Sweat and Tears

I think James is worried about us. After the first day or so, when we arrived, me weak with a rather heinous mixture of sea sickness and hangover, and both of us suffering from a seemingly unshakeable cold, we have got a bit more into our stride. Well, a stride of sorts. We keep disappearing in the morning before he can see or speak to us and then reappearing at about five looking half dead. 

Today was no exception. By the time we finally plodded through the door, we are drenched in sweat, a vivid shade of pink, and tired enough for our feet to be dragging and our mouths and minds unable to work together to form coherent conversation. 

"You should rest now, yes?" says James, concernedly, "and cool off. It is unusually hot today."

He said exactly the same thing yesterday, when we fell through the door at about the same time, in a similar condition.

Today's mission was to get an air conditioned local bus to the extensive National Park area and do a 9 kilometre round trek to the lighthouse at the tip of the island and back again. Then home for curry puffs (M has been on about these ever since we first ate them with Gemmy - and we have seen a place not so far from our lodgings which we think might do them). After the curry puffs, 'Armenian Street Got Talent', a set of street stalls and talent performances on, believe it or not, Armenian Street, which we happened to see a poster for on (wait for it) Armenian Street, yesterday.

Sounds easy enough, surely? And so it seems as we stride off into the National Park, feeling intrepid in our walking boots, down a fairly flat concrete path.

"TripAdvisor said the routes were well signposted," says M, impressed, but they've even surfaced it."

A little further on, when we have left a particularly sweaty couple and a family with a small child in the dust of our wake, the concrete path becomes wooden steps.

Should be fine. We stride up those - and down again - and then up again. I am getting a little tired of heaving my walking boots about. When you've been wearing sandals for four months, closed in shoes, let alone bulky closed in shoes, feel odd and restrictive. Heaven knows how I will cope with high heels when I get back. Perhaps I just won't. Maybe work would get used to me skipping into the office in flip flops, baggy trousers with holes that I long since ceased to care about, and messily piled up hair without make up. Or, on some occasions, even a hair brush. Sure they will. But for now it's many many years away and all I have to do is concentrate on using this fraying rope to haul myself up and over the enormous boulders now strewn in our path.

Even so, the rope rather aids my enjoyment.

"This," I say to M happily, "is just like Go Ape, only more natural."

"And without the safety harnesses" adds M, watching me slide unceremoniously down some dry earth, skipping hastily around the various mischevious looking tree roots which hoped to trip me up on the way.

Even so, it doesn't seem that far or that difficult. 

"It doesn't seem very far does it" I say to M, rather enjoying the idea that I am simply too fit to notice difficult terrain.

"We're only about half a kilometre in" observes M.

This is true. And the sun is still climbing in the sky. 

I see a Monitor Lizard the size of a baby crocodile. He is sneaking shyly away into the undergrowth.

"We couldn't see him" I say to M, listening to the distant sounds of a tantrum, " if we had an excited child with us."

Having said that, I can't help thinking that this track is practically designed for children. There are roots and boulders, things to scramble up and duck under, and all with the smugness that comes of being a child and having much much more energy than your adult counterparts.

We arrive at a beach and walk across it. It's flat, which is nice but the sun is now very definitely high in the sky. It's noon - and it is BOILING. 

It is with rather less of a cocky spring in my step that I cross the beach and haul myself up again where the trail resumes on the other side. We are now never walking on the flat, it is either up a hill or down one, with plenty of wickedly entwined tree roots and low hanging branches along the way. Water, though clearly a necessity, is causing my bag to be what seems to be impossibly heavy. I start to drink the water M is carrying as much for the sake of lightening our load as for the actual hydration properties of it.

"Do you think you make yourself need three litres of water because of the effort of carrying it?" I ask M. 

The answer is a convoluted, though surprisingly interesting investigation into the various trade offs race drivers make between fuel and pit stops, which serves to distract me from the fact that I am now really very very far from being even a passing resemblance to either a race car, or a Human. By the time we reach the last leg of our journey, a punishing up hill climb to the lighthouse at the tip of the island which is our destination , I am purple, drenched and weighed down by legs which feel like boulders hanging from the end of my body. M is characteristically rather more cool looking than either me or anybody else just emerging from that climb. But even he wipes his forehead and sighs a little. That's about as extreme as it gets with M. I have to constantly remind myself that normal people do sweat and struggle. I am not unusually weak. I am the normal amount of human frailty. M is basically superman. Is it really ungrateful to wish your husband a bit, well, less perfect?

I am rather comforted by a notice at the lighthouse informing me that this is 'the most difficult lighthouse to visit' because of the arduous climb. It doesn't qualify what is the most difficult out of. The island? Malaysia? South East Asia? The world? I decide privately that it must be the world, just to sock it to those rude monkeys which had the nerve to fill the tree tops with a chorus of derisive whooping noises when I had the nerve to ask M if we could pause a little in our climb. And the stray dog who so kindly escorted us up but gave up on us when we rested and instead joined another couple who happened to be passing. So much for dogs being more loyal than cats. We find him again a little further up when the other couple stop to have a break. Fickle.

The climb downhill is rather less arduous and therefore less sweaty, though it is the full heat of the day now. Every time we tell ourselves we will NOT time the most difficult part of the day to coincide with the mid day heat. And every time we look at our watch and find it is midday, guess what, we're half way through climbing a mountain.

