Goats and monkeys

In the 1990s my sister (who must surely by now be tiring of me appropriating her/our stories) was invited to travel on an all expenses paid trip around the motorways of Britain as "assistant" to a family friend who was writing a book about off-the-motorway beauty spots. (A great idea, I think - instead of stopping at some moribund service station for grey coffee, chips and sad burgers, why not, guided by the book, travel up some anonymous slip road and find a small pub by a river with a weeping willow under which you consume delicious roast pork sandwiches? But I guess the internet will do this for you now.)

The "assistant" tag is as dodgy as it looks; he was after her body, but was, I'm afraid,  a deeply unprepossessing man - we'll call him A - known to us as "A the Goat" because you didn't even need to half-close your eyes to see him as a billy (perhaps even the stinking one my Dad once owned, a creature who was dubbed by my brother "the Cultural Wizard" on account  of his little wispy beard and crazy-wise yellow eyes, who had to be locked in a shed down the road far from human habitation because he smelt so bad). Claire was having none of it, and at one point stormed from the car with A tailing pleadingly after her.

A drank himself to death at a tragically young age, and my mum went to his funeral last year. She passed on the post-funeral celebration, which was scheduled to take place down the pub. A fitting location, you might think, given how much he loved booze, but I think it a little bit of a queasy choice to be celebrating the life of someone who killed themselves with alcohol by raising a glass of it.

Although my sister and I mocked him (and we had some prior history with him, having spent a very strange Christmas in a holiday cottage in Wales with him and his girlfriend at the end of the 1980s, and Claire endured who knows what on her motorway odyssey), I'll always have a special fondness for A because, in a travel piece he wrote for the Scotsman, he managed to get this past the subs: "The Kyle of Localsh and the Kyle of Minogue".

Truly Asia

I'm in Kuala Lumpur, probably for the last time in a while. It's a city quite a few people I know profess to dislike. My first ever visit here seven years ago got off to a shaky start when my overeager taxi driver started telling me his wife didn't understand him and asked me to come and sit next to him in the front seat as we sped in his battered Mercedes along a near-deserted highway from the airport, surrounded by jungle as far as the eye could see. As we raced past an exit ramp clearly marked "Kuala Lumpur", I clutched my mobile phone, which had run out of battery, nervously.

The cityscape here is quite different from other Asian locations such as Hong Kong and Singapore. As Malaysia more or less successfully keeps its inherent racial, ethnic and religious tensions under control, the architecture reflects the mix of cultures and the exigencies of the climate, albeit with a relentless mall-creep which is typical of Asia's successful cities. The extraordinary, gleaming Petronas Towers rise boldly above the city, visible from miles around and startlingly illuminated at night.

There are plenty of flaws: the religious police, the corruption, the terrible traffic, a constant prurient interest in western women on their own; but I always feel a sense of wonder, curiosity and interest here. The lack of uniformity in the buildings means there's constantly some new and interesting conjunction to observe of Islamic minarets, multi-inclined Imperial Chinese roofs, shiny shopping malls, colonial turrets, ancient shop rows and dirty shacks.

Death and taxes

[Photo credit mrcreighton.com]

They're building another casino in Singapore - a three-towered monstrosity, improbably modelled on card decks, apparently, and built to feng shui principles (earth, wind and fire) near the Singapore Flyer, precisely positioned so that the Flyer ("the world's largest observation wheel - a moving experience at every turn": who writes this stuff?) will, accordingly, deliver good fortune to all who gamble there.

This evening I attended the closing dinner for a week of conferences and events which we were sponsoring. It was held at the Marina Barrage, an enormous, rather unappealing building which features a long, swooping roof walk, a big spiral leading you up to the roof and amazing views back to Singapore's financial district, past the Singapore Flyer's glittering lights and across to the sepulchural three towers of the almost-finished casino.

All this development - and a huge swathe of this part of Singapore is a building site, with thousands of workers from India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar housed in rows of temporary dorms - is impressive, and certainly the scale of it is astonishing and the sheer size of the buildings, if nothing else, is a marvel; but there's an emptiness there that reminds me of my least favourite place on earth, Las Vegas.

