roganjosh

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…

Some of my occasional readers have been asking me if I’m taking plenty of pictures, presumably because they don’t believe I’ve actually gone travelling anywhere and I’ve simply spent the last couple of weeks at home watching daytime TV. Well, I have been taking a few pictures and I’ve even drawn a few things while I’ve been travelling around, but I’ve yet to find a computer on my travels that would make uploading all the pictures onto the internet an easy task, and they’re not very interesting pictures anyway. That said, here’s a stupid photo of me taken after I went to the Tate-do class in Tokyo. Luckily the sweat isn’t showing up too much.

So I spent a couple of days relaxing on Koh Phangnan and growing myself some new shoulders. I don’t have too many exciting adventures to tell you about though, not because I didn’t have any but just because if I had them I can’t remember them. Alcohol in the beach bars is served in small buckets, that you might use to make sandcastles with if they weren’t filled to the brim with vodka and coke, or more dangerously – whisky, red bull and coke. So yeah, I had a good time, there are some gaps…

I never made it outside of Haad Rin once I was on the island, although bombing around the island on scooters did look like it might be fun. Haad Rin itself was very laid back, and a bit of a lawless frontier town. All the bars showed pirated films when they weren’t showing the football, so I’ve seen MI3 and X-men3* and a host of other bad films.

*my review: A big budget version of top-trumps.

Mostly recovered I hopped over to Samui with my scottish mate Stuart, where we jumped on a quick elephant ride and then went to watch some Muay Thai kick boxing. The boxing was brutal, but after about three hours you get a bit desensitised to it – until the last fight of the night where one guy is completely knocked out by a lightning kick to the head! Probably the most violent fight was between two kids, maybe 15 years old, tops. One of them sweeps the legs away from the other, and then gets in a quick kick to the head while he’s falling! All the westerners are looking at each other trying to work out if we’re meant to applaud the victory or call an ambulance.

We stayed on Chaweng beach in Samui, which is an absolute hole. The beach is kind of okay in a families on jet-skis kind of way, but the main road just stinks of sewers and is full of pushy tailors and hostess bars. I couldn’t get out of Samui fast enough! Stuart headed back to koh Phangnan with the idea of spending a couple of weeks lazing on the beach before starting to head home, but I went to Koh Samui airport and hopped on the next flight to bangkok. Two firsts for me with this flight, first time I’ve ever bought a ticket at an airport, and the first time I’ve ever boarded a plane wearing flip-flops!

Met up with Jenny, one of the girls from the hostel in Singapore, last night who has headed off to cambodia today, and I spent today mostly hungover and wandering around Bangkok zoo - where I got to see what happens when a turtle accidentally wanders too close to an elephant. splat!

So that’s that – next couple of days in bangkok I think. My brother Rob turns up tomorrow and then next week we’re heading down to Phuket to spend a couple of days learning to sail. I’ll let you know if I see any pirates…

I’ve finally made it to Thailand! I enjoyed my trip up through Malaysia, but on the whole it took me a lot longer than I meant it to, and since Kuala Lumpur I have been fairly solidly caught in organised tours and well trodden traveller’s paths. In hindsight I might have been a little harsh on Melaka because in the sunshine it was actually fairly pretty. That said I did run out of things to do in the town after about two hours, and all the bars I went to were pretty dead. Malaysia is a largely Muslim country though, so I guess I should count myself lucky there were bars at all!

After Melaka I caught a coach up to Kuala Lumpur. My first glimpse of the city was the Petronas Towers looming up over the horizon. They’re incredibly impressive to see, but unfortunately shut on a Monday, the day I had for sightseeing around the city. It didn’t matter much though because the KL Communication Tower was just down the road and it’s actually taller than the skyscrapers. You can only go up to the 41st floor of the Petronas Towers anyway, and frankly I’ve been in bars higher than that!

