Bondy goes travelling!

Toastmasters: Eat whatever you like

2010-11-07T14:05:00.008+08:00

This the transcript of a speech I gave at Toastmasters on Wednesday. I've been going to weekly Toastmasters meetings in Fremantle for months and I am finally developing real confidence as a public speaker.

Competent Communicator project 9 - Persuade with Power

Eat whatever you like

Would you believe me if I told you you could eat whatever you like and still lose weight? Well it’s true.

We live in a world where diets are increasingly used by both men and women. Gone are the days of medieval banquets and Henry VIII gorging himself on huge chunks of meat. Nowadays men and women both want to look good and feel healthy.

The dieting industry is a multi-million dollar business. Books, DVDs and specialist weight-loss products prey on the human race’s insecurities and compete for our precious cash. Does anyone agree that a lot of the wisdom preached by dieticians seems bogus and contradictory?

Well now I have found something better than any diet. I have found a means to eat what I want, when I want, and still lose weight. It’s a book by hypnotherapist Paul McKenna, entitled ‘I can make you thin’.

Let me tell you about Paul McKenna. Paul McKenna seems to be barely known in Australia but over in the UK he is a household name. He’s helped countless people overcome smoking, all manner of addictions and serious phobias through hypnosis and mental reprogramming. His TV programs are rarely off the air – in fact he has become irritating in his ubiquitous nature and air of quiet smugness.

I was always dubious about his work... until I read his book I can make you thin.

A friend of mine recommended this book to me. He used have problems with his weight. He weighed over a hundred kilos. After studying this book and rigorously applying the principles that I’m about to explain to you, within a year he knocked off almost thirty kilograms. He looks and feels like a different person.

This obviously caught my attention. Now let me tell you something: I used to share the eating habits of Homer Simpson. In one scene of the Simpsons, a co-worker comments that Homer eats like a pig, and another replies, ‘Pigs tend to chew. I’d say he eats more like a duck.’ Well that described me too, until last week.

I’m going to take you through the four golden rules of ‘how to be thin’. It’s a simple system.

Let me make one thing clear – this is not a diet. The word ‘diet’ implies restrictions on what and when you can eat. The problem with diets, medically speaking, is that by restricting your access to food, you slow down your body’s metabolic rate and force it into what is known as ‘starvation mode’.

Our bodies cannot differentiate between life in the comfortable modern age and the days when we used to have to chase food round for days on end with a spear. It’s so difficult to lose weight on a diet because your body’s clinging on to every single morsel of fat it can get to prepare you for a difficult winter.

These four golden rules are very easy to remember, and you can take them away with you tonight.

The first golden rule is: eat whenever you’re hungry. Eating whenever you’re genuinely hungry sends signals to the body that food is in plentiful supply. If you keep doing this your metabolism picks up and you feel more energetic. But you must only eat when you’re actually hungry.

I always knew that most of the time when I ate, I wasn’t actually hungry! This is what is known as ‘emotional eating’ – devouring food for comfort or, in my case, to pass the time.

If you find it difficult to tell if you’re hungry or not, practise rating your hunger on a scale of one to ten, with one being as hungry as you can imagine, faint-headed through lack of food and ten being as full as you can imagine, bloated to the point of nausea. If you score a four or below, time to eat. If you score above four, chain the biscuit barrel shut and find something to distract yourself with for an hour. Then repeat the test.

The second golden rule, the one people find hardest to believe, is you can eat whatever you like! If you place certain foods off-limits you distort your natural relationship with them and fantasize about them all the more. But if you allow yourself the freedom of eating whatever you like, over time you actually gravitate towards healthier foods and develop a better diet.

The third golden rule is: enjoy your food. Eat slowly and chew each mouthful thoroughly. Stop and savour each meal. Eating provides a fix of endorphins which compel us to eat faster and faster in order to score another hit of brain chemicals. But by eating slowly and chewing thoroughly, you give your stomach chance to catch up and tell you when it’s full.

And if you chew your food properly, it becomes easier for your stomach to digest. You no longer feel bogged down and lethargic after eating. You feel lighter and you possess bags of energy. Also, because you’re stopping to enjoy your food, rather than wolfing it down in one go, you most likely feel like you’re enjoying it on a whole new level.

The fourth golden rule is perhaps the hardest to follow: you must stop eating when you’re full. Many of us were told as kids to always finish our meals. Leaving food on your plate apparently makes you an ungrateful person. “There’s people starving in Africa,” my teachers used to say. And I felt powerless to disobey their commands.

It’s difficult to break this programming. But doing as you were once told and finishing the food on your plate won’t solve any global food crisis. So sweep your leftovers into the bin. If you find this too difficult start by leaving a single chip on your plate.
After following the four golden rules for a couple of weeks, you start to develop an understanding of when your stomach is full. Continuing to eat past this point becomes a less and less appealing prospect.

I’ve been following this system a week, and already my food portions have halved. I can go hours between meals without hunger. I’m amazed. I don’t know what to do with all my spare time now I’m not eating!

The key is to apply the system consistently day after day. Soon it will become second nature. And don’t beat yourself up if you suffer a relapse into your old ways. Keep trying. You’re only human.

So if you’re worried about your weight, help is at hand. Don’t fall prey to the dieting industry – give this book a go. You can eat whatever you want and still lose weight!

Flying to Bali

2010-10-12T16:47:00.004+08:00

I'm off on my travels again. Right now I am sat in the departure lounge at Perth Airport. It's 4.30 in the afternoon and I have just caught a taxi straight here from work. Tonight I fly out to Bali for a three-day break.

I am surprised to note from the entry and exit stamps on my passport that my latest stretch in Australia has been a few days shy of eighteen months. A lot has occurred for me in that short time. Long may the forces of change and upheaval continue their bewitching dance!

I've never been to Bali before. I'm excited to see it. Right now I'm killing time till my flight boards. I always find flying exciting - it takes me back to the very first family holiday when I went abroad with my mum and dad.

It was the early nineties and we spent two weeks in sunny Bulgaria. The Communists had left buildings unfinished everywhere and there were topless women on the beach. I loved it. Maybe there is still a subconscious link in my head between getting on a plane and seeing girls' tits. I just enjoy flying.

I'm stopping at a villa in Seminyak that my friends have rented out. It has a pool and a pool table. Yes, that's right, two accessories with the word 'pool' in the title. And there's more features too, including some wicker chairs and maybe some beds and light sockets. It promises to be the height of luxury - it looked great in the photos and we only payed about $35 each a night for it.

Before I get there, another encounter with Air Asia, a microwaved meal of Nasi Lemak (egg noodles, non-fascist related) during my flight and possibly a cheeky beer to go with it!

Sydney to Cairns – Part Five

2010-10-09T19:43:00.023+08:00

One flight later, the plane was swooping low over the Great Barrier Reef on the final approach into Cairns. I was blown away by the sight of the tropical hills and the turquoise ocean. After two years of hard graft I had finally stumbled upon the Australia they show in the adverts.

“Enjoy your stay,” the lady next to me smiled, an extremely friendly type. “Watch out after dark for the Aborigines.”

The weather was muggy and tropical, the airport small. The sun shone down on beautiful green hills. I got a lift into town, to a hostel who offered me a private room for $30 a night. This was an incredible bargain. I changed into shorts and sandals and hit the seafront. Cairns is a delight with its natural beauty and laid-back pace. It’s a backpacker town and the premier staging point for day trips to the Barrier Reef.

When in Rome... my first act was to book myself on a diving trip. My second act was to head to the night market and chow down on a monster plate of food from the Asian food court. Forget the cheese plate in the sea – this was decadence. Too full to finish my last piece of hoi sin octopus, I wandered through the market, marvelling at the cheap prices. I had a quiet evening. Revellers down the corridor kept me awake and there were lots of mosquitoes in the room. At least I had my own fridge though.

I’d never so much as snorkelled before so the diving trip promised to be something completely new. There were dozens of boats competing for the tourist trade. Finding the one I booked with was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Our boat carried fifty or so passengers. After an hour and a half of sailing through calm seas, giant turquoise streaks appeared under the sparkling blue waters. We were at the edge of the reef.

If I made a habit of wearing spandex I dare say I’d feel right at home in a wetsuit. However this was the first time I’d zipped one up and it seemed a little tight. I felt like James Bond. The boat came to a halt and our group went snorkelling. I learnt the basics of breathing through my mask and working the flippers while gazing down at colourful swathes of coral and shoals of rainbow fish. It was great to see these things in the flesh, although you wonder how much tourism is destroying their habitat.

Next came a scuba dive, with an oxygen tank, to a depth of five metres. One by one we got kitted up like spacemen and dropped off the back of the boat into the water. I got much closer to the corals, and was allowed to touch a big purple thing on the sea bed shaped like a clam. It felt very velvety and flinched at my touch.

I was guided through this dive by a Japanese girl. Most of the guides, and a lot of the tourists, were Japanese. A Japanese guy with an underwater camera swam down to take my souvenir photo. It was all a bit Disneyland. I could barely recognise myself in the picture as I looked very Japanese with the mask on. This seemed to be a strange consequence of the water pressure.

The boat returned to shore at the end of the afternoon and I set out to explore some more of Cairns. Cairns is by the ocean but there is no beach – just miles of empty mud-flats dotted with crocodiles. The Esplanade has an outdoor lagoon and an array of wood and metal bars for morning push-ups. My explorations didn’t take much time.

On Lindsay’s recommendation I tried a Chinese massage at the night market – suffice to say it was the Bohemian Rhapsody of massages. The man even planted a strange-smelling plaster on the vertebrae of my back to ease the tension. That was $15 well-spent.

Next day I went to see the tropical rainforests of Cape Tribulation. A lovely Aussie girl picked everyone up in a minibus. As we drove through Cairns we spotted fire engines and masses of smoke billowing from a burning house. The morning’s newspaper told of another house burning down. Fires seem to break out a lot in Cairns. Perhaps the cane toads like to chew through wiring.

As we drove up the coast, past an empty nudist beach, our guide told us about Australia. Some of the foreign tourists hadn’t heard of Neighbours. She wasted no time pointing out that she despised the show. I would have loved her to have met my Neighbours-mad Blackpool friends. There would have been a passionate exchange of views.

Our first port of call was a cruise on the Daintree River. We saw crocodiles lurking in the mangroves, but the main fascination for me was a German tourist who was videoing the entire voyage on his camcorder. He was possibly the most German-looking person I have ever seen. He wore a bumbag, sandals with socks, and sported a Rudi Voller moustache and an Italia 90 permed mullet. He was on holiday with his kids. What fantastic trip was he the Holiday Dad for?

The clouds didn’t break all day but the trip was interesting. Next we went for a walk in the rainforest, followed by a free lunch of child-sized fish ‘n’ chips at a beach resort. I sat with a Dutchman and a Portuguese guy who had been visiting Sydney on a business trip from Amsterdam university. Talk about a convoluted story – the introductions took us a full five minutes.

This was as far north as tarmac roads go – there are many miles of untouched rainforest north of Cooktown – so we started to head south again. A car ferry brought us back over the spooky Daintree River, which our guide told us was home of at least one croc-related fatality every year. It reminded me of our family holidays in Cornwall, with the added twist that if you stuck your hand out of the window you might die.

Finally we had a brief stop in the yuppie haven of Port Douglas. Its church has a three-year waiting list for weddings. The beautiful landscape appeared rather drab under the constipated grey sky. How I cursed those clouds for tainting my photos. I bought some homemade iced tea from a cafe and it was rubbish. Literally just Tetley’s with ice cubes in it.

I'd seen reef and rainforest during my brief stay in Cairns. All sight-seeing boxes were ticked. I cut a rather forlorn figure wandering round town that evening. Travelling by myself – something I once did without blinking – had lost its allure. Time to go home and put the kettle on surely? This was the evening when my friends flew home from Melbourne, and I too would soon be heading back to everyday life.

Next morning, the sunshine was back to send me off on a high. I finished a monster cooked breakfast at the hostel and caught the shuttle bus to the airport. The driver told me it was his birthday. Mine was following a few days after his and I would be working too. I’d found a cheap Qantas deal that took me back to Perth in two flights, via, of all places, Uluru!

The aerial photos I got of the mountains and desert were spectacular. Uluru lies maybe ten kilometres from its airport, close enough for incoming planes to see the glower on its face like a disapproving in-law. I was fortunate enough to be bathed in its orange scowl at very close quarters last year. You’re never quite the same afterwards.

After a brief wait in the tiny terminal, it was time to board the same plane with the same stewardesses for the final leg of my journey. It’s a real feat to visit Cairns, Uluru and Perth all in one day.

Landing back at Perth airport, a mere fourteen days after leaving for Sydney, I felt rejuvenated and alive. Truly this was the best holiday I’d ever been on.

For more Cairns photos and aerial shots see my Facebook album here.

Sydney to Cairns – Part Four

2010-10-09T09:01:00.021+08:00

Brisbane lay about two hours away from Surfers Paradise. A testing final drive for Dave and Theresa brought us to the capital of Queensland. I liked the place already on first glance. It was incredibly hilly (at least compared to Perth). The bridges and river paint a fascinating panorama from any angle. Our hostel had a fantastic rooftop pool.

After sampling the city’s Hog’s Breath franchise over dinner, I headed out for a quiet drink with Cheese, Caz, Laura and Alex. The bar we stumbled upon changed our holiday forever. If a place can be said to be hallowed, enchanted and throw open the doors of humankind’s perception, then this was it. It boasted pansexual bar staff, interesting clientele, and a new and thrilling delight that answered our many prayers. I speak, of course, of a karaoke machine.

That quiet drink turned into a full-on jamboree, as is the wonder of such spontaneous nights out. We jostled for position on the karaoke with two rosy-cheeked girls in dresses, who seemed eager to provide the assembled punters with the world’s least compelling Mariah Carey tribute act.

Dave and Alex performed a number of tunes together and were clearly seasoned professionals at this kind of thing. One of the plump girls bravely upped the stakes and gave ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ a go. This was an error. My impromptu rap to ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ inspired one stranger who was watching to whoop excitedly and mime doggy sex in front of the stage. I’ve never seen anyone do that in public before. It’s surely the ultimate hip-hop accolade.

I rose early in the morning to watch the World Cup final in the hostel’s TV room. The score was locked at 0-0 and I managed to watch fifteen minutes before heading back to bed. My friends all slept. The buzz of football’s big party passed our time zone completely by.

Later in the morning we dropped off both the vans at the rental depot and bid them a sad farewell. They had carried us all the way from Sydney with only one problematic headlight bulb to trouble us.

Then we set forth on foot to see the city, still guided by the Sat Nav. Needless to say it threw us a couple of curveballs, but we found our way round pretty easily. There were many grand streets, skyscrapers and river views. Brisbane is not everyone’s cup of tea, but in my opinion it is up there with Sydney and Melbourne in terms of culture. I do like a city with hills in it.

Some of us went to Starbucks to meet Caz’s friend Mikaela and Theresa’s friend Paul. Meanwhile I went with Alex, Katie and Dave to the Brisbane Art Gallery and saw an exhibition by renowned sculptor Ron Mueck. He specialises in producing realistic human figures in unflinching detail, a lot of them naked. You wonder what stories lay behind these fascinating characters. The day certainly inspired me to take more of an interest in art.

After rejoining the rest of the group we of course proceeded to drink heavily into the night. I got so badly drunk I was put in a taxi by my friends, but I still managed to find my way back to the hostel and update my Facebook status with the following pearl of wisdom: “Brisbane is ace as tits. Fact.” And so to bed.

We had another day to kill in Brisbane so we visited the artificial beach and lagoon down by the river. It lived up to our demanding Blackpool standards. Presumably they had shipped in the finest-quality sand from the Bahamas at great expense, such is the logic of these schemes. Some of us hadn’t seen the art gallery yesterday so we took another stroll over there to breathe in more culture. “If it’s free, give it me.” I was enjoying all this art.

That night was my final night with the group and we made an occasion of it, introducing the people who missed it to our new karaoke bar find. Everyone took to the stage with a frenzy. The plump girls were there holding court next to the DJ and our presence was welcomed by the other regulars.

Within a span of time that felt like the blinking of an eye, the nine of us were uproariously drunk and showing the world how ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ should (not) be sung. When I left at 2am the others were still there partying. Was I learning a degree of self-control in my old age? Probably not.

So came the breakfast of farewells. Lindsay and Theresa I would meet in Perth in a few weeks. The rest I would not see for several months. The last ten days had been a roller-coaster ride of travelling, resuming old friendships and forming new ones. For some reason it just felt great to hear lots of northern accents again. The rest of the group would now return to Melbourne before most of them flew home. I chose not to choose Melbourne. I chose something else.

Sydney to Cairns – Part Three

2010-10-07T23:00:00.014+08:00

The Scottish sea captain was waiting to show us to our houseboat, which bobbed serenely in the inky black night-time waters of Sanctuary Cove. This was a gem of a rental that Chris had dug out from the cobwebs of the internet. Stepping aboard we discovered a slick interior, several bedrooms, furnishings fit for a prince and a spacious sun deck. Already this promised to be the Boat that Rocked!

We stocked up with hundreds of dollars of food and drink from the shops near the marina and ventured on board, vowing not to return to dry land for three days. Katie cooked a big pot of chilli for everyone in the ship’s galley. Beers were quaffed. Memories of this first evening on the boat have been pushed out by what followed, but I assume it was pleasant.

The next day the sea captain returned and fired up the houseboat’s engine. The ropes were cast off and we were out into the ocean. Luxury mansions drifted past and the skyscrapers of Surfers Paradise appeared on the horizon. We travelled maybe fifteen miles down the coast to a secluded bay and dropped anchor.

The boat towed a small dinghy for trips to shore. After a brief instruction on how to start its engine, the captain left the dinghy and boat in our semi-capable hands. It was time to unpack the beach towels and have a dip in the ocean.

Despite the afternoon sun, the water was quite cold and choppy. Dave and I experimented with floating a cheese-plate in the sea. It ended in disaster, with several crackers and a selection of continental cheeses heading to a watery grave. Such is the price of decadence.

That evening, we threw another party. This was an ‘un-birthday’ celebration as several of us had birthdays due. We drank some more and listened to recordings of a band performing Queen songs in Japanese. The Japanese Freddie amused us with his theatrical panache. I retired quite early and missed the birthday cake, but Caz ensured everyone else got a slice. From what I understand she turned quite sinister.

I awoke very early the next morning and spent several hours writing and watching the sun rise. Once the others had risen, six of us – Alex, Dave, Chris, Lindsay, Katie and I – decided to take a trip on the dinghy to the nearby sand island. We spent a carefree hour on the kilometre-long needle of unspoilt sands, in the brilliant sun, chasing the swarms of tiny blue crabs which scampered from our Godzilla-like footsteps.

The problems came when we tried to return to the houseboat. The boat’s engine wouldn’t start. We tried all the advice the sea captain gave us and nothing worked. Nightfall was only a couple of hours away and the houseboat was too far to swim. The dinghy held four people so we needed to make two trips to ferry everyone back. Chris cranked the engine frantically for around five minutes before we finally got it going. He, Lindsay, Katie and I were in the boat.

The following five minutes were a blur of adrenaline and survival instinct lunges. I was nearest to the motor and pumped the throttle to keep it alive. Stuck it in forward gear. The boat surged wildly across the incoming swell. A wave hit. I pulled at the rudder. We careered off the other way, into deep water. Where the hell were we going?

Another wave hit. We began to take on water rapidly. The boat was vanishing under the waves. One of us grabbed the bucket and began bailing it out. The rest of us lay on the boat to prevent it capsizing and scooped out water with our hands. Somehow we didn’t sink and made it back to tie up at the houseboat. Alex and Dave, stranded on the island, were brought back by some kindly locals.

A stiff drink was needed. When I turned to look back at the island, the area was swarming with boats and concerned people searching the sand. ‘A bunch of tourists in too deep.’ It must happen from time to time. I wonder if we made the local news. The dinghy bobbed innocently in the ocean like nothing had happened. I dare say the bastard was cursed.

Not to be outdone by its smaller cousin, the houseboat was providing its own share of technical wobbles. The grey water pump malfunctioned and regurgitated foul-smelling effluent through the shower’s plughole. The ship’s toilet, already an experience in avant-garde noise art and sphinctral discipline, was now full up and beeping madly. A meaty wave from a passing ship struck us and the boat began listing oddly to one side. Add all of these ingredients together and you’ve got a bad package holiday to Sharm El-Sheikh. I think we were ready to return to dry land.

Nevertheless those three days on the houseboat were magical and unforgettable. Next day, as we chugged back to the marina, the group reclining on the sun deck was a picture of contentment. Caz had failed to apply suncream and turned bright pink like a lobster. We all envied her colour-changing abilities.

Everyone had ‘sea legs’ for days afterwards. The world span slowly round us as if moored to a buoy in a serene maritime bay. Next up: another day in (Surfers) Paradise. Katie cooked sausages in the hostel kitchen while I sorted out my travel plans on a borrowed laptop. I was to part ways with the group in a few days.

We celebrated our return to dry land with yet another piss-up. Hitting the pubs and bars of Surfers Paradise, everything seemed eerily reminiscent of Blackpool. It was full-on. Let’s be under no illusions: Surfers is not a quiet glass of red wine by the fire and a discussion about philosophy; it’s an evening doing shots of tequila through a fire-hose in a crack den. Dressed as a priest.

Never mind, the slap-up breakfast the next morning, in an all-you-can-eat fry-up cafe, made up for any perceived trauma. We strolled to the vans, hungover, taking photos on the golden sands. The views were stunning. I wasn’t taken with this huge, bristling elephant of a tourist resort, but Surfers has an absolutely fantastic beach.

Sydney to Cairns – Part Two

2010-10-06T22:06:00.012+08:00

The next day we went to Byron Bay. It had a nice atmosphere and was full of hippie shops and backpackers. We parked our vans at a fortified campsite where there were lots of old people. Our lodgings that night were a cheap and cheerful twin bunkhouse close to the shower block. The triple bunk beds were a squeeze to get into.

I bought a T-shirt with ‘Byron Bay Australia’ on it. It looked proper good. Everyone was buying clothes. We went out for dinner at Hog’s Breath but they didn’t have hog. Then we went out and got pissed, as Byron Bay didn’t shut down at 6 in the evening like the last two places we stayed in.

It was a messy evening involving meat platters, cycle taxis and numerous changes of venue. The bloke in the cycle taxi ferried us all to the other side of town in two trips. Not surprisingly he was a very thin man. I asked him where he got his cycle taxi from and he said Colorado.

We watched Lindsay sing at the jam night. Two guys from a band asked her to record with them at their studio. Later on I hit my head in a minibus. Everyone was going mental and singing something called the ‘Magpie blues’. Things were getting out of control. I didn’t enjoy this night.

The next day, nursing one of many hangovers, we went for a look at Byron Bay bay. It was bloody amazing. There were great views up by the lighthouse and the council had thoughtfully employed a man to run up to our window and tell us the car park was full. We didn’t get any photos up there so the nine of us went for a swim down on the beach. Well it was more like a British seaside paddle; shoes and socks off but no funny business.

There were lots of surfers on the beach, some of whom I am reliably informed by the girls were ‘fit’. Dave spilt coffee down his new astronaut T-shirt and tried to wash it off in the sea. I remarked that it was a likely act of subconscious self-sabotage and that the T-shirt was too beautiful for this world. After those high jinks it was time to do more driving. We had to keep an appointment with the boat man up in Sanctuary Cove.

We stopped off for the afternoon in Nimbin, a famed hippie town. Psychedelic shop frontages lined the street in silent homage to the long-vanished days of flower power. Aging figures in tie-died clothing minded stalls. This town was home to those who turned on, tuned in, dropped out for good then started a small business once the drugs wore off. Signs in the street warned, ‘no dealing’. In a big city you’re never more than six feet away from a rat. In Nimbin you’re never more than six feet away from someone selling a bag of weed, apparently.

The Sat Nav had obviously been at the ‘space cakes’ and directed our convoy down a narrow and winding gravel track. Alex, who usually drives a Mini, put in a great shift at the wheel of the second minibus as the vans crawled up and down hills and through miles of forest, seemingly without end.

Eventually, our strange journey through the woods bore fruit, and we emerged on to another highway that would take us to Sanctuary Cove. Now we crossed over the border from New South Wales into Queensland. The clock was ticking and we were very late for our rendezvous. Chris, the instigator of the trip and official Holiday Dad, was starting to show his dark side to the stragglers.

We’d driven relentlessly for a few days since leaving Sydney and everyone was craving a moment to put their feet up, crack open a beverage of alcoholic content, gaze out to the horizon and give each other a contented high-five. It was with not inconsiderable excitement that we awaited our three days at sea.

Sydney to Cairns – Part One

2010-10-06T21:46:00.012+08:00

The trip started in late June when the group of eight came together in Melbourne, with six of them flying in from England for a three-week holiday. Apparently the best thing which happened in Melbourne was that everyone went on a Neighbours tour. Not liking Neighbours, I thought this was pretty tragic. But they got up to lots of fun antics and they were clearly having the time of their lives. Then they moved on to Sydney and I flew in to meet the party.

I was excited as I’d not seen any of my friends in fifteen months. For two years I’d lived over in Perth, doing my own thing, but now I was like a fish back in water. I knew Lindsay, Chris, Laura and Theresa, but Katie, Alex, Caz and Dave Cheese were all new faces. Sydney was like an old flame, as I’d lived there for a month in 2008.

Our very first outing was to Harry’s Pies. This was a dark corner near Central station with tables and chairs, where a bespectacled foreign student in a caravan served up all manner of pie-based exotica. Hangovers and tales of last night’s Irish pub abounded among us. My drinking libido was rising, a day late. We spent a quiet evening in at the hostel.

The next day: road trip! We girded our loins, assembled our party and set sail for the beach at Manley; by which I mean we drove there. We had rented two camper vans to take the nine of us and our luggage up the coast. Our eventual target was Brisbane.

Wicked Campers seem to have two styles of van for hire: ‘new’ and ‘junkyard death trap’. We paid extra for two nice new ones with automatic gearboxes and CB radios. Each van was adorned in a custom ‘graffiti’ paint job. The one in which I was travelling had ‘Skool-a-palooza’ emblazoned on the side in ghetto lettering. We were still Skoolies in spirit, if sadly no longer in age.

In Manley we strolled on the beach then went for lunch with Caz’s friend James. He grew up in Blackpool and now works in Manley as a groundsman at a golf course. We ate in a busy seafront restaurant. They served up a cracking seafood risotto. Later on Laura was sick in the bogs. We said goodbye to James and left.

“On the road again!” came Theresa’s sing-song call over the radio. We were up, up and away, travelling through New South Wales’s breadbasket. Heading north into the night we cut a huge swathe through the countryside, finally stopping for rest at Port Macquarie. Theresa and Cheese did a great job of driving – no doubt sustained by the game of ‘Blind Date’ they played over the radio.

We had expected ‘Port McFlurry’ to be quite a happening place, but when we pulled up, at 9.30 on a Sunday night, it was of course dead. The one and only food shop still open was a Dominos, so we all bought takeaway pizzas. Fast-food franchises are often your only friend in Australian country towns.

Beds were waiting for us nearby, at a tennis court motel run by a friendly Asian woman. We stroked her cat then took our pizzas back to our rooms. I shared a room with Laura and Theresa. I was to be on the receiving end of a lot of girly chats during this holiday.

The next day we had breakfast in Port MacQuarie – mainly memorable for Linz canoodling with a statue of Aussie politician Sir Edmund Barton. Moving on to Coffs Harbour, we found a curious community radio station that resided in a shopping centre. It was run by a friendly lady with a strange name which escapes me. She gave us all a tour of the studios and I waved at the DJ. It was like a step back in time to the mid 1980s.

The barbeque was good. We cooked many fine foods at the park by the beach –supermarket sausages and burgers basically. You’re either too full or not quite full enough after a barbeque. I think we were all very full and there was food left over.

For the next leg of the journey I took over as van DJ and dropped quality track after quality track. I remember selecting the classic hit ‘Bills Bills Bills’ by Destiny’s Child and treating my fellow passengers to some freestyle dance shit. You can take these risks when you’re on holiday.

Arriving in Grafton (a small country town) that evening we found it to be just that – a small country town. All the shops were shut and the streets were empty. It was an exact repeat of our experiences in Port MacQuarie with the added twist that this was a weekday. Perhaps everyone living there suffered from agoraphobia?

After the hotel bar closed at 7.30 we came up with the genius idea of having a shopping trolley race down the deserted high street. Chris and Cheese wheeled the girls along the pavement at full tilt. I think Chris’s team won the race. We whooped and hollered. Curtains twitched. The town slept. Grafton seemed to merit no more than an overnight stop but the hotel was very good. We stayed up playing dirty drinking games in Dave’s rented cottage.

Sydney to Cairns – Introduction

2010-10-06T21:03:00.009+08:00

A sudden wave broke. The boat pitched violently like a leaf. The four of us scrambled in vain to stop the water engulfing us. The oar and a lifejacket went overboard. The water surged. The engine let out a distressed whine. The boat span round in aimless circles. Figures on the nearby sandbank looked on in horror. Our trip to the island was ending in catastrophe.

This isn’t some Rolling Stone-style introduction to a tale of rock star antics gone awry. This is an everyday scene from a recent holiday, when my friends and I nearly sparked a major search-and-rescue incident off the Queensland coast.

When we Blackpool folk holiday abroad, we have a knack of drawing attention to ourselves. If I were to give a reason it is simply because we love life. The world is a great big playground.

It was not a good idea for me to pilot the dinghy in hindsight. I knew as much about boating as I did about Kyrgyzstani import tariffs, which is not a lot. But despite a nerve-jangling afternoon featuring a dodgy outboard motor and a few unexpected waves, the gods conspired to micturate the sweet urine of good fortune down on our day. We bailed all the water out from between the seats while I steered the dinghy back to our houseboat; an oasis of calm floating on the sea a few hundred metres away.

Vuvuzelas - some friendly advice

2010-06-13T18:57:00.012+08:00

Hurrah, rejoice, Allah be praised – the World Cup is with us once more. The global carnival, the cirque du monde, “football’s big party”. One month and sixty-four matches of top-class international football. The greatest players in the game taking each other on under the banners of nationality.

Here in Australia, thanks to SBS every single game is being shown live and free-to-air. SBS is a curious old thing - normally it's a broadcaster of lesser-known jewels of world cinema with titles such as Steamboat to Kyrgyzstan. But now the World Cup dominates its schedules.

Due to blanket wall-to-wall promotion in the media the normally soccer-cynical Australian populace is suddenly embracing the beautiful game. And thanks to advertising we get to watch Cristiano Ronaldo, a man with more wealth than most Pacific island nations, attempt to sell us engine oil with all the charisma of a mechanoid, six f**king times a match.

So far I have watched South Africa-Mexico, Argentina-Nigeria and England-USA. A lot of the games are on in the middle of the night due to the time difference. To watch them requires heroic feats of power-napping and the cessation of normal night-time activities. We’ve already seen a lot of great football, and it’s great that Africa is finally playing host to a World Cup… but do we really need the vuvuzelas?

Vuvuzelas? Surely you know what they are. I’m assuming you are familiar with the atonal honking sounds accompanying every single match on TV made by the long flute-like plastic trumpets in the crowd. The subject has already generated a lot of ire so it would be far from an original sentiment if I were to say they’re a bit bloody annoying.

The typical pro-vuvuzela argument is that they are part of South Africa’s cultural heritage, generating as they do a raucous celebratory atmosphere amongst the country’s gleaming new stadia. And therefore by extension, to want to deny the fans their vuvuzelas (or vuvuzelae?) is apparently to be a bigoted colonialist or a snobbish football purist.

I’m not saying get rid of vuvuzelas – I’m saying change them. Make them more musical. I know a fair bit about musical pitch and what strikes me is that when vuvuzelas sound together en masse, they don’t produce a clear note. It is a horrid dissonant mix of B and B flat. In musical terms it’s like a badly-tuned-in TV picture. That’s because no two vuvuzelas are alike – they are manufactured using crude plastic moulds - and they all produce a slightly different pitch when blown into.

With a bit of precision engineering these instruments could all be developed to strike exactly the same pitch at once, like instruments in an orchestra. Hey presto – the horrible drone would be replaced by a clear note, ringing out throughout the stadium.

To take this further, the companies making these things could manufacture different varieties, each playing a certain note in the musical scale. Some would play a C, some would play E and others would play a G, and together, through collectively blowing the three notes, the crowd would sound the chord of C major.

Imagine 50,000 vuvuzelas playing the chord of C major in a football stadium. It would marry art and beauty on a vast scale; it would a fitting musical accompaniment to the colourful and exuberant crowds. The World Cup is an event like no other - and as it only comes around once every four years, South Africa 2010 requires a grand vision to make the occasion uniquely memorable.

I propose that the tournament organisers work together with the fans in choosing different chords for different matches. France-Uruguay could have worked well with an A major (vuvuzelas in A, C sharp and E). England-USA could have been a D major (D, F sharp and A).

For teams of countries with oppressive regimes, such as North Korea, perhaps a more mournful minor chord, such as A flat minor (A flat, B and E flat). That would poetically convey the fact that the poor buggers on the pitch may be sent to a gulag if they fail to qualify from the group.

And for Argentina, a more complex diminished seventh chord, to reflect their players’ technical prowess, and in the case of Maradona, a fragile mental state teetering towards full-on psychosis.

All of this is esoteric waffle and if put into place would drive up the cost of these plastic trumpets. Then again, surely it would be a good thing to price the vuvuzelas out of the fans’ range? The world would be free to enjoy the tournament without the noise of frigging trumpets.

Take note FIFA: with my vision, you could have created not so much a tournament as a UFO ride into outer space.

I expect a call.

Eleventh hour reprieve

2010-04-14T16:24:00.018+08:00

There’s never a dull moment in my life at the minute.

So far this year I’ve booked a holiday to India, cancelled it, bought a car, driven it into a Mercedes, taken my parents on a road trip around Western Australia and nearly been deported. And it’s still only April.

Apart from the road trip (more on which later) I’ve mainly been preoccupied with the struggles of getting a new Aussie visa. For the last two years I’ve been on a working holiday visa and it was due to end this month. Once your second year as a backpacker is finished, it's all over, the eternal goon cask has run dry, and you have to go home. But the adventure can't finish. I won't let it.

After checking out all avenues, such as returning as an international student (hideously expensive) or applying for permanent residency (only open to certain skill types and takes years to be approved) I was advised to try a 487 regional migrant visa. This would allow me not only to stay, but to eventually be eligible for permanent residency. It sounded like a win-win.

First there was the little matter of passing the skills assessment. Sending off the Vetassess paperwork was one of the most complicated things I’ve ever had to do. I had to gather copies of my passport, degree certificate, contracts of employment, old payslips from the early 2000s, a photo of me holding today's newspaper, proof I owned at least three stubby holders… not an easy task considering most of this stuff had to be extracted from my old bedroom and posted to me by my folks in the UK.

