Festivus

Image from http://www.duke.edu/web/chinacare/midautumn.jpg

It's festival time in Singapore.

Last night a few of us went to a local family's house to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival. Traditionally this means lots of colourful paper lanterns, celebrating the harvest and telling stories about the lady on the moon. In its modern incarnation, one of the students in my residence - a true Singaporean - assures me that "it's all about the food." That means mooncakes, seriously rich pastries filled with lotus seed paste and salted duck egg. Sounds weird (from a Canadian standpoint) but they're tasty.

For the Hindu population October is the month of Diwali, the fesival of lights. Little India is decked out with light displays every night - think that hardcore neighbour's house in December, but substitute elephants for the reindeer.

Coinciding with Diwali but not (to my knowledge) connected with it is Theemidhi, where devotees walk (or, well, run) across a bed of hot coals. Of course, I had to see this, so at midnight on Monday I was at the Sri Mariamman temple along with an enormous crowd of the supportive and the merely curious.

Even more numerous than the spectators were the participants. I had somehow expected there to be an elite group of holy men solemnly walking across the coals. In fact, for several blocks from the temple there were barricades set up to control the throngs of yellow-clad men who had walked from Little India to the temple in Chinatown* to take part. They then lined up to walk (or run) across the coals.

The promo literature makes much of the fact that none of the devotees get burns on their feet. I wouldn't go that far - I saw a fair few men hopping around afterwards - but for the most part they did seem pretty unfazed by it. Mark tells me this is in fact a "phyisically trivial" feat that takes place at a lot of self-esteem workshops or something. Still. It's not for the wimpy.


*Apparently the walk to the temple takes about an hour. In their bare feet. Keep in mind that that this is a modern city...one where you're fined for spitting or littering, and executed for trafficking in drugs, but still a modern city. I don't know, I just have some psychological aversion to walking barefoot on pavement. Just ew.

Borne-O!

Frequency of blogging is inversely correlated to intensity of living. Sorry for the dry spell on your end - I was just never moved to interrupt the flow with a blog post, which on a travel blog is almost necessarily restrospective. NUS has a week's break in the middle of 1st semester (Canadian universities, take note!) so a few of us rocked over to Kuching, in the province of Sarawak (Malaysian Borneo).

Our arrival coincided with Hari Raya, the end of Ramadhan. The owner of the hostel suggested we take a boat over to the nearby _kampongs_ (villages) and wander around until somebody invited us in. So we did, and they did. We were served lunch and cake by a lovely Malay family. We sat around making awkward conversation with the limited language that we shared, and laughed at the antics of their little grandson who clearly believed that clothing is the tool of the oppressor. Got a little sick that night - as far as we could tell it was the _rice_, of all things - but the experience was totally worth it.



Being in Borneo, of course we had to check out some apes and longhouses. Semenggoh Wildlife centre is a rehabilitation centre for orangutans and they're building a pretty substantial little family there. We headed over for the morning feeding time. Despite the staff's dire warnings about how dangerous the orangutans could be, they seemed pretty indifferent to the horde of people gawking at them and taking pictures.



Further down the road was the only longhouse we could access without spending a few precious days traveling further east. My doubts about the authenticity of the experience were confirmed when we pulled up to the village's own tourist registration centre and received stickers to wear on our clothes - as if we wouldn't be recognized as tourists. There was a "headhouse" so that us crazy Westerners could pretend that the long-dead headhunting ways were still alive, and the locals were clearly instructed to maintain a "traditional" veneer. A few satellite dishes betrayed the modernity that other travelers said was much more evident in the "real" longhouses they had visited.



At Bako National Park, home of the rare proboscis monkey, we hiked for six hours without seeing any wildlife except a bunch of crabs and unnervingly large ants. It's not that we were especially noisy, just that our timing was off and we ended up hiking during the hotter parts of the day. We camped by a small waterfall for the night and ate little boxes of cereal in the morning. Apparently the whole bowl-in-a-box thing is not a universal phenomenon - at least, the mini granolas I bought didn't open that way, and my Australian travel buddy was amazed at the concept. I may have recruited a tourist for Canada. One who's intrigued by the idea of things like bowl-in-a-box mini cereals, s'mores and pie.


The hike back out was lovely but similarly un-wildlife-y. I finally saw some fauna at the canteen, where local boys are hired to weild sling-shots at the macaque monkeys that try to steal people's food (and often suceed). I had a few hours to play with after lunch so I headed to the mangrove where the proboscis occasionally congregate. A few members of our group came with me but left to catch an earlier boat back to town. Minutes (_minutes_!) after they left a whole family of proboscis showed up. I watched them bouncing around in the trees about 20 metres away for about an hour. When it started to rain they scaled some trees a little closer and waited out the storm. Amazing. They look so awkward with their pot bellies and gangly limbs, jumping noisily from branch to branch, but they seemed completely at ease, playing and eating and completely unfazed by the human presence.



For our last full day in Kuching a couple of they guys rented motorbikes and we visited Wind Cave, which was underwhelming but cool in the unnerving way that you could hear but not see the bats and had to home you'd walk out without guano in your hair. Okay, maybe that isn't everybody's idea of a good time. But it was an experience. Worried about the weather, we headed back to town and had dinner at a steamboat barbecue that was really pricey but allowed me to eat substantial amounts of vegetables for the first time all week. Hawker centres in Kuching are cheap and delightful, but even the "vegetable rice" I ordered in one place contained more meat than vegetables. I'm now bingeing on salad.