Station to station across Malaysia

Jeremy Atiyah takes the train from Singapore to Bangkok via the old Penang town of Georgetown

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 10 January 1999

WHY IS there no great Eurasian rail terminus in Singapore, commanding a network of long-distance trains to Peking, Moscow and Paris? I bet there would be if the Singaporeans had anything to do with it. But until Laos discovers the train, Thailand is as far as rail travellers from Singapore can go.

Luckily a two-day journey to Bangkok was enough for me. Which was why I suddenly found myself last month in the station cafe in Singapore, listening to the rain. A single line of track ran away north through a dripping forest of potted palm trees. The coffee tasted odd.

Even odder, Singapore's train station is technically a part of Malaysia. I enjoyed the anomalous experience of passing through Malaysian immigration before checking out of Singapore (20 minutes later at the border). But the train was surprisingly dull inside. No ducks on the luggage rack, no peasants squatting on sacks of rice. It might have been the 9.20am from Euston to Birmingham, and I was sitting in a big quiet armchair. The other passengers included an American school teacher who was larger than an entire Chinese family.

It didn't take long to cross this minuscule country. Suddenly I was on the causeway to Malaysia. Grey waters, a narrow strait, a road lined with trucks. We hit land: this was mainland Asia, stretching all the way to Calais and Ostend. After Singapore, the first impression was of trash. The second was of corrugated roofs, flapping laundry, spindly coconut palms, shacks and muddy streams.

Some of the housing looked remarkably British. The Malaysian countryside featured bungalows and terraced houses with red roofs. But inside the train I was soon feeling rather bored. The air-conditioning was so cold that I might have been on an unheated train in Norway. Except that the earth outside looked red and tropically forested. Hours later we were rumbling through misty Kuala Lumpur, which looked little more than a thinly scattered web of flyovers and distant skyscrapers.

Night fell like a stone. The air-conditioning was now so fierce I had a headache. Only on arrival at the oddly named town of Butterworth at 9.30pm could I finally escape into the reality of hot, wet, salty breezes from the Indian Ocean.

Along with late-working commuters, local teenagers from Butterworth's pubs and a few scraggly backpackers, I strolled through to the terminal for Penang ferries. We made the 20-minute crossing overlooked by the bright lights of Georgetown.

Disembarking, I suddenly became a king, lounging back in a rickshaw with my hands behind my head. Nor did the Cathay Hotel dispel the illusion. It was only a tenner a night, but from the outside its columns and Corinthian capitals looked palatial. Inside, I heard footsteps on the ceiling; there was a woman eating noodles under a fan and an old man sweeping the floor. May the human race always be blessed with such arrivals.

Georgetown was the perfect stopover from Singapore. Half a century ago these two places had been twins. Originally founded as "Straits Settlements", both were small islands off the Malayan peninsula, packed with industrious Chinese immigrants. But while Singapore has now joined the aristocracy of world nations, Penang has mouldered on magnificently. Look at the Eastern & Oriental Hotel, for example, set up by the Armenian Sarkies brothers, who were also responsible for Singapore's Raffles. While Raffles made the transition to a modern five-star hotel, the Eastern & Oriental closed down for an agonising refurbishment. Looking for it, I found a shell.

An improbably cool breeze blew in from the murky mountains of mainland Malaysia. I passed a British war memorial to "Our glorious dead. 1914- 1918". This was the Padang, a moth-eaten piece of muddy grass marking the centre of town. Cocks crowed, bells from a Hindu temple rang out like those from churches. I passed the grimy brick walls of a 200-year-old British fort, still the major architectural feature of this sad old town.

Who could have built that fort? In the local museum I found a bewigged statue of Captain Francis Light, who founded Georgetown in 1786. He was interested in cinnamon, cloves, cumin, pepper, chillies, star anise and tamarind. I cared more about the fact that this was a town where backpackers could catch ferries to Medan in jungly Sumatra.

The last stop before the jungles took over? That sounded just about right until I noticed that it was also a town where old Chinese clan associations had set up their kongsi, or temples, for the worship of their ancestors - benevolent self-help societies for people of the same surname. I visited the Khoo Kongsi, as large as a council estate, comprising entire blocks of homes built around alleyways and courtyards. Old Chinese music rattled from doorways. The main temple, full of hanging lanterns, was a vast chaos of ceramic shard decorations, gilt and swooping swallows. Later I dropped in on the Kuanyin temple. Amid pillars of entwined snakes, blackened burners and huge incense sticks three metres high, I found that people had scribbled notes with their prayers on them: "Biology I, 11- 12.15pm. Give me a good grade please."

In my years of visiting China I had never seen anywhere half as Chinese as this. I dropped in on the Hangchow Cafe and sat at a round marble-topped table under a sooty ceiling. "Life's greatest imperfection is melancholy wisdom" ran a Confucian saying on the wall. A Portuguese sailor in the corner was coughing his guts out. Ancestral portraits on the wall going back to about 1919 included a man whom I suspect to have been the first Chinese in history to wear a tie.

