The two towers

“Name a Kuala Lumpur landmark.”

“The Petronas Towers”

“Name two Kuala Lumpur landmarks”

“Both Petronas Towers”

“Name Three Kuala Lumpur landmarks”

“…”

Looking out of a taxi window leaving Sentral station* , one of the Petronas towers hides the other, so it appears like there’s only one of them there. You can’t make the mistake elsewhere in town – they’re (now) the tallest twin towers in the world, a landmark to take your bearings from, like the Eiffel tower in Paris, but filled with oil companies rather than tourists.

The buildings are surprisingly classy up close, art deco with a hint of Moorish Islam and Khmer temple. Their walls are clad in stainless steel, and still look clean, unlike a lot of high-tech office architecture which gets as streaky as an oil derrick after a few years in operation.

We’re here to meet Margaret, to talk about one of the best-run alumni societies in the world. OUS Malaysia hold fantastic English language events every year, attended by thousands of local school students, for instance, including an essay competition observed by the national press. Because of their organisation and local know-how, they’re even contributing to a debate about the use of English in Malaysian schools.

She works on the 78th floor, higher than the tourist observation deck which is on the bridge between the towers. Security to get into her office was enormously elaborate, almost like a US airport. It was worth it for the interview, and for the view. The rest of town is laid out in front of you to gaze at (or film), and you can peep over at the workers in the other tower.

Without wishing to sound like a lift geek, the mechanics of getting tens of thousands of people up the towers and back again are pretty fascinating. Double-decker lifts shoot you up to a transfer lobby, so fast your ears pop. Then you have to transfer to another stopping lift, the local service, which takes you to whichever floor you actually wanted to reach.

Is that my bag?

The process can be elaborate – a vertical commute – and Margaret says it’s not worth the bother of going downstairs at lunchtimes. She takes a packed lunch. Lots of her office-mates do the same, though when we were filming they’d all made the trip downstairs, to go to Friday prayers.

It’s strange to think that this icon of Kuala Lumpur wasn’t built when I started secondary school. To judge by grime artists’ pop videos, modern London is the Gherkin and the London Eye – both recent additions I remember being constructed. Closer to home, my Oxford college has now doubled in physical size, adding lots of extra student accommodation, so I can already say that ‘I remember when this was all fields’. I didn’t realise I’d be so young when I started feeling old.

- Tom

*so many nouns in Bahasa are like that – English spellings, rationalised.

Down and out in Chow Kit and Chinatown

Kuala Lumpur can, to the casual visitor, seem a bit sanitised – a laid-back stopping point between Indonesia and Thailand, a place for travellers to arrive, get a stamp on their passport, and then head off to Angkor Wat or Chiang Mai (or home).

Our round alone gave out over a hundred meals

After spending time with Sharon Saw and her family, though I’d say they’re missing out. Even if our days have followed t

he same pattern as the rest of the trip – our nights have been enlivened (if that’s the word) by tagging along with our hosts’ insane timetable of volunteer activities. Our only ‘tour’ of the city, for instance, was joining them on a feed the homeless drive between one and three in the morning.

It was organised by Kechara, the Buddhist charity that employs Sharon. The homeless in Kuala Lumpur take to the streets because of mental illness, drug addiction or trouble at home (not poverty as you might assume); so rather than simply giving handouts the charity aims to give them a second chance in life, giving them counselling and legal advice and replacement identity papers.

Not just another plastic bag.

That requires trust though; and that trust is built up with the food deliveries. Hence our tour of bus stations, doorways and skyscraper service entrances, dropping off food in distinctive orange bags. The deliveries have to take place at night, to ensure the recipients are actually homeless.

By the way, you won’t get to see a video of Sharon once this trip is over – she’s from Cambridge (it’s a joint Oxford-Cambridge society here, which explains why she hosted us), and our remit only runs to Oxford grads. Cambridge alumni department, if you are reading this, the ball is in your court.

- Tom

Singapore: City-state as airport

Singapore, half-way between India and China, was purpose-built for stopping over. By Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (after whom all the roads are named), and by Lee Kuan Yew (he of the chewing gum fines).

Hannah films on Orchard Road

Changi airport, consistently voted the world’s best by business travel magazines, is pioneer of such amenities as the terminal swimming pool (with views of the planes). It actually offers model itineraries for those spending a few hours waiting for a flight. Singapore Airlines gives you little vouchers to go out on the town if your wait is longer than a day. Going back to Heathrow now will be like rediscovering childhood TV and finding it was crap all along.

