Bali and Malaysia, part 3

Day 6: Surfing and fever

Klaus leaves for Sydney and I head down to the beach and rent a surfboard. The surf is quite bad, probably no more than 3 ft, but I have some fun. In the evening I don't have so much I am attacked by some kind of evil mix of fever and sunstroke. Later, I realise that I have caught some stomach bug and I spend the next two days being sick.


Day 9: KL

I wake up feeling hungry. What a great feeling! The rest of the day is pretty much spent booking, taking and leaving our flight from Bali to Kuala Lumpur, where we arrive sometime after 10 pm. Lucky for us, this is surely not too late for a meal, but the middle of prime time of KL's brilliant night markets. One of the biggest turn out to be only a few hundred metres from our hostel. Our hostel, called "Classic Inn Budget Hotel" or some generic name like that, turns out to be a brilliant place as well; really friendly staff and a great place to meet fellow travellers. Anyway, the night market is a fantastic and chaotic sight. A thick swarm of people are walking around or stitting down eating at simple plastic tables covering most of a wide street lined with a swarm of open air restaurants where another swarm of people are frying crabs, frogs, chickens and noodles and about a hundred other things. All of this exists in a beautiful and chaotic mess. As for the smells, the mix is even more beautifully messy, if possible. The smell of roast chicken, fish and fried spices is mixed with that of exhaust fumes and the rotten smell of those disgusting durian fruits.

Day 10: Drifting around in KL

During the impressive hostel breakfast I make aquaintances with Alberto the Mexican and Scottish Chris. This duo, who are in fact having their last couple of beers as I eat my breakfast, is quite entertaining and we have a long talk about diving, Scottish rock groups and whether it is a good idea to sneak into Petronas Twin Towers impersonating a mysterious Mr. White and his photographer, as Alberto suggests. The reson for this idea is that we are much too late to grab one of the few daily tickets to go up to the viewing deck of the towers' bridge, issued at 8.30 each morning. Me and Ali decide against it, in favour of just heading up the KL Tower.

Having consumed the view of the city from the KL Tower, we drift around Little India, the Colonial Quarters and Chinatown. However, we move at a snail pace and have to stop several times to cool down from the tormential sun. The first stop is in great Indian vegetarian restaurant where we are served way too much food on pieces of banana leaf, to be eaten with the right hand. The second stop is in some famous mosque, the third is the most desperate one where we run straing in to the first open building nearby that turns out to be a library, and the fourth is in the not-so-special Central Market.

A strange event occurs to us on our way home. A woman of heavy stature, possibly transvestite, stops her car and offers a ride, wavinve wildly and tells us to get in. We decline and walk on. When we over an hour later get out of the monorail station and cross the street heading for ou hostel, the very same woman drives by and honks her horn desperately, but this time she cannot stop. This mildly mysterious event was never explained, but it scared Ali frightfully for reasons that I do not fully understand. He tells me that he still has reoccuring nightmares about it, but hopefully he will recover one day and look back at this day as a happy one.

Anyway, in the evening we head back to the same night market for dinner, together with Alberto and Scott the Aussie. After feasting on crab, chicken fish and different stir fries, washed down with generous amounts of Tiger beer and coconuts with rum, we hit the town, or more precisely some place called the Beach Bar, where Jack Sparrow works as a bartender. By this I mean the actual Jack Sparrow and not just some guy dressed up like him.

Day 3: Diving at Nusa Penida

In the early morning, we hop on a boat with Klaus’s old diving colleague Peter, who is working for Tauch Terminal, which I can warmly recommend to anyone who wants to dive in Bali. After just 20 minutes of high speed pursuit off we reach a really good dive site off the coast outside the small island of Nusa Penida. This island used to be like a penal colony, where the old Balinese kingdom put many of their troublemakers and criminals, kind of like the Balinese version of Australia.

The first dive is completely brilliant, following quite a strong drift over almost a kilometre of a continuous colourful coral reef. The second one has much less current and I have time to have a look at some anemone fish and crazily coloured nudibranches. After the dives we spend the afternoon snorkelling on the Blue Lagoon again and then we head for Tulamben for the night. However, we only get as far as Candidasa which is a small and quite beautiful tourist resort some 15 minutes away. However, the beach is destroyed by concrete wave breakers since the previous natural wave breakers in the shape of coral reefs all have been destroyed by dynamite fishing. In the evening we eat a luxury dinner and watch a solitary Balinese folk dancer. She seems very bored and asks basically everybody to join her on stage in order to stand and look ridiculous next to her, which almost seems like an insult to the fine art of Balinese dancing to me. After a lot of insisting I join her for 10 minutes though. Nobody else dares to..


