I dug this up from Glastonbury last year. Rolf Harris’s encore, including stairway to heaven. It was taken on my Lumix, not the Nikon, so the picture quality is poor, but the sound is just magic.
As background, there are about 70,000 people and it’s reached about 25 degrees by 11a.m. on Sunday. The place is humming. He’s only got an hour on stage, so he’s trained up the audience for the encore giving instructions on when to cheer and what to do to get him back on as quick as possible. Take it away Rolf…
From where the Thai border meets the South China Sea down south to Singapore, a single track line cuts through the middle of the Malaysian peninsula, linking the deeply Muslim north with the mixed and more developed south of the country via isolated communities through the thick jungle. Local schoolchildren and market-goers use the train as their only available means of transport, and stack the aisles and vestibules high with organic matter.
You can join them, as Tim and May did, and experience the sights and smells (there are so many smells!) of jungle transportation, so long as you’re at the station for the off by 4am!
Old Dhaka hums with mundane daily life so alien to outsiders. Bangladeshis cannot comprehend how the outside world operates, but equally, outsiders have little idea of the daily going-ons of the flower merchants on Hindu Street who watch a flow of rickshaws, pedestrians and mopeds travel in one line in either direction past their stalls. Who understands the bus conductors, hanging from their tin boxes, whose once painted exteriors display more scratch than paint now. The loud speaker salesmen (!) or boatmen who’ve developed a technique much like a fish’s tail to propel their tiny craft through the motorway of overladen crosstraffic from one side of the old Ganges to the other demand your attention. The cardboard merchants, the snake charmers, tea stirrers, bottle collectors and rickshaw wallahs. Dhaka is rickshaw wallahs…it costs £100 to buy a rickshaw, but you wouldn’t dare not spend the additional £60 decorating it before it’s street-ready:
Things have never quite returned to pushing the condemned from the top of minarets, but where Mohamed meets Marx, the Soviet regime of terror favoured by Stalin lives on.
The world is largely ignorant of this mumblistan, the seventh most corrupt country in the world, whose government holds so many thousands of innocents in jail under the auspices of the war on terror and whose cotton is boycotted by many western clothes retailers due to slave and child labour concerns.
But the country has extraordinary history. In 1405, within just 30 years, Timur, the country’s national hero, built an empire that stretched from India to Syria, centred on Samarkand, his sumptuous capital. The resplendent buildings of his reign have been restored and rebuilt.
Uzbekistan sounds like an interesting place to visit, no?
This video is split into two parts, due to upload size restrictions.
Wedged between China and Stans three,
Lies the carved Kyrgyz land of turning tree
From Russki Bishkek we travelled t’orient,
A land of potatoes and local inhabitants…
I’ve much more respect for song lyricists after penning this video verse of a Kyrgyz hike:
Kyrgyzstan might be for you! Pheasants, ducks: they were ended. Sheep, if they’re not going to feed their young, better end them too. Mushrooms: there are plenty of them to chase, hunt and end after a good dose of rain. Shock absorbers, they get ended pretty quickly on Kyrgyz roads: pocked with pot-holes, and camels.
Of course the birds will need plucking, the mushrooms attending to, the horses will fancy a ride, and the hills a good hike – when it’s not hailing.
And to ensure you don’t end yourself, avoid the vodka at 50p a bottle, make sure your shashlik is cooked through, and when things do go wrong check out the Bishkek home delivery medical services! Drips: not a problem, enemas come as an added bonus, in the other end.
It’s a cliche, but nothing prepares you for India.
It’s huge, to get anywhere requires an overnight train journey; yet it’s still 50% more densely populated than the UK. And when you get there, the contrast is mindblowing. Octogenarian waifs will pull you and our two friends, in a hand-drawn rickshaw for ten pence to a bar where a beer costs three pounds.
Railway stations are home to thousands of people each night. Each station. Under staircases, all throughout the waiting rooms, arrival halls, platforms, and even between the tracks, people will lay their heads to catch some sleep. Simultaneously, the rich will pay thousands of dollars a month to rent marble apartment palaces in the south Delhi suburbs.
By the time you’ve realised what ‘poor’ and ‘rich’ really mean when compared, you will have been approached by thousands of rickshaw wallers, hundreds of stallholders, and tens of drug dealers. They prevail throughout all of the Indian cities I visited, although only in the touristy areas. Break out to areas where a white man is rare, and the warmth and excitement extended to you is genuine and has no strings attached.
It’s so rich in culture, they are knocking down thousand year old temples to build Commonwealth Games amenities, without complaint. It’s so rich in bacteria, that you’ll pretty much be shitting non-stop for your entire trip.
Here are a few images to accompany these and other words:
Xinjiang, China’s New Frontier province is the north-eastern extremity of a swathe of Turkic speaking peoples; it’s the northern boundary of Tibetan buddhism and the north-eastern frontier of China. Quite the melting pot.
Venture east and south: westerners are rare, hotpots are tasty and ever-present, and when we passed through, snow caused unseasonal havoc. The perfect opportunity for my first experiences of buddhism, the most peaceful of faiths, in the most peaceful of untouristy surrounds:
