Wafflings of a Wanderer Volume 1: Recollections & Ruminations of a Gallivanting Scouser

By Paul G Robson

Everybody's got a story…

A 70s child brought up on a drug-ravaged council estate in Liverpool, Robson had already been working 7 days a week delivering milk for two and half years, when he left school at 16, an introvert with no exams. By the time Kajagoogoo came on the scene, he knew it was time to leave Britain behind and experience the world. Weeks after the Berlin Wall came down; he finally escaped to Germany and a job at Herr Stinkstiefel's plastics factory. The odyssey had begun.

Sixty-seven countries later, and told with a healthy dollop of effing and blinding, a look back at how he ended up in the Far East as a glorified babysitter, otherwise known as an English teacher. Whether scuffling with a Chinese bus cuntductor, or defecating from a beachside bamboo toilet in Goa, into the hungry mouths of waiting pigs, it takes talking shit to a whole new level.

Readers are given access to over 260 photographs, too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Aug 5, 2018

Book preview

While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

WAFFLINGS OF A WANDERER

First edition. July 26, 2018.

Copyright © 2018 Paul G Robson.

Written by Paul G Robson.

WAFFLINGS OF A WANDERER

Volume 1

P G Robson

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Paul G Robson is the author of WAFFLINGS OF A WANDERER, an amusing memoiry account of his travels and tribulations. Already a cult classic and hardback bestseller in the parallel universe of Meopia, his hopes are high for the online version to smash the twenty-copy sales barrier.

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Asterisks and superscript numerals throughout the book denote photographs *⁰-⁰.

All 262 of them are viewable here,

https://www.facebook.com/paul.robson.988373

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Whilst I took the utmost care for this to reach you error free, mistakes or grammatical aberrations may have slipped through. If you find any, let me know with an email citing chapter and full sentence. Any other queries, questions, quips or quibbles are welcome.

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https://twitter.com/PaulGRobson1

1

Once

Everybody's got a story . Most never get heard or told. As someone who's set foot in over 30% of the world's countries, I've thought about getting mine down several times. The first time the idea surfaced was enjoyable. I woke in my friend Luca's apartment, in the heart of Stockholm, still a wee bit drunk from the night before. As I lay sprawled on a sofa bed, savouring the waking afterglow, my mind lucid and cruising through memories, swoosh! In it swirled from Neuralford's downtown area, Nowherestad.

... WRITE A BOOK ...

For the next few hours, I revelled in a bout of pure nostalgia and mental scribing, a literary love child of Hemingway and Woolf. The drunk over state I was in, more likely Barbara Cartland and Dr Seuss. Without warning, the fog of a hangover rolled in and poisoned the party.

On my return to Norway, where I worked in the fishing industry, the intention to write stayed with me for months. The plan had been to take a laptop (now called a notebook) to India and get cracking, once I'd escaped a frozen Norwegian winter. But that idea melted. And here I am in 2015, twelve years later, sat in my apartment in the toasty south of subtropical Taiwan, where I've been for close on a decade, teaching English.

A few days ago, I returned to work after a three-week vacation. It's something I've been dreading. The main reason for the trip was to surprise my friend, Ryan, in Melbourne, on his birthday. All the while I was away, my inner thoughts battled with the urge to not take the return flight. It was close, but chivalric common sense triumphed over raging recklessness. I did, however, email the boss of the school with the required two-month notice to quit. I've only been working there four months and have yet to sign a contract. Not having one leaves me obligated to nothing and doesn't complicate matters. Shoot! I wrote vacation. I don't do vacations.

