Monkey boy's travels

Last night I paid to have fiery coconut shells kicked at me by a man who thought he was a possessed horse. This it seems is normal in Bali, and I have to admit that it was good fun. This happened when we went to one of the traditional religious dances. The first section was a short play, we didn’t have much clue what was going on, but it involved lots of chanting men who were an army of monkeys, two women, and two king monkeys who had a fight. The second part was the burning of at big pile of coconuts, and a horse man running around, kicking them at the audience, trampling on the red hot shells and generally acting a bit like Ozzy in his Sabbath years. After 5 minutes of going mental he was wrestled to the ground by two half naked men, had his hobby horse taken off him and he fell to the ground and sat there with soot blackened feet looking a bit confused about what had happened. Excellent!

As opposed to Korean traditional dances it was quite captivating (sorry Korea, you made me fall asleep a few times) and the chanting and dancing looked almost African and was really interesting. It also had monkeys in it as any good show should have.

We’ve been in Indonesia for nearly a month now, it’s so enormous we haven’t even begun to touch on it, but we have driven all around Bali in a jeep and spent Christmas and New Year on a tiny island off the coast of another island called Lombok so our time has been spent well.

Driving around Bali has been interesting to say the least. As a rule the drivers here try to kill themselves (and you) at every opportunity; blind corners, oncoming trucks and steep hills are the best places to overtake or pull out but they’ll try at any time. Motorbikes undertake and overtake at the same time and we’ve even had motorbikes riding alongside us whilst we are driving trying to sell us a tour or random souvenirs.

Christy and our trusty (?) jeep

Since we have been here we have been back to a town called Ubud three times, we are there now. It’s such a nice town, and after driving around the rest of Bali it’s safe to say that Christy made the best choice to stay here when I go to Africa. It’s very relaxed and I think of it as the Holt of Bali as it’s full of boutiques, nice restaurants, art workshops, yoga workshops and lots more of that kind of stuff. Every house seems to be built like a temple, the people are really nice (we've even been invited to a few weddings) and it also has a main temple which has hundreds of seriously overfed monkeys around it.

Our local chicken

The view onto rice paddies

View from hotel

Christy and a friendly monkey

We splashed out for a nice hotel for our last week together; it costs a whopping £8 each per night. Our room is really nice and we get to wake up overlooking rice paddies, then jump in the pool, then have our breakfast brought to us on our balcony. Sweet.

During our exploration of Bali we did some really cool things; one morning we got up at 3:30am and climbed an active volcano (whilst we were climbing in the dark the stars were so bright and we saw loads of shooting stars)(plus we had an egg boiled in the volcano too), went snorkelling at an amazing nature reserve and even saw some dolphins. Our trusty jeep took us to do all of these activities with a maximum speed of 10km/hour, up hills it really struggled and it literally didn’t go over 2km/h (in first gear, move it to second and it died!). I suppose for a fiver a day we couldn’t expect much more.

For Christmas and NYE we went to Gili Trawangan. We had 2 choices to get to the island; the fast boat which took an hour, and the slow boat which took 12 hours. Naturally we took the “scenic” (and cheap) slow boat which meandered all over the place. The journey was an interesting one as we got to people spot people, lie around eating noodles and watch men trap their fingers in doors.

We finally reached Gili Trawangan where we stayed for a couple of weeks. Gili T is a tiny island, 3km long and 2km wide, with a native population of 700 and only horse and cart as transport. It has potential to be a perfect island getaway, and some parts of it are idyllic.

We spent most of our time snorkelling and searching for turtles which are abundant around the beaches. One day we went to the next island over and we saw ten turtles in one snorkel, which was fantastic. The coral is fairly good (considering!), and we saw loads of fishes, eels and other animals. In the evenings we went for nice BBQ meals on the beach, drank in the world’s largest Irish pub on the smallest island (although to be honest I couldn’t find all that much Irish about it, but at $1.30 for a double rum and coke who cares?). The manager of our hotel was really nice and we spent some time with him playing backgammon and chess with him.

