angthong marine park.

some piccies from the national marine park. the water was a bit murky so not great snorkelling but the place was amazing nevertheless. off to bangkok now for a couple of days.

  

   

i read some rubbish.

i often find that when you’re travelling and things are a bit complicated, catching buses and trains and stuff, the best books are ones that are simple – i mean dead simple. for example, once i read the autobiography of wwe wrestler kurt angle, it’s true! it’s true! and surprisingly enjoyed it. it had a bit of an element of those parts of films where things get built, like in robin hood prince of thieves where they build the village in the trees ready for battle, man stuff i guess.

the first book i read here was the giants by j.m.g. le clezio. i must admit to not really getting the point, maybe i should read it again.

next i read the handmaids tale by margaret atwood. it was good, it was an easy read and one of those books, as so many do, that predicts certain elements of the present time so closely it’s scary, even 30 years ago.

then i read a book called middlesex about a haermaphrodite born with a missing chromosome resulting in him being brought up as a girl until age 14. it features lots of historical facts as it traces the origin of the gene back through his family until him, starting mostly with his grandfather and grandmother who are brother and sister. it was also good, very factual, but i lost interest a bit towards the end as the story seemed to lose it’s truth and become a bit sensational.

so i’d read those serious books, i wanted a book about something more uplifting, inspirational. i quite like biographies about people who’ve achieved amazing things like climbed mountains or ran around the world, but the book shop didn’t really have them so i ended up with a book called surfing the himilayas: a spiritual adventure. now i wouldn’t even be telling anyone about this had i not just read the wikipedia entry about the author, frederick lenz. this book charts his meeting with the last surviving truly enlightened buddhist monk, who has foreseen his meeting with a snowboarding californian to which he will pass on his spiritual knowledge. i definitely had my doubts about this one at the point when the monk took to floating from the bottom of the mountain to the top. granted, it did say not everything in the book was true, but it said based on truth. i think what really made this book stand out as a load of crap was all the hippy terminology scattered throughout, references to auras and mysticism, things i’ve never heard mentioned when referring to buddhism. i’m pretty sure it contradicted iteself a million times along the way but there was so much repetition and the writing style of a 9 year old it was basically impossible to figure out what the point was. suffice to say it was not the buddhist teachings i’ve heard before, not even similar.

one good thing about reading this was that if i ever stumble across some conman, cult leader type who happens to have written a book i’m always intrigued to read it but never do, but this way i stumbled upon it backwards-ly and have read the book of a deluded, drug-addled, nut who somehow convinced people to invest time and money in his ‘teachings’.

this is a crazy, crazy world…

long time, lots to say.

so, i am obviously terrible at keeping this up-to-date, sometimes i think i’ll write things and then i end up thinking ‘no-one will want to read about our train being delayed for 5 hours or me losing 3 games of scrabble in a row and getting in a mood’ so i just end up not blogging.

we’ve left our little home in chiang mai, i missed it instantly, it’s good having somewhere to come back to and also somewhere that means you don’t have to carry everything round with you. mainly i miss:

a) food – i had an excellent collection of fine eateries established through my comical thai and goofy smile, think people just love to feed me really…and i love to oblige.

b) chiang mai bouldering wall – i spent lots of time here whilst jen was busy studying, i was toiling away at the climbing wall for a few hours a day. it was a tough job, it’s not all fun and games you know. i learnt lots of stuff of various people from all over who just stop by to do a few routes while i struggle on the easy ones.

c) having a swimming pool – this is just obvious really, everyone loves a swimming pool when it’s touching 40 degrees out.

d) the little fino – i miss having our young stallion to ride about on, despite it’s numerous flat tyres and cold, morning engine, scooters are simply the best way of getting around thailand.

e) master kuma’s yoga experience – every night on thai tv, master kuma does an hour of yoga. no tv, no yoga! i was getting quite good too after less than a week and i was also learning a bit of thai too, such as ‘breath in’ and ‘breath out’. i think if you put something similar on in the uk between 5 and 6 pm, a surprising amount of people would do it.

not to worry though, i’m away seeing the world now. right now we’re on koh samui, just using someones wifi connection in our nice bungalows minutes from the beach. before this we were on koh tao, i won some brownie points by finding a really special beach called ao tanote, very quiet with coral reef starting 1 metre from the shoreline. i sensed sceptacism from jen and my mum when we started climbing a rutty, dusty track but i knew it would be worth it.

