Singapore

    I arrived in Singapore this afternoon which has triggered off several memories of previous visits here although it is never a place I would say I know. My first visit was when I was 20 years old and I had made the momentous decision of throwing away the rest of the airline ticket back to London from New Zealand and embarking on an overland trip through Asia. I remember well the feeling of trepidation as if I was approaching the end of a high diving board and trying to jump off. Ironically, I stayed in a very posh hotel which was included in my air ticket but yet I was too nervous to go out and explore. All I knew was the next day that  I had to be on a train for 12 hours, travelling up the coast of Malaysia and I just hoped that my friends who lived in Ipoh had got my letter and would be there to meet me. Those were the days before internet!
     The second time I was here was in 1985 when Andrew and I had left Bermuda and were travelling the wrong way round to UK. We had been to Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia and this was nearly the last stop before we headed "home" . It was also the place that I realised that I was pregnant with Lisa - either made in Hong Kong or Thailand - and I remember breaking the news to Andrew and that feeling of fear and excitement all rolled into one. Our next visit was "en famille" in 2005 on the way back from a holiday in New Zealand when we "collected " Lisa from her Gap year. It was the first time the children had experienced Asia and Naomi and Tanya nearly fainted with the heat in the first day. However, it was a great taste of clean easy Asia for us all and we visited many things including Sentosa Island, the Bird Park, Chinatown, Raffles and the Changi Museum. We stayed in a backpackers hostel and took over the whole dorm. and had a wonderful time. The visit to the Changi Museum was perhaps the most significant for me as despite knowing that my father spent 5 years of his life here, I never asked him about it or gave it more than a passing thought. Visiting the museum however changed that and I began to realise the horrors and deprivation that the Prisoner's of War had suffered under the Japanese.The massacre at the Alexandra Hospital was not just our family story- it was described as one of the most heinous crimes of the Second World War in which between two to four hundred defenceless people were slaughtered. I sobbed the whole way round the museum ( much to everyone's embarrasment!)
    So here I am again on the eve of the surrender of Singapore 70 years ago. The Alexandra Hospital massacre would have already taken place as the Japanese approached the city. The whole of Singapore would have been a burning furnace with the oil tanks and the shelling and the desperate fighting until the end. The water and food supplies had been cut off and the Allies had to make the decision as to whether to surrender or keep fighting. Tomorrow I will be attending the service at the Kranji War memorial to commemorate the surrender. I have no idea what is in store and how many people will be present. Despite the amazing modern architecture of this city there are remnants of the colonial Singapore and tomorrow I am going to try and visit the Alexandra hospital ( now a large modern hospital) and try and imagine what Singapore was like for a young Doctor who had never left Northern Ireland before in 1940.

The End of the Celebrations

          Silly me of course it was not the end of the Chinese New Year until last night! The fireworks and crackers were still going last night and on Friday we finished school early and enjoyed a professional  lion dance being performed. It was very well done and there was a lot of interaction with the pupils and I was very impressed how clever and agile the lions were. There was a”fight” between the two lions as to who was going to win the money in red envelopes dangling from the ceiling and then there was lots of jumping up and down the steps. The pre-school performed their own lion dance which was equally entertaining and as always I’m impressed by the musicality and rhythm of these young children.

  The children’s names are beginning to seem slightly easier to say now although I do have problems with some of the very long Muslim ones. In the Chinese school they seem relatively easy for me as they are predominantly Christian but yesterday in Year 1 when they were saying their names I had to keep getting them to repeat their names as I thought I hadn’t heard correctly. There was Rapunzel, Mcandream, Nickles (pronounced Nicolas), Lighturn, Rayckley and a girl called Brainy - just to name a few!

Rafflesia keithii

There is a fly inside ready to be dissolved!

  Last weekend we had a fellow mentor visiting the Ranau district for the first time so Emily and I showed her around and went on a guided walk in the Kinabalu National Park. We also went to Poring Hot Springs and on the way we saw a little sign by the roadside " Rafflesia Blooming". We of course had to stop and we paid a ridiculous amount of money to be brought to where a rafflesia was indeed blooming. A rafflesia keithii is endemic to Sabah and is a parasitic insectivorous plant which has the largest flower in the world. The flowers can be nearly 1 metre in diameter but the one we saw was probably about 40 cm in diameter. The blooms last for about 3 days but there were two more buds ready to bloom so the villagers will still be able to rip the tourists off for a few more days! In Kinabalu National Park we saw many nepenthes, also known as monkey's drinking cups, which are again endemic and insectivorous. We saw many sizes and the most amazing colours.

Nepenthes raja (Sorry about me in it but just to show you the size!)