Day 4: Gunung Batur and Beduguhl

After the first sleep-in of the trip we head to the small but touristy village on the outer crater rim of Gunung Batur; Bali’s second-most holy mountain. The volcano looks really impressive from there and we can see the fresh black lava from the latest eruption in 2006 that destroyed several homes and all the roads leading up to the inner volcano itself. After lunch we bravely chose to take a road that is dashed in the map we are using, from the 1998 edition of Lonely Planet. At first the road is great and we think that a lot has happened with the infrastructure in the last ten years, which is true, but after an hour or so it is obvious why the road was dashed. Several hours on pot-holy dirt tracks later we reach Beduguhl; a popular lakeside weekend resort for Balinese people.

Day 5: The Conquering of Gunung Catur

After an early breakfast we head up the 2,200 m tall volcano Gunung Catur together with Anna from Atlanta, that we met on the hostel (no relation to Hannah Montana, or so she claims). We almost get lost but some school kids send us off in the right direction. Later it turns out they are just three of probably a hundred kids from a Denpasar school on a class trip, climbing the mountain together with us. We finally make it to the top and are rewarded by a feeling of grand achievement, but not, however, a view. One has to be up there at sunrise to see anything but white clouds over the lake below.

In the afternoon we slowly head back to Kuta through some incredibly dense traffic jams. We have dinner in a fantastic yet really cheap Chinese restaurant in Denpasar together with Peter and his family and then spend the evening in Kuta sampling different bartenders’ imaginative interpretations of advanced cocktails and dancing at the Bounty nightclub with the normal clientele of drunken Aussies.

Bali & Malaysia part 1

After two fantastic weeks in Bali and Malaysia, I am now in Kuala Lumpur International Airport, waiting for my flight to take me back home to Norway. I've written a kind of travel diary and I thought I should post it here in parts, so more will follow..

Day 0: Arrival (7 June 2009)
After a long and complicated series of flights (to utilise the super cheap tickets from London) I finally arrive late in the evening in Kuta, Bali, where my old friend Klaus is waiting. Klaus's friend Ali is also travelling with us and they have already spent two days on Bali when I arrive.

Kuta is pretty much the same as I remember it from last time I was there, ten years ago. It's full of drunk Australians and Western franchising stores (The Mc Donalds logo hovers over the view from the beach at night). The only exception is that mine and Linus's old hangout Sari Club no longer exists, since it was blown up by fundamentalists in 2002, taking 200 lives with it into the grave. Anyway, I don't mean to sound melancholic; it is really good to be back!

Day 1: Padangbai
After breakfast we head out of Kuta and Denpasar's traffic chaos with Klaus behind the wheel of our rented Toyota, in true Balinese rally stile. In Padangbai we check in to the simple but very cosy Sidha Karya homestay and discover that Klaus's old visit in 2002 is still in the guest book. They haven't had any visits for over a month which perhaps says something about how few tourists there have been for the last years here

We spend the afternoon snorkelling in Padanbai's Blue Lagoon; a fantastic coral reef just meters out from a beach. The reef is boiling with colourful fish such as needle fish, blue-spotted stingrays, a moray eel, parrotfish and many more that I don't have a clue about what they are called.

In the evening we discover that the other beach of the village is really destroyed. The whole forest of palm trees that surrounded it are gone and someone has started to build an ugly concrete hotel and a big wall closing in the whole beach. Later we hear that it is a Korean construction company and that they were stopped by the local guvernor, but too late to prevent the destruction. Quite a sad story.



Day 2: Padangbai & Tulamben
We start the day by driving up to Tulamben to dive on the wreck of the U.S.A.T Liberty. She was a American transport ship loaded with weapons and sunk by the Nipponese during the war. Klaus used to work as a dive instructor there several years ago so he really knows the site. We get two really good dives, although the visibility is a but murky, and have a look at the wreck and the myriads of fish.

