Airlie Beach

As part of my ongoing hardship tour of the world, I will be subjected to touring the Whitsunday Islands on this baby for the next 3 days.

Lonely Planet

For anyone who has ever left the comfort of their native country, "Lonely Planet" is probably a familiar name to them. Yes, it is the world's most popular guidebook, providing books on everything from Budapest to Bangkok and Belize to Bangladesh. They are informative, extremely well researched, full of facts, maps and helpful hints and are above all COMPLETELY CRAP.

The mere fact that a guidebook tries to tell you about places that are "off the beaten track" or "practically unknown to tourists" is contradictory. Especially if the effing book sells about 1 million copies a year. The books are also so PC that you nearly get into a moral dilemma by giving a kid a polo mint. It is full of pleas like "Don't do Opium in Laos - it makes the locals rely on the poppy" (well the fact that the locals have been cultivating it for thousands of years even before the tourists came seems lost to the authors). "Don't do drugs at the full moon party in Hat Rin - you can get caught by the police" (this is a party that is as wild as a Tasmanian Devil, carries on for two days on a paradise island and you are expected not to partake). Lonely Planet recommends hotels in Bangkok which do NOT allow Thai people in, it tells you not to go to a Monastery in northern Thailand where Tigers that have been reared by the monks roam freely, because "you might get bitten".

And still you see thousands of people walking around with their thumbs stuck in the middle of a pristine Lonely Planet edition. These people are normally sighted wandering around in the eatery area of town looking for that ONE restaurant the Lonely Planet recommends ignoring the thousands of other places which are probably just as good, probably cheaper and right in front of their nose. Sheep, the lot of them.

It is time for a guidebook which gives you the real information you need: How much do the drugs cost, where can I get some, how much to bribe a policeman, which hotels have late checkout, a list of bars sorted by the length of the happy hour, the best place to pull someone, a list of restaurants which serve rare animals etc. Any suggestions for more useful traveller information?

Hervey Bay

The concept of giving 11 complete strangers a three tonne 4wd vehicle and sending them off to drive at breakneck speeds along the beach and to hurtle down tracks that would even give a mountain goat the willies on a large island with no direct medical facilities is something that I am still trying to work out the sanity of, but of course it was huge fun and despite our best efforts, we didn't crash. I left the driving to the others, as 30 hours with a driving instructor and 1 hour with an Examiner on German streets in a left hand drive Golf is not exactly good preparation for driving a moving shed down 2 meter wide tracks with potholes large enough to swallow a Elephant (African).

3 days and 2 nights on Fraser Island and I saw spiders large enough to block the sun, a couple of dingos, which incidentally look like the product of a fox - greyhound marriage and some funky lizards. Not to mention beaches, fresh water lakes and rainforests.

Got up at 5am on the second day to go shark watching. The f**kers never turned up - not a single one. We nearly voted on throwing one of the group in as bait, but the guy got away before we could lay hands on him.

Off to Airlie Beach tonight.

Byron Bay

I have been the All Ireland Snowboard champion for the last 6 years now and also having extensive Wakeboarding skills, presumed I would jump on the surfboard and be riding 20m waves within about thirty seconds, springing over sharks and dancing with dolphins...

Well I didn't. In fact I "wiped out" about 49 times and still have salt water pouring out of various orifices.

The problem with surfing is the fact that it is not only about your ability, but about the waves playing ball too. So you find yourself paddling around for hours waiting for that killer wave only to find that it either never comes or comes along and breaks about 10 metres behind you causing you to be drowned in tonnes of foaming water and making you do underwater sommersaults like a demeted russian gymnast as the wave rolls over you.

Otherwise it was great fun, with a good crew of people, decent food, campfires on the beach and lots of late night drinking. I also saw a real live kangaroo whilst going for a pee in the bush. Nothing prepares you for seeing an animal in the wild. They are just more "real", no matter how much TV you've seen or how many times you've been to the zoo, the first time you see a 2 meter creature hop out from behind a tree is still a thrill. We stared at each other for 30 seconds and then he hopped off quite unimpressed with my pouch.

This is one of the strange things about Oz, it all looks familiar - roads, bungalows, trees, road markings, white people, but then you look around and see parrots climbing in the trees around a carpark, look out to sea and see a pod of dolphins frolicking in the surf or go to the toilet and find a spider the size of Nebraska licking its lips at you in the corner.

