Renovation

No one asked our opinion about the remodel that’s taken over the portico, driveway, and lobby.  This is because we’re leasers, not owners.  I imagine the four or five residents who own flats in the building discussed the project.  Did they deliberately invite this hell?  Did they foresee muddy footprints everywhere, the noise, these dark people napping in all corners of the property at midday?  What negative condition could have prompted the owners to take this action?  It was a clean lobby, lovely floor and walls, wrought iron railings along the stairs and handicapped ramp.  The driveway was cobbled and the portico was roomy enough to allow taxis to exit without excessive maneuvering.  Visitors offered compliments regarding the marble floors, the subtle chandeliers, the cheerful fountain, the refreshing breezeway, the inviting pool—though no one in the building was sad to see the waterfall being torn out; it was a blight on the vista, a twelve-foot crag, and the splash reverberated through the lower fifteen floors. 

In Singapore, the noise a jackhammer makes when it breaks up cement is referred to as “hacking”—and considering the way buildings are constantly being torn down or renovated, it’s not unusual to hear the term several times a day.  The morning the work began a notice appeared in the elevator warning that there would be “hacking” for the next couple of months.  It never occurred to me that the noise would be so thunderous that I wouldn’t be able to host book group or Mahjong, but that’s exactly how bad it got, and still is.  From eight in the morning until six in the evening the hacking soars up and out, smashing into the walls of the other high-rises, and ricocheting back at us until it’s uncertain whether it’s coming from over there or over here, above or below. 

Today they closed off the residents’ elevator, leaving only the service lift in use.  I’m not a snob.  I don’t mind sharing the elevator with delivery people or live-ins or the maintenance staff.  But now, and for the next vague period of time, everybody’s using only one elevator, whereas before there were three.  And in order to get to the single elevator, a hike through a hardhat zone is necessary.  Workmen stop working and step out of my way when I leave the building.  I’m a hindrance to their progress.  Tools clutched, their brown eyes follow me as they wait for me to pass; and the same thing when I return.  Oathman, the man who’s in charge of the comings and goings, is quite agitated, ushering people through the cement carnage, explaining to everyone that it’ll only be four more weeks. 

I’m leaving for Houston next week.  When I return to Singapore, a whole new lobby will be in place.  

The elevator control fell into my hand when I pushed the button for my floor.  I laughed while Oathman raced for the tape.  

Where the poles are poking up is where the hideous waterfall used to be.  

This worker was happy to have his picture taken.  

Naptime.

Tribe Camera

When David and I first moved to this highly populated and touristy area near Orchard Road, if someone in our path was taking a picture, we dutifully stopped and waited, replying, “No problem,” to their “Thank you.”  But we soon found that there were so many lens-up folks blocking the sidewalks that our progress was more stop than go.  So we ceased being polite about it.  Now we’re the couple that barges on through.  Our images can be found in photo albums from India to Indiana.  If the tourists aren’t taking pictures of each other, they’re blocking foot traffic by huddling around their cameras or phones, looking at the pictures they’ve taken so far and trying to decide where they should set up the next shot. 

This excess photography is because Singapore is too stunning.  Perfect backdrops are everywhere.  Interesting statues are tucked into shady corners.  Fountains flow from walls and splash in courtyards.  Forests grow on rooftops.  Colorful bougainvillea waves from overhead walkways.  Malls, ultramodern at ground-level, sprout massive towers that poke the sky.  A museum in the shape of a hand?  I gotta get my picture taken in front of that.  A giant spiral pedestrian bridge?  Perfect place to stop and snap a selfie.  A ship on top of a fifty-five story hotel?  Take one of me, right here, slanted upward so it’s in the background.

Another result of having so many people taking pictures is a ridiculous camaraderie, a sort of “Hey, we’re all in this together” friendliness that grates on someone who’s as easily irritated as I am.  Men and women on the street have no problem approaching me, a stranger, holding out their cameras, and asking me to take pictures of them.  Regardless of what the insane camera people assume, all cameras are not alike.  The zooms, the on/offs, and the shutter releases are located differently on every model—but that doesn’t stop someone I don’t know from pushing his or her camera into my hands and rushing away to pose for what seems like forever while I try to figure out how the stupid thing works.

