Crystal Shop Logo 2

Crystal Shop Logo 1

Melaka, Malaysia Part 2

When the tide had gone down in this picturesque little colonial port town, I walked along the muddy banks of the river where there was the most amazing wildlife like you would only usually see in zoos......googly eyed fish that came out of water and wallowed around in the mud, pulling themselves along using their fins, huge 3m long monitors (something between an aligator and a lizard) basking on the banks in the afternoon sun, and a vast variety of unusual birds which I'd never be able to name! Quite spectacular.

Then down the road was a pet shop! I really must stop visiting pet shops..they make me sooo mad. Caged up little cats, dogs going mad, monitors that should be basking in the sun, snakes that should be in the trees in the Borneo jungle etc etc and then i saw something that made my stomach turn, a baby monkey in a tiny cage banging and jumping to get out! Really horrifying! Speachless!!

I dont understand what makes humans feel that they have the right to steal or kidnap these animals from their homes, from their families, imprison them when they have not committed any crime and then feel that they can make money out of them...when the animals are not even theirs to sell! I'm afraid if I see anything like that again i might just not be able to resist setting them all free...imprisonment for me would be more than worth it.

Anyway back to my eye.....confirmed swollen lacrimal gland.....so no operation thank god....and keep taking the steroids for another month or so....

Melaka has got to be the most beautiful, colourful historically interesting (was a Portuguese, Dutch and British Colony) and architecturally stunning places i have been to....and on top of that, a very spiritually energised place. I happened to walk into a crystal shop in China town and it seems like I never came out again. I ended up becoming part of the family.....run by a Chinese Malaysian family and a number of other people who experienced the same as me.....went in and never came out again.....I was invited to stay all day ...was fed the most delicious home cooked Chinese meals 3 times a day, was given free run of the shop and beautiful rooms and kitchen in the back, spent many hours there meditating, using their crystals, being given guidance and readings whenever i needed, all out of the generosity of their hearts. A very protective and caring place....I was finally resting, feeling at ease to open up, relax and develop my spiritual gifts further. It was really wonderful. I was also given the opportunity to produce logos for their business, using my art and meditation in combination (see logo sketches on the website). Heaven. So I was there practically every day for the 2 weeks. Sure i'll be back here.

Anyway 2 weeks later had to leave for KL again. Will be working for 3 weeks at a summer camp with 100 12 year old, underprivileged Tamil (South Indian Malaysian) kids to help improve their English. My role as a warden will mean that I have to help organise the kids and help with all the daytime activities 8am to 10pm. Additionally I will be getting up at 6am to give them all yoga lessons every morning and then help run all the other activities throughout the day and at weekends we take them on outings...and i get paid really well for it too along with free accommodation and food!!!! Looking forward to it immensely...will be good for the soul.

Well next update after camp I guess......

More Photos

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Sketch 10 - Minority tribe West China

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Sketch 9 - Minority tribe South West China

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Sketch 8 - Malaysian Muslim, Kuala Lumpur

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Sketch 7 - Rare Irrawady Dolphins in Mekong River, Kratie, Cambodia,

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Sketch 6 - Minority tribe West China

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Sketch 5 - Minority tribe South West China

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Sketch 4 - Minority tribe South West China

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Sketch 3 - Pat Pong, Bangkok

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Sketch 2 - Illegal Philippinos in Kota Kinabaloo, Borneo

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Sketch 1 - Proboscis monkey indiginous to Borneo only

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Photos Russia / China

Hi all.
Manish here. Just letting you now that some photos of tina aer now online.
Follow this link.

Thanks Manish

Melaka, Malaysia Part 1

So my eye was getting worse .....what to do??? The doctors don't seem to have a clue.

Anyway for some reason i've picked up a lot of south indian malaysian friends here - all male!!...who all want to take me places, treat me and generally be my best friends. I'm not normally a suspicious kind of person but there just seems to be something fishy about this, I mean sooo many men willing to take me anywhere??? Well (in multiple choice format for the Americans out there) is it because:
A) they think that as i'm from UK, I'm an easy shag?......THINK AGAIN!
B) they're after my money?......working at the lowest possible ranks of the 'lucrative' civil engineering industry, obviously i'm loaded.....NOT!
C) they're after a British passport?....keep telling them i'm never going back!
D) they genuinely want to be my best friend cos i'm such a cool, good looking, (although with my eye i look like a hideous monster), fun loving generally amazing person to hang out with?.....ummmmm

I'm guess I'm just not used to all the attention, it all got a bit too much for me and i was starting to get paranoid...so rushed back to my hotel, packed my bags and got the first bus out of KL to Melaka...a really beautiful colonial port town 2 hours away. A really peaceful and charming place and a lot cheaper than KL. Just what i needed when I have a bad eye and need some rest.