It cost $555 just to send off for the assessment. If I passed, I would then have to pay $265 for a medical, $200 for state sponsorship and a whopping $2,525 for the 487 visa itself. This means the total costs would exceed $3,500 (£2,100) and I still wouldn’t be guaranteed a ‘yes’ from immigration at the end. It’s no lie to say that the buggers charge an arm and a leg, and I was taking one hell of a gamble throwing myself with gusto into this, using what money I had.

I finally got the paperwork together and sent off for my skills assessment in early February. It was then subject to a lengthy delay after the perpetually useless shower of bastards known as "Australia Post" managed to take a whole week to deliver my overnight express delivery parcel to Melbourne.

Once it got there I had to sit and wait patiently for 6 to 8 weeks while my assessment was considered. I was still confident of getting the results before my visa expired on 15th April. Even a few days' leeway would give me enough time to apply to immigration and be granted a bridging visa to stay.

By Easter I was getting a bit worried that I’d not heard anything back from Vetassess. Repeated phone calls to them yielded me the same solitary sentence of information: “it’s with the assessors and they’re looking at it now.” Had I missed out paperwork? Did they want to see my A-level certificates? No-one was telling me anything.

I’d already made big commitments on the assumption I’d get this visa – I bought the car and signed a new contract with work stretching till the end of June. The immigration laws are really strict and you face strict penalties for overstaying. I'd have to leave on the 15th without that bridging visa, even if I subsequently passed my skills assessment, regardless of my employment. Not knowing what hemisphere I’d be living in in a couple of weeks started to feel strangely liberating.

I finally got the skills assessment back last Thursday, on 8th April, and as I impatiently scrolled down the fax I saw the telltale words, “ASSESSMENT OUTCOME: NEGATIVE”. Oh shit. How had I failed?

Apparently my work history wasn’t up to scratch – I’d done too much IT work to be considered as a business information professional, but not enough to be classed as an IT professional. Bullshit. They could have told me that earlier! I had no time left to lodge an appeal, which would cost another $330 anyway. There was now no way I could apply for the visa.

My dream of staying in Australia was in ruins. I was left to break the news to my work and to my friends that I'd have to leave very soon. Then I had to think about selling my car, guitars and computer, packing my bags and booking a plane ticket home. All in less than a week. I tried to keep calm, but wondered what the hell would I do back in England?

On Thursday evening I switched on my computer to start arranging all this, and hit yet another stumbling block. After months of working fine, Windows suddenly deactivated itself and was refusing to start up. Now I had no access to a computer and couldn’t do a thing. Really all I wanted was to pour myself a cold beer and chat to my mates on Skype. It seemed like God was not only laughing at me but sodomising me with a ginormous comedy dildo.

The next morning I turned up at work, after a miserable evening stewing in my own company, and talked through the situation with my boss. He was gutted I had to leave so suddenly. His issue was that they hadn’t been able to recruit somebody else with my computer skills after my first spell working there. Luckily, we suddenly realised, there was a way out of our problem.

The 457 long-stay business visa is often seen as the holy grail of backpackers; you're allowed to stay for a long time, with few of the attendant costs or hassles of applying for your own visa. Often this can lead to permanent residency. I phoned the immigration department and they confirmed that, yes, I would be eligible to apply for a 457, and yes, there was still time for us to lodge the sponsorship paperwork. Sponsorship would allow me to stay until at least the end of my contract in July and give me time to plan my next move.

Before the day was out we had completed all three stages of the application and submitted them on the immigration website. Cost to my work: $415, cost to me: a quite palatable $260. And with one last click of the mouse, the application was lodged, and I was legally able to stay in the country on a bridging visa. I made sure I reached profound levels of drunkenness that evening to celebrate.

With six days left to go, it was not so much an 11th hour reprieve as an 11th hour and 59th minute reprieve! Some people say computers are the future... maybe mine had known I was staying all along when it refused to start up.

Raw food diet

2009-11-29T11:44:00.032+08:00

Today I am listless and lethargic with all the energy of a dead dog. I have lines under my eyes and I shuffle round the house with a lumbering, unsteady gait, trying distractedly to find something to do.

It's not flu. It's not a hangover. The reason for this is that I have just begun something known as a 'raw food diet', which I will be on continuously for the next three weeks. I can eat only fruit, salad and nuts, plus certain specific meat and dairy produce. Caffeine and alcohol are both horrifyingly off-limits.

I have to eat specific foods, in a specific order, at specific times throughout the day. The life of monk-like asceticism and self-denial is mine. All I need now is a robe, a manky length of rope to flagellate myself with and a religion that makes absolutely no sense.

It’s extraordinary how much you can come to rely on food. Food is there to prop you up when you feel low; to console you when all is wrong with the world; to replenish you when you are tired and weary; to waste your time when you've nothing better to do but exquisitely stimulate your taste buds with some wondrous foodstuff. Eating defines so much about our lives. Remove this comfort and you are left staring at the bare bones of your own existence.

And what is it that has sent me on this solitary outwards path into the nether regions of the soul? Why could I possibly do something so stupid? Well, over the next few weeks I am participating in a ground-breaking personal development course here in Perth that requires a heightened level of mental clarity and focus for a sustained period of time. A level of brain performance that would not be possible eating normally. A heavenly parabola of thought that will breed fresh and astonishing insights into my life, or so I'm led to believe.

As the old adage goes, you are what you eat. We all know caffeine gives you a boost in the mornings then takes it back with interest later in the day (‘first it giveth, then it taketh away,’ as the Queens of the Stone Age sang, though they were talking about drugs). Well other foodstuffs have this effect on the brain, in subtle, far-reaching and incalculable ways. Processed foods serve to muddy the waters of the mind and distract its focus away from the path it wishes to follow.

As such the course requires I must shun them, and the only things that can pass my lips from now on are the Lord’s own vegetables, grown in his holy nourishing Soil; and the feta cheese, skinless chicken breasts and boiled eggs that are his children. We are all one, connected and hard-wired into the universe, humans, animals and vegetables all. By eating life you regurgitate life through your thoughts and deeds, or so the theory goes.

It's taken a hell of a lot of self-discipline to get this far, but a whole lot more is needed to see this through. Once the detritus of everyday living and everyday eating has cleared itself out, my mind will be clear to soar and swoop like the mighty hummingbird. Many folk never dare to tread that far, and I won’t be practicing the elimination diet for any longer than the prescribed three weeks. If you eat this way for too long there comes a point where malnourishment kicks in and you get sick.

My mouth salivates at the prospect of the finish. As a doughnut-loving sugar fiend, I plan to be back among my everyday thoughts, happily gorging on my everyday crappy, over-processed, mind-numbingly delicious foods once the period is over. And through doing the course I will hopefully take home some enlightenment in a doggy-bag, to remind me of the strange and hallowed spiritual turf on which I once trod.

I’ve already lost a prodigious amount of weight over the last few months, through tons of exercise and cutting out a lot of the crap I used to eat (compulsive cheese sandwich-eating being the main and surprising culprit). My previously rotund frame is now much more thinner; but this diet will take it a step further and give me protruding ribs that could double up as a mid-range xylophone. I plan to continue going to the gym in the midst of this - I figure the exercise won't swallow up too much of my meagre energy and will burn off more fat.

And yet there are two more gaping holes newly rendered in my life; with caffeine and alcohol off the list, I find my general enjoyment of things massively restricted. I’ve lost all appetite for going to the pub and socialising - it just isn't the same when all you can drink is tapwater. Soft drinks can no longer be purchased and consumed, depriving me of the associated cool that aligning my thirst aims with these quality brands would provide. How can I cut it with the cool kids now!

Wisely I chose to quit tea and coffee several weeks ago, so that's one battle less to face. But it's still not a pleasant task to write this as the delicious smells of toasting bread and fresh coffee waft up from my housemates' unencumbered breakfasting orgy in the kitchen. The bloody bastards.

I don’t even have a job now the Christian fee-paying school I was temping at (oh yes) no longer requires my services for proof-reading school reports. I've got nothing to occupy me until the course starts in earnest next weekend.

I can only sit at home, listening to the sounds of nature and the street; absolutely certain in the knowledge that somewhere, someone is having more fun than me.

Melbourne Cup day

2009-11-04T08:24:00.007+08:00

Today it was the Melbourne Cup. The Melbourne Cup is a horse race held in Melbourne, hence the name Melbourne Cup. It features about 20-25 racehorses and all the requisite jockeys, in a traditional horse race on a big field. I don’t know what else to say about it. It’s a horse race, but a flipping big one. And all of Australia stops to watch it.

Obviously with Australia being something of a ‘young’ country its customs and traditions are still developing. You don’t get the zealous religious festivals of Asia, or some of the weird folk ceremonies that exist in parts of Europe, which have evolved from medieval or even pagan times. There are only three big ones to remember: Australia Day (where everybody gets pissed), ANZAC Day (like Remembrance Sunday, but everyone gets pissed) and Melbourne Cup day (horse-racing and, yep, everyone gets pissed).

That’s about as deep and meaningful as it gets, but there is the occasional unwritten rule to remember. One tradition of Cup day is that the women, all over the country, get glammed up and go to work wearing fancy hats. So you get a lot of eye-candy, which suits us men just fine. We’re not required to do anything. The ship of political correctness is but a glimmer on the horizon in this country.

All the offices grind to a halt around midday to screen the race, and they put on vast quantities of food for the workers. There is a flurry of last-minute bets and sweepstakes. All pressing business is quickly forgotten for that brief half-hour.

This year, like the last, I was in Perth, plodding along in a temp job; observing the Melbourne cultural circus from afar on a TV screen. I had an inspired bet last year and won about $80 when my horse came in third. This time round I didn’t have the luxury of sneaking out to the bookies, as my work is marooned in a big industrial estate out near the airport. So I just sat there demolishing the buffet and watching the race. It was a pretty decent contest and a horse named Shocking won.

My journey home after work turned out to be strange. With summer newly in bloom, the afternoon sun was stifling. The bus became very crowded as it threaded its way down the highway towards the city, full of people leaving work early. Clearly a lot of workplaces had downed tools for the day and thrown a full-scale party. A crowd of revellers clambered aboard and one of the young guys plonked himself down in the seat next to me.

He was about 18, stank of booze, and wanted a chat. He wanted to be my friend. Nothing wrong with that, but suddenly I realized his hands were caked in blood! Surprised, I asked him what happened, and apparently he had got into a drunken bust-up with his girlfriend at the work party, then she ‘attacked’ him with a bottle. “She’s a f**kin’ psycho mate, ay,” he confirmed. “That’s why I’m going home!”

I reckoned the girl's angle to this tale would be quite different. Who knows what chaos he had left behind. He seemed a bit remorseful and was heading off home to stay out of bother. The bleeding had stopped but his hands were covered in blood. I considered giving sage advice about seeing a doctor then thought better of it; the school of hard knocks would look after this guy. He’d probably wake up the next morning, blood all over his sheets, and wonder what the hell had happened.

I meanwhile was stone-cold sober, still in my work gear and had a book in my hand. He was determined to have a chat, and was asking me where I was from and where I was heading to now. He wasn’t an aggressive drunk, just aggressively friendly, in the manner of one whose drinking habits are yet to be impinged by frequent hangovers. I was stuck in the seat next to him and had no alternative but to take part in a conversation with the guy. Ignoring him wasn't going to work.

He sensed my agitation, and gave me a friendly poke on the leg, unwittingly smearing a postage stamp of blood on my work trousers. I was not happy and told him so. He attempted to touch my shirt in apology. I halted him again. He was like a bull in a china shop. He asked me where I went out at weekends, I told him Fremantle. I was not in control of this conversation.

“You go to Metro’s, ay?”

“Nah, not my scene.” I replied. Metropolis is a nightmare, a massive club where there is trouble every week.

“Yeah, full of dickheads, ay!”

“Yeah that’s right.” He reminded me remarkably of one of said dickheads. “I usually go to Little Creatures.”

“Yeah, it’s good, ay. Full of good people!” Clearly he saw himself in this sub-strata.

He got off a few stops after, looking for a McDonalds. And like that, this crazy drunk man stumbled out of my life.

“Don’t worry mate, I’ve not got the Aids!” he added, touching my fist with his in parting.

"Take care, mate," I answered.

What a weird afternoon! The Melbourne Cup might not have been that interesting but it’s not every day you get to have somebody bleed on you on the bus. I just hope the little bastard's blood comes out in the wash!

May 09 – present: This is Perth

2009-10-17T02:54:00.014+08:00

And since my time in Melbourne things have settled down and become rather predictable, almost boring.

I returned to Perth on 5^th May and within a few weeks had found a job in the east of the city doing admin work for a big electrical company. I stayed with my friends Shannon and Troy in Kardinya initially, but soon I found a good house-share near Fremantle, where I’ve been living ever since. My social life has been a bit quiet but I’ve met a lot of new people and have kept myself busy with fitness training, writing and music recording. It's been a productive time.

Everything’s so easy in Perth. The city is big and spread-out, the pace of life is relaxed and thanks to the massive booms in industry there’s usually a decent amount of work knocking about. It’s like life back home but with all the rain, frustration and misery taken out; and with shitloads of beaches, sun and happy contented people thrown in.

Clearly I’m not the only one who felt this way – it has grown astronomically in size over the years, and the city is swollen with expats from the UK and all over Europe and Asia. Amazingly 1 in 10 people living here were born in Britain. You can’t move for bumping into Londoners. Strangely I've not encountered as many northerners.

Some days I love Perth and some days I hate it. It’s too quiet. It is one of the most isolated state capitals in the world. The big cities like Sydney and Melbourne are thousands of miles away in another time zone. Singapore is actually closer than the likes of Bondi Beach and St. Kilda. The city shuts down at 5pm every day and the shops don’t open on Sundays. Some of the pubs even close as early as 7pm! It’s a strange place, modern and clean with futuristic-looking buildings and transport systems, yet trapped in a draconian 1950s trading philosophy.

It was recently voted the fifth most liveable city in the world, but getting round without a car is hard work. The suburbs stretch on endlessly for miles and miles. Even the college students drive cars here. I found it hard to get to know the city and its people as to a large degree it lacks the culture, regional identity and social history we might take for granted in England. And the nightlife is bloody expensive - it costs up to $9 (£4.50) a beer in a pub! Drinking at home suddenly becomes a much more appealing option.

This brilliant clip, which local film-makers Vincenzo Perrella & Dan Osborn made, sums it up perfectly:

Yes! It really is that f**king boring!

On the flipside I’ve totally sorted my life out again and got back on track money-wise. I’m not complaining about how things have turned out, I know I’m fortunate to still be out here in this beautiful country. And so it is now October and summer is drawing near once again. I think I shall remain here for many months to come, completely hooked on Western Australia’s ample charms as I am.

The generosity of my family back home and friends locally has really helped me when things have looked bleak. I’ve been through a hell of a lot of adventure in the last twelve months, which I wanted to narrate via this blog; a task which took me many months. This story is now completed and up to date, but the tale is far from over.

Now, to use a bit of bland corporate jargon, I’m moving ‘onwards and upwards’ into the future; to get whatever is coming to me, be it good or bad. As the saying goes, ‘in life, plan to be surprised’!

Melbourne, Apr/May 09 – Home at Fitzroy

2009-09-30T15:11:00.010+08:00

The journey out to Australia was much more tiring than coming home. As Alex Garland once observed in The Beach, the jetlag is far worse if you fly from west to east than the other way round. Piling up the hours, in effect you’re saving them up in the piggy bank for the future return home. A long gruelling flight to Kuala Lumpur was followed by a similarly gruelling eight-hour stopover.

I dozed on my brand new suitcase, wary of dropping my guard in the crowded terminal, and wary of falling over as the suitcase had wheels. The flight to Melbourne lasted another eight hours and I slept like a baby. It was midnight on Wednesday by the time we landed in the city. I had all sorts of paranoid fantasies about my electronic visa being declined as I stood bleary-eyed at the passport desk, but the security guard waved me on through without a second glance. Good to have ya back mate, what’s crankin’?

I caught the shuttle bus into the city and stayed for a few days in Elizabeth Street Backpackers, a huge and chaotic hostel just down the road from Flinders Street Station. I wasn’t in the mood to party – I was very low on cash so my priorities were to find a permanent place to stay and, more importantly, a job! I was excited about living in Melbourne for the next few months though, as it is regarded as the cultural epicentre of Australia. First I needed to find a comfortable, cheap and conveniently-placed base to explore the city.

Unfortunately, Melbourne being full of travellers, all the hostels were full and vacant rooms in house-shares were scarce. I was naïve to think rent would be cheap. The metropolitan area is huge, stretching away for miles in all directions, into dozens of suburbs I didn’t even know the names of. I think one of the hardest parts of moving to a new city is getting to know all the place names, so you don’t look like a gormless twunt when you have to ask somebody for directions. I had little time to work with, and I would soon have to surrender my precious $65/night double room at the hostel.

I did find somewhere, but it wasn’t what I was expecting. ‘Home at Fitzroy’ was its name. A small suburban house twenty minutes’ walk from the city centre, it wasn’t in any of the backpacker guides or Lonely Planet. It billed itself as Melbourne’s greenest hostel and a relaxing place for long-term backpacker stay. Essentially it was a very large house-share, featuring an ever-changing cast of twenty or so inhabitants, some uninhibited partying, and as one internet review memorably stated, “bong-stained retro furniture”. It seemed to survive solely on word-of-mouth recommendations, and was one of the most extraordinary places I’ve ever stayed in.

The suburb of Fitzroy is one of the highlights of the city – a melting pot of bohemian culture teeming with life at all hours. The main strip of Brunswick Street is packed with restaurants, cafes, bars and live music venues. There are big events and gigs every night of the week. Down the other end of the street sits the CBD, an easy walk away. A few streets across is Lygon Street and Carlton, another bustling area. There was always something happening. When I had no money (which happened to be always) I used to just wander through the noisy streets, floating between the crowds and soaking up the night-time atmosphere.

The hostel itself was established at the end of the 90s by a good-natured Aussie couple, who seemed just to want to rent out their property and meet some travellers. They extended the house out into the back yard, built an extra storey of bedrooms and created a courtyard for people to mingle and play table-tennis. Solar panels on the roof powered the hot water. On the house fridge was pinned a grand ‘manifesto’ in grubby laminated plastic, spelling out its aims as an exercise in sustainable communal living. As time wore on it appears they tired of the labour and delegated a series of travellers to manage the hostel and collect rent etc. When I arrived there it was descending into chaos.

It was the sort of thing I would have loved to be part of back in my uni days. There were so many people coming and going. Ex-housemates who knew the door code came back to visit all the time. The whole house was painted in psychedelic colours and furnished with a cluttered retro-futuristic theme. There was a sunken circular pit in the lounge where people would lie on bean-bags and read by the fire. People would plug their music players into the battered house stereo and blast out dance music, ambient stuff, rock or hip-hop depending on the mood, time of day, and their level of inebriation. The tea and coffee were free, and there was an internet room where you could surf for free, and some giant bookcases stuffed with thousands of volumes of eclectic reading in numerous languages, left by an endless succession of travellers from around the globe.

The owners had just appointed Linda, a new full-time manager, to steady the ship and get the place running smoothly again. There were lots of complaints about the noise from the neighbours and the place constantly teetered on a knife-edge of being shut down. In a way it was one of the city’s best-kept secrets, a whole world away from the cattle-market chaos of the big backpacker hostels. But in fairness it was the kind of place that needed constant vigilant attention and should not be left to run itself.

As with most hostels there were cliques and counter-cliques, and a few nutters that made it difficult for the rest. There was a group of Kiwis and Brits who took it on themselves to get pilled up and stay up partying for three days most weekends. There was not much point sticking around in the house when their sleep-defying chemical frenzy was at its peak. It took me a while to make friends purely because there were so many names to learn. Each day would bring a tide of new faces barging through the front door. I was just one man and it felt like a lunatic asylum.

Some of the long-termers were pissed off with Linda for spoiling their fun and trying to change things too quickly. She got her friend in to help decorate and the friend promptly painted over the messy Uluru mural in the computer room, which actually brought one of the long-termer girls to tears. I was glad of somebody trying to bring order to the place and I helped where I could with the tidying up. We went through all the books in the book-cases and threw a lot out; there were some really old ones there. I shared a quiet dorm room right at the back of the yard with a Swedish guy, Olof, and we cleaned that room out. Olof even jerry-rigged a clever pulley system with string and a water bottle to stop the door from swinging open and bringing in the cold. If Linda ultimately succeeded in her purge I do not know.

One of my favourite places was the posh cinema down the road that showed independent films. I often went to the discounted screenings on Mondays, a cheap hit of culture for the hard-up amidst a bountiful well of sophistication. I’m not proud about it but one week we paid for one movie then sneaked into another film for free at the end. I got caught out by a keen-eyed usher when I tried it again the next week and was effectively barred from coming back; all to save paying $6 for another ticket! I felt like such a cheap wanker and I couldn’t even look him in the eye as I left. But all I can say is the longer the economic crisis goes on, the more will try to follow in my footsteps.

The parties came thick and fast. A girl who was leaving held a fancy dress party, where people came dressed as superheroes and movie characters and danced away in the lounge in the middle of the afternoon. You can’t really potter about making yourself a cup of tea when that’s going on. Another time the house-share across the road invited the entire hostel to their ‘tight and bright’ party. The idea of ‘tight and bright’ is pretty simple, guys wear something tight, and girls wear something bright. The small house was bursting to the seams with revellers by the time we all got in, but it was a very well-organised party, where you could help yourself to unlimited booze by paying a $10 cover charge. It was the sort of thing that would have been really good if there’d been half as many people there and we could properly mingle. I sort of hung around at both events, neither present nor absent, not really getting in the mood.

Meanwhile there was always a lot going on in the city. A guy I knew, James, kindly gave me a spare ticket to see the show Suitcase Royale at the Melbourne Comedy Festival. It was alright, a bit zany and surreal like the Mighty Boosh, but lacking that show’s fantastic absurdity and clever musical routines. I was very glad to sample one of the events though. I couldn’t help thinking how great it would be to live in Melbourne if I had money.

Due to the recession, backpacker jobs were suddenly very scarce indeed. I searched endlessly for work without success and had to borrow money from my parents. I’d envisioned myself bagging a high-flying IT job in some fantastic city skyscraper and living the life of a prince on my super-high wages. But I was in dreamland, living in denial of the stark economic wasteland, where all that might be available was a bit of miserly-paid bar or restaurant work. If I was lucky the hours I worked in such a job might cover my rent at the hostel, then in a few months I might work my way up to a call centre position and find a room in a house-share. Sod that. After a long time of scratching and saving I was done working in crap jobs.

After a few weeks in Melbourne I got tired of the rut I was in and realised I was probably barking up the wrong tree. Either I was looking in the wrong places or looking for the wrong thing entirely, and this vast city of money and culture would yield no treasure for me.

Once again I was out of options and out of cash, so I returned to the comforting bosom of the strange, prosperous land that is Western Australia. Surely I could find a job there!

Mar/Apr 09: the return home

2009-09-24T23:02:00.012+08:00

Time to make a confession: much as I worry about the environment and mankind's future and all that, over the last couple of years I've built up a heinous 'carbon footprint' from all the flying I've done. Every time I take a flight, I think guiltily about the clouds of noxious jet exhausts burning up the ozone layer, and the little baby dolphins down below who cry confused tears at mankind’s wanton destruction of their beautiful environment. Yet I prefer not to confront the dilemma, as I could not have done the things I have done without this invention.

If, for instance, I’d wanted to come home from Australia in the olden times, I’d have had to splurge all my life savings on a sea ticket and then sit on a ferry for months on end, among the rats and disease, reading poorly-bound books of Victorian pornography. Now it took little over £200 and a single day of flying. And that's the problem really - it's just too convenient for people to ever do without, especially skint backpackers!

There had been rumours for months that an airline was set to introduce cheap flights between Perth and London. Doing some research at a Manjimup internet café I found not only was the rumour true, but that a return trip to the UK and back was just within my means. I’d got my second working visa, a couple of paycheques in the bank, and enough money that I could borrow to make the trip a reality. There was no reason not to do it!

I departed the hostel at Manjimup in much the same way as I had arrived; anonymously and with little fanfare. It had been a weird solitary experience out there in the countryside, and getting my visa had become not only a struggle against time but against homesickness and my waning enthusiasm for the whole adventure. Nevertheless I had worked hard and been rewarded, in hindsight, with a string of memorable experiences. After a few weeks’ break to catch up with my family and friends I would return to Australia to continue the journey.

The flights were with Air Asia X, a budget Malaysian airline who had very recently opened up a long-distance route to London. My total round trip (a flight from Perth to Kuala Lumpur, a return from Kuala Lumpur to London Stansted and a separate outwards flight from KL to Melbourne) cost just £550 – half what you’d pay for an economy seat with one of the big airlines. You had to fork out a little extra for meals and heavy baggage, but they thoughtfully included things like toilets, seats and windows for free, so it was a steal.

The long-awaited day finally arrived – Sunday 22^nd March. I was coming home. Early in the morning I checked in at Perth’s international airport and got the final black passport stamp confirming I was leaving Australia. And soon the plane was up and away into the sunrise, circling the Perth city skyscrapers as it gained height. Five hours later, we landed in Kuala Lumpur, the bleak airport buildings surrounded by palm trees and dripping in tropical heat. After a short break, and some authentic Malaysian KFC, it was time to check in again and begin the journey to London. I got two Malaysia passport stamps even though I’d only been in the country three hours!

The flight to London took fourteen hours and I battled in vain to stay awake, trying to beat the jetlag. The spadeful of caffeine they put in the airport coffee helped. Though the seats and legroom were reasonably generous it was obvious this was a budget flight, as all food and drinks were extra, and you had to pay for a handheld flatscreen thing if you wanted to watch movies. There was no map showing us our position either. Hopefully the pilots had one!

I saw a brilliant (if terrifying) thunderstorm out of the window at one point, the clouds towering up into the sky, firing huge bolts of lightning earthwards. I wouldn't like to have been stuck under that. Other than that it was a smooth flight. The night seemed to last forever as we followed the earth’s shadow around the globe.

The plane touched down at Stansted late on Sunday evening, back in good old Greenwich Mean Time and back in the bitter cold. As the throngs of passengers exited the plane we found the automatic bridge was broken, the airport toilets were flooded and there were huge queues at the passport desk. Yes, this felt like Britain alright! Clutching my Home Office immigration card, I advanced through security and met up with my good buddy Rick, here to collect me. It was fantastic to see him after all this time.

After more than 24 hours of travelling I was suddenly wide awake again and ready for a beer. Unfortunately we’d missed all the pubs shutting by about half an hour! Thankfully when we got to the Travellodge the guy on reception agreed to open up the bar and sell us a few bottles so we could drink in the room. I don’t know if that’s officially endorsed in the Travellodge rules and regulations but we were bloody grateful for this act of kindness!

And the next day I returned home, to my family in Yorkshire and to the old life I had almost forgotten. I'd seen my mum and dad quite recently in Melbourne but it was good to be reunited with them so soon. The next three weeks were a comforting blur of cups of tea, family dinners and trips to Blackpool to catch up with mates. Most of the people and places I’d missed were just as I remembered them. I began to regret the return plane ticket with my name on it, calling me back across the globe. I was seriously thinking of delaying my flight out so I could go over to a festival in Belgium with my mates. Yet I knew that whatever I sought from travelling was still out there and I had to go find it, sooner rather than later.

This was an ending of sorts – it marked my transition from a backpacker to a ‘suitcaser’. Things would have to change; I left behind my travel guitar, roll-mat, sleeping bag and trusty 65L rucksack and switched to a suitcase big enough to transport a midget in comfort. I threw out the faded rags I’d been wearing constantly for the past year and bought new clothes. I doubled the size of my wardrobe.

I stocked up on anything and everything I might need, mindful of the sky-high prices in Aussie shops. I got an international driving permit, a travel insurance extension, a new YHA card and sorted out various other jobs that had been mounting up. I put several gigabytes of songs on to my music player, found some books to take, then played a special ‘comeback gig’ in Blackpool (supporting the Blue Pig Orchestra) and said farewell to my friends. They seemed more used to me not being there now, and so did my family! This travel lark was nearly becoming routine for me.

And so I flew out from the UK on 14th April, back to Kuala Lumpur, and then on to Melbourne. And so ended a magical three weeks; an expensive folly that rejuvenated my soul. Now I had to get back out there and discover how to live again.

Feb/Mar 09: Bondy does Manjimup 2

2009-09-10T22:30:00.019+08:00

My experience in Mildura left me seriously disillusioned with backpacking and Australia in general. The town had a weird, unfriendly atmosphere and I didn’t stay a moment longer than necessary. The only place I could think to go was back to Manjimup. It was two thousand miles away on the other side of the country but I knew the score there and there would be no more nasty surprises.

Before dawn on the Tuesday, I began a jumbo day of travelling, catching a taxi into town, then a bus and train down to Melbourne, followed by a Jetstar flight all the way over to Sweet Home West Australia. The total cost was about $250, pretty cheap considering the gargantuan distance. The beatific city of Perth didn’t seem to have changed once iota since I’d left, and to be honest I don’t think it ever does. I stayed the night with my good friends Shannon and Troy out in the suburbs then caught the bus down into the country the following morning.

And a few hours later I was back at the hostel where I had spent Christmas and New Year. This remote place seemed fixed in history too, everything was the same as it had been. The afternoon was muggy with quite a lot of rain, and the grounds smelt of trees and wet earth. Lots of the old faces were still knocking about. Even the surplus food I'd left on the kitchen shelf had not been touched. I had mixed emotions at returning; the feelings of a caged rat mixed with the gratitude for having accommodation and a job sorted with people I trusted.

It was good to catch up with the folk I knew but I felt detached from them now, like a Vietnam veteran who’d seen unspeakable horrors. They didn’t know what things went on in Mildura and maybe they were better off protected from that knowledge. I quickly settled into my metaphorical foxhole and got ready for work the next day.

Abdul gave me a job on his vineyard crew, a considerable act of faith considering there wasn’t much work about. The big grape harvests were only a month away and we were preoccupied with grape-thinning, checking the vines for underdeveloped grapes and pulling them off. It was a cushy job; lots of strolling around and all the grapes you could eat. The work/drink/sleep cycle resumed and I awaited my first paycheque with glee.

Up until now I’ve always used the real names of people in my blog, but I’ve become increasingly aware that this information is very visible on the net, especially with search engines like Google that instantly index pages and render all form of embarrassing anecdotes instantly readable to the world at large. Therefore I would like to invoke my “author’s right” to change names, on the basis that everything else I write here is truth and actually happened.

Our shift leader was a guy named Jim. Yes, Jim. That was really his name, honest. Jim was a hell of a guy; friendly and open yet scary as f**k at the same time. A wizened fifty-something sporting a sizeable beard and long hair combo, he looked like one of ZZ Top, dressed like a farmer and liked to hunt. He’d lived a life, surviving against the odds like the settlers of old, and had scores of stories to tell. Several of his front teeth were missing and he had the deep, deep sunburn of a rural Aussie. Hard as nails in appearance and character, but rigorously honest.

I wish I’d known him for longer and got to hear more of his stories. He’d spent years travelling round labouring on farms and as a fisherman, yet he knew how to fly a Cessna plane too. He told us lots about his family and his upbringing. Every generation of his family seemed to have been involved in some kind of conflict: his grandad was an IRA foot soldier killed in a London bomb blast; his father was a mercenary in the Far East and served time in an Australian prison for tax evasion; Jim himself was born out in the deserts of Central Australia and endured a tough upbringing at the hands of his violent father. Yet he maintained a philosophical outlook on life and was grateful for all that the school of hard knocks had taught him.

Now he’d been mysteriously reincarnated as Abdul’s trusty right-hand man. It was often he who would collect us at first light and drop us back in the afternoon, and administer bollockings when people weren’t pulling their weight on the team. When Abdul was chastising us in broken English he’d stand at his side nodding vigorously like an assistant manager of a football team.

His dream was to buy his own farm. He was an avid fan of hunting and for some reason had taught all his six kids how to use hunting weapons. He told me the youngest two, six and seven, were already experts with throwing star knives and horse whips. It seemed like a bewildering alternative lifestyle, and yet through this they bonded as a family and gained hand-eye co-ordination, practical skills and a tolerance to pain. As Jim told me, “all of them have broken fingers at some stage.”

At home his wife took care of the cooking and he took care of the man stuff. Everybody had a job. I got the sense he was grounded in the frontier mentality of the outback and saw this as the future for his family. It’s not something you'd want to try in your own back garden but it seemed to work well in its context.

He had a strange sense of humour. One day he told us a joke that went something like, "What's funnier than a deaf man being run over? A blind deaf man being run over." We were talking another time and he said, "I saw an awesome catfight in town the other day. Two women absolutely beating the shit out of each other, scratching, pulling hair, it was great. It got me turned on in the end, I went home and gave the wife a right good shagging!" Most of his stories seemed to end with him shagging his wife. No wonder they had so many kids.

Meanwhile the money started to trickle in from Abdul. He was a dependable boss in some ways but a confusing one in others. He would only pay me by cheque, meaning I had to wait for one of the shopping runs into town to cash it and get my hands on my wages. Sometimes it would be a long wait. The shopping runs happened three times a week and featured mad scrambles for the remaining places in the hostel minibus. If you missed the call for the bus, tough shit, you’d have to make do with whatever food and money you’d got, unless you fancied a three-hour walk into town. Soon the grape-thinning work dried up and we were relegated to grape-picking, which paid the same hourly rate but carried far less hours.

Around this time the immigration department emailed me to advise I’d been granted my second working visa. This was brilliant news. After all my calculations and planning and nervous hand-wringing the whole process turned out to be ridiculously simple. I’d spent half an hour filling out my details on the website, paid the $195 charge, and they received and approved it within two days. It was all done and dusted. I started to wonder what to do next.

In the meantime the hostel found me a few other odd jobs. I chased a tractor filling vats of grapes at a vineyard – in one day we harvested an incredible 11.5 tons of fruit. I picked grapes for another farmer, an irritable bloke called Fabio. He wore ridiculous denim shorts that looked like hotpants.

Then they sent me to a truffle farm to help two scientists in a buggy take soil samples from under hazelnut trees. That was a pretty interesting day. I got the impression the two male scientists were a couple. All the orchards and farms were busy harvesting and the hostel was full of complimentary boxes of fruit people had brought home with them.

In March came St. Patrick’s day and all the Irish contingent had a massive noisy party. It stretched over two days. I was invited to join in, but to be fair I just wasn’t in the mood. I’ve nothing against it but not being Irish, or even part-Irish, I’ve never really seen the point of celebrating it. I might as well celebrate the national holiday of Belgium.

95% of the people staying at the hostel were from outside Australia, which is as you'd expect. Working hostels exist solely to help backpackers and travellers get seasonal work. But there was the odd Aussie knocking about too. One of these was Paul (another false name), a guy in his thirties much besotted with partying and having a good time. A friendly bloke, he always had something interesting to say or some relevant 'pub fact' to chip in with, and he was an awesome drinker. He would think nothing of polishing off a single 4-litre container of goon (cheap backpacker wine) in a single night.

