Seasoning

TO THE KIKES

Happy celebration of the lasting properties of kosher oil in times of strife (and the one time we managed to fuck over the big dominating empire) by lighting candles on the days we remember and eating 5 or 6 slightly cold glutinous doughnuts at one sitting out of a combination of sugar addiction and a need to express somehow the inexpressible intricacies of a cultural identity divested of any substantial religious belief (or is that just me?), while pretending the festival is a little bit more important than it is just so we don't feel too left out of the Christmas thing. I've always preferred Pesach, much more glamorous, and who can beat a whole platter of symbolic foods and the visitation of a dead prophet midway through dinner?


TO THE CRISPIES

Happy birthday to your saviour. Christmas in Argentina is not quite the hurricane of commercialism that it is in England. I imagine that's because they have much less money to spend on useless crap. It's frankly glorious for me to be able to walk into a shop, café or restaurant and not be subjected to the same 14 Christmas songs as every year that aren't even any good anyway. Out here people have their Xmas dinner on Christmas Eve, often an asado (Gaucho style barbeque) with present opening at midnight. The day itself is usually a chilled affair with immediate family. I told many Argentines that English people tend to go out and get trashed in the pub on the 24th, then get up really early, eat a 6 hour lunch and drink constantly before falling asleep in front of the TV.


TO THE ZOROASTRIANS

I am not sure quite what you do to celebrate the death of Zarathustra on Zarathosht Diso (26 December), but I hope it involves presents and that you get nice ones. I'd also like to register my delight at how many Z's your religion involves. I've always thought a lack of Z's to be a terrible shortcoming in most religions today.


TO OTHER FAITHS AND ATHEISTS

Look, just eat the turkey, okay? Who's going to know? And if there's a shadowy presence lurking by the doughnut bowl, who'll raise the alarm? Not I. I too have seen Darkness's gory visage and know. Plus there's more than enough to go round.


EL AÑO NUEVO

Amazingly, omitting that little wiggly line on the N changes 'new year' to 'new anus'. Having just been informed by my marketing people of the recent success of a face transplant in Paris, I hope that 2006 may finally see a successful anus transplant in Rome. I also hope that none of you be the guinea pig. Though they probably have more advanced ways of doing keyhole surgery these days.

Tengo un cocodrilo en mi bolsillo

It was the same night as the puppet party that my bag was stolen from under my nose by an urchin selling Jesus cards in a restaurant called Hipopótamo next to the infamous Parque Lezama that forms the boundary between culturally happening and slowly gentrifying San Telmo and the rough and ready streets of La Boca. The only night I have seen fog in Buenos Aires, hanging like a dream over the hilly park, griddled with paths and studded with bizarre classical statues. My bag contained all my books and notebooks, numbers and letters and writings worthless to no-one but me and future scholars. I would like to hope that the penniless kid who nicked it was prompted by the contents to commence a life of letters but it is far more likely that the contents ended the night garnishing one of the numerous piles of rubbish propping up lampposts in every corner of the slippery city.

I was very upset, but the puppet party was the perfect antidote. Set in a courtyard deep in Boca territory, the partiers were a brightly coloured selection of street performers, clowns and puppet masters who put on a great show among heckles and crates of Quilmes beer. There was some bad onstage chemistry between compere straight man and clown wearing a toaster in front of his face. A complex war story involving a soldier running slow motion armed with a large elongated chicken was particularly entertaining. When the sun started smacking the city with its cheery hammer I was wandering in a stupor with an American clutching my guitar. On a previous night in the same area I had been accosted by a wiry old man who yabbered at me in dense Porteño slang and showed me his (possibly artificial) gun while asking 'Estoy ladrón? Estoy ladrón? (Am I a thief?)'. I think he was just looking for love, but I had none to give.

Un Manga de Boludos

SOME MEAT INFORMATION

Vacío, which also means 'empty' is a flank steak and my current favourite.

Asado, no translation, is a kind of barbeque where the meat is cooked for a long time over smouldering coals to ensure it is cooked all the way through leaving it tender as a lover's caress on a Spring morning.

Lomo, or loin steak, is a popular choice, sometimes snuggled under a blanket of ham and cheese (sorry mum). Lomito is the same but thinner.

Morcilla is a squidgy blood sausage delicious when mashed onto crusty bread. It has the gutsy consistency of intestine and the rough charm of a peasant farmer slapping your ass as you mount his donkey.

Tira de Asado are short ribs (not a medical condition). Tenacity required when penetrating fat to the juiciness within. Just like everything.


WHAT WERE YOU SAYING?

My lovely friends Portia and Itay left Buenos Aires to pursue the elixir of eternal youth in the Patagonian mountains. Portia gave me an early birthday present of a new bag and a bottle of champagne - I had trouble deciding which one to drink and which one to put things in! I was extremely grateful for the new bag as the French Exchange style rucksack inherited from Jazmin had entered the final phase of zip dementia. It was painful to dispose of such a trusted and long-serving slave, but sometimes loved ones are better off 'put out to pasture' to save them bothering themselves and others (sorry mum).

I am hoping to move hostels and find an apartment soon, but leaving The End of The World (TM) is bizarrely difficult, like reading the works of Samuel Beckett in a public toilet.

Teaching English in businesses means sitting around chatting about football and politics while being overly pedantic. So nice when one's job is also one's hobby. A plastic cup of ludicrously strong & sweet coffee lubricates. One of my students is indescribably boring. I just fix my mind on what I'm going to earn out of the conversation, which reminds me of being at a cocktail party with media executives.

I went to a party in an exquisite house. The people were painfully overcool and the DJ operated in a different time zone. Balloons manipulated the wind in their bid to escape the confines of the roof garden.

I feel scattered but vaguely stationary. The weather is the black and pleasant hammer of moistness. When eating you need an entire toilet roll to absorb the sweat.


BOCA JUNIORS 2 2 UNIVERSIDAD CATOLICO

I have never been so high up at a football match. People pinioned themselves to the fences to see better. Boca were terribly shit in the first half. In the second half they scored and the stadium become a whirling maelstrom. Then the Chilean Catholics retaliated with two goals, and their 15 or so fans bounced around obnoxiously waving for some reason a French flag. I learnt some nice phrases like la concha de tu madre and hijo de puta. The man next to us was like a puta machine, bellowing it every 15 seconds and soaking half the stadium with a high powered jet of saliva.


CON PACIENCA Y SALIVA EL ELEFANTE SE COGE EL HORMIGA

With patience and saliva the elephant fucks the ant. This well known Argentine phrase says more than a little about national priorities, as well as conjuring up some hideous mental images.

Can you believe the Falklands happened?

SAVE THE BABIES

The tyre was still rolling past us down the deserted street when the police collared them. Pulled their car round in a U, and waded out of it the way fat men do. Three boys, non-specific adolescent age. Mara pulled me over to a good spot right next to them to watch. I was appalled- in England we usually just emulate the badly traumatised and deeply sociopathic; edging by looking slanted up through furtive eyes to decipher what's happening. 'Are we just going to watch!' I asked with the thrill of the fairground. 'We have to support them,' she said. Two more people had marched up and taken position as well, the dreadlocked woman standing defiant arms folded. I realised we weren't watching but taking part.

Bizarre really, for me anyway. I'm usually on the side of the adults in England, despite barely being one myself. Can that be true? After all my youth work? But in Argentina with its tender wounds of military junta and highly corrupt police force, we had to be there to look out for the kids.

The Officer McClusky figure sidled up to 'You cannot mess with me' dreadlocked woman and attempted to justify himself.
'Did you see what happened?'
'I just got here.'
'They were rolling a tyre down the road, it could have caused an accident.'
'They're just children, leave them alone.'

Four more police cars appeared, presumably out of boredom. Mara called out 'Hey - they're just kids playing!' A warning and the kids were sent on their way through the chaos of the squadron cars. Before they went they turned to us and saluted. 'Ciao chicos!' People power against the draconian security forces. I felt like a Paris student in 1968, it was breathtaking.


END OF THE WORLD AND SUPERPANCHO WONDERLAND

In its favour it has jazz chequered flooring, an ingenious mural showing a continuation of the room into a parlour filled with sophisticated cocktail-drinking silhouettes, and a free pool table. Against it, the bathrooms are an enduring symbol of urban squalor, the kitchen a theme park for cockroaches where the cutlery drawer typically contains just one dirty teaspoon and there is no cosy lounge area. On the first day I arrived with a trio of Ozzie girls I'd met in Santiago, I intended to leave the hostel at once.

I had a nap at 5pm and woke up at midnight to the sound of severe racousness echoing in the gymhall acoustics of Downstairs. Drawn like a dung beetle to a pile of steaming ordure, I happened down to find an exuberant and chatty mélange of Israelis, French-Canadians, Chileans, the inevitable English and many more. Before long I'd been introduced to the local 24 hour shop where decent wine can be bought for 50 English pence and large bottles of beer for 80p. Soon after that I brought down my guitar and unwittingly lit a powder keg of enthusiasm. I decided to stay at the End of the World for a while.

Another night I found myself at a festival of Balkan music at the Armenian Institute, and then all of a sudden (in the immortal words of Jonathan Richman) I was dancing in a lesbian bar . We emerged into the sunshine and dined extravagantly on Superpancho hotdogs (effectively free at 1 peso 25 each) and beer at our local 24h pancho house. Opera Bay is a superclub built to emulate the Sydney Opera House, with a wide open portion overlooking the spectacular mouth of the estuary, betoothed with sparkling skyscrapers. And when Susannah the brazileña tried to make me understand the word 'tile' in Portuguese as we walked down the street, I turned to look at her mime on a wall. I began to walk again and collided forcefully with a large metal box. For a few days one cheek was permanently rouged and my nose resembled that of Robert de Niro in Raging Bull.

The hostel is situated in San Telmo, a neighbourhood of Buenos Aires close to Downtown whose mention inspires a look of disgust on the faces of middle aged Jewish women (naturally I am beginning to insinuate myself into the network). It is an historic area with narrow cobbled streets and good bars peeking out from behind enormous piles of festering rubbish.


SANTIAGO IN A BLUR

I had flown straight from New Zealand to Santiago, Chile. I found a converted mansion in which to stay, called the Casa Roja. I played much guitar with large groups of Argentians, and met a lovely Uruguaya called Evelyn with a killer wrist on the ping pong table. 4 hours Spanish lessons with an española called Ahinoa ['Hey what's that girl's name?' 'Ahinoa.' 'Yes, I know that's why I asked you.' etc] fed me some much hungered for culinary vocabulary and pulled me through some juicy prepositions.

