centre of Siem Reap. On the approach, you cycle around a huge moat, before the complex’s famous towers suddenly reveal themselves to you in all their higgeldy-piggedly glory. A series of bridges and raised walkways leads from outer to inner to inner-inner courtyards, in what some observers have taken as a metaphor for a trip back to the beginnings of the universe. (They might have stopped on their way for a funny cigarette or two.)

Angkor Wat was built by Suryavarman II, who ruled from 1112 to 1152, to honour the Hindu god Vishnu. Indeed, one thing that’s striking when touring the Angkor temples is how much of an Indian influence there is, an influence that sets Cambodia squarely apart from neighbouring Vietnam, where the dominant cultural reference point was historically Chinese. At Angkor, the Hindu gods are as important as the Buddha statues that over time came to replace them, and scenes from the Indian epic the Ramayana can be seen depicted in  relief alongside moments from the lives of the Cambodian kings.

The North Gate, Angkor Thom

For my money, even more spectacular than Angkor Wat is the nearby walled city of Angkor Thom. The six metre high walls have four gates, each presided over by a stern-looking stone head which represents, apparently, the Buddha of Compassion, Avalokiteshvara. At the centre of the palace is the Bayon Temple, a stunning, fragile pile of stones that looks like it might collapse at any moment. Nearby is the Terrace of Elephants which was used for military parades and audiences with the king. Carved elephants, Khmer lions and dancing nymphs watched over us as we clambered up its steps to marvel at its scale and grandeur.

The next couple of days were spent in some pretty hardcore temple-spotting, first by bicycle then, when we had to venture farther afield, by tuk-tuk. Highlights included the overgrown Ta Prohm, where huge tree roots threatened to push over 900-year-old walls, the sprawling Preah Khan complex and the  9th Century Shaivite masterpiece Bakong where, for the first time, the Angkor architects used the tiered pyramidical structure which they’d later perfect at Angkor Wat.

The temples are Cambodia’s biggest tourist attraction, and as such they attract an array of hard-working and eager hawkers, selling everything from flutes to slices of pineapple. As we cycled around, it was quite odd sometimes to hear their shouts following us: “Sir! Cold water, sir!”; “Lady! You want pineapple? Laaaadieeeeeee!”.

There are lots of children working at Angkor too, some of them very young. As we wandered around the temples they clambered after us, carrying postcards, cold water and bracelets. When we told them where we were from, they were able to reel off a series of facts about the UK: “The Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the capital London, the population 60 million”. It’s very hard telling a five-year-old that no, you don’t want to buy anything, but after a while you have to find a nice, gentle way of doing it.

From Siem Reap, we took a boat to Battambang, near the border with Thailand. Battambang is Cambodia’s second city but, from the quiet roads and the unlit streets, you wouldn’t guess it. Maybe it’s something to do with its position on the banks of the sludgy, slow-moving Stung Sangkel River, but the pace of life here seems decidedly slow, in a way that makes it a pleasant place to visit for a day or two.

Meeting the monks. Battambang area.

We took a tuk-tuk along some bumpy backroads to Phnom Sampeau, a hill 18 kilometres from town. On the way we stopped at a pagoda where poor children are looked after by monks for part of the year. They don’t seem to get many visitors: the children followed us around with some interest calling out “hello, hello!”.

Kids at the pagoda. Battambang area.

Phnom Sampeau itself is a long hill which dominates the flat countryside around. It used to be a place where people came to enjoy the cool breeze at the top and to have a leisurely picnic. There’s a cave just below the summit called Theatre Cave which, before civil war broke out in 1970, was used for traditional Khmer theatre performances. Now Theatre Cave is known as ‘the Killing Cave’. Under the Khmer Rouge, prisoners were brought here and thrown to their deaths from an opening high in the rocky roof.

Today in the Killing Cave there’s a shrine to the victims. Bones that have not been identified lie interned in a glass cabinet. Nearby is a huge reclining Buddha statue, and incense burning in a holder.

Climbing back into the fresh air, we reached the summit of the hill, where a stately pagoda looks out across miles of fields. Just below is a huge golden Buddha, erected on the spot where the Crown Prince once prayed for rain during a drought. The rain came and up went the statue in gratitude. Cheeky monkeys try to snatch food from visitors and are chased away by playful young monks, and it’s easy to forget that this place was once the site of so much horror. Once more I was struck by how steadfastly cheerful the Cambodians seem to be and how determined to make the best of the future.

I can't believe it's not Buddha. It is! Phnom Sampeau.

Now who would live in a house like this? The King of mother-lovin' Cambodia, that's who.

One of the first things that we see in Phnom Penh, as we wander along the banks of the Tonlé Sap River, is a young boy catching sparrows. With a snare attached to a long fishing pole he stalks them through the scrubby undergrowth, just a stone’s throw from the Royal Palace. Plucking them deftly one-by-one from the ground, he imprisons them in a cage with dozens of fellow feathered friends.

At first I assume that this must be for food. There’s not much meat on a sparrow, but there do seem to be plenty of desperately poor people in Phnom Penh. But then I start to have doubts: surely that fishing pole could be put to better use in the wide, muddy river that runs through the heart of the capital?

The next day, when visiting the city’s Wat Phnom Pagoda, all becomes clear. A man approaches us outside with a cage of little tweeters and offers to set one free for the sum of $1. “Good luck, good luck” he says. We politely decline. On the steps of the Wat, and all around the city, there are people who probably need a dollar much more than the birds do, and some good luck more than we do too; victims of landmines and war, the disabled, the vulnerable, children. One way or another, poverty is much more visible in Cambodia than in neighbouring Vietnam, the socialist system in the latter providing at least some kind of social safety net.

As we sit in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club later, I get the slightly uncomfortable feeling that we’re back in colonial times. Inside Europeans sit on the balcony sipping drinks and watching the world go by while outside – across the road in fact – poor children sit on the riverbank.