Gong Xi Fa Cai

        So welcome to the Year of the Dragon. There have been many firecrackers, fireworks, and gonging going on throughout the week and I managed to see the end of a lion dance. Most shops have opened again except for some of the Chinese community and most things are back to normal now. So when is the next festival to celebrate I ask? Well there is Mohammed’s birthday coming up next weekend and I think we have at least one day off for that!

         My house is beginning to look and feel more like home and on Friday I bought some chairs and cooked my first meal on my gas cooker. There seems to be so much to buy when you start from nothing but at the moment with just me, I am trying to lead a simple life and get by with the bare minimum. Those who know how full my cupboards are at home in France with many plates may well be astonished by this news!
   On Saturday  I went down the mountain and stayed with a friend in Tuaran which is a town on the coast, north of Kota Kinabalu. There are beautiful beaches and mangrove swamps and lagoons that you can’t see from the road and on Sunday we visited the water village that one of the mentors has a school at. The village had been there for many years and the people were all from the ethnic group of the bajau who are often known as the sea gypsies. Many originally came from the islands that belong or belonged to the Philippines and they are people who are renowned for their fishing and marine skills as well their horsemanship. The water village, to me as a tourist, of course looked very picturesque and charming. There were ladies paddling canoes full of buckets of drinking water and some of the men were fishing and collecting the oysters from the mangroves.

There were all different sizes of houses and some in very good repair and others tilted precariously at an angle; some were made of wood and others were small shacks made of corrugated iron. It was like any other village except of course the reality being that there is no running water or sanitation and only a few with electricity. We turned the corner and there was a huge housing estate of 1000 identical houses being built by the government in order to rehouse the people in the village. There were already some houses occupied and people from outside the water village were being housed there too. We talked to one of the villagers who spoke about his fear of  losing the traditional way of life that they had always had in the village. In developing countries and of course in Western countries too progress is measured by housing with electricity and sanitation but I left the village feeling sad that progress meant that this way of life perhaps will disappear for these people before too long.

Chez Moi!

                                         Chez Moi!

     Well it is not exactly the wooden kampong house I romantically imagined myself in but at last I have moved to my new home in Ranau. It is brand new, which is a first for me, and has two bedrooms ( one for my guests!) a small kitchen/living room and shower room. My landlady agreed to install hot water in the shower room kindly for the pathetic orang putih which I’m very pleased about! It is set in a lovely garden and seems very private and safe and the only thing I’m noticing is more traffic noise rather than the river but the birdsong in the morning is wonderful. Of course I was sad to say goodbye to the people and the beautiful setting of my homestay but I am very pleased to spread myself out and have my own home. At the moment I have a bed and a fridge and not much else but I’m going shopping this week because I’m on holiday!
       A holiday so soon I hear you ask. Yes of course it is for Chinese New Year and all of my schools are adding 3 extra days onto the 2 official ones so they have a week off. They are supposed to catch them up some time through the year but I have my doubts that that will happen! Anyway there is definitely excitement in the air and there are fire crackers and fireworks going off as I write. I was left a big bag of satsumas on my desk in my Chinese School which is for good luck . The streets and shops are decorated with lanterns and everything seems red and Chinese music is being played everywhere. It is very much a family celebration and today is the clearing and cleaning away the bad spirits of the year with the lion dance and welcoming the Year of the Dragon tomorrow.

       On Saturday I went to the first wedding where I was officially invited. It was a teacher at one of my schools, whom my head teacher subtlety described as “the short fat one”! There were some of the pupils dancing and playing the gongs. It was very lavish and there was a non-stop buffet all day. It was held at the groom’s home and the actual wedding ceremony seemed to be there too. Apa’s bride was a convert from Christian to Muslim and so she had to change her name. It went on from 11 a.m. until late and there seemed to be many people invited who came, ate and went again with the odd one singing some karaoke. The theme was purple and the décor and all the relations were dressed in purple too. I was called up to bless the bride and groom, who sat on thrones with two people fanning either side of them. I had to sprinkle water and a few flowers into their hands which wasn’t too difficult but I could see some of the family were watching anxiously in case I did something odd!

I haven’t yet sorted out internet at my new house so hence the delay with my blog but hopefully things will get organised soon.

Rain, Rain and more Rain!