The culture shock was thrumming on the streets. Not only had I jumped from Western to Latino, from 1st world to 3rd, but from depopulated NZ with its vistas and mountains and inalienable relationship with the land, to a big dirty South American city with curtains of smog and millions of people. I loved it, of course. Everywhere were people lounging and chatting. Everywhere were couples really going for it in the street. Everywhere were stupendously gorgeous and exotic looking women. I could live with this, I decided.


EL ACENTO PORTEÑO

I am learning Spanish, but inevitably the Buenos Aires bastard of the Argentine variant. 'LL' and 'Y' are pronounced 'SH' instead of 'Y' in Spain-Spanish, and there's a different groovy informal 'you' form. It's quite a sexy little spin off, also used in Montevideo, as Evelyn the Uruguaya taught me. The pronunciation is Italianate and highly dramatic. All sorts of plosive squirting noises are employed as conversational enhancers. Taxi drivers are hilarious. An affectionate BA greeting:

¡Che boludo! - Hey asshole! (use with discretion)


OVERTURES OF GREASE AND HANDSLAPS

I am putting out mucilaginous tentacles to find food. I have put up signs offering lecciones privadas con profesor recibido en la universidad de Cambridge. In life I have barely started to abuse my Educational Privilege. I attended a meeting of the Jewish gay, lesbian and transexual club to find contacts. The room was full of men ranging from upper youth to lower old age. I brought Itai and Jeanette from my hostel; Jeanette was thrilled to be the only female, and not Jewish at that. We mingled and watched 3 fairly arresting Israeli short films on gay themes. In one a scorned woman fakes a coma to stop her lover leaving the country. Another had a large-eared teenage boy exploring his sexuality by orchestrating meetings between other men on his computer. I chatted voraciously, working the room with an empanada in one hand and a plastic cup of diet coke in the other. Received a few potential leads. Then I attended Conversation Club at Hillel House, Jewish student hangout and pulled out a bunch of flyers. I searched myself for shame and found none.


BA OVERVIEW

There is a glut of dogs in prime pedigree, being walked ten at a time by dog walkers who are some of the highest paid workers in the city. I saw someone tie up a bundle of dogs outside his flat and go inside, presumably for a nap or to watch TV for a few hours. Cushy work. An enormous muzzled hound cocked his head at me to say 'I could do this man's work, and you'd only have to pay me marrowbone.' Or he might have been assessing my nutritional value.

I have made good friends round the pool table. I am platonically sharing a room with a crazy Portia from Blackpool. There are some people, like the camp and ebullient Pablo & Ivan double act from Chile, who appear to live at the hostel indefinitely. I might have sunk into that state of being, at least for now. My boss (for my 4-6 hours teaching a week) is a loquacious entity named Sandy 'La Teacher', who talked continuously through my interview without inhalation only to say after an hour 'so you didn't ask about money' not that I hadn't been waiting for a nanosecond pause to introduce the subject.

The coffee is excellent, and the unbridled carnivorousness of the nation is only matched by how eagerly they all smoke in every space, public, private, children and old people welcome. I experienced an election, when the whole city was closed down. My private lessons were a good opportunity to grill a variety of people about politics. The broad leftist only-credible-option Peron party got in again, but there were significant gains from a pro-business magnate called Macri.

Graffiti is more political. Music is more political. People have more style and finesse, even those working in McDonalds. People my age are forced by financial necessity to live either with their parents or in bunkbedded dorms. But food and drink is cheap and plentiful, and music crashes into the smog refracted sunlight of each new day.

Newly Zealous and the Penetration of the West

LIVING ON MY OWN

My campervan weeks passed in a dream of endless valleys, rushing ice rivers and various Germans. I read and thought a lot, drank cups of tea out of plastic cup with van perched atop vertiginous point after point. I skydove in Queenstown.

New Zealand has carved a touristic niche for itself in the arena of extreme sports and gymnastic pasttimes (not to mention Lord of the bloody Rings). Queenstown is a whole town built upon the obscene money travellers spend hurling themselves off cliffs tied to elastic, canyon swings, gliders, parachutes. Cross the bridge and be undershot by dozens of jetboats and rafts in a space of minutes. Hear screams from the surrounding sky. The town looks to a cliff up which scales a cable car. Naturally there is a bungy jump from the cable car.

I decided to spend much of my remaining cash on a skydive. I was driven out to the N-Zone skydive ranch. The van was full of Swede, with a pinch of Ozzie and English. We sat in the blinding sun as two ladles of Swede went up and came down.

Then it was us: myself, Mr. Xtreem Sportz Ozzie, and English girl. We donned our suits and were taught how to hang out of the plane door before jumping (make yourself into banana, open arms when tapped). We were introduced to the people who would strap themselves to us for the jump. I was thrilled to receive an enormous Serb by the name of Sasa. We all crammed into a tiny metal tube with wings. I sat between Sasa´s legs, according to ancient custom.

The plane flew up through mountains dusted with icing sugar. All around a vague cloud layer the sky was brilliant blue blinding. I felt fear for the first time, and grateful to be enveloped by titanic Serbian limbs. Sasa attached us together and I put on hat, gloves and goggles. The door opened and I was suddenly hanging out. Then it was chaos.

They say you never remember the first ten seconds. The brain can´t understand what is happening - and who can blame it? The world was everwhere, mountains flashing and jerking lake. Rolling and diving and my face making an elastic bid to return to the plane. Sasa tapped me several times before I realised what that meant and splayed my arms, hugging the mass of air below me. Exhileration, rush, narcotic! I screamed for a bit before deciding there was no point. Freefall was 50 seconds but passed in a triangular vortex. Then the cord went and we were yanked frozen still.

Nothing can replicate the silence and peace then. After the psychotic scream of air, we were stationary hanging in the sky. The bulging meniscus of the world curved up around in a wall-eyed oval. A plumline in a snowglobe. The harness was giving me a groinal heimlich manoeuvre but all I could do was gibber:

This is ins-ane. This iss ins-ane. Unh. It´s beauti...ful. Ins-ane.

The lake stretched blue, the mountains bobbed. Tiny white dots grazed in the field. Our shadow became apparent, drawing circles on the green. Everything grew larger. We lifted legs and swooped in, hit the ground running. Absurd and wonderful; epiphanic. I stuttered with adrenaline. Cut a sun-starched slice of that moment.


ABBA´S DEATH DAY AND SHANA TOVA

Before I left Wellington Miri thoughtfully gave me a yahtzeit memorial candle to commemorate my dad´s Hebrew death date. 2 lunar years on I sat on the beach near Nelson with a wide angle of sea and sky. I chatted to something resembling my father and looked at my life through his eyes. I sensed pride and vicarious enjoyment of my adventuring, with a definite underlay of career-related concern. I thought about his life and his aspirations, thoughts and feelings, all now residing purely in the memory of others. Vicarious is the word. I ate cheese and Thai red curry paste sandwiches; I´m sure he wouldn´t have objected to food at his own memorial service.

Rosh Hashana followed soon after and was saturated with memories of him and years of standing by him in Shul. He was always so happy to have Renato and me next to him in Shul. It was perhaps his high point of fatherhood, the time when he felt he had succeeded, when so often he thought he´d failed. It made me sad because I am not a Jew in his ideal. He was hardly Mr. Halacha but he tried, and crucially, believed it was right to do so. I can´t believe that, at least not now. He felt it so strongly, beating his chest during Avinu Malkeinu his passion was tangible. My Judaism will always be symbolised by the image of my father, I think it is often the way - God of my fathers. But I am pulled away from appeasing his memory by my confusion. This gives me a profound sense of guilt at this time of the year. I don´t want this to detract from using the memory of my father as a source of love and joy. Perhaps that takes time.

I went to a shul in Christchurch (ironically) containing approximately 15 people, most of whom were octagenarians. On the request of the Rabbi I attempted to blow the shofar on the bimah but all that emerged was a pathetic squeak. A 75 year old shoved me aside and trumpeted energetically. Despite all my best intentions, I failed to secure a lunch invitation.


BOOKS

Amused and elated by absurdity of The Master and Margarita. Been drinking Margaritas to enter the holy spirit.

Blown away by family interrelations in The Corrections.

Book of Fame by Lloyd Jones chronicles lyrically the rabidly successful tour of the UK by the 1905 New Zealand rugby team: the first All Blacks. I´m no rugby fan but they were legends. Poetic exploration of their knowledge of space and national selfhood.


JAEGER BOMBS

Simply take a glass of red bull and a shot glass filled with jaegermeister. Add the jaeger, glass n all, to the red bull. Neck immediately. Highly popular in NZ. Drives you mental. I was treated to several of these by an American firefighter called Mike who was about to go to Antartica and was spending up his US government money. Thank you Uncle Sam. A Tanzanian called Messenjah with his name on his jacket was also part of our troupe, along with a couple of Icelandic females. Messenjah had effusive theories about positive attitude, cf. Stand up for your Rights.


NZ CHIPS

come in binbag size portions. I used a litre of vinegar.


RIGGERS

of ale are 2 litre bottles that are obscenely cheap and refillable. God bless New Zealand.


SQUANDOR: THE LAST INDIAN LAWYER

On my last night in the van I slept by the sea with wild wind buffeting and a demonic spread of stars. I woke up to seals basking on the rocks.

Dempsey was high on life, or possibly something else. We played guitar and drank beer on the ferry to the North Island, and formed a little family with a gym teacher and sex shop attendant, a guy with lots of piercings, and a hoary old singer songwriter from Oz. There was also a heavily tattooed man who hitches up and down NZ on a permanent basis. Positive things that Dempsey repeatedly said:

This is all just a big advincha
Kids are so out there and on to it
It´s so amazing that you just walk into a pub and then walk out in a different place
Life is a great advincha
etc advincha advincha etc

I helped Lissa move by driving a fun bus belonging to Miri´s family. The tyre almost exploded shortly after we almost plummeted off a cliff. Plumes of black smoke rose from the tyre. Lissa limped around on a sprained ankle and fell over a few times.