On Christmas day we opened our presents on the beach, had a beer for breakfast and went snorkelling, ate a lobster (which was amazing, courtesy of Christy and her parents), and drunk lots of rum in the evening with two Finnish people we met. It was a good day and it made being away much easier. On NYE we met again with the Fins, had a great meal, then saw in the New Year whilst in the sea, watching lots of fireworks and drinking vodka. Many vodkas later we wobbled home and then spent the next day regretting drinking that much (again).
The island is frustratingly good; in a way it’s everything that’s wrong with the negative aspects of tourism, crammed onto a tiny island so the effects are felt even more. I could rant about it for hours, but I’ll try to rant for one paragraph only, to make myself feel better!

Christy on the beach xmas

The island is totally reliant on tourists for an income; it used to be a quiet get away and everything was dirt cheap, but now there’s lots of (over)development and overcharging going on which is slowly destroying what people actually came for in the first place. The island gets through 10 tonnes of rubbish a day, and it appears to be being spread evenly over the island and also in the sea, the beaches are dirty. The coral reef was damaged initially by cyanide fishing and is now being stomped on by lots of stupid tourists, the locals who run the snorkelling trips don’t bother to mention and rules and when I asked the man in charge why he didn’t tell people not to stand on it (it’s his livelihood after all!) he replied “yes, they always tread on the coral” and then for a spectacular finale he threw his anchor into some live coral. It’s all about getting money today and not caring about tomorrow, stupid. Interestingly this year was a bad year for tourism for them, probably because the island is getting a reputation for being ruined! When it boils down to it it’s the locals who need to do something about or else there will end up with a deserted, rubbish filled, coral-less island with lots of empty hotels! Somehow I think that’s what it will end up like which is shame; at least we saw it before it turned into a hot Yarmouth and we can remember the good parts of it! Success! Rant over in one paragraph!

On the way back to Bali we were confused because the ferry did a 180 turn and started heading the wrong way. I went to investigate and it turns out the captain had seen some tuna and there was lots of Indonesian men out the back trying to catch them to sell, classic Indonesian style!

We’re now relaxing in Ubud again where I am securing a firm reputation for being a mentalist with the hotel staff for taking photos of insects. I think the idea of paying any attention to bugs is a bit beyond their imagination! Here are some of my recent shots...

Anyway, that’s about all for this episode. We’re off to Thailand for a short while next, then to Hong Kong for a two day stop over which works out perfectly as it’s their New Year celebration and there will be lots of fireworks for us. After that we head to South Africa for a while and then we’ll be heading overland all the way up to Uganda. Fingers crossed we’ll keep out of trouble for our last 2 months

Here's my scores on the doors for Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. We were only in Malaysia and Singapore for a short time so as usual my scores will probably be wildly out...

THAILAND

Natural Beauty ----------- 8 (Nice beaches and national parks)
People --------------------- 6 (Way too many people just out to get your money let it down!)
Sights/Activities ---------- 8 (lots of cheap things to do!)
Food ----------------------- 9 (Thai curry, yummmmmm!)
Cost ----------------------- 8 (nice and cheap!)
Shopping ------------------ 8 (good cheap shopping, £20 goes a long way!)
Architecture -------------- 7 (Nice temples)
Transport ----------------- 8 (Good cheap buses and trains)
Price of beer ----------- c.£1

Overall Impression ------ 7 (would be higher if there was more smiles!)

MALAYSIA

Natural Beauty ----------- 9 (Stunning rock formations and nice rainforests (what's left of them!)
People --------------------- 9 (friendly locals who take the time to say hello and have a chat)
Sights/Activities ---------- 8 (Good prices)
Food ----------------------- 8 (I didnt think that much of Malaysian food, but the Indian and Chinese food made up for it!)
Cost ----------------------- 7 (Cheap accomodation and costs)
Shopping ------------------ 8 (cheap shopping for everyone!)
Architecture -------------- 7 (Beautiful mosques!)
Transport ----------------- 8 (Cheap and fast trains and buses)
Price of beer ----------- c.£5

Overall Impression ------ 8

SINGAPORE

Natural Beauty ----------- 6 (Most of it is built up, but i'm sure there's some beautiful areas)
People --------------------- 9 (friendly and relaxed people)
Sights/Activities ---------- 7 (lots to do, but maybe not on our budget)
Food ----------------------- 8 (Surprisingly cheap and good at Hawker stalls)
Cost ----------------------- 6 (Expensive, but I guess that's to be expected)
Shopping ------------------ 6 (expensive shopping!)
Architecture -------------- 9 (Nice modern cityscapes)
Transport ----------------- 9 (Good cheap transport)
Price of beer ----------- c.£2.50

