Greetings, welcome to another pre-departure edition of my travel blog. Help yourself to refreshments - there are tea, hobnobs, malaria tablets and Hepatitis A vaccination syringes in the corner. Drape yourself in a mosquito net, zip up all the flaps (ooh pardon) and we'll begin.
I've been massively busy the last few weeks sorting out various things. Things. Things to do with travelling. I acknowledge right now that if you know me at all you may well be jealous as absolute f**k about what I'm doing next year. I'm sorry, I'd love to take you with me but there's not enough room in my rucksack to fit you in on top of my camping towel and various boomerangs and snares (if anyone from HM Customs sees this that's a joke). You're there with your Barratt home, your curlers and your Robson & Jerome DVDs, and here I am, king of all Leeds, dancing a merry jig in the STA Travel office.
Yes I am very lucky to get the chance to do this, and I also realise I am either foolish or brave to attempt to do so much in one trip - I'm visiting about 14 or 15 countries at the last count, I forget how many exactly. Be assured it ain't easy; it takes about as much planning and organisation as your average invasion of the Nazi-occupied European continent (D-Day would be a good example). Which is about 10,000 times more planning than the average invasion of Iraq. (Oooh, controversial!)
I have never been very good either planning or organisation. Why did destiny pick me? Have I the makings of a successful globe-trotter? Or will I run aground against the rocks of my own naivety then get gunned down by the massed ranks of Hitler's armies? As Roy Keane memorably said to Mick McCarthy just before he told him to stick the World Cup up his bollix, 'fail to prepare; prepare to fail'.
Well it's Saturday night and here in Meltham it's dark and f**king chilly outside. There is a sense of subzero festive promise in the air. Not sure what it promises exactly; other than in about ten days it will be Christmas. From the lounge comes the gentle clack of balls as my parents watch snooker on telly. Outside two or three horses graze sullenly in the frozen field, wondering if this 'being a horse' lark really is all it's cracked up to be.
Over in Blackpool the Christmas Tree Ball is playing out in all its splendour. Certain very good friends of mine will be attending in their Sunday best. Local rock colossii the Sound of Superstring and Lotus Circle will soundtrack the evening, entertaining the massed dinner-jacketed throngs and pretty girls in sequinned dresses. I'm missing out on that dizzying eye-candy fix, so I came on here to spill my brains.
Now I've caught up with all my emails and paused momentarily to catch my breath it's about time to inflict on you another blog entry choc-full of verbal diarrhoea. And the next thing I will say is this: bloody Christmas! As if December wasn't busy enough for me already!
I really wish you'd have waited until the new year before popping into existence Jeebus. I've got a major scheduling clash going on right now in my calendar thanks to all these bank holidays and shit. I don't need the hassle and expense of present-buying right now while I'm frantically planning my trip!
True to the Bible, the merchants are all making a fair old wedge selling their trinkets and baubles in the temples, so come on Jeebus - bloody well come back and overturn their tables or whatever the f**k it was you did that sounded proper cool when I heard about it in infant school. At least make Amazon dispatch their orders on time (miracles can happen). You were the prototype of Jimmy Dean, and no-one can ever take that away from you dude. You're the man of the people, the rebel without a cause and all that. I know you're still pissed cos they nailed you to a cross, but look lively man, most of the world has been worshipping your ass for nearly 2,000 years, in some rather misguided and violent ways - so give the fans something back!
But enough finger-pointing at major religious figures. My point is - neither Jeebus nor Santa Claus will bring you gifts of joy; you've got to flash da plastic to get da goodz. And ain't dat da awful trut'. In readiness of my travels, I have now bought:
- Fujifilm A820 camera (on special offer at Jessop's - a more advanced camera than the Canon Powershot I loved and lost this summer thanks to a thieving bastard Ukrainian)
- 2GB memory card for said digital soul-catcher, capable of storing over 1,000 photomographs in glorious technicolor
- Brand new 80 gigabyte iSchmod; thanks to stupendous technological advances, my sprawling music collection no longer needs a team of 10 hand-picked Burmese militiamen to cart it through the jungle in tarpaulin bundles behind me as I hack my way through the undergrowth with a machete.
- Belkin Tunetalk: small digital recording unit about the size of a fag lighter, available for the new low price of £30. Plug it in to an iSchmod, and it records CD-quality audio on to it through its stereo micromophones. (A stupendously simple answer to the question 'how can I lay down a demo of my killer new song while I'm traversing the Thai-Laotian border by riverboat'? Damien Allbrans from Gorillaz eat your heart out!)
- A year's worth of comprehensive backpacker insurance, costing just over £210. This will provide the bearer with generous financial recompense should they wander over a land mine, get their limbs knawed away by sharks or stumble into a Pet Shop Boys concert by accident and suffer brain haemorraging after their auditory cortex implodes.
- Indian visa: now... not to get up on my soap box or anything, but if I was a promising up-and-coming economic superpower like friend India, I'd make my visa-issuing department a LITTLE BIT more customer friendly! As it stands, if you want to visit India with a UK passport, your options are: send your form to the Indian High Commission in London, enclosing payment for £30, and start praying, cos they only accept payment by postal order (on condition that you: enclose a lovely crayon drawing of some flowers, promise to send them a birthday card every year asking after their mother, and your name contains a 'J'). Or pay significantly more and get your visa through a third-party agency, who generally seem like quite rational and friendly human beings. After hearing a lot of horror stories about option A (which I have not exaggerated all that much), I chose the hassle-free route, and after parting with the princely sum of £80 I have an Indian visa to show off in my passport!