The following afternoon I crossed back to the mainland. Destination: Bangkok. Eat you heart out, Virgin Trains! Even my second-class compartment contained immaculate couchettes that folded down after dark, with curtains that drew across to protect sleepers' privacy.

The border, too, was stress-free. Leave the luggage on the train, sir! Step this way to have your passport stamped! But where, I asked myself, were the belligerent officials rummaging through my rucksack? Unavailable on this border, it seemed.

The next morning I woke up in Thailand, with white cranes flapping across muddy paddy fields. We passed ramshackle houses on stilts and temples like peaked meringues. Hua Hin station, when we got there, looked like a temple in itself, surrounded by sodden grass and cows.

We rolled into Bangkok two hours late. Not bad for a two-day journey, I thought, as we crawled, at snail's pace, into Asia's traffic-jam capital.

FACT FILE

singapore to bangkok by train

Getting there

Jeremy Atiyah's flights to and from Singapore and Bangkok were courtesy of Singapore Airlines. Trains run daily between Singapore and Butterworth, departing Singapore early morning and arriving in the evening. First and second-class seats are both perfectly comfortable and, from Singapore, cost S$127 first, S$60 second (about pounds 45 to pounds 22). From Butterworth to Bangkok a train departs every afternoon, arriving in Bangkok the next morning. Very comfortable second-class sleepers cost S$95 if bought in Singapore. Reservations can be made through Malaysian company Ktm Berhad (tel: 00 603 2757269; fax: 00 603 2736527).

Hanging out with the Dali of Bali

Hanging out with the Dali of Bali

Jeremy Atiyah discovers the surreal, serene island where locals and foreigners alike turn living into an art

JEREMY ATIYAH

SUNDAY 10 JANUARY 1999

I USED to find Bali hard to believe in. Geographically, the island was practically an extension of Java, one of the most crowded places on earth. This was Indonesia, a jungly, chaotic and slightly menacing country - but at the same time it was home to the notorious Kuta Beach, crowded with surfers and Sheilas. If anything, it sounded like the worst of all possible worlds.

Nor was I much tempted by the history of European colonisation in Bali. At the start of our own century, the Dutch were still butchering the locals. And Gauguin-wannabes who should probably have been fighting Hitler were dropping out here, waxing lyrical about little brown men and canoodling with topless Balinese girls under the pretence of being artistically creative, all the while lamenting the "commercialisation" of the island. Well, come to think of it, I might have done the same. But it was incredibly irritating to think that others had got there so long ago. What could the much-vaunted joys of Bali amount to in 1999, if not a gigantically stale cliche?

To smooth things along, I put myself in an almost unimaginably upmarket hotel, the Bali Hyatt in the beach resort of Sanur. Vast gardens of mature coconut palms spread away in all directions. At breakfast-time I sat in the open air under a thatched roof surrounded by carved wood and weather- blackened statues of wild-eyed Hindu gods. Steaming clouds swirled about the trees, cool raindrops tinkled in the goldfish ponds. More moss seemed to grow on those statues even as I ate my shining slabs of mango and papaya. Gentle people in Balinese head-wraps greeted me at every turn.

But what about the real Bali? I took a day trip to the centre of the island, past volcanoes surrounded by black cloud and terraced paddy fields where the water curved round hills like mirrors. The first stop was to see a Barong play, part local pantomime, part mishmash of temple rites cobbled together for tourists.

In the audience we were perhaps a hundred people; the German sitting next to me had a camera lens half a metre long. Cymbals and strings rippled and billowed across the scene; off-stage was the usual perfect arrangement of trees and lava-stone gods. The action came and went, a tiger with a beard full of flowers, dancing girls with swivelling eyes and bare feet, a roaring, quivering monster, a sad boy who died in a bundle of feathers, a boar, a giant cock. There was explosive stomping, a little bestiality, traces of pathos, much spectacle and tons of technical aplomb. Despite my fears about feeding from the trough of tourism, I soon found myself sipping from the lightness and beauty of the Island of the Gods.

There are a thousand temples on this little island: territorial temples, market temples, public temples, family temples. Driving the narrow lanes of the island, in fact, you seem to see only one industry: temple-building. Bali does have mess - road-works, construction - but beauty invariably lurks around the next corner. Men in yellow silk sarongs, little walls, shrines, gateways and towers of red brick graced by stone carvings: sections of grey volcanic tuff, chiselled into demons and deities.

Like their temple carvings, the daily life of the Balinese is governed by protocols of staggering complexity. Taxi drivers told me of the need to make offerings in the family temple every day after dinner. A tour guide spoke of ritually slaughtering pigs in the front courtyard of his temple every 15 days. I was told of ceremonies for every day, week, fortnight, month, century etc. I saw little leaf-trays containing rice and fragrant flowers - offerings to the gods - in villages, in temples, even in the airport terminal. And the ancestors? Another complex affair in Bali, though not necessarily one of grief. "We bury our dead maybe for a year or two," a guide told me. "Then the priest will tell us the propitious day for a cremation. We dig up the body and cremate it and have a party. Everybody is happy."

