No, no, I like it. Really. But oh, why do people have to arrive and let me meet them and let me really really like them and then leave??? 

Bye-bye dear Steve and Perry. It was a blast. Damn you, transitional nature of Hong Kong!

And here I’d been thinking that being caned would be uncomfortable if not downright painful, and quite humiliating at that. No, it turns out that the three women, all caned in a prison outside Kuala Lumpur for having sex without being married, all “praised their punishment as well deserved and an opportunity to repent from their crime” according to Malaysian government linked media.

Phew, that puts a rather different spin on things, what? As a woman, I had up until now felt sorry for and been angry on behalf of the wrapped-up, held-down and put-away women of super-islam; you know, those walking balls of wool with their propensity to fall into man holes because they can’t see, their rickets caused by never getting any sunshine and what I thought would be their dreams of one day being elevated to the rank of second class citizen (up from 45th or something).

No, it turns out they like being treated like that. They welcome it! 

Well, at least Malaysian women do. Others, like this one in Saudi Arabia, are always complaining and making noise. Well, she had it coming. 300 lashes and 18 months imprisonment for appearing in public without a male guardian is nothing more than people like that deserve, if you ask me.

And talk about beer drinking? Don’t get me started. When will these hardened harridans understand that it’s unseemly for women to go outside at all, let alone drink beer in public! This particular caning, unbelievably, could have died a death and never taken place had it not been for the jacking-up of sharia law (about time! Call themselves a muslim country?) in Malaysia, and the successful whacking punishment of the three dirty sex-perpetrator women mentioned earlier.

Bring it on I say. And why stop with Malaysia? I’m sure the women in places like Hong Kong could benefit greatly from a bit of caning, lashing and light imprisonment now and again. Keep them in their place, what?

And they could also take a fashion leaf out of the women pictured above. Although the photo was taken a hundred years ago, it might as well be yesterday! That’s what I call honouring tradition.

Yeah, give me small town China any day. These little towns with their beautiful countryside and surreal and enchanting sights wherever you turn, unsophisticated but easily accessible, beat the shit out of boring old Boracay and tedious Thailand.

We just jumped off the bus as soon as we spotted some scraggy crags, and suddenly we’re in this old village hall where nothing has been touched since probably the 50’s, because there were inscriptions praising Chairman Mao all over the walls.

Some local children took us to their school to go to the toilet, and also made someone open the local shop so we could buy some water.

It was refreshing to see one Chinese school at least completely empty of kids on a Saturday; normally they slave their arses off every day of the week and especially in the school holidays.

Right outside the school gates was a China Drool:

The weather was beautiful, the air fresh, the crags scraggy, the hovelage, needless to say, superb with good incident of Decorative Laundry: yes, what’s not to love? And everywhere we were welcomed by inquisitive locals. These were the only sceptical ones:

but some people just don’t like cameras, do they. Especially when they’re 98 and deaf! Still curious about Whitey though.

And I suppose not every whitey who visits that village puts on pig’s ears and snouts, and proceed to play on the railway line.
(Yes we were shooting a film.)

Guangdong - criminally overlooked! but now you can go into these little tucked-away places without any hassle at all. I’ll deal with all the arrangements and you won’t have to worry about language problems, food misunderstandings, being cheated or, well, anything! Don’t believe what “they” say about China. I’ve been exploring it for 20 years and I can tell you: It’s a constant, never-ending blast. Join my China Tours for some high-grade surrealism, adventure and fun! And the best food. So much better than Hong Kong.

Chomp chomp swallow swallow, gotta finish the whole field, crunch crunch, gotta eat everything, chomp chomp

Poor Lasi running into the void, never to be seen again

Have you always wanted to learn a little bit of Cantonese, just enough to get by, but can’t be arsed to take lessons?

My side-line (blogging being the main one) could be the answer for you! Check it out at www.happyjellyfish.com

We are caring, sharing and baring all of the Canto secrets - for yooooooou!

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Now YOU too can learn Cantonese without really trying …

So “hovelage” is a word meaning “beautiful houses which in some instances have gone a little to seed.” It can also mean “Dickensian.”
Last weekend in Inner Guangdong province I was photographing hovelage and grading it good to excellent, and my friend Ah-On said: “That should totally be a word!” Well my dear young friend, it’s been a word for at least five years.

Good hovelage with river.

Good hovelage with river II. After I had taken this photo, a woman came out on the second floor balcony and threw a bag full of rubbish into the river.

Fine hovelage with motorbike taxi and wanted criminal posters

Superior hovelage with texture

Excellent hovelage. Courtyard (with bags)

Good hovelage with Chinese new year door couplets and fine balcony

Outstanding hovelage. Tenement building

Good example of fine city hovelage, Sei Wui

Superb hovelage. Whole row (including corner)

And here is a collection of village hovelage, including scraggy crags and firecracker debris:

Happy year of the tiger and happy hovelage hunting!

Five days on the mainland feels like all the time in the world, and yet, when the last day rolls terribly around, one realises the holiday was far too short. Again.
This time we went west in Guangdong instead of north, because a weather report we happened to catch while having a foot massage, promised 4 degrees and rain in the north. As opposed to 5 degrees and a light drizzle in the west, presumably.

Yes, it was cold. Bone-rattlingly, spine-curlingly cold. But not “if you look to one side your eyeballs freeze in that position” cold, unlike for example Harbin where a lot of people are inexplicably going this year, paying to look at ice.

My friends had never been to Guangzhou, so we swung around that lovely city to find it completely empty, closed and shut down, apart from some lion dancers doing their stuff the next morning at 8.