So on arrival, went straight to a private hospital there for some more bad news....my eye was either in such a state because:
A) It was a very bad swelling of the lacrimal gland in which case strong STEROIDS and antibiotics should get rid of it ( well boobs are getting bigger, not sure whether i like the beard though!)
OR
B) it was a tumour, requiring a serious operation. And if that was required...the doctor suggested i should go back to UK where i have friends and family....I was in shock! BACK TO UK.....I don't think so matey!!!

So off for an x-ray which was like being in a space ship surrounded by aliens. They strapped me into this white plastic bed with their 15 wart covered arms, the dry scaley skin flaking away, they warbled to each other and their ping pong eyes popping out of their heads. Then they stuck this very painful needle into my arm and left it pumping this green glutonous dye into my blood vessels. All i could hear was my heart beating so hard , tears welling up in my closed eyes from fear and pain. The bed started jerking backwards feeding my head to the firing rays. This went on for at least 20 mins. Obviously these out of space creatures wanted to find out about the workings of a superior human brain and what better one to chose than mine!
OR
B) were they trying to brainwash me into becoming their human slave back on the planet Zondor?

Anyway x-ray completed..huge stern female Indian doctor..looked horrified....results worse than expected...swelling extending way back behind my eyeball...still not sure what it was though (a swelling or a tumour?)...but in her opinion, because it was painful it was more likely to be a swelling...in which case the millions of pills should work...otherwise back for a biopsy....on Saturday when she is coming in especially to see me.

Phone call to my UK insurance company, who suddenly found a hundred and one excuses not to pay up before I'd even managed to open my mouth...and what the hell do they mean its completely at their discretion?

So although Melaka is a lovely place, I miss out on the big city celebrations for Diwali on thursday and Hari Raya on Sat Sun Mon Tues. Bank holidays on all these days too...so everything will be shut. Well I guess I have to do what's best for my health....getting sensible in my old age!

Part 2 coming soon to an internet near you.

Borneo, Malaysia

Jungle boys - here I come! A huge island, Borneo is covered in beautiful, wild, tropical jungle, except unfortunately for 60% of it where the jungle has been destroyed to be replaced with very lucrative palm oil plantations (used in household products like Palmolive). Really very sad. Even with the plantations, when the trees stop producing (after approx. 25 years) the tree is not cut down but injected with a chemical which will slowly kill the tree and the rotting carcass will fertilise the soil and give nutrients to the new trees planted nearby. I guess the chemicals also leach into the soil and are absorbed by the new plants!!!

Since the destruction of the jungle the number of native Orang Utans have drastically reduced in number, but UK voluntary organisations set up here, have managed to rescue and increase the population....god knows where this increasing population is going to live though if the jungle is already too small!

Well unless someone can come up with another way for the locals to earn so much money, I guess they have to earn a good living somehow if they want to live a western lifestyle, which of course is the "only civilised and best way to live!"

Anyway Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah, is a small city, with great markets especially the night market where you can get deliciuos plates of local food for 50p.

Went to meditate in the national mosque....love it.

Got a boat across to some small islands with beatiful beaches and good snorkling....so many fishes...got eaten by the black ones though, vicious little things. Saw some huge comodos, over 1,5m long (something between a huge lizard and an aligator) in the jungles there, and cheeky wild long tailed monkeys who stole your food from the beach.