I drove through the village of Batubulan, the centre of stone-carving in Bali. Anyone with a large garden in need of ornamentation would be mad not to come here: the village is jammed with enough statuary to keep Buckingham Palace and Versailles stocked with Hindu gods and goddesses for the next 2,000 years. If that wasn't enough, I then came to the wood- carving village of Mas. It was a similar story: house after house stocked with fantastically beautiful objects. Weeping Buddhas, lithe Ramayana figures, animals, masks, pieces of furniture.

Balinese art, never forget, is real art. It is not simply a matter of churning out the same old artefacts for the consumption of tourists. There are dynamic artistic traditions here. In the middle of Bali, above the rice terraces, lies the miraculous town of Ubud where nobody lifts a finger except for the sake of art or religion.

The day I walked into Ubud I began to sense that it might take more than a world war 
to drag me away. This is a town where even the bank is built in the form of a temple. The first thing I saw was the Ubud Palace, where dozens of men in head-wraps were hard at work preparing for the cremation of the wife of the local chieftain. Cutting, carving, planing, flattening gold paper on to frames, erecting a temporary four-storey roofed tower of bamboo. A sign in the local tourist office announced that tourists would be most welcome to attend the cremation spectacle themselves. Other signs invited tourists to attend the Fire and Trance Dance, scenes from the Mahabharata and the Shadow Puppet play. In short, to join in the local joy.

Quiet lanes lined by frangipani trees and courtyard homes ran off in all directions. Down these lanes I found what may be the best-value hotels on earth. Stylish little rooms under trees in grassy miniature palace- style gardens were available for about pounds 3. If you could stretch to pounds 15 you would have a swimming-pool in the garden. Over thoughts of dropping out, I took a lunch of fish in coconut leaf with green chilli and coriander, washed down by a mint and mango cocktail - for next to nothing - then strolled away to become an art-buyer. I snapped up two large, heavily framed pieces - a Barong monster and a Balinese dancer - before skipping down to the house of Antonio Blanco.

Of all the pretentious good-for-nothing European layabouts who have ever dropped out in Bali, this immodest Catalan has done it with by far the greatest panache. High above the Wos Timor river, and three grown-up children later, he still lives with the Balinese woman he met nearly 50 years ago, having first spotted her working on a temple construction site. I would have dismissed this as a tawdry Spanish fantasy had I not just met a group of straight-backed young women carrying massive baskets of bricks on their heads myself.

Antonio Blanco leaves his fabulous house open for visitors to wander round. A sign announces the determination of this artist to "serve the mythical goddess of beauty diligently". Through avant-garde little poems made of cut-out pieces of text, erotic paintings of pre-pubescent girls and photographs of himself with the King of Spain, this particular Dali of Bali makes it perfectly clear that at 86 years old he is still defiantly proud of the madness that once tempted him leave his home for a place on the Island of the Gods.

FACT FILE

bali

Getting there

Jeremy Atiyah travelled as a guest of Singapore Airlines and the Bali Hyatt Hotel. Contact Hyatt's worldwide reservations (tel:             0845 758 1666      ). Until 28 February, double rooms in the Bali Hyatt cost from US$80 (around pounds 49) plus 21 per cent tax.

The most direct route to Denpasar, Bali, is via Singapore with Singapore Airlines (tel: 0181-747 0007). It flies daily, with returns from pounds 555 plus pounds 20 tax. An interesting alternative is to fly to Singapore for pounds 490 return, plus pounds 26 tax, with Singapore Airlines and make your way to Bali by land or sea, or by cheap domestic flight from Singapore to Jakarta and then overland to Bali. Garuda (tel: 0171-486 3011) offers some of the cheapest fares to Bali. It flies three times a week, via Frankfurt and Bangkok, with return flights from pounds 425 return plus pounds 20.

Further information

The Indonesian Tourist Promotion Office 3-4 Hanover St, London W1R 9HH (tel: 0171-493 0030). It offers a variety of useful free publications, such as the Travel Planner, Tourist Map of Indonesia and Calendar of Events for Bali and the whole archipelago.

Where the hosts demand ransom

JEREMY ATIYAH 

Sunday, 3 January 1999

I'VE JUST been holidaying in deepest rural Switzerland which is one of the least likely places I can think of for a tourist to be caught up in a shoot-out between rebels and government.

A hooded man on getaway skis attempting to seize a bottle of wine punch from the buffet table? After the fondue and before the chocolates? I cannot see things getting much worse than that.

Of course there is always the reasonably moderate risk of breaking an arm or a leg on the piste. There is an almost infinitesimally small chance of being gnawed to death by the rare wolves who may inhabit some of the remoter valleys.

But beyond that the Swiss are remarkably skillful at assuaging the nerves of tourists. The rest of Europe may once have laughed at the silly people who resorted to living on mountain-sides but they should not be laughing now.

The Swiss, after all, live in a country which makes a mockery out of us all. These are the people who pirouette across crisp snowy fields on cross-country skis for the pleasure of tourists breakfasting in large bay windows beneath chandeliers.

