Greetings from Adelaide.

What a hectic week we've had. I've existed in a kind of dream state for most of it; a surreal, mind-altering existence punctuated by the occasional flicker of reality.

We left the UK last Friday, flying through the night to Singapore and the on to Sydney. The family goodbyes were traumatic but tolerable, but then four hours into the thirteen hour flight I suddenly started crying and couldn't stop. It was a sweet release from the stress that has built up throughout all the preparations for moving to Australia. Once on the plane the feelings of finality were overwhelming - it's hard to describe the sensations but I felt as if an immensely powerful door had whammed shut behind me and that I were now a tiny, flickering candle flame struggling to shed light at the entrance to an enormous black cavern. We arrived in Sydney on Sunday morning and checked in to our room on the 31st floor of the Sydney Harbour Marriott hotel, overlooking the opera house and the harbour bridge and the marathon runners below. Absolutely knackered. Us and them both.

Our plans changed slightly during August. The Abbott engineer in Adelaide was promoted to work in New Zealand which created an opening and gave us the option of living in Adelaide or Sydney. We chose Adelaide on account of its size, climate and lower cost of living. After a couple of days meeting the staff in the Sydney offices we flew to Adelaide on Tuesday afternoon. I have to say that our first impressions of the city have been rather cool.

What are they doing now?

Since we arrived back in the UK clip has been working as a Dog Instructor for Hearing Dogs for Deaf People. She trains the dogs, most of which are rescue animals, to alert their future deaf recipients to sounds like smoke alarms and oven timers. Unfortunately she is based in the south of England, near Princes Risborough in Buckinghamshire, which means that we see each other only at weekends. She loves her job but doesn't like living in the south and being so far away from her family and friends and me.

Since we arrived back in the UK I have been working as a Technical Support Specialist for Abbott Diagnostics. I am doing a similar job to that which I had before we went travelling, though I am now responsible for a much smaller geographical area and I have been trained to service a few more types of analyser.

Memories of our trip are still very vivid for both of us. We often sit and look at the photographs and reminisce about the things that happened. We haven't really settled back in to life at home. Time seems to be passing very quickly now because each day is essentially the same as the last. There are no real time markers and there are no novelties. There's a nagging feeling that we ought still to be away travelling somewhere.

And, in fact, this may soon be the case! I've signed a four-year contract with Abbott Australasia to work as a Customer Support Executive based in Sydney, covering New South Wales and some of the Pacific islands. Abbott are sponsoring my application for a Long-stay Temporary Business Visa (subclass 457) and clip can be included in it as my "de facto" partner. To prove the necessary long-term and permanent status of our relationship we have had to swear oaths on a bible in front of a solicitor and have our Statutory Declarations notarised by a Notary Public. We have been for chest x-rays and a medical examination, and we've had to provide official documents and photographs of us together in various social situations over the last few years. If all goes well we should fly to Australia around the middle of September 2004. We are hoping to find clip a job training dogs in Sydney, or working at a Koala Sanctuary, or we may enrol her to study for a degree at Sydney University or similar. There are a lot of opportunities open to her.

Published by The Kununurra Echo on 12th February 2004


Notorious business closes

A notorious Kununurra business has finally closed its doors, but not without continuing controversy.

S. Parker Mechanical Repairs, also known as Battery World Kununurra, was recently the target of a Consumer Affairs investigation.

While the fact that the owners are moving to the NT might be welcome news to many, some victims of the business' trading practices are still left well out of pocket.

Queensland tourist (clop) was one of the early people to complain bitterly of the way he was treated.

In a letter that was circulated to various local tourism businesses and media, (clop) claimed that he had asked Mr Parker to diagnose a loud whirring noise that was coming from the rear of his Holden Shuttle van.

Another mechanical workshop had already diagnosed the problem as a worn differential bearing.

(clop) alleged that, after a test drive, Mr Parker told him the noise wasn't coming from the differential. Instead it was coming from the rear wheel bearings and tail shaft universal joints. He was charged $73 for this diagnosis.

(clop) claimed that the vehicle was kept at the workshop overnight, despite the fact that it was his accommodation. He said Mrs Parker threatened to increase the hourly rate if he complained.

$900 later the loud whirring sound was still there; 40 kilometres out of Kununurra the new universal collapsed and the tail shaft fell off the vehicle.

The vehicle was subsequently repaired at another workshop and the now-damaged tail shaft replaced. A senior mechanic, with 40 years experience, signed a statement concerning the work that had been performed. The wrong universal joints had been ordered, a grinder had been used to enlarge holes in the tail shaft and an attempt had been made to weld the universal joints in place. The holes were too big, not round and not central. The senior mechanic described the work as 'irresponsible and totally incompetent'.

Kununurra woman Michelle Manning was in for an even more expensive version of the 'Parker treatment'.

She took her Mazda 323 to the Bloodwood Drive workshop for an engine overhaul. After several weeks she was quoted $3390 for parts, which she paid.

After more delays, and Mr Parker going missing for a time, Ms Manning asked to see an itemised list of the parts that had been purchased. It came to $1000 less than the initial quotes and by this time another mechanic, with the same business, was trying to sort out what work had been done.

Mr Parker returned and, after a telephone conversation with Ms Manning, refused to complete the job.

Mrs Parker told Ms Manning that she needed to pay an additional $1586 before she would be allowed to tow her car away. By now she had paid $4976.30 for a car with the engine in pieces. She had trouble getting another mechanic to take on the job of reassembling the motor. To add more insult, Parkers charged Ms Manning $72.60 to pack up parts and tow her vehicle to another workshop. Labour was charge at $66 an hour for 16 hours and $90.75 for one hour of 'after hours' labour. On top of this there was an 'administration' charge of $66.

Ms Manning has supplied the Kimberley Echo with all quotes and receipts.

The stories go on.

The Echo also has on file a letter from a tour guide, who purchased a 12-volt fluoro tube from the Parkers, only to find that it didn't work. When he asked for it to be tested, he was sworn at and told that the only way they would test it would be to pay them at the hourly rate.

All of this evidence was forwarded to Local Member Carol Martin, who then forwarded it on to Consumer Affairs and the parliamentary pro bono solicitor.

Consumer Affairs has not acted on the information.



**********************************



Published by The Kununurra Echo on 5th March 2004


Department denies inaction

The Department of Consumer and Employment Protection has denied it failed to act on complaints against former Kununurra business S. Parker Mechanical Repairs.

The Kimberley Echo recently ran a story about some of the blatant mistreatment of customers by the now defunct business.

The department said, in a letter to the Kimberley Echo, that complaints from three people were forwarded to it by Local Member Carol Martin in October last year. It had also received an independent complaint from a fourth person.

Several approaches were made to Steve and Shiree Parker but they made no admission of failing to meet their obligations under the Fair Trading Act and made no offers to assist.

The department claimed it had kept in regular contact with the complainants and referred some to the Small Claims Tribunal. The letter said the department's role was to negotiate between the parties where no breach of legislation had taken place.

It was exploring what other action could be taken, but the closure of the business was an important consideration in determining future action. The department has written to Consumer and Business Affairs in the NT to inform of the Parkers' move to that territory.

Be that as it may, it is cold comfort to Michelle Manning and others like her, who lost thousands and received shoddy work.

The Parkers closed their Bloodwood Drive business and are believed to be living on a small acreage at Mandorah, west of Darwin across the harbour.

Since running the story, the Kimberley Echo has heard from numerous other victims of the business, which is believed to have been set up with the assistance of an ATSIC grant.

The coughing contents of the Manchester-bound departure gate at Singapore airport offered me my first glimpse of what life would be like back in the UK. Most of the other passengers were English and making their way home from various far-flung holidays. After four months in Asia three things about them were readily apparent; they were predominantly Caucasian, they were physically big (and often comically fat) and they had a burly, unapproachable air about them. Many of them looked like nightclub bouncers.

It was cold, dismal and rainy when we landed in Manchester. I was stopped, questioned and searched by a customs officer. He spent several minutes carefully sniffing my Beedies.

I couldn't help but treat England as another new country and found myself making comparisons with the other places I had visited. It took mere seconds, rather than two hours, to purchase a train ticket for the journey across the Pennines to Leeds. I did not need a reservation. There was a train every hour, rather than one every day. I was able to drink the tap water without worrying that it had come from a contaminated well. The station floor did not have a thousand crippled homeless people sleeping on it. I was not approached and followed for an hour by a heart-breaking weeping begging leper with the bare white bones of his thumbs sticking out of his ruined hands. I didn't see anyone shitting on the ground in front of me. The train set off exactly on time, rather than many hours late. The train was warm and clean and quiet. The people around me were wearing clothes and shoes. There were no cockroaches or rats. Everyone on the train had a newspaper and possessed the ability to read them. We arrived in Leeds six minutes late. I overheard one of my fellow passengers complaining about the poor quality of the British railway system.

My parents were out at work when I arrived home so I spent a couple of hours anxiously pacing the rooms of their house, lost for something to do and trying half-heartedly to perform many pointless tasks simultaneously. I hated the feeling of being back. I felt as if I had been sent to prison. I was looking forward to seeing clip again. I figured that she would be the only familiar thing in an unfamiliar place. But I was wrong, she had already changed back into "home clip" and things were quite strained between us for a while. Boggle and Shithead had been replaced by television.

For the next few days I was paraded around like a circus freak. It was like sitting on a conveyor belt as it trundled through workplaces, family meals, telephone calls and the bedrooms of infirm ladies. I lost control of my life. The most commonly asked question, "did you have a nice time?" and my dutiful answer, "yes thank you," both failed spectacularly to capture any concept about what had actually happened to me over the past year.

