7/30/2002

:  All I wanted from Ko Samui was a bit of colonic irrigation. But between eating Chile Con Carne and greasy English breakfasts, I don't seem to have found time. Though I think I may need it more now. Maybe I can just get it done in Bangkok - everything has a price there.
posted by Garreth at 11:16 PM

7/29/2002

:  July's words of the month: whores, cooted, Beer Chang
July's phrase of the month: Isn't Thailand great?
posted by Garreth at 8:39 AM

:  Someone died at the Full Moon Party in Ko Phagnan a few nights ago. One out of twelve thousand isn't so bad, especially considering how utterly hammocked most of the revellers are.
posted by Garreth at 8:35 AM

:  Imagine how miffed I am at the pique of Joe. Mike, Joe and myself are sharing a bungalow at the end of a dark, dangerous beach, scattered no doubt with muggers. I think that I'm doing well, getting home after a Sunday night out at 9:30am - in time for a quick bacon sandwich before my day of fishing. Mike is passed out in one bed, various things in strange places, such as his money and trousers outside. But Joe is nowhere to be seen. The gall of the young whippersnapper. Mike told me on Monday evening that he strolled in at about 1pm with a bucket of Samsong and a girl under his arm. Ghet managed to get into more trouble than I did, though he didn't have to pick the lock of a hotel bathroom with two coat hangers. And Mike did fall asleep in the sea on his way home, and doesn't know how his trousers got ripped. But those are other stories....
posted by Garreth at 8:17 AM

:  So this was the plan: rent a fishing boat from a friend of a friend's friend. At the Northern most tip of Borneo. Then drive it around at 8 knots to all of the surrounding islands, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia. We'd save money on accomodation, diesel is cheap, and we'd be fully independent. It was a plan devised on Balak, where we weren't allowed to drive any boats, where going to islands was part of the norm, and independence was a memory of a strange feeling. The idea actually formed when I had a quick go at driving the 'big boat' for about five minutes one day - the feeling of control mingled into the excitement about doing the forbidden.

After we left Balak, I actually got as far as test driving two boats - both equally wooden and pretty much what you'd expect to get if you nailed some planks together and slapped a dirty underpowered diesel engine in it. 'Basic' really doesn't do the simplicity of th craft justice, but heck, we'd just lived with no running water for 9 weeks. It was all systems go, save for checking the owner's fishing licence could be stretched to allowing two English hooligans to terrorise the seven seas with it. We had the plan of not fishing much, but using the big iceboxes to hold lager and hotdogs - things that were in short supply on the island. Perhaps a few Philippino brides to do the cleaning and cooking too.

We agreed a date and a price, and as marine conservationists, we were pleased to note that us hiring the boat would prevent the owner from destroying reefs and bending compressor divers - his crew were pursuing the very activities we had seen cause so much damage on the reefs (reeves?) around our island. But then the authorities got in the way - apparently fishing in zones 1 and 2 is viewed as a very different activity to getting drunk and drunk-sailing to islands to light fires and chop trees down. Our only choice now would be to buy our own boat. Fishing boats come in at about 9000 GBP, so we figured it wasn't really going to happen in the short term.

This is why I'm on Ko Samui, renting motorbikes and getting into trouble with ladygirls (as opposed to ladyboys) rather than tooling round on a wooden death trap.
posted by Garreth at 8:09 AM

7/27/2002

:  Thought of the day:
posted by Garreth at 8:05 AM

7/25/2002

:  Running really hurts. Let me watch you suffer and get covered in vaseline.
posted by Garreth at 12:57 AM

7/24/2002

:  We watched some Muay Thai last night. An Englishman called Poo kicked seven shades of Sunday out of his opponent, finishing him off with several knees to the face. The crowd liked that. And the crowd liked it when the announcer summoned the "lady boxer fighting". The announcer had a limited grasp of sentence structure, and perhaps even the meaning of his English words. But he had a large vocabulary, and could quite happily string together apparently random words for the audience to search for his meaning. Stuff like "Beach bungalow, happy boxing yes fight strong leg maybe bungalow lady knockout, good" The Brits in the crowd were expecting him to say "Jumpers for goalposts", or "poisonous frogs" at any moment. But "Lady boxer fighting" did actually herald a bout between two tiny women, one bizarrely named "porn". One mercy in the three round slugfest was that they didn't knee each other in the face, or kick each other in the head. Strangely compelling to watch, but perhaps only once.
posted by Garreth at 9:26 AM

:  Its very easy renting badly maintained dirt bikes here. In fact, its pretty hard not to. Every second dwelling advertises bikes for rent, jeeps for rent - Thai massage. And probably they'd rent you an idea of a complete slack, beach-bum existence, let you hold it in your head for a few months, and then take it back when you'd spent all your money. But I imagine that you wouldn't be able to put your finger on the idea once they'd taken it back. If you were lucky, the space in your head where the idea had been lurking would remind you of the notion of paradise. (If your idea of paradise involves cushions, being brought food and booze, and watching movies on a beach all day, and watching the progress of the sun and moon as they chase each other into the sea, before heading into a melee of fun-loving partygoers. The same partygoers that one veteran happily describes as wankers)