These are also the people who keep cows in barns beneath their living rooms, who train armies to ride bicycles, whose answer to the cruise missile is the penknife. And I have not even mentioned cuckoo clocks.

Shop windows in Kandersteg, the village where I was staying, look as though they have not been disturbed since before the Second World War. Since, in fact, the days when lone travellers with straw in their shoes would have come walking through these valleys on their way from northern Europe to Italy.

But why worry about commerce when your bankers are world experts? Why dump the Alpine knick-knackery, the teddy-bears and the watches, when you already have one of the highest GNPs in the world? The locals may not be charming but they make exceptionally effective hosts.

The country sometimes touted as the Switzerland of Arabia - the Yemen - is a rather different case. It has one of the lowest GNPs in the world. It also occupies an extremely unpromising location for tourism, across from Somalia, at the bottom of the Arabian peninsula. In any world league table of the world's favourite countries, you might have given the Yemen as much chance of success as a snowflake in Saudi Arabia - or a camel in Kandersteg.

But in truth this unlikely little country is one of the most fascinating I have ever visited. To see medieval stone skyscrapers built on terraced green Arabian hill-tops, in fact, it is almost obligatory to visit the Yemen.

Except that you might get shot. Well, now you might. Which is one of the saddest things I have heard for a long time. The Yemen is certainly a country where your driver may ask you to mind the automatic gun while he is in the toilet, but I also remember it as the country where an Italian tourist, having spent several days as the guest of tribal chieftans, later admitted that he was unaware that (technically) he had been kidnapped. He had never received such gracious hospitality in his life, he said. In fact he had never had such an enjoyable holiday.

Perhaps the Yemen is really going to become a dangerous place for tourists. The few hotels that there are may soon be empty and the desert cities of the Queen of Sheba may moulder unvisited for a few more years. With the exception, possibly, of a few happy Alpine hoteliers, the whole world will be the poorer for it.

Noodles, gongs and skyscrapers

Forget the stories about being arrested for chewing gum in the street, says Jeremy Atiyah. Singapore, more Chinese than China itself, is relaxed, clean and intoxicating

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 20 December 1998

WHY FLY for 14 hours just to visit one of the smallest countries in the world, and one chiefly remembered for having banned chewing gum? A large kindergarten with a venerable teacher named Lee Kwan Yew who delights in administering fines before breakfast? An oriental theme park and tropical island containing 147 varieties of snake, where people are instructed to call the police if they see one?

Paternalistic politics aside, I was not deterred from visiting Singapore. A theme-park? In fact its population - 75 per cent Chinese - was one of the last bastions of traditional Chinese culture anywhere in the world (including China). Repressed? Sort of, but it had just overtaken Hong Kong as the freest country in the world in which to do business. A skyscraper jungle? Except that half of this tiny country was also covered by real jungle.

Anyway, I was impressed when I arrived last week. Typical Asian cities are maelstroms of baking concrete, overflowing garbage cans and revving traffic. Here, I found myself gliding along a smooth-flowing freeway embraced by an unending green canopy of mature Rain Trees, under bridges covered in creepers and bougainvillaea.

Ecologically speaking, that was not the end of it. Value kept deducting itself from a swipe-card implanted in my car as we went, triggered by radio-waves from the kerb. Singapore's automatic Electronic Road Pricing system - the equivalent to road tolls - makes Britain's transport plans look pitiful. Underground, meanwhile, the train station floors are cleaner than the surfaces in Delia Smith's kitchen.

Once in town, I tiptoed past lawns, spreading banyan trees and brightly painted apartment blocks. Looking for breakfast, I ended up in a local hawker centre, under whirring fans, with steam pouring out of cauldrons. Atmospheric curtains of rain drummed on the corrugated roof overhead.

It was around 1820 that the first Chinese arrived in Singapore from southern China, seduced by the promise of work in Stamford Raffles's new off-shore colony. Raffles (himself no mean hand at paternalism) placed his Chinese settlers on to the south side of the river, an area which later became known as China Town.

Back then, Boat Quay was crowded with coolies unloading barges. Today, with the river cleaned up, it is lined by boutique-style restaurants. But the house fronts are still Chinese baroque, all half-moon tiles, bamboo roof-ridges, Malaysian swing-doors and Corinthian columns.

On arrival, the first thing most Chinese did was to offer thanks at the Wat Hai Ching Temple on the sea-front. Land reclamation and development have now left the temple stranded in the shade of skyscrapers, but donations from devotees continue to flow in. When I dropped by, I found spiral incense burners hanging in a smoky courtyard. Round the back men were sitting on stools four inches high, eating a steamed fish and spitting the bones out.

Scared of being fined before breakfast? Not me. Delightfully scruffy Singaporeans were shuffling around my hawker centre in shorts and singlets and flip-flops. Tiny bandy-legged ladies with pearl necklaces were carrying umbrellas longer than themselves. For breakfast I chose noodles, strips of bitter gourd filled with fish paste and chunks of steamed white radish paste in chilli. To drink? Delicious ice-cold soya milk and a thick black coffee. There was nothing remotely fake about this experience.

