Tuesday 30th April

It is now time to power through the rest of South-East Asia, not in a Henry Kissinger-style way, but hectic all the same. This was the busiest stretch of the journey, at least in terms of the number of stops, and I realise people on seventeen-week holidays expect – and for that matter deserve – precisely zero sympathy, but after this section we were knackered.

Vietnam being two days behind us, we tendered ashore at Ko Samui in Thailand, one of the bizarrely short and kinda-pointless nowhere-y places that CMV tends to touch upon at the expense of places with more potential. I have about as much actual experience of the economics of running a cruise-line – and particularly the logistical clusterfuck that a full four-monther must entail – as I do in the requirements needed to be a proper functioning adult, but there have been a few makeweight stops where you just have to get your head down and create your own fun, as we did here.

A taxi out to see one of yer actual Big Buddhas in the wild schooled us in both the vividly active roadside entertainment on offer – zoos, shooting ranges, hundreds of attractive-looking restaurants and bars, massive hoardings for ultra-violent fighting-championship events – and exactly how cheap Thailand is, for westerners at least, with the hour’s round-trip being a little under a fiver. The Buddha was pretty cool, as far as gigantic golden statues go, and was set in a landscape of raw and pulsating beauty.

There had been a vague plan to go to the beach out of The Beach, but the need to get lunch and the strictures of the day’s timings meant that there wasn’t enough to do it justice, so we settled on a poke around the market (I was in need of some shorts, and a couple of quid later saw me kitted out with a striking navy pair that subsequently had my lily-white calves on show, to the alarm and sudden need of sunglasses for all) and a quick test of whether Thailand’s pharmacies really did have the marked lack of concern for prescriptions that had been rumoured. (Spoilers: the big ones are just like at home, but nip into the back-street ones and Robert’s your father’s moderately blissed-out brother).

Getting back to the ship was something off a ball-ache, as despite using local (and thus much larger) tenders, something was off with the comms between the ship and the local staff – combine that with a keenness not to overshoot the ridiculous 3pm embarking time, and this meant that from about half-two the pier filled up with hundreds of our fellow passengers, waiting to get back on board – and it was baking. We weren’t fans of it, to say the least, but for the Shufflies, some of whom are only hair’s-breadth from spending the rest of the trip in a cold box on Deck Two anyway, it was positively dangerous.

It all got sorted out, mind you, and not without some tempers flaring, but it was too hot to get properly annoyed, especially as the chug back to the ship was on such a millpond-like calm it was as if we were gliding over glass. Plus, thanks to the trip to the chemist, we were both super-high.

The next day we stopped at Laem Chebang, home to feeble jokes about Ricky Martin and the access point to get a two-hour coach to Bangkok and The Day Of The Three Shopping Centres. The journey was long enough to feature a guide, and you pays your awful-lot-of-money and you takes your choice with these dudes (or ladies), as they can be fountains of useful and relevant information, delivered in delightful and mellifluous tones, or they can be pointless and annoying pains in the dick. Tony, as our chap here told us to call him, was one of the former, pleasingly, and was at pains to let us know that due to it being some form of graduation day in Bangkok, the town was going to be extra-hectic, and we should make allowances for that.

Ultimately, I don’t think there’d be any real way of telling gradations of busyness of mentalness in a place like this, as right from the start, the dial was set to Crazytime and we’d just have to deal with it. One place that had been recommended, if only for the experience, was the Chatuchak Weekend Market, so we headed there on the SkyTrain – kind of like a chunkier, up-on-stilts DLR, only much busier, which gave me time to admire Bangkok’s sweatshirt-slogan game, which gave Tokyo’s a run for its money. I couldn’t decide which I liked more; ‘NEVER STOP LEARING’, or ‘COPLIMENTS: YOU HAVE NONE’.

We’d been told by Tony that the CWM was the biggest market in the world, and while there’s possibly room to dispute that depending on how you’d define the word ‘market’, this place was certainly hundreds and quite possibly thousands of stalls, all crammed into the north end of a large park – from what I can gather, I mean; the park might just have been the southern tip of the massive market, it was hard to tell – seemingly at random, but on closer inspection all forming their own little streets under cover that you had to plunge into to investigate.