For my last party night, we ate strips of meat at a Mongolian BBQ. Then I started buying tequilas. The bitterenders, ie. myself, Claire and Sam, bought party pills. Party pills are totally legal herbal highs that people of any age can buy in 24h shops in NZ, and they are extraordinarily good. We danced to Blondie and croony classics in a club called Indigo and babbled to everyone on the smoking balcony. Sam and I swayed for an hour. The barman foolishly served us absinthe. Of course we were there till the bitter end. We were effusively thanking the barman and the DJ for everything when I noticed that only the barman was clear, while the rest of the world was in soft focus. I explained this to him lengthily, drawing comparisons with the presentation of the Love Interest in early episodes of Star Trek. We emerged into the street and sat on a floating jetty watching the sun rise dazzling. The water pink-rippled magnificently. Wellington is a stunning place.

I was very sad to leave Lissa and all my new gorgeous friends. I had fallen in love with Wellington life but the date line beckoned. New Zealand was a lovely warm bath and I was becoming prunelike. I left Wellington at 6pm on Monday and arrived in Santiago at 1pm on the same day. What a head fuck.

Kiwi Capital and Campervan Collaterol

TEA AND DEAD SHEEP

Apologies dear reader for the warp and weft of my narrative. We are all but poor loomsters in country cottages circa 1814.

As I type, I am living in a campervan. I spent a few days ensconced in a carpark in Nelson. Now, that might not sound like a New Zealand idyll, perched on a granite head with black waves pummelling the coast and slightly deformed people waddling around on stilts, but Nelson is a gorgeous sunsoaked place. I have left Nelson now in search of that monstrous idyll. After all, as the great Jonny Berliner once said:

There's nothing like stopping on a country lane simply to make a cup of tea and when your kitchen is your back seat there's no finer cuppa.

And he should know - he lived in a bus for much longer. Anyway to this end, I stopped at a viewpoint called Something Saddle. And there they were, the Southern Alps on the horizon, white caps sparkling in the sunlight. I drank tea and ate biscuits, and scowled, manfully. More on this later.

But now, I beg you to travel back with me but a menstrual period. You are standing on a pile of dead sheep in Auckland staring paranoiac upwards, when you see a tiny grey specklet berthed in the sky. But wait - it is growing! Could it be - one of those metal monsters that have conquered the clouds? And on it, obsessively reading My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok, eating a gargantuan chocolate muffin and totally ignoring the view, is that.... Lemuel Gulliver? No, it's Yorick the pastor. No it's Amy Earhart. Oh, no, it's.. oh fuck it.


DORKLAND TO SMELLINGTON IN ONE EASY CHAPTER

I flew from Auckland to Wellington the next day.


FOR ANARCHISTS THEY'RE EXTREMELY WELL ORGANISED

Wellington is scattered over a series of bays, with a ridiculous system of gorgeous hills, a plentitude of sea everywhere, and brain-defying connections between the disparate suburbs. I didn't know there were still Anarchists but the movement is alive and Wellington. I went to an Anarchist stronghold for a free Spanish lesson from Jose. I made myself a cup of tea and deposited 40c in the food donation box. I'm not sure if the Spanish lesson was actually free or if I'd just failed to find the Spanish lesson donation box.

I read some leaflets about why your vote doesn't make a difference. I believe in their communal enterprise, and they were all very environmentally sound, but do we have to do away with Democracy? I find election campaigns so entertaining.

I was in good time for the New Zealand election. Lissa & Co. were extremely absorbed, and I couldn't help but be the same. I watched a leaders' debate. Owing to proportional representation, quite a few ridiculous parties get a look in. A short square odious guy called Rodney Hide leads the 'scrap all bureaucracy' party. Someone out of a 70s cop show spoke for the 'scrap all immigrants' party. The leader of the oppostion National Party was wormlike and chemistry teacheresque. He had an Anglo-American accent lilt rather like Lloyd Grossman. And imperious throughout was the matriarch Helen Clark.


WELLINGTON TIMES

Borrowed a lovely group of friends from Lissa. Lissa is in fantastic shape, and has a great new feller by the name of Russco. Won $40 at poker. Saw a great klezma band. Got drunk repeatedly at a place called Chow's with fantastic cocktails. Played a lot of Scrabble. Tried some NZ party pills (legal). I didn't think they'd had any effect on me then I realised with a start that I was standing on a balcony chewing my lip and babbling about Shakespeare to anyone who'd listen. Ate disgustingly good blueberry muffins in a cafe with a high opinion of itself. Spent a rustic weekend eating in Palmerston North with Bob & Helen Chong. Made some obscene cocktails with Lissa's blender and a variety of foodstuffs. Spilled a galaxy of red wine on her carpet. Played a ferocious game of ping pong with Russco.


MAKARACOSMIC

Drive but five minutes in any direction from Wellington and you will find a stunning bay. Makara, for example, is a particularly special beachy bay rocky headland place. It contains dinousaur egg rocks, an elephant's graveyard of driftwood, the sea swooshing on gravel, and, up extremely high, some gun battlements from the War that point far far out to the serene and endless blue of the sea. They were created with the aim of foiling an invasion. Apparently Hitler had intended at one point to invade New Zealand in order to tap its natural resources. But that doesn't limit the incongruity of those battlements so high and far from anything, in the middle of farmland and sheep atop a dizzying cliff. We played frisbee with a piece of a bread for a surprisingly long time.


RAIN

Quintessential Kiwi film, a touch sepia sentimental but highly well acted and atmospheric. Apparently sums up the collective Kiwi childhood holiday experience. But why kill the kid?


TALES FROM THE OPEN ROAD

Arrived in Wanaka under a canopy of misty rain. Last night I parked at the bottom of the enormous glacial Haast valley with snowy mountains standing guard. The radio doesn't work so I talk to myself and sing incessantly. I think I might be too far gone to host passengers now even if I found some.

I met a Dutchie driving round the South island sleeping in the back of his car. He prefers to park up in country lanes, eschewing cities. Whereas I love 'em. My favourite place is right in the seedy middle of a town, round the back of a restaurant in a residentially deserted carpark. This is the real me, I feel. I have resorted to licking cutlery clean - is this a backward step?

When I'm stumbling around these human settlements people peer at me as if to say 'What a solipsist!'. I just calmly say to them 'I might be a solipsist but at least I exist.' But at this point they have vanished, or never were there, at least at that time, in this place, in that form.


And yes, what if I did play in an Irish band with a mean fiddler and a barnstorming banjo (not to mention the frollicking flautist and beneficent bodhran)? No-one was fooled into thinking I was Irish, even when I started bragging loudly about my staying power. But I chimed in all the same on my guitar, though why it was making a chiming sound is beyond me. Whiskey in the Jar, Danny Boy, D A G D A G D A A G went the chords for every song but FUCK! was it exhilarating, especially when ol' Fran or Jesse on the fiddle led up the tempo and the whole pub was stamping and singing. Some of my contributions were I Will Survive and By the Rivers of Babylon, which were played with degrees of accompaniment. I figured Irish pub songs and Gospel are both indicative of hope in the face of cultural hegemony, no?


The West Coast is sheer drama. Black crags, a monstrous sea, terrifying cliffs and pancake rocks. Sorry, what? Did you say Pancake Rocks? Yes, they were a part of the early Imperial Government's attempts to 'breakfast this shitty little island up, what!' (Colonel Arthur Dagenham IV, Redbridge Balloon Corps). These limestonically layered piles of pancakes are riven by whamples of hard grey water into a multilevelled system of coarse tunnels through which the water surges to -POP!- up out of blowholes. Geologists don't know quite how the pancake stacks were formed, but for me the real mystery is how the Maori name for the area Panakaiki (meaning 'springs in the rock' and referring to the blowholes) sounds so bloody similar to 'pancake'? Only time will tell.


Abel Tasman was okay but once you've seen one dazzlingly gorgeous untrammelled beach in a cove with blue green water delicately playing among the silt you've seen them all.


I ran over a couple of hobbits today. They're quite difficult to see. First I knew was when I heard someone screaming 'Fek!' in an unconvincing Irish accent and then - bdm! bdm!. Though apparently they're a pest for the farmers.

Speaking of roadkill - if I collected all the dead possums (possa?) I have seen and stitched them together I could carpet Greenland.


For the past 2 days I have seen a glacier a day. I am hoping to maintain this excellent record. I saw the Fox Glacier (mint flavoured) and the Franz Josef Glacier which is similar to Franz Ferdinand only less rock-based. I saw quite a few tourists with bad cases of terminal face. Not a pretty sight. Foolishly I walked to Franz Josef in only a fluffy bra and lacey panties. My heels were a nightmare on those large chunks of rock.

But my favourite place so far has been the enchanted forest just next to Fox Glacier. I had never believed in fairies until one nicked my wallet. But the leaning trees carpeted with moss and the little murmuring creeks were enough to soothe my loss.

Hawro Darwin

THE KIWI: FLIGHTLESS, YET LAYER OF DISPROPORTIONATELY ENORMOUS EGG

Travelling is a metaphor for life, and that was a metaphor for travelling. What on earth have I been doing for the last four weeks? I have been in New Zealand though I have barely seen any of it, being camped out in Lissa's bunker-like lounge on a futon. It might be said I have ghost-written an informal fact book for boys for a leading New Zealand author under a pseudonym (his not mine). Though it might be said that I have merely collected facts into organic heaps and piled them up against his shed.

In Wellington, this overwhelmingly trendy city with cloistered and fecund music scene and proliferation of anarchists/barefoot types wandering the pavements, I received great respect from locals for getting a job in Tupelow, a bar so trendy you need a bloodhound and radar system to even find it. However they could only give me one shift every six months so I'm forced to pass them by.

But first I need to return to Australia.


TO BRISBANITY AND BEYOND

Ten minutes before the bus to Brisbane I realised with horror that the pouch with all my extremely important papery things was still behind the desk at the hostel.

I leapt into a taxi and barked at the driver.

'ALL RIGHT SOLDIER - WE GOT EIGHT GODDAMN MINUTES TO GET TO BEACHES AND BACK. IF WE MAKE IT, YOU'RE A HERO. IF WE DON'T, I'M GOING TO ADMINISTER YOU A SUPPOSITORY - WITH THE BARREL OF MY AK47!'

He gave me a firm salute, passion and provenance bursting through the veins of his neck. Seven and a half minutes later the cab screeched into the bus bay. I shot the driver in the back of the neck. Poor bastard knew too much.

Brisbanic contained chillified cocktails in funksome bar the Press Club, garnished by giant cogs and elaborate light fittings. Superclub FAMILY has four floors. It pumps some kind of house through the bottom three. The top level resembles a space pod with breaky tunes and a Tim Burton ice bar. We bonded with Justin and Whassername. Justin was convinced I was an undercover cop. Before long we were all gyrating on a podium amid diverging washing lines of laser light. Spent a while curled in a gazebo drinking gin and tonic. The song You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To is not addressed to 11 people with whom you are sharing a dorm.

