Around the World in 50 Books

Right, if you want to accurately recreate my year you''ll need to read the following books. As I generally take any opportunity to offer an opinion on something, especially if I think it's rubbish (which is most things), I've included a bit of reviewing too.

I did my best to only read good books whilst I was away but occasionally, well, you'll see...

Glamorama - Brett Easton Ellis isn't as clever as he thinks he is.

The Historian - Great yarn, rubbish ending

Joy Luck Club - Don't think I was the target audience for this book.

Count of Monte Cristo - Loved it

Day of the Triffids - better than I feared

A Million Little Pieces - Painfully good (Lana lend me the sequel)

The Alchemist (re-read)

Bourne Identity - Different from the film

The Perks of being a Wallflower - not sure it's the new "Catcher" but enjoyed it a lot.

Breaking Vegas - I read it because I liked the cover. Someimes I'm really shallow.

Harvest - Everyone seemed to love this book. I thought it was bobbins.

To Kill a Mockingbird (re-read)

The War of Don Emmanuel's Netherparts - suitably South American

Personal Days - there was an impressively long sentence in the third chapter, other than that it was entirely forgetable.

The Falls - Always wanted to read a Rankin as he seems like a nice bloke. It was predictably average.

Don Quixote - I never realised this was a spoof. Pretty funny for something that's 500 years old. Pretty postmodern too.

Tibet's Secret Mountain - Check me reading mountaineers' journals

Woman In White - whoever told me that this was better than The Moonstone was mistaken.

Dubliners - I only understood one of the stories in this - guess I'm still not ready for Ulysses

Shakespeare - I've always been a bit scathing of Bill Bryson books, turns out that they're rather good.

Hound of the Baskervilles - I didn't enjoy this as much as the large amounts of other Holmes books in this list but lead you to surmise.

Tortilla Flat - Funnier than Cannery Row (goes without saying that it's also funnier than Grapes of Wrath).

Imperium - Proper beach book.

The Great Gatsby - Nothing happened and not in a good way. Yawn.

Kidnapped - oh, look at how clever i am writing in dialect. Yawn, again.

The Black Tulip - better than Three Musketeers, not as good as Monte Cristo.

Even Cowgirls get The Blues - Tom Robbins is as clever as he thinks he is and that makes me jealous.

The Gate - Okay, I didn't actually finish this but I reckon I read enough for it to count.

High Fidelity (re-read)

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Lots of lists of fish.

The Man in The Iron Mask - Nowhere near as swashbuckly as I hoped it would be.

The Polysyllabic Spree - The main reason I made a note of what I was reading - just so that I could foist a whole heap of books onto you, just like that rotter Hornby did to me.

The Three Musketeers - I like reading Dumas. It's pulp trash, but because it's 150 years old it looks respectable.

The Truth (with Jokes) - I've not found many books as shocking as I found this. It made me spit out food and stutter offensive facts at strangers. It also made me glad not to be an American.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - I just don't really like short stories that much. I don't see them as proper reading.

The Throwback - Funnier than I was expecting

A Fraction of the Whole - I'd not heard of this before I started reading it, but really enjoyed.

We Could have been The Wombles - Thought this was going to be the kind of irreverent, coffee-table, music-geek factbook that I love. It wasn't; it was rubbish.

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - I hadn't realised that Moriarty only appeared in one Holmes short story - I had figured that he was a presence throughout the series (not that I've read every story but I've made a fair dent in the oeuvre)

Imperial America - Think I'd've preferred it if it had been about the 2004 elections, as it suggested on the cover, rather than a collection of mid-eighties essays.

The Beach (Reread) - I read the Beach about ten years ago. Then I thought it sounded exotic and supercool. Reading it now it sounds some like some kind of hippy hell. The main character lasted five months on The Beach. Me? I doubt I'd last five hours.

Belief in God; Good, Bad or Irrelevant? - I think this was put out by a Christian publisher, which makes it an incredibly brave publishing decision. Cringingly funny watching a theology professor trying to exercise his punk credentials.

The Damage Done - Don't think I'll become a heroin dealer after all.