Boredom, frustration and depression started to set in. Instead of spending my days doing interesting things, outside in the sunshine, I now found myself spending my days doing nothing, inside a house. The weather in this country is utterly shit. It's always cold, dark, overcast, rainy and windy. People practically climax with enthusiasm when they see a little patch of blue in the sky. Why do we put up with it?

It became clear that I had a choice to make. Either I could struggle and make returning home a long and painful fight against the inevitable, or I could accept that our travels were over, cherish the memories and make the decision to settle back into normal life. I chose the latter but I can feel that our year away has changed the way I am. Our outward behaviour is generally dictated by our immediate surroundings but less-obvious things can change behind the facade. I wonder if my character seems any different to the people who know me.

Here are a few of the things I've learned from our trip, and a few recommendations;

1 The price of a book has got absolutely nothing to do with how good it is.
2 If you photograph everything you see you won't see anything. Look with your eyes. There were dozens of people on the boat with us off the coast of Kaikoura who only saw the whales through their camera viewfinders.
3 You cannot accurately judge anyone from their appearance. On the surface this seems a fairly simple idea to grasp, but putting it into practice is extremely difficult.
4 Generally speaking, the more money you have and the more possessions you covet, the more unhappy you will be.
5 If they have no influence on you or your life, worrying and moaning and complaining about what other people are doing is a pointless waste of your time.
6 If you're on a train journey in the dark in a country where no-one speaks English, it's quite useful to know the name of the station that the train stops at immediately before the one you want to get off at.
7 Read The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.
8 Read A Million Little Pieces by James Frey.

clip has been successful in getting a job as a Dog Instructor with Hearing Dogs for Deaf People, which is great news. She starts with them at the beginning of February.

I have been back at work for one week. My work colleagues asked, "did you have a nice time?" and I answered, "yes thank you," and everyone said, "you're so thin." I spent my first working night in a hotel near our country office in Maidenhead. The room rate was £141. That one night in Maidenhead cost the equivalent of twenty weeks accommodation in India. Having seen how people in other countries live (starving under tarpaulins with rags for clothes and no shoes) this almost makes me want to cry - we should help them not ignore them. I feel so sorry for them. Next time you go on holiday go to India, or Laos. It will change your life forever.

Those Akha children are in their hilltop wooden-hut village in Laos right now. None of them can read or write. They've never been in a car or seen a television. They're fetching water from a stream and feeding their pigs and chickens. And they're running around and laughing. Their responsibilities are life responsibilities. Our responsibilities have no intrinsic importance. Their happiness is based on true life happiness. Our happiness is based on a series of perceived successes in a purely artificial system.

This will probably be my last blog entry. I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Please feel free to email me with any comments or abuse; it would be nice to know what you think.

Take care everyone.

clop

Our brilliant adventure lasted 359 days.

How much did it cost?

We had no income for a year and were very careful to keep an eye on how much we were spending as we went along. To make this easier for ourselves we bought our famous Book Of Sums and wrote down in it how much we spent each day. "What geeks," I hear you thinking, but it makes an interesting read, and if you are planning to travel perhaps this information will be useful to you.


Flights

Our Round-The-World flight tickets cost £906 per person.

Each ticket included a total of eleven flights; from London to San Francisco, Los Angeles to Fiji, Fiji to Auckland, Auckland to Christchurch, Christchurch to Melbourne, Brisbane to Singapore, Singapore to Hanoi, Bangkok to Singapore, Singapore to Delhi, Bombay to Singapore and Singapore to Manchester.


Insurance

Our comprehensive travel/medical insurance cost £250 per person.


Accommodation Costs

Accommodation Costs for 358 nights came to a total of £2517, an average of £3.52 per person per night.


Travelling Costs

Travelling costs included country visas, bus fares, coach fares, tram fares, taxi fares, tuk-tuk fares, cyclo fares, songthaew fares, train fares, ferry fares, boat fares, hire cars, hire cars petrol, Bertha, Bertha's transfer fee, Bertha's stamp duty, Bertha's rego fee, Bertha's petrol, Bertha's oil, Bertha's repairs, Bertha's servicing, Bertha's depreciation, tools, road tolls and airport departure taxes.

Travelling costs (not including our flights) came to a total of £4024, an average of £5.60 per person per day.


All Other Costs

All Other Costs included food, drinks, beer, clothes, shoes, toiletries, medicines, anti-malarials, insect repellant, suncream, camping equipment, cooking utensils, gas cartridges, internet, printing, phone calls, cinema visits, entrance fees, organised tours, trekking, bicycle hire, motorcycle hire, motorcycle petrol, boat hire, membership fees, maps, books, stationery, pens, postage, games, laundry, haircuts, cloakrooms, batteries, bulbs, contact lenses and all other day-to-day living expenses.

All Other Costs came to a total of £5939, an average of £8.27 per person per day.




So the total cost of our year-long adventure was £7396 per person.




If you're still awake, here are the country averages for each category


Country ...................... Average Accommodation (per person per night)

USA .............................. £10.20
Fiji ................................... £3.50
New Zealand ................ £2.90
Australia ........................ £3.65
Singapore ..................... £9.15
Malaysia ........................ £1.88
Thailand ........................ £1.78
Laos ............................... £1.05
Vietnam ......................... £1.55
India ............................... £3.40


Country ...................... Average Travelling Costs (per person per day)

USA .............................. £14.82
Fiji ................................... £2.28
New Zealand ................ £6.74
Australia ........................ £6.46
Singapore ..................... £1.00
Malaysia ........................ £1.67
Thailand ........................ £1.63
Laos ............................... £2.69
Vietnam ......................... £2.70
India ............................... £6.38


Country ...................... Average All Other Costs (per person per day)

USA .............................. £16.43
Fiji ................................... £5.82
New Zealand .............. £19.16
Australia ...................... £11.24
Singapore ..................... £2.90
Malaysia ........................ £4.35
Thailand ........................ £5.09
Laos ............................... £4.76
Vietnam ......................... £4.20
India ............................... £6.72


and here are the country averages for the total cost


Country ...................... Average Total Cost (per person per day)

USA .............................. £41.45
Fiji ................................. £11.60
New Zealand .............. £23.80
Australia ...................... £18.95
Singapore ................... £13.05
Malaysia ........................ £7.90
Thailand ........................ £8.50
Laos ............................... £8.50
Vietnam ......................... £8.45
India ............................. £16.50

My body has arrived home.

Travelling by local buses in India is not only cheap but also marvellous fun. Numerous private companies ply each route with grotty battered old buses with ripped seat covers. As usual in Asia the scheduled departure times are academic - the buses leave when they are full. In order to attract passengers and speed up the filling process the conductor stands near the back of the bus and slaps the bodywork and screams the destination (for example, "panajipanajipanajipanajipanajipanajipanajipanajipanajipanaji") at the top of his lungs whilst the driver revs the living shit out of the engine and rocks the bus back and forth as if it is about to set off. But of course it isn't about to set off. This slapping and screaming and revving and rocking back and forth usually continues for a good fifteen minutes or so. More than enough time to set your teeth on edge if you're crammed in the back seat sweating. Even when the bus does set off there are still things that can go wrong. As my bus from Mapusa to Anjuna was finally lurching its way across the bus station to the exit gate a gang of men armed with wooden sticks dragged our driver from his cab and beat him up alongside the bus. A substitute driver was supplied for the journey.

Throughout most of Asia public displays of affection between men and women are considered offensive. In some places even holding hands can cause grave offence. Strangely enough, this aversion does not apply to public displays of affection between (heterosexual) men. It is very common to see Asian men walking hand in hand or arm in arm. On buses they drape their arms around each others necks and gently pinch each others cheeks. In restaurants they fondle each others hair whilst eating. clip thought it was nice and I kind of envy the Asians - they are so much more comfortable with tactile friendship than we are back home.

We spent a day sightseeing in Old Goa and took a ferry across to Divar Island. Churches were very much the theme of the day.

A few more days sunbathing and then it was time to catch the overnight train from Goa to Bombay. We arrived at 6:30am with fourteen hours to kill before our flights home. We spent a while walking around between all the people sleeping on the streets. We drank some chai. We optimistically bought tickets for a half-day bus tour of Bombay city centre (1ukp). We thought it would give us something to do.

The tour bus was of the usual grotty battered variety. There was some confusion about which bus we should get on. The bus set off an hour late. We were the only white people on the tour. We couldn't understand the grossly distorted commentary. After a stop at the Gateway To India and the Taj Hotel we were moved onto a different tour bus. We were the only white people on the new bus. We couldn't understand the hoarsely shouted commentary. We stopped to see the sea and an aquarium. Neil played the "Find The Card Game" and immediately lost 100rps. We drove past the Towers Of Silence - stone pillars where human corpses are left out for vultures to eat. We visited a temple.

At 2pm we discovered that everyone on the bus (except us) was on the full day tour. Unfortunately we discovered this halfway round (and at the apogee of) the full day tour circuit. We were informed that our half day tour was over and told to get off the bus. We were 6km away from the starting point, without a map. We were a bit bamboozled. There was an argument. The commentary man suggested we hail a taxi. We argued and held up the bus for a while but of course we didn't get anywhere. In the end we had to take a local bus back into town.



clip and I have answered a little questionnaire about our adventure.


Which two countries would you most recommend others to visit?

clip

Laos because of the fabulous, friendly people and the fantastic unspoilt scenery.

