And one last memory to relate. We were lounging by the hotel pool, when husband got talking to a couple from the Middle East. Thirty-ish or so, good-looking, Western dress, she with a hubble-bubble, him with a can of Heineken, both with excellent English skills. They were from Damascus. At the time, the Syrian government, on a daily basis, was shooting mostly unarmed protestors in the streets of other cities, children included, all recorded on the ubiquitous camera phones and then emailed out as videos to the rest of the world…

“All lies,” says the gentleman. “Damascus has no demonstrations, nothing.”
His wife nods in agreement. “We’re are very happy with our President. (Bashar al-Assad.) We don’t want a change. Our government is a good one.”
“All that you see on al-Jezeera, CNN — all lies,” he says. “Don’t believe it! 90% of Syrians do not want any change. We are a prosperous country. These are terrorists, thugs, attacking our legitimate government.”

I look around at the swimming pool, the palm trees, fronds waving gently in the breeze, the sound of children laughing and splashing. A waiter brings colourful  cocktails with umbrellas to a nearby table. The sun shines, the breeze is — perforce — balmy…

I think: enjoy this, my friend, while you may. Because if people like you won’t acknowledge the true nature of your problem, how can you ever mend it?

And I am grateful, so grateful, I am who I am, living in this place, at this time. Or are we all living with our heads stuck in the sand?

The following photos are all from Langkawi Island. The resort we were staying in has a floating boardwalk a short distance into the mangroves (seen here at low tide).

Some years ago I sent six months working on a mangrove project, living in the heart of Johor Baharu in an old colonial house overlooking the Straits of Malacca — except if I was in the field, when accommodation varied from sleeping on cement floors being bitten by sandflies to hotels directly over a Chinese coffee shop, and much of my day was spent in boats poking around in some of Malaysia’s remotest streams and estuaries.

 

One memorable day when we tried to walk through one of Malaysia’s oldest untouched mangroves to find the southern most family of gibbons in the Peninsular. No one had known those animals were there until we heard them; the scientific books and papers said white-handed gibbon territory did not extend that far south. (I imagine they don’t exist now, a few short years later — I suspect the area has vanished under the all-encompassing “development” greed of man, and the gibbons died, or were captured. They were not in the mangroves, but isolated on a patch of higher ground forest. )

Unlike these flat seaside mangroves, an old grove can be incredibly rough going, with lobster mounds two metres high and drainage rills two metres deep – climb, descend, repeat, climb, descend, repeat. The trees were huge things, gnarled beyond description with interlaced roots — a cat’s cradle of wood. To set foot on the gluey grey mud that would suck your boots off in a second, it was necessary to balance on this lacy network of grey goo-slippery wood below and haul on the tree branches above. All lugging cameras and backpacks in near 90F heat and 100% humidity.

It took us over an hour to go less than a kilometre, which is when we decided to give up (given that getting trapped in there by the tide might not have been funny.) It was easier for the men involved — they were 6 footer lanky Danes, with long legs, and twenty years younger than me…

What surprised me most was how astonishingly beautiful mangroves could be. And how alive with life.  Note the roots poking through the mud above, a case where roots grow up to aerate themselves.

And (above) in among the roots and the new saplings, a hermit crab with his shell adorned with the remains of other dead shellfish.

And what about these, above — fiddler crabs. Each male has developed a single claw much larger than the other. Its purpose is pure aggression. It can’t use it to feed itself! Below there’s one guarding his hole.

Note all the other types of shellfish lying around, waiting for the tide to come back in.

I have several favourite resorts on Langkawi Island. It has a whole range, from glorious luxury (Datai Langkawi; The Andaman — where I once stayed while on a job!) to cheap backpackers.

This time around we went for comfort and great surroundings, but not outrageously expensive. I like the Berjaya Beach Resort because they (like the Andaman and the Datai) pay a lot of attention to keeping the green surroundings and blending the resort into the greenery.

 Some of the chalets are over the water, but these are not my favourites; I like the chalets tucked away among the trees. You get woken up by the birds, including hornbills, and can watch the wildlife on your verandah. At night, there are flying “lemurs” (actually colugos) and flying squirrels.

 Of course, there are still the usual things like swimming pools and recliner chairs on the beach.

 One of the restaurants, see below, I enjoyed at breakfast because just below was the playground of about fifteen grey bellied squirrels and a number of common mynas.

These squirrels were wrongly identified in the resort literature as Plantain Squirrels; they aren’t. They are Grey-bellied. (I have both types in my garden.)

One other reason I like these “green” resorts is that they don’t clean the beaches with tractors and mechanical scarifiers — it’s done by hand, so crabs and other wildlife living beneath the sand is not disturbed. This means the herons and waders come to feed.

I remember walking out on to the beach in the early morning at The Andaman, and seeing the beach covered in tracks: monkeys, monitor lizards, otters, civets, leopard cat, herons, rodents, crabs and mud worms of all sizes. It was like a written history of what had happened during the night and at dawn, written in the sand.

A colugo taken at the resort on a previous visit. Remember these things fly. Well, to be more accurate, they glide…

Langkawi is a group of islands — supposedly 99 of them, off the northern coast of Peninsular Malaysia. You can see the Thai islands from there. We were back there, just recently.

Back in those early days, you had to take a slow local ferry that didn’t run all that often, and you were probably the only tourists on the boat. In fact, we might well have been the only tourists on the island. there weren’t many roads, and even fewer cars.
 

 

I

 

But first let me show you the answer to yesterday’s wildlife trivia. The answer is a Colugo. Also known (erroneously) as a flying lemur. It’s a herbivore mammal that flies (well, glides actually) using a membrane that stretches from the tail via back and front legs to the sides of the neck.

And now for the nice things that happened today. Well, first I realised someone posted 3 rave 5-star reviews on Amazon for the 3 books of The Isles of Glory, which is always nice.

(OK, I know one is not supposed to put any store by Amazon reviews – they are all supposed to be written by one’s mother or best friend or something, right? And I promise you, once I am hugely famous and no longer need the reassurance that someone out there likes my work, I’ll stop reading them… Until then, bless you, you Amazon reviewers. I love you all. )

Next my Australian editor, wanting something to put in the 2007 sampler, read the new first chapter of The Song of Shiver Barrens (the old first chapter was totally scrapped) and seemed to like it enough to use. I’m a little embarrassed as it is only a day or two old and not polished, let alone copy edited! Still, I feel I must be on the right track.

And just a few minutes ago, my lovely agent (may she be showered with blessings in 2007) sent me an email detailing another offer for yet another foreign language version of The Isles of Glory to be published 2008.

In Trade first, then Mass Paperback. My first TRADE!! Eureka!

Major publisher in a major language. (Having once had an serious offer from a Big English Language Publisher that later fell through before signing, through no fault of either mine or my agent, I am not saying more than that, but believe me, I am already grinning from ear to ear on this one. ) Yay!!