Overall Impression ------ 8

Two weeks into our stay the empty house next door to ours was moved into. The two houses were almost adjoined and our balconies looked out to one another so friendship could have blossomed but unfortunately our new neighbours were incredibly unsociable and barely mustered the effort to say hello let alone have a conversation with us. Our new neighbours consisted of a morbidly obese upper class English man who insisted he was Scottish, a German man who insisted he was German, their miserable Thai brides and 4 noisy dogs who wouldn’t shut up all night and donated fleas to our bed (even so the dogs were definitely our favourite). After three weeks we were ready to go, and were looking forward to getting back to travelling. We waved goodbye to Braveheart, Fritz, the house, beautiful sunsets, flea ridden dogs and Mama Pooh, and set off for Malaysia.

Bye bye Thai sunsets

Our favourite restuarant, Mama Poohs did us proud

On reflection, a major part of travelling seems to be meeting freaks whilst waiting for the next bus or train. Possible favourite in the Hall of Freak was a delightful one eyed drunk man, with no teeth and an open wound on his skull who suggested that we didn’t take the train but let him drive us 1000km through Thailand saving us hours on our journey, but possibly having our eyes stolen and being locked in his boot as compensation. There are so many more oddballs it is hard to choose the best.

We were not let down when we travelled from Thailand to Malaysia, in fact we were really quite lucky and the wait scored highly on the freakotron scale. Our train was 3 hours late, it was 2am and I was having an interesting conversation with the latest local lunatic. After getting the essentials of basic English conversation out of the way, he asked me “do you know what’s wrong with life?”. I replied that I didn’t and didn’t really want to know but asked him “what?” out of courtesy. He stared off into the distance, I presumed he was considering this question and framing his answer eloquently with maybe a reference or two from Freud. Time went by, kingdoms rose and fell and still he stared off into the distance. I thought he’d forgotten his question which was quite a relief when after five minutes he returned to earth and replied “money”. By this time I was half asleep and glad that the conversation was over but it jolted me awake. He continued in this vain for some time, asking a question, dropping into silence and then answering with a word or two after a couple of minutes. After gentle questioning techniques, and many time delays I found that he was high on opium, which explained his vagueness, interest in philosophy and glazed eyes. I was hoping the train would come to save us, but luckily he promptly passed out in front of me and fell asleep on a bench. We moved away to another bench just in case he woke up again and were greeted by a large 60 year old woman with no teeth, who looked like she had learnt how to apply cosmetics from Marilyn Manson and to speak English from Stephen Hawkins’ electronic voice box. Again we fell into the English for retards conversation (I should get it recorded then I could just press play and leave them to it, it’s very tiring at 2:30am). We feared another lengthy conversation but after she asked “where are you staying?” and we replied “on a train” (evidentially, or maybe not so to someone who hangs about during the early hours at train stations for fun), she ran out of questions and went off to shave her tongue with a loaf of bread along with the other local maniacs.

Once we finally got the train we were relatively safe, and it was very late so we went straight to our bunks. When we woke up we were near the Malaysian border. We stopped to get our visa stamped and for the officials to check there weren’t any “hippy types” on board, (or people with sandals or dirty shorts) which apparently was forbidden. They must not have noticed my dirty shorts and sandals because I got through to the other side. The train ride from there on was very interesting, the people were very different to Thailand with lots more Indian and Chinese on board, and with more of a Muslim feel with women wearing burkas or semi-burkas and bikini burkas. Everyone seemed very happy and smiley and it felt really nice to be back on with happy folks who didn’t want to suck money out of you all the time.

Our first stop was an island called Penang, we stayed in a city called Georgetown, which was not surprisingly was built by the English. It was an interesting mix of Malaysian, Chinese and Indian neighbourhoods, set in a colonial English setting. Walking down one street you could hear Indian music and smell joss sticks and vindaloo and then next you would be surrounded by tiger’s penises and chow Mein. We had a great time sampling all of the food, which was fantastic and incredibly cheap. One of the curries we paid £2 for was the best I have had yet, and the crispy pork was delicious too. With such great food, we spent lots of our short time in Penang eating, and the rest in a butterfly park and just wandering around the streets.

