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This informative article on adventure desitinations draws on excerpts from our friend Harold Stephens' newest book Return to Adventure: Southeast Asia. Stephens, an adventurer and early escape artist, is a well known expatriate in Asia having written thousands of newspaper and magazine articles and 19 books. He is currently writing travel articles for the Bangkok Post and we can assure you that you will not find better more interesting writing anywhere.  Denis Grey, the Bangkok bureau chief for AP, describes Stephens this way: "The fires of youth may have burned down low. We may have reached mid-life or even beyond. But moments come when we still dream about it: an emerald green cove in the South Seas with our own yacht lilting at anchor; throbbing, libido-unleashed ports-of-call; a life free of niggling bosses and nagging children and nasty bill collectors. Yes, many people dream about it, but Harold Stephens does it. Stephens says, "How few of us ever stop to realize that adventure is not something in the past. It's now. It's happening all around us, all the time. The problem is knowing where to look. We turn to new horizons. Adventure awaits in SE Asia." To read Harolds unique travel writing view:  - www.bangkokpost.net/travel -

That Southeast Asia has an intriguing and alluring outdoors may come as a surprise to many. We have fixed images of Asia that are hard to overcome. The very mention of Asia and our minds conjure up all kinds of preconceived ideas. Take Thailand. Thailand to the world is an image of enchantment that's hard to dispute. It's a land of golden temples with tiny bells that tinkle in the breeze; a country with green mountains, tropical forests and endless offshore islands; a nation of smiling people and happy children, and monks in saffron robes moving in silent animation; a country interlaced with rivers and canals, with rice barges, teak logs floating down rivers, ferryboats and river buses all gliding along in a kaleidoscope of changing colors.

The image Thailand presents is real enough, but it's not the complete picture. Thailand is more than golden temples and smiling faces. Thailand has adventure lurking in its midst, at every turn. It's mountains are a challenge for both rock climbers and mountaineers; it's wild rivers churn
with white water for daring rafting and kayaking; it has trails to hike or cycle through majestic hilltribe villages and lovely tropical forests; it has ocean floors littered with wrecks to investigate; it has ancient ruins and archaeological sites still to be uncovered; and for the spelunker, amateur or professional, it has caves to explore. The fact that Thailand has unexplored caves is news to some, but even more astounding   is that these underground caverns number in the tens of thousands. The caves of Thailand are one of the country's greatest mysteries.

This is the image we have of Thailand, but we can't forget the other countries of Southeast Asia -- Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia to the south; and Burma, now Myanmar, to the west; and to the east, all of Indochina, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Nor can we can't forget the Philippines, and all of East Malaysia that is Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo. They all, even tiny Singapore, have their images, beneath which lie the hidden world of adventure.

It is not foreign travelers alone who are unaware of what Southeast Asia's outdoors has to offer. I know a Chinese family in Singapore, typical Asians, and good friends, who went on vacation to Los Angeles and returned home filled with excitement. What was it that impressed them the
most -- Disneyland. They raved about a boat ride they took up a jungle river. They traveled 9,000 miles to see a fake jungle, and yet less than a hundred miles to the north of their home in Singapore they could have seen the real thing, the last great jungle of the world-the Oriental jungle. Imagine, the oldest, untouched rain forest on this planet, a jungle that teems with wild animals and illusive aborigine tribes who make the forest their home, and they chose Disneyland.
 

Asia outdoors is hard to sell. Years ago I was invited by the Malaysian chief game warden to join an expedition that was taking stock of the wild elephants. The expedition was successful and got a great deal of press coverage. A Singapore travel company, upon reading about the expedition, came up with the idea of introducing jungle safari trips to foreign tourists. To promote the idea, the travel company asked me to assist in producing a short travel film. It was a fun assignment depicting a weekend safari into the jungle. When the editing was

complete, the agent went offto Europe and America with the film tucked under arm. "I'll have clients flocking to the jungles," he said.

A month passed, then another, and another. A half year came and went, and not one person, not one, signed up for a jungle safari. The agent sold shopping and sight-seeing tours, but no jungle tours. It wasn't that people were against jungle bashing and wild animal watching. It's just that they
were contented to sit in Raffles Hotel in Singapore and listen to the bartender at the Long Bar tell them about the tiger that was shot under the billiard table back in the 20s. It didn't matter the tiger had escaped from the zoo. And tourists felt comfortable just to sit in a Tudor-style hunting lodge (but no hunting, please) in the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia knowing that outside their very door was a forest where elephants and tigers roamed.