In the evening we meet Camilla who turns out to be from Vallentuna, which is the countryside suburb of Täby, where I grew up. She has just been to Malaysia and gives a lot of advice where to go there. Some plans have formed and Ali has decided to stay in Asia for another week instead of going with Klaus to Sydney.

Glasgow - international Capital of Cross-Cooking

Ask anybody what they think of Scottish food and most people will not feel very hungry, or think of dishes such as haggis (which is hugely under-appreciated by the way), deep fried pizza or even the lunatic dessert deep-fried Mars bar, which you can get in some of the chip shops here. During my short visit, however, I have realised that Glasgow should, in fact, be recognised as the Capital of Cross-Cooking. Not only is this the only place in the world where you can order Haggis Pakora in Indian restaurants; When ordering an archetypically British Fish & Chips yesterday, I was asked if I wanted curry sauce with it. My Glaswegian friend Jim confirmed that this is completely normal. He also pointed out that "Scottish cooking doesn't recieve as much recognition as it deserves". I am prepared to agree, although I was not brave enough to try the fish & chips with curry sauce just yet. But I will..

Another interesting thing about Glasgow is its subway, with possibly the smallest train cars in the world. Being of average Scandinavian height, I can barely stand upright in it. The general design is simplistic and good with a circle line where trains go in both directions around. But, they don't just call the only line the "the Line" or the "Circle line". No, instead one of the directions is called the "Inner Circle" and the other the "Outer Circle". Does this make sense? Of course, one direction will always be on the inside of the other, but to me it seemed like a bad joke. At first. Just like haggis pakora. But perhaps it is, just like that dish, or like kilts, or curry sauce with fish & chips, actually quite sensible, and not so stupid after all.

Goodnight from Scotland!

Back from Australia

It's now been a week since I returned from the my three week long reunion with Queensland, so it's time to write something about it. I have uploaded bunch of nice photos from the trip on Flickr and some more are on their way.

My journey started with a stopover in Taipei on the way to Cairns, where I spent a week participating at the biennial International Society for Microbial Ecology meeting. After this meeting, which was the main reason for going really, or excuse for going at the very least, I rented a car with two workmates and travelled down the East Coast on a mission to:

1) See as many funny animals as possible, and
2) Do some extreme sports.

The results were quite satisfactory. I managed wild crocodiles, wallabies, lots of tropical fish, corals, sponges, nudibranches, snakes, spiders, platypus ("platypii" ?) and even a couple of cassowaries. As for sports, I settled with scuba diving (but quite a lot of it), surfing and a day of sailing.

It was an amazing trip.

Proposal for Bio-LOLCode package or IM IN YR GENEZ

Working in bioinformatics, you typically have to deal with people of two different categories; those with a biological background and those from an informatics background. Luckily there are also those that fit in both categories. When it comes to programming, people from the first category generally just want to get the job done as quickly and (often) impossibly hacky as possible, while many people belonging to the later category often have very strong feelings about how programming is done; what language to program in and if it is LINUX or Windows etc. I am no exception to this rule myself, preffering Java and disliking Perl and Windows strongly. This may seem pretty geeky to some of you, but, there are always degrees of geekiness.

For the most geeky of geeks, it is not enough to talk about how Windows sucks and how .NET is Satan's spawn or whetever it may be. The true übergeek instead turns to an unusual esoteric language that very few people use, thus making life harder not only for himself, but also for those around him and this, I suspect, is what he really wants. Typical languages to turn to in this case is Haskell or Darwin. Other people that want to compile the code of the übergeek then has to install the compiler, strange packages and programming libraries for it and other things that may be virtually impossible to find or manage to install. The übergeek smiles as he watches them fail. It has been said that all the Haskell programmers of the world would fit in one Boeing 747. It's also been said that if this Boeing would crash and take the lives of the poor programmers in it, nobody at all would notice.

