Exotic Lands and Dodgy Places

Wee Cheng Tan

Description

Distant Lands and Dodgy Places chronicles the adventures of intrepid traveller Tan Wee Cheng - from witnessing an Eskimo seal hunt in icy Greenland to meeting Chinese stranded in Paraguay and The Amazon, and arriving in chaotic Comoros just as a volcanic eruption threatens to blow the capital apart. Hot on the heels of his runaway success Hot Spots and Dodgy Places, Distant Lands follows Wee Cheng into the heart of Mauritius, Land of the Dodo, and across the exotic Land of Many Waters in Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana, where he sidesteps a drug proposition and survives nearly being mobbed at the chaotic French border. From partying in Columbia as the world's longest civil war rages on in the surrounding countryside, to risking life and limb with Cypriot gangsters and a host of other dangers - Wee Cheng has done it all. Forget the package tour and venture into the unknown from the comfort of your armchair!

Informations

• Publié par: MarshallCavendish
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789814398718
• Langue: English

Extrait

Parts of this book were previously published as The Greenland Seal Hunter by Times Editions.
© 2010 Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Pte Ltd
Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196
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National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Tan, Wee Cheng. Exotic lands and dodgy places : adventures in Greenland, the Amazon and other far-out places / Tan Wee Cheng. — Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, c2010. p. cm. ISBN : 978-981-4302-90-6 (pbk.) 1. Tan, Wee Cheng — Travel. 2. Voyages and travels. I. Title. G465 910.4 — dc22         OCN672929846
Printed in Singapore by Fabulous Printers Pte Ltd
“ Once we had a planet. Now we're left with a suburb. ”
–John Simpson in A Mad World, My Masters: Tales from a Traveller's Life
Contents
Introduction
THE NORTH ATLANTIC
Greenland is Ice and Iceland is Green
Faroe Islands — Green Mountainous Heaven
CENTRAL & SOUTHERN EUROPE
The Cypriot Trilogy
Poland — Salt Mines, Holocaust and Phoenix Rising from Ashes
AFRICA / INDIAN OCEAN
Mauritius — Globalisation, Life and Death in the Land of the Dodo
Comoros — Volcano, Decay and Illusions in the Islands of the Moon
Mayotte and Réunion — A Rendezvous with France in Africa
Madagascar — Erotic Tombs, Tribal Warriors and Bull Fights in the Great Red Island
LATIN AMERICA
Guyana, Suriname & French Guiana — Land of Many Waters
Venezuela — Angel Falls, Mysterious Tepuis & the Andes
Paraguay — Rotting Away in Asunción
The Amazon — I Fed On Piranhas and Mosquitoes Fed On Me
Trouble in Colombia and Slowboat on the Amazon
Colombia — Searching for the War in Party Town
EAST ASIA
Mongolia — In Search of the Furry Mongolian Groundhog
Across Inland China by Train
About the Author

