Lisa's Hospitality and Byron's Hosteliality

We stayed for one night down in Coogee Bay. This place was relaxed and it looked a bit like a better photo of a place like this.


We finally managed to meet up with Tori who played hockey with Helen at Uni. (If you recall, we were going to meet her in Laos, but she had a few too many 'shroom shakes and we just generally had the shakes.) Then Emma had to leave us to go back up to Brisbane and Noosa to go back to work.

At some point or another in the four or five months prior to our arrival - don't look at me, I'd been drinking - Helen had got in contact, or vice versa, with her old school friend Lisa Guy.

Lisa had said that while we had a few days left in Sydney we could come and stay in her flat as her flatmate Alice was away for a week or so. We were ecstatic at the offer and shifted our bags round for a most enjoyable few days and nights. It was a great feeling to have what felt like our own little space again and it was in a good location to have a better explore of Sydney too.

Again, we're hugely indebted to Lisa (and Alice too!) as not only was it great fun but it saved us an Australian monkey, as rent even in the shittiest of hostels in Sydney is higher than Bush Jnr during the Vietnam war.

The time in the flat allowed us to find our feet a bit, write some blog and eat some food. And eat we did. I took it upon myself to eat anything that I saw.

To quote my little sister: 'You looked fat in Australia. Well, really chubby. Well, either that or you were just standing next to boys who might exercise occasionally.' Cheers Chloe.

Also in Sydney, if you haven't heard already, as she made enough of a racket about it, Tony and Guy (both of 'em) ballsed up Helen's hair, and she essentially got bumrushed out of the shop by the artistic director for the southern hemisphere or someone equally unimportant in the real world.

She was angry, like this:







She did eventually get it sorted out though, and then she was happy, like this:



We visited Bondi Beach, which was everything I hate about everything.

We had another special night out in the famous World Bar (not world famous bar) this time with Lisa and later a few of her friends.

I am distinctly red. That's not sunburn or embarrassment, that's just the colour of my skin.

We were seriously winding down into holiday mode, and readying ourselves for our first foray into Byron Bay.

Emma had clubbed a few days holiday out of her boss, and when she made the trip down the coast to us she also brought along her boss's mate Rick 'The Rat' who was over in Australia on holiday.

Byron Bay was pretty good fun, and not much else, with a few bars that played good live music. We did manage to meet back up with Jose. Out of the blue we also got an email from Pip who was at Southampton in our first year, and we met up with her for a few days too.

We didn't do much here apart from laze around, so I'll let the photos do the talking (or typing, or whatever).

We did drive to a hippy commune called Nimbin where reputedly you could buy cookies that would make you chuckle. But the police presence was greater there than in a particularly good episode of Taggart, so we left empty-handed and went to the pub instead. Much healthier for us...

It was at this pub, and later club, that we learned that Rick, rather than dancing, would slap walls as hard as he possibly could.

Strange? Yes. Idiotic? Yes. But he's a nice bloke and a great laugh so I won't have you say another bad word about him.


'Twas this fateful night that I made the embarrassing move of - after realising Jose had never spoken about a girlfriend - suddenly becoming very aware of how much everyone was saying things were 'gay'. Therefore, naturally, as any man would, I took him outside of the bar and asked if he habitually fucked men in the arse.

The answer was no. But, for some unfathomable reason, I categorically wouldn't let it lie, and for around twenty five minutes I dug myself deeper and deeper into a homosexual mistake hole.

But it was all OK in the end.

Apart from when anyone mentions what happened, speaks about Jose or says the word 'embarrassing'. Then I get the same sick feeling you have about ten seconds after you've been kicked in the balls.

Anyway, after this giant craziness we made our way up to Noosa, a strange place where people poo money. Metaphorically. 

Did You Know That the Self-Appointed 'Most Popular' Cheese in Australia is Called 'Coon'? Neither Did I.

We got into Sydney pretty early and dived into a taxi. It immediately hit us how weird it was going to be adjusting to being in an English (nearly) speaking country again.

Our taxi driver was perhaps a bad example, as he had no grasp of the use of different tenses whatsoever, but was a nice enough bloke. He also made us laugh when he left his milk on top of the car and drove off, saying it was the second time he'd done it. That day.

Screeching into King's Cross we arrived at the hostel that we were meant to be staying in and meeting Emma, Hel's sister - but there was no sign of her. We also couldn't check in for another few hours and so we lay down in the common room and fell asleep for a bit.