Our driver, he was actually quite friendly even though he looks very moody here

Us on rickshaw

Tricky Malay language

A local bike taxi driver having a haircut

Our Chinese meal

The best Chinese restaurant

Hawker stall

After Penang we moved on to the Cameron Highlands. The hostel we stayed at was fantastic and had everything set up well, we went on a hike through the rainforest, saw a snake, a praying mantis, and then got lost. We ended up a few kilometres away at a power station wondering where we were, and then walked back along one of the roads. We heard afterwards that a Malaysian family had gone walking in the forest and got lost for a week and that the founder of the silk trade in Thailand, a man called Jim Thompson, had gone into the forest in 1970 and never come out again. The next day we took a taxi with a few other people for a tour of the area. Our driver was great and had lived in the area since he was born, his parents were moved over from India by the British to set up the roads. He showed us photos of from when he was young and the area had changed so much, when he was young the area was run by nuns, priests and the British army and consisted of a few buildings in the jungle. He remembered not being allowed in white people’s houses (apart from to carry their bags), seeing tigers on a weekly basis when he was a shepherd, and lots of other interesting stories. He took us to the tea plantations, which are still owned by a Scottish family. They were really beautiful and the mist flowing over them was magical.

Tea plantation

Tea men, they used to pick the tea by hand but now they luckily have machines

Tea plantation road

Next we set off to the countries capital, Kuala Lumpur. It seemed like a nice city, filled with mosques, shopping centres and overpriced alcohol (over £8 a bottle of beer in some places!). I brought my new macro lens there because electronics tax free in Malaysia and spent a couple of days in the butterfly park experimenting with it. Christy checked out the local mosque, wore a burka and was almost, nearly, not at all converted by a local Muslim man who worked there.

The Lime Butterfly

Dragonfly head

Butterfly head x5

Christy with butterfly hairclip

Poo chart, this wierd chart was in the butterfly park toilets

After a much too short stay in Malaysia we caught the bus down into Singapore. Naturally we were on the watch for mental escapees and were once again not let down. Behind us on the bus was a giant Indian man with an enormous handlebar moustache and limited English skills, who was accompanied by a small boy (with no handlebar moustache but better English skills) who we presumed to be his son. Whilst we were on a break at a service station he looked at me in a devious way, and pretended to have a camera in his hand whilst taking an imaginary photo of us. This was his invitation for a photo shoot outside, declining was not an option. We were ordered outside and rotated through various photo combinations as instructed by Mr Wong Raja; me and him, Christy and him, Christy and the boy, the boy and me, the boy me and a stray dog, and on and on. He obviously wanted some evidence that he had bonded and made best friends with some Westerners on his trip. The shoot went on for some time, without much dialogue, and of course we made best friends. It turned out that he was a karate master and his son was not his son but his apprentice and they were over in Singapore for a Karate competition (evidentially the young boy was the karate contestant; the Mr Raja’s belly was not one of an athletes). He didn’t really understand much English but had a very bolshie manner and pretty much bossed everyone around with sign language, and his timid apprentice translated and tried to keep his head down as much as possible. He insisted that we visit his home in India, next January, to meet his enormous family and to have more photo shoots. Imagine the photo combinations with an extended family of 300. We said we couldn’t which he wouldn’t accept, so to keep the peace we agreed that we would definitely probably maybe visit him then. Now happy, he continued to talk in length in very broken English, and when we did understand and replied he didn’t understand us. This breakdown didn’t seem to put him off one bit. When we got off the bus and transferred to the shuttle bus which moved us over to Singapore we tried to escape, but he followed shouting my name at full volume, and when a small Chinese man sat next to Christy he literally picked him off the seat and placed him elsewhere, then grabbed my heavy camera bag and threw it onto a seat to reserve the space for his apprentice, hitting a lady on the head with it in the process. The locals looks horrified but he didn’t seem to notice, he was a man with a Karate mission. He seemed to spiral further into madness on this journey and his conversation was interspersed with lots of snorting and head rolling. When in Singapore we managed to escape with a promise of a zoo visit the next day, we parted ways with a bear hug in which he picked me up and shook me up and down. We ran around the corner and thankfully so far we haven’t seen him again.

