i am the confusior

i'm basically the crappest blogger ever. already in this first sentence i've used the word crappest. crappest? that's definitely not a word. who cares. i'm in hua hin in thailand visiting my friend emile. emile lives in his bosses house. his boss doesn't live here. emile works from home. emile doesn't do any work. he's supposed to be working today and we've just woke up at 3pm. i hate emile. i'm messaging one of his friends on msn letting her know that he's deeply in love with her. is that wrong? no. it's karma. someone has to do it.

From DMZ, My Son and Da lat

joe kinnear is averaging 1 point every game. i'm unsure how i feel about him. i think i really like him. or do i want to hit him with a bat? i'm confused. just more than one point joe. then we can be real friends. i've already arranged emile a date for tonight. he's taking her to the hilton. he must have money to burn that boy.

From nice to meet you

dalat's been a highlight so far. as has mui ne. dalat's like some old colonial french town in the hills which is totally different from the rest of vietnam. myself and rich hired two motorbikers to drive us around for the day. my driver was called tom and rich's was called jerry. they found this hilarious. i blended in with the locals by wearing some giant white sunglasses.

From DMZ, My Son and Da lat

we visited an array of beautiful places; gateshead, shepherds bush, earlsfield.......no, no we didn't. we saw coffee fields, flower plantations - is that right? they're not just big gardens, or are they? or is it a coffee plantation? who cares. places where they grow coffee, flowers, vegetables, make rice wine and cotton and other such cultural niceties. we also payed homage to a little known waterfall which we were nearly swept away by. waterfalls love monsoons. fact. fact of nature.

From DMZ, My Son and Da lat

i was thinking about asking rich if it would be disrespectful to take pictures in the buddhist temple we were visiting, only to find him around the corner riding a sacred golden dragon. unbelievable.

From DMZ, My Son and Da lat

later on i fell out of a tree, declined a drink of bird wine....erm, i'd sooner toast my own face thanks squire, then in the evening myself and rich got lost for 3 hours. all irrelevant. the place was a beaut. i also asked a australian man what a galar was. he informed me it was a bird. i then asked him, if you were lucky enough to be in possession of said bird, why would you set it on fire? i then enquired why there always seems to be a shortage of shrimps on barbeque's in australia. why not put more on to begin with, thus rendering the unneeded and possibly wasteful task of throwing more on at a later date. he informed me that only alf off home and away uses such terms and they're an untrue representation of the nation as a whole. i'm not convinced.

From DMZ, My Son and Da lat

i'll remember mui ne for a few reasons. mui ne is beautiful. it's on the coast. it's small. not small as in tiny, or phats and small, or gladstone small the ex-england fast bowler without a neck (i believe the medical term is a 'heck'), but nice, quaint, idyllic small. i felt guilty about being there. i've done nothing to deserve it. i slept on the beach one night, as an act of kindness, and was subsequently feasted on by a variety of creatures. most likely to be mosquito's and sand-flies, as i have no evidence i'm not ruling out any animals. i might start punching cows again. it's addictive. anyway that event reduced my guilt temporarily.

From nice to meet you

i slept in a petite beach side hut complete with swimming pool and amazing views for $5 a night. i satayed for 4 days. i meant to write i stayed for 4 days. it would be impractical to satay my entire body for 4 days. it would wash off in the sea for starters, i'd get sand stuck to me and where the fuck am i going to find enough peanuts to make the damn sauce? ridiculous.

From Mui Ne

anyway i saw plenty of the place. a few of us went on a tour in a jeep. we saw red sand dunes, white sand dunes, a nice fishing village and sandboarded on a plastic tray. finally we walked along some sort of river of mud. my guilt was returning, but then a local kid who was supposed to be our guide just kept on murdering crabs for fun. at least i don't murder crabs. i'd murder a cat though. or a bird. it wasn't your usual tour, but it was different.