I liked the guy but I couldn't help speculating to myself what he might be running from over east to want to take up residence here. Maybe not everyone has the same sense of home and family I do. Incredibly he had been living at the hostel for over two years. Some people just loved the place - the people, the undemanding work, the simple lifestyle - and wanted to stay forever. I was wary of this happening to me; I didn't want this place and this situation to become the be-all and end-all of my life.

The English Premiership (or the EPL as it's called) had a very strong following among the residents. People would often get up to watch the football games live in the middle of the night. One of the hostel's blessings was a comprehensive TV package including all the sports and entertainment channels - a slender thread which halted the slide into full-on anarchy.

The TV room was packed for the Man United-Liverpool match, which began at about 10pm our time on a weekend. All the Irish and lots of Koreans were crammed in on couches and chairs. All those pre-season tours in Asia seem to be be paying off - the Koreans love Man United.

As the only English person in the room (and one of the few Liverpool fans) I felt strangely isolated. Most of them had never even been to the north-west of England and here they were, shouting, tensely watching, united in their passion for English football. Needless to say the smiles were wiped right off their faces when Liverpool pulled off an amazing 4-1 win! I really enjoyed that night.

As always there were many joys to be had living the backpacker life, but I was sick of it. Sick of hostels, sick of dorm rooms, sick of living out of a rucksack and sick of being away from home. I’d been away from my friends and family for fourteen months. I’d missed out on such memorable events as Euro 2008, the financial collapse of the world and an ailing Michael Jackson’s decision to play 50 concerts in London. Friends had had babies. I’d always thought it possible to stay away from home indefinitely, visiting country after country on some sort of magic carpet ride, but now I knew home was more than just a state of mind. The pull was too strong.

Luckily my call was answered by a plucky low-cost Malaysian airline and its ambition to undercut all the big boys. Before I knew it I’d ‘slapped plastic’ and booked a plane ticket back to London.

Feb 09: Mildura - a day on the fig farm

2009-08-30T21:30:00.041+08:00

I arrived in Mildura at 7am on Saturday, having travelled all night on the bus. I was sleepy as I unloaded my bags at the station, eager to check into my new lodgings and immediately get some much-needed kip. I planned what to do later: go food-shopping, meet the people at the hostel, a few beers in the evening maybe.

The hostel looked great on the website. “Where excellent accommodation, good work and great wages go hand-in-hand”, it proudly proclaimed. I’d found it a few days ago by random, and was pleased that they could accommodate me at short notice. The manager, Vickey, told me they had grape-picking work available at one of the farms. She’d even collect me from the station soon after I arrived. Everything was going to plan!

There were a few other travellers sat in the cold waiting room waiting for lifts. I wondered if they were going to the same hostel as me. I wondered if there were other hostels. Mildura is certainly a decent-sized town, with a reputation within Australia as a major agricultural centre. The place should be swarming with backpackers looking for work, I thought, so I wouldn’t be short of friends.

Presently the phone rang. It was Vickey, due at the station any minute to collect me. She’d seemed friendly enough on the phone before and seemed to be running this place on her own. “Are you free to work today?” she asked out of the blue.

“Not really, I’ve just come on the bus from Melbourne and I want to rest, can I start tomorrow?” I said.

“Okay, well you’ve basically got two choices. You can do the fig-picking, which pays great money, or you can do grape-picking, which pays really bad money." She’d not bothered to mention the really bad money before. "If you want to do the grape-picking, you can start tomorrow, but I need people today to start the fig-picking and I’d really like to have you working there.”

After a long night with little sleep the last thing I wanted to do was put in a heavy shift on a farm, but I said I’d think it over while she drove here. The circumstances surrounding the job seemed a little strange. I decided yes, what the hell, I’d do it. I could rest in the evening. I didn’t want to miss out on the better-paying job and time was of the essence in getting my visa.

Vickey arrived in the minibus fresh from doing the morning drop-offs, and I met her for the first time. She was a woman in her late 30s with a conspicuous hearing aid that gave her the appearance of a Bond villain. I was still rather tired as she drove me to the supermarket to pick up provisions. We made a bit of small talk but she seemed keen to get me checked in and off to the fig-picking job ASAP.

As is normal she asked for the week’s rent up front, but there were numerous extras – a deposit, an ‘admin fee’ for collecting wages, and transport fees – which brought the sum up to a colossal $250. Being too tired to think straight I withdrew the wad of money and handed it to her like a trusting child, not even thinking to ask for a receipt. How I would come to regret that.

Alarm bells started to ring in my head when she talked a bit more on the way to the hostel. The 'great money' turned out to be $16 an hour, close to the minimum wage. She clearly didn’t hold any of the travellers in high esteem and made out she was waging a constant war against backpackers’ laziness and lack of gratitude. I asked her to clarify what she meant and she gravely confided, “I’m afraid the house you will be staying in is full of negative people.

“You seem like a positive person so I hope they don’t get to you. But yes, we’ve had some problems in that house. Recently there were some Canadian girls there, they caused a terrible fuss, it really gave me a negative impression of Canadian people. They’ve left now.”

She continued off on a tangent: “Living at this hostel is a challenge, but you have to embrace these challenges when you’re travelling – that’s why I enjoyed being overseas when I was in London. My dad always said I was more resourceful than my sister when it came to things like that.”

“I thought I was staying in the hostel, not a house?” I replied. Not only was it a very strange conversation but I had to shout all my questions, as she was deaf in one ear and had the hearing aid in the other. I suddenly felt stupid to place my trust in this odd woman.

It turned out the ‘hostel’ was just a couple of bungalows, supplemented by another house for overspill located on the town outskirts. I was driven to the overspill house, and it was clearly in the middle of f**king nowhere. I didn’t like the look of it; it supposedly housed ten or twelve people but was very small indeed. Still a lone voice piped up in my head: “you can do it, just a few weeks, you’ve survived in worse.”

I had just spent a month at the working hostel in Manjimup (Western Australia), and that was a bit of a hole, but it was magnificent compared to this. Now I thought about it I’d never appreciated how well-run that place was. I particularly missed Naomi – she was an absolute saint next to Vickey – and she had the added bonus of not being completely insane. My overwhelming concern was that I wouldn’t find another place to work in time and would miss out on my visa.

I lugged in my bags and my food shopping from the van, briefly checking out the house and my room. The people living here were either out at work or still asleep at this early hour. I was sharing a small bunk room with three French guys and a Chinese girl who’d also just arrived in Mildura. Like me they were standing around wondering what the f**k they had got themselves into.

Dirty plates littered the sink; the kitchen and the living room didn’t seem to have been done up since the house was built. There was one shower and one toilet that were shared by the dozen or so people living here. There was a strange ‘cocktail bar’ installation joining on to the lounge that was decked out in hideous 60s upholstery. It was a dump.

Worryingly Vickey was expecting us to work not five, not six, but seven days a week at the fig farm. Non-stop, ten-plus hours a day, week in, week out. How would we rest? Or find the time to organise future travel plans? I figured it might work out okay over a few weeks, and the total lack of any free time whatsoever would make it easier for me to save my wages.

I did a quick change into my work clothes then we set off for the fig farm, the French guys following in their beat-up 4x4. Vickey drove on through the countryside and I'm not sure if we crossed into New South Wales as the town sits right on the border. Questions were answered intermittently. She continued her bizarre monologue: “Is that a guitar I saw in your things? I love music. Do you know Chris Issac? He did a gig here at a winery recently. Oh, he was brilliant.”

I didn't like Chris Isaac but I didn’t bother questioning the wisdom of her concert-going decisions. There was already a lot happening today that bothered me. For one thing, she now had possession of my passport, as she needed a photocopy of the visa. Again, a dumb move on my part to entrust her with it, but it was the standard procedure at these places.

The farm lay on an unmarked plot of land up a dusty road, garlanded with a few rustic outbuildings and a couple of walk-in freezers. The savage early morning chill had now given way to the extreme heat of day, the sun climbing high in the sky. We could see a busy harvesting operation already in progress on the endless rows of fig plants, people swarming to and fro carrying big polystyrene boxes of fruit.

Vickey led the five of us to the farm, subjecting us to a new low in patronising ‘advice’: “As you walk on to the farm it’s very important that you lift your legs up and walk quickly. You have to demonstrate that you’re eager to work. The farmers have been through a lot of troubles and get upset very easily. And if they ask you what hostel you’re from, tell them ‘Vickey’s place’. They don’t know what Borderline Backpackers is, just say ‘Vickey’s place’.” It was all very strange.

We were left with a German girl to sign us all in. Apparently she was a supervisor but she seemed pretty new herself and didn’t know where anything was. Elsewhere in the warehouse a group of girls were busy packing the fruit into little plastic containers. They looked like they had a cushy job. We were each given a book of tickets with unique numbers in to put in our boxes, so they could check how much work we did. I was paired up with Ying, the Chinese girl.

And so the picking work began. I didn’t know much about figs, recalling them solely from the dead brown gunk you get inside fig rolls, but live in the flesh they are a difficult proposition to deal with. The apple-sized fruit bruise incredibly easily in the boxes and the trees produce a foul milky sap that burns your skin on contact. We were all kitted out with flimsy plastic gloves as protection and left to soldier on in the heat. We were expected to fill four boxes of fruit an hour.

Supervising our section was an intimidating redneck bloke called Noel with long unkempt hair and a fearsome moustache. He seemed like a proper slave-driver and was clearly used to sacking people at the drop of a hat. He looked at me like shit for turning up in rubber boots in this heat, but as far as I’d known you always needed wellies for farm work. Vickey certainly hadn't bothered to warn me to wear trainers. I complained my clippers were rusty and he simply spat on them to ease up the joint then handed them back.

I got to speak to a few other backpackers working on the farm; most of them were staying at another hostel in town. They said it was incredibly over-crowded too; there were so many travellers booked in that people had to sleep on the floor of the TV room. One guy was sharing a single bunk-bed with his girlfriend. I don’t know how the Mildura hostels can get away with squeezing people in for extra cash; whatever safety laws are in place don’t seem to be enforced.

Ying and I filled box after box with fruit as the day wore on, but it was clear we were struggling to meet the quota. She was grafting away like there was no tomorrow but I felt like I was running on empty, struggling to comprehend the day’s strange turn of events. What was I doing here? 24 hours ago I had been strolling round St. Kilda with my parents and my best mate, on holiday. Here I was, lured into the great beyond by a wildly inaccurate website, and I didn't even know what f**king state I was in!

It was early evening when they let us clock off for the day. I was relieved the hard slog was over, but I wasn’t ready for the bombshell Noel was about to drop. Turns out Ying and I had not filled enough boxes of fruit. We were sacked on the spot. It was humiliating. I felt bad for Ying too as she was blameless.

I’d heard this happened a lot to new people; these fig farmers had a reputation for being utter bastards. The staff turnover rate was very high as they simply didn’t bother re-hiring you if you weren’t fast enough on the first day. I met the owner, and he was genuinely frightening. He ran around shouting and swearing at people if they made even slight damage to his precious fig plants. They really did talk to the workers like they were stupid.

I felt frustrated and powerless. The three French guys commiserated me while we waited for the pickup. They had done okay, despite receiving a furious bollocking from the head honcho for pulling off a leaf. They couldn’t understand why I hadn’t argued the toss and demanded another chance. But I didn’t want to face this shit again tomorrow. If I quit the hostel I’d lose the week’s rent but at least I would get my day’s wages. (Though it would subsequently take Vickey five months and repeated demands to finally cough up the money.)

Vickey was surprisingly sympathetic when she arrived in the minibus. Presumably by giving it a good go I had proven myself not to be a ‘negative’ person. She said she would “sort something out” for me but I knew this would involve doing badly-paid grape-picking.

She seemed to have taken quite a shine to me; she even asked if I wanted to accompany her to a motorbike race that evening. I said I was too tired. I had horrible visions of her trapping me in some sort of dungeon and forcing me to be her 'husband'. I felt a lot better when she handed my passport back. We were dropped off at our house. Ying was making plans to leave for Adelaide and I was in half a mind to go with her.

I met some Irish backpackers who were hanging round in the living room and explained my tale of woe. Like everyone I met that day they commiserated me; I was doing excellently on the sympathy front. I guessed these were the ‘negative’ people Vickey was talking about. I soon understood why.

They’d been stuck in Mildura for weeks, waiting for occasional crumbs of work from Vickey, and they had all run out of money. Strung along on her false promises and too skint to move on. The grape-picking wages at the vineyard were criminal – just 25 cents for each full bucket of grapes. One guy I spoke to explained you’d be lucky to make $40 a day doing this; he was forced to quit after three days due to exhaustion.

I felt sorry for them but no way was I going to let this happen to me. I got a good night’s sleep and spent the next day searching the internet for decent working hostels within a day's travel. The only ones I could find had vague information or very bad reviews. I wished I’d investigated Mildura properly before I came; the reviews for Borderline Backpackers (which tallied very closely with my experiences) showed its website up to be an utter lie. I grew more and more angry as I realised I’d been had. I had a lot to learn.

Now my savings had run out and my choices were severely limited. So I did the only thing I could do. I got out the credit card. And I booked a flight.

Feb 09 - Kings Canyon and the end of the holiday

2009-08-12T22:24:00.008+08:00

The night after we feasted on the views of Uluru at sunset, our group got together for a big celebratory dinner at the Kings Canyon campsite. We enjoyed a meal of, oh yes, more burgers, then played some party games. It was a long time since I played any party games, other than drinking games or piling furniture on to people asleep on couches.

There was that old favourite the chicken game. We took it in turns gripping a rubber ball between our knees and trying to chicken-walk along the ground to drop it in a cup; I got an excellent video of my dad doing this. Then there was the kangaroos and emus game, which involved going outside and pretending to be, erm, kangaroos and emus; then the circle of truth, where we formed a giant circle then each person took turns to stand in the centre and perform some special feat.

I told a joke about ducks and Bill Withers, and Anthony entertained us with his vast array of barcode and US highways trivia. We’re very fun people to be around obviously. I like evenings like those – the games were pretty unimaginative but we were making our own entertainment, like they did in the old days. Finding enjoyment from the surroundings, be it playing daft games or killing things in new and inventive ways, seems like a big part of life in the bush.

After darkness fell, Nick told us (almost as an afterthought) that part of the camp was haunted by sinister tribal spirits; people waking in their sleep were sometimes panicked to feel an invisible force pinning them to the ground. I took it with a pinch of salt, as Aussies have a bit of a reputation for bullshitting visitors about made-up scary monsters. But then we got a chance to see if the myth was true, spending another night sleeping out under the stars in swag-bags! Nothing happened, though we hid our shoes from the dingoes as a precaution.

And so the next morning dawned, and we did a big hike round Kings Canyon. Epic scenery, rock formations, wind erosion, wild plants, blah blah blah. More of the same and I loved it, but there just aren’t enough words in the English language for me to describe this awesome experience without repeating words I’ve written about the Grampians National Park and Flinders Ranges, etc. We had been utterly spoilt with great scenery in the last couple of weeks.

This was the longest walk we went on during the holiday and featured some tough climbs, particularly the fearsome Heart Attack Hill that marked the beginning. I liked the way it was named; no poetry, no bullshit, just a no-nonsense encapsulation of its identity. It didn’t prove fatal for any of us but it was certainly a steep unrelenting climb.

Once our group got up Heart Attack Hill we went along on level ground for a while, with the huge valley of Kings Canyon to our right and far-away scenery to our left, then we crossed a couple of bridges; then we went down to see a massive rock pool called the Garden of Eden. It’s a popular swimming spot but travellers frequently fall ill from the dodgy water. Lonely Planet recommended it for a dip, which shows you what they know I guess.

Then we crossed the Lost City, which is a plateau with loads of mesmerising patterned rocks. Nick showed us a plant which produces the natural equivalent of MDMA. He refused to tell us how to prepare the leaves, much to our disappointment! We walked along taking lots more photos of the horizontal rock strata. After all, when would we be coming here again? Most of us had filled our memory cards with hundreds of photos on this trip. A smorgasbord of colourful pixels to dine out on for eternity back home.

After three or so hours of walking we climbed down the opposite hill and that was it, the end of the hike across Kings Canyon. We boarded the bus for the final leg of the journey to Alice Springs. More driving through nothing, then we had a lunch stop at a roadhouse that kept emus in a paddock. One last emotional lunch of burgers and salad, the food we’d survived on almost completely for the past week. Clouds of flies descended on the food, ignoring most of it and heading straight for the tuna.

The bus carried on up the highway, passing an interesting turn off that led to a covert US military base. I was fascinated by all these secret goings-on in the desert. Apparently there are thousands of US personnel housed on this base – God knows why – and they get all their food flown in direct from America. Word is that they are all designated with menial job titles such as ‘gardener’ to hide their true identities. But if anyone asks, I didn’t tell you that. (I’m not dissing gardeners by the way, I’ve already got the CIA on my back after writing that.)

Soon afterwards the beginnings of a town appeared over the horizon. We had reached Alice Springs! The Stuart Highway, that friendly stork guiding us through the treacherous desert, was flying on to pastures anew – and sadly we would have to say adios. On the outskirts of town, the road bent through 90 degrees for the first time in a thousand miles. We stopped at a pair of traffic lights; again, the first we’d seen in a thousand miles. And suddenly we were back in civilisation, shops and houses and streets crowding all around us.

Nick did the drop-offs at the hostels round town; me, Anthony and my parents were almost the last off the bus. Esther was still sat there at the end, grumbling about some perceived slight from Nick. Some of the other guys would regroup later for a tour up to Darwin, but the four of us were glad of a rest from the constant activity, and also had two nights to look forward to in a big hotel.

After a quick shower everyone got together for a farewell party at Annie’s backpacker bar. There were about twenty of us who did the trip and we all sat at a long table and got uproariously drunk together one last time. Email addresses were exchanged. Verbal commitments were made to add one another on Facebook and tag each other in our travel photos. After tonight we would most likely never see each other again.

Nick came too and had some beers with us. He didn’t hold back either, he had the next day off and was evidently very happy to have a break from driving. The last I saw of my group, I was getting in a taxi and he was getting ready to lead them off to a casino! In my experience the point in a night out when your mates decide to go to a casino is the point where you should go home.

Anthony stayed out with them till the wee small hours, partying like the behemoth of high living that he is. Later he had to get the porter to let him into the room. I was passed out on my bed like a proper lightweight and didn’t hear him repeatedly phoning me. That night was a big blow to my confidence in my drinking abilities.

The next day it was just the four of us again. We lived it up in style, nursing our hangovers by the hotel pool. My parents went shopping in Alice Springs and my dad bought a fancy hat made of kangaroo leather. The hotel was really posh – it was the kind of place where you suddenly feel attractive and interesting because the staff are smiling at you, then you realise they have to smile at the guests in these sorts of places.

I went for a wander round Alice Springs with Anthony. There is a dried-up riverbed running through the town centre, the Todd River. Every year they hold a pretend yacht race on it, teams of runners carrying boats along the ‘river’ as a laugh. Like I said, in the outback you have to make your own entertainment. There were lots of Aboriginal people hanging round in the town centre. Having spent all this time in Australia it was the first time I’d seen them in any number.

The next day we flew out from Alice Springs’ tiny airport, to Sydney. We got the standard safety demonstration on how to use the life-jacket, despite the fact we didn’t pass over water at any point during the flight! We spent three days sight-seeing; checking out bare essentials like the harbour bridge, the opera house, the ferry to Manly etc. I’d been there before but it was worth the four of us paying a visit so my parents and Anthony could see the amazing cityscape and the unending panorama of harbours and coves surrounding it. We didn’t get the greatest weather, in fact it pissed it down nearly every day we were there.

Walking round Circular Quay we had a chance reunion with Matteo, the Italian guy from our tour, who was going about his mysterious business in Sydney. A man like Matteo, you don’t ask too many questions. Then the weather brightened up so we did a boat trip round the harbour. The trip was notable not so much for the views as for the tour guide’s strange obsession with Nicole Kidman and camp showbiz trivia. It was quite a good trip though – there are miles of dramatic views around the harbour.

Next we caught a long-distance train down to Melbourne and spent a few days by the sea in St. Kilda. We had literally come full-circle – by a weird quirk of fate our hotel was just over the road from the pick-up point on the Great Ocean Road tour. That adventure on Dave’s bus was now a distant memory from a fortnight ago. I was starting to realise that the holiday was nearly over; soon I would have to go back to farm work in the country.

St. Kilda had a strangely familiar atmosphere; due to its southerly location and colonial buildings it is probably the closest thing you will find in Australia to a British seaside town. Despite that it was enjoyable and relaxing. There was a harbour and a fun park and all the other stuff you get at the seaside. The streets were lined with endless cafes and restaurants, the maddening diversity of choice that is Melbourne’s trademark. The trams flocked here, bringing people to and from the city centre. We pottered round looking at trams and boats mostly, with my dad taking photo after photo.

We wanted more sight-seeing so we went on a winery trip round the Yarra Valley; a day of fine wines, haute cuisine and the painful experience of making small talk with posh strangers. Our guide, an enthusiastic wine buff named Orson, explained how the countryside was marred with bush-fires. Many of the vineyards were bravely staying open for business despite being in high-risk areas. The recent tragedies certainly took the fun out of the occasion.

And so we spent the afternoon going from winery to winery, sipping chilled chardonnay and staring at the massive plumes of smoke on the horizon. It’s easy to forget how massive the bush-fires were, and many people living rural Victoria were affected. I detected an atmosphere of forced jollity among our group. A flowery Canadian tourist named Darcy held court over the table, rapturously praising a hit new musical based on the life of Shane Warne. His passions in life seemed to be the theatre and fancy restaurants. It was interesting to finally get to meet the coach party brigade, but I still harbour a Trotskyite mistrust of them.

That night, relatively sober despite all the wine, we went back to the city and met our friend Seana for dinner and drinks. We ended up in a karaoke bar, an abrupt return to working-class life after all the folly of the wineries. It was the final evening of our holiday and we had a few beers to commemorate this, followed by a few more. Anthony put in a rare appearance on the karaoke, singing Elton John’s ‘Your song’. I was not looking forward to this holiday ending.

The day after it was all over; time to pack up and check out of the hotel. We spent a long day hanging round in St. Kilda with our bags, drinking tea in cafes and watching the hours creep by with sad eyes. My parents took me shopping for new trainers in Melbourne – after all these years I can only be forced to buy footwear with the application of an electric cattle prod or parental shame. This was the last they’d see of me in a long time and they wanted me all turned out in shiny new school clothes.

That evening we got a cab to the city and enjoyed dinner by the river one last time. My parents and Anthony talked excitedly of the flight home; it would be my last ‘posh’ meal for some time and I savoured every mouthful. I felt a mixture of happiness and sadness that I was continuing my strange wandering life while these familiar faces departed home. I felt a bit lonely to be honest, and not for the first time I inwardly wondered what the hell it was I was hoping to achieve from this trip.

We said our goodbyes outside Southern Cross station, a massive transport hub crouching under a giant freakish canopy of twisting metal. We exchanged hugs and then they were out of my life in a flash, speeding away in a yellow taxi, quickly lost in the sea of rear headlights. I headed to the coach stop, humming upbeat tunes and looking forward to my next adventure. I could hack this travel lark; loved ones coming and going did not distract me in the slightest. Probably.

While Anthony and my parents were spending a mind-numbing 24 hours on a plane back to the UK, I was going on a long journey of my own. A crowded bus took me on an overnight journey up to Mildura, a country town in Victoria that sits on the border with New South Wales. I was low on money and needed to get more farm work for my visa. That meant another stay on a working hostel and some serious hard graft!

Feb 09 - Uluru and Fooluru

2009-07-28T12:42:00.004+08:00

The next morning we woke very early and ate packed breakfasts in our cave hotel rooms at Coober Pedy. Then it was time to rendezvous with the rest of the group at the cave hostel and board our bus. Today we had yet another epic drive in store, further up through the central deserts of Australia.

As we left town the sunrise cast long ghostly shadows over the unearthly terrain. The surrounding landscape was strewn with piles of rubble from the opal mines. Soon the mines petered out and we were heading through the great nothingness of the Stuart Highway again. The vegetation was much sparser, the horizon utterly featureless.

Our destination was Uluru, the world-famous landmark known in times gone by as Ayer’s Rock. Uluru means different things to different cultures – to the Aborigines, a sacred worship site; to tourists and travellers, a big fun rock to climb on. As you might imagine this has caused a little bit of tension between the two parties down the years. Climbing the rock is now officially discouraged, but not forbidden.

“What colour is your urine?” demanded a sympathetic sign at the next roadhouse. Pale yellow is good; your body’s fully hydrated. Deep yellow is cause for concern – drink more water straight away. If it’s orange then you’re f**ked, no two ways about it. Drink water immediately and seek medical attention. It wasn’t as hot as it had been in Adelaide, but here in the red centre it can reach an amazing 60˚C in the summer, so drinking enough water is crucial.

Soon we left South Australia and crossed into the Northern Territory. The clocks went back an hour. The Northern Territory doesn’t do daylight savings time it seems. Working out the time in Australia when it’s summer gets a bit difficult; half the states put their clocks forward, the rest don’t bother. The same weekend the clocks go back for winter in Europe, they go forward for summer in Australia, and vice versa. Depending on which state you’re in and what time of year it is, you could be anything between 7 and 11 hours ahead of the UK.

Eventually the giant monolith appeared on the horizon; not Uluru, but Mount Conner, an Uluru-shaped mountain that was plainly just put there to confuse people. Mount Conner is nicknamed ‘Fooluru’ due to its resemblance. Fifty miles past Mount Conner, we glimpsed the real Uluru, shimmering majestically in the desert mist.

At the end of the day, yes, it’s just a rock, but it’s a bloody impressive one. Uluru dwarfs the landscape around it, measuring a good two or three miles from end to end. It is set in bushland in the midst of a giant national park. There used to be a resort complex next to the rock itself but this got bulldozed years ago so the area could return to its natural state. Over time the local Aboriginal communities have gradually been able to assert their control over this spiritual site, though it is still a bit of a tug-of-war between them and the government at present.

We began our pilgrimage to the mighty rock by checking into a permanent campsite at nearby Yulara. Here there were water taps, barbeques and washrooms in a basic but clean environment. There were a few different tour groups knocking around in the high season. It became apparent there were two strata of tourists doing this trip through the desert: us, the backpackers, travelling on a budget; and the coach tours full of the elderly and wealthy, waited on hand and foot by phalanxes of guides.

Making the most of the daylight, we did a brief walk past one side of Uluru, going along a path through some trees to a water-hole. The rock towered over us, reflecting beautiful orange light all through the glade. I shot a few videos on my camera, trying to capture its immense scale close up. My mum and Anthony missed the rendezvous back on the bus because they followed someone who was wandering about confused. Esther flew into a panic, convinced some terrible fate had befallen my mother, but eventually they found their way back safe and happy in time for the sunset.

Nick drove us round to a great vantage point where the sun was setting behind us, bathing the entire rock in light. It was a magnificent sight – I’d not been so awed since I visited the Taj Mahal in India. Slowly the sun dipped below the horizon and the colour of the rock changed from deep orange to dirty brown. The daylight was fading and darkness would not be far behind.

Lower down the hill, a massive group of people from the coach parties had been enjoying some sort of exquisite dinner served on long plastic tables with tablecloths. Meanwhile we munched boxes of crackers and drank Asti Spumante from plastic mugs. And I was perfectly happy with that. We were living on the edge, experiencing the raw thrill of the outback. The toffs from the bus were floating along on a cloud of luxury, out of touch with reality; none of them would get to climb the hill and eat our crackers, and it was their loss.

Afterwards we went back to the camp at Yulara and laid all the swag-bags out in the open. Swag-bags are outdoors sleeping bags, traditionally used by bushmen and wandering travellers in place of a tent. We hid our shoes inside the swags so dingoes wouldn’t steal them, and then slept out under the stars, the bushland lit by brilliant moonlight. It was amazing. Quiet was all around, save a bit of muffled snoring, and the weather was perfectly still. I dreamt more vividly than I have since childhood, strange dreams, dark dreams, my brain dazzled by the light from the sky.

We got up in time to witness sunrise at Uluru. Not much I can say about it except the rock turned from brown back to bright orange, so it’s exactly like the sunset in reverse. We began a long hike all the way round the rock, an exhilarating two-hour journey on foot wearing our hats and fly-nets. The flies were everywhere.

Up close the rock has a lot of detailed features where bits have eroded; once again, a geologist’s wet dream. Certain sections of the walk cannot be photographed, as the features on the rock carry spiritual significance to Aborigines. There was a stiff $5,000 fine for taking pictures in these bits and we all nervously followed it to the letter.

It was quite a hot day, though not as hot as the heatwave down in Adelaide. Over in Victoria the bushfires were now raging. We’d hear the apocalyptic news reports every time we passed a TV on the fuel stops. Meanwhile up in Queensland there were tropical rainstorms and flooding. This country is so huge it can have any number of weather-related emergencies happening around it all at once. And I’m buggered if I can understand all that meteorological gubbins, but the rule seems to be there is no rule.

After several miles we’d done the full circle round Uluru; what an epic journey. Next, a short journey to Walpa Gorge in the Kata Tjuta national park and another hike for those that could be arsed doing more walking. My dad and I joined the group exploring the area while my mum and Anthony stayed back to rest their aching feet.

We’d glimpsed the Kata Tjuta hills on the horizon the previous evening; they are a series of dome-shaped rock formations (always with the rock formations) that have significance in the Aboriginal Creation Time stories. Walpa gorge was a narrow pathway running through a very steep rock valley – the sky shrank to a narrow band of blue up above as we walked through. It wasn't quite as impressive as Uluru but still pretty memorable.

Nick told us another grim story about how hundreds of Aborigines had been slaughtered in this gauge by ruthless farmers; as they weren’t classed as people in the olden days, legally it had been seen more as a ‘cull’ than a massacre, abhorrent as that sounds. Next thing we know Esther starts chipping in and he got into heated debate with her about whether the old Christian missions were a good thing. She believed they were, but he pointed out they had been partially responsible for destroying the Aborigines’ traditions and culture. Thankfully somebody interrupted with another question, otherwise it could have turned ugly!

After the standard lunch of burgers and salad at the campsite in Yulara, it was time to pack up and leave. Then another long drive, back out on to the Stuart Highway and up to King’s Canyon. Another campsite settlement awaited us there. The time had really flown by since we left Adelaide, and tomorrow would be last day of the trip (not the last day of our holiday though).

I think all four of us really enjoyed doing the backpacker trips – there was a good mix of people, the sight-seeing was interesting and the guides had both been great. Anthony and my mum and dad got a great introduction to Australia, and it added immeasurably to my experience of the country; prior to this I’d travelled plenty but seen very little of what it has to offer.

9th Feb 09 – Coober Pedy and the Stuart Highway

2009-07-22T12:53:00.013+08:00

Day 3 of the trip presented us with our first seriously long drive. We were packed up and out of Quorn by daybreak. Half an hour later we passed through Port Augusta, notable as the place where two very very long roads branch out in opposite directions. One of these is the Eyre Highway, spreading across the Nullarbor Plain into Western Australia. The other is the Stuart Highway; not so much a road as a heroic feat of civil engineering that stretches all the way up through the central deserts to Darwin on the north coast. In between the two roads lie millions of square kilometres of nothing. Bugger all. Truly this was the crossroads of Australia.

And so we began our odyssey up the Stuart Highway. The road was named after John McDouall Stuart, an intrepid Victorian explorer who was the first to cross Australia from south to north. He was a key figure in the development of this route and spent half his life exploring the great bugger all (as it is known) and naming ranges of hills after him and his mates. Alongside the highway runs the Ghan, a long-distance train that puffs arthritically through the desert, pulling up to two kilometres of freight wagons behind it.

As we travelled, the immense empty landscape was bathed in rays of morning sun. Our guide Nick drew our attention to the Ghan – a vast, slow-moving metal snake passing us the other way. He kept himself awake with beef jerky and a wide array of other snack foods on the long drive while the rest of us dozed in the back and played games. There was quite a lot of vegetation around the road as there had been recent rainfall. The steady showers – no more than a couple of days of rain – equated to two years’ annual rainfall for this region.

We stopped at the tiny settlement of Pimba to buy supplies and refuel the bus. Nick asked us all to exit the bus when he put petrol in it, due to some safety requirement or other. I guess heat plus petrol can have nasty consequences. After a few hours cooped up inside we’d be mad not to want to stretch our legs anyway.

The fuel station was called Spud’s Roadhouse, and featured a restaurant, motel and pub. All the basic needs of humanity, grub, bed and booze, rolled into one at this remote outpost. The shop sold car stickers declaring “Where the bloody hell is Pimba, South Australia?” Wherever it was, we were there, happily acknowledging its existence.

After another spell on the highway, a giant sea of white loomed into view far on our left. We were entering an area of natural salt lakes, left over from a giant inland sea that dried up in prehistoric times (according to the boffins and such). We spent an hour sightseeing on Lake Hart, walking across the rough gravelly salt, marvelling in the beautiful crystalline light that surrounded everything for miles around. It was a bloody huge salt lake, measuring maybe twenty miles in length.

Then there were the trick photos. Being perfectly white, the salt lake gives no impression of distance, so you can walk far off from the camera, pose in line with your mate who’s in the foreground, and it looks like you’re a little pixie standing on their shoulder (or booting them playfully in the head if you move your legs). We spent ages setting up these photos for each other; posing, positioning, gesturing to the far-away people to move a little bit this way, a little bit that way. Good times. Only when you’re on holiday can you truly f**k around like this.

After the wonderment of the salt lake, Nick brought us back down to earth with some grim facts about the area. The British used the desert in South Australia for nuclear tests back in the 1950s. The bombs killed thousands of Aborigines dwelling in the bush and left a wide swathe of land contaminated with radiation. The military chose this spot as it was among the most isolated in the world, but were totally ignorant about the damage it would have on the environment and people.

Nick also told us Aborigines were still classed as ‘flora and fauna’ by law until 1968, and didn’t even acquire the legal status of humans till then. I found this amazing. The brutalities the colony was first built upon are far from a thing of the past. He wasn’t pulling any punches in giving us the secret history of the land. We were passing through a stretch of the Stuart Highway where the radiation levels are still so high you’re not permitted to go off the side of the road.

Safely through the fallout zone, we took a rest stop in Glendambo, billed as having a population of 30. This sparse pit stop was like a scene out of Crocodile Dundee; a single street, clouds of dust, and one of those big metal windmills on a giant stalk. Obviously there was a pub too.

We did all the usual toilet/shop/walk around gubbins, then there was a comedy 'old lady moment' as we pulled out on to the highway. Esther suddenly declared she’d left her wallet behind, so Nick turned the bus round and headed back to the fuel stop, only for her to find it safe and sound in her handbag just after he’d executed a perilous U-turn on the highway.

We were starting to see a fair few road trains – massive American-style trucks pulling multiple trailers, transporting goods up and down the highway in clouds of dust. Often Nick would give them some kind of ‘convoy’ salute as we passed them on the road. Maybe it was a greeting, maybe a plea not to flatten us under their wheels? Places like Glendambo survive on the deliveries from road trains; all the food in the shops is marked up by a dollar or two to cover the transport costs.