In fact, ignoring the heat (which we’re beginning to be able to do) the whole island is a little like an airport terminal – clean and well-signposted and tastefully dotted with tropical palms. And not a good place to bring drugs.

Like an airport, the shopping is amazing, so long as you’ve money to spend. In Hong Kong the offices were the most impressive buildings. In China it was the state-owned enterprises. In Singapore it’s the shops.

Sipping dollars at the Long Bar

Like an airport, the food and drink concessions are expensive – our touristy drinks in Raffles Hotel (we flew Qantas, so no vouchers for us) were about the price of a full meal in the UK, and our food in a hawkers’ market afterwards, sitting outside on plastic chairs, could probably buy a second hand car.

Our hostel, ‘The Hangout‘ is magnificent and unlike any backpacker’s haunt I’ve known – with gorgeous views from its little roof garden and a hotel-like atmosphere. It’s so expensive, though, that once our filming and interviewing is over we’ll move straight on.

So, farewell to Singapore. It’s been nice to spend a few days in a place where everything works, but my, we’ve paid for the privilege. And I could never quite get used to crossing the road in a hurry, out of fear of the jaywalking fines.

- Tom

Hello laptop, my old friend

This week we spent most of our time on computers. I’ve got deep red grooves on my wrist from using the trackpad on the (hot, metal) mac, instead of my external mouse. My contact with the outside world comes increasingly via Facebook, and the adventure novels tucked between the textbooks on Vikram’s shelves.

We thought about the lost city of Hampi, just to the north, but it’s unreachable after the region suffered its worst floods in decades. There are lots of ashrams – the city is famous for them- and via Soha we found someone willing to give us a tour. But that didn’t pan out either; editing took priority.

Still, as in our previous stops the people we’ve met have made up for the missed tourist opportunities. We met a former ambassador and his wife, who had tales of drinking with the Brezhnevs and being accidentally shelled by Saddam Hussein’s anti-aircraft guns. We got a tour of the town by another alumnus, a journalist almost exactly my age, who was very eloquent about some of the pressures created by being young and having an Oxford degree in India.

New skyscrapers: expect to see more of these

Bangalore has been the Silicon Valley of India since the 1980s, so we’ve been speaking to lots of people in the IT sector. Shrini asked us to guess how many workers HP alone has in the city; I underestimated by a factor of four*. Later, we met someone at AOL who left Britain for India because the opportunities for IT research are better. All those Oracle offices I used to see in Reading, from the window of the London train, are sales and consulting – the computer stuff is all based in the US and India. There are certainly call centres here, matching the UK cliche, but that’s a fraction of the activity going on.

China feels like the future and everyone there seems to know it. It’s harder to see India’s potential when jammed behind an autorickshaw in heavy traffic, but talking to people you realize the prospects for the place. We’re a pair of geeks but we were completely stumped by the projector system in the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, before Hannah delivered a talk there. That seemed to be a metaphor for something.

Amenities in Bangalore Airport

I’m not being completely honest about it being all work. Full disclosure – on the last day, in the last 45 minutes, I did manage some tourism. Along with Vikram’s father-in-law and daughter (up on her feet and feeling much better after her bout of fever), I went to the local temple – or rather, temple complex. I visited four different buildings, spread out across a road and including many statues to walk around, offer flowers to, or be splashed by water from. I was still baffled by the goings on, but ended up with a red tilaka on my forehead, which led to kindly looks by airport security. I think they get a lot of bumbling white guys finding themselves around here.

- Tom

* It employs 40,000. For comparison purposes, Oxford takes 26 computer science undergrads a year.

Soha so good

Our view of Soha, guest judging a gameshow

When Soha Ali Khan, Bollywood star and Princess, agreed to be interviewed by us we were pretty excited. When she agreed to let us shadow her – to a TV show screening, and the dubbing of her latest movie – we were over the moon. Mumbai was obviously going to be a very productive stop.

When we discovered the Assistant Director’s terms for letting us into the dubbing studio – that we dub some lines ourselves – it was almost too much to take. Getting a glimpse into private worlds, from hospitals to movie studios, is what keeps us going through the slog and jetlag of the trip.