For legal reasons, increasing numbers of cram schools here have cameras installed to protect themselves. It also allows them the opportunity to track your every move and word if they so wish. The week before I left to see Ryan, the school manager summoned me to his classroom. He wanted to have a word about a low-level class of mine he'd observed in secret, Big Brother-Style, a day earlier. Only four, nine-year-old students had turned up. I'd spent 40 seconds marking their test papers during class time, a heinous offence he deemed worthy of a reprimand. The disdainful dressing-down continued with him declaring my lesson had bored him to tears. His delivery and objectionable demeanour were excessive and left me stunned. I can handle negative feedback when it's justified, but such an overblown made no sense. It pissed me off, how pissed off he was.

I'd taken over classes from a Canadian guy who'd done me no favours. He'd left them in a mess and fuck knows what he'd been doing with the students for the past year because far too many were disobedient, didn't listen or follow instructions. But within weeks, I'd gotten them into shape and received positive feedback from parents. The manager's undue displeasure and cutting words were a kick in the balls, provoking serious consideration to prolong my upcoming trip and stirring up feelings of, 'FUCK IT!' I smirked to myself, imagining his face if I didn't come back. Alas, I relented and returned to keep everything tidy and cordial like a good, little boy. But the English teaching scene has bored me shitless for over a year. This was the catalyst.

My current school differed from the previous one I'd taught at for years. The owner of that one had only one agenda, making money. He did this by keeping the kids happy, no matter what, and put them before the staff. Learning was secondary. Many private English schools here offer nothing more than glorified babysitting. The new school was a complete departure. It took the student's language tuition seriously and had a solid, structured curriculum in place. The higher standards required more prep work, increased the workload and demanded a focused and conscientious attitude. I had to pass two grammar tests and learned more in the short time there than in the preceding years instructing Taiwanese youngsters in my native tongue. When regular school finishes here each day, most children spend their afternoons and evenings at buxibans (cram schools) for more study. Parents pay for these extra classes in English, Chinese, math and other subjects. It's the same in Japan, South Korea and China, and this Far East mentality has provided me with an income.

Routine's not for me. Well, it wasn't until I came to Taiwan. To have stayed focused and disciplined for eight years in the same job, saving for a rainy day, is a big achievement. I'm now prepared for heavy showers, but they remain a dim dot on future's horizon as I bask in bright, razor-sharp sunlight. It's gone well, considering I'd never held any job for longer than 12 months. But I've become jaded by chasing money and a castle built on eggshells. I've fallen into tedium and the trap known as the rat race, which I avoided for years. Way back when Kajagoogoo inflicted their second album, Islands, on humanity, I itched to escape the mundane monotony of everyday life and leave the isles I called home behind. Travel, adventure and exploring the amazing diversity on our planet seemed the logical thing to do. It's time to revisit that mindset, methinks.

Work to live, not live to work, is a principal I've tried to adhere to most of my life. I'm ever mindful of how fortunate I am having the luxury of this way of thinking. A job can reward on personal and emotional levels. But for the vast majority of us, it's a means to an end, a mechanism to earn enough cash to sustain life. Work is often shit, a pain in the arse, a fucking cunt of a four-letter word, up there with the best of them. We have to work, but it doesn't have to consume our existence. My mind's drawn to Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Not the axe-wielding psychotic, more the deranged writer repeatedly typing the proverb, 'all work and no play...' on each page of his manuscript.

A perfect moment of musical coincidence just occurred while making breakfast. Of the 6,500-odd songs on my computer playing on a random shuffle, up first came Once, a Roy Harper song. Kate Bush's haunting harmonies and Dave Gilmour's deft intro and solo enhance Roy's guitar and deep, poetic words, which move me every time. The main theme of the song is how each and everyone one of us gets only one chance, one dance, one life. That's it. Once. They sum up how I've felt these last few months. And I still haven't had breakfast because David Gray's This Year's Love followed and enticed me to play along on my Taylor GS Mini acoustic. OK, time to eat.

Breakfast was a raw egg, a large banana, passion fruit and plums blended with organic flax seeds, oats, organic coconut oil and a cup of low-fat milk. I try to eat real food, but it's difficult when modern farming and food companies don't make it easy.

