Seasons Greetings

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all! I hope you all have some wicked parties lined up to take advantage of the break. Take heaps of photos of you all in your messed up states and send some through to give me some entertainment.

Adventures of The Power House

We are just chilling out with the guy formerly referred to as Nick or Skidder but now exclusively known as Power House or more formally as The Power House. So yeah he is now at night four and each night has brought a new adventure.

Night 1, a couple of beers down and I decided to put myself to bed (~2km away) after telling matt and power house that I was just going toilet. They caught me a few hundred meters down the road getting a feed. That aside back to the adventures of power house, some time in the middle of the night he made a trip to the toilet and locked himself out of our cave, so he proceeded (in vain) to wake us up by yelling, climbing the wall and breaking the mosquito screens to the windows about 2.5m off the ground. At this point he accepted his fate (at the advice of the unhappy neighbours) and went to sleep in the hallway.

Night 2, power house got drunk and again woke up to piss in the middle of the night; however this time he learnt his lesson from the previous night and didn’t leave the room.

Night 3 and power house made a bed for him on the beach while we were drinking, then on my advice made a stagger for home. Later that night he was man down again due to his inability to balance himself on a double bed (while lying).

Night 4 and power house is down, I repeat its 7pm and power house is down. Cause: overdeveloped boy syndrome, effect: full system failure, prognosis: hassle, torment and abuse for the next two weeks.

Northwest Thailand

Over the past four days I have done two four hour van journeys followed by a four hour local bus and yesterday a six hour Sawngthaew (on the back of a Ute) trip. We have travelled south along the western Thai boarder with Burma (Myanmar). The scenery has been amazing, it is an elevated area with high mountains, hot days and very cool nights. Heading into the area the bus was searched by a machine gun clad officer verifying the Thai’s documentation (thank god he didn’t check my body board bag!) In-case they were attempting to join the conflict at the Thai-Burmese boarder. Yesterday we were checked again into and out of the Mali refugee camp just before coming into Mae Sot. Today we hired some 125cc motorbikes and adventured around the city, after about an hour Matt was sick of his bike misfiring and stalling so he took it back and demanded a replacement, the guys at the shop just laughed at him when they discovered he had been riding it around with full choke on all morning. Tomorrow we are back to Bangkok on an 8 hour bus ride to meet my brother, then heading south to the beach for some R&R.
My favourite place of this little trip has been Mae Hong Son. It provided dirt cheap, lake front accommodation. Shortly after dropping our bags we were off to one of the many local watering holes, after our first beer we made friends with the local police officer who then escorted us to a near by club. Three large Chang’s down and one of my travelling companions was making himself known (intimately) with some of the local wildlife, while I was doing my best job convincing a pommy bird that trying to haul into me in front of her boyfriend and father is not conducive with a happy family holiday.

PS. I wrote this two days ago, since then we have met skidder and been on the hammer pretty hard. One good funny to report back, on the trip from Mae Sot down we (Me and Matt) went through at least 5 armed check points heading back for Bangers. At one of the check points an armed officer found it necessary to give matt and inside thigh rub on the way past then a cheeky little hug on his way out while matt sat there in disbelief. Shortly after this some glue sniffing old prick got on the bus and proceeded to abuse matt in Thai for the following 20 minutes until the bus driver pulled over at the police station and kicked him off!

Bus Bangkok to Chiang Mai

More issues… We decided to leave BK and travel north to Chiang Mai to trek through the jungle and meet some local tribes. Arriving at the travel agent at 5pm I almost gave our knob of a taxi driver a heart attack when I opened the passenger door into traffic and narrowly missed having it taken off my a Mercedes Benz. I don’t know what he was worried about, there were millimetres to spare (don’t forget engineers are very precise people). We were then whisked to the ‘bus station’ (read: side of the road), our “VIP” [I suspect “Very Important Prisoner”] bus arrived 3.5 hours later and we were away on our ‘dinner included 12 hour – over night journey’.