I’ve been in one or two Soho post-production houses, and despite the unpaved pavements outside this place, it could have been transported from Dean Street, right down to the last black leather sofa and overworked production intern.

The studio uses the same headphones as us!

Some of the material we were dubbing – filmed in cafes or moving cars – understandably needed fresh sound, given all the background noise. I dubbed a line of a grumpy man in a cafe, and Hannah a line of an art teacher in a busy drawing class. However, a lot of the stuff Soha was dubbing consisted of dialogue between her and the other leads, in what looked like a studio. Why do Bollywood movies dub so much more?

Wikipedia says the tradition arose in the 1960s, when Indian movies were made at such speed that crews didn’t bother to muffle the noise of their film cameras. That ruined the sound recorded on set. Replacing all the dialogue (and removing most of the ambient sound in the process) became a tradition until only a few years ago.

As production values rise in sound (and everything else), there are still a few ways to save money it seemed, though. For example, rather than get all-the-bells-and-whistles insurance, apparently actors signed a waiver and the producers flooded the set, recycling the water for 40 days of filming. You can imagine the potential health hazard. But everyone went about their jobs, no-one drowned or got too ill, and the film got made. Jim Cameron would probably approve. This is where probably the biggest difference between Hollywood and Bollywood exists.

Interviewing Soha at home (note the Oxford print on the wall!)

Hannah and I sweated blood to sort out insurance for this trip (dealing with eventualities ranging from medical repatriation to a burst pipe to hijack at sea), and it was both refreshing and terrifying to discover that the movie they were making – a disaster movie – had less insurance than us.

Needless to say, Soha was a practised and professional interviewee and couldn’t be more down to earth with the two of us, or more patient. Having shared experiences with her and chatting about her time at Oxford (she was there only a couple of years before us) was a great giggle and made great footage.

I was surprised how easy going she was with takes. She explained how she felt that the more film experience she’s had, the more she trusts the cameraman and editor, and the less self-conscious she has become. If we were happy with the take, she was. If there’s anyone who understands why a series of two-minute films takes four hours to film and days to set up, it’s someone who works in front of cameras for a living.

- Tom

Bengaluru bound

We’re flying round the world on full-service airlines, which has meant eating airline food again; glimpsing first class behind a curtain rather than being able to see the whole cabin front-to-back; and using a seatback screen to watch lots of films we wouldn’t pay to see.

For budget reasons, however, and since trains were too time-consuming, we’ve ended up using a low-cost carrier to cover the leg from Mumbai to Bangalore. Apart from some luggage issues (how many novels to pack?) the only downside of paying less seemed to be a walk across the tarmac to the plane, rather than a stroll through a nice carpeted corridor covered in bank adverts.

After I’d climbed up the rickety stairs to the cabin, I could see what looked like smoke billowing out of the air conditioning system on the inside. Three scenarios occurred to me:

- the plane is on fire, and we are all going die
- the plane is being fumigated with a powerful insecticide, and we are all going to die in a few years
- that’s condensation from the air conditioning, because it’s so amazingly humid.

The stewardesses reassured me it was option 3, and the flight ended up being pleasant, uneventful, and pretty much on time – more than Ryanair usually manages.

Laid back city: In Mumbai he'd be standing up

Bangalore meanwhile, was rainy and cold. The roads were clearer and the buildings cleaner. The nice bits could be northern Italy, and even the shacks on the outskirts were upmarket – surrounded by long grass rather than mud, and never far from a brightly-coloured mobile phone kiosk. Balloon sellers are still there at the traffic lights, though, looking pretty miserable in the wet.

Vikram, our host, is the kind of person for whom the word ‘genial’ was coined. I think he appreciates our company too, since his daughter has fallen ill with dengue fever in Chennai, and his whole family is out there with her while she recuperates, leaving him alone. We’d hoped to buy a beer to cheer Vikram up, only to discover that the shops were closed for Gandhi’s birthday.

Shrini, who is our main contact at the alumni society, is the kind of person people imagine when they hear about Bangalore – he quit astrophysics because when he graduated materials science lagged behind what he and his colleagues could design. Wanting to make a difference, he ended up in IT instead.

