Feeding time at the zoo

Nope, that's not referring to my daily dinner, but rather to the 3pm feed at the Orang-utang sanctuary, about a 3 hour drive from Medan on the east coast of Sumatra.

These beautiful creatures end up the sanctuary because they used to be kept as domestic pets and have either been given, sold to or rescued by the sanctuary. They then begin a process that will eventually see them released into the wild. Depending on their age and whether they are good learners, this could take just a number of months, or sometimes years. Despite being solitary creatures for most of their lives, Orang-utans learn basic skills such as swinging rather than walking from each other and so it's important to gradually introduce them into the wild. The way the Sanctuary has chosen to do this is by first making sure they are not ill, and then letting them loose into a somewhat enclosed area of jungle. They are then fed bananas and milk twice a day. Watching the other Orang-Utans arrive by jungle vine and feed helps the new guys learn how it's done. Some take off with the group and go deep into the jungle, never to be seen near the feeding platform again, and those are the success stories. Others tend to hang around to make friends or come back every so often for a bit of a top-up. They are only fed bananas and milk to encourage them to keep going back to the forest for food, while providing them with the necessary in case they are a bit slow to figure this out.

Orang-utans have four 'hands', very similar to humans'. Like some humans they are incredibly hairy but unlike any I've seen, they enjoy hanging by one arm and one leg. They can spend quite a lot of time in this position. Watching them move is something else. They swing trees backwards and forwards in order to catch other trees and hang on to the most precarious looking vines. They tend to not jump like monkeys and they have no tail, so lollop through the tree tops at a slow and steady pace. The next day, during a jungle trek, we saw an Orang-utan swinging his way through the jungle, but only about a foot off the ground. It shows their preference in the wild for swinging rather than walking, which many domesticated Orang-utan have to learn.

It was a great experience and easy to dabble in a bit of anthropomorphism - to give their expressions and movements quite human qualities.

Down Came the Rain in Torrents....

Having seen the Orang-utans, we returned to the Jungle Inn for some down time...and just in time too as the heavens opened and down came the rain in torrents. The tropical downpour lasted around 1 hour, and the little stream outside my window went from this (a gentle, lulling, zen-like trickle):

to this (anything but lulling):

But by the following morning, the river it flowed into was back to its normal this:

(view from my balcony)

Who's the King of the Jungle (oo oo)...

...that would be Raida then, a bright orange Orang-Utan:

On a wing and a prayer...

At WFC, every member of the 'scientific' (i.e. non-admin) staff is expected to make a presentation at a weekly seminar series called 'Food For Thought'. Today was my turn, and although the bright-orange skirt did not make a blinding appearance, 2 bars of Cadbury chocolate did (nothing like a little litteral food, ok, bribery). My presentation was along the lines of my 'Responsible Retailer' talk given at IIFET on the increase in standards and labels in retailer supply chains and what that means for producers trying to access those supply chains. It's amazing how a room that is always too cold suddenly becomes really far too hot and stuffy when you are suddenly doing the presenting. So I was very happy to finally leave work for the airport and hop, skip and a jump to north Sumatra, Indonesia. At the end of the safety annoucement, the stewardess said 'God Bless this Flight'. I was still debating whether this came out of faith or fear as we crossed the Straits of Malacca, but the Straits' notorious reputation for pirates soon diverted my attention.

Rain, rain, go away....

I was introduced this morning in Church as 'Grace from Scotland', which i quite like..!

By the afternoon, it really felt like home. I have so far only experienced tropical downpours, but today the rain clouds hang low and there's a thin, light rainy mist everywhere. In fact, it's drizzling. Although my pool time has been postponed, I am truly happy to have a break from all that sun.

The Tropical Spice Garden

This week has been all about the work. Complications arose regarding my PhD funding applications, which resulted in some long hours in front of the computer in my own time conducting research. But I now have a plan, so Saturday I was able to take advantage of a hired car for the weekend and head off to the tropical spice garden - a beautiful piece of paradise on Penang's north shore.

The garden is more a jungle and you climb and dip as you explore along a hillside. They've done it really well though with gorgeous mosaics, painted benches, a hammock or two and little ponds and streams that are crossed with wooden bridges and well-placed stones. Combined with a sea-breeze, a pretty good cafe and a gift shop, it was close enough to paradise for me!

A less than love-ly weekend...

After the indigestible theatrics of Friday night, I was hoping my weekend would improve. It started off well after I got 2 hours at the physio instead of 1... Apparently I am a good teaching aide. There is a lot of me compared to the rather shorter locals, so my physio's students in their final year are able to learn without crowing around. Also, I am still rather slim around the torso, which is a bit rarer with Indian physiques or even chinese, despite their skinny limbs. This means that each of the muscle groups can be felt and the outcome was that I had a really long deep tissue massage while the physio demonstrated what she was doing, where and why to her class.

Although it was nice to get a bit of a freebie, it was really painful and so I decided to go for a massage at the place I went to last time. Although she had been really good that first time, I now suspect she had just finished on a big rugby player and her hands must have been a bit tired, because this time she was totally fresh, and inflicted total agony. No joke, I am boasting burst capillaries today as well as bruised muscles.

Having forked out all this cash, I decided to get the bus home. I headed off to the bus station to wait in the dirty heat in the midst of idle buses without cathalytic converters. I was told that either the 306 or 204 would get me home but when the 11b pulled up, the guy directing operations told me to hop on. I was a bit sceptical but asked the bus driver too and he nodded. It's always slow going through town and this was a bus with no air con and I soon fell asleep. I woke up an hour later on the other side of the island and had to spend another 45 minutes on the bus until I could get to a destination where there would be a taxi to take me home. I was livid but realised that everyone is trying so hard to be helpful that they'll tell you anything if they think it's what you want to hear. So that was a waste of an afternoon, although a quick dip in the pool to cool off followed by Slumdog Millionaire boosted my spirits.

Sunday I worked all day on some PhD stuff but the lure of Benjamin Button finally forced me out the house: my silver screen dose of lurve on V-weekend.

A little Play time

I have not seen bad theatre in a long time, but on Friday night I was reminded about just how bad a bad play can be.

In honour of Valentine's Day - and for a good charitable cause - a local amateur dramatics society put on 3 short one-act plays. They were absolutely hideous. Each successive play had older and more experienced actors which meant that the 3rd one was bearable. But how about this for a line from the first one: 'so, if I cook dinner, does that mean you're cooking breakfast?' Cue overly dramatic big wink and nudge nudge motion. Ugh. It was enough to make me want to reach for the vinegary Australian over-priced Shiraz, but frankly, the wine was worse.

Thankfully, we had been fed first, which was the best part of the whole evening. The desserts were fantastic, and, as a dessert fiend, I was able to settle down to watch the dire theatrics that followed with at least a full stomach (if not a heavy heart as the plays progressed).

This is me tucking into the best part of the evening - the pink desserts.

I'm gonna make you sweat...

I know that the aim of a workout at they gym is to make you sweat. But here, an aerobics class in 33 degrees and 80% humidity becomes, frankly, quite disgusting.

The windows are all open, the fans are spinning, but I slip and slide my way through grapevine, knee bends and half turns, turning ever pinker and feeling the sweat slide down even my shins and the palms of my hands. It doesn't help that in comparison to my fellow aerobics-ees, I am dressed for the arctic.

These tiny, skinny creatures are all immaculately turned out in skimpy little tops and tight, short shorts. 'Ah, all the better for dancing around in the heat', you might say. True, but the lack of men (permitting the women to wear next-to-nothing) and the abundance of women (permitting the women to coo and oo over the latest fashionable positioning of the straps, width of material that maintains decency while allowing for evaporation, and trendy combination of colours), mean that I in my normal shorts and t-shirt, feel decidedly over-dressed and out of fashion.

And annoyingly, these women don't sweat. Even after 50 minutes and we're all ready to keel over, they merely glisten. And they never change colour. Meanwhile, I am as red as a tomato. This makes my hair look blonder. And I am at least a foot taller than everyone else. I get stared at - a lot.

Exercise: good for the heart. Bad for the self-esteem!

The Esplanade

The Esplanade 2 weeks ago with Laila one sunny Sunday afternoon:

Last night:

Valentine's Day - Chinese Style

The third and final day of the Hindu festival Thaipusam also coincided with the final day of Chinese New Year, which lasts for 15 days here...and we counted every single one of them down as the fireworks kept exploding in the courtyard outside our window.

We'd had enough of piercings so we decided to celebrate with the Chinese. Tradition has it that on the final day, all the girls go to the side of a river and as the single men row past, pelt them with their oranges. The man to catch a woman's orange will somehow or other end up with her. Quite novel and in the traditional culture of the Chinese, the women's only chance to be the proactive ones in finding romance.

Today, this involved heading to the Esplanade in Georgetown, which is the flat area for parades outside Fort Cornwallis and along the seafront. There you buy your orange (all the money goes to charity), write your loved one's name on it or 'world peace' or something (but have you ever tried writing with a ball point pen on an orange??) and then hurl it at 'the guys in the boat'. It's two wooden statues floating in the sea with baskets ropped to the front of them. With the breeze and the swell, there were about 30 oranges in each basket and about 3000 in the water around them...including mine (although I did hit the guy's head on the way past).

Looking up the quay to the floating 'men':


Looking from the quay to the floating oranges:

Thaipusam Sunday

The festivities at the temple go through the night and the warmish light of day brings a whole fresh batch of men beginning their pilgrimage. Get there early and you can see all the piercing being done. Be warned, the sensitive among you, for what follows.

This is a guy with the hooks in his back, pulling his friend along.

Same again.

They paint the roads along the route:

There are lots of little sections like this in the piercing temple - lots of little milk pails that will carry the milk offereing, lots of milk and things to pierce with etc.

