Ok this is the last post here just to provide the links to the last of the photos from Japan.

Here you'll find six panoramic photos of various landscapes in Japan:

http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Totally%20Excellent%20Panorama%20Album/

Here you'll find a video of a robot serving me ice cream along with loads of photos:

http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Japan/

Here you'll find a load of other photos that I have compressed in order to load more quickly:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gctrionaem/sets/72157605693919687/

That's it for this year folks. Watch this space next summer because you just never know what I might do next!!!

Apologies for this untimely end to my blog but be sure to check back next summer/autumn as I may very well be headed off somewhere else although I have no idea where yet. As a small consolation, I will leave you with the bit of an entry I tried to upload last time. Note that everything below happened last week now:

Last time I wrote I was in Osaka. I left as quickly as possible and headed for a place where foreign tourists rarely go: Matsumoto. This is a little alpine city up in the mountains of central Honshu. It wouldn't even have occured to us to go there were it not for the fact that Noride's host family from two years ago lived near there and she wanted to see them again. I'm glad we went because it turned out to be a very nice little city that rather reminded me of a Japanese version of Asheville. It was about as Bohemian as the Japanese get. It was nestled in between lots of huge tree-covered mountains and the train ride there was quite spectacular. The tracks wound their way around the sides of steep interlocking spurs with huge boulder-speckled rivers far below us. The tracks actually curved around bends so that the train banked slighly as it went around which was a very unusual sensation for a train. It felt almost like a very sedate rollercoaster.
This city is so isolated from the western world that we were constantly being stared at - a lot more than in Osaka. One middle-aged woman nearly crashed her car, turning around in her seat to stare at us as she drove by slowly. It's amazing that being white can be so amazing. However, we did happen upon a party of about 30 white English teachers under a bridge. They were barbequeing, they had a bonfire and some techno music playing and they were all hanging around under this bridge, drinking and speaking English. They probably represented 100% of the white community in the Matsumoto area. It was such a strange sight. They stared up at us as we walked by and we stared down at them and we were kind of smiling at each other thinking "hey you're white!" We thought about going down to them but for what? So we could say "Hey! We're all white! So how's being white working out for you?" You need more of a reason than sharing the same skin colour to invite yourself to a party!
We went cycling around town on some old school Japanese boneshakers that wouldn't have looked out of place gliding through the background of Chun Li's location in Street Fighter 2. Unfortunately though, there were no men repeatedly strangling a chicken. As we made our way home, a thunderstorm began and we got absolutely soaked. It was kind of fun actually! We took shelter for a bit in...an Irish pub! There really is no escaping. Of course the authenticity of this pub was questionable as we were the only white people there, we were shown to our alloted seats by staff and one of the staff was wearing a surgical mask for hygiene purposes. Also the music playing on the PA was elevator music. For some reason, everywhere you go in Japan has elevator music (except elevators). When I mean elevator music, I mean really crap electronic "relaxing" almost gameboy-like music. Anyway, for the record, a pint of Guinness cost the equivalent of 5.50euro in there but were mostly sold in half-pints! Blasphemy!
When we got back to our hostel and dried off, we ended up chatting to this half-Japanese, half-American (quarter Irish) lad called Patrick who was born in Japan but raised in Arizona and now living in Oregon. Apparently he got stared at just as much as us despite being half-Japanese and the locals were shocked to find that he had fluent Japanese. He could understand when they talked about him behind his back in Japanese too which I'm sure they're doing all the time with us! Japan really is a difficult place to be accepted in if even a half-Japanese person can't do it.
The Japanese are certainly the largest Asian race, physically. It's actually kind of a false stereotype that they're short. Sure there are some short people, but on average they're probably only slightly shorter than westerners and most men would be a bit taller than myself and some women too! The boys are very effeminate though. They really look after themselves, cary Louis Vitton handbags (I kid you not) and clearly spend hours working on their hair. This is a country where the boys look like girls and the girls are built like little boys. Sometimes you have to look twice to figure out from behind whether someone is male or female. They are more fashion conscious than any other country I have been to. Some of the get-up you'd see on lads over here! They'd look very silly altogether walking around at home anyway! We saw another t-shirt a few days ago that said "Star I need your man luv". Just thought you might like to know.
Technologically, Japan is years ahead of us and I can't understand why they don't export this technology because they'd make a killing on some of it. For example I saw an ad for an XD memory card with a 32GB capacity! For those of you who have no idea what that means, we still think 2GB cards are pretty nifty here. If that doesn't amaze you, how about taxis with electric back doors operated from the driving seat which open as if by magic or some other such trickery. It is as if there is some invisible ghostly coachman holding it open for you! All the cars seem to be fitted with talking GPS systems that map everywhere you drive and also play DVDs! It marks shops and restaurants and stuff on the maps too. They also have these trolleys for carrying crates but they're on a special kind of caterpillar track that allows them to go up and down stairs! And coolest of all, a few days ago, we were served an ice cream cone by a robotic arm! You put in a coin and the arm picks up a cone fills it with ice cream and hands it to you! It was so creepy! What can I say...Japan is weird!

Most of the subways in Osaka have "women only" carriages that men aren't allowed on to help cut down on groping while commuting, another bizzare Japanese social problem. I guess they have to let loose somehow and since there is very little crime, I suppose a bit of groping is just the price you pay for an efficient society. On a completely different note, despite Osaka being a much bigger city than Kyoto, I could count the amount of white folk I've seen here on one hand and I feel like I get stared at more here than in Kyoto. Admittedly, I was wearing my FABULOUS little red Hawaiian shirt today which is simply to DIE FOR so I'm sure many of the stares were covetous, quasi-lustful ones rather than curious, quasi-entranced ones.

I went to an onsen this evening which is like a hot spring spa only that it's a normal thing to do over here. There were loads of little marble pools all over the place to just hang out in and the water was roasting in all of them 40 degrees Celsius actually. And the saunas made ours look like igloos. They were 70 and 80 degrees celsius respectively! That's just wack! Then there was a freezing cold pool as well and people were lounging around comfortably in there too. Some of it was outside in a courtyard with a rock garden and everything and there were little gazebo pools where if it was too hot, you could just lean back outside the roof and the rain would fall on your face to cool you down. There were also little cradles submerged in the water that you could lie back in and various kinds of jets would shoot at you really hard and supposedly massage you although I found it rather uncomfortable. There was another little spot between two walls where there was a very weak electric current being passed between them and you're supposed to sit in the current and get mildly shocked! And that's supposed to be pleasurable or good for you or something! These baths are an etiquette minefield so I was trying to watch everyone else to see how they did things and not do anything at all until someone else did. There are loads of rules like where to wear shoes, where not to wear shoes, where to wear flip-flops, where not to wear flip-flops, where it's acceptable to be wet, where it's acceptable to dry off, where to put your facecloth. I knew some of the rules already. You HAVE to take a shower (while sitting on a little plastic stool in front of a mirror) before you get in . You have to soap up and you can't get in if you still have any suds on you. You take a cold shower after a sauna and apparently it's customary to empty a bucket of water over yourself just before you leave for some reason. Hanging out at the baths seems to be a social activity here. Dudes were just kicking it here, some of them were just lying back on tatami mats beside the pools taking naps and everyone was just letting it all hang out. Weirder yet was the fact that the women who worked there were free to walk in and out as they pleased to clean or whatever, and have a bit of a gawk at all the naked men. And everyone thought it was quite normal!!! What can I say? Japanese people are weird!

Today I visited the Osaka Peace Centre which is basically a war museum about all the atrocities commited by the Japanese in the last century. It was very blatant in accepting full Japanese responsibility for those attrocities and didn't try to dress it up in patriotic rhetoric or anything. It used words like "invaders, massacred, tortured" to describe Japanese acts - words one would expect Mongolians, Chinese, Koreans, Malaysians, Indonesians or Pacific Islanders to use. Clearly there is a lot of guilt about WWII, like in Germany, and it's a chapter of their history that the Japanese seem to be ashamed of but they won't let themselves forget it. I was told that this was a taboo topic here and not to try debating it so I won't (even if I could find a fluent English-speaking Japanese person who was a willing and able conversationalist). Probably the best way to put it in perspective though is that all of Asia seems to still feel about Japan the way the Irish felt about England until a decade ago (although that resentment was probably only justified to THAT extent up until about fifty years after the Cromwellian invasion). Some of the photos on display in there and some of the testimonials were chilling. I'm going to love wearing that T-shirt praising the old Japanese empire now...