There is something of London about Brisbane, and I don't just mean the concrete South Bank replete with art galley and theatre complex. Damn - I like it! Hannah bought a green hat. In the art gallery a film concerning the meticulous destruction of a supermarket warehouse was hypnotic. They were working intently, psychopathically. The camera's slow pan revealed at least three ways to destroy toilet paper, as well as some people diligently pulling down shelves and chipping away at the bricks beyond.


EVOLUTION AND OTHER FACTORS

A deadpan voice above a spiral beard belonging to Dwayne informed us that Elke's Backpackers had mislaid our room reservation. This was at 2am. Eventually we shacked up in the TV room, to be woken by a stream of people gawping through the french windows.

Darwin is small and hot, rednecked but charming. It was great to get back into the heat and all the lack of socks that entails. We feasted on steak. Darwin's nightlife consists of a fantastic market with every food on the planet. A stall called Roadkill served us skewers of crocodile, camel and kangaroo. I think the retching was due to the quality of the meat, not the incongruity of the animals. Aboriginal bands cavorted and belly dancers shook their collective booty. A stargazer sold constellations. On the beach the sun splashed the sky with unset raspberry jelly. Cheap flip flops gauged symmetrical chunks out of my feet.


PRACTICAL PARK PRATTLING

We cruised national parks Kakadu and Litchfield in a rental car with a rental tent. After setting fire to the car on its first journey (nothing permanent) we reached a campsite and realised our grave error. Entire civilisations of mosquitos were born and died on our non-repellented bodies. They love the fleshy bit at the back of the upper arm. My skin was carpeted with thick clusters of red welts. You could barely hear anything above the sound of buzzbombing. We walked five minutes to the toilet block to get water for pasta. While we were there some bastard completely rearranged the layout of the entire campsite. For over an hour we wandered through bracken holding a pan full of water. Our lantern sputtered out. Eventually a drunken Ozzie took pity on us and used Common Sense to find our site.

I had to do all the driving (except for a few unnamed sections) but the car was automatic which gave me a feeling of great power. The roads were mostly deserted which meant we could travel at interstellar speeds. The landscape was reddish and desertesque with endless scrubby trees and terrifying rock behemoths propping up the sky. It was seriously hot. The fizzy jubes flowed freely through our systems manifested in a manic gleam of the eye. Cathedral termite mounds towered cathedral-like. The Moreno Wetlands were obscenely wet. Thousands of whistling ducks stood in groups as if at a community meeting to discuss how wet the wetlands were. They whistled and whooped, and the Aboriginals' favourite magpie geese honked. Jabaru cranes probed. I got the car stuck on a concrete breezeblock. As I edged back and forth to get it off, brain-crumbling scrapes made me fear for my deposit. At the campsite we kept the water boiling and the mosquitos melted away with only the psychotic braille on my arm to confound the blind. The intoxicated moonlight spilled into the tent like frozen vodka and milk.

To Blood on the Tracks we drove to Yellow Water Billabong at 5am. Dawn rusted the sky. Three boatloads of tourists had made it. A Kiwi woman spoke through a PA about crocodiles and birds. We saw plenty of both. Crocodiles are my favourite. Though preening eagles aren't bad. A guy in front had a camera like a rocket launcher, and kept demanding we go back to look at kingfishers. Not another bloody kingfisher. The sun rose and mist shagpiled the saturated plains. I wanted to see an archer fish spit at an insect but they were all off fighting in that senseless war against the shrews. I asked if anyone had a baby to throw to the crocodiles and received a stony silence.


OLD MEN FALL AND A BRECHTIAN FAREWELL

The main campsite of ghost town Pine Creek was locked up and deserted. A small chalk board bore the message 'Gone fishin. Back soon'. Perfect. Fortunately a small site next to the Shell petrol station was open, and crammed with old men positively ejaculating out of campervans. We drove into the corner next to the road and set up shop. We dined extravagantly on steak and mash with onion mushroom gravy and drank extravagantly on red wine. The old men peered at us from behind their fish.

Litchfield had stunning waterfalls in which to swim and frolic. A secret warm rockpool at Wangi Falls was particularly frolicsome. We camped within earshot of Wangi's roar. Our neighbours were long-term itinerants. So many Australians sell up house and board campervans to travel the country. Incomprehensible distances are part of the culture, and campervans a beautiful way to manage them. I would love to do that - outward on the great red roads, self-sufficient and able to eat at a moment's notice. I feel my great skills as mechanic would stand me in good stead.

Darwin Arts Festival was ON. The Threepenny Opera was packed out. The set was thrilling. The actors stood around barking their lines with several seconds delay between each. What is it about the Australian accent? Perhaps I'm slightly prejudiced but the sound of those nasal syllables embarrassing the stage makes me laugh out loud. Sorry. We were forced to escape early to eat pizza. Hannah flew off to the States via Fiji and Mexico, and I mournfully watched Aboriginal dance shows and drank vodka with Irish people.


9 INCHES OF DEMOLITION AND THE END OF AN ERA

Brendan and Gin were overexcited about the Nine Inch Nails concert. They donned a panorama of make-up and monochrome clothes. Fritzi took me to dine with a House of Germans. This reaffirmed my love for the Teutonic people, most of whom have by now infiltrated my family. A Demolition Party was rocking Tamarama.

So they tell me: these houses are/were the last vestige of the neighbourhood's former beatnik character, but finally the siege has been successful. They too will now meet the demolition ball, thus heralding Tamarama Beach's complete gentrification into Yuppie Parquet Floor & Slate Fireplace Land.

I celebrated this highly symbolic occasion by shamelessly booze-scavenging. I found a suspicious premixed caramelly drink in a fridge and guzzled it before delightedley securing a rogue bottle of white wine. I met several assorted beatniks and Teri, a documentary producer, who kindly gave me fruit salad.

Sunday's Opera House gleamed like enamel against polished blue tile. With Lissa's friends Paula and Caroline I quaffed wine and cheese like a newly released prisoner. At home Brendan and Gin were still relishing the 9 inches. I watched some grisly videos and chatted long with Brendo. Nice way to finale.

Sydney Poitier and Fraser Crane

THE MAN WITH NO EARS AND INNOVATIVE COCKTAILS

Brendon and his housemate Gin held up a sign 'The Man With No Ears' so I could recognise them at the airport. All three of us had ears, fine ones, so the sign must have been a homage to a fictional entity, or some kind of grisly summons. Gorgeous and welcoming like the hot winter sun, B and G swept me to breakfast where the enormity of Australian portion sizes became apparent.

The waiter used a forklift truck to deliver the toast.

I eagerly ran into the bathroom to watch water swirling down the plughole in the opposite direction, but I'd forgotten which way it swirls at home. I think one of them is anti-clockwise and the other is clockwise, but it could be the opposite. People in Sydney wear large sunglasses, and Brendon is no exception.

I gorgeously met Hannah, last seen (by me) in Vientiane, Laos, 6 weeks before. I found her and Emma where I'd left them - hungover and sleep-deprived. They'd been peddling vibrators at the Sexpo festival over the last few days. Hannah and I celebrated our reunion with obscene cocktails in the 'W' trendy and expensive hotel - warehouse chic. Each cocktail had an essay devoted to it on the menu, containing phrases like forbidden marriage and gesture of hyssop.

We upheld the backpacker ethos by checking into a split level studio room with an expensive minibar that sirenously beckoned us. Thus born was the cocktail LaBambert - half whiskey, half vodka and double ginger ale. The 'W' bar would have added a circumference of forsythia but some people know when to stop.

I spent a few days in Sydney wandering about. Hannah and I continued our mission to spend a year's traveller's budget in a few days (venison was involved). The harbour shoots with shards of sun. The shade reminds chillingly of winter, but all this changes, sure as the Global Market. Brendon introduced me to the Canon of Heavy Metal, particularly Marilyn Manson who has a malleable and munificent face. I saw several videos of impromptu operations being carried out by the Nine Inch Nails. We ate shnitzels the size of antelopes in a true German tavern. I decided to hop on a plane to Byron Bay with Hannah and Emma. Why not?


CALCULATED HATS

Byron Bay is a hippie hangout, crawling with aging Israelis and ubercool travellers with calculated hats who discuss the structural aspects of each guitarric specimen in studiously loud voices. The Arts Factory is a hostel/centre for organic growth run by travellers who work for accommodation. One behatted acid freak excitedly explained the meaning of this: 'This place is ours, man, I mean, this place is ours.' I accept his point but did he have to be so irritating? The beach is crystal expanse, a plain of frolics. German Johannes drunkenly bewailed female obstinacy in the abhorrent club Cheeky Monkeys. He had been blanked by all surrounding women for trying too eagerly to massage their hands. 'They don't know how good I am at massage,' he moaned. I urged him to engage in at least superficial pleasantry before leaping to the massage stage. The next day with a Scottish girl called Emma we hired a car and gunned the windy roads to Nimbin.


PERFORMANCE POETRY WORLD CUP QUARTER FINALS

Colourful small town Nimbin is famous because you can get a wide range of psychotropic drugs there within 40 seconds from an assortment of hippies representing both sides: intellectual bourgeoisie and down-and-out beatnikdom. Like everything else in our commoditised culture this enclave of ostensibly radical ideas has become a tourist attraction, to be gawped at by passers-by who feed the community by buying weak hash cookies and overpriced 'organic hydro' (hello, yes). We caught the Performance Poetry World Cup Quarter Finals at the Rainbow Cafe!

To the taste of angostura bitters we entered upon a berobed woman of stature poesising a wet dream. She was the compere. We watched 9 contestants. One man read a poem about Jesus visiting him. Apart from his shaven headed girlfriend forming a crucifix behind him, the performative element was undermined by his murmured drone and hooded glare. Another man called Brian or Mark (or possibly Robert) blew everyone away: a fluid poem about summer days with a rhyme scheme almost worthy of Eminem but more regular, and pictures painted of stone skimming and breathless delight in nature - phwoar. One act was a trio: halfly skinhead halfly punked-yellow woman swirls arms and shouts sex in the shower; older continentally beautiful woman stands eyes closed at other mike muttering sensually in Portuguese; dreaded hippy stereotype sits on stage and plays haunting yet faintly ridiculous guitar. First glance had my self-conscious critical hackles flaring but the interplay and their sheer absorption caught me up in a trance, and it worked. Now that's what I came for! We also came for mushrooms but the mushroom people had moved on when we emerged from the crazy-painted shim-sham bright-eyed world of hippy untouchability into the darkened puddle of night.