And the roads are quite suited to the bikes, being etched out of dirt, surfaced in some places but not in others. And there's a certain feeling you get when your back tyre suddenly goes over really soft sand that you weren't expecting. The tyre breaks away, and the rear of your bike steps sideways before finding some grip again, and the power can lay itself down predictably once again. But in that moment, where you aren't going in the direction you expected, your heart leaps into your mouth, and you have no idea when that next piece of predictable traction will save you from a future that only holds skinless limbs and a limp. And that's the only way I can describe the way your brain feels when you're sitting on the beach at Haadrin in Ko Phagnan, after you buy one of those funny mushroom drinks. You might be watching the dancing one minute, taking in the beatiful sight of lots of monged out zombies arythmically twitching in the sand. The next minute, your whole train of thought, everything your experience told you was likely and possible, would suddenly slide away, and you'd be left slack jawed and confused, waiting until the next piece of tangible sense entered your head.

But at least with motorbikes, you get the wind in your hair.
posted by Garreth at 9:19 AM

:  At least on Derawan, the people claiming to protect turtle eggs are living a dual existence. When asked what they do with the turtle eggs they salvage off the beach, they don't show you a hatchery, they say that they get good dollar for them. And then you see them boiling some to eat, and then they serve them at breakfast. Chickens - one, turtles - nil. Conservation minus one.
posted by Garreth at 8:48 AM

7/22/2002

:  HA! Fresh from the f*ckers in Spain changing the date of La Tomatina last year, so that I couldn't get to throw tomatoes at Spanish people (actually the secret weapon was half-spanish Ramon - who can throw stuff amazingly hard, but was working for our team), they've changed the date of the Full Moon Party on account of some Buddha bloke. One will be no longer able to buy alcohol or consume it publicly in Thailand on the 24th and 25th of July. So how are the authorities going to react to lots of mashed westerners throwing shapes all night, drugged to the gills on slimming tablets, red bull and viagra?
posted by Garreth at 1:02 AM

:  In KL, our taxi driver offered us Russian girls. They were, at about 60quid, far more expensive than the Asian girls he could send round, on a kind of sale or return basis - he wanted to send to our hotel 4 girls from which we would be able to select some if we liked, or return the whole lot free of charge, post and packaging pre-paid. Seedy man. This was my first ever taxi sollicitation. But in Thailand, Joe and I hopped onto the back of the same moped taxi - legs dangling in the air as our pilot proved that we had in fact been walking in totally the wrong direction to get to our cheap but flea-bitten hotel. And then he offered us 'ladies'. I'm sure people who hire ladies aren't the sort of people who economise on costs and life-expectancy by sharing mopeds, but then again, I don't really know the market.
posted by Garreth at 12:50 AM

7/21/2002

:  Joe recruited an interesting guy from Arizona to go disco dancing with us the other night, based on strict acceptance criteria into the group of jumping fools we were to become - how fast he drank lager. The interesting thing about this guy, christened Wayne, son of Dwayne, though I believe he was really called Ryan is this; he said that if he hadn't met Joe and done away with conversation and started jumping about, giving piggybacks and swapping hats, he would have done the usual thing - meeting other travellers, asking questions about where they'd been and where they were going. And that he was sick of that. Nice perspective, but I did manage to weazel out of him a good story where he got drugged in the Philippines and relieved of his money by two old ladies, who subsequently put him in a taxi back to his hostel to come to his senses.
posted by Garreth at 6:44 AM

:  The full moon parties look truly attrocious, and will be funny to see. It looks like motorcycle bandits might attack if you are on a moped on the island. Broken glass in feet, the sea turning into a sewer, plain clothes policemen extorting bribes from terrified revellers. All sounds like a good night out to me. Personally, I intend to dress as the Grim Reaper and scare the hallucinating weekend zanies feckless by spurting fake blood from every orifice I can get it into.


posted by Garreth at 6:28 AM

:  Back in Thailand - I don't know if they put something in the water (which you obviously cant drink anyway) but it just feels nice. The food smells great as you walk past the street hawkers. The smell of sewage and decay, ever present in KK, is absent. People really do smile here more. And its cheap.

I'm with my David Beckham look-alike travelling companion - Joe - an Essex geezer with a never-ending supply of smiles, and we're on a mammoth 24 hours of boats, buses, tuk-tuks and noodles to get to a full moon party in Ko Phangan, to hire motorbikes, and to do all of the things that you are advised not to in such places:

"But the majority pack into pickup taxis or hire small motorbikes to drive 20 minutes from the port over a roller-coaster road, narrow and full of blind curves, to Haad Rin. None wear helmets, though few have ever been on a motorcycle before. Hospital officials say at least 231 riders needed treatment from accidents in the first three months of this year - more than half the total for all of 1999. So far this year, two tourists have been killed in physical assaults. Last year saw six fatalities from accidents, assaults, drowning and suicide."

