When little trips go bad.

I went out shopping today. I thought I would be about 30 minutes. The plan was to ride to a music shop, have a look at the guitars, ride back.

What actually happened was as follows.

Drive to a music shop; find another one on the way; have a look in there; keep on going to original shop; get lost; get found; fail to find shop; make way back to first shop; look at guitars again; not buy one anyway; ride home; realise trip lasted about two hours; notice legs feel odd; ponder that I have been out for 2 hours with no sunblock; have a cool shower; liberally apply Vaseline Intensive Care; spend rest of afternoon trying not to touch foot; curse myself liberally.

Honestly, my foot is a joke. Not only is it cut, but now it's swollen from where I've been kicking the bag, and then I go and burn it too!

What was good about the day though is that when I was by the side of the road blatantly looking like a lost foreigner, a couple of lads pulled up and with the aid of my map showed me where to go. They didn't ask for anything, they simply went out of their way to help me then turned around and rode off.

Lovely.

A plague on my house.

As you know from previous posts, I'm getting the life bitten out of me over here by mosquitoes. Today however, things managed to get worse.

I woke up this morning to find my kitchen over-run by ants. I mean, absolutely covered in ants. They were all over every piece of cutlery and crockery I have, they had built a small nest like thing in my sink and they were covering the entirety of my work surface. Breakfast was officially off.

I did the best I could to clean them up but in the end I just gave up from frustration and hoped they would be gone by the time I returned. In the back of my mind I was thinking the maid would notice and know what to do in this situation.

I spent the day by the beach, shopping and drinking lemon ice shakes.

I got back to my bungalow, took of my sandals and noticed there was a can of Raid outside my door. Excellent, I thought, they have sorted it out for me. I went inside and as my hands were full I walked straight over to my bed to put my stuff down. Now my bungalow is dark, really dark. I had to buy new bulbs as the ones that were fitted only managed to throw a soft glow on the ceiling, never mind supply adequate light for and kind of meaningful activity.

While I was stood at my bed I thought, 'hmmm, what's that under my foot?' I turned and put the light on to be greeted by the kind of vision usually reserved for horror movies.

Covering my bed, floor, table and any horizontal surface in the room were dead and dying wasps. Lying there, writing in their death throws must have been almost 500 wasps. It took me a moment to take it all in. You just don't expect to see such an outrageously vile site when you turn on the light.

I started cleaning them up and the job never seemed to end. I shook my trainers out and found 11 in those alone. They were under my bed, under my table, in my change mug, in my towels, in my clothes. . . just. . . everywhere!

In the corner where my wardrobe is there was a pile as high as the toe of my trainers and about as wide as dinner plate. They must have swarmed into my room during the day. Luckily for me someone noticed and emptied a can of raid before closing the door.

I got the guys from the camp and they decided that they came in through a gap in my wall which has now been taped over. My confidence that I'm going to make it the night is not even nearly restored.

I hate my bungalow. During the day I get bitten by mozzies which creep in through all the cracks in the walls; ants have literally taken over my kitchen and made any sort of activity in there impossible; wasps have taken up residence somewhere in my room and geckos hide in my toilet roll . . . . which to be honest I find quite cute but I needed something to keep the tempo going!

I mean, can you imagine if I'd been asleep when they swarmed into my room. I would have woken up to a couple of hundred angry wasps and been stung so freaking badly it could well have put and early end to my trip.

I'm not training tomorrow. There's no way I'm going to be able to sleep tonight. What I am going to do though is get a better place. I don't even care about the price anymore. Having to sweep wasps off your bed with a broom while avoiding the kitchen and being bitten by mosquitoes is not something that lends itself to that 'homely' feel I'm so desperately trying to achieve.

Ok Then

I know this is a bit funky at the moment as new posts arnt appearing at the top but I'm doing this so I dont end up with a load of posts just on the days I manage to get to the internet cafe.
Now my usb stick works this shouldnt be a problem as I wont have to back track so far.

Anyways, scroll down for the new stuff.

Denied!!!