Despite its relative poverty, Phnom Penh is a fascinating place. It’s not the prettiest city in Asia by a long way, but there’s something about it that’s refreshingly down-to-earth and a little bit mysterious too. Go out at night in the city centre and you’ll be faced by an overwhelming darkness and stillness, punctuated here and there by the lights of government buildings and bars catering to foreigners and ex-pats. There are few cars on the road and few people in the street, and this after a decade of huge growth, economically and demographically.

In the mornings, we watched saffron-robed monks walk in small groups from shop to shop to beg for alms. In the cafés nearby we discovered not one but two excellent English language newspapers – The Phnom Penh Post and The Cambodia Daily – and a pretty good French language one – Le Cambodge Soir – too. How these papers are viable in a country of only 15 million people, most of them Khmer speakers, I couldn’t tell you.

The stories printed did not always inspire great faith in the government. In a typical week there was one about the forcible displacement of HIV positive slum-dwellers from the city to a camp in the countryside and another about the government’s angry reaction to a World Wildlife Fund report suggesting that the Irrawaddy river dolphin is nearing extinction in Cambodia (the WWF were telling ‘lies’ and the board should resign, the minister responsible said). But they did testify to the freedom of the press in this once rigidly-controlled country. Or at least, to the freedom of the foreign language press, which must have a fairly limited readership.

Some light relief: a monkey scratches himself inappropriately.

Back at Wat Phnom, an elephant was having its afternoon shower and a monkey was scratching itself inappropriately. We’d come here both to climb to the highest point in the city (erm, it’s not very high) and to see where the story of Phnom Penh began. The first pagoda was supposedly built here by one Lady Penh (‘Phnom Penh’ means ‘Penh’s hill’) in 1373 to house four golden Buddha statues that she found in a tree that washed ashore from the river. Inside the present day pagoda, at the top of the hill, a glittering and – dare I say it? – slightly gaudy selection of Buddhas sits on a dias, one with an electric space-age halo. The faithful come to pray and leave incense burning before the altar.

Later, we headed to the Central Market (Psar Thmei) for a good nose around the stalls and a bowl of noodle soup, before walking down to the Royal Palace, residence of King Norodom Sihanouk and his family. Much of it is off limits to the public but the bits that we did see, including the famous Silver Pagoda, were impressive, although not exactly restrained in their use of gold and diamonds to coat every available surface.

As a tourist, you can’t walk anywhere in central Phnom Penh without being offered a tuk-tuk ride every two minutes. “Do you want to see The Killing Fields, sir?” is a common refrain shouted by beaming tuk-tuk drivers. To see the horrors of Cambodia’s recent history transformed so quickly into tourist attractions is unsettling, but understandable – this is a poor country after all. As well as the Choeung Ek Killing Fields, 14 kilometres from town, you can also visit the notorious Tuol Sleng or S-21 Detention Centre where, under the Khmer Rouge, 12 000 people were tortured before being executed. I didn’t have the inclination or the stomach to go to the place. One can only hope that the people who do behave as they would at Belsen or Auschwitz.

Indeed it’s strange when travelling around Cambodia to think that anyone you meet who’s over 30 somehow managed to survive that time, when around 1 ½ million people out of a population of 7 million were murdered or died from starvation, slave labour and disease. What’s all the more remarkable is what a friendly, happy bunch of people the Cambodians seem to be today. Almost everywhere we went we were greeted with a wide, warm smile. It seems that the woolly humanist conclusion is the correct one here: when a country has been through so much horror, its people truly appreciate all the things that we rich foreigners take for granted – peace, enough to eat, and a roof over your head.

But I don’t speak Khmer, so I couldn’t say for sure.

The walls of the citadel in Hué

In Hoi An we ate ‘white roses’ – tiny shrimp fried in thin rice paper parcels. In Saigon we had spring rolls, greasy and spicy and still-hot from the pan. In Hué a speciality was bahn xio – shrimp, beansprouts and shredded pork wrapped in a crispy, crèpe-like pancake, while in Hanoi, we ate pho bo – a spicy soup of beef and noodles – almost every day, while steering well clear of Dog Meat Alley.

Vietnamese food is like that. As you travel from town to town you find that each place has its own repertoire of signature dishes, all made with ingredients fresh from the local market.

And the towns themselves are like that too. The six or seven that we visited during our three weeks in the country all had a very different feel from one another, each with its own distinct identity, history and culture.

Our first stop after Hanoi was Hué, the former capital city. From 1802 to 1945, emperors from the Nguyen Dynasty ruled Vietnam from here, for much of that time under the supervision of the French colonial authorities. The citadel that the emperors built was also the scene of heavy fighting during the Tet Offensive of 1968, when American soldiers holed up inside against the Viet Cong advance.

Hello moto. Rosie and driver.

The citadel, then, was our first point of call in town, and it is indeed a good place to start. The war damage has been largely repaired, leaving an imposing, grandiose and, in places, still crumbling palace complex. The most obvious centre point is the throne room, from which the emperor issued orders to his generals and mandarins (but not apparently to his satsumas). There’s a lot of citadel to explore elsewhere though, with walled gardens, pagodas and a confusing array of palaces-within-palaces, so much so that it’s easy to find yourself suddenly wandering around on your own.

The next day, we took a motorbike tour around town as part of a small group, with each tourist sitting on the back of their own driver’s mount. Once you get used to being out in the somewhat unpredictable Vietnamese traffic with absolutely no control over steering, braking, or whether you live or die, a motorbike tour is actually a pretty good way to see Hué.

Our drivers took us first to a pagoda just outside town, where the monks were in full song at morning prayers. In the grounds, a couple of football nets gave an indication of how they spent their less contemplative hours. We also visited a ‘Vietnamese Colosseum’, where fights used to be staged between tigers and elephants, and one of the thirteen whacking great tombs that the emperors built for themselves along the banks of the Perfume River.