The oddest camera-related experience David and I had was in Goa.  We were scrambling around a Portuguese ruin, Fort Aguada, when a group of about six approached.  One of them was holding out a camera.  David smiled—he tends to be friendlier than I am—and graciously resigned himself to the imposition of stopping mid-step and fiddling with their camera.  To my dismay, they all circled around me, putting their sweaty arms around my shoulders like we were the best of friends, signaling to David that they were ready.  When David returned their camera, they handed it to me, gathered around David, and asked me to take a picture of them with him.  Then they grabbed some other hapless stranger, asking him to take another picture, this time with all of them squeezing in around both of us.  When other fort scramblers saw this camera dance, they, too, moved in and held out their cameras, asking the people of the current group to take their picture with us.  By the time we left the fort, David and I estimated that about twenty memory cards held pictures with the two of us as the focal point, surrounded by strangers.  This was over a year ago and I still don’t have a clue what it was about.  I mean, what the hell, right?  

On the steps of Ion Center

Three people with cameras up

Tourists on Orchard--it's hot out there.

That's a big camera.  

Beijing For a Week

After returning to Singapore from Borneo, Leanne and I visit Beijing.  My son, Sam, has lived there for three years and speaks Mandarin, which’ll make the trip easier.  We arrive in Beijing on a Thursday afternoon. 

A lot is said about the air quality in Beijing.  The nasty atmosphere is the first thing we notice when we step out of the airport.  It’s as bad as it’s reputed to be—filthy, toxic, dense, stinky.  Everything is viewed through a dull brown cloud.  Our eyes sting, our throats hurt, and the assault to our lungs makes us cough—and this is just after a few minutes of exposure.  China should be ashamed.   

I’ve got a slip of paper that has the name of our hotel written in Chinese.  I hand it to the taxi driver; he grunts, hands the paper back to me, and pulls away from the curb.  Forty-five minutes later he comes to a stop, points down an alleyway, then gestures toward the meter.  We pay, get out, and roll our bags in the direction he indicated until, thankfully, we arrive at our hotel, The Traditional View, which is clean and spacious, and has the hardest beds in the world. 

Sam and his girlfriend, Julia, meet us at a nearby restaurant for dinner.  Julia started showing up in Sam’s emails about four months ago.  I know what to expect before I meet her—Sam likes exceptional people and exceptional people like Sam.  And Julia doesn’t disappoint.  She’s stunningly beautiful, smart, self-confident, and appropriately respectful of the visiting mother and aunt.  The two of them have gone to some trouble to plan our tourist itinerary, which includes the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs, the Llama Temple, the Confucius Temple, the Summer Palace, the Olympic Park, the Hagglers Market, The Drum and Bell Towers, and the Temple of Heaven.  Oh, and somewhere in there Sam manages to find time to demonstrate something called a MacBook Air, which is a light laptop he’s certain will make my life more perfect than it already is. 

Rather than share an in-depth report about all the sights, I’ll just say they’re exactly what I anticipate—worth seeing, but crowded (we actually fear we’ll get trampled in the mob at the Forbidden Palace)—so I’ll just offer a few comments on the things that please or amaze me.  The underground transportation is clean, clearly marked, and efficient.  The food is inexpensive and terrific and often entertaining, like hot pot, where you order the food raw and then enjoy yourself while you cook it at the table.  And I also must mention dumplings, China’s most glorious contribution for the well-being and absolute happiness of all mankind.  The parks are remarkable—beautiful, clean, and popular.  Quite a few of them charge entry fees, which I find surprising.