BRIEFS AND BONDAGE

Hannah, Emma and I shoveled ourselves with bags onto the street at 3am to wait a worrying time in the silent road until a bus arrived like Jean Claude van Damme popping out of the rubberised ether in Timecop to puke a grumblingly officious (I told you) and grizzled driver. He did us a big favour and let us on his bus. Thanks, you old bastard.

Hervey Bay; starched in sunlight and rather like a beachside retirement town. Actually it is a beachside retirement town. We got to Beaches hostel in time for a Fraser Island briefing. Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world, is mostly accessed by backpackers in groups and 4x4s arranged by hostels. That's what we did, and were therefore part of a group of 9 travelling in the same truck. There were three groups of nine going out at the same time from Beaches so we suddenly had an extended group of temporary friends.

Each group put together a food list and booze list for the next three days. Our group was very proud that we bought double the booze of the other two groups put together. This included 16 litres of wine for some reason. Hannah & I also wisely bought some sparklers and face paints. Scouts say: Be prepared.

That night Beaches threw a party for us including drunken physical challenges. I'd have felt like I was back at uni if I'd ever actually done that stuff at uni. The Ozzie backpacker scene is like a big campus. The birthday boy Sean frequently tried to snog me and then played a whale song on his banjo (not a euphemism). Hannah and I escaped and hit the beach where stars gaped and cold sand beckoned.


GROUP KANGAROO, OR PERHAPS DINGO

Dominic from Ireland surprised everyone at the pre-Fraser bonding party by being able to pick up a piece of paper from the floor without using his hands. This Houdini-like flexibility had been unknown to him up to then. The only other person who could do it was a gymnast who could also bend both arms backwards, which she did on a table to drunken roars of appreciation. At the start I understood barely 30% of the words Dominic said, but it was a steep learning curve. A berocca addict, and all round bouncy fellow. Damien and Aine completed the Irish trio, and then we had Kelly and Mike from America, who were travelling together despite their intense mutual hatred. Gary from Blackpool was a wonderfully mental driver. And finally there was Hannah, Emma and myeself who were the demonic impetus behind the excessive alcohol buying.

The potent aroma of a dead stingray permeated the dock. I befriended a local fisherman and he showed me his bream. Romping Rhonda (name trademark Hannah Lambert) with large shoes and an expansive midriff ran tirelessly to and from the ferry when it arrived. The sea alongside was peppered with constellations of sun shrapnel.

And then the island - the largest sand isle in the world! Have I mentioned that? I drove on the endless beach alongside the roaring slapping sea that we couldn't swim in because of the sharks. I drove the van through a crevice which scared everyone and scored a '9' from a passerby. Not understanding Dominic's Irish accent I unwittingly affirmed that I was an experienced surfer. We stopped at a barnacled shipwreck and took photos. Then we decided to go to the campsite and drink. We played bizarre drinking games and Hannah and I produced the sparklers. I was having difficulty speaking. 'Sentences are fucked!' I declared post-structurally. I whipped out my tiny guitar and thrashed obsessively for a thick crowd of drunken people. And don't they always go crazy for Don't Look Back in Anger?

The next day we hit the Champagne Pools. They are actually like champagne! Waves crash over the rocks into pools, and fizz up like a natural jacuzzi. From Indian Head, a high point, we saw whales frolicking in the sea. Drinking games involved face paints. Everyone crashed down to the beach where a dazzling canopy of stars loomed. I've never seen a sky like it. Rings and clouds, and the milky way like a cummerbund across an boundless besuited belly.

A Vietnam Sandwich

OZZIE WRAPAROUND (1)

In Australia time seems to move more slowly, creakily negotiating the vast spaces. People in minor bureaucratic positions are even more officious than in England, perhaps in an attempt to impose petty order on this unwieldy terrain. The urinals all have flush chains. After Asia it was a shock to see so many white people who all speak English (of sorts). Another shock was the price of everything. I had become accustomed to splendour, which is difficult to forget.


HOI AN FLUSH

Last night in Hoi An. It's been gorgeous, full of experience. Lots of stories, some that I can't even fathom. Seems crazy to have a story without a suicide bomber these days. I feel like an idiot - but these chances are so fleeting and must be grasped. From one ridiculous experience to a really rather beautiful one. From a great non-realised romance with the cutest Vietnamese girl [her accent and the way she laughed the words 'no' and 'maybe', and never said yes just the Vietnamese grunted 'ugh' (sp?), and threw her head back bashful to the audience when we said goodbye] to an abortive homo dalliance. And kisses in the street. Love runs parallel, never quite touching, always visibly staining the street with its syrupy ooze. I am DRIVEN by these things. Is this the time for self-indulgence?

I lost my camera in Hoi An, with 300 photos of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. I have drawn minature sketches of all the ones I remember. I passed through Hue in an afternoon.


HIGH HANOI

I received a pen and a drink from a lovely London family atop the City View cafe in Hanoi against the lake stretched out darkly sparkling. The man had once been arrested with some friends for being Irish and loud on the tube. The woman was beautiful and had a theory that the world's terror atrocities were following their family around the Globe (there was some substantiation for this, which I won't go into right now). Their littlest daughter was very cute and clever and loved watermelon and riding camels, and the eldest was teetering on the brink of adolescent bashfulness. We drank beer and breathed in the crazy city, astoundingly alive far below us like the bottom of the cave in Raiders of the Lost Ark.


MONEY AND STREETS

Hanoi was running around ripped off. Sometimes I am gullible as a hungry puppy. An irritating hotel and an obscenely extravagant flight to Hong Kong brought about by my lack of forward planning. An overpriced day trip to Halong Bay was deafeningly misorganised. On the good side, fantastic beef noodles at a street cafe where no-one spoke English. I love sitting on those tiny plastic stools amidst sweat guzzled streets and Viets huddled round endlessly chatting and drinking beer with ice and smoking White Horse. I LOVE IT! The memory of the streets hits me like a wave, and the taste of the soup inhaled with voices and people and warmth. America has used chemical warfare. No other country has used nuclear weapons in war. In the concerted effort to prevent other countries from developing nuclear technology we are like the members of a very smug club. We have it but you can't. Or, we have it so you can't. The big question is, though the US has used and uses hideous means to conquer the world ideologically and financially, do I want their mission to be successful? It has been enormously refreshing to be in Vietnam, a country that seems to work without the gush of Americanised culture that's inescapable in the West. There is poverty and corruption, inefficiency. Healthcare is all but unaffordable to the average person. Nonetheless the culture is strikingly warm, friendly, community based. Families look after each other, which might be the result of poverty and the lack of a welfare state as much as indiginous cultural differences. Does our welfare state come after our individualism or does it inculcate it? Do they advance together? In a replica ethnic longhouse in the grounds of the Vietnam Ethnology Museum I drank tea and chatted with Dat. He was rather happy with the Government but wanted more cash and the ability to travel. It will come eventually, I'm fairly sure, along with living alone and plastic surgery.


TWO THOUSAND STUBBY ISLANDS ALONE IN THE SEA

En route to Halong Bay (with a bunch of people who had paid less than me) we stopped off at a tourist warehouse with 30 other buses. Whiteys swarmed, buying diet coke and smoking fags in the scorching heat. Disabled people sold bits of cloth. The free lunch was lousy. I ate it next to Vung, a Vietnamese girl with pointy shoes who I'd chatted with on the bus. She was about to go to Reading for a month, the poor thing. Several others at the table ate in surly silence. Hung out with two French bombes, Oriane and Valentine, for the day and they laughed at my French. Sitting aft of the boat in the sun silently roaming an inescapable canopy of bluest sky and everywhere around craggly knobbles sprouted out of the sea like mushrooms after a storm. Two thousand islands, some cut away underneath, some stretching out towards their siblings; some adrift, alone, pensive.

Into a grotto lit up with multicoloured lights like Disneyland. Too majestic to ruin, but they did their best by installing penguin-shaped bins in every crevice. Hundreds of tourists traipsed through and tour guides bellowed an assortment of languages. The walls were stone jellyfish, soaked with cold condensation.

I didn't pay to see another cave, even though it starred in a James Bond film and a French flick Indochine. People live in between the islands on house boats. Surreal in the midst of this natural beauty, little plastic prefabs topped with TV antennae. A school floats, funded by the UK government. I took credit for that. Someone had to!

I was sad to part with Valentine and Oriane. I put so much of myself into these transient relationships. As soon as people feel at ease with me I can't help working into them like the ocean into a fissure of rock. But all the while I am working them into me and I feel it so strongly.

Travelling solo is both wonderful and difficult - I always craved a weird poetic ideal of solitude yet I NEED companionship. And when I have it I want to escape. Some people are never happy. When I'm alone my deranged imagination starts to feed on itself, which is entertaining at first, but irritating after a while.


NEW CENTURY

The calculating crooks at my hotel were one step ahead of me again. All ready to confront them for overcharging me for the Halong Bay day trip, when I was greeted by the sight of someone playing my guitar in the lobby. But.. that was in my room! And is that my bag over there? Yes, it was. Some vague 'problem' with the 'room' had forced them to stuff all my things into various pockets of my bag. THE WRONG POCKETS! Don't these scurrying misfits know that there's an order to things? I was whisked away by bike to their 'other hotel' and put in a vast warehouse type room with cracked mock antique furniture and hammer horror light fittings. The shower was an abbattoir. I bumped into Jakob, my hirsute Canadian friend. We drank in an overpriced shithole called Funky Monkey and met two Ukranian girls who took us to a club that was new and closed. Then, in a superclub called New Century, drinks were astronomical and thousands of pineapple slices had been used as decoration. Bouncers wearing orange boiler suits (each with their own number) prevented me from taking a drink onto the dancefloor and from eating the pineapple. One of the Ukranians expected me to buy her drinks so I ran away upstairs and played pool on a balcony with some guys from Dorset while a bouncer told me I was handsome and offered advice on which shots to play. When the club closed, my bag had magically transported from one locker to another one. I asked the guard to saw a woman in half as his next trick, but this was misinterpreted and I decided to leave Vietnam forthwith.


MIXED BALLS

And what about Hong Kong? Have you ever seen such a craven crowd of skyscrapers? People slosh at the bottom like rainwater in a gutter. Flash storms combined with many short people holding umbrellas on crowded strips of street is bad for my head. Hotness and wetness, and an occasional unexplainable belt of cold air that passes through the city like an angel of mercy.