i got to use my christmas present off jen finally – a snorkel – and i got sunburnt for the first time on the backs of my legs because i wanted to snorkel the whole time we were there. it’s worth the pain though, i saw a black tip reef shark, loads of other types of colourful fish and coral and a few puffer fish. i tried to get them to puff up but i was too scared to get close enough to make them.

just took my mum out to a thai bbq, don’t think she enjoyed it as much as me. i’m buying one of the grills before we come back so maybe if there is still some summer left in england we’ll get to use it. i love these bbq’s. here’s an earlier excursion to one in cambodia, believe it or not i am not doing that french ‘magnifique’ type, finger kiss gesture there but chewing on some fine, fine meat of some description.

so that’s pretty much up to date. there was a little trip to the river kwai and stuff in between where we stroked some tigers and saw the bridge and stuff. tomorrow we’ll be doing more snorkelling.

the golden triangle shopping excursion.

we had to take a trip to the burma-thai border so jen could get her visa extended so we decided to do an organised trip which goes to a few different places. it was a bit weird.

firstly you go to a hot spring. it’s not really a hot spring like you imagine, not in nice surroundings or anything like that, just a steaming plume of water in the middle of a car park surrounded by shops. you can buy tack and eggs to cook in the spring and then you get pestered by beggars.

next we went to the white temple of chiang rai. this was really good. inside was a kind of modern michelangelo being painted by the monk who built the temple, depicting hell on one side, with images from the matrix and pictures of george bush and osama bin laden and mobile phones etc. on the other side was heaven, shown by a sitting buddha. it was really interesting, especially how modern it all was, totally different to any of the other temples i’ve been too.

next place on the trip was the golden triangle, the point where the mekong meets with a tributary and forms a point where laos, burma and thailand meet. we had a little boat trip up to a burmese casino along the river before going to a laotion island where i had a bit of snake whisky. there was a choice between gecko, snake, tiger penis and many others, i figured they must all taste the same actually, not very nice, so i just took snake. bit novelty. anyway, the rest of the island was just gift shops and stuff, and more beggars. we heard the theme to mario brothers coming from the back of one of the houses, the original nintendo one with square graphics. kids were jumping in the mekong between sessions of asking tourists for money and jen got a little elephant stamp in her passport, but i forgot to bring mine. our guide described the mekong as a red river, though i think that is a positive spin on the colour brown, apparently it’s 50-60 metres deep.

after a weird buffet of toned-down thai food and chips we went to maesae to the border with burma. jen went to get her visa, said it was scary and confusing and opted not to walk into burma and back. i had to look round more market stalls and shops. shopping is a pastime here and being a foreigner obviously you’re a walking cash machine. it’ll take more than some broken english advertising to make me part with my money.

the last part of the trip was a visit to a ‘hill tribe village’. this was my least favourite part of the whole trip. the village was like a model thai village, it seemed like the people dressed up when they saw the bus turn in. i felt uncomfortable taking pictures of people so i didn’t. you could pay extra to look in someone’s house and see some ‘longneck tribe’ people. i know they make money from us and they are using the tourists as much as the tourists using them, it just didn’t feel right to be staring at people. villagers were sat around and didn’t interact with any of the tourists, probably because they feel like some kind of zoo attraction, i didn’t hold it against them when they refused to say hello to me, though i would’ve liked to try to talk to them. i met a cute dog though.

so this trip was just a bit weird, it made a trip to the border a bit more interesting. the temple and the mekong were really cool and i wished we had more time in those places rather than the watered down versions of ‘real’ thailand that were in between.

 

merit cermony.

the other morning i went to a merit making ceremony in the car park of our building. the monks chanted for half an hour before you kneel and give them gifts. it’s a bit confusing when you don’t really know what to do but someone always shows you. there’s loads of rules about what you shouldn’t do in fornt of monks and i’m never sure if i get them right or not, though i don’t think thai people stick to them all, all the time. monks look like they have fun together, they always seem to be laughing with eachother.

muay thai.

for the last week i’ve been going to lanna muay thai camp in the afternoons. it’s hot and hard. i have cuts to every major limb, particularly my feet, tops and bottoms.

morning sessions start at 6.30 with a run somewhere like up a mountain or round a lake, then back to the gym for sparring. yesterday i had to wrestle a 6′5″ bloke with dreadlocks i nicknamed ‘predator’. training in the