My favorite outing is to the park of the Temple of Heaven on Sunday morning, when the older people gather and participate in unusual activities meant to promote fitness and demonstrate that they’re engaged in the world around them.  Ballroom dancing, yo-yoing, whip cracking, hacky sacking, Tai-chi, badminton—these old folks are doing all this stuff, and doing it well, though sometimes their actions seem bizarre, which causes me to believe this is a very uninhibited culture.  I have mixed feelings—while I admire their unrestrained spirit, I also find it cringe-worthy; I would never be so spontaneous in a public setting.  There’s a man standing by himself under a tree singing at the top of his lungs.  Some other old guy places himself on the edge of an elevated deck and howls, his voice rolling out over the park.  One thin man, dressed all in black, repeats the same polished dance move again and again and again, while nearby a shirtless man slowly crawls along the perimeter of the courtyard in “downward dog” position.  We come across a group of about fifty people all gathered around one ancient character who hollers, “Ho!” and his followers holler, “Ho!”  Then he hollers “Ho-ho!” and they holler “Ho-ho!”  This goes on for as long as it takes us to pass by, and the whole time everybody’s bouncing up and down on the balls of their feet and clapping in rhythm.  We turn a corner and there’s an eighty-year old man rapping out a humorous tale—we know it’s funny because his three-person audience is laughing. 

Also worth mentioning are the hutongs.  Hutongs are alleyways—narrow, crowded, smelly mazes that call to mind what Peking must have been like a hundred years ago.  Nice homes and tenement dwellings abut one another.  The cobbled streets are gray and all the walls are gray, and the gracefully sloping low roofs are gray, so it’s difficult to discern beginnings and endings.  Every hundred yards or so there’s a sign pointing toward a public restroom.  When I mention to Sam that I think they do a good job of providing facilities, he explains that these toilets are for the people who live in the area because they have no toilets in their homes.  When he tells me that they are all “open plan”, well of course I have to poke my head in.  And yep, he’s right.  Squatting toilets, no doors—and I have another question answered, which is, how do really old women squat like that?  The reality is—they just do it.  I don’t have the audacity to take a picture. 

Taken from Olympic Park.  The pollution's so thick you can hardly see the IBM sign at the top of the building.

The man on the left crawls along in Downward Dog while the man on the right performs the same twirl-and-point dance move over and over.  

Sam and Julia.  Do you see a helmet?  I don't.  

The hutongs are clean, but not spacious.

A doorway in the hutong.  See all the stuff stored at the side?  This can be dangerous when someone's trying to navigate their way home at night.  

The Great Wall.  For some reason Westeros was on my mind that whole day.   

Me, on The Wall

The Cave and the River

Michael tells us we’re going to stop at a cave between Sandakan and our next stay, the Myne Resort on the Kinabatangan River.  The cave, Gomantong, is where we’ll find swiftlets’ nests.  He explains that the nests represent a multi-million dollar industry.  We’re unimpressed at the idea of going into a cave, and maybe a little irritated at interrupting the trip for something so mundane.  Birds in a cave—who cares? 

We stop at the visitors’ center before making the trek to the cave.  Here Michael cups a nest in the palms of his hands and tells us that the nest is made of swiftlet saliva.  Each nest holds two eggs.  The nest is harvested and cleaned and sold for twenty-five hundred dollars a kilo.  It’s been used in Chinese cooking—mainly in soup—for four hundred years, and is thought to have health benefits such as relief of asthma, aiding digestion, and improving focus.  (Want sharper concentration?  Eat bird spit.)

The mouth of the cave is huge and inviting.  Foliage frames the shadowy portal, a picturesque grotto carved into a green hillside.  It’s miserably hot out here in the humidity and scorching sun.  It’ll be cool inside.  People exit wearing hardhats, and this stirs a bit of anxiety—why were they issued head-coverings and we weren’t?  The wooden bridge that leads to the cave crosses over shiny nasty sludge.  We enter a massive chamber that soars to a height of about six stories and extends back about a hundred and thirty meters. 

The smell hits.  Bats and birds.  Nasty.  Both creatures are swooping and fluttering high overhead.  With one hand I cover my nose, breathing shallowly.  With the other I cover my head to block the droppings that are visibly raining down.  Imagine the worst thing you’ve ever smelled and multiply it by a thousand.  According to Michael the guano in the middle of the cave is two meters deep.  The handrail, placed thoughtfully because the walkway is slippery, is crawling with two-inch cockroaches.  Don’t touch the rail!  Oh, and look, cockroaches are under our feet too—keep your feet moving or they’ll crawl up your leg!  And they’re all over the walls of the cave.  And the golden glittery movement atop the huge pile of guano?—cockroaches.  

