Hey friends,
This Hobo Travelogue got started from 40,000 feet like many of them do, en route from Melbourne to a trippy two-day stopover in Brunei Darussalam that I’ll show-and-tell you about below. I’m finishing it from a second-floor apartment in Fulong, a fishing village on Taiwan’s northeast coast where I’ve done a ton of writing over the years (including a song called “Pass It Along”) and where I’m holed up for the next month to finish the book for Troubadourly Yours. I’ve got a hard self-imposed deadline of three weeks to pull it off. I’m only playing two shows while I’m in the country — Saturday Dec 6 at Tiger Mountain Ramble in Taipei, and Friday Dec 12 at Delicatesses Desmarais in Taichung — but I’m planning to come back in the spring for a longer stay, more hangs with old pals and a proper tour of the island on two wheels. This time around, the writing mission takes priority.
The spot ain't swanky, but I can't tell you how happy I am to be in it. Here's the pano view from the balcony.
And here's a few snaps I took walking around town town, including a visit to Dong Xing Temple just down the block, which you might recognize if you've read Tangle of Souls.
My old friends Crees and Jean hooked me up with the apartment, as they did the last two times I stayed here. Their kid Noa is suddenly tall and incredibly competent on a skateboard and surfboard, not to mention fluent in three languages. I'm always surprised when I notice that we're all getting older. I've got memories scattered all over this country, and they're reappearing every day as I'm walking around. The birds chatter in local language, the grey waves roll in steady against the pier and the heavy trucks rattle and roll on by along the coast highway all day and all night. I can feel my time horizon widening to take it all in.
I closed out my Australian tour last weekend at Andrew and Heather Pattison’s Burke and Wills Winery, a place that holds a special place in my heart. It’s where I finished my very first Australian tour eleven years ago, sleeping out in the field and marvelling at the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds. Andrew got me into Australia the first time, vouching for me with the authorities before we’d even met, and he's introduced me to so many die-hard Aussie music fans and fellow troubadours since then. I felt all that this past weekend – the whole crew’s getting older, but the stars shone just as bright, I got to hang with Rod McCormack and Kevin Welch for the first time, and I left with a full cup of inspiration.
I’ll fly back to pick up Pamela in Melbourne on Christmas Day, and we’ll head up to Nariel Creek Folk Fest for a lazy week of creekside picking. I wrote a song about the festival that's on my Patreon here and will be recorded on the bluegrass-adjacent album I'm gonna make with my Aussie bandmates in the new year. Pamela and I don't have a lot of time in Australia, but we'll visit some choice spots, including her first visit to Tasmania:
Sat Jan 3 • Healesville, VIC • Duckpond House Concerts
Mon Jan 5 • Hobart, TAS • matinee at the Museum of Old and New Art
Fri-Sun Jan 9-11 • Cygnet, TAS • Cygnet Folk Festival
Wed Jan 14 • Stratford, VIC • Courthouse Theatre w/ the Mafeking Hillbillies
Thu Jan 15 • Candelo, NSW • Candelo Village Hall w/ the Wild Martinis
Fri-Sun Jan 16-18 • Bulli, NSW • Illawarra Folk Fest
Tue Jan 20 • Narara, NSW • Narara Ecovillage
From there we’re jumping across the ditch for our first duo tour around Aotearoa (New Zealand), a place we first visited in 2019 before Pamela even played the bass!