D_ S__ by P__ J__ - They say all publicity is good publicity, therefore I'm not going to name this book, merely dismiss it as the worst thing I've ever read. On two positive notes: it was so simplistic that I read all 500 pages in a period not much more than 24 hours, so i guess someone did something right; and if this clunking time-waster can get published I'm pretty sure I can. Now all I have to do is write something.

Frankenstein - about a third of this book was unnecessary description. Yawn.

Quite Ugly One Morning - a re-re-read to try and detox from wordy classics and terrible thrillers. The new Brookmyre is out now. Pan-daemon-ium. I'm pretty excited about reading it, so don't tell me what happens. Okay?

Shantaram - two of my travel companions from this year have rated this as their "bestest ever" book; a third met Linbaba and gave him a bear hug.

City of Thieves - Corker of a read

The Island of Dr Moreau - Not sure what I made of it. Enjoyed it, I guess.

Tropic of Cancer - Oooh, how very risque?


Freakonomics - More accessible than I thought it was going to be.

Moby Dick - See Frankenstein, only more so. There's only so many descriptions of bits of boats and whales you can take before you start harpooning strangers.


Superfreakonomics - See, that's how accessible Freakonomics was...

White Fang - Figured that, as this is a "kids' classic" the story woukld be entirely guessable. It wasn't.

Weird Food and Karaoke

So that's that. Back from the USSR. Twenty-one countries across four continents. Karaoke in seven languages across four alphabets. Scorpions, guinea pig, beetle, starfish, ants, dog, duck embryo, seahorse, snake, spider none of it so much as made me gag - my main regret is not buying that rat in Yang Shuo (a secondary regret is not buying Dennis, sorry Ellie).

So did it change me? Probably a little bit. If you'd asked me at the start of the year what the thing I would most likely repeat would be there's pretty much no chance I'd've said working in an orphanage, but it turns out that even I have an altruistic streak (incidentally, if you fancy a week or so without hot water or toilet paper in the middle of Cambodian nowhere sometime next year, let me know).

Did I ever take the same photo as everyone else? Yeah, of course I did - Angkor Wat; Red Square; The Maoi; Machu Picchu; Sydney Harbour; The Great Wall; Iguazu Falls; The Terracotta Warriors - A cliche's a cliche for a reason.

Only thing left to say is...
Traveller Cliche, these are your Best Bits:

Finally finding that swimming pool * El Calafete * Glacier trekking * Half kilo steaks for $1 * Punta del Diablo * Learning the best ever card game whilst trying to cross the border at Chui * Beach parties at Florianopolis * Andy's Tour * Paraty * The sweaty boys at Carnival * Losing JP, then meeting people who you'll be spending the next two months with with the worst hangover of the year * "Dan has velcro gloves for catching squirrels" * Speed boat through Iguazu Falls * Getting up close and personal with toucans * Paraguayan karaoke and Pirate Bar * Zip-lining * "One day Wes you'll be a man like me" * Salar d'Uyuni * Lana falling down a silver mine * The La Paz experience * Getting increasingly cocky going down The World's Most Dangerous Road * The goal that almost retained our dignity at 3000m * Dead Woman's Pass * Michael falling over a stick * Pumaman * The Porter switchbacks * The Waimu Picchu Elite * Gringo on the Dancefloor * "This is a game I like to call 'Smash It'" * Tanya falling down a manhole * The caged condors * One of literature's great monologues * Conga on the bus * ceviche * Rushing the mountain * Pedalo on an oasis * Dune buggying * The Ballestas islands * Roast chicken in Lima * Paillon del Diablo * Jenga in Banos * Bullying a terrapin * Tom with ants in his pants * Tubing Amazon style * A monkey stealing Michael's cake * Shooters and karaoke in Quito * Best steak in South America * Swimming with turtles * The boobie dance * Seeing a hammerhead * Stepping over an albatross * Swimming through a shoal of sardines as it was getting eaten by sealions from below and pelicans from above * Sliding down Pucon * Biking around Easter Island * The fish in that restaurant * Sunset over the Maoi (Day Three) * Being followed by a dog for five hours * Biking around the Atacama Desert * Cafe with Legs * Bunjee jumping from Auckland Harbour Bridge * Sky-diving at Lake Taupo * Dolphins playing in our wake in Charlotte Sound * Keas eating the windscreen at Arthur's Pass * The Paradiso * Sydney with Stacey and Lana * The view from Manly Ferry * Singapore Zoo * The Perhentian Islands * Full Moon hedonism * Wondering why Aranya Prathet isn't in the guide book * Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm and the Capitals of the World * A bag of insects, a stray elephant and a run-in with some ladyboys * Nou, Dani and Jan Tou's cook-offs * Mangosteens and jackfruit * Borrowing five crates of Klang from Mary's shop * Khemerak Sereymon, Naey Kren and Yamaha Day * Jonny, his drinking game and an "I heart Cambodia" tattoo * Mr Krum * Mr Klang the toothpick holder * "Hmmm, tastes like crickets" * Beating a Connect 4 hustler * Beating Dara, Sambo, Socha, Ratha and Sot at volleyball * The waterfight getting out of hand * The drinking game with the gekko * "Don't forget us" * In the Tubing * The waterfalls at Luang Pra Bang * Falling through the floor of a bamboo hut * A monkey eating Anna's bracelet * Wondering if the elephant would drown * A holiday from holidays * Lunch with Sir Jimmy * Proper jungle at the Kinabatangan * Face off with a macaque * Riding on the roof of a jeepney * The Batad Rice Terraces * Return to takeo * Casey in The Rock * The kids loving an English lesson on bike parts following a week of modal verbs * 5am aerobics and the Grade 2 classroom * "Dani no have." * "Excuse me, can I touch your head?" * "Well one of them's a mango" * Goss scoring 99% in Vietnamese * The scariest moto ride ever * mudbathing * drinking a snake heart shot * The sinking of the kayak * Ha Long Bay piracy * "You'll float out to sea" * Creamy Dreams * Trekking in Sapa, with a broken toe * Karaoke carriage * Hong Kong light show * Off-road tandems * Yichang's Tri-alphabet karaoke marathon * Snowball fights at the Terracotta Warriors * Shanghai night boat * "The Backwards Crew, The Backwards Crew, We walk backwards fast as you do." * Pantomime dragons * The bit of the Great Wall past the No Entry signs * "We should probably start with a seahorse" * The dramatic conclusion to the Visa debacle * Hiking by the Ger camp * The legend of the Mongolian Phlegm Chisellers * Dog-sledding around Lake Baikal * Sausage Lady * Red Square in the snow * The "Last" night in St Petersburg

All to the tune of Low by Flo'rida

Pug in a Shellsuit

Today I saw a pug in a luminous green shellsuit, bimbling around the grounds of St Catherine's Palace. It looked ridiculous, possibly even more ridiculous than me in my Peruvian hat, Chinese coat combo, although it's a close call. Not looking ridiculous (all the time) is one of the reasons I'm kinda looking forward to going home. That and catching up on a year's worth of stuff. And cheese. And maybe some of you guys (which reminds me, I probably don't have your number any more, if you could drop me a line with it that would be cool, unless I don't know you, in which case don't bother, I'd find it a bit too eerie if you managed to stalk me down).

Had my official last night two nights ago. My Trans-Siberian crew did Secret Santa (I got Chloe and enormous spring - Nothing says Merry Christams like an enormous spring), cruised around Petrograd in a pink limo (classy) before going clubbing (unreal, you wouldn't believe me if I told you, so I won't).

Since then, aside from a little bit of sight seeing, I've pretty much just been thinking about roast dinners and stilton.

Venice of the North

I'm in St Petersburg. Which basically means I'm home. It's all European and the locals don't look or sound anywhere near as much like Bond villains as they did in Omsk.

The buildings are pretty majestic but they're very short and there's a lot of open spaces. Peter Parker should count himself lucky that he wasn't bitten here. Maybe there's loads of spidermen around but the St Petersburg ones just don't get a mention because there's not really any where to swing and dangling's just not a good look for a superhero.