I love statistics. Six fatalities from accidents - out of how many people? I dunno. But I always say that you don't really know you're on holiday until you have a Magnum ice cream bar, and rent a vehicle - a moped if possible. So that's what I'm going to do.
posted by Garreth at 5:46 AM

7/19/2002

:  Memories of Balak - II I don't know what kind of school anyone else went to, but at mine I didn't have beatiful bikini-clad teachers coming to get us out of bed to do tests. And there were never classes in the communal bedroom. At Balak, we'd pile into one half of the longhouse bedroom, and close the window shutters. It would be fiercely hot, and we'd all crowd round on the floors, peering around mosquito nets at a projector sceen while pictures of fish would be flashed up for us to recognize. Joe would play a guitar badly and shout things out randomly. Trudi would fall asleep and hope noone noticed. Sarah would find an excuse to mention badgers. And our enthusiastic science staff would keep being cheerfull and supportive, as we tried to become fish spotters. Dedication.
posted by Garreth at 12:14 AM

7/18/2002

:  KK - the sucker of life from the fountain of youth. Managed to actually achieve something today - didn't manage yesterday - still felt like dog pooh.
posted by Garreth at 1:36 AM

7/17/2002

:  I was in a rainforest camp the other day. I saw animals on a river safari - crocs, many many monkeys, eagles, owls, snakes, kingfishers, bearded pigs and monitor lizards stick in the memory. Although I enjoyed it immensely, I couldn't help thinking that you get much more detail watching animal behaviour programmes on the tevelision. And the photos people were taking aren't going to be particularly good - they should just get a postcard. It was an odd thing to feel, but I just couldn't help it.

Task for the day: stay out of trouble. Get a new hat. Feel less like dog pooh.
posted by Garreth at 12:33 AM

:  Carlsberg Special Crew

Back in KK - it feels like coming home in some ways - you can walk into Trekkers Lodge and Mike will be there, reading a paper. He'll tell you who is where, what's happened to whom. And then to find everyone else, off to BB's cafe - predictably busy given that it sells smuggled lager 50% the cost of everywhere else. And Special Brew. And a bottle of Special Brew, supplied not with a glass, but with a straw, is how my evening began.

After a meal free evening of beer drinking, we managed to find our favourite Karaoke brothel - Happy Garden Karaoke Lounge, and belt out some songs. This time, we used the winning strategy of letting Erika sing into the microphone, the speakers drowning out the cacophany issuing from the rest of our mouths. Soon it was down to just Joe and I, and a few miserable looking hostesses (apart from the one we bought a drink for, who perked up), so we enquired of our new friend where disco dancing could be had. Off into a taxi to Los Angeles we went, heaven knows where it was. It took about twenty minutes in the dark folds of the club to figure out that it was just a tiny room with mirrors all around it.

The rest of the night had to be pieced together from fragmentary evidence, and Joe and I, who got separated and lost each other in a nightclub the size of a cardboard box, came to the conclusion that either the beer in Los Angeles is weird, or they put elephant tranquilizers in it. In that hungover kind of flashback jigsaw, I managed to find the corners of the night, and have started slotting other pictures in:

I woke up in a plate of noodles. I couldn't find Joe. I couldn't find KK. I walked about a bit. I don't have my hat anymore. I asked at a petrol station where KK was. A transvestite approahed me, and lunged for my trousers. My belt saved me. I found an internet cafe curiously open at what must have been about 6am. Women were passed out on the seats. I sent a few random confused emails. The women turned out to be men dressed as women. I tried to find the Daya Hotel - quite a landmark with its tall tower and huge sign. I found myself at Trekkers Lodge just after 7am. I feel like dog pooh.
posted by Garreth at 12:26 AM

7/14/2002

:  Off to kiss some Orang Utans.
posted by Garreth at 5:18 PM

7/13/2002

:  Tip of the day: never try to help a 53 year old American arse with his bag, especially if he's trying to put them on a longboat from a pier on a stormy sea. Chances are, he'll not let go of the bag when you go to grab it, leaving you off balance on the end of a pitching and yawing monster. Then you'll fall in. Then all the money you just changed into half a trillion nonsense currency will get wet. Then he won't even admit hes done anything wrong. Then you'll spend the next two hours in wet clothes planning how to push him in.
posted by Garreth at 4:07 AM

7/10/2002

:  So who won the jungle bungalow?
Well, after lots of deliberation on the entries, I have decided to expand the compound to invite all of the applicants, and give them a bungalow each. We'll need plenty of room, as someone wants to bring Michael Jackson, a Giant Peach, and a deconstructivist anvil of veracity. There will be a big party after one week of aclimatisation, in which the locals will be shocked and amused to see people:

• wiggling ears, putting fists in their mouths, doing backflips
  
• blowing bubbles through their tear ducts
  
• cracking bull whips and levitating
  
• drinking heavily and performing Jedi mind-tricks
  
• burping national anthems and doing handstands

After the party, we'll repair to the river with one of my favourite new gifts (not to mention clean pants and saved souls), the PISCO-BE-GONE...