Re yesterday's suicide discussion, I discovered today that Japan's suicide statistic for 2007 was 33,093. I'm guessing that's a lot - I don't really know. Apparently the figures have been steadily rising over the years and the main motivations have been lonliness, social isolation and work fatigue, which pretty much confirms all of my speculation yesterday. The increased suicide rates are roughly proportional to the increased average working hours over the last two decades. Apparently, many businessmen work all day, everyday, only coming home very late to sleep and starting very early the next day. I wish the Japanese service industry had the same attitude because a lot of places seem to just take random days off. The rate of suicide is highest among the 30-50 age bracket unlike Ireland where it's mostly men in their early twenties. Presumably men in their early twenties here have yet to have their hopes and dreams worn down by the relentless routine of Japanese office life. So what have we learned from these statistics? For a happy and healthy life, do as little work as possible, and focus on having as much fun as possible and making everyday as different from the last as possible. Sure I could have told you that! When you die you'll wish you spent more time with your friends or doing crazy stuff. You won't be lying on your deathbed cursing the heavens for not granting you a few more hours in the office. You'll wish you'd spent your time in college partying and your summers travelling, so I hope you did/are/will...It's a little more difficult to put that philosophy into practice after college but I suppose that's a challenge we all have to meet head on...New photos up at http://www.flickr.com/photos/gctrionaem/sets/72157605693919687

I often wonder what they think of foreigners and when I see the way many Americans carry themselves here, I worry about being tarred with the same brush. There are way more Americans here than in any Asian country I've been to, probably because they pull more weight in this Asian country than any other. The Japanese, as should be obvious at this stage, are usually fairly reserved (when sober), but many Americans I have seen don't really seem to have adapted much to the Japanese ways of behaving and speak just as loudly as they would at home when it sometimes seems inappropriate to do so. They draw attention to themselves everywhere, as if being white wasn't conspicuous enough already. I carefully watch the controlled expressions of the Japanese for reactions. They are a mask of Steven Seagalness. I can tell they're rolling their eyes inside their heads though! The Japanese never seem to argue openly which some foreigners don't seem to get.　There was a misunderstanding today with an Italian woman who felt she wasn't receiving adequate customer service. In fact she just wasn't conforming to a particular system of doing things so she wasn't going to get anywhere. She complained loudly nevertheless, which resulted in all the female staff looking very worried and trying to explain to her how it works, while saying things in Japanese to each other that was probably slightly less polite. One male member of staff didn't have the patience for this foreign ignorance as was slightly more visibly irate eventhough the words he used were still technically polite, they were delivered in a manner that left no room for negotiation. The Japanese want to resolve disputes　in a way that allows all parties concerned to save face. When Westerners argue they want to win and aren't as concerned about causing a scene. This results in culture clashes such as the one above. That's my take on things anyway. I may have misinterpreted the Japanese way of doing things as I'm sure I've done in the past few days on a few occasions.

Today we checked out the Imperial Palace. Kyoto used to be the old capital and seat of the Emperor. We also saw the "Golden Pavilion" which is actually golden as you can see from the photos. I wanted to see it because some Japanese guy made a film about it which I saw on TG4 a few years ago. Unsurprisingly, it was a rather weird film which was allegedly based on a true story about a monk who had a very unhealthy obsession with this temple that drove him to burn it to the ground. Of course it doesn't make sense! Then we went to see a famous rock garden with all that meticulously raked sand around it. Apparently, the rocks are positioned so that you can't see all of them from any one location around the garden. Then we checked out the local fish market. I was expecting something like the Thai fishmarkets I'd been to but it was way classier. Most of the fish came pre-killed for you and everything. There were also octopi (yeah it's a word), a wide variety of mollusks and other such sea-creatures that you would only ever put in your mouth for a dare. I soon found myself wandering cautiously into a pachinko parlour. Packinko is like a kind of gambling pinball where you have no control over the outcome of the game. The goal is to win loads of pinballs which you can trade in for money but it's more a game of chance than skill. The Japanese are addicted to it for some reason. I walked in and the sound was deafening. Hundreds of steel balls whirling though bleeping machines just sounds like a huge roar. Like most things Japanese, I had no idea what was going on and after spending the equivalent of 60c trying to get rid of ten steel balls, I cut my losses. They also had normal arcade games in there and there were little huddles of Japanese teenagers gathering around players to watch them. It was, of course, weird. I should mention that they have Tekken 6 in arcades here! I didn't even know it existed! There are new characters and the graphics are UNREAL in that they're actually quite nearly real! Why do they get all the cool stuff before us in Japan!

              We finished off the evening with a traditional Geisha stage performance (tourist trap). They arranged flowers for us, poured tea, danced around, played music and manipulated puppets…all that kind of carry on. Some of the music made so little sense to a western ear that it actually wouldn't have sounded out of place at all on a late Tom Waits album. (If you don't know who he is google him now!) To top it all off, I now have a very mild sunburn after another really hot day. It's probably about time. New photos for your viewing pleasure up at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Japan/　

            On the other end of the scale entirely, another feat of Japanese architecture was the Kyoto train station which is so huge that we didn't even see most of it when we first arrived. It should be a tourist attraction in itself because you can get all the way up to the ceiling hundreds of meters above the floor and walk along a suspended corridor which provides an amazing view of the city. It's the quietest part of the station and we were pretty much alone up there apart from a few window washers rappelling on the glass roof. Instead of wasting another thousand words on either this building or the temples, just look at the damn photos I spent so much time taking and uploading. I can't be describing everything for ye! I have to get back out and experience it!

              Everything in Japan is tiny…and I mean EVERYTHING!!! They seem to love it that way. They actually get pleasure out of seeing something really small either because they find it cute or technologically advanced. That's all well and good until they start messing with my daily dose of tea. I was given a tiny little cup of tea this morning. In the evening I went back and asked for a "bigu cupu" and pointed at the big cup. A worried expression overcame the girl's countenance and she said "Tea onry smallu cupu! Vely solly!" I turned on the Cork charm and patiently explained that she could just take one of these bigger paper cups (which are the same size as a regular cup at home) and just put more water in it. She looked confused and then said "You wait here…" She went to check with her manager and after some debate came back looking delighted and gave me a big thumbs up and said "Is OK! No probrem! Arigato gozaimaaaaaaaas!" Japanese girls sound so cute when they speak Japanese!

              I get the feeling that Kyoto is kind of like the Cork of Japan in that it's a fairly small city (by Japanese standards – it's still bigger than Dublin). In comparison to Tokyo, it feels much more relaxed and scenic. They're mad for bicycles here. They're all riding round on these dodgy looking old boneshakers and they're allowed to ride on the pavement which means you have to keep your wits about you. Seeing all the bikes around the place really makes it feel like old Japan.