Australia because of the wildlife (particularly koalas) and the fact it's so big and the landscape is so varied.

clop

Laos because it was the country least-affected by tourism, particularly the northern parts. The Lao people were exceptionally friendly and genuine, travelling around was frequently a proper adventure and the landscape was the best I have ever seen.

Australia because I loved everything about it. In general the people are friendly by default and they have an inate sense of fun and adventure, the variety of wildlife is awesome, the landscape is incredibly varied, the weather is great and it is so sparsely populated that you can achieve true isolation without straying very far from "home".

And I have to mention the eastern Malaysian islands Tioman and Perhentian. It's worth going to Malaysia for these alone.


Which two countries would you least recommend others to visit?

clip

Vietnam because although the people were friendly they were over-persistant and it was not relaxing at all. It was an ugly country too.

Fiji was the dullest horriblest place ever. It was too hot, too humid, there were too many biting bugs, there's nothing to see or do, it's dirty and generally really crap.

clop

Looking back I cannot remember a single thing about Vietnam that would make me want to go there again. The scenery was nice in some parts but hardly remarkable, the people hassled us relentlessly which made it hard to relax and the general attitute did not make me feel welcome as a visitor.

I'll have to say Fiji as well, though I don't think we gave it a chance. We were trapped in the same place for a week, much of it spent vomiting, sweating and being bitten in a waterlogged tent. Perhaps if we had explored the other parts I would not be so negative.


What are your best memories/moments of the trip?

clip

It's very hard to pinpoint my best memories because the whole trip was one great memory.

I would say that skydiving was definitely a fabulous moment if for no other reason than I never thought I'd have the bottle to do anything that scary. I would do it again.

Holding Zagget my koala would have to be another great moment. It made me realise that I am meant to own one at some point in my life. They are by far the cutest animal ever.

Our first night in Bertha on the Great Ocean Road was lovely because it was the start of proper Aussie travelling and a long-awaited escape from Melbourne.

Whale watching in Kaikoura was very exciting. I couldn't help but cry when I was waved at with its huge tail.

Surviving the trip between Laos and Vietnam. I truly thought that we weren't going to arrive alive. This is one of my worst moments too.

clop

Like clip said, the whole trip was one long great memory, but I can pick out a few special moments.

My best memory is snorkelling with huge sea turtles off the beach of Pulau Perhentian Besar in Malaysia. I could have stayed out there for weeks with those turtles. They came up to the surface just a few feet away and looked right at you. They were fantastic.

I also enjoyed sitting alone with clip in a forest in Australia for half an hour watching a wild Duck-billed Platypus swimming around and foraging for food in the river in front of us.

Selling Bertha was a truly wonderful moment. We were so relieved when we walked away with $3000 cash in our hands that we couldn't stop laughing and whooping.

River-tubing squiffy near Vang Vieng in Laos was the most relaxing moment of the year. The scenery was staggering and it was all so quiet and peaceful.


What are your worst memories/moments of the trip?

clip

Fiji. I keep trying to block out the fact that we even went there at all and it gives me shivers whenever I remember it.

As I said on the last question, the trip on the 24 hour bus journey between Laos and Vietnam. I cried when I saw what we were going to be travelling in and the fact that nobody seemed to speak English and everybody seemed to want to go to different places. I was very scared.

Going home the first time. I am very glad I did go because otherwise I wouldn't have got to see my Grandma again but saying goodbye to clop at the airport I would say is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. I felt like my life was ending.

clop

clip going home the first time. It was horrible. I've never been so upset in my life.

Discovering that clip had lost all her flights. It was such a shock when we found out what had happened that we couldn't think of anything to say to each other for a while. We thought the whole of the Asian portion of our trip was going to be ruined though in retrospect I think we had a much better time overlanding than we would have had if we had flown.

Breaking my dad's new boomerang when the wind blew it over some tarmac.

My encounter with S Parker Mechanical Disasters. I wonder how many other travellers' lives he has mucked up. Everything is still being investigated by the Western Australian government - watch this space.


What are the most irritating things you remember about the trip?

clip

Fiji and the Indian Embassy in Vietnam - what an idiotic system.

clop

Accidentally leaving things behind. We did not have anything stolen from us all year long. The only things we lost we lost ourselves. It was so irritating each time we realised what we'd done. Our water carrier, our cutlery, clip's jumper, our Yahtzee dice, my scissors, our Indochina map, my palm, my blue cup etc. Grrr.

Noisy neighbours. clip and I made an effort to keep quiet late at night or early in the morning but some travellers seem to deliberately make as much noise as possible at any time they like. Talking loudly or shouting or banging or stamping around. I wish people could be more considerate.

The Indian Embassy in Saigon. I start trembling with annoyance when I think about that place.

And, of course, the flies in the outback.


What are your biggest regrets about the trip?

clip

I don't think I have any real regrets about the trip, it was a fabulous experience. I do regret not being able to visit Cambodia; I was really looking forward to going there and, well, maybe my only other regret is not pinching a koala. I so want one of those.

clop

I regret not visiting the Great Barrier Reef from Cairns. We hated Cairns so much that we moved on before we realised what we were missing.

The Full Moon Party at Haad Rin on Ko Pha Ngan in Thailand. What a waste of time and money that was.


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Phew. I'm now using one of the free internet terminals in Singapore airport. I've just paid S$8, the equivalent of three nights accommodation in India, to have a shower (3ukp). There was a sign telling you not to take more than fifteen minutes so I deliberately stayed under the water under my fingers went wrinkly. And then I had a shave. S$8 for a shower! They can get stuffed. You should get the sodding shower for the whole day for that much money.

My flight to Manchester leaves in under four hours. I feel very peculiar. I can't remember home properly. I feel as though it is somebody else going home, not me; I'm just an observer. It is not a nice feeling.

Recently I have discovered the existence of an inconvenient condition which affects males when they are sunbathing. I have named it "Sunbed Knob".

I don't know if it is the design of my swimming trunks, the spacing of the plastic ribs across the sunbeds or the fact that I am always surrounded by at least a hundred bored onlookers but I can guarantee that, after just five minutes of sunbathing, things will be maddeningly out-of-place downstairs, no matter how well-positioned things were when I first laid down.

And there is never an easy way to resolve the situation. Well, not without extensively groping yourself in full view anyway.

Does anyone have any ideas as to how I can avoid this affliction?

We wanted to visit Palolem beach, located some 100km south of Anjuna, after Christmas but knew that it would be impossible to find accommodation in Anjuna when we got back, during the run-up to New Year. So we decided to leave our big rucksacks in our Anjuna room for a few days while we went to Palolem, ignoring the fact that we would be paying for an unused room.

The journey to Palolem involved four local buses (Anjuna-Mapusa, Mapusa-Panjim, Panjim-Margao, Margao-Palolem) and took four and a half hours. The return trip cost 88p each - not bad considering that the organised tour price is 12.85ukp.

Palolem is famed for being one of the nicest beaches in Goa and having "Thai-style" wooden beach huts that you can sleep in. It was indeed very pretty but there were several hundred of these huts crammed together in the palm trees along the top of the beach and they were nothing like the beach huts we stayed in this year in Malaysia and Thailand. The huts in Malaysia and Thailand were made of bamboo and woven leaves, had thatched roofs and cost 1.50ukp per night; the huts in Palolem were made of plywood and beach mats, had bright blue plastic sheets for roofs and cost 6.30ukp per night. A more cynical person may have noted the presence of an extremely successful marketing campaign. The place was packed with haughty and sullen travellers, the kind of lard-haired campfire-guitarist twerps who spend their time complaining about everything, brooding cross-legged in their cliquey posing groups and showing off their tassle-twirling prowess on the beach. Many of them were Israeli and had throat problems.

When we arrived back in Anjuna we got told off by Santos, the owner of our guesthouse. He had been wondering where we had been for the last three days. Whilst we had been in Palolem more than forty people had come looking for rooms and some had offered him more than double what we were paying. Heh heh heh!

We were woken up several times during the night by the rhythmic squeaking of our neighbours' bed inching across their bedroom floor. On each occasion we were soothed back to sleep by their post-coital musical greetings card.

New Year's Eve wasn't bad at all. We went to an open-air Goan trance club in Vagator called the Ninebar, then to Primrose Bar, then to a free 36-hour, open-air Goan trance rave party in Disco Valley off Vagator beach. Blimey what a great night.

I miss clip terribly. I miss her peering into dank bathrooms looking for creepy crawlies; I miss us playing Shithead to see who has to make the morning coffees; I miss her saying that everything stinks; I miss the amusing way she packs her rucksack and flattens the bed clothes; I miss her obsession with avoiding mosquitoes; I miss her worrywartness; I miss her saying she is shtufften. It felt as though my travels ended when she went home, despite the time I am now spending in India. I feel like I am on holiday for a couple of weeks; it's like a buffer between the travelling world and the real world.

Happy New Year everyone.

love clop

Whilst the bacteria from Neil and Emma's chicken currys were busy festering and reproducing inside their tummies, we caught the evening train to Agra. They mustn't see many white people at Agra railway station because we spent our entire two hours there (waiting for our late train) being gawped at by mass crowds of Indians, having our photographs taken and being hounded (and attacked) by grubby street children.

Our Indrail Passes allowed us to travel in 2AC class, a two-tier air-conditioned sleeper carriage with surprisingly comfortable bunk beds hanging by chains from the ceiling. Clean bedding and good food were provided; it was all very civilised. The train had to go slowly because of the thick fog and we didn't arrive in Agra until 4:30am, four hours behind schedule. We reached our hotel at 5am and fell into bed exhausted.