I left my guitar upright against the wall in the bedroom and not a good idea. It now lays flat on the bed, snug and safe in its case. You never know, an earthquake might strike. Positioned on the Ring of Fire, Taiwan gets them often. My apartment's on the tenth floor and the taller the building, the more it sways. It must terrify, living much higher when a big one hits.

I've almost finished Neil Young's book, Waging Heavy Peace, which Ryan gave me a week ago, in Melbourne. The plan to pop up and surprise him on his birthday, spawned last November between me and his wife, Portia. Born in Paris, she has Aussie and Spanish passports. Her dad, Félix, left Spain in the 1960s and immigrated to the state of Victoria as part of the 'Come to Work in Australia' campaign. The story of her mother, Esther, is more complex. She and her twin brother came into the world in Egypt, offspring of Italian migrants. Their Catholic father and Jewish mother couldn't wed as Papà was already entwined in the sanctity of matrimony. His wife had run off and disappeared, leaving him two sons to look after and little chance of an annulment or ab initio. Religious denominations and their severe rigid codes must have been a heavy burden back then. The forced abdication of Egypt's King Farouk in 1952 left the country in turmoil, and the British no longer holding power and control over the Egyptian monarchy. Portia's grandparents gathered their four children and fled to Italy. After a long-drawn-out saga to immigrate, Esther made it to Australia with her mother and two half-brothers. Her twin stayed behind to take care of their ill papa, who died two years later. Esther and Félix met working at the Holden Car Plant in Port Melbourne when she injured herself on the production line. He was the designated driver and drove her to hospital. I'll leave it there, but see what I mean about people having stories? Don't get me started on King Farouk.

Ryan's birthday surprise went well. He came home one evening to find me sat on the arm of his sofa in the living room wearing a black mullet wig. Strumming his guitar, I sang the Christy Moore song, Don't Forget Your Shovel (I changed shovel to scissors, seeing as he's a hairdresser). He didn't have a clue it was me until I took the wig off, which left him gobsmacked. We'd last seen each other a decade earlier, when he came to Taiwan for six weeks while his Australian residency was getting processed.

Lea, my Taiwanese girlfriend, travelled with me for those three weeks away. It was a big deal for her as she'd never set foot out of Taiwan or seen inside an aeroplane. We flew to Singapore from Taipei and onto Langkawi, a striking archipelago of 104 islands in the Andaman Sea, nestled in Malaysia's north-west corner. Rainbow Lodge, a basic backpacker's hostel two minutes from the main beach provided a base for a few days. After another plane to Kuala Lumpur, an eight-hour flight the following day landed us past midnight, in a rather chilly Melbourne. Leaving subtropical Taiwan for tropical Malaysia near the equator and arriving in a Southern Hemisphere winter was a shock to the body's central heating system. Melbourne's latitude, equal to Palermo's in Sicily, might make one envisage agreeable winter climes. WRONG. The temperature was 4 ℃ or to put it another way, fucking Baltic. I used to be a hardy British northerner. But wearing shorts and flip-flops ten months of the year, as I do in Taiwan, has turned me into a big girl's blouse. Lea suffered worse. She'd only ever known a hot climate. We stood outside the airport at 1 a.m., shaking from the brisk weather and scanned every van, hoping it would be the car hire lady to pick us up. Thirty minutes passed before she appeared.

We'd arrived in Malaysia in the final week of Ramadan, the sacred month for fasting, praying and introspection for those of the Islamic faith. The atmosphere was relaxed, summed up by a small mosque near Rainbow Lodge. I walked by several times wearing only beach shorts and sipping a beer. In most of the other Muslim countries I have visited, being half-naked and drinking alcohol is nigh on impossible. And that's putting it mildly.