              Last night we went to an Irish pub where a bunch of Japanese lads were playing a trad session! Seriously! We were the only Irish people in there and there were actually Japanese people playing trad and enjoying it and they were actually alright! It wasn't a cheap imitation or anything – it was real trad. They wouldn't win the All-Ireland Fleadh or anything but they were competent. Then I went to an English pub only because they had internet and got talking to a group of rather inebriated Japanese folk. It was the first time I'd seen Japanese folk letting their hair down at all and it was quiet a relief to see that they could relax and have some bit of craic when they put their minds to it. They translated the Japanese on my T-shirt for me and I was relieved to discover that the slogan was complimentary to the Japanese. It praised the pre-World War II Japanese empire. I was slightly troubled when I remembered that I had worn this in Hong Kong the day before! I decided I'd chance it when I had some drunk Japanese people and rolled up my sleeve to see if they could read my harm. They didn't recoil in horror but instead ooh, aahd and peered at it with interest so I'm beginning to think that tattoos are no longer as taboo as they used to be. They tried to buy me drink and get me to hang out but unfortunately, I had to go. Then I stumbled upon a street performance by various groups of singers on a street corner. They were basically barbershop quartets except there were usually six of them, often including a girl or two and they sang lots of different genres of music, all in "Engrish." They were amazing – it was hard to believe the whole thing was being done by voice alone without a single instrument. One guy would be beatboxing away while a bass did the bass bum-dee-dums and one guy even gave a convincing electric guitar solo with his mouth. They seemed to competing against each other and there was something else going on too because there were people going around the audience giving out flyers about the various bands. I left Noride there for about half an hour and when I came back I asked if she had figured out what was going on yet. She said "no…but does it really matter." That kind of sums up Japan. I'm rarely sure of what's going on but I'm loving it anyway! The last of the photos from Hong Kong are up at http://www.flickr.com/photos/gctrionaem/sets/72157605593888763/ and photos from Japan are now up at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Japan/

Last night was my first extremely confusing forray into this culture and it so puzzled me that despite my extreme jet lag, I stayed up until 1AM just scratching my head trying to get to grips with this strange system. Japan is best understood as just that, a system, and a very complex one. Everything has its place in this system and any deviation from it is unthinkable. When we landed we took a train straight into the centre to our hotel because it was late and we were exhausted so we didn't really see any of Tokyo. I spent my first night in a capsule hotel, which for those of you unfamiliar with this uniquely Japanese concept, is basically a morgue for people to sleep in. Instead of a room you get a little box not unlike a large hi-tech coffin which is stacked amongst dozens of others. For the equivalent of about 25 euro, you get the privelege of lying in your box. There's a tiny little TV in there and not much else. Japanese TV is the first piece of evidence of their weirdness. I won't bother going into detail on this baffling media but suffice to say they like mindless game shows. Anyway, apart from this little coffin, you get a miniscule locker to put your stuff in and there's a communal bathing area where a bunch of naked guys basically hot-tub it together in a totally not gay way. Apart from all the naked Japanese men, it's actually quite a relaxing experience. What I was most afraid of in this hotel was messing up on the extremely complex protocol. Most signs  were in Japanese but there were one or two in English listing a few dos and donts. Japan has more dos and donts than anywhere I've been and many of them don't immediately make a lot of sense. At check in you are issued with two disposable toothbrushes, two tiny towels and a yukata, which is a light cotton robe that you're supposed to wear around the hotel. You're supposed to leave all your clothes in your locker the whole time, which I couldn't get my head around because my locker was four floors away from my coffin so I had to get an elevator if I wanted anything from my bag. You have to tie the left side of your yukata over the right or else it's a bad omen or something and you'll piss people off. Your shoes are locked away at reception as soon as you check in and you can't have them back until you check out! You:re supposed to walk around barefoot except in the toilets where you're supposed to wear the communal flip flops! Not doing this is very much frowned upon apparently. There are hole in the ground toilets and then there are the hi-tech toilets you've all probably heard about that play gameboy music to cover up natural sounds and shoot water up where the sun don't shine. Luckily the toilets in this hotel were normal. The standard issue pillow was literally, and I mean literally, a bag of pebbles. I cannot stress enough how much my pillow was a bag of pebbles. I was so exhausted though that I slept quite comfortably. It was actually quite cosy in my little coffin and not claustrophobic at all. However, there was some lad about three coffins away snoring so loudly you could have heard him in the elevator. I reckon he actually lives in that coffin all the time because his wife kicked him out, unable to cope with the sleepless nights anymore. While the concept of the capsule hotel is typical of Japanese efficiency, I rather resent the implication, that everything I need as a human being can be reduced down to a tiny little box. You see, in my Western mind, everything revolves around me. Conversely, the Japanese obviously are more concerned with keeping the machine running smoothly and this means making personal sacrifices for the greater good. When everyone does this without exception, which they actually seem to do, this small densely populated country runs more efficiently than any other I have seen, but to me, this approach lacks the essence of humanity itself. Perhaps, my perceptions of freedom, autonomy, liberalism and everything ele that I believe to be integral to being human is merely fed to me by western culture and may seem as absurd to the Japanese as theirs do to me. Maybe there is no objective essence to humanity at all...but let's not get too bogged down in post-modernist philosophy...One thing I do love about Japan and that I can actually relate to is their obsessive attention to detail. They share my love of symmetry and parallel lines and take considerable care when presenting something to you, that everything they are giving to you is neat and unwrinkled and as it should be, whether they're giving you money or cutlery or food. Here I am not a "neat freak". Here I'm actually comparatively messy!

So my first night in Japan passed off rather successfully without committing any major faux pas...or at least it think it did. The thing is with the Japanese, they're so unfathomable, you never really know what they're thinking so you could have inadvertantly been offending them left, right and centre and they'd just smile awkwardly. I'm trying to get used to the constant head dipping everytime someone acknowledges me. I wonder if I'm bowing correctly. I had learned a few basic Japanese phrases to get me by but unfortunately, I don't even understand when people say these because they speak so quickly that everything they say sounds exactly like "adgaioblignneisaiiiiieee". The last vowel is always drawn out and the intonation goes sliding upwards. I smile weakly and say something stupid in English. Japan has been one of the most difficult countries for me to get around so far despite their extremely well-developed transport system. This is because this system, like every other Japanese system, is extremely complex and mostly in Japanese. Navigating the streets and even the trains has been surprisingly difficult. Of all the countries I've been to, I really should have brought a Lonely Planet book to this one but I said I'd chance it. We spent most of the day today just trying to get from A to B and got very little done. First thing in the morning, we took the Shinkansen Nozomi (Superexpress Bullet Train) to Kyoto (we're leaving Tokyo till the end of the trip because we have to fly home from there anyway.) I don't know what speed it goes at or anything but it was fairly lively alright. It did a journey that Iarnrod Eireann would probably have spent about six hours on in two and a half hours. Along the way we saw what Japan looks like. Skyscrapers gave way to sprawling higgeldy piggeldy housing estates and they didn't really end at any point. They don't really have much countryside in Japan. Any spare inch that isn't built on has a little ricefield squeezed into it. The only untouched parts are the dense bamboo-covered mountains that are too steep to build on. Everywhere else is just houses, skyscrapers or industrial plains with belching chimneys. I'm assured that there are national parks though where we will be going to see some of the countryside that they put in the brochures. The weather has actually been fine so far - not a drop of rain although it's very cloudy and the temperature is very comfortable; only slightly warmer than Ireland was when we left.  So no thunderstorms, typhoons, earthquakes or volcano erruptions just yet but I don't want to jinx it!  When we got to Kyoto, we met our Hospitality Club host, Makoto (who's a middle-aged dude) and he drove us back to his apartment where we'll be staying for the next four nights. He's actually moving back into his parents house for those four nights so we can have his apartment to ourselves! What a legend! Then we went to check out the sights. Unfortunately, it took us quite a bit of time to figure out the trains so the only sight we got to check out in the end was a ridiculous period village where everyone dressed up as samurai and such and pretended to be living in the "olden times". Not just the employees either, some teenagers who were visiting were dressed up in the weirdest get up ever. They looked like they'd just walked out of Yu Gi Oh or something. I can't describe it just check out the photos. The only explanation: Japanese people are just weird! (I'll upload some photos of this fair land as soon as I get a chance.)

            For returning readers, the last you heard of me was when I got home from Hong Kong last September. For the sake of completeness I will fill in the gaps between then and now. I completed my final year in college rather uneventfully and it was with a sense of ambivalence that I finished my final exams two weeks ago. I already miss UCC terribly but am happy to have finished exams for now. I am now working for the time being in a tax law firm in Cork, which also inspires considerable ambivalence in me. Needless to say, tax law is not the most interesting area in which one could work but it is a job I can shamelessly put on a CV. Nevertheless, my leaving the office to resume my totally excellent adventure is a prospect that fills me with a sense of growing excitement and urgency akin that inspired by watching the fuse on a massive firework slowly fizz away. Basically, I am desperately in need of a holiday. I am leaving Ireland at its hottest and most pleasant and facing Japan in the rainy season, which, apparently, is currently enjoying some rather tempestuous weather featuring thunder and lightning. I have to make life difficult for myself!

