Malaysia

I'm in Kuala Lumpor, in - of all things - an irish pub. This is a typical Irish pub, very like home, with hostess girls lorrying whiskey into, and flirting with, rich Chinese businessmen, a dj with a strange obsession with Diana Ross, and as many tv screens over the bar as can possibly fit. On three tvs there are premiership repeats. On one, however, there is a music video channel. It's so bad, even without the sound, it makes me pine for the days of Brittany and Boyzone. 

The video i am most intrigued by is one in which a short, floppy haired kid who thinks he's black is trying to woo a taller, skinny brunette by generally just being cool. The irony - ahem - in the video is that she turns out to be so much cooler than him, but in the end she decides to give him a chance anyway. Sounds all too much like a Bollywood movie. The floppy haired kid has a posse of race- and stereotype-appropriate kids who are also trying to look cool in the background, they try to woo the skinny brunette's equally culturally diverse chick posse (or chosse). There is the asian kid who is, naturally, slightly overweight. He directs his attention at the asian girl, who has a smile that says if this is what i have to do to make money legally in this town, once i turn 18, porn it is. There is the black kid, a ringer for a 15 year old Obama, his direction has been to whiten it up a little, presumably to not take away from the blackness of the pasty white floppy haired kid who is doing his best Will Smith impression in the foreground. He's dressed like a Jonas brother, so it probably comes as no surprise that the black girl, channelling Beyonce, eyes him with utter contempt. For taste's sake, i won't go near the latino kid.

And of course… the main attraction. He flopsies his way to getting his ass kicked at bowling and then pool, and then maybe even skateboarding, by the brunette. The chosse love this, particularly the cheerleader one, who knows this isn't how music videos are supposed to work, but that her time is coming. This is probably a valuable life lesson for the hero and one which will - if he truly wants to be pretend to be black - result in his next video having only blondes. These, convention tells us, will not attempt to engage him in anything which might show up his lack of coolness, rather they will simply dance around him while he sings about someone who isn't there while dry-humping the ones that are. After getting his ass kicked, he tries to appear humble, but effects only sulky, and this, apparently, softens the hitherto implacable brunette into deciding to give in. I can't help but wonder whether while he was getting pasted in pool (in the brightest, shiniest pool hall i've ever seen) he didn't slip something into her product-placed soft drink. In my version she is disappointed to find out that he is not only a douche, but he's gay as well (something she might have been able to tell earlier) and she impales him on the pool cue.

The humidity here is murderous.

Shantaram: a summary

I broke out of prison in Melbourne and somehow scrounged my way to India with a lot of money and a filched New Zealand passport. I can't do the accent. I'm wonderful. I think India is wonderful, so therefore India must be wonderful. I'm even more wonderful because i went and learned all the languages of the people of India. The people are wonderful. They are poor but they are happy. Maybe they are happy because they poor. Except the rich ones. But they are happy as well. Probably because they are rich.

I have a series of wacky adventures in Bombay, mostly in or around a slum i've chosen to live in for a while. Previous life experience in first aid, martial arts and poetry allow me to bring my own brand of wonderfulness to each situation. I also hang around sometimes with a gang of foreigners and snooty locals at a name-drop bar where we get drunk and i make up conversations about philosophy to make them sound as interesting as i am. I'm getting paid by the page.

I introduce a large number of supporting characters, almost all of whom are men, and all of whom i will either do illegal business with, beat up, or come to love, generally after some incident involving a gun, a knife, a drug addiction or a kidney-meltingly dull discussion about good and evil. All this talk of loving men might make you think i'm gay, but i'm not, and i emphasise this by spending the first half of the book wearing down this Swiss chick who eventually agrees to shag me. I spend the second half of the book trying to get her to shag me again. She turns out to be have been treacherous from the start, but that's about all you can expect form the Swiss. Most of the supporting characters die. A couple come back from the dead. Some even survive the book, due in no small part to not having had to read it.

I am mostly renowned for setting up a dodgy health clinic in the slum, where i stopped a fire and cured cholera. In reality i spent more time beating people up and making shed loads of money for a mafia boss. He then went a bit doolally and took us all to jihad with the Afghans, fighting a lifelong battle against their sworn enemies, the Afghans. Like Catherine the Great however, horses brought about his end, but it's okay, because he betrayed me like the father he never was, and i'm still wonderful because i forgave him. I made it back to Bombay to continue making shed loads of cash for somebody else who isn't likely to try to recruit me into a private militia on hire to whichever Islamist group feels the gubment isn't representing them properly and the best way to show them is to shoot - rather than vote - them out. Inexplicably, i then agree to go on a jihad to Sri Lanka. Shooting people in Afghanistan, or indeed anywhere, is fine as long as you are on the side bankrolled by the Americans.

Along the way i pontificate incessantly about What Is Love, to the point where readers will wish they never ever find out. Bombay is very smelly, heroin is great when you are on it, and not so great when you aren't, Pakistan is resolutely no fun, and muslims drink a lot of chai.

Espiritu Santo

The plane overflies the airport and effects a kamikaze descent by spiralling down twice. Kudos to the younger members of the Brisbane Youth God-Botherers Club, inevitably clarinet players, for declaring this their 2nd flight ever (their first was to Vila) but not overreacting to the uprushing coconut trees. The screams of the locals worried me a little more however. These trees come up to what i guess initially is the fence line of the airport. When we land i see that there is no fence line, just a line where the trees end. The "International Airport" is what Knock would have been had Horan had his epiphany in the '50s, and Mayo had a tropical climate.

The cabin crew take my bag from the plane, walk it over to the terminal and hand it to me. I get fleeced by the taxi driver, although this is the first time on this trip, so i don't really care. They have the advantage of me because there is a fact sheet of taxi prices to common places just outside the door, but my destination isn't on it. Putting the seat-belt on is a reflex action, but the driver points and laughs, and then shouts to his buddies as we leave the airport and they all laugh too. He shakes his head and chuckles away to himself in what might be a sign that the kava bars open too early here. The first thing i notice as we drive into town to get petrol - the driver doesn't have enough to take me where i need to go, which softens my reaction to the fleecing somewhat more - is the spiders. Hanging in midair, webs spun together, there are hundreds of them. They weigh down the power lines and the tree branches. I get a flashback to an old Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movie where giant spiders do something interesting like kidnap his son, or make a pass at Jane with a grammatically sound and well thought out line of conversation that immediately pits them them at odds with the hero.

On the road north there are crabs scuttling across the road. Often they freeze and raise their claws in challenge before dancing left and right and then haring back where they started the road cross. I can't figure out if the driver is lining them up as we go, but we account for more than i might ordinarily be karmically comfortable with. He doesn't seem to mind. He looks like Danny Glover with grey hair, but a couple of days later i realise that all old men in Santo look like Danny Glover with grey hair. And most of them drive taxis. And they all know each other. In a bizarre reflection of true West of Ireland traditions more than half a world away, they acknowledge each other based on nothing discernible. This truck gets two fingers and a head nod. These three taxis get a raised index finger. This other taxi gets a slow down and some mutually shouted abuse before some maniacal laughter. It almost feels like home, and i think i am going to like it.

And then there's the diving still to come...