South India as Miami

Many of the alumni society in Bangalore seems to think the same way – both about IT and making a difference. The society is a pioneer in using newer web technology, such as Picasa photos and sophisticated e-mail lists, to get members ‘chattering’ to each other (actively participating, rather than simply waiting for a newsletter) and bonding as they do so. Now the group is a decent size, it’s turning its attention to giving back most efficiently. For instance, Shrini proposed that rather than teaching English to one schoolroom of children, the group should spend their time encouraging interchange of ideas between teachers, and as a result reaching thousands of kids, through improved teaching methods, for the same amount of effort.

- Tom

Past, present, future, misc

The nature of our itinerary, touring lots of places with an Oxford connection, means that we’re seeing quite a lot of the old British Empire. Confronted with reminders of this, I tend to feel a mixture of guilt, nostalgia and bafflement (during conversations about cricket, especially – I know nothing about the game).

The nostalgia has been strongest looking at the old buildings of Mumbai, which are slowly being absorbed by mildew and enormous, liana covered trees. Near where we’re staying is a cast-iron building turning black with decay, subdivided into obscure business lots. It turns out that this was once the finest hotel in Bombay, designed with the same technology as Crystal Palace just after the Great Exhibition. India’s first film was screened there. Legend has it that a local entrepreneur built the Taj after being refused admission.

An eye for a bargain will make the whole world blind.

It seems pointless to reflect too much on the past, though, when this is a city so concerned with the present. Gandhi’s signature is advertising Mont Blanc pens, and local billionaires are constructing 27-storey vertical mansions. Even if Mumbai no longer hosts the world’s largest slum the crowds of the poor are never far away, sleeping on the pavements at night, or tapping on your window at traffic lights to sell mobile phone chargers and giant pink balloons (why?)

One way the locals are preserving a link to the past is in the constant religious worship. Driving to a flat on Malabar hill we passed a procession of people with pikes through their faces, with friends and families helping out with the weight. At night, huge lorries turn up on side roads, with shrines on the back and massive floodlights at the front picking out a crowd of devotees. Roadside shrines covered in fairy lights (at first I’d assumed they were cinema entrances) add to the illuminations.

We mixed the old and the new tonight, as Hannah gave a presentation on web video to a group of alumni at the Bombay Yacht Club. The audience, most of whom stayed around for dinner afterwards, were a mix of grandees, expats and young businesspeople. Hannah’s talk went down well, with a polite crowd forming round her laptop once she’d finished to watch examples of the films we’re making. We had a chance to speak to some of our potential interviewees, too, including a filmmaker and an entrepreneur importing sushi to India. It’s always encouraging to have too many rather than too few contacts on our first weekend in a new city.

- Tom

Welcome to Mumbai

A signed and stamped swine flu declaration is required to get through Indian immigration, but it seems that a lot of our fellow passengers didn’t read that part of the website. Nor are there signs to inform them once they arrive. So, as well as the flow of people towards the immigration desk, there’s also a riptide of passengers going the other way, in search of the relevant bit of paper.
This process would be quicker if the people divided into two lanes, back and forth, but no-one gives way. The result is a scrum, a sort of three-dimensional queue with elements of rugby and cage fighting.

The Gateway, a hop, a skip and a jump from our hotel

When we make it out of the terminal, the roads are the same, but with autorickshaws and retro black-and-yellow cabs taking the place of bored travellers. It takes two hours to reach our hotel, even taking a bypass that the authorities constructed out into the sea, because of the shortage of space on land.

Ashok, our host, has obviously seen this before, when we meet him for a beer at the Bombay Gymkhana that evening. He seems earily calm, a worldy gentleman of the old school; and as a well-travelled sort he’s able to put these annoyances into perspective and to answer my dumb traveller’s questions. About the blue sheeting everywhere, for instance – there to protect against Monsoon rains, which have been poor this year and will take a percentage point off Indian growth.

Since space is at a premium in Mumbai, spare rooms are scarce, and we’re staying in a hotel in Colaba, in the very south of the city. The Bade Miya kebab stand is round the corner, where every night there is live music – which I guess is related to the Dusshera festival. In front there are crowds of people dancing with sticks – sort of like sexy morris dancing. The Gateway of India and the Taj hotel are two minutes further on.

An encouragement to hoot: redundant surely?

Chatrapati Shivaji (Victoria) Terminus is a short cab ride away – as we discover on our first day, searching for a UV filter to replace one that got broken en route. Lots of our previous searches for kit have ended in electronics stores stocking nothing beyond flat-screen TVs, but the D N road has everything you need and more. We end up with a polariser in addition to our UV filter, and I got my pocket camera repaired for free. Inside the repair shop, I registered for the first time why people might store film in a fridge – the humidity is back at Hong Kong levels, making my shirt dark with sweat after a ten-minute stroll. Our poor equipment.

The hotel is well staffed, with two quasi-military doormen manning quite a small door, and an army of flunkies inside to seize our bags and carry them upstairs. When we get to the room (Cable news! No internet censorship! Bliss!) we can still hear the drums by Bade Miya outside, and rival attempts to direct traffic made by the doorman’s whistle, and the cab driver’s horn.

- Tom

Cake and wall

Work has absorbed almost all of our time in Beijing – we keep being suggested day trips to art villages or scenic tombs, but our free time has been measured in hours. My overriding impression of Beijing will be the (very good) service at the Regus managed offices here, courtesy of co-host Gloria Du.

However, the 18th of September was Hannah’s birthday. Having spent most of it recording an interview, we decided to take the evening and next day off.

Birthdays mean cake – and luckily for us there was a shop round the corner from Alec’s flat willing to make one on the spot. Chinese icing is a bit powerful, like Sunny Delight in solid form, but it was impressive to see icing flowers made in front of us in seconds, just using a piping bag.

Next came the question of what to do on Saturday. At 9pm on Friday Alec got on the phone to the owner of a shop in Huanghua, a slightly more tumbledown section of the Great Wall not too far from Beijing. Obviously guilty about encouraging us to eat duck tongue, he also bargained with a taxi driver to get us there, until the fare was half what we’d been prepared to pay.

We set off into the night, driving for over an hour along virtually empty roads, always uphill, passing poplar trees with their trunks painted white like in the French countryside, but hung with red laterns ready for the mid-autumn festival. We arrived at our hotel/shop/restaurant at around one.

Because we were tall, we were given the children’s bed – a huge expanse of mattress, designed to accommodate 10 children horizontally or a midsize Orca vertically. It was late but the owner Xiahong’s son brought us jasmine tea. After a breakfast of egg-and-tomato fried with garlic and ginger, we set off for the wall proper the next morning. It was incredibly misty, making for an atmospheric – and almost completely deserted – wall experience, but wiping out most of our ideas for shots.

Taxis being a bit hard to come by, we took the bus back (with a bit of mime-help from the local inhabitants when finding the stop). It was packed, and the coffee and shower at the end of the trip were luxuries from the Gods. We spent the evening at Yugong Yishan, a music venue recommended by Alec, to see local bands the Gar and Carsick Cars.

From the Great Wall to a rock gig! It’s as if we were in one of those tourist ads you see for Scotland – which, since they can’t show you Mediterranean sunshine, stress the amazing experiences you have. As a cynic, I used to doubt anyone could have a day like that, especially in front of quite so many landmarks. I’m happy to say I was wrong.

Back to the managed office tomorrow.

- Tom

PS During our taxi ride, we pass a district of Beijing where every shop is selling trophies. Why? What’s the demand? Little emperors all needing to win?

Beijing taxis

My standard approach to finding a subway plan for a new city is to look it up on Google – but in Beijing that’s a risky strategy. New lines are opening so fast here that you risk relying on one that’s well out of date. A friend’s two-year-old Lonely Planet might as well describe a different city. Moreover, in constructing the new subways, the architects haven’t entirely kicked old Communist habits – the stations are vast, and changing lines is like participating in a distance event in athletics, even without our bags.

The view from above ground

For this reason, and because we’re insufficiently intelligent to work the ticket machines even in English mode, we’ve switched to taxis – they’re incredibly cheap and take you door-to-door, rather than dropping you off, like the subways, a half-hour from home. None of the drivers speak English, but pointing to maps or Chinese characters copied down into our notebook is usually enough to get us where we need to go. There’s always a phone call to Mandarin-speaking friends if things go wrong.

Plus, we have ring roads to help us navigate. Urbanites have devised a lot of different ways to divide up the cities they live in – north or south of the Thames, with or without a 212 area code, and so on – but Beijing is the first I’ve seen that uses ring roads. There are six of them, beginning with the streets around the Forbidden City and ending with an expressway that loops 130km around the town. For us non Chinese-speakers, these ring roads (along with the gigantic ‘spokes’ that link them to the city centre) serve as a way of orienting ourselves.