It didn’t take long to work out that if you weren’t ready to open negotiations for military-surplus clothing, fake designer-wear, suspiciously-cheap high-end timepieces, steaming bowls of hygiene-certificate-lacking deliciousness or an endless stream of as-advertised ‘massages’, then your attention wasn’t going to be held for anything much more than an hour, but as experiences go, if only for the profusion of sight and smells and an intense human crush also somehow managing to feel friendly and safe, then I’d recommend it.

SkyTraining it back to the vicinity of our drop-off and pickup-point, the Asia Hotel (a large-ish establishment that tries to outdo its air of remittance-man seediness, and sadly fails – tip for you, lads; don’t advertise rooms by the hour) we got lunch in the basement of the Siam Paragon mall – the fried-cheese parcels in the Grand Palace restaurant being too much for this Scotsman to avoid instantly ordering – before deciding that the rest of the place was too posh and not mental enough – and thus boring – to investigate any further.

Recommendations from others had pointed towards the MBK Centre as worth visiting, and indeed, our guide Tony had said that it was the biggest shopping centre in the world – by this point I suspected that Tony just liked saying things were the biggest in the world.

To give Tony his due, however, if there is a bigger shopping centre in the world, you’ll have to take me there and show me, or at least take me to the vicinity and hand me a theodolite, because the MBK is mind-blowingly huge, and what’s even better than that, it’s relentlessly and unstintingly interesting. With not a chain outlet to be spotted anywhere (except for, puzzlingly, a Boots The Chemist), it’s six at-least-double-football-pitch sized floors, all devoted to different types of shopping – this huge section food, this one clothing; this entire floor electronics, that floor furniture and so on – with every shop or stall falling over themselves to get your custom by being exciting and colourful and fun.

Critics of this blog – and let me just say, I don’t like the way my stats from Burundi have fallen off alarmingly – may possibly raise a jaundiced eyebrow at the way we don’t seem to do a lot of CULTCHA, at least in the traditional sense, but I’d counter that in two ways – one, if you’ve ever spent more than an hour in a museum without wanting desperately to leave, then I’ll call you a fucking liar, and two, there’s more actual genuine Thai culture on show in the MBK Centre than in any number of po-faced trudge-huts you could care to mention.

There’s hardly anywhere you can go, incidentally, without seeing a large and probably gilt-framed picture of the King of Thailand, who’s been the actual king since 2016 but is getting properly crowned the weekend we arrive back in the UK. I mention it here, because even the huge bookshop I browsed in had a big window-display proclaiming his autobiography as the greatest work of literature that humanity has ever produced; almost certainly a product of the lèse majesté laws – of which it’s obviously a fine idea to keep on the good side. My favourite fact from his Wiki page is that when he got divorced, his then wife had to accept being blamed for everything, because if she’d spoken up in defence, she’d have got banged up. (He does seem to be a terrible, terrible person, which I can now say from this far-away point without fear or risk.)

Being vaguely interested in buying a tie, I got into an excellent conversation with a couple of sharp fellas who came this close to selling me an entire suit they promised would be ready in three hours, but sadly for me (but probably not for my wallet) I had somewhere else to be in three hours i.e. the ship. I did get the tie, however, for three quid, which has served me excellently on formal nights ever since.

A pleasingly trek through downtown Bangkok (and past the national Anti-Money Laundering Office, a building so nicely-appointed that you suspected that they weren’t all that anti it) got us back to the Asia hotel and a much-needed beer for the road. I don’t really like drinking before long-ish journeys, and would rather avoid it than require using the lavs on a Shufflie-wagon, but I’d figured that I’d sweated so much that day that any moisture taken on would be routed towards better places than my bladder, and so it proved.

Getting out of town was less flyover-based than getting in, and the attractive suburbs stretched for miles and miles, far outlasting any chance of me staying awake – falling asleep on coaches being my only reliable superpower. If only I could make it pay, somehow, but at the very least, least I’d make a more useful Avenger than Jeremy Renner.