Tastes in travel do change. Today travelers want something different -- adventure. For years, it seems, even the spirit of adventure was dead. It wasn't so long ago that whenever I talked about going off to explore the jungles of Borneo or about sailing aboard a trading schooner in the Pacific, people would scoff. "You can't do that anymore," they said. "Those days are gone."

Today it's quite different. People are interested in adventure. It's obvious from the books and magazines we read, from the films and television programs we watch. Adventure is the theme. Newspapers carry tales of adventure; social clubs invite lecturers to give talks on travel and
exploration; adventure clubs have become popular; and there are 'adventure tours' that promise to take you to faraway and often hard-to-get-to places, usually for handsome fees.

Whatever the motive or reason, the reawakening of adventure is very encouraging. We all share this earth together, and it can be a very exciting place if we let it be. Adventure, or call it discovery if you wish, adds a new dimension to our lives. It gives us a purpose.

We often confuse this "reawakening" of adventure with nostalgia, that is, dreaming of a return to 'the "good old days." Movie films and TV drama depict the past, and we become lost in reverie. And certainly when we read the pages of Somerset Maugham and Joseph Conrad, and the book on our lap falls shut, our imagination runs back through time. "Those were the days," we sigh. "To have lived a hundred years ago!" Granted, a hundred years ago, or even thirty or forty years ago, the world was very different, but how few of us ever stop to realize that adventure is not something in the past. It's now. It's happening all around us, all the time. The problem is knowing where to look. We turn to new horizons.

Southeast Asia is a new horizon, a vast unknown land. People look askance when I mention this. Despite the fact that the bulk of the world's population lives in this region, there are still areas, mainly the jungles and mountain plateaus, that remain unexplored. Stone age people continue to be discovered in the Philippines, and there are tribes of Punans in Borneo who have never seen an outsider. This is today. What about yesterday? We haven't begun to scratch the surface of Southeast Asia's past. Written history began when the first Europeans arrived. But the Chinese and Indians had been trading by land and by sea for as many as 5,000 years. They had well established trade routes, trading posts and even cities, centuries old and long forgotten by the time the Portuguese arrived. Early Chinese chronicles from the seventh century AD make mention of such cities, or trading posts, located

up the dark rivers of the Malay peninsula. Yet no one has uncovered these sites. It seems that modern man is more interested in finding oil than in discovering another Angkor Wat.

Thai fishermen sparked off the spirit of adventure a few years ago when they located a wrecked Chinese junk in Sattahip Bay in Thailand. It was a sensational discovery. Its cargo contained priceless Sawankaloke pottery. How many hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of other such vessels were lost through thousands of years of trade? In the relatively short span of 500 years, England claims to have had 220,000 wrecks along her shores. Think of Asia, where few divers have ever ventured.

A number of years ago I was assigned by the Straits Times to write a book on Malaysia. The paper provided me with a researcher to help with background material. She was a bright Indian girl studying at the university. Halfway through the project, I was invited to join the jungle
expedition I mentioned, but not wanting to dismiss the researcher I asked her to find what she could on pre-war wrecks. Six weeks later when I returned, she had located more than 200 wrecks. When I delved deeper into her findings, I learned to my astonishment that she had not only pinpointed many of them, but that no one had done anything about salvaging them. When the Sattahip wreck was found later, I checked through my notes, and she had documented that one too. I have written about this in detail in the chapter "Treasures Beneath the Sea."

An incident that has always fascinated me was the sacking of Malacca by the Portuguese in 1511. Malacca was an incredible port, even larger than the Genoa and Venice of its day. The Portuguese commander, D'Albuquerque, spent some nine months loading his ship with the spoils and riches of Asia. Three days out of Malacca bound for Europe the ship was lost in a squall
off the coast of Sumatra. The wreck has never been found, nor, to my knowledge, has anyone ever looked for it. Marine archaeology and treasure diving are not for everyone. Maybe you would prefer to explore remote places-not jungles but islands. To explore the islands and rivers of Southeast Asia, I built and outfitted my own schooner Third Sea, and found that the world Joseph Conrad had described in his novel Lord Jim was not dead. Imagine sailing into a port in Java, where Macassar trading schooners tie up to the quay, side by side, forming a line a mile long. These schooners, with jutting bowsprits and ratlines running up the rigging, measure a hundred feet long. They have no engines; they leave and enter port by kedging, like the square riggers of old did. For the daring adventurer, it's possible to find a berth aboard one of these schooners and sail with them to remote islands in the Indonesian chain.