Lenin-a-like

The Bolshoi, The Metropol, Gorky Park; Moscow is chock-full of places that I've heard of but never really thought about where they are.

Obviously I'd heard of Red Square (I didn't know that the Red bit of it was just a corruption of the Russian word for beautiful, no stories of blood flowing through the streets - how disappointing?), although it was looking more white than red when I was there just now - a veritable wonderland of winteriness.

I'd heard of The Kremlin too, but putting my ignorance on public display I had no idea what it was. I thought it had something to do with St Basil's Cathedral (you know? that one with the domes - incidentally, there's a pretty good story about that involving Ivan the Terrible, an architect and a pair of eyes), it doesn't really, it's a walled bit of the city with enough cathedrals of its own that it doesn't need St Basil's with its Disneyland icing.

Went to see my second dead dictator of the last month. It turns out I look an awful lot like ol' Vlad; it's not often I say that about an eighty year old corpse (hopefully I look at least a little bit less waxy, although, with the length of time I've been travelling, I can't be too sure).

45 Minutes in Omsk

I've just finished wallowing in my own filth for 81 hours. Longest train journey in the world? Ate that up for breakfast, along with more pot noodles than the whole of my uni days.

The down side of spending so long on the train is that I've got pretty much no news. I did visit Omsk, which is ridiculously fun to say, but in the 45 minutes I was there I didn't get to see all that many of the sights. Just the train station, which was pretty similar to all the other stations we stopped at, only with less weird looks from the locals as I made the effort to put on trousers and boots rather than just wandering round in the snow in shorts and flipflops.

From Russia with Gloves

I'm in Siberia and it's nowhere near as cold as I thought it was going to be. So cold I didn't thik twice about jumping in Lake Baikal, although to be fair, once in I didn't think about anything other than getting out again. Very cold. Very big too, apparently there's so much fresh water there that if everyone in the world tried to drink it it would take 44 years.

Top three things that I've done since being in Russia that I hadn't done before:

Dog-sledding - More fun than I'd feared it would be, although my dogs seemed intent on taking short cuts which meant I spent more time than I'd like being dragged along behind an overturned sled.

Driven a skidoo - I think I can add that to the list of things I'm not that good at.

Sauna - yeah I've been into a sauna before but I've never done it properly. I've never stayed in it til it hurt. I've never run straight out to roll around in the snow all scantily clad. And I'd never been whipped by a slightly overweight Russian man.

The first leg of the Trans-Siberian was relatively painless. Although the border crossing took the wrong side of ten hours, for most of which our carriage wasn't connected to anything even slightly resembling a train, which got enough Weird Points to pull me through the wait. It didn' get as many Weird Points as the hat Kim bought in the Mongolian black market. It had legs. Not enough hats have legs nowadays.

Boots with the Ger

I'd thought a beard would be a welcome addition to my Trans-Mongolian get-up. I'd figured that a layer of facial hair would be an extra layer of warmth. What I hadn't bargained for was that in these kind of temperatures it would just freeze. It's pretty unpleasant but does make me look like an explorer.

I've spent the last couple of days in a Ger camp in the Mongolian nowhere. Below -20 in a tent, I was ready for some serious cold nights, what I wasn't ready for was ludicrous warmth. Five nights in a dorm room without aircon in a Rio summer, absolutely nothing on this. I don't think I'll ever be so pleased to walk through sub-zero temperatures to get to a drop toilet.

Spent the days wandering round the countryside either on foot (fun), sledge (more fun) or horseback (way too cold to be fun) eating hard yoghurt and drinking salty tea, both of which class as local but probably not as delicacies.

If Genghis Can then so Can I

I'm in Mongolia. By the skin of my teeth.

Last time I wrote I was all miserable and whiney as I'd just heard there'd been a hold up at the Mongolian embassy in London, meaning my passport wouldn't be released until Friday evening. My train ticket was booked for early Tuesday morning; my passport had three days to get from London to Beijing, two of which were weekend days. I was near certain that I wouldn't make the train.