At the Thien Mu Pagoda, we watched monks hard at work in the garden and admired the holy wedding cake-like architecture. Built in the 17^th Century, this was the home of the monk Thich Quang Duc, who publicly burned himself to death in Saigon in 1963 to protest against the policies of the South Vietnamese Government. Also harking back to the Sixties was the American gun emplacement that we visited, set at a strategic point overlooking the river and the border with Laos. In the distance was ‘Hamburger Hill’ where heavy fighting in 1969 left hundreds of locals, Viet Cong and American troops dead. Our guide tells us that tribespeople in the area are still so angry about this – and who can blame them? – that anyone who looks American and wants to visit the hill has to travel with police protection.

Our next stop, via train and taxi was Hoi An which, if anything, was even more laid-back than Hué. Hoi An used to be a thriving port town, and today gets by on its reputation as the tailoring capital of Vietnam. We tried very hard to do cultural things – visiting the nearby Cham ruins at My Son and a few of the town’s various temples and pagodas – but most of the time it was too hot and humid even to walk to the corner shop. The evenings were more bearable, and were spent sitting by the riverside, sipping a cold drink and watching the bright lights and crowds of the night market on the opposite bank.

A little further down the coast is Nha Trang, which we travelled to by night bus. In theory, the rows of beds on the bus allow passengers to get a good night’s sleep while being whisked somnambulantly to their destination. In practice, unless you’re under 5′ 5” and can sleep through the regular honking of the driver’s horn, you’ll be sore and sleepy the next morning. Nha Trang was, to quote a maxim popular all over south-east Asia, ‘same-same but different’. It’s a nice enough place to spend a couple of days but is a little bit touristy, with pizzerias, burger bars and a strip of golden, cigarette-butt-strewn sand.

Rosie crosses 'the bridge of death', near Dalat

It was still ridiculously hot, so we did the only thing we could think of and headed for the hills. To be more precise, we headed to Dalat, or ‘Da Lat’ (it’s written both ways) in the Central Highlands. Dalat’s chief selling point is that it’s a good 10 degrees cooler than the coast, with temperatures rarely rising above 25 degrees C. The surrounding area is something of a veg basket for the rest of the country, with all manners of fruit, vegetables and coffee being grown on the cool upland slopes. There’s even wine made here although the results, based on the few tastings that we did, are not as yet fantastic.

Dalat itself is not exactly Shangri La – it’s much bigger and noisier that we’d expected. The surrounding countryside is very pretty though, as we found out when we set out on an 18 kilometre trek one day. Our route took us up pine-covered hills, through coffee plantations and hill-tribe villages and across a couple of extremely rickety bridges.

After Dalat, we headed to Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City – the two names are used fairly interchangeably – which we reached after an inexplicably long bus journey (8 ½ hours to cover 200 kilometres!).

Saigon is a less obviously charming city than Hanoi but less chaotic too, with wide boulevards in place of the capital’s network of tiny, twisting alleyways. It’s also more obviously a centre for commerce and business, with shopping malls and shiny new buildings dotted amongst the old.

Public health posters in Saigon

On our first day in town we went to visit Reunification Palace, formerly the seat of the South Vietnamese Government. An iconic moment came on 30^th April 1975, when Viet Cong tanks broke through the palace gates forcing the final surrender of the South Vietnamese. We took a free English language tour with a family of corpulent, stair-avoiding Indians and saw, amongst other things, the operations bunkers where the South Vietnamese met and planned the war, the apartment where President Diem (assassinated in 1963) lived with his family and the rooms where foreign allies, including Henry Kissinger, were received.

Given how much the Viet Cong and the Vietnamese in general suffered during the war, the tone of the tour and the exhibitions in the palace was surprisingly measured and non-aggressive.

Next we headed to the War Remnants Museum, a collection of photos and artifacts from the American War, as ‘the Vietnam War’ is called here. There are some pretty horrific images, as there should be, of the effects of U.S. bombing and the use of Agent Orange, and of the massacre of civilians. A tourist ahead of me takes photos of the most harrowing images on his mobile ‘phone. Luckily for him there’s no-one around to administer a good kick up the backside.

The next day we went to see the famous Cu Chi tunnels, 40 kilometres or so to the north of the city. The Cu Chi tunnels form part of an underground network that extends for 200km in the area, right to the Cambodian border. Construction was started during the war against the French and continued throughout the American war, with the network gradually expanding, giving the Vietnamese the ability to launch surprise attacks before disappearing without trace.

The first tunnel that we take a look at has an entrance so small that only some of the Asian tourists and smaller European women can fit in. Later we have the opportunity to crawl along a 20 metre section of slightly (and I mean only slightly) larger tunnel. We’re on the topmost of a series of three descending levels, each hotter, darker and more cramped than the last. Nevertheless it’s pretty claustrophobic, and not a nice place to be. Although better than being shot at by Americans, I suppose…

Point well made: a very nasty booby-trap, yesterday.

We also saw some of the homemade booby traps that the V.C. used and had an opportunity to shoot an AK47 rifle on a nearby firing range, an opportunity that, in the end, I didn’t take. Something just doesn’t seem right about loosing off a few rounds for fun in the middle of a former war zone, no matter how enthusiastically you’re encouraged to do so.

As if to underscore this, on the way back our tour bus stopped at a government-run craft centre for victims of Agent Orange, the chemical used by the U.S. to defoliate much of central and southern Vietnam. Physical and mental disabilities are still common among children born in the affected areas. The craft centres give working-age victims the change to earn a living by producing handicrafts for the tourist trade. We didn’t have room for any handicrafts in our backpacks, but we did buy a cold drink or two before heading back to town.