Or imagine sailing in the shadowed sides of islands where smoking volcanoes rise up from the blue sea, or stepping ashore on beaches where the descendants of dragons fifteen feet long still survive. And maybe somewhere in that Indonesian chain of 13,000 islands there is another Bali
where no tourist has ever intruded. It is possible.

And what about exploring the spice islands of the Sulu Sea by local boat? It was this small cluster of islands in the Indonesian archipelago that sent Asian maritime kingdoms to war and sparked off the age of discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries, prompting Columbus to cross the Atlantic and Magellan to circumnavigate the globe. The Moluccas produced the spices aristocrats craved. In time the trade to Europe became so lucrative that a vessel loaded with spices from the Far East could make enough profit from one voyage to pay ten times over the cost of the voyage,
including the value of the ship. Yet few people today visit the Moluccas.

When you knock around Southeast Asia long enough, you become fascinated by the mountains, and there are some great challenging peaks, all the way from Japan down the Malay Peninsula to Borneo. To reach the summit of the highest peak in central Malaysia you must first chop through primary jungle. It takes a couple of days just to reach the base of the mountain. To reach the summit of the highest peak in Southeast Asia, Mount Kintabalau, you must climb to 14,500 feet. By Himalayan standards it's not terribly high, but when you begin at sea level, it's quite another thing.
 

It was in the remote jungles of Malaysia, while on a fishing trip on the Endau River, that I heard orang asli aborigines mention seeing oversized human foot prints up river at the source. The possibility that there might be a Malaysian version of Big Foot intrigued me. I began my research and a year later, after getting sponsorship from an American magazine, I led an expedition into the area. We didn't find the Malay yeti but we did discover on a mountain top a prehistoric life-size stone carving of an elephant.

The orang asli themselves, along with the hill tribes of Bangladesh, Burma, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, are fascinating to anyone interested in anthropology. The negritos of the Malay Peninsula and the Punans of Borneo still live in the stone age. I have lived for a short time with both, but to research their way of life would take a lifetime. In the chapter "On Safari in the Oriental Jungle" I will introduce you to a negrito, a jungle man I came to know.

In the days when Somerset Maugham traveled in Southeast Asia and wrote about the things he saw and the people he met, the sport was big game hunting. Hunters thrilled in having their photographs taken with a booted foot propped up on the carcass of an elephant. We can be thankful times have changed. The fun today is to chase wild animals, especially dangerous
ones, with a camera. There might be more excitement there than one bargains for. On an assignment in Assam at the Kazaranga Game Reserve, I rode with rangers on elephant-back while they checked the wild elephant herds coming down from Tibet. I felt perfectly safe until a rogue elephant in heat broke through the thicket. The elephants we rode were females! I was too
preoccupied with my own safety to think about getting pictures. Another time in the Malay jungles I had my orang asli guide lead me to within twenty feet of three wild elephants so that I could get a good shot with my camera. I had to decline. The click of the shutter would have done us in.

In Asia it takes much more courage to hunt with a camera than with a gun. When you are at a jungle camp, orang asli sit around the camp fire at night and tell tales about man-eating tigers that have carried away members of their tribe. It can send a chill right through you when in the black of
night you hear a tiger roar. One's immediate reaction is to stack the campfire, until you remembered that roaring campfires attract elephants. A tough decision to make.

For the spelunker, or cave explorer, Southeast Asia is prime territory. Geologists tell us that Asia was once connected to Australia by a land bridge. For millennia the land has been eroding, leaving many limestone outcroppings that appear like city skyscrapers. Most are hollowed out and
deeply caverned, and it was here that early man found shelter. Niah Caves are the best known. Java man occupied these caves 35,000 years ago. Also well known are the Batu Caves a few miles north of Kuala Lumpur. Thousands of tourists visit the main cave every year, but few ever venture into any of the other caves that extend deep within the mountain.

I came to Southeast Asia more than thirty years ago looking for adventure. As a beginning writer, I made a contract with the Bangkok Post to write twelve articles on the area. Thai Airways International was my sponsor. But I was a little worried. How could I possibly find enough material to fulfill my contract? Twelve articles! Many thousands of newspaper articles and magazine stories later, and more than a dozen books, I feel that I have only begun. There is still so much to see and do.

Return to Adventure is only an introduction to Southeast Asia's great outdoors. Much of the material presented within these pages is based on my own personal experiences, with the hope that it will encourage others to enjoy Southeast Asia's outdoors as I have. Adventure doesn't necessarily have to be hard-core, fighting rapids or climbing mountains. It can be as simple as taking a train trip, getting behind the steering wheel of a car or jeep and motoring, or joining a bird watching group. It's all up to you.