My guide book said Mount Kinabalu was an easy climb all 4100m of it!...so off i went only to be horrified at how very wrong the guide book was...will be writing to them!!! Well as I thought it was going to be a breeze, I decided that I would walk 5km up hill to the start point....whereas everyone else....who were obviously better informed than me and had been training up for this, decided to get minibuses to the start...now I know why!!! By the time I got to the start point I was completely whacked out! Then began the 14km up steep rocky mountain paths through the jungle with the last 3 hours worth in the dark up steep barren sheer slabs of granite using ropes and feeling dizzy from exhaution and lack of oxygen! But sooo many stars!!! and electric thunder storms in the distance!! Incredible. I was really not prepared for this kind of excrutiating pain though! And at the top it was bitterly cold...but the sunrise was the most spectacular sight ever....electric reds and oranges and as the sun rose over the other peaks it lit up the vastness and the barreness of the huge slabs of granite falling steeply away from us. And way down below in the distance pockets of clouds and further down still the thick green jungles covering the other mountains and hills across the island. It was so still and silent up there, like time had stood still...and that I had reached heaven.....was erally incredible. The climb down was worse thoughthan the climb up and my legs wer no longer working I had to haul myself down using handrails where I could and crawling the rest, using my hands as much as possible. If I stood up and tried to walk my legs would just give way! quite frightning. Eventually made it down ....and straight off to the Poring Hot Springs!

These hot springs were a complete disapointment...grubby tiny tiled bathtubs which took about 3 hours to fill by which time they were cold and full of flies. But anyway they had a good canopy walk...which I managed to crawl along...where part of the walk was over the tops of the trees at a height of 40m, walking along a thin plank of wobbly wood suspended in a rope net....quite exciting!

Then off to Sandakan...the old capital....small but friendly place. Went with the 2 lovely Swiss mountain boys I had met up the mountain...they actually thought they WERE Orang utans which was quite embarrassing especially when they leaped onto the front desk at a posh hotel where we were organising our tour to the jungle and started picking flies off each other!!! Hi Andy and Tom. They like to give themselves human names you see, but they did teach me a bit of Orang language.

I took them to a Indian restaurant, on leashes of course! And the South Indian owner there asked me where in India I was from...when I told him Gujrat...he asked if the two white guys I was with were also from Gujrati!!! Ummmm let me think about that one!

The jungle trek was amazing though....we went on a boat cruise up the river, saw snakes coiled up on trees and climbing branches....pythons and yellow striped snakes....saw the famous indiginous Proboscis monkey with the funny nose...many of them leaping from tree to tree, long tailed monkeys, many birds like kingfishers, hornbills and barbets, even an orang with its baby..high up in the tree, they are very shy you see. And sorry for throwing you into the crocodiles Tom, but I was rather impressed at the way you wrestled them all barefist and then leaped back into the boat, without so much as a slight rise in your pulse rate!

Night trek through the jungle was pretty quite, didn't see much except a frog, a leach, a couple of huge spiders, an ant or two, a sleeping barbet, a sleeping kingfisher....great....also bumped into a man I used to work with at Stents...good friend of Julian Creepy Crawley....In the middle of the Borneo Jungle...cant get away from him!!!

Anyway did a trip to some famous cave where there were tonnes of cockroaches, bats and swifts, but famous for its birds nests. Not just any old birds nests, these were special ones that cost a fortune! This is because people boil up the nest and drink it and it makes you very horny....eat your heart out viagra! Dont tell Pfizer about this though or they will be exploiting this place too! Well surprise surprise the nest drink all strated in China...where the emporer had to drink it, as he had so many concubines to please....

So then onto the Orang Utan centre in Sepilok. They were just stunning. 11 of them came swinging through the jungle right up close to get their bananas and sugar cane. they just swung around so freely but they were very quite and very shy always keeping their back to you except while they were swinging. So playful too. It was hard to beleive I was seeing them in their true home not in some zoo. Sooooooooo cute. I was almost in tears!

Then goodbye to my 2 Swiss orangs....and headed back to KK. But what an adventure this turned out to be....Got a taxi from my hostel to the long distance bus station, before the taxi even acme to a stop, 8 men came screaming around the taxi. Apparently there are many privately owned buses all going the same route so they fight each other for customers. Here there were 8 buses lined up to go to KK. One man opened the door of my taxi grabbed my bag and ran off, the others grabbed my arms and started dragging me off in 7 different directions. In shock ( at having so many men after me for the first time in my life!!) I instinctively ripped away from them all and ran after the man who had my bag. Upon reaching him, I leaped on him, wrestled him to the ground, poked him in the eye, kicked him between the legs and snatched my bag, then leaped onto the nearest bus, where the driver was out taking a leak....hopped into the drivers seat...stuck the bus into gear and drove off with the others still running behind.

So I drove the bus back to KK through the stunning scenery of the jungle covered mountains , picking up local hitch hikers with their chickens and goats on the way. Had to refuse the Orang utan because I didn't think city life in KK would suit him very well.