The next few hours are a bit jet-lagged and hazy but somewhere in the mix was a happy reunion with Emma, finally getting into our room and also meeting up with a lad called Jay that we had met on 'the bus through Hell' to Luang Prabang.

Up in our room was a smug French twat that had scattered himself and his belongings over the entire six-bunk room like some sort of human clusterbomb full of rancid underpants, who generally laid about in bed scowling at people and mumbling to himself.

On the bed opposite him however, was his complete antithesis - the man, the mountain, the legend that is Jose Alonso-Recaj.

Jose was a bit older than us and from Spain. He was over in Australia on holiday from teaching English as a foreign language near Brighton and Hove. He is probably the single nicest person I've ever met. Which is why what happened about a week later was probably the most embarrassing thing I've ever done... but more on that later.

That day we went for a walk to Sydney harbour, got the generic pictures in front of the Opera House (which is much, much smaller than I thought it was) and the bridge and had a stroll around the Botanical Gardens and had a look at the fruit bats.




We ambitiously bought a box of 'goon' - cheap wine to you and me, Aussies trying to be 'funny' I think - but were in bed by quarter past nine.

The next day we went to the Australia Museum, which was really good. It gave a reasonable fair and just portrayal of how Australia was colonised and how the Aboriginal people have attempted to adjust to a new way of life while keeping their culture alive. I like the idea of 'The Dreaming' too.

But my favourite part was in the dinosaur exhibition, when I told Emma that this fellow was a cow's skeleton.


That night we went out with Jose to a place called World Bar which is, other than the night we were there of course, entirely missable. We did have a great time though, and, once Jose had departed, the three of us cleared the dance floor within literally one song.

The next day our jet lag, fuelled by alcohol, kicked in. We slept for a good majority of the day and didn't do much else other than drink fizzy drinks and prepare more pasta than you can shake a pesto covered stick at.

The following day, however, we went out again to watch Arsenal versus Manchester United. Beautiful. Jay still owes me a pint for that, actually.

Also, two things of note: one was a mad Irishman that shouted 'WANKY RED CUNT!' at the top of his lungs in the most menacing way imaginable every time they showed Alex Ferguson on the tele (but anyone that's seen my face would attest he could've been talking to me), and the other is DO NOT DRINK GUINNESS IN AUSTRALIA. Horrid.

The following day we met with Helen's Old Man's old mate Swifty, who has been living out in Australia for nearly a quarter of a century. We also met his wife, his son Daniel and his son's girlfriend and had a few drinks and fish and chips in a nice posh-ish place just down the road from their house. We then drove down with Daniel and his girlfriend to Coogee Bay where we met up with some of his mates and sat on the beach.

I was completely unprepared for the beach, and, as inviting as the sea looked, I was in my heaviest shorts I had and, more importantly, the Calzaghe fight was about to start.

Helen and Emma stayed down with everyone while I went to the Coogee Bay Hotel, reputedly the biggest pub in Australia or something, and watched the fight on my own. This was fantastic for numerous reasons, not least Calzaghe's victory. It mostly meant that I didn't have to spend another second with one of Dan's mates who, not to put too fine a point on it, was a Grade-A prick. His chat stunk, and mostly consisted of put downs to the three of us. The most potent of which was 'I’ve been here longer than you, so I should know.' He was the sort of moron that thinks by commenting on everything that anyone says - at all - he has reached some sort of comedic zenith.

This torrid time, for Helen and Emma anyway, was probably worth it for Helen's comeback. Helen was talking about cheese with Dan (as you do) when his mate frothed up in his awful Tourrettes style 'WELL THERE'S GOOD CHEESES AND BAD CHEESES!' at which Helen responded with 'Like there are good jokes and bad jokes?'. Apparently half the beach applauded.

Needless to say, she had the last laugh.

A Child Prodigy and The Fat of the Land

After missing Ed and Nicky the night before, we were a little bit down in the dumps. We were also pretty pissed off that when our 'private' taxi that had cost us an arm and half a leg pulled up outside our hotel, we only drove round the corner before the driver picked up some random and tried to charge him too.

The random was, in fact, quite an interesting man from Australia, who worked on an oil farm, growing oils, in Kazakhstan. He was also a hunter, and try as he might couldn't quite understand Helen's choice of diet.