The other hugely disconcerting thing is the orderliness of Australia. Forget your images of Crocodile Dundee and the hard drinking miners, the average Australian is as orderly as a Swiss Bureaucrat. I mean this is a country where it is forbidden TO BE DRUNK IN A PUB!!! Yes, I kid you not. I have already witnessed two people I knew being expelled from a bar for being "visibly" inebriated. If brothels were legal here I would love to know if having an orgasm would also be forbidden. It is a country where the bus drivers explain how to use the bus, telling you to hold on to the seats or overhead luggage racks while walking up and down the aisles, because otherwise you might injure yourself. One guy even told us to close the toilet door like it was "a nursery door", to avoid waking other people up. Smoking is prohibited in public buildings and it is illegal to drink booze on the streets in most places. On the tourist immigration form it even asks you if you have a criminal record. I met an Irish guy in Laos who actually said to the immigration official "Why, I thought I didn't need one anymore to get in?".

Fricking nanny state.

Off to Fraser Island tomorrow for a spot of 4wd driving.

Malaysia, Singapore, Burma

Pictures from Malaysia and Singapore
and
pictures from Burma

Off on a 3 day surfing trip to Byron Bay tomorrow. Life is hard.

Sydney, Australia

My flight of the bumble bee tour continues, arriving in Sydney with no plans, no guidebook and generally no clue.

The Australian immigration form proved to be harder than advanced calculus:
"Home address", er, eh, well I don't really have one, but here's me mum's one.
"Occupation", hmm, well after considering "Lighthouse cleaner", "Hero" and "Man" I chickened out and wrote "Student"
"Intended place of stay in Australia", for f**k's sakes I don't have a bloody clue. I write down "Sydney" and realise that they also want the name of the state. I then realise how bad my Australian geography is and write "Queensland?".
I feel like a 12 year old kid that has just failed a spelling contest because he couldn't spell "arse".

I arrive downtown Sydney @ 7am and my first impressions are:
White people. High prices. TV. Lots of signs prohibiting things. Screaming kids. Miniskirts. Rain. Prams. Fat people.

Welcome back to the first world. I think I am suffering from reverse culture shock.

Asia summary

Time spent: 4 months 1 day
Countries visited: 7
Distance travelled: somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 km (anyone know a website with distance tables?)

Plane jouneys: 4 (5 hours)
Train journeys: 2 (26 hours)
Boat journeys: 9 (30 hours)
Bus jouneys: 28 (190 hours)
Total travelling time: 251 hours (yeah 10 and a half frickin' days)

Beds slept in: 54 (in 36 different cities / towns / villages / forests)

Pyin u Lwin - Mandalay - Yangon

The ride down from Pyin u Lwin was quite thrilling - sitting on the roof of a pickup truck with 5 guys and about 400 tonnes of cauliflower. Only 2 and a half hours - the shortest journey so far in Burma. I got to Mandalay, where the mercury was now hitting 40 degrees, so I headed for the nearest bit of shade I could find - the Mandalay train station and collapsed on the marble floors for 3 hours sweaty sleep. A short Rickshaw ride later and I was on the bus to Yangon to complete the final chapters of my new book - "Why 6ft 4' people should not ride long distance busses". 15 hours and a partial spine
amputation later I arrived in Yangon for breakfast and my flight back to Bangkok.

In short:
Burma is the friendliest, most hospitable nation in south east Asia (even outdoing Laos). The people will buy you tea and cake, invite you for dinner, give you a ride for free. Try as you might you cannot force money into their hands. It is also one of the cheapest countries I have ever been to - my new record for a meal is 5 large Samosas and a cup of coffee for 10 euro cents. A single room will set you back 2 / 3 Euros. The Burmese are incredibly honest - on many occasions I have heard of people mistakingly handing over a 1000 instead of a 50 Kyat note, but have been corrected by the smiling shop owner. Burma has stunning scenery - a truely photogenic country. It also has an amazing diversity of flora and fauna - the biggest population of Asian elephants, quite a few tigers, a sprinkling of Rhinocerousesi, amazing rainforests (75% of the world's teak trees are in Burma), huge unexplored mountains and pristine coral banks in the south of the country. And much much more.

In fact Burma sounds like paradise?!

Well it would be if it weren't for the evil, brutal, nationalistic, uneducated, corrupt, egotistical, greedy (insert nasty adjective here) military junta "government", which decided in 1990 that the country didn't REALLY want their democratically elected leader (Aung San Suu Kyi), but would rather have a military dictatorship.

Actually, read it here for yourself.

It is all true, you really do see hundreds of people in chain gangs digging up the roads (esp. in the north of the country), all doing their "part for the country". I.e. forced labour. Recently the government wanted to rebuild the fort in Mandalay so it forced one person per house to toil for 16 hours every month. Young children are not spared either. Aung San Suu Kyi actually requests people not to go to Burma, but as one of the many Burmese people who I spoke to said:

"You travellers are the stars in our skies, the proof that there is a world outside of Burma, we are so so happy you come".