Anyway, to get to the point, I have realised that to transgress the boundary and become a true übergeek myself, I have to find my own favourite programming language that nobody else has ever heard of and now I think I have found it! The language is called LOLCode and inspired by the pidgin English of LOLCAT pictures, using sloppy chat-style language and geeky snowclones. Its main mission is to rival XML as the Lingua Franca of computers. There's a compiler for Perl and even for .NET. A typical example of a program written in LOLCode would be :

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "O HAI, I HAS LOOP!"
LOL COUNTER R MINIMUM
BTW LOOPING
IM IN YR LOOP
VISIBLE COUNTER
BTW Below is an IF-statement
I HAS A DIFFERENCE
LOL DIFFERENCE R COUNTER NERF DIFFERNCE
YARLY
 KTHXBYE
NOWAI
 I HAS A NEXTCOUNTER

So, for this beautiful language to truly be useful to us bioinformaticians, we need a Bio-package. Every language with any sense of dignity has one and the time has come to LOLCode. To be a little different, I suggest we call it IM IN YR GENEZ. Time to sit down and work on a grant proposal to the Open Bioinformatics Foundation. I will let you know how it goes...

(I PROMIZ LEZ GEEKY POST SOON, DOODZ)

Rock Werchter 2008

I'm a little tired and suffering of the usual post-festival trauma. Just came back from four days of bloody good concerts, not enough sleep, beer for breakfast and the other usual festival attributes. In Belgium. For a change. Actually it started with a day in Brussels, spent mostly at the local pub from 11 a.m. until 6 or so, just because torrential rain followed by us by people from the to-be festival camp dropping in and stopping us from leaving. It was a tough week, but we made it.

First of all, Werchter does not compare to my favourite; Roskilde. Ok, the beer is cheaper and the weather is supposed to be better, but who cares when it just lacks all the fancy things that make Roskilde such a cool place to just wander around aimlessly, such as cocktail bars, lounge tents, 6 stages of music you never heard of and most of all, the perfect organisation. Instead it feels quite commercial and a festival area built without much love and in a hurry. That said, Belgians really know how to go wild during concerts, in a very good way. The Aussie-Norwegian-French-Swedish-Finnish-Lebaneese-Swiss-Austrian camp we had managed to get together was also something else. And last but not least, the concerts this year were bloody good. To mention a few:

--==Neil Young==--

Clearly the biggest legend of this festival, Neil with his band basically blasted the hell out of the festival. As opposed to Radiohead, we managed to stand right in the front which made the impact even more powerful. I had not expected such energy from this man, even though he is known to have invented grunge, more or less. But he is 63 years old! During Hey Hey, My My, we were seriously afraid that he would suffer a heart attack. Over two hours and several great songs later, many with long intense guitar solos later and all of which sounded better than I ever heard them before, he was long overdue the schedule but couldn't help doing an encore. This was maybe the highlight of the concert and surely the best Beatles cover anyone is likely to ever do; a hardcore version of A Day in Life, ending with Neil trashing his guitar against the speakers. Truly awesome.

Tracklist :
Love And Only Love
Hey Hey, My My
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Spirit Road
When You Dance, I Can Really Love
Fuckin' Up
All Along the Watchtower
Oh, Lonesome Me
Mother Earth
The Needle and the Damage Done
Unknown Legend
Heart of Gold
Old Man
Get Back to the Country
Words
No Hidden Path
A Day In The Life

--==Radiohead==--

One of my long-time favourites that I never got a chance to see live, this was what I looked forward to the most. And they did not disappoint. They played most of the newest In Rainbows album, quite some from Kid A and also some classics like You do it to Yourself. The last one is what really made the crowd go crazy. And almost the whole crowd seemed to know the lyrics and sing along.

--==Grinderman==--

Grinderman is Nick Cave and half of the Bad Seeds, in some kind of new configuration, appearently and only playing new material. Very powerful and a much better than the album.

--==Sigur Rós==--

I had already seen this amazing icelandic band on the smaller "Green Scene" of Roskilde, which was magical. This time was almost as good, but made it clear that the biggest scene of a festival is just not optimal for these guys, at all. I will try to catch them in Iceland some time. In a small village on the countryside on the Heima II tour. It's important to have dreams, at least..

--==Beck==--

He is not that charismatic on stage, but the man is a genius. Very good.

--==The Hives==--

"I solemly sweaiearrrRRRrr, to.. have NO... Other... Gods. Thaaaan... The Hives.". These guys are gods on the stage and the Swedish-American-slurry accent of “Howlin” Pelle Almqvist is actually brilliant.

--==Justice==--

Ok, these guys were not actually that great, and were quite obviously lacking material for a whole concert, but the atmosphere during this gig was amazing. It was simply a really great dancefloor and we liked it. Belgians sure can party. (Even though they should try to shut up a bit more during quiet, introvert Radiohead songs)