roganjosh

it was cold outside and I was a bit bored, so I’ve uploaded some of my photos (as far as Kuala Lumpur)

Looking through tourist brochures when I first arrived the phrase “rug up warm” kept appearing before some suggestion of going outside and doing something exciting. Not only is this a fantastic turn of phrase (who doesn’t want to get ”rugged up”?) but it’s sound, sound advice. The weather during the day has for the most part been glorious but the nights are cold, particularly for the odd couple of nights I’ve been in hostels. I’m back at my cousin’s in Perth now though, and he’s cooking a roast! life is good.

One of the things that took me a while to get used to in Australia after being in Asia for a few weeks is that I’m no longer completely foreign, and can blend in with the man in the street with such ease that I get approached by charity muggers. Last Saturday I even started the day by going surfing and finished it with a barbeque! Admittedly any standing up that I did on the board was only a brief prelude to falling off, and standing by the barbie was like a cold bonfire night back home but it was all great none the less. As for the rest of my time in Perth I’ve been to the zoo, been shopping, eaten kangaroo and baramundi (not seen any emu on the menu anywhere yet), visited Fremantle and seen the first australian ship wreck, that kind of thing.

I spent the last couple of days doing a tour of south west australia, down to Albany and back round via Augusta and Margaret River. I think my favourite place was Elephant Cove, simply for the rather dubious resemblance of some giant rocks to elephants. The Valley of the Giants was good too, a canopy walk among the huge Karri trees. Actually, wine tasting at the wineries was a hightlight, though it would save time if they’d just put all the little samples in one glass! There was a pretty good crowd on the tour considering it’s winter and we had fun, although the tour guide did have a tendency to play Dire Straits on the long journeys.

Not too sure what I’m up to next, though I’m hoping to find a way to get out to Lake Ballard near Kalgoorlie to see the Anthony Gormley statues in the desert (he’s famous for the Angel of the North). I hear you can go on a guided tour of a brothel in Kalgoorlie too, so I’ll have to see what their gift shop is like. After that I guess it’s Melbourne and Sydney - I’m running out of time to go anywhere else!

I’m sure you’ll all be terribly upset to find out that I’ve been rained on quite a lot over the last couple of days. Me and my brother went back to Phiphi for 2 nights and there was not a single break in the clouds. In fact on the first day there it rained hard for hours. Then again, people who go on holiday in Thailand in the rainy season can only complain so much, and I have to say that Phiphi is a lovely place full of genuinely friendly people. I hope all the rebuilding they’re doing after the tsunami goes well.

Anyway, the weather had gotten me down a bit and I was considering whether to cut short the Thailand leg of my adventure and just jump to Australia a week earlier than planned. Then I remembered that the next full moon party was on Koh Phangnan the next day and I figured I really ought to leave Thailand with a bang. Now full moon parties are a pretty big deal on Koh Phangnan, with a couple of thousand people turning up to party all night on just one beach. Conventional wisdom says you should arrive a few days early to make sure you can get accomodation nearby, otherwise you either have to travel to some far flung corner of the island or just end up sleeping on the beach come the morning. I didn’t have time for conventional wisdom though, so I just flew in to Koh Samui on the day of the party to see what would happen.

As it turned out this was a perfect plan - I met up with a two Aussie guys on the flight who also didn’t have any accomodation, and after a few minutes of walking along the seafront being told everywhere was full the three of us fluked our way into staying in a really nice resort just ten minutes from the main beach because someone had just checked out. The room even had one double bed and a single!

The full moon party itself was a laugh, and pretty much exactly what you would expect from an all night dance session on a tropical beach. lots of lightly dressed drunk people, covered in  body paint and falling over to banging dance choons. We stayed up all night and watched the sunrise from the Mellow Mountain bar.

The next couple of days alternated between big nights out followed by exhausted early nights in. The resort we found ourselves staying in was definitely a party place, and a group of six Irish girls that we ran into had been staying there so long that the staff had a leaving barbeque for them. Not that they were leaving, it just seemed to be a good excuse for another party. On my last night there I got pushed into the swimming pool by three girls in their underwear. It was that kind of place.

So time was ticking by and it was getting to around the date when I wanted to head for Singapore before my flight to Perth, when my whole “I don’t need to book tickets in advance” policy backfired as all the flights from Samui to Singapore were full for the next couple of days. This resulted in a fun day yesterday where I had to fly up to Bangkok in order to catch a flight down to Singapore the night before my 9:30am flight to Perth. The Singapore leg of the trip was delayed so I arrived at 11pm and had to stay in an el cheapo hotel in the red light district just to get 6 hours sleep before heading back to the airport. I did get to watch Ice Age 2 on the plane though, so that was alright.

So here I am in Australia, a brand new continent and the first time I’ve ever been south of the equator! It was beautiful and sunny when I landed, but it’s bloody cold now it’s night! I’ve even had to dig around in my bag to find a pair of socks. I nearly said “root” around in my bag then, but that means something different out here…

okay, I’ve been here a few hours, I think it’s time I had a beer.

edit: Bloody hell! The stars are all different! I’m going to go and see which way the water spirals down the plughole…

I’m back from my stint on the good ship “Intan”, and I’m now RYA certified as ‘competent crew’ - possibly the highest recognition of my abilities I’ve ever received. The course was great, we sailed out of boat lagoon on Phuket and then up to the national park, full of islands that look like they’re either populated by King Kong or bond villains. I slept on the deck most nights, and woke up looking at clear skies and tropical islands, apart from on the last night when I was woken up by torrential rain instead. The weather was good for sailing, by which I mean it was mostly cloudy, windy and you only got drenched by downpours occasionally. The sun did come out often enough to surprise me though, so I’m now sunburnt again, though this time it’s only on my face, which I don’t use for anything much anyway. We weren’t attacked by pirates at any point on the course, though this might be because they knew we’d been taught the naughty pirate knot on the second day, which turns a rope into some handy handcuffs. I’ll be drunkenly demonstrating in pubs when I return.

Before Phuket I spent five nights in Bangkok which I’d been told I was going to hate so often that I actually enjoyed the place just out of spite. One of the highlights was going for a traditional thai massage at the Wat Pho massage school. It was an hour of absolute complete agony inflicted by a highly trained thai woman with thumbs of steel. At the end of it though my back felt incredible, so I figure it was both healthy and character building.

What else have I been up to? erm… went to the thai red cross snake farm in bangkok and had a huge python draped round my neck. Bought a lot of flowery shirts. Went to a shooting range and loosed off a couple of rounds from a colt .45 (I was pretty good, which just goes to show how close to real life goldeneye on the N64 is!). Today we almost went to Phiphi for the second time as well  (we sailed there on the course) but we managed to turn up at the ferry port after the last boat. I’m just back from a really good bar in Phuket Town called Timber Hut which was full of thai people out getting drunk, dancing and having a great time - making it completely unlike any other bar I’ve been in in Thailand so far, and at no point did they play the black eyed peas! Simply for that it’s the best bar I’ve seen in the whole country.

oh, and in Bangkok I went to Patpong as well, which is the red light district for those who hadn’t heard. It was so rubbish, just such an annoying, trashy little place. I actually got taken there by an american guy I met in my guesthouse, who said that going there was one of the best experiences in his life, and oh how I pity that man.

After the third or fourth night there I really hated it…