I cant connect my usb stick to the computer in the internet cafe. Once again you are going to have to wait a couple of days.

But seeing as I'm here now.

This morning at training I discovered a new type of sit up. I shall call this variant a punch up. You lie on the floor in normal 'sit up' position, then someone punches you in the stomach and you do a sit up. Pleasant. During this same session I found out that if you do a set of 10 'punch ups' and the instructor says 'one more' he does not mean one for luck. He means another set of ten. You'd better believe that number 12 took me way by surprise and knocked the wind out of me.

I'm going to use all the micropore in the camp if I'm not careful. I'm now bandaging both big toes, one little toe and the ball of my left foot every morning. Tomorrow I'm going to have to start on my knuckles because they are starting to gross me out. I need to sort my punching out as well, I have no skin on my little finger knuckles, this is bad technique, only my first and second knuckle should be suffering.

Damn my soft English skin.

Why hello there.

Consider this your substitute post. I have stacks written back at my bungalow but when I went to pick up my disk it was being cleaned and I didn't want to get in their way.
Needless to say, it's nice over here. Feel free to consider 'nice' and understatement.
At the beach, when I'm in water up to my neck, I can look down and see my feet. Bite that Bournemouth!
It's hot, hot like eating curry in a sauna hot. During training I manage to get through about 4 liters of water.
I ache like I've never ached before, my feet are a medley of blisters and open wounds, my knuckles are raw and on my right hand I have two nice craters in my knuckle that have turned a whiteish yellow.

I'll post more later. I've got about 6 long ones already written. This place is a breeding ground of good stories!

Training.

Can only get easier. Thank god.

The greatest band in the world.

I know I've said this about some bands before, but now I really mean it. Last night I went to a faux English bar ( It's like Britain, but with the weather). I ordered steak, I thought I'd treat myself after my first real day of training. The food was immaculate, the chef even came out to see if we were happy with everything. No chef has ever asked me if there was anything more he could do for me, I felt privileged.

In this bar there was a four piece band. All Thais, there was a bass, two lead guitars and keyboards. This band was so cool they almost redefined what I class as cool. They did songs from the likes of Elvis and Ray Charles, even a quite brilliant rendition of Under The Boardwalk. But what makes this band stand out is the sheer class with which they played. The lead singer changed for the different songs, they harmonised with each other, they just stood in, were wearing, and even oozing the kind of cool someone like me can only dream of owning. I could have cried when I found out they didn't have a cd I could buy, in fact they didn't have anything I could buy to remind me of them. However, I do know they are playing again next week so I'm going to go along and when they take a break I'm going to get a photo of myself with them.
Nobody I meet from this day forward will impress me as much as those four guys managed to. That is, unless they find a way to bring Evil Kenevil back to life, but that goes without saying.

The Beach.

When I'm standing in the water up to my neck, I can still see my feet through the water. The beaches are so nice. There is no seaweed sprawled near the waters front, there is no litter, there is no pollution. What there are though, are vendors ever hundred meters selling food and drink, people walking around selling everything from wooden eagles and snakes to pieces of Aloe Vera for sunburn and soft soft golden sand.
There was a guy selling hammocks too and at the time I said no but now I really regret it. I've been back since looking for him but so far, no luck. I reckon I can turn my veranda into the ultimate chill out zone with the clever use of a hammock and a cunning selection of music.

I start training properly tomorrow. Early night.

Would you like a Rolex sir.

I spent most of the afternoon looking for a bag. I know just what kind I want but cant find one anywhere. I was in one shop and when I asked for one a note of recognition went through the guys eyes. He then took me outside, into an abandoned shop next door, and then through the back. It was at this point that alarm bells started ringing. We then went through another door into a small room packed wall to wall with bags, jewellery and watches. All the walls were covered in black curtains and there was one over the door we just went through. The guy stood in front of the door and told me to "pick one". Not so much a request as an order. Now this was a small small room, just big enough for the both of us and a counter. The only exit was blocked and we were behind an abandoned shop. Nice.

