road warrior

January 26, 2007 - Iran

AFTER leaving Iran for the glitz of Dubai and Europe beyond, I get an email from an outraged reader - let's call him Peeved of Perth - who seems to regard my earlier musings from Tehran as shallow.

Peeved describes me a 'white boy in the big smoke,' asking my editor "has he ever travelled outside of the West before?." And that was the nice part. (The answer to the second question is yes. I first left Australia for Asia in 1985 and have spent 15 of the 22 years since in the region, Australia's backyard, and the other six in the US (three), Europe (three) and Australia the remaining one. From rural Victoria, I have lived out of Australia permanently since 1990.)

Peeved correctly sees Iran as "central to the critical issue of our times." He's right of course and, in his crankiness, he has a point about shallowness. Peeved wants to know more, go into the topic deeper and me and my colleague correspondents specialising in Asia, well naturally we'd like to oblige him.

But I'm minded here that correspondents often lament they write 10% of what they know. Asia can be a tough sell to Australian/Western editors. We writers insist it sells magazines but when we become editors we curiously don't. We could sit down with the Peeveds Of Perths and perhaps bore them silly with the complex recipe of the Sri Lankan civil war alphabet soup, the relationship, say, of the Karuna Group to the GOSL, of the JVP to the LTTE et al, the Nepali peace process, why the coup-loving Thai King is S-E Asia’s most powerful political figure.

Or on his pet subject, Iran, I could publish the entire two hour interview I did in Tehran with Ebrahim Yazdi, Khomeini's foreign minister who split with him over the 1979 US embassy crisis, or discuss the religious dynamic and contradictions between Qom and Tehran, or Iran's linear (as distinct from the usual pyramidical) power structure. He might find it as fascinating as I did but perhaps not the other readers, who'd rather read about Paris Hilton, and not why the Tehran Hilton her family once owned is no longer called that.

Australia has some of the world's most learned scholars on Asia - understandable given the closeness of access – and people like Peeved of Perth who know their stuff. But then some of the world's dopiest people on Asia live in Australia as well - I'm thinking the Corby fiasco here, the supposed threats from Indonesia, the yellow peril hysteria of the past – and they are voters to be manipulated, and readers to be informed and entertained, not necessarily in that order.

Writing about Indonesia once, an editor once told me to limit the number of "complicated names" (that would be those of normal Indonesians) in the copy. And I still shake my head at old Georgie who had flown to Bali from Schapalia to give the stricken Gold Coast druggie moral support in court only to complain he couldn't hear what was going on because of a Hindu ceremony outside or, as he put it, "the bloody Mewslims going off." In the 1990's, an editor at Time in Hong Kong had no idea what Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir Mohamed's "Asian Values" were - he initially thought the story was going to be about comparing Singapore and Hong Kong camera prices. My wife, formerly a correspondent with the famously self-important Wall Street Journal, once wrote about the World Bank only to be told by an editor in New York that she should've included its recent share price performance in the copy. Writing about the "Korean stockmarket" once, she was asked by an editor if she meant North or South Korea.

With such ocean-going ignorance, is it any wonder our leaders drag our fighting men and women off to war to places like Iraq - and perhaps soon Iran - safe in the belief that the wider populace would be none the wiser about who's fighting who and why, with no clear understanding of who precisely “the enemy” is? Do George W Bush and John Howard know the difference between Arabs and the Persians of Iran, a Sunni and a Shia? That Saddam was a secular dictator and had no truck with Osama's extremism? Peeved of Perth clearly does but the latest Lonely Planet coffee table book, supposedly a bible of travel, doesn't. It describes Iranians as Arabs. Some in Iran's desert south are ethnically, but the majority of Iranians are not.

This is not trivial, at least not to Iranians and every time the West insults Iran, Iranians feel it deeply and Tehran's nationalist mullahs exploit it. It only takes a map and a limited grasp of history to see that Iran and the West share significant foreign policy objectives and should be talking instead of trading insults. The West got rid of Iran's two greatest neighbour enemies - Afghanistan's Taleban on its east and Saddam west - and then left a vacuum in both places for the mullahs to exploit. Israel? Most Iranians couldnt care less, but they will if Tel Aviv bombs the place looking for a well-hidden nuclear program. There's very little appetite in Iran for Islamism but there's limitless taste among its ruling clergy to turn Bush/Howard's bellicosity into a cultural attack on Iranians.

Reading Peeved of Perth’s mail, the nasty tone of which he later graciously apologises for, I'm minded of the spectacle one witnesses when Iranian women travel, those few who are allowed to. Threatened by beatings if their head is not covered, the moment they step on an Emirates jet heading out of the place, they remove their hijabs. If they are travelling state-owned Iran Air, its the moment they step out of the plane at their destination.

Peeved and friends want to know more and my colleagues and I would like to tell them. I'd like to describe - even name - the Tehran families I met with whom I drank pure alcohol they'd bought from vets (ethanol makes a great margarita base), describe the suburban opium smoking - a millenia-old tradition amongst the middle-class - and how we watched the 300-plus non-propaganda TV channels piped in by their illegal satellites on their roofs. But to do so would be to jeopardise those people's lives, good normal folk making their way as best they can in a Islamist police state and trying to keep out of prison simply because they dont subscribe to the Qom mullahs' extreme Shiism, or because they are Jewish (20,000-odd in Iran) or, worse still in the mullahs' view, Bahai, or can't afford to leave their birthland, all 5000 years of it, 4000-odd of it pre-dating Islam. Were Peeved of Perth an Iranian and have written that mail to the Tehran Times, he’d likely be Peeved in Prison, or worse.

I'm sad and glad to be leaving this mostly wonderful country. I'm glad that I can.

Mullahs Don't Ski

AFTER two weeks in Iran, and contrary to widely-held stereotypes propogated by the White House and friends, its refreshing to find that Iranians 1) have neither horns nor cloven hooves, 2) are anything but hostile to the West, (save their theocratic government, and of even that I'm not convinced) 3) aren't particularly religious (the atmosphere here is much less heavier, Islamically, than say Afghanistan, Pakistan and even Indonesia) and 4) are avid skiiers.

So exhausted after too many days in struggle sessions with the state for interviews in a system that's anything but foreign media-friendly, I retreat with friends for a ski at Abali, about 50km east of Tehran high in the Alborz Mountains. Skiing was huge in pre-revolutionary Shah times and Abali was Iran's original resort. Pahlavi built a casino just down the road that became the centre of Iran's beau monde, until it was shut down by Khomeini's mullahs after 1979.

Abali has seen better days, and this is no St Moritz or Aspen. No groomed runs, or helpful mountain maps here. Apres-ski seems a rather rudimentary hut, with a samovar for tea bubbling away in the snow. A phalanx of beards pounce on me as I get out of the car, leading me to a snowy bench where I select a pair of boots that were old in the 70's. I'm fitted into similarly aged skis, handed poles and pushed off toward the lift, a decrepit poma t-bar, one of just two operating here by smoking diesel generators. A main-chancer in a modern smart suit buttonholes me at the lift, offering lessons for $10 an hour he insists to me, presumed the gullible foreigner, are state-compulsory (they aren't). Its cold and blizzardy and the rawness of the conditions remind me - ski-schooled at Canada's immaculate Whistler - just how spoilt we Western skiers are. And ripped off too; my gear costs $5 to rent, the lift tickets another $4, about 1/20th what it would cost elsewhere.

Etiquette on the slopes leaves something to be desired. Skier and boarders dont mind jumping the queue, or simply skiing back to the t-bar despatch in front of the queue. There's not too many female skiiers - its got to be tough schussing down the slopes in a chador - winter sports not regarded by the clergy in Qom, Iran's religious capital, as an appropriate undertaking for half Iran's 72 million population. Still, there are familiar themes. Punked-up snowboarders with attitude; the haughty fanatic carefully carving edges; the charming 40-something who has "skied around the world" and doesnt mind telling you in the lift line. His designer stubble is familiar but in Islamist-run Iran that's nothing special.

The blizzard worsens and the old men in beards close down the mountain. A dozen or so of us retreat to the old hut where we are plied with hot tea and sugar cubes under portraits of Ayatollahs Khameini and Khomeini. Curious fellow skier Mohamed cant speak English but he does French - he studied at Paris' Sorbonne - and I attempt a conversation where I think he's asking me how 'les indigenes de l'Australie' are treated by "les blancs", again not a conversation one might have on the pleased-with-themselves yuppified ski-slopes of Europe and North America. I struggle to respond, offering diplomatically in bad French "les conditiones et la histoire pour les Aborgines sont difficile pas mieux que avant" though the mourners of Palm Island might disagree that conditions are better now than before.

A day's drive further east along the Caspian shore toward Afghanistan I meet Louise Firouz (nee Laylin) on her farm near Iran's border with Turkmenistan. A native of Great Falls, Virginia, Louise she married an Iranian prince in 1957 she'd met at Cornell and went to live in Iran, where she's lived ever since. Now a hale 73 and a widow since the mid-90's, she has experienced the full drama of what it is to be an American woman in Iran; the Shah's court, the 1979 revolution, the 1980 US embassy seige, property dramas and raising three successful children, one of them a war photographer for Reuters and his two sisters wives of foreign ambassadors. Raised on a Virginia farm, Louise's great passion is horses and she has re-discovered and re-constituted the great Caspian and Turkomen horse breeds of the area, regarded by many zoologists as the true ancestors of the modern thoroughbred.

Louise rears them on a 14ha farm, operating summer horseback treks for foreign tourists. Her farmhouse is cosy - its a bracing -5 out here on the steppe and I spend three days absorbing her remarkable life. We sit down for chats at 5pm. Suddenly its midnight and I haven't noticed the hours whizz by. She is a remarkable woman.

It's difficult enough getting into the secretive theocracy that is Iran, but once inside, you enter a world locked in the past and riddled with corruption and cronyism

My luggage returned by Emirates (see Lost in Translation below) - with an apologetic upgrade for next time I travel with them (thank you, but much better not to lose luggage in the first place) - I plunge into Iran.

Utterly fascinating, this theocracy can be a particularly frustrating and complex country for foreigners to operate in, particularly journalists, whom the system sees as spies.

Visas take months to be granted and, once arrived, one is assigned a minder from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, for which you pay upwards of $US200 ($255) a day to "foreign agencies" controlled by cronies of officials from Iran's intelligence service, who also have pull at the foreign ministry to stop visa applications.

One such agency is Ivansahar, which wanted $1500 from me for the privilege of them "hosting" me in Iran for a week. Claiming impeccable contacts, they are supposed to set up meetings and insist that nothing is off limits for inquiring hacks. The reality is very different. Last time I was here, I heard from Ivansahar just twice - once on arrival to guide me to the guidance ministry and second as I was on my way to the airport seeking their $1500 for meetings that I set up myself. Corruption and cronyism is rampant in Iran and at agencies like Ivansahar there's also just plain incompetence, all of it dispensed with the charm of old Persia. I'm trying to avoid Ivansahar and its clone but no doubt they'll catch up as I'm leaving.

To a child of the 70s, Tehran can feel very retro. While sophisticated and rich North Tehran tilts strongly to Europe, particularly France, the poorer south of the city is a chaotic urban sprawl and very little of it has changed, cosmetically, since Shah days. Khomeini had urged Iranians to breed wildly and make permanent the Shia revolution with sheer numbers. Problem was there was no meaningful response from his government and civil service. A population near doubled since 1979 struggles to get around on 30-year-plus infrastructure. Old pre-revolutionary Hillman Hunter knock-offs called Paykans cram permanently clogged streets. As enlightened technocrats, the Ayatollah's revolutionaries make great clergymen.

Apart from name-calling between Iran's Great Satan taunt at the United States and Washington's return-fire Axis of Evil (which has the annoying impact of stopping the use of credit cards anywhere), Iran's essential internal conflict seems to be cultural, between those who proudly hail Persia's 5000 years of secular civilisation, versus the Islamists, who are winning, at least for the time being. Little wonder so many Iranians fled to the US, Canada and Europe where they are among their adopted nations' most successful immigrants. Apart from what the politically weak President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have us believe Iranians want, no-one I've spoken to wants to "wipe Israel off the map" or has politically invested much at all in the Palestine issue, regarded here as a rather boring Arab preoccupation.