The NEW!! PISCO-BE-GONE speargun. Fully equipped with Titanium flukes & tines on the arrow heads, these fletched and ready to go scourges of the sea are fully powered and ready to go after only ten minutes out of the box (once a suitable radioactive power source has been located of course). With one of these PISCO-BE-GONE beauties in your hand and switched to fully automatic, you can render a season of turtle mating completely obsolete. Alternatively, go shark fishing. With an almost inexhaustible supply of spears, you can painfully wound animals in the fins. Laugh with your buddies as they swim helplessly in circles, around your boat! Pathetically bleeding their lives, as they maintain their concentricity to their very tormentors! Pop! There goes an eyeball! Bang! Yeah! I got the Bud can stuck on its head! By getting one of these brand new models, you are also entered FREE into the grand prize draw - A week on the Galapagos Islands. Biodiversity through a big tortoise?
fuck 'em all, that's what we say. Just remember the PISCO-BE-GONE, the byword for reliability and defence, corporate mission - When global warming finally brings the shores lapping to your doorstep, do you think marine life will pause for one instant before cruelly, senselessly, eating your children? No sir. Strike now, and strike hard. Give the finned, webbed and be-gilled bastards a taste of their own medicine, before they have a chance to become doctors.

DON'T LET SOMEONE ELSE'S APOCALYPTIC VISION CONTROL
YOUR DESTINY!! FOR GOD'S SAKE - START THE KILLING NOW!!!


Although someone from Trekforce tells me that the jungle is colder and wetter than you imagine, so it might not be all its cracked up to be. Unless I build a big sun deck and chop down some of those pesky hardwood trees....
posted by Garreth at 1:36 PM

:  So what am I doing right now, people often ask me. (After we've been through the "Where do you come from?", "Mighty, Mighty Loughborough" rigmarole) Right now, I'm trying to find some friends of mine based on the following information: the name of an island in Indonesia (which is good - apparently there are over 5000, so that narrows it down), a phone number that is always engaged (I've been trying it for 4 days now - I'm pretty sure it's engaged). All of this information was contained in an email which had been transcribed by a third party from a crackling international phone call from one of the said friends, in a language which is not their mother tongue.

Nothing like a challenge to take your mind off the throb and hum of Tarakan. If anyone else has any wild geese that they want chasing, drop me a line at the usual address.

Being in an internet cafe in Tarakan is quiet an experience - I've already agreed to go and talk to someone's 13 year old class about the Boy Scouts (they like the idea of Boy Scouts apparently). Several small children are happy to watch everything I type, and occasionally shout out a word or two that they recognise. People give me a bit of "Hellor Meester", from time to time, and people read my email address from the screen and promise to send me nice email. I have to stop typing from time to time to get the ants off the keyboard. They distract me a little, though I do love ants. They taste kind of sharp - can't really tell if it's them biting as you put them on the tongue, or whether they are genuinely spicy.


Memories of Balak - I Sitting on a bench on the beach. It was a Saturday - that's how come we were allowed to be drunk and disorderly on the beach, so we sat around the customary fire. Joe and I were feeling especiallygood due to having built the bench we were fighting for places on. As usual, as the night wore on, the week's fatigue set in, and we were down to the final dozen folk left for the late night hard yards. This time, though a storm threatened to send us running for the cover of the house, with the typical torrential gobs of raining being hurled down from on high.

"First one to leave gets a beating," put paid to any such notion, and half of us scrabbled for a leaky tarpaulin to hold above us. Carl went to fetch the canopy from one of his many boats, and sat bone dry and smug with a few others as the rain poured down. Fiercely proud, but not a little wet, Amy, Alex, Joe and myself huddled together to keep the worst of the downpour out. Ros inexplicably sat between the canopy and the tarp, getting the run off from both. Once the storm had decided that the tarp team (and Ros) were soaked to the skin, it decided to quit, but it was kind of hard to get warm again without standing above the fire. It was still glowing, giving off a very smokey heat, and left you with the choice of choking and drying, or shivering and breathing.

Despite the storm, a few survivors (fools to the initiated) decided to get a few of the flimsy mattresses onto the beach and stay in a swarm of blood-thirsty insects all night to see the dawn in. As usual, a few hours shy of sunrise, we fell asleep, and missed it entirely, and as usual, Laura crept off in the night back to her mosquito-netted room, leaving Joe and I to wake up parched and bitten in the early sun.
posted by Garreth at 5:29 AM

: 
Memories of Balak - III

Despite being an island mostly filled with fish-hugger conservationists, there was a fair amount of competition on Pulau Balak. At the start there was a big challenge to learn to identify fish, coral, and slimey spineless things, with tests. Some of the volunteers were straight out of their A-Levels and were still on a learning tip, so this proved no problem to them. But a comparison of identification test marks bears no real relationship to the spirit of true competition on the island. This was to be found in the various awards that were presented....

Muppet Award

This nightly award was the highlight of the evening meal (hotly contested with the expedition leader's daily roundup) . Emily, first winner of the award, would recite the nominations for who had done anything remotely absurd that day. The nominations would primarily include one of the members of TRACC - the other NGO we shared the longhouse with. They had more boats to play with, which are always a source of mishap - people falling between boats, people setting off to dive without masks, people forgetting to take their small boat from between the beach and the house before the tide went out.