From Mui Ne

the final stop in vietnam was saigon. it's pretty much the same as hanoi, just without a lake. that's that coved. i visited the ho chi tunnels. more vietcong stuff. don't bother going. the ones in the DMZ are much better. our coach driver got lost. then our guide lost us. then we were shown a propaganda video which used the phrase 'american killing hero' many times. admittedly this was highlight number one. highlight number two was watching a fat american woman get stuck in an underground hiding hole. i thought i'd rather take a picture than help. i am being nice though. i've been to an orphange and everything. i'll write about that next time. i'm tired now.

From Saigon

newcastle just won 3 - 0. joe kinnear. i always had faith in the man. he reminds me of jesus.

miscellaneous meats

i didn't realise i'd left it this long. lots has happened. both involving me and not involving me. new presidents. dancing bears. flooded countries. giant cockroaches. joe kinnear. he manages to get a mention every time but he doesn't seem to be doing much. why does he have his hair like that? he looks like a cross between a walrus and a wolf.

anyway. im currently in dalat in vietnam. it's in the hills which is the only reason it's not flooded along with the rest of the country. it's wet and misty and they sell rice jelly filled with miscellaneous meat which i've just ordered by mistake. the jury's out on this one.

nanning was different. there's not much to do there apart from collect visas and get stared at by the locals. that said it's interesting to see the places untouched by the tourism brush. the hostel i stayed in had a nintedeo wii and one toilet complete with infinity mirrors, so there was enough to keep me entertained. myself and matt spent an evening drinking the chinese equivalent of tennants super t next to the strangest river ive ever seen. it was if the river was shitting. no one asked for it. it just happened. i'll move on.

From hanoi

the usual border-crossing fun to vietnam followed. general carnage involving golf buggies and eager locals. nothing too stressful though. hanoi was the first stop on the flooded express. apparently 55 people had drowned the day before we arrived. no one drowned when i was there. they knew i wouldn't stand for it. a lad we went out with did fall in to the lake right in the centre of town though. he thought that the lake was 'a step' and fell right in. this was the highlight of hanoi. i should mention that i also saw water puppets and drank the occasional 'bia hoi' - 16p for a glass of beer? i'll have 19.

From hanoi

11 of us took a 2 day excursion to halong bay, one of the 7 natural wonders of the world apparently. it was pretty nice. we ventured through caves, kayaked, jumped off the boat and all that malarkey. malarkey. i'm proud of myself for that one. our tour guide looked like a vietnamese jack nicholson and i liked him for this. he spent 20 minutes on the coach ride explaining how he gets to work every day. thanks for that jack but my ears are bleeding. a successful trip anyway. much fun was had by all.

From hanoi

on the way to hoi an we were persuaded by an over eager vietnamese war vet (a veteran, not an actual vet. i'd imagine all of the vets were called up to fight in the war though, so maybe he actually was a vet? i'll never know) to get off the bus and take a guided tour of the demilitarized zone that divided north from south vietnam during the war. we went down some tunnels used by the vietkong, saw some of the war cemeteries and stood on a tank. it turned out to be a good decision.

From hanoi

in hoi an i bought 2 tailored suits, 2 shirts and 1 pair of shoes. i don't have a job or even a home but for some reason i felt the need. we rented mopeds and drove to the beach on the second day where it rained again. the rain cant get you when you're in the sea though. take that one rain. poseidon wins this round. i liked hoi an. my current travelling companion richard painted a monobrow and a french mustache on his face and got overly drunk. i'll remember hoi an for this. the monobrow. so cruelly outlawed by modern society. lets bring it back.

From hanoi

finally. na trang. apparently some sort of uber beach resort. you can't be a beach resort if you're wet. fact. fact of science. end of. it was still fun though. again when you're in the sea......poseidon 2 - 0 ....etc. the bars were also good, as was the food. i think i like vietnamese food more than chinese. at the roadside cafe we stopped at today, they were selling vegetarian soup with chicken and beef. brillant. most restaurants sell meals containing 'miscellaneous meats'. it's what makes the world go round people. lets go celebrate.

rayden and the pakistan sandwich

my ass hurts. yangshao has a wooden seat only policy. when you pair this with 4 days of mountain-biking it's like putting together a tag-team of pain you just can't put down. like the legion of doom. biking had it's successes. we've rarely found what we were looking for, but there's always been other things to see. like chinese people and hills.