I moved from the miserable Iranshahr Hotel - fleeing a succession of guests who upon seeing a foreigner tell me their sob stories and implore me to help them leave - to the Azadi Grand Hotel. Azadi means freedom but pre-revolutionary visitors would recognise the hotel as the Tehran Hyatt, one of the four international hotels - along with the Hilton, Sheraton and Intercontinental - seized by the mullahs and their Revolutionary Guard. Billions of dollars worth of assets have been quasi-nationalised into bonyads, or "Islamic foundations" that were designed to help the needy but have been a goldmine for the powerful, which in Iran means the pious, or those close to the pious. Former and perhaps future president Hashemi Rafsanjani is one of the few Iranian billionaires and he didn't get that way from his official salary.

After four days at the $US150-a-day Azadi, "retro" is a nice way of saying there seems to have barely been a cent spent on it since "Enqelab", as Iranians call Khomeini's revolution. Very little works properly, from TV to Internet to hot water to the lifts. The unsmiling staff seem much put upon, and simply lazy. After five phoned requests to get my laundry returned, I simply went down to the laundry to retrieve it. Naturally, it wasn't done. Much of the coffee shop food is near inedible, even though this is regarded as Tehran's best hotel. The health club is off-limits to female guests for five days a week.

Satellite TV brings the BBC into the room but when something isn't to taste, the mullahs simply cut or delay the sound. The catch-up can be funny. The BBC had run an ad for Singapore Airlines' "luxury first class" but by the time the sound caught up on my room's TV, the ad's voice-over came during vision of a news item showing someone being air-winched to safety during a storm somewhere, with near perfect timing.

Still, the Azadi's pretty full. As a designated official hotel, its crammed with visiting Bahraini and Tunisian officials on a cultural and commercial exchange (read junket). Grappling over the hotels' failing net connections ($US5 an hour for 32kps access), I fell into conversation with three young Tunisians, all very sophisticated, well-travelled and immaculately dressed in Armani. One of them tells me that oil is the Middle East's curse and Washington's addiction to it is why the region's US-manipulated autocrats won't democratise. He hands me his business card - he's a director of BP's operation in Tunis. Go figure.

The oil man says he wanted to emigrate to Australia - which he once regarded as a "democratic paradise" - until he saw footage of the 2005 Cronulla riots "and the brutal way John Howard attacked the Arabs on that beach". Clearly, it's not just George Bush who has some PR spadework to do in the Middle East.

Cold, lonely, annoyed, uninformed and without toiletries in the heart of the Axis of Evil

Like so many of us on the move these days, I'm a walking office, with every essential gadget and cable seemingly ever made packed carefully into a Tumi wheelie-bag that weighs 15kg that's in a perpetual cat-and-mouse game with airlines who won't let hand luggage weighing more than 7kg into the cabin. Fair enough, we argue at check-in, but we ain't going to trust that irreplaceable (and unbacked-up) gizmo to the luggage hold because Murphy's Law rules that the airlines will lose it. And today, en route to Tehran, I was right to insist that when I got on Emirates Flight 349 at Singapore my important stuff never leaves my sight.

After three flights and 24 hours on the move, I write this in the very average Hotel Iranshahr in downtown Tehran, where I've come to see how Iranians are preparing themselves for the presumed Part Two of Washington-Canberra's War on their real or imagined Axis of Evil. This sprawling metropolis of 15 million is a bracing -3 degrees, the glorious Alborz Mountains that frame the city a massive ridge of white snow against electric blue skies and I'm standing in the smellier-by-the-minute gear I've travelled in because Emirates naturally lost my main luggage in transit somewhere between Singapore, Colombo, Dubai and Tehran, despite the Somali check-in clerk at the Dubai gate insisting that my bag was on board for the last two-hour hop north.

So I'm not a happy camper. I've got my 15kg of technology but no clothes or toiletries. Emirates tells me my luggage has been traced and is arriving on the next flight at 3am - but I'm wary. They've lied before and my experience with the gorillas doubling as ground staff at Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport doesn't fill me with confidence. Unlike much of Australia, I'm convinced Schapelle knew her bag had 4kg of dope in it but, still, I can't help thinking that my bag and belongings have been souvenired in a style that would satisfy Corby conspiracy-theorists.

In fact, life's pretty crook all round. My expensive internet phone decided not to roam and the hotel's dial-up net connection struggles to connect between 2.4kps and 32kps. No warp-speed broadband here. Not that getting online matters much here. Most of the sites I want to visit - the world news pages - have been blocked by Separ, the mullahs' net nanny. And Australian ones aren't immune. You can access The Bulletin and the ABC sites here but not the SMH or Age, or The Australian, or the NYT. Separ also seems to have blocked the proxy servers I use to get around censorship. They're good, and Iranians are poorer for it.

Lonely, cold, cranky and uninformed, I step out onto Tehran's mid-winter streets. Khomeini's revolution was a peasant triumph so its unsurprising that the capital feels Sovietesque, even Stasi-esque, in its authoritarian chill. Burly men in greatcoats loiter on street corners. Cars park furtively near hotels, their sole occupants betrayed by the red cigarette end illuminating the dark. A massive portrait of the unsmiling ayatollah stares down from the side of a building, 18 years after his death still ruling from the grave. At the Iranshahr, the desk staff won't give me my passport back until I check out, citing police checks.

Hungry and jet-lagged, I find a cheerful kebab house near the hotel where George W. Bush drones away on a crackling TV announcing more troops for the war next door in Iraq. The bearded cook snorts at the US president and, immersed in grease, asks me, "what country you?"

"Australia," I tell him, and he breaks out in a massive smile. "Harry Kewell very good player World Cup Italy no penalty!" This place can't be all bad. His spicy kebab's good too. I hope Emirates have got my bag back.

Life's easy in Singapore, but that doesn't make it interesting or efficient. By Eric Ellis

The Road Warrior has been operating out of Singapore for a few years now, so he's had a good chance to view things up close. Admittedly, I was only here 63 days last year and only about 30 so far this year, but I think I have a reasonable idea of how stuff works, modern daily stuff like getting online, getting things done, dealing with the infrastructure, the people.

And Singapore, of course, is the place that many Australians like to cite as the epitome of efficiency, where they point to when that same basic modern stuff in Oz doesn't work.

I've heard it time and again. Ultra-efficient Singapore is a paragon of this and that, many Australians - who blow through here for a few days - think. Qantas horrible? Why can't it be like Singapore Airlines? Fed up with crime? Do what Singapore does and cane people. Drugs plaguing your neighbourhood? Be like Singapore and execute suspected druggies, no questions asked, no reasons why, or why not. Bearded chap next door paying a little too much attention to the Koran for your taste? Lock him away without trial. Your broadband slow? Be like Singapore, because of course it's always fast on the 'Wired Island.' It must be, because your imagination says it is.

Well, here's some news. Stuff doesn't work in Singapore too. After a few days in Oz last week, I'd say at many levels, comparative infrastructure is worse than Australia. And remember that Singapore is a city of barely five million (compliant) people, spread over an area about the size of your bathroom - ok, maybe Adelaide.

Singapore has never known a democracy like Australia. It's basically been a one-party state since the 1950s so it might've had some practice at getting things right without the interference of dissenters, an opposition, and over-bureaucratic committees. So stuff shouldn't break down, but it does.

I've been battling all week with my state-provided broadband. It's as slow as a wet week, and has always been slow.

Telstra's much-maligned broadband at my mate's place in Sydney last week seemed like a Ferrari compared to the FJ of Singapore's Starhub. I've called up Starhub's customer service for the umpteenth time and the robots there blame me and my (new) computer. It's almost impossible to get someone to come out and take a look to fix it. So, I've taken to using the wireless signal from my neighbour, slower still. Apparently someone went to jail here for doing that recently.

None of this gets aired in the media. Official Singapore is contemptuous of the media, because it controls it. I've never seen anything other than praise heaped upon Singapore's broadband platforms, even though they ban access to many websites. Of course, I'm sure the fact that the two main corporate providers of it are companies run by the wife of the prime minister and, until he recently stepped down, his brother, has nothing to do with it.

My electricity trips but does my landlord care? The state grid? They know there is no meaningful trade practices legislation in Singapore, a toothless consumer association and no meaningful advertising standards body. And as for those comely stewardesses on SQ, Singapore doesn't have legislation that prohibits 'looks-ist' or 'ageist' hiring policies that helps keep ageing Qantas gals in their gigs. The leader of Singapore functions a bit like the mayor of a medium-sized well-behaved town - Mt Thomas with no need for blue heelers. Singapore's PM can get very mundane in his national day speech.

Running LA, or Sydney or London, is a much more challenging job than running Singapore. It doesn't have a complex program of multi-culturalism like Australia, or deal with more than 500 ethnicities. It doesn't have to deal with say, the issues of a Serb immigrant moving into a neighbourhood where there are Croats or Albanians. Or of a huge community of Somalis moving into Colac, near where I grew up and, knowing the pubs of my youth around there and those who patronise them (and who drive cars fashioned with bumper stickers showing an Australia crossed out Ghostbusters-style and saying 'Fuck Off, We're Full!'), it worries me a little for the sake of the darker-skinned 'new' Australians, whose fairer-skinned compatriots clutching pots of VB wouldn't know Mogadishu from Mogadon.

In Melbourne, there's a big community from Afghanistan gathered around Dandenong. The average Aussie knows them as 'Afghans' and many - those who'd vote for Pauline Hanson (I see she was at it again slagging 'diseased' foreigners again this week) - would like them all to go back where they came from. But what those Hansonites don't get is that those Afghans divide into myriad ethnicities and clans and back home in Afghanistan they don't much like each other.

While in Oz last week, I noticed the Herald-Sun and The Daily Telegraph getting all hot and sweaty about 'terrorist Tamils' in our midst, as if they'd just graduated from Osama bin Laden Finishing School. Little matter that these so-called 'Tamil Tigers' and indeed their enemy-compatriots on the Sinhalese side would likely be highly qualified physicians on seven-figure incomes. Sometimes people bring their arguments to Australia. That's no good if things get nasty as they very occasionally do at soccer matches but it happens. And Australia, being a democracy, allows it to happen. Violence aside, I think it makes Australia, and other emerging democracies like Indonesia, more interesting.

None of this happens in Singapore. That it doesn't happen makes Singapore easier - and duller. It should make it more efficient than it supposedly is, that it often virulently says it is.

Politics is basically banned as a subject of discussion, which is perhaps why so many Singaporeans talk about food, the default acceptable conversation. I remember once interviewing a senior politician here, a bright and capable man who wasn't part of the ruling family so he knows he'll never be PM, Singaporeans not being inclined to revolt, except over a freebie. His minders had told me he's very busy and only had 30 minutes to spare. I bustled through my questions and made to leave after half-an-hour. But he kept going and we ended up having a robust, fascinating debate that went for 2-3 hours. He told me he rarely gets to have this sort of discussion. What he was effectively saying was that his office was a compliant sea of 'yes' men who did his job for him, when what he really wanted was some intellectual gymnastics because that would throw up ideas, make things better.

He could start by making my broadband function with the 100mbps it advertises itself.

Missing emails and strange voices make life in Singapore a bit weird sometimes

The Internet has been generally working but some messages I'm sending are taking two or three days to get through, instead of the standard seconds. Others simply haven't arrived, or haven't been received at my end. And I've been hearing funny noises on my phone. Clicking sounds, sometimes people talking. I've had a few calls ringing in but there's no-one on the other end. And my two computers have both been running very slow when accessing the net. I had a colleague officially visiting and she also had some issues with mail.

What's especially puzzling is that I can access pretty much any website I like - except the many that are banned - but I can't get to my own, nor to my webmail. But people outside Singapore can, including the company that hosts my communications in the US, but it ain't showing up here through the government-owned service provider. So it's all a bit weird and, yes, even suspicious. And it's been happening all week, and only in Singapore. I've been dealing with some locally-sensitive topics, this week. Is it a coincidence that my communications technology is suddenly playing up?

If I lived in Australia, I probably wouldn't give it two thoughts. I'd call my provider, give someone a serve, feel placated and hopefully it will be sorted soon enough.