In Saigon, the traffic whirred on regardless. Vietnam today is an overwhelmingly young country, with its eyes set firmly on the future rather than the past, or at least that’s the impression we had. The majority of the Vietnamese we met, at least in the towns, were born after the war. They owned scooters, dressed fashionably, used the internet, and worked long, long hours. In Hanoi we even saw a teenage girl wearing a top emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes. She didn’t seem to be trying to make a political point; it was just a nice design to wear. At the same time, in the countryside farmers work the land with the ox and the plough. And newspapers reported recently that a well-known Saigon lawyer had been arrested for ‘undermining the socialist system’ by openly criticising government policy. A country of contrasts then… and beyond that, I’ll say no more for now.

Hanoi traffic

Over the last three weeks, Rosie and I have spent a lot of time in Vietnamese places beginning with the letter ‘h’: Halong Bay, Hué, Hoi An, Ho Chi Minh City. But for us, Vietnam began with The Big H – the capital city Hanoi, where we landed on 28^th May.

The first thing we had to learn in Hanoi, as a matter of some urgency, was how to cross the road. ‘Mirror, signal, position, manoeuvre’; that’s what I remember from my driving lessons all those years ago. Well, in Vietnam – and in Hanoi in particular – things are slightly different. The advice given to motorists here seems to be something like: ‘honk, honk, honk, manoeuvre, then honk again, just to be on the safe side’.

There’s roughly one scooter per person in Hanoi, and at rush hour (and at other times of day for that matter) the traffic rattles along in a seemingly never-ending, chaotic stream, with scant regard for pedestrian crossings, traffic lights or any of the other niceties of Western motoring.

Crossing the road involves walking slowly, but confidently, into the traffic . No matter how narrow the street, you have to divide it into imaginary lanes and cross one stage at a time, all the while maintaining eye contact with the scooter riders, cyclists and motorists who are bearing down on you. And it’s not just foreigners who have problems crossing the road either. On our first day in Hanoi three young Vietnamese girls lined up beside me and crossed the road in my shelter, giggling nervously when we reached the other side in one piece. (Perhaps they were visiting from the countryside.)

In a strange way Hanoi reminded me of the Sicilian capital Palermo. For a start there were the scooters which were everywhere, sneaking up on you in the narrowest of alleyways and clustering untidily on the pavements. Then there was the layout of the city itself, with its French colonial architecture, its balconies and squares, and its miles of market stalls selling fresh produce. There was the Italian-style driving, of course, and, to top it all, there was a Catholic Cathedral near our guesthouse, with bells that sounded a deathly peal on the hour.

Slightly more Vietnamese are the pagodas on Hoan Kiem Lake in the centre of town. Legend has it that in the 15^th Century the Vietnamese King Le Thai To defeated the invading Chinese with a sword lent to him by the gods. Having scored this victory, the sword was taken from the king by a golden tortoise which, in a rather Arthurian moment, swam with it into the lake and disappeared. Today, on an island in the lake is Tortoise Tower, a tiny fortified pagoda. On a slightly larger island to the north of the lake is Ngoc Song Temple, which is connected to the mainland by a bridge. The temple houses a shrine to the famous hero-king along with the preserved remains of a pretty big tortoise which may or may not have lived in the lake.

Inside the Temple of Literature

On another day, we took a walk up to Van Mieu, the Temple of Literature. This isn’t actually a library, as the name might suggest, but a series of interlinked pagodas begun in the 11^th Century and extended and rebuilt ever since. It was also the country’s first university and, as such, is a symbol of national pride, with displays on, and shrines to the kings associated with its heyday. On a quiet day, Van Mieu would, I’m sure, be a place for quiet contemplation away from the noise of the city. On the day that we passed through however, a huge group of Young Pioneers was also visiting. The children were good-natured but noisy, chatting among themselves and shouting out “hello, hello” when we walked past.

‘Hello’ seems to be the one foreign word that all Vietnamese children know. The Vietnamese may drink coffee and eat baguettes, but the French language seems to have all but died out in the country, much to the chagrin, I’m sure, of the Institute Française, which is still very active here. Only the old, who were educated under the colonial system seem to speak French; elsewhere, it’s English all the way. Children in school learn English, people who work in the tourist industry speak English, and menus are in Vietnamese and English. It was all a little bit embarrassing for us, in a convenient kind of way.

In fact, being in Asia, I’ve really started to appreciate the power that English is gaining these days as a global lingua franca. Regional broadcasters from Japan, China and elsewhere screen English language TV programmes, there are English language newspapers printed everywhere from Bangkok to Hanoi to Tokyo and, more than once, I’ve heard Asians of different nationalities use English to communicate with one another.

Is this a good thing? I’m sure that lots of people (especially the French) would say no. And in a sense, English is a bit like the McDonald’s of languages, popping up everywhere and making the world a less diverse, exciting place. But, on the other hand, unless we all start speaking Esperanto, then surely some languages will inevitably gain the upper hand over others, for everyone’s convenience. Anyway, I’ll let greater minds than mine puzzle this one out…

Going back to Hanoi for a moment, let me tell you a little bit the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, which Rosie and I tried – and failed – to visit. 40 years after his death, ‘Uncle Ho’ is still everywhere in Vietnam: a friendly, avuncular face smiling up from bank notes, political posters and portraits in buildings public and private. When he died, his body was preserved Lenin-style, by being pumped full of chemicals so that it could be viewed by future generations. We turned up at the mausoleum – an impressive block of granite surrounded by soldiers and a huge public square – to find it closed. Apparently once a year Uncle Ho is shipped off the Moscow for ‘essential maintenance work’, so we can only assume that’s where he was.

Another very touristy thing that we did was to go and watch some traditional Vietnamese water puppetry at the Water Puppetry Theatre (where else?) in central Hanoi. This form of puppetry developed in the rural north where, after the yearly harvest, the empty rice paddies would be used as big outdoor stages. From behind a curtain the puppeteers, waist-deep in water, act out traditional stories using puppets controlled from below the surface of the water. Meanwhile, a band plays music and sings. The stories we saw reflected age-old rural concerns – how to keep a fox away from your ducks for example – as well as being by turns comedic (a man trying to catch a fish, but catching his wife) and historic (a re-telling of the legend of Le Thai To and the tortoise). I enjoyed it a lot, as did the little boy a few rows ahead bouncing and waving his arms in time to the music, and the old man behind us who broke into song every few minutes.

