This Week in Photos
This post takes us through all but the last two days of a six-month trip that ends twelve hours from the time published at the bottom of this post. I’d really like to skip ahead those twelve hours and maybe twelve more; I hate saying goodbyes, especially one as difficult as this will be parting ways with Will.
Expect a flurry of backed-up posts after I’ve had some time on the weekend to sort through the themed sets I’ve been working on. For now, though, here’s a handful of snaps from our last week spent bumming around the rather dull Malaysian islands of Perhentian:
Bottlecap chess. Photo credit Will van Engen.
Players on a break.
Low tide.
Catching crabs on the shoreline.
Will looks out to sea (a shot for the rellies).
A solar farm under construction.
Solar graffiti.
Solar out to sea.
Boat to the mainland.
Friendship.
This Week in Photos
Homeless and destitute in Rangoon.
Domes.
Birds on a wire.
Thatched green roofs at the labyrinthine, colonial-era Rangoon Central train station.
Ghosts in transit.
Religion and the state at Rangoon Central.
Footballs at the station.
Footballs crossing the road. For more footballs, see Will’s blog (link on sidebar).
Departure gate at Rangoon International.
Singapore public transit.
Bric-a-brac council flats in Singapore.
A newsagent opens for the day in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Will fast asleep at the Kuala Lumpur bus station.
The 21:40 to Kota Bahru.
The Past Two Weeks in Photos
This monster post takes us through another two weeks in Burma, stopping along the way in the royal capital Mandalay, hill station retreat Kalaw and aquatic breadbasket Inle Lake.
Watch this space for a flurry of pent-up posts coming later this week after we’re back in Singapore.
Crushed areca nut doused with limestone extract and wrapped in betel leaves. A mild narcotic when chewed, the nut rots the teeth of regular users to stubs and leaves a nasty residue on the streets. Chewing betel is popular across most of southeast Asia.
A streetside chapati assembly line. Strollers and locals gather around multicoloured kiddie furniture every afternoon to scarf down this tasty fried bread. A flat frisbee-sized piece with accompanying vegetable and meat curries runs for 150 kyat — or 12 cents — on the streets of Mandalay.
Three on the grill with saturation cranked.
Widget shop.
Afternoon siesta at the monastery.
Cricket vendors.
Dead crickets and swarming flies.
Clean ‘n scrub duty on a Mandalay high-rise.
Local kids kick around a deflated football in an alleyway.
Needless to say, Will and I often end up with the same photos. The photograph he’s seen taking here can be viewed on his blog (link on sidebar).
Backs to the window.
A thannaka-streaked boy peeks out of a train window.
A platform market. Although cheap to ride, the government-run trains in Burma are among the slowest in Asia and crawl across the countryside at about the speed of a morning jog. Most rolling stock and rails are still leftovers from the early-20th century British colonial era and derailings are common.
Two porcelain toilets look out from the space where a wall once was in an abandoned colonial-era building in Kalaw.
Morning traffic in a village outside Kalaw, one of our first stops on a three-day, fifty-kilometre trek to Inle Lake.
Lost in the landscape. Photo essay coming soon.
Checkerboard hills, in close-up and from a distance.
Our trekking guide, Alex, surveys the neon landscape.
Butterfly.
Welcome to Inle Lake. Some 70,000 people live in the eighteen villages and towns built on stilts across this long, shallow lake. All trade and transportation, from the growing of crops to the staging of the markets that sell them, gets carried out on its waterways.
Three teachers paddle to school. Note the earbuds.
Inle suburbia.
Washing laundry.
Fishing in the sticks.
Storm clouds gather behind a sunlit pagoda. Photo credit Will van Engen.
A rainbow breaks a storm on Inle Lake. One of our first “postcard” pictures; I spotted, Will snapped. Go team.
A woman spins cotton and lotus thread at a textile shop on the lake.
Women assemble cigars from locally-grown tobacco.
Smoke break…
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Nuns-in-training in the town of Nyaungshwe, near Inle Lake.
Traffic on the canal. Photo credit Will van Engen.
Bows. Photo credit Will van Engen.