            Upon discovering I am going to Japan, everyone asks why, a question that puzzles me. Does one need an excuse to go on a holiday? My Japanophilia began many years ago with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and it is an interest that has not waned since – an obsession that will finally culminate cathartically with me actually visiting the country. That's the plan anyway. In preparation for the trip I have been studying the writings of some of the earliest Europeans to successfully sail to Japan to try to understand the inevitable dichotomy between Japan and the west in its proper historical context. My study has been most illuminating and has further whetted my appetite for the exotic secrets of the land of the rising sun. I hope I will not be disappointed. I expect to find a people and a set of customs that I know only from books and films and if they are not as unusual and different as I have been promised, I shall be most irate! It is the Japanese psyche that I most seek to understand; their communitarian outlook, their emotional restraint, their extreme humility and the subtlety and infinite layers of meaning in their communication. This will be no mean feat given the language barrier. I hope my experience will be similar to Bill Murray's in "Lost in Translation" but perhaps a little more cheerful and less decadent.

            I have been searching for another travel anthem for this summer. Loyal readers may remember "Carolina on my Mind" and "Shiver Me Timbers" from previous years. Some generic examples that have crossed my mind include "Tokyo, I'm On My Way" and "Turning Japanese" but I have settled instead on another Tom Waits song, the much more vague and poetic "Foreign Affair," the lyrics of which I have provided below.

when travelling abroad in the continental style

it's my belief one must attempt to be discreet

and subsequently bear in mind your transient position

allows you a perspective that's unique

though you'll find your itinerary's a blessing and a curse

your wanderlust won't let you settle down

and you'll wonder how you ever fathomed that you'd be content

to stay within the city limits of a small midwestern town

most vagabonds i knowed don't ever want to find the culprit

that remains the object of their long relentless quest

the obsession's in the chasing and not the apprehending

the pursuit you see and never the arrest

without fear of contradiction bon voyage is always hollered

in conjunction with a handkerchief from shore

by a girl that drives a rambler and furthermore

is overly concerned that she won't see him anymore

planes and trains and boats and buses

characteristically evoke a common attitude of blue

unless you have a suitcase and a ticket and a passport

and the cargo that they're carrying is you

a foreign affair juxtaposed with a stateside

and domestically approved romantic fancy

is mysteriously attractive due to circumstances knowing

it will only be parlayed into a memory

Nice isn't it? My greatest fear upon embarking on this journey is that my unsophisticated nature will result in my inadvertently causing offence to the Japanese people in a thousand different ways without realising it and that they will be too polite to inform me. I also fear that I may be further alienated from the locals by my tattoo which they associate with Yakuza membership. I have read that foreigners are advised to cover any tattoos with bandages to ensure admission to various places. I will test the waters with bare forearms first to determine the extent to which I will cause offence.

            I have already had one experience of extreme Japanese humility before even leaving Cork. One hotel I booked emailed me in broken English to very politely and unclearly ask for clarification on one point, and upon providing said clarification, they thanked me profusely and apologised for quote "wasting your precious time" with their unworthy query.

            I should introduce you all to a new character in this blog. Her name is Noride, she's my sister and she will be tagging along on this adventure, no doubt being a source of great irritation to me and to you. Not being as tenacious, resilient or cultured as my good self, she will surely spend most of my holiday bickering and complaining and generally lowering the otherwise very civilised tone of my experience. I usually travel alone and this major change will no doubt alter the manner in which strangers will relate to me as I will no longer be a mysterious lone rider. I am sure that this journey will make it clear for the future whether mystery or company is superior and that is an experiment I am willing to conduct once.

            For now though, my sights are set firmly on the now familiar Special Autonomous Region of Hong Kong which I am very much looking forward to seeing again, as you can imagine if you have read the last few entries. I will once again be staying with Leah, given how gracious a host she was in September. Soon I will be soaking up the neon, strolling through glittering glass canyons and eating Cantonese food again! Yung sing!

            I was up at 3AM the next morning (which was only two hours later) to go to the airport. My Qantas flight was wonderful but Heathrow was a nightmare. It is without a doubt THE worst airport in the world. I imagine hell is probably just an eternity in Heathrow Airport. There is no excuse for the incompetence and inefficiency with which this airport is run. There are bigger airports around the world that run more smoothly so its size provides no justification. Neither does the terrorist threat since American airports, despite being very irritating to fly through and being at risk from the same threat, are still more efficient. The irony of the situation is that terrorist attacks are no longer necessary to bring the gears of Britain grinding to a halt. The British authorities have already done this themselves by devising a new security regime for Heathrow without altering the infrastructure of the airport to facilitate these changes. As the airport is now, it is simply incapable of dealing with the huge backlog of people caused by tighter security restrictions. Expansion is needed if the airport authority is serious about delivering a real service to its customers. When I flew out of Ireland four months ago, I flew out of Dublin instead of Cork so that I could avoid Heathrow and transfer in Frankfurt instead. It was unavoidable on the way back though. It is very frustrating for Irish people because apart from a few American cities, we can't travel anywhere outside of Europe without changing in Heathrow which immediately adds a minimum of about four hours to your journey. The only silver lining around Heathrow is that as I was about to board my flight, I met Shane McGowan! For those of you who don't know, he's the frontman of a band of which I used to be in a tribute band so it was really cool to meet him and shake his hand and he was so nice he even let me take a photo with him (which I have put in the Hong Kong album) eventhough he was travelling incognito, wearing big shades and I kind of blew his cover.

            A lot of things have changed since I left but many more have stayed the same. It was difficult for me to feel the cold Irish air again after being out of it for so long. It was difficult for me to look certain Irishwomen in the face with their Oompa-Loompa make up which was actually intended to make their skin look darker! (crazy!) It was very easy for me to finally eat a big fry up of sausages and black pudding though. Already, Asia is sadly beginning to seem like a distant memory eventhough it was only last week. I have slipped seamlessly back into routine and I sometimes wonder if Asia ever happened at all or whether it was just something I dreamed up once. At least I have this blog as evidence otherwise. In any case, the adventure is well and truly over now which means that it is time for this blog to end too. It has been great writing it and I'm glad that I have documented the whole thing so that I will never forget all the sights I saw, all the things I did and all the people I met. The last of the photos from Hong Kong are up at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Hong%20Kong/ and a motley collection of panoramic photos from all around the world that I recently stitched together are up at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Totally%20Excellent%20Panorama%20Album/ It's time to put it out to graze now though. I will resurrect it again the next time I have an adventure and who knows where I'll be off to next summer. Check back here then to find out. Thanks for reading. Peace. Eoin.

Last night Leah took me to an excellent performance in the Hong Kong Cultural Centre called "Shaolin in the Wind" which was half ballet, half Shaolin kung fu. It was a sublime fusion that dispensed with the need for spoken language to tell a story. It dealt with many themes; love, war, religion...but I think it was essentially a story about finding dignity through suffering. Now that my Leaving Cert English days are over, that's as much detail as I could be bothered providing. At the intermission, Leah snuck me up a back stairway (she knows the theatre like the back of her hand because she goes there so often.) We ducked through a room of ventilation ducts and found ourselves in a tiny dark broadcasting booth in the ceiling of a huge auditorium. Right below us was a full chamber choir and an orchestra in the middle of a spellbinding performance in front of hundreds of paying audience-members and we had a birds-eye view for free! Nobody could see us up in the ceiling but we could see everything! We stayed there for the whole intermission and then tiptoed back down to our own concert hall for the second half. I felt like I had just stuffed my face with the entire contents of someone else's cookie jar and got away with it! Sweet!

Today I went to the horse racing track. There's always been plenty of horseracing at home and I'd never gone before but I figured I might as well go while I was in Hong Kong where they're seriously into their racing and there's racing every day of the week! Each race is over very quickly and then you have to wait nearly half an hour before the next one - plenty of time to study the form and get your bets in. Study certainly is the operative word here because the place was full of men with furrowed brows, lost in racing programmes, making mental calculations in their heads. For them this was not a form of entertainment - it was just a job or an obsession. I don't think anyone else there was there just for the spectacle. In fact there really wasn't much of a spectacle - none of the upper class glamour of Irish horseracing. I might have won the best-dressed woman prize had there been one. There were no overdressed women with hats big enough to boil a chicken in - just desperate men cursing tired horses with poetic names and tearing up their betting slips. Twenty minutes of their careful deliberation and calculated cunning is all erased in about two minutes of thunderous hoofbeats. I couldn't stay to watch their personal tragedies unfolding for very long - it was too depressing. The whole sport existed only to steal money from broken men.