And then he bought me some tea...

Pyin u Lwin

Sounding like a Welsh brand of floor polish, Pyin u Lwin is an ex-British hill station which was used as a family retreat when the Brits couldn't take the heat of the plains anymore. It has a botanical gardens, waterfalls and is generally a very pleasant if somewhat quite place to stay. I only stayed one night as I had to get back to Yangon to catch my plane.

The road to Mandalay

God, I have always wanted to say that I was on the road to Mandalay, and by golly I was. For 11 f**king hours...
I even played the Robbie Williams song on my iPod but it just did not lift my mood. Maybe it was the fact that there were two men sleeping on my shoulders, four babies practising for the Olympic synchronised screaming discipline and my legs were numb from the thighs down.

Mandalay (the original and cultural capital of Burma) itself is nice enough, but hotter than inside of Satan's boxer shorts on a long bus ride, so I left the next day to...

Inle lake

Inle lake is "only" 3 hours from Kalaw, but I spent the journey more or less hanging out of the overcrowded minibus door, hanging on for dear life as the diver tore up and down the mountain roads. The bus took a welcome stop at 11:50 so that the two fat monk passengers could get a last feed up before their usual midday fast curfew.

Inle is one of the most famous attractions of Burma and rightly so - it is situated at about 800 meters and is surrounded by lofty mountains. More famous still is the fact that the traditional fisherman use one of their legs to row (pictures to follow)! Most of the fisherman live in bamboo houses which are built on stilts close to the shore. It is a beautiful area and was a great place to chill out for a couple of days.

Kalaw

I met a Canadian guy and his German girlfriend at Yangon airport. He had already been to Burma and knew his way round pretty well, so when they asked if I wanted to come along to Kalaw it sounded like a very good plan. well actually, it was the only plan I had. I didn't possess a guidebook or even a map, so here was Karma again presenting itself to me on a plate.

Kalaw is a 14 hour bus ride north of Yangon, I will save the description of the journey for a time when I no longer feel the pain from that ride and can speak about it without wincing. Anyway we arrived at 3am (a really excellent time to arrive anywhere). We knocked on a guest house door and about 10 minutes later a man who could hardly get his eyes open came and let us in. He didn't say a word, complain or generally make us feel like wankers for waking him up, but instead showed us the last room he had - two single beds, so we said yeah and flopped into them.

The next two days were spent trekking in the hills around Kalaw. They were absolutely beautiful with native hill tribes dotted around the place. We spent the first night at a place called the Viewpoint (run by a wonderful Nepalese ex-Gurkha family), which is at about 1200 meters and commands a view of at least 100km into the distance. When we arrived we were offered delicious samosas and tea which was made from the bushes dotted around the landscape. We devoured the food, drank about 4 liters of tea and enjoyed a world-class sunset.

A delicious dinner, a couple of Myanmar beers and some of Nepal's finest brown export later and we were in bed with the sound of some hill tribe villagers singing mysteriously in the distance.

Rangoon Yangon, Burma Myanmar

Burma worked its way into my favourite countries list within about 12 hours of arrival. The reasons being varied but some of the highlights were certainly:

* The taxi driver at the airport accepted 3 dollars and a tiny bar of chocolate instead of the usual 4 dollar fare into town.

* Within 3 hours of landing I was teaching english to 12 teenagers and about 43 monks. Some of the class then proceeded to invite me out for lunch and paid for everything.

* Going to a tea shop whose owner is called "Daisy" and is a blonde haired, burmese, muslim (picture that if you possibly can). She promptly invited us back for dinner at her house. The dinner was great and was shared with a bemused Slovenian couple (being the first Slovenians I have ever met, I am not sure if this is perhaps a national trait).

* By 23:30 I was sitting in a bar drinking Myanmar beer and talking to an ex-merchant navy man called Tarzan (75 years old) who had been around the world about 15 times and spoke fluent english.

Burma is similar to Malaysia in the fact that there are lots of Indians, a good few Chinese and a fair few "natives". It was also a colony of the great British Empire which leaves them with fantastic un-asian heirlooms like the imperial system and 3-pin plug sockets.

Bangkok

Don't stand up, I'm only passing through. Burma was great (more later), arrived back this morning after travelling for about 20 out of the last 36 hours.

On the plane I managed to read my horoscope in the Bangkok Post with the one eye I could keep open:

"Keep a smile on your face, and let people wonder just what you have been up to. An air of mystery will help your work go faster and may pay off later tonight. Strong, silent types are very attractive this week".

Must go out tonight.

Off to Sydney tomorrow, see you down under.

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