Luckily I noticed that all the bags were really expensive handbags like Gucci and D&G, I explained that it was for me and that I didn't need a handbag. I then had to talk him out of selling me a Rolex (read Faulex) and begrudgingly he let me leave.

I'm glad it happened now it's over, but let's hope it never happens again.

A night full of firsts.

I went out for the first time tonight. Seeing as it was my first time the guys thought they would show me "the sights". Needless to say, I have never seen so many beautiful women in my life. And I mean really really beautiful. Also for the first time in my life the beautiful beautiful women were all freaking over me. Usually I go out, have a couple of drinks, make an ass of myself while trying to be smooth, and go home. Here though, oh man, I don't know how to put this. . . the challenge here, is to not get laid. Where as you would usually have to try to get a girls attention, here you have to try to get them to leave you alone.

I was on water as I had to take my bike to the bars we went to. Later though, I discovered that just because people take their bikes does not mean under any circumstances they don't drink. They do drink, a lot, and then watching their painful attempts to get on their bikes and get them started at the end of the night kind of lightens the feeling that you really don't see them making it home alive.

I spent the whole night jaw open, trying to take it all in. There is nothing you can't see or do here. We went to an after club and -sober- I made it through to six in the morning. . . sober . . . stone cold sober . . . man it was a long night.

Seeing as I tried to take in a whole torrent of information in one night I'm still not sure what to make of the nightlife. I know they tried to shock me, and in some ways they did. I expected everything I saw, but knowing about it and seeing it are two different things.

If I learnt anything that night it is this.

The subtle art of the chat up has been lost. And romance is dead.

Come ride the death machine.

For 3 300 Baht a month I have chosen to nearly die, every single day that passes. This is not because I've once again sold my body to medical science. Doing that in this county is even beyond me. It is because I am now the proud owner of a yellow death scooter. A scooter, meant for death, painted yellow. Death is it's game, yellow scooter is its name.

Getting this scooter was painfully easy. I just asked.

What is your name. Give me your money. Here are your keys.

That's it. So simple I would describe it as a painless procedure, would I not die in a scooter crash of irony if I did so.

The first time I tried to set off, I shot across the street towards a restaurant, I'm now on the wrong side of the road, with on coming traffic and a while bunch of people looking at me. I turn to face my side of the road again, try to gently pop the throttle and once again I'm a flying machine of un-coordination and fear. Then before I get to the petrol station, as the patrons kindly drained the tank before letting me have it, I managed to stall it and flood the engine - - and this thing is an automatic! Once the tank if full again I shoot towards a car which has to pull out of my way, and then I'm once again on the road. Just me, my scooter and a population with the kind of road sense less "Driving Miss Daisy" and more "Mad Max".

I was sweating so bad by the time I got back to the camp. I had a shower, and then a sleep. I know that I just need to take it out and practice but the thought terrifies me.

I think one of the places the fear stems from is my brothers bike. When I went out on that we were going a lot faster than I'm ever going to get, but I had a full set of leathers on and a helmet that looked like it might actually be of some use if I fell off.

Now, I'm wearing a helmet that has long since parted ways with it's padding and the only protection between me and certain pain from falling is a wistful layer of body hair.

Falling, quite literally, is not an option.

The first causality of war.

Any by 'war', I mean 'humidity'. Do you remember a little while ago, I didn't make much of it you probably missed it. I had a few little things called dreadlocks. I loved these dreadlocks, I thought they were awesome. I preened them daily, I plied them with lotions and potions the world over to make them look good and smell nice, I treated them with the respect and dignity I thought they deserved.

Then I got to Thailand.

Humidity is a strange thing. Worse still when it's already boiling hot and all you want to be is cool and dry, just like my dreads. Humidity is like being wrapped in a thick wet quilt, inside a sauna. . . . with hot wet feathers inside you lungs. Sometimes the humidity is lovely, at night when I'm sat on the veranda in nothing more than shorts and it's warm, I mean really nice and warm, but it's night, I love that. The other side of the coin though, is when I'm training. Because when you feel like you're inside a sauna, wrapped in a quilt, coughing up chicken insulation, you kind of want it to be drizzling a little bit. . . and cool. . oh what I would give for a nice cool drizzle!