Went to watch the Holland match in a Reggae Bar in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown on the first night I was there, which made sense at the time. I even bumped into one of the girls from the hostel that I stayed in in Singapore! If that wasn’t coincidence enough then the Scottish guy from the hostel I was staying in had bought his contact lenses from the Scottish guy from the hostel she was staying in over a year before in Scotland! It is apparently a small world. The Scottish guy from my hostel, Stuart, was doing pretty much the same trip as me so we figured we might as well stick together till we made it to Thailand.

From Kuala Lumpur we headed up to Taman Negara, a vast rainforest national park. It was a bit of a long journey involving a four hour coach trip followed by a three hour long river journey on a very thin, low wooden boat on a very brown, muddy looking river. The first thirty minutes were quite pleasant, but the remaining two and a half hours did drag a bit. It was quite fun imagining that I was in Heart of Darkness though. The village we arrived at was a bit of a shanty town of floating restaurants, wooden shacks and people trying to sell tours into the park. The whole thing was a bit of a tourist conveyor belt really, which was a shame because the park itself was damned impressive, but everything seemed geared towards keeping you away from it until you were on a tour. Then again I didn’t get eaten by tigers at any point, so maybe I shouldn’t complain.

The jeep night safari I went on was probably the biggest con given that it didn’t go into the jungle at all, but instead took you around a palm plantation! We got to see a couple of owls, a sparrow, some civets, a leopard cat (basically a cat) and on the drive back a loris walking along some phone lines.

The next day we went for a canopy walk which was a lot more fun. The canopy walkway was ten rope bridges up to 50m up in the air slung between trees in the rainforest. I’m not scared of heights, but after the third of fourth bridge I was starting to pay very close attention to the state of the safety nets on the sides of the bridges, and not liking what I saw! The rope bridges were maybe 40-50m long in places and when you had a couple of people all on them at the same time they really started to sway from side to side. It was nerve wracking, and in the end I got through it by singing ”I’m the king of the swingers…” to myself until I’d made it safely out of the trees. After that excitement we just had the trivial task of a 1km walk up a hill in the rainforest to look at the view. I was a bit paranoid about catching malaria in the jungle so after a while I was covered in sweat and insect repellent, and yeah, repellent is exactly how I felt! The view was great though, just miles and miles of jungle and mountains covered in jungle. No elephants though, so honestly, what was the point?

All of the jungle adventure was just before lunch! Afterwards it was another trek into the jungle to go and see some bats in a cave. When I read the tour description I thought it would be a big cave, some stalactites and some bats flying around a bit. This wasn’t a big cave though, it was a long slimy tunnel that you had to crawl through with bats flying over, across and in front of you. Clambering over slippery rocks in your trainers wondering what happens if anyone breaks their leg in here was a bit of a new holiday experience for me. In the main cave we did get right up close to the bats clinging to walls around us, and we weren’t too far away from the white cave snake that lived on an alcove on the wall and ate the bats that got too close. After that I just had to slide down a guano covered rocky slope, inch through ankle deep water, pull myself through a gap not much wider than me and then clamber up a wet rock face and I was out in the open air again! Everyone on the tour seemed to be in shock as we walked back to the camp.

So Taman Negara was fun in mostly scary kind of ways, but after that we headed up to the perhentian islands, which are everything tropical islands should be – white sand, turquoise water, jungle all round and a couple of chameleons living in our beach hut. Considering this is rainy season the weather’s been pretty good, sunny most of the day, and torrential rain in the evening, by which point we could normally make it to the pub. Former computer programmer that I am I did manage to get sunburnt within about ten minutes of arriving on the island though, and my shoulders still haven’t quite recovered – a bit of a problem when you’re carrying all your possessions around in a rucksack! I’m on the mend now though anyway.

The one small gripe about the Perhentian Islands, well actually it’s a fairly major gripe, is that because everyone is doing diving courses all the time nobody goes out drinking in the evenings! There’d be loads of people lazing around on the beaches all day, but as soon as night fell it was a wasteland. It did make the place a little dull. With not much else to do we went snorkelling on the last day there, which I loved! I swam with black tipped sharks, an enormous turtle, huge yellow fish, huge blue fish, small pointy fish. Lots of fish anyway, and lots of coral.