In the past, I travelled around Bangladesh for six weeks. It was Ramadan then, too, and being vegetarian only added to the daily struggles. I spent three months in the north of Pakistan, two in Indonesia and one in Egypt, and coexisted for months, the length and breadth of India, with its huge Muslim population. Morocco and Eastern Turkey both saw my skinny arse for a month, and I even had half a day roaming in the West Bank. Near the end of the last millennium, while in northern Bangladesh, a local guy attacked me. I never saw the ten-inch rusty blade of the knife he held upturned in his hand. He'd concealed it under a blue, nylon pullover draped over his arm. Why did he attack me? Did he have mental issues? Was he a Fundamentalist or angry over losing his job as a Lollipop Man? Could it have been sheer jealousy of my jaw-dropping handsomeness? I'll never know.

Please don't get the wrong idea. I've been treated with the utmost respect and warmth many times over while travelling through the lands of Islam. In my experience moving around the planet with a backpack on, most people have shown kindness and offered help. Most of humanity grapples in a daily struggle and has to wade through so much crap, trying to exist. Poverty, deprivation, religion, exploitation, politics, cultural differences, addiction, genetics, mental illness and more, combining to intertwine, govern, influence and control. It only takes a single person or incident to make you lose sight of that view.

An Airaisa flight out of Melbourne took us back to Kuala Lumpur, and we returned to the same backpacker's hostel from two weeks earlier. Once again, twenty-something travellers idled around the hostel's trendy lounge, heads buried in smartphones and tablets. Nobody interacted or acknowledged each other's presence. I sat there people watching and realised the impact technology has had on backpacking. It's killed much of its charm. No need for guidebooks, asking locals for directions or shock horror, explore unaided on your own. What happened to discovery and leaving familiar behind? Or detaching oneself from everyday life and getting homesick, instead of daily connection with family and friends? Fat chance any of them would know what poste restante is, a lifeline in the 90s, since reduced to a relic from another age. Searching online for the latest reviews and smartphone videos of the next port of call spoils it for me. Everything is too easy. I relished escaping my comfort zone and letting the mystique of each destination unravel, with a few lines from a guidebook, or chats with other travellers providing a tad more allure.

No sighting of the school manager yesterday, but he emailed to say it's disappointing I'm leaving and will talk with the owner over when my last day will be. Students on vacation for the summer holidays and new class schedules have left me with twelve teaching-hours a week, eight less than before I visited to Ryan. Oh yeah!

Chapter one finished. Now there's a first.

2

Beginner's Guide to Writing a Book

'T is day two and I haven 't drunk the first coffee yet. The prospect of writing has me wired and my head is buzzing with so much to say and convey. A stream of consciousness, bursting out, flowing and coursing through my mind has torrents of thoughts and memories cascading into the pool of my perception. Notions float around and I'm trawling through them, straining to hold on to every drop of cognitive data. A lengthy procedure of pondering and reminiscing is under way. I finished the Neil Young book, and he talks of his muse, the creativity he's harnessed with remarkable results. Let's see if I can channel mine.

The worry of losing any of my transcribing, due to a computer crash, malware attack or any other technical disaster, persists. My PC still stands after a 6.0 magnitude earthquake hit around Valentine's Day this year. I came home to find it suspended from a taut power cable, perched in mid-topple mode*2-1. The monitor lay on the wooden floor, face down, in its final resting place. Both survived this minor calamity. Within minutes standing upright back on the desk and turning them on, they functioned as if nothing had happened. The computer bares a four-inch, scimitar-shaped scratch on the left side panel, caused one presumes, by a one-metre square mirror, which hadn't been so lucky. Shattered*2-2 into ready-made glassy daggers, it spread over the floor, having fallen from its spot behind the monitor. To say I'm glad I wasn't home when it struck doesn't come close. They scare the shit out of me and it's hard not to become rigid and frozen when one quakes. There's nowt you can do, absolute zero. Half a minute spent hanging in anxious uncertainty, hoping it's not a biggun, and all the while beseeching Mother Nature to be merciful.