Singapore was really nice and much cheaper than we had expected. Everyone talks about how sterile it is, but it didn’t come across that way to us. We thought it was just a well organised and clean place, which can only be a good thing really. We found lots of hawker stalls to eat at which was about £2 per meal and got to eat with the locals. One evening we got to witness a show in which two of the Chinese owners of the stalls had a massive screaming argument which went on for 20 minutes and culminated in a light slapping match. Unfortunately the dialogue was all in Chinese, which was most inconsiderate for those who could only understand English.
We looked out of place wandering around the Ritz hotel in flip flops checking out the $5,000,000 worth of art work in it, looked at the Singapore eye, went to the amazing zoo and bird park (everything was almost free range!), saw the amazing Christmas lights in the posh area of town whilst wandering amongst Gucci and Versace shops and gawped at the prostitutes in the poor end of town (we didn’t purchase any Gucci products, a Singapore eye ride or a prostitute due to lack of funds).

The legendary Raffles

Singapore flyer

Christy tweaking the nipples of an African statue

Hamadryas baboon male portrait

Hamadryas teenager portrait

Brown capuchin monkey hanging around on a stick

A very friendly lemur

Ring tailed lemur

A sleeping baby orang, the only ones I will see in Indonesia

Orang hand

Baby orang swinging

Egret

Pelican in the rain

We only had a few days but we really enjoyed Singapore and would love to go back.
After our brief visit we set off to Bali, which is where we are now. I will write another blog soon about our exploits here. If I don’t before have a very merry Christmas, we’ll be on the beach for it and I’m planning on going diving on Christmas Eve which will be somewhat different to normal.

After the Vegetarian festival we spent a few days in an island called Ko Phangan which is famous for its full moon parties. We had missed the full moon party but were there for the half moon party. We went along and had a good time, it was set inside a jungle clearing and was decorated with lots of UV, it reminded me of an illegal rave in England, but without rain or with no police trying to shut it down.

We spent the next couple of days exploring on mopeds, snorkelling, relaxing and winding down to island time. During this time we realised that we’d be travelling almost non-stop for over six months and that we felt a bit tired of all the buses, trains, planes and waiting rooms and wanted to settle down for a while, kick back and take in the atmosphere of somewhere for more than a few days. Ko Phangan seemed like a good place to do this. Unfortunately before we made this decision we had already booked tickets up to the other end of Thailand to go to a festival called Loy Krathong, we decided that as we had paid we should go so undertook a massive journey to go to the festival and then travelled back to Ko Phangan where we are now. I don’t think we fully realised how much travelling we would need to do, we travelled for 35 hours each way, covering a total distance of over 2,200km to spend a couple of days at the festival!

Two 15 hour train journeys and a boat ride later and we arrived at the festival, in Thai Loy Krathong means “to float” and Krathong is a small decorated raft which the locals add incense sticks , candles, decorations and a small amount of money. The act of releasing this raft acts to pay respect to Buddha and is also symbolic of letting go of all of your grudges and anger. Millions of them are released down the main rivers and onto lakes and it seemed like everyone was involved.

Along with the krathongs, paper lanterns are released and the whole of the sky was filled with hundreds of these during the evenings creating a new floating orange cosmos.

It all sounds very idyllic and it definitely was, but naturally an element of Thai chaos was injected to make it a little more interesting. The lanterns were lit and people waited for them to fill with hot air before releasing them, lots of people weren’t patient enough so they slowly took off and then came back down to earth on fire setting fire to people’s heads, telegraph wires, trees, market stalls and motorbikes. Some of the more adventurous Thai’s took to attaching pyrotechnics to the lanterns so that as they took off they shot off fireworks and firecrackers at unsuspecting bystanders. This was a health a safety workers worst nightmare but the Thai’s loved it and had a great time! Only 14,598 people were maimed so no real damage was done.

A lantern crashing down into some wires

On the main evening of the event we went down to the river to watch the fireworks and people release their krathongs. As we sat peacefully a really wrecked Thai man wobbled over and asked for money, I gave him 10 baht to get rid of him as he had a funny look in his one remaining eye. He wobbled a little further and then jumped into the river where he proceeded to rip apart as many krathongs as possible to get out the money. People were symbolically releasing all of their grudges and anger only to have some drunk idiot pull it all apart 10 seconds later, which no doubt didn’t help with their grudges and anger. In true Asian style no one confronted him about this and even when people saw their krathongs destroyed in front of them they just looked a bit sad and then left. Christy and I were about the only people there who seemed to be annoyed, I wished that an English mentality lynch mob would come and dispose of him but they never came. Where’s The Sun when you need it?!