Thu Jan 22 • Wellington • UnderCurrent w/ Cotton Daisy Backstep
Fri Jan 23 • New Plymouth • Taranaki Festival of Lights
Sat Jan 24 • Auckland • Auckland Folk Festival
Thu Jan 29 • Auckland • Ministry of Folk w/ Hoop
Fri Jan 30 • Katikati • Katikati Folk Club
Wed Feb 4 • Pukehou, Hawke’s Bay • Small Halls Sessions
Thu Feb 5 • Ongaonga, Hawke’s Bay • Small Halls Sessions
Fri Feb 6 • Twyford, Hawke’s Bay • Small Halls Sessions
Sat Feb 7 • Palmerston North • The Globe Theatre
Sun Feb 8 • Wellington • Petone Abandoned Taproom
Wed Feb 11 • Onekaka • Mussel Inn
Fri Feb 13 • Nelson • Ruby Bay Store Theatre
Sat Feb 14 • Barrytown • Barrytown Hall
Sun Feb 15 • Hokitika • Old Lodge Theatre
Thu Feb 19 • Invercargill • Southland Musicians Club
Sat Feb 21 • Christchurch • A Rolling Stone w/ Adam McGrath
Sun Feb 22 • Dunedin • Dunedin Folk Club
Pamela's eldest daughter will join us for some of that, so with any luck we'll have some pictures to prove it happened! When that’s wrapped, Pamela will fly back to Edmonton to perform as part of the annual Women of Folkways concert at Northern Lights Folk Club alongside Dana Wylie, Maria Dunn and Darla Daniels, and I’ll head back to Australia to play some more shows and record the new album I just mentioned with my Aussie bandmates the Little Rippers:
Thu Feb 26 • Stanwell Park, NSW • Stanwell Park CWA Hall
Fri-Sun Feb 27-Mar 1 • Cobargo, NSW • Cobargo Folk Festival
Sat Mar 7 • Newcastle, NSW • Newcastle and Hunter Valley Folk Club (solo)
Thu Mar 12 • Melbourne (Clifton Hill), VIC • House on the Hill Concerts
Fri Mar 13 • Eaglemont, VIC • private house concert
Sat Mar 14 • Upwey, VIC • Burrinja Cultural Centre w/ Liz Frencham opening
Sun Mar 15 • Castlemaine, VIC • Northern Arts Hotel
Fri-Sun Mar 20-22 • Yackandandah, VIC • Yackandandah Folk Festival
Four shows sold out on the last run, so if you’re planning to come to any of these, I’d suggest booking in now. Same goes for the Women of Folkways concert Pamela's in; Northern Lights Folk Club shows almost always sell out, and besides which, advance tickets are love made concrete.
I'll come back to Taiwan for two months, then reunite with Pamela in Europe for our run with Scotland Folk Tours, which is on its way to selling out. It’s a bus tour for twenty folks, starting in Edinburgh and looping up through the Highlands to the Isle of Skye, Isle of Raasay, Inverness, Loch Ness and Pitlochry. We’ll roam through some stunning scenery, learn about the country from our local guides (who our fellow folksinger friends say are hilarious), enjoy some Scottish cuisine and whiskey, and have nightly music from us and some locals. If it sounds like something you’d be interested in, all the details are here, and we’d love to have you. Single travellers up for sharing a room are welcome to contact our organizer Alexis, who’ll send out introductions and make sure you’re happy with your match before you sign on the dotted line.
We’ve got a few shows in Denmark and one in Scotland booked around the bus tour, but we’ll need a few more to make it all make sense — if you know of any listening rooms or even living rooms we should play in Denmark, Western Germany, the Netherlands or (especially) the UK, please do drop me a line and hopefully we can make it happen.
Ramble recap!
Last I wrote you was during a couple days off up on the Moray Coast of Scotland, and the rest of that run was great. We saw some incredible beauty up in the Highlands, where neither of us had ever been.
Outside Inverness we dropped in at a really special little monthly folk club where we met some great local musicians, a Nepali bansuri master, and my old pal Rob Ellen of the Moose Mobile. We had our own apartment for three nights in Glasgow’s West End thanks to our generous hosts Ron and Janey, whose country house we played at alongside our transplanted Canadian pal Sarah Jane Scouten and our transplanted Aussie pal Jeri Foreman. We shared our biggest show of the whole run with Sarah Jane at the lovely Letham Nights concert series, a double bill we’d booked for September of 2020 and had to postpone for five years. We played sweet folk clubs in Edinburgh and in Falkirk, where the people sang along to “Pass It Along” because they already knew it from my Taiwan pal Jez Hellard. And we spent three days in the mountains in Aviemore, where we shared a show with long-running Scottish band the Poozies and had surprise visits from my Aussie friend Missy and Toronto friends Peter and Andrea of Westfalia Way fame.