If it's in a museum, it can't be rude... Carvings at The Museum of Ethnography in Hanoi.

Hanoi then: I could write a lot more about it and I could have spent a lot longer there. It’s the kind of city where you’re always discovering new things, where a walk around the block or a trip across the road is an adventure in itself, where the people are friendly, the food tasty and the beer cheap (but a little too gassy).

Cam on, goodnight, and tam biet, as they say around these parts.

'The staircase to the moon', in Broome

There’s roadkill, and then there’s roadkill. Driving through Australia, Rosie and I had become used to the sight of kangaroos strewn along the roadside in various states of decomposition, but it wasn’t until we arrived in Western Australia that we saw our first roadkill cow.

Futile zig-zagging black tyre tracks led to her; a snow-white two-tonne heiffer lying docile on the verge, her stiff legs skyward. As we headed south along the Great Northern Highway, things only got worse. Every few kilometres there would be a new bovine mess, sometimes fresh and bloody and keen, and at others nothing more than bleached bones and a sun-tanned hide. At one point we had to steer around a three cow pile-up. It wasn’t pretty, I can tell you.

The road trains are mostly responsible for this carnage. Long, powerful interstate trucks with three or four carriages apiece, they can’t (or won’t) stop for anything. And then there are the cows themselves, which wander dumbly across the road from giant unfenced cattle stations with scant regard for the Green Cross Code.

Our journey across Western Australia started in Broome, in the state’s tropical north-west. Now technically speaking Broome isn’t an island, but it certainly feels like one. On three sides you have hundreds of miles of parched red desert and on the fourth nothing but the Indian Ocean, stretching wide and blue over the horizon towards Indonesia. Being in Broome reminded me a lot of our stay in Rarotonga at the end of last year. There’s the same disconnected, slightly eccentric feel to the place, and the same kind of elastic approach to time-keeping too (‘Broome time’ is what the locals call it).

"Bring me a crocodile sandwich, and make it snappy!"

Broome started life as a pearling town and, as such, has an interesting, not to say lively history. The first European pearlers arrived on the scene in the 1870s, initially press-ganging local Aborigines into service before replacing them with Japanese divers who arrived en masse from their homeland following an attack by an angry mother whale on a small fishing village (I’m not making this up).

In its early years, Broome had a reputation for being a rather sordid mosquito-ridden slum, so much so that the Governor of the Swan River Colony, Sir Frederick Napier Broome, after whom the town was named, petitioned unsuccessfully for the name to be changed. In later years it enjoyed greater prosperity, with the telegraph cable linking Australia to the rest of the world coming ashore at the town’s Cable Beach in 1889.

Now I love cinema as much as the next man – if the next man’s Barry Norman or Mark Cousins – and I also love history too, so one of my favourite places in Broome was the Sun Pictures Theatre, a beautiful, heritage-listed cinema built in 1916. The theatre is open-air, with deck chairs to sit in and a screen mounted on the back of a neighbouring building. It’s also right under the flightpath of Broome’s airport, so from time-to-time during a performance (we went to see the ubiquitous Slumdog Millionaire) there are a few extra sound effects from above.

On another evening we went to see Broome’s famous ‘Staircase to the Moon’; an optical illusion created by the full moon reflecting on mud flats at low tide. The effect does indeed look like a silvery staircase to the stars. After many failed attempts to photograph the scene (see above) we sat back on the beach to enjoy the spectacle, happy that we’d had the good fortune to be in town at just the right time (the ‘staircase’ can only be seen when there’s a full moon).

After the moon had risen, I thought about taking a stroll out over the mud flats, but for some reason decided against it. The next day, when we went back to the Town Beach and saw a sign warning that a saltwater crocodile had been spotted in the bay, I was glad that I hadn’t. Undeterred by the warning, a fat little local boy went splashing into the sea for a swim. I readied my camera, just in case anything happened, but happily for him the croc was nowhere to be seen. On the same afternoon we saw dolphins jumping around in the outgoing tide just a hundred metres or so from the shore. The beach was almost deserted – most tourists head for the sandier, more glamorous Cable Beach – so we had the dolphins almost to ourselves for half an hour.

We saw a lot of other interesting things in Broome too, from five metre ‘salties’ at Malcolm Douglas’ Crocodile Park to Aboriginal art in the town’s galleries, to Louis Theroux (or at least someone who looked very like him) at our hostel. But I don’t have the time to tell you about those right now, because our road trip proper demands attention.

We left Broome in a clapped-out campervan that we’d hired to drive the 2 200 kilometres to Perth. The company involved is well-known for the witty and/or lewd quotations that are printed on the back of its vans. As ours was heading to Perth for a re-paint, we were given the chance to suggest a quote and came up with this piece of modified Marxism (of the Groucho school): ‘One morning I shot a kangaroo in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I’ll never know’. Predictably, we got something altogether different on the back of the van, with words missing, too many exclamation marks and grocer’s apostrophes all over the place. You just can’t get the staff these days, I tell you.

Such minor problems aside, we tootled and putt-putted down the coastal road, making only a short diversion inland to the Karijini National Park. At least it looked like a short diversion on the map. In reality it took six hours to get there and six hours back, through a landscape strewn with piles of perfectly round, red rocks, stacked neatly like marbles, and cows, dead cows – lots of them. We spent the night in a wilderness campsite surrounded by dingoes and some of the most stunning scenery that we’d seen in Australia so far. In the morning we walked into a canyon where Rosie went for a swim at the foot of a waterfall. It would have been great to stay longer but, as with so much in Western Australia, there just wasn’t time.

"Oh, sorry mate - I thought you was that Jacques Cousteau."

