Blame Rachel.

I got an email from her begging me to post photos of myself in my slim and svelte form before the lager and western food kicked in and turned me back into a fat sack of crap so here they are. She's probably constantly horny as the head is pressing against her cervix. That happens right? I'm sure I read somewhere.

Oh also. here's a picture of my hookworm. It didnt come out that well but it's the toe next to the big one. I should of taken a picture once the medication kicked in and it was all crumbly as my body was rejecting the little fucker.

Still, next time.

R.I.P.

You know, it was that trek in Malaysia that finally did them in.

But they've served me well and I hate to see them go.

Much as Powers Booth says to Nicholas Cage in the Rangers Division at the start of Con Air except that my sandals are not a horse-faced twat actor who's been in some of the worst films ever commited to celluloid although I do have to admit he was quite good in The Rock.

Ghost Rider.....Brrrr....

And The Wicker Man? Oh he must die.

Right, let's try that again.

Okay, so here I am, back in Bangkok for the FIFTH and final time, having a beer in the first cafe I went into when I arrived in November.

I had a KFC yesterday.

It was fucking fantastic. It's not that the food in southern Laos was necessarily bad it's just that I was always eating the cheapest food and not much of that in order to save cash so when I tucked into a big greasy processed sugar and salt laden western junk food fest I just felt (insert sound of Homer Simpson drooling here).

The area I went to in Laos was nice but was extremely quiet (like much of the country) and there really was not much to do beside sit in a hammock and read. Now I like sitting and reading but nine days was pushing it a bit even for me. Besides, I finished Vanity Fair just after I got there and as there was no bookshops in the area I had to rely on the books that people had donated to the guesthouses which didn't provide the best choice. By the last day I was reduced to reading The Girlfriend Curse about a thirty-something Manhattan career woman who cant land a husband.

It was not good.

Also my guesthouse was overrun with chickens and I have come to the conclusion that chickens, even worse than dogs, are the most annoying, pointless and stupid animals on God's Green Earth (I've never been that keen on dogs but have really gone off them on this trip particularly after being chased by a pack of strays when walking through the WW2 cemetery in Kanchanaburi). That KFC tasted all the sweeter when I imagined I was biting into one of those crowing bastards. Why didn't I buy that catapult that kid offered my in northern Thailand near the start of my trip? Sitting in a hammock, book in one hand, beer in the other, catapult at the ready and a big pile of hollow-point explosive-tipped chicken-piercing ammo to hand. That would have been great.

Yes, I am now back in the land of beer thanks to the completion of my medication and the destruction of my hookworm infestation. Oddly, the first few beers went down very well but I rapidly tired of the exercise. I have come to the conclusion that my body is starting to reject the absorption of that much fluid each day and is now craving wine above all things.
Yes, definitely time to come home.

On that note I should go and confirm my flight now.

Bye!

Look Another Buddha! Bet you'd forgotten all about him hadnt you?

This one has a tree growing round his head which I thought made a nice change of pace.

I only popped out to get something to eat.

This is me after stepping out on to the Kao San Road during Songkran. I got the hell out of Bangkok the next day and am now in Ayuthaya and I will be getting the train to the Thai/Laos border tomorrow as I have decided to spend the end of my trip in Southern Laos. The soonest I could transfer my ticket to another flight was only going to be seven days before the 3rd and would have cost 222 pounds so I've decided to stay the course till the 3rd and use my ticket as is. Leaving photographic evidence to the contrary aside I am in a slightly more upbeat mood as I type this than I was during my last couple of posts. It feels good to be on the move again after stagnating in despair in Bangkok for a week, plus everything is cheaper outside of the city (provided you go north not south) and Laos is cheaper again. I didn't get to southern Laos when I was there before so it will be nice to check out the area and it will also be a laid back way to bring the trip to a close. There's apparently not much to do in the area I'm heading to (it's called the 1000 Islands and is a collection of, you guessed it, islands in the Mekong river right on the border with Cambodia) other than drink and read by the river. Course, I cant drink for eight days due to my little parasite (possible idea for a range of children's toys?) but by George I shall enjoy it when I can! In the meantime not drinking is seriously saving me money and I think for the first time in the whole trip I may have actually lost some weight! I should probably take some pictures of myself sans shirt as a souvenir.

Anyway, I'm off now. Nowhere in the 1000 Islands had electricity before 2006 and I think most of it is still unconnected so I wouldn't think I shall be posting for a while.
Bye!

Forgot to mention...

The day before I spotted my parasite I visited the Siriraj Medical Museum that included the Sood Sangvichien Prehistoric Museum, the Songkran Niyomsane Forensic Medicine Museum and......the Parasitology Museum!! Lots of pictures of scary looking things and the scary looking stuff they can do to you. Oh what exquisite timing!
No sign that I'm developing Elephantiasis in my foot just yet though which I'm quite happy about.