Monday night, ten minutes before the local courier office closed I got an email from London saying my passport was in Beijing. A mad cross-town rushhour dash ensued - I had to Indiana Jones under the company's rollershutters - but the passport was there with the two visas I needed. But yeah, in your face Russia, I'm coming in.

Beijing had got more Beijing like by the time I left. By which I mean smoggy. Apparently they'd pumped a whole load f smog dissolving chemicals into the air for Obama's visit, these wore off after a week.

The first leg of the Trans-Siberian has been weird. We had to stop at the Mongolian border for four hours whilst they changed the wheels of the train. Then we got prodded awake by authoritarian Mongolian border guards who made us stand to attention whilst they checked our passports and Visas. I had mine, so in their faces too.

In Ulaanbaatar now. Which means I've finished my major city alphabet. Get in.

Best Mongolian shop name: Wool-mart.

Hey Mickey

I went to see Chairman Mao. That was a bit weird. In my Western eyes I'd always had him down as one of those slightly untoward political figures but here they seem to absolutely love him. Is that a case of access to information leading people astray, or is it that in the West the powers that be want us to fear China. I just don't know.

I also went to see a troupe of acrobats. They looked a lot less waxy than your man and were far better at jumping balancing on bicycles.

____________

This blog was going to turn into another rant about the hindrance of petty bureaucracy but I'm fairly sure that no one finds in anyway interesting. What zou maz find interesting is that on the German kezboard that I'm currentlz using the y and z buttons have swapped places. crayz, I tell zou.

Tiananmen Squeg

Well that tour's over. It's only taken, what, five blog entries. That's no time at all. Absolutely whizzed by.

The Tour ended in Beijing and for the last couple of days we had the same itinary as Barrack Obama. I didn't see him. Although we may have been in Tiananmen Square at about the same time, I had spent most of my time there walking backwards in solidarity with Jamie who was trying to keep his (ridicluous) new tattoo out of direct sunlight.

After the square most of thr group tried to go to the Forbidden City, which was closed for Presidential Security. Them there short-term Beijingers were cursing him for ruiniung their holiday. What they didn't realise is that the Forbidden City is at least a little bit rubbish.

Unlike the Great Wall which is anything but. Although it isn't so big as you can see it from space - that's a ridiculous urban myth, you have to squint to see it on the nearby mountains. Took the tobogan down the hill which would have been ace if I wasn't trapped behind a camera wielding moron.

Went to the Shaolin Monks Kung Fu show. It started with an amazing scene, I didn't know how they were going to find a suitably spectacular finale for their two hours of Taoist wisdom and eastern mysticism. They opted for a pantomime dragon fighting a child. Genius. Couldn't have come up with anything more ridiculous myself.

Speaking of ridiculous. In most days a chicken's eyeball would be the weirdest thing I ate. Yesterday it didn't even make my Top Five:

5. Duck brain (more ducky than brainy)
4. Sparrow (whole, way too bony)
3. Scorpions (tasty)
2. Starfish (not so tasty)
1. Seahorse (?)

Chinese Socks

I'm in the rather unethical position of finding that it's cheaper to buy new clothes than wash my old ones. That's not sustainable, right? I'd say I haven't replaced everything yet for environmental reasons, but really it's because I can't work out the sizes. My new t-shirt is a small and makes me look like a yacht, my new pants are a large and make me walk funny.

I'm in Shanghai now. The weather here is thoroughly British, in fact quite a lot about Shanghai is quite British. The train here got delayed because of snow on the line. Just like home.

Some things are perhaps less like home. Grasshoppers are a popular pet, there's a market devoted to them. They have little grasshopper leads and everything, if they had had sadles I'd've probably got one.

They do skyscrapers here in a big way. Most of the new buildings look properly amazing. I've just been up the Financial Centre, highest observation platform in the world, don't you know. The view would have been amazing had it not been so cloudy. Couldn't even see the ground, I guess that's the risk you run at those kind of heights.

Warriors, Come Out To Play

I'm in Xi'an, which is a vital chain in my Big City Alphabet.