The difficult part once the developments are complete is bringing buildings to life. I walked to the top to see people on the roof of the Marina Barrage flying kites, taking photographs and jumping in the grass; appreciating the new view, as I did, and enjoying their new building.

Photo credit mrcreighton.com

A thing of beauty

Big Bill lives in Jurong Bird Park in Singapore. He is a bird with a great deal of dignity, despite, or perhaps because of, his massive beak. Humiliatingly, Bill is sometimes called a "whalehead", but not by his friends. Bill is a shoebill; there are 5,000-8,000 left in his habitat of tropical east Africa and he is classified as Vulnerable. However, he can eat a baby crocodile, although it seems unlikely that he ever gets the chance in the civilised confines of Jurong Bird Park. Shoebills are magnificent in flight, appearing almost prehistoric, but it is not clear whether Bill ever gets to fly.

Station to station

I was telling someone the other day how excited I was, on starting a new job in 1993 (my first proper job, in Alva Street in the West End of Edinburgh) to be able to use the fax machine. If I'm honest the idea of being able to write something on a piece of paper and then have it reproduce on the other side of the world somehow still really impresses me. Here I am now, on a train from London Euston to Penrith, writing a blog post, able to report that the American Christian evangelical (with the pamphlets to prove it) sitting opposite me has a large spot on her ample chin and is sniffing continuously and annoyingly; that it's raining in Tamworth, where the train just stopped; that we're running 15 minutes late... all this of little interest to anyone of course (and that's what blogging's all about!), but despite the fact that I deliver training to lawyers on technology, and consider myself fairly computer literate, I still have a childlike delight in what technology can do. Perhaps that's partly because I'm of the generation that didn't grow up with it. It still seems like a miracle to me that you're reading this.

The ride

Track record

I've always loved trains, above all other forms of transportation. One of my earliest memories is of being taken on a steam train journey in Devon and I still remember the excitement and mystery of it. Once I attempted to create some new memories for my little sisters, then aged 6 and 8, by taking them to Glasgow with me on the train; although it's a much more prosaic journey, something about racing along the tracks, looking out of the windows as the landscape flies past, even buying a coffee from the trolley, serves in some small way to deliver a fraction of the experience of Robert Powell in The 39 Steps, all the Agatha Christie novels I tore through, Adlestrop by Edward Thomas, and the beginning of Stardust Memories.


Sydney's trains are double-deckers, with excellent, practical green leather seats kitted out with a middle section that converts from one side to another so you can change the direction you're facing in (an important consideration for me because my travel-sickness is exacerbated by facing backwards) and shiny fittings glinting in the light. The windows are scratched to hell and the interiors are dim; it's not the Trans-Siberian Express, but I'm completely satisfied.

Thief in the night

Phuket (formerly known as "Junk Ceylon") is only three and a half hours' flight from Hong Kong and, according to the woman I sat next to on the way home, is where everyone from Hong Kong goes on holiday. Although the name apparently means "hill" in Malay, and there is a mountain range on the island, most of the landscape where we were, near Surin Beach, was extremely flat.

Most of the wedding guests stayed at the Chedi, a slightly down-at-heel resort consisting of villas on stilts in the hillside near the sea, linked by a network of wooden steps and bridges. The wedding took place in a curiously bland mega-villa owned by a prominent Hong Kong couple. The sun shone, everyone was happy, and the groom, an Australian, quoted Alasdair Gray to describe how he felt about being with his wife, a Scot: "Work as though you live in the early days of a better nation". When it got dark, we released huge paper lanterns into the night sky; they disappeared twinkling into the distance.