Some nominations were kind of strange, and in my best Dennis 'Speak a bit quicker and stop nodding you hapless fool' Norden way, here are some of the ones that spring to mind:

• Trudi put chicken into the vegetarian food and continued to protest that it was a vegetarian meal
  
• Jackie suggested using cement to fill the crack in the wooden dug-out canoe whose bouyancy was always suspect
  
• Joe saying that only he could drink Tequila like a real man - through his nose while hanging upside down from the pullup bar, and promptly having to lie down with his sinuses in excrutiating agony
  
• Dave, the expedition leader, leaving one of the boats pointed at the beach with the engine running, getting out of it, and forgetting about it
  
• Rich for absent-mindedly pouring coke into the only container full of drinking water on the island
  
• Emily for keeping her waterproof diving torch in a ziploc plastic bag to keep it dry
  

Hardcore Award

This weekly award was for valour, for being hard, and nothing to do with those junk emails you get when hotmail reveals all of its email addresses to all and sundry. (Britney, Shakira, Viagra, Strap On, add 3 inches etc). Scouse was the second winner, managing to hang from the pull-up bar by the tops of his toes. I managed to get it by dragging about 20 metres worth of tree and poles from the other side of the island while recuperating from Balak Belly, and not being able to temporarily ingest anything other than water for three days. Alex got it for breaking her toe, throwing up underwater, and driving everyone back from a dive without mentioning it to anyone.

Pisshead of the Weekend Award

I was disappointed at not winning this more than once - putting my heart and soul into chimping on a Saturday night by the inevitable fire on the beach. One weekend I did win was Sarah's 30th Birthday party, for which I roped myself in to promoting party games. I was particularly proud of being able to turn the prize for pass-the-parcel from a packet of TicTacs (don't underestimate the power of such a treat on a remote island) to a packet of TicTacs and the opportunity to dance and sing the Flashdance theme while having jugs of water thrown at you. It was kind of upon Alex's insistence that she won and got her opportunity to do this feat, and while she normally sulked if people threw too much cack at her clean clothes (cake in nightclubs, talc in the changing cell), she was keen as chips to be covered in water and prance around. To make sure I got the award, I fell over a few times, spilt things and shouted a fair bit too.

One weekend I was particularly miffed at once again being pipped at the post for the pisshead award. It was the same Saturday night that the 'Stars in Their Eyes' competition had been postponed and I had rummaged into my secret stash of jungle to pullout enough quality firewood to make a 'Burning Man'. The chaps did an astonishing job of stealing the requisite bent rusty nails to fasten the logs into said effigy, and nailing them together, so the prospect of a booze fuelled night with no obvious focus for entertainment was avoided. For some reason, I declared no burning until midnight, probably to weed out the lightweights.

I'd put in a good early appearance - hardly able to sit up at dinner, I had poured some of the very limited and precious commodity called Tequila into a communal punchbowl, fashioned from specially imported ice. I realised my gaff at having to share my sacred booze (there were only three bottles on the island in 9 weeks as far as I'm aware), and made a desperate attempt to slurp the lot (via a series of four straws) before the hippies got their greedy tonsils on it.

With another block of specially imported ice, some folks fashioned a tequila luge. By carving a runway into the surface of a two foot long block of ice, a Cresta Run for booze was made. Propping the ice up at one end, you could deliver cold booze (tequila if possible) mixed with anything you could squeeze onto the lower part of the cooling run into someone's waiting gulliver at the lower end. Cold things were a precious commodity on a tropical island with no fans, no fridge, and no running water, so even our most holy Christian, the reverend Susie, got her Jesus-loving lips wet with illicit booze.

No matter that I passed out at about 10pm, managing to wake up when my name was called for burning the man. No matter I subsequently staggered all over uncharted bogs and broken glass on the island to collect more palm fronds for the burning. No matter how P D Mulhooned I was, Susie was awarded the prize the next day. Apparently she didn't walk in a ruler-straight line after a few shots of nasty meths. My liver and I were a little disappointed after our concerted efforts. The only consolation was that she resolutely refused to admit that she had been at all inebriated, and wouldn't touch the award, being totally offended by our intimations that such a clean living lady would ever lower herself to the level of a common animal with drugs.


posted by Garreth at 2:49 AM

:  Things to do in Tarakan:

• Scream "Hellor Meester!" back to everyone who screeches it at you
  
• Ignore the tooting of passing 'Mr Jolly Lives Next Door' microbuses touting for taxi trade
  
• Ask insane beggars for money to see how they like it
  
• Consider re-reading Neil Cross's excellent 'Mr. Inbetween' for a third time, or just skip to the violent bits
  
• Count down the hours until your ferry out of Tarakan
  

posted by Garreth at 2:23 AM

7/09/2002

:  Apparently you can hire rocket launchers to vaporise cows in Cambodia. Anyone up for a bit of burger making?

Ever feel like blowing up a cow? Well, in the Phkor Lan Club shooting range, you can. You could shoot AK47s (which Mike actually did) for US$20, or a rocket launcher for US $200. For an extra US$200, you could shoot a rocket launcher at a cow (although this was not mentioned on the menu). The fact that this kind of stuff was on offer meant that there was actually demand for this crazy stuff. I, personally, could not understand the attraction with actually firing weapons that were once used in war.

Obviously never shot big guns for fun before, but wanted to do it cut-price.
posted by Garreth at 4:07 AM

:  And I wish I had a baseball bat so that I could play fruit baseball with General Noriega's head. It might be worth the fine to push him into the sea next time I see him. On my fourth crossing of the bowel shaking waves between Malysia and Indonesia, I managed to scrape past Noriega. He originally fleeced me for about 200 US Dollars, but his colleague, who appeared to have less stars on his epaulette than Noriega, made him give me most of the money back. Not much English language was involved, but lots of pointing at people who my passport was now okay with ensued. Noriega was not happy with this, and took to his normal stance of ignoring me.