While I may have a love hate relationship with humidity, my dreads only saw it one way. The wrong way. From the moment I stopped off the plane, my nice tight dreads started to transform. They started to resemble the tails of small squirrels sticking out of my head. No amount of rolling could reduce the fuzz, infact I think it might even have made it worse. Dreadlocks like to be dry, when they get wet they start to unravel themselves because of the reduced friction. They also smell if they stay wet for too long, not nice. So there I was, day after day, rolling away and applying my ointments, and what happened? They just started to look greasy, wet greasy squirrels tails that will end up smelling. I tried to dry them, but seeing as I'm sweating more than the builder who sold Barrymore "slip-safe" tiling for around his pool, it's not really working.

Eventually, something had to give.

It is at this moment that I would like to thank Dave. Dave tirelessly spend hour after hour after hour working on my hair to get it looking sweet. He would do any touch-ups that needed doing and he would get the awkward ones at the back that I couldn't reach. Without him, I would have never had dreads in the first place.

So one day, after morning training, I decided enough was enough, these things have got to go. I dutifully armed myself with shampoo, a steel comb, and time.

Needless to say, getting them out was a lesson in patience and pain. So much so that I haven't been able to get them out completely. Some of them are too stubborn to budge. This means I'm now left with a big mop of hair that is reminiscent of a badly kept seven year old boys. A big mess full of knots.

At some point, I need to find a barbers on this island and get the whole lot cut off.

Please note here people that I made a decision, I chose substance over style. . . this county is doing strange things to my head!

If you're on a plane and it crashes somewhere remote, hope I'm on board.

This isn't because I think I would be of any use. The only use I would be was if you were looking for someone who was comically hysterical, and even then I'd just get annoying. No, the reason I would be of so much use to you is that I taste great. I mean really great. Not wanting to sound too big headed about the whole thing I took a poll. I mean who am I to say I taste great, it's not like I've ever really had the opportunity to sample my own flesh. The poll was easy. If you like me, bite me, if you don't, leave. The results were outstanding. 143 out of 120 000 000 mosquitoes think I'm the best thing since a dog. When faced with statistics such as those it seems almost child like to complain that these bites are concentrated around the straps on my sandals making walking painful, and my left arm, for no reason I can fathom.

The French Lady.

If I sit on a bus and drink, I could get arrested. There are some parts of my city where if I drink in public, I get fined. I'm not even allowed to drink and ride my mountain bike. So why, please tell me, do they see it fit to serve alcohol on airplanes.

There just doesn't seem to be any logic behind it. Take a group of people, put them into what could become a stressful situation, cram them together and let them get drunk. What insight.

On this particular flight I was lucky enough to get the seat by the emergency exit. Lucky, I thought, as this meant I would be able to get some sleep as I had extra leg room to fit myself into. This seemed like such a good catch until the plane took off. On the ground it was quiet and serene and my leg room was my own, in the air the door was so noisy I couldn't sleep and my leg room was continually interrupted.

On the same flight as me, sitting in the aisle seats, there was a group of French people. Now I don't want this to turn into a French bashing post . . . but here we go anyway. The one particular French lady started drinking wine a full hour into a seven hour flight. She then continued to drink wine until she was suitable inebriated. This is, unsurprisingly, when she started making an ass of herself. As if singing was not enough, she started talking to the guy in front of me who could talk a few words of French. Busted, I though, he's gonna get stuck with the crazy lady. . . oh how fate laughed at me that day.

While I was gazing out the window she noticed me and thought she would come have a look too. As there was enough room to kneel in front of the door -barely- she did just that. Only, there wasn't quite enough space and her breasts ended up resting squarely on my knees. It wasn't a case of "oh oh, her breasts just brushed my knees" more "her breasts are fully, and with all their weight, on my knees. . . classy".