But I'm in Singapore, which is a bit like being on the set of the Truman Show. Nothing much happens here that someone in authority doesn't know about. Everywhere. There are more closed-circuit cameras than Kevin Rudd's had policy backflips. One of my favourite ads in Singapore is for its military. There's lots of imagery of dynamic soldiers soldiering. There's sailors on a submarine. There's dramatic music, suggesting battle. Up goes a periscope, and the crosshairs alight on a little boy playing with his family by the side of the water. The voice-over is all about protection but the message it sends is that Singaporeans are being spied on by their government.

Singapore authorities reckon they don't spy on their citizens and residents. That would be a bad look for a government that tries to project an image that it's a democracy, and not a nanny, a big brother, not just to locals but to much-prized foreign investors who help provide jobs for locals, and make Singaporeans some of the wealthiest people in Asia. But try telling that to sceptical friends and colleagues outside the city-state who often ask if my communications are being tapped. They know that Singapore is hardly a temple of human rights, and free speech. This issue came up in Australia a few years back when the Singapore government telco bought Optus, which carried sensitive defence traffic. People who knew Singapore were worried about the deal.

My answer is pretty standard - "probably". That's not just my view but that of very senior and experienced editors, who say we should operate to expect so. My wife is also a foreign correspondent so, if I were the spooks, I'd see our household a cost saving - they get to monitor two for the price of one. Then I tell friends and colleagues that if they were monitoring me, they'd get bored pretty quickly. Anything I know usually finds its way into the media pretty quickly. Sometimes I say hello down to my listeners, just in case anyone is there who really shouldn't be.

Paranoid? Not at all. Mostly I think it's funny, Mickey Mouse meets James Bond. I'm so not fussed about it, if it happens that is, except when it inconveniences me, or potentially compromises people and matters I'm dealing with. I'll ring up the ISP and see what the hopefully innocent problem is.

The Singapore government, which has had only one party in power since the 1950's - a record rivalling China and Cuba - usually jumps on anyone whom it thinks has traduced its international reputation. Powerful people threaten them with libel actions, heard in Singapore's courts, which have never been lost. Their diplomats and press secretaries often write cranky letters to editors defending their corner so I fully expect to get one for what I've written above, even though I haven't actually said that I'm being spied on. But we'll accept that letter graciously and probably run the inevitable refutation but I would ask those diplomats before they tap out their grievances…would you mind checking first with your spooks?

And tell them that if they are blocking me, might they stop it soon so I can get on with stuff.

In 1957, the Anglo-Australian novelist Neville Shute published his most widely-read novel, On the Beach. Two years later, it was turned into a Hollywood film, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire. Australian actors were in it. It was John Meillon’s – he of the hard-earned VB thirst – first role, and Bill Hunter too and I think Graham Kennedy even got a look in, though his take ended up on the cutting room floor.

Shute portended Doomsday. The world’s great powers of the northern hemisphere had nuked each other into The Apocalypse. Radiation crept around the world, choking those not obliterated by the bombs. Playing the dashing Commander Dwight Towers (was there ever a waspier American character name?) in the movie, Peck gathered his crew into the USS Sawfish and sailed south looking for fresh air and humanity. They found it in Melbourne – well, found fresh air anyway – as well as Astaire improbably cast as a car-racing scientist, and an alcoholic Ava, who Greg bonked a few times before heading back out to sea to maybe save the world.

I read and saw OTB as a kid and it spooked the hell out of me. My mum remembers me crying myself to sleep one night, not wanting the world to end as Shute described, at least not while I was in it. Blowing ourselves up was one thing, but the slow choking was quite another.

Forty-odd years on, I’m still worried about a global conflagration, except were Neville Shute alive these days, I suspect he’d be writing about pollution instead of nuclear winter. I was out last night with a friend visiting from Hong Kong, the CEO of an international business that employs about 500 people. Sitting on a Singapore terrace, he was telling me how hard it is in Hong Kong to keep staff. They were all emigrating, he says, to 'pristine' Australia and New Zealand. The last time this happened was through 1996-97, in the build-up to 1997 when Hong Kongers were worried about the imminent takeover of the then British colony by communist China. Ten years on, Beijing has proved a benign landlord, politically at least. The Chinese Communist Party, with its 75 million members the world’s biggest political institution, has proved to be the world’s biggest chamber of commerce.

These days, my mate says, the reason why his staff are leaving is pollution, rolling in from across the border from China and the heavily-populated Pearl River Delta, where most of your clothes and your kids' toys are made. They are going to Australia to give their kids a chance to breathe. He reckons there is at least a month a year of days in Hong Kong where it would simply be life-threatening to spend long periods of time outside. My mate’s put on a bit of weight since I saw him last, but complains that its impossible to have a regular run in the muck that fills the air. He's a Pom but too is thinking about moving to Oz.

I’ve seen China’s pollution up close, flying into it from Japan earlier this year, when it was impossible to see the ground, even though the weather was clear. It was the same flying out of China over Hong Kong to Singapore. Its not pretty. The Earth only hove into view somewhere around Vietnam, until the view closed down again approaching Singapore, thanks to the haze from forest fires spreading over the Malay archipalego from Indonesia.

Its not just China. In Calcutta, one of India’s biggest cities, police have been equipped with oxygen devices to deal with some of the worst pollution in the world. Calcutta bests (if that’s the word) other Indian cities in lung cancer statistics – around 19 cases per 100,000 people, compared to Delhi at 13. And they ain't getting it from smoking. Australia is about 1-2. Indian environmentalists are suing the West Bengal government, alleging it has done nothing to alleviate air pollution. There’s similar litigation in Hong Kong. And South Korea.

I’m betting – and choking – that its only going to get worse. India and China are booming economically. They have to, particularly China for if Beijing can’t feed the beast, the ruling communists are worried they’ll get knocked off by cranky workers. But at what cost? Its very hard for the relatively wealthy rest of us to point fingers at Delhi and Beijing and tell them to stop their earth-choking industrialisation. Our businesses and economies and jobs, and particularly so in resource-rich Australia, are increasingly dependent on their Chinese and Indian customers. And there are still more poor people in India and China than rich, despite their booms.

So their rich leave, because they can afford to, emigrating to a country which has one of the world’ most drastic water supply crises, and where immigrants, pace John Howard and Pauline Hanson, aren't so welcome. Asia's pollution leads to social and economic pressures elsewhere.

One of the last scenes in On The Beach was a montage of Melbourne’s streets, deserted because Victorians are dead. Stanley Kramer’s cameras in "glorious black and white" alight on an old Salvation Army banner - “There Is Still Time, Brother.”

But is there? In Melbourne – the abundant utopia of Shute’s 1957 novel - water supply is down to officially alarming levels, the reservoirs just a quarter full. It’s a scenario that a Neville Shute might revel in, and just like the time I first read and saw On The Beach, its scaring the hell out of me.

P.S: For a fascinating trip back to the time “When Hollywood Came to Melbourne,” log on onto http://delarue.net/beach.htm where Victorian historian Philip Davey (Philip.davey@chisholm.vic.edu.au) transports readers onto the On The Beach set, circa 1959 - and explaining the background to that alleged Gardner quip that Melbourne was "the ideal place to film the end of the world."

After death threats, bomb blasts and courtroom dramas, a journalistic frenzy over a story about Rupert Murdoch's wife paled in significance

AN INFLUENTIAL member of Singapore’s leadership once explained to me, straight-faced, that it was possible to function as two different people inside the one brain with neither side in conflict with the other.

His view was that tiny Singapore has so few capable people in public life, officials can be poachers as well as gamekeepers, businessmen-politicians can steward portfolios and departments that directly effect their own fortunes and still do a fair and competent job. We were discussing a senior civil servant who was a director of Singapore Airlines as well as chairman of the island’s aviation authority ruling over some of SIA’s competitors. No conflict there, only convergence, as he saw it.

It was self-serving nonsense of course. But after two of the wackiest weeks I’ve had, I can sort of see his point about the two sides of the brain thing. Not that I am 1) part of any elite or 2) in any professional conflict, except perhaps with some editors of my acquaintance. But my brain certainly has been torn apart, between a civil claim, a civil war and a rather uncivilised stoush about a media mogul's wife.

It started when I stepped out of a tumbledown Sri Lankan courtroom where I was trying to save a piece of land my wife and I own there from being legally stolen from us, to answer my mobile. It was pushy hacks from Australia seeking comment about a long and suddenly inexplicably controversial story I had prepared on commission (aka someone else’s idea) a month earlier about Wendi Deng, Rupert Murdoch’s wife. It had been spiked by the Sydney newspaper that commissioned it and what did I think about about that? Indeed, what did I think about those who control Australia’s media?

It was a pinch-myself-is-this-happening moment. I looked around the airless courtroom, 200km from the capital Colombo. Tangalle being a fishing town, on both sides of this temple of tropical justice were flotillas of hard-toiling Lankan fishermen and their wives, the men resplendent in white formal sarongs, the ladies in saris, and all awaiting their moment in court. In the middle of the courtroom were learned counsel, mostly geriatric rich men in black suits muttering and scheming, playing god. At the back was a massive cage, to house the more violent offenders. The judge lorded imperiously over it all, in a black leather swivel chair which he surely must be sticking to in the heat, under a red velvet canopy. I was the only ‘sudo’ – foreigner, literally means white (as in skin) in the local Sinhala langauge – in the courtroom. I’d bet our property that these people, earning perhaps a $1 a day with their petty land claims and business disputes over tuna and seer, the occassional assault charge, had never heard of Wendi or her husband, or much care. Knowing what I know of these toiling Lankans after four fascinating years amongst them, most can barely read.

“Maaate, what’s gunna happen to yer piece,” the reporters in Oz demanded . “Don’t know and its not appropriate for me to talk about it,” I parried, referring callers to the beseiged commissioning editor in Sydney for comment. I turned the phone off. My case was called, the one I had flown 1000s of kilometres to front. I presented in front of His Honour, and bowed. My lawyer said something in Sinhala, the judge said something back and then shut his case book. “Come back on June 25,” my lawyer said. And that was it.

I turned my phone back on. About a dozen messages and texts and emails, all to do with Wendi. I switched it back off and eventually made my way back to Colombo, trying to keep baying hacks at bay, patchy Sri Lankan mobile coverage mostly doing the job for me. I ensconsed in the venerable Galle Face Hotel, where the owner had etched my name on his honour board in 1989 between the Aga Khan, Pakistan's Ali Bhutto and some Norwegian countess simply because I’d written a nice article about him after I’d stayed there once, when I was the only guest after a Tamil Tiger attack in the capital kept tourists away.

I settled in to watch the World Cup final in the GFH’s main bar, Australia versus, fortuitously, Sri Lanka. It was a dull game. I was secretly hoping the underdog Lankans would win, just to see what would happen here but Gilly and his squash ball would not deny Australia. Game virtually over after Gilchrist's heroics, I went to bed about midnight, only to be awoken two hours later by an Tiger air raid on Colombo and the indiscrimate firing by a government anti-aircraft post just 50m from my hotel window.

I checked the net for any news but only more Wendi emails from various parts of the world. With tracer flying around me at real or imagined Tigers, it was another pinch-myself time. I banged out a piece about being eyewitness to the air raid, something hacks don’t often get to see, and not usually during the final of an international sporting event. I described the government’s dysfunctional response to the air raid, pointing out that Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse was actually at the cricket final in Barbados with his team as his country was under attack.

The piece ran the following day in the US and caused great controversy among expatriate Sri Lankans. Colombo’s Daily Mirror bizarrely opined that it was 'unfortunate' a foreign correspondent happened to be in town at the time of the raid because of the bad publicity his report gave to Sri Lanka, trying to be a regional air hub like Dubai. I had unwittingly become news again.

Then more mail poured in, about 100 more, the country’s racial strife dividing right there in my inbox. To Lankan Tamils, I was suddenly a courageous correspondent “daring to tell the truth.” But to Sinhalese, I was a “White Tiger.” A Don Subasinghe of Melbourne opined that I “was probably a man who likes to terrorise people and (has) no guts to do that by himself.” Sam Dias, writing I think from Sydney, said my “mentality is of a man (who) just got away from a long prison term in a jail.” But forget poilitics, an outraged Dias said “worst of all is the disgusting and unprofessional evaluation of Sri Lankan cricket team's achievement.” ‘Mani’ warned me to ‘watch out’ for assassins. ‘Sashi’ said “Eric, just watch yourself over there! In Sri Lanka, everything is expendable to prolong their corrupt governments, including their own mothers!”