Every cloud has a silver lining; I got to watch 'Rush Hour 2' in Chinese on the ferry for a third time, and felt another boat smashing itself to pieces on waves it wasn't designed for.
posted by Garreth at 3:32 AM

:  Facts for the visitor to Tarakan: You probably don't want to be here, in the same way as people staying in Luton are more likely to have missed a flight and be stuck, than keen to see the marvellous Luton clockwork museum. My advice - lay low and drink a bottle of Benylin. I wish I had a bottle now.

posted by Garreth at 3:22 AM

7/08/2002

:  Waking Up Is Never Easy

A pretty normal kind of Sunday morning, hugging 3 of the 5 girls I had spent the night with, and then checking out to go to the airport. Saturday had been a bit unplanned - I'd ended up at a nightclub tantalisingly called 'Swingers' with the lovelies Emily and Ros, despite trying to avoid alcohol to give my antibiotic course a chance to do its thing. The decision to go out was hastily made, though the chance to once again make decisions was not something I took lightly - I'd just spent 10 weeks with very little responsibility on Balak, perhaps having to decide whether to make sweet and sour noodles as opposed to salt and sour noodles.

Because I'd been in a kind of protective Balak bubble, my wits had been sufficiently off with the fairies a week previously, when I had left my passport 9 hours away by bus in Tawau. So after saying a final goodbye to the Greenforce girls (2003 calendar out soon), I had caught a soporific plane journey from KK to Tawau, on which I grabbed half an hour's sleep, thanks to 'Drowsy Actifed' decongestant, and the four and a half hours sleep that I'd had between Ros throwing, and me waking up. Collecting my passport, I was once again a whole independent traveller on his way to Indonesia to meet some dear chums.

I was back in the swing of things, pressing on from one kidney shattering speedboat leg to another on the way to Indonesia. Forget the fact that Malaysian immigration was allegedly shut on this Sunday, I ploughed through the water regardless, after getting the go-ahead from a Polis man on his boat. This guy was more intent on clubbing to death an eel he had just caught, than looking at my passport, so off I sped to Tarakan in Indonesia, after a brief and drowsy exchange with a bunch of crazies who hang around such borders. "I really don't give a toss how many children you've got. I'm tired. I'm drowsy. I feel kind of vulnerable as I can't be arsed taking all of the padlocking and hidden money-belting precautions that I used to. I'm in a bad mood. No, I don't particularly want to fight you. No I don't care how much pussy there is in Bali. FUCK OFF" That kind of thing.

The final leg of the journey involved a narrow, cramped speed boat, with the sort of horse power I would expect to see on the end of a drug running powerboat in Miami. Well, 600 HP did seem over the top, and the journey took far less than my untrustworthy guide book implied a ferry crossing would. And there weren't many people on the ferry, but just enough for the boat to be on the verge of taking in gallons of water if we had the 'windows' in the meagre 'cabin' open. Suffice it to say that 2 hours of hot,sweaty, kidney-bruising, contorted cramp ensued until we arrived, somewhat against the odds, in Tarakan, Indonesia.

On getting back onto dry land, I was led off by an ugly official, whose uniform identified him as an immigrations chap - this consisting of brown nylon trousers, a pock-marked face, and the kind of haircut reserved for seedy second hand car salesmen and pompous border officials. After a few car journeys, and my insistance that I followed him and my passport around despite him telling me to stay still, we figured out that I had to go back to Tawau and since there were no more ferries on Sunday, I would have to spend the night in quarantine. At the time, I didn't imagine sick puppies in cages, just a night on a wooden pontoon by the ferry port.

Doing Time in a Maximum Security Twilight Zone

My fears of a night on the docks where soon quelled when I was driven to a prison. I thought this a bit harsh, and was still convinced that this was a scare tactic to extract money from me for the 'ugly, no-necked, immigration official retirement fund', and in my Actifed-induced stupour, I imagined me folding notes into his pocket, saying "I see, we need to ahem, 'sort out', my visa problem." I was gently recalling the fact that someone in KK had explained only a few days before that you should never give anyone in Indonesia your passport, but hand over a bundle of notes and peg it.

I was led into a house opposite the prison, and saw a modest lounge with a television. I thought that I could handle this kind of confinement, until I noticed a barred grille in the corner, replete with semi-naked gimp. Bollocks, I was being banged up proper. Until this point, I was still confident that I was going to wave a few notes about and be on my way. My previous experience in Africa had been that it was quite possible to drive around a border post, and just check in with a bent official and a few quid in the next town. Seeing the cell and the gimp, my first thoughts were, "He's well built but I reckon I've got a longer reach than him. Shit I'm really bad at figuring out people's builds. They really are locking me up aren't they." Upon being incarcerated, and being informed in pigeon, or perhaps chicken English, that I'd be out at 8am on Monday to get a ferry back to Tawau in Malaysia, my thoughts were no less random: "I hope there's a toilet in here. There's no mosquito nets, and the barred windows don't shut. There's no fan. What about drinking water - my guts are sensitive. Oh there's a mandi (toilet and shower combined). What's that fish doing living in the water container? I have no drinking water."