I had mixed ball soup in a Chinese cafe with condensation coating the front window. I was greeted with frank hostility by the waiters, which I rather liked (do you ever feel like you could use a beating?). Somehow a bit of chilli made it into my eye causing me to weep like a baby. I felt the eyes of everyone on me, like a monkey on drugs. I dabbed with a tissue and soldiered on with the mixed balls, some of which were brown, some white, and some inscrutable grey.

I walked three hours when I arrived in Hong Kong, disbelieving at the difference in room prices from Vietnam. Rooms were 15 pounds - 15 pounds! Can you imagine? I hadn't paid more than 50p for 3 months. Eventually I found the cheapest room in the city at HK$100 (about 8 pounds). It was approximately 2 x 1 metre, with a bathroom that you couldn't sit down in owing to a crisis of width. It was impossible to turn around in the 'shower area' between sink and toilet. There was no floor in the room, it was all taken up by a bed that sagged and groaned under aeons of filth. Wombfully I loved it.

'What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.' (The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami)

I sat in the Peninsular Hotel blowing any difference in room prices I had scored on gin and tonic, listening to unobtrusive jazz and breaking the dress code. The next day at the peak of Hong Kong, overlooking the dizzying bay furred with fantastic protrusions, I met Ruth, a psychiatric nurse from Stoke. It's very difficult to meet people in Hong Kong - there is no backpacker guesthouse scene, and big cities impose anonymity. Ruth was feeling much the same so we descended on the ridiculous peak tram and drank bizarre chinese wine cocktails in a subterranean bar airconditioned to freeze the eyeballs.

AC's friend Alex, who lives in Hong Kong, let me stay at his stunning apartment with a panoramic view of the sci-fi city. Alex is relaxed and charming. Jane is down to earth classy. And my fellow (though more long-term) freeloader, Sophie, moved to Spain in order to learn flamenco and make clothes. It was warm and nice being welcomed into their place. Alex and I managed to have a conversation about Pol Pot and the Cultural Revolution as a violent expression of the Hippie revolution in America within about 10 minutes. Brilliant. We all left together, they to a dinner party. I met Ruth and ate won ton noodles in a thronging eatery. Lang Kui Fong is a street with an unusual gradient, packed with people drinking beer out of yard glasses on straps round their necks. We met Alex & co in an ex-pat bar called Feather Boa which is rather like the Bennets' parlour in Pride and Prejudice as seen through a twisted mirror. The size of the cocktails defied belief, and my capacity for reason. I discussed religion and marriage with Alex and a small posh man, young and married and awfully pleased about it all. Small pictures of dogs and things grinned from paisley walls. My vision blurred. Ex-pats bobbed and weaved. I eventually made it back and decided judiciously to have a one hour nap before leaving for the airport at 05:30 to catch my flight to Sydney.

I slept soundly and woke up 45 minutes after my plane had departed. I crashed in on sleeping Jane and Alex to announce my folly and then scarpered off to the airport berating myself intensely during the hour journey. 'Why am I so STUPID' was the mantra, accommpanied by slapping of own face and occasional punch to temple. I was convinced I'd be charged for a whole new ticket, and that the rest of my tickets would be cancelled. And I was supposed to be meeting Hannah in Sydney that night. And Brendon was supposed to be picking me up from the airport.

But the Qantas desk lady didn't even seem to hear my muttered story about severe stomach problems. Nor did she seem to smell the margarita crust that had formed around me. She simply changed me onto the night flight, no charge. I felt tears of relief welling up. I wanted to fall at her feet and offer her my eternal soul, but I didn't want to get locked in a customs bin for 24 hours. And partly I felt I should have been punished for my stupidity. I didn't deserve to be awarded the winning raffle ticket. So I resolved to spend the 12 hours until my flight in the airport, as a sort of purgatory. Hannah emailed saying she couldn't meet that night anyway and Bren offered to pick me up the next morning. Plus HK airport is a shimmering wonderland filled with nymphs and goodies. Am a lucky bitch or what?


12 HOURS IN HK AIRPORT

Ate bowl after bowl of noodle soup;
Bought item after item from Pacific Cafe for 15 min internet slot you get with each;
Read;
Played guitar and attracted large crowd of Chinese who gave me biscuits;
Napped;
Stared into middle distance with runway transit eyes


OZZIE WRAPAROUND (2)

And now Australia. Filled with campervans and friendly people (though there are many people who are painted-friendly shells filled with hate. I know that's true everywhere but their accent gives them a strained intensity that terrifies me).

What have I done in this enormous country over the last three weeks? Did I rescue Hannah from the pouch of evil Professor Wallaroo? Did we save the human race from eradication by a horrific biotoxin with only a can opener and a boomerang? To find out, tune in next week to rrrrrrope of sssssand!

So much has happened..

WHILE I TRAVEL

Global terror intensifies, and home territory looks horribly vulnerable. At the same time I am in Vietnam experiencing a culture and environment still coping with the horrendous effects of war, dealing with poverty and corruption, but today feeling rather safe and optimistic. It's a different world, far from the face of terror today. It's a strange feeling being away from London when it's under attack. I feel guilty not being a part of it. I am staggered by the brutality of the London police shooting a man in the head 5 times. Such facts are daily realities in Israel, and will be increasingly in England. But Israel is a lot easier to police. We have enjoyed relative liberty and safety for a long time, but it can't continue in the same way. I can't help but think of all the juicy vulnerable targets in England I could strike at if I were a terrorist. I am thinking of home and Egypt and wondering how anyone can stop people who want to kill themselves to kill. Sounds trite but there we are.


ANG-KOR BLIMEY GUVNA

Siem Reap is surrounded by mind-evaporating temples from the Khmer Empire 1000 years ago. It's SE Asia's premier Wonder which means that 5:30am sunrise at Angkor Wat includes several hundred tourists. Low season. It's testament to the sublimity of the sight/site that hoards of chattering tour groups can't spoil it. The whole walled area of AW is 500 hectares (that's big). The temple/mortuary (for it might be either) itself is encrusted with age and surmounted by 5 enormous lotus bud turrets like missile silos sprouting out of a craggy and weirdly symmetrical island. The temple faces West, and the sun rose behind it, streaking the sky with pink like a demented artist.

I bought a book on Angkor from a shoeless urchin-

segue way into

DO YOU FEEL LIKE A SPOONFED TOURISTIC CHIMP?

Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam are paved with backpacker stepping stones. Travellers are all doing some cocktail of the 20 or so key spots. Little shoeless urchins walk around with boxes containing a selection of academic texts on Khmer Rouge, the Vietnam War and the temples, as well as your normal guide books and the Da bloody Vinci Code. And Mr Nice. Why Mr Nice? Who gives a shit about Howard Marks? Every place has its three or four things that tourists do, and people crowd you in the street offering to facilitate your doing of them with a motorbike or some kind of wheelchair bicycle contraption. The backpackers all go to the same couple of bars, usually the ones in the South East Asia Lonely Planet guide, which I've got. I do indeed feel like a spoonfed touristic chimp sometimes, travelling from one highlit place of interest to the next, learning about massacres and genocides and getting pissed and making transitory relationships. Don't think I'm complaining. A cynical self-critic hangs around me like a friend with whom I sometimes can't be bothered but usually find entertaining. Sometimes he is yawning at my neck, and sometimes keeping me awake with interminable whining.

I could leave the beaten track I know, and have done over the last few days. But when you have two weeks to travel through Vietnam, you gotta move your ass. And there's so many friendly people around offering highly convenient all inclusive bus tickets. I feel less like a walking sack of cash here than I did in Cambodia. In fact, in Cambodia I felt more like a fat cow at a meeting of hungry butchers.

BACK TO THE TEMPLES

I bought a book on Angkor from a shoeless urchin and painstakingly read extracts to Dan while we strolled around examining bas reliefs and distinctively Khmer architectural features such as porticos, vaulted ceilings and cruciform passageways. The place is encrusted with Time and stokes the imagination with exploits of another era as I'm sure Machu Picchu must do. Bas reliefs surround the temple detailing Hindu legends and Khmer military exploits. The most memorable one depicts the Churning of the Ocean of Milk.

The Churning of the Ocean of Milk - a cockeyed and half-arsed version

Around 1000 gods and 1000 demons both crave the elixir of immortality, obtainable only by Churning the Ocean of Milk. Must have been some kind of cheese. The foes decide to co-operate. They each tug on an enormous snake coiled around a god/mountain, thus turning the mountain and churning the milk. They keep at it for 1000 years (which makes one wonder why they need the elixir of immortality anyway) when - FUCK! - the mountain begins to sink.

Enter Vishnu, who seems to be THE DUDE in all these Hindu legends. He is incarnated as a tortoise. He supports the mountain until the job is done. The gods nab the elixir (thank gods) and many gifts appear, including a three headed elephant, worth a fortune on the ivory market. And thus, cheese is born.

N.B. My irreverent tone in the foregoing passage is not due to any scorn of the Hindu religion or its legends. In fact I love the legends, and Vishnu is a GEEZER.


FACES

The Bayon temple has over 200 faces staring out North, South, East and West from over 50 enormous turrets. The faces are HUGE and weirdly benevolent. No-one knows if it's some buddhisatva or the face of King Jayavaraman VII. I was unable to shed any light on this. Dan and I walked round the temple for an hour or two, literally FACE TO MASSIVE FACE. At the end of the day we happened back past the Bayon, and decided to have another look. 'Oh my god!' exclaimed Dan on approach. 'Have you seen the faces?' Faces, you say?


CHILDREN

Many children hang around the temples. As young as 6, they have a startling knowledge of history. Leeching onto you ('Hello, where you from?') they follow you around spewing out interesting facts about Angkor and Cambodia and then beg for dollars to 'help me at school'. How can you refuse?

In fact children working the streets is endemic along the S. E. Asia tourist trail. They roam around the streets of Phnom Penh, hitting and poking you if you refuse to buy their postcards. There are hundreds of them. I feel a moral quandry about whether to support child labour, combined with an increasing hard-heartedness owing to the sheer number of people who want cash out of you. However this is balanced against the desperation of the kids, and the effect of seeing children wheeling their hideously deformed friends from tourist to tourist. In Saigon chewing gum selling kids are still working the tables outside the bars at 3am, mostly barefoot. So sometimes I bought and sometimes I didn't and mostly I just felt sorry.