Hong Kong has been a very good city to me. Here, I have already found many of the home comforts I have been dreaming of for months...Earl Grey, hot showers, public toilet paper and the ready availability of toilets you can actually sit on rather than offensive, anonymous holes in the floor that you are presumably expected to squat over! I can now dispense with my bowel training and stop regulating my intake of food so as to postpone the need to excrete faecel matter until such time as civilised facilities become available. Hurrah!

So I suppose given that I only have one more day on this continent, it would be proper to summarise what I have learned from it and draw some simplistic conclusions about it. Well I have learned how to say several essential phrases in a variety of languages and I can now read about three Chinese characters. Ordering food in Asia has taught me to accept fate contentedly without longing for what I cannot explain that I want...because such futile desire only leads to suffering. Finally I have learned that I can never be Marco Polo no matter how much I want to be. Everywhere has already been discovered. The steady march of globalisation goes on unimpeded and threatens entire cultures. However, I do believe that with sensible regulation, we can enjoy the little conveniences of globalisation without eliminating diversity. McDonalds and Starbucks are not eliminating people's love of local food and putting local restaurants out of business. They are in fact merely contributing to multiculturalism and the diversity of the global palate and I have been very happy to have them here in Hong Kong. What really threatens to wipe out local culture is foreign media such as MTV selling a western pop culture that has no place in the east.

So...dare I give some kind of verdict on the vast array of cultures I have seen on this continent over the summer? Well I can certainly say on a very general level, with some exception, that Asia is, at least to me, some kind of crazy bizzarro world where everything is inside out. People who are poor seem happy. People smile at me despite my no doubt alarming countenance (or at this stage possibly because of it...I am badly in need of some grooming.) Women are unaggressive, unintimidated and curious despite my aforementioned appearance. Communist really means capitalist and illegal really means widely acceptable. Taxi driver means pimp/drug dealer and often policeman means the same thing! It has been a journey of contradictions, paradoxes and dichotomies between progress and preservation, prosperity and politics. It would seem that progress and prosperity are the goals and preservation and politics are stumbling blocks to be avoided. Nothing will stand in the way of these young economies, even if it means sacrificing everything that defines these ancient nations. In all of this Hong Kong and Singapore are the notable exceptions where progress and prosperity have already won. It certainly has been a totally excellent adventure but I can't help but imagine how much more totally excellent it would have been had I done it about a hundred years ago.

I will fly home on Monday morning and I'll be in my own bed on Monday night. It still amazes me to think that all this time I have only been one day's journey away from home. When I recover from my flight and gather my senses, I will write some kind of short epilogue to let you all know what it's like to finally get back. In the meantime here are some new photos for you to gawk at:  http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Hong%20Kong/

Anyway Hong Kong is a beautiful city - way nicer than New York and the people are much more polite than New Yorkers. I cannot abide discourteous people! You know what makes Hong Kong better than New York?...one word: neon. All the skyscrapers are festooned with neon so that the city looks like a forest of giant festive Christmas trees at night. I'm staying with a Hong Kong hospitality club girl called Leah here and she took me to see the skyscrapers by night from Kowloon. At eight o clock there was a big light show and lasers and searchlights started swinging from the tops of the towers and each building was given a light solo where they were introduced over the PA and the lights on them flashed dizzily. One of the skyscrapers here is the fifth tallest in the world. It was as if the whole show was a performance where each skyscraper was a dancer and I gave them a round of applause at the end eventhough some people probably thought I was weird.

The climate here is pretty nice. This is the nicest time of the year. It's hotter than it ever gets in Ireland without being uncomfortably hot - high 20s to low 30s. They have an air-con fetish here though and they turn them up way too high which is not good for my cold! When I got to Hong Kong, there was another step up in the standard of living (and a massive step up in the cost of living although it's still nowhere near Irish prices) and I realised that now, I was REALLY back in the first world. No strangers here have come up to me on the street offering me drugs or prostitutes. In fact, apart from the African/Middle Eastern area of city where I've just come back from, nobody has come up to me trying to sell me goods or services that I didn't ask for. Hong Kong is a far, far, far safer city than New York, possibly the safest city I've been to yet although the African/Middle Eastern part did seem slightly dodgier at night - but not as dodgy as many parts of Cork at night. You may ask why I am comparing it to New York. It's because it has that really big, big city feel that only the major cities of the world have. The only other such cities I have been to this summer are probably Bangkok, Singapore, Sydney and Melbourne. It's also quite a cultured city. Wednesday is free museums day, so on Wednesday, I spent all day in the Museum of History, Museum of Art and the Space Museum. Tomorrow night I am going to see a dance/kung fu play at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. I visited the Avenue of Stars which is like that street in Hollywood with all the actors' handprints in the cement. Jackie Chan has bigger hands than me. I spent today out on the rural Lantau Island, wandering around monasteries and little fishing villages where a lady on the street pulled out a page and asked me to correct her daughter's English homework - the standard was very good, although I pointed out the use of American slang. Anyway, the bottom line is I love this place. You can see all the amazing photos of it at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Hong%20Kong/ You will notice the remarkable speed at which they appear thanks to my cool new Chinese photo compression software.
Later!

       One of the girls I was walking with confirmed my theory about the curious juxtaposition between the unsentimentality of Chinese life and the cheesiness of Chinese art. She said that life in China didn't leave any time for romance and that Chinese people had to use some fantasy outlet to express their repressed emotions. Presumably, really corny karaoke singing is the most popular form of this outlet.

       China gets a bad rep for human rights abuses and rightfully so but being here has made me realize that trying to present an alien idea like human rights to the Chinese on a silver platter with an air of righteousness and self-satisfaction and expecting them to dispense with thousands of years of tradition by adopting it is like trying to convince an Irishman that his house needs volcano insurance. A rights-based society where every individual has rights that conflict with other individuals' rights just makes no sense from a Chinese perspective. To them this sounds like chaos. While most Chinese people seem to agree that the current situation is far from perfect, the western model of governance does not seem to appeal to them either. Better the devil you know that the devil you don't know. While some of the human rights abuses here are undeniably appalling regardless of where you're from, I think the west hasn't got a hope of "fixing" China because it just doesn't understand how it works, and this is a job best left to China even if it means it will never be done. I don't know anything about cars so I wouldn't try to build one. That is better left to the car manufacturers. Having said that I'd rather die than let Ireland become a country based on anything other than the rights of the individual.

Today I leave Yangshuo. I have been here for about five days and I already feel so at home. I walk down the streets of this small town and I already see so many people that I recognize and who salute me. I think I could happily leave in this little town for a year. It's far more international than Guilin and plenty of people speak English. Tomorrow I will be in Hong Kong and this time next week I'll be on a plane home! It's so hard to believe that my totally excellent adventure is nearly over already!

I don't think I'm going to have technical difficulties with my photos any more because I have now found a way to compress my huge photos to a miniscule size without much loss of quality. If you check my latest batch of photos on http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/China/ you will find that they appear almost instantly now with no annoying delay which means they should now be perfectly viewable even with a 56k modem and a dial-up connection. Enjoy!