After this, the Wendi Deng matter compartmentalised on the other side of my brain was a relative doddle.

Internet cafes in Sri Lanka aren't so much places to connect and communicate but proxy sex shops.

To Sri Lanka, where something I pretty much already knew is confirmed again, that sex sells on the sub-continent. But first an explanation…

Sri Lanka isn't Silicon Valley. In fact I'm not even sure the 1960's let alone much of the Net Age have yet arrived on this gorgeous island of 22 million people, burdened by civil war, ethnic strife, and an infrastructure that was old when Methesulah, or his Hindu and Buddhist equivalent, was a lad. To say that Sri Lanka is dysfunctional is a little like saying Australians are sports-obsessed - it's obvious, one of its defining characteristics.

Lanka is a technology-deprived land where, to most people, a Blackberry is a fruit, Outlook is probably the last gloomy summation of the prospects for peace between Tamils and Sinhalese and Excel is something local leaders wouldn't dream of doing.

So, as I drive down the 200km of beautiful coast to attend a court case over a property my wife and I own, I find myself in the midst of a minor crisis brewing elsewhere that required urgent and constant email attention. GPRS lines are down so mails aren't getting through to my phone. I have to seek out net cafes en route, the few that exist here, where you grind away on lines always dropping out to get online. Problem is, as I've discovered in poor and socially conservative places across India, Pakistan and here, net cafes aren't so much places to connect and communicate but proxy sex shops, as the browser histories and caches reveal. Very much male preserves, they are neatly packaged into booths for reasons I don't want to speculate at except to say that netizens aren't checking their Hotmails, more like hotfemales.com.

I first discovered this sub-continental internet phenomenon in East Timor while it was under United Nations administration in 2000. Again a place lacking technology, the only place to get online in Dili at speed was this large room within the UN compound, which had about three dozen satellite-connected computers for use by oh-so-important UN personnel saving East Timor. I've discovered in various hotspots around the world that officials of the sub-continent have a particular skill in joining big multilateral agencies like the UN and World Bank. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fat tax-free salaries and generous perks of a scale unknown in civil services, police forces and militaries back home in Calcutta, Karachi, Colombo, Kathmandu and Chittagong.

Of course, back then in East Timor, once the Australian military had sorted out the militias, and Jakarta stopped funding them, there wasn't a great deal of administering to do for the 22,000-odd personnel, than surf the net. And they weren't checking cricket scores. I snuck into the compound to send some mails and there the UN facility was full, of Ranjans and Ravis openly salivating at online porn.

And so it was in a net cafe coming down the Lankan coast this week. The machine I was using was running extraordinarily slow, partly because the browser cache had never been emptied of pics and movies of unclothed Asian babes in various stages of copulation. It took a full 10 minutes to clear it, for that little hourglass icon to stop whirring. I'm sure the next regular user after me is going to be very displeased at my censorship.

Crisis sorted, it was back on the road with my driver but even here there was no escaping. He's a lovely man, a 40-something father of three trying to make his way driving tourists around his beautiful country, sadly starved of travelers fearful of the civil war. His place was trashed in the tsunami and my wife and I have helped him out when we can. We bought him a phone a year or so back, and last visit gave him a computer we'd replaced from Singapore, and paid for a net connection. He'd never used a computer before and his teen daughters and I had walked him through some basic functions. He was struggling with it all a bit but he was gradually getting there.

Driving down this week, I asked him how he was getting on. He seemed to have figured out email because I'd got a few from him. He said it was a bit difficult but he was doing OK. He liked reading the BBC and some cricket sites. And then a curious one..

I asked which program did he mean - was it Word? Or Excel? Or Outlook? I didn't imagine he was using Power Point down there in his fishing village. "No, no, no, the internet," he said, explaining that his 17 year-old daughter was "a bit angry with me."

The penny dropped. I stopped the car, cranked up my laptop and walked him through it, calling up a browser and pretending to be online. "You click tools, then options, then clear history, delete files, delete cookies and OK."

He's struggled with basic functions in the past. He got this one first time.

Friday, April 20, 2007
Covering world affairs and travelling the globe is a valuable thing; seeing the Aussies win at cricket is priceless

The entire Chengdu departure lounge room was transfixed by a match from the Football World Cup then underway in the U.S. It was a great game delicately poised and minutes from the end, as the plane to Shanghai was boarding, I contemplated delaying to see the exciting game out. By 1996 and the Cricket World Cup in India and Pakistan, I’d well and truly succumbed to FCPS, postponing a weeks-to-obtain interview with the elusive mayor of Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City so I could see Australia fall to Sri Lanka in Lahore.

Since then, treating FCPS and juggling one’s job has made life tough to manage. There’s televisual temptation everywhere; quadrennial World Cups in football, cricket and rugby, Olympic Games, winter and summer and each of 16 days; the FA Cup, myriad European football championships, not to mention the fifth day of a cliffhanger Lord’s Test or Boxing Day at the MCG and its all on ESPN/Sky/Star/Globo 24-7. I’ve determined that the South African sports channel Supersports is the world’s best, and Fox the worst. How is one supposed to make a living with all that essential viewing?

In 1998, the disease had started to effect my marriage as I was struck by a mutation of the virus – its ability to turn one into an uncontrollable, calculating liar. My wife and I had flown to Toronto for a friend’s weekend wedding in nearby Ottawa. The ceremony was great, the food superb, the company scintillating but come Sunday, the problem was that the four-hour return journey to Toronto would clash with the World Cup Final an Atlantic Ocean away in Paris between France and Brazil.

Options were limited; staying back in Ottawa to watch it would’ve left too far a journey to get to the airport in time. Opting out of the traditional post-wedding Sunday brunch would’ve put us in Toronto way too early, not to mention my wife - for it was her friend - missing half the wedding festivities. I told her I had ‘an urgent appointment’ in Toronto. “With who?” she asked. “Oh, just a guy I’ve been chasing for a while,” I lied. “Rubbish," she snorted. "You want to watch the football. You are pathetic.” She was right, of course, but by now FCPS had completely consumed me. We fashioned an artful compromise, which is how I came to be roaring at a TV in a Holiday Inn for two hours in Kingston, Ontario, about half-way between Ottawa and Toronto, while patient Sara read a book in the town square.

Sometimes you get lucky, like during the 2002 World Cup in Korea-Japan. Flying via Perth to Singapore after holidays in Broome, I resigned myself that I was going to miss the Brazil-Germany final in Yokahama (and FCPS sufferers know delayed broadcasts are no substitute for the real thing). But arriving in Perth three hours before kick-off in Japan, we were told there were ‘technical difficulties’ with our return leg to Singapore. The plane would be delayed 14 hours and the airline would put us up in a hotel. Damn. Not.

Lucky too in 2003 when I was in India during the Rugby World Cup. I journeyed to an ashram in the Kolli Hills 400km outside Madras to interview Swami Pranavananda Brahmendra Avadhuta, an ascetic 62 year-old Hindu monk who followed a stream of the faith so pure he eschewed all worldly goods, which also happened to include his clothes. Fortunately the nude swami was known in a former life as M. Christian Fabre, who was a rugby-mad Frenchman from Beziers. M. Fabre had indeed ditched his beret and all other garb en route to enlightenment but not his rugby passion or a satellite TV connection, which as France succumbed to England in the semi-final, is when I began to understand the notion of Nirvana.

A week later, I was on the couch of one Major Robert Hamilton Wright of Calcutta’s venerable Raj-era Tollygunge Club. After a lifetime in India, chainsmoking Bob, all 82 years and six-pinks-gins-a-day of him, has well and truly ‘gone native.’ But as Johnny Wilkinson kicked England to glory in extra time over Australians, it was clear – Wright almost had a stroke at the thrilling finish – this Cambridge rugby blue hadn’t forgotten his roots. And neither had my English mother-in-law, of my Australian ones, as she called me from Pomgolia seconds after the final siren to gloat. Yes, Australia had lost a world championship but it took only a week for me to see another, the Davis Cup and this time watching from Kathmandu.

But this Cricket World Cup in the Caribbean poses particular challenges. It seems to have gone on forever, so long that it seems that it was Robert Menzies, Cricket Tragic, who farewelled the inevitably victorious Australian team. I’ve barely lifted a finger, staying up all night to laugh at ridiculous pub amateurs like Scotland v Canada and then sleeping all day. Still, its not as horrible as the last day of the Oval Test in 2005. Being Germany, the Frankfurt Hotel Intercontinental had lots of porn but no cricket on the box so I listened to Kevin Pietersen win the Ashes for England over the internet on the BBC's Test Match Special. Except it wasn't so special.

I’ve now accepted that I’m incurable and FCPS will be with me forever. This weekend I’ll watch all five AFL games beamed into Asia on the ABC regional service, and maybe A Super 14 or two as well, a big advance on listening to Rex Hunt's Fat Lady sing on 3AW on the US military's broadband in a Kandahar guest house last year. But at least I’m learning to live with it, which means I’ve stopped lying. Recently despatched to Jakarta to cover a terrorist bombing, I expertly delayed an appointment with local Islamist hothead an extra two hours so I could see beloved Geelong lose an AFL final beamed into my hotel room. “It would be more convenient for me to come after evening prayers,” I told the cranky cleric, aka after the final siren at Telstra Dome.

Now there’s a clash of civilizations.

A disagreement with Sri Lankan villagers over the ownership of beachside land has Eric Ellis desperate for a resolution

Twenty years reporting in and around Asia has taught me that investing in the region can have its rewards and its pitfalls. And in those same two decades, I like to think I've been around the regional block. But there are still things that can floor me.

Take Sri Lanka, which after having met a fair few of its leaders over the years, I'm not alone in regarding as one of the world's worst-governed countries. It's also one of its loveliest; a tropical gem in the Indian Ocean, though one tragically riven by civil war, ethnic strife, terrorism and extremism.

As frequent visitors to Sri Lanka, my wife and I bought a beachside property there in 2003, at a better time than now, when the 20-year conflict between the Sinhalese of the south and the Tamils of the north-east at last seemed consigned to history in a ceasefire. It's a beautiful spot, in Sri Lanka's deep south, where the beaches are beyond perfect. The locals were friendly and welcoming and we approached the transaction with anything but a neo-colonial hauteur of noblesse oblige that so many foreigners in Lanka adopt. The plan was to build a modest beach shack, no gin palace, but something tasteful and sympathetic, employing local tradesmen and techniques, spending some money in a place that's never really seen much.

We weren't alone. The area went through a minor boom, as Sri Lanka's ceasefire ushered in long-overdue economic reform. After years laboring in a 1950s style economy, at last Lankans were free to do what they wanted with their assets, incuding sell them or develop them for an expanding tourist market. There was talk of big Japanese carmakers building factories for the huge Indian market to the north. The future at last looked bright. Reform meant one could get actual title over property, basic rule-of-law stuff in developed countries like Australia, but not in developing countries where nationalist politicians don't mind stirring up xenophobia to get into office. Sri Lanka was different. It was going through a long overdue period of economic enlightenment and was joining the world. There was foreign investment, but more importantly, there was hope for the future. It played out in funny ways. Strolling the beach in Bali or Thailand, foreigners regarded as walking dollar notes would be offered trinkets and massages. In Sri Lanka you'd be offered property. Locals were getting rich and they seemed to like it.

Then came the tsunami on Boxing Day 2004. Our place faces south-east, facing Sumatra 2000km away, on a headland overlooking a charming fishing village of about 500 people. The 10m high waters came in from Sumatra and, thanks to the area's unique topography, hit our headland, welled up and like water in a funnel, had nowhere to go except down the creek below along which the village sat. I was called to Lanka to report the devastation and of the 100-odd villages I passed through en route from Colombo, Mawela village was among the most devastated - 75% of its houses disappeared, about a third of the villagers dead.

I arrived on the beach a few days after the waters to discover utter human desperation on a scale I'd never seen, and never want to see again. "Your land, your land, the waves hit your land," the villagers wailed as they buried their many dead. We felt as if we were somehow responsible. I stayed for two months, representing a group of foreigners who had land in the area in a 'foreign friends fund', one of many such efforts that sprung up along the coast on those difficult days. We raised $US50,000, enough to buy Mawela villagers 60 new fishing boats, re-fitting another 30, delivering them all two months to the day after the waves. We funded a learn-to-swim campaign, and donated to the local hospital. We also began moves to start an annual scholarship for a local girl and boy to go to a good school in the capital. We were bit players but truth be told, it felt good to do something for a community we'd come to cherish. All of us felt like the foreigners were accepted as good neighbours, that out of tragedy comes humility and understanding. We postponed plans to build our beach hideaway, thinking that scarce resources were better employed, for the moment at least, in re-building Lankans' houses.

