Andrew Duff

October 1, 2009 · 5:19 am

A triple whammy! And a final journey

A tale of triple jeopardy

It’s 3.45am, and I’m standing outside a 7-11 store in Kota Bharu, Northern Malaysia. I’m about to embark on the final train of a looping 11-month overland journey from Mumbai to Singapore. There’s one problem. No taxi driver.

Fresh from a 10-day meditation, I try to put what I’d learnt to use. “Calm and balanced mind, Andy, stay equanimous…” But inside I‘m a knot of anxiety. My 32,000km journey from Mumbai has been spookily trouble-free. Surely I am not going to be tripped up at the final hurdle?

3.55am. A dilapidated taxi rounds the corner on two wheels and screeches to a halt in front of me, five minutes after my panicked call to the driver’s mobile. An impossibly scrawny Malay man, procured the night before to get me to the station, takes my bag and slings it in the boot with half-open bloodshot eyes. We set off at high speed.

“How long?” I ask. “Twenty” he replies, with a gold-toothed grin, momentarily removing both hands from the steering wheel to signal twenty and nearly giving me a heart attack in the process. This is going to be tight – the train leaves at 4.18. I breathe deeply and try to remember that there’s nothing I can do to change the situation.

“Sorry… three people…” he grins again. I look over. He is making that unmistakeable hip-and-fist-pumping action that indicates carnal activity. I raise an eyebrow. “Three people?”

“Three people… very good…” There is no mistaking that grin. I ponder the unsolicited addition of this information, wondering what the correct response is. He is suddenly apologetic. “Sorry… English…” he adds. Given the potential for sordid details, I am rather relieved at his lack of communication skills.

4.11am As the station looms out of the darkness, I realise I’m going to make the train. The driver makes one final conversational gambit.

“Where from… US? Bush NO! Obama OK…” I tell him I‘m from the UK.

“Ah… good language , good people, good economy…” he replies with a tinge of envy, as if to remind me that the UK’s not that bad after all.

We draw up to the station. I hurriedly get my bags out of the boot. Suddenly I am enveloped in a warm hug. Clearly Mr Taxi feels we’ve connected. I disengage carefully, trying not to betray that I can’t get the thought of “three people” out of my head.

I buy a ticket and board the crowded 4.18 from Kota Bharu to Gua Musang, the first stage of my final journey to Singapore.

Newcastle to London – via Wick

Actually getting to KotaBharu in the first place had been something of a challenge.

As an analogy (and with apologies the international reader(s) unfamiliar with British geography), most of you will agree that going from Newcastle to London via Wick is both mentally and geographically loopy in the extreme. But 11 months ago I left Mumbai by train, and I was determined to arrive in Singapore by train.

The problem: Kuantan (Newcastle) had no train station let alone trains to Singapore (London). So getting to the start-line for this final train journey involved an 8- hour bus ride from Kuantan (Newcastle) north to Kota Bharu (Wick) in order to take a 17-hour train ride to Singapore (London). Nice. (I suspect it’s the kind of thing that only appeals when you travel without deadlines).

Once I’d figured out that the three different trains that I had been told I had to catch were in fact one train (you just had to get off and buy another ticket for each section, rather bizarrely), I settled back to enjoy my final 17 hours of railtrack on this overland journey through Asia

And boy was it worth it. The first stage of the line from Kota Bharu on the Thai/Malay border to Singapore (off the southern tip of peninsular Malaysia) is aptly named the “Jungle Line”, cutting a swathe through the virgin jungle and plantations that cover the interior of the Northern part of this country.

I was reminded of everything that I love about train travel in Asia – the relentless movement towards a destination, however slowly; the wonderful rural stations, the changing faces as passengers board and alight. And the stations themselves – always deeply pragmatic buildings, the guards proud in sparkling uniforms, the tired plastic waiting seats firmly affixed to the walls, the signs in varying fonts for sub-master this and assistant-platform-manager that. They are a place of practical expectation – a place to wait – comfortably and without concern – for the future to arrive.

My reverie was broken as we arrived at the Singapore border, the quasi-military efficiency of customs and immigration a reminder that this is a city that feeds off a mix of pride and paranoia, and one that keeps a foot in both the East and the West.

315 days and 32,000 kilometres of overland travel were finally over.

Singapore – sterile? Self-consciously superficial? Or just Singapore?

Two days is hardly enough to start to understand a city, but there is something wonderfully honest and self-consciously superficial about Singapore, so I think it‘s OK to try. There is no pretence here – they’re just trying to build a city that works, financially and commercially, and one that provides the cleanest and highest standards of living

In that sense, the accusation that it’s “sterile” is both true and false. It’s true that there’s little room for anything the government and the residents don’t consider “hygienic”, but the people that live there do so happily, and in peace, which is hard to argue with.