Our destination was Coober Pedy, a remote mining town that produces some of the world’s finest opals. The precious stones were first discovered there about a hundred years ago – the name Coober Pedy is taken from the local Aboriginal phrase for ‘white man down a hole’. Sadly the white man down a hole turned nasty at some point and told the Aborigines to bugger off.

A makeshift town has sprung up around the mines, people digging underground homes in the bedrock to escape the heat above. The surrounding desert is a sprawling moonscape of holes and rubble. Anyone can come here and get rich, but the going is sweaty and dangerous. Opals are worth a surprising amount of money – the finest unpolished stones can fetch up to a quarter of a million dollars.

We arrived there mid-afternoon, having covered nearly 400 miles in one day. It’s far from a large town, with only two or three streets, purely functional in design. One way or another, the whole place revolves around the opal trade. It lacks a lot of basic amenities – people often go on ‘fast food runs’ down to Adelaide, a seven-hour drive each way, providing a thriving black market in frozen burgers and fries around the town. Amazingly, McDonalds hasn’t thought to set up shop here.

Coober Pedy has featured in a fair few films down the years. A yard near our hotel proudly displayed the full-size spacecraft model used in filming the Vin Diesel movie Pitch Black. I am sure there are people out there who consider Vin Diesel to be the world’s greatest actor, but most of us reacted indifferently to this fabled artefact.

After checking into our accommodation (all built underground in amazing hollowed-out caverns) we went to look at the town’s underground church. This quirky innovation, a rudimentary chapel dug into the side of a hill, delivers religion and sedate organ music at consistent low temperatures all year round. ‘SEEK THE LORD WHILE HE MAY BE FOUND’ declared a sign on the wall. The altar was basically a bunch of logs nailed together, biblical in its primitive design.

Then we had a look round the opal museum, which was built on a former mine. This included a tour round an underground show-home and several of the mine tunnels, followed by the obligatory gift shop. Unique local laws forbid big mining companies from moving in and the mines are all small operations, funded on people’s retirement savings and the like.

A group of us went to an abandoned patch of ground where the public is free to noodle for opals (sifting through giant mounds of rubble looking for precious stones). Despite my gung-ho optimism every speck of dirt on the mine seemed to have been sifted by a thousand hands before and I found precisely bugger all. I was bored of opals after that.

Our party got together for dinner, enjoying pizza at the imaginatively-titled “John’s Pizza Bar”, then drinks in the underground hotel bar. Coober Pedy was an interesting world and I enjoyed seeing it, but I was relieved I’d not experienced a lucky find that might persuade me to stay here and take up the noodling life.

Feb 09 - Outback Nick and Wolf Creek

2009-07-10T09:45:00.006+08:00

When we got to Adelaide we discovered the tour company had booked us a basic dorm room in a backpackers, which was alright for me and Anthony, but my parents hated it. Somehow all four of us had failed to spot the tell-tale words “overnight dorm accommodation included” on the invoice. We decided to upgrade our accommodation to hotels for the rest of the trip. Whack it on the plastic and to hell with it. I certainly wasn’t going to complain about a bit of extra luxury!

After the Great Ocean Road trip we had a free day in Adelaide. I did laundry while my parents went with Anthony to find him a dentist for his toothache. It is a small city, easy to explore on foot, but our sight-seeing was curtailed by scorching 43˚C temperatures. That’s a heatwave even by Australian standards. Stepping outdoors was like walking into a furnace. We smeared ourselves with as much suncream as possible and went out to do some shopping. Then we sat out in one of the parks, which was deserted. Anyone with any sense was sheltering indoors. My mum got a bit ill due to the heat, but she recovered once we sat down in a cafe and gave her some water.

Later on we had dinner and a few drinks with Seana, a Scottish girl we met on the trip. Everyone had an early night. I was suffering from a profusion of inflamed mosquito bites all over my back and shoulders, due to sleeping next to an open window in Halls Gap. Much as I was grateful for the holiday I was tired of living out of a rucksack and starting to feel like I was losing my grip. Every day I’d pack; then unpack; then pack again; then unpack; living in a permanent state of travel.

The day after, it was time to start the next leg of our journey, an epic six day trip through the desert that would bring us to Alice Springs. No more coastal rock formations for us now. We were joined with some of the people from the last trip and a few new people, including a cantankerous old lady called Esther who seemed decidedly out of place. Other than that the group was mostly young travellers in their twenties. It was a big group; the pavement was strewn with backpacks and mounds of luggage as we loaded up the van’s massive trailer unit.

Our guide was Nick, a burly man of the outback who dressed in khaki shorts like Steve Irwin and carried a fearsome Bowie knife. He had a different style to Dave (the last guide), much more serious in tone and less extrovert. However he too was a bloody good guide and turned out to be a right laugh once we got to know him.

On the first morning we stopped in a country town for breakfast, passing through the last set of traffic lights we would see in a very long time. The road north into the desert was long, straight and lonely. South Australia was the only colony in Australia to be settled exclusively by free men, not convicts, and they always make a big thing of this. It’s hardly a populous state, made up mostly of farming country and arid desert plains. Most of the farmlands inhabited in the 1800s soon dried up, leaving a trail of abandoned settlements stretching north.

Much of our time was to be spent on travel; be it on the road, packing up the trailer unit or unpacking it. Nick organised us with military precision. This was by necessity, as the distances we covered were huge and the places we would visit were unimaginably remote (from start to finish the road journey from Adelaide to Alice Springs measured about a thousand miles). Everybody pitched in preparing the meals – we mostly survived on burgers and salad, those staples of Aussie food. Flies were just extra protein. All of the supplies and cutlery were carried in two or three big cooler boxes in the trailer and had to be carefully looked after.

Our first stop was at the Kanyaka homestead, a cluster of stone ruins dating from the 19th Century. The farm was abandoned long ago when the lands dried up, and it presented quite a ghostly spectacle. The weather was once again scorching hot, topping 40˚C. Nick warned us gravely that it would get even hotter as we travelled farther north. For now I felt safely protected with a hat and sunscreen. We’d all bought fly-nets too – an essential item of headgear for keeping out the marauding waves of flies.

We travelled on into the hills of the Flinders Ranges, and went to look at some Aboriginal rock paintings in Yourambulla Caves. Nick explained all about the local indigenous cultures, and it was clear he held them in high respect and wanted to give us a comprehensive education on them. He told us lots about the native wildlife too. The paintings were simple groupings of animal pictures and symbols and apparently date back to 5,000 years ago. Up until the 20th century the caves are thought to have been used as a school for the Aboriginal children.

Once again we did the introductions over the bus’s mic but this was halted by a technical malfunction and never finished. That made learning the names of the new people a bit harder, but soon everyone was chatting away and having a good time. It was a bit of a mystery why Esther had chose to come on the tour – she wandered round muttering under her breath constantly and was appalled by the fact the dorms were mixed. She would probably have been better off going on a luxury coach tour but she seemed intent on saving money.

Our first overnight stop was in a country town with the odd name of Quorn. This was once a railway outpost and agricultural centre but now the town mostly revolved around tourism. It had nothing to do with quorn whatsoever. We stayed at an old mill that had been turned into a restaurant and motel development. Down the road was the grand-sounding Transcontinental Hotel which in reality was a redneck pub.

Now the four of us had upgraded our accommodation we were spared another dorm and given our own room with a fridge and en-suite bathroom. Cold drinks were bought and placed in the fridge by us ready for early-morning consumption. Say what you like about Anthony – he knows how to plan drinks refrigeration for maximum enjoyment.

We all sat out in the long summer evening, enjoying an eclectic barbeque of emu burgers, kangaroo steaks and camel sausages. Vegans must have such a shit time when they come to Australia – it is a country of staunch meat-eaters. Anthony got chatting to a Scottish couple who knew Blackpool well and had even been to Popeye’s, the takeaway round the corner from our house. We were joined by Matteo, an Italian guy from our last trip, and Franco, another Italian.

With some prompting, Nick told us the tough story of his life – orphaned at a young age, he had been left to raise his sister alone. Now his sister, grown up, had run off to join a religious cult in England and severed all ties with him. He’d got back in touch with her eventually but relations were strained – any attempt he made to talk her out of it was met with fresh hostility, and there seemed to be nothing he could do to change the situation. Much like Abdul in Manjimup, he was bravely ploughing a lone furrow in life and not looking back.

The wake-up times on this trip were extremely early, ranging from 4am to 6am each day depending on how much travelling needed to be done. As the sun rose the next morning, we went on a hike to Warren Gorge to observe the rare and timid yellow-footed rock wallaby in its natural habitat. Wallabies are native marsupials that resemble small kangaroos. We saw a few of them watching us tentatively from a distance, and they would disappear into the undergrowth at the slightest movement or noise. They had rather endearing yellow-and-grey striped tails.

The hot weather meant some of the itinerary changed – the more demanding hikes were out of the question in this heat. But we still did a lot of strenuous bushwalking, which I was glad of. The next odyssey we went on was through Wilpena Pound, a huge circle of mountains that resemble a giant meteor crater from the air. After a barbeque lunch we spent the afternoon walking through the woods in the hollow.

Several of us took the more ambitious option of climbing to the top of Mount Ohlssen Bagge, a huge, steep climb. Some of the others made it all the way to the top and saw the splendid views of the surrounding mountains. I got about two-thirds of the way up but couldn’t finish it – the levels of heat were insane and I would have got ill if I’d gone much further. I was gutted I missed out, but everyone has a limit in these circumstances.

Somehow on the way down from the hill Matteo and I got separated from the rest of the group. We ended up waiting in a car park, the wrong car park entirely as it turned out. However this gave me a thrilling close-up encounter with some wallabies skulking in the bushes, and I got some great photos of these strange, shy creatures while I was looking for somewhere to throw away my Calippo wrapper.

Back on the bus, with zero fatalities from the death hike, we left Wilpena Pound. Next off was a stop at Huck’s Lookout, a scenic roadside stop, followed by a visit to the roadside location used in the Wolf Creek movie poster (much of the movie was filmed in South Australia). Everyone was keen to get a photo of this, and Nick posed in the road clutching his bowie knife, looking every inch a psycho outback farmer. He did various comedy poses of ‘murdering’ people too.

We stayed at the mill in Quorn a second night and enjoyed another barbeque. For after-dinner entertainment we of course watched Wolf Creek on DVD. Nick dropped a few hints that he would play a prank on us when the movie reached a scary point – something along the lines of bursting into the room waving his knife – but he didn’t. Sometimes the rough Aussie humour doesn’t translate to us delicate foreign souls, and maybe he knew this. My dad and I watched about an hour of the movie then went to bed. No disrespect to the Australian film industry, but it is a bloody terrible film.

Feb 09: Meet the family

2009-07-08T10:44:00.018+08:00

At the end of January I left Manjimup. My parents were flying into Melbourne from the UK, and I was going over to meet them. Also coming from home was my good mate Anthony, known variously to our friends as Josiah, Safe Anthony and Silverback. I’d not seen any of them in a year and was both excited and – after all this time – a bit apprehensive.

I should explain something at this point: us northerners aren’t a rich people. International air travel is something exotic to us. None of my family or Anthony had ever been to Australia before, and with me being here, they decided to pawn various family heirlooms and bodily organs in the hope of joining me on holiday. The grand plan was coming to fruition.

My dad had meticulously organised a three-week trip round Australia for the four of us. We would go in a clockwise circle west to Adelaide, north to Alice Springs, over to Sydney and back down to Melbourne, taking in all the popular tourist gubbins on the way. I’d been in Australia nine months and not yet seen any of the famous sights like Uluru or the Great Ocean Road. It was a travesty. Thankfully my dad had killed two birds with one stone – not literally, he wasn’t into hunting or anything.

At that stage I thought I’d never set foot in Manjimup again. Our fling had run its course. I left on the Friday morning, and one bus and train later I was back in Perth, the state capital. After seeing nothing but trees for weeks on end I was back in the midst of skyscrapers and traffic, and it felt intoxicating. I stayed with friends in the city that evening and flew to Melbourne the next day. Similarly, I thought this would be the last time I’d be in West Australia, but I was to be proved horrifically wrong.

This was my first visit to Melbourne and I was keen to see the city. All and sundry in Australia rave about Melbourne. “You’re going to Melbourne?” they’d say. “Oh, you’ll love it, it’s brilliant.” I heard this so many times. For the uninitiated Melbourne is basically just a massive city, cold and wet and expensive. A bit like London. But I didn’t know that then, and was anticipating streets paved with gold and circus jugglers performing cartwheels on every street corner. Bondy’s verdict: thumbs down plus.

Fortunate scheduling meant my cross-country flight landed a mere hour before my mum and dad and Anthony touched down at the same airport. I didn't have too long to wait in Arrivals before the long snake of bleary-eyed people came out off the plane, and right at the back I recognised my parents and Anthony!

I waved frantically through the crowds. My mum saw me and ran over to give me a big hug but my dad and Anthony carried on, oblivious to the straggly-haired sun-bleached ocker standing before them. Eventually they recognised me and came over to shake my hand rather gingerly. We’d got a lot of catching up to do.

And after that it was just like old times; like I’d never been away from them at all. After a year immersed in unfamiliar places around totally new people, it was good to have a bit of familiarity back. We got a cab into the city centre, with my dad firmly in charge of the itinerary, and checked in at the swanky Pensione Hotel. This was one of those mid-range ‘boutique’ hotels, with fittings straight out of Ikea, en-suite bathrooms and flatscreen TVs in the bedrooms. No more bunk beds or communal showers for me. Brilliant!

Me and Anthony shared a room and caught up on old times. We’re not a couple or anything, don’t get the wrong idea. Anyway, the next day, once they’d recovered from jetlag, off we went sight-seeing round Melbourne. It seemed quite nice. It has a lot of bridges. The river Yarra features prominently. Endless processions of trams buzz up and down the city streets like big metal pigeons. My dad was enjoying the trams and the architecture. He is what is known as a ‘transport nut’ and enjoys seeing trams thrive in urban surroundings.

We went on a cruise up and down the river seeing some of the famous landmarks. The skyline looks impressive from the river; the old Flinders Street station contrasts very nicely with the jungle of skyscrapers rising behind it like mutant concrete palms. In the evening we dined out at a fancy restaurant, setting a precedent of high living which would take us through numerous culinary spheres and leave me with next to no savings by the end of the holiday.

Initially we planned to do a self-drive holiday, but after checking the logistics we decided it was simpler to go on a couple of backpacker tours, for slightly extra cost. My mum and dad were up for the adventure and so were Anthony and I. So after another day in Melbourne it was time to start our travels along the Great Ocean Road, with Dave and his merry Oz Experience bus.

Dave was an energetic curly-haired fellow who was constantly cracking jokes in a Butlins redcoat stylee. I was initially dubious, but he turned out to be a fantastic guide and a proper good bloke. There were about twelve of us on the trip: us four, and a mix of other European travellers in their twenties.

As we left Melbourne on the first morning, Dave forced us all to get up at the front of the bus and introduce ourselves over the mic. Despite being able to sing confidently on stage, I hate public speaking and really phoned it in, with none of my trademark witticisms. But it was good to hear everybody else’s story and this was a great tactic to kick off the getting-to-know-each-other process.

On the first day we visited Bell’s Beach, which is, erm, a beach. Then we carried on along the Great Ocean Road. Bit of history for you: this sprawling coastal highway was built in the 1930s to provide employment to out-of-work war veterans. It was a great journey, twisting and turning along the scenic coast, heading up and down misty hills and through lush valleys. Dave played a medley of Beach Boys tunes on the stereo to complement the amazing views. From that moment on I realised he was a dude.

Next we stopped at a koala sanctuary and fed some colourful parrots. They were very excited around people and kept jumping on our heads. After lunch in Apollo Bay we headed inland to the Otway Fly treetop walk. This was a series of massive trees spanned by metal walkways a hundred feet up in the air. There was a display of plastic dinosaurs too, for some reason. After months and months of working and saving and trying to live like a local I really enjoyed being a slack-jawed tourist again.

That evening we went to see sunset at the Twelve Apostles, a coastal rock formation that provides some amazing photo opportunities as the sun goes down. This was a memorable experience, though it was packed with travellers, and I must have taken over a hundred photos that day. We stayed overnight at the tiny country settlement of Princetown, which numbered literally four or five buildings. The backpacker tours always stopped off at the hostel there, which was wittily named the Thirteenth Apostle.

The next day we went to look at the Twelve Apostles again from Gibson’s Steps (a nearby lookout point) and by helicopter. The helicopter trip cost $70 – nearly a day’s wages with Abdul – but I was very keen to try it as I hadn’t flown in one before. And yes, it was quite good. Basically the Apostles are tall needles of rock which have been eroded away from the coast by the sea winds. And there aren’t even twelve of them so it’s a bit of a con. It was decided in the 19th Century to rename them to attract tourists – formerly they were known as the Sow and Piglets. How someone looked at lumps of rock and thought to name them after pigs I don’t know, but those were very farming-oriented times.

We travelled further along the coast, pausing to appreciate more limestone formations. This trip would be a geologist’s wet dream, it really would. Loch Ard Gorge was the site of a shipwreck in the 1890s, and London Bridge was a peninsula of rock with naturally-formed archways passing underneath it that made it look a bit like a bridge. A few years ago one of the archways collapsed into the sea without warning, leaving two day-trippers stranded.

There was a famous story (possibly untrue) that the trapped people were a man and a woman from the city who were having a secret affair. Being cut off from the land by the sudden rockfall, they were forced to shout for help from passers-by, and before they knew it the police were called. Soon the Channel 7 news helicopter was buzzing around filming the scene and it was being broadcast live on TV! They were rescued after that, but unsurprisingly it kind of blew the lid on their relationship. Dave related this story to us by drawing an amusing marker-pen diagram on the bus windscreen, a good use of props.

We were a long way from Melbourne now, and it was time to kiss the coast (and all those rock formations) goodbye. We went for a long hike through the Grampians National Park, and started a lung-busting climb up a steep hill to a lookout called the Pinnacle. The heat was intense, but after a month of wrestling with grapevines my fitness levels were pretty good and I rocketed to the top. There is a photo of me at the summit, plastered with sweat and grinning a shit-eating grin. The views were amazing at the top and you could see for miles around. We all rested in the shade of a rock, passing round snacks, then we began the trek back down.

Dave saluted our climbing exploits by playing ‘We are the Champions’ on the bus home. And verily, we were champions. Well I say ‘home’, it was actually somewhere we’d never been. We stayed overnight at the town of Halls Gap, sharing accommodation with another group coming the other way from Adelaide. Everyone pitched in to cook a giant communal pot of spag bol and it was very nice. I remember being extremely hungry and going back for seconds twice, like a fat bastard.

There was a blonde woman with the other group who looked vaguely familiar. Turns out it was Terri Irwin, widow of Steve Irwin! She was travelling with the group to do tourism research, finding out what the company’s guides taught about ecology. This might be to do with that theme park they've got up in Queensland. None of us twigged who she was until much later though.

We rose very early the next morning to begin the final leg of the trip to Adelaide. As everyone was sat eating breakfast a monstrous bang came from outside; the bus’s engine had backfired. That was a bit worrying but Dave checked the engine and it seemed okay. We had just swapped buses with the other group as this one needed to be taken back to Adelaide for maintenance. Little did we know that it was the Bus of Death.

As we arrived at the Balconies Lookout it played another trick on us; one of the side windows suddenly exploded, showering the car park with beads of glass. I've never seen a window explode like that before. It was a strange, unexplained event, witnessed by the people on another bus who imagined someone had smashed it from the inside. A girl had actually been sleeping against the window at the time – amazingly she wasn't hurt. Dave made sure she was alright and taped up the hole with a bin liner, then put in a call to Adelaide to order a replacement window!

From the high vantage point of the Balconies Lookout we watched the sunrise over the Grampians, and it was pretty special. There was an old fire lookout tower there which we took photos from. Then we went hiking to a colossal waterfall, MacKenzie falls, and did the obligatory group photo in front of the water. Terri was there, posing with her group.

Next it was time to hit the road and cross into South Australia, turning our watches back half an hour as we crossed the state border. We stopped for lunch in the border town of erm, Bordertown, which had some public toilets cunningly installed in an old town jail. This was a famous spot in the gold rushes of the 19th Century. Also we had a look at some rare white kangaroos in a nature reserve.

Then it was time for a long uninterrupted drive to Adelaide in the Bus of Death. The bin liner on the window flapped noisily in the wind but there were to be no more freak accidents. We arrived in the city safe and sound, around 6pm, in glorious late afternoon sunshine.

In three days we’d seen and done a hell of a lot, but now it was time to bid a sorry farewell to Dave and many of our group. And so the Bus of Death went off to the abattoir to be put out of its misery.

Dec 08/Jan 09: Trunk-rubbing and other activities

2009-07-06T10:45:00.019+08:00

At 6am on Boxing Day I was inducted into the world of Abdul. All the newcomers, I’d been told, worked for Abdul. Over time, you’d work your way up the hostel’s pecking order and land a job with another farm, some of them very good, but everyone had to do the hard slog for Abdul first. Whoever he was and whatever it was he did I didn’t know, but he always seemed to need a lot of people. There were about a dozen of us waiting out there in the car park that day for the morning pickup.

Turns out we were doing a job called wire-lifting, working on a vineyard. Abdul was in the labour hire business, supplying temporary workers to vast vineyard estates when they needed work doing on the vines. The vineyards liked it because they didn’t need to keep permanent people on the payroll (and probably because they wouldn’t pay our insurance if we were mangled in a horrific tractor accident, but that’s just me hypothesising).

This hostel was Abdul’s main source of labour, providing a fresh pool of bored, caged-in lost souls badly in need of paid employment. He took care of our transport and essentials like water and work tools. A dour yet humble Afghanistani man, he had fled the Taliban in his home country, emigrating to Australia and building up his own business here in Manjimup.

I don’t know what brought him to this part of the country but clearly it was an inspired move. Since arriving he had sent for his family and worked his way up from vineyard labourer to shift leader to finally now, several years later, running his own company. A pillar of the local community, he worked with tireless energy in building his empire. He deserved a lot of credit for his achievements.

Every day Abdul would turn up at the hostel in a big white bus and drive us to a different vineyard. Often they were very far away, miles out in the countryside, down long unidentified dirt roads. On the way we’d pass through indigenous forests, seeing kangaroos and emus bound across the bus's path in the dawn mist. Recognisable landmarks were sparse. The wilderness was big, green, remote and all-encompassing. The only insight into his mysterious former life would be the exotic Afghan bhangra music he listened to as he drove.

Our crew did three kinds of work. Firstly there was the wire-lifting, adjusting wires on the grapevines to make the vines grow higher and harvest better. Then there was grape picking, which happened later in the year. And finally there was trunk-rubbing, which not only had a dodgy-sounding name, but was the toughest job of the lot. Working as fast as possible, you had to get down on your hands and knees and work along the grapevine, pruning the trunks of excess shoots. After a morning of trunk-rubbing I had the arthritic joints of an eighty year-old.

I’d got what I was after – days ticked off against my working visa. For the next month, I worked nearly every day with Abdul and his crew. The work itself was simple enough and I couldn’t complain about the pay or the hours. But what made the job tough were the heat and the sun. We worked from 7am well into the afternoon, and this being the summer, temperatures climbed above 30˚C most days.

We worked hard. By 4pm our crew of Koreans, Taiwanese and Europeans would collapse exhausted into the minibus and we’d be on our way back to the hostel. There was drinking water on the bus, and sometimes even a beer at the end of our shift, courtesy of Abdul and his voluminous cooler. We’d sleep on the drive home, recuperating ready for the day to come.

The evenings at the hostel passed slowly, alcohol medicating the perpetual cycle of work and sleep. People hung out in groups, playing pool, watching TV, listening to music. Over time you’d fall into the routine, early to rise, early to bed. From 5am each day the kitchens would stir into a flurry of activity as everybody made their breakfasts and lunches ready for the morning pickup.

There were eighty or so travellers staying there in peak season. Backpackers came and stayed for months on end, working and saving. There was much partying. Days off were a blessing and a curse; the opportunity to rest, but the vexing question of what to do out here? There was literally nothing unless you had a car at your disposal. I have to say though that this was the best working hostel I’ve stayed at. Naomi ran it on honest principles and didn't promise what she couldn't deliver.

2008 soon became 2009. The hostel organised a trip to Pemberton for the occasion, sparking more drunken revelry. Several days later, a personal milestone: I’d been travelling for one year. All that time I spent in Asia and elsewhere seemed like a distant memory. My old life at home was a fabled dream, and I began to relish the connectedness and luxury I’d always taken for granted.

Now and then I’d remonstrate with Naomi to let me in the office so I could fire off an email or two to update my friends. Mostly I was too tired from working to be bothered communicating or stringing together the requisite words to describe my situation. Every day felt the same. I was becoming lost within myself. I was like Alex Garland’s character in The Beach, struggling to find my personal Vietnam, but confused about what it was I was actually looking for.

Luckily all that was about to change. I was buggering off again. On holiday!

Christmas 08: Bondy does Manjimup

2009-07-02T11:00:00.005+08:00

This is a big read so I recommend you run off and grab the following:
1 x cup of tea/coffee
1 x muffin OR 2 x biscuits
1 x jazz cigarette (optional)

I’d looked forward to this a lot: my first ever Christmas away from home and my first Christmas down under. Shrimps on the barbie, beers on the beach, playing Frisbee with kangaroos, beaucoup good times. That’s not quite how it turned out.

It was Christmas Eve morning as I struggled up the hill to the bus stop with my bags and guitar. I was as heavily-laden as one of those African tribeswomen who carry the jugs of water through the desert on their heads – not just with my bags, but with a hangover.

I’d spent the previous evening in festive congruence with some Victoria Bitter and the movie Tropic Thunder on DVD. One of them had ended up devoured (the beer), one of them watched (the movie) and one of them pissed (me). Another thrilling tableau from my amazing life.

The town of Margaret River barely stirred in the morning heat. It was only about 9am but already the summer sun was making the transition from pretty golden orb to massive evil burning bastard. I resented the sun; it caused me to feel detached from all around me. Whilst everyone in the area was getting ready to put their feet up and host their loved ones I was itching to ditch the snail’s pace country lifestyle and get to work.

I pictured myself as a sci-fi hero like Buck Rogers from the 25th Century. Ready to make a big leap into the unknown. I had four months left on my visa and it was make-or-break time for finding farm work. I don’t know if Buck Rogers had any experience of applying for a second working visa in Australia, but it stood to reason that he had at some point.

My destination? Manjimup, a small town about 50 miles away, where I was promised work. The hostel reviews didn’t encourage me but they appeared to have plenty of people staying there over Christmas so a party of some sort was guaranteed. I had no plans for crimbo so I figured the sooner I got there the better.

I was joined at the bus stop by Ben, the German dude I met volunteering on Carmel’s orchard. During the couple of weeks we worked together we got along well and combined our efforts to look for work. I persuaded him to make the trip with me, though I think he was less keen to leave Margaret River than I was. In hindsight I fear I pushed him into a personal Vietnam from which he would never recover.

The bus was the last service out of town before Christmas, and was full of exciteable 60-somethings clutching tartan luggage. The driver greeted us cheerily over the mic as the bus inched its way through the backstreets out of town. There is no direct service linking the two towns so we had to make a two-legged trip via Bunbury, and that killed a good few hours.

It was mid-afternoon by the time we alighted in Manjimup, and it looked more or less just like the place we’d left, not that that was a bad thing particularly. We waited around at the bus stop for our pick-up, and eventually a pale girl in a hoodie announced herself from over in the distance.

“Are you from the hostel?” I intoned loudly, in my best ‘talking to the locals’ voice. She answered us in the affirmative and led us to a sleek minibus of Japanese origin caked in the ubiquitous country dirt.

“Hi, I’m Ella,” she announced cheerfully, “and if you’ve got weed on you, please don’t smoke it inside the hostel. We have a special place down the garden for that sort of thing.” This was a standard greeting for travellers it seemed.

Being depressingly un-rock’n’roll, neither of us had any drugs on us of course. But as opening gambits go, it was a memorable one, and a refreshing change from the usual zero tolerance attitude you get in travellers’ hostels. Man, I’ve been in places where they don’t even let you hide dead hookers in the laundry. Talk about uptight.

Ella granted us a quick stop at a local supermarket to buy provisions before taking us to the hostel. I took this as a sign that this place must be bloody miles away out in the middle of nowhere. It was. Never mind, the countryside is an awesome place to be in, right? All those fields and trees and sunshine and shit. It’s like getting back to Mother Nature.

Manjimup had the configuration of a typical Aussie country town. There was a small shopping district laid out in a grid, a couple of pubs offering rooms to stay in and copious amounts of gambling, a smattering of supermarkets and fast food joints, and if you were lucky that was topped off with some patchy mobile coverage.

Stocked up with instant noodles and other basic foodstuffs, we journeyed on. The bus hurtled down a succession of green country lanes, each one redder and dustier than the last. Trees and fields stretched as far as the eye could see. Occasional farmhouses surfed past on rolling hilltops. Eventually we arrived at the hostel, my suspicions as to its remoteness proving grimly accurate.

The photo didn’t lie – it was definitely on the functional side. A series of wooden dorm shacks surrounded a stagnant-looking lobster pond, next to a giant dusty quadrangle lined with various decrepit-looking and well-travelled motor vehicles. Across the pond, a stately-looking farmhouse housed the office and the hostel’s one and only internet PC. Apart from brief periods in the evening this was always locked up, communication with the outside world lying tantalisingly out of bounds.

In the office we paid up for a week’s rent and each received one plate, one bowl, one mug, one spoon (small), one spoon (large), one fork, one knife, one container (plastic) and bedding. These would be our only comforts on the inside. We would have a day off to relax (Christmas day as it happened) then, we were assured, there would be work waiting for us. The local agriculture industry was working at full tilt, messiah or no messiah. Boxing Day couldn’t come soon enough for me.

Just then a wild-haired Irish backpacker called Mikey appeared and led us to our rooms, showing off the various bits of the building to us and chattering excitedly in his semi-comprehensible brogue. He had a walkie-talkie so seemed to be in a position of command. I took a liking to the guy – anyone who wears a mullet with a baseball cap is alright with me.

Walking through the hostel it seemed deserted, but Ella had told us most of the travellers staying there were still out at work on farms. As the afternoon wore on droves of people returned in the same minibus and soon the place was crammed to capacity. Ben and I had taken the last two beds, shoehorned into dorm rooms filled exclusively with meek-looking Asian girls.

That in itself was a bit weird, and the rooms were extremely cramped. Everyone lived in each other’s pockets. My room was right next to the communal kitchens and teemed with smells, sounds and people well into the night. I slept on half of the top bunk with my clothes and books strewn on the other half. There was no space to put them on the floor.

The kitchens themselves were even more cramped, the shelves and fridges overflowing with people’s bags of food. Every inch of kitchen space was more highly prized and fiercely contested than prime Tokyo real estate. A bizarre irony that in the middle of the vast wilderness, here we were squeezed in like sardines. Too many people and too few cookers made cooking dinner like playing a game of Twister around the stove.

Over time I became the master of fixing myself a sandwich with the minimum number of chess moves around the kitchen. Hanging on to your plates and cutlery was a challenge – if you didn’t hand back the same number of items to the office when you left you’d lose your deposit, and stuff was always going missing.

Having said that the hostel was also a friendly and welcoming place – the cramped conditions bred a strangely tolerant and convivial atmosphere amongst all the nationalities. What’s more, you could regularly leave valuables like iPods and laptops lying around in your room without fear of them being nicked. I’d been backpacking in India and south-east Asia by that point and was used to slumming it. Ben however disliked the place intensely and returned to Margaret River a few days later.

Go to the east coast and you can’t move for British backpackers. But here in the untamed west I was the only Brit in the entire hostel. A novel situation. The dominant nationalities were Taiwanese and Irish. I think we had roughly half the population of Taiwan staying at our hostel. Taiwan’s only a small country, a bit like Wales or Belgium or something, stuck out in the Pacific Ocean. How does it produce so many people, and how do they all end up in Manjimup?

These, and many other questions, were vexing me, so I turned to drink. The hostel handily sold wine, a distressingly obnoxious brew called (appropriately) Foul Bay. Frankly, it was that bad that tramps would turn their nose up at it. But at $5 a bottle it would do for the first night, in the absence of other intoxicants. So Ben and I sat up long into the night, hanging out with a bunch of Taiwanese travellers and drinking this awful, awful wine. That is how I spent Christmas Eve night.

Christmas Day was yet another hot December day, a typical antipodean scorcher marked with neither sleighbells nor windfalls of snow. The owner Naomi – who was in fact Ella’s partner – threw a massive party for everyone, with roast chicken, trimmings and free booze for all. An impressive feat of generosity that took a lot of effort to execute.

Then there was the Secret Santa, where people exchanged random gifts like watermelons and umbrellas. Being new arrivals Ben and I missed out on this. I’d already had two presents to unwrap on Christmas morning: a Simpsons Christmas t-shirt from my relatives and some sort of plum pudding in a box from Carmel. So just like being in the Secret Santa then really.

I was introduced to a throng of travellers from all over the world, and an atmosphere of merry debauchery ensued. Many of the Taiwanese got shit-flying drunk off a surprisingly small amount of Emu Bitter. Other people went swimming in the rancid lobster pond. A half-crazed French guy called Jeremy rampaged around chasing the girls and getting his cock out in the background of group photos. It was funny to watch, to say the least, but I was glad it wasn’t me being all nude and drunk and French. I limited myself to several beers and a bottle and a half of Foul Bay – I had work in the morning.

Margaret River - Thumbs up, thumbs down (Nov-Dec 08)

2009-06-22T16:25:00.008+08:00

Hello! You join me six months further on in my journey round Australia. I have been struck from time to time that there's something I've been forgetting to do, and that thing is to update my travel blog!

A huge amount of water has flowed under the bridge in storytelling terms so I'd best crack on and recount my travelling tales before a whole load more stuff happens. If there's anything guaranteed in this life, it's that stuff (both good and bad) happens.

When I spoke to you last I was still in Margaret River - the beautiful wine-producing town in Western Australia that couldn't be more laid back if it tried. I'd found myself a place to live, a loaf to butter and a glass of milk to declare half-full. The country roads reverberated with the sound of me whistling a jaunty tune as I cycled on by. The sun shone bright day after day after day.

To be truthful I was bored of my surroundings and seeking work. It had been my lifelong dream since about 5 minutes before leaving Perth to work on the area's famous vineyards. But the season was unseasonably quiet, the grapes swelling untroubled on the vines, leaving me twiddling my thumbs at home. My journey on the harvest trail had hit the doldrums big-time.

I passed the time playing guitar, and reading the free local paper, an unassuming weekly bugle concealing a work of unintentional comedy brilliance. I refer of course to none other than the hilariously pointless feature known as 'Thumbs up, thumbs down'!