BREAKFAST AND PHYSIO

In Angkor Wat Dan and I had breakfast with a couple of English girls, one of whom was a North London Jew (I know - they're everywhere). That night we bumped into them in a bar and played drinking games with a guy called Hedley who later vomited twice on the floor of the Martini club. What was amazing was his utterly blasee attitude about it. I think his brain had shut down all unnecessary feelings to keep him alive. His friend Will was unsupportive, and Dan and I took care of Hedley before emotionally blackmailing his friend to remove him forthwith to his bedchamber. We drank with the girls until 4:30am and then decided to head straight for Angkor Wat for the sunrise. Sadly we just missed it, but sat for a long while staring at the brightening sky reflected in a crystal pond in the compound, clouds occasionally breached by leaping frogs. The girls were both trainee physios and worked our hamstrings in an ancient library. Needless to say we never saw them again. Beware girls who physio and run.


DEAD FISH AND BLIND MASSAGE

Our guesthouse, evocatively named 'The Dead Fish Tower' offered free head massage to all guests. Dan took advantage of this to discover that 'head massage' actually means 'quick shampoo'. We stormed off to get massaged by blind people instead. In a dank crepuscular room I lay face down on a table with my head stuffed in a cushioned hole. My masseur enjoyed clicking bones. 'Is it good to pull each toe until it cracks?' I wondered. Then he folded my leg back onto my bottom and sat on it until it gave out with a deafening POP. I yelped in agony and limped for the rest of the day. Where's a physio when you need one?


PHNOM PENH AND THE KHMER ROUGE

The capital of Cambodia delivered to me the mess of the country with startling vivacity. The poverty and desperation of so many people, bearing scars from the insane Khmer Rouge regime of 25 years ago everywhere are juxtaposed against a stunning confluence of rivers and an exhilerating buzz on the streets. The place is alive, monstrous, fascinating.

My friend Eelco, a Dutch pilot, ska sax player and all round great guy whom I had initially bonded with impersonating fish on Perhentian Island, Malaysia, had a stopover in Kuala Lumpur and flew down to PP to meet me. We went to S21, Tuol Sleng prison, used by the Khmer Rouge to torture 'intellectuals' before sending them off to be executed in the killing fields. Intellectuals was a broad term that included teachers, foreign language speakers, anyone who wore glasses. The place was originally built to be a school, with a series of multistoried buildings facing into a large central courtyard. However, all the classrooms had been converted into cells.

There's something horribly symbolic in the way that schools and temples were transformed into places of detention, torture and death. In the Khmer Rouge 'experiment' education and spirituality meant brutal repression and hideous cruelty.

For high ranking KR officers, there were individual classrooms, which still had the shackles and torture implements lying rustily in the centre. Photos of the brutalised corpses found by the Vietnamese invaders in 1979 hang on the walls. Rank and file prisoners were put in brick cells of 2 square metres crudely put up inside classrooms. Blood stains remain on one of the floors. Medieval instruments of 'interrogation' are in glass boxes. A gallows stands in the centre of the courtyard next to a large pot that was used for dunking people in shit.

But the most affecting is the display of 4000 portrait photos of prisoners taken by the Khmer Rouge before the subjects were executed. The faces are confused, stubborn, normal. Young and old, male and female. All women had the same bob haircut required by the Pol Pot regime. Some had number tags pinned into their chests. They look terrifyingly alive as they stare out at you.

Our guide had been separated from her family at 10 years old and forced to work rice fields 7 days a week dawn to dusk on 6 spoons of porridge a day. A huge amount of rice was produced by the millions of Cambodians who had been evacuated to the countryside and forced to farm, but most of the produce was sold abroad by the government. I saw the killing fields south of Phnom Penh with its dug out mass graves and dizzying tower of skulls. The Cambodians I spoke to told me they don't talk about it, but they all remember. The sheer nonsense of it befuddles me. Two million people killed, for an incomprehensible experiment. All cars, trains, clocks destroyed. Families separated, men and women kept apart. Barely any children born in the 5 years of the regime. Teenage guards at prisons and the killing fields worked for 6 months to a year before being killed themselves. No Cambodians even knew who was in charge at the time. And now amongst the population live people who killed, tortured, perhaps as much the victims as those they killed. I don't understand how the Cambodian people with minimal education can even begin to deal with what happened not thirty years ago. Especially when it makes no sense.


HEART OF DARKNESS

A seedy gothic bar red lit and filled after midnight with tourists, ex-pats, groups of locals, and plenty of working girls. In fact basically all the Cambodian women there are working girls which is a fact I was unaware of at first, thinking that a particular girl 'just liked me'. Always have had a high opinion of myself.

Other entertainment in Phnom Penh includes 'happy herb pizzas'. I indulged in one with an Alex from Texas and a Claire from Edgware, plus 3 other random English girls. I became one of the world's leading pool players for 15 astounding minutes, before suffering an attack of paranoia that a disgruntled motorbike driver was going to break into the cardboard box where I was staying and slit my throat. Actually he didn't, and I employed his services the next day (as moto driver) to his immense gratitude. When you walk in tourist areas of Phnom Penh you get offered, in this order:

Moto? (ie. I'll drive you like a maniac where you want for $1)
Tuk tuk? (ie. I'll trundle you where you want in my golf buggy for $2)
Smoking? (ie. would you like to be overcharged for some shit weed?)
Opium? (ie. would you like to be massively overcharged for some shit opium?)
Boom boom? (have a guess)

With the patience of a wildlife photographer, I said 'no thank you' to each of these requests, which came with relentless regularity from every person I walked past on backpacker alley. My guesthouse was based on a wooden deck that spanned out onto the lake. Bats flew under wooden bridges at night. It was cool.

Colonially, I became rather fond of spending happy hour (5-7pm) at the Foreign Correspondent's Club, which is high above the street and looks out onto the gorgeous Tonle Sap river at sunset. I met some charming Ozzie vets called Kate. My last night in Phnom Penh was spent in Heart of Darkness with Israeli Avi, Edgware Claire and French Sabrina. We danced to shit music and then finished up sitting on the lake as the sky whitened. I packed my bag and boarded the bus to Vietnam.


HIDY HIDY HIDY HO CHI MINH CITY

I love Vietnam. I love the food, the business, the persistence and optimism of the people. Ho Chi Minh (Saigon) is a big dirty city. Great! It's a whirling maelstrom of motorbikes, driven with outrageous audacity. As in Cambodia, it's customary to drive for about 300 metres on the wrong side of the road before turning left. I hung about, went to some bars with a Canadian metaller called Yakob, and did a fair amount of eating.

I ate some strips of beef that I cooked on a personal barbeque at the table. I made friends with a Vietnamese guy in a bar who spends his days in marketing and his nights trying to pull foreign girls. He likes Jamaican girls the best because of their bottoms. His friend was wearing a Dutch football shirt in hommage to his Dutch girlfriend, who also has a big bottom. I think Vietnamese men are bottom-starved.


WAR AND DESTRUCTION AGAIN

The War Remnants Museum is an excellent museum, rather anti-American in stance as one might expect, with an intense selection of war photographs, and a gallery of paintings and sculpture. The US dropped 4 times the amount of explosives on Vietnam than they did anywhere during WWII. The museum included foeti in jars deformed by the chemical warfare deployed by America. The courtyard contains aircraft and enormous guns. I spoke to some Americans who felt uncomfortable. We call it the Vietnam War, but they refer to it as the American Aggression War. The guestbook was filled with anti-American comments from tourists. The war was totally misguided and carried out with insane brutality. I found myself wondering what would have happened had they not invaded. Would the feared 'domino effect' have taken over South East Asia as predicted? Certainly large areas of Laos and Cambodia would not be scarred by craters now. And the Pol Pot regime might never have happened. But these are all what ifs. Some Vietnamese still hate the Americans, but most are looking forward. There is a great drive to become a developed country.

My Vietnamese seamstress friend Hoi's father fought for the US-Saigon army during the war. As a consequence of that she was unable to find work as a lawyer and had to drop out of law school. Most Viets that I speak to say there is a great difference between South Vietnam and North Vietnam and some ill feeling. Saigon is very much a Western city these days, even with hammer and sickle flags draped from lampposts.


A DIRTY BEACH

I 10 hour bussed it to Nha Trang, a rather long beach flanked by mountainous outcrops and coasted by litter. The sea was warm and the waves were high, making the dodging of plastic bags rather difficult. I played pool with a Vietnamese guy called Ben who rather liked me and ended up dancing with him and his 'sister' (not actually his relative) at the Sailing Club, which has big noisy parties every night in a picturesque outdoor setting on the beach. I wisely stashed my bag behind the bar for safekeeping and then unwisely forgot to pick it up before wandering off down the beach with Yakob the Canadian metaller. The beach turned out to be crawling with unbelievably persistent working girls, so I ran away. The next day I picked up my bag. Everything was in it except my nail clippers (darn it) and spare batteries. 'Phew! there's my camera', I thought, only to discover that the rechargable batteries in it had been replaced by dead AA ones, and the battery compartment filled with water. Now the bastard doesn't work. Do you think I could find anyone at the Sailing Club to hold accountable? You might as well try tracking down a dog whose shit you've just stepped in.

Wandering along the beach with my guitar I was called over to a large Vietnamese Californian family whose parents had just married, and were on their honeymoon with their three enormous daughters, who seemed significantly older than their father and mother. They gave me beer and we sang some songs. The new husband had grown up in Nha Trang but skipped the country at 10 years old. His mother and brother (the latter was also there at the beach - he had a piercing whistle) had failed to make it to the bus in time. He had arrived in Boston alone. Apparently there are 300,000 Vietnamese people in California, who are slowly bringing their whole families over through a lengthy sponsorship system. The guy I met was unable to do that because he had changed his name. They gave me a bowl of sweet tofu to taste - delicious!


HOW LONG HAVE I BEEN IN THIS GORGEOUS PLACE?

Hoi An is a small town filled with mazy streets, Chinese temples, tailor shops, and a fantastic market. It's riverside is fringed with sweet cafes serving some of the most delicious food I have had in Asia. Hoi An has plenty of its own specialities from the large Chinese influence, and I have been stuffing my face. I had a suit made for some reason, and was invited out fishing by the seamstress, Hoi. On the back of her bike we sped off some 10 miles out of town to a little village, where we met a few of her friends. They didn't speak much English, or really any, but that was okay. We caught three tiny fish, that flapped on the rock for a while. It's amazing how long they live out of the water. Eventually they found their way back to the polluted river. We sat up at a rooftop cafe and drank beer with ice, smoked cigarettes and chatted. Her friends were lovely. We communicated fairly well considering they didn't speak English. They insisted on paying for everything - Vietnamese culture. Then we went for the obligatory Pho Bo (beef noodle soup) on the street. You sit on plastic kindergarten chairs and get a huge bowl of soup with white flat noodles, strips of beef and vegetables. Simply add fish sauce, chilli paste, and leafs of various herbs, and then scoff with loud slurping noises.