So, two years on, and with the civil war again raging and the 2002 ceasefire a distant memory, it comes as something of a shock that two of the fishermen we gave boats to have decided to make a claim on our property. Now there's gratitude for you. Its got to be a hangover from the tsunami, where livelihoods and assets were literally washed away. They are not squatting; apparently they claim to own part of the property. They can't have any paperwork because we've got it; official titles, stamped, ratified and officially surveyed by the Sri Lankan state with all its pomp and circumstance. No matter, there'll be a court case on April 23 in a nearby town which I have to attend. I will, with titles prominently in hand. I'm assuming the claimants will paddle up to the bench, in the boats we donated to them.

I'm told by my laid-back lawyer, suddenly banking fees I never imagined we'd have to pay, that it's apparently quite common. Indeed, he says that about 60% of property cases in Lankan courts concern erroneous land claims. It raises some cheeky thoughts. My wife and I have admired a few other properties in the area and, given that it seems possible to simply say you own a place to do so, we reckon we'll lay claim to our friend's resort, which would save building costs at the very least.

While I'm inclined to accept the courts' verdict, experience also tells me it may not go our way, regardless of the legitimacy of our state-sanctioned paperwork. So what to do?

A few ideas have been bandied around. We have photos of the boat recipients, which we took at the time of the boat handover so as not to duplicate donations, to give the handover a quasi-official air. Do we print a few out, get someone to write in Sinhala that these people got boats from the foreign friends and now they are stealing their land and then stick it up on palms around the village? The name and shame approach? Bad idea, said one of the other now-nervous foreigners in the area, that might encourage other locals to go on a land-seizing free-for-all. So do I pompously complain in court that this is unacceptable behaviour and sets a bad precedent for the very basis of the Lankan economy? I'm not sure anyone would care.

What about a local press campaign? Many locals are illiterate and I'm reckoning that in Colombo there' d be very little sympathy anyway for the (relatively) rich foreigner versus the (presumably) impoverished locals. There never is.

I've thought about sitting down with them and talking it through, not to intimidate, just to find out what it's all about. But maybe that's too touchy-feely.

Paying them off? But that would be rewarding them for their outrageous behaviour. And paying off the courts, as is a fashion across Asia and apparently in Lanka too, would be encouraging corruption, not a good look for a journalist.

So we wait and see, somewhat powerless in the lap of the many gods that Lankans worship. But two weeks away from our joust with Lankan justice, I'm open to suggestions.

Something needs to be done about regional air pollution, but John Howard's $200 million is not the answer

You can see a lot of the world from 12,000m, a place where I've spent too much of the past 10 weeks.

As observed in earlier posts, I've seen how much larger - and more Latino - the Los Angeles sprawl has become in the decade since I lived there, 15% more to fly over. And coming from Tokyo over Korea to Beijing, you can see the filth the Chinese economic boom, which everyone is so anxious to have a piece of, is spewing into our lungs.

Flying back to Singapore from China, you can also see the need for and, knowing something of Indonesia and the World Bank too, of the stupidity of John Howard's $A200 million "Greening Indonesia" initiative. This is the PM's half-arsed anti-Kyoto attempt to shore up his enviro-credentials ahead of the coming election, which opinion polls so far suggest he looks a lot like losing.

The need for urgent action is obvious. Coming out of grey Guangzhou, you can't actually see neighbouring Hong Kong below, shrouded in a putrid blanket of pollution. With 2000 people a week falling ill to life-threatening respiratory diseases, I read some citizens there are taking the government to court for neglecting its duty to provide a clean place to live. Good for them and all power to them.

The air clears over the South China Sea until we get toward Malaysia and Indonesia, when it again gets very ugly. Approaching Singapore - I'm glad there's radar because visibility is next to zero - I'm reminded of Singaporeans' particular fondness for TLAs.

TLAs are the Three Letter Abbreviations of public institutions in Singapore that the locals have a great enthusiasm for using and adapting, in the absence of democracy and a decent press there, to joke or vent their spleen. They like to call SIA - Singapore Airlines - "Sex In (the) Air'', a dig at the servile stewardesses who graduate from SIA's "Asian Babe Factory'' to get onboard. There's the PUB, the Public Utilities Board also known as "Pay Until Broke'' for its expensive services, and there's the MRT - the Mass Rapid Transit subway system, which Singapore drivers call "More Road Tax'' because they pay for it.

But looking out the window of the SQ flight at the muck I'll soon be breathing, I'm minded of the PSI - Singapore's Pollutant Standards Index. Whenever Indonesia's smoggy haze envelopes the region, as it frequently does, the PSI readings go through the roof. "Pay Suharto Immediately!" the spluttering local cabbies bleat (yes, it's been going on that long, since before he was toppled in 1998) for they know that 1) Indonesia is deeply corrupt, 2) it's the elephant in the ASEAN room and that 3) weak countries like Singapore always tiptoe around it.

Since President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono came to power in Jakarta in 2004, promising a new broom he's yet to sweep, the term has been adapted to "Pay Susilo Immediately'', which seems to be what Mr Howard plans to do with Australians' taxes, to get himself re-elected.

There are several problems with this. The first is corruption. It's endemic in Indonesia, it's in the justice system, the government, the civil service, business, it's everywhere. Transparency International doesn't rank Indonesia one of the world's corrupt countries to get a headline. It happens to be true. I remember how Jakarta complained when I once wrote that the piracy in the Straits of Malacca was largely the work of rogue coast guard and naval operatives doing some freelancing with government vessels. Several Singapore shipowners, who'd had their fleet pillaged as they sailed through the straits, had told me and, deeply cranky and millions poorer, they weren't the type to lie. Jakarta said that was nonsense, that rebels from Aceh were laying waste to passing ships to fund their insurgency.

It was a plausible explanation at the time but one history has proved wrong. The tsunami helped end Aceh's civil war. The Free Aceh Movement's one-time rebel leader Irwandi Yusuf is now Aceh's elected leader, his colleagues disarmed and defanged. Change in Aceh is now being effected by the ballot box but guess what? There's still some of the world's highest levels of piracy in the Malacca Straits. Either the world has been sold a pup on Aceh and Governor Irwandi - which having been to Aceh recently I doubt - or those rogue coast guards are still at it. I'm guessing the latter.

The second reason why Mr Howard's idea is flawed is power. There is haze across ASEAN because powerful people, influential in Jakarta as well, have a personal business interest in the timber industry. The haze comes from burning the growth around forests so the trees can be extracted and logged illegally. It's going on across Kalimantan and Sumatra, across an archipalego that de-centralising Jakarta is busily extending more power to. These regional potentates logging the life from our lungs in the world's greenrooms aren't warlords in the Afghan model but they ain't far away. And no amount of satellite peeping of the kind Malcolm Turnbull proposes will stop it. Who's going to tell them to stop? SBY and his mates in Jakarta? There's an election coming up there too, you know.

The third reason is the World Bank, which apparently is going to be the body that administers this fund. Jakarta has welcomed this initiative and why wouldn't it? It's always great when someone else, your rich neighbour - be they Singapore or Australia - pays for your own mal-governance. Powerful Indonesians love the World Bank, which has a record in Indonesia that isn't one to be too proud of.

A few years ago, the bank's country representatives admitted billions of WB funds had been siphoned off and lost, disappearing into the accounts of corrupt officials. No-one apologised, no-one went to jail, it was regarded as the price of operating in a country like Indonesia. I've seen the WB in action in Indonesia and in Sri Lanka, after the tsunami. I've supped with WB reps living in splendour on fat salaries in Dutch colonial mansions in Jakarta that bank funds - your taxes again - immaculately restored. They've told me what good work they've been doing bringing clean water to Indonesia, this as one of her five maids served Evian at a lovely dinner party the WB again paid for because no-one dared drink the local tap stuff.

Mr Howard says his initiative will make a greater contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions than the Kyoto Protocol. No, Prime Minister, Asia's respiratory system and I wish you well but I fear about the only thing your initiative will generate is higher prices for Singapore property as those people who have a new dollop of Australian dollars in their hot little hands look for some place to park it.

The sounds of Mandarin will be heard around the world as China's newly affluent discover the holiday

Time was when mainland Chinese might take their holidays at Beidaihe, an unremarkable beach on the Bohai Sea fronting the Korean peninsula.

True, taking holidays anywhere wasn't exactly something average Chinese did much. Maoism didn't much provide for that. During the "Great Helmsman's" dark years, there was rapid industrialisation to achieve, crop-munching birds to stone, ill-conceived great leaps forward to make, Red Guards to avoid, or become.

Beidaihe and its sanatoriums were mostly off-limits to all but model workers, or for conflabs with Mao's Soviet central planning friends from Moscow. And to schmooze your mates in the Communist Party. Every July, Beijing's politburo used to transport itself to the seashore here and plot. Beidaihe was known as China's "smoke-filled room", where party insiders became outsiders and vice versa, power politics in a rubber floatie if you will. Observers would study Beidaihe's tea leaves and draw extravagant conclusions about who was in or out. It was all good fun until current President Hu Jintao, obviously a spoilsport, put an end to the annual Beidaihe migration.

Today, Chinese go to other beaches, because they can. I'm told that Beidaihe today is apparently full of low-rent Russian tourists and what self-respecting Russian-hating Chinese wants to go there. It's also only warm for a few months of the year. Tropical Hainan Island at the other end of China is balmy all year round, the beaches are better and you can punt on the stockmarket too.

I sit at Beijing's brand spanking Olympics-built airport, I notice a flight from Sanya, on Hainan, disgorging itself of its "chuppy" passengers. It's snowing in the capital but this lot are decked out somewhat ostentatiously in surf shorts, sunglasses and Hawaiian shirts. They seem to be saying "look at me, I've been on holidays". And they have, returning from a break in a tropical paradise, albeit one where the party used to exile its undesirables, like anyone who expressed notions like democracy.

The scene reminds me of any in say, London's Stansted, New York's La Guardia or Tullamarine in winter; package holidaymakers fleeing bitter cold for some winter sun in Marbella, Miami or Mooloolaba. I've never seen such a scene before in China or felt compelled to contemplate what it means, which is probably not much more than now China has a booming economy and people have some cash. Why shouldn't 1.2 billion people do what most of us have enshrined in labour law, and take for granted? Like taking a holiday.

Clearly it's still a bit of a novelty in China too. Many of the Chinese travellers waiting for planes to colder climes than Sanya - and dressed in layers for the occasion - start laughing at this lot lolling through in lurid shirts, pointing them out to fellow travellers. "Sanya, Sanya!" they collectively murmur, explaining what is still unusual to them.

A leisure economy is developing. And looking at how fast China is growing, I'd say next year no-one will notice, just like they've long stopped marvelling at the Starbucks or flash hotels or the (many) Mercedes on China's streets any more. I read about the mainlander at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport who spent 40,000 euro in 15 minutes on fine wine, including a cognac from 1806 that Napoleon should've swilled.

Strolling the ritzy Stroget in Denmark last summer, my wife and I ogled the exquisite Royal Copenhagen porcelain on display at its flagship outlet, so far beyond our price range. Inside a party of loud Chinese tourists were each getting exquisite dinner settings at E10,000 a pop wrapped up by the oh-so-solicitious Danish staff.

One of the least pleasant places on the road is a departure lounge at Bangkok airport when a Chinese tour group is in the vicinity. There's more thrusting and pointy arms, legs and elbows than Lisa and Ralph in the Qantas Mile-High Club. In Melbourne recently, I noticed the Fitzroy Gardens was full of strolling camera-wielding mainland tourists. And very well-behaved. Peter Costello was beavering away in his Treasury Place office nearby, perhaps working out ways to spend the bonanza the China boom has provided Australia. I didn't see any Hawaiian shirts. It was a bit chilly so maybe the loudies were on the Gold Coast.