The only small blot on the weekend happened on Saturday night. While I was asleep, some opportunist opened the sliding door of the villa, which was unlocked, and took a few steps to my bedside to find my camera, wallet and phone. The camera was, humiliatingly, clearly found wanting (and to be fair it's seen better days) - that was discarded outside the door; the cash from my wallet was taken too but they left the credit cards. People kept asking me if I was traumatised by the experience. I wasn't: I didn't know any better; I was asleep at the time. If anything I feel lucky: I didn't wake up to see them there, they didn't get much, and no doubt they needed the money more than I did.

Tramspotting

In Edinburgh, on the day before the first day of the Edinburgh festival, as immortalised in Trainspotting; I've never seen so many people on the streets, but that may be because when I lived here, I studiously avoided coming in to the city centre for the reasons outlined here (call me small-minded and parochial).

Irvine himself I was never that sure about, ken - visceral and shocking at first, and perverse fun to read aloud on a beach in Italy; but something of a one trick pony especially in later novels. He reviews others for the Guardian now.

Jenny Turner once wrote a devastating critique of Ecstasy here which has yet to be bettered.

I'd forgotten they're building tramlines (Darling Alistair's pet project, much to the scorn of Private Eye) and there seem to be roadblocks everywhere. I walked past the old Miss Selfridge just to see the modern neon clothes (same as the old clothes) and always pause for Robert Louis Stevenson's favourite view: down the straight streets to the Forth.

Leaving New York

A friend who saw my pictures of Minnesota and New York, below, said they looked cold and lonely. It's certainly cold, and I think my vision is probably lonely (although as the inimitable Roddy Frame said , "they call us lonely when we're really just alone"). I've enjoyed many things about this trip. I liked Washington, if only for the novelty of the board games in my hotel (AKA rooming house, a shabby, glorified B&B presided over by a perpetually delighted Eastern European man with a shock of black hair and a disconcerting squint), with the White House just down the road, the sharp contrast of bitter cold and blazing sunshine, and the (black, middle aged, highly educated) taxi driver telling us he'd probably vote for McCain; Minnesota was an experience, from the ice storm at the airport which nearly prevented us landing, vertical shards of white dashing past the plane windows on either side as I said to myself they do this all the time, they do this all the time, and the question I always ask myself when I travel somewhere new (especially somewhere as monumentally undistinguished as St Paul), how do people end up here?; I've enjoyed getting to know New York, walking down Madison Avenue thinking about Kirsty McColl's song of the same name, buying Kiehl's products in Bloomingdales, passing the Empire State which is currently in a state of renovation, following the Pilates session on the TV in my hotel room and feeling silly lying on the carpet trying to connect my legs to the earth, and visiting the jawdroppingly enormous New York HQ of UK law firm Clifford Chance (the largest law firm in the world, both by number of lawyers and revenue) for a happily coincidental meeting arranged by one of my Hong Kong clients, who hadn't realised I was in New York, the night before.

The thing I don't like about travel is the fact of it. The weariness, waking at 4am with thoughts running round my head as insistent as a headache. Not knowing where I am, what time it is, and whether I should eat. When I've been in meetings I have had no trouble at all. Outside of that temporary adrenaline rush, though, it's been like walking around with several sheets of bubble wrap tightly wound around my head.

What I have positively disliked is the fact that the clothes in every shop I go into seem to be "Made In China". Having just moved house I have an unusually powerful distaste for buying anything, but I feel particularly averse to the idea of buying anything made in China; to China it shall not return, at least not in my luggage. Viewed in this perspective, even the most technically desirable dresses are nothing more than landfill futures.

Sunburst and snowblind

The view from the somewhat dirty window of the Holiday Inn SoHo, Lafayette Street, Manhattan, New York, March 3, 2008

Flying out of St Paul airport, you could see for miles and the whole country seemed perfectly flat and white with snow as far as the eye could see. I don't think I've ever seen so much snow covering such an expanse of land. Today in New York the sun was shining and the sky was a perfect blue, though it was bitterly cold (as I walked along Broadway I thought of "You promised me Broadway was waiting for me" and "The wind blows right through you, it's no place for the old" from Fairytale of New York). I met an old friend from Hong Kong in an Asian cafe called Rice, on the corner of Lexington and 28th Street. She's been in New York for two years and says it's a tough, and toughening, place to work, and people will step on each other to get ahead; but much better than Hong Kong for a single woman looking for a relationship (in Hong Kong, this attractive, intelligent woman had begun to wonder if there was something wrong with her).

