I left the UK on the 2nd February, on a round-the-world ticket my parents had given me as an 18th birthday present. The first leg of my journey, from London to Sydney, took about 31 hours in total since in order to return via Hong Kong as I originally planned I had to travel via Los Angeles airport, though I only had to wait there for a couple of hours (even shorter once I had negotiated the very strict US Immigration system). I did manage to get some sleep on the second plane - not too difficult as it was about 3am to me - and was introduced to the famous Australian friendliness when my neighbour introduced himself and asked who I was immediately after sitting down.
Australia: Sydney
Having lost the 3rd February to the International Date Line, I arrived in Sydney early in the morning of the 4th - just past the hottest part of the summer in the Southern Hemisphere, but still very warm. Not being in the mood to learn the intricacies of the Sydney public transport system I took a taxi to my new home: 45 Cook Road, Moore Park, Sydney, NSW 2021, Australia.
My landlord Lou Winters, an 80-year-old retired coal-miner from the Blue Mountains, had just got up by the time I had arrived; he had previously let a room to a colleague of my mother and I had made arrangements with him before I left the UK. There was one other tenant, a rather taciturn 30-year-old sociology lecturer at the University of Sydney who has apparently been living in the same place since he was a student at the University of New South Wales; we had the run of the house including quite a well-equipped (albeit cockroach-infested) kitchen, in which I attempted to learn the art of cooking quickly and efficiently for oneself. The house is quite close to both the city centre (along "Oxford Street", which leads to "Hyde Park" - a very large number of the names of towns and landmarks here are the same as parts of Britain). However, precisely because it is so conveniently located, many fine old houses like it have been turned into blocks of apartments which overshadow the house and garden, though the beautiful Centennial Park was also nearby and the Royal Botanic Gardens (quite a bit more impressive than Kew) a short ride into the city. Annoyingly I had to catch a combination of two buses to reach the University, taking up to 40 minutes if the connections were bad, so I borrowed a bicycle. It made the journey more convenient but the fairly steep hill on which the house sits was pretty tiring to ascend in the evenings!
That day Lou showed me my room, which I thought small but sufficient, and other important information such as the nearest bus stop (fortunately Sydney is quite well-served with buses and as a student I had a 50% discount on all public transport) and supermarket. Most shops were in an area called Bondi Junction, just next to the famous Beach, where I can confirm that it is very pleasant to swim. He then dropped me at the University of New South Wales, which allowed me to officially enrol as a "Practicum" student (their category for people who don't fit any other!), though I was not able to meet the professor in charge of me, Claude Sammut (pronounced phonetically, not in the French manner with a silent "t" - as I had thought until I tried to ask people where to find him!) until the next day. I had originally found the placement through a colleague of my father who had been taught by this professor and who had asked him if I could spend some time in his department during my Gap year. As I had mentioned to Professor Sammut that I enjoyed Lego he suggested that I might start by helping with RoboCup Junior, a competition for schools in Australia that takes the place of Robot Wars in Britain: teams of students build teams of robots, most of the time out of Lego, which then compete against other teams from around Australia and the world at playing soccer. After constructing my own team I tried to assist students who were actually taking part in the competition, initially at workshops at the Powerhouse science museum before I found a local school that was close enough for me to reach relatively easily; they were very grateful for the few hours of help I gave them each week, but wished I could have started doing so earlier!
Most of the other students in the robotics lab at UNSW were working on Sony robot dogs (Aibos) to make them play soccer rather better than my Lego; they worked exceedingly hard to try to beat rival teams that included the big technological American universities, but they were fun people to be with in their time off! I am pleased to report that their work paid off, too - in 2003 they came first in their league (of teams using Aibos, rather than wheeled-shoebox-shaped robots), beating the University of Pennsylvania 4-3 in the final. The stress also showed on the dogs, as due to the constant practising the motors in the dogs' heads frequently wore out. Myself and another student managed to fix several of the heads of the dogs, with which we were quite pleased given that they cost about £300 each new and are so complicated inside that Professor Sammut did not believe we could succeed.