I made two files, one named ORIGINAL, the other CHOPPED. The ORIGINAL file will stay as is, to keep the natural flow of my thoughts and recollections as they realise and form into the visual onto my screen. Since I started yesterday, the CHOPPED file is in a continuous edit. Every few minutes I click on the floppy disc icon in the top left-hand corner to save, forever copying and pasting from one Word doc. to the other. They're also backed up on a USB stick and an external hard drive and I plan to save them to my laptop. Better to be safe than sorry. I'll send emails to myself with the fruits of my labour, but they must wait because I can't get online. My Taiwanese landlord followed my instructions to cancel it while I was away. At that point, I was considering revisiting Burma.

The internet will return the afternoon after tomorrow and cost 193 NT$ (New Taiwan dollars) a month which is not even four quid! Let's hope the connection is as outstanding as the price. My previous internet service provider charged 1,000 NT$, about £20. Forrrk! I could've made a yearly saving of nearly £200 these last few years. Not being online has its pros and cons. I have no distraction, but no capability to research. How did we manage without the internet? I can't remember. It's become so pervasive and ingrained into the human psyche in such a short time, an invisible gigantic serpent, coiling around us slow and deliberate, in an ever tightening grip. I used to proclaim with a modicum of pride, of not owning a TV. Broadcasting networks show too much rubbish, and because of online streaming and the Tube of you, I had no need for one. The reality is there's no difference, a screen showing moving images of TV shows, sports, films, videos, etc. Born into the phenomenon of the digital age, the younger generation knows nothing else.

My smartphone's out of action too, dropped on the floor at Pulau Langkawi airport, two weeks ago, while retrieving it from a plastic tray at the X-ray security check. Helpless, I watched it execute a couple of faultless somersaults and a half twist before landing flat with a thud. I awarded a score of 9.7 for artistic interpretation as I picked it up from the ground, mouthing a seething 'Fuckety, Fooking Fucker.' My gnarled expression reflected from the cracked screen showed an immaculate grimace of Picasso perfection worthy of a 10. My Xiaomi Mi3 phone's aquatic ability surfaced once before. Eight months earlier, on a seven-day fast in Thailand, I took an early morning stroll along the beach and came upon a small river, flowing into the sea. While wading across, I heard a faint plop as it fell out my pocket into the brackish water. With a frantic grab, I scooped it up from its brief, sandy resting place. Not a glitch. It glistened still displaying the time and other various icons, resolute and undisturbed, as it had from the first day of its manufacture. I shook off the excess water and rested it on a coconut shell, to dry off in the sun. Well, it impressed me.

So, how do you write a book? Erm, you write, right? Nagging bits in my head include paragraphs, syntax and grammatical aspects. Not important at the moment, but I have to maintain a reasonable, coherent level or it may become a mess. Bill, a dear friend, has already offered to edit. He's a smart guy from the USA who's lived in Taiwan for a quarter of a century. We bumped into each other twenty years ago in the remote, north-western mountains of Ladakh, and about as far north as you can go in India. A military standoff (ongoing) to a border dispute between Chinese and Indian forces saw to that. The main town, Leh, could fool most they were in Tibet, if abducted, blindfolded and dropped there like a freed CIA hostage. My encounter with Bill is how I ended up in Taiwan. He mentioned the possibility of making decent money working as an English teacher. It sounded enticing so... Oh, I digress. Wafflings of a wanderer that's what it says on the tin.

More on this unfamiliar process of writing I find myself in. Constant mouse-clicking in Microsoft Word resembles the discipline of a military drill. Left-click, right-click, left-click, right-click, left-click, left-click. Each page goes through various permutations on a carousel of punctuation. Words, sentences, capitalisation, commas, semicolons, apostrophes, hyphens and full stops, all in a perpetual state of modification.