This Week in Photos (3 of 3)
800-year old temples dot the landscape at Bagan, in the parched plains of central Burma. An intriguing hybrid of Hindu and Buddhist imagery, and the westernmost point of the massive Angkor kingdom that once swept across much of southeast Asia, the temples of Bagan are deservedly Burma’s largest draw card for visitors. Estimates put over 3000 temples in a 42-square kilometre area, some of them restored multilevel palaces, used by locals for worship or shelter from the midday sun, others, crumbling ruins entered only with the help of a keymaster (often a farmer whose land the temple sits on.)
Will van Engen, adventure photographer.
We intercept three Burmese women on their way to market…
…and take a stab at conversation with the help of a translation dictionary.
Giant Buddhas adorn the insides of most, if not all, of the temples. Many were rebuilt using plaster and paint following the devastating 1975 earthquake.
Buddha watches us watch you.
A blind woman puffs on a locally-made cigar.
Tending to the herd.
Farmer’s brood.
Crops line the way to two temples at sunset.
Fences and cobwebs ring the headquarters of the Bagan division of the National League for Democracy, a popular progressive political party prevented by the military government from taking office in 1990 despite winning the elections by an overwhelming margin. The party was crippled in the violent aftermath and its leader — Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi — put under a house arrest that lasts to this day. She was due for release on May 27 but her sentence was extended by another year, prompting a rare protest rally in a nation where the slightest outcry usually gets quashed with forced labour or a prison sentence.
This Week in Photos (2 of 3)
This entry, the second of three in the series, dates from our overnight trip upcountry to Bagan last Monday, when sixteen hours in the bus became twenty-four after a road became a river and we found ourselves stranded in the heart of mosquito country…
Two nuns brave fierce rains at the Rangoon highway bus station.
Hands shoot up to feel for the longed-for air conditioning. To conserve strictly-rationed gasoline many drivers will keep the AC on the lowest setting or keep it off altogether, despite charging between 20-40% more for air-con buses. And with daytime highs averaging 44 degrees celsius in the days since we arrived, it’s a luxury difficult to live without.
Our bus stopped at 3am without warning or explanation. As the sun rose and we groggily stumbled outside and through the freak bus jam that had built up along this country road we discovered the true reason why. Here, two big-wheeled tractors attempt to rescue a stranded jeep from the raging highway waters.
Locals watch the action unfold from the headlands.
An unseen passenger tosses an empty water bottle to an enterprising local kid.
Weary after a night at the wheel, a bus driver seizes an opportunity to catch some winks.
Back at highway level the waters keep building.
This Week in Photos (1 of 3)
I’ve taken so many photos since leaving Singapore on Saturday, and the internet here in Burma is so slow, that I’ve broken this week’s photo post into three sections. This entry takes us through Monday morning.
Welcome to Rangoon/Yangon. I won’t get into the name debate here, it’s been touched on enough elsewhere, but for the sake of consistency I’ll use the colonial name Rangoon, favoured by many locals and the international media but not by the ruling military junta.
…as Will poses with fistfuls of virtually-worthless 1000 kyat notes. All the paper in his hands is equivalent to roughly $300 USD, or the annual income of many of the faces seen in the photos below.
Faded colonial splendour barred off and closed up.
Shadows brave the rains at a night market in Rangoon’s Chinatown.
Sopping wet but still hopeful, a wandering street kid seeks spare change.
Old cars imported from Japan.
Fixing a streetside hydrant. Power and water supplies in the nation’s largest city are spotty, more so since 2006 when the administrative capital was moved without warning from Rangoon to new city Naypyidaw in the north.
Drinking water at a monastery
A father and son repair the tiles of a footpath after dusk.
Lice patrol.
Sandals for sale.
Slow business.
Streetside garment mending.
Sandals act as goalposts in a barefoot game of alleyway football.
Announcing a stop on the back of a local open-air bus. 140 kyat — about a penny — will take you to anywhere you want to go in central Rangoon.
On the bus…
…nuns…
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Silhouettes look out to the main stupa at Shwedagon pagoda, the largest religious structure in Rangoon. Nearly forty tonnes of solid gold was used in its construction.
Stupas.
Novice monks rest on a plaster cast of Buddha’s toe at the Shwedagon pagoda.
The faithful pay their respects.
A kid awaits his turn to look through a high-powered telescope stationed opposite the largest stupa at Shwedagon.