The old cliche of Beijing as a city of bicycles is getting less and less true – the number probably peaked some time in the 1990s, and then declined as people who’d become rich enough to own a bike became rich enough to own a car instead. China has overtaken America as the world’s largest car market. By the time Katie Melua sang that there were nine million bicycles in Beijing, she was getting out of date.

2 wheels good, 3 wheels better

That’s not to say there aren’t bikes here. Those grandiose multilane highways leave plenty of space for bike lanes along the edges, filled with cyclists and pedestrians weaving about under the trees, and dodging electric or pedal three-wheelers (the Ford Transit of Beijing, in that they’re good for mid-size deliveries, and bad for those who get in the way). However, all that activity is drowned out by the noise and dust coming from the roads.

Use of a control other than the accelerator, the radio buttons or the horn is considered cowardice by taxi drivers (I’d say ‘unmanly’, but quite a few of them are women here – proportionally more than in the UK). We’ve taken lots of journeys in the standard VW or Hyundais, and it’s always a surprise when we emerge unscathed after so many emergency stops and near-misses, as gigantic lorries decide to change lanes in front of us on a whim and the driver zooms through traffic coming in different directions. Still, all the drivers have been very friendly. We manage a mangled hello in Mandarin – “Ni Hao” – and the driver usually says “bye bye”; so we’re doing our bit for cultural exchange, too.

- Tom

Wrong about China

We’ve arrived in Beijing. We were expecting hassle at immigration and customs, but swept through terminal 3, where the police booths are equipped with little smiley-face buttons for travellers to vote on the performance of the officials. The airport is so new that its runways are still clean – without the tyremarks and oil patches you subconsciously expect.

What modern Chinese posters are about

I was ready to emerge into a polluted, drab, city, but the road into town was lined with flowers and trees. The mid-rise tower blocks on either side, while hardly pretty, were livened up with neon and multicoloured lights. Advertising hoardings look beautiful when you can’t read them.

Granted, I was seeing the public face of the country, benefitting still from the improvements for the 2008 Olympics, and getting an extra boost ahead of the 60th anniversary of the PRC (roadside flower beds are full of lovely planting that none of the drivers can see, tended expensively by legions of gardeners). It doesn’t hurt either that this is the nicest time of year to visit – spring is dusty, summer is muggy, winter is snowy; autumn is just right. Even so, I’ve had my preconceptions disturbed.

The drinks stall was out of shot

I saw a tourist campaign for London which included a photo of Piccadilly Circus, cropped to exclude any neon lights. I wonder if that’s because advertising hoardings are a bit too Hong Kong, and don’t conform to mental images of London. We’ve done the same taking personal photos of China- I’ve tried a couple of times to photograph an old man in a blue boiler suit in front of a market stall, only for a 4×4 to reverse into shot and spoil my illusion. Or for the old man to make a cellphone call. I’ll see a cart carrying a bundle of sticks, only to discover the sticks are concrete reinforcing bars destined for a building site.

One aspect of Chinese society has conformed to stereotype, though – the restrictions on internet use. Web 2.0 has been a particular target for the authorities after the technology was used to disseminate pictures of riots in Western China. There’s no WordPress (so this update will have to be backdated, unless we can sort out a proxy connection), there’s no Flickr (no high-dynamic range photos of sunsets? How will I cope?) and no Facebook (it feels like losing a limb, but local expats say you learn to live without). The restrictions can be got around, but it’s a faff, and that’s enough to dissuade a lot of locals from trying.

Meowism

My old uni friend Alec is putting us up for a lot of our stay, in the student quarter of town. We’re sharing with an invisible flat mate and a house-cat called Li-Hai (an untranslatable expression roughly equivalent to ‘badass’). She likes to use our bedding on the floor as a place to run in circles, and to play with string. This can be a surprise at five in the morning. Hospitality is a big deal here, and our opening meal (courtesy of host Will Chen) was in a private room of a local restaurant. It was a banquet, most of which we had to take home. Alec came along as a guide, and has obviously picked up some of the same spirit – he provided us with a map, a guidebook, a SIM card, and a lot of wise advice about what to do while in Beijing. He also stressed the custom (which the Chinese people at the meal hadn’t mentioned) of serving duck tongue to the honoured guest. I don’t know how to repay him.