The next day Hoi took me to the Marble Mountain - a huge, um, marble mountain, out of which have been carved a range of pagodas and grottos. Dark caves streaked with green and red contain huge Buddhas. The view from the top reaches the spectacular coastline. Whenever I see a giant Buddha I am always beset with the notion that he might get up and start stomping around smashing buildings and throwing people around. Not sure why. She also took me to meet her family, and to the place she grew up. It has been nice to see a real side to this place, outside the tourist cafes and western faces. I think I could live here, even just for the noodle soup.

Against a backdrop

LONDON

On the first night I've had a tv in two and a half months we switched it on to hear the announcement that London had won the Olympics. On the second night we switched it on an hour after three London Underground trains and one bus had been bombed by terrorists. We sat stunned for three hours watching the chaos unfold, feeling a combination of long-held fears realised and a deep sense of unreality. We stared at the streets we know so well on the television in Cambodia and raced through mental lists of all the commuters we know. Even now as the media and the world digests the news there are still pieces of body being collected far underground in unbearable heat. We phoned and emailed and made contact, and still wonder about those people down there. I miss the city (for the first time), and feel distanced from the mood I am sure is tangible there in the streets. I also feel something else strange - a bubble of nationalistic outrage. Certainly it's been the talk of the travellers. And the next morning we watched the sun rise over the magnificent 1000 year old Khmer temple of Angkor Wat, powerfully reminiscent of a different time filled with different atrocities. I keep thinking about the people affected, and selfishly hoping I don't know any of them. I recall Tony Blair standing in front of a group of the most powerful people in the world, arms rigidly by their sides, faces like waxworks.

Backtrack to Laos and forward to Cambodia

DOWN THE PAN

In the en suite bathroom of my room in Luang Prabang was no sign that said 'Pleas put paper in bin, nott in tolet!'. There was also no bin. So I put toilet paper down the toilet, just like the conditioned Westerner that I am. After a few days, the toilet was filled to the brim with liquid of spine chilling colour and throat mangling consistency. I was forced to tell the tiny slightly deformed guy who ran the hostel, who came into my room with three of his friends. Many toilets out here have a little spray hose with a trigger firing action next to the toilet for arse cleaning purposes. Fearless and businesslike, our man set about detaching the trigger, causing a jet of water to start firing out of the hose. He plunged his hand into the toilet up to the shoulder. His three friends gently closed the door, shutting him in there alone. They giggled at me while I sat on the bed mortified. Horrific sounds of splashing and squealing emanated from within the bathroom for ten minutes. Eventually he emerged, soaked in water from head to toe. The bathroom was spotless and the toilet was an apogee of flushable perfection once more. I couldn't look at him. All I could do was sheepishly press a wad of notes probably equal to a week's wages into his hand. He was naturally thrilled.


BIG JUGS

I travelled with Daniel and several to Phonsavan to look at the Plain of Jars. Fields full of unexplained enormous stone jars thousands of years old. They are huge things, hewn out of rock found nowhere nearby. Over 4000 jars in total, but you can only see 1000 because most of the fields are littered with unexploded ordinance from the USA's steady carpet bombing of Laos in the 70's. We took a 'local bus', which means it breaks down every 20 miles and has enormous bags of grit in the aisles. The bus was red and white and resembled something clambered together from scrap metal found at the back of a supermarket. The driver smoked cigarettes constantly, possibly to disguise the black smoke billowing from the engine. My knees were pressed into my head. But it was okay - the journey was only seven hours.

The jars themselves were differently shaped and differently sized, just like countries can be. Some had square holes and some had round ones, just like people can have. One jar in particular was big enough to contain at least three members of the New Zealand rugby team, whilst others could barely have contained a contortionist midget. None of them were filled with sweets or amphetemaines, but some had algae and even flowers.

We visited a Hmong village (a local tribe), where houses and fences have been built out of U.S.A. missile casings. We saw wide expanses of fields studded with enormous craters. Grass grows at the bottom now but the flat land was once blown apart by bombs. Strange to imagine that in peaceful arable land scattered with villages and rice fields.


FIFA KARAOKE AND WHISKY NATIONALISM

I managed to single handedly get all the tourists in Phonsavan to Fifa Karaoke Bar. Their concept of karaoke is to put Chinese karaoke videos on a tv while a DJ plays mix cds of cheesy dance music. However, it was 2 pounds for a litre of whisky. 20 Lao teenage girls danced on the dancefloor in a circle, taking in turns to dance in the centre. The other girls responded to the centre dancer's antics by letting out a collective scream you might otherwise hear at the appearance of headless zombie holding a dead baby and an axe.

Daniel and found ourselves in the street with two French guys and a Canadian. We respectively sung our national anthems while the others respectfully downed shots of whisky. We were then ready for Phonsovan Night Club. It was reminiscent of a Greek restaurant in Finchley, replete with pillars, murals and a fantastic keyboard player who was accompanied by two fat men singing with gusto. There had been some kind of event and the entire party was made up of middle aged Lao types. On the floor they danced in couples, not touching or even looking at each other, but twirling their hands and revolving incredibly slowly while the group as a whole moved round in a larger cirle, as waltzers at a fairground. Come to think of it, maybe that's why they call them waltzers. Did everyone else know this already?


VANG VIEN

...is a tourist strip on the Song River surrounded by vertiginous limestone karsts (cliffs, you dummy). The strip has restaurants which each serve 'special' food, such as marijuana pizza, mushroom shakes, opium tea, spaghetti heroin bolognese and crack waffles. Ok, not the last two. Many of the bars show episodes of Friends all day, which gives you the eerie feeling of being in Hell. Daniel and I acquired a gorgeous bungalow with a charming veranda overlooking the stunning view. I wonder if I might have included a few more positive adjectives in that sentence. Hannah and Emma, from Bangkok, Chaing Mai and Luang Prabang, were there. We all went tubing together along with Daniel's Germans and Irish.

Tubing is sitting on a massive rubber ring and floating surprisingly quickly down a river. In Vang Vien there are little bars alongside the river, where men with long sticks hook you in for a drink. Actually getting over to the side in time can be tricky. I had to watch Dan torn away from me by the current, screaming and clutching in vain at flimsy branches only to disappear round the corner. May I never see such a sight again. Caught up with him later in a bar. He had gallantly reentered the water to rescue Katrin (one of our Germans) and managed to sustain serious scratches on his arm as well as puncturing his tube. That's what you get. The bar had a swing on which you stand while three guys run up the hill pulling you back on a rope. There is a moment when you are thirty feet above the water, horizontal, staring straight downwards, when they release, and you hurtle downwards, skimming the water before being thrown in. For the rest of the way down the river I had to drag Dan alongside me on his deflated bit of rubber. We stopped several more times, being handed shots of Lao Lao whiskey (rather like sake's demented cousin). We were quite merry by the end and sailed well past our get off point, necessitating a 2km walk back to town. Fantastic.


VIENTIANE TO SIEM REAP IN 30 SHORT HOURS

Spurning Southern Laos and dodgy border crossings, Daniel and I opted for:

Vientiane to Bangkok - 11 hours
Bangkok bus station - 1 hour
Bangkok to Arunya Pathet (Thai border) - 7 hours
Cambodian Immigration and waiting for bus - 4 hours
Poyet - Siem Reap - 9 hours

Travel incident 1:

Laos immigration forgot to give me an exit stamp, so when we arrived on our bus at Thai immigration, they refused me entry. Our bus would not wait very long - it had to catch the connecting bus to Bangkok in the bus station. Er.. so did we. The Thai immigration officials were stonily intransigent. 'It's not my fault!' I wailed. They pointed back to Laos. I wildly banged on the estate car of a well-to-do Thai couple and begged them to take across the bridge to Laos immigration. Then I coralled a young Thai guy listening to rock music in his pick-up truck to take me back to Thai immigration. Daniel stood forlornly with our bags - our bus had gone. We boarded a tuk tuk which drove us torturously slowly towards our bus station, resigning ourselves to spending the night in wherever-the-fuck-we-were. But in the bus station, like a shaft of light penetrating the bleakest dawn, was our bus, all kitted out with pink frilly curtains and free cans of coke. I blissfully sank into the seat, my feeling of elation only partially undermined by the deafening volume of the Thai pantomime they were showing on the tv.

Travel incident 2:

I left my guitar on the bus at the Thai-Cambodian border. I realised when we were almost at immigration in a tuk tuk. We returned and I ran around in the midday heat from bus to bus. I frantically boarded 7 buses, but none was ours. Finally our tuk tuk driver stepped in, like Sylvester Stallone in Demolition Man when he has just been defrosted. He made a few calls and took us round some side streets to a barren country road, where our bus was sitting happily by the side of the road. My guitar had sustained a serious neck injury, but nothing that Cambodian glue can't fix.

Travel incident 3:

The road to Siem Reap from the border makes a quarry look like the M1. The distance is 120km but the journey takes 9 hours. Car-sized holes abound, and so do the passengers in the bus, up clear off the seat. We stopped occasionally to be mobbed by the cutest kids in the world selling stuff we didn't want. 'No thanks,' I said, several times, and then bought a pack of postcards, a bracelet, a drink and gave several donations. Cambodians are very pushy, and know how to use extremely cute kids to full financial advantage.


BYE FOR LAO

It is a beautiful country. Wonderfully relaxed, though that might be because most of the people don't have jobs. It's one of the poorest countries in the world, yet the people are so much less pushy than Thais or Cambodians. Might be the opium. Beer Lao is the elixir of immortality, though it makes you sleepy. The cliffs are astounding. I missed the 4000 islands in Southern Laos, but I figure I can go to the 3000 islands in North Vietnam and just take a bottle of thousand island dressing. I didn't do Laos justice; it's so hard to cram everything in. Or even anything. Not that I'm complaining. Hannah went off to Thailand so our frequent meetings along the way are at an end. Daniel has also gone the way of the Thai islands, and I'm now travelling alone for the first time. Daniel was an unexpected blessing, and we had a great time together. Now, for the open road, with only a brown paper bag and a plastic windcheater for company. I'll tell you about Angkor another time. If anybody's out there.