.: ShaolinTiger - Kung-Fu Geekery :.

Thaipusam is a Hindu festival celebrated mostly by the Tamil community on the full moon in the Tamil month of Thai (Jan/Feb). Pusam refers to a star that is at its highest point during the festival. The festival commemorates both the birthday of Lord Murugan (also Subramaniam), the youngest son of Shiva and Parvati, and the occasion when Parvati gave Murugan a vel (lance) so he could vanquish the evil demon Soorapadman.

The biggest Thaipusam festivals in the world are in Malaysia and Singapore, most notably in Malaysia at Batu Caves, a place everyone that lives here should be familiar with.

This year there was 1.5 million people expected at Batu Caves, that's an experience everyone should feel I think. Plus the sights, sounds and smells of being up close with the people bearing Kavadi (burdens) and piercing themselves. At its simplest and most common as I noticed, the Kavadi may entail carrying a pot of milk, but mortification of the flesh by piercing the skin, tongue or cheeks with vel skewers is also common. The most spectacular practice is the vel kavadi, essentially a portable altar up to two meters tall, decorated with peacock feathers and attached to the devotee through 108 vels pierced into the skin on the chest and back.

Some info is from here: Thaipusam at Wikipedia

I also spotted The Snark there and a few other photogs I recognise.

I went very early to avoid the chaos that ensues around 7/8am, I arrived at the caves around 4am and found a pretty decent parking place nearby.

Then I headed inside..

I was shocked to find at 4am there were already droves of people, it was chaos!

The piercing and Kavadi had already started when I arrived and floods of people were making their pilgrimage up the 272 stairs of Batu Caves.

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A while ago I was in Singapore so I decided to head to the famous Bugis Street market, and on from that to Little India as it's nearby.

Again I was limited to a 50mm and a 90mm prime at this time as I had no other lenses!

Bugis Street is an explosion of colours, smells and tastes with all kinds of things on sale and all kinds of characters selling them.

I managed to capture a little bit of the hustle bustle and what was going on there, a little bit of street photography

This is the famous Bugis Street market, always busy..

Bugis Junction, just outside where you come off from the MRT.

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Ah back to work today, so sad.

Continued from Part II.

September - Archives

September was a fairly busy month and dominated again by posts about my trip to UK and straight after that another trip to Dubai.

UK was great as always!

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Happy New Year All!

Sepang was awesome! Loads of updates coming soon...promise!

Continued from Part I.

May - Archives

May was a pretty happening month with a good variety of different types of events.

My quest for decent Siao Loong Pau started and still continues to this day.

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Well the year is coming to an end yet again, it's New Years Eve and it's time to PARTY! I'll be at Sepang International Circuit tonight participating in a new Malaysian Book of Records record, 50 years of drifting for 50 years of independence, there's also a rave..so that's why I'll be there, and a free chance to trash my car on the track of course.

You can find more details here: Transit: Sound of Smoke

Anyway, 2006 has been an interesting and rewarding year..a lot of things have come and gone and all in all I feel it's a been a much more positive year than the previous two.

January - Archives

Unsurprisingly the whole year was plagued with incidents of lousy service and quality of connection from Streamyx, this started right in January..

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Yes indeed I'm in Stinkapore Singapore with my Mom! It's cool, no time to update though really see if I can grab an hour to do it tommorow, here's a taster from todays trip.

Yes I got out of Manila and came straight to Singapore to meet my Mom.

It's really hard shooting with two prime (fixed) lenses, 50mm and 90mm. I tried a super wide angle lens in Peninsular Plaza yesterday too, oh I love it..10-20mm.

We tramped around Chinatown today, pretty interesting place. A bit commercialised nowadays though like everything else.

Mom!

Pagoda Street and the Hindu Temple, some mad stuff going today with people walking on coals.

Must sleep now almost 3am zzz, headache.

I still have quite a few posts from UK, so back to normal service again for a while, until I decide to whinge about the stupid SE K750i I bought in January that now doesn't work because the screen is totally white...and the LCD warranty is only for 1 MONTH, yes I just found out today when I looked at the back of the warranty card..

Anyway, whilst I was in UK I suggested to my Mom we pop down to my Aunt's cottage in Minehead, Minehead is a small coastal village towards the south of Bristol in UK. You can read more HERE.