To the uninitiated (basically everyone outside the Margaret River area) this involves anonymous readers writing in to comment on subjects meeting their approval or disapproval. Examples include:

"Thumbs up to the Margaret River Police for having the hardest job in the world and doing such a great job."
"Thumbs down to no drinking fountains in Margaret River."
"Thumbs up to sugar-coated carob free almonds."
"Thumbs down to people not paying tradespeople on time."
"Thumbs up to all the shops who decorate their windows at Christmas."
"Thumbs down to people who take social sports too seriously."
"Thumbs up to Nanna Rose's new smile."
"Thumbs down to the P-platers (learners) and other drivers who scared me and my horse on Caves Road."
"Thumbs up to great beauticians."
"Thumbs down to anyone who wants to bring one million people to Margaret River."
"Thumbs up to the Augusta Pharmacy."
"Thumbs down for vineyard workers not being supplied with portable toilets."
"Thumbs up to those taking part in Movember."
"Thumbs down to those who broke into the privately-owned helicopter at a hangar party."
"Thumbs up for Saul's blue cheese pizzas and burger Fridays."
"Thumbs down to people who try to get out of paying their bills."
"Thumbs up to our beautiful display of native flowers."
"Thumbs down to people who steal wood from their workplace."
"Thumbs up to Mess Fest – best ever!"
"Thumbs down to rude graffiti on signs."

Fantastic! I always enjoyed those. But not as much as I enjoyed imagining the respective authors clutching the paper in triumph and yelling, 'they published my idea! Yes! The system works!'

And even now, many months later, I lie in bed at night wondering if the workplace wood-stealer was ever brought to justice.

I enrolled as a WWOOF volunteer in a bid to clock up some time towards my second working visa. This entailed me cycling out to a palatial countryside residence to help a lady called Carmel dig irrigation trenches round her fruit trees. In exchange for working mornings I received nutritious vegetarian lunches and the healthy glow of a man at one with his spade. Who needs money anyway? It was an interesting diversion for a couple of weeks.

I was joined by another volunteer, Ben from Germany, who had a cracking beard. He smoked rollups and had just travelled by car all the way from Darwin, an immense journey (and one I’d like to do someday). Soon we’d dug all the trenches, weeded all the weeds and dotted all the Is and crossed all the Ts in a gardening sense on Carmel’s property so it was time to say our goodbyes.

Around the same time my tireless inquiries about work finally hit paydirt. I got word of a working hostel that lay an hour down the road in Manjimup. This being of course a place where the twin baubles of farm work and accommodation happily collide!

I tried to research this fabled place of labour on the net but found nothing but a fuzzy JPEG of some wooden sheds and a couple of old reviews from 2005/6. As per most working hostels it was as well-advertised as the average Taliban hideout, and twice as mysterious.

I phoned the number and spoke to a flustered-sounding woman called Naomi who assured me yes, they had a couple of beds free and some work. After weeks without earning any money, that was good enough for me! I arranged to leave my house-share at short notice, and it was only a matter of packing my bags and booking a bus ticket to Manjimup.

Just one problem: the date was now 23 December.

Oh bollocks… Christmas!

Coming soon: Christmas 08 – Bondy does Manjimup

Margaret River - beginning the harvest trail

2008-11-15T15:41:00.007+09:00

And so I have come to a new town. And that town is Margaret River. Margaret River is notable for being two things: a town, and a river, also called Margaret River. To reduce confusion I shall call the town Margaret River, and the river Margaret River-river. Still with me? Good.

Margaret River (and Margaret River-river) is in a remote rural region of south-west Australia. Never-ending miles of hills and unspoilt woodlands lie on all sides. The climate is temperate and wet, making it a little reminiscent of West Yorkshire, albeit with drastically improved weather conditions!

The feel is of a remote, countrified place in a lush rural setting, first colonised less than two centuries ago. Apparently the river, and the town, were named after a woman called Margaret who the original settlers knew. She must have been quite something. Or maybe she paid them lots of money to do it, I don't know.

There are lots of vineyards in this region, and orchards too. 200 miles south of Perth's sterile pretentiousness, the two are worlds apart. This is a sleepy country town where folk stop to say 'how do you do' in the street and neighbours lend a hand churning your butter. Probably.

And what is it brings me, intrepid explorer and cultural ferryman of the masses, to this pretty and unspoilt corner of the world? Well my visa lasts till April next year. If during that time I spend 3 or more months doing specific types of labouring (e.g. vineyard work, orchard work, construction) in remote rural areas of Australia I am entitled to apply for another 12-month working visa in the future.

I've fallen in love with Australia and I'd love to come back. Problem is, a lot of the jobs on the list are back-breakingly arduous and no-one in their right mind would want to do them. Hence the immigration department's special concession allowing desperate backpackers eager to risk life and limb (that's me!) to work towards the golden ticket of a second working visa.

And loads of travellers do it! It's known as the harvest trail, and it has a whole supporting infrastructure of work agencies, backpacker hostels, pamphlets and free advice guides built up around it.

In the grand scheme of things I would rather be poncing round with a pair of secateurs on a vineyard, or trampling grapes like Sideshow Bob on the Simpsons, than hoisting cinder blocks up a ladder in 40 degree heat. Time will tell if I am being cavalier or misguided in my romantic flirtations with viticulture!

After a final whirl of farewell drinks and parties, and the tying up of various loose ends, on Sunday (9th Nov) I left Perth. Loading my bags into my housemate Maria's car I felt a curious mix of elation and nostalgia at a huge chapter in my life closing. Shortly followed by frustration when I realised, halfway into town, I'd left some stuff back at the house!

We drove back to get it but it made us late for the bus. Maria 'put the pedal to the metal' as the young people say, and got me to Esplanade bus-port on time, the light Sunday traffic not posing much of an impedance. I hugged her goodbye and staggered off down the concrete forcourse carrying my entire life: 65 litre rucksack with sleeping bag, roll-mat and travel guitar attached, small rucksack, two bags full of clothes and a full-size guitar in a heavy case!

Stepping into the bus's air-conditioned interior, I felt a cool sense of relief and smugness that I, Andrew Bond, was advancing on my mission. The bus glided off in a hiss of air-brakes and I soon drifted into sleep.

Opening my eyes a few minutes later I couldn't believe what I saw: the bus only made a stop to collect passengers outside Murdoch Uni, 200 metres from my house! I'd made us embark on a whole mad scrambled journey into town for no purpose! Thankfully Maria saw the funny side too when I texted her.

That comedy moment aside it was a pleasant journey south to Margaret River. I caught up on more sleep as lush green countryside sped by under a watchful azure sky. My slumbers that particular day were soundtracked by Captain Beefheart and then some ambienty Radiohead stuff on my music player. And that perpetual moment of inner peace and tranquility finally encapsulated for me what travelling should feel like.

After arriving in Margaret River I spent a few lazy days writing, playing guitar and drinking endless cups of tea at my friend Ruth's house. There was no TV so at night I sat outside listening to the rustling of the trees, bathed in multicoloured lights on the veranda. This, my friend, is what backpacking should all be about. Now to find some work!

Having paced the quiet streets I have found the town's attractions to number: some shops, a few cafes, restaurants and pubs, an internet cafe or two, a cycle trail out through the woods, and a bridge over a lily pond. That's right: a bridge. Over a motherf***king lily pond. Jealous? This town is where it's at.

The town's free weekly paper, the Margaret River Mail, carries an astonishing lack of headlines. This week its readership were treated to the exciting news that CowParade, the international cow art festival, is coming to Margaret River next year. Maybe. Apparently it is next on the list after major cities like Prague, Sydney and Chicago. A likely story!

Also a local author is launching a children's book featuring a talking lamprey. All this while a black man has been elected to the White House and the times they are a-changing. You don't know what you're missing folks!

I have been taken aback how the people here are very friendly, generous and helpful. The woman at the internet cafe knocked two dollars off my bill the other day just because I seemed hard-up. Country people rule!

I've just moved into a house-share with a guy called Nick who is a chef, who brings home free boxes of red wine from his work! And all I have to do now is watch and wait for the phone to ring with work. And I might just get shit-flying drunk while I do so! Doing nothing never felt as good as this.

Perth part 3 - departure imminent!

2008-11-06T09:36:00.005+09:00

Hello and welcome once again to my travelling tales. Please help yourself to a mint imperial and tell your fellow guests to do the same.

How am I and where am I at? Apart from a brush with shingles and a recent head-lice scare, I am well and good. I am still in Perth, though at long last I shall soon be leaving. Off to the countryside to work on a vineyard, where exactly I cannot say.

And what of the intervening weeks and months since last I wrote? A strange and wonderful time it must be said. New friendships have been made and new places have been visited. My fresh and revitalised mental state has sent a cascade of creativity gushing forth, revealing a shower of wondrous new songs and lyrics galore. I feel I'm writing (and thinking) on a higher level than I have ever done in my life.

I've played a few gigs in Fremantle and Perth which, while not leading to any great new opportunities, left me in no doubt my music has been well-received over here. I am also busy finishing off two new songs in a recording studio. The studio is in the suburb of Bassendean - birthplace of Rolf Harris, no less! Bassendean is a quiet suburb much like any other – there were no tributes or statues to Rolf evident anywhere. How can their famous wobble-boarding son continue to be overlooked in such a way?

Anyway, the songs will go on a compilation of local artists which will hopefully garner some modest airplay on the radio. And I want my songs playing on the radio – it would make me feel I've finally achieved something with my life. And then my mum can go around telling people, "My son gets played on the radio in Australia you know," as she has no doubt long been craving to do.

"But Bondy!" you ejaculate. "Enough of your music news, what of your travelling?"

Well beloved reader, I have been getting up close and personal with the wheat belt. This isn't some item of farming fetish wear, but rather a vast tract of farmland that surrounds Perth on all sides for hundreds of kilometres. Nipple/areolae is the relationship we're talking here, on a vast scale. And it's the closest I've come to seeing any boobies in a long time I must say!

My friend Shannon took me to spend a weird and wonderful weekend in the country with her family. Some of her 'rellies' (that’s what they call relatives over here) have bought a vast plot of land out in the wilderness. We pitched a tiny two-person tent amidst the empty acres and joined them around the bonfire to listen to rude Australian music and enjoy a beer.

With the WA property boom sending house prices to astronomical levels over recent years, many folk have taken to buying an empty plot of land out in the middle of nowhere and building their own home on it. It takes years to do – the people we stayed with had only been there long enough to set up a homely tin shack and a few caravans on their land to use as an occasional weekend retreat.

Using this as our base, Shannon's dad (a colossus of geography and plant knowledge) led us on a series of bushwalking adventures around local rock features. This wild terrain was all new to me and in my eyes it was a fantastic and authentic Aussie experience.

I have seen the sun set over the rolling open farmland, and spied the shining of the moon in rock pools fashioned by angels. I have ridden a dune buggy over the crest of majestic hills like a medieval knight atop a proud steed. And also I have gone for a dump in a wooden shack humourously titled the ‘site ofice’ (sic).

This was also my introduction to the great flora and fauna that lurk out in the vast wilds of WA: namely lemon-scented orchids, red snapper orchids, chicken burrito orchids, kangaroos, emus, flies, more flies, tics, head lice, gonorrhoea and drop bears. A drop bear is basically a cross between a kangaroo and a rhinoceros that can bounce up to fifty metres in the air and spits poisonous acid in the direction of whatever perturbs it. They look like this:

I’ve been on another trip away, down to Castle Rock near Dunsborough, to camp right next to the beach! Castle Rock is notable for being, err, a big rock shaped a bit like a castle. It’s in the middle of a national park on a beautiful stretch of coastline 250 kilometres south of Perth. Notable things about that weekend include:

Seven of us travelling down in 3 cars, in various states of inebriation and tiredness
Arriving at 1am on Saturday and pitching our tents in the black of night
Waking up later that morning to discover a stunning ocean view right in front of us
Climbing Castle Rock and standing triumphantly atop it, hollering into the ocean breeze
Everyone seeing a whale in the sea, but me missing it
Me and Josh drinking a beer at 6am on Sunday while we attempted to keep the fire lit in adverse weather conditions
One of our brand new camping chairs collapsing into the fire and quickly bursting into flames – flame-retardant my arse!
Enjoying a replay of Radiohead’s Glastonbury ‘97 set on Triple J (radio station) on the drive back up to Perth, to soothe the hangovers

What more could you demand of a weekend? Well, sex and loads of money perhaps. Nevertheless it was pretty cool.

I am still house-sharing in sleepy old Murdoch. There have been upheavals of the housemate variety – Dave did a runner owing us all money (as we long feared he might) and lives to fight his battles another day in locations unknown. Our empty room was taken by Tim, a punk guy from Sydney who’s just moved over to Perth.

It’s been a nice enough house to live in on my occasional forays outside my head, but the living area now festers in a state of woeful untidiness. As is usually the case with house-shares, no-one wants to concede the mind-games and undertake any housework! Though I now suspect beer and TV have probably left us too lazy and defeated even for mind-games.

The atmosphere in the house is one of neglect, and soon the four of us shall all go our separate ways. But weep not dear reader - even the radiant chrysanthemum must wither and die as part of the great cycle of life.

I have also been on a voyage of momentous personal discovery. A couple of months ago I did another personal development course with Mitch Behan called ‘Letting it go’. Essentially it was a two-day cram-a-thon held for the benefit of me and a few dozen other people coming from all walks of life. We received an expert education in quantum physics and the principles that govern the divine order in the universe. Then we learnt how to apply these principles to achieve lasting success in our own lives.

Simple eh? Actually, the courses were among the toughest things I’ve ever done – not only for the work I did but the concepts I was trying to grapple with and understand in my head – and they pushed us very hard. Much as I don’t want to be a killjoy I have to be vague and mysterious as it is all proprietary knowledge. It mostly concerns building and then deploying nuclear weapons.

I know what you’re thinking and it’s probably, “what the f**k!?” Well I’ve not changed. I’ve not joined a cult or become a scientologist or anything. Everyone makes their own way in life and whether you choose to believe in a ‘higher power’ and all that jazz is up to you.

The jury’s still out on whether this will help me fulfil my dreams, but so far the work we’ve done has taught me a great deal about life and I feel much happier and more complete. In the immortal words of Homer Simpson, “All my life I've had one dream: to achieve my many goals.”

In a work sense not much has changed. I am still a humble research officer for the Office of Public Sector Standards, though my job finishes this week – hence my decision to move on. It’s been a rollercoaster ride and during my time on the 17th floor I have bonded meaningfully with my erstwhile colleagues in an atmosphere of supportive cerebralism. I have had some sucky temp jobs in my time but this is one I shall most definitely miss. Just one of the varied worlds I have inhabited upon my journey.

And my final thoughts on Perth? Well, after spending 6 months here, I will be f**king glad to see the back of the place. Much as it is a beautiful, unspoilt little city it is ridiculously cliquey. Making friends as a new face in town was impossibly difficult. As a handsome well-heeled motherf**ker-about-town I was not accustomed to having gaping open spaces in my social calendar. It’s given me plenty of opportunities to work on my writing at least – just like being a teenager all over again really. And now I’m counting down the days till I move on!

I hasten to add I’ve had a great time in Perth, but the flimsy little world I’ve built for myself here has all the staying power of a paper bag and is about to blow away. A pocketful of dreams and a heart that’s willing will only get you so far in this world, and I feel a lot of the time like I’m sinking in the quicksand of indifference. What better reason to hit the road, Easy Rider stylee?

One thing’s for sure – I ain’t coming home anytime soon!

Perth part 2 - mega update!

2008-08-19T14:04:00.013+08:00

Hello! You are now reading my latest 'letter home to the folks'. A lot has happened since those crazy days of June when I last blogged as a fresh and spunky 26 year old. I am now a withered and haggard 27 year old, as it was my birthday in July.

I'm still in Perth, living with Josh, Maria and Dave. The relentless piss rain of the Australian winter is giving way to sunny springtime. Bunny rabbits playfully frolic in gay meadows and past splashing waterfalls. Such pleasant surroundings cannot help but rejuvenate the soul.

I stayed in Perth for work, and now I rather bloody like the place. It has a small-town charm all of its own, yet it is free of Deliverance-style inbreeding. My computer monkey work at the agribusiness place (otherwise known as Castle Greyskull) finished several weeks ago and I've had a few different jobs since then.

First my agency sent me to a suburb called O'Connor, to a bus depot, to fill in for the Human Resources department while their HR girl went on leave. I am not a girl as such, but I did very well in this role.

For me the term 'HR department' normally conjures up images of sterile skyscrapers, faceless suits and needless written warnings, but this HR department was none of the above. It was a portacabin. With a desk and computer in it. I liked the bus company's low-key approach!

There wasn't much to do apart from go through all the bus driver application forms that came in the post, and phone up the least scary and unhinged people to offer them interviews. I got to fulfil my lifelong dream of working in a portacabin. And it gave me a new-found respect for Perth bus drivers, who are a cheery and helpful bunch despite their modest wages.

But my cushy role as HR girl soon ended after the regular HR girl came back from New Zealand. Then I got to play at being a boy, working as a 'bloke in a warehouse'! The agency gave me a single day's work with a betting company, packing promotional gifts into envelopes to be sent out to competition winners (baseball caps, rugby balls, umbrellas and the like). This was possibly the most tedious and mundane job I have had ever since I worked as a chip shop potato preparer in Meltham. I'm like a modern-day George Orwell, doing shit jobs then writing great books about them (sort of).

At that point the teat of opportunity ran dry, and I spent a week as an unemployed layabout, searching for jobs at the library then going home and writing whiny entries in my diary about how shit it is to be an unemployed layabout. Thankfully this period of moping and introspection soon ended when the newly-refilled teat of opportunity came knocking on my door, to mix a metaphor or two. I then suckled on the teat of opportunity. And got an opportunity. (Isn't it nice when a teat knocks on your door?)

Anyway, the situation improved because I got a job temping for local government. Oh the joy of sailing into familiar clerical waters! On my first day I discovered my workplace was actually a huge great big skyscraper with a revolving restaurant on the top!

High on the 17th floor, with great views overlooking the city and surrounding river, there exists something called the Office of Public Sector Standards. Basically they have to monitor all the government agencies to ensure no employees are being mistreated or unfairly passed over for promotion. It's like the Batman of the admin world, and as a minion in this department I'm like a non-homosexual Robin.

I've been working there for two weeks and it's actually going bloody well. They've been so pleased with my job of being a non-homosexual Robin they've extended my contract till October, given me a payrise and promoted me to Research Officer! (I don't know what that equates to in Batman terms... quasi-Batman maybe?)

While the ox of my employment has been roaming free in the fatty pastures of success, I have been through a few life-changing and inspiring experiences. During the earlier part of my travels, I saw a lot of wonderful things and met some great people, but despite all of this I didn't feel I'd really grown or learnt anything as a person. The whole purpose of doing this travel was to broaden my mind and get some answers about what my life is about, and despite being fortunate enough to see many of Asia's wonderful spectacles, my mission was in danger of falling flat on its arse.

In June I got wind of a personal development seminar happening in Perth called Relationships and You. These seminars are run by an Irish guy called Mitch Behan, who does this sort of thing full-time. Rather an inspiring chap too, I must say. He would be the first to point out he's not Jesus or anything, but he's been through a lot of ups and downs in his time and dedicates his life to helping people overcome their problems and realise their true potential.

I liked what I saw at the information evening and signed up there and then. I spent a weekend with Mitch and eleven strangers on the course, and after undergoing some tough challenges, the twelve of us emerged unburdened of our collective woes, as firm friends. While I have to remain vague about what went on during the course (for proprietary reasons) I will say that it was a profoundly uplifting and inspiring experience that has left me with renewed optimism, strength and self-belief. (I would recommend the course to anybody, but unfortunately there are no plans yet to introduce it to the UK.)

As you may know dear friend, last year I endured something of a nightmare on my birthday, when I got pick-pocketed and had to cut short my trip to the Ukraine. This year I was determined to put those troubles firmly in the past and have a f**king blast!

On 20th July, a couple of weeks after the seminar, I met up with my buddies from the course in Fremantle. We enjoyed a slap-up meal at Cicerello's - a huge fish 'n' chip restaurant on the quayside - then lots of beers next door in a giant brewery/pub called Little Creatures. It was a beautiful sunny Sunday (if a little on the chilly side) and we had ourselves a grand old time. It wasn't the most ostentatious birthday celebration ever, but 27 is the age of rock star death so I figure I should avoid coke and hooker binges for the forseeable future!

A lot happened in July and the month was not without its ups and downs. I've always been something of a frustrated entrepeneur - printing my own newspapers, selling my CDs at gigs to widespread public indifference; you name it, I've tried it in the name of making a quick buck. Actually, just the selling CDs - I added the newspapers thing to pad out the list a bit.

Anyways, my housemate Dangerous Dave asked me one day if I'd like to make some extra money. Thinking he was asking me to rob a bank or be in a porno, I asked him what he meant. He said he'd just been introduced to a company called ACN by a ladyfriend, and proceeded to show me a slick promotional DVD. Shouty rich man Donald Trump promptly appeared on the laptop, waxing lyrical about a glorious new investment opportunity in telecoms. Hey, if Donald Trump endorses it, it must be a good idea!

In essence, you buy an ACN sales license then go about obtaining customers and reps for the company. Every time one of your customers pays a phone bill, you get paid a percentage of the money. The reps you recruit form part of your business, and every time one of their customers pays a bill, you receive a percentage of that too. Meanwhile your reps recruit their own reps, and you earn off them too! Month after month, year after year, you keep earning more and more money - no effort required.

Sounds too good to be true doesn't it? That's because it is. I know that in hindsight. Pyramid schemes have existed since the dawn of time. Only these days they are cleverly embroidered with terms like 'network marketing' and 'warm selling' to try and remove the stigma.

ACN are a growing worldwide communications company who don't rely on traditional advertising, but rather the aforementioned network marketing and warm selling. This involves getting reps to pitch the company's services to their friends and family, thus buying a form of advertising no TV commercial can match in credibility - for a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising.

Man, I was dubious, but the DVD said all these great things about using ACN to achieve lasting financial freedom, quit your day job, achieve all your wildest dreams, etc. etc. As I watched, a succession of permatanned, dimpled, smiling Americans were wheeled out in front of the camera to make blithe testimonials like, "yeah, me and my friends enjoy a jet-set lifestyle thanks to ACN, man. We're like a bunch of rock stars, we travel around in luxury, having a blast! It's totally radical, to the max!"

The camera then cut to a montage of the people frolicking in limousines and fancy restaurants, laughing and joking without a care in the world. (Presumably they were laughing at all the people who say pyramid schemes don't work.)

If I have one failing it's that I sometimes forget the end doesn't always justify the means. It's like the time I torched that orphanage just so I could bake some muffins on the roof. All my life I've wanted money so I can be free and make music all day, and not kow-tow to some stupid boss with multiple personality disorders.

To cut a long story short, I naively allowed myself to be wowed by it, and signed up as a rep, paying $495 for an ACN sales license. Then a couple of days later, the bullshit spin from the positive corporate messages began to fade in my mind, revealing the bare truth. I realised there was no way I could stoop to warm-sell anything to my friends and family, and I withdrew from the organisation immediately.

Fortunately I got my money refunded - though many people in my situation have been left out of pocket. The way I see it, I sold my soul - but then I got it back, with a few dents and scratches on! And in doing so I glimpsed Hell.

I saw the company's stifling corporate culture, and the obedience and dedication it demands of its reps. I heard the stories of people who'd 'made it' in ACN - superstar salespeople supposedly raking in millions of US dollars a month through their huge phalanxes of customers and reps. I met the reps at ground level who slaved away night and day building their mini-empires without success; people too far down the line to ever go back or to stop believing the lie.

The basic truth is that these types of company are designed to make more money off the reps than the customers. In the main ACN attracts a professional crowd as its reps, with a wide variety of ages present, including a sizeable contingent of brillcreamed Asian businessmen. These people aren't fools, but it goes to show how powerful the herd mentality can be. You're told to sell a dream you have no personal proof of actually working. I for one couldn't do it. I never sold a single phone, and I was happy to walk away and carry on my clock-punching life. Working hard for an honest wage never felt so good, or so liberating.

Happily reunited with my soul, a couple of weekends ago I finally had my first proper travel adventure in Australia! Some friends and I drove 300 kilometres south of Perth to stay at my housemate Josh's mum's house out in the woods, near the remote town of Kirup. This short leap on the map became a magnificent odyssey into the unknown. The lush green of the countryside passed by in a magical drunken blur.

The house Josh's stepdad and mum built in their woodland is amazing - it's completely self-sufficient, running off solar power, with all its water supplied by a rainwater tank on the hill! Some day I want to retire to the Western Australian woods and build my very own self-sufficient dream home. And at the present rate, if I keep on selling CDs at my gigs for the next million years or so, I'll have the funds to do just that!

So here's to accomplishing your dreams. Until next time, "catch ya"!

Perth part 1 - that's agribusiness!

2008-06-18T17:27:00.012+08:00

Hello! It's been a long time since I wrote a blog. Indeed one could well opine there has been an unnerving pause in the narrative. If one has just swallowed a frigging dictionary that is. As a matter of fact I have settled down in Perth and got a job. I'm working in an office doing data entry (read: tedious computer monkey work) for an agribusiness firm.

'Agribusiness?' you say. 'What the hell's angrybusiness?'

Well, it's an agricultural investment company who let rich people invest money in farming and get even richer. You see, unlike the UK where most farmers have either gone bankrupt or shot themselves, farming is big business over here in Western Australia.

Farming and mining are booming industries in this mineral-rich land, huge areas of which are still largely untapped. Everybody you meet seems to be either raking it in running their own business, or coining it in working out on the mines. It seems like there's possibilities and opportunities ghosting round everywhere in this vast tundra.

I'm living in a suburb of Perth called Murdoch. This may or may not have been christened after Rupert Murdoch. I'm staying in a house with my mate Josh, an Aussie I met in India, and his housemates Maria, Dave and Bruce, who are Aussies too. Well, this is Australia isn't it!

We're out in the vast urban sprawl, in a rented house 10km south of the city centre. All the streets are wide and spread out, lined with palm trees and roomy-looking single storey houses. It's like the streets you see on Neighbours!

Getting to work in the morning takes me an hour, on a bus, then a train, then another bus. Going down the shops for a bottle of milk involves a 20 minute hike along a main road. Walking anywhere takes a mammoth effort. Conurbations like this weren't built with the pedestrian in mind!

It all makes me what kind of sinister influence car manufacturers exert on city planners. They want us all to need a car. I dare say I'll get kidnapped by men in suits one of these days and whisked away for brain re-programming for daring to use my legs. So if my next blog is titled 'why cars are utterly brilliant and we should all buy as much petrol as we can', you'll know what's happened.

I'm feeling pretty cynical on the subject after seeing Who Killed The Electric Car?, a film about a hugely-promising electric car prototype released in America back in the 90s. It was fast, cheap and the motorists who test-drove it loved it. It was even poised to enter mass production, but suddenly the project got mysteriously shelved.

As the film reveals, the whole thing was scuppered by major car companies and oil conglomerates fearful of a loss in trade. I don't mean to get all deep and preachy in a light-hearted travel blog, but my god, has anyone else noticed how humanity is utterly doomed thanks to its own stupidity!?

When not ruminating cheerful subjects like the end of the world and the downfall of civilisation as we know it, I have been doing my best to escape the drudgery of life in the suburbs. So far I've visited the nearby coastal town of Fremantle, headed out to the vast forests east of Perth to enjoy a pub lunch in Parkerville, and gone to the Subiaco Oval to watch an Aussie rules football game.

Aussie rules (confusingly called 'football' by the Aussies) is a bit similar to Gaelic football. The players all wear vests, and kick an egg-shaped ball through rows of posts on an oval-shaped pitch. Crazy! (I don't know much about Gaelic football other than it's a bit like rugby, and the games probably involve violent thugs on Cork housing estates stamping on each others' heads - but I was told Aussie rules is similar to it. So if that makes any sense to you then I genuflect in all my humble literary magnificence!)

My housemate Dave (who like 90% of all Daves in the world is nicknamed Dangerous Dave) got some free tickets, and so on 14th June we witnessed Fremantle Dockers end their chronic losing streak with an emphatic 120-67 victory over North Melbourne, who come from Melbourne. Similarly to normal sports, the big number shows which team won the match.

As a sport it has a lot going for it: it's a game of speed and skill played in front of passionate crowds in noisy arenas. But I doubt after one game it will replace my lifelong love of the working man's game, an honest sport played all over the globe, bigger than any other. I'm talking about Risk obviously.

I've been getting to meet plenty of Aussies and they are a friendly and quick-witted bunch. Getting the hang of the Aussie lingo is a bit challenging though. I have deciphered a few of their linguistic heiroglyphics, shown here in the following chart:

Sunnies = sunglasses
Stubbies, longnecks = bottles of beer
Doccos = documentaries
C**t = an affectionate term for a loved one
Hey/eh = standard exclamation at the end of a sentence (see Canadian English)
Servo = petrol station
Salvos = the Salvation Army
The Chuck and Di story = the marriage and subsequent heart-rending divorce of our future monarch and England's tragic rose
Pom(mie bastard) = English person, usually found on the Gold Coast eating kangaroo and chips.

90% of backpackers from the UK end up hanging out in the tourist haunts on the east coast. If you know anything about me at all you will know I am a colossal snob and loathe to rub shoulders with the great unwashed in the discotheques of Marbella. I followed my instincts and headed west, intent on exploring Australia's lesser-known delights. Besides which, Marbella is in Spain.

What has struck me is the number of Aussies I've met who have spent some time living in the UK. If you lived somewhere hot and sunny would you bother heading up into the northern hemisphere to shiver in the piss rain for a few months? I doubt I would. Maybe our sceptred isle is not such a shit tip at all in the grand scheme of things. That's probably the homesickness talking, it's sending me daft.

Far from starting a new life 'down under', I find myself settling into a familiar pattern: I work in an office every day, which I hate, then I come home and while away my precious free time drinking beer and watching the Simpsons. Am I really so irrevocably set in my ways?

I was expecting a bit more of Perth - there isn't much to do. Though they do put on a lot of big gigs here, thanks to international touring artists making an obligatory stop in WA. Daft Punk, Elton John and Sting all played here recently. In fact I know a guy who worked as a roadie at the Sting gig, and not only did he get to keep his plectrum, but he got to have his picture taken with him! That Sting seems like a nice generous man.

I got to work as a roadie the other weekend with Dave, my housemate. I didn't meet any rock stars or anything, but it wasn't that sort of event. But I got to pack up equipment, carry boxes and f**k my back in - all part and parcel of the roadie existence. It's also worth noting the amount of band memorabilia the good roadies get their hands on - tour T-shirts, setlists, drum-skins... you could make a tidy sum flogging this stuff on Ebay.

So thus far money is something I have mostly been only dreaming of, though by the time my temp job finishes in late July I should be quids (or Aussie dollars) in and ready to start fresh adventures. Until next time, I remain your friend, wannabe roadie and spinner of exquisite bollocks extraordinaire.

PS - Don't forget to check out my India photos on Fakebook!

Dharamasala/McLeod Ganj photos here:

Rajasthan photos here: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

I am without internet at my house for the forseeable future but I hope to whack some more on as soon as I can. Sorry!

Sydney: will drop pants for food.

2008-05-12T20:27:00.018+08:00

How yus goin cobbers? Tie me kangaroo down sport, toss another shrimp on the barbie, "that's not a knife, that's a knife!" and all that gubbins. It's high time I crawled out of the woodwork and whacked an update on here.

After my long journey through Asia I have entered Australia on a working visa, to live, work, frolic and fornicate in this vast and plentiful land for a period of anything up to twelve months. I've been in Sydney for nearly four weeks now, doing some sightseeing, hanging round with other backpackers and living out of a suitcase at a hostel. I backpack, therefore I am. Halfway round the world already - who'da thunk it!

I flew in on 15th April, fresh from the madness of Hong Kong. It was a shock to finally be out of Asia and back in the 'real world' again. A world of drinkable tapwater, expensive coffee, sensible traffic and rain. Winter is fast approaching over here, and the hot weather is gone. There's still a decent amount of sun though, and not enough to get annoying.

Sydney is a nice place to wander round - it has a calm and relaxed feel and everywhere you turn there is either a harbour, a skyscraper, or a restaurant offering exotic cuisine from some far-flung corner of the globe. But it's a very expensive place to live and it can easily devour vast sums of travellers' money in the blink of an eye. All the fun stuff like bungee jumping and learning to surf is bloody expensive. Take the credit cards and bury them in concrete!

The cheapest way to spend time in Sydney is definitely walking round looking at things, as this costs nothing. As well as numerous picturesque bays and beaches (such as Bondi beach, my near-namesake), it also boasts the iconic opera house and close by, the Sydney harbour bridge. This is a magnificent towering iron structure dating from the 1930s that spans the entire harbour. Paul Hogan, aka Crocodile Dundee, used to be a maintenance worker on it before he was famous.

Sydney is the showbiz capital of Australia. Keanu Reeves was here the other week for the premiere of some film or other. There are big gigs on all the time. The Pope is coming for an official visit in July, meaning the city will be swamped with pilgrims, i.e. Christian nutters. If you want to see the Pope you'll have to a) make sure you buy a ticket, and b) be under 35. Apparently he wants a youthful crowd, to make Christianity seem hip and cool to the world's cameras. Isn't religion just the biggest load of shite ever!?

Anyway... after a few days staying at a city-centre hostel full of drunken yoofs I migrated out to the suburb of Glebe, a long leafy street that would be the preserve of middle-class snobs and ballet schools if it were in England. But it's a really cool area - full of Victorian-style pubs, restaurants and 'alternative' shops with incense sticks burning in them. The bottle shop (what they call an off-license here) has a mural of an Aboriginal flag and the word 'SORRY' daubed underneath it. There are cats in the gardens and possums lurking in the trees (a possum is sort of a cross between a cat and a rat).

The people are nice and friendly, and there is a local newspaper, the Glebe, full of parochial grumblings about how shocking the public transport is. It's an immensely likeable place, but after a few weeks here I've run out of things to do. So today, like most days, I sit here in the library on the internet, trying to write my blog and cursing my writer's block.

I've spent more than three weeks staying at Glebe Point YHA, a small and friendly hostel that lurks behind a forest of trees on the main street in Glebe. I've made friends, learnt to cook again and even helped out at the weekly rooftop barbeque, in exchange for a free night's stay. There are a huge amount of British, Irish and German travellers here. I look forward to the day when I can meet some real Australian people!

My week revolves around the quiz night at our local pub, the Landsdowne. The guy who does the quiz is an actor who used to have a bit-part in Neighbours! (He played Brett Stark, Neighbours fact fans.) Unlike most pub quizzes they seem quite happy to sidle up and whisper you the answers, and you get drinks vouchers for winning. The beer in Australia is great - there's no Fosters (thank Christ) but beverages like Toohey's New and Cooper's Sparkling Ale slip down a treat.

This fancy living is eating into my travel funds, so I've been on the lookout for novel and ingenious money-making schemes. I tried busking with my travel guitar in a subway near Central train station, and made $5 from 30 minutes of afternoon troubadourage. It's somewhat gratifying to have a handful of coins chucked at your feet while you're belting out an up-tempo version of 'Dreaming of You', but it won't pay the bills at this rate.