In the afternoon I had a facial and a massage at a spa called Eden. Both therapists were Chinese, one from Hunan and one from Fuzhou; the latter, Sandra, was about the same age as me, had an 11 year old daughter (it's amazing what you can find out from someone who's wrapping a hot towel around your chin) spoke Cantonese as well as Mandarin and was delighted with my few hamfisted phrases. I lay on the massage table listening to, apparently, the music which wafts from the speakers of every spa I've ever been to worldwide (the CD is, I think, Now That's What I Call Inoffensive Tinkling 55) and thinking about the circumstances which led a Scottish-born Hong Kong resident and two Chinese born New York residents to a spa on Broadway on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Mississippi God Damn

The Mississippi, from the Crowne Plaza St Paul Riverfront, February 29, 2008.

Minnesota feels like it typifies the US in so many ways: a land of giants and giant spaces, where everyone dresses down and looks down. Jeans to the office? Sure! Dirty snow in huge drifts. Huge cars, huge roads.The worst hot chocolate I've ever tasted from the vending machine in the office kitchen. Kids in the hotel hallways, here for some wrestling competition, with nothing better to do than stand by the lifts staring. At every restaurant we're served huge, somewhat tasteless portions, larded with butter. So much food... US flags everywhere and bumper stickers saying "Support [or Pray for] our troops". Everyone is friendly, up to a point. Public as well as private spaces are massive and bland. Only the sunshine relieves the atmosphere. The TV adverts are all for drugs. The CNN newsreader says "Communist China".

St Paul is not a city you could walk around. Without a car you'd be nothing. Everyone drives to work. They drive between buildings on the office "campus". We drove to lunch and back. It's second nature to be driving a car: how will Americans ever give that up? The entire infrastructure is predicated upon driving.

My taxi driver has a black beret and John Lennon blue specs and is playing freeform jazz on the car stereo. He barks at me "I'm going to Lexington because it's quicker". I say "OK". He asks me if the reason I have a crease in the middle of my brow - just there, and he points in the mirror - "is because it's frustrating dealing with the Chinese". Straight faced, he says the people in Hong Kong eat rats.

The Mall of America is near the airport, but I can't quite bring myself to go there. 40 million people visited in 2006 and it's the most visited shopping mall in the world. All very good reasons for me to avoid it completely.

But sitting at the desk in my hotel room, watching the sun go down over the Mississippi, with clouds of smoke puffing in the cold, I have to admit it's beautiful.

Ghost world

View from the window of the Crowne Plaza St Paul Riverfront, St Paul, Minnesota, after an ice storm, February 28, 2008.

Home and away

Then your life becomes a travelogue
Of picture postcard charms…
Joni Mitchell, “Amelia”

January 6 marks five years exactly since I arrived in Hong Kong. Five years seems like a landmark, for no apparent reason except, perhaps, that it’s easily divisible and multipliable (although there are good historical precedents for five, 10, 15, 20 and 25 years being treated as significant markers and denominated as specific anniversaries, centenaries and jubilees). Accordingly, this may be a time for reflection – as I have now spent what amounts to almost 15% of my life so far, so far away (5,985 miles, to be precise) from the country where I was born.

Returning to the UK, as I did recently, is always an interesting experience; without wanting to sound too pretentious, each time I return I’m aware of feeling less connected to the culture, in the simplest sense: what’s on TV, who’s in the news, what people are talking about, or how they style their hair. The UK has been described as somewhere where people are overly concerned with local news at the expense of what’s happening in the rest of the world; this is surely a universal issue, but although I think of the UK as being much less insular than the United States, the island geography must contribute to a certain sense of isolation. I remember being in the US not long after the invasion of Iraq. Numerous other disasters were happening around the world as the implications of the Bush administration’s criminally fainéant approach post-invasion became clear: but the top news story on every channel was whether a certain talk show host’s new short haircut meant she was a lesbian.