It's also very cold. No, colder than that. Coming from Yichang to here is the biggest temperature difference I've had since switching from a British winter to a Buenos Aires summer. I got on the train wearing shorts and flip flops; got off the train and was pleased that I'd been carrying superfluous walking boots for the past ten months.

We had about six inches of snow the first night. That's a fun amount of snow. So much fun that it somewhat diminishes the experience of seeing the Terracota Warriors. Really, who wants to see an incomplete archeological site when the alternative is throwing snowballs at strangers?

Weirdest Food: I'm not certain but I think I ate a barbecued testicle last night. The trouble with never knowing what you're eating is that you can't tell people that you've eaten weird stuff.

You're Gorgeous

I've spent the last couple of days on a boat cruising through the Three Gorges on the Yangtze River. I thought it was pretty sunny although the Chinese people on the boat were appalled that we were wearing shorts on what they considered a winter's day. They did teach us how to play Mai Jong so we can't have discusted them that much.

Now I'm in the "small town" of Yichang. Population 1.3 million. That's Leeds and Sheffield combined which, by my humble standards, makes it reasonably big.
____________

Shouts:
Happy Birthday you. It's a biggy, eeek (and after thinking I couldn't wish you any kind of birthday message I'm now bombarding you, that's the way I roll).

Karst No Shadow

April: "I just can't see a situation where I would join another overland tour."

November: I'm on another overland tour. I've got my reasons but I'm not giving them to you because they'll just sound whiney, and frankly I deserve the stick.

So I'm in China proper now, the land of restricted internet access. We crossed the border into Shenzen, which turned out to be a surprisingly normal town. The only reason you would know you weren't in Manchester is because the buildings are taller. Shenzen also turned out to be a city that's bigger than London that I've never heard of, I have a feeling that that might happen a fair amount over the next couple of weeks.

I'm in Yangshuo now. I feel a bit sorry for Yanshuo, it's surrounded by limestone karsts which a fortnight ago I would have found amazing but in a post-Ha Long Bay world it just seems a bit average. We went "bamboo rafting" to see the karsts. The bamboo raft was neither a raft nor made of bamboo. Guess us tourists wouldn't go for it if it was called "plastic pipe boat".

We went on a bike tour through the karsts too. We hired tandems, unfortunately the guide didn't appreciate that his mountain bike with its suspension, gears and small turning circle was far better suited to offroad tracks than our tandems. Evidentally there's a reason you don't get tandem BMXs.

Watched an old man cormorant fishing last night. That's not the most vegetarian thing I've ever done. Getting picked up in the dark from a back street wall by a boat with no lights put down such a good base-level of weirdness that seeing a man throwing choking cormorants off a boat seemed fairly normal.

And I've just been hot cupped. Which really wasn't that pleasant, apparently the scars go away after a week or so. Which is nice.

Weirdest Food: China 's not disappointed so far - dog, lily flower intestines, bring on the weird.

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Apologies to anyone who's tried to contact me on facebook, I can't get it here. You'll just have to use good old email. How very 2002?

Good Night Viet Nam

So I've left Viet Nam and with it South East Asia. Four months, six long-term travel companions, eight countries and a good, solid base level of weirdness. Probably the bits of the trip I'm most likely to repeat and the bits of the trip I would least like to. Incidentally one of those unpleasant bits Goss is having to do tomorrow, which links those two sentences nicely.

I'm in Hong Kong now. It's a proper city. All HMV and Marks and Spencers. Starbucks and Subway on alternate corners. Kinda like home only with really tall buildings. I mean REALLY tall. Most of the buildings here are quite tall but some are really tall. Four of the World's Top 20 are here. It's got the tallest building I've ever seen and until a few hours ago I was completely unaware of its existence; who needs to know what the fourth tallest building in the world is, anyway?

And they dance. You heard me, the buildings dance. When I heard of the World's best static light show I thought that was a euphemism for how pretty the harbour looked at night. I really wasn't expecting all the lights of all the buildings to be synchronised to music for fifteen minutes. Absolutely ridiculous. Loved it.