So with all the fun on the Perhentians exhausted we hopped on a fast boat back to the mainland, jumped in a cab to a border town and walked across the border to Thailand! On the train journey up to Hat Yai we even saw an elephant working next to the railway line! Score one for Thailand over Malaysia! Spent the night in Hat Yai drinking ridiculously cheap beer (40 baht for a bottle of Singha, that’s about 60p?), and at dinner we even had lady-boy waitresses, so Thailand’s really been living up to its reputation so far! Yesterday was another coach and ferry combo to finally arrive here in Koh Phan Ngan. We’re staying in a beach bungalow in Hat Rin at the minute, and the village is a bit of a strange place. From the internet cafe that I’m currently in I can see two other internet cafes, a shop selling nothing but poi, and a bikini shop. Nothing but life’s essentials here!

Well, I think that’ll do for now. Hopefully I’ll have more stupid adventures to let you know about next time!

Flying in to Singapore it occured to me that this is probably the first time I’ve ever travelled from one foreign country to another! I only spent a couple of days there this time, but I’m coming back in about 5 weeks to catch my flight to Perth, so I can get my safari suit made cheap in Thailand and then head over to Raffles for my Singapore sling.

As far as I can work out Singapore is an enormous shopping mall, some of which is called Chinatown, or at least if you take a bus tour round that’s the impression you get. I was staying in the Arabic quarter though, in a bed and breakfast called Sleepy Sam’s that had a really nice cafe vibe about it, and the dormitory was air conditioned – which in Singapore’s humidity felt like paradise!

Once again I met a really good crowd where I was staying, and we had a top night out starting at the Asia High bar for happy hour on the 70th floor of the Raffles tower. The view was incredible, and the cocktails were just about affordable (they make a rubbish mojito though). After that the night degenerated into drinking, Chinese karaoke and then accidentally finding ourselves in an indian bellydancing club. No, really, it was genuinely an accident!
Caught the bus out of Singapore to Johur Bahru in Malaysia yesterday, and at SGD $2.40 it was both the cheapest international journey I’ve ever made, and the first time I’ve crossed a border on a bus with a leaky roof. From there I took another bus up to Melaka, which is… well, I’m staying in a bit of a dive so that may be colouring my opinion, but it’s a bit rubbish so far. I might head up to Kuala Lumpur tomorrow, or I might just head for the Jungle Railway and see what the rain forests are like.
Yesterday Malaysia was wet, but hey, it is the monsoon season. Today’s looking a bit sunnier, so I think I’ll start casing out the pubs to see where’s best to watch the England game.

I’m in Singapore now. The last couple of days in Japan were great! On what was meant to be my last day in Kyoto I went to a public bath with a couple of guys from the hostel. The tubs of water were so hot I thought I was going to pass out from sitting in them too long, but it turned out us ignorant gaijin had got in the baths in the wrong order so I’d started with the hottest one first! It was good though, in an energy sapping kind of way, and Chris from Arizona who speaks some Japanese got talking to the locals. One of them had been in movies, possibly as a Samurai or a Cowboy, it was a bit hard to tell from the miming…

Back at the hostel I got talked into not going back to Tokyo, but instead travelling down to a place called Koyasan to stay in a buddhist temple with a couple of people from the hostel. Koyasan is way up in the mountains, and the train ride there was stunning – just mountain after mountain. We stayed in a traditional japanese room, i.e. we slept on the floor, and ate the same food as the monks – which I liked, though not everyone was keen. The tempura vegetables were particularly nice, and the strange thing that tasted and looked like a damp sponge is probably best forgotten.

After that we went back to Kyoto for one last night on the town, which involved getting smashed at the hostel playing a drinking game before heading into town. It seems to be standard now that if I have a long journey to take I don’t make it back to the hostel till about 4am, though I made it hard on myself this time by walking home from the club, which took me an hour.

Next day I took the bullet train back to Tokyo, which is obviously very cool (and expensive), and caught a glimpse of mount Fuji on the way. Well, I think it was Fuji, it was certainly pretty big.