Hooks in the back:

A guy getting his cheek and tongue pierced:

We stayed until it got too hot to keep standing around but these guys then walk the couple of kms to the main temple with groups of their friends and supporters dancing around them and keeping their spirits up..although there's talk that they use a little more than spirits to keep going...

In Batu caves near KL, over 100 000 make the pilgrimage with around 1 million on-lookers and apparently they have similar crowd control issues.

Thaipusam Saturday

From the first Chinese festival of the year to the first Hindu. This weekend was Thaipusam. It's celebrated mostly by the Tamil community on the full moon of the Tamil month of Thai (January/February). 'Pusam' refers to a star that is at its highest point during the festival. The festival commmemorates the murthday of the Hindu god Lord Murugan. What makes the festival very, very different, is the bearing of 'Kavadi' or debt burdens by worshipers. Generally, people take a vow to offer a kavadi to Lord Murugan for the purpose of avoiding a great calamity. A kavadi is normally a pot of milk but it goes as far as piercing the skin, tongue and cheeks with skewers...hooks in the back to pull floats etc...

Worshippers have to cleanse themselves, shave their heads, pray and fast for period of time before a pilgrimage to the main temple. About 10 000 people carry kavadis to the temple but about 300 000 people go to watch....

...and so did we. Oxen pulling a huge chariot leave Little India in Georgetown around 1830 and process towards the temple. That takes about 6 hours as processors hold bowls of offerings including incense sticks, fruit and flowers, and then pass them up to the chariot for the incense to be lit from a central flame before being passed down the line again to the owner. It's long, slow and smelly, and if you want to beat the chariot to the temple, you have to pass it. That is problematic as we soon discovered. On either side of the main processional route, hundreds of companies have erected stalls advertising themselves and providing refreshments to their employees and friends. They also have huge, huge loudspeakers blaring Indian music. Imagine a 1km street and every 20m on either side of the street is another mega-ton loudspeaker blasting your ears until it's physically painful and that's if the neon lights don't get you first.

To make matters worse, it seems to be tradition to smash cocounts ahead of the oxen ...which means sticky juice at head height and large, heavy coconuts at leg height. The result:

And the coconuts:

One type of Kavdi - carrying a heavy Hindu symbol along the route (it reached to around 2m over his head):

And the other type. These men carry their pots of milk on their head. Little bottles of milk are hung on their skin. And their tongues and cheeks are pierced so that they cannot swallow or talk - this level of endurance is a big kavadi.

And finally arriving at the temple. There, worshippers climb the stairs to the temple and pour their milk over an image of the deity. However, there are too many people and not enough space, so helpers collect the milk and do the pouring. Women do the pilgrimage but we didn't see any women pierced. Instead, their big deal seems to be shaving their heads. They do it at the temple and it was quite distressing to see these long beautiful black locks tumbling to the floor. They also used the loos to wash. They wrap themselves in sarongs and then use the tubes normally used instead of loo roll as a shower. We could go up to the temple but only because it was early ie 11pm and we could still move, and only as far as the steps to where the deity is housed. It was absolute chaos up there. People were siphoned into lanes according to their kavadi although we couldn't see any pierced people emerging at the other end, so perhaps their piercings were removed inside there too.

The problems really started when we tried to head home. The chariot that we had semi-successfully passed earlier (I got hit by a coconut so I guess that's me saved from future shark attacks ;-)) was now 100m away from the temple. And as it got later, it had got busier. By midnight, the coconuts were still going, the incense was everywhere, the majority of people were swarming up to the temple and lots of people, including lots of children, were trying to get home, past the coconuts and past the chariot. And on either side were stalls of food. So initially, the people going down the road took half the road and the other half of the road was taken by those making merry on their way up to the temple. But as we moved towards the chariot, great swarms of people were trying to get past it to beat it to the temple. The crowd in front of me were being funnelled increasingly to the left into a narrow corridor as those opposite kept coming and kept coming. I have never, ever been in such a volatile and crushing crowd. We were walking over broken coconut shells with many people having undertaken the pilgrimage in bare feet. It was hard to breathe and people were clutching on to each other for balance. Children were howling and eventually got lifted out of the crowd to the side. All you needed was for something to have gone wrong and it would have been absolute crushing pandamoneium. Thankfully, it took us another half hour of being forced forward in fits and starts with the crowd until we emerged past the chariot, drenched in sweat, having been crowded around sweaty bodies and with so much incense around it stung. It was hideous but is apparently all part of the experience. We were the lucky ones as friends who were moving forward at the pace of the chariot took another hour to get to the temple but it was then too busy to get in.

So, another cultural experience chalked up!

The Beach Bar

And by Friday night it was us who could be found by the bay for post-work drinks.

Dolphins near the dock of the bay..

Dolphins were seen swimming in the bay this morning between us and Jerajek Island opposite as seen from my appartment balcony at 0715.












Unfortunately, by lunchtime I had sampled another of Penang's animal delights...or rather, he had sampled me.

More Chinese New Year...

...it lasts 2 weeks here but this middle weekend was the traditional parade...