Neil started vomiting at 10am. And other things. And Emma too. They spent the whole day in bed, and in the bathroom. I spent the day chatting to other travellers on the rooftop terrace, chortling at the antics of the monkeys climbing on the surrounding buildings, and squinting through the mist at the Taj Mahal nearby.

The next day Neil and Emma were still very poorly but they managed to get out of bed for our one-day tuk-tuk tour of Agra. First we visited the Taj Mahal, an exquisitely beautiful mausoleum rendered in white marble and semi-precious stones. The entrance fee was a con; 25p for Indians and 9.75ukp for tourists. The freezing shroud of early morning mist made it impossible to take any really good photographs but it heightened the mystique and deadened the din of the traffic buzzing and peeping around in the streets outside the perimeter walls.

From the Taj Mahal we went to see the so-called "Baby Taj", a smaller and older, but in my opinion more satisfying (cheaper and less crowded) mausoleum on the other side of the river. We had a foggy look across the river at the back of the proper Taj Mahal and I had a go at driving the tuk-tuk (great fun), then we visited a carpet factory. Neil and Emma came over all poorly again so we headed to the railway station for our night train to Bombay, with a connection at Matura Junction. Predictably, the connecting train was two hours late, which caused us more than a little stress, especially considering Neil and Emma were still rather loose in the toilet department.

I didn't see much of Bombay but the bits I did see seemed quite nice. We'd only been there a few hours before it was time to catch yet another night train to Goa. We arrived at our (pre-booked) hotel in Candolim at 11am on the 23rd. Time to relax at last.

I have to say, Christmas away from home/clip was absolutely rubbish. I won't be doing it again. I'm sure it would have been better if clip had been here with me but, and nothing against Neil and Emma, it was very lonely. Christmas might as well not have happened. Christianity is a minority religion in India so Christmas is not celebrated to the same extent as it is in England, but for those that do celebrate it, it is much more about goodwill and sincerity than about present-giving and over-indulgence. We spent Christmas day sunbathing on the beach and paid 7.80ukp each for Christmas dinner. We built a sand snowman and the puzzled Indians stood around staring and asked, "What are you doing?"

Neil had only booked us into our (old people) hotel for five nights so after Christmas we had to find somewhere else to stay. We chose Anjuna, a more traveller-orientated beach village further north. It took us a while but we managed to find a decent room with a double bed and a single bed for 250rp (3.16ukp) per night.

Lying on the beach in Goa is not as relaxing as you might think, because you are pestered by a steady stream of fruit sellers, trinket sellers, henna tattooists, drum sellers, sticker sellers, nut sellers, masseurs/masseuses, cheap tat sellers, drink sellers, icecream men and ear cleaners who pretend to be able to see soap or wax in your ears from ten yards away. The ear cleaners are particularly amusing because they always carry a notebook of accolades, supposedly written by satisfied customers, but the comments never seem quite genuine somehow.

Typical examples include

"My ears were so clean I could hear a mouse fart from three hundred miles."

and

"This was the most beneficial biological enquiry I have ever had performed on my head."

Ha ha ha god that makes me laugh.

To all those of you that celebrate Christmas...

Merry Christmas!

and to those of you that don't...

Happy Holidays!


love clop xxxx

I have been home now for six days and I am just starting to settle in. I felt very much like I did the last time I popped home. Very floaty, as though I didn't fit in anywhere, just visiting. I have had a bit of trouble chatting with friends and family. I feel as though I have lost my ability to chit-chat. But, that too after a few days is starting to come back. I think I probably chose the best time to return home. It's Christmas time and everybody is happy and friendly. A lot of people have already finished work so I have plenty of people to see. And of course there is Christmas food shopping to do, and that sort of thing, that I love.

I was less excited about coming home this time than the last, probably because it is the end and I now have to settle down and find a job, somewhere to live etc. And that is a bit scary. I have grown to love not having to work, and the thought of having to wake up early every morning to go somewhere I don't really want to go, for not much money, just seems rubbish.

It is strange being without clop but I am really pleased he's spending Christmas with his friends, away from all the things he hates about this time of year (presents, false friendliness, over-eating etc.), in fact all the things I love. It seems like a long time till he gets back. But it's much more bearable than the last time.

It feels a bit like the trip never really happened, because I don't really have anybody to talk to about it. Friends and family ask questions but it's not like fully discussing where you've been and what you've seen. I've tried but it ends up sounding really dull or as though I'm a bit up my own arse. The only person I've come close to talking about it properly with was a taxi driver who had travelled to a lot of the same places. It was nice to swap stories. I'm looking forward to chatting properly about our trip with clop when he returns at the beginning of January.

In order to annoy me as much as possible, the air traffic controllers at Delhi International Airport specially arranged for my flight (which was packed full of Indian people who complained about everything and never said thank you) to land a few minutes behind two other immensely-full passenger jets. As a consequence the queue to clear immigration was wrist-slittingly long. It wound back and forth across the entire width of the concourse eight times, then right back to the far end of the immigration hall, then right back to the bottom of the staircase and then all the way up the stairs and into the arrival gates. I was worried about keeping Neil and Emma waiting too long. I needn't have. The traffic around Delhi was so bad that their 17km taxi ride from the city centre took them an hour and a half, and they walked in almost as I walked out.

Seeing my friends again was strange but not as strange as I had been expecting. Things between us weren't much different to how they had been a year ago (though they did seem rather white).

Once into town our taxi ran out of petrol in the middle of a busy street and we had to walk the rest of the way along the Main Bazaar to our hotel. It was 12C and misty and I still had my shorts on from Singapore. It was perishing. After a chat and a beer and some dosas we went straight to (triple) bed.

The next morning our priority was to go to New Delhi Railway Station to try to buy me a ticket for the evening train to Agra (Neil and Emma already had their tickets) and to reconfirm all our Indrail Pass reservations (Agra-Mathura, Mathura-Bombay, Bombay-Goa, Goa-Bombay) which Neil had cleverly organised from Leeds.

In the station two Indians stopped us from going up the stairs to the official ticket office. They said the office was closed and "proved it" by pointing to a Danger! sticker on a nearby lift. They said we should go to a different (ie con-artist) ticket office outside the station. We ignored them and went upstairs to the official ticket office which was, of course, open.

With over 1.2 million employees, the Indian Railway company is the biggest employer on the planet. Given the size of the country and its incredible population (over 1 billion) I can well believe it, though the term 'employee' must be applied in the vaguest sense - there were a dozen staff present in the ticket office but only three of them actually appeared to be doing anything and it took us over an hour to get served.

I managed to get the last remaining seat on the train to Agra, which was handy, and then we had to go to a different desk to sort out our Indrail Pass reservations. This second desk was cluttered with tickets, teetering piles of paperwork and battered record-keeping books. We handed over our passes and looked on with considerable skepticism as the clerk uncovered one such knackered book (seemingly at random) and started thumbing through its torn and ragged pages (some held together with yellowed sellotape) as though he knew what he was doing. It was therefore a shock to suddenly see our names and all our details handwritten on a fresh page in the book, and even more of a shock when the clerk quickly extracted our pre-printed tickets from several whopping great bundles he produced from the depths of a chaotic drawer. We were very impressed.

We spent the rest of the day walking around Delhi city centre. It is the filthiest, busiest, most appalling, disgusting place I could ever have imagined. The streets are very narrow and they are full of workers, touts, beggars, cripples, rickshaws, cars, hand-carts, cyclos, mopeds, horse-drawn-carts, cow-drawn carts, cows, pigs, dogs etc. There is no open space, just people shoving to get through any possible gap. There are many open street latrines (which stink to high heaven) but everywhere you go there are also people urinating or defecating along the sides of the road so that urine flows across the pavements. The air stinks of piss and shit. Nobody gives way to anybody at any time - everyone pushes only for themselves. The road junctions are all snarled up and nobody can move but nobody will give way. We had to climb through vehicles to cross the road. The buildings are literally crumbling all around. Piles of rubble everywhere. People living under tarpaulins along the road-sides. People shouting and pushing and touting. And the constant stink of piss and shit.

We managed to walk as far as the Red Fort and back before we were too exhausted by it all to go any further. We decided to eat some food before we had to catch our train to Agra. I chose vegetable noodles. Neil and Emma chose bowls of tasty chicken curry. This unfortunate decision was to have catastrophic consequences, as they would discover fourteen hours later.

Vietnam Immigration Officer: "Your passport and boarding card please."
clop hands them over.
Vietnam Immigration Officer stares disdainfully at the documents and his little screen for a while, with a face like a half-sucked lemon.
Vietnam Immigration Officer: "What was the name of the hotel that you last stayed in?"
clop: "I have no idea."
Vietnam Immigration Officer: "I need to know the name of your hotel."
clop: "I have absolutely no idea what it was. It was in Vietnamese."
Vietnam Immigration Officer: "Well, what was the address of the hotel?"
clop: "No idea. I have no idea what the address was."
Vietnam Immigration Officer: "You've no idea at all?"
clop: "It was in Saigon."
Vietnam Immigration Officer, making a face as if he's doing something in his pants: "OK. Through you go."

Vietnam and its pathetic bureaucracy. Why even bother asking questions when it doesn't matter what answers you get?

Looking down from the plane as it roared up through the Saigon skies gave us an uninterrupted view of a surreal flat landscape of tiny pale pastel-coloured concrete buildings stretching in every direction as far as the eye could see.