It's Songkran Festival here at the moment (Thai New Year) which involves spraying lots of water about and smearing each other with some kind of flour and egg paste. It is unsurprisingly particularly manic around the Kao San Road.

I am most decidedly NOT entering into the spirit of things. Remember that because of my medicational needs I am completely sober. My plan to fill one of the plastic super-soaker guns everyone is using with concentrated acid instead of water came to nothing when I forgot that concentrated acid melts plastic. I now have a new plan to replace the water with bullets and the plastic gun with a real one.

But seriously, a bunch of Thais given licence to assault foreigners, westerners given licence to act like hyperactive children and a whole load of cheap booze swilling about. Sounds like the perfect recipe for an out of control bloodbath to me.

Makes me nostalgic for southern Thailand.

Some time ago I posted a blog entry while in southern Thailand (Phuket I believe) in which I stated I had reached a low point of sorts in my trip. Well it turns out however low you go there's still more down below that!
Original plan - Get back to Bangkok, arrange a flight for the 14th or thereabouts and spend a few days of comparative luxury staying in a nicer than average guesthouse, having some drinks etc. then come home fairly well within budget.
Where reality deviated somewhat from the plan - The soonest it seems I can get a flight back to England is the 3rd of next month. I'm not likely to get a cancellation and the cost of transferring the ticket to another airline looks likely to be equal to or more than the cost of staying out here till May. Ive been staying in a dogshit guesthouse trying to spend as little money as possible while I wait to see if there are any cancellations and there are some really annoying French twats in the next room who make loads of noise and who I want to kill.
Also in the original plan I most certainly do not get infected with parasites. Well one parasite really. At least I hope there's only one. A filaform larvae of the non-human hookworm to be precise. It's a long wormy thing coiled up under the skin on one of my toes. Two things to be thankful for (though I'd rather be thankful for not having hookworm at all)- it's not moving about...and the infective larvae cannot complete it's normal life cycle in a human host (they prefer raccoons apparently), meaning it remains undeveloped but can persist under the skin causing cutaneous larva migrans. Basically it digs through your skin leaving the area itchy and inflamed. Now as you may have guessed I went to the doctor's and picked up some information and also some medication. It should be completely treatable (barring some horrendous House-style complications) and the costs should be reimbursed by my travel-insurance. I cant drink for the duration of the treatment and that will take me over the Thai New Year period so I shall have a dull time there. Not that I can afford to drink or eat or do anything much at the moment anyway, still it's better to be not drinking because you cant afford to than because you're on medication to treat larval parasites.

You know, I had a nice ending for Geoff all planned out. While Geoff was going to be a bit disappointed that no great truths had been revealed, nothing had been found out, no clues as to what he was to do with his life etc. had come his way while travelling he was still going to be sad the trip was coming to an end . There was going to be a bit where he looks at a wall in England and is sorry to see no Geckos on it (there are geckos on every wall in Asia just so that makes sense to anyone who hasn't been). But now, by the time I finally get the fuck out of fucking Thailand (or the toilet bowl of Southeast Asia as I am affectionately calling it at the moment) I'm going to be so happy about it the final frame of Geoff is likely to be him turning cartwheels in an English pub going "YEE-HA!!!!! I'm out of Thailand!!! WAAA-HOO!!! No more fucking geckos!!! YAAA-HOO!!! No more rice/noodles/beggars/tuk-tuks/tailors/open sewers etc!!! HIP-HIP-HOORAY!!!"

You get the general idea.




I don't like it here anymore.




I want to come home.

And how the world turns...

...yielding place to new. The wheel spins, time go by in unceasing flow, autumn leaves fall, the flow of history - skip to the end!
So here I am back in Bangkok for the fourth and final time. Fourth time I hear you cry in perplexituity. Yes, flew in on November the 12th, went north, into Laos,Vietnam, Cambodia, back into Thailand, Bangkok for one night, southern Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, flew from Singapore (that was a really nice and extremely well organised airport by the way) to Bangkok for a couple of nights, went to Kanchanaburi (where the Bridge on the River Kwai is located) and finally came back to Bangkok where I currently sit in one of the first internet cafe/bars ever I went in, supping a beer and pondering the trip and it's ending. I am kind of looking forward to coming home. The horror many people feel at the end of a long trip and the subsequent return to reality has the sting taken out of it a little for me as I shall be going to Brighton for a short while then heading to Cornwall to stay with my parents for ???? so I am not leaving Asia and heading straight back to work or anything nasty like that.
I have to say however that as I have not found myself whilst travelling, have had no revelatory experience about the nature of my existence and have most decidedly not come to any glorious conclusion as to my purpose in life from hereon out and subsequently have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do when I get back to Brighton from Cornwall I'm a little depressed as whatever happens will almost certainly entail taking a temp-job, probably at Amex and moving into crappy accommodation that's too expensive with people I don't like much.
Still, there's always the hope I'll die of malaria. I understand you can still contract the disease up to three months after leaving an infected area. Fingers crossed!