The other project on which I worked was for an "Experimental Robotics" course, run as part of the Computer Science degree but which I took part in for fun. We were given a choice of topics to work on, but the one I and the electronics-inclined member of the Robocup team elected to do was called "Pentagoon". I had found what looked like an interesting robot design in a book and together we decided to build a robot along the same lines, partly because (as far as we could tell) no-one had ever done so before. The design was for a method of locomotion that made a compromise between wheels, which are very fast over flat ground but cannot cope with obstacles, and legs, which can cross any kind of terrain but only slowly - it was the equivalent of a person wearing powered roller-skates, though it had five legs (hence the name). Together we spent quite a large amount of the 14-week term making and programming the robot; we were fairly elated when it was able to climb a flight of (2cm tall) steps, and even more so when it did so successfully in the demonstration we had to give at the end of the course! The other student, who has now returned to his native Perth, and I are hoping to find a journal that would accept the 50-page report we wrote on it for publication; maybe my name will appear in print in the next few months...
I didn't spend all my time at UNSW working, however: I joined the Circus Society, with whom I attempted to juggle at a Mediaeval Feast of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and the Space Frontier Society, which claimed to organise lectures about space though I did not hear about any while I was there. I also attended the meetings of the Fossil and Mineral Societies of NSW, which I found out about through the Australian Museum (of natural history). I had originally joined them due to an impression that Australia was a very good country in terms of sites to find fossils and minerals; however, one of the first comments made by members of the societies on discovering that I was from Britain was that I was extremely lucky to live on an island where quarries, fossil beds and mines from which to obtain geological specimens were so prolific and above all close together - something I did not appreciate at all! I hoped to join some field trips with the societies to find my own specimens, but unfortunately the fact that I did not have my own transport made it rather difficult, though I got a lift from another member of the society on one occasion when their route took them past a train station I could get to fairly easily - it still involved getting up at 4am! I even joined a march against the war on Iraq in the centre of Sydney, though had brought neither a banner to wave nor any slogans to shout so fear I contributed little to the effect of the demonstration...
Apart from the fossil-hunting trip I managed to get out of Sydney occasionally at weekends, to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, to some friends of my grandparents in Helensburgh in southern NSW and to Canberra, the capital of Australia. In addition, a couple of weeks after I arrived my landlord took me to visit some friends of his in his hometown, Lithgow, about 3 hours' drive inland across the Blue Mountains. Unfortunately that weekend the first rains of the year arrived so I did not get out for much of a "bushwalk", but I had plenty of opportunity afterwards to admire the bushfire-scarred trees and other exotic (to me) vegetation of the area.
As well as working at the university, for which I was not paid, I tried to find a part-time job to assist the money I had saved from working at WS Atkins before I left and ended up invigilating financial exams part-time for nine days. The exam season only lasted for a few weeks so I could not have done any more work even if I had wanted to; however, since the shifts were 5 hours long and included 3 exhausting hours standing in silence in front of a "section" of up to 50 students (adults taking professional qualifications for the most part) I would not have liked to do any more!
New Zealand
Over Easter I spent 10 days in New Zealand with the family of a friend of mine from Winchester College, also on a Gap year teaching in a school near Brisbane. His parents came over to the Antipodes for an Easter holiday with him, and for part of the time they hired a campervan in New Zealand and invited me to join them.
Arranging my own holiday from scratch for the first time was rather a challenge for me, but I did eventually do all the necessary organising and arrived in Christchurch the day before I was to meet my friend's family, giving enough time to look around the remarkably English-seeming city, including the botanic gardens and the Christchurch Wizard. He is a local eccentric who wears a black wizard's robe and hat (though I have a postcard of him in a hat remarkably like a flying saucer!) and stands on a stepladder to expound somewhat bizarre points of view. This time, since it was the beginning of the school holidays, he took as his theme "Are children human?" to which the answer appeared to be a resounding "no", though he quickly became side-tracked onto the (to him) familiar topic of "Am I a real wizard?" (a just-as-resounding "yes").