I eat, much to M's absolute disgust, a packet of crisps I buy from the only stall on the beach we walk across on the way back.

"There's zero nutritional value in those" says M

"I am replacing salt" I say with dignity.

M shrugs and turns away while I eat, muttering something about MSG. I don't know what it is, but I just can't learn M's purist attitude to food. I don't mind if it's not great quality when I am hungry and need fuel. And sometimes - don't repeat this - but I quite like a bit of MSG and lack of nutritional content. This is where the government gets it wrong when it tries to put us off fattening food by making the manufacturers own up to the contents. Sure, turkey twizzlers are full of nasties, but if a turkey twizzler smelled nice and you were hungry, wouldn't you conveniently forget?

No. It's just me then. But you can't blame me this time. I just climbed to the most difficult lighthouse on the planet.

I have side tracked slightly. Essentially what happens us that, as per usual, we limp back through the doorway at getting on for five ravenously hungry (no nutritional content, remember), stinking, and half dead.

"You will rest and cool off, yes?" says James, concernedly. 

We have a shower and spread eagle ourselves on the bed under the air conditioning. When suitably refrigerated to venture back out for the long awaited curry puffs, only to find they don't actually do them. To assuage M's sorrow (if there is anything he does show emotion about it's food) we try some Dragon Biscuits which are in fact more like small round dough cakes with a sweet filling. This isn't quite enough so we go to the Indian part of town and gorge ourselves on curry.

Then we walk to Armenian Street. Things are in full swing. There are small stalls selling various handicrafts and, just as we arrive, a group of drummers who have been hanging around their drums suddenly leap into action and provide us with our own personal (it feels like) Chinese drumming display. They are generally boys in their teens, thirteen to nineteen, and all of them are brilliant. They leap onto their drums, holding their sticks out to allow others to do a smaller group riff or a solo, they drum whilst walking around the drum, they crouch down and spring up and they manage the whole thing with unsmilingly theatrical flourish and incredible masculinity. What a cool pastime. Not for the first time, I think what a narrow range of 'cool' activities are available in the UK for, especially young teenagers. No wonder they have to make their own fun, drinking White Lightening in children's playgrounds and park corners.

Actually the usual thing has happened, and tears have spring into my eyes watching them. Thus often happens. I am not sure if it's something's soppy to do with children performing or just a response to something beautiful, but I am about a hundred times more likely to cry at something great than at something bad. You should have seen me when M proposed. It was NOT dignified. 

We stroll down the street once the performance ends to our hearty and, in my case, hand stingingly fervent, applause. We pause because a man is playing a stirring tune on a small, china, something with incredible skill. He sways a closes his eyes to the music. It's an impressive display. I video it, still with a bit of tearful happiness. This trip is just so beautiful. We've seen and done such amazing things. Sometimes it's just too difficult to cope with. You can't help but become pleasantly overwhelmed. Though 'pleasantly' is a little understated. 'Overwhelmingly' does it more justice. Overwhelmingly overwhelmed.

M is characteristically calm. But it isn't until later that it really hits me.

The man stops playing his 'china thing' which turns out to be a 'Lovoca' and invites me to have a go. He has a little stall of them, of various shapes, sizes and decorations.

"Choose one" he says.

I can see how this is going to go, so I select one I can afford. It is shaped like a duck.

There is a brief and amusing interlude in which I am taught how to play 'twinkle twinkle little star' and then give a short and much less accomplished performance, to tumultuous applause. I think it is tumultuous out of sympathy for my predicament as 'really rubbish lovoca player' rather than impressedness. I give a small bow. 

"I think," I say to M, "that we have found our 'gift for someone with a story'."

"And a video" says M, holding up his phone on which is a sweaty still image of me laughing and preparing to play the easiest tune in the world. Badly.

"Excellent" I say, and am genuinely pleased.

"Did you know?" Says the man at the lovoca stall. "That you can enter the old clan house tonight? It's only once a month. And there is a special performance."

"Amazing!" I say, genuinely staggered by how much good luck we have had on this trip, how many times we have simply happened to be in the right place at the right time.

I put my lovoca gift carefully in my bag and we prepare, excitedly, to enter the clan house.

The lovoca man has to remind and us to pay.

When we walk through the small alley and into the courtyard if the clan house, open only once per month, I stand there and just look.

Behind me the temple rises, magnificent and ornate in the sunset. It's the kind of beautiful, especially in this light, that can genuinely make you stop breathing for a second. And you are not normally allowed in after six pm. So viewing it at sunset is a unique privilege. At the sides, stalls sell a variety of sweet smelling and beautifully crafted baba nonya desserts. On the ornate stage in front of me a dance troupe perform, with seemingly genuine enjoyment and energy, a traditional Chinese dance. 

It is all so beautiful. And so much. I start to cry. I start to cry the way a child does when over tired and over excited. I  am simply too happy. Too happy, too lucky, and the world is too amazing. I don't know what we did to deserve this opportunity.

M put his arm around me. We sit on the hot ground, night falling around us, dancers, Chinese opera singers and acrobatics in front of us.

For free. Both in monetary terms and in terms of our worthiness to see and to experience all that we have.

Life is not a bitch. She's a saint.

Don't listen to anyone who tells you otherwise. You have no idea what you might get to do in your lifetime.