Ben on the River Kwai

Here I am on the Bridge on the River Kwai, the bridge built by Allied prisoner's of war for the Japanese as part of the Burma Railway, or Death Railway as it became known because of the terrible working conditions and appalling casualty rate. Of course there were probably far fewer floating restaurants either side of the bridge when it was being built and I'm fairly certain when the railway became operational that you couldn't get a cold can of Singha beer aboard the train either.

In praise of cold beer in hot climates.

Once I realised how expensive beer (and everything else) was in Malaysia I became teetotal and started staying in dorm rooms to save cash. It was only then, as my expenditure dropped drastically that I realised how much I have been spending on booze over the last few months. I was dry from the 22nd of March till the 31st. Ten days. Which is the longest I have been dry since the 12th of November when I flew into Bangkok. Actually, if you want to get technical that's the longest I have been dry in the last seventeen and a half years. And when I started drinking again I realised how much I missed it. Actually that's a lie. I was well aware how much I was missing it as I was going without.

Even though Singapore is mighty pricey I thought I had to drink some Tiger beer here (as this is where it is brewed) so here I am in the heart of the historic/financial district enjoying a jug for the bargain price of $21. If you look closely you can just see the Raffles statue on the far right of the picture.

Mmmmmm....beer.

In praise of the British Empire.

So I was stuck at the arse-end of Southern Thailand without a book to read and so ended up reading the History section of the Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei guidebook I had in far greater detail than I normally would. Coming after Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia which were sorry tales of French Imperial atrocities (carried out within living memory) and enthusiastic American bombing and chemical warfare campaigns the history of British involvement in Malaysia and Singapore made for quite undepressing reading. Lots of free-trade, bargaining, and infra-structure building, and less of the brutal genocidal put-downs of the natives that characterised other Imperial power's Asian history. Okay, there was a bit of that (after all you cant expect everyone to respond well to having the higher ideals of the British Empire forced upon them) but generally it was not too horrendous. I think it is high time the British Empire and the East India Trading Company was rehabilitated (I think that Neil Ferguson wrote a book recently praising it but we need some big movies to do the same...after all if Gladiator and 300 can make the Romans and Spartans look good even though they were both extraordinarily brutal despotic regimes then anything is possible...the closest thing we have so far is Master and Commander but that was marred slightly by having an Australian twat in the main role) and became more than a pantomime and slightly effeminate villain in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Who's with me?! Say it once and say it loud...I'm British and I'm proud... whilst simultaneously being rather modest and ever so slightly guilt ridden.

The white statue is Stamford Raffles, the lieutenant-governor of Java, located on the spot where he first set foot on the island of Singapore which he took over (in exchange for cash and a life pension to the sultan and local chieftain...no inappropriate violence) and turned into a major free-port, trade centre and safe haven on account of the very efficient and law-upholding British presence.

The other photo (which is not at all tacky, touristy or stupid) shows some tacky tourist idiot next to a statue of Captain Light who founded a free port on Penang in northern Malaysia. No picture of Light could be found at the time it was made so it was modelled on the features of his son William who founded Adelaide in Australia. Busy family.

Culture!

Well after nearly five months and six countries I have finally managed to take in some culture (other than museums and art galleries). The rather impressive building shown is the Conservatory of Music on the National University of Singapore campus and I saw a free piano concert there a few nights ago. The following evening I saw the Singapore Symphony Orchestra perform Elgar and Mozart at the Theatre on the Bay which is near to Raffles Place, the most Singaporish bit of Singapore, where the Salvador Dali and the Henry Moore sculptures are located. To balance this out the next day I went to the cinema and watched The Shooter in which lots of people got killed and some things exploded.

Octowood!

Nice.

More mocking of an ancient and revered religion.

More evidence (as if any was needed) that the Hindu religion is completely crackers. These photos were taken at Sri Krishnan and Veeramakaliamman Temple in Singapore. The woman is Kali, goddess of death, destruction, fear and the consuming aspects of reality and those wacky Hindus actually worship the bloodthirsty bitch. that's when they're not stabbing you with their ritualistic daggers or strangling you as part of some diabolical Thugee sacrificial rite of course. Of course my knowledge of Hindu religion is gleaned mainly from a briefly perused Wikipedia, Gunga Din and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom so may not be entirely accurate.