Together with the family I travelled roughly anticlockwise around the South Island, whose sharply mountainous scenery and temperate climate made it refreshingly similar in appearance to Scotland after the worn mountains and eucalyptus forests around Sydney; although New Zealand is further north than the UK is south, there is nothing between it and the Antarctic to deflect the cold winds and currents (in fact Christchurch is a major port for travel to Antarctica). We stopped to walk to the Franz Josef Glacier, pan for gold and buy carved "greenstone" (jade) on the west coast, then had a relaxed boat cruise on the fjord-like Milford Sound in the south and a rather more frenetic 70mph jet boat ride through a narrow gorge near the adventure-sports Mecca of Queenstown. The parents of the family flew out of Christchurch leaving my friend and me for a few more days, which included visiting an English-style fudge kitchen for a belated Easter celebration! Once we returned to Sydney he spent a few days sleeping on my floor as he wanted to visit the city - I suggested visiting him in Brisbane but he said that his city was not nearly as interesting as mine!
Australia: travelling
I stayed in Sydney until the end of UNSW term, halfway through June. I wanted to try to see some of the rest of Australia before I left it, so spent two weeks travelling around the eastern half of the continent by coach. The first five days were an "Outback Tour" of western NSW, which the brochure implied might be very much an exaggeration of the Australian stereotype with sheep-shearing, boomerang-throwing and beer-drinking as the main activities, but in fact was most enjoyable and genuine. The reason I had chosen it despite my concerns was that it included a visit to Lightning Ridge to find black opal; I could have made the journey by public transport but that would have been much less convenient and almost as expensive, as most Australians have their own vehicle and very few take coaches from place to place.
My four fellow travellers (an unusually low number, due to the other world events taking place) included three from the UK of whom two were Gap year students; they were all friendly, though for most of the long coach journeys from one place to another we tended to watch the extraordinary landscape go past. Annoyingly, however, my camera seized up on the first day and I could not repair it until after the trip! On the second day, while staying at the driver's property, we were wakened at 5am to go wild pig hunting which we unanimously opposed - not that it had any effect on the enthusiasm of the locals. Fortunately from our point of view the dogs did not find any sport; we also panned for gold with rather more success than I had had in New Zealand, swam in hot springs and enjoyed numerous barbecues in the (surprisingly cold) evenings.
The most fascinating part for me, though, was finding the opals in a subsidiary opal field a short distance from Lightning Ridge. The nearby village was populated almost entirely by opal-miners, including a friend of the driver who owned a large and successful opal mine and let us in to rummage through his tailings; due to the drought that had only just broken, however, they had been forced to wash and sort through a large volume of opal-bearing clay and rock in a short time and so the pickings for us were rich. I found a good number of pieces of precious opal, including three which were judged good enough to be cut; however, one of the other backpackers found a stone that when polished could have been worth around £2000 if she had decided to sell it! We stayed overnight in "The Glengarry Hilton", a typical "country pub" which acted as the hub of the local community, and a place for the opal-miners to show off their most recent finds to each other - and sell them to any passing tourists who had not found their own. The building had hardly any walls, the better to catch the rare breezes in summer, but making it imperative to be near the brazier in winter. The accommodation continued the somewhat less than luxurious theme, consisting of bunk beds in trailers with collected rainwater for washing. It was, I am sure, very typically Australian, and I can half imagine myself retiring to such a place to track down the elusive gemstone; however, as well as those who had made a sizeable profit from their claim there are also plenty of people who have wasted large sums of money looking for it, so I think I will try to make my fortune before I begin!