Back in KK, got the only train on the whole island I think, to a small village called Tenom at the end of the train line. The train was quite an experience..was a bit like stepping into a wild west wardrobe. The plain hard leather covered filthy green seats and filthy dirt covered walls...and wooden hinged swinging doors, no fans 35 degrees hot, chugging along the 100 year old line, through the jungles and along the river where peple go white water rafting.

Not much to see in Tenom, people not too friendly either, it really was like being in the wild west...dusty empty streets blazing hot sun, John Wayne music playing in the distance...an eagle flying up ahead in the midday sun.

So back to KK with all my ailments (cyst in the eye, aching legs, soar throat etc etc) to rest for a couple of days before flying back to KL. Gutted because I was planning to see some fishing villages one day and go white water rafting the next! Never mind.

Borneo is so big I only managed to cover about 5% of it if that...will have to come back and explore other parts at some time.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Coming down from Krabie to KL, I changed buses numerous times, but the first stop in Malaysia was in the back streets of 'rat city'- Butterworth where I waited 4 hours 'til midnight for the next bus. During my wait I did manage to find a food stall open nearby selling roti and dal mmmmm my favourite for 50p too! And a welcome relief after all that shite thai food. And in the background the mosque (Malaysia being a dominantly muslim country)was blasting out the Beach Boys 'Ram Ram Ramadam, bacon and ham' over the city. Well if the trip to KL had been without all the stops and changes it would probably only have taken 8 hours, but as it is with Asian timing....'NO HURRY NO WORRY NO CHICKEN NO CURRY.....it took nearly 24 hours!

So eventually made it to the beautiful though modern city of KL. For me this was one of the most interesting cities i have visited, it has such a diversty of cultures and my favourite style of architecture - Islamic architecture. The mosques were wonderful places, I would just go in and meditate for hours in the ladies prayer room...(not usually being the kind of person who can stay still in one place for very long...I managed quite nicely here)and i'm not converting or anything but I really like the atmosphere and the energy in these places and there are no distractions in the prayer room so it is easy to meditate there. Its especially nice when the Immam starts chanting prayers they are so tuneful and lulling.

The south Indian temples being very ornate are really beautiful too, especially the Ganesh temple.

But I really like the fact that in KL there are so many Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists all living together so peacfully and they respect and understand and celebrate each others religions and festivals.

Talking of festivals, there are so many of them and I arrived just in time for the Hindu Navratri....which the north Indians and south Indians celebrate differently ( saw some beautiful south Indian classical dance shows and joined in some north indian folk dancing)and in time for Ramadan...and Diwali and Hari Raya. Hopefully i will still be here in Jan/Feb when they have the Chinese New Year and the South Indian Thai Pussam where Hindus go to the huge cave temple outside KL, go into a trance and then pierce themselves with hooks upon which they hang all the material burdens and ties of their lives to remind them to be free of materialism. Amazingly, because they are in a trance they don't feel a thing.

All this spirituality is doing me a world of good and I've been getting some amazingly accurate messages and images for strangers that i've done healing on during my travels.

Sightseeing - KL has 2 Indian areas - one south Indian Hindu and one Muslim Indian, it has a China town ....so lots of delicious food around masala dosas etc....

So KL fever hit, I turned from Thailands hippy chick into Malaysias Miss traditional India overnight. I made some very good friends here, the locals keep coming up to me and waffling away in Malay...which makes me feel quite embarrassed that I can't speak the language, it probably confuses them as i dress in a Punjabi dress and have had my nose pierced so look like a local, anyway when they find out that I'm foreign they always offer to show me around the city and take me places to visit. Now they call me a FIT bird! (Foreign Independent Traveller). So generous and genuine! Lovely people.

So continuing with the sight seeing....Petronas Towers the tallest buildings in the world since 9/11, but you could only go up as far as the bridge connecting the 2 buildings. I preferred the KL tower where visiters could go higher and see more of the city. A 5 year old Malay girl reckoned she could see the Great wall of China from there!!! Wow

The Islamic Arts Musium was really nice too...had many models of famous mosques all around the world and a lot to learn about the Muslim religion. Its a very powerful and peaceful religion.

The butterfly park...funnily my mums name, Rama, means butterfly in Malay.

It was really good to see how Islamic architecture influenced so many of KL's skyscrapers. They are really beautiful.

And soooo many shopping centres everywhere you turn, you can buy just about anything you could ever need or want here...drives you mad!

So off to Borneo for some back to nature jungle adventures.