She then started to talk to me. In French. She would look out the window, look at me, talk for a while, I would do my best British tact of smiling politely while forming this post in my head. I understood a couple of words. There was Mag-Nif-Eek, and then later Be-You-Tee-Fall. I think she was talking about the clouds, I'm not entirely sure as I was far too distracted by the battering my knees were getting. I mean, there's no way in that turbulence free sky that she didn't realise her every movement and gesture was causing her breasts to knock, roll and rest on my knees. I was taken aback. I didn't know what to say. Luckily for me, my fake laugh and smile got me through the worst of it.

Then as we coming into landing, she was still being an ass and then she just got out of her seat and started dancing. A lady who was sat near her grabber her arm and very politely told her that she needed to be sat down as we were coming into land.

Boom.

All hell broke lose. There was a whole load of swearing going off. I don't know French, but you can tell when someone is swearing, and she was, repeatedly. This woman just wouldn't shut up, and then the best thing is, she was getting so mad that she wound herself up and just started getting madder. The poor woman that was trying to help her ended up getting a face full of abuse, then other customers started telling this woman to calm down and take her seat; so she started swearing with higher force and frequency, gotta love the French.

Security had to come over and see what the matter was, then when they grabber hold of her, she had a go at one of the people she was travelling with. He'd had a bit to drink as well and then both of them started on each other. There was another round of "who can be loudest" and then the Saudi security guy took her to another part of the plane. There was a little bit of clapping, people made sure the nice woman whom unfortunately started this whole thing off was ok, and we came into land.

This should have been the end of it. We had out bit of Air Rage, all would now be well. That should have been the end of it, yes; but guess what?

Lining up at Thai customs we were chatting and wondering what had become of her. It didn't take long before all our questions were answered as the now familiar sound of a drunk French woman swearing at the top of her voice rang through immigration. At this point I was at the gate getting my passport checked. The customs official stopped what he was doing for a while to watch her. A colleague of his called security. He looked at her, looked at me, stamped my passport and gave it me back. All through this he had been keeping an eye on her as she was in his queue, security were now approaching. As he gave me the all clear I nodded over to her, looked back at him and said "Have fun", for the first time since I saw him, he smiled. It was a smile that said "Ohhhhhh, I'm gonna".

Nearly There.

I've just got into Bangkok, thought I'd give my first internet cafe a whirl. The journey hasnt been too bad so far, apart from a complete lack of sleep there havnt been too many upsets, of course there have been some, otherwise I'd have nothing to write about, but they will have to wait untill I have more time.

Cant say much, got to go try and get some sleep before my next flight and the big introduction, I need to shave (Yes, it has been that long since I set off, nearly a week!!! har har har) and get some food.

Untill next week.

I'm off guvner.

Well this is it. My final post from the safe and comfortable shores of home. Next time I post it shall be from Thailand. In about three hours I have to go and start my journey. Hopefully it shall be uneventful and routine, the last thing I want is a hilarious "and then the engine failed and everyone started screaming" story to write about.

Thanks to everyone who has helped out with time or things over the past few days. A postcard shall be your gift!

Also, if anyone out there knows of an easy way to host and post pictures in blogger while I'm away then comment up. I'll be using internet café's so it's all gotta be online.

Here I go. Lets hope it doesn't hurt too much!

A question of customs.

This Wednesday I leave. Finally, after all the waiting and work, it?s nearly time for me to go. But now a question.

Do I take all my training supplements with me on the plane, or post them.

Let me explain.

To post them costs a lot. And I mean a Lot! It will be close to £100 to get it all over there with registered post. I wouldn?t want to use anything less than this as if it gets lost I?m stuffed, all for an extra twenty quid.

To take them in my bag may mean a very stressful questions and answers session with the Thai authorities as I try and convince them that the kilo?s of white powder I have in my bag are Not Drugs!! That they are Legal, and that I don?t want to spend the rest of my life in Prison!

And so I have to ask myself, am I overreacting, and I?ll be ok going through customs with completely legal substances, receipts and tamper proof containers; or should I just post it.

Most people think ?oh just take them through you wimp, you?re not doing anything wrong.? However, these are not the same people that have to take part in a sit down chat with Thai customs officials.

That, unfortunately, would be me.