I've needed to buy a hell of a lot of stuff for this trip. I now have more gadgets than James Bond! I have also seen fit to open an account with a bank that will let me withdraw my dosh abroad without laying loads of heavy breadhead monetary shit on me. That would be Nationwide then - every single one of the other f**kers demand a pound of flesh every time you dare to be so bold as to access your savings from remote corners of the world such as Katmandhu, Prague or Barnsley. And get this - by law they can make WHATEVER charge they like! (I read that on the internet so it must be true.)
Unfortunately I'm not gonna get to see Japan dammit! Dropped from my itinerary cos it just isn't feasible. To recap, after I go to India, the plan is to fly to Singapore, then on to Bangkok. From here the straightforward option would be to travel on through Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and South China up to Hong Kong (where I have a flight ready and waiting to take me to Oz). If you study a map of the far east you'll notice that Japan hardly fits into this route as it sits out on its own in the ocean. A bit like Britain and Ireland; isolated amongst the waves.
I'm repeating myself here slightly but some golden rules of long-distance travelling seem to be to keep your itinerary as uncluttered as possible and your route as simple as possible. Just get from A to B, without going through C, Z, Y, X and Q. You can't visit absolutely everywhere. Getting myself over to Japan then back down to Hong Kong by air could potentially add a lot of logistical problems and cost a f**k-load, plus I'd be crossing God knows how many time zones in a limited number of days. And I don't like crossing time zones. We'll have to save our blossoming romance for another year, Japan.
My bloodstream is now swimming with so many antibodies and vaccinations I swear I must exude a smell of disinfectant from my pores. I'm more toxic than an Azerbijani chemical factory. (Watch out Britney Spears!) In the last year I've had: Hepatitis A, Rabies, Typhoid, Diptheria, Tetanus (the vaccinations, not the illnesses) and I'm also planning to get Hep B and yellow fever jabs. Who needs Deet? Any mosquitos brave enough to bite my pasty white English flesh will most probably puke their guts up and die on the spot.
This mammoth operation takes ca$h to do. Hence I have now shamelessly dedicated myself to the pursuit of MONEY. Junk from my closet has been diligently parcelled up then flogged on Fleabay. I work Monday to Friday at an office for the local council, helping those lovely folk bring free childcare training to the great unwashed. I work evening shifts at a local pub too, helping drunken idiots get even drunker. Pub life is proper ace though, I love it. Recently I worked behind the bar till 6am for the Hatton-Mayweather fight. Bloody hell what an epic night. I'm no boxing fan but it was clearly a special occasion. We bonded that night, the pub and I. I feel its sleeping life-force and its quiet inertia.
In amongst all these developments I have doggedly pursued that silly indulgence of mine, my "music career". Again, if you know anything about me you will know this is my NUMBER ONE passion/delusion in life. I'm taking a year out of music and I need to keep things ticking over. By the time I head for Heathrow on 10th January, I need to have my website (
http://www.bondymusic.co.uk/) fully updated, my highly sexual musical content uploaded on to every free music site between here and Timbuctoo (to get what exposure I can), and a framework in place so my CDs and promotional material can be posted out and my stuff can remain on sale while I am living the life of a bushtucker man, incommunicado with the world at large.
The website is now updated with some of my recent various witty remarks. I am now signed up to about 15 music sites, with another 20 or so on my list to do (including
NickRhodes'sBiscuitHour.com and
Al Jazeera Unsigned). Thanks to a good buddy the CD orders will be delivered. There is loads more work to do, which will keep me occupied during the terminal French & Saunders re-runs over Christmas eh? Oh and amidst all that I'm releasing a special limited-edition Christmas EP. Madness!
Once that's all over and done with I'm hosting a final farewell piss-up in Blackpool - at the West Coast Club Above, on Friday 4th January. Bands. Booze. Partying like it is one year shy of 2000, i.e. 1999! Certain good mates of mine are getting sick of all these leaving parties I keep having. I'm starting to feel like the boy who cried wolf. But rest assured guys - you're not gonna see me for a VERY long time after this one. This one is for real. Wolf! Wolf! WOOOOOOOLF!!!!!!!!
The first twentyish years of my life were quite boring and uneventful, and I would like to commemorate the fact there is now such an insane amount going on in my life. Regular concerns like wooing the ladies and shooting turkeys for Christmas dinner with my trusty 12-guage have been pushed temporarily to the back of my mind. Would you really want to be in my shoes, with all the accompanying hassle of getting visas, buying travel insurance, booking vaccinations and bugging friends and acquaintances for every last travel tip when you've got the presents to wrap and a great big bird sat in your kitchen waiting to be stuffed? (Talking about the turkey obviously.)
I am labouring under the delusion this crap I write is in some way funny and/or entertaining and I hope it makes a good read. I came out of my mother's womb as a fully-fledged after-dinner speaker and I am more than happy to share the experiences I have as I go on. Hell, if you even bothered scanning this far down the page then I'm
delighted! Rest assured life ain't never easy, and a pimp's gotta do what a pimp's gotta do just to survive in this modern world. But it will one day make a thrilling novel that someone will glance at then put down in an airport book shop.
Merry Christmas, y'all.