Having spent the previous 40 years knocking down anything old, Singaporeans are now mad keen restorers. I stayed in a street of two-storey houses where couples slurped noodles on verandahs after dark and men in glasses sat in dark rooms beneath pictures of their ancestors.

Round the corner, the Far East Square comprises entire streets that have been glazed in and air-conditioned. Red lanterns hang by steel pillars. A block or two back from the water front I even found unrestored vestiges of ancient China: shops selling shark fins, birds' nests, sea cucumbers and antelope horns ("Take bird's nest soup and pig's brains just before important examinations," a shopkeeper told me).

Those early Chinese immigrants came not to stay, but to save money to take back to their families. Many of them are saving still. It is not uncommon for third or even fourth generation immigrants to continue the tradition of sending remittances back to their home villages in China.

The Chinese spoken in Singapore comprises a bewildering cocktail of dialects spoken in the southern fringes of China: Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Teochoo. The government's "Speak Mandarin" campaign , originally targeted at housewives and shop-keepers, is now being aimed at the yuppies in their downtown skyscrapers, most of whom have grown up speaking English as their first language.

The clan associations of the Chinese communities are another mystery worth penetrating. If two families came from the same Chinese village, or shared the same surname, then they will probably belong to the same clan association. This is partly about worshipping the common ancestors in ancestral halls. It is partly about belonging to a good old-fashioned social club. I dropped in on a Chinese Cultural Products shop on River Valley Road, which has been flourishing since 1935. Cymbals, gongs, mandolins, drums, flutes, fiddles were all on sale. Just another pile of old Chinese stuff?

"Not exactly," explained Jeffrey Eng, the grandson of the original owner. "Don't forget that China is a world, not a country. This for example is a Cantonese gong. You see it is small and makes a happy noise? But this one is a Teochoo gong - large and imposing. The Cantonese cannot stand it.

"All the local clan associations contact me when they need stuff for a funeral procession," he said. "But the clans are not just about making a noise at funerals. They are about investing money and buying property. My clan has about 400 members. But it is more difficult to get young members now."

Like many Singaporeans, he was ambivalent about motherland China, reverential but a trifle disillusioned. "I went to a bookshop in Shanghai and asked for books on music and culture. But people looked at me as though I were mad. Some-

times it's the same here. The Yellow Pages doesn't have a category of Chinese cultural products. So where are they going to include my shop? I have no choice but to carry on with the shop. I still send money to China, so they can use it to give offerings to our ancestors."

A good Confucian sentiment if ever there was one. But I could hardly agree that Singapore was getting like China. Compared to aggressive Hong Kong and frenetic Shanghai, Singapore had the qualities of a village: light and relaxing, with kindly faces smiling from under porches dripping with tropical rain. People had time to chat. Or was this just the product of the latest "Be Kind To Foreigners" campaign?

I came to a street corner where a group of tough men lounged in wicker chairs. Drop-outs? Gamblers? Pornographers? In fact these were hardened bird-song competitors. Their birds sang in cages hung from tree branches overhead.

Singaporean wives complain not about their husbands drinking too much, but about them showing too much concern for their canaries. Fed on a diet of crickets, grass paper, vitamins and hard-boiled egg, the birds drink from exquisite little China vases and are never exposed to the sun. At weekends, men take them for public airings, where they pick up singing skills from each other. The champion singers can change hands for thousands of dollars.

For lunch I by-passed the nostalgic House of Mao (where dishes included Stir-fried Democratic Centralism) and plumped instead for the more traditional Imperial Herbal Restaurant. A learned Chinese physician took my pulse and diagnosed excessive yang, or internal heat. I sat down to dishes of chrysanthemum flowers, ladybell root and dumplings to remove dampness, phlegm and water retention.

Later that afternoon, with an electric storm crackling around the horizon, I dropped in on the Tea Chapter for a traditional Chinese cuppa. Hip young kids were pouring out water at precisely 90 degrees Centigrade into a pot a third full of Imperial Golden Cassia tea-leaves. "To remove grease and stink between the teeth and cheeks, cleansing the oral cavity giving it a fragrance," explained the tea-menu.

Over a scalding thimbleful of tea I chatted with Choo Lip Sin, who divides his time between a day job of quantity surveyor and theatre producer. A Singaporean bohemian?

"There are no real Bohemians in Singapore," he told me, regretfully. "Nobody can afford it. But of course Chinese culture is a useful source for playwrights here. We can use stories, folklore, idioms and characters that everybody will recognise. But not too many classical references. Don't forget we are in competition with TV.

"The problem has always been which language to use. English used to be preferred language. Now people are using the Chinese dialects more. My latest project is on the subject of taboos. Of course there is still self-censorship in Singapore. But these days less than there used to be."

Boring Singapore? It occurred to me that what makes the place exciting is the idea that so many things have not yet been said here. I would love to be around when someone says them.

FACT FILE

singapore

Getting there

Jeremy Atiyah travelled as a guest of Singapore Airlines and the Singapore Tourist Board. Singapore Airlines (tel: 0181-747 0007 or 0161-830 888) flies twice daily from London Heathrow, with a third flight on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and five times a week from Manchester. Return fares cost pounds 490 plus pounds 26 tax between 1 January and 30 June.

