A visit funded by the University of Nottingham graduate school was just in order for a 9-day break from lab work and the blandness of reptitive Nottingham life. In exchange, I would give a 15 minute presentaion on my PhD work to peers and explore university life at the Malaysian campus. It was a great opportunity to meet new people from around the world, studying things related to the topic of 'food' which I knew very little about. We were put up in the smart 'Royal Chulan Hotel' and spent time at the University campus which was about 50 mins out of town in a place called Seminyih.
Highlights included one chap, Thom Davies, who had spent much of his time for his PhD researching the social and economic fallout within the exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl disaster (fantastic photography included). A second was Beth Honeysett, who spent many months in Syria (one of my favourite countries) researching attitudes towards food intergrated with state policies towards food - something very relevent to uprisings in Syria today.
Of course there was more to do and see than just the inside of the lecture hall and the streets of Kuala Lumpur offered a taste of a unique culture. The street Jalan Alor served up a diverse array of street food best served with cold beers and the street markets (Chinatown and Central Market) offered an arrange of knock-off/fake products from watches to Gucci handbags. Oh the days of owning a Rolex at school could all come back again. The main reason for a visit to these streets is to taste the fresh fruit on offer which included variants of lychee and the infamous Durian fruit. I can't imagine anyone liking this fruit just to eat, it must be used by the locals in cooking stews or something... I'm yet to find out as the smell and taste of rotting onions with maybe a hint of garlic and other over-powering tastes. The highlight of any cultural tour of Kuala Lumpur must be to have dinner at the (a restaurant I can't quie recall the name of) where they take great pride in performing ridiculously out of context cultural dances with synthetic traditional music over an aged pa system. To top of the entertainment was a rendition, on repeat, of Malaysia's tourist slogan of 'Malaysia, truly Asia' - evidently the Malaysian tourist board spent time on this one.
Apart from visits to the University campus, the only visit I made outside of Kuala Lumpur was a day visit to the west coast to try and find swarms of fireflies. This involved taking a 2-hour taxi journey through the plantations and stopping at anything remotely interesting (temples, a gathering of monkeys, markets) before stopping for dinner at a fish restaurant right on the river. It also happened to be the location of where we would get the boat from to go up river in search of fireflies. The food was actually pretty good, I was expecting a tourist trap yet the food was as good as some of the food I had had elsewhere in KL. However, the viewing of the fireflies wasn't so great. We did see some, but it was touted as the one of the best places to see swarms of fireflies. Maybe I just got a bad day.
April 2011 saw some fantastic UK weather, with temperatures on the golf course reaching a steaming 25C. After a frantic stableford competition which saw me score 43 points (a mere 4 points behind the eventual winner) we took off down to visit my parents in South Wales. A four hour drive and some careful directions, post dinner at the local pub, we arrived in seculded area called the Cothi valley.
The new house sits in position carved into the Welsh hillside. A severe slope behind the house leads up to the crest of the valley with open fields and woodland inbetween. Below the house is the modest river Cothi. I'm told 3600 trees are to be planted on the land in 2012, eco-friendly indeed.
Not much travelling to be done in 2010, but a weekend break in Manchester was taken in aid of seeing the Arcade Fire in concert in the old railway station known as Manchester Central. The place feels enormous, sort of like a vast aircraft hanger and quite a good venue for some decent rock music.
The trip included a stay in the budget Lansdowne Hotel, conveninently placed in the heart of the student area. Not a bad place to stop if on a budget, although the basment club does reverberate through the whole building. Buses to town were regular and the city was pleasantly nice. I could definitely spend longer than a weekend exploring what was on offer. As it was Christmas, it proved decisive to do our Xmas shopping once more away from Nottingham. We ventured through the Arndale Centre (the venue for the 1996 IRA bombings) and other large department stores. The Christmas market was probably the highlight of the shopping trip with mulled wine and giant ginger cookies to be tasted. Hmmm Manchester... you're an alright city, I will come back.
A visit to my city of birth was for the cause of seeing Yusef Islam (aka Cat Stevens) in concert. There isn't much to write home about Liverpool. People I speak to say there is much change and there is a fantastic shopping centre, not forgetting it being the European City of Culture in 2008. My interpretation is it’s still the wet, cold and miserable city of the North West I remember. Sure there has been a lot of money pumped into the retail centre of the city, plenty of glass and shiny steel aswell as shops full of high price tags and useless tat. Didn't stop us doing our Christmas shopping there thou. Otherwise, the city still feels pretty grim; out towards Sefton Park the endless estates have a visible air of degradation and the Liverpuddlian accent hasn't improved much either.
Our trip got off to a cracking start after driving for 2.5 hours we arrived at our pre-booked accommodation only to find it wasn't as pre-booked as we anticipated due to an administration fault on Emma's part. Thus we had to find last minute accommodation in the area, fingers crossed it wasn't a Liverpool FC home game this weekend. Driving about we found a suitable hotel and settled in for the weekend. Sites we visited included the old docks (without the famous UK weather map) and the Metropolitan Cathedral or enormas wigwam.
We toured around Spain a little, taking in some sights along the North coast (Santander, Llanes) and also a visit to Barcelona before heading back to England. We had our directions to the campsite we wanted to stay in Barcelona, well Castelldefels which is just South of the city. Unfortunately, we could not find it and after hours of driving up and down the coast and finding one campsite which had since closed down we had to make a phone call for help. Emma made a quick call to Sophie B and all the tension between driver and navigator were healed. We located the road, which happened to be a busy dual carriage-way, and eventually arrived at the campsite (Estrella de Mar) to find it was fully occupied and that they do not take bookings. Our best bet was to arrive early the next day and hopefully get a pitch. This turned out to be a good opportunity to get a night in a hotel and find a nice restaurant to have dinner at.
Once settled in Barcelona we took several trips to the city and found a local clay-court tennis club just around the corner from the campsite.
Summer 2009 was a Bruce Springsteen tour year and thus I had to get to a show or two. Conveniently the tour stopped in Santiago de Compostela a city in North West Spain at the end of the Camino de Santiago pilgram trek. We packed the car and headed on our own pilgrimage of our own to see the Boss play his final European show of 2009. We stopped along the way in Bordeaux, France and several Spanish towns along the North coast including Llanes. Our accommodation was the trusty, tried and tested, Vango tent which was suitably dwarfed by its European counterparts notably the fold out Quecha tent.
Santiago also happened to be the home for my brother, Jonathan, who has been working there teaching English as a foreign language. Conveniently, he is fluent in Spanish and helped us with accommodation, food and bars to visit. Driving around Santiago was quite good also, underground parking on the edge of the old part of the city offered a cheap, easy way into the city centre. In fact, driving on the other side of the road isn't as bad as anticipated and the towns and cities we visited were easier and cheaper to find parking.
My only knowledge of Scotland/Edinburgh was that if you went to University when i first did you would be entitled to no fees - something which a good school friend of mine did. Edinburgh was as far away as I thought it was, the drive did seem to go on for sometime. Nothing the Sprinsteed wagon couldn't handle thou.
A second hand, lightweight, 2-man Vango Vortex tent was going to get its first trial... in the nearest campsite to Edinburgh, not the outer-hebrides it was probably designed for.