'So you don't eat any meat at all?'
'Well, I eat fish now, but that's only recently.'
'But you eat chicken and stuff like that?'
'No.'
'Beef?'

The flight was more than a little bumpy, with the tail end of the storm still whisking its way through the province. Helen was, as it says here in my scrawled and bogey stained notes, 'v. unbrave'.

But, yet again, no one died.

We were met at the airport by the charming KC and the increasingly wonderful Aunty, and promptly went for round two at the Shangri La buffet. I had a decidedly ropey stomach and didn't do my best at eating as much as planned, or at least not without tribulation, but Helen got stuck in enough for two.

We went back to Aunty and KC's house and we saw Lucky, the kitten that we had met before, who had all grown up. (Unfortunately, since then, it transpires that Lucky isn't quite worthy of his name, having succumbed to a bout of rat poisoning.)


There was now also a new black and white kitten that Aunty hadn't named yet, and wanted Helen to name, so Dagley called it Barney. Here he is with his mum.

The next day we travelled up a bulbous winding mountain to a casino. This was frankly weird. Helen and I weren't quite sure what we were doing there, but didn't want to seem rude. We knew from KC that Aunty liked one slot machine game in particular and so we just endeavoured to find it and play along with her.

The amount of people in the casino was astonishing, and it didn't appear that many of them could afford to lose much money. It was all rather stifling and perplexing, as well as reasonably uncomfortable, but we had a good time with Aunty and actually doubled her money!

The next day we said our, again teary, goodbyes to Aunty and KC and got on a coach to Singapore. We'll be forever grateful to them for their infinite generosity and we hope that KC and the family can persuade Aunty to get on a plane out to see her family in England soon.

At the border we were asked for the address that we would be staying at in Singapore and Helen made the bold decision to literally make it up.

I immediately blew our cover by laughing, not so much at Helen and the lady asking the questions but just thinking about Alan Partridge when he gets pulled over by the police. 

'Bill... C-Car. King Road... TEN! Just going to go home and go straight to bed and stay out of trouble.' 

Luckily we were both let through and lived to lie another day.

The coach ride was a breeze and we were met at the drop-off point by one of Auntie’s daughters, Lai Yeu, her husband Twa and their son Eugene.

Eugene is, without doubt, a child prodigy. At first he was reasonably shy, talking about his school and his different extra-curricular classes - which include robot makingmanship, amazing, I want to go to school in Singapore! - over the buffet that we had at the hotel we were dropped off at.

Soon he plucked up the courage to ask why I had a 'beard', which I was frankly most flattered by, if I was only 25. I didn't really have an answer.

The next day we went to a bird sanctuary with him and his mum, and he got into full swing. He was explaining - in perfect England - the taxi surcharge system, recent meteorological science advances and unwanted changes to his favourite TV programmes.

The Bird Sanctuary was rather good. Helen almost got in on a family ticket - meaning she would have been under 12 - and then got her mind read by a parrot.

There were lots of multi-coloured flying things and also a lake full of flamingos. The most impressive part, if slightly distressing, was when they had the birds of prey show and huge eagles and vultures and the like swooped around like giant pigeons or miniature planes.

There was also this little twat that made the Eagle man name every single city in India whilst trying to guess where he was from before saying he was from 'India'. He was pretty good at feeding eagles from a stick though, so I cut him some slack.


Later that evening we gave Eugene his present, Happy Feet on DVD. He said that he liked the film very much, and he had seen it 'a very long time ago'. The lad's seven.


Early the next day we got the bus, and then a train, to the airport with Lai Yeu and Eugene to get on the tin eagle to Australia.

Eugene fell asleep on the train, and when we left him at the airport he was still a bit groggy. I thought that perhaps his eyes had started to well up and when we left I told Helen. We both thought we were being silly as he was a very grown up wee lad, but it turns out that when we left he got really upset and, in his mum's words 'wasn't even interested in his hand-held games' for days afterwards because he missed us.

Though I'm sure his plans for world domination were still ticking over nicely. (In fact, he currently wants to be a pilot, and I'm quite sure he will be one. The kid's a fucking jenieus.)

With our seats in an upright position, trays safely locked away and seat belts fastened, we were off to Australia and part two of our trip. 

If I was George Lucas this would probably be Episode Six, but the third one made. But we'd always planned on also making One, Two and Three. But I'm not George Lucas. I have a neck.