hong kong was a success. i bought a camera that likes to turn itself off occasionally, but it only cost 40 pounds so it'll do. myself and matthew p bendall caught the tram up to victoria peak and inhaled some more pollution before catching the bus to yangshao. yangshao's the niceset place in china. this is a fact. the last 5 days have basically been the same, but different. wake up. eat breakfast. hire bike. get lost. find something - sometimes a hill, sometimes a quarry, always a chinese person wearing one of those hats that rayden wears in mortal combat. we started off shooting fake fireballs at everyone we passed but the novelty's worn off now. back back forwards - that was his move. what a champ. anyway, find something - climb a hill. ride back to town. ow my ass hurts. get drunk. pain goes. happiness comes. i unintentionally slept by a river one night and was rudely awoken by a dog at 5am. not recommended. dogs have rabies, rivers have rats and mosquitoes have teeth. do mosquitoes have teeth? i think so.

other things i wouldn't recommend would be painting your entire body with chinese oil-paint, and breaking in to area surrounded with rusty barbed wire. they both hurt. the chinese don't do halloween, so i had to cut up one of my 4 t-shirts and paste the chinese equivalent of dulux on my bite ridden torso. the chinese loved that shit. though most of them are now covered in red and yellow. unlucky.

other than that, i've generally just climbed lots of hills, done lots of good deeds, had a mud bath in a cave and spent a lot of time trying to persuade matt to eat a 'pakistan sandwich' from the local cafe. one hill we climbed had a fenced off area at the top with 'important machinery' inside. we managed to get in, but there was no machinery of any importance. another hill we climbed had a hole in the middle and was called moon hill. we were followed all the way up by an old woman with metal teeth trying to sell us drinks. matt said he'd only by a drink if she ate the can afterwards but she refused. i bought a drink.

we're catching a bus to nanning on monday then it's onwards to vietnam. everyone says i'll get mugged. not with 3 rotten t-shirts and a chinese haircut i won't. i'm practically invincible. like joe kinnear - only with less swearing.

i'm alive, the man with the second face

hong kong. it's pretty busy, the air tastes of petrol and it's pricier than one of those ice cream based oysters you buy at the coast. why do they cost so much? it's essentially frozen cream and wafer. not gold. it's 11pm and i've just bought a volleyball for $135 . i don't know why. i'm confused.

i promised some genuine travelling advice. here it is. you need a visa to get in to china from hong kong. they're not the same place apparently. so i'm waiting on having my visa accepted before i can leave this place. "it's common knowledge" i was told by the helpful visa woman. the fact that all argentinans carry dice in their hats 'just in case' is common knowledge. the chinese visa situation - less so. more advice. apparently you can acquire vietnamese visas after 5.30pm from a man behind a shop in nanning. that's where we're going. they'd better sell them, otherwise we'll be stuck in the arse end of nowhere with a swiss army knife and a volleyball - and that's only going to end in tears.

enough advice for one day. hong kong's definitely worth a visit. myself and young matt are going to the beach tomorrow and we visited ocean park yesterday which is a theme park for kids (and men who like roller coasters and ice cream). again, some great sights but i still haven't purchased an electronic picture capturer so no one else can see what i've done. i'll buy one tomorrow.

other than that i've been on the ferry that connects where i stay with hong kong island about 13 times. it's only $2 a trip so i'll be doing that a few more times. we went disco clubbing in a private members bar last night which we were allowed in because we were with a rich chinese gay man. it seemed normal at the time but now i think about it it's not that normal.

finally, there was a chinese guy on the train the other day with 'listen, i'm majoring in pirate' written on the back of his top. this is my current favoured response to people trying to sell me things. good. stay classy san diego.

no dogs, no chinese

i'm in shanghai at the moment. i've been here on and off for about 9 days. i didn't know much about shanghai before i arrived, but it's a bit special. i'd definitely come back. its like something off alien, only there are no aliens and its not in space. id love to add photos of what it looks like but i haven't replaced my camera, so bang shanghai in to google and see what it brings back. that's what its like.