Landing in Singapore was like being transported forwards through time to a squeaky-clean, super-efficient, futuristic space colony. Three months in the less-developed countries of Southeast Asia make you forget what Western civilisation is like. Everything is so neat and quiet and clean and easy and smooth and unfriendly and expensive. It's amazing.

Our last few days in Singapore have been horrible. Like waiting for your own execution, it's very hard to enjoy yourself when you know the axe is about to fall. We tried sunbathing but it started raining. We went to the Asian Kennel Association Championship Dog Show at Expo 3 - the little dog agility events were very entertaining but the show was essentially an exercise in avoiding puddles of dog urine. We visited Orchard Road to see the Christmas lights (it's very weird seeing Christmas trees and Santas and fake snow and reindeer and hearing carols when it's 32C - impossible to feel Christmassy at all really) but it started raining. We went to see a laser-light show at the Fountain Of Wealth at Suntec City, supposedly the biggest fountain in the world - very nice. We went to hear some carol singers at Downtown East Resort which was also very nice but again weird because it was hot and humid and I was sweating throughout the performance. Their rendition of "I'm Dreaming Of A White Christmas" seemed particularly futile. We visited Little India and ate dosas off banana leaves. We watched television. We played Boggle. We waited. We waited.

And now clip has gone home. I do not feel as bad this time as I did the last time she went home, because this time I know I will see her again quite soon, but I feel bad all the same. We have spent every minute of every day of the last six months together and it is quite a wrench to lose something so intrinsic to your everyday life.

Today is a traumatic day for clip, more traumatic than I think her friends and family might appreciate. It's the end of her adventure and she has to go home (it's impossible to convey the stomach-churning emotions of this event), she's flying all the way around the world on her own (quite a feat for someone who still can't go through car-washes on her own) and she's having to leave me behind again. She was the best travelling companion I could have wished for. I hope everyone is nice to her when she gets back.

Tomorrow I fly to Delhi.

We're famous!

We're being featured on the homepage of http://www.gapyear.com and there's an interview with us here

w00t

Posted by clip

I feel very strange. It is very nearly time to go home and although I am excited about seeing my family and friends, and there isn't anywhere I'd rather be at christmas time than with my family, I am very nervous about it too. Travelling has been our life for so long and going home doesn't feel like going home; it's like planning to go away from what we know all over again.

I too am very proud of what clop and I have done. It's surprising how you can get used to living out of a bag, moving on every few days and learning new languages, and after so long it doesn't feel strange anymore. It also doesn't seem like a year since we were planning it and packing our bags. We've seen and done so much and I don't think people at home can fully appreciate what it has been like. It's just been clop and me together as a team and it will be odd mixing with other people I know and including them in my life again.

I am worried that I will get home and everything will go back to how it was before we went away. I don't want to fall back into old routines but I do think it will be difficult not to. I am worried about getting a job. The easy thing to do is to go right back to what I was doing before we left, but I don't want to. I need for this trip to have changed my life, not just while I was away, but at home too. Otherwise, it's just been a nice long holiday.

I think I would feel a little bit better if clop and I were returning home at the same time so that we could get used to being at home, and try to fit in, together.

In an ideal world I think I would rather be going home for a two week holiday, and to see friends and family, and then return to my life travelling. I never expected to feel like this a few months ago.

Today's blog episode nicely illustrates the continuous perils of travelling.

It was Monday morning. My passport had already been at the Indian Embassy for five days but would not be ready to collect until Friday evening. Singapore Airlines had kindly arranged for us to fly for free to Singapore on the following Monday. We had booked accommodation in Singapore for Monday night. Everything seemed to be under control.

Hmm, almost a week to kill. What should we do? We've seen the local sights. How about a few days sunbathing on the beach at Mui Ne, three hours north of Saigon? What a great idea! And why not see if we can collect my passport on Monday morning instead of Friday evening and spend even longer on the beach? Another great idea!

And so we walked to the Indian Embassy and were made to wait for fifty minutes before Mr Murli Nair deigned to see us and answer our simple question. We walked into his office. There, lying in his desk drawer, untouched since the day I'd handed them over, were my passport and visa application form. Does this man have any idea that he has already ruined our travel plans in Cambodia?

"Yes," says the unlikeable Mr Murli Nair, "you can collect your passport on Monday morning."

Oh wow, thanks Murli.

So, on Tuesday, we got a bus to Mui Ne, spent half an hour finding a nice beachside guesthouse, chose a room, haggled a reasonable price, left our rucksacks on the bed and went to reception to check in.

Check-in Woman: "Can I have your passports please?"
clop: "This is (clip's) passport. My passport is at the Indian Embassy in Saigon having a visa processed. This is a photocopy of my passport and this is a photocopy of my Vietnam visa and this is my immigration form."
Check-in Woman stares blankly at the photocopies and speaks in Vietnamese to a surly bloke drinking beer at a table.
Check-in Woman: "Sorry, we need your passport."
clop: "It's at the Indian Embassy in Saigon."
Check-in Woman: "You can't stay here."
clop: "Why?"
Check-in Woman: "You no passport."
clop: "It's at the Indian Embassy! Look, here is a photocopy of my passport and here is a photocopy of my Vietnam visa and here is my immigration form.... and here is my driving licence.... and here is an identical copy of my passport photograph."
Check-in Woman: "Sorry, you can't stay here."
clop: "Fucking hell."

And so we had to leave. What a stupid rule. Where are foreigners supposed to sleep while they wait for visas to be processed?

After a while we found another, cheaper beachside guesthouse and checked in with no problems.

Then we realised, somewhat belatedly, that our Vietnam visas would expire on Sunday, the day before we were due to leave the country. There would be no time to apply for extensions. How would be able to get accommodation on Sunday night? Would we be fined and/or arrested at the airport on Monday? Immediately we rang Singapore Airlines in Saigon and asked if we could change to a flight on Saturday or Sunday; they were already full. We asked to be added to the waitlist for Sunday's flight.

A day later and we were still waiting. In desperation we sent an email to the Singapore Airlines staff in the UK, asking them to help. They wrote back within an hour to say they had confirmed two seats for us on the Saturday flight. Michelle Dee and Iona Payne are brilliant.

As we were leaving Vietnam unexpectedly early we tried to extend our accommodation in Singapore to include Saturday and Sunday nights. The hostel was already fully booked. It was a struggle to find a room in a different hotel for Saturday.

After a couple of relaxing days on the beach we returned to Saigon to collect my passport on Friday. We arrived at the Indian Embassy at 4pm, the time we had been given by Mr Murli Nair nine days earlier. We walked into his office. There, lying on his desk, untouched since the day I'd handed them over, were my passport and visa application form. We could not believe it.

The Unlikeable Mr Murli Nair looked up at us as though we were imposing on him, opened his hands and gestured towards the pile of passports: "Well it's not ready yet."
clip and clop, gobsmacked.
The Unlikeable Mr Murli Nair: "Which one is it?"
clop, gobsmacked: "That's me on top."
The Unlikeable Mr Murli Nair: "Can you wait ten minutes?"
clop, gobsmacked: "Right."
clip and clop return to the hot waiting room, speechless.

Ten minutes later we went back into his office.

clop: "Is it ready?"
The Unlikeable Mr Murli Nair, working on someone else's passport: "No. It will be ready at 4:30pm. I will call you."
clip and clop return to the hot waiting room.

Ten minutes later he came and gave me my passport with the Indian visa stuck in it, but turned his back and walked away before I could ask him why he'd kept my passport for nine days, ruined our travels in Cambodia, wasted the money we'd spent on our Cambodian visas and even then not had it ready on time, when it took him less than ten minutes to process.

We do not like you Mr Murli Nair.


We fly to Singapore this afternoon. Dam biet Vietnam and good riddance.

"This table ok? Sit here yes? Scramble egg? Vesheytaybull? With noodle? Vesheytaybull with noodle? Two bottle Spite?"

This is the sound of a person who can actually speak English perfectly well but is ordering some food from a foreign waiter and thinks that by adopting an extraordinary accent, making everything into a question and talking as if they're addressing a three-year-old they will help the waiter to understand the order and allow him to improve his English for the future.

The 22nd SEA (Southeast Asia) Games are well underway here in Vietnam, this year's host country, and the football tournament is attracting a lot of attention. Vietnam are doing quite well. Minutes after they had beaten The Philippines the roads of Saigon erupted with mopeds ridden round and round and round for several hours by a million over-excited, hooting, peeping, bandana- and cap-wearing, pan-banging, flag-waving, ecstatic screaming Vietnamese citizens. We sat on the pavement and drank beer and watched everyone zipping past. A waitress said, "It's funny. It's not that they like football. They just like riding around and making a noise."

Just south of Saigon the Mekong River completes its 4000km journey through Tibet, China, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam as it spreads out across the Mekong Delta and drains into the South China Sea. Continuing our recent lives as package tourists we did the only decent thing and signed up for an all-inclusive organised two-day tour of the delta. I had expected a rural paradise of green rice fields, narrow waterways and earthy tracks. In fact the delta was more like a vast industrial estate studded with decaying cities and criss-crossed by ridiculously-wide muddy rivers and busy highways. We went to a rice noodle "factory", drank some snake wine (yes, it did), walked around a rice-husking mill and visited a floating market (pineapples were 8p each). We sailed up and down rivers in a variety of boats and saw the delta people going about their daily lives - mainly washing clothes, swimming in the water, lying around in hammocks and cooking. We saw riverbank petrol stations with their watery forecourts.

Everywhere we go in Vietnam we see many people with facial injuries, or with arms and/or legs missing. This is the legacy of the mines that still lie scattered around much of the country. The victims beg from tourists but not from Vietnamese people.