From the endpoint of this tour at Byron Bay on the coast north of Sydney I took a twenty-four-hour coach journey north to Airlie Beach, passing through Brisbane on the way. From there I went on a 2-night sailing trip around the Whitsunday Islands, snorkelling on the southern fringes of the tropical reef that becomes the Great Barrier Reef (the locals claimed it was just as good as the reef further north, but their counterparts in Cairns of course claimed that the reef there was much better than further south) and walking on the beautiful islands. Again the group was fairly small, six passengers and two crew, but as the boat had been designed to sleep ten people we had plenty of space. I greatly enjoyed the snorkelling, whether it was the best of the reef or not; I saw sea turtles, corals, giant clams with fluorescent green lips, a 50cm-long orange sea cucumber and any number of brightly-coloured fish, only slightly marred by the fact that with my short-sightedness I had to keep diving down to the bottom (only a couple of metres) to see them clearly!
After another coach journey, of only twelve hours this time, I arrived in Cairns where I toured the Daintree National [rain]Forest, which apparently receives around eleven metres of rain each year - fortunately I was there in the dry season (or "The Dry" in Australian), so it was not too muddy underfoot! I stayed for a night in a resort there, braving the mosquitoes for a walk in the forest itself and admiring the workings of "sand bubbler" crabs on the beach, before being picked up by the same tour bus on the way back for a crocodile-spotting cruise on the Daintree river (the single specimen we saw was a one-metre-long juvenile, though they grow to lengths of around four metres). I also went on a day trip to the Atherton Tablelands from Cairns before flying back to Sydney to recuperate from the epic voyage and prepare for the next leg. In addition I had to post off around twenty kilograms of possessions, including ten of second-hand books, that I had acquired in my time there; I sent them by sea mail, so I will not know for another month or so whether they made it intact!
Singapore
After a few days of stability I took off for my next destination on the 1st July. I had previously changed my plans of returning home via Hong Kong and Sri Lanka due to the SARS outbreak, and instead chose to stop in Singapore and Thailand before accompanying my aunt, uncle and cousin on a trek in the Himalayas. My father had arranged with a Singaporean colleague of his for me to stay in student accommodation in one of the universities there, and so I had a place to spend the night already arranged when I arrived; not, however, that the taxi driver could find it… During the course of the three full days I had there, I walked around the original Colonial District, Little India, Chinatown, the Arab Quarter and visited a nature reserve, a pottery factory and the Haw Par Villa (a garden of slightly grotesque painted concrete sculptures illustrating Chinese mythology).
I managed mostly to stay away from the shopping centres despite their blissful air conditioning, but bought a digital camera for myself as a birthday present from my parents. I ate mostly in what were called "hawker centres" where those who had formerly been roadside food sellers had been corralled into tidier collections by the ever-restrictive Singaporean government; there was nothing wrong with the food at all, and I even had durian, the incredibly smelly fruit, for pudding - and rather liked it! I didn't expect Singapore to be very different from either Australia or England, and indeed it was not; however, it was a step in the direction of Southeast Asia.
Thailand
Again, I already had somewhere arranged to stay in Bangkok, this time in the guesthouse of a company run by a friend of my aunt and uncle; the company, Polyplex, had just built a new polyester film factory south-east of Bangkok and I spent one of the days I had in Thailand visiting it, for the engineering experience - nothing could have been further from the traditional Thai lifestyle! For a large portion of my stay I was taken care of by some friends of my father's Thai flatmate in Holland, who collected me from the airport, treated me to many meals and took me on a day trip to see some of the 80-odd 16th century semi-ruined temples at Ayutthaya, the former capital of Thailand. They even invited me to go with them to Khon Kaen province in the north-east of the country to stay with their family over a long weekend, swimming in a shallow river, walking in the trees and visiting some more temples, which was certainly a change from Bangkok.