- Tom

Hong Kong in lift buttons

31: Every building is is tall here; even suburban developments are made up of clusters of 40-storey blocks. We asked Mimi what to do if a lift broke. Her suggestion was “pray”.

G, 1, 2: The hotel’s facilities are spread across a few floors. Everywhere is so tall because there’s so little space – walking around you discover that huge skyscrapers you saw from a distance are perched on miniscule parcels of land, usually on a crazy slope. As a result, and to ensure natural light reaches most parts, towers are narrow as well as tall. The reception desk and the stairs absorb most of the first floor, pushing the breakfast diners up to the second. The biggest developments – the airport, IFC2 – have to built on what was the harbour. Our own floor has maybe the surface area of a squash court.

3-6, 13-14, 24: All these floors are missing. Some don’t exist due to the numbers sounding unlucky. 4 sounds like ‘death’, a fact which the posters for the latest Final Destination movie are exploiting; 14 sounds like ‘certainly die’ and presumably 24 doesn’t sound much better; 13 is unlucky in the West, so that knocks out another. Maybe 3,5 and 6 are the laundry and the kitchens – or both, judging from breakfast.

7-8, 10-12, 29-31: So many smoking floors! Smoking in public places carries a fine here, but people haven’t kicked the habit. Why is 9, specifically, non-smoking? There must be a deeper meaning to the number. Or maybe a child moved one of the stickers.

- Tom

Mimi Mo and many malls

We’ve just got back from interviewing Mimi Mo at her flat in Sha Tin, after a slightly frantic journey (ferries are a risky short-cut). Mimi studied pharmacology in Oxford but chose to go into business instead, and has a lot to say about how the University turns scientific research into startup companies. We didn’t just talk business, though – at 21 she published a book for Chinese students thinking about coming to Oxford, and can speak with authority about musical theatre, having spent a year training as a singer.

Mong Kok district: many cables to be found here

Over a delicious dinner (we owe you, Mimi) she told us a little about the culture, languages and economy of the region. How, for instance, a territory with a mere seven million inhabitants can sustain all the shopping malls we’ve seen. Where most cities would have one shop, Hong Kong has a whole retail development, and there are vast, gleaming white palaces to consumerism on pretty much every street corner. They’re at the bottom of every office, next to every housing estate and every ferry terminal, offering luggage, TVs and scarves to all comers, as well as massage chairs, Chinese medicine and Starbucks coffees. They’re so air-conditioned you have to put a jumper on to go indoors. Mong Kok might be how I imagined the city, but I guess this is the real Hong Kong.

- Tom

A change of scene

Our Hong Kong hotel has air conditioning, but it’s no match for the heat – outside it’s in the mid thirties and as humid as bathwater, and metal handrails are hot to the touch in the shade. The city is beautiful, though, especially at night, which makes it hard to begrudge our big windows. The tourist board light up the main buildings on the harbour every evening with lasers and multicoloured neon (you can listen along to synth music and commentary if you want, on local radio) but you have to wonder what the point is, given how stunning the skyscrapers look already.

The view from our window

After fidgeting and reading through the entire flight across the Indian Ocean, rather than getting sleep, we’re both very jet-lagged and have developed the capacity to ignore Hannah’s phone alarm. Editing in the last couple of days has been brain-intensive enough to wake me up (good job, given the amount of footage to work through), while Hannah has been fighting off the sleep by catching up with e-mails, having been deprived of high-speed internet while on the road in South Africa.

Mikey, Kieran and Roland at dinner

Our last day in Johannesburg was my birthday (along with that of one of the student interns), so Kieran took us to dinner at Monarch, a newly-opened hotel-restaurant. I can recommend the Springbok loin to eat. For company I would highly recommend Chantelle, Kieran’s assistant, who has a wicked sense of humour.

Things since our arrival in Hong Kong have been quiet. We’ve had a chance to unpack our wrinkled clothes, sort out our kit (another flight, another broken bulb) and most recently to host Hannah’s mother Margaret for a day. We went up to Victoria Peak at sunset for more views, and to the streets round Mong Kok (one of the most densely-populated parts of the world) to look at the shops, but Margaret had a terrible cold and was fighting off sneezes, in a city where people tend to wear masks when they’re ill. She felt very embarrassed, and understandably annoyed to be laid low when there was so much to see. But it was lovely to have her here.