Where to stay

The author stayed at the simple Damenlou Hotel (tel: 00 65 22 11 900) in a characterful part of Chinatown, where air-conditioned rooms cost around pounds 35 per person per night. A range of hotels, up to the most luxurious in the world, is also available. Contact the tourist board (below).

Further information

Lunar New Year holiday takes place between 30 January 1999 and 2 March 1999 and is celebrated in spectacular fashion. The Chingay Parade is held on 26 and 27 February.

The weather is hot and sticky throughout the year. The heaviest rain falls during our winter months.

Singapore Tourism Board UK Office (tel: 0171-437 0033, website www.newasia- singapore.com) can supply vast numbers of leaflets and brochures. Both Rough Guides (pounds 8.99) and Lonely Planet (pounds 6.99) publish useable guidebooks

Where Alexander had a date with destiny

Deep in the western Sahara lies an oasis which has been green for thousands of years. Jeremy Atiyah celebrated the return of tourism to Egypt by visiting the Spring of the Sun

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 29 November 1998

IN EGYPT there is the river and there is the desert. The Nile and the Sahara; water and rock; Osiris, who grows, and Seth, who kills.

All tosh, of course. The desert west of the Nile is certainly the largest area of arid land on earth. But it is not dead. As the Roman geographer Strabo said, it is dotted with oases like the spots on a leopard.

What makes an oasis? A geological fluke. These are places where waters which have trickled for thousands of years - and thousands of miles - through underground passages from the rainy heartlands of central Africa, unexpectedly emerge, producing islands of trees and grasses and insects and birds. And occasionally people.

Siwa has always seemed to me the most miraculous of Strabo's leopard spots. From the Nile at Cairo, it goes over 500km in a straight line across waterless desert. From the nearest point on the barren Mediterranean coast it is at least 300km, or a nine-day trek with camels. Getting to or from Siwa has always been a monumental undertaking. But there, lurking under the palm trees, this speck of desert has harboured a minor civilisation of its own, unbroken for thousands of years.

Unlike the Egyptians of today's Nile Valley, whose claims to pharaonic ancestry have always struck me as somewhat dubious (after all, the Arabic language was imported a mere 13 centuries ago), the Siwans can plausibly claim that the Berber tongue they still use has been spoken in the area since before the dawn of history; since, in fact, that not-so distant era, recorded in rock carvings discovered deep in the Libyan desert, when rain still fell, and when the Sahara was a giant savannah inhabited by giraffes, elephants and crocodiles.

These days it takes nine hours by bus to Siwa from Alexandria, including a final four-hour stretch across a flat, featureless desert, as eerily silent as it has been for 3,000 years. But unlike most Egyptian buses, this one was not even crowded. My fellow travellers ate sunflower seeds or slept with the curtains drawn. A 19th-century Englishman, Bayle St John, on his descent into the valley of Siwa, spoke of "towers and pyramids and crescents and domes and dizzy pinnacles and majestic crenellated heights, all invested with unearthly grandeur but exhibiting that they had been battered by the mighty artillery of time". Unfortunately darkness had fallen when our bus began dropping through the folds of the escarpment. Minutes later I was walking down an empty, sandy lane to a hotel overhung by palm trees.

Siwa contains about 10,000 people, scattered in villages through the oasis. It may be a small dot on the map, but I was hardly the first to have found it. Herodotus himself, who knew Siwa as the land of the Ammonians, visited in the middle of the fifth century BC. He came investigating the mysterious story of Cambyses, the King of Persia, whose huge army had vanished in the sands outside Siwa. To this day explorers still look for their bones.

Herodotus went home to Greece spreading tales of the miraculous Spring of the Sun (today known as Ayn El-Gubah, or Cleopatra's bath), which bubbled ice-cold by day and boiling hot by night. Then, one morning early in 331BC, the Siwans awoke to find that their appointment with history had arrived. The most glamorous man of his time - of all time, some whispered - had materialised out of the desert. His name was Alexander.

My first morning in Siwa I walked along paths lined by palm trees, listening to the pervasive sound of running water. I agreed with Herodotus: the springs of Siwa were a kind of miracle. The whole oasis contains at least 200, including a dozen or more major springs, which suddenly appear as deep, turquoise pools bubbling through clearances in the trees. And these were not the feeble, decorative palms you find in southern Europe, but hardy creatures of the desert, jackhammered by sunshine. Enormous spiky frondes dangled this way and that, like the taloned wings of some prehistoric reptile. But down below, long grass grew, and labourers sat, sorting the orange dates from the brown.

The story of Alexander's visit to Siwa was no conjuring trick to attract tourists. It was simply one of the strangest tales in world history. As the new pharoah of Egypt, he came for one reason: to put questions to the ram-headed god, known to the Greeks as Zeus Ammon. Alexander would never admit to the questions that he asked, nor to the answers that he received. But it was this encounter at Siwa that convinced him of his world-conquering destiny. Later he would even ask to be buried in Siwa. Despite recent claims by a Greek archeologist to have discovered Alexander's tomb here in a Greek doric temple, it seems that Alexander's last wish was ignored.