No stranger to losing my dignity in surprising ways, I also tried my hand at medical testing for cash! Well, everyone has to once, don't they. It all started when my friend spotted a notice in the paper, advertising for paid volunteers to test suncream at Sydney University. I volunteered, and spent a week sitting on a chair in an office, reading a book, while a friendly old lady drew on my back with lipstick and sunblock then pottered around shining UV lights on it.

The photobiology department there is like a private company that carries out testing and research on new suncreams for cosmetics giants like Avon and Boots. They offer cold hard ca$h to penniless students and backpackers willing to risk a bit of sunburn. It's money for nothing in effect! As a pasty-skinned part-ginge I was a prized specimen, and after several hours' of tests I walked away with $180. There have been no side-effects, apart from a strange network of lipstick noughts and crosses on my back that didn't wash off for ages!

As well as suncreams, I've also been dosing myself up on culture. As the earliest European settlement in Australia, Sydney has quite a lot of history. The rash of humungous skyscrapers in the central business district is surrounded by streets full of quaint Victorian buildings. The oldest part of the city (known as the Rocks) reputedly has ghosts lurking in it.

Though it's true that Australia was once a prison colony, most of the convicts weren't really criminals in the modern sense. Minor crimes like sheep-stealing, forging a one pound note, or disrespecting the King of England's chin could see you transported half-way round the world in shackles. Within a few years all the prisoners were freed, and a new kingdom was on the rise.

Before the first ships landed, Australia had been an undisturbed continent populated with a multitude of ancient Aborigine tribes. Aborigines are one of the oldest civilisations in the world, but their days were numbered once the Europeans arrived and brought exotic new diseases such as smallpox with them. Some tribes still exist today in remote areas, but a lot of the indigenous culture and language has been lost for good.

Until late in the 20th Century the government had a shockingly medieval attitude to the Aborigines; they weren't granted full citizenship rights, and liable to have their children taken away and re-homed with white families (the so-called stolen generations). The Australian government only just this year issued a formal apology to the Aborigines for all the wrongs of the past. It's a harsh and unforgiving land with a surprisingly cruel history.

Australia is such an unfeasibly vast country and one month in, I've only explored the tiniest part of it. I've seen some of the countryside around Sydney, which features some areas of outstanding natural beauty. A few weeks ago I did a day trip to the Blue Mountains, but it was foggy and we couldn't see anything.

Last week I went on a wine-tasting trip to the Hunter Valley with Ross and Lucy (two chums from the hostel) and we gorged ourselves on the finest wines available to humanity. The Hunter Valley is a stunning area of rolling green hills and vineyards about two hours' north of Sydney.

We stood there, in glorious sunshine, getting plastered at ten in the morning on a farm. Brilliant. I learnt that to drink wine properly you're supposed to sip it and make "f-f-f-f-f" noises like Hannibal Lecter. It does taste better and more interesting when you do that.

I was originally planning to get a job in Sydney and stay here for a few months, but I've seen all I want to see and I'm ready to move on now. I've arrived in Sydney at a time when the weather is turning to crap, and the conventional traveller logic would be go somewhere else in the country where the weather is nice, possibly to pick grapes while wearing sandals that were made from hemp fibre in an ethically sound factory/commune.

On a whim I've bought a plane ticket to Perth in Western Australia. I fly there on Saturday, to stay with an Aussie guy called Josh that I met travelling in India (at the Banyan Tree in Goa). Perth is supposed to be very nice, and a lot cheaper to live in than Sydney.

Money is a pressing concern so I need to get a job over there for a couple of months, then Josh and I are planning to explore the country by road. My first month in Australia has passed by quite uneventfully, but it promises to be a gas from here on in.

This blog was brought to you by Coon - the racist cheese!

HCMC & Hong Kong: war is stupid and people are stupid.

2008-04-15T07:57:00.041+08:00

Howdy again. I apologise for the recent gap in updates for anyone who is becoming hooked beyond all sense on my travel stories. It's understandable. Please see your GP, who will immediately prescribe you some hard drugs or send you for an unnecessary operation.

So I left Vietnam, spent some time in Hong Kong and now I've reached Sydney! After getting two hours' sleep overnight on the plane my body clock is once again in a sense of confusion re. the arse/elbow conundrum, and I am a greasy-haired jetlagged mess. I'm sitting here attempting to gather my thoughts in a strange new land. At the moment Sydney is cold and wet like England don't you know!

Well Ho Chi Minh City turned out to be mad and hectic; a bigger and busier version of Hanoi without the old-world charm. It's full of concrete skyscrapers and neon signs, and the busy streets are over-run with biblical swarms of motorbikes and cyclo taxis. There are a few interesting sights to see but once you've done that it's just like any other big city in Asia. And Christ there are a lot of motorbikes!

Cyclo taxis are a bizarre invention: a one-seat bicycle taxi where the passenger sits in front of the pedalling driver like a kamikaze wheelchair patient! I've not tried riding in one but it's meant to be shit scary - you have literally no protection against the traffic hurtling towards you. Tourists are warned against using them due to the risk of muggings and bag-snatchings if you're a cyclo passenger.

The bus stopped in the central backpacker district of Pham Ngu Lao (trust me, it's much easier to say than to spell), which is a concentrated touristy area much like Khaosan Road in Bangkok; a bustling street densely packed with hotels, tourist agencies, restaurants and bars. Everywhere you can sense the hum of machinery for milking the constant supply of tourists. I found a cheap room for $7 (US) a night in a tiny family guest house hidden down a quaint alleyway; a shoebox of a room hoisted high up in the armpit of a congealed mass of tangled urbanity. I felt more like a degenerate lodger in a French art-house film than a backpacker, and I loved it!

Ho Chi Minh City was known as Saigon in its colonial past, and within Vietnam it is still widely called by that name. It's famous for historical stuff, i.e. things that happened in the past. Primarily it was the capital of the old Republic of Vietnam, who America decided to "assist" in the war. As we all know that didn't quite go to plan - the commies from the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) ended up winning, rolling victorious into Saigon in 1975, by which time the yanks had long since buggered off.

I went to see the Reunification Palace, which was once the headquarters of the Republic's government. Here in 1975 the NVA's tanks stormed through the gates to historically end the war. Strangely it has a boxy 1960s facade that makes it look more like an NHS hospital than a palace, but it looms on a grandly impressive scale amidst expansive grounds. Many of the rooms are preserved in the way they were found in 1975; there are subterranean comms bunkers complete with the original equipment, the President's bedroom, luxurious reception suites and even a gambling room with Austin Powers-style retro furnishings!

The same afternoon I visited the War Relics Museum, which was more of a sobering experience. Thousands upon thousands of photos unflinchingly catalogue the horrors of war; one exhibition tells the stories of the many fearless war photographers who did one mission too many with the US troops and never came back. There are lots of old warplanes and tanks standing outside; having seen the end effects of these ruthlessly-engineered killing machines it's suddenly hard to take pride in our monkey race's technological mastery.

The Cu Chi tunnels are a vast network of underground tunnels, sniper holes and various nasty booby traps that the Viet Cong secretly constructed outside Saigon. These allowed them to launch surprise attacks on the enemy and the Americans in their own back yard. The tunnels are still there for tourists to visit so I went on a day trip to see this piece of war history.

Our group, led by a jovial grandfatherly Vietnamese chap nicknamed 'Slim Jim', crawled through a hundred metre section of tunnel that was specially enlarged to allow tourists to get through. Some of the original tunnels were as small as 80cm high by 80cm wide! Only a diet of rice and communist rhetoric could leave you thin enough to get through a space that small. The Viet Cong excelled in their ability to hide out in tight confines, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. The enlarged tunnels were still a bloody tight squeeze to get through with my bulky western frame!

Near to the tunnels is a firing range where tourists can shoot with live ammo. A dollar buys you one bullet. I stood by while some others tried it, and live ammunition is bloody loud let me tell you! Bondy despises war in all its forms. "War is stupid and people are stupid", as the Culture Club once sang.

I did another day trip, round the Mekong Delta - a network of muddy brown rivers fanning off from the Mekong towards the coast (forming the conclusion of the river I travelled on earlier in Laos, that runs all the way down from Tibet). That was dull in a pleasant sort of way. Rivers look like rivers on your holiday photos, no matter what country they're in.

Also there was a lunch buffet featuring evil-smelling durian fruit and a short concert from a traditional folk band. I've liked a lot of the other Vietnamese music I've heard, but not this lot. Their timing seemed out and they were playing random notes all over the place - it sounded more like a Captain Beefheart album than anything meaningfully oriental! (Not that I'm knocking Beefheart - the man was an insane genius - but there is a time and a place for that sort of thing.)

The next day (11th April) it was time to leave. After some fruitless attempts to track down an airport bus, I endured a nailbiting ride to the airport on a motorbike taxi, hanging on for dear life with my big rucksack strapped to my back. It was an adventure to tell the grandkids about, but next time I'll pay extra and sit indoors in a proper taxi!

Flights from Vietnam to Hong Kong are bloody expensive for such a short distance, so I found a cheaper route there via nearby Macau. Macau is a small city state on the coast of China, that as a 'special administrative region' allows Westerners to come and go freely without so much as a nod and a wink to the top brass.

Until 1999 it was under Portuguese rule, and was actually the last place anywhere in Asia to be under European rule. Go Europe! I only passed through, but it left me with the distinct impression of being a drab wasteland full of casinos where the Chinese come to gamble away the weekend. I don't like casinos much in case you wondered!

The tourist information girl at the airport was nice though. With her help I found a bus to the ferry terminal, and boarded a gleaming hydrofoil hovercraft catamaran-type thing which propelled us at high speeds towards Hong Kong. Also, being thick, I inadvertently purchased the most expensive type of ticket and ended up sat in the VIP lounge at the front of the boat. I helped myself to not one but two complimentary cups of tea to ensure I got my money's worth. The businessman sat next to me was an executive manager at one of the casinos. We didn't share much in conversation, with him working in casinos and me hating casinos!

After an hour of gliding serenely past the shadowy mountains of south-eastern China we rounded a corner of the land, suddenly confronting the vastest cityscape of skyscrapers you will ever see! (We'd got to Hong Kong in case you're wondering.)

I alighted from the ferry in one of the vast terminal piers on Hong Kong island, suddenly aware of a new and pressing difficulty. Darkness was falling and I'd not got anywhere to stay! I'd tried several times during the day to phone ahead and book at a youth hostel, but they were all full up.

A quick search of the Central district for anything hotel-like proved fruitless. I wandered from block to block in a vast streetlit kingdom of monolithic skyscrapers, overpasses, underpasses and sterile shopping malls. Quaint Blackpool-style electric trams scurried between the tall hulking buildings. But there were no hotels.

I caught the underground MTR train to Causeway Bay, a couple of miles down the road. Causeway Bay is a shopping district similar to Central, where the streets are bathed in the overwhelming kaleidoscopic glow coming from galaxies of gigantic Chinese neon signs.

Despite the influx of Chinese culture since 1997 the road names all remain stoically British; Gloucester Road, Lockhart Road, Wellington Street and the like all have Chinese translations on the bilingual street signs. It's a crazy mix of east and west with a character all of its own, and after getting over the initial culture shock I began to like it!

Behind the glitzy shop fronts the conditions are cramped and the buildings are often decaying. I found a place to stay, upstairs in a poky hostel bizarrely called 'Bin Man Hotel' (next to another simply called 'Clean Hotel')! The room was small and basic but set me back 300 Hong Kong Dollars, just shy of twenty quid. I was starting to panic at the expensive prices after the relative cheapness of Vietnam!

I consoled myself by heading out for dinner and a drink in the Lan Kwai Fong party district. I chanced across a small Chinese eatery which was an experience in itself; a condensed, speeded-up version of a regular restaurant! You queue up outside, then the waiters quickly usher you in, shove you on to a table with a load of random strangers, and jot down your order before rushing off. You eat, then you take your slip of paper to the till to pay, and off you go. No nonsense, no messing about. The turnover of customers is so rapid it's more like being sat in a beehive than a restaurant!

I also discovered the immense delights of Chinese condensed milk buns - they resemble small toasted tea-cakes and are possibly the sweetest thing I have ever tasted. If a bread product could be said to represent heroin, this would surely be it.

Thanks to the restaurant's 'seating randoms together' policy I got talking to Lish, an Ozzie guy, and we set out on an unprecedented alcohol and hookah-pipe binge. It was a good laugh but Christ that was an expensive night. I am loathe to disclose how much I spent but it was more than I would ever spend on a night on the lash in Blackpool. A pint in Hong Kong can easily set you back 4 quid! That's worse than London even, surely!

The next day I quickly bade farewell to the overpriced Bin Man Hotel, catching the Star Ferry across the harbour to Kowloon, which is on the Chinese mainland but still forms part of Hong Kong. From my conversation with an English guy in a bar the previous evening, I knew it would be a much cheaper place to stay in than Causeway Bay. Kowloon has more of everything Hong Kong island has; skyscrapers, malls, traffic and British-sounding street names. I ended up more by accident than design at the notorious Chungking Mansions on Nathan Road.

Chungking Mansions isn't a mansion so much as a giant concrete nightmare. It's a tower block full of hostels and shops that boasts a cult following among backpackers. It was originally built in the 60s to house the area's large Chinese population; a domineering grey slab of a building nearly twenty floors high, that looks like it hasn't seen a coat of paint (or a window-cleaner) in nary a year.

The bottom two floors house a fascinating honeycomb of small markets, Indian restaurants and stores. From there upwards the building sprouts into several different blocks, each housing a bewildering cornucopia of cheap 'n' nasty guest houses. 'Death trap' and 'fire risk' are two tags it has acquired in recent years. Nevertheless it is a big hit with travellers, and it's packed out all year round. Vast queues form waiting for the lifts; there are just about enough of them to cope with the sheer volume of people heading up into the abyss, and a security guard is on hand in the lobby to marshall the crowds coming up and down.

After protracted inquiries with a number of hoteliers wandering about in various states of nakedness, I found a room to stay in a place on the 16th floor of A block. The guest house owner was a wizened old Chinese man with a mole on his face that had a long hair growing out of it!

This would be cheap, 9 quid a night. But it smelt bad. And it looked worse than it smelt. The grey tiles on the walls were straight from a prison cell, the strip-lighting flickered a sickly shade of yellow, and though I had a window it was far better to keep it shut! The window opened out onto a sort of dark internal quadrangle, festooned with foul-smelling AC ducts, that stretched down as far as the eye could see into the nefarious bowels of chez Chungking. Was this really to be my domicile for the forseeable? Beggars can't be choosers.

I hurriedly set about doing some sightseeing, heading over to Lantau Island for a go on the much-hyped Ngong Ping 360 ride. This is a brand new attraction where you are carried high over the sea and then on over the top of some densely-wooded hills, on an epic cable-car journey that lasts for miles. In clear weather you are witness to some stupendous views of the surrounding territory. I cursed the murky grey clouds that were obstructing my view! It was still worth doing for the occasional glimpses of scenery.

The end destination of Ngong Ping village is marked by a gigantic bronze Buddha figure on a hillside (the Tian Tan Buddha) which is the largest of its kind in the world. It was a eerily majestic sight, looming through the mist with the palm of its hand outstretched as the cable car descended. (Buddha says, 'practice cable car safety!')

I went for a walk up close, to study its giant Buddha face inquisitively for clues of enlightenment. No clues came, but I found a machine that sold me iced coffee in a can. Then I went for a walk through the woods to the 'path of enlightenment', a series of giant wooden pillars carved with Chinese characters that were laid out to form the infinity symbol (∞) from above. 'God/Buddha = infinity = enlightenment = a Good Thing' was the message I think.

The next day I got a bus to Aberdeen, a small fishing town hiding round on the other side of Hong Kong island. On impulse I hopped on a ferry to nearby Lamma island, which is green and pleasant. It boasts a huge range of seafood restaurants equipped with displays of exotic-looking fish, lobsters and crabs swimming in tanks.

I'm no expert but I suspect there were a few endangered species in amongst them! Presumably you point to the one you want to eat, then wait at your table salivating like a barbarous Chinaman. I just ordered a plate of squid and they seemed sufficiently depersonalised to consume, coated in thick yellow batter.

Yesterday (14th April) I checked out of Chungking Mansions and headed over to the eatery on Hong Kong island to enjoy the delights of condensed milk buns one last time. I choose not to choose life - I chose something else! Then I caught the tram to Victoria Peak. This is a very steep tramway that takes you to the top of the big hill, where you can look down on Hong Kong and Kowloon in all of its immensity. Thousands of skyscrapers jostle for space on the shoreline, presenting a fantastic spectacle of man-made engineering from above.

But then I had my plane to Sydney to catch, so I rode the metro one last time with my bags, over to the airport. It felt like an ending. Travelling in Asia is bewildering and frustrating at times, but I certainly will miss the endless variety and new discoveries it presents. From here on it's back to the west and its elevated cost of living! I shall have to find work.

Hong Kong airport is modern, sparkling and bloody huge - getting to your departure gate is a marathon three-day trek for which you need a sleeping bag, tent, compass and a couple of Sherpa guides.

As the plane lumbered into the sky, I was treated one last time to the awesome panorama of Hong Kong's skyline, in glorious night-time technicolor. This is in all honesty one of the definitive sights of the modern world, and it topped off what has been thus far an amazing journey. My three months in Asia are at an end and a whole new adventure is set to begin in Australia.

Vietnam - same same but different!

2008-04-08T18:58:00.027+08:00

Hello and welcome to another fanschmabulous edition of my travelling tales!

Having spent several days hopping from place to place down Vietnam at a rate so fast it should carry a government health warning, I'm now nearing the end of my whirlwind trip. It's like something off a speeded-up Benny Hill sketch - I get on a bus, I look round, I get on another bus, I look round somewhere else, and on it goes. Sadly there's no birds in lingerie for me to chase around in a comical sea captain's uniform, but you can't have everything.

12 days is nowhere near long enough to "tick all the boxes" for Vietnam but I've done my best. I've seen some amazing places in this immense country, that curls round the eastern reaches of Laos and Cambodia on the map like some sort of sleeping topological dog.

I was in Hanoi when we left off. When you're travelling you start to lose track of what day of the week it is, and this causes the weeks to fly by faster than ever. That was several days ago. Since then I've been living a safe and pompous existance on air-conditioned tourist buses, staring out like a wistful dog at the endless rice fields zipping by. Travel is relatively cheap in Vietnam and it's been easy to get from one end of the country to the other, even on my limited budget.

I frittered away my last evening in Hanoi sat at one of the city's many streetside bars. The rain held off and I had traversed the maze-like streets of the Old Quarter to find 'Bia Hoi junction'. This is an intersection of busy shopping streets where you perch on children's patio furniture to enjoy incredibly cheap glasses of beer direct from the barrel! At 3000 Dong a glass (about 9p), Bia Hoi is quite possibly the cheapest beer in the world! (Does anyone else not find the fact that the Vietnamese currency is called Dong hilariously funny?)

Hanoi is famous for this tradition of amiable boozing on the street and rightly so. The convention always employs inappropriately-sized plastic chairs, presumably for ease of storage. It was great to sit (well, crouch) there on the pavement and watch life go by in this strange and exotic city. Tourists and locals mingled together, surrounded by flocks of conical-hatted street vendors and motorbikes streaming past in the warm and humid night.

Bia Hoi had a fresh but rather rough and ready taste, perhaps due to them not cleaning the pipes on the barrel. After a few glasses (and the usual 'where I'm from, what I do, am I married' conversational rounds with some inquisitive Vietnamese chappies) I could feel my stomach slowly rising up, like the Irish in the 19th Century. By ending the drinking here I avoided a major bacterial infection but I suspect I imbibed enough dodginess to do marvels for my immune system!

The next day we went to look at a museum about hill tribes, a few kilometres' bus ride out of the city centre. It was immense. The museum's grand central building was surrounded by a number of fantastic and outlandish looking replica tribal houses built in its capacious grounds.

Hill tribes in SE Asia worship a bewildering array of animalistic gods, and they aren't shy about graphically depicting fertility scenes! We saw some kind of burial shrine with carved figures copulating on top of it. They'd have to pixellate some of it out if they ever showed it on TV, let's just say that!

Once we'd got an eyeful of wooden tits and genitalia and whatnot, it was time to check out the museum's mammoth collection of ceremonial exhibits and photos. There was an exhibition of photos and writings from some French anthropologist bloke who'd studied the hill tribes closely in the early 20th century. We used up our whole day looking round. It's a very good museum, don't get me wrong, but there was just too much to see and take in. Spending that long in a museum can make you feel physically tired! I had to get out, and get back to killing my brain with beer.

The same evening we caught the sleeper bus to leave Hanoi. Vietnam's transport system is geared up for tourism in a big way and we were shuttled out of the city in a gleaming new coach kitted out with two levels of upholstered reclining beds. Each bed was housed in what I can only describe as an individual plastic pod, making the interior seem more like the sleeping quarters of Red Dwarf than a bus!

After spending the night contorting myself into a comfortable sleeping position in my space capsule and re-acquanting myself with Bill Hicks's album 'Rant in E Minor', I awoke the next day as the spaceship with wheels ground to an unexpected halt in the town of Hue in central Vietnam. We were now near to the old DMZ (de-militarised zone), which ironically was home to some of the most intense fighting of the whole Vietnam war. Nowadays it's a hub of Vietnam's tourist industry.

With a few hours to wait till our connecting bus to Hoi An we decided to go for a look round. Hue (pronounced Hooay) is a quiet little place with lots of old temples and pagodas which are quite pretty but rather expensive to get in. It was once the medieval capital of Vietnam (if I remember right), so it's got a load of history, but little stands out about it today.

Perhaps the pallid overcast weather cast the town in an unattractive hue (no pun intended) but it didn't offer any new thrills for us, apart from watching a coachload of Chinese tourists cavorting round and cackling excitedly inside a temple. I was glad I chose going to Vietnam instead of China - the Chinese culture seems so inpenetrable and alien.

After some travel-weary temple-spotting we caught our next bus, travelling a few hours further south to Hoi An. I stepped off the bus to discover a beautiful little river town trapped in a different age.

Hoi An is one of the must-sees of Vietnam. The afternoon sun bathes the sleepy streets with golden rays and illuminates the harbour waters a brilliant blue. Pagodas jostle for space with ancient French shop buildings in the crowded streets. A cluttering of small boats bobs peacefully up and down on the quay, while the adjacent street market throbs and hums with activity, the covered awnings reflecting all its sound and energy back inside.

The streets are lined with tailors' shops where you can get any item of clothing knocked up for a bargain price. A good quality suit would set you back about 50 quid, which is bloody good value whatever way you look at it. The tailors could probably make you something as outlandish as a P Diddy-style pimp suit or a taffeta ball gown if you asked nicely. Much as I was tempted by the idea of owning a taffeta ball gown, I had no space to carry it in my bag.

The next day I hired a rickety old bicycle and painfully creaked my way towards the coast. Cua Dai beach lies a couple of miles away from Hoi An; a stunning vision of blue sea, palm trees, white sand straight out of the tourist brochures. You can even buy a coconut and sit there and drink it like you're on a tropical island or something!

I sat there and read my book, a solemn story by Bao Ninh called the Sorrow of War. Some Vietnamese office workers in smart shirts kept trying to speak to me in Vietnamese, laughing at me for not understanding. I don't know what's up with me, I just can't be arsed interacting with the locals at the moment. That's what the joy of travelling is supposed to be all about - and I'm too jaded to enjoy it!

Travelling from country to country, you notice certain cultural differences. Vietnamese folk can seem a bit abrupt and rude at first, but then they generally warm to you if you make an effort with them. It contrasts with Thai and Lao people, who are automatically smiley and friendly with you even if they don't know you from Adam.

Vietnamese uses the European alphabet, but it is no easier to master than Lao, Thai or Akha. Again I tried to learn a few phrases but it just wasn't sinking in. Hearing someone talk in fluent Vietnamese is like being buried under an avalanche of syllables; an incomprehensible deluge of sing-song vowels and constanants. Everyday conversations sound like furious arguments!

The next day I went on a trip to see the ruined temples at My Son. That's right - My Son! You pronounce it 'mee sonn'. It was a bit of a disappointment, because the ruins of temples had been further ruined by American bombers back in the 60s, leaving just a few jaggy brick columns carpetted in weeds and moss! They date back to the 7th Century though, and that is very old.

Having got that over and done with, it was time to make another coccyx-numbing overnight bus journey, heading straight through Nha Trang (Vietnam's number one scuba-diving tourist trap) to another beach town called Mui Ne. After travelling together for a while, Sonia and I had to go our own separate ways here.

The Lonely Planet portrayed Mui Ne as a sort of deserted seaside fishing village. My expectations were confounded when I discovered it to be nothing more than a long strip of hotel resorts lining the coast, stretching on for miles and miles! Strange. It would take three or four hours to walk from one end to the other.

It was an immensely likeable place nonetheless, boasting more of the palm trees, blue sea, perfect beaches and relentless sun that the southern Vietnamese coast is dripping in. I saw fit to stay a full day here and chill out. Beer + sun lounger + a photocopied Nick Hornby book I bought in a Hoi An bookstore = good times!

Mui Ne is noted for its sand dunes, which are different colours, red and white! The next day I paid a man to give me a tour of them in a jeep. We drove south of the town to see some giant white sand dunes, and I tried sandboarding down the side of one, but it was expensive and crap. It was worth going to see the spectacular views of a lake and a forest of pine trees that exist rather improbably right next to the dunes. That was a pretty unique sight. Then we drove back north to see some red sand dunes, which were sort of red and dusty, but interesting also.

Later that day (7th April) I descended into the pandemonium of Ho Chi Minh City, but I'll have to leave it there as I'm running out of time and mourn for my dinner like the wolf pines for the full moon. Tomorrow I fly to Hong Kong. Goodbye for now and don't be a stranger! I will promise likewise.

Hanoi - turning Vietnamese!

2008-03-30T19:45:00.036+08:00

Hello again. I've moved on to Hanoi in northern Vietnam. All my thoughts are on Australia now and the day of my flight to Sydney is fast approaching. But my trek through Asia is far from over. I've 12 days left in which to see the whole of Vietnam, and that's not a lot by any stretch of the imagination!

But the whole essence of my journey has been to see as much as possible in the shortest amount of time, surviving on overnight journeys galore and big bags of crisps from roadside shops. So grab a bumper pack of Lays (what Walkers crisps are sold as in Asia), a dubious bottle of local spring water and join me once again upon my journey!

I left off having just arrived in Vang Vieng in Laos. Vang Vieng is a town of modest size, a couple of hours north of the capital Vientiane. It is situated in a dramatic landscape of rivers and forests, in the midst of a range of beautiful and surreal dome-shaped mountains that glower down from over the water.

Once upon a time this place was a well-kept secret, but fast forward to 2008 and now it is more packed with tourists than anywhere in Laos. The town's central streets are swamped with bar after bar after bar. In a peculiar quirk of supply-and-demand marketing, there is a rash of 'Friends bars' in Vang Vieng; places kitted out with TVs and DVD players, endlessly replaying episodes of Friends all day long! I voted with my feet and went elsewhere.

If getting pissed in an exotic location - and watching actors who are now very very rich acting out humourous situations involving people who are not rich or famous - isn't your cup of tea, Vang Vieng offers alternatives. As promised I've been dabbling in watersports (teehee), and I had a mixed degree of success!

The main pursuit on offer at the dozens of tourist agencies in Vang Vieng is tubing, which skilfully combines the joys of drinking, swimming and floating in a river! By utilising a tractor's rubber inner tyre and the natural river currents, you can drift downstream in peaceful serenity. Don't forget to don your swimming togs first of course!

Backpackers throng to Vang Vieng for the tubing, and it is choked with travellers. Every morning the local guys who work as tourist guides ferry people up to the starting point, driving fleets of tuk-tuks with racks of rubber rings piled haphazardly on the roof. A long stretch of bars built on the banks of the river offer travellers drinks (plus in some cases the discreet vending of herbal products, should they be desired).

Failing to see a downside in any of this, we arranged to go tubing with one of the agencies. Dozens of tourist agencies exist in the town (side-by-side on the street in many cases), boasting similar prices and trying to undercut one another. But at the end of it all, no matter which agency you book with, or how low you haggle the price down, it's the same blokes that pick you up and act as your guides!

And so, after an exciting trip through some water-filled underground caves, our guides drove our group in a tuk-tuk to a patch of ground a few kilometres up the river. Then they issued us each with a giant rubber ring, and left us to float back down to Vang Vieng on the river currents! There's a lot to say for floating past the stunning mountain scenery in such comfort and serenity. All that was missing was a bland soundtrack by the Lighthouse Family and I could have been in an insurance commercial!

The river winds its way through several kilometres back to Vang Vieng, and at every bend in the river is a bar with rope swings or volleyball courts, blasting out loud reggae or trance music. Thirsty? Paddle closer to the bank and a man with a stick comes and tows you in to buy a drink. Then once you've bought a beer you can take it back in the water with you if you like, and drift away!

Or if you want to stay at the bar and enjoy the ambience, a tuk-tuk will ferry you back to town at night! This is rest and relaxation taken to a ridiculous extreme. On a sunny day it would have been utterly brilliant, but we went tubing in overcast weather and the time soon began to drag. Thank f**k I didn't have to listen to the Lighthouse Family!

I spent a few days in Vang Vieng and we did a guided cycling trip round a lagoon and some nearby villages, which was jolly good wholesome exercise. (I'd struggle to define what a lagoon is, but basically I think it's a pond that looks really pretty, with some trees and a swing and shit.) Sonia and I made friends with the guys at the tourist agency and ended up going out drinking with them in a Lao karaoke bar. They seemed really happy to show us around, and gave us a lift on their mopeds to a bar at the edge of town!

It was cool to get away from the main tourist strip and see where the locals hang out. The bar was a small dark room lit with neon, with the ever-present Thai pop music on the karaoke system; full of friendly folk enjoying a drink and a sing-song. Lao people love drinking in dimly-lit establishments, which oddly mirrors British culture!

On our last day in Vang Vieng we went kayaking. It was my first time on a kayak and I fell in a few times, as is the way. In a rush of bravado I followed all the experienced daredevils up a rock face, to dive off a ten metre high cliff!

When I reached the top of the cliff I realised I was not an experienced daredevil and began to sh*t myself slightly. I got the better of my nerves, stepped off the edge, then dropped like a stone and did a comical 'back flop' into the water! That was an experience I'll never forget for sure. Throwing myself hell-for-leather into life's turbulent jetstream, hoping for it to make me more of a man.

After the kayaking the guides drove us to our next destination, Vientiane. The capital of Laos is a smallish riverside city on the Mekong with some of the urban crush and pollution you'd expect of a capital. We quickly tried all the recommended guest houses, discovering as the hot and humid evening descended that horror of horrors, everywhere was full.

We met up with some Americans and Canadians who were kayaking with us, and eventually the five of us found a couple of rooms to share in a hotel. We recovered from the heat in the fridge-like air-conditioned rooms then headed out for a meal. A night of drinking ensued, and we ended up heading off in a tuk-tuk for a game in Vientiane's one and only ten-pin bowling alley! For me, bowling is a precursor to alcohol, not the culmination of the evening, and I struggled to adapt to the American way! It's hard to get in the game being several drinks worse for wear.

The next day I handed over my passport and a large wad of Lao Kip at the hotel reception to get my Vietnam visa rush-processed. This was followed by a rather good fry-up at a nearby cafe. Lao cuisine takes a back seat on many restaurants' menus! Bacon + hot dog sausages = enlightenment. What can I say?

The heat of the day became intense. Sonia, an American guy named Cesar and I did some sight-seeing round a bizarre park full of giant Buddha sculptures (Xieng Khuan). This lies just outside the city and is only reachable by taking a tuk-tuk down a long and extremely bumpy road. Then we went for a look round one of Vientiane's main temples, Pha That Luang. Always with the bloody temples! It was an amazing sight though, resplendent with a magnificent gold stupa. We chatted with some of the Buddhist monks, who were delightful chaps. One of the younger guys had been studying in the temple for ten years and was due to complete his duties and leave town the very next day!

One of the sights that defines Laos (and Thailand) for me is the flocks of orange-robed monks that congregate in towns and round temples. Being a monk is a highly respected position and most men will serve as a monk at some point in their life - in Thailand the back row of seats on buses is actually reserved for monks!

Another night of drinking with our kayaking cousins from across the pond ensued. The next morning (29th March) I was in a near-comatose state from over-exertion - not a good position to be in when you've got to pack your things and get ready for a flight! Somehow I managed. Sonia and I were leaving Laos for Hanoi.

I was a bit apprehensive about flying with Lao Airlines, having heard the rumours that they have frequent crashes. Their accident statistics are cloaked in secrecy by the Lao government and I know for a fact they're banned from flying over the EU!

The flight really was okay though. We flew in a smallish twin-engined propeller plane and got to Hanoi inside an hour. Lao Airlines seem to be tidying up their act these days; they're phasing out all the dodgy old Russian aircraft and they even gave us a charming in-flight lunch of shrinkwrapped cheese and ham sandwiches, much to my delight!

And so on to Vietnam. From the little I've seen so far it's clear that Hanoi is a hectic, bustling, frenetic place. It is built around the Old Quarter, which has existed for five centuries as a sort of giant marketplace. Whole streets are dedicated to shops selling different commodities such as shoes, china bowls and roasted fish. Women in conical hats sell fruit from baskets that they carry on a pole over their shoulder. It's like something from a different era.

The first thing you notice is how many motorbikes there are on the streets - there's millions of them! The roads are unbelievably chaotic. The unending streams of bikes and traffic constantly race from A to B, jostling for position. That's the thing about traffic in Asia - they just have a completely different idea of how it's supposed to work compared to us!

Crossing the road in Vietnam takes nerve and practice; unlike elsewhere I've been you literally have to step in front of the traffic and let it swarm around you! Vietnamese drivers will often even grant you the courtesy of keeping your life.

Also it is bloody confusing to find your way around Hanoi, as all the streets look alike and have similar-sounding names, e.g. Ngo Gach, Nguyen Sieu, Hang Chieu... eeh, it's all Greek to me! By which I mean Vietnamese. I like the Old Quarter though, it's got a definite character to it. There are some picturesque views round the Hoan Kiem lake in the centre of the city; the algae-infested water shines a pretty bottle green under the dour cloudy skies.

We've seen a few sights in Hanoi, such as Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum, where the former communist leader's embalmed body is on display for public viewing, and a museum of his life story. I didn't really get the point of the museum, it was more like a modern art exhibition extolling the joys of Communism. Everywhere were photos of Ho Chi Minh making speaches and attending state events, but there was little obvious explanation of his life story. The whole thing seemed to serve to make a political point I had neither the patience or inclination to figure out.

Hanoi is famous for is its centuries-old tradition of water-puppetry, and I saw a water puppet show in a theatre by the lake. It was an eerie and magical experience unlike anything I've seen. The puppets appear to float by themselves in time to the unearthly oriental music. The stage is a rectangular pool of shallow water on which the figures float, and a group of musicians sit in a kind of orchestral pit at the side playing traditional Vietnamese music.