Michael walks us along, talking as though bacteria isn’t rushing in every time he opens his mouth.  He points out rope systems and ladder placement, explaining the harvesting of the nests.  He tells us that the walls of the cave are divided into allotments belonging to families and are passed from generation to generation.  Because the sections are valuable, the family must guard them from interlopers—it’d be easy to sneak a hand over a boundary and grab a nest.  And that is why the owners of the allotments stay nearby, dwelling in shacks on the hillside just outside the cave.  One man is so paranoid that he has built his own little nest in a protected nook of the cave.  We look in and see a counter, a bed, a radio, a lamp.  A little boy is cuddled against his father as they sit on the bed and gaze at us as we pass by.  This is the man’s life.  This is his child’s life.  What good is the money he makes from the birds’ nests if he lives like this? 

We trek back to the SUV.  The drive to the Myne Resort is half an hour.  The place we’ll stay for the next two nights is lovely.  Overlooking the broad Kinabatangan River, the elevated deck offers a breathtaking view of green rain forest and silver water.  Oh, and also, there’s wine, a pleasant robust cab that’ll do me just fine. 

This stay is all about the wildlife to be seen from the river.  Three cruises are scheduled—two in the evening and one in the morning.  It’s hot.  Sunscreen, hats, and drinking water are strongly advised.  I have an excessive love of being carried along in boats—scooting over the water, bouncing along the waves, the clean breeze whipping at my face—being on the water is conducive to clear-thinking and relaxation; it makes me feel one hundred percent content.  So I’m happy to go searching through the area—but I’d be equally happy not to see a single one of the creatures that everybody else seems so keen to spot.  There’s a list of what we’re looking for—orangutans, proboscis monkeys, pygmy elephants, crocodiles, monitors, macaques, snakes, and lots of birds.

We find them all.  But it’s not like we’re all alone out here looking.  When the pygmy elephants are sighted all the guides along the river communicate the location of the herd and by the time we get there thirty other boats point toward the shore, each filled with up to twenty-four people with their cameras to their faces.  In our boat it’s just David, Leanne, and me—along with Michael and the river pilot.  I had a picture in my head of elephants the size of dogs.  Silly me.  They’re called pygmies because they’re smaller than their African and Indian cousins—but only slightly.  They’re still pretty big.  There are babies with massive ears and tourists exclaim over how cute they are.  According to Michael, such a successful sighting is rare.  But honestly, we sit and watch the beasts chew for over an hour.  They look at us and we look at them.  We’re here for so long that people have lowered their cameras.  There are simply no more pictures to take.  Yet we remain.  The sun is beating on us.  Let’s move on already. 

The morning trip is the best.  We turn into a calm tributary.  No other boats coast through here.  We get up close to a group of macaques, witnessing an intense and dangerous battle for territory.  Lots of screaming and trembling of leaves.  A couple of young males are pushed from high up in a tree.  We find birds, lots of birds, which is a rewarding challenge.  Flashes of blue and red and yellow swish by the boat, flit through green branches, hop about on the ground.  We see a hooded pitta, which Michael tells us is a five-year bird, meaning even if you’re an avid bird-watcher, you’re lucky to sight one every five years.  There are loads of different types of hornbills and eagles and kingfishers (the giant one looks clownish with its exaggerated coloring).  When the pilot turns the boat’s motor off the jungle noises take over—birds shrieking and flapping, monkeys shouting and leaping, insects droning on and on. 

After two days on the Kinabatangan River we’re delivered back to the airport in Sandakan, where we catch a flight to KL, then to Singapore.  My little dog, Trip, is thrilled when we roll our luggage through the door of the flat.  He pulls all his toys from their basket, presenting them proudly.  He wags all over.

People who harvest the nests stay nearby to protect their property.

Michael and I approaching the cave.  

A lovely cave full of guano and cockroaches.

A swiftlet sitting on its nest.  

Lots of fat cockroaches.  

A young pygmy elephant

The macaque looks sad, but I honestly don't think there's a lot going on in his head.  

Knowing we'd be leaving the area soon, the monitor was kind enough to strike a pose.