Donkeys scuttled past in fast motion, pulling creaky carts. Thoughts of world conquest did not seem to be on the agenda today. Siwa still runs on the brawn of donkeys. The smell of their droppings fills the air. Their braying - rather than the noise of traffic, of which there is none - woke me up on each morning of my stay.

The temple of the oracle of Zeus Ammon has never been buried or lost. It is simply there, 20 minutes' walk from the main market-place. It occupies the highest point of the now abandoned hamlet of Aghurmi. I pushed open an ancient wooden door and clambered up the dissolving alleys, beside tottering walls and conical minarets. The temple is the only building of cut stone, as opposed to mud. I entered the back chamber, where Alexander put his questions to the god; the view through the high doors was unbeatable. Over glinting water and an ocean of palm-tree tops, I saw as far as the craggy escarpments and silver dunes lining the edge of the oasis.

What happened to the oracle of Zeus Ammon? It certainly survived into the Christian era. The Greek traveller Pausanias came to Siwa in 160 and found the temple alive and well, with priests still officiating over its rites. But the next time Siwa appears in history - 1,000 years later - it had been thoroughly Islamised.

Today, Siwa is one of the most traditional, Islamic corners of north Africa. It is run by the nine sheikhs of nine tribes. Alcohol is forbidden, even in the secluded Safari Paradise Hotel where tour groups stay. Local women do not show their faces. Tourists are politely asked to cover their arms and legs in public. But when I mentioned to an educated Siwan my concerns about the threat to local customs posed by increasing numbers of tourists I was told in the sweetest way: "But we need tourists. It is our problem, not yours." In fact tourists are received with great kindness.

And despite Islamic strictures, the olive groves and palmeries still rustle to rumours of the old days, when local farm workers,

known as the zaggalah, famously got drunk each night on a liquor called labgi extracted from the crown of the palm tree, and made homosexual love to the sound of music outside the walls of the old town.

"Yes, old Siwa lives on," Mahdi Hweity, who runs the tourist office, told me the next day, "but it is disappearing fast. The old city is falling to bits. Camel caravans stopped coming through around the time that the old city began to be abandoned, in the 1920s. But until 1982 there was no macadamised road and it took 18 hours in a truck convoy from the coast. You slept on the roof of the truck. When you arrived you had two kilos of dust in your clothes."

Talk of change in Siwa sounded ludicrous when I stood in the centre of town amid the few vendors selling aubergines and onions and squawking chickens in cages. I saw backpackers step awkwardly aside as a queue of veiled women was carried past on donkey carts driven by men in jelabbiyas and skull-caps. Behind my head, the abandoned fortress citadel of Shali - a jagged silhouette against the sky - may have been slowly reverting to its original mud, but in the tomb of Sidi Suleiman by the mosque, I found a group of old men on a rug, tapping drums and singing like monks. The Siwan who led me there later asked if I wanted some labgi. Old Siwa has not yet gone.

But tourism and population growth do threaten Siwa with meteoric change in the coming years. On my bus home I met a young Siwan who was studying for a masters degree in agriculture. "My thesis concerns irrigation in Siwa," he explained. "My teachers in Alexandria told me it was a bad idea because there was no information, and it was difficult to research. But I had to do it. They are risking the water supplies of Siwa by introducing chemical fertilisers and causing the fresh wells to be flooded by the salty ones." He did not quite say what I was thinking, that Siwa without fresh water would be worse than a leopard without its spots.

FACT FILE

siwa

Getting there

The arrangements for Jeremy Atiyah's trip were made with the assistance of El-Sawy Travel, 80 Park Rd, London NW1 4SH (tel: 0171-258 1901), which can provide tailor-made tours to any part of Egypt or the Middle East. A sample one-week tour, including the first night in the Ramses Hilton in Cairo, two nights in the Montazah Sheraton in Alexandria and four nights' half-board in the Siwa Safari Paradise (tel: 00 20 46 4602289), plus all internal transfers and return flights, currently costs pounds 796.

If travelling independently, Egypt can be even cheaper. Adequate accommodation in Siwa can be found for pounds 5 a night. The bus from Alexandria to Siwa (twice daily) also costs pounds 5. Flights to Cairo before 13 December or after 1 January cost pounds 186 plus pounds 29.40 tax with Lufthansa; the Christmas period costs about pounds 40 more. Trailfinders (tel: 0121-2361234).

Further information

You can get Egyptian visas on arrival at the airport, though it is more relaxing to get them in advance. Contact the Egyptian Consulate, 2 Lowndes St, London SW1X 9ET (tel: 0891 887 777, calls cost 50p per minute). Egyptian State Tourist Office, 170 Piccadilly London W1V 9DD (tel: 0171-493 5282).

If you were Jerry Hall, would you have Mick Jagger back?