  So this is what is known as the rainy season. It rained quite a lot before up in Ranau but now I understand the difference and the relentless and continuous force of the rain is what causes the landslides and roads to be washed away. Not being a stranger to rain and floods in Normandie, I now realise that this rain is on another scale. I arrived back in Sabah last week and as a temporary measure I am still at the homestay until I can move into my house. It is nice to see everyone again here and they seem pleased to see me too which is comforting! The gossip from the homestay is that the Indonesian maid has been sacked for not working and having too many boyfriends! The Filipino builders who were building an extension that was progessing at a VERY slow rate and were having rent free accomodation have done a runner leaving a very unfinished extension. Immigrant workers seem to be an essential part of the employment structure in Malaysia as many of the Malaysians including some of the Sabahans believe that some types of work are beneath them. The homestay is built in an old established orchard and this seems to be the season the rambutans, and many other fruits that I have never seen or tasted before. The aroma of durions is still around as the end of the season approaches and the price in the market is down to 4 ringitt a kilo. The padi fields have changed to a carpet of bright green and this photo is taken where the lady was building the mud wall in October.

durions at the market

rambutans

buah tampoi

tarap (in the jack fruit family)

   As we all know continuous rain can be very depressing but on Thursday when I felt that it was never going to stop, the thick dark clouds disappeared and Mount Kinabalu revealed herself in all her glory and I remembered how much I love living in the mountains in Sabah with Mount Kinabalu as our goddess.

Coincidences?

      In the last month I have had two very weird experiences that have made me wonder how small the world actually is or is it just fate, which my buddhist friend insists it is.

        I was sitting on the random seat on my Air Asia flight getting ready for take off in Kuala Lumpur to return home in December, when a Malaysian gentleman sat down and proceeded to introduce himself and shake hands with the row of passengers in our section. With an ice breaker like that, before long we were all chatting like old friends. Sayed was from Penang and was a great source of knowledge of anything to do with Malaysia but his passion was collecting memorabilia and history of the Second World War. Did we know about the Japanese invasion of Malaya he asked? At that point the last thing I was going to do was tell him that actually I did. He proceeded to give us a brief account of the Japanese invasion of Malaya in 1941, recounting their progress down the Malayan peninsula, onto the Singapore “fortress” but when he started telling us about the brutal invasion of the British Military hospital and the massacre that followed I felt that I had to stop him. I told him and fellow passenger, Eric, that my father was in the horrific massacre in the hospital and that he was the young doctor who was saved by his cigarette case while being attacked with a bayonet thrust aimed at his heart. Sayed was speechless at this stage but eventually managed to utter my father’s name “Tom Smiley was your father ? I have read the story of your father and I know his name.” At this stage we all felt rather stunned but to cut the long 12 hour flight short, the section 34 DEF, arrived at Paris airport exchanging email addresses and promising to keep in touch after a memorable flight.

    On my return to Malaysia I was invited to a colleague’s house for New Year’s Eve just south of Kuala Lumpur airport. Jane had been working in Sabah for 4 months replacing someone on maternity leave and had now returned to her home in Port Dickson. Strangely I knew about Port Dickson because my father had been stationed there in 1941 as a Medical Officer and I have the letters he wrote from there. Anyway, I arrived at her house and met her parents, who were visiting from England. After chatting over breakfast I discovered that Jane’s parents had lived in Kuala Lumpur in the 1980’s and I told them that my parents had too for a short time. We talked about life in the tropics in general and I mentioned that my mother had not enjoyed her time in KL as she hadn’t had enough to do and wasn’t allowed to work etc… Margaret replied “Yes I had a good friend like that and it was terribly sad that shortly after they returned to England, her husband had a heart attack in church and died.” That was my father I said. It is a very strange feeling when someone that you have never met before starts to tell you part of your very own family history. It turns out that Margaret had been in the choir with my father and then Kurt and she had befriended my parents and taken them on outings and had introduced Mummy to the silk patchwork class. Mummy had written to Margaret after my father’s death and then they lost touch.

   So you bloggers are these just amazing coincidences are am I in some reality TV programme version of “Who do you think you are?”.

"On the road again..."

I found myself humming the Johnny Cash tune this morning as I walked through the dark streets of Paris on my way to the Metro. I’m on my Air Asia flight just waiting for everyone to board and now feel I can relax and enjoy the flight. It was very hard saying goodbye to everyone again and in some ways even harder than in July. It is a terrible wrench leaving my loved ones but everyone seems to be just fine without me, apart from the dog  -  Phoebe has started eating the curtains! We had a perfect Christmas with all the family together for a couple of days at least, as Tanya had to go back to work on the Monday. Andrew gave me a new camera with a good zoom so I’m hoping you will see an improvement in the photos! It was SO lovely to see and chat to so many friends and catch up on everyone’s news. The champagne party at Chez Laurence and Benoit made me realise how dear all my friends are around Livarot and how much I miss you all.  Thank you all you bloggers for your enthusiasm and support for my blog. I will continue to write it and I’m hoping to see at least some of you in Sabah.  Take off time! Au revoir and health, peace and happiness to you all in 2012.
These are just a few photos of Christmas at La Ferme des Vallots en famille. Miss you all!