The puppets are cleverly controlled by levers from behind a bamboo screen, but glide around as if moving on their own. A bewildering cast featuring dozens of puppets are used to portray different animals and people. It was hard to tell what the f**k was happening, as the play just explores various themes rather than having a structured plot (various scenes are titled 'on a buffalo with a flute', 'catching frogs' and 'unicorns play with ball'), but it was an impressive spectacle. Apparently water puppeteers have to train for 3 years to master the art, and they have to get used to donning waders and working in waist-high water!

Also I went on a cruise round the northern beauty spot of Halong Bay, where thousands of small limestone islands are grouped in clusters around the coast. That was the first time since northern India that I've experienced weather as cold as the UK. It was beautiful, though the weather was cold and blustery and we couldn't see an awful lot.

We stayed overnight on Cat Ba island (where there is a large national park), and saw a massive street party commemorating the day 49 years ago when Ho Chi Minh visited the island. This guy pops up everywhere! I can't distinguish whether he is actually revered as a national hero among the people or whether the authorities are adamant that he be perceived that way.

Tomorrow we catch the night bus south to Hoi An to continue our journey. Hopefully there will come many more enlightening discoveries and wonderful adventures. But that's all for now - time for a crafty Bia Hoi at a streetside bar methinks! Arriverderci for now folks.

Laos part 2 - you've only got one pop song...

2008-03-23T20:12:00.023+09:00

Oh God, I'm sat in an internet cafe again. What am I doing here? I might as well give you another update eh!

Me and Sonia have now moved on to Vang Vieng in central Laos, a nice little city next to a river with lots of beautiful craggy mountains nearby. It is a popular centre for trekking, cave-exploring and watersports (teehee). The watersports attract lots of barechested western jock types who drive up and down hollering like chimps on adrenaline. Watersports always bring out this side in people I suspect. Other than that life is very good. I myself will be going to caves and trying some watersports tomorrow. I will keep you updated on my progress!

I've been to Luang Prabang and Phonsovanh so far in Laos. Luang Prabang is a beautiful place. It's Laos' second city but has yet to develop any of the characteristics of a city; for now it is just a small unspoilt town that sits on the meeting-place of two rivers.

With no skyscrapers or modern buildings, and with its quiet streets and Parisian lamp-posts, it is strangely evocative of a small town in pre-war France. But then Laos was a former French colony - the British weren't the only ones who liked nicking other people's countries and changing all their shit around! There are hundreds of beautiful, glittering Buddhist temples spread throughout Luang Prabang, populated with flocks of orange-robed monks. After a day spent temple-spotting in the old town I have now definitely seen enough temples to last me a lifetime!

Late on Monday afternoon (17th March) our slow boat chugged up the river to the town, completing its mammoth journey down the Mekong. We gratefully disembarked, free to explore the town as dusk fell. Like many of the places in Thailand and Laos I've been, a small, cheap and friendly guest house just happened to be waiting in a backstreet for us to chance upon it.

The friendly old lady greeted us with 'sabadee!' (Lao for 'alright me ducks!') and once a price was agreed, she showed us to our room. That night I changed approximately 50 pounds of my Thai money into the local currency and was presented with 870,000 Lao Kip - a humungous wad of money literally an inch thick! I was rich!

The guest house, we later discovered, is built right next door to some sort of all-night open-air karaoke bar, where pissed Lao people go and sing Thai pop songs rather badly all the way into the wee small hours. But on the plus side, guests are welcome to free tea, coffee and bananas round the clock, so I was quickly placated! Oh and they have a big wall collage of former guests' pictures, from which one of my utterly minging passport photos is now gurning out at the world for all posterity. I cannot be held accountable for any loss of business or unforseen mental problems which will ensue from the airing of that rather unappetising photo.

Thai music and TV is everywhere in Laos. In some ways Laos is like a smaller sibling of Thailand, and the Thai culture pours into the void which westernisation is creating in Lao society. The two countries have different languages, and completely separate alphabets, yet there are many cultural similarities.

Even in the quiet backwaters, nearly every village has a house with a huge Jodrell Bank-size satellite dish bracketted to its roof to pick up all the Thai channels. Having seen Thai TV I'd rather face a life with no technology at all!

Thai pop music is kind of strange too. They ape western musical styles but they only seem to have grasped one basic tune. It crops up all the time on the radio in countless different songs - the chords run in a dirge-like circle of C minor-B flat-A flat-B flat, or something like that. And they've taken to one particular musical style with a relish - the all-out, balls-to-the-wall 1980s power ballad!

Our first two nights in Luang Prabang were marked with calm weather and unexpected monsoon-like downpours of rain. We did a few trips out to surrounding villages and beauty spots as is the usual way. First we rode on a boat to the cavernous Pak Ou caves, which nestle inside a big cliff on the Mekong. The caves contain a massive shrine and countless sacred Buddha figurines - small gold statues which visitors must not touch.

Then we visited a village where locals produce Lao whisky and rice wine for tourists, in rustic-looking metal vats. The white rice wine is excellent stuff - alongside the excellent lager Beer Lao, Laos has a lot to shout about alcohol-wise!

Finally we went swimming at the stunning Kouang Si waterfalls, discovering the Lonely Planet brigade from the river boat had all come to visit too! Eeh, it's like taking your holidays at Blackpool. I was affecting a haughty air of anti-western snobbery by this point.

On Friday (21st March) it was time to pack up and move on. We booked tickets at a travel agency and endured an eight-hour bus ride to Phonsovanh. That was tough going. Phonsovanh is a small town a couple of hundred kilometres from Luang Prabang through very mountainous terrain.

At many points on the journey the elderly bus was slowed to a crawl by the uncompromising gradients of the road's endless twists and turns. The views of the wooded valleys and plains, however, were spectacular. Our sanity was further tested by the endless replays of Thailand's one ubiquitous pop tune blaring from the driver's radio at full blast! I turned my music player up on full, stuck my headphones in, lay back and thought of England.

Phonsovanh was bombed to oblivion during the Vietnam war. Quick history lesson - America bombed Laos because they were on the commies' side, and refused to see that communism is dirty and nasty and wrong. Bad Laos! Dirty Laos! In your bed! And they didn't do it by half measures, dropping two million tons of explosives on the country in ten years; more than was used on both Germany and Japan in the second world war.

The town now been entirely rebuilt from scratch, featuring street after street of entirely new buildings. But bomb craters and unexploded bombs still litter the countryside. The debris of war lies everywhere, and much of it has been ingeniously recycled by opportunistic scrap-hunters. Rusted old bomb casings are used as fencing, house foundations and water carriers, and many of the guest houses have some sort of arrangement of old bombs and metal helmets outside to try and catch the tourists' eyes.

We came to visit one of the other 'must sees' in Laos, the Plain of Jars. This is an area of about 15 square kilometres of countryside, near Phonsovanh, containing thousands of giant prehistoric stone jars. No-one really knows when they came from, or why they were put there by the ancient civilisation of the time - are they funeral urns? Food storage? Was it... aliens?

The area was also the centre of intense fighting during the war and is still littered with UXOs (unexploded bombs) dropped by US planes in the late 60s. As much as 30% of the bombs dropped over Laos never detonated, and still lie in wait somewhere. (I have many more bomb facts and figures I intend to save for small talk at future dinner parties!)

So I spent the day yesterday wandering round various picturesque hillsides, littered with giant stone jars and ancient mossy bomb craters. In some places the earth is still churned up from those terrible events many years ago; and always the bomb craters are perfectly round and spherical in depth.

Also we went to see a cave where the Lao people once sheltered from the incessant American bombing raids, a rusting Soviet tank in a nearby village that had been cannibalised for scrap, and an imposing war memorial for Lao & Vietnamese soldiers up on a hillside. Am I a communist now? Not sure. But I certainly take the Vietnam war a lot more seriously now I've seen its implications in people's lives forty years on.

Finally we visited the local office of MAG, a Manchester-based charity who organise the clearing of explosives from Lao villages. There was a hugely interesting exhibition there explaining how many Lao villagers are very poor as they cannot farm on their bomb-infested land. Due to intense poverty they are forced into the incredibly dangerous route of digging up the bombs, attempting to diffuse them, then selling them on as scrap metal. The unused explosives also have monetary value. In an absolute sense the people are attempting to live off the land any way they can; accidents and deaths are commonplace.

What I can't believe is how forgiving the Lao people are - they love all foreigners! They're even friendlier than the people of Thailand. I was expecting the older generation to harbour grudges against Hawaiian shirt-wearing Americans at least. Most of the people don't seem to care, and every credit to them. They only want to rebuild the country and move on.

Laos: Mekong madness!

2008-03-22T23:29:00.034+09:00

Hello friends, enemies, relatives, the 'Man' or whoever else is reading this. I have now begun a whole new chapter of my travels. I'm in Laos; a wonderful and mysterious land that sadly, due to the Vietnam war, has a scarred legacy of being one of the most bombed countries in the world.

Take a look past the beautiful scenery and the nation is still struggling to find its feet after decades of war damage and oppressive regimes. The people are extremely poor. Whole areas of the countryside are still littered with thousands of unexploded bombs, dropped by US warplanes during the conflict. The bomb disposal squads from international charities will need to work away for several more decades (if not a whole century) to get rid of them all.

Since opening its borders in recent times - particularly the one it shares with Thailand - Laos is now suckling on the teat of tourism. If you can picture such an image. The yankee dollars are starting to pour in and the times, well, they are becoming different. There are hordes of tourists here, fresh off the riverboat from Thailand and trooping around landmark after landmark with their Lonely Planet guidebooks. My travel buddy Sonia (who I met on the volunteer camp) and I have ungratefully entered their ranks. This country didn't stay a well-kept secret for long!

Well the Akha volunteer camp finished last week. It was a really great experience and told me much about what goes on in this corner of the world. I was sad to move on, and I really liked the group of people, but such is life; nought but a patchwork of brief moments of respite.

The people at AFECT treated us with the typical warmth and hospitality westerners find so flattering and bewildering in south-east Asia. I think we learnt an incredible amount as a group in the two weeks.

We didn't do much work for the communities, mind you. We spoke to some other western people staying with us who told us this is always the case! I came to accept this project was more of an exercise in cultural exchange, i.e. like when you had to write a letter to a French pen-pal back at school saying, "bonjour, je m'appelle Andrew, j'aime jouer au guitar, ping-pong et le mini-disco" or something like that, and then wait eagerly for their reply.

Traditionally the hill tribes cultivated opium crops for their own use, but they are now forbidden to do this by the government, and now many people from the hill tribes have to migrate to the big cities in search of work. But the majority of tribespeople have not been taught and educated in Thai schools, and cannot obtain a national ID card.

The government will only properly acknowledge citizens who have an ID card, and as such, the Akhas struggle to fight for their rights. Their tribe's traditional way of life is dying out, and the other hill tribes of the region, such as the Lahu, Lisu, Karen and Hmong face the same threats too - so awareness needs to be spread.

On our final days we saw lots more of the region. On Thursday (13th March) we went on a day-trip to the Golden Triangle, where two rivers intersect and the borders of Thailand, Burma and Laos converge together like the slices of a big pizza. It was a delightful view, with lush green countryside on all three sides. There were no big black lines running over the terrain like wot there are on the maps, so it was kind of confusing to remember where each country ended and where each one began. Luckily though, God had marked out the borders with some handily-placed rivers.

The same day we went to the Hall of Opium in the nearby town of Sop Ruak, a compact little museum lovingly decked in regal bunting and portraits of the royal family that documents the Golden Triangle region's legacy of opium production. It was a fascinating place, packed with information and featuring real poppy plants and ornate 19th century opium pipes.

One of the things I discovered was that the British were originally to blame for introducing opium to Asia, when their traders needed something to bargain with the Chinese. That's the British empire for you - an efficient machine that spread railways, venereal disease, civil service-style bureaucracy and hard drugs to all corners of the world. I am seeing a lot more of our disturbing legacy as I voyage from country to country!

We also went on a crazy speedboat trip to Laos, which lay five minutes away across the Mekong river. Have you ever tried to eat an orange ice-lolly on a rocketing speedboat? It ain't easy. I got gunk from my lolly all over my digital camera and the lens jammed. And they say the US Marines had it tough in the Vietnam war!

The Mekong is a truly mighty river; it flows thousands of miles, all the way from the snowy mountains of Tibet down into the cornucopia of rivers forming the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam. The stretch I've seen has a sludgey brown colour reminiscent of the Irish sea though; you wouldn't want to go swimming in it!

On the final evening we had a big outdoor party at AFECT's headquarters, dining on a huge spread of food with all the other volunteer groups. A dancing troupe of Akha ladies in fancy traditional costumes gyrated on stage to cheesy Thai pop music, while we filled our glasses from the endless bottles of Chang beer doing the rounds.

Our group cooked food from each of our countries; I treated everyone to the British classic bangers and mash! It lost something in translation, as the only sausages the supermarket sold were hotdog sausages, and they had nothing I recognised as gravy. But the mashed potato worked out well, and it seemed to go down a treat!

Then the next day it was all over, and we all left on our respective onwards journeys. Most people have travelled to Bangkok to fly home, or gone on to other places in Thailand. Zach went to Burma (brave guy!), and Sonia and I headed for the Laos border at Chiang Khong, a two hour bus ride away.

At Chiang Khong we caught a small ferry-boat over the wide expanse of the Mekong river, and that was it - the month I'd spent in Thailand was at an end. A month barely did it justice and there's plenty more that will have to wait for my next visit, such as the beaches in the south.

We disembarked across the river, at the Lao village of Houay Xai, and hauled our rucksacks up the concrete jetty. The first task was to join the queues of travellers waiting in the baking afternoon heat to get a tourist visa. We paid about 40 US dollars for a month's visa at the small immigration office. (In many Asian countries the US dollar acts as an unofficial second currency.)

We celebrated arriving in Laos with lunch at a small cafe. A Lao guy played his acoustic guitar at one of the tables nearby, before running off to shake some fruit down from a tree. The guitar is a very popular instrument in Laos - quite often you walk past guys sat on their own on the pavement, strumming on a guitar without a care in the world!

Houay Xai is a quiet little border town with nothing much to it really. There is one dusty main road lined with restaurants and tourist offices, targetted at the waves of people coming over from Thailand every day. All the shops and cafes accept Thai Baht, US dollars and Lao Kip, requiring their employees to do impressive leaps of mental arithmetic when calculating prices. The lights of Thailand blinked away from across the river in the night, reminding us of the place we'd just left behind (i.e. Thailand).

The next day we began what has been hailed as one of the definitive experiences of Laos - the two-day riverboat journey to Luang Prabang down the Mekong! I was really excited about doing this. Bear in mind most areas of Laos have never had proper roads, so journeying by river is often the quickest way to get from A to B (though this is slowly changing as more highways are built).

To get to Luang Prabang you have two choices: a) do it in six hours by speedboat, running the risk of losing either your hearing (from the deafeningly loud engine) or your life (in one of the fatal speedboat crashes that frequently occur). Or do the journey in much more relaxed style on a slow boat. While the conditions on a slow boat are cramped and uncomfortable, it leaves you free to chill out and enjoy the dramatic scenery.

We set off early in the morning from our guest house and we were collected by a man in a rickety tuk-tuk (rickshaw). A tuk-tuk is a small three-wheeled vehicle with a lightweight metal cage welded to the back, common in Laos and Thailand. I was astonished to discover a dozen other bleary-eyed travellers crammed into the back, and their luggage, piled into a tottering pyramid on the roof!

We gently hoisted our things on to the roof, taking care not to disturb the fragile equilibrium of baggage. Then we inserted ourselves into the cram of bodies and the driver set off through town to the slow-boat pier.

Down at the pier we registered for the trip, showing our passports to a stern uniformed man sat in an empty office whose job it obviously was to reassure us travellers that Laos really does have some sort of functioning government, honest! A line of slow-boats was waiting down on the river, one of them chugging its engine with intent. After carrying our rucksacks across a narrow rickety plank, we were safely on board!

Soon the wooden benches (and all other free space) inside the boat became packed with travellers, and after waiting for a few more stragglers, we were on our way. The boat made steady progress down the river, much swifter than I'd expected it to. The hours flew by; whirlpools, riptides, mountainous valleys and forests were punctuated by stops at villages on the riverside. Groups of village kids swimming in the river would wave to us - the latest bunch of exotic spectators passing through their lives. Despite the basic conditions of the boat and the arse-numbing wooden seats, such scenes of isolated bliss almost untouched by humanity made the time pass by quite fast.

Eventually it grew dark and it was time to make the overnight stop at the village of Pak Beng, halfway on our journey. Getting off the boat was a mad scramble, as everyone rushed to retrieve their baggage from the hold before the local villagers doubling as 'porters' attempted to carry their bags off for a fee! Time to stretch our legs after sitting on the cramped and uncomfortable wooden benches for several hours. Sonia and I clambered off with difficulty and joined the snake of travellers heading for the guidebooks' recommended guest houses.

Like Houay Xai before it, Pak Beng experiences a daily rush of tourists making the journey down the Mekong. The sights, sounds and smells of rural Thailand were present here too; chickens crowing day and night, the smell of wood smoke lingering in the air. We knew all the hotel rooms in the tiny village would quickly fill up from the people off the boat, but we managed to find a room in a small wooden guest house just up from the jetty that many people had overlooked.

It was cheap and accomodating and had fly nets over the beds, and a communal bathroom with cold water only - standard fare for this part of the world! The guy running it was very jolly and even offered to sell us a bag of weed for 500 Baht. What a rip-off!

Everywhere in town we glimpsed familiar faces from the boat. I randomly bumped into a British couple I met staying in the same hostel in Singapore. Then Sonia and I headed out for a meal, and we got talking to a jolly old Canadian guy who reminded me a bit of the Major off Fawlty Towers. He was raving about what a great place Vietnam is. Then we just had time to head back for an ice-cold shower before the village's electricity was shut off at 10pm. Many remote areas of Laos such as Pak Beng only have electricity for a few hours in the evening.

Normally when you wake in the middle of the night your eyes have adjusted to the dark surroundings of the room. But I woke and it was so dark I couldn't even see my hand in front of my face. A night with zero electricity or light pollution in the surrounding area is a very black night indeed!

Luckily the sun obliged and came back to light up the world several hours later. And off we left for Luang Prabang. And the rest of the Lonely Planet brigade left with us. And so, Pak Beng became a sleepy ghost town once more, for a few hours.

That was nearly a week ago and I've spent several days in Luang Prabang and Phonsovanh (town in eastern Laos). I will write more when I get chance. Ciao for now!

Thailand part 3 - hanging with the hill-tribes

2008-03-12T21:45:00.015+09:00

So now I'm well and truly off the beaten track! For two weeks I've been staying in remote mountain villages in northern Thailand and learning about the culture of the Akha hill-tribe, a group of people living throughout neighbouring regions of Thailand, Laos, Burma, Vietnam and China, whose population numbers 2.3 million in total. Why would I go and do a crazy thing like that you ask? Well I am one crazy guy, and it looked far too interesting to miss. As a traveller I am a fly buzzing on the cake of life, and here comes another cherry.

The volunteer camp I've gone on is run by a Thai organisation called AFECT, who have been working since 1981 to try and preserve Akha culture. The Akhas' traditional way of life is under threat, as they have few democratic rights in Thailand, and evil Christian missionaries from the US are seeking to convert as many of their villagers and villages as possible to Christianity.

The Akhas inhabit hundreds of little villages in the border region known as the Golden Triangle, which historically produced a lot of the world's opium. Their people have been left to struggle with opium addiction and poverty, unsupported by the government. AFECT is trying to help these communities, and to raise international awareness of their plight.

Last week we spent four nights in a place called Hue Yo, which is a tiny village up in the mountains that numbers fifty or so inhabitants. There is only one street, lined with simple wood and straw houses, and no electricity. Dogs and chickens run around everywhere. Children play in the street, running wild and free. One time I saw a pair of kids playing with a dead bird as if it was a toy doll!

The Akhas live by simple means, supporting themselves through crops of vegetables and plants, and keeping chickens and other livestock. As a guest of a local family, I lived as they lived, sleeping on the ground in a bare-floored breezeblock building, and bathing in a small bamboo hut by pouring bowlfuls of cold water on myself from a trough (not to mention having to master the dreaded squat toilets). It was an experience far-removed from the Chiang Mai Plaza Hotel, and I didn't miss the scented hand-towels one bit!

Also on my volunteer project are people from Oklahoma (Zach), Italy (Sonia), Norway (Mathilde), Austria (Julia), Canada (Danelle), and - like on my last project - lots of Koreans! (I won't attempt to spell their names.) They are all great people and I've enjoyed meeting them and travelling with them very much. The two weeks have flown by 'like a speeding antelope' (as I opined at breakfast this morning) and it will be a shame to move on. I feel like I've gained a great insight into this region's culture; a culture that may sadly vanish before too long.

The guides take care of the ten of us well, providing us food and shuttling us round in two flat-back trucks. Up and down the dusty mountain roads we go, travelling through kilometre after kilometre of unspoilt woodlands sprinkled with tiny hill-tribe settlements. It's exciting to travel on the back of a truck - it feels like doing a road-trip in the American desert! Despite our general bonhomie the rest of my group possibly suspect me of being an alcoholic, due to my frequent sulks when I am unable to obtain beer.

During our stay at Hue Yo we helped the villagers to sweep up leaves in the forest, as a defence against forest fires. This was quite a tiring task and our guides Miti and Aiyo treated us to a buffet lunch of roast pork and dog (yes, dog!) served on banana leaves for our troubles. My curiosity got the better of me and I'm ashamed to say, I tried some dog. To all the dogs I have ever patted, I apologise. It actually tasted okay. The meat is a bit fatty and I guess it is quite similar to duck. Oh, and we saw an Akha guy make a bong from a length of freshly-cut bamboo!

Bonus fact: did you know that the only word the country of Laos has contributed to the international vocabulary is 'bong'? (Bong technology originates from Lao hill tribes apparently.)

The next day we went to see all the nearby villages take on each other at a local sports day! With a sports field, a marching band and a bloke compering the festivities on a microphone, it reminded me a bit of an English country gala! Our group got to take part in the procession, where all the villages paraded along in their finery to the sports field. The women wore traditional Akha headgear and dresses, while in something of a break in tradition, the men wore knock-off replica football shirts!

Each village adopted a football team's strip. Hue Yo wore AC Milan shirts. Other villages wore Man U, Chelsea, Marseille, Roma and Argentina shirts. It was definitely a football-themed day. (There was even talk our volunteer group would take part in an exhibition match, but thankfully for me that was probably just someone's joke!) The villages' men took on each other at football and takraw (foot-volleyball), with winners and losers seeming to enjoy the fun equally. The women spectated, while some danced in cheerleader troupes or sold ice lollies.

We were unable to determine if Hue Yo won or lost in the championships - when we asked Aiyo he issued the rather ambiguous reply, 'yes... no', and didn't clarify further. As with much I've seen on this project, you have to shrug and accept it only makes sense in the context of life in Thailand!

After the games finished we went to see a museum dedicated to opium warload Khun Sa, housed in his derelict former forest hideout. The Golden Triangle area produced up to 70% of the world's heroin back in the 80s, and Khun Sa was one of the world's most powerful figures in heroin production.

Later in the week we took a memorable trip to the top of a mountain called Doi Tung that lies on the border with Burma. We dismounted from the trucks and climbed the hill, emerging in a stunning vista of untouched green pastures that was bisected by a stern wooden fence running the length of the border, wreathed in barbed wire. Staring across the hill to the Burmese guardpost on the other side, I saw the two armies are very much interested in keeping their two countries as separate as possible! (Interestingly, the countryside in a totalitarian state looks much like the countryside in any other. And they say the grass is greener!)

It's been fun to travel in Thailand, but by Christ I've found it difficult to master the Thai language. It is a tonal language, meaning you have to put the correct emphasis on every word and speak it in a certain pitch. Different tones/pitches give words entirely different meanings, so trying to pronounce the words right is not enough; it won't be understood unless you use the right tones. I quickly gave up and resigned myself to being a dumb tourist yet again!

We've also been learning the Akha language, which is completely different from Thai, but shares the similarities of being a tonal language and hence difficult to master. We were given comprehensive printouts with lots of phrases on, then we discovered the phonetic spellings made no sense! I can just about manage 'uddu tamar' (hello) and 'goo long hooma' (thank you) after two weeks. Give me a month and I might manage to learn the Akha for 'make me a cup of tea'!

Our group quickly struck up a rapport with one another, and we all spent a weekend back in Chiang Rai (where I attempted to write that last blog in a hungover state). After several days of roughing it, we treated ourselves to hot showers and western-style toilets at the friendly (but mosquito-riddled) Ben Guesthouse. Miracle of miracles, they even let guests help themselves to beers from the fridge at any time of day or night, on condition we noted it down on the tab at reception! Heaven on earth indeed.

Every day at breakfast the crazy old guy whose job it was to hands out flyers to travellers at the bus station would walk into the reception/restaurant room and cheerfully announce to us, "I'm off to the moon, to hunt for the mafia!" Maybe he is some form of crazy genius who only converses in abstract metaphors. Or maybe there's just something in the water round here.

On Saturday (8th March) a group of us went trekking to a remote waterfall on our day off. That was one intense day of hill-climbing. I decided to wade into the waterfall fully-clothed, rather than let the others see my nipples. Physical exertion in the day was followed by much drinking in the night, as we treated the weekend as an excuse to go and sample the Chiang Rai night market and get uproariously drunk. We ended up in a western-style rock bar called the Teepee Bar, run by a young Thai guy who seemed to have created the bar as much as for a place to get drunk as to make a living! The next evening I went for a Thai foot massage in one of the town's many massage shops. The sign on the door proudly proclaimed 'no hill tribe workers - and no ladyboys!'

This week we've stayed in another remote village (sometimes it's hard to ascertain the names of these little places but I think it's called Heel Kaulag), visited our project leader Miti's grandparents in her home village, and done more sightseeing. This project has involved lots of sight-seeing and being the tribes' guest - there's hardly been any work to do! I've found this a bit frustrating, but there's been lots of happy times and interesting experiences to be fair. The people at AFECT are brilliant and have looked after us really well, especially compared to the shambles of the Delhi project I was on.

After the camp finishes we all go our separate ways, which is sad. I am off to Laos. Maybe I will find the origin of the humble bong?

Thailand part 2 - life in the year 2551...

2008-03-09T14:57:00.014+09:00

Hello again readers. How's the family? I am still in northern Thailand, and the weeks are starting to fly past so incredibly quickly. I'm now halfway through my hill tribe volunteer project, on a rather warm and muggy Sunday afternoon in the sleepy northern city of Chiang Rai.

I'm staying in the city for the weekend with the rest of my new volunteer group, who seem like a quite spiffing bunch of people. As with the Delhi group we are a mix of nationalities: American, Canadian, Italian, Norwegian, Austrian, and we have another large contingent of South Koreans. International volunteer work seems to be a favourite passtime of South Koreans!

At the moment I'm in an internet cafe full of Thai kids playing shoot-em-up computer games - a typical sight in Thailand, even in rural areas! (Internet addiction is a common problem in many places in Asia - in South Korea they even have 'internet boot camps' where children are forced to spend time away from computers as rehabilitation!)

It is the year 2551 here in Thailand. Thais use the Buddhist calendar, which started over 500 years before the Christian one, so 2008 is 2551. Crazy! Despite being a huge tourist destination, with internet cafes chock-full of kids, Thailand still has its roots grounded in tradition. I've seen glimpses of the fascinating culture and the tourist brochure cliches about the 'land of smiles' are true - the people are really bloody friendly! The day-to-day living is very cheap and you start to realise there is a lot of financial inequality in the world.

Heck, if I can pick up a beautiful wife for the price of a Mars Bar I ain't complaining! No, that's not funny. Take it from me - Bondy cares about the troubles in the world.

The last few weeks have been a hectic whirl of travelling and sight-seeing, and it's high time I spent a day on my own slowly unwinding. And filling you in on my adventures of course dear reader! So much has happened... I'd got up to Bangkok last time I wrote this 'ere blog.

I didn't see much of the city in the three or four days I spent there. The city traffic is so bad it is very hard to travel round, and the taxi drivers have a love of ripping tourists off, so I was limited to journeying round on foot round the Grand Palace and the major temples. They were stunning though - check out Google pictures here, here and here. I've fallen into this daily routine when I'm travelling on my own of sightseeing in the morning and afternoon, going to an internet cafe in the evening, then at night I get food and try to perfect the art of "looking cool while sat on my own nursing a beer". And the damage to my wallet is light!

Thailand seems to be in something of a state of flux right now. The popular former PM Thaksin Shinawatra is back in the country to face corruption charges, and the country is in a 100-day mourning period for the king's sister, who died in January at the age of 84. (The royal family is highly revered, particularly the king, who is worshipped as if he was the Pope.) Also there have been elections, resulting in a 3-day ban on the sale of alcohol for fear of rioting. Despite the tough government sanctions, there is not even the merest sniff of trouble on the country's streets - it's a really relaxed place.

I saw a royal procession while I was in Bangkok. I was walking towards the Grand Palace when a burly man in uniform ushered me over the street to where a big crowd of people had gathered. "Okay," I thought, "the street's closing... this makes sense."

All the streets around the palace had suddenly become lined with crowds, waiting to see the king leave his palace by limousine. A phalanx of futuristically-uniformed motorbike cops were followed by a succession of security guards in an endless convoy of souped up Mercs. By now the moment when we would see the king was approaching, as the crowds began excitedly shouting 'song phra charoen' (long live your majesty). Then a stretched limo with a few shadowy figures sat inside sped by, and that was that. Off he went on his important state business. That was half an hour of my life I would never get back!

After Bangkok I spent a week in Chiang Mai, which is Thailand's second city. It is actually a lot smaller than Bangkok - it's more like a town. It's got a square moat, inside which is the kilometre of so of the old town. I travelled up there on the night train and woke up in the morning as the train was slowly winding its way through the stunning tropical scenery of the Thai countryside.

I'd booked to go on a three-day Thai cookery course and the package included four nights at a top hotel, the Chiang Mai Plaza! I swear I have never stayed in anywhere so ridiculously posh in all my life. It's the sort of place politicians and movie stars would go to get up to all sorts of seedy pursuits away from the public eye. The lobby is the size of an aircraft hangar, decked out in gilded mirrors and marble, and there are bell boys following you round everywhere if you look like you're carrying something heavy. It was kinda cool to be pampered after roughing it for several weeks but I just don't need that much luxury. The free breakfast buffet was amazing though, it had poached eggs and bacon! Mmm... bacon.

The cookery course was a fascinating learning experience that left me bamboozled under a tidal wave of knowledge. One of several such schools in Chiang Mai, it is run by a legendary Thai chef called Sompon Nabnian who has done TV work around the world. He actually taught most of the classes himself, demonstrating how to cook the dishes while dispensing James Bond-style wisecracks. I learnt about basic ingredients in Thai cooking, such as lemongrass, fish sauce and kaffir lime, and cooked over a dozen dishes (such as hot and sour prawn soup, Thai green curry and spicy glass noodle salad) in a class of around 25 people. The ingredients you need are easily available in the west, so I guess I'll be opening a Thai restaurant when I get home (if I can remember the recipes that is)! After you cook your food you get to eat it, and after a day of cooking and eating six or seven dishes you are bloody full!

I liked Chiang Mai, it's a very green and pleasant place - a nice change from the wall-to-wall noise of Bangkok. I also saw Doi Suthep, a stunning golden hilltop temple which you have to climb 306 steps to get to, and I stayed in a homely wooden guesthouse in the old town, nicely titled 'VIP House'!

The next day I did a day safari, which is a popular tourist package trip where you get to ride on an elephant and travel down a river on a bamboo raft. It featured a free lunch buffet with fried chicken drumsticks, and a snake show where three Thai guys prodded snakes in a miniature ampitheatre. I had a few good adventures and met plenty of fellow travellers while propping up the bar every night. Life was good.

Last Saturday (1st March) I came to Chiang Rai to start my volunteer group. Chiang Rai is a different city to Chiang Mai, but it's confusingly similar in name. It lies in the far north of the country, close to the border with Burma and Laos; a small town with a bustling night market.

I met up with the other volunteers at the bus station, and our Thai project leaders came to greet us with two pick-up trucks. We crowded on to the back of the trucks with our bags, and sped away into the countryside to spend the weekend in a basic wooden hut on the grounds of a rural children's home. After two days of team bonding and basic cultural orientation, we left the fringes of civilisation to head out into the wilderness, and live for a few days with a hill-tribe!

But I'll have to leave it there for now - it's been good fun but it will take another whole day to explain! Tata for now, again.

Thailand part 1: comfortably numb

2008-02-25T20:23:00.013+09:00

Hello again. My never-ending journey has brought me to a new country - Thailand!

It's a fascinating old place, full of Buddhist temples, monks and markets, cheap as fook to stay in, and bloody hot! It takes a while to fully make sense of the local culture, and I'm still staring at the metaphorical road-map scratching my head. Luckily I'm staying in the country for a full month and I will get to see and do an amazing amount.

So another week, another country. The joy of travelling has rather lost its meaning in recent days; Singapore induced a cloud of gloom and homesickness over me that took a long while to shift. Its pleasant soullessness affects you like a mosquito that's been zapped with repellent - you lose your bearings and find yourself drifting aimlessly, day after day, on autopilot. And before you know it that juicy human limb is far out of reach. I don't normally go around attacking human limbs you understand, though I dare say I would if I were a mosquito. It would kind of be my job, you know?

Anyway, Singapore is a bit boring. After I wrote that humungous blog pontificating on just how boring Singapore is, quite literally two more things happened. The first is I randomly met Joe, an Asian-American guy staying at the hostel, and we hung out together briefly. He bought me lots of food and then began to annoy me with his fog-horn voice and brash mannerisms. All these random acts of kindness from strangers - I must look like a proper charity case! Either that or I have an indescribable winsome charm.

We went to look at Raffles Hotel (a big hotel founded back in the mists of time by Sir Stamford Raffles, owner of one of the poshest names I have ever seen). Then he told me a lengthy anecdote about him biking up the coast of California with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Kevin Spacey. I always doubt people who claim to know famous people. There's always some bloke in the pub who 'had that Cat Stevens in the back of my cab once', or 'used to clean Sting's plumber's windows'. I tend not to come out and pour scorn on their wild claims in case they're telling the truth, in which the banner of stupidity would be transferred directly on to my head. But hanging out with the governor of California and one of Bill Clinton's close personal buddies... Jesus, give me some credit!

My head still ringing from Joe's over-amplified dulcet tones, I bid farewell to the hostel and headed off to the one attraction I'd not seen in Singapore yet - Sentosa Island. This is a small island that lies just to the south of the main harbour, which some developer presumably spotted back in the mists of the 20th Century and thought, "ooh, there's a nice green island over there - this doesn't really fit with our 'bland skyscraper' motif, let's bulldoze the f**k out of it, slap all the indigenous wildlife in new and exotic beefburgers and put a theme park there!"

