When I left you (yes, and I know it was a month ago!) I was on my way to Burma. Wow, talk about a culture shock after coming from Thailand. That A-hole General who ‘rules’ the country has sure done his best to run the country down into the ground. The streets of Rangoon were a mess of broken footpaths, dilapidated buildings and dilapidated locals. The poor folk don’t even have electricity most of the time and the streets are full of noisy and smelly generators just so they can have some light at night. I stayed at the YMCA (which was the recommended place to stay back in 74), although the clientele has changed somewhat from backpackers…

… to dogs and lepers!

At least I didn’t eat like a dog or a leper. I’m sure they don’t eat fried crickets because that’s what I had for dinner on my first night in Rangoon. I ate a whole bowl of them that I got from a street stall. They didn’t taste too bad although their little legs do get stuck in your teeth…

At my next stop Mandalay I did find a few of the original hotels including the Man Shwe Myo Hotel. But, the Burmese government had taken away their license to ‘house’ tourists because the rooms weren’t ‘fit for people’ the owner told me.

The room did look very basic (and dirty). ‘Now only Burmese can stay here,’ the owner told me.

Mandalay is also home to the ‘famous’ Moustache Brothers who have been performing shows (that combine screwball comedy, classic Burmese dance and sharply satirical criticism of the totalitarian Burmese military regime) for tourists and locals since 1974. Except they don’t perform to locals anymore. They perform in the front room of their house. They haven’t put on a show for the locals since two of the three ‘brothers’ were sent to a hard-labour prison camp for seven years for telling a joke about the government in public. So they’ve been out of prison for a couple of years now and they are still telling jokes about the government and even making light of their time in prison…

Mind you, he did say that if the police came the brothers were bolting out the back door to leave us tourists to the police!

Next stop was Bagan, which hasn’t changed much at all since 1974. Oh, except the government moved the entire town (and gave the locals a couple of days notice and then just tore down their houses). I did follow the suggestion in the old guidebook, though, and hired a horse-and-buggy for the day to visit the 5,000 or so temples scattered around the countryside (although I didn’t quite get to see all 5,000). Here’s a shot of me on a temple and another of Myu Myu my driver (his teeth are black from chewing betel nuts!)

On to Laos next where nothing had changed but everything else had. The temples still had roaming monks…

… but the hotels had been turned into ‘gym and spa centres’…

I finished my trip in Singapore where Tony and Maureen Wheeler finished their trip and put together the first ‘South East Asia on a Shoestring’ in room 5 at the Palace Hotel in Singapore. So, that is where I finished my trip. Except the Palace Hotel is now called the ‘Madras Hotel Eminence’…

… and room number 5 is now room-half-of-number-5. The rooms have been split into half to make more rooms (and more money)…

On the last night of my ‘South East Asia on a Shoestring’ trip I ate at one of Tony and Maureen’s ‘personal favourite’ restaurants. Komala Vilas in Little India has been around since 1949. And it still looks the same…

… and is still popular…

… and still serves the Tony’s recommended dish exactly the same way it was served in 1974…

So, now here comes the fun part. Writing the book. I’ve certainly got plenty of material (and of course I’ve only told you a tiny part of it because you wouldn’t need to buy the book if I told you all the good bits). Oh, and I promise I’ll be blogging regularly (and I mean proper regularly) even if I do have a 90,000 word book to write!

I started my Thailand leg in Patong Beach. Back in 1975 there was only one place to stay. And that was the Patong Beach Restaurant, which offered you ‘a patch on the floor for 11 cents (and a mat to put on it for another 8 cents!). The 1975 Lonely Planet guide says: ‘The two sure signs of a freak centre have already gone up, the “no nude bathing” sign and fruit salad on the menu.’ Well, it sure is still a freak centre (and they still have fruit salad on the menus). The most freakish thing is the sleazy men who watch Thai girls perform tricks with intinate parts of their anatomy.  My travelling partner Beth and I strolled down the street past lines of Go Go Girl bars and we were accosted every few metres by men holding up cards with the ‘entertainment’ provided by their prospective ‘club’. On the list were the usual ‘tricks’ involving ping pong balls, cigarettes and marker pens. But there were also ‘tricks’ involving catfish, swamp eels, mice and even ‘knitting’. I talked Beth into going to a show (we were both keen to see the swamp eels) , but she only lasted 8 seconds before we both ran out in disgust. Mind you, watching a woman ‘knitting’ would have been interesting.

After a few days on Phuket we headed to Bangkok where we stayed in two of the original hotels from the 1974 guidebook. The Malaysia Hotel was the No. 1 travellers hotel back in 74 although you had to ‘fight to get toilet paper and your sink may fall off the wall’. The sinks stayed firmly attached when we were there although most of the clientele would have liked to get hold off my pipes. It is now pretty much a ‘gay’ hotel. It was full of men with large moustaches wearing tight little shorts with deep brown tans. I got winked at quite a few times and I caught one guy checking out my bottom.