       Last night I had a really amazing experience that I know I will never be able to fully explain in words but I might as well try. I went to this so-called light show. I thought it would just be lasers, neon and loud music but it turned out to be a very elaborate and charming musical with hundreds of performers and amazing special effects. I have never been so affected by a piece of drama in my life. I think it was quite possibly the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I know I've been saying that a lot recently but this wonderful continent just keeps raising the bar. This was like a Chinese Disney movie only it was a live musical with hundreds of performers, and billions of watts worth of sound and lighting. What really made it so remarkable though was the fact that it deceptively blended fiction with reality by having a real-life location as its backdrop. It was performed entirely on fleets of little boats on a huge lake with those strange mountains all around lit up with spotlights. I cannot describe how spectacular it was in words because it was a subjectively emotional experience and the blurry tripodless night shots I took of it certainly don't do it justice so I deleted most of them. The show affected me deeply and I couldn't understand why. I psychoanalyzed myself and slowly figured it out. What I saw last night was essentially the China I dreamed of as a little boy and seeing it again, this time in front of my very eyes, allowed me to become a child again for just one hour. I had an idea of China in my head that featured simple country folk leading simple happy lives while wearing exotic clothes and beautiful girls washing their long black hair in mirror-like lakes under weeping willows while birds serenaded them. I didn't realize I came here looking for anything until I found it. I think I had a subconscious need to come here to either confirm or disprove the existence of my idyllic imagined China and seeing this show made me feel very happy because I had finally found it and at the same time very sad because it didn't really exist with the same purity in the real world. In the real world there certainly are simple country folk leading simple happy lives but they don't wear beautiful exotic clothes and their lives are not accompanied by enchanting traditional Chinese soundtracks. In the real world there are also other far less appealing things that I never even considered as a boy such as bus exhaust fumes, constantly hooting horns, hard-nosed twelve-year old hagglers, desperate ruthless prostitutes and leering, vest-wearing men with ragged mocking voices and long white cigarettes hanging obscenely from the corner of their snarling lips. It was to this compromise-world that I returned with a heavy heart after the show. The beautiful side of China is disappearing every day and in a few decades I think it will be gone entirely as culture acquiesces to the all-powerful force of progress and the global economy. I love China as it is now but I love Vietnam a lot more because it has preserved a lot more of its culture and will still have buckets of it in years to come. Of course ironically, Vietnam could never have put on a show like this because no director could get enough money to pay for these kinds of special effects.

It's funny how something as trivial as a play can trigger an epiphany that suddenly brings meaning to a whole summer of travel. I had been trying to come up with some conclusions to end the summer with for when I got to Hong Kong and nothing was really coming to me and then I saw this play and all of a sudden I have my conclusion a little earlier than expected. It's also funny how in all of their art - drama, music, film and architecture – the Chinese are unashamedly romantic and breathtakingly poetic, but in real life, they all seem painfully practical, horrifyingly unsentimental and utterly consumed with their pursuit of prosperity and success at any cost. I'm sure there are exceptions and I am of course always open to explanations but I think my generalization is largely accurate. The stereotype of the single-minded, hard-working Chinese is completely in conflict with their taste in art. I think there must be a terrible internal dichotomy in every young Chinese person when they're growing up and learning the ways of the world but I'm hardly in a position to psychoanalyze an entire nation whose language I cannot speak and whose country I have been in for a week! But enough of this intellectual jibber jabber! I need to eat now! The most recent photos are at: http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/China/

       I'm now in Yangshuo which is even more beautiful than Guilin. Guilin is a big city bigger than Dublin so it inevitably has lost some of its charm. Yangshuo however, is smaller than Cork. You can't walk anywhere in Yanshuo without being watched by a huge mountain. I spent the day today climbing them to get eagle eye views of the place and I wasn't disappointed. You really can't describe in words what this place is like. It's totally surreal. It's difficult to believe that such a place exists on earth. Just take a look at the photos. Some of them are up at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/China/  and the rest are up at http://www.flickr.com/photos/gctrionaem/sets/72157601886388004/ I'm staying at an English school where I spend two hours a day just chatting to students in English over free drinks and I also get to eat and sleep there for free! It's great because it also means that I have people who can speak to me in English. It's a really relaxed place and I'm enjoying my time here.

       I've also been thinking about going home though and I must admit that now that I have begun preparing myself for the reverse culture shock of returning to Ireland, there are a few things I am looking forward to; Jaffa Cakes, Earl Grey, Mars Ice Cream, Heinz Spaghetti Hoops, Denny's Gold Medal Sausages, Galtee black pudding (not Clonakilty!) and a big feed of spuds and mincemeat. I am looking forward to eating all of the above in the week between my return to Ireland and my return to college. While I am still here though I plan to soak up every second of the experience while I still have the opportunity to do so. Tomorrow I'll spend the day cycling around the countryside and gawking at mountains and lakes like an American in Killarney.

PS. Can all the food manufacturers listed above please send me cheques ASAP for my endorsements of their fine products.

Guilin itself is like a big limestone Las Vegas nestled amongst the unlikely looming mountains. I thought Vietnam liked neon – China REALLY likes neon. It's the standard method of illumination. My arrival here was supposed to mark a cathartic climax to my adventure because I have always wanted to come to Guilin ever since I saw a picture of it in my geography book in school years ago and couldn't believe my eyes. However, having now seen the similar but superior scenery of the more obscure and poorly marketed Ninh Binh I am now relatively unimpressed by the views here. It probably doesn't help that most of the scenery is obscured by an oppressive September drizzle. As for China itself it seems a lot more subdued than Vietnam and feels less Chinese than Vietnam did. Most of the buildings are big rectangular functionalist high-rise apartment blocks or small flat-roofed cuboids and there is little oriental architecture to be seen. The Chinese themselves are taller on average than the Vietnamese and less charming. The women don't smile at you just for walking by while being white like they did in Vietnam. There's a noticeably higher standard of living and with it a slightly higher cost of living. The amount of rice fields has decreased and there are more fields full of tall waving sugar cane with hills lurching upwards out of it. There are forests of tall, skinny identical trees like the ones in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and a lot of bamboo. The money bears the image of Mao instead of Uncle Ho and is a bit more sensible with roughly 10 Yuan to the euro. Tomorrow evening I will make my way to the smaller and reportedly more charming town of Yangshuo and spend a few days there. I hope to live and eat for free in an English college in return for spending a few hours a day talking English to the adult students in informal conversation classes. I can only hope that the rain will go away although the fact that this province has been suffering from flooding recently is not promising. The last photo from Vietnam is up at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Vietnam/ and the first batch of photos from China is up at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/China/

Anyway Hoi An was a nice quiet little town along the lines of Luang Prabang. The night I was there just happened to be the mid-autumn festival and traffic was kept out of the city and all the streetlights wer turned off so people could stare at the moon and there was some kind of play going on in the square. The river was full of candles floating in coloured cardboard flowers and little rowboats full of revellers negotiating their way between them. It was beautiful.

Next stop was Hue which was a biggish but ulimately chilled out city. I stayed with a hospitality club guy there called Long (eventhough he was about as short as myself). Him and his friend Thuc Quyen took it turns to drive me all around the city and show me the best sights which means all I had to do was relax and enjoy. I didn't have to worry about hwere to go next because Thuc Quyen had made out a little program of activities for me. I visited several pagodas and a royal tomb. At a monastery I saw some young monks engaged in a game of soccer, some others were practising kung fu, some other were chanting, prostrating themselves or gently banging big deep bells. I ate lunch with Long's family on their kitchen floor. The evening was spent driving around the city on mopeds. We went to an ice cream parlour and a coffee shop and everyone we passed stared at the white guy with the three Vietnamese kids. The next day we went to see a neighbourhood of houseboats on a canal and sat in an orchard eating huge green citrus fruit kind of like giant oranges called Tantha. And I learned how to say Ireland in Vietnames: Ai Lan! I also discovered that Vietnamese folk take a siesta during the hottest part of the day. And there was I struggling away in the sun this whole time! That night we went to the Purple City in the citadel. There were some kids practising break dancing in the huge square outside under a massive Vietnamese flag and we went up to them and watched for a while. Then the sun set and drums began to beat at the city gate. We witnessed a colourful noisy show involving pairs of acrobats dressed up as lions and then we followed the dancing lions through the city gates into another world. The city was resplendant in its relaxed royal glory. The paths were lined with colourful paper lanterns and people stood around in traditional dress. The atmosphere created by the laid-back beauty of the place was indescribable. We strolled around until we came to a courtyard where old gambling games were being played with sticks instead of money. I won one game and got a scroll with calligraphy on it as a prize. There were poetry readings, horse-drawn carriages and a bohemian air about the place. The day before was a church holiday (Buddhist) so everyone was visiting pagodas to pray. It was a day for praying for your mother and people wore a red rose on their lapel in honour of their mother if she was alive and a white rose if she was dead. Thuc Quyen had a red rose for me to wear. The next morning Long and his friend, An, took me to the beach which was deserted. We had the whole beach to play football on and the whole sea to swim in. Then we went to a karaoke bar for an hour and then to a dog restaurant where I finally ate a dog. The restaurant was full of live dogs and puppies running around barking and waiting to be killed when they got fat enough. They taste a bit like pork but not as nice.