What a contrast to Sei Wui（四 會）only two hours away, a town positively hopping with new year joy. Here everything was not only open but more open than usual. And instead of sitting at home watching tv with their families, the geezers of Seiwui were out in force, filling every available party space. We were invited to gatecrash one party in a karaoke room, where we found about seven guys in their late 30’s snorting ketamine through a bent straw.

It was just them by themselves in the room, no whores, even. I suppose they had gone back to their villages for CNY. Small wonder the guys were sucking up the “lao K” like Scarface at Christmas. They weren’t too keen on us taking photos, and we weren’t too keen on being involved in a possible police raid of some sort, so we quickly left, presumably leaving the face of the guy who had invited us in tatters.

Finding the world’s biggest motorbike graveyard the next day further made up for all disappointment some of us may have felt at a gate crashing gone awry.

And anyway, another party with younger, non drug-taking (but drinking) guys quickly made up for our miss, and Seiwui retains its title as “most intense party town in Southern China, possibly the whole country.” Just go there and see for yourself.
Oh and you must stay in “Filmcenter Hotel,” built only a few months ago but already looking like an early 80’s hotel. It proves the strange rule I’ve seen time and time again: In China, three star hotels vastly out-perform those of four.

Take the marvellous town of Wan Fau (雲浮）for example. We arrived there shivering and on the brink of death after having spent the night in a four star hotel in the nondescript town Lo Deng (羅定）- a hotel so far up its arse that the heating wasn’t working AND I couldn’t close my window properly AND the floors didn’t have carpets, only shiny white morgue-like tiles. There were no extra blankets or duvets and the teacups had no lids because they were so fancy and “European.” (The place was called Hollybay. Say no more.) For this we paid almost 500 yuan, 300 more than the well-equipped, heated, perfectly working three star hotel in Wan Fau, across the road from the bus station and two minutes’ walk from a lake and some Guilin-like scraggy crags!

It’s Wan Fau forever for me now. That town has everything. Next to the hotel: A good restaurant. Next to the restaurant: A great bar.
And the hovelage! Oh, the hovelage. I love a good hovelage, me. Actually the houses in Wan Fau aren’t even hovels, just traditional houses.

Another victorious trip!
But should have chosen the slightly bigger bag. One that could hold a down jacket and a very thick woollen jumper.

Now I know where the HK government takes it from. Naw, of course I’ve known for ages. Before the handover in 1997 - god what a long time ago - people were saying that China would become more Hong Kong-ified. That by being near us and having greater openness between the two entities, China would follow our lead because we are, well, just better, more advanced etc. Pretty much in the same way that Europeans think that muslims, once they’ve settled in Europe and learnt the language of wherever they are, they will become integrated.

Well, that didn’t happen, in the same way as China never became Hong Kong-ified. (all right, so they’ve picked up the Canto words Dek-si (taxi) and Basi (bus) but that’s about it. No, the truth is of course that Hong Kong is becoming more and more China-ified. The railings, the “take ceah,” the increasing micro-management of all we do and say, walk and sit, it’s all classic communist intrusionism.

And most of all, the influence of mainland thinking manifests itself in the incessant drive to improve everything that doesn’t need improvement. Metal railings along forest paths, fences and tacky flowers around trees, widening and concreting of footpaths, railings along flat, completely non-dangerous roads; the list cloppety-clops drearily on. It’s mainland thinking. Make no mistake - our government officials, the few who weren’t actually born on the mainland, now want to be more communist than the communists, falling over themselves to out-commie each other.

The formerly wonderful bamboo forest in Guangying, west Guangdong, is a case in point.
I’d heard so much about this wondrous forest and had tried to go there for ages. One year ago I succeeded, and it was indeed a beautiful thing to behold; mile after mile of bamboo, the most elegant and most evocative of trees - and to think that it’s just a type of grass!

However, when I got there that day, it was almost six o’clock, and the park was about to close. I just got to walk along the river, mirroring an endless sea of bamboo, for half an hour or so, marvelling at how many shades of green with a light coating of luminous white powder just one bamboo can hold.

Last weekend I went back with two friends to get a good look at it, and semi-gladly paid the now 100 yuan to get in - I would finally see the bamboo forest!

Alas, the mainland official thinking-people had got there before me. The bamboo forest had now been improved.
Not only had the formerly wide and shiny river now been reclaimed to make way for a fake sandy beach festooned with weird balloons and with sand motorbikes sitting there at the ready to welcome the thousands of people who can’t be content with just walking along a river looking at bamboo and enjoying the peace, no, most of the bamboo trees were gone to make way for Thai-style bungalows, children’s playgrounds and wide foothpaths decorated with awful flowers. And to improve the bamboo experience further, all the footpaths were about to be covered in red carpets.

The bamboo forest had, in short, become a Disneyland-like hellhole with a few scattered bamboo, which only seemed to be there to accommodate the speakers blearing out Kenny G-like muzak. All in the name of “improvement.”
I have to say fortunately though, there was nobody there. Nobody was using the motorbikes and all the other stuff put up to entertain people.

When we left the place after an over-priced meal in an empty restaurant, we were picked up and driven to the bus station by some locals, who said: “Bamboo forest? Bah humbug, who’d want to go to that place? It’s just for gullible tour groups. If we want to look at bamboo, we can just look out the window. There’s no bamboo left in the bamboo forest.”

And that sums up rather depressingly how mainland thinking is now dominating Hong Kong, which is: How to take a perfectly good, nay, marvellous thing, and ruin it, in the name of improvement. Why? Because we can.

Aren’t they wonderful? This is the kind of vista I behold every morning. People ask me how I can live in such an “inconvenient” place - 40 minutes’ travel from Central. This is how.