On my last day in Tokyo I was just bumming around buying souvenirs when I suddenly remembered that I’d booked myself onto a samurai sword acting class in Shinjuku! I rushed across town, and get lost very near where I was trying to get to. In the end a guy working in a coffee shop actually took me to the building I was trying to find, which was lucky because the building name was only written in Kanji. The people running the class didn’t speak much English, but luckily a British guy who’d been living in Japan for 17 years translated most of it for me. I was taught a few moves, and then shown how to act out a mock fight, which they let me win! I had so much fun I was grinning like an idiot on the way out.
And that’s it for Japan! I had an absolute blast, met some great people and learnt how to attack people with a sword. What more can you ask?

Singapore is – well I know it’s wrong to travel to asia and complain about the heat, but – Singapore is damn hot, and horrible humid! The hostel I’m in is nice and air conditioned at night though, and again I’ve met a good crowd. Next stop Malaysia I think, but hey, let’s take each day as it comes!

I took the night bus from Tokyo to Osaka a couple of days ago, and now I`ve moved on to Kyoto. Findings so far:

Tokyo Tsujiki Fish Market
For the best sashimi stay in a club till 5am and then go straight to the fish market to drunkenly eat octopus and tuna in a small shack/restaurant down a side street. With any luck a kindly old japanese lady will roll you some sushi rolls while you`re tucking in.

Tokyo-Osaka night bus
You might think that staying out all night the night before a long bus journey is a good way to make sure you`ll sleep on the bus, but no matter how much sleep you get you`re still going to be knackered when you arrive.

Kobe
Heading to Kobe I got given some sweets by another old japanese lady for shuffling along so she had enough room to sit down on the train. Kobe itself has a cable car running up to the hills on the north of the city, which makes it pretty cool in my book.

Kyoto
Great city, great hostel, nice bars. Lots and lots of shrines. I haven`t been to the monkey park yet, but I swear I will

Nara
Big park full of deer. Standard practice seems to be to buy some food for the deer, hold it out to them in your hand, and then scream and run away when the deer approach you. For an advanced move try running away so slowly that the deer feel obliged to chase after you.

Mos Burger
Simply the finest burgers in the world. The first one I had seemed to have some kind of lasagna type sauce on it and was delicious. Next time I tried the teriaki one, which was perhaps better. I know that coming to Japan and eating in burger restaurants is a bit dumb, but they`re mighty fine burgers, and I`m having plenty of noodles, grilled chicken and the like to make up for it.

Green tea ice-cream
delicious.

Ants
vicious bitey things, that seem to own every park in Japan. I would happily worship our new overlords if they`d just stop biting my ankles.

Castles, Shrines, Buildings etc.
There are lots of them.

So after months of talking about heading off round the world I’m finally underway. Tokyo didn’t look much when i saw it from the train after an 11 hour flight from heathrow, and I’ve been caught out in rain storms twice now, but even so it’s a brillant city. I’ve spent most of my time doing fairly normal touristy things, like visiting akihabara (where all the electronics shops are), going up tall buildings, walking around imperial palace gardens and that kind of thing, but to add to the sense of adventure I’m catching the overnight bus to Osaka tomorrow!

Finding accomodation for Friday was getting a bit tricky, and I wanted to see a bit more of the country, so this looked like a great way to kill two birds with one stone. I’m not sure I’ll feel the same way when I arrive in osaka at 7am after being on a bus all night, but we’ll just have to see. After Osaka I’ll be spending a couple of days in kyoto, where hopefully there are lots of nice temples and shrines I can have a go at drawing.

So if anyone has any recommendations about things to do in Osaka, Kyoto or indeed Tokyo (which I’m coming back to for the last couple of days) then let me know in the comments.

I got some hostel practise in this weekend by visiting Berlin, and had a great time. It’s a strange city to get a handle on because there just doesn’t seem to be any center to it, which is understandable given its history. Got taken to some great bars by my mate Jake, and I’d recommend the Elvis burger at White Trash to anyone who knows a good heart surgeon.

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