We also had plenty of lively political discussions, just like the last time I was in Scotland. One thing on a lot of people's minds was the Labour government (which is supposed to represent the left) systematically arresting people for carrying signs saying “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”. PA was classified as a terrorist organization after members of the group broke into a military base and spray-painted some airplanes, and consequently, over 2,300 people, mostly senior citizens, have been hauled away and charged with serious offences for holding up a sign. Anywhere in the world, people with too much power are prone to abuse it, no matter what side they're on.
We saw a lot of flags in England, both the Union Jack and the red and white St. George's Cross (the flag of England), and plenty of white roundabouts spray-painted with red crosses. And while we were in Scotland, a far-right provocateur named Tommy Robinson brought over 100,000 people out to his “Unite the Kingdom” anti-immigrant rally in the centre of London. Just like back home, decades of chronic underinvestment in health care, housing, education and infrastructure have hollowed out the public sphere, and the feeling of everything going to shit (reflected through the fun house mirror of social media) has ordinary people looking for someone to blame. Just like anywhere in the world, that kind of discontent makes fertile ground for demagogues to redirect that rage toward marginalized groups. The big difference we saw there is that while people were talking about things breaking down, things were nowhere near as broken as they already are back in North America. The long history of popular uprisings against the worst Dickensian depths of capitalist plunder have put the goal posts in a different place. Still, the game's the same.
On the way back down the country we played the charming Café 9 in Sheffield and reunited with Aussie expat Marilla Homes as well as my Taiwan pals Olly, Emily, Megan, and the Anglers’ last bassman Tom Squires.
In London we went full tourist mode: dug Monets and Van Goghs in the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, saw Oliver! in the West End, rode bikes around Big Ben and Westminster Cathedral and the Thames waterfront, and found a couple Bansky pieces in situ.
The next day we caught a train to Harwich and got aboard a boat to Holland for Pamela’s first visit to the continent. We took a train to Belgium and walked around Antwerp ‘til our feet were sore.
I forgot that German trains are only cheap if you book in advance, so we had a hella expensive ramble up the Rhine and back, but we saw some beautiful country, stood in some unfathomably ornate churches and got to play three sweet house concerts.
One of my Fellow Travellers, an American living in Köln, came to the show in Schwalbach and found out that back in the 80s, our host Dietmar had lived about 3 miles from her in the middle of nowhere in North Carolina. In Bonn we were hosted by Canadian friends who used to do house concerts in Toronto. And in Duisburg we played for my old friends Guido and Conny, who I met at BC’s ArtsWells festival back in the day, and who hosted me on my very first visit to Europe in 2012. They’ve presented a ton of ArtsWells alums over the years, including Karyn Ellis, who showed up and sang one in our second set. They even managed to source out an upright bass for Pamela rather than the little uke bass we’d been traveling with since we left England. That night we also met a German couple who’d been on two tours of Scotland with our pal Tim Grimm, the guy who connected us with Scotland Folk Tours in the first place. We’d just assumed that nobody from Europe would be into it. Turned out they were the first Europeans to do so.
After a couple days off in Amsterdam, Pamela flew home to dig the potatoes and pick the squashes in our garden, and I flew onward to Melbourne via two nights in Guangzhou. I’ve already posted pics to Facebook, but for those of you who aren’t on that dangerously time-hungry platform, I offer my admiration for your life choices, and a few pictures for your eyeballs below. I’d never been out of the airport in Guangzhou before, so it was a trip to finally get amongst it. My hotel was in a weird, mostly-barren airport-land where almost everything was under construction. I didn't buy a SIM card, because Gmail and Facebook and WhatsApp are all blocked by the Great Firewall of China anyway, and it turned out to be a palpable relief for my brain to be offline, finding my way around like we used to do, though I was one of the few people not looking at my little black mirror.