About an hour into it while we were still excited about the whole bus thing, the biggest storm I have ever witnesses began approaching over the horizon. We had an hour of constant thunder and lightning bolts, trees blowing over on the motorway, torrential rain and massive winds blowing the bus over the road (lucky the lane markings have little relevance in Thailand!). We later found out that the storm killed over 100 people in the Philippines. At hour four we arrived at our destination for dinner, I had a cramp I was so hungry, that is until I saw the shit on our plates. Fried sizzler type sausages sliced into strips that I could seen through and probably used and a lubricant in an engine, rice soaked in water and Bok Choi. I slanted away from the sausages in favour of the BC but within seconds was seriously questioning if I had just finished my first mouthful of dog meat. Needless to say their plan worked and I brought dinner from the solitary nearby store. An hour later and the fully laden “VIP” bus was approaching the mountain ranges of North Thailand, with this came a severe chill in the passenger compartment. Apparently stopping four times to refuel the radiator and running the air conditioning at full blast (~15degreesC) and freezing the passengers for hours to prevent engine overheating is appropriate “VIP” service in Thailand. Being the fresh naive traveller I was left unaware of this policy, the only things that kept me going over the last three to four hours were:

1. My Bay of Plenty rugby jersey with my arms tucked well inside,
2. The curtain from the window that I wrapped around my head and upper torso, and
3. The fact that Matt desperately needed a piss, he was within seconds of filling two 350ml bottles while sitting in his seat when the “VIP” bus took another water stop, to my disgust and extreme disappointment.
   

On arrival I was in disbelief (possibly shock), very cold but some how excited to get to Chiang Mai at 7am being greeted by a taxi driver holding “Matthew Wallace” upside down ready for a day to explore the town.

PS. I am having an absolutely awesome time, I have just chosen to share stories of my misery as I know it is funny for everyone else involved.

DAY4&5 (Bangkok, Thailand)

Arriving in BK around midnight (with no accom sorted) and getting dropped off in one of the main travellers streets was like diving into a 100mm deep pool head first. I would be lying if I said I wasnt slightly concerned about everyone around me. Not to mention the piece of shit stock-car that took us from the airport (pic's to come). The two days were mainly spent drinking 50B ($2NZ) big bots, eating from the street vendors for between 25B and 75B and staying a converted prison cell at 210B (~$nz4 each) a night for me and matt.

The first night we ended up getting rather intoxicated at which turned out to be one of the cheapest bars in town, when we decided to leave matt had the idea that it would be brilliant for us to get into some bugs. We ended up just munchuing a couple grass-hoppers while some other western tourists were asking us if we were on 'fear factor' or just plain crazy all the while taking photos.

DAY1&2 (Austraaalia)

Wholly fuck, I knew I would do something extremely stupid at some point on this journey and yes today was the day. Within 24 hours of embarking on my 1 year trip my passport was destroyed. Who would have thought that leaving a paper document to soak in spilt alcohol would compromise its integrity. Day 2 has just come to an end and I was on the phone all morning, the prognosis was that I needed to get to Sydney (from Melbourne) to get a replacement at the jaw dropping cost of $AUS622 (seriously, does the NZ government need to pay for this stadium with internal affairs revenue), so yeah if anyone from QBE insurance is reading this then you will be expecting a rather unpleasant call from me in the next few days!

Foundations

This is just a little outline to let everyone know my rough travel plans and a bit about why I'm travelling....

Travel Plans:
Duration of between 1 and 1.5 years, definitely want to be back in NZ in May 2008 for Graduation. I realise that I have a fairly ambitious list of countries to get around, however the plan goes a little something like this:

1. Auckland, NZ
2. Melbourne, Australia
3. Bangkok, Thailand
4. Burma / Myanmar
5. Cambodia
6. Vietnam
7. Laos
8. Paris, France
9. Europe (not sure but definitely London, Ireland, Denmark, Germany)
10. Kenya
11. Mozambique
12. Tanzania
13. Argentina
14. Chile
15. Peru
    

Time in each place is totally dependant on what I think of the place when I get there and visa restrictions etc... However as an indicator I plan to spend about 3 months in each of South East Asia, Europe, Africa and South America.

Why:
This is a difficult question that I have put to myself and am slightly struggling to come up with any solid answers. The main feelings that come through are that I have enjoyed meeting travellers and international students at uni and have wanted to travel for so long I do forget my initial reasoning. Also after finishing uni last month I have realised that I do enjoy learning and this is just another method to keep developing. I also just want to have some fun and 'let my hair down'.

After all I hope that I can look back at the end of this journey and have a good laugh, say I enjoyed myself, consider myself a better person and probably fall over laughing when I read this posting.

Contact:
If anyone does want to contact me you have a two options, email is the best for non-urgent matters danzemail@gmail.com, skype is also good skype name: daniel.tombleson