i'm unsure of my abilities as a traveller. ive looked at other peoples blogs and theirs are different to mine. some would say different, some would say better. i don't really have any advice or tips or amazing stories to tell. the most amazing thing ive seen in the last 10 days was matt bendall, my current travelling partner, claiming he wasn't hungry, then he ate a large big-mac meal, a double cheeseburger and a quarter pounder. that's amazing. no one else mentions mcdonalds in travelling blogs, but everyone goes there.

i tell a lie. i have seen something amazing. the bund sightseeing tunnel. the tunnel runs beneath the haungpu river in shanghai and connects the main part of the city with the skyscraper madness part. the tunnel is the one of the best and shittest things i've ever experienced. there's no sight-seeing involved what so ever. you board a capsule, which myself and the boy matt were lucky enough to have to ourselves, then it begins to move slowly under the river in the pitch black. suddenly, random light bulbs in the tunnel start flashing and an alan partridge esq voice over spouts "meteor storm". later on partridge pipes up "under the sea", and some wavy lights appear. then , best of all, some electronic rings start shooting down the tunnel and partridge yells "electronic rings". yes alan. yes they are. so, 65 yuan for the sight-seeing tunnel. no sights, but worth every penny. if you were on acid you'd be having visions for the rest of your life. if you had epilepsy you'd be dead. well done shanghai. you win this round.

we probably spend 35% of our time sleeping, 20% of our time chatting rubbish and eating food, 35% of our time chatting rubbish and playing pool, and 10% of our time doing travelling things whilst chatting rubbish. that's not bad really. that's nearly 3 hours a day visiting museums and the like. i've done the following:

• rode a bike around beijing - there aren't 9 million bikes in beijing. that song's a lie.
• walked round the temple of heaven in beijing. i've been eating 3 magnums a day since ive arrived in china. i've even got a magnum budget i can spend on other things if i don't have 3 a day. recently i was told the milk in magnums is contaminated with evils and its killing thousands of chinese. i've stopped eating magnums. i ate 4 magnums in the temple of heaven. it was a great day.
• visited the birds nest stadium - busy and closed.
• took a pedalo on the emperor's lake in the summer palace - very nice
• called in at the sex museum in shanghai - rubbish
• travelled to shanghai airport on the maglev train - it goes to 431 kph. loved it. the train, not the airport. it's not a bad airport, we just caught the maglev back to the train station. basically we spent all day on trains. geeks.
• walked around the french quarter in shanghai - cultured
• looked at pottery in Shanghai museum - old
• travelled to nanjing and visited the memorial museum - worth a look
• travelled to suzhou and visited some gardens - tranquil
• drank cocktails on the 87th floor of the jinmao tower last night for matt bendalls birthday - expensive. but obviously worth it. matt ate a dodgy crab the other day. it's still alive inside his body.

finally, i saw mao in his vinegar cage. there was definitely tension. i looked at him. he looked at me. i told him i loved him. he said nothing. dictators can be so cruel.

i'm going to put more effort in to my next post. people have been complaining.

i'm as serious as cancer, when i say rhythm is a dancer

what a song.

to start off with - beijing is really good. the nightlife is busy, as are the streets and the food is excellent. myself and the boy matt have visited tiananmen square and the forbidden city. admittedly we were looking for tiananmen square when a tour guide told us we were in the forbidden city but that's irrelevant. i've bought a watch with mao waving which is the best purchase ive ever made. it stops every 30 minutes but that's beside the point. rumour has it that mao is pickled in a frozen cage in a building just off tiananmen square. they wheel him out every morning between 8 and 11, so we need to see this.

as expected, we've also made a few errors since arriving in this part of the world. the first being sleeping on the great wall of china. your not allowed to do it, the chinese knew we were doing it, we knew they knew we were doing it, but we denied it. on the way along the wall the last person we saw at around 5pm was a german character. when we told him our plans he said "well you won't die, but it will be cold." he wasn't wrong. we spend most of the night marching back and forward like border guards along a 20 metre stretch which we thought we couldn't fall off to try and keep warm. earlier on we tried our best to avoid drawing attention to ourselves in case we ended up in a gulag. from midnight onwards we attempted to start a fires in the hope of ending up in one of them. matt wouldn't let me burn the lonely planet, he reckons it's made of the wrong material. it's made of paper matt. idiot. the sun came up at 5.30 and i'd rather speak no more of it.........apart from the sunset was out of this world........and my camera broke so i don't have any pictures.