All this conspicuous consumption - and I reckon its still very early days - has started to attract the attention of authorities. A recent article in a state-sanctioned (as they all are) newspaper discussed "Ugly Chinese", expressed in similar terms as one reads of "Ugly Americans'' in Europe or Aussie yobs in Kuta.

At the airport in Beijing, there are ads, in Chinese, for holidays in Phuket, in the Philippines, for Spain and Greece. None for Australia that I can see but they'll come. I hope Mambo has Mandarin-speaking counter staff.

The view of China is of an economic boom topped with a ghastly polluted atmosphere

TWO weeks in China convinces why we should care about happens here, and how much of the world has little clue about what actually does happen here.

First, the economy. I arrive in Beijing on the same cold day that the Shanghai stockmarket goes into a minor meltdown. It in turn sends other world markets, big grown-up transparent (unlike Shanghai) ones like New York and London, into paroxysms. Stupid foreigners panic, and their money gets lost.

There are several things wrong with this but overwhelmingly is the ill-informed view that China's stockmarket somehow bears some meaningful relationship to the booming economy. A "securities company" in Chaoyang district, one of thousands of such places in China, is evidence enough. A close approximation to this place is an Australian TAB. Grizzled old men, most of them smoking, anxiously gather around flickering monitors for much of the day. In Australia, the form guides they're holding would be the day's racing pages. Here in Beijing, its one of the thousands of share tip sheets that circulate such venues. Apart from the language, the notable differences between here and, say, the Traralgon tote, are that these old punters don't have mullets, don't clutch cans of VB and don't have girlfriends called Shazza.

All of which are details too far for many of the commentators who inundate outlets like CNN with their excitable take on events in Shanghai. These blusterers fall into two categories; those in China with meaningful undertanding of it, and those without with little clue. Those few within offer a more erudite version of what I've said above while those without blather on from NY or Sydney about China's "position in the world" ad nauseum. Much of it is nonsense, trading off the world's collective misconceptions and cluelessness about supposedly mysterious China.

I doubt any of them have been to places like Xuzhou or Jinan or Chengdu, just three of China's myriad cities with several millions of people that few outside China have ever heard of. And yet to go to a place like Xuzhou in northern Jiangsu Province, once the heartland of Mao's Great Leap Forward and 90 minutes flight south-east from Beijing today means going on a comfortable, safe plane that leaves on time, arriving at an airport cloned from Norman Foster. Its then a 30 minute dash on a freeway to a $100-a-night hotel that would genuinely live up to a 5-star billing, except its four.

I've stayed in worse hotels at three times the price, and most of them are in India, China's great rival for the world's investment attention. I'd man to the barricades to the last defending our right to democracy. But if the India v China economic debate comes down to that choice, which I doubt, then maybe I'd be inclined to vote for a little less democracy in return for a reliable freeway to the airport, trying to catch a plane that's not going to fall out of the sky. That's a debate to have on CNN, not that jitters in the Shanghai casino should matter much in the West. Those old buggers in the Chaoyang TAB, sorry, brokerage, took it all in their stride and plunged back in.

But it all comes with a price, and here's another even more pressing debate to have about China. While Xuzhou's great infrastructure, mirrored in most big cities across the country, is great for getting your goods to market at the right time but its not much fun for your customers' respiration. My four hour flight from Narita to Beijing was a lesson in how economies develop, and how societies don't.

It was a beautiful clear day across North-East Asia and as the JAL Boeing headed west over Honshu, Fuji-san presented gloriously on the port side in near perfect visibility that was maintained across much of Japan, an OECD member. The further west we flew, toward South Korea, the lesser the visibility even though the weather hadn't changed much. But for the last hour as we cross the coast into China, it was a blackout or, rather, a brownout. The day hadn't change, just the managment of the economy, which was literally changing the climate. The World Economic Forum says China uses three times as much energy as the average rest of us to generate every dollar of GDP growth. This is China's boom write large, across a large swathe of the northern hemisphere. Little wonder that jittery Japanese and cranky Koreans are contemplating taking China to some international jurisdiction.

Not that they have much hope of winning, their businesses are too closely invested in the China boom, likewise many of their politicians. Its just like the rest of us, increasingly hooked on the China drip that keeps prices down where we live, where we can breathe properly. The environment has been discussed in passing at the 'Ren Da,' as the just-finishing National People's Congress is known locally. The party heavies who live cossetted lives in the Zhongnanhai leadership compound next to Tiananmen pay lip service to the environment but the view from the plane, my watery eyes and the crap I'm coughing out of my lungs suggests the damage has been done.

That China booms is a wonderful thing, but they way its doing it, its strangling us.

It's a good job Tokyo operates like clockwork every day because, if it didn't, chaos would surely ensue.

There are few more terrifying places for a hapless Road Warrior than the main concourse at Tokyo Station at peak hour, (a term which of course is moot as "Tokyo Eki" seems to be in a permanent state of peak hour - this in a country that is supposed to be going through an elongated economic slowdown or recession.)

The place, immaculately clean, is utterly bewildering even for experienced foreign travellers. It's probably the busiest place in Japan. The permanently crowded Tokyo Subway, where the route map looks like a Heath Robinson invention, merges here with the permanently crowded Japan Rail system, where the map looks like a Heath Robinson invention. Commuters rush at you from all directions, their heads buried in manga or their DoCoMo 3G cellphones while bustling robotically to their seats. Ceaseless public service announcements are enveloped by platform calls, all overlaid with advertising, flashing LCDs and video displays.

The station's lowish ceiling, lack of windows and artifical light give it all a manic claustrophobia, a discombobulation that brings the nerves to snapping point. It's hard to describe the feeling; a little like gripping a ledge in a central nervous system and desperately holding on lest you plummet helplessly into panic. Or like being in the bowels of a massive computer, or the remake of the Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, as-busy Shinjuku 30 years on.

Even for Asia hands, the curious thing about Japan is that when one visits it, one becomes an armchair anthropologist in a way you wouldn't in, say, Indonesia, in trying to decipher it, wrap your mind around it. It's perhaps telling that stockmarket analysts when writing of Japan from afar describe their CV as "ex Japan/Asia", shorthand for its exceptionalism, Japan's distance from Asia.

Everyone has some telling anecdote to descibe Japan's differences. I regard Japan as a remarkable well-oiled machine and Tokyo Eki one of its engine rooms.

It works seemlessly, to the second. Because if it doesn't chaos ensues in a country sized for maybe 40 million but which houses 130 million. And there's little - here's the armchair Richard Leakey again - the Japanese hate more than chaos. Japanese actually complain if the Shinkansen, the famous bullet train that I'm trying to find, leaves a minute late. I love it but I'm totally confounded by it, which I thnk is probably quite normal.

I'm trying to find the Shinkansen to Nagano in the mountains of central Honshu, the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics, to meet a remarkable Japanese man. He's a man determined by one survey to be the 7th most recognisable personality in Japan, a 70% recognition rate among the types of commuters transitting Tokyo Eki. Many Japanese regard him as "more Japanese" than they are.

But this chap is a rather unusual Japanese. For a start he's neither a Takahashi or Takeshita, a Fukuyama or a Fukushita. His hair's not black but a rather florid red, which he sets off with a beard that would shame Santa Claus. His name is Clive Nicol and he was born in the southern Welsh town of Neath, tough coal mining country from where he's made a remarkable life journey.

At 67, he's lived with whalers, run a big game conservation park in Ethiopia, written 130 books, many of them bestsellers, in both Japanese and English, all while attaining a 7th dan black belt in karate. With his nationally-televised TV program, Nicol-san was a celebrity chef, a kind of bush tucker man for Japan where recreates at his mountain hideaway dishes lost or unknown to modern Japan. With a wildlife documentary series, he's kind of a David Attenbrough for Japan, setting off with film crew to remote parts to explain wildlife and ancient landscapes, all presented in immaculate Japanese and wit that the machine loves. He's one of Japan's tarento, talent who make a lot of money telling the Japanse about themselves

And he is a trencherman of some order. I had intended to stay in a ryokan in urban Nagano after coming up from Tokyo on the bullet train, and then spend the day with him at his 70 acre forest at Kurohime, the massive snow-topped mountain that translates as Black Princess. I called him on arrival in Nagano and he asks me where I'm staying. I hadn't made any booking so he said "why don't you keep going and stay here?". I accept and about an hour later arrive at his house by taxi, whose driver instinctively understood Nicol-san no ie (Nicol's house) and took me straight to his snowy door from the station.

Big Bluff Nicol-san offers me a welcome of warm bonhomie as I rock up to his snowbound front door. "I hope you drink," he bellows. Without waiting for my answer - I'm no great boozer but I'll have a drink to break the ice of an interview - he thrusts a frosty glass of shochu on-the-rocks at me, Japan's fiery vodka-like rocket fuel made from potatoes or barley or soba (buckwheat), often distilled with 45% alcohol. Its 7pm on a cold February evening, and about the last time I had a sensible thought. At about 2am, Nicol-san pours me into bed, from which I wake with the mother of all hangovers.

My last memory was of about 0030 when he declared, disgustedly, "you are still sober". My next memorable moment is lying down on his living room floor the next day after a lunch of wild boar, him bright as a button, me interviewing him with a splitting headache, a rising feeling of nausea and aching for aspirin, a packet of them at the very least. Then I discover I've recorded our previous night's ruminations. There is a god. And he may well be Shinto. And when you are around this remarkable Japanese man, it'll probably be Hotei, the much-loved god of happiness.

Environmentally responsible, culturally aware and very PC - there's a lot that's nice about Canada.

To Canada. Specifically, to beautiful Vancouver, often designated as the world's most liveable city.
It often puzzles me why so many Australians look to the US as a cultural beacon. Vigorously multicultural, Canada is much more relevant to the Australian experience than the wacky American melting pot.

Much the same basic stuff goes on. Like Oz, Canada is massive and most of it uninhabited due to harsh climatic conditions. Both have tiny populations relative to their size, and they live in much the same way; long, healthily and wealthily. Australians gather along a stripe that temperately clings to the coast. In Canada it's a continent-wide band barely 100km from the US border, as far south as politics and weather allows. Though both are designated as "New World" lands, largely built by and comprised of immigrants plundering the abundant resources, they share much the same British traditions and, with it, the baggage of monarchy. Their leaders have both wrestled with the guilt and the belated demands of a confrontationist - and historically abused - indigenous community. And both countries have experienced a sudden, huge and society-changing influx of Asian immigrants, particularly from China and the so-called "Yacht People" from Hong Kong.

Canada has dealt with those issues in a much more harmonious way. No race riots on the beach here, no Pauline Hanson, and no real republic debate to speak of. Canada is the first to put its hand up for UN duty, traditionally regardless of what Washington demands. Howard's Australia first checks with the White House and then does the minimum of what's required. I often half-joke to my relatives here that Canadians are just like Australians "except they are decent". That may not win friends in Oz but here in Canada everyone is so, well, so…nice. Australians boisterously stir sugar through their coffee, Canadians delicately dissolve artificial sweetener into their latte.

Even the arrival into Vancouver's international airport is nice. Its an impressive building, toned in earthy hues, a monument to the indigenous cultures of the region, the "First Nations" as they prefer to be known (not 'tribes' or 'Indians'). The long haul to the immigration booths is a bit like walking through a zoo. Arriving passengers are piped in with birdsong. That doesn't happen at Tulla.

I like to fill out the French part of my Canadian arrival form. Not that I speak much French at all but thanks to the disproportionately powerful Quebecois, Canada is officially Anglo-French bilingual. Civil servants are required to have fluency in both. But here in British Columbia, the second language is probably either Hindi, Punjabi, Cantonese or Mandarin. I'd say French is the twentieth most widely spoken language and that would be a stretch. So I like to see what happens when I fill my form out in French, for a town where the federal language rules are irrelevant. The response at the booth is, again, nice. A Canadian official called Patel greets me, sees my passport is Australian and asks in flawless French - so far as I can tell - "Préférérez-vous parler français? - would you prefer to speak French?" "Non," I say with a smile, "parlent Anglaise, sil vous plait." He's very nice.