Jeremy Atiyah / Virginia Ironside 

Sunday, 29 November 1998

Jerry and Mick are in trouble again, as one supermodel after another pops up to claim intimacy with the veteran rockstar. Should Jerry sling him out? Must an affair mark the end? No, says Jeremy Atiyah, there are worse things a partner can dump on a relationship. But infidelity is a betrayal of trust, says Virginia Ironside, and that's hard to come back from

Why stake an entire relationship on some narrow definition of fidelity? asks Jeremy Atiyah

When my wife told me she was having an affair, it didn't feel like the end of our world. She told me that I was still the main person in her life and I believed her. What mattered to me was how she felt, not what she had done.

I knew that if the movies were anything to go by, this situation should have developed into an enormous and slightly enjoyable drama. I, the faithful one, should have felt betrayed. I should have demanded my pound of flesh. I should have seized with great relish the opportunity to play the role of the wronged partner. At the very least I should have given my partner some kind of ultimatum: leave home now, or stop seeing that man.

But blow me down, life turned out to be more complex than that. I sat there thinking how unique every infidelity must be, and how useless the movies were. Neither I, nor anybody else in history, had ever been exactly here before. There was no obvious response. Was I really the wronged partner? Perhaps my partner was having an affair because she felt like the wronged partner. I wasn't sure. Neither was she.

In fact I hardly gave separation a thought. I didn't want it and my partner didn't want it. She had a problem with the progress of her life and was expressing it. Perhaps she even deserved credit for this. Who could tell? She had broken the emotional log-jam of our not particularly exciting marriage. Perhaps that was what was needed. For me to enforce a sudden split would have been a ludicrous act of petulance, a totally disproportionate and self-defeating reaction.

We live in experimental, changing times. Who can honestly say that they know exactly where they are going? What is fidelity? Why stake an entire relationship on some uncompromising definition? There are far worse things that people dump on their partners than infidelities. Private neuroses, abuse, blackmail, bullying, manipulation and deceit for example. My partner had given me none of these, nor had she done anything to deserve them.

Who was I suddenly to start laying down the law in such a simplistic, brutal way? I did not want to subject the infinite complexity of our relationship to neanderthal social rules invented by other people. I was certainly confused but so was my partner. I felt that this was her crisis just as much as mine. In fact it was our crisis. The first evening after she had told me about the situation, we sat together with our chins in our hands and tried to think.

What we needed was time, not deadlines. If possible, time together. We needed to find out what it all meant. And by seeing the problem from the same angle, we did come closer together. We spent more time talking more openly than we had for years. She talked about the difficulties of her affair and I listened sympathetically. She deserved it.

I'll be honest. A couple of years later we did split up. Ah! you say: the affair! It must have inflicted irreparable damage, it must have left behind its poison! But I say that affairs are what married people do. Whether or not an affair means infidelity is up to you.

Jeremy Atiyah is

travel editor

of the

`Independent

on Sunday'

Infidelity hurts people, says Virginia Ironside, and it can be hard to forgive such betrayal.

"It was like a glass made of crystal shattering into a thousand pieces," wrote one woman to me when her husband had had an affair. "However hard you tried, you could never put it back together again."

What most couples find most hard to bear, when their partner has an affair, is the breaking of trust. It's not the actual sex they mind so much about; it's the breaking of a commitment to each other. If they're married, they've made their vows in public. Fidelity is one of the promises they've made to each other. Fidelity is usually crucial.

It's the breaking of trust that makes women say to their partners: "If you do ever have an affair, I don't want to know about it." It's as if they're saying, go ahead, sleep with the odd person if you like, but the moment you let me know or I find out, the balloon will go up.

Apart from the lack of trust, anyone who's had a partner who's had an affair will know of the terrible effect it can have on their sexual self- esteem.They question whether they're attractive any more to their partners. They feel like dreadful sexual lumps of nothingness. Their sexuality has been drained by the affair.

But affairs are usually the tip of the iceberg. As marriage counsellors know, they're rarely had out of context. Nearly always they signify that something far deeper is wrong with the relationship than sex. Frequently someone will have an affair when things are going terribly wonky at home - a disastrous way to try to put things right, of course.

Affairs can hurt children too, who may be unwittingly be drawn into the whole grim business. I remember going away on holiday with my mother to France. She made friends with a tall, dark handsome Frenchman and suggested I didn't mention him to my father when we returned, but being only eight, I blurted something out by accident. My father didn't speak to my mother for a week; she didn't speak to me for a day. I felt in some horrible way that it was all my fault.

Then, often, other people will know about the affair when you're left in the dark. "I felt such a fool when I told my best friend about it," wrote one woman. "She said she'd known for years. `But why didn't you tell me?' I said. `We didn't want to hurt you,' she said. But the idea my friends knew and had kept it secret was far worse. I felt so humiliated."

It's been said that an affair can add spice to a partnership. And it's true that if an affair forces a couple to address the issues that are going wrong, they can become closer. But it's terribly rare. Having an affair to gee things up is rather like building a bonfire in your sitting room to generate more heat. True, it'll warm things up. But usually it will burn the house down as well.