I explored the city on foot, walking through the Arab area, the bits of the colonial era that still stand, and along the river which for so long was the beating heart of trade in the area. The roads (at least those that weren’t blocked off for the Grand Prix last weekend) are so clean that it was almost disquieting to see a rhododendron blossom ( they are in season) on the immaculate pavement.

Personally, I’d take the messy chaos of India every day, but each to their own.

I am now in Indonesia, enjoying more free-diving and scuba on pristine islands (the Gili islands, off Lombok).

Next stop – by air – Australia.

Meditation’s what you need

The first time I heard of Vipassana meditation was in India in December last year. Justin, a seasoned traveller heading for Auroville on a Royal Enfield motorbike, told me about the increasingly popular 10-day courses in hushed tones, as if he was relating a ghost story.

“It’s really serious, man… ten days without a word – can you imagine that?” There was a short pause as it sank in. Ten days sounded a very long time indeed. I’d never even meditated. But there was something intriguing in the idea of being silent for ten days.

A month later in the Yoga Ashram some of the myths about Vipassana’s effects were dispelled by three girls who had completed it. “Oh yeah, it’s tough” said one. “You go a bit crazy after 5 or 6 days, but then it’s pretty cool…” Going crazy? This was starting to get interesting.

And when I read some of India’s top CEOs find the time to do 10 days of Vipassana every year without fail, I felt like I had no excuses. If they had the time, I definitely had the time. I found a centre in Malaysia that was running a course that fitted with my plans and signed up, with (I have to admit) a secret smile at the irony of doing a Buddhist meditation course in a Muslim state.

A journey from the inside out into a mad, mad world

4.30am on Day One. The meditation hall was so dimly lit that it felt like the light was battling the darkness. I crossed my legs for the first time with some trepidation, recalling my mental wrestling and physical wriggling during mere 20 minute sessions at the Yoga Ashram. My practice since then hadn’t exactly been what you would call ‘diligent”. Now I was embarking on 100 hours of a famously challenging technique, over 10 days. Ten days of navel-gazing… had I gone mad already?

“Vipassana” is a meditation technique discovered by Buddha 2500 years ago. It is a particularly pure form of meditation, and far from introspective. It is still concerned with stopping the mind completely, but in Vipassana, the purpose isn’t communication with a God – it’s to turn outwards, understand how impermanent everything is in reality, and therefore to engage with the external world in a positive and compassionate way. In the process, you rid of some of the bad stuff that we all carry around, and get to meet your Self.

The latest in a line of teachers, purportedly stretching back to Buddha himself, is S N Goenka. Goenka has been so effective in spreading the technique’s popularity through 10-day courses (there are centres all over Asia and the world) that he can no longer teach them all himself. Instead, instructions and chanting on every course (at the start and end of each 1-2 hour sitting) come in the form of his disembodied flowing Indian voice wafting through the meditation hall.

In the evenings, this voice was given a face for 90 minutes, as we sat listening to a “discourse” from Goenka, who had an uncanny knack for knowing exactly what had been going through our heads during the preceding day. Warm and mellifluous, his voice begged mimicry, but that had to wait – for nine days, you must observe “Noble Silence”, complete absence of verbal, physical or visual (no eye contact) communication with other students so that the mind gets a decent shot of achieving silence.

The first few days were an extraordinary exercise in becoming aware of just how many irrelevant (and random, so random) thoughts go through your head each day as we became aware of what it means to meditate properly. Thoughts of the near and past future jostled for space with memories that I‘d forgotten even existed..

It all felt suspiciously easy. During those first two days we were given considerable leeway on movement during each 1-2 hour session. and Goenka’s slow sonorous delivery at the start of every session helped to sear his instructions deep into my cortices and develop a habit. “Be very aware, very attentive, very vigilant. Work patently and persistently, patiently and persistently. Work diligently… diligently…” Even the body adapted well, shifting to two meals a day ( 6.30am and 11am, with only fruit at 5pm to keep the wolf from the door in the evening). Time slowed, as the extraordinarily regular rhythm of life that mediation brings was established.

Crank down the volume

But on day three, Goenka shifted things to the next level. Unbeknown to us, the first three days had been mere warm-up – we hadn’t actually started learning Vipassana yet, he informed us. While this was ever so slightly disheartening, when the real essence of the technique was explained, it at least had the benefit of keeping things interesting by setting a new challenge. And for Vipassana from Day Four, things would be stricter. In a display of “Aditthana”(strong determination), we would now have to remain motionless for three of the ten hours each day. Ouch.

It is impossible to explain Vipassana and what happens to your mind. The next five days were a deeply personal journey that it would be impossible to describe without sounding a bit ridiculous; which is, of course, precisely why Goenka insists that experience over 10 days is the only way to learn.