What all this niceness seems to mean in daily life is that Canada, and Vancouver in particular, is PC Central, a party town for minority interest groups. There's big money and popular support for all sorts of causes. The press is crammed with stories about some ethnic group claiming for state compensation because some white leader - way back when - prosecuted some rule that today's Canada has deemed he (was never a she back then) shouldn't have. So descendants of Chinese 'coolies', of Sikh indentured labourers or whomever are making claims, and usually winning. Speak against it and you risk being called a racist. And to many Canadians, you may well be. It's Chinese New Year in a town where the Chinese population is around 20-25%. But 'Year of the Pig' seems too coarse to the English ear so the Chinese city fathers have re-dubbed it to the more palatable "Year of the Boar."

Vancouverites are exercised about the environment in ways few are elsewhere, understandable given the stunning city surrounds. My aunt lives just 4km from downtown Vancouver, on the pleased-with-themselves slopes of West Vancouver, and yet a protected stream spawning salmon runs literally through her backyard. She says you could probably drink its water. A recent storm toppled trees in Stanley Park, Vancouver's Hyde Park. A drive to raise $10 million to restore them was quickly mounted, the money not a problem.

Last week the Vancouver Sun carried a page one story I doubt one would ever see in Australia, at least not for a while; "33%! Can Campbell Do It?" the Sun screamed about a pledge by British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell to cut greenhouse gases by a third by 2020. Campbell represents the centre-right and has staked his political future on the environment in a way that John Howard would never contemplate. Had the MV Tampa showed up off Vancouver Island in election year, I'd say the BC pols would've breaststroked out there to offer it a warm BC and PC welcome, because that's where the votes are. Tap "Canadian Shock Jock" into Google and you get just nine results.

Vancouverites are world champion citizens of community. Joggers and bikers, and there are thousands of them, do so very vitally with their dogs, an iPod and a pooper-scooper for the pup, which they actually use. (There's no obvious obesity here, certainly compared to the neighbouring US.) You see niceness on the roads. Where Australian road rage can get violent and will at least come with an abusive earful, a curt little toot on the horn is all it usually takes a Vancouverite to get displeasure across. Drivers actually take it in turns to get onto the crowded lanes crossing the landmark Lion's Gate Bridge over the harbour. No, its true!

So is BC Australia's vision of the future? Perhaps the answer lies in the stately Vancouver Club, where I supped last week in the heartland of the city's old Anglo-oriented establishment. Its sister clubs in Australia are the fusty Melbourne Club and the Australian Club in Sydney but this is no longer a bastion of the roast beef and claret set for whom the sun never sets. The members are as multicultural as the city itself, the food fusion, the talk around the club of accommodation and understanding and harmony, or 'harmoney' as might be more correct, given the property revolution the Hong Kong Chinese have launched here.

Vancouver's Anglo elite still run British Columbia but there's less British about them and nothing particularly Columbine. Today they are more likely to be represented by people like Vancouver's 47 year-old mayor, Sam Sullivan. You might've seen him during the closing ceremony of last year's Turin Winter Olympics, being handed the flag for the 2010 Games that Vancouver and nearby Whistler are hosting. A true son of the city, Sullivan speaks Cantonese and Italian, apart from the required English and French. He's also a quadriplegic, from injuries he sustained when he was 19 while skiing on the mountains that surround the city. He drives a car, and flies an ultralight. Some talk about him as a possible leader on the federal stage in Ottawa.

Americans can be incredibly polite and infuriatingly insular - and sometimes way too nosey, writes Eric Ellis.

It can be tricky being a foreigner in the US in a time of war. I'm not talking about the issues of trying to enter the place, or the mindlessness that has seen blameless Sikhs killed because some redneck thinks he's Osama's best friend.

I'm talking conversations with regular Americans, dealing with their neurosis over their position in the world.

Americans, 300 million of them, famously don't travel much. I've seen stats that say as few as 7% of them have passports. That seems low, but the highest I've seen is only about 25% so let's say the truth is somewhere in the middle, I'll generously posit about 15% to 20%. I can't seem to find any sensible data on this on the State Department website but let's assume half of that 15% to 20% of passport-holders have only visited neighbouring Canada or Mexico, spring breaks and all. That brings the number of travellers down to around 10%, or a generous 15%, and I'd say many of those are Americans who've been born elsewhere - and still have family to be visited in their birth nations. So, still being generous, I'm thinking about 90% to 95% of Americans haven't been anywhere much other than the US, and the massive all-consuming experience it is.

So it was at Jan's Diner on Beverly Blvd in West Hollywood last week, to where I'd retreated for a restorative breakfast after a night on the sauce with an old friend.

I fronted the barstool, ordered from an ageing waitress who called me "honey" and, as often happens with Australians in the US, my accent attracted attention. Soon I was explaining myself, that I lived in Asia where I worked as a correspondent. "Isn't it dangerous over there?" a fellow diner, a middle-aged man in check pants and fedora, asked me. "No, not really," I assured. "Places like Afghanistan and Pakistan can be a bit tricky sometimes but most places I'd say are no more so than LA." A few more diners picked up their ears.

More diners pressed in. I said that was an interesting question. "Do you want the polite answer or what I think is the right answer?" I asked. "Gimme the truth," he demanded. So away I went, as diplomatically as possible, explaining that many people in Asia and indeed the world have great regard for Americans and the US but they generally think that Americans are insular and increasingly don't understand the world as much as their importance in it demands, that important decisions made in the Bush White House can have significant impact on their lives but can seem to be based on wrong information or understanding. Iraq, I said, seemed like a good example where basic cultural blunders have been made by the US administration there, Afghanistan too, and those missteps had damaged the enormous sympathy for the US after 9/11. I said I had seen examples of that up close, quickly adding that such blunders weren't exclusive to the US, that my country also makes them, particularly in Asia.

The restaurant was now in silence. "Yeah," said the old boy, "you're damn right. I voted Bush but he's been the worst damn president we've ever had." The other diners nodded in agreement. The restaurant was now buzzing with chatter. Having dropped my bomb on the unsuspecting clientele, I ate my eggs, paid my bill, tipped generously and tried to quietly slip out of the diner. "You have a good trip back to Australia now, honey," said the ample waitress. Some of the other diners waved me off, generous, hospitable, American to a fault.

It reminded me of a funny time a few years back when I was in the Deep South, in Mississipi researching an article about, of all things, Americans raising emus.

Naturally, because this is America, someone had figured there was a buck in it. Emu farms blossomed across the country; there were "emu breeders associations" in 40 of the 50 states. Prices for a pair of breeder birds shot up to as high as $A100,000. Then the arse fell out of the market and farmers were left with suddenly worthless birds that were expensive to maintain. Some let them go into the bayous, prairies and deserts and a few had been struck by passing cars, pretty common in Oz, but plain bizarre in the US.

I flew out to investigate, meeting a farmer in Brookvale, MS. He seemed puzzled why I, speaking with what to him was a wacky accent, would be interested in emus. I patiently explained that the emus were Australia's national bird and appeared on the coat of arms. I think I even produced an old 50 cent piece to prove the point.

The farmer seemed puzzled. "Os-tray-lee-ya?" he exclaimed. "I got my birds from Lubbock County, Texas."

Next door in Alabama, I met another farmer who told me I was the first foreigner she'd ever met. She was perfectly pleasant, a very nice lady, and as we walked around her emu farm asked me if I like the South. It was May, a bit sticky in the northern hemisphere, and I told her I liked it a lot. I used to live in Asia, I explained, (her eyes were glazing over) and the humidity reminded me of that. I said I liked the sub-tropical vegetation, particularly that evocative green stuff that hangs off trees which I'd seen adding atmosphere to noir Hollywood thrillers. "Oh, that's called kudzu," she helpfully explained.

"Parasite?" she asked herself. "Hmm, I don't know where it comes from."

MY accent attracted attention at LAX, eliciting a travel tip from the The Road Warrior ... never get on a plane with the biography of a porn star.

Killing an hour waiting for a flight to Vancouver, I slip in to the bookstore looking for gifts for my aunt and cousins in Canada. Leering at me from the shelves is a fat hirsute man called Ron Jeremy, who I know is a famous (or is the word infamous?) porn star. And the reason why I know that rather bizarre piece of information is because my Vancouver cousin once made a joke about him the last time I saw him a few years back, a joke which required explaining to me. Jeremy's name since stuck in my head, as one of those useless things we subconsciously store away. So when I see he's written a book, I'm kind of intrigued. The title tells me a lot: Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz. I buy it as a kind of a running gag gift for my cousin, who's still celebrating his firstborn and, I assume, has outgrown what I presumed was a casual understanding of porn.

The flight to Denver for the Vancouver connection is two hours and I discover I've got nothing to read myself, so I pull the gift out of my bag, with its lurid cover. As passengers find their seats, I remove the cover sleeve so as not to have to deal with the real or imagined thought-bubbles of my fellow passengers looking over my shoulder. I'm clearly not going to explain the backstory of why I'm reading a porn star's biog. It would surely be one of those conversations you have when you simply dig yourself a deeper hole - "Yeah, sure fella" you can hear them saying as they uncomfortably inch away from you.

Marj sits down next me. She's a management consultant from North Dakota and has a nice mumsy demeanour. She's also a talker, a very pleasant lady. I respond to a question from her, and my accent elicits a "where ya from?" and "watcha doin' here in the US?". Explanations follow, we exchange brief life stories as strangers often do on planes, and fall into an hour of easy discussion on a range of topics; the Iraq war, George Bush, the upcoming presidential poll, the media, the sort of things people talk to journalists about.

I tell her some of the same anecdotes from Iran and Afghanistan, places she only knows from CNN. She tells me she did journalism at college but family life got in the way but it's "an important job, you guys are so important". Perhaps, but she's building a mental image of me and journalists in general as noble, the type who sups with intellectuals and the powerful, defends the defenceless, visiting dangerous places Over There Where There Be Dragons. We discuss the quality of the various US papers, praising The New York Times, dissing the LA Times. She seems impressed that I, as a foreigner, know them. I tell her I read widely across the media, its a big part of the job keeping up.

"What's that you're reading now?" she asks, pointing to the sleeveless tome I've been nursing for an hour.

"Oh, that? ... umm, arrrh, aw you know, nuthin' special ... ummm ... gosh, we must be close to Denver by now, surely?"

MY much-lightened wallet thanks me as I leave expensive London on Virgin to New York (and yes, I paid my carbon surcharge for the polluting flight), the first time I've been to the US since that terror-related crackdown last year on inflight handcarry.

I pragmatically decide to pocket my check-in arguments to take my mobile office with me and check it in; sans computer, memory stick and important papers but leaving the all-important cables in the bag. I've been hearing horror stories of travellers arriving at JFK without their luggage and then having huge rows trying to gain entry to an increasingly terror-paranoid America. I decide I dont need the extra hassle of a fight with a burly marshall over my handcarry, let alone the bona fides of my Australian passport. As David Hicks knows, John Howard's alliance with GWB hasn't done Australians abroad too many favours. And I'm not in malleable Asia anymore..

As it turns out, JFK is a breeze, the US immigration service perfectly polite and welcoming. And my luggage arrives - a bonus - so I plunge into the zero-temperatures of a late January New York night. CNN drones away in the terminal, bizarrely with a story about global warming presented by a 'Mary Snow' and featuring comments from protester 'Frosty Hardison.' You gotta love America.

I ride through the soulless Queens suburbs into Manhattan with a spooky Guyanese Muslim cabbie who spends the entire $US45 ride trying to convert me to Islam. This Australian infidel's not for turning but having spent a lot of time in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan this past year, I leave the pious cabbie with a $10 tip, a wink and a recital of 'la ilaha ill Allah, Muhammad-ur-rasul Allah' (there is no God, but Allah and I say believing it to be true with conviction that Mohammed is his messenger), the pledge in Arabic I've memorised that Muslims make to the faith. He smiles as he waves me into my hotel. Confusedly.

I'm a week in New York and its as manic and intoxicating as ever. My wife and I used to live downtown in a Soho loft and then just two blocks from the World Trade Centre - this before 9/11 - so between a hectic schedule of appointments and interviews (Americans are world champions at agreeing to media requests) I re-visit our old haunts; our apartment on Greene St which we then decided not to buy but is now triple the price; the amazing Dean and Deluca deli on nearby Broadway; Kelley and Ping restaurant below our loft, the closest New York has to an authentic S-E Asian restaurant. Chinatown along Canal Street, traditionally ethnically Cantonese as in most Western cities, has become mainland Fujianese where the lingua franca is Mandarin - a sign of the times as the US cozies up to a thrusting China.