I have never knowingly bought Hello! or any of its derivatives, finding its fawning approach to celebrities quite nauseating (“Jackie Collins shows us around her gracious London home and tells us of the secret agony that drove her to write 60 best-selling novels”). A fairly recent trend is for celebrity mags to be a lot more caustic, Heat being the best exemplar of this, and initially funny and rather readable for its irreverence. But the longer I’ve been away, the less interesting it becomes, partly because I no longer know a lot of the micro-celebrities, ex-Big Brother 25 or X-Factor 15 winners featured in its pages; have no taste for Britney’s cellulite, Jordan’s crippling synthetics and Cameron Diaz’s craterous forehead, nor any part of Jade Goody; and no longer care about Sharon Osbourne, a woman whom the popular consensus seems to have deemed to be some sort of heart-of-gold trouper but who comes across to the objective eye as a thoroughly self-absorbed and nasty piece of work.

It’s far too simplistic, of course, to extrapolate from my distaste for Heat and its ilk that I’m becoming detached from British culture, and I can still hold a conversation with only a minimum of puzzled responses – and let’s face it I’m well used to dissembling, having grown up without a TV: the sample classroom conversation having gone from this:

“Did you see the Incredible Hulk last night?”
“No.”
“–.” (turns away to find someone more interesting)

to this, once I learned to lie on the realisation that they weren’t really listening to me anyway:

“Did you see the Incredible Hulk last night?”
“Yes, it was great.”
“Did you see when he …?”
“Aye it was brilliant, he just burst right out…” (and so on)

All this trivial stuff perhaps obscures the real point which is that I’ve now spent quite a lot of my adult life away from my home country, and my responses to what’s around me are informed as much by recent experience as by my past: the person who arrived five years ago (and just as I can remember not being able to read street signs when I was three years old, I can remember not being able to read the landscape of Hong Kong) now seems quite remote in some ways. Now I am someone who can dive, who can paddle either in a canoe or a dragon boat, and who can (after a fashion) row; who can speak Cantonese (albeit still embarrassingly poorly); and who no longer finds flying intimidating (I have completely used up my allocated lifetime of environmental impact in five years). I’ve met thousands of people and seen things I could never have imagined.

Strange fruit

When we were in Palau, we were out to dinner one night and S, a member of our group, ordered the Palauan delicacy, fruitbat. No one was quite sure what to expect, but when it arrived there was an indescribable shocked hush followed by uproar because it was, frankly, the most unnerving dish. The most astonishing thing was the lack of finesse in preparation: it looked as though they'd dunked the bat in hot water to cook it and then sploshed it in to the bowl with some coconut milk and a few desultory vegetables; and the hair, and the wings, were all still intact, with its little face, teeth bared,as well they might be, poking up above the water line.

Such was the commotion on the appearance of this dish that the restaurant staff looked somewhat affronted and I was suddenly cringeingly conscious of the fact that we were mocking what amounted to their national dish -

If you are squeamish, look away now

- but when S sliced off its face to eat the brain - and you have to give him credit for eating, at the end of the day, all the meat he could find on its little body - there was really no way to respond except with a kind of appalled gasp.

I took the photo above using S's camera. I'm pleased with it, under the circumstances, but I don't think I'll be selling it to Nigella for her next recipe book.

Stop making scents

From Cathay Pacific's inflight magazine, November 2007 (Hong Kong to Singapore):

Kelly Caleche (Hermes)
"The conniving encounter between the spirit of the Kelly Bag and the perfume. The unexpected caress of a leather floral scent".

Rarely, if ever, has the word "conniving" been so inappropriately employed. As for the unexpected caress of leather florals - I am beginning to feel quite nauseated. Unexpected? You bet! Get off me, you old git!