Our adventure is rapidly drawing to a close. The end of our trip is looming like a horrible sickening wall. clip flies home in just five days time. I fly to Delhi the following day to meet my friends Neil and Emma for our three-week Christmas Bamboozlement Tour of India.


I am very very proud of what clip and I have done together this year. All the incredible places we've been, all the amazing things we've seen, all the people we've met, all the things we've done, all the risks we have taken, all the problems we have overcome; there is enormous sense of achievement and I am proud of us. Well done sweetheart xx

When we first made the decision to leave home people said, "oh you lucky things!" and, "wow! I'd love to do that!" and, "oh I wish I could do that!" But whenever I asked, "well why don't you do it then?" they replied, "oh I can't afford it," or, "I'm too old, it's too late," or simply, "I can't."

Absolute rubbish!

We are not particularly young or brave or rich or lucky people. If you want to do it, you can do it; it really isn't difficult. And it's not as expensive as you might think. Our average spend during the last three months in Southeast Asia has been 8.89ukp each per day. This includes accommodation, food, drinks, beer, clothes, toiletries, insect repellant, internet, phone calls, entrance fees, tours, trekking, bicycle hire, motorcycle hire, motorcycle petrol, maps, books, games, laundry, haircuts, medicines, batteries, train fares, bus fares, taxi fares, boat fares, country visas and all other day-to-day living expenses. Two of us could travel comfortably for a whole year here, staying in hotels every night and eating in restaurants every day, for just 3240ukp per person. Start saving up!

As a life experience it must be hard to beat. This is the best thing I have ever done! If you are considering going travelling, I urge you to take the final step. Anyone can go. There are thousands and thousands of other people out here doing it right now. Some are 18, some are 30, some are 60! Nothing has happened at home while I've been away. I haven't missed anything. What did you spend your money on this year? What on earth are you waiting for?

But after a whole year of travelling, travelling becomes normal life. Going home will not be a return to normality because normality has become constant sunshine, 34C, living out of a bag and moving on every 2.03 days (our average this year so far). I am typing this into my palmtop whilst sitting alone on a beach in Vietnam at 6:30am, quietly watching the sun rise over the fishing coracles in front of me. I can hardly believe that I ever lived and worked in the UK at all. It's like a dream of somewhere that doesn't exist anymore, and I am scared to go home. I feel that I won't fit in when I get back. I expect to be bored and fed up. I don't know what I will talk about with my family and my friends. You can't appreciate the feelings of alienation unless you have travelled for a long period of time yourself. I am more frightened about going home than I was about coming away.

The other morning clip woke up with a look of relief on her face and gasped, "Thank goodness you woke me up! I was just about to have to do a tumbling skydive for Noel's House Party. And the worst thing was that there was only half an hour left before I had to do it and they still hadn't shown me how to work the machinery!"

Women eh?

I'm pleased to say that Vietnam is slowly growing on us.

We've had some extremely bad news and some extremely good news recently, and there have been a number of both frustrating and facilitative developments. On to those after a round-up of our travels through Vietnam so far.

Call us Mr and Mrs Lazy but, having struggled more than two thousand miles through Southeast Asia on public transport and with only a few weeks to go before the end of our year away, I think we deserve to relax and let somebody else do the hard work for us. In Hue we gleefully purchased two Sinh Cafe open tour coach tickets and have since been whisked around Vietnam in convenient air-conditioned comfort.

Moving south from Hue we spent a couple of hassle-rich days in Hoi An, a quaintish (if you screw your eyes up and wave your fingers about in front of your face as you might do for a scrambled porn channel) seaside city stuffed with cobbley streets, colonial-style buildings and hordes of irritatingly-persistent street vendors. We looked at the Japanese Covered Bridge and walked to the beach and back. Sheer adventure.

Next stop was windy rain-swept Nha Trang, another, slightly less quaint, seaside city. We attempted to walk to the market but got lost and spent half an hour staggering around lost in the heartbreakingly-poor riverside slums area. The people living there were very surprised to see us but were friendly nonetheless. Having said that, it was still a relief to finally find an exit (via some rotten planks bridging a stinking watercourse between two shacks) and clamber up a riverbank to the main road. We stood for a while and watched all the huge rats scurrying around the slums, then caught a cyclo back to our guesthouse - me and clip sitting on top of each other in what is essentially a pedal-powered pram!

From Nha Trang we tracked inland and upland to a place called Da Lat, a city originally founded as a mountain retreat by the French in 1893. Along the way we stopped at a lookout and bought fruit from some street vendors (surprise surprise) - I was disgusted to see fellow travellers bartering the vendors down from 3000D to 2000D for a bunch of bananas and still complaining that they were too expensive. 1000D is 4p. I sometimes think people take haggling too far.

Da Lat was very nice indeed - there were many man-made lakes and lots of beautiful alpine scenery. It was sunny during the day but chilly at night. The region is well-known for flower horticulture. By a stroke of luck we arrived on the penultimate day of Da Lat's 110 Year Birthday celebrations - there were fireworks and bands and crowds of people in the streets. We paid to go on a day tour of some local sights - a Buddhist meditation monastery (where we saw a hundred-year-old bonsai tree), the Flower Gardens (where we saw nine snakes basking on the grass between the plants), the Valley Of Love (where French newly-weds traditionally spent their honeymoons), the Crazy House (a guesthouse of bizarrely shaped and furnished rooms designed by an old lady who was too poorly to speak to us), the Last King's Palace (where we had to wear slippy shoe-gloves and where clip lost her jumper) and an ethnic village famous for its gigantic cement statue of a cockerel (the statue is to commemorate two local lovers who starved to death in nearby woods because they couldn't find a chicken with nine toes).

And then to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon until it was renamed at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Nowadays only the central area of Ho Chi Minh City is known as Saigon but it's shorter to type so I'll use Saigon instead.

Saigon is a vast sprawling low-rise metropolis with a population of ten million people. There are three million mopeds. There are lots of crossroads and junctions and roundabouts but there are few road markings and there are no Give Ways. People drive aggressively on whichever side of the road they like. The result is absolute bedlam. The traffic on every single street is a cross between the Stoke-on-Trent Easter Egg Run and the start of a GP500 race. The only way to cross the road is to shuffle forwards with your arms squeezed in and grit your teeth while the mopeds (hopefully) dodge around you.

Soon after arriving in Saigon we walked to the Indian Embassy and applied for my Indian tourist visa. The sign in the hot room said it would take four working days to process. We handed in the application form and the application fee and were told to ring a Mr Murli Nair the next morning to find out when the passport would be ready for collection. When we rang he told us, "Next Friday." This means that the visa is taking seven working days to process, a farcical total of nine days including the weekend. And this means that we will not have enough time to visit Cambodia unless we fly in and out, which we can't afford. Recently we have been in regular contact with the Public Relations department of Singapore Airlines in the UK and they had offered us a discounted fare on a SilkAir flight from Siem Reap to Singapore. Had the visa been ready earlier we would have taken them up on their offer but as it is we have had to turn them down. The good news is that they have agreed to let us exchange the voided/cancelled/unused sectors of our Round-The-World tickets for two free seats on a Singapore Airlines flight direct from Saigon to Singapore. This has saved us 360ukp! We are very pleased with the airline but sad that we cannot see Cambodia this time.

We visited the War Remnants Museum and learned about the Vietnam War. Most of the museum displays were galleries of black and white photographs taken by various wartime photographers. We saw photographs of American soldiers laughing and holding the heads of decapitated Vietnamese men. We saw photographs of Vietnamese men tied to the backs of American army vehicles and being dragged along until they were dead. We saw photographs of children burned by napalm and phosphorous bombs. We saw photographs of the massacres of South Vietnamese villagers. We saw pickled foetuses malformed as a result of the defoliant dioxins sprayed across the country. It's difficult to see how the museum can be biassed when the photographs show the evidence of what really happened. It was horrible.

We spent a day visiting the Ben Dinh tunnels near Cu Chi. This 200km network of interlocking, three-levelled tunnels was built during the French War and expanded during the Vietnam War. They were used by the Viet Cong when the Americans were trying to approach Saigon. We looked at some gory home-made traps and crawled through a 100m tunnel and a 60m tunnel. They have been widened so that big Western tourists can get in them but they were still very hot and narrow and claustrophobic. The Viet Cong sometimes stayed underground in them for months at a time. We don't know how they did it. Near the tunnels there was a shooting range where you could pay a dollar a bullet to fire any of the guns used during the war, but at distant cardboard animals rather than at innocent villagers and children.

Vietnam is a major disappointment. We won't come here again.

In Vietnam many people capture wild monkeys and keep them locked up in tiny bare cages or chained together in the open so that they spend every minute of every day of the rest of their lives fighting each other, trying to hide under rags and rocking back and forth in frustration.

By Southeast Asian standards Vietnam seems to be quite a rich country. Almost everyone is well-dressed and lives in proper brick buildings rather than wooden huts. The roads are all surfaced and in good condition. Mains electricity is supplied twenty-four hours a day.