Angelika Cinema was across the road from where we lived so I take in a movie for old times sake - the excellent Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench in the dramatisation of Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal. Sitting there in the expectant gloom of Cinema Two, I'm transported back to 1999 by the rumble of the subway below the screen, famously a homely characteristic of this venerable movie house.

A lot of the places I knew have changed - like the WTC - but one that hasn't on my trip down Memory Lane is the jeweller Stuart Moore on Prince, where my wife and I chose our wedding bands in 1998. My ring has since been dinged up by wear and tear and Asia but the staff graciously re-shape it, gratis. By midnight, after the flicks, its minus five degrees and snowing and I decide to walk back the 60-odd blocks up and across town to my Midtown hotel from Soho, exhilirated by the city. Still the Capital of the World - for the time being until Shanghai takes over - New York can be sublime. A week is never enough.

United 27 from JFK to LAX takes five hours, and some change. I sit next to an American sales executive and a Kiwi winemaker on a business trip, the ANZUS treaty represented right there in an airline row of seats. The otherwise pleasant Kiwi describes Australia as "fascist" and New Zealand as "moral" for our respective approaches to ANZUS, all of which bemuses the American for whom it seems a revelation that Australia and NZ exist let alone are separate countries. Her taxes ultimately anchor ANZUS but she's never heard of it.

Most of the flight is over the Mid-West, well, flyover states and today, mid-February, four hours of the journey is just a massive sea of white - a snowy Ohio/Illinois/Nebraska/Colorodo punctuated by the occasional Rockies peak. There's a bit of desert and then Los Angeles' sprawling conurbation hoves into view. When I regularly took this route in the late 90's when I was posted to LA as a correspondent before NY, it took what I thought then was an extraordinary 30 minutes to fly over the City of Angels, and the then 15 million people who lived there. Today it takes 15 more minutes, to fly over three million extra people who've since become Angelenos.

This is my first time back to LA since 1999. Indeed, I've barely given a thought to it since. I never saw its appeal and I hated living there. Sold to the world as creative and fun, I found LA shallow, impersonal and, as a city, it shut down way too early for a town that's supposed to specialise in personality. You spent all of your time in a car, and good bookshops, debate and pedestrians were as elusive as a Best Actress Oscar for Our Cate. Covering Middle America, it was then post-Hogan and pre-Irwin and I remember my introductory mantra at the time to people I wanted to interview, that I was a reporter from Australia, which is a big country on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. It sounds patronising and maybe it was. But I found it necessary sometimes. I was then desperate to return to Asia but, as we descend, today I'm strangely excited about returning to LA and all its introspective wackiness. Maybe its because I've got an onward ticket in my pocket. Oddly it feels like a homecoming.

It doesn't take long to have an "LA Moment." I'm standing at the LAX carousel waiting for my luggage next to an unremarkable 40-something Mum in Jackie O sunnies and khaki cargo pants who's telling off her five year-old for climbing over the moving machinery. Actually she's more interested in her 'Crackberry' - as info-obsessed Americans call their Blackberry PDAs - and laughing loudly and very publicly at the messages its spewing.

The kid runs wild while Mum squawks into her mobile. "Hi Al, its Sarah Jessica here." The name seems familiar - to me and those around us. Of course, its Carrie Bradshaw from "Sex and The City." I remember a sniffily devastating piece in Britain's Spectator magazine a few years back that was confounded by the popularity of that series. The writer described Sarah Jessica Parker as "strangely horsefaced." Viewing Carrie up close and personal by the baggage carousel, I see it was an inspired description. Parker's not quite Phar Lap but she's not Cate either. Admittedly she's just come off a long flight with a whining kid in tow but there's no exuding of star quality charisma here. Indeed, she's quite shrill and loud. Some fat guy comes up to her and says he met her "13 years ago" somewhere. She's blows him off but he's persistent, no, he's all over her like a bad suit. She says "thanks for stopping by, see you in another 13 years, have a nice life." I text friends in Singapore and Beijing of my disappointment. Beijing texts back "yeah, they are never as good in the flesh" while Singapore says "she's hideous and has poor dress sense." They're both right but, with Cosmopolitan in hand, our bitchery would get us star billing on "Sex."

Sort-of-meeting-Sarah-Jessica-Parker brought to mind a funny dinner party I had recently on holidays with Australian friends who also used to live in NY. After too many reds, we played "Brief Brushes With Fame." Professional contact was banned - journalists often meet the prominent, as did this bunch of corporate lawyer friends - it had to be a chance encounter with a Famous Someone. The moments we've all had similar to the one I'd just had with Carrie were trotted out; someone shared a table at a Starbucks with Julia Roberts, another went shopping with Sean Penn and wife Robin. The ubiquitous Russell Crowe appeared all-too-frequently, and I lamely offered the time when Henry Kissinger and I had a tug-of-war over the last International Herald Tribune on the pile of a Hong Kong hotel kiosk (I relented, mindful of world peace).

As amusing anecdotes were aired, the winner seemed to be the one who claimed to be sitting next to Michael Hutchence while a young fan performed fellatio on him under the table in a Hong Kong bar. But that just seemed just too fantastic, and he did confess he didn't actually witness the said, er, contact, just the fan disappearing under the table while he was trying to have a conversation with what seemed a distracted Hutchence.

My mate, a thoughtful though somewhat taciturn Sydney lawyer whose Dad was a ranking officer in the Royal Australian Navy, was quietly drinking it all in. When everyone was done and laughs subsided, the spotlight turned to Grantly. We knew he too had lived in the US for a while, in the mid-60's when the RAN were getting the destroyers HMAS Hobart, Perth and Brisbane built at a Lake Huron dockyard in Bay City, Michigan. His Dad was part of an RAN team overseeing the job, making sure the shipbuilder was spending Aussie taxes properly.

His contribution rocked the table. "I went to school with Madonna." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_City,_Michigan#Notable_Bay_City_people He's not the type to lie. He won.

Despite the trial of six would-be Tube bombers, all Londoners are talking about is a cat-fight on Big Brother

London in mid-winter is cold, snowy and yes, miserable. It's also horribly expensive. It becomes clear pretty quickly after arriving from Dubai that this city is perpetrating economic fraud on the rest of the world - and itself. I love London, I lived here in the early '90s and married an English rose of a Londoner, but there are few bargains in this city anymore, and it's now probably the world's most expensive to visit.

The 15 minute ride on the Paddington Express from Heathrow is 17 quid ($A43). It's three quid for a basic ticket on the - still-filthy and oft-delayed Tube - that's $A7.60! - and the same for a coffee. Flagfall for a cab is about $A10.

Beyond transport, you don't get much change anymore from 100 quid ($A254) for a meal for two at a half-decent restaurant, and this being London I stress only half-decent. Add another 50 -100 pounds for a feed in an eatery you'd be inclined to return to.

Cinema tickets cost 8 -11 quid ($A20-28), parking a car in the West End is a criminal 18 pounds ($A45) for two hours, and try getting a habitable hotel room for under 100 quid a night. My editor is staying in an unremarkable hotel on The Strand that costs 340 pounds a night.

It's out of control but it wouldn't be so bad if the quality was there. Call me a Whingeing Oz but every time I buy something in London I feel like I'm being ripped off. I can't imagine how Londoners can afford to live here. Mustn't grumble.

More puzzling still is the obsession with the TV show Big Brother. Some white trash housemate called Jade Goody (and the mainstream British media offers much worse descriptions on its front pages) has apparently racially abused a fellow housemate, a struggling Indian actress Shilpa Shetty who's trying to kickstart a Bollywood career that hasn't gone very far.

The whole farce seems contrived but it's the only thing people seem to be talking about, as if the troll-like Goody's racism somehow defines the nation. Maybe it does but, having just come from Iran and recently being in Afghanistan, I would've thought the trial underway in the Woolwich Court of the six British-resident African Islamists implicated in the July 21 2005 Tube bombing plot might be more pertinent to contemporary London life.

This was the copycat attack attempted two weeks after the 7/7 bombings that killed 52 commuters and the four Islamist suicide bombers. The evidence presented against the six is as damning as I've ever seen in a courtroom. The detail of the case is gripping and would seem to have implications for the welcoming that has long been forwarded by this city (one that Americans and Europeans disparage as "Londonistan") to foreigners and asylum-seekers

But it's not enough to push the odious Jade and the saccharine Shilpa off Page One. Sad.

Dubai's economic model seems to rely on the truth that dare not speak its name, the exploitation of foreign labour.

Transitting through Dubai en route to London from Tehran, I never fail to be amazed by this thrusting city-state.

No doubt you've seen the myriad of articles about the Miracle of Dubai, how it's become the Singapore of the Desert (hardly an endorsement to my Singapore-based ears), that it's enjoying a limitless economic boom, becoming a tourist magnet to the chavs and blingmeisters like Posh and Becks (a good reason to stay away I'd say). The ubiquitous Emirates Airlines seems to sponsor everything from Collingwood to Chelsea.

There's that bizarre development "The World," where the rich and gauche can pay $10 million and more for a man-made island arranged in a phony archipalego that's supposed to be a map of the globe. There's that ridiculous indoor ski resort, and the Burj-al-Arab, the iconic hotel tower that evokes the sail of a dhow. Stunning to look at from afar, its interiors are tack on steroids. Why you'd ever want to stay in its "7 star" hotel at $1000 a night and then some, let alone holiday here, is beyond me. The Burj Tower is another phenomenon taking shape - at 420m it's already the tallest building in the Middle East and the sixth tallest in the world, but some local reports claim its only half-built. Could it be the world's first kilometre-high building? Why not? Oil-free Dubai looks like the world's biggest construction site and it's all quite remarkable, a triumph of the art of the possible.

It conjures up images of Dubaians as the new Chinese, industrious workaholics bent on global economic domination. The second part may well be correct but not necessarily the first. Dubai's economic model - and this is true of much of the resource-rich Arab Gulf states - seems to rely on the truth that dare not speak its name, the exploitation of foreign labour. Millions of impoverished Lankans, Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos, Africans et al get paid triple what they might back home if jobs existed - which is still below the poverty line of most Western countries. It's almost as if Dubai's economic planners have scanned the latest OECD wealth survey and sent its talent scouts off to the bottom 20. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has the world's highest foreigners-to-locals ratio; about 80 per cent of the UAE's four million people were born somewhere else, usually somewhere poor. Indeed, about the only Emirati one meets in Dubai is the guy - it's almost always a man - who stamps your passport on the way in. Sub-continentals are OK for toiling in the 50 degree sun for 12 hours a day on a pittance they send home while spending years away from their families, but the UAE doesn't trust them with important stuff. As a Middle Eastern Emma Lazarus might've said, "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses and we'll exploit the hell out of you".

Another reason is that Dubai has also been a huge winner from 9/11. Arab oil money that would ordinarily have found its way to Europe and North America now gets speculatively parked here, because its owners feel discriminated against when they travel to the West with their Islamic names, the West remembering that 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi. Apparently sheikhs don't much like taking off their shoes, getting patted down and interrogated going through Western immigration channels.

The UAE isn't exactly a paragon of enlightenment, with democracy and workers' rights not being that high on the national priority list, two things it has in common with Singapore. As one Lankan restaurant worker lamented to me, complain about your conditions and you're on the first flight back to Colombo, a ticket you've paid for. The untaxed Emirati minority sit back, count their money and invest it in an ever-spiralling tower of speculation. The myriad of monuments to excess sprouting around town - party-time for overpaid foreign architects but many of their buildings are untenanted - in a huge speculative wave suggests to me that it can't be sustained.

January 26, 2007 - Iran

AFTER leaving Iran for the glitz of Dubai and Europe beyond, I get an email from an outraged reader - let's call him Peeved of Perth - who seems to regard my earlier musings from Tehran as shallow.

I'm sad and glad to be leaving this mostly wonderful country. I'm glad that I can.

It's difficult enough getting into the secretive theocracy that is Iran, but once inside, you enter a world locked in the past and riddled with corruption and cronyism

Utterly fascinating, this theocracy can be a particularly frustrating and complex country for foreigners to operate in, particularly journalists, whom the system sees as spies.

Cold, lonely, annoyed, uninformed and without toiletries in the heart of the Axis of Evil