A few hundred more kilometres down the road is Exmouth, and the Ningaloo Reef. The Ningaloo Reef is less well-known than the Great Barrier Reef but in some ways equally spectacular. In many places you can swim out to it from the shore and trouble the colourful little fishes to your heart’s content. At a beach called Turquoise Bay Rosie snorkelled, drifting with the tide over the coral, while I splashed around and saw very little indeed, there being no speccy-friendly snorkelling masks available.

The next day we headed for Coral Bay, a tiny town across the peninsula from Exmouth. From the beach, you can wade out into the shallows to the edge of a sandbank which suddenly drops away at your feet to the ocean floor. There, just 50 metres from the shore, is the reef. We took a trip in a glass-bottomed boat and saw schools of red snapper and small brightly-coloured fish brilliant against the green and brown coral. The fish, particularly the snappers, swam up close against the glass-bottom of the boat, peering in at us as we peered at them. At first I took this for natural curiousity. Later, when we stopped and were invited to throw a few fish pellets into the water, I realised the real reason for their interest.

At Coral Bay

Later, on the beach, I waded out into the shallow water of the low tide and watched as a two-foot-long bream and an even bigger manta ray swam around and past my bare feet. I followed the ray for a while, but he slithered and slinked away from me in that sneaky way that rays have.

Our last major stop on the way to Perth was at Cervantes, a small town around 200 km to the north of the city. Cervantes is named after a U.S. whaling vessel that was shipwrecked there in 1844. Nearby is the Pinnacles Desert, where an otherworldly collection of man-size stone pillars stretches out for miles like some kind of Antipodean Terracotta Army. The pillars were formed when shells from a long-dead sea were moulded under pressure into rock tough enough to survive while all around it eroded. We visited at sunset when, on a cloudless day, the shadows cast by the clusters of rock are supposedly very impressive. Unfortunately it was cloudy when we were there, but the Pinnacles themselves (as they’re known) were impressive enough in whatever light there was.

The Pinnacles

One final question for you: what’s the earliest date that Europeans are known to have lived in Australia? If you’re thinking 1788, or even 1770, then, as they used to say on Banzai!, “You wrong!”. In fact, the first documented European arrivals were two Dutchmen who were marooned in Western Australia in 1629.

In the 17^th Century, Holland was king of the swingers in the nascent art of colonialism, with bases in the spice islands of modern-day Indonesia and in Batavia, now Jakarta. The Dutch kind-of knew that Australia was there, because every so often one of their ships would crash into it, but they didn’t quite know whether they were dealing with an island or a series of islands or a new continent. And as there weren’t any spices there, they weren’t particularly interested either.

In 1629, the Dutch trading ship the Batavia ran aground on a reef near the Abrolhos Islands of Western Australia. The crew managed to get to land, but the ship broke up. After a fruitless search for fresh water, the captain, Francisco Pelsaert sailed for Batavia to get help. Unfortunately, the men he left in charge had been planning a mutiny for some time, and they took advantage of his absence to have one, murdering over 100 men, women and children in the process. Against the odds, Pelsaert made it back. Once he found out what had been going on, he tried and hanged the main conspirators on the islands. The captain took pity on a couple of the younger mutineers however, and marooned them on the mainland, leaving them with orders to do all they could to make contact with the natives and open up future trade links. And that’s the last anyone heard of them…

The point of this little history lesson is that I’d been reading up on Pelsaert’s exploits in a library in Melbourne but had never heard anything about the wreck of the Batavia being salvaged. Imagine my surprise then when, in Fremantle, just south of Perth, we stumbled into part of the Batavia almost by accident at the Maritime Museum Shipwrecks Gallery. The port side of the stern of the ship was discovered and raised in 1972, 343 years after she sank. The wood was only preserved for so long because it was buried under coral, and it was preserved rather well.

And so from the first Europeans to arrive, to among the last Europeans to leave… After a few days in Perth, Rosie and I had a last, sentimental Bundaberg Ginger Beer, discussed our thongs and the esky and stubbie holders for the last time, and boarded a flight bound for Hanoi, and fresh, moderately-priced adventure.

Somewhere over the rainbow... The mythical Land of Oz.

“I’ve been everywhere, man / I’ve been everywhere.” So sings Johnny Cash in his 1960s hit single I’ve Been Everywhere, before going on to give a list of place names that have, erm, nothing to do with the theme of this article.

But you get the general idea: since my last post, I’ve been all over the proverbial shop in the mythical land of Oz. Here’s a little summary of some of the places I’ve been and the lessons I’ve learned:

Coober Pedy

Coober Pedy is a small, dry town in the middle of the South Australian desert. Summer temperatures reach 50 degrees C, water has to be shipped in from down-state, and the dusty, fly-blown soil supports neither life nor tent pegs (as we found to our cost). In fact, about the only thing Coober Pedy has going for it is the abundance of opal deposits in its rocky earth.

Since these deposits were discovered in the early 20^th Century, the town and its environs have been fairly extensively mined, first with the shovel and the pick, then later with dynamite. Driving into town, we crossed the opal fields; a barren, lunar landscape, pockmarked with triangular molehills of dirt, marking the spots where present-day prospectors are working their claims. Notices warned against wandering around in the opal fields, as there are some very deep shafts waiting to swallow the unwary tourist.

In Coober Pedy itself, much of the population lives underground, in a trend which was started by soldiers returning from World War One. We took a tour at the Umoona Opal Mine and Museum and saw some of these underground dwellings. They’re built far enough down in the rock to maintain almost a constant cool temperature throughout the year which, with the extremes of the desert climate, is a definite plus point. Most of the houses are, in fact, abandoned, ‘worked-out’ mine shafts. This didn’t always stop their inhabitants doing a bit of dynamite-assisted D.I.Y. though. Our guide, an ex-miner, told us how it used to be a fairly regular occurrence for neighbours to blow holes in each others’ living room walls while doing a little home-mining, until a city council ordinance imposed massive fines to put a stop to such ‘accidents’.