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Shouts: Edward T Horncastle, dirty thirty and married. Well grown up.

Energy Sapa

"I'm not sure what I'm going to do, I can't put any weight on my feet."
"You're speaking as though I didn't break my toe yesterday."
"Touche"

I think it's fair to say that neither Goss nor I were especially well prepared for the two day treck in Sapa.

Really it all started when we decided to get the party boat tour of Ha Long Bay (I guess a purist might argue that it all started when I left Dan a few months back, he left with the words "it's a pity we won't meet Goss, weird things happen to Goss", so I had been warned) - incidentally that was the correct decision, most of the other boats we saw (and we got quite close to a few of them) were filled with somewhat older, more Russian couples.
Ha Long Bay is magical. I'd seen pictures before I went but in no way did they do the place justice (obviously I used this as the excuse for not taking my camera out of the bag).

Within the first few hours Goss and Kevin had managed to lose a sea kayak. Kayak's shouldn't sink, right? Fortunately they were within swimming distance of the cave / secret lagoon combo we were visiting.

We spent the first night on a junk on the bay; we tried to round up some of the people from the other boats to join our party but strangely none of the somewhat older, more Russian couples seemed that keen on joining us.

We spent the next day on the beach of a deserted island, which was fairly paradise-esque, or at least it would have been if the rocks and coral hadn't made toast of our feet.

Had a go at night time kayaking (which is obviously sensible), the bay was filled with phosphoresence. Mighty sparkly, I tell you.

From Ha Long Bay we went fairly much straight to Sapa where, dosed with painkillers, we spent two days hiking through the rice terraces. Now each individual rice terrace may be a heap younger and a heap less impressive than those at Batad, but the sheer number of them was incredible. A whole valley filled with big green steps. It must have taken ages.

There's six different hill tribes around these parts and members of each one follow you around trying to sell you pillowcases, which is a little annoying. We stayed in a homestay, allegedly with one of the tribes, but it was about the least homestay-y homestay I've stayed in (five "stay"s in one sentence; is that a record?).

After a few months of jaded cynicism where everything seems to be the same as something I've already seen, two bits of take-your-breath-away scenery in just a few days.

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Best new fact: the Dutch for snail is slugundhaus.

Boots with the Pho

I don't think I can live in Viet Nam, I just don't see noodle soup as an acceptable meal. And they absolutely thrive on that stuff here. they love there phos. I don't even like saying pho. I didn't mind it so much when I thought it was pronounced Po - I mean that sounds like a word - but it's pronounced a bit like fear and a bit like fur. It sounds like you started saying feather but found it was too much effort so stopped.

Another reason I'm not Vietnamese is that I'm just not very good at squatting. They love to squat here, just on the side of the road, squatting away as a comfortable alternative to sitting. If I squat for any length of time I lose feeling in my legs. Sopheak tried to teach me squat Asian style (that's flat footed, none of this Western, on-your-toes nonsense) when I was in Takeo. I fell over.

I'm still in Hanoi. I'm nailing the sites at the moment. Went to my first art gallery since Sydney. I hadn't realised how much I'd missed them. Is that weird, probably, but not as weird as this...

Weirdest Food:
In just about any other blog entry snake spring rolls would be a shoe in for weirdest food. Today it doesn't make the Top Three.

We went to the snake village yesterday (a 4x4 drove into our taxi on the way there, thankfully it didn't play out Shantaram-style), we got given a snake to play with. A small child tried to kick our snake in the face, which Goss thought was unkind, then realised how much of a hypocrite he was about to be proved. The snake had its heart cut out, which was put - beating away - in a shot glass, mixed with blood and rice wine. It had stopped beating by the time I got to drink it, I felt a bit cheated. The twitching snake was then taken away and chopped into a smorgasbord of dishes (sauted snake with lemongrass and ginger was ace, fried snake skin wasn't).

Incidentally, snake bile is surprisingly green and, unsurprisingly, doesn't make rice wine taste any nicer.

Hanoi Rocks!