I was invited to attend a party that evening. It was one of the lad's friends who was having a going away party before he moved to HCMC to go to college. It was actually kind of a dinner party in a restaurant. The host came out to meet me and shook my hand. He greeted me in French and it was in French that we conversed for the rest of the evening as his French was better than his English and it was a rare opportunity for us both to practice notre Francais. He introduced me to his mother and challenged me to guess her age which I cautiously and correctly guessed as 36. A whole gang of them came to the train station with me after the party to wave me off and waited on the platform with me until my train to Ninh Binh arrived and I reluctantly got on board. They were such a nice bunch of people. I think I had more fun in Hue than I did anywhere else on my travels. I'm beginning to realise that I will really miss Vietnam when I leave. It has made more of an impression on me than anywhere.

The countryside around Ninh Binh may quite possibly be the most beautiful place on earth. The only drawback is the suicidal driving and deafening horns on the highway. Dodging death is a daily activity here. I rented a motorbike for two days to explore the countryside and I was astounded by the magnificent sights I saw. On the back roads, young girls in conical hats drove cattle with bamboo whips and I had to weave in between ponderously plodding buffalo. Farmers on their way to the rice paddies laughed at the white boy taking photos of jagged mountains they had lived under their whole lives and found wholly unremarkable. I hired a strapping young fellow to row me around the partially submerged landscape in a little boat. We passed women selling bananas off their rafts and they rowed with their feet. Other women did needlework on boats in the shade of a cave and other women slept on their rafts in the cave with their conical hats over their faces. I climbed up to the top of one of the karst behemoths until I heard a little old lady at the bottom who referred to herself in the third person as Mamma shouting at me to come down before I broke my neck. It was quite treacherous up there. Millenia of glacial erosion had turned the mountain into a heap of razor-sharp flint knives and one wrong move could be quite painful. The sweat was actually falling off me like rain by the time I finally got to the bottom. It was worth it for the breathtaking view though.

I spent the next day trekking through the jungle on my own in search of a thousand year-old tree I'd heard about. I decided that I would be good idea to attempt this without water. Six kilometres later I staggered triumphantly back into the clearing where I'd parked my motorcycle with my clothes plastered on to my skin and the tongue hanging out of my mouth like a rabid Irish girl deprived of alcohol for several hours. Why do I put myself through this you ask? Why indeed? I also explored a dark cave on my own with only the light on my phone to guide me. It was pretty big and went way back although the ceiling got very low in places. I found myself in a cavern full of sleeping bats at one point and quietly made my way out again as quickly as possible. That night I got on a bus and went to Hanoi where I am now.

Hanoi is probably my least favourite place in Vietnam. It's ok but it's another big city and it lacks the nightlife of Saigon. I was wandering the almost deserted streets last night with a Canadian lad searching in vain for a pub. Several pimps drove slowly beside us on motorbikes offering us drugs or their girlfriend who sat smiling innocently on the back of the motorbike as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth…but nobody could offer us somewhere to sit down and have a drink after 11PM. Cops with sticks stood around and gave us dirty looks as if it was illegal to be out late. Maybe it is – I don't know. In fact there's not even that much to do during the day. Last night I went to see a performance at the Municipal Water Puppet Theatre which was very nice. For those of you unfamiliar with water puppetry it's a Vietnamese art where wooden puppets perform on a stage made of water and the puppeteers stand in the water behind a curtain and manipulate the puppets with rods under the water. My greatest achievement in Hanoi today was to visit Ho Chi Minh's preserved body in his Masoleum. It was really weird. He's been lying there in the half-light of his air-conditioned monument for years and queues of Vietnamese people go all the way down the street and around the corner and around the next corner to see him. You're not allowed to take photos of his ghostly white face. You have to check any electronic equipment before you get near the masoleum. His body gets sent to Russia every year for three months where expert communist embalmers do maintenance work on him. They really really like Ho Chi Minh here. He's almost like a god. Everything is named after him, even a whole city! Everywhere you go it's Uncle Ho this and Uncle Ho that. There really is no equivalent Irish patriot because he is way more popular than any patriot Ireland ever had. It's all a bit strange really. I also visited the house where Ho Chi Minh used to live which was crap because it was just an ordinary house with way too many annoying people staring at it. I spent most of the day in Hanoi seeking refuge from the heat in a waterpark. Tomorrow I go to Halong Bay and the day after that it's off to China!!! We're getting near the end lads! I'm going to have to start having some epiphanies soon so that I can write some kind of deep profound "what I learned on my travels" entry. Most of my new photos from Hoi An, Hue, Ninh Binh and Hanoi are now up at the usual: http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Vietnam/

Nha Trang seems like a nice beach town. Most of the tourists here are actually hardworking Vietnamese folk from all over the country on a break with the family for a few days. My time, however, is running short and so I can ill afford to spend more time lying around on another beach. By getting a night train I can save time which would otherwise be wasted sleeping in a stationery position and I also save money by not having to pay for a hotel tonight. I spent the day on a boat exploring the islands of Nha Trang Bay. I went snorkeling over a coral reef and jet skid around a bay at break neck speed. We had a bit of a party on the boat with a live band and people dancing around the deck and everything! Then we had a floating bar with free booze. The floating bar was a donut shaped shelf on top of some bouys in the sea with a Vietnamese lad hanging on in the middle serving drinks to us when we swam up on our ring bouys. It was a fun day. There were two lads from Mayo there who informed me that the Cork football team was in the All-Ireland final much to my delight! I probably won't be home in time to see it though. There was also a Japanese exchange student there who I hung out with learning important Japanese vocabulary such as cheers/sláinte. Since it had two syllables I have now forgotten it. The Vietnamese word has only one syllable and it is one I am already familiar with and is therefore much easier to remember: "yo!" It occurs to me that when I write here where I am and where I am going next, most of you have no idea what that means in reality or how far I'm travelling so to put this final leg of my odyssey in context for you, I have marked out a rather rudimentary map of South East Asia with a green line indicating the route I have travelled so far and a red line indicating the route I will travel over the next three weeks…hopefully! I have uploaded it along with the remainder of my photos to http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Vietnam/ and the direct link to the map itself is http://i209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Vietnam/South-East-Asia-Map.jpg Hope this helps to put my ramblings into a cartographical perspective for you.

Today was much more fun. I decided to explore the countryside on my own so I rented a motorbike, and with a rudimentary map in my pocket, I took off into the chaos of the little town's traffic. Once I got out of the town the scenery was beautiful and the roads wound around hills and valleys. Motorbike is the only way to travel – with the wind blowing in your face and the environment close enough to touch. My destination was Lang Vian Mountain which I found with surprisingly little difficulty given that it was about 20km out of town. I had to park the bike at the bottom of the mountain and hike the whole 6km uphill on foot. The sky was blindingly blue and the sunlight filtered down through the pines gently. On the way up the mountain I met a big group of Vietnamese students who invited me to join them on their hike because it would be "more fun for you together with us"! Plus they wanted to practice their English. They were terribly nice and told "funny stories" which were essentially Paddy Irishman, Englishman, Scotsman jokes with the characters bizarrely replaced with the President of Vietnam, the Prime Minister of Japan and Bill Clinton. They couldn't believe I had actually come to a place like Dalat on my own and was actually single and suspected that I was up to something. They obviously thought I had left my girlfriend locked up in the hotel room while I went out to enjoy myself. They asked me to sing my national anthem to make the journey shorter which I agreed to do in exchange for a rendition of the Vietnamese national anthem which they happily provided with great gusto. I was quite pleased with my own delivery of Amhran na bhFiann as I took it in quite a low register and still managed to reach "chun báis nó saol". When we got to the top, the panoramic views of the rolling Vietnamese countryside were well worth the long hike. They were going to hang out on the top for a few hours but I had lots of other places to see and I could see the afternoon rain clouds loitering in intimidating gangs on the horizon so I bade them good morrow (as you do) and agreed to meet up with them in the evening to go to a karaoke bar. Sure enough the surly clouds bullied the innocent blue sky into submission with sharp cracks of thunder and lightning. They moved en masse over unsuspecting mountains which impaled their dark underbellies. Somehow they managed to hold in their rain though and I made it to my next destination: Dalat Flower Garden. There was an excellent collection of ancient bonsais here and I totally dig bonsais, especially ancient ones. Then I drove to the Valley Love which proved to be perfectly tolerable. I rode through the valley on horseback and took everything in. I could see the romantic attraction all right – the natural scenery looked like it was straight out of a fairy tale. So that's Dalat! There's a brand new batch of photos up at http://www.flickr.com/photos/gctrionaem/sets/72157601549952373  and the most recent few are up at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Vietnam/  And guess what? More technical difficulties mean I am unable to upload the last 30 photos but I'll get them up when and if aforementioned difficulties resolve themselves. I must go and do a vocal warm up now in preparation for tonight's karaoke performance. Mmmm, an Abba medley followed by a Bee Gees number methinks! La la la la la la laaa. Lee lee lee lee lee lee leeeee. Lu lu lu lu lu lu luuu…