A lion watches guard…
Pigeons close in on an enterprising birdseed vendor. Photo credit Will van Engen.
…as others stake out their territory directly above her.
This Week in Photos
Not much to show for a week in Singapore. After a pair of false starts we finally leave for Burma tomorrow morning so keep an eye on this space in the coming weeks.
Will bought a hot new Nikon digital SLR today and he promises his blog will be bursting at the seams with more photos too. Link on the sidebar.
The Singapore skyline. Notable for being the first photo taken with my shiny new lens (an 18-200mm DX VR for those acronym-hounds out there).
Orbs. A DHL-branded hot air balloon peeks out from behind a skyscraper.
Street crossing.
Hanging out at the Esplanade waterfront on a Friday night.
Earbuds (x3).
Listen to the crow.
The sign calls it art.
The sign calls it art.
This Week in Photos
Greenery reclaims the 800 year old corridors of remote Beng Mealea, a highlight of the Angkor complex and the last temple we visited in Cambodia…
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…Will explores Beng Mealea…
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A young girl watches a multicoloured melange of fishing vessels off the coasts of Mui Ne.
…as another woman navigates the same fleet in a basket.
While hiking the hills around Mui Ne we stumbled across a band of army recruits on a picnic, drinking homebrewed jungle juice and frying up some just-caught frogs on their makeshift barbecue. We were invited to try.
A monk in orange. He was sitting on a bench that, incidentally, was marked “Calgary, Canada”.
My mum and I. Photo credit Will van Engen.
Sighted on the streets of Saigon…
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…a backalley sign, sliced in half by a newer building, marking a French colonial-era hospital…
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…the driver of a moto — motorcycle taxi — sleeps between customers.
Farms in the hills around Dalat, an agricultural hotbed in the cool Vietnamese highlands.
Elephants.
Elephant secrets.
Tools of capitivity.
Pitting live crickets against each other in a duel to the death.
Will sandsurfs at Mui Ne. We spent the better part of a morning riding the dunes and honing our skills.
A kid — one of a troupe that adopted us at the dunes — demonstrates the “stomach down” technique.
Swimming with the Nikon during a storm. I had a scare when the camera’s image review functionality seized up after taking on a little too much water but luckily it dried back to normal.
This Week in Photos
Will watches the monorails and overpasses of Sentosa Island pass by out the window of an air-conditioned bus.
Thirteen sets of escalators at the awe-inspiring National Library in Singapore.
Will and my mum stretch outside the Burmese embassy after a botched attempt at securing travel visas. In a fatal lapse of reason, I admitted to having been involved with the media and was denied access on the spot. Hoping they’d forget, and planning to try again through a travel agent the next day under a different passport, I shaved my head just before my mum struck upon a genius solution to salvage airfares and go into Cambodia instead. My head looks rather like a tanned egg.
Eggs?
A detail from a wall of skulls at the Cheung Ek genocide museum in Cambodia. Between 1975 and 1979, the ultra-communist Khmer Rouge government was responsible for the deaths of 1.5 million of its own people — some 10% of the nation’s population — and even now, some thirty years later, there are ghosts of their regime at every turn.
A hallway of holding cells at the S-21 genocide museum in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh.
Some obligatory temple photos…
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…Will in an uncharacteristically dour mood…
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…the termites go marching ’round and ’round…
…and a rather feeble-looking bug carries a dead spider up a temple wall.
The view from our tuk-tuk (a motorbike hauling a small carriage) as two tour buses pull up outside one of the Angkor temples.
Waiting for the rains to pass.
Palm sugar bubbles and steams in an open wok on the drive to Banteay Srei.
This Week in Photos
Another week, another batch of photos from Sumatra. This will be the last you’ll see here of Indonesia; tomorrow we leave for Singapore to meet up with my mum for two weeks in Burma.
A lone tree stands guard at the base of “the mountain”, held in reverence by the locals for its wealth of natural resources.
Storms over Lake Toba on our final day in northern Sumatra.
Dua ibu prepare nasi goreng, a staple meal of fried rice and egg.
Parapat, the town tourism forgot.
The view out the window of our sixteen-hour Trans-Sumatran bus at breakfast time — 4am.