What the theme of the theme park is, I haven't a clue. Fun? Tourist-land? It's like the rest of Singapore - enjoyable on the surface but without history and meaning. There's some nice rides, and if you like theme parks, you'll love Sentosa, the land where tourists come to do tourist things of various descriptions! I didn't love it especially. There is a monorail ride over the harbour that links it with the mainland, lots of different zoos and rides, and some man-made beaches. It didn't push many of my 'fun' buttons but then I'm not eight anymore. I have turned to the dusky pleasures of women of the orient and opium, and become a withered and depraved old curmudgeon.

I went on a luge ride (which is kind of like riding down a dry bobsleigh on a kid's trike) and that was fun - though I'm a bit ashamed to admit it. It reminded me of the happy childhood times before I was a man and had to fight for king and country. Cheered by my experience, I headed through an artificially-planted woodland glade in the direction of the 4D Magix cinema, to watch a 3D film about pirates with Leslie Nielsen in it.

The film was terrible (Leslie Nielsen, what are you doing man!? You're a comedy legend!) but watching the 3D action was quite cool through the NHS-style square specs they give you. It was noticably lacking in the extra dimension, although the chairs wobble in time with the slapstick action and hidden water-jets squirt in your face when a character falls in the sea. These cheesy gimmicks became incredibly annoying after a couple of minutes, but the rest of the cinema laughed like goons! Foreigners - they've no bloody idea what comedy is, I tell thee.

By now I was all Sentosa'd out, and engulfed in a cloud of gloom. I was the mosquito thinking, 'where the f**k did that pasty white English person with delicious blood go?' I don't know how it did it but Singapore had got to me. I was jaded. You're not meant to feel like this on the trip of a lifetime!

I got my things and rode out on the metro to Changi airport; back to the palace of glittering modernity that had ushered me into this strange land. I checked in for my flight at the 'budget' terminal, which turned out to be a small shed hiding behind the rest of the airport, and that was that.

The flight north to Bangkok lasted two hours, treating us to a breathtaking sunset up in the clouds over the Gulf of Thailand. I flew with Tiger Airways, a cheapo airline who do flights around Asia and Oz. No frills, minimum of fuss and it only cost about thirty quid including airport tax. When we touched down the first thing I noticed was the heat. It's intense, even at night.

I found a cheap bus that would take me to the centre of town, and off we headed through the traffic. Journeying through the city at night I saw an abundance of spectacular temples whizzing past us, featuring ornate multicoloured stone chedis (towers) and pointy oriental-style roofs painted in magnificent shades of red and gold. You generally see lots of Thai flags and ceremonial bunting out on the street, and everywhere there are pictures of a bloke with specs. That being the all-powerful King Bhumibol of Thailand. He's the ninth monarch from the Chakri dynasty, rulers of Thailand since the 18th Century. Don't criticise him EVER or you will go to jail!

Apart from that one important rule, it's a very relaxed place with very friendly people. Thai roads are crazy though. Traffic is very bad in the big cities and you could die of old age waiting to cross the road. The traffic literally never stops! And if you get stuck at a red light, you could be waiting ten minutes for it to change. Shanty towns can spring up at stationary road junctions. People are born and die waiting for the light to change to green. And the big highways have several different strands of traffic woven in together, the lanes built on one-by-one as the years have gone by. On a typical highway you might see one lane going forward, next to three lanes going back, next to another two lanes going forward, next to another three lanes going back! Mad. I don't know how that system works, but it does!

In recent decades the city of Bangkok rapidly mushroomed in size like a bacterial culture growing in a petri dish, acquiring mile upon mile upon mile of suburbs quicker than it knew what to do with them. And the city centre district of Khaosan Road, where I was coming to stay, is incredibly packed. Since the early 90s Khaosan Road has been the place for backpackers. Teeming with life every hour of the day, the strip is full to the brim with stalls, restaurants, clubs, bars, hotels and a ladyboy or two lurking in the shadows I dare say (not that I went looking mind). The neon glow rising from the street at night matches sunlight pound-for-pound in brightness.

Narrow alleyways sprawl off the main strand, each revealing a teeming microcosm of city life and dozens of bars and hotels nestling incestuously together. Unlike Delhi the crowding feels safe and intimate; it's like being part of a greater living organism and I loved the buzz of the crowds (and I'm not even a of nestling incestuously, either).

In one such narrow alleyway I found the New Joe guest house, a compact and friendly little place offering various commodities such as food (via the adjoining restaurant), laundry, internet, a bar and a travel agent (most Thai hotels have some sort of tourist info service). Oh, and rooms with beds in obviously.

I don't know who New Joe is, or how or in what way he differs from the old Joe, or if maybe they came from a long succession of Joes, or even a dynasty of Joes, or if there was a bitter power struggle between the new and old Joe that was eventually won by New Joe, but hell, not everything has to make sense in life. I dumped my bags in my room and ran off gratefully to enjoy a beer at a nearby backstreet reggae bar, watching a rerun of a classic Real Madrid-Roma footy match from 2004 - the halcyon galactico days of Zidane, Figo, Roberto Carlos and Ronaldo (the fat one). Later I got talking to an English guy with a young Thai wife. Ahh, the Thai bride phenomenon. The morsel of comfort for every single man in his 40s and older!

European football is incredibly popular in Thailand, particularly English football. I've met tons of Thais supporting Liverpool, and Man U, and even a Man City fan (who proudly boasted that dodgy ex-Thai PM Thaksin Shinawatra is the club chairman, much to my amazement). They follow their chosen team with a religious frenzy, despite the team belonging thousands of miles away in a place they're unlikely ever to visit. It's crazy to see - that's the power of western marketing unleashed on the world!

Three days is nowhere near long enough to see all that Bangkok's got to offer, but three days was all I'd got. The next day I got up, doused myself in factor 40 suncream and headed out into the great unknown. The first mission (working out where the f**k the New Joe guest house is on the map) was accomplished over a coffee at breakfast. Now I wanted to see the Grand Palace and the nearby temples of Wat Pho and Wat Arun, a short walk across town. This second mission would not be as easy as the first.

Bangkok is geared up to tourism in a big way, and the streets are crawling with canny touts trying to befriend western visitors with polite chit-chat and draw them into their friend's rickshaw for a sight-seeing trip. The sight-seeing trip inevitably involves a visit to a crafts shop of some description, where there is the risk you will be locked inside until you make a purchase. Mmm, think of that lovely commission the guy's gonna get! The best way is to smile and politely decline, and remain unflappable like Roger Moore.

I know that now with hindsight. I was misled by a tout near the Grand Palace who told me it was shut (they always tell you it's shut, it's bollocks) and he convinced me to go in the rickshaw to see two other temples. They were both stunningly beautiful and it was well worth the 40 Baht (60p) fare, and canny backpacker that I am, I refused to go in when the driver made the customary stop outside a craft shop. (You have to get up pretty early in the day to beat me, Johnny Foreigner!)

But Bangkok boasts a bewildering array of over 200 temples that the touts are eager for you to see. (You wonder why they bothered building so many temples, but then our cities have lots of chuches I guess.) As a tourist you should ignore the other 200 temples or anywhere else the tout wants to take you, and concentrate on seeing the Grand Palace, Wat Pho and Wat Arun first, as these are the biggest and best. After you've seen a few of these amazing Buddhist temples they all start to look the same, and what is life when you can no longer appreciate beauty?

Taking a rickshaw ride in Bangkok is like buying a lottery ticket; you never know if you're going to come out of the other side in the right place or even see your hotel again! Luckily he obligingly dropped me back on Khaosan Road and off I headed to feed my troubling addiction to internet cafes. The next day I caught a boat across the river to see the temple of Wat Arun, which was truly splendiferous. It will be months before I get round to uploading my photos but you can see good pics of it on Google here.

I got chatting to a Japanese student on the boat and we climbed the monumental stupa (tower) to get a bird's eye view of the temple and the river. He took a photo of me and I did a two-finger 'peace' sign as a bit of a joke. I took photos of him to return the favour and he innocently copied my peace sign both times, presumably thinking this to be some sign of religious respect. Don't you just love it when humour doesn't translate! I know I do. I felt a bit guilty about that actually.

Anyway I'll have to leave it here as I'm out of time and I need to go do things. That was a week ago and I've since gone up to Chiang Mai (city in northern Thailand) and done lots of other stuff like Thai cooking schools and riding on elephants. And tomorrow I start a two-week volunteer project, this time working with remote hill tribes. Amazing times. Curses, this thing is taking forever to write! We'll catch up with it somehow. Fare thee well, reader.

Photos: Delhi and the volunteer camp (January)

2008-02-20T18:10:00.054+09:00

Okay, it's hard to sum up Delhi without using the words 'smelly', 'smoggy', 'chaotic', or the phrases 'men pissing in the street', 'packs of wild dogs', 'cows eating rubbish' or 'beggars sleeping peacefully in the gutter', but I'll give it a try. To be fair it is also a vibrant, bustling and colourful place that can open your eyes in wonder.

Here is Jama Masjid mosque, an important building for Muslims and a historic place of worship, built in the 17th Century:

I also visited the Red Fort in Old Dehi, a magnificent giant walled compound dating from the 17th Century with similar historical ties. It was built to defend the ancient city of Shahjahanabad (and no I definitely did not just copy and paste the name out of Wikipedia 'cos I couldn't be bothered typing it!):

To get round the city it is easiest to travel by rickshaw. A rickshaw is essentially a moped with a roof that totters around on three wheels at unsafe speeds. There are millions of the things buzzing round the streets, providing income to a whole section of the population:

The idea might seem kind of scary to us pampered westeners used to luxuries such as seatbelts and doors (and hey, who needs those!) but it is a mega-cheap way to travel. I've seen a rickshaw with eight or nine Indians squeezed in travelling down the highway! Now that's how to car-share.

If you don't feel up to a rickshaw ride why not hop on the bus! Delhi has a good bus system - the down-side is the buses are ancient, over-crowded and most of them look like they've been driven off a cliff several times. But once you've got over the fear of dying, riding the bus becomes easy!

Hinduism is the dominant religion in India and most cars and buses have a small Hindu shrine on the dashboard. Religious Hindu drivers feel a spiritual connection with their vehicle, and consider it a soul-mate through which they can earn a living. Who needs furry dice!

This bus even had Christmas decorations up in the front window! This is a typical way of marking Hindu new year:

The swastika is an sacred symbol in the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain religions and many buildings in India are adorned with it. Don't panic, they're not Nazis!

Marriage is an important part of Hindu life. Arranged marriages are still the norm in India; these days a marriage will only go ahead with both partners' consent, after an initial meeting. It's sort of like a first date, but then you have to choose whether you want to spend the rest of your life with the person. Talk about a big decision!

One day our volunteer group got randomly invited to a neighbourhood Hindu engagement party! This was a vibrant, colourful affair with lots of food and loud Bangra music. I even got to have my photo taken with the bride. (How uncomfortable do I look!)

Hindus don't drink alcohol, so thankfully things like punch-ups and crap dancing are rare sights at their weddings! On the contrary, they could put John Travolta to shame with their highly skillful Bollywood-inspired moves, and wedding ceremonies are typically huge, lavish extravaganzas that last for days.

Delhi can be a bit bewildering at first. Even as an experienced traveller (I've backpacked round eastern Europe three times amongst various other japes), when I arrived I took one look and thought, 'f**k me, this is intense!'

Here are some more everyday street scenes from India's capital:

(Check out the smog in that last picture!)

On my first day I gratefully retreated to my bed at the Hotel Chand Palace - a typical budget place nestling in amongst countless other hotels in the backpacker district of Pahar Ganj, where travellers come to rest their weary heads and escape the noise, heat and hustle (and indeed the bustle) on the streets outside.

99% of Indian hotels seem to have the name 'palace' in their name - depending on the hotel, it's usually either a bit of a misnomer or a total misnomer. Not that anyone cares, the Trade Descriptions Act is just the stuff of a madman's dreams over here! This is my room - basic but clean:

And this is how I spent my first evening - slurping a lentil dhal (similar to soup), watching bad Indian TV and celebrating my discovery of room service with a beer!

Then I chanced upon some Premiership football on a sports channel, took a photo of my feet and dozed off. What an amazing life I live!

I whiled away a few evenings in similar homesick fashion till I adjusted to being in India. I was pleased to soon meet a group of new people. I had arranged to work on a two-week international volunteer camp, teaching street children through Cardiff-based charity UNAexchange.

The day after I visited the Taj Mahal I got to meet my fellow volunteers - a mix of Korean, American, Dutch and Indian people who volunteered through charities in their own countries. I was the only Brit and as such probably represented all this country's terrible baggage in their eyes. I behaved myself though and didn't start any football riots or invade any countries. In fact I behaved like a charming gent and, if anything, helped restore their unerring faith in the inherent goodness of British people. Honest.

We spent a fortnight together and had some great times. Here we are enjoying a meal in Pahar Ganj - what a lovely bunch we are!

The bottle next to me wrapped up in newspaper is beer - restaurants without an alcohol licence often sell alcohol 'under the counter' in such a fashion to avoid attracting the attention of the authorities. It's still pretty obvious what it is though! I christened this new discovery 'newspaper juice'.

This is the guest house in the district of Rohini where all 13 of us stayed for several nights:

And yes, the term 'guest house' literally translates as 'room with duvets on the floor'. Such luxury! It was very basic and cramped, even by Indian standards. We slummed it there for a few nights before seeking out some proper beds in a basic hotel.

As for the project, well that turned out to be far from plain sailing. Having paid the equivalent of a hundred quid each at the start of the project (to cover our food and accomodation), we quickly became disillusioned with our project leader Daya, who was rather reluctant to part with money for teaching materials and our food, and seemed to be dishonestly holding all the cash back for himself. Also he did very little to co-ordinate us or manage the project; we were left to figure it out for ourselves. Complaints have been made - here's hoping they've been heeded, so the volunteers' work can be put to more effective use in future.

That's not to say we didn't do any good - our group had lots of useful ideas on what we could teach the children, and we spent around three hours a day working with them. The charity-run school Tejas Asia operates a number of free schools throughout Delhi, providing poor children with food and a basic education:

The level of poverty amongst these kids is very high and they all live in the slums in the surrounding district of Nizamuddin. Many of them only have one set of clothes and come from families who have to beg for a living.

The children were a delight to work with, and seemed to really enjoy our company and our attempts at communicating in Hindi. Westerners were a weird new experience for them and they were very curious about us and our lives.

This is me playing guitar and initiating a 'sing-song':

We brought chalk for them to draw with...

We brought them toothbrushes and showed them how to brush their teeth...

And at the end of the project we treated them to a picnic and a massive bag full of sweets:

The kids went nuts when they saw the sweets - we nearly incited a riot, though thankfully nobody was injured! It was a great experience and the two weeks flew by. We got quite a rapport going with the children and they nicknamed us 'baya' (Hindi for big brother) and 'didi' (big sister). Saying our goodbyes was difficult.

It's hard to say how much of an impact our project made, because efforts like this are just a drop in the ocean and there is an unending amount of poverty out there. But there is a momentum to bring lasting change in India, and we helped support part of it.

Singapore - so clean you could eat your dinner off it.

2008-02-15T11:27:00.040+09:00

And so on Thursday afternoon, I bade farewell to India, cutting my way through the crowds and the smog of Delhi in a rickshaw bound for the airport. If it was an episode of Michael Palin the credits would have been rolling and it would be time to turn over for the snooker. But it wasn't, and they weren't. There are so many other things I wish I could have seen in India, but as a country it boasts so many fascinating sights and attractions that it would take years for you to see everything there is to offer.

I have travelled from Dharamasala in the north to Goa in the south and in these five weeks I only scratched the surface. It is a perplexing, mysterious, chaotic, beautiful, cruel and shocking land. And it's not often you visit a place that needs at least six adjectives to describe it! It's a giant melting-pot of cultures, featuring several major religions, over ten official languages and a population of one billion, increasing by 3% every year. (As you might imagine, it is facing a slight population crisis!)

But seeing Delhi again, I was reminded what an overwhelming city it is. It is a horrible mess of overcrowding, pollution, pushy touts and intense, intense poverty that groans under the sheer weight of the millions of people living there. The roads are choc-a-block with buses, rickshaws and taxis, continuously belching smoke up into the evil haze of carbon monoxide floating over the city. There is a regularly-quoted statistic that spending a day in Delhi is like smoking an entire pack of cigarettes. I dread to think how much soot is in my lungs now! There's probably enough to coat an entire Dickensian orphanage.

Walking around the tourist areas, you are hounded every step of the way by touts, stall-holders and rickshaw drivers, all competing for your business. Getting from A to B through crowds of people while fending off approaches from wannabe salesmen is a challenging pursuit. Seeing all the homeless people and beggars huddled on the streets you feel ashamed to be a pampered westerner - especially as you have to remain immune to all the pleas for money and assistance and keep on walking, otherwise you wouldn't last a single day.

Parts of the city are nice (the area round India Gate is pretty), and there's a few interesting buildings (the Red Fort and Jama Masjid mosque are two I saw), but it's far from an easy place to visit, and once was definitely enough for me. The only meaningful conclusion I could draw as I made my way to the airport was, 'thank f**k I'm leaving!'

The night flight to Singapore took 5 hours, and the time flew by thanks to a bumper selection of in-flight movies and some unexpectedly foxy Geisha-like air hostesses serving us drinks. I tried to grab a morsel of sleep as the plane soared over the sea, my mind a rabbit warren of unclean thoughts. Stuck in limbo-land between time zones, I only managed an hour or so.

We touched down in Singapore's pristine Changi airport at 5am local time, and went through the formalities with customs and the touching reunions with our baggage. With two new passport stamps in a day I was well happy! So far so good, and I headed off to meet my pickup in the arrivals hall. But due to a cock-up with the booking there was no driver to pick me up!

I scoured the terminal building, interrogating groups of drivers who were waiting to ferry people far richer than me to accomodation far posher than mine, all to no avail. After two hours I thought 'f**k this,' and headed off on the MRT (metro) in search of my hostel, dreaming of the abrasively witty and expletive-laden email I would later send to STA Travel.

Normally, the first glimpse that you get of a new country as you step off the plane is misleading, as all big airports are utterly alike: smartly-decorated, bland, homogenised, signposted in English and betraying nothing of the country they are in. But the shiny modern airport terminal I had arrived in proved to be a foretaste for the rest of Singapore - slick, sterile, ultra-westernised, hyper-efficient, and ruthlessly air-conditioned!

A small island port off the coast of Malaysia that was historically an important trading place, Singapore was under British rule until the 60s, and has now evolved into a dense jungle of skyscrapers populated by a mixture of Chinese, Malaysian and Indian cultures. It is a pleasant but strangely soulless tableau of eastern and western culture; a popular stop-off point for travellers on their way to either Australia or Thailand.

Despite being very crowded and having one of the highest population densities of anywhere in the world, Singapore is remarkably green and tranquil. Measuring about 30 miles by 20, it is a very well-ordered place, with lots of parks, grass and tree-lined boulevards. There is a harbour, and a nice river that winds through the city, fronted on both sides by restaurants, fancy colonial buildings and state-of-the-art office blocks. The shortage of natural resources means that everything gets recycled and re-used, even the water.

The strict limits on car ownership (only 12,000 new cars are allowed on the roads each year!) mean there is little smog and pollution. You can walk all round the city centre and smell fresh air. And the public transport works so well Hitler could set his watch to it. The buses and MRT (mass rapid transit) system connect all areas of the island and are bloody cheap to use.

Suffice to say it is a whole world away from Delhi! You couldn't find two more different cities anywhere on Earth. I can't help worrying what they do with all the poor and homeless people here. Do they dispose of them in a big incinerator or some kind of a squashing machine? Maybe they give them jobs at Starbucks? (There are millions of Starbucks here.)

Much of the city is built on reclaimed land. Depressingly, a phalanx of giant cranes are at present beavering away at the corner of the harbour constructing a new super-casino development. 90% of the population live in high-rise flats - with land at a premium, only the richest of the rich can afford a house.

All the suburbs look well-ordered and tidy. No-one dares drop litter - I've no idea what the penalty is but it may well involve getting fined six months' wages or facing a firing squad. It is a fair and free place to live, but you can sense a subtle threat that any wrongdoing will be treated harshly by a man carrying a big stick. The fine for smoking on the metro for example is S$1000, over three hundred quid!

Singapore is very hot all year round. It sits almost slap-bang on the equator and the heat is sweltering, even at night. I staggered up the hill to my hostel on Friday morning, bedraggled and drenched in sweat after three days' solid travelling, and even through solid cloud cover the temperature was about 30C. I was a man in need of a serious lie down.

Fortunately the hostel turned out to be f**king ace! After weeks of roughing it in spartan Indian guest-houses I was delighted to get a piping hot shower delivered with the full force of western plumbing! The dorms are cosy (despite the strange smell of sweaty feet lingering in our room) and the whole place is furnished from top to bottom in ultra-hip Ikea stylings. You get free breakfast, free internet and even free tea and coffee while you surf the web. They have nightly movie screenings.

I'm filling my boots with all the free stuff. I'm spending Sunday evening going goggle-eyed in front of a computer, gorged to the nines on caffeine, while the dialogue from some Hollywood flick booms from the corner of the room. I'm into my third day here and I'm still suffering a litle with jetlag. Tonight is supposed to be my 'quiet night in' where my body clock resets itself and remembers its arse from its elbow.

I've done most of the sight-seeing I want to do. Singapore is nice to visit for a few days, but once you've seen everything it begins to get dull. The place lacks that little bit of tradition and soul necessary to give it a unique identity. You almost forget where you are after being here a while - you could be anywhere in the west!

On Friday I explored the city centre and went on a bumboat (the hilarious local name for motorised river taxis) along the river, watching the driver and his cronies bickering in Chinese with some amusement. That evening I had a meal and a leisurely beer at a riverside restaurant, and felt myself unwind as the daylight of my first day faded and the kaleidoscopic night-time skyline blinked gradually into life. What a mistake that was, it's a bloody pricey area to eat out! Suitably chastened by the bill, I headed back to the hostel but couldn't locate any affordable alehouses in the vicinity. My Friday night had died a death.

On Saturday I went on a coach tour round the city and visited the Little India and Chinatown districts. I've just visited real India so Little India didn't intrigue me much, though Chinatown looked cool. Next came a totally unnecessary visit to a jewellery store. It always pisses me off when you're on a tour and the guide/driver ushers you into a store - it happened loads in India. You can almost see them salivating at the prospect of commission. This gave us less time at the botanical gardens in the north of the island, which were lush and inviting and could easily have kept me entertained for a few hours!

That evening I went on the world-famous night safari, which was pretty good, but not the mind-bending rollercoaster ride the travel agent's hype had led me to anticipate. It's just a zoo. At night. You get zoos everywhere. Admittedly though they put on a good show featuring some interesting and well-trained creatures, and you got to ride out into the middle of the animals' habitat on an electric buggy. I got chatting to a guy from Leeds and we saw all manner of creatures; hippos, elephants, bats, buffalo, ant-eaters and many others. It was a cool way to spend an evening but the jet-lag had left me weary and cynical and I gratefully returned to my bed that night.

Today I journeyed out by bumboat (teehee) to Pulau Ubin. This is an island about a mile long that lies just to the north of Singapore, very close to the border with Malaysia. Unlike the rest of Singapore it has survived completely undeveloped, covered in trees and lush vegetation and home to a small fishing community. I hired a push-bike so I could cycle round the island, and spent a couple of hours roving up and down the peaceful roads, occasionally dodging people who were blissfully cycling on the wrong side. It was a nice and relaxing alternative to staying in the city.

The island is dotted with traditional cottages (nowadays selling cold drinks to the small but steady stream of tourists passing by), while numerous wooden dwellings on stilts crowd the waters around the island. It allows you a glimpse of Singapore's vanished past, and a clue as to its cultural identity that has been all but lost in the frantic drive towards modernisation.

Well that's all for now, I've prattled on for bloody ages and I need to get some sleep! Nighty-night y'all!

Delhi: I'm leaving town baby....

2008-02-14T14:10:00.023+09:00

Hello, and happy Valentine's day. The occasion when greetings card company executives get their first bonuses of the year is upon us - enjoy the Bahamas chaps! Us single people are feeling like crap.

A tad cynical perhaps? Yes, right now I feel like a kid who got dragged from a toy store to go shopping for drills and workbenches with his dad. I really didn't want to leave Goa. Of all the places I've been in India it was the finest. I've had to come back to Delhi to catch my flight; tonight I leave for Singapore.

It's been two days since I last wrote my blog, and I've spent most of that time cooped up in a train carriage! Some interesting facts: 1) India is a bloody big country; 2) Delhi is a long way up the country from Goa; 3) trains in India don't go particularly fast; 4) to get to Delhi from Goa takes 39 hours by rail. Hooray!

If I was a rich man I would buy a ticket on a plane and get to Delhi in two hours. But if I was a rich man I could afford a lot of things, like oysters and champagne, my own private rail carriage, and a working robot clone of Nell McAndrew. Possibly I would sport a rakish moustache and tweed trousers, and a monocle.

But I'm not a rich man; I'm a budget traveller, used to doing things the cheap and difficult way. By combining travelling and sleeping I saved on airfare and two nights' accomodation. And Christ it was a boring journey! Not having anybody to talk to, the time really dragged.

I played my guitar till the lights went out, then I went to sleep dreaming of travelling across Australia, earning money from gigs - some bar or restaurant out there will have me surely! I awoke to another full day of rolling landscapes, bustling platforms, barely-edible train meals and air-conditioned tedium.

One of the things I love about India is chai - sweet spiced tea, served in short measures. It's sold everywhere. Indian trains swarm with chai wallahs (tea-men) who constantly beaver up and down the carriages selling lovely hot chai for 5 Rupees. By the end of the journey I had a towering stack of empty paper cups, rotting teeth and a hole in my wallet, but the chai somehow saved me from going insane!

But enough of that, let's resume the Goa story: After 40 minutes of speeding along dusty country lanes and over scenic hillsides, I arrived in Arambol. It has a beautiful beach, one of the best in Goa. The giant crescent of golden sand is lined with beachside huts and guarded at either end by rocky cliffs.

I parked my bike and set out in search of the Banyan Tree, walking north along the cliffs and rounding a corner. I saw Sweetwater Lake, a small inland lake where people take their children to swim, and knew I was on the right track. I headed inland, down a well-trodden path snaking through forested hills. Overhead a dense canopy of leaves and branches blocked out the sun.

I passed various travellers heading the other way down the trail, then I met a middle-aged lady in a bikini who I assumed must be suffering from some disgusting skin disease all over her body. Seconds later it dawned on me that she was just caked in mud from a mudbath! Good job I never went into practising medicine eh.

After a long series of twists and turns the path snaked up to a rocky clearing festooned with banners and colourful symbols, and petered out. Bongo drums and meditation chants rang out from the clearing. I had found the Banyan Tree!

Now I've never visited a hippie commune before so I didn't know what to expect. Peter really sold the place to me; he said it was a great place to hang out, you get chatting to new people straight away, everyone is welcome, musicians jam together all day long, and the people living there constantly cook food and share it out so nobody goes hungry. A beautiful utopian dream, maaaan!

The clearing was a bare rocky floor, about fifteen feet wide, set into the side of the hill. Hindu shrines were set out at each corner of the clearing, and the branches of the tree were fashioned into an archway to welcome new arrivals. Several people sat in a circle on mats, either meditating or relaxing, and in the middle lay the smoking remains of a camp-fire. I removed my shoes, said hello and joined them, waiting for a cue as to what to do. Staring vacantly seemed to be the done thing.

Immediately my attention was drawn to a strange old man called Thomas who was standing above us on a nearby rock, repeating the words, 'to find peace, you must stop worrying about the future and find forgiveness for the past'. He seemed to be in a world of his own, as if suffering from schizophrenic delusions.

With his grey hair, glasses and slightly creepy German accent he reminded me of the character Herr Lipp from the League of Gentlemen. He kept repeating his mantra as if he was practising lines for a play. For some reason he was also wearing a woolly hat which had three knitted rats attached to the front of it - but hey, I suspect there's a perfectly logical reason for that kind of thing when you're a delusional schizophrenic!

Seems like I caught the commune on a bit of an off day - there was trouble in the camp. Thomas has been staying out in the forest for some time, behaving erratically, causing problems for the other residents (some of whom have lived there peacefully for years) and stirring up discontent. Initially I wondered if headcases like Thomas were part and parcel in hippie communes (and maybe they are), but looking back, everyone else I met seemed sane and well-balanced; he was the only oddball.

The mood at the Banyan Tree was subdued, and after spending a couple of hours jamming on guitar with a bongo player and relaxing there in the shade I left the others and went to grab some dinner.

Personality conflicts are a frequent problem in hippie communes, Peter said later. It was great to see one but I found it's an experience I can only submerge myself in for so long. You start to feel trapped and need to get back to the world: hot showers, comfy beds, electricity and the like.

The next day I met Peter again in Arambol and had breakfast at a German bakery on the beach. We hooked up with a Swiss girl called Nadjia and rode out to explore a spectacular ruined fort near the Terekhol River, the northernmost point of Goa. Afterwards we took a look round an idyllic expanse of sand next to it, known as Paradise beach.

The area currently seems like an unspoilt paradise, but there are signs this will be the next 'hip' place in Goa to attract swarms of tourists. It moves in cycles; first Anjuna, now Arambol. Will Paradise Beach be next? The smattering of touts offering boat rides from the beach suggest the tourist juggernaut is already approaching.

My initiation into the Goa hippie/traveller circuit continued apace that evening; I spent a night at the Banyan Tree, jamming on guitar around the fire with several other travellers, including a Nepalese didgeridoo player. Thomas insisted on spending the whole evening talking to me, which was nice. I always attract the nutters. I understood little of the things he said, though I gathered from his rambling, garbled life history he was once a puppeteer. It worries me greatly that he might have worked with children!

Eventually he crawled off to his own space in the forest to crash. Rid temporarily of his presence, we all slept peacefully under the stars, surrounded by the noise of crickets and the howling of monkeys. It was a nice evening but in the morning I woke covered in mosquito bites. Why I didn't put the repellant on I'll never know. I gathered my things, and left for my comfy friendly bed in Anjuna.

In my remaining time I explored some more on moped round north Goa, enjoying the freedom and the sun. I returned to the Blue Tao restaurant in Anjuna on Monday evening and got invited up on stage to play a few songs. We got chatting to two girls from Wales who were from a family of triplets, and a Swedish guy called Otto who was celebrating his birthday. Suddenly I was meeting people, and I didn't want to leave!

As I travel I meet people and I leave people behind, but the bottom line is I'm out here on my own. It's a thrilling ride, but there are moments nearly every day where I get sick of being on my own and dream of the day I can come home and be around familiar people again. That day is a long way off but I dare say I'll meet many more friendly faces upon the way!

Today I'm meeting my travel buddy Laura for lunch in Delhi, then I have to find my way to the airport. I'll catch you when I get to Singapore!

Arambol - born to be wild (aka the moped diaries)!

2008-02-11T22:48:00.005+09:00

Hello! Right now I'm sat in the most uncomfortably sweaty internet cafe I've ever been in. I'm at Madgaon railway station in Goa, waiting to catch the train back to Delhi. Outside, swarms of rickshaws ferry passengers to and from the station while the sun covers the swathes of palm trees in afternoon heat. I can't believe five weeks have passed already. Soon I will be leaving India.

Goa was brilliant. I can't wait to go back. So much happened since I last wrote! Let's start with Friday evening: I wandered down the street in Anjuna, looking for a cheap fly-blown place to drown my sorrows for an hour or two, and I spotted a sign on a doorway: 'Live music - Peter from Australia!' Suitably intrigued, I jumped from the saddle of my metaphorical horse and headed inside.

Inside was a restaurant (not a metaphorical one, a real one), and I sat down and ordered prawn curry. Peter, a youngish musician guy around my age, was performing cover songs on guitar for the assembled diners. It's rare to hear Western music anywhere in India so I sat back to enjoy some familiar tunes with a beer.

After his gig I got talking to him and asked him where was fun to go. He told me to head to Arambol (20 miles up the coast) and check out the traveller scene, and then visit a banyan (fig) tree out in the forest where lots of hippies live!

Peter is travelling round India for several months and - talk about a dream job - earns his keep performing at the restaurant five nights a week! He gets enough money from playing guitar and singing to continue travelling as long as he wants, visa permitting. I think that is an awesome thing to do. You don't always need a plan when you travel, just head off on the road and try to use your talents and abilities to earn money! (I am an expert lover and also a skilled assassin. I think this will earn me lots of money.)

We hit it off pretty well and after his gig he offered me a lift on his moped. We visited the nearby town of Chapora (which buzzes with travellers at night-time) then stopped at an outdoor nightclub in Vagator to watch a gymnastic and juggling show. I learned later it was the finale of a four-day international juggling festival! There was a special energy in the crowd; it reminded me of the first time I visited the Sziget festival in Hungary and saw people partying in forest glades without an advert in sight.

Galvanised by my nocturnal moped experience (I'd never ridden on a motorbike before), I headed out the next day in search of a scooter to hire. Public transport in Goa is patchy at best so to explore properly, you need to rent your own transport. I struck a bargain to rent a shiny new Honda Activa bike for three days at the bargain price of 500 Rupees (less than a tenner). 240 more Rupees secured me a full tank of petrol. I quickly acclimatised myself to the bike's controls and off I flew down the road to Arambol!

Elsewhere in India I would recommend you never ever try and drive. The roads are extremely busy (especially in the big cities) and the motorists are lunatics. But Goa has much quieter roads than anywhere else I've been and it's reasonably safe to drive yourself - all the tourists do. And when in Rome, do as the Romans do - beep your horn at anything in sight and go as fast as you f**king want! As you speed past a beautiful field lined with palm trees, with the wind rushing through your hair, you realise what it is like to be truly free.

Shit, my time is up... my train leaves in 30 minutes. I have to collect my luggage. I'll continue the Goa story once I return to Delhi. Bye for now!

Photos: Taj Mahal and Akbar's Mausoleum (13th Jan)

2008-02-09T22:58:00.000+09:00

I got a photo DVD burnt, so finally I have some pictures to show from my travels!

In a month's journeying through India I've taken almost a thousand photos, and presenting them to you is sure to be a mammoth task - especially as I'm taking more all the time as I travel. Rather than bore you with one ginormous photo gallery I'll split the pictures up and show you the different places I've been.

First up is my visit to one of India's most famous landmarks: the Taj Mahal. I had only been in India for two days when I went there and this was my first 'day trip'. I had a car with a driver and everything, cos I'm posh like that. The Taj Mahal is in the city of Agra, four hours south of Delhi, down a dusty highway lined with shanty towns.

Before reaching the Taj I visited Akbar's Mausoleum - the nearby resting place of a 16th Century Indian ruler:

That was impressive to see, but the Taj was an even greater experience. To wander through the massive courtyards and gardens, and then walk up close to the iconic white palace (built in the 16th Century by a lovesick king in tribute to his deceased wife) was simply awesome. It was a beautiful hot afternoon and the air smelt wonderfully crisp and fresh.

Afterwards we just had time to take a quick photo with me in it (spot the Taj Mahal in the distance, and notice my lack of a beard!), then my driver Deepak and I headed off up the highway back to Delhi.

Compared to other things I've done in India it was an expensive trip, but it was definitely worth it - the Taj Mahal is truly spectacular.