second mistake - going to mongolia during a national holiday. bus to chinese border town - 15 hours. sleep in odd hotel - 5 hours. time to cross the most messed up border in the world to Zamen Uud - 7 hours. Being told there are no trains to Ulaan Bator or back to beijing - priceless. By this time it was dark, one of the drunks in the car park claimed to be a taxi-driver. he took us around 3 hotels and none of them would have us. we ended up sleeping in the taxi drivers yurt eating sheep milk curds - my favourite. 4 hours across the border the next day followed by a 15 hour coach journey back to beijing. 3 WHOLE DAYS. i'm ruined. we did sleep in a yurt, i got punched of a mongolian and we were in a jeep in the desert so it pretty much ticked all of the boxes anyway.

our plans for the nest 2 days include: eat beijing duck, see acrobats, see pickled mao, stop taking the piss of mao so loudly - it's frowned upon.

all that's left to do is buy a joe kinear face mask and i'm sorted.

no more india

so i'm just about done in india. it's been different. if i do come back, i'll be going to the south and i'll be bringing more people with me. and a gun. no. no guns.

i've been round rajasthan for the past 7 days with my driver called anwar. he was a very nice man. was in the sense that i'll probably never see him again. he's not dead. travelling from town to town was an experience. indian roads are something else. i was easily entertained on 6 hour journeys just by the surrounding chaos that follows you everywhere you go. dogs (wild/domestic/dead), camels (herd of/strangely happy), sheep (flock of), cows (random/dead), buffalo (herd of), elephants (singular/grey), mules (herd of/demoralised), goats (mental looking), tortoises (mostly dead) and monkeys (angry) litter the roads. there are also no rules on indian roads. you can drive anywhere, in any direction as long as you use your horn. it's brilliant. the places i visited were:

Mumbawa - not much there

Pushkar - got caught up in the Ganesh elegod festival and was forced to dance by locals. felt better later on when the drowned the elegod in the lake. that'll learn him. drank a dodgy milkshake was out of action all the second day. missed the camel safari. downer.

Jaipur - saw the pink city and a fort (there are too many forts they should really knock some down)

it rained so i didn't go on an elephant. thinking about it the animals let me down on that trip. i have punched my fair share of cows since arriving here though. you've got to get your fill when the RSPCA aren't in town.

Agra - saw the taj mahal. it's pretty good. it's no st james park though. WHATS GOING ON WITH KEEGAN! I'll save that rant for another day.

so......i'm back in Delhi. it's even more of a party town after those bombs went off. people aren't happy. i blame jesus. i think i'm going to find the gandhi museum this afternoon then pack my bags for china. i'm meeting my friend matt in beijing. it should be special.

not the usual

Things are still mental. Can you chill out in India? Not even if you book a weeks holiday in a war zone? No chance. I've been in staying on a lakeboat in Srinagar, like Michael Palin did in Himalaya. It was possibly the nicest place i've ever been, bar Hexham. Instead of chilling out I embarked on a 4 day trek in to the Himalayas. It was beautiful, odd, scary and weird. Two nights ago i was in the mountains at 16,000 feet with 6 pony's, a campfire and 3 guides singing and banging drums to yellow submarine. I don't know why. I couldn't see yesterday as I had snow-blindness. Today my eyes are red, which matches my face, but I'm happy enough. I'm going to Bikaner tomorrow. I think there are elephants there. I'm off for some food.