The closest residential neighbourhood to my hotel was called AnHe Resettlement Area, built to house people relocated from the countryside. My first walk through their skinny market street was a rush of all the stuff I'd almost forgotten about wandering in the developing world—fruit and veg piled high, old ladies squatting by their wares, weird smells, live animals in cages, seafood I’ve never seen, and adorable puppies playing in a scooter repair shop that was set up in a tent like we’d use for selling clothes at a festival back home. I saw a lady giving haircuts on the street for $2, shirtless old men playing cards and mah-jong, old people exercising to Chinese disco, kids playing in rubble piles in front of their apartments, little alleys between the buildings that two people couldn’t pass side by side in. I didn’t see a single foreigner that whole day. It felt great to speak Chinese again, though I only had a proper conversation with one person, the owner of a tea shop I stepped into to buy a couple tiny cups. Tea shops are like the pubs of China, and they always invite you to sit a while. He served some really subtle and fragrant tieguanyin, then some pu’er, and we talked as best we could for an hour or so. He grew up in the countryside, and he missed the old place, but there were more opportunities in the city. He had to fight to get his kids to turn their screens off and take a walk before bed. He said they’d stay on there as long as he’d let them.
Everywhere you go, people are people. There are 17 million of them in Guangzhou, among the 87 million there around the Pearl River delta, each one their own world, lit from within. That's something I can't fathom.
The next day I took the subway into the centre and walked around all day. Guangzhou has some amazing old temples, and the oldest mosque in China, originally built in 627 by Mohammed's uncle. The city's a crazy mishmash of ancient and modern and gritty and tacky and weird, and I gave myself blisters walking and drinking it all in.
Oh, and the alleys of Guangzhou are a thing of chaotic beauty that deserve a photo gallery of their own.
Back down under!
After that heaping eyeful of Guangzhou I flew to Melbourne where my friend Bronwyn got me from the airport. She'd taken on shared custody of our campervan Hector at the end of our last tour, camping in him for a few fests before she made up her mind to go all in on a swanky new RV. Reuniting with Hector was like opening a time capsule, a trippy collection of half-forgotten life debris from the moment we handed Bronwyn the keys in Sydney a year and a half ago. That first night I drove through the city and out to a free campsite, spent some time organizing the van and asked myself how lucky one guy can get. As it turned out, I'd already peaked. Hector died in a Kmart parking lot in Bairnsdale the next day. But I still felt pretty lucky, considering — my roadside assistance covered the tow, two nights in a hotel and the first week of a car rental while he got fixed. Sleeping in the back of the SUV wasn’t nearly as comfy, but it worked for the weekend at Kangaroo Valley Folk Fest, and then my friends Carrie and John loaned me their sweet old pop-top campervan for the trip up to Dorrigo Folk and Bluegrass Fest. The abundant generosity of the road never ceases to amaze me.
Along the ramble I played some really satisfying shows as a duo with Liz Frencham, as a trio with our pal Justin Vilchez on mandolin, and as a fearsome foursome with Pete Fidler on dobro. Working with such high-calibre players is making me a tangibly better musician. I’m learning to slow down, relax in the pocket and hold the time in a way that feels new. I’m practicing more than I ever did on the road, since I don’t want to be the weak link. I’ve even started getting in the habit of playing guitar before I open up my computer in the morning — as if I was a professional musician rather than a professional email-answerer — and wow, I’m already noticing the change.
In Yackandandah, we played our dear friends' hat shop, Feather and Drum Hat Co, saw their hilarious doggo Messy, met their new baby (and downright joy nugget) Frankie, and shot some video with our buddy Josh which'll come out when we make our bluegrassy album together.
At the 50th annual Maldon Folk Fest it got cold and rainy, so we played a song called “Under a Tarp With Our Friends” that I only sing when the weather turns at festivals. Right after we finished our set, we heard the first thunderclap of what became a deluge, followed by hail piling up so thick that people were having snowball fights with it, something I’d never seen down under.