Sixteen hours ago, a few of the Greenforce mob had been sitting around, trying to sum up people from the volunteer phase:

• Emily : fun
  
• John : laid-back
  
• Mike : sex-crazed
  
• Ros : lateral-thinking
  
• Alex : enthusiastic

, that kind of thing. It was kind of ironic that the word that was used to sum me up was 'free', as I was now learning what it meant to be locked away in some tiny town in the middle of nowhere, with nobody really knowing where I was, and a jailor who didn't understand too much English.

My roommate was a celebrity, and for a while, my bad mood lasted, and I tried to entertain his command of English and his questions. I learnt he was from the 'Pillypeens', had ten children, and had been inside for two weeks. While he didn't know when he would be released, he expected his term to last at least three months. Yeesh. In a kind of bolting stable door after the horse has been taken away and made into Pedigree Chum way, I started hiding money, stashing valuables, and padlocking things. They had left me with my bag at least, and I eventually figured out that my cell phone would work.

I helped my cell mate as much as I could, looking up travel routes back to his home in the Pillypeens, to the village in which President Marcos had been born. But then my temper turned from bad to foul, and after our jailor came into the cell in an effort to pump my lungs with more fag smoke than the chain smoking pirate could, I went to sleep at 6pm in an effort to shut the crazy voices out. It worked to some extent, until my pirate friend woke me up to enquire about exchange rates, and to show me his picture in the paper, under headlines that described his capture. I managed to sleep fitfully after this, no thanks to the brain-damaged cockerels outside the mosquito highway which passed for a window. Cockerels that felt sure it was dawn every 10 minutes from midnight, and announced the assumption loudly.

I got up at the real dawn, when the psycho pirate hollered at me, and tried to engage me in some early morning noodle scoffing. I declined, and managed to persuade a random member of the jailor's family to get me some bottled water. This meant I could take my antibiotics once more, and hydrate after a sweaty night as an eat-all-you-can insect buffet. I washed in the mandi, and waited for 8am, and my escort to the Tawau ferry. Of course, the ugly official with my passport didn't arrive. I kept hoping to see his scarred visage all the way up to 9am, when I knew the ferry departed. After that, my spirits crashed, and anger intermingled with escape plans, and the realisation that I could also be here for 2 weeks, like my pirate chum.

Escape and Hot Pursuit

Despite it being an entry on the list of things that I should do before I'm 30, I had never been behind bars before. I think I'd ripped the list up in fact. So my plans on what to do in these situations plumbed the depths of movie experience. I saw how the bars were fastened to the window frames. I saw some discarded magazines, and a pile of planks outside the window. I had a lighter in my bag. I was pretty sure that my jailor didn't have a gun, and I could probably outrun him if my life and freedom depended on it. I had a pair of fins and a snorkel in my bag, if only I could make it to the sea. I could get a speedboat to take me to Malaysia, and land at a beach somewhere, and then claim to have had my passport stolen. I was pissed off.

I tried to figure out Noriega's motives for lying to me about my release. This is what I had named the ugly customs official, who I felt was taking out on me his fury at being bullied as a child. Surely this no-show was mental cruelty designed to up my release price. By this time, I would have paid a fair amount to be free any time soon. I didn't fancy rotting away in this cell with little light, a half crazed roommate and not much prospect of exercise. The food was okay though.

At 11:30, General Noriega arrived. He announced I was going to the ferry. Those three and a half hours late had seen a lot of thinking in this frantic mind, freed from the clutches of Actifed by 12 hours of fitfull sleep. My Pillypeeno cohort whispered a few things conspiratorially to me about how if I had missed the ferry, all I'd have to do is pay them to let me go, and then I was out. The next hours before I was on the ferry passed with me not daring to hope that I'd get back to Malaysia, as Noriega took the opportunity to play with my fears by ignoring me, and wandering off without returning my passport. I was eventually taken to the ferry, about two minutes before it departed, and was escorted by a random bloke in a Hawaian shirt all the way to Tawau, where my passport was politely returned to me. Again, during the journey, my mind turned to the movies,and how to escape your captor, should the need arise.

Free as a Chicken

After a brief interview with a Malaysian official, I was allowed back into Malaysian Tawau. What to do when you are unfettered and you can walk in the daylight again? I assumed as evil a face as I could master, and strode out of immigration into the street. My eyes must have done me proud - no teksi driver approached, and a stray dog that did turned away and whimpered when I pointed at it. What does freedom mean to me now? Freedom means that I can blow my budget on a hotel room, the first bath, and the first steak since April 22nd 2002. Before all of this, I did actually walk around the town for a while. Because I could. And despite my antibiotics, I felt the need to try a few ice cold Carlsbergs, just to make sure.
posted by Garreth at 6:14 AM

7/05/2002

:  Chinese businessmen rule. Ever wondered how to untraceably get the software to upgrade mobile phones, which isn't particularly illegal in Malaysia? Simply hop onto a flight to Mumbai with a laptop, meet a man in the airport who will give you a different hard-drive. Test a few phones and upgrade them, and then hand over some wonga. High tail it back to Malaysia, and upgrade to your hearts content. Nice.


posted by Garreth at 11:48 PM

7/04/2002

:  Tip of the day: travel around with girls - they have plasters, pharmaceuticals, ointments, and cheese sandwiches
Tip of yesterday: travel with at least one boy to fix heaters and things.