Mumbai Madness

.......Mumbai's not exactly mad in the rave sense of the word. It's just pretty fucked up. Noise, hassle, taxis, drowning elephant gods in the sea. I'm lost for words.....and I was only there 3 days. I'm kind of glad I did it, but I won't be going back. The one massive positive I'm taking away from Mumbai is Elephanta Island. There are no elephants there, but monkeys a plenty. Other than that, i've been ripped off numerous times, stood in plenty off cow poo's and had a drunken taxi driver crash over a central reservation - the only central reservation in Mumbai, it possibly through him. On the train to Delhi I fell flat on my face, then knocked a light off the roof which fell in to a womans curry. I'm on fire. Since I've been in Delhi I've had men trying to usher me in to a mosque and been in a car crash. I've been in Delhi for 8 hours. INDIA. SORT YOUR LIFE OUT. I'm off to the North tomorrow to find some tranquility in the mountains. I'll be back next week with an update.

I've just read this back and it's really negative. It's been ok. Maybe it's just because I have the shits?

inverter face

I leave in 6 days. It’s raining in Mumbai, and in Delhi, and in Agra, so it looks like the monsoons are still about. I've been researching more on India and I like the look of the north. I may try to venture in to Nepal as well. Mountains, camels and elephants have recently been added to my ‘to do’ list. I've been told there's flooding in the north of India, near Nepal. I may not be going there anymore. Downer.

I've had my photograph taken in one of those machines for visas and the like. I don’t like it how you’re sat there looking in to the camera, staring at your own face thinking ‘that’ll do’, then you press the big green button, it flashes, then it shows your face again looking like a goon. They take your face and invert it so it doesn't really look like you. In short, I have a backwards face, and I'm not too pleased about it.

I took all of my new gear to Keswick at the weekend to test it out. The mosquito spray was useless, as was the penknife. I sprayed a badger and knifed a squirrel but they were never real threats to my safety. The best thing I took by far was the head torch. Mainly for the fun factor. You feel like you're in a swot team, when all you're really doing is annoying people.

so it begins

getting organised for this trip hasn't been as easy as i expected. mainly because i didn't know what to expect. meaning i hadn't really thought about it. i bought my trip in the kensington olympia branch of STA on my first trip to the branch. i had a rough idea of what i wanted to do, which was to go everywhere in the world. my lack of planning was apparent as i went through my itinerary with Ben from STA. after nearly 3 hours of chatting a mixture of impossible routes, pandas and maps we came up with a trip which actually looked realistic. Ben removed Madagascar, New Zealand, Japan, Fiji, Cancun and North America from my trip. these are all small places where very little happens so i'm fine with that. i bought a place on the inca trail, some travel insurance and an australian visa. it all came to around £2200. i put it on my credit card, Ben gave me about 12 sheets of A4 paper, and that was that. spending money is far too easy. Ben basically designed my trip for me and for that i will be eternally grateful. unless it goes massively wrong, then i know where he works.

picking up visas for China, Mongolia and India were all different experiences, all had their hiccups, but neither was a real pain in the arse. i waited at the indian visa centre for 1 hour before deciding to sample the delights of the local Victoria greasy spoon cafe to kill some time. true to form i re-entered the visa centre to discover i'd missed my place in the queue. the extremely kind woman on the front door let me push in, thus ill-tempering many frustrated indians. 3 days later it was ready for collection.

by far the most interesting of the visa centres i visited was the Mongolian embassy. one man sat behind a desk in an underground living room. i expected to be able to fill in an application form in the centre, like in the Indian and Chinese centres, but this is Mongolia, everything is online in Mongolia. Bill Gates is Mongolian. after filling the form in a local internet cafe i returned to hand it in. the man behind the desk didn't remember me. i'm fairly sure i was the only person in the embassy that day.

injections have been the real pain in the arse. I've left everything too late, therefore I'm heading off without an immunity to hepatitis b, rabies and some sort of Japanese disease. all should be fine, as long as i avoid any temptation to play with needles and dogs frothing at the mouth. that's about as medical as i get. you can get most of the injections on the NHS, but i decided it would be better to spend over £150 in a private centre. so that's nice.

finally, all i need to do now is sort things out like money, clothes, accessories and the like. all of this will be done in good time, or possibly not at all. all that's important is that i get on a plane to Mumbai on September 1st. then the adventures begin. i'm planning on doing something different and something good on every day of my trip. we'll see how that pans out.