Suffice to say that I did feel more than slightly crazy on Day Six (those thoughts just don‘t want to stop), I leaked gallons of water both from the eyes and the nether regions in one of the strangest “clearouts” of my life on Day Seven, and I had some incredible insights into many aspects of my life on Days Eight and Nine.

As Noble silence was broken on Day Ten and at last we could discuss and compare notes, it quickly became clear that experiences of the technique differ. But there was not one person who felt they had failed to gain from the ten days.

Vipassana is a truly extraordinary and rewarding experience which is bringing greater peace of mind to increasing numbers of people. In fact, I’d probably vote for a party that suggested it as a new form of National Service in the UK. Non-sectarian, easy to comprehend and with tangible benefits, it is now even being used to great effect in many prisons in India and even in America.

I left the centre with a happy heart and a clear mind. I felt ready for the final step in my overland journey from India – one last long-distance railway journey, down through Malaysia to Singapore.

[to be continued…]

The life aquatic

It’s not easy being a turtle egg.

Mum’s journey up the beach to lay you has its own dangers, but that’s only the start of it. You and 100 or so potential brothers and sisters then lie buried a metre down in the sand, hoping to survive without being discovered by inquisitive predators. Presuming you manage to get out of your shell and up to the surface, you still have to cover 100 yards back to the sea, avoiding the spider crabs and their holes in a Lara Croft-style obstacle course. Then you’re in the sea and at the mercy of the waves and various seaborne hazards.

By the time you reach the age of majority, it’s easy to understand why you might pat yourself on the shell – you’ve survived against odds of roughly 1000 to 1 to get this far.

The conservationists got involved in Turtle-world when it became clear that human intervention – often to steal the valuable shells and the reputedly aphrodisiac eggs – was starting to challenge even these odds. Then, back in the 50s and 60s, something rather unfortunate happened. The conservationists didn’t know that the temperature of the sand in which the egg is buried has a bearing on the sex of the hatched animal. The devastating impact, particularly on the Leatherback turtle population, was only felt 40 years later (a couple of decades ago) when thousands of female turtles were left stranded without mates.

It’s *really* not easy being a turtle egg.

Nevertheless, turtles are a focus area for conservationists like WWF now, particularly in Malaysia. I had happened across the Ma’Daerah Green Turtle protection programme on the internet, and arranged to spend two weeks helping them out on the beach they patrol in Northern Malaysia.

I was welcomed a couple of weeks ago by Sharifah the biologist, two rangers and a hatchery worker. The basic nocturnal work took a little getting used to. Two night patrols – one at 9pm, one at 2am. with one of the rangers, I would walk the 2km of remote paradise beach by moonlight, lie down on the sand for a couple of hours, stare at the stars with the ranger’s radio gently wafting over the sand, often drifting off to sleep before waking and stumbling to the sanctuary. By the final day, I loved the patrols, particularly those with the middle-aged ranger Pak Mat. Not only did he seem to enjoy babbling to me in Malay (seemingly oblivious to my complete incomprehension), but he also had a caring wife – I must have tasted every kind of weird tropical fruit carefully bagged for beach consumption.

For me, there was high excitement in finding turtle-tracks on the beach, following them up to a nest, and hearing the sound of strong flippers scraping sand over eggs. The job of collecting hatched turtles from the hatchery and releasing them in their 100s into the sea was even more rewarding. Pak Mat just laughed gently at my child-like enthusiasm – for him, it was just another day of his ten years here, supporting his seven children.

With the end of the season approaching (now-ish), we had another job to complete. WWF had acquired four expensive satellite transmitters to fix onto the backs of mothers after they had laid their eggs. This was no easy task – weighing in at 100kg and about a metre long, these turtles were (understandably) not that keen on being boxed for 3 hours in the early hours of the morning while a hot epoxy resin was applied to their shell. But this is a necessary part of the conservation effort – even now, very little is known about the lifetime movements of turtles out at sea.

In my last few days at the sanctuary, Sharifah the biologist started a final small project. Around a headland north of the beach, the lights of a huge Petronas oil refinery cast an eerie red light into the sky. Hatchlings are attracted by light, and Sharifah and her boss had a hunch that the “Petronas effect” was pulling hatchlings North like a magnet once they reached the sea. To test the theory, small lightsticks on polystyrene floats were attached with sellotape and fishing line to the back of 4 hatchlings, which were followed for a couple of hours with kayaks. Results – as yet – inconclusive; though I know where I’d lay my bets.

I left the sanctuary 4 days ago and moved on out to the beautiful Perhentian Islands, renowned for their fantastic diving. Given the increasingly aquatic theme of this section of my travels, it seemed churlish not to learn to scuba-dive, so I’m now a PADI Open Water scuba-diver. Another day, another aquatic qualification.

I’m heading into silent Vipassana Meditation now for 10 days, before heading to Singapore and then Bali, where I plan to surf and do some more free-diving.

Toodle-pip!

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