The capital city is extremely densely populated and very built up, though less organised than a Western city in most places, especially in terms of the traffic which is nearly stationary for most of the day. Fortunately there is now an aerial railway covering part of the city, but it excludes the area with the most interesting temples in it so to sightsee I was reduced to taking the bus or even walking! I equipped myself with a map very early on, which proved to be entirely indispensable, though often when I asked passers-by to show me where we were on it they contented themselves with giving me the name of the district of Bangkok and no finer detail.
Despite all this I did manage to see several of the famous attractions of Bangkok, especially the Grand Palace and attached mirror-tile-covered temple containing a small jade Buddha image, hidden under a thick layer of plaster until the outer coating was broken in an accident. I also visited some attractive smaller palaces and temples, as well as a group of streets where a few families still made monks' alms bowls in the traditional manner, hammering them out of eight pieces of sheet steel. I purchased a bowl from one family, and then was treated to a display of firing the bowls by another as I had said that I was interested in seeing how they welded the segments together; unfortunately it was a mock-up purely designed for me to take photographs rather than letting me see how the bowls were actually made! I also tried to take a day trip to see the famous floating market at Damnoen Saduak, an hour or so south-west of the capital city by bus; unfortunately when I arrived I discovered that the overwhelming pressure of tourism had erased any authenticity and the area was now devoted to selling souvenirs to coach-parties! I enjoyed the trip along the canals, though, and saw plenty of traditional Thai wooden houses on the way back (the Lonely Planet guidebook had mentioned a way of travelling part of the distance by water taxi, but a wily local merchant had spotted an opportunity and quadrupled the price for tourists!).
One part of Bangkok culture that I would have gladly missed, though, was the locals' notorious tendency to try to scam gullible, inexperienced Western tourists. In the first few days I was there I brushed off several people who were trying to strike up a conversation (I suspected) as a prelude to taking me to their friend's jewellery shop where I would be persuaded to buy some inferior sapphires and post them home in the mistaken belief that I could make a large amount of money on them. However, when a friendly Singaporean with good English appeared to be going in the same direction as me on my first attempt at the bus and showed me some of the sights of central Bangkok; I was suspicious, but the fact that he was genuinely heading for the same destination and seemed to know English very well by Thai standards made me have confidence in him. After showing me another of the temples in Bangkok, decorated with broken porcelain brought from China as ballast in ships, he invited me to the house of his brother-in-law for lunch (at this point alarm bells began to ring) to try to explain to his sister that her daughter would be safe while studying in England. Of course, neither niece or sister were there, but after lunch (which I ate sparingly because of the possibility of drugs in the food - though I think the slight lightheadedness I felt was purely psychosomatic!) the brother-in-law offered to teach me a "system" for playing blackjack. This was straight out of the guidebook's warning against scams so I politely refused, saying I knew about the mathematics behind gambling and it was either just probability or else dishonest. Curiously this did not make them lose interest in me entirely, as the original scammer still ordered me a taxi (for which I ended up paying when he had somehow lost all his small change...) and a bus back to where I was originally going. My happiness at my escape was tempered a few days later when I was scammed with an even older trick, "giving" me bags of corn to feed to pigeons and then asking for money once I had poured the contents all over the ground! However, all the Thais I met through friends were exceedingly kind and helpful; it is a shame that those with whom tourists are most likely to come into contact are those trying to part them dishonestly from their money.
India
Partially as a result of the scamming, and of the constant interjections of taxi or auto-rickshaw drivers who seemed not to be able to believe that a Westerner would want to walk anywhere, I was fairly glad to leave Bangkok and fly (via Singapore) to Delhi to meet my relatives. I spent a couple of days in the air-conditioned comfort of their house, with my parents arriving the day after I did, before leaving by express train (again air-conditioned, and very luxurious) for Chandigarh - a planned city about six hours north of Delhi, halfway to the Himalayas. We spent an afternoon at a rather curious garden consisting mostly of concrete and broken ceramic bathroom fittings and ordering clothes for my sister and mother, which were made in the all-but-miraculous time of two hours. The next morning we completed the next leg of our journey by car, arriving in Manali at an altitude of 2000m in time for supper with the rest of the trekking party, and the day afterwards my sister and I, together with my uncle, aunt, cousin and the other five trekkers (plus one dog), set off for the start of the trail in four-wheel-drives. Several hours later we arrived at literally the end of the road - apparently only two hundred metres further on than three years before! My parents, meanwhile, were starting a jeep safari around the Spiti valley followed by a trek that was both shorter and lower than the one on which we were going.