We were off to kill some stingrays in revenge for them killing Crocodile Dundee Cake. Or something to that effect.

And, after more free booze than Oliver Reed could have thrown up over a 14-year-old Greek prostitute, Dagley was actually 'really brave' on this flight.

Go Away, Come Again Another Day

"Noah was 600 years old. It was the 17th day of the second month of the year. On that day all of the springs at the bottom of the oceans burst open. God opened the windows of the skies. Rain fell on the earth for 40 days and 40 nights."

Genesis 7, 11-13.

This, of course, is complete bollocks. But what happened to us is only slightly less unbelievable.

We were about 45 minutes away from getting back into Ha Noi city when it began to rain. Very, very hard.

We had to slow down to a pedestrian pace, but other people on the road were still skimming around missing each other by a balding cat's whisker. We actually witnessed the aftermath of a crash between a little car and the back of a lorry that I don't think anyone in the car could have survived. It was rather gruesome and nerve-racking and even served to shut the pleasantly motor-mouthed driver up for a few minutes.

We eventually got back to the outskirts of the city. We were halfway round the roundabout that leads to the bridge into Ha Noi, when we came to a halt.

We waited.

An hour later we had moved about three feet. We were hearing over the radio (translated - between sighs - by our increasingly fed up driver) that the worst storms in 35 years were overhead. Super.

Helen and I thought we were in trouble as we had our flight down to Kuala Lumpur the next day - what we hadn't realised was that Steph, Kyle and the gang had to be at the train station for ten o'clock that evening.

It didn't look as though we were going to move very far at all, and after another half hour's deliberation, interspersed with watching people trying to mount curbs and get stuck in the mud and turf that surrounded the roads, we bailed out of the van, like rats from a dry but sinking ship.

It was still raining. Really, really hard.

We literally waded, sometimes up to our mid-thighs, for about a mile down the road in the direction that we were only half sure was the right way to go. Helen and I were better equipped than the others were, as we had only packed a very small bag to go on the trip. Others had full backpacks on with as much as twenty kilos of swag. We were, conversely, the least prepared clothing-wise.

Whilst Ed and Nicky whacked on their arctic-shitstorm-proof jackets we tried to put our 'other T-shirt' on under a borrowed umbrella.

After about half an hour’s trudging, narrowly missing falling down open drains and breaking our toes on roots from the trees lining the road, Kyle realised that he'd left his 'fucking bastard fucking' camera in the van.

While he sprinted back as best as he could in flips flops and three foot deep water, we made hard work of the next 400 yards or so. The stench from the sewage that was now floating around our special areas started to sting our nasal passages and we stopped and waited for Kyle to get back.

While we were walking the streets had been all but still, people had abandoned their cars and left them at the side of the washed out road. But then large trucks seemed to start to drive past that would wash surfboarding rats up onto the windows of the shops. (Did you know that rats don't have livers, so when they process liquid they just piss, wherever whenever. This is why you shouldn't drink out of cans.) 

Now we were worried that we'd left the van only for it to drive right past us.
We were wetter than a beaver's beaver, but tried to keep upbeat.

Other people were doing the same, and one of the biggest (literally, s/he must have been six foot six) ladyboys in existence offered us a cup of tea and a strange cigarette. Declined with a smile.

Over two hours later we managed to cross the bridge back into the city and found our hotel. And here we are, sodden.


The hotel (which Ed and Nicky had stayed in before the trip and we had left a deposit at for this rainy night) utterly denied that Ed and Nicky had booked a room. 

They then had to run around trying to find a room at ten o'clock at night, which, luckily, they finally did. We planned on meeting up about an hour later, as we had a plethora of things to organise before our flight the next day.

We were hungrier than Roseanne in the episode that she ate Dan.

Running so fast the rain missed us, we went to a place called, ingeniously, 'LE PUB' to get a pizza. 45 minutes later, still pizza-less, we decided we would take it back to the hotel to eat. When it finally came out, we dashed back to the hotel to find that we had been locked out and the young lad who was looking after reception had already made his bed in front of the door.

We had to wake him up, and he begrudgingly let us in. Speeding up to our room to eat our soggy plates of cheese and flour, we realised what time it was.

We weren't entirely sure where the other guys were and it was getting late. The final nail in the coffin was that we would have to wake the poor lad up again if we were to meet up with them, and then again when we came back in.