Whilst this was taking place a thousand fireworks were being let off all around us. Think of all the fireworks that have been banned in England since the 1800’s and then give those to under 7’s to set off as they please! “Grenade” fireworks were being thrown into the river which exploded throwing the water up into the air, fireworks on string were being spun around and then released to shoot off in a random direction and firecrackers were being thrown all over the place. It was quite a scene, and the noise was deafening. After a couple of hours of being in this war scene we retreated, thankfully with all limbs and major organs intact, but with mild post traumatic stress. We spent a couple of days in Chiang Mai, looking around and enjoying the incredible cheapness of everything in Northern Thailand.

We then had the monster journey back to Ko Phangan to undertake, we decided to mix it up and got 2 buses back instead of the train. We arrived at the port exhausted only to find there had been a storm for the last few days and that the water was rough. The 3 hour ride over to Ko Phangan was choppy, but sitting on the front of the boat as it rocked around seemed to help with sea sickness. Finally we arrived on the island, happy in the knowledge that we were here for a bit and there would be no more travelling!

Our choppy journey

We searched around for houses later on that day and what we found wasn’t encouraging, we were beginning to think we would be stuck with a Korean style one bedroom, one kitchen place when we found Lakeside House, which is where we have been for the last 3 weeks, we only have another week left, it’s gone so quickly! It’s a really nice house, with two bedrooms, a kitchen which opens on one side to look over the lake. It has a nice area outside which we can relax. As the name suggests it sits on the edge of a lake, which backs onto mangroves, followed by the sea, perfect!

The kitchen

The bedroom

The bathroom

Outside

Our view

View from our bedroom

The highstreet!

Most evenings we go down to “our beach” and watch the sunset and the fishing boats head out to sea for the night.

Our beach

We have hired brand new super mopeds, 100cc of pure power (£2 a day!) so we can scoot around the island.

The beast

The island has pretty much everything we need, including the plague-like Tescos (bad, although good for cheap rum!) and an even an English pub, which looks a bit odd sitting amongst palm trees but serves a mean proper English sausage sandwich and gammon and chips!!

An English pub, stage 2 of colonisation

We even have a major branch of HSBC bank on the island, which is great for our banking needs....

HSBC, the worlds local bank

We can get about nearly everywhere on the island, apart from where the roads give way to mad paths or have fallen into the mountain!

Road followed by, no road

We’re just a few km’s away from the best snorkelling spots on the island so we’ve spent lots of time on the beach. Our favourite beach in called Coral Bay, it’s in a cove and has a perfect sandy beach. The water is clean and clear and if you swim out a bit there’s a reef with lots of fish and according to Christy a few great white sharks, although we haven’t seen any of them quite yet. This beach also has a resident pig that snuffles around and occasionally attacks women for no reason which I find quite funny, and the women do not. The owner of the pig told us a bit about this; the pig was brought up with an old dog, so it thinks that it’s a dog and behaves in many ways like a dog. When the old dog died they got a new puppy, who now thinks he is a pig and snuffles around the beach digging up the sand with his nose like a pig does. So there’s a dog who thinks he’s a pig and a pig who thinks he’s a dog. To add to the confusion they’ve now got another dog, which looks very much like a wolf – I wonder what effect that will have on the trio, maybe a killer pig!

Apart from the beach we’ve been to a Muay Thai (Thai boxing) match, where we saw 7 fights. It’s not much like normal boxing, they can kick and punch, and they are much more agile and they had music playing when they were fighting which they almost danced to. It was like Swan Lake apart, apart from the fact that they beat the crap out of each other. Fighters start young here, at 13 days old they take their first steps in the ring, by the time they are 2 they can disable a man from 15 metres away, and when other children are just starting first school they are killing buffaloes for fun with their bare hands. The first fight we saw was very young fighters, they were actually pretty rubbish and one of them fell over in the 2nd round, I think even I could have beat him. The fights progressively got better and better until the last one was a frantic full 5 rounds of pounding and I definitely wouldn’t even consider looking directly at the fighters let alone sparring with them.