- Tom

At the Cape

I’m typing this with a view of Table Mountain – swanky though that sounds, the mountain is big enough that it’s not really an exclusive view here in Cape Town. In fact, one of the best views you can get is from a former prison – the infamous Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was forced into hard labour at a quarry, and where the constitution of free South Africa was debated among political prisoners cooped up in the same cell block.

We were following four of the student interns from Oxford as they explored the prison, and were able to interview them in various spots around the island (including a cell). It sounds like they’ve had a fantastic time of it. One intern was quoted in court on his second day on the job, as a law firm intern; another was flown out in a little plane to visit a farm in the middle of nowhere. All of them have become evangelists for this country and at least two of them sound as if they will be coming back.

Tom filming the mothers and their babies on the TB vaccine trial

Yesterday, by contrast, we were in the agricultural region around Worcester. The workers who help prepare the region’s wines have one of the highest TB infection rates in the world, making them a logical group to help test a new vaccine developed by Oxford University – the first for children developed in eighty years. From the sounds of it the doctors are well-practiced in speaking to the media, given the interest that such a project has provoked. Still, they couldn’t have been more welcoming.

Dr Michele Tameris giving a check-up to a baby

After an early start and a long day at the clinic we drove back exhausted in our host Linda Rhoda’s car, snoozing despite the amazing mountain views (and occasional baboons straying on the road). But it gave us a great feeling of optimism, as well of a couple of memory cards’ worth of good footage, spending time with the doctors, nurses and helpers at work.

- Tom

Joburg impressions

Sandton, Joburg

After a few days in Johannesburg, we’re beginning to get our bearings in big, vibrant and untidy city. Districts are certainly not an Oxford bike ride away, and most journeys across town feature some motorway driving (with all the improvements being put in place for the 2010 World Cup, that can take a while). Maybe that’s why the city can feel so American, even as so many other aspects of life in the city’s swankier quarters (from the English spoken in restaurants to the adverts on TV) can be echoes of home.

The outside impression that the British seem to have of the place is of high walls and razor wire in fearful suburbs, but our experience (which has taken us to the literal heights of Constitution Hill down to the famous melting pot district of Yeoville) has shown how accessible even the most important people in the country can be.

Hannah films outside the Constitutional Court

We’ve filmed Constitutional Court justice Edwin Cameron donning his robes, and were greeted with tea by Greenpeace CEO-to-be Kumi Naidoo, who chatted with us about his extraordinary life before Oxford (his Rhodes scholarship began early, since he was on the run from the Apartheid-era secret police) and his plans for his new job. We should probably keep quiet about those.

We got an idea about the future of South Africa (though she’d probably regard that phrase as far too pompous) by speaking to Trudi Makhaya, who followed an MBA at Oxford with a job at the innovation consulting arm of Deloitte.  While her views about South Africa are hardly rose-tinted, it’s interesting to hear how she regarded coming back as a no-brainer: not as a sacrifice, but as a positive choice given the opportunities this growing country provides.

- Tom

Day one

We’ve arrived safely in Johannesburg, swapping the rain of August in England for the warm sun of South African winter.

After kit checks, a shower and a search for a local SIM card (mobile phone shop staff are the same in every country, we’ve concluded), we met up with Kieran Clifford, our main contact here and president of the local Oxford and Cambridge alumni group. At huge personal and professional cost, Kieran has organised a gold-plated internship scheme for seven hyper-achieving current Oxford students, introducing them to South Africa and vice versa. It was impressive to meet him face-to-face, both for stories about his globe-trotting life, and for a description of this country from someone who is obviously in love with the place.

We’re also getting sorted a packed programme of interviews, as well as filming the Cape Town TB vaccinations (that’s going ahead!) and meeting with the interns, now in the final week of their placements. I guess we can sleep on the plane.

Lastly, we caught up for a beer with fellow filmmaker Will Sansom, who’s been in in the north of South Africa and Lesotho filming the activities of Msizi, a charity providing food for disadvantaged kids. As well as learning about the charity, it was good to talk about the practicalities of filming here from a friendly Oxford face. At the risk of sounding preachy, today (day one!) showed what this trip is all about – passionate people giving back to the future generations, and using contacts made through the University to get things done.

- Tom

Will Sansom at work