Far more enticing is the location in which I am currently perched, namely Dalat, a town with such a high elevation that my ears popped several times before I got here. It's so high that the temperature actually feels like August in Ireland and is far more comfortable. Air conditioning is unnecessary and I can finally wear long pants and a long-sleeved shirt again! I've even seen some children wearing coats! Coats! The shady cocnut trees have been replaced by even shadier pines and I am astounded once again by the veritable cornucopia of landscapes that is Vietnam. (I've been waiting to use veritable cornucopia all summer.) The roads to get here were very steep and windy and narrow and the bus had to labour all the way. The buses here like to drive in the middle of the road even when it's a perfectly wide road and sometimes they even like to drive on the left just for kicks. They also like to hoot arrogantly at any traffic brazen enough to actually want to travel in the opposite direction. I am so sick of the hooting here. Drivers of all vehicles hoot their horns constantly and for no reason whatsoever. It's not like their horns make a pleasant noise although many of them play a merry little tune which is even more annoying. This habit makes sleeping on buses rather difficult and as soon as I get to the next city I am switching to trains. I was very glad to finally arrive in Dalat after six gruelling hours. The alpine environment is favourably reminiscent of beautiful Cullowhee in North Carolina only cooler and with a resort town smack bang in the middle of all the forests and mountains. As I write this in my hotel lobby (which has TV in the bedrooms with English channels and a hot shower for only $6 a night!) the rain fizzes outside and the receptionist sings a little song to herself. She has quite a nice voice. One downside to Dalat is that it is apparently a bit of a honeymoon destination and full of couples and could be quite a sickening place to be single. With local tourist attractions bearing nostalgic names such as "The Lake of Sighs" and "The Valley of Love" it remains to be seen whether I will be regurgitating my breakfast tomorrow when I go out to explore the countryside. A friendly waitress with rather poor English in Mui Ne who was attempting to make small talk with metried to warn me about this and asked if I was going with my girlfriend. I, thinking she was just flirting, explained jocularly that I had left that position vacant as having a girlfriend in tow made picking up pretty Vietnamese girls intolerably inconvenient. Naturally she didn't understand what I said which was just as well because she was merely expressing surprise that someone would go to a place like Dalat on their own and trying to prepare me for the kitch to come. I haven't encountered any such kitch thus far, not having actually explored the town yet but tomorrow we'll see whether it's really as soppy as she made out. In the meantime, here are two more photos for ye: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gctrionaem/sets/72157601549952373

After that we drove further inland and the landscape changed dramatically. It looked more like the middle east than Vietnam. It was just sandy scrub with a few free range goats wandering around aimlessly. We pulled in at a little grove of pine trees in the middle of the desert. There were kids tearing around on scrawny little ponies and trying to rent sheets of plastic with ropes attached to use as sand sleds. We got a few and started sliding down the huge dunes. The sand got everywhere. The desert is fun for a while but I would not like to live here. Sand blowing all over the place gets old fast. Then we visited yet another strange landscape - a big red mountain full of canyons that we clambered through. I felt like I was on Tatoonie (a fictional desert planet from Star Wars) with the strange rock formations rearing up on either side. I kept expecting Tuskan Raiders to jump out and shoot me. The view of the bay from the top of the mountain was spectacular. At dusk we went to visit the fishing village and saw all the brightly coloured boats bobbing in the bay with little lights. In conclusion, I'm quite pleased and unsurprised with myself for squeezing every last drop of activity out of another day. I am quite happy to have seen so many strange and beautiful landscapes in one day. Naturally I took lots of photos and due to aforementioned technical difficulties, I am uploading them here for the time being: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gctrionaem/sets/72157601549952373

Life here is so different to Cambodia and Laos, not quite as backward (from my perspective.) In Cambodia, marriages are often arranged and wives are always bought. The cheapest one you can get is about $500 but they're crap. If you want a good one you have to fork out at least $3000. Knowing them beforehand is not necessary. There is no courting ritual of any kind in Cambodia. Girls don't go out at night unless they're ''ladies of the night''. Vietnam seems much more western. Teenage couples drive to the local park on their mopeds, with the girl clinging amourously to the boy. Then hundreds of them just park their mopeds in the park and sit on them and talk and drink. At least they have some social outlets.

A strange effect of constant travel is that you acquire a much more accurate conception of space and the distance between places in the world but in exchange for this understanding, you completely lose all sense of time. Because I'm always on the move and everyday has so many new experiences packed into it (unlike an ordinary nine to five life) I have no idea how the time is passing. Things I did last week seem like a month ago because I've done so many other things since. I don't wear a watch here. If I really need to know the time I can turn on my phone. I never have any idea what day it is because it really doesn't matter what day it is. Life is one big long weekend. I have to make a point of checking the date now and again to keep track of my progress and travelling speed so I know whether I need to move faster or dilly dally some more. At the moment, I'm not sure. I've got a month and I think at this semi-leisurely pace I can probably cover Vietnam in about three weeks and the little corner of China I'm doing plus Hong Kong in the last week.

One strange slightly sinister thing about all the south east Asian countries I've been to so far is that all the hotel owners ask for your passport when you check in. Some of them insist on keeping it while you're staying. Others are content to photocopy it or take down all the details in it. The seem to be required to do this by law. They have official forms they have to fill in for every guest and presumably they're sent to the country's government so they can keep tabs on our movements. I suspect the purpose of this mechanism is twofold. Firstly, if I get in a fight and kill a guy or walk out of a hotel and forget to pay, they'll find me that night when I check into the next hotel. Secondly, if I should suddenly disappear and they've got the Irish embassy demanding answers, they know where I stayed the previous night so they can start the search from there and put out an APB to every hotel in the country for my passport number. Frankly I don't like it. It's very Big Brother, and I don't like being monitored like that.

Apart from that though, the Vietnamese really know how to treat us white folk - like royalty. They're really too humble. Everytime I'm brought a cup of tea and I ask for milk they look really worried because they think they have failed me as a waiter and they usually can't understand what's wrong. I very politely ask "Is there any chance of a small drop of milk for the tea when you get a chance?" and their brows furrow with anxiety and they stare blankly. After about five minutes I manage to explain what milk is and when they finally get it they they say "aaaaah" and apologise profusely for their lack of foresight in soft broken English. Then they scream something scary in Vietnamese at someone in the kitchen who quickly runs out with a little eggcup of milk. If I were to translate the gist of what they're saying I imagine it would be something like this: (To me:) "I'm terribly sorry sir. It is extremely embarassing to me personally that I have failed to serve you in exactly the manner that you desire. Please accept my humble apologies and allow me to rectify this unfortunate error immediately." (To cook:) "You idiot! He wanted milk! Why didn't you bring him milk? Run and fetch it immediately before I invite our honoured guest to publicly flog you." Of course this is only what I think they're saying. For all I know they could be shouting in Vietnamese at the cook: "Another bloody foreigner wants milk in his tea. What's wrong with these people. There's always something wrong with everything we serve them. Would you ever go and get this wanker his bloody milk before I punch him right in the face...and feel free to spit in it first!" I'd like to believe that the former dramatisation is the more accurate of the two though.

The internet is so slow in Vietnam that it is nearly impossible to upload