This morning we went and had an archery lesson which was fun. I hit the target quite a few times (although not as many times as I missed it), as did Christy - there is Robin Hood potential yet. I’m going to hunt down the shooting school and have a go there sometime this week too. I will be combat ready! We are also hoping to go fishing one day with some local fishermen, spend some time with our friends the elephants and get lots more beach action in over our final week.

Once we leave here we head down through Malaysia and Singapore to spend the next month in Indonesia. We’ve just booked our Christmas and NYE accommodation in a tiny island called Gili Trawangan, which has no cars or motorbike, excellent snorkelling (apparently there’s thousands of turtles there) and possibly most importantly, suckling pig!

One of the things I’m enjoying most about Thailand is the chaos. Take for example the traffic, it seems to be out of control - cars don’t stop at traffic lights, mopeds ride on the wrong side and weave around moving cars piled high with children, pets and furniture and pedestrians stroll out in front of speeding buses – but still it all seems to work itself out and as of yet I haven’t seen anyone hurt or flattened. Most areas of Thai life seem to work in this way and I’m definitely warming to it!

A few weeks ago we went to Phuket vegetarian festival. Those who didn’t do their homework and travelled to Phuket with hopes of tofu stalls, kindness to animals and a peaceful hippy vibe would have been disappointed as vegetarianism took back shelf to the locals impaling themselves through their faces with any available item, varying from a machine gun to a child’s tricycle. As gruesome as this seems it does have some kind of background and they do have a reason for doing this to themselves, I will explain now (caveat: some information is correct where as other bits may be incorrect or just plain lies). It all begin in 1825 when the governor moved Phuket’s principle town to its current location because he envisioned it would one day make a better city to host many Tesco stores and 7/11’s. At the time the area was covered in dense jungle and a fatal fever struck down many of the locals. By co-incidence a travelling Chinese opera was visiting and they all came down with the fever, thankfully the Daily Mail wasn’t in circulation at the time or else there would have been mass hysteria around the world about the next swine/ bird or crab flu about to strike. To combat the fever the opera company ignored their doctor’s instruction of a lemsip, and lots of sleep and instead kept to a strict vegetarian diet for 10 days to honour two of their Gods; Kung Fu Panda and Mr Myagi. At the end of the 10 days their fever reduced and they packed up and went back to China. The locals saw that the vegetarianism stunt worked, so for ten days a year they abstained from meat in honour of Myagi and Panda, and also observed other rules such as not having sex, not eating chocolate biscuits and ordering their children to set off as many crackers humanly possible, preferably at tourist’s feet. This is where I get confused of the link between this and the sticking the rods through your face, but it seems that the Thai people have pimped up the Chinese version with the appearance of Ma Songs, or entranced horses. These are the devotees who the Chinese Gods ‘enter’ during the festival. Whilst possessed they manifest supernatural powers such as being able to stick machine guns through their heads, walk on hot coals, pour boiling oil on their heads, walk along razor ladders and endure endless hours of Enya on loop, all without feeling any pain. Now, I don’t want to be a non believer, but I did see quite a few of them look like they were in pain, but I guess it’s a little too late to bring that up once the pole has been stuck through your cheek and you’re claiming some kind of link with God, so they just had to put on a brave face and look a bit mental/ possessed for the crowd. It’s interesting and backs up the theory that certain elements of religion can be seen as a mental illness. If one person claims that an invisible person who lives in the sky talks to him (Jesus excluded, he definitely wasnt crazy and could really, honestly, definitely (maybe) walk on water too...) and also sticks poles through his head to ensure that people won’t get the flu then he would be locked up in a Mental Home, but if several people do the same then its religion and OK.

Either way it was an interesting insight into human behaviour, we certainly are an odd lot. Crowds were out in the city wearing white to pay their respects to the devotees and everyone from toddlers to old ladies stood patiently at the edge of the road praying to them as they lurched by with umbrellas and other items hanging from their faces. It would have been pretty awful if it had of appeared to be faked for the tourists, but in fact it was quite the opposite, the locals seemed to thoroughly believe it, the participants believed it (evidently because they were the ones piercing themselves) and the atmosphere of the festival was one of serious worship, apart from some of the odd items they chose for the processions.

Definitely not a festival to miss if you're not too squeamish!