The next day, we visited an underground Catholic Church, which I described in the visitors’ book as ‘a little ripper’. I hope that God has a sense of humour…

On the way south to Adelaide – almost 1000 kilometres from CP – it rained relentlessly, something that doesn’t happen very often around these parts. We picked up a local station on the car radio and listened to a phone-in discussion about – what else? – the rain. “Now over to Jeff in Mount Gambier,” the presenter would say. “Jeff, have you had any rain there?”. “Naw mate, not a drop.” And so on.

Holy Mackeral Batman - it's smalltown Australia!

Sydney

We arrived in Sydney just in time for ANZAC Day (25^th April), when Australians honour the sacrifices of their war dead by getting blind drunk and throwing up in an alleyway. To be fair, the ANZAC Day church services do start very early in the day – in many places there’s one at dawn – and the heavy drinking comes later. Also, many of the people we saw staggering about the streets of Sydney at 9pm were military personnel, for whom this must have been a rare day off.

Many of the things that Sydney has to offer the visitor – an Opera House tour, a Harbour Bridge climb, a trip to Taronga Zoo – were beyond our means, so instead we spent time wandering around on foot which, it has to be said, is probably the best way of seeing the city. Sydney’s suburbs follow the twists and turns of her harbour, with coastal tracks and ferry services often connecting them far more directly than roads do.

We spent a windy afternoon walking from Bondi Beach to Coogee Beach, and the next day headed to Manly where yet more white sand and tanned flesh awaited our pale Pommy eyes. Manly was named by Arthur Phillip, Captain of the British First Fleet, who is said to have been impressed by the natives’ ‘manly’ physiques. Other places named by Phillip include Phwoar! Bay and Hello Sailor, How’s Your Father Cove. Or maybe I just made that last bit up – I’ll let you decide.

We walked over the Harbour Bridge of course, and also a few times around the Opera House, which international backpackers in our hostel were in the amusing habit of calling ‘the Oprah House’. (If that’s not an example of American cultural imperialism, I’m not sure what is.) Like a movie star, the Opera House is smaller in real life but otherwise exactly as you’d imagine it, with improbable, graceful curves that just cry out to be photographed.

The Blue Mountains

We moved on to the Blue Mountains, a couple of hours’ drive inland from Sydney. Australian place names – at least those that don’t come from Aboriginal words – have a habit of being obviously, even brutally descriptive. See a big hill somewhere, and the chances are that it’ll be called ‘Big Hill’.

The Blue Mountains are no exception to this rule: they are indeed very blue. Their blueness comes from the way that the light hits the mist which rises from the eucalyptus trees which cover almost every inch of them. We did a few walks in the mountains, including one around the ridge of part of the range. Along with spectacular views out over the basin, we saw laughing kookaburras, parrots and colourful songbirds, but sadly none of the speckled drongos that I’d been reading up on in Sydney.

At night, it gets cold in the Blue Mountains, and I mean properly cold – European cold! On our first night, even fleeces and woolly hats weren’t enough to keep out the chill and we were forced to repair to the local tavern to keep from freezing in our campervan. Four pints of Guinness later, I was well-insulated for the night ahead, but still left facing the problem of how exactly I’d be getting to the campsite toilet block at 3 AM without developing frostbite.

The aptly-named Big Prawn in Ballina, New South Wales.

Nimbin

Nimbin is both a quiet town of 500 souls in the gentle, rolling countryside of the New South Wales dairy belt and, to quote Mark from TV’s Peep Show, ‘a hippie free-for-all’. Its fortunes as a farming town had faded, and many of its buildings had fallen into disrepair when, in 1973, a whole heap of hippies showed up for the Age of Aquarius Festival.

Many of them liked Nimbin so much that they decided to stay and establish a progressive, alternative community that would explore new and better ways of living. Oh, and smoke dope of course. Mustn’t forget about the dope.

We arrived a few days after the town’s annual Mardi Grass cannabis festival had ended, but the party still seemed to be in full-swing. One of the first sights to greet us was that of a bare-chested, dreadlocked fellow sitting by a stream and playing his flute to… no-one in particular. In a town park, a Japanese drummer beat out a crazy rhythm on his bongos while his friends danced nearby, while across the street a man in a tie-dye shirt seemed to have lost his dog Hash (at least that’s what he kept calling out).

You get the sense that it’s always a bit like this in Nimbin. Someone later told us that, ironically, the police were actually a bit stricter than usual at Mardi Grass this year, and that consequently there was a real shortage of the old wacky-baccy at the festival. Try telling that to the guy with the flute.

If you are ever in Nimbin, I can recommend the museum there which is called, conveniently, the Nimbin Museum. The museum is as eccentric as the town itself, featuring a seemingly random collection of objects assembled in a style reminiscent of a well-appointed junkyard. The decorated shells of VW Combi vans sit side-by-side with archive newspaper reports about Aboriginal land rights and video footage of the museum being raided by police in a drugs bust. No real narrative is given; instead you’re just left to work things out for yourself which, in Nimbin, seems to be the way things are done.

The Outback, yesterday

What’s big and red and covered in flies? Well, besides Sarah Fergusson the answer is of course the central Australian Outback, to which Rosie and I repaired this week after five months of living and working in Melbourne.

We first flew to Alice Springs, where we hired a gas-guzzling four-wheel-drive vehicle for a trip across the red heart of the continent. From Alice we headed west along sealed roads before, in true Fast Show style, going off-road and following the 200-odd kilometres of the Mereenie Loop track to King’s Canyon.

Now the first thing to say about the Outback is that, if you let them, the flies will drive you mad. Within seconds of stepping from your vehicle, you’ll be surrounded by a cloud of insects, trying their level best to get into your eyes, ears, nose, mouth and any other orifice they can find. Getting back into the vehicle is even more difficult. Rosie and I evolved a little ‘fly dance’ which sent the wee beasties skywards for a few seconds, giving us a brief opportunity to get back into the car without taking too many of them with us.