We had beautiful weather thankfully and it was a incredibly relaxing couple of days, the first day we did nothing, we just sat on the terrace, had lunch Al Fresco and enjoyed a good bottle of wine.

My Aunt's cottage is a quaint little place build into a rock hill, the back is actually joined to the hill it's ancient and she spent a lot of money fixing it up, it's really beautiful now.

She has a new neighbour too, this is their dog Jessie a beautiful Golden Retriever.

The stairs up to the terrace.

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Ah finally back from Dubai, my sleeping pattern is a bit screwed though because of the 4 hour time difference and the 7 hour overnight flight..

It'll get back to normal soon enough I guess..

Well yes, finally I'm back! Dubai was...hot and sandy and it makes me fat as you can order everything under the sun there without moving your ass off the sofa...Pizza, fried chicken, chinese food, arabic food, indian food, iranian food, lebanese food, groceries..basically whatever you want. And the portions are all huge!

We managed to grab a couple of days off towards the end and relax, we planned our trip out and went for a Dubai Desert Safari the day before we came back.

I recommend the Desert Safari to everyone, it's an amazing experience, if you are ever flying with Emirates, just stop over in Dubai for a couple of days, check out Jumeirah, perhaps the Mall of Emirates and do the Desert Safari, that's enough

The Desert Safari includes sand duning (driving fast up and down sand dunes in a massive jeep which feels like it's about to turn over!), a camel ride, belly dancing and a bbq in the middle of the desert, oh yah and some shishas!

It costs between Dhs 150 and 280 depending which company you go with (that's equivalent to the same amount in RM as the exchange rate is 0.99 = 1) and is worth every cent!

You leave for the safari about 3-4pm as it's too hot before that, and it's a good time to head out and catch the sunset on the dunes.

After quite a long journey and a quick stop at a buggy place (you can take a buggy on the dunes for Dhs100 for about 20 minutes and get sunburnt for free), which none of us took up, we hit the dunes.

The driving is crazy, it's fun, it's like a rollercoaster, up and down, sliding sideways down sandunes in a heavy 4.5 litre Toyota Landcruiser GXR.

You stop off a couple of times to admire the view and take some pictures of the dunes, it's a beautiful peaceful place and is suprisingly windy.

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Sorry for the lack of updates, was travelling back from uk, then resting, then had to rush to office, then was re-installing OS, finally time to move into the 21st century, gone is Windows 2000, here is Windows XP! I've been using Win2k since the advanced BETA leaked in early 1999.

I took some pics in Mom's garden, mostly as I was teaching her to take macro shots of flowers, so just used those in the garden as examples so she could get the hang of it.

Technically she picked it up fast, but needed some ideas on being more creative, framing the pictures etc as at the beginning she just took the flowers straight on, which is boring!

She got the idea towards the end, here are my efforts anyway..

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Streamyx, but actually I do!

Current equipment - Pentium II 333mhz, Windows 98 and a crappy dial-up connection.

So yeah I did manage to get on the plane the second time, I didn't miss it again, flight was smooth, slightly earlier than planned they gained some time. Watched a Spike Lee movie on the plane "The Insider" with Clive Owen, not too bad, might review it later, and had a few ultra strong Gin and Tonics and passed out.

I'll try and upload some pictures, but flickr takes forever to load so I'm not sure how many I'll be able to do, I got some nice ones yesterday of the Malvern Hills.

Did an 8km walk up to about 1300ft, pretty tiring, totally not used to walking.

Was beautiful though, if rather windy and cold up top at the beacon (the highest point in the range).

I'll try and sort out a few pics after lunch and get some uploaded from yesterday!

My Moms addicted to Flickr now too, but she goes down the library to look at it.

She's so excited about her new camera, I bought a Panasonic DMC TZ-1, 10x optical zoom, 5 megapixels etc..

Excellent little cam, shame about the high noise at higher sensitivity ISO, but I guess they will fix that as they go along.

It takes great macro and very nice scenery and the flash metering is good so indoor portraits look nice too.

I'll post a review and some samples from it when I get back probably on DigiSniper.

So Hi and Bye for now, off to have some bacon and eggs for breakfast it's 9.30am here.

Will be back later with pikchures and stuff.