Type. Save. Click on Spelling & Grammar. Change. Ignore Rule. Ignore All. Select words. Copy. Paste into ORIGINAL USB file. Check word count. Is it the same as the ORIGINAL word doc file? Click on floppy disc icon. Save. Click on File and Save As (to make double sure). Reread. Type. Save. Select. Copy. Paste. Fuck, it never ends.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Boring! You've taken a valuable minute to get through those last two paragraphs. My point trudges through a swamp of tedious banality, a novice writer trying to describe a process which already sits at the one-hour toll gate on the Lexicon Highway. At this rate, the toll charges will accumulate to several months on my gloriously laborious endeavours, or should that be, laboriously glorious?

Compelled to write, such an undertaking down an unfamiliar avenue seems both arbitrary and destined and how life can be. Mine's been a great adventure. Born a British citizen, I won the citizenship lottery. A UK passport has been gold for a few hundred years and affords me liberty and protection; such is the geopolitical landscape that has governed my lifetime. There have been highs and lows, naturally, and they help create balance. To have everything handed to you on a plate is the worst thing imaginable. From where does the sense of achievement and triumph emanate? OK, that's a lie. Born with green, curly teeth would be worse.

Not long after my travelling began, I returned to the UK for a short time and a close friend asked about the best things I'd seen. Years later, he quizzed me again with the same question. It surprised me when he said I gave the same answer. He was eager to hear of the Taj Mahal, The Pyramids of Giza, 18,500 ft. up near Mount Everest Base Camp, Jerusalem, Manchester Arndale Centre, etc. I could've lyrically waxed his ears with amazing visual and geographical wonders. But for me, it's humankind that shines and stands out, be it travellers or the natives. Local people, more often dirt poor, have welcomed me with big smiles, radiated warmth and shown hospitality. They've shared their food, homes and lives with me, a complete stranger turning up out of nowhere. For brief passages of time, mutual, exotic fascination has reciprocated in harmonious goodwill and it's hard to fathom the esteem lavished in my direction. Everyone is the same, but where we're born and the hand we're dealt has a huge bearing. I'm more fortunate than most, but undeserving of such high regard. Experiencing it repeatedly humbles you. It has brought me face to face with the Goddess of Humanity in her most dignified splendour. Imagine if you will, the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz dressed in a dazzling gown of gold leaf and magenta silk, spun by fireflies fuelled by steroids. Her presence has graced mine many times, as pure, incarnate souls. Let me offer a few accounts.

I spent six months in Israel, most of them volunteering on a Kibbutz with a spell working in Tel Aviv. In the middle of this, I visited Egypt for a month which was a profound trip. I felt 'out-there' and for the first time sensed no trace of my culture. The affection shown to me by poor Bedouin tribes in Saharan oases was touching. Many times they offered water, mint tea, biscuits and dates, an introduction to acts of kindness, which have played out again and again.

After leaving Israel, I travelled in eastern Turkey and met four westerners who'd met at random while travelling in the Turkish hinterlands. One morning, trekking in mountains near the Iranian border, we happened upon a mob of impoverished nomads herding goats and sheep. Dirty and scruffy, as anyone would be, trying to eke out an existence on such barren hillsides, they belonged to the world's largest, stateless, ethnic group, the Kurds. Two huge, savage dogs and I mean HUGE, stood on the edge of their camp and foamed with rage when they spotted us. Called Kangals, they're bred as guardians of the flock to protect from wolves, bears and other unwelcome visitors. The size of these beasts was a fearsome sight. They can nudge up to a metre in height and weigh up to 80 kg. I struggled to dismiss the thought of them breaking free and feasting on my bone marrow. Only tethered ropes around their canine necks saved us from ending up as Pedigree Chum.

It caused a stir when we showed up. The gang of Kurds fractured in two and the women came over smiling, collected Mona, the petulant, Dresden native of our group and led her to one of their tents. The Kurdish dudes were as happy as their womenfolk to see us and bade we sit. A generous stack of unleavened bread and a large jar of piquant curd