Into the blue

Having just obtained a PADI Open Water diving certification, in the less-than-clear waters of Clearwater Bay in Hong Kong, my first series of “real” dives was in Palau, in Micronesia. We were there for the Micronesia Cup and the following weekend were heading to Guam for the Heineken Cup (where, incidentally, my crew won gold in the Women’s 16K). During the week inbetween, we did 11 dives in total in the most heart-stoppingly amazing conditions: clear blue skies, beautiful water, sunshine, and incredible locations such as Blue Corner, Blue Hole, German Channel, as well as a wreck dive on a sunken Japanese warship, where I peered through a darkened porthole almost expecting a face to come up to meet me. We saw giant manta rays moving langourously through the water like stealth planes; turtles carrying their ancient burden and protection; black tip and grey sharks; wicked schools of black barracuda; my favourite, the noble, sad-looking Napoleon wrasse; and cute little matt black fish with blue sickle-shaped tails and pouty blue lips.

The technicalities of diving are quite straightforward: panic is the only enemy as long as you remember to keep breathing. There was one moment at Blue Corner when we swam alongside a massive wall and I looked down into unimaginable darkness below as the wall went on and on, falling away beneath us, and I had to look round quickly for someone else nearby to reassure myself I wasn’t alone. I also had a “Lost in Space” moment when we hooked into the reef at German Channel: against the current, if you don’t hook in, you can float away, and when my hook came free I was saved by one of the others, as if in slow motion, reaching out to grab my string as though I were an errant pet.

On the boat on the way back, in the sunshine, speeding between muffin-shaped islands in the clear evening, I was thinking that I must be the luckiest person alive.

24 hours from Tampa

It's funny how strange coincidences happen wherever you are, utterly at random of course, but perplexing nonetheless. I'm in unlovely Tampa, Florida. The day started unsuccessfully - after a 24 hour journey to get here from Hong Kong, and a restless sleep on the wrong side of the world (12 hours behind) - with a visit to an area of Tampa called Ybor City, which held out the promise of "boutique shopping", but actually resembled a ghost town so closely you could almost see the tumbleweed in Urban Outfitters. Everywhere I asked for what I needed (amongst other things, an iPod nano, as a prize draw gift for the stand at the exhibition we're here for, and a place to have a manicure), I was told to go to a mall. So I finally ended up at a faceless place called the International Mall, and walked in to Neiman Marcus only to hear Annie Lennox singing a song written by my sister's ex-boyfriend, the (infinitely better) original of which I first heard on the M8 between Glasgow and Edinburgh, while being driven, in his old black Mercedes, by the guy who'd co-written the music.

Then I went to have my nails done in a huge, but hitherto completely empty nail bar, which smelled strongly of air freshener and whose walls were adorned with slightly suspect plastic flowers. Five disconsolate Vietnamese girls sat waiting for customers. As "Tina" scrubbed my nails and painted them neutral pink, on a huge screen over her shoulder I was lucky enough to be able to watch a completely preposterous film, entitled "DOA" and purportedly set in Hong Kong.

Just shut up and paddle

I’ve just spent the weekend racing in Guam with my team, the Hong Kong Outrigger Association (HKOA - although for some reason the vacuous commentator consistently referred to us throughout the tournament, over the PA system, as “HKOC”). We flew in to Guam extremely early on Saturday morning and went straight to our hotel, the Marriott, overlooking the beach where we were going to be racing. We just had time to change and rush down to the beach which was a long, narrow strip of sand overlooking a bay of clear blue water with huge waves breaking on a reef a few hundred metres from the shore.

The US formally purchased Guam (“Where America’s Day Begins”) from Spain for $20 million in 1899. It’s an “unincorporated organised territory” (according to the US federal government) and a “non-self-governing territory” (according to the UN) - I think this means it’s voluntarily part of the US, not pressganged into being a colony, but falls short of being a proper US State. It’s the place where, amongst other things, Ferdinand Magellan anchored in 1521 on his ill-fated circumnavigation of the globe. During WWII, it was occupied by the Japanese and retaken by American forces in August 1944 - a mere 18,000 soldiers died in the process. It was home to the Japanese soldier, Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi, the poor devil who was discovered hiding in a cave 28 years after the war was over.