From Vinh, route one runs all the way south to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon), just north of the Mekong Delta. The main places of interest to tourists are Hue, Hoi An, Nha Trang, Da Lat and Mui Ne. There are several tour operators offering open tickets along this route, so that you can get on and off the coach when and where you choose to. This is a very convenient way to travel but the constant stream of wedged-up tourists passing through and staying in these towns has now made spending time in them almost unbearable. All we get is constant hassle from street traders. Cyclo riders, motorbike riders, taxi drivers, photocopied-book sellers, hammock sellers, cigarette sellers, sunglasses sellers, flashing-lighter sellers, sweet sellers, newspaper sellers, chewing gum sellers, fruit sellers, camera film sellers, tiger balm sellers, postcard sellers, bracelet sellers, drink sellers, picture sellers, map sellers, shoe shiners. It is impossible to sit down or walk anywhere without being hassled. The traders even come into restaurants and queue up at our table to badger us. It wouldn't be so bad if they went away when we smiled and said, "no thank you," but they don't take no for an answer and stand there for ages showing us things that we don't want. It is fantastically irritating. Whenever we do buy something they try to rip us off.

Another irritating thing about Vietnam is that there are two fares on public transport - the Vietnam Fare and the significantly higher Foreigner Fare. Coming from much poorer Laos, where everyone pays the same price and where travellers are respected as people rather than being seen solely as easy targets for salespeople, Vietnam seems greedy, racist, tedious and actually quite dull. The only redeeming feature is that, unlike in Thailand, the Vietnamese people are not lying to us at every available opportunity.

Most Vietnamese people speak excellent English. In Hue we were approached by a straight-backed, toff-dressed, umbrella-twirling teenager who started thus in a plummy English accent: "Excuse me sair. Are you looking for some accommodation? My family runs a hotel near here. If you would care to take a look at our rooms I think you'll find that they compare very favourably."

It seems that every Vietnamese male chain-smokes cigarettes. Seeing as everybody smokes there is no need for a No Smoking rule anywhere. Of course this is entirely shit for non-smokers like us - we cannot eat or use the internet without people smoking all around us. Western smokers evidently love this state of affairs and are happy to puff away in places which would be considered anti-social back home. Thanks guys.

I am proud of my parents.

I can't believe it's time to leave Laos! :o( It turned out to be the prettiest and friendliest place by far. I would definitely go back there for a holiday. The people were great - so happy and always smiling. Even the language was fun, it's really springy and easy to learn. Well, clop struggled a bit with the numbers which was a shocker, but I thought it was a doddle. Vietnam next. Neither of us are wanting to leave Laos really, we've both fallen in love with the place which means unfortunately that it's putting a bit of a downer on Vietnam.

Only three weeks to go until I head home. It's gone so quickly. It's going to be a bit of a rush through Vietnam and Cambodia, so a lot of travelling days ahead. Let's hope our travelling isn't as disastrous as Adrian and Cally's.

Yesterday morning an intense stinging pain woke me up at 4:40am. It felt like somebody was sticking a hot pin into the top of my shoulder. I frantically flapped myself with my sleeping bag liner and leapt out of bed. My shoulder was still stinging but there was no mark to be seen in the bathroom mirror. I turned on the bedroom light and woke clip up, worried that whatever had bitten me was still in the bed. We were gingerly moving the sheets and pillows about, not really knowing what we were looking for, when a chunky, three and a half inch centipede ran across the mattress and disappeared behind the headboard. It took us twenty minutes of dithering with a torch, a big cup and a tupperware box to catch it, after which neither of us felt like trying to get back to sleep. The bite area went red and bruised, and the stinging pain got progressively worse throughout the day, peaking around 7pm. Today it is weeping fluid from the two fang puncture holes and the surrounding skin is starting to blister and slough. For the love of God, what wirrig are we going to get next?

Further post by clip below...

Well, it's taken almost a year but at last her patience has been rewarded - clip has finally managed to get her hands on some fresh dong.

Ha, ha, ha. More rubbish jokes about Vietnam's currency later.

Before leaving Vang Vieng we made the mistake of walking around the local open-air market. This is what we saw: a bucket of live frogs with their legs tied together, dozens of live bats with their legs tied together, bowls of live fish bubbling in an inch of water, neat rows of pared skinned barbecued rats with the tails still on and various other feathered and furry, live and dead, raw and crozzled morsels, some of which we couldn't even identify. Like clip said, "Lao people don't eat Milky Ways between meals, they eat rodents."

After one more lovely day of river-tubing on the Nam Xong we took a posh minibus south to the Lao capital of Vientiane. Heh heh, well Vientiane does not look like a capital city - it is about the same size as Horsforth! How cute. We spent most of our only day there arranging bus tickets to Hue in Vietnam.

We were both very sad to be leaving Laos and both very worried that Vietnam might turn out to be another Lieland. Laos had been a refreshing change compared to the rest of Southeast Asia; an utterly gorgeous landscape with a primitive infrastructure and the people friendly, genuine and honest without exception. I would highly recommend northern Laos as a holiday destination.

Our first impressions of Vietnam were not encouraging. We had chosen to take a direct, long-distance (23 hours) bus from Vientiane to Hue, a service provided by a Vietnamese bus company. When we purchased our tickets we were shown a photograph of the bus we would be travelling on - a nice-looking VIP model with reclining seats, air-conditioning and a television.

A courtesy sawngthaew delivered us to the "bus depot" at 6:15pm, where it quickly became apparent that we, along with another English couple and three travelling Malaysians, had all been duped. The bus depot was a dark yard with one bus in it. The bus was an utter wreck. Plastic and metal, loosely-mounted seats positioned so close together that even my stumpy legs would not fit between them. The only seats that reclined were directly in front of us; one permanently in recline and the other sometimes in recline and sometimes not, depending on how jerky the road was. No air-conditioning and, of course, no television.

The Vietnamese driver shouted, "Hanoi! Hanoi!" and lobbed our bags in the back. Hanoi is in the opposite direction to Hue which was a bit worrying but nobody could speak any English to let us know what was happening. clip started crying. With some difficulty we gathered that the bus would take everyone as far as Vinh, where the Hanoi-bound passengers would change buses and our bus would continue to Hue.

At 6:40pm the bus filled up with chain-smoking Vietnamese people and we set off. The bus lurched and crashed and rattled loudly all the time. The driver was obviously in a hurry. For the most part he drove down the middle of the road with the airhorn on. All oncoming vehicles had to frantically flash their headlights to make him move over for them.

At 9:45pm the bus stopped somewhere in the dark. The bus staff spent ten minutes loading sacks into the storage compartments. We set off again at 10pm.

At 10:15pm the bus drove down a dark alley and stopped in a yard. This time the bus staff spent fifty minutes loading sacks into the storage compartments and onto the roof. We set off again at 11:15pm.

At 2am the bus stopped outside a shack in some mountains. The bus driver walked down the aisle and said, "Leave." Everyone got off and went into the building. We were served tea and super-sugary coffee, which we made the mistake of drinking, and were over-charged for. The bus driver pointed to the bus and said, "Sleep." Everyone except the driver, who slept in the house, got back on the bus and tried to sleep, which was impossible because the Vietnamese were chatting and chain-smoking and gobbing out of the windows all night and the door was left open and it was freezing cold and the seats were too small and uncomfortable and there was nowhere to lie down.

At 5:45am everyone got up and got washed and weed outside the bus. A few of the Vietnamese were vomiting without ceremony. We set off again at 6am.

The road winding up to the border crossing turned into a dirt track - the kind of rubbley cloggy muddy thing you might expect to see running through a quarry. We arrived at the Laos checkpoint at 7:15am and had to wait until half past for it to open to have our passports stamped, then we walked through the drizzle to the bureaucratic nightmare of the Vietnam checkpoint.

First we had to fill in arrival cards and health cards. We were charged 4000D (about 16p) for filling in the health cards, though the other English couple didn't fill them in and didn't get charged. The immigration official checked our visas, checked our arrival cards, signed them and stamped our passports. He placed our passports on the desk in front of him, looked coolly through the security window at us and said, "Stamp Fee, one dollar." There is no such thing as a "Stamp Fee" but there was no point in arguing. Basically we had to pay a bribe to get our passports back. Then we had to go back to the bus and bring our rucksacks in for the customs people to inspect. After everything had been x-rayed the customs man signed our cards, then they were signed again by the man operating the x-ray machine, then they were signed again by the customs supervisor. Then we had to take everything to the customs declaration desk where the cards were signed again and stamped again and we were given the top copies to keep. Everything was re-checked by an official at the exit.

Meanwhile the bus was being emptied and searched. A bottle of whisky and two hats were stolen from the overhead racks, presumably by border officials. The bus was reloaded and everyone got back on. An official boarded the bus and inspected everyone's passports. The bus drove across the carpark. Another official boarded the bus and inspected everyone's passports. The bus drove into an inspection bay. The storage compartments and the sacks on the roof were searched again. Another official boarded the bus and inspected everyone's passports. Finally, after an hour and a quarter, we left the checkpoint and started down the long steep road towards Vinh. The narrow road, which was cut into the mountains and had an abyss on one side, was still under construction, so we had to stop every few minutes for the scores of JCB's and bulldozers scooping mud and rubble in the middle of the road to get out of the way and flatten the surface enough for us to drive over it. The bus was boarded and searched several more times.

We arrived in Vinh around noon. The Hanoi-bound passengers got off. We continued south towards Hue, stopping at a transport cafe partway for dinner. We were served boiled spinach, plain rice, an omelette and a dish of raw beansprouts and plant leaves.

My first impression of central Vietnam, other than the ridiculous amount of bureaucracy and mild corruption, is that it is very flat. Route one south was flanked by endless plains of rice fields with herds of water buffalo strolling around in them.

Twenty three hours after leaving Vientiane we arrived in Hue in the pouring rain at 5:30pm, sick with tiredness and suffering from smoke inhalation. After walking around for an hour and getting soaked to the skin we managed to find a nice quiet room for 2.65ukp in a hotel next to a dogmeat restaurant. And we've got satellite television! Yey!