We'd survived another big old storm, but, unfortunately, that was the sad end to our travels with Edward and Nicola. (Now safely back in Sunny Sunny London!)

Halong, long time ago...

Dearest E-reader, long time no type. How have you been? Really? It's flared up again? You really should get it seen to. Anyway, enough idle chit-chat about your genitals, I have a point to make. That point is this, the following, here:

Please excuse the fact that these next few blogs will have about as much cultural detail as a Jackie Collins 'novel' but with twice the amount of bollocks. I'm about three months behind in the third dimension of the blogosphere and this is being reproduced from only a crusty scrap of A5 paper and my already waning memory.

Cast your mind back (or just read the post below this) and we were around about... here:

Slumping round the corner to the office that we would dump our gear at whilst off on the tour, things were looking up, like an astronomer changing a light bulb. 

Like the astronomer, we'd decided we had to look on the bright side. It was a shame, what had happened to us in Hoi An, but no one had died, for instance, and we were really excited about the trip to Halong Bay.

We dropped our bags off and bundled into the minibus ('big boys, back-of-the-bus') that would take us to the harbour. Ed and Nicky were picked up just round the corner, and we were introduced to their friends Steph and Kyle. Also on the bus were Stu, who had studied medicine at Southampton, and the lovely Katherine.

Katherine was also in medicine but should have a full time job reading children bedtime stories. Her voice was like a half-melted magnum in a bowl of custard.

The rest of the bus was filled with middle-aged American people, and two people who were a bit younger than us who lived in Ha Noi and worked for a charity there.

The harbour was rammed full of Junks, and at first glance it was hard to imagine how we were going to negotiate our way out of it onto the open sea.

To help lubricate our minds in order to work out this problem, I bought a litre of gin and a lot of tonic.

Once on the boat we had a look around; our money had been well spent. The rooms were a pretty good size and everything seemed reasonably smart. For some reason we were impressed with the table cloths.

The only problem (that we encountered on the whole trip) was that we had to pay for drinks. Any drinks. So if you wanted to have a glass of water you'd part with a dollar or two. Hence the gin.


The first day was spent sailing through the various islands, and then we had a walk through a big old cave called 'Spectacular Cave'. It was pretty vast and couldn't really be captured even by my unit of a camera, but we tried all the same.



This was by far my favourite rock.


This was Helen's. (God knows...)


Spectacular, eh?

After the caves we trekked on up and through the island. For this, we had two guides, one of whom I think must have been new.

Before we started our ascent, the more experienced guide told us to watch what we grabbed onto as there were snakes called Pit Vipers that looked a lot like the vines that were also scattered along the trek. 

At this, the newer guide visibly started to shake like a shitting dog, and throughout the walk you could hear yelps from upfront when he thought he was about to meet his maker at the hands of what was in fact shrubbery.

We mooched onwards and upwards and saw a lot of rocks and trees and not much else. We also stopped off at a lady's house, the only inhabitant on the whole island reserve, where we were told to go inside. I refused and just sort of loitered outside of it because, as I think I've stated before, I hate the voyeurism that seems to be incorporated into all of these trips. We were offered fruit and the lady received a small amount of money, but I don't see the benefit from either side, really.

The trek was hard work, especially for the older members of our group, but was definitely worthwhile once we gained a bit of height. We also got a bit of time to dip in the sea and to walk up about three hundred steps to this great lookout spot above a beach.

That night we had a few drinks and readied ourselves for the next day’s kayaking. I embarrassed myself by explaining in the dark - to who I thought was only Kyle, but was in fact the whole boat - what Danger Wanking was. Kyle thought it was funny. Everybody else thought that it was a hobby of mine.

After an early start, we kayaked off into the bay. We went to a beach that had a load of old syringes on it and the biggest spider carcass I'd ever seen and then went into a little bay that was entirely enclosed apart from a small cave that you sail through.

This was truly beautiful, and unfortunately I didn't have my camera on me for this. Suffice to say I ruined it for everybody else when I realised there was more of an echo in there than in Madonna's pants.

'I'm Old Greg' has never been shouted louder.

The rest of the day was spent eating and sailing, with a brief stop off at a fish farm that had what can only be described as great big fuck off sharks in a net, which was entertaining as the fisherman's dogs kept nearly falling in.

We finally made it back to dry land. But the land was not dry for long...