When I was ten, Mother brought home a box of colourful stamps from the office. I remember that most of the stamps were still stuck onto the original envelopes. They fascinated me, not just the excitement of holding something from an exotic, faraway land, but also the very fact that these tiny objects had travelled a long way to reach my home. Later, Dad brought home a simple but colourful map of the world, with different colours representing different states. From then on, I became obsessed with exotic lands and their cultures.
I come from an ordinary Singapore family. Those were the days before budget airlines and mass tourism. Vacations usually meant a chalet weekend in Changi. For a long time I'd thought that my travels would be restricted to the armchair variety. Before long, I became an expert on trivial facts such as the old name of Burkina Faso, the whereabouts of some long-forgotten Paraguayan dictator and whether Greenland was green or white.
How the world has changed! After graduating from university, I decided to backpack around Western Europe against the advice of family and friends who felt that it was too dangerous to travel independently. I was bitten by the travel bug and the love of travelling became an incurable disease. The very sense of achievement after undertaking a major journey was intoxicating. One journey followed another: Eastern Europe, Middle East, China, Central Asia, the former USSR, Latin America, Africa and the Pacific.
In an increasingly globalised and capitalistic world, governments and businessmen have invested in tourism and transportation infrastructure to make it easy to travel. The availability of well-written guidebooks provides everyone with practical advice on even the most exotic and faraway countries. There are few places that are difficult or outrageously prohibitive in cost to reach for the average citizen of any developed country; whereas a mere hundred years ago, such journeys could only be undertaken as major expeditions by highly connected and extremely wealthy members of the elite.
While major international tourism cities once appealed to me, it soon dawned on me that I was attracted to places I knew little about, or places where I was least likely to bump into tourists on package holidays. Places that now get me excited are those which are more likely to be featured in National Geographic than Condé Nast Traveller, or hot spots that insurers would hesitate to cover.
I am neither a mountaineer nor a hardcore explorer. Climbing Mount Everest or braving the sandstorms of the Empty Quarter are not my cup of tea. I am more interested in simple journeys on public transport, albeit through epic routes like the Silk Road or the Trans-Siberian; or visiting places with strange names like Ouzarzate or Tierra del Fuego; or the recent battlefields of the Balkans and hotspots like Armenia and Azerbaijan, which — for someone interested in history, politics and economics — are particularly fascinating.
Even then, the places I have travelled to are not extraordinarily unusual. Many are standard destinations of slightly more adventurous backpackers from the United States, Europe and Australasia. Increasingly, I also bump into fellow Singaporeans in the most unexpected places, ranging from Azerbaijan to Mongolia and Colombia.
What I have included in this book represent an exotic sampling of my stories and encounters in a number of off-the-beaten-track areas, as well as impressions and thoughts about a few more familiar destinations. History, current affairs and business have always been my passions. My thoughts often evolve around the colourful coincidences of history and culture that I discover during my journeys, as well as the intricacies of development and the reasons for the lack of social and economic progress in certain countries.
This book is a revised edition of my 2004 book The Greenland Seal Hunter. I have added photos and maps too so that my readers can travel with me visually through these distant lands. I have also included in this edition stories relating to my journeys to Mauritius, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.
There are many of you whom I should thank as you have helped me during my journeys, or made them more enjoyable. I had considered listing your names but have decided that the list would be nowhere close to being complete or fair. You know who you are, thank you very much! Lastly, I would like to dedicate this book to my family who have supported my never-ending wanderlust through their concern and advice.
Tan Wee Cheng
October 2010
THE NORTH ATLANTIC

Greenlandic Seal Hunter for a Day
I had barely arrived at Mette's home when her telephone rang.
“Look here, Wee Cheng, there's going to be a seal hunt today. If you are interested, you must set off now.”
I changed into the bulky outfit which Mette handed me — a multi-layered thick windbreaker, long johns and heavy boots which made me feel like a spaceman — and joined Benti on his weekend seal hunt.
Benti was 39 and a native Inuit Greenlander (previously known as Eskimos, but now considered a derogatory term due to its reference to people who eat raw meat),whose youthful face did not betray the many hours spent in the cold biting winds of this harsh frontier land. He worked at Kulusuk's only supermarket during the weekdays and hunted during the weekends for vital seal meat to feed his family and their 15 dogs. Dog sledges remain an important mode of transport in this remote part of Greenland and the dogs have to be well fed even in the summer months when the sledges are hardly used.
We hopped onto Benti's small, two-metre long wooden boat, which he had bought ten years ago in Tasiilaq. The Inuits of today no longer hunt on kayaks, a local invention known worldwide and one of the few Inuit words that have entered the English language. On Benti's boat were three rifles, a strange long stick with a hook at the end and a long steel harpoon somewhat worn out by age, plus a thermos flask of coffee made half an hour ago by Benti's wife, a few plastic cups and two packs of cookies — in case we stayed out at sea too long, said Benti. There were a few orange-coloured safety jackets as well. Benti smiled in a semi-defensive manner, “My sons were with me this morning, and they are young.” Perhaps he felt the need to apologise for the presence of the safety jackets, which might have diminished the symbolism of Inuit manhood.
We sailed out of the harbour slowly, carefully negotiating the numerous icebergs that had drifted into the sound between Kulusuk Island and the Greenlandic mainland. Here, the mountains loomed high in the background, haunting greyish silh