Sadly, it is almost time to leave Laos and go to Vietnam. Now decisions, decisions, decisions - which border crossing shall we use? We have a choice of two well-established checkpoints, one across the mountains to Vinh and another further south to Hue, or one recently-opened, dodgy-sounding crossing further north at Nong Het, east of Phonsavan and the Plain of Jars. This last crossing would be a very handy shortcut for access to Hanoi but the logistics and transportation sounded unreliable and vague. Which should we choose? We cunningly sent ahead two Nong Het route-testing guinea pigs in the form of our trekking friends Adrian and Cally. This is the email they sent us when they arrived in Hanoi...


To clip and clop

Our route:
Laos - Louang Phabang to Phonsavan to Nong Het to Nong Can to
Vietnam - Muang Xen to Vinh to Hanoi.

Do not take the new border crossing, especially if it's only two of you.

We left Phonsavan and headed for the border on the public bus at 7:30am which cost peanuts. They drop you off at Nong Het and from there you take a songthaew for the last 23km. The driver tried to rip us off.

Then we waited at the border for two hours before it opened. They stamped us out and we crossed over to Vietnam. The Vietnam checkpoint wasn't open for business yet so we waited another hour before starting the lengthy immigration process. After a quick geography lesson about the existence and location of Ireland they proceeded to empty our bags, completely, guffawing at Cally's underwear and such.

All this was quite daunting as we were alone, but just as we were about to leave, along came a bus of Swedes and Israelis. We waited around for them so we could all catch a bus together. But there was no bus, only ten motorbikes to take us the 25km to the nearest town. They drove fast and Cally had an accident. The drunk driver in control of the bike didn't see a dog sitting in the middle of the road and they took a tumble. She is ok, a few grazes and a few bruises. She was a bit shocked for a while.

After the hair-raising ride we were again ripped off but in the light of Cally's shock we were unconcerned, paid up and we were delivered to a tailor shop. The tailor shop owner was a frantic lady who insisted on encouraging all the hick locals to surround us and offer us a cheap bus to Vinh, twenty times the price of the local bus. We declined politely and continued on down the road.

We found the public bus and agreed the price of US$5 to Hanoi. They told us the bus would be leaving at 10am and that we were to leave our bags on the bus. At this stage there were only five of us. We did as we were told. Then we went for some food, valuables in hand.

On return, no bus. Two hours later, no bus, no bags and nobody with a clue. Nobody in the town could speak English. One of the Swedish guys lost the plot and started banging on doors, which attracted a crowd. Luckily the crowd consisted mostly of kids, who through gestures told us the bus would be back. Then they hung around for an hour using us as climbing frames.

When the driver eventually showed up the angry Swede forced him to show us our bags. The bags were in the tailor shop with the Israelis who had just come on the scene and through powerful negotiation arranged a fantastic price, US$2 each more than our arranged price.

All aboard and off we go at 11pm, sixteen hours after we set off from Phonsavan. We picked up more passengers and a few tons of rice.

After half an hour the bus stopped. The man in the passenger seat stood up. We all recognised him as the chief immigration officer from the border crossing. The news he delivered was that the price was now double for everybody. Right there in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere they gave us an ultimatum: pay now or go back. After a lot of shouting, and threats, we convinced the driver to turn around, much to his disbelief.

Under these circumstances everybody decided that the bus staff were not to be trusted and we were better off sleeping on the dusty road of the one-horse town. The money wasn't the issue - it was our safety and the integrity, or lack thereof, of the driver and his assistants.

We arrived back at the town and got out of the bus, and with a few unsavoury words hit the road to who knows where. Who knows where arrived in the shape of a thirty-seater bus with recliners in the back! They agreed to take us half the distance (Vinh) for US$5 each. They bauked when they heard that we were promised the complete trip to Hanoi for that price. We all got in, followed by the driver of the first bus who was intent on having a price war with the big bus driver, by which time we were chanting for him to get out. Israelis, Irish and Swedes all shouting... and Cally snapped.

She demanded that the immigration officer leave the bus, who in turn threatened to arrest her but that wouldn't really have gone down well. So we won. They left and our driver went to get petrol. We began our journey at about 1am. Each with a cigarette given to us by the driver, which in Vietnam seals any deal. And off we went. Only to be stopped by the other bus pulling in front of us with its cargo of dickheads and a few scooters to boot. Eventually, after a heated debate featuring our driver and the old driver and the immigration officer, they drove off, but insisted on stopping us threateningly a few more times. Our driver decided to do a lap of the town and picked up a few more locals and a policeman and off we went again. Uninterrupted for five hours of off-roading with Vietnamese ska gracing the airwaves and a bus full of weary smoking and spluttering non-smokers deprived of sleep.

We got to Vinh and caught a bus to Hanoi at 9am. We arrived in Hanoi at around 2pm.

Adrian and Cally




Riiiight... so we've decided not to use the Nong Het crossing after all.

The other day I had my hair cut in a wooden shack. Then we watched "Matrix: Revolutions" on a television set in a bamboo hut bar.

Yesterday we went tubing on the Nam Xong river. A tuk-tuk took us, and two bright pink tractor inner-tubes, 5km upstream of Vang Vieng and dropped us off near the riverbank. We spent the next three hours floating lazily back downstream in the sunshine, avoiding submerged rocks and stopping off occasionally to buy beer at floating wooden platforms. It was the most relaxing thing I have done all year.

Everywhere we go in Laos there are people, some wearing camouflage jackets and some in normal tatty clothes, wandering around the countryside carrying dangerous-looking automatic weapons. It's not clear what they are doing or why they are there. I doubt they're hunting animals because there are even more people carrying hunting rifles. Fortunately, they have all smiled and waved back at us so far.

Recently someone told me that when a person stops wanting material possessions they lose their personality.

Louang Phabang is Laos' second-largest city but that doesn't say much. It is about the size of Market Weighton and sprawls dustily along one side of the Mekong River immediately downstream of the confluence with the Khan. As usual in Laos, most of the population lives in little wooden huts and cooks on open fires. Louang Phabang attracts hundreds of Western tourists - the scenery and ancient temples were spectacular but the town is rapidly losing its Lao identity.

I've noticed that many backpackers spend a lot of time complaining about "tourists" and "touristy places." The way they talk you'd think they were some kind of incredible superior race of travelling beings who consider it beneath themselves to mix with "tourists" or visit tourist hotspots. Oh and of course they went to so-and-so years ago and oh yes wasn't it beautiful but oh no now it's all touristy and spoiled and there are so many tourists and we can't get away from them they're taking over god it's just so touristy. These are the same sort of twerps who think they're cool because they liked a band before anyone else had ever heard of them and now oh they're so mainstream and popular and everyone likes them and I'm so cool because I used to like them before anyone else had ever heard of them and for the sake of the lord why don't you shut your stupid whining gobs.

In actual fact, these backpackers are tourists too, only arrogant.

But what luxuries! Louang Phabang had mains electricity (though prone to three hour black-outs) and, more importantly, a reliable telephone exchange which meant we once again had contact with the outside world.

We visited an impressive waterfall at Kouang Si. We spent a day cycling around the town on rented bicycles. clip was poorly for two days with a bad cold. We looked at the town's ancient temples. We ate a lot of Indian food (Lao food is rather dull).

Filthy snobs that we are, we splashed out 10ukp on minivan tickets south to Vang Vieng. We spent most of the journey staring open-mouthed out of the windows. The scenery in Laos is beyond comprehension. It is by far the most beautiful place I have ever been. clip described it as "absolutely nuts." It is emotionally-moving. In every direction there are severe knobbley 2000m-high craggy limestone mountainous towers with white cliffs and velvet-like tree cover. And behind those mountainous towers, the greyish silhouettes of more knobbley mountainous towers. And behind those, the black silhouettes of more knobbley mountainous towers. And beyond those, yet more of them fading away right out to the horizon. And the sun shines severely through the gaps and lights up the valleys like distant searchlights beaming through mist. And rivers race along the gaps between the hills. And the little roads through the little hut villages wind up and round and over everything. It is amazing.

Vang Vieng is a Lao version of Haad Rin. The whole town is geared towards backpacker hedonism. There are quite a few drugs available. Many restaurants sell "Magic Shakes." On menus - "Add 10000kip to any pizza order if you want to get stoned." Accommodation is very cheap though - our fantastic double en-suite hotel room is 1.76ukp per night!

Yesterday we hired a motorbike and rode it around the hills with no helmets on. Fifty kilometres away from Vang Vieng, in the middle of nowhere, in the scorching heat, we stopped for a rest. And heard a loud hissing noise. And the front tyre deflated. And no traffic came past. And we pushed the bike for a kilometre, wondering what to do. I thought I was dreaming when we came to a tiny ramshackle bamboo hut with a motorcycle workshop inside. An old sweating lady in a sarong who couldn't speak a word of English levered the front tyre off, found the hole in the inner tube, stuck a bit of grass in it, filed it, glued it, clamped a patch on it, lit some kind of pyrotechnic backing strip, removed the clamp, replaced the tyre and re-inflated it, all in about ten minutes. She charged us 10000K (59p) but we were so relieved we paid double! :oP

Why do tourists in Asia insist on buying and wearing complete wardrobes of ill-fitting, half-mast, itchy, threadbare, toggle-necked ethnic clobber which gathers uncomfortably around the crotch, interferes with their normal gait and makes them look like a cross between Worzel Gummidge and Coco The Clown, despite the fact that not a single one of the ethnic people selling the gear ever ever wears any the stuff themselves.