We walked for less than two hours to reach camp that day, but the norm was about six hours including a leisurely lunch break, rising to nine hours on the two days we crossed passes. We only had to carry what we needed for the day in question, however, the remainder of our baggage being carried by a team of packhorses that gradually diminished as the food was eaten and they departed for their homes. The horses usually passed us while we were eating lunch, and by the time we arrived at the campsite in the afternoon their human guides had already pitched tents and were getting tea ready for us. All our meals were cooked for us, including cakes for my sister and myself on our birthdays which were somehow prepared on a kerosene stove! The warmed washing-water provided twice each day and the bed tea each morning only added to the luxury; the sole arduous part of the trekking was the walking itself, and even then there were two riding horses in addition to the two guides accompanying us. On the other hand, the going was fairly tough; according to a guidebook our trek was meant to be about 85 miles, but that did not take into account the endless zigzagging when ascending and descending the two passes into and out of the Zanskar valley.
The lower oxygen content in the air took its toll, too, with one of the trekkers suffering from acute mountain sickness and the dog from kidney problems a few days into the two-week journey; both were evacuated by horse, the latter accompanied by its two owners. Even those of us who did not succumb felt the increased difficulty of climbing the frequently steep paths, and often when we arrived in camp we were too exhausted to do anything apart from reading. The very quick initial climb was the problem - we hit the top of the 5100m Shingo La (pass) on only the 4th day after leaving Manali. Once in the valley itself, however, it was fascinating to see the very isolated villages, unspoilt but for the occasional shop selling Coca-Cola to the hundreds of (predominantly French) trekkers who pass through every year, surrounded by chortens (shrines) and mani walls amongst barley fields. The same could not always be said for the campsites, however, and we spent one of our three rest days collecting rubbish and digging a large hole in which to bury it all.
On two occasions local people put on shows of traditional dancing for us (afterwards we attempted to reciprocate with Scottish country dancing led by my aunt, to general amusement!) and we were frequently invited to take tea with the locals. In addition my aunt and uncle had sponsored a project of an Indian NGO to train local herbal doctors, or amchis, in the cultivation of their medicinal plants instead of collecting them from the wild where some are becoming endangered. We visited many of their plantations along the way, but even the wild flowers were beautiful, especially against the dramatic background afforded by the Himalayas. The furthest point of the trek was a visit to Phuktal monastery, built into a cave in the mountainside, after which we turned back and trekked out through the 5350m Phirtse La to the waiting vehicles. Having spent so many nights under canvas it was quite a relief to return to civilisation in the shape of a warm shower - even in terms of pouring buckets of warm water over oneself, showering had been restricted to only two of the campsites at which we had stayed!
On our return to Delhi we had two days before our flight home, which my father used to acquire some low-priced jewellery-making tools from the numerous and diverse shops in Old Delhi; we were fortunate to have my aunt, who has been spending one day each week mapping the area for her forthcoming book, to guide us through the fascinating but tangled streets. And then it was onto an aeroplane and back to the United Kingdom, arriving in the middle of a heatwave to remind me of the countries I had visited. It was curious to see how much of an outsider's eye I turned on even the most familiar places when I arrived, after six months and one week away; the strangeness is fading now, however, as I turn - with great pleasure and (mostly) happy memories - to thinking about the rest of the summer and the beginning of my university career.