Hanoi's pretty cool, I tell you, everywhere else is just nowhere. Although that could just be because getting here's been a long trip, it made me flip. Really long. No longer than that. I left you in Hoi An, whinging about the incompetence of travel agents. Well said travel agent proved their incompetence, which resulted in me trekking back to first Nha Trang (with the hope of intercepting Casey there on her way north) then Saigon (where i intercepted Casey).

So that was twenty-four hours of bus rides.

Then I got the train. Managed to get ripped off by a travel agent again (my own fault, I chose to eat my first meal rather than go to the station to get my own ticket), travel agent charged me for a soft sleeper and gave me a hard sleeper. For those of you who don't know, a hard sleeper is a wooden shelf and a pillow. It wasn't all bad, 'though, I got to share my cabin with a Vietnamese family and their chickens. I'd been a bit jealous of other travellers sharing enclosed spaces with livestock but now I've ticked that box. Twenty-nine hours and one Reunification Railway later I was in Hanoi, three hours early ("whoop" you might think, but you'd be wrong 4.30 is a rubbish time to arrive anywhere).

Went to Mo Chi Minh's Mausoleum. I didn't go in because a. I wasn't dressed appropriately and b. Uncle Ho was on holiday. Went to the Temple of Literature instead. More tortoises with doctorates there than most places.
Hanoi doesn't rock as much as it could as I still can't get a Russian Visa. And I hold the City responsible. Still, I didn't want to go to Russia anyway. It'll be really cold. Trans-Siberian, Schmans-Schmiberian. Who wants to spend three weeks on an icy train, hey? Hey?

I've got to get myself an ice cold beer.
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Kudos to anyone who spots what I did for my own amusement in this post. Answers on a postcard marked "I'm Way too Geeky" or "I Can Read too Much into a Two-word Title".

New Best Friends

I guess it was at about the three-month point on my travels when the majority of my emailing / facebooking switched to being to "new" friends: to people I'd met since I'd been away.

I guess this is hardly surprising. At the moment I have more in common with people that I spent two weeks in a Cambodian orphanage with, than I do with people I've not seen since Christmas. Maybe my "proper" friends think that their news (doing an extra three hours over time, say) doesn't compare with sky-diving, life-threatening moto rides through the streets of Saigon or even the more mundane things which generally don't make my blog (seeing a pig wandering through a petrol station, for example, or buying lygons at a floating market). Maybe they're too bogged down by work to chat (this time last year I would've been). Maybe that by writing a blog I'm missing out on personalising messages. Maybe that we only really have a memory of about three-months and anything before that is essentially irrelevant (several of my closest friends have left Britain for periods of a year or more, I doubt I emailed any of them more than a handful of times after the first couple of months). Whatever the reason, most of the people I communicate with are people that I didn't know a year ago.

I was chatting to Nou the other day; she asked if Dan was my best friend. She seemed surprised that I'd only known him a few months - "you know each other very well". Truth be told, at the time Dan probably was my best friend. We'd travelled together for about three months, been through a heap of stuff together - it's not with everyone that I've cycled death road, or shared a bag of insects, or walked the Inca trail, or been jumped by a gang of ladyboys - we were going to know each other pretty well.

It seems that when you're travelling whoever you're with is probably going to be your best friend, albeit in a completely disposable manner. Within 48 hours of leaving Dan I had met Anna, who was my best friend for a week. Then she left and Emma and Christen got promoted... You get the idea.

Shared situations (eg. being unable to cross a border because of a strike) mean that you form instant bonds with strangers which result in actions which in normal circumstances would seem ridiculous (eg. sitting in a gutter playing cards with people that don't speak your language or lending someone you've known for less than a week $100).

When I get back to the real world I have no doubt that I'll be able to reintegrate with my "proper" friends, even those I've had next to no contact with over the last year. What will be far more interesting is what will happen to the new 2009-vintage friendships.

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Two blog posts in one day. You can tell the storms haven't eased off... I walked down to the river just now, I didn't go too close as I couldn't tell where the road ended, I guess the boats were a bit of a clue.