First light after a sleepless night.
Ghosts in headdresses wander the Bukattinggi market.
Sisters close up shop for the day.
A twisted carcass of a construction site…
…and again at sunset.
Scenes from a city park…
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Dusk over Bukattinggi.
And the same view during one of the city’s frequent blackouts.
Will and his new pet. “Plants and bugs in the jungle are usually red for a reason.”
Twigs of cinnamon trees, their fresh-scraped bark laid off-frame for drying.
Brown sugar from sugar cane.
Liquid sugar spills through the pores of the vat and into the pan below.
(L-R) Will, Steve, Silka, Terry, Rachel. Not that it matters.
Our overnight homestay in the west Sumatran jungle.
Tiller takes a break.
Will sips from a fallen coconut. As you do.
A water buffalo helps make short work of a farmer’s terraced rice paddocks.
Monkey in the wild…
…and a deer behind bars in Bukattinggi’s depressing zoo.
An elephant’s foot tethered to the end of a six metre chain, pacing back and forth as if trapped in a video game loop. Worse still was the banana-fed black bear, panting and pawing at the walls of its grimy 20′x20′ enclosure as locals pointed and prodded.
On the bus to Pekanbaru…
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This Week in Photos
Lake Toba at twilight, the view from our waterfront cottage.
The flies here grow to the size of small rodents.
Flowers?
Scarecrow.
It’s difficult to tell by looking at the photo – and my trigger finger was a moment too late to catch it – but this woman is holding her mobile phone upside-down.
Scenes from the Saturday market.
Tip jar.
A row of souvenir shops — most of them vacant — dubbed by us “the lane of death” for the pressure sales tactics employed by its desperate shopkeepers. No fewer than twenty shops still hold out, competing for an ever-shrinking pool of browsers. We were told that it’s not unusual for entire weeks to pass without a foreigner stopping to shop.
Shopkeepers’ brood.
We’ve been converted to the cult of the biker. $6/day hires you a Honda Supra and one tank of petrol to use as you wish…
…we explored. More photos another day, maybe.
Will in Professor Challenger mode.
The view from atop Samosir, our village of Tuk-Tuk receding into the background haze.
Jump!
Splash!
Will with Poppy, the owner of our favourite restaurant in Tuk Tuk. His curry fish and banana pancakes are highlights.
Lake fish barbecueing in banana leaves. “For medicine,” Poppy says. We don’t challenge him.
Pastries.
Slippers.
This Week in Photos
Rickshaw drivers watch taxis pass by. With so many green-and-yellow cabs on the roads of Chengdu, the slower, pricier rickshaws seem to be dying a slow death.
Hens going to market.
Pigeons at market.
An advertisement for a popular Chinese ice cream bar. The face on the specimen I bought was frowning at me.
A woman sculpts glass figures along the market strip in the village of Luo Dai.
In China, all public toilets — or “Water Closets” — are given a star rating, from **** – which ranks up there with the worst of the first world – to * — which is so frightening that even cockroaches wouldn’t dare enter. Although you wouldn’t think so from its exterior facade, this particular water closet scores **.
My fluke flight to Singapore was the only plane departing from the international terminal of the Chengdu airport. It was eerie, seeing schedule boards with only one entry, corridors and concourses vacant and unlit. I wish I’d had more time to explore.
Silhouettes dancing around the one open departure gate…
…and the only plane on the apron.
In all likelihood the last photo I will ever take of Chengdu.
Laundry hanging out of apartment windows in Singapore. I had only twelve hours to enjoy the pleasures of the first world before we left by ferry for Indonesia. Arriving at 1:30am, I spent those hours wandering the airport, catching up with Will, and watching the long-awaited 300 in cinemas (our first film since Moscow).
Cable cars leave Singapore for nearby Sentosa Island.
Freighters in the waters near Singapore. ’Scuse the dirty skies, my camera body needs a good cleaning…
The view out our front window in Batam, Indonesia.
Will reading “Everyday Indonesian” en route to Nagoya, the business centre of Batam.
Workers at an Indonesian water bottling facility.
Builders at the construction site of our hosts’ new home.
This Week in Photos
Some favourite photographs from a week spent wandering the streets of Chengdu.
Taxicab on the move.