Guam itself is a rather weird, almost wholly Americanised place. If you woke up there without knowing your location you really would think you were in any anonymous town in the American mid-west - with the same wide roads lined with the same chain stores and chain food outlets. It was jarring to see US flags everywhere and a large picture of George W. Bush in the airport. It sounds fatuous given current events, but it’s easy to forget just how patriotic Americans are - I can’t imagine any public place in the UK displaying a cheesy snap of a grinning Tony Blair.

The beach where the races took place was actually very nice and the water was clear and blue - a vast improvement on paddling in Hong Kong in murky water you dread falling into. Paddling is exciting; reports of it are not. Here they are anyway.

A day at the races: Saturday
The sun shone and it was already very hot by the time the first races started - 1,500 metres, with four turns around a buoy. The turns are exhilarating and exhausting, with everyone yelling and the paddlers at seats one and two (the latter being me on this occasion) leaning out of the boat to draw on the left while the water, with the texture of just-setting concrete, seems to resist every effort our bodies are making.

We had an alien paddler at seat four in both the 1,500 metres and the 500 because our steerswoman had hurt her back and couldn’t do turns, so the other team (the A Crew, who are all more experienced paddlers) got one of our team and we had to ask the other Hong Kong club to lend us someone for each of the races on Saturday. Paddling with six women in a crew has taught me a lot about teamwork - it sounds trite, but we work really well together and had all been training together at least three times a week at least for the weeks leading up to the race, so it really felt like there was something missing when she went in to the other boat.

A day at the races: Sunday
I was at seat 3 for the 16K race - an hour and a half of hard paddling, for which we went out beyond the reef into the big wide ocean. Seat 3 calls the changes, which means that every 15 strokes, in what must seem a rather quaint exchange, I call “Hut!"; everyone responds "Ho!" and we all swap sides from paddling on the left to the right, or vice versa (we paddle on alternate sides down the boat). The B Crew triumphed by beating the B and C crews of our main Hong Kong rivals as well as the A Crew from our own team - a victory that was, probably perversely, very sweet. The picture above is of the victorious team (well, we came fourth, but it felt damn good as we are all new to outrigging this year) in our eye-wateringly bright kit in front of the canoe.

I can't believe how much this has changed me: starting with dragon boating, and now moving on to outrigging, two sports I'd never even heard of before coming to Hong Kong. I am now so far gone that I am convinced that a paddle is a beautiful thing - I am even going to buy one of my own. Clearly I am now nothing more than a Paddle Zombie, standing lifeless and unmoving, waiting only for the cry “Paddles Up!”

Still, I'd leap in front of a flying bullet for you

At Ho Chi Minh City airport I was stopped at the boarding gate for the flight back to Hong Kong and asked to open my bag. After a thorough search nothing was found, but I was asked to put the bag through the x-ray machine again and then the officer searched one more time. Still nothing. I was getting a bit irate by this time, so a woman officer was called over (to handle me with more tact perhaps?) and she said that something which looked like a bullet was hidden in my bag.

My little perfume dispenser (currently containing Allure, as it happens) was a present from my brother-in-law and is a silver bullet-shaped object which has gone undetected in my makeup bag through countless airport security checks – in London Heathrow, Edinburgh, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Bali, Tokyo – even Singapore which has pretty efficient security.

Afterwards I realised that the Vietnamese are more attuned for people carrying bullets than most, as there is still a lot of ordinance lying around from the war which after all ended only 30 years ago: guidebooks tell you that in rural areas you shouldn’t stray from the path because of UXOs. Presumably you can pick up discarded bullets in a field behind someone’s house and they often catch people trying to smuggle bits of guns, helmets, military insignia, grenades, anti-personnel mines and other crackpot souvenirs.

I sprayed some perfume for them to demonstrate how harmless my “bullet” was – which was quite rude of me in retrospect; the place probably reeked for hours afterwards.