In  Chiang Mai we went a restaurant that was listed in the original guidebook, but it seemed to have moved – and changed it’s name slightly. We asked a tuk tuk driver if he knew where Pat’s restaurant was and he didn’t know but called a friend on his mobile phone who did. The Pat’s from 1974 was ‘near the moat’. We drove over the moat and out of town past the airport and somewhere between Chiang Mai and the Laos border we stopped at a restaurant called ‘Pat Restaurant’. We were the only diners, but the food was nice (and nice and cheap). We did have a bit of trouble getting back into town, though. There were no taxis or tuk tuks in sight and we had to walk along  the side of a dark freeway stepping over rubbish and dead dogs.  When we stumbled across a taxi driver having a rest in a large supermarket carpark I almost hugged him I was so excited.

So, there are lots more stories from Thailand, but I can’t tell you all of them or you won’t need to buy the book!

It’s a novel way to chart the evolution of what for many young Australians has been a rite of passage for decades. Travel writer Brian Thacker is retracing the 1974 journey through South-East Asia of Lonely Planet founders Maureen and Tony Wheeler using their original guidebook — based on information they collected during their adventure a third of a century ago — as his only reference. With the Wheelers’ 1975 edition of South-East Asia on a Shoestring in his pocket, the Melbourne writer set off two months ago to see how the region had changed.

“I was a little bit worried that half the places would have been turned into highway overpasses,” the writer said.

Thacker wanted to retrace the Wheelers’ journey as closely as possible, with a view to writing about the experience. His first hurdle presented itself immediately. The 148-page volume was no help when it came to booking his first flight. Following the Wheelers’ itinerary, he needed to start in “Portuguese Timor”. But the thrice-weekly $73 TAA service from Darwin into Baucau had long gone — along with TAA. Three of the Indonesian airlines suggested for further bookings had also disappeared.

Timor’s turbulent recent history meant there was no chance of finding the “old-fashioned colony” described in the 1975 guide. Tourism was dead, with locals tending to assume, mostly correctly, that any foreigner was from the United Nations or an NGO. Dili’s Beach House hotel, also known as the “Hippie Hilton” no longer existed. The Chinese restaurateurs of Baucau had fled, along with most of the Chinese population, after the Indonesian invasion.

However, upon arriving in Indonesia, Thacker was pleasantly surprised to find many places in the guide not only still standing, but in the hands of the same people — or their children and grandchildren.In Jalan Jaksa, still the epicentre of Jakarta’s backpacker area, the guidebook-endorsed Wisma Delima was being run by the son of the man the Wheelers had described as a font of information for the young travellers of 1974.

“He told me that his father had opened the first hostel in the street back in 1969 — and all the neighbours had told him he was crazy,” the writer said. In 2008, the man’s son pointed down a street now lined with hotels and restaurants. “Now everyone is happy and everyone loves our family,” the second-generation hotelier said.

In Bali, the two guidebook-listed restaurants for the hillside artists’ town of Ubud were both still open. The landscape had been transformed, with queues of cars honking down roads that, in 1974, were dirt tracks between rice paddies. But Canderi’s was still a popular meeting point for travellers. Its founder, Canderi, whom Maureen Wheeler remembered — somewhat prematurely — as a “little old lady” in 1974, was now 78, and still running the business with the help of her son and grandchildren. The Ibu Rai restaurant was now being managed by the grandson of the original owner, and was still serving up the “bean soup and Bali-style porridge” praised in the 1975 guide.

Arriving at the once popular 1970s haunt of Samosir on Lake Toba in Sumatra, Thacker found the lakeside village of Tuk Tuk quiet. Until the early ’90s, the area had been popular with Dutch tourists, who flew in on later-discontinued direct flights from Amsterdam. Tourism to the area was then destroyed by the combined effects of the secessionist war in Aceh, the Bali bombing, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the area and the 2004 tsunami. Bernard, the founder-owner of Bernard’s — mentioned in the 1975 book — welcomed Thacker into the restaurant he had opened in 1972 at the age of 24 — and then sent staff out to buy ingredients for a meal.

The next day Tony and I jumped on scooters and raced out into the countryside. I didn’t get much of a chance to admire the view, though. I was concentrating too hard keeping up with Tony who sped in and out of traffic like one of the locals. At one point we stopped to take a photo of a spectacular view of Lake Batur and within seconds a couple of locals appeared out of nowhere trying to sell us sarongs and T-shirts. When the lady said to Tony ‘ for you special price’ I laughed and said to Tony, ‘You must have heard that a few times.’ In 36 years of almost constant travelling I’m guessing Tony would have heard that a few hundred thousand times.

It was such a privilege to have Tony join me for part of my journey with the original Southeast Asia on a shoestring. Not only was it the highlight of my trip it will undoubtedly be a highlight of the book. 

Brian and Tony on the way to Lake Batur, Bali.

'For you special price...'

That’s not the only memorable meal I’ve had so far on this trip. In Jogjakarta I had fried frog. It was all chopped up into bits and then battered so I really didn’t have any idea if I was eating the head or the bottom. It tasted like chicken. And in Jakarata I had goldfish. I did feel guilty, though, that some poor little girl would come home to find Goldie and Bubbles missing from the goldfish bowl.

Anyway, gotta go. I need to quickly duck to the loo…