An encouraging sight out front of the PSB.
And behind a very different set of bars.
Chef.
Yes, it’s a piece of toast with an egg baked in the centre. Of utmost deliciousness…
…and the best mystery-fried-meat-and-herb-breadlike-product vendor in all Chengdu.
Patterns.
A flaw in the pattern.
Strands.
A leftover from the panda photo posts, a rare red sub-species that shares more in common with the raccoon than it does its black-and-white namesake.
Dinner? The basket wasn’t secured but the hen’s wings were clipped.
An altogether-too-common sight on Chengdu streets.
We’d joked that, with indiscriminate littering the norm, China’s landfills must be empty. They’re not.
Some plant.
Paper route.
Basketball.
This Week in Photos
We’re on our last day of a two-week sidetrip through the remote mountains of western Sichuan province, a detour prescribed by our American friends Liz and Doug as an antidote to the smoggy, anonymous Chinese cities we’d called home for the month before, each of them (slightly) different in name and climate but identical in character, or rather their startling lack of it.
An in-depth rundown of our personal trials and lessons learned and suchlike will have to wait for another day, but it’s enough to say that this trip was exactly what we’d needed. Photos are organised more-or-less chronologically-ish from March 4 onward and may take a few minutes to load:
The view out the front of the bus approaching Songpan.
Water’s edge, but which side?
Soft-focus egg market.
The wares at a local fruit market. Think 30c for a basket of strawberries.
A friendly yak.
Two horses startled mid-meal by a truck’s horn.
The same two horses eating dinner along the side of the road.
Fresh veggies, small town style.
Veggie kids.
Will looks out over the river valley after a steep climb.
The view over Danba. Photo credit Will van Engen.
The view over Songpan, leaving for a two-day horseride.
Continuing the climb. On the horse behind Will is our Parisian friend Pauline, who we spent a few days hanging out with before parting ways leaving Songpan.
Pack horse.
Vistas behind the riders.
Will’s horse engaging in the consumption of deliciousness. Day 2 begins.
Our guide saddles his horse.
Trees and ice.
Freezing waters.
Rest stop.
Prospecting trail.
A rickshaw parked for the night.
Two Tibetan kids we befriended in Songpan. Judging by the way they received us I don’t think they’d ever seen a digital camera before.
Taking a breather from play-fighting.
Namhi, a girl we met from S. Korea, shows the kid photos of him and his friends.
Leaking pipes.
Will and Namhi walking with the monks.
Watching for customers. Photo credit Will van Engen.
Thatched tombstones.
An open sewageway running through Danba and into the river below.
Dinner?
A yak a’grazing.
Will crosses a rickety suspension bridge lined with prayer flags. Photo essay coming soon.
Misty fields.
Working in the fields.
And a well-deserved rest.
Lookout towers appear all along the river canyons in western Sichuan province, built centuries ago by the Tibetans to help ward off Chinese invaders.
One of those towers up close, managed nowadays by an old man we found working his field.
Inside the tower.
The view over Jiajiu, a small Tibetan village we stayed overnight in.
Our Tibetan host spinning a yarn. Literally. Communication was tough.
Will climbs up the ladder seen in the previous photo.
Sunset over the mountains.
And a celestial slideshow over the same range two hours later. Photo credit Will van Engen.
Along the road back to Danba.
Pots steaming away at our favourite jiaodzi joint. We’ve frequented it five of our six nights in Danba and would be on first name basis with its proprietors if only we could speak the same language.
Rural grids.
Urban grids.
And finally, an apology to anyone who I owe emails from the past week or two; your replies, alas, will have to wait for another day. I found an internet cafe intending to catch up on my backlog and found myself blogging instead. Go figure.
This Week in Photos
A travelling pomelo vendor in Chengdu. Look closely to the top right-hand corner of the frame, where one of the last remaining statues of Mao can be seen through the haze.
Stacks.
Shot…
…reverse shot.
Brothers.
At the Xi’an train station.
Cops.
Guards of two different sorts. Photo credit Will van Engen.
Reading material for two particularly unlucky terracotta warriors. Photo credit Will van Engen.
Rocks?
Patterns.
Flaws in the pattern.
Six 306’s.
And a seventh caught on the road.