Three days later was a shock to the system – not arriving in Singapore itself, which was as delightful a jolt as one could expect, but because of the time issue. For three months, every few days as we’ve headed west around the world, we’ve had to wind our clocks back an hour, which has been brilliant. You know how nice it is in September, when you get that extra hour in bed to be hungover in? Well, imagine that on around about a weekly basis – okay, you do eventually have to skip a day, but it was in February, and nobody likes February anyway, so missing out on one of those was fine.

Malaysia, and thus Singapore, does things a bit differently from the rest of Round That Way, however, and we had to put things an hour forward, which after being treated so nicely for so long felt like a bit much, all things considered.

But we pressed on, heroically, as because this was Singapore, various people had said to us, ‘oh, if you’ve got a day in Singapore, you must do this’, in a manner that not that many other places had generated, giving us a laundry-list of things to pack in.

First up was a stroll – if you can call a stroll in ultra-tropical conditions a stroll, it was more like a squelch – from the port through defiantly non-touristy Singapore to Tiong Bahru market, which had been recommended by a pal (whose novel in which it features you should really consider picking up) as a place to get some early sustenance. It was a cracking walk – I liked the Mega City One-style numbers on the side of the huge apartment blocks – and an even better place to eat; a local food-court with a bewildering array of options, most of little succour for the timid-palated westerner. Eventually I just pointed to something that looked a bit duck-like, and was handed a bowl of hot, meaty gloop (and I used the world gloop in a hugely non-perjorative sense) that I’d kill for again right now. I also recommend the Lime Juice Featuring Fermented Plum from the same stall – at the back, fifth stall from the left. It’s the one with the things that might be ducks.

Flagging down a cab, and a few cityscape-featuring flyovers later we’d hit the Gardens On The Bay, a big biosphere sort of a place that’ll need a couple of pics to do justice to, although it’s just filled with interesting things, and despite being a world-class tourist attraction, had an admission fee of such eminent reasonableness that I wondered if they’d got it wrong.

It was a squelch-through-the-park away from the Marina Bay Sands hotel, of which we’d promised ourselves a trip to the top – you know the one, it features in absolutely everything to do with Singapore, and is that three-towered monstrosity with the flat bit joining the peaks. It looks a bit like an elephant, if you squint, and are mad.

It’s the sort of place where you’d only stay if someone else was paying i.e. work, if you do something ridiculous for a living, or were or had a family member that was an oligarch, warlord or criminal. They do let the proles into a rooftop bar, after paying an entrance fee that includes one of the bad drinks, but not one of the many good drinks, so you’re constantly reminded of your place in the scheme of things. You’re also treated to a glimpse of the moneyed classes at play in the infinity pool they have there, which should make you envious but somehow doesn’t – but the upside to all of this is that the view is spectacular. Regular readers (fuck you, Burundi) know we do like an up-in-the-air drinkie, but the difference not having any safety-glass between you and the abyss made a difference I wasn’t expecting.

Not quite enough to counter that sort of over-attentive service where they won’t demonstrably mind if you didn’t spend anything else but they’d sure as fuck prefer it if you did. Correspondingly, I wasn’t about to throw another fifteen quid at a second pint of will-this-do? Stella, so after a root around the not-for-the-likes-of-us boutiques on the ground floor, which are always good value to the easily amused, we got in a cab to Raffles.

To find it shut.

Well, most of it was. The hotel and the bar proper were undergoing a comprehensive refurbishment to a degree that most of the place looked more akin to building-site than attractive destination. We’d heard, however, that the Long Bar was still open and relieving tourists of their cash in a quietly effective manner, so we rocked up to find a decent proportion of the ship queuing to get in. You can say whatever you want about a dismal traipse through the last, still-fairly-objectionable vestiges of outdated colonial attitudes, and you’d almost certainly have a few sentences worth listening to and reflecting on.

But we wanted a decent drink, and true to their reputation, they provided them in a much more pleasing fashion than those sniffy cunts up the top of the Sands. So much so, in fact, that the little booth we’d been lucky enough to be given was such a great spot for people-watching that we stayed for at least three drinks more than the original plan for the day.