Some other things that had never happened before: I was the first name on the posters for Kangaroo Valley Folk Fest and Bendigo Blues and Roots Weekend, my picture was on the cover of a folk music mag, and this past weekend I closed out Friday night at a festival on my own. Only in Australia! We had good turnouts and warm receptions everywhere, even the big-city shows that I’d worried about filling. To put this recent flush of success in perspective, I almost made up for all the money we lost touring Europe in September, but hey, the long game's the only game for me.
Fate dealt a hard hand toward the end of the tour, though, when Liz had an attack of Bell’s palsy serious enough to cancel the rest of her gigs for the year. We'd planned to record our bluegrass album in November, but we’ve postponed it ‘til March, and we’re hoping for the best. Music’s a crazy way to make a living, and small timers never retire, we just aim for the long haul and hope our bodies stick with us.
Brunei?!?
The best deal I found on flights from Australia to Taiwan was routed through Brunei Darussalam, and since I never tire of the thrill of fumbling around in a country I know next to nothing about, I booked a two-night stopover. It’s a tiny sultanate on the north coast of Borneo, which is the third-largest island in the world (smaller only than Greenland and New Guinea), a place with 140 million-year-old rainforests, elephants, orangutans, rhinos and cloud leopards, and at least 65,000 years of human habitation. Most of the island’s owned by Indonesia and Malaysia, with Brunei only making up about 1% of it, but at the height of the empire in the 1400-1600s, the Sultan controlled the entire coastline, getting rich from trade along the Silk Road between India and China. His capital city Kampong Ayer was built on the water, on pilings, and called the Venice of the East. The inland was inhabited by indigenous Dayaks, who hunted heads up until the 20th century. The official language is Brunei Malay, which comes from the Austronesian family, which comes roundaboutly from Taiwan. Like Chinese, Malay uses phoneticized English words for things that weren't common there — words like “cheese” and “chocolate” in Chinese, and “ais” (ice) and “mesin” (machine) in Malay. The official religion's Islam, and the country’s Muslims are ruled by Sharia law since 2014, but there are also people there from all over Asia, including a substantial minority of Chinese. They have Chinese temples, Hindu temples and Christian churches, but other faiths aren’t allowed to proselytize, and apostasy is punishable by death for Muslims. As far as my quick read of the sharia-ometer goes, I didn’t see any booze or smokes, but I did see some women singing karaoke.
Brunei struck oil in the 1920s, which led to a very close relationship with Britain's highest-grossing company, Shell. The British sent troops to help the Sultan put down a popular uprising in the 1960s, and a couple thousand of them are still there. Shell and the Sultan split the oil revenues 50/50, which has made him a multi-billionaire, but he maintains his soft authoritarianism by spreading the wealth around. There’s universal health care and public schooling, and malaria's been eradicated. I didn’t see any destitution, though I did notice some of the confident incompetence I’ve seen in places where people are used to deferring to unearned authority.
The capital moved onto land during the 20th century, but there are still thousands of people living on the water in Kampong Ayer. I set out to see it, but I let the boatman talk me into a run downriver to see proboscis monkeys and crocodiles first. Before we left, he stopped at a petrol station on the water that reminded me of Venice, and at another spot where he put money in a bucket to get a top-up card for his phone. We found monkeys, and a baby crocodile too, but the trip ended in a proper drenching when we got caught in a storm out on the water.
I eventually dried out and caught another boat out to the water village, where I found my way among the houses, schools, offices and shops, all connected by wooden walkways in various states of repair. Definitely one of the most unique places I've ever seen.
Alright, that's enough outta me, I've got a book to write! I pretty much wrote a novel right here. Mostly, I just wanted to put down some kinda record of all the rambling I've been doing; of all the daily reminders of what a big, strange world this is; of how many different ways we've made up to organize our corners of it, how foreign our lives can be to each other, and yet how akin they all are on the level of the human heart.
Wherever you are, thanks for riding along awhile.
Hope from here,
s