Achievement of the day: got up and down a 4000 metre mountain in under fourteen hours, with a stinking cold, and no sleep at the halfway shed due to aching sinuses and the general lack of air. And the crazy idea that setting of for the final ascent at 3am was smart. Scrabbling up with ropes and three torches between the four of us. But spending about 90 freezing seconds at the top watching the sunrise was worth it. Then back to sea level and piping hot KK.

posted by Garreth at 3:59 AM

7/01/2002

:  It only costs about 10000 GBP to get a commercial helicopter pilot licence in Australia....
posted by Garreth at 2:59 AM

:  Grandma can drink

Dave, the Greenforce Balak expedition leader, and his wife of six months, Lidwina, cordially invited us to their wedding party. Quite a few of us honkeys turned up to his new house in the mountains of Sabah. After proposing to Lidwina, Dave had been given permission by her father, the village boss, to build a house next to his, which he dutifully did. Nice place too. With this great addition to the community, and the prospect of a party, the villagers set about making rice wine. For several months.

Rice wine could be an answer on Roy Walker's Catchphrase. "Say what you see". Wine. Made from rice. And then sometimes distilled, though I can't really recall the details. But there often seemed to be rice in it.

It's drunk in a variety of ways. One way is to poke a long straw in an urn of the stuff (rice still in the liquid). A fork or piece of twig is submerged in the ricey goodness so that you can gauge the level in the otherwise murky urn. Each contestant/drinker then adds a glass of water (or rice wine if they're feeling thirsty) to the urn, and then has to drink the mix down to allow the fork/twig to stand proud of the killer booze once more.

A second way of delivering this rice wine hooch to the masses is to tip the distilled liquid into a three foot piece of bamboo, and to dip four smaller pieces of bamboo into the tonic.Each laden bamboo cluster is then passed around a group of people as shots. Each little piece of bamboo delivers just enough wine to make you gag, but not to fully retch.

The party was last night. Well technically, that was day four of the party, but it was the big one for us. Joe and I arrived at about 2pm, and the drinking was in full effect. Beer arrived in our hands as soon as we got there, and a variety of drinking methods were employed to ply us with alcohol. Relentlessly. One grandma, whose eyes were more bloodshot than should be possible had obviously started long before we got there. She even had a blackeye - I'd put that down to drinking injuries, as it was quite fresh. She would come and dance with us, not that we were dancing, and be periodically reeled back in by one of her relatives, and confiscated so that we couldn't play with her.

Everybody was drinking, except for the masses of children, who were quite happy trying to teach us how to count in Bahasa Malay. And attacking Carl with balloons, mud, and whatever else they could find. Joe produced a video camera and the little blighters went berserk, trying to get in the picture, climbing over anything and anyone who was between them and the camera. Rich, who had disappeared into some kind of rice wine hell, came back alive, and assumed the role of Pied Piper. He started a conga for the little tykes which lasted for hours, and sucked most of us in at some point.

Mori became our newest friend; it was his job to deliver wine in the bamboo shot 'glasses', which was fun enough in itself - he could never refuse a round, even when the ante was raised to 4 bamboos per round. This was only interrupted by the arrival of the Malaysian equivalent of Norman Lamont (when he was important), and with a little egging on, Mori was persuaded to force this dignitary to neck some bamboos of wine too.

Drums kept being banged, Lidwina had at least 5 dress changes that I could see through my red squinty eyes, and there was dancing. The traditional dancing seemed to involve arm flapping (imagine you are an eagle, fly, be free) , and standing on the balls of your feet and shuffling. Later on, when Rich, Laura, and Joe had passed out, quite literally from over-optimistic bamboo shooting, the cha-cha made its rounds. I thought my charming dance partner was called Cha Cha, which seemed a kind of funky name. But after observing her feet for some minutes, I noticed that there was a kind of rhythm thing going on. Fortunately I was saved by the slow dance. Why do I always seem to be with young girls at weddings when the slow dance kicks off? I dunno.

Everyone appeared to be someone's cousin by this point, with my Bahasa Malay fallback words for "good","drink","good drink" being put into frequent practise, and the concept of "cousin" surfacing in English quite often. John arrived by taxi after the football (a 2 hour taxi ride - nice) and it was left to Carl, he and I to challenge all comers in the drinking challenges in the wee hours. We were getting quite cocky at this point, having been drunk for about 12 hours, and I was picking ants off the wall and eating them to show my impatience at the pace of some of the challengers' supping. Most of the challengers appeared to be about 14 years old, and I twigged that the grown ups had gone to bed. Except for one guy who tried to give me a deer's paw.

The inevitable cockerel woke us up at around 6:30, and I think we mostly struggled out of bed at around 9 or 10. By this point, the hardcore local party animals had become stoked and red eyed again. The 5th day was when the real drinking was begun, and this meant starting at 7am.....

posted by Garreth at 2:50 AM