From a fly’s point of view, I suppose, finding a person in millions of acres of uninhabited Outback must be something of a coup: something to tell the grandchildren about even. But for the life of me, I can’t see why they’re so keen to land on us. I watched one of the blighters the other day as he settled down on my arm just to see what he’d do. Would he suck the moisture from my skin? Would he bite me and draw blood? No, he just gave himself a little wash, then sat and enjoyed the view.

There are no flies on Rosie Niven.

Having perfected our ‘Aussie wave’ (the hand sweeping windscreen-wiper-like in front of the face every few seconds) we arrived at King’s Canyon, a yawning red chasm in the middle of the desert. We followed the Rim Walk (stop that sniggering you at the back) for spectacular, jaw-dropping views over the surprisingly fertile canyon below. At night, we heard dingoes howling in the sand dunes near our campsite. Posted about the place were dire warnings against feeding these animals or otherwise treating them like domestic dogs. ‘A fed dingo is a dead dingo’ apparently: if they get too used to human company they become more of a danger to children, so have to be shot by a friendly ranger.

The next day, we headed to Uluru or Ayers Rock. Few images can be considered as quintessentially Australian as that of the sun rising or setting over Uluru. You’ve seen it before and I’ve seen it before, on postcards, tourist brochures and beermats. Strange then to think that this iconic monolith was for so long unknown to white Australia. The first European explorer, William Gosse, arrived in the region in 1873, naming the rock after the governor of South Australia, the nearest British colony at the time. Soon afterwards, cattle ranchers arrived and changed the lives of the local Aborigines forever. Within a generation, they’d lost access to most of the land that they’d had custody of for thousands of years and were reduced to hunting dingos for the bounty on their scalps. Today, while much of the Northern Territory remains in the hands of the ranchers, the Uluru-Kata-Tjuta National Park has been handed back to the land’s traditional owners – the Anangu Aboriginal tribes – on the condition that they lease it back to the government for 99 years.

Uluru itself is the focal point for many of the Anangu’s ‘dreamtime’ creation myths. As you walk around the base of the rock, there are signs requesting that you not photograph certain areas because of their sacred nature and the fact that they’re still used today for Aboriginal ceremonies. Like an iceberg, two thirds of the rock is reckoned to be underground, but that doesn’t stop it being an impressive sight. The base walk is 11 kilometres (6-ish miles) and the colour, even on a cloudy day, is a deep otherworldly red.

The base walk at Uluru

Climbing Uluru is a bit like farting in a cathedral: you can do it, but you probably shouldn’t. One of the Anangu myths involving the rock tells of how their dreamtime ancestors clambered to the top and planted a ceremonial staff there, cementing the relationship between the people and the land. Anangu signs at the base of the climb ask visitors to show respect by not climbing the rock. Nevertheless, a significant number of people still do, although when we visited the climb was closed due to high winds.

If a bad conscience isn’t enough to put you off climbing Uluru, then a display in the visitor’s centre might. The ‘Sorry Book’ contains letters of apology from visitors who have either climbed Uluru or taken small pieces of rock from the site as souvenirs. Many report that bad luck has dogged them ever since. Never underestimate the persuasive power of a terrible curse!

40 kilometres from Uluru is Kata-Tjuta, or The Olgas, an equally impressive collection of rocks, the highest of which towers 500 metres (1500 feet) above the surrounding landscape and the tiny people in it. The site is even more sacred to the area’s Aboriginals than Uluru: every Anangu man is required to visit and perform a particular ceremony once in his life. The details of the ceremony – and even of the spirits involved – is a closely-guarded secret, for the initiated only.

Ace reporter Rosie Niven shares a joke with The Olgas.

Our trip was punctuated by visits to other rocky outcrops and hilltops and dried-up creeks, but what sticks in the mind most is the overall impression created by the red dusty soil and the huge empty spaces of the Outback. We saw a wild, white donkey by the side of the road one day, and cows that may as well have been wild – left to roam across vast acres of scrub land until the twice-yearly helicopter-assisted muster. (The largest cattle station, in the Northern Territory is reckoned to be the size of Belgium.)

Returning to Alice Springs was like returning to an oasis of lattès and shopping malls. By most people’s standards, Alice is a small town, with only 26 000 or so people. In the context of the Northern Territory however, it’s a bustling metropolis, and a significant centre for Aboriginal art and culture, with galleries dotted around the town. It’s also a place where a lot of the problems that Aboriginal communities face, particularly those related to alcohol, are plain to see.

The thing that I found most striking was how most Aboriginals and most non-Aboriginals seemed to live almost parallel lives, disconnected from each other. So while the non-Aboriginal population got on with shopping and sipping lattès and selling souvenirs to tourists, much of the Aboriginal population could be found congregated in the town’s public areas, or walking along the dried-up bed of the Todd River, which serves as a kind of alternative high street. It was like the town had simply dropped from the sky around these people’s ears and they were still somehow bewildered by it and separate from it. And in a sense, historically, that’s what has happened.

I’ve only been in the country for six months, so I’m in no real position to comment on the thorny issue of reconciliation between post- and pre-1788 Australians. Nevertheless (and after a couple of schooners of beer) my two penny’s worth is that a big part of the problem is that we whitefellas are accustomed to think of 200 years as being a long time. Aborigines have been living in Australia for at least 40 000 – many experts would say 60 000 – years. Their culture is the oldest living culture in the world. In this context, 200 years is no time at all, particularly when two groups of people have such radically different world views and when one has done so badly out of contact with the other.

With such sombre thoughts weighing on our minds (alongside what we were going to have for our dinner, and the song 500 Miles by The Proclaimers) we hit the road once more, heading south towards distant Adelaide and fresh, moderately-priced adventure.