They make ‘em big, and they make ‘em strong – they make so many Singapore Slings that they need a huge bit of green-enamelled farm-machinery to crank the cocktail shakers to the required demand – and when this happens at home, dinner gets relegated to a blast through the M&S Food Hall before going on to get more booze. Luckily, one of the few places in the world where you can do this outwith the usual holy purview of St. Michael is Raffles Long Bar in Singapore, which has a little M&S in the mall across the road.

Now, you might think that wanting to keep up the high alcohol-quality levels of a lovely day out, when combined with the less-than-stellar choices back on the ship might then lead to slightly pissed people spending slightly too much money on good wine, before heading to the basement lavs in a Singaporean mall to decant selfsame into recently-emptied water-bottles, for the purposes of smuggling it all past security. You might think that an acceptable way to behave. You might consider that something people in their forties would deign to be a decent use of their time. You might think that forgoing the manifold culinary options in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities in favour of hitting the Pizza Hut at the cruise terminal and brazening it out though the x-ray scanner would be just a zippy thing to be going on with.

I have no opinion on the matter.

Amazingly, the next day was greeted in a manner both bright and fresh, and ready for a short stop at Port Klang, where we’d previously booked a taxi to take us into Kuala Lumpur for a flying visit to the Petronas Towers.

There were official excursions for this, of course, but they’d been all booked up before we even set sail, and so we took matters into our own hands and thus Stanley, our taxi-driver, was waiting at the terminal. This not only had the advantages of feeling (slightly) less on rails than mixing it up with the Shufflies, even though we tipped well it was still – and this is the proper CMV terminology – an ‘Aching Fuckload’ less money than we’d have been charged by the company.

The Petronas Towers used to be the world’s tallest skyscrapers, but now languish at 16th place, and they feel it keenly, I think. They have a display at one point, when you get out of the lifts at the Skybridge where other, newer towers are featured, but the biggest section is still “PETRONAS TOWERS – #1 TWIN CONNECTED TOWERS IN THE WORLD”, which as nobody else seems to be rushing to try and make a bunch of other twin connected towers, seems to be something of an empty boast. It’s not as if they’re even going to be the tallest towers in the city shortly, as nearby there’s a vast, dark, TMA-1 style edifice being thrown up a few blocks away – the construction of which is all mired in some sort of scandal involving an ex-PM or two, Stanley told us – which, confusingly, according to this is going to be exactly the same height, only without spires so it’ll look taller. It’s all a bit much, and this paragraph is too long anyway. Have a picture.

Anyway, the Petronas Towers are amazing – just look at them! You get to go onto the Skybridge, which is even better when you realise it’s not even properly bolted on to anything, it just sort-of hangs there using some complex hydraulics to account for the sway in the towers. Then, you get to go up to the proper top of them (well, one of them) where there’s a fabulous set of instructionals and maps, pointing things out and just generally being interesting and fun. They’re so popular, in fact, that you’re assigned into groups and rushed around the place a bit faster than you’d like, but not before I spotted a display for The Spirit Of Malaysia…

…which featured slightly more in the way of real human skulls than I’d seen on the trip so far.

Still.

Maybe they were family.

Lunch was acquired in the big mall at the bottom, before rendezvousing with Stanley nearby, he and his taxi being on the receiving end of a tropical thunderstorm of – to us – epic proportions which certainly provided a bit of freshness as we slid out of town, coincidentally going by the base of the previously-mentioned new tower, by which point I’d discovered was named The Exchange 106 – if it was up to me, I’d try not to give menacing new temples of capitalist evil titles that could be confused with provincial FM stations promising all-hits, all-day-long, but at the time of writing I haven’t been asked for my opinion.

I’d probably go for The Death-Sentinel. You can have that one for free; just make sure you keep the skull motif going.

The next day was on the island of Penang, up the Malaysian coast, and specifically Georgetown, where the port is. Our plan was little more than wander and eat, both of which you can do lavishly – I’d used a bit of precious wifi to gather a map or two with points of interest, not that you needed it, because everywhere you looked, particularly in their Little India, was a riot of colour and fun.

I had both successes and failures, the latter being an Upside-Down Museum which seen objectively was a charming little venture where various domestic environments were portrayed in a succession of rooms with everything (that’s right!) upside-down, and a bunch of perky teens encouraged you to get into the right position while they took pics of you with your phone, giving the subsequent pictures the impression of you being caught in some sort of earthquake. Well, I’m not ashamed to say (I’m a bit ashamed to say (I’m a lot ashamed to say)) that I just wasn’t in the frame of mind to be suddenly ordered around in such a manner when I wasn’t expecting it, had a minor freakout and decided to sit this one out etc. It was either blameable on the intense heat or me being a massive dick – tbf, there’s a time and a place for being told to lie on my back with my shoeless legs in the air and pretend to be distressed, and this wasn’t it –  but I’m saying it was a little of the first one and a lot of the second.

The success, such as it was, was navigating one of the local eating options, where there was a basic rice dish, and you picked a bunch of nice things to go with it just by pointing at them, and it was cheap and delicious and I was still a bit annoyed with myself for being a dick so I was just happy that it worked without too much embarrassing western flailing.

For the afternoon we’d settled on going up Penang Hill, the most attractive way to do so being the funicular railway, which turned out to be both good and bad in that yes, it got an awful lot of people up the hill safely and quickly, but the fun in FUNicular railways (that’s why it’s called that!) is meant to be the journey rather than the destination – at least, I always think so – and this one was a cramped, noisy and sweaty mess.

Still, the view, eh? Look at that fuckin’ view.

It paled after a few minutes, as truly spectacular views always do, especially ones like this that crammed in so many wide vistas and constant changes of focus and perspective that it started to tickle the back of my mind in a way that people who’ve had Ménière’s Disease in the past will recognise as Oh Fuck Get Me A Can Of Beer To Both Drink And Focus My Eyes Upon (And If You Have A Valium To Hand, Better Still), so we wandered off before the shutters fell on my brain.

There was plenty to do up there, in terms of attractions – including the one-two hit of adjoining museums, one devoted to cameras and one devoted to owls; work the point of that out if you can – but being a bit peopled-out we went on one of the nature trails, which seemed to be less popular. We chose the middle-sized one, said to be about an hour in duration, and it was great – we hardly saw a soul, saw a bunch of interesting flora and fauna, including an excellent ten-inch long black centipede that I named ‘Michael Parkinson’, and weren’t even fazed by the trail eventually getting confused and leaving us unsure about how to get back to the top of the railway. Happily, it all worked out, or you wouldn’t be reading this and I’d be back looking to eat Michael Parkinson for my dinner.

An Uber (or ‘Grab’, as the system is known here) got us back near to the ship, so we could take a look at the Clan Jetties – long piers out into the water that used to belong to the many Chinese families back in the 19^thC. I don’t know how many times I can get away with ‘it was super-fun and interesting’ on this blog – I’m perfectly aware I might already have pushed things a bit too far on that score, but some were used as little stalls and shops, lots were still residential homes, some a bit of both, but if you’re going to have people traipsing by and gawp at your way of life, you might as well try and make a buck out of it if you fancy – I bought a fermented-plum ice-pole that managed the fabulous trick of being equal parts delicious and disgusting, which must be extremely hard to pull off. I finished it and fancied another; make of that what you will.

Anyway, in a day filled with Interesting Things, the Clan Jetties managed to feature about seven of the top ten, and maybe the amount I’m spending on uploading pics here might serve to give a taste of it. Probably not, but let’s see. Go to Malaysia, it’s great.

Okay, 4200 words in a single blog is pushing things a bit, so – next day: Patong, on Phuket, back in Thailand. Searing, wet heat. Sun intense. Nice enough during the day, prob. v. sleazy at night. Plenty of creepy middle-aged westerners in groups (not from ship), prob. semi-permanent residency for unsavoury reasons.  Anyway, last chance for hour or two at beach, enthusiastically taken. Waves stronger than expected, got knocked down by one, lost sunglasses. Bought fake Ray-Bans from beach hawker as a result. By time to go, too early for lunch at seafront café, maddeningly, so last meal in Thailand was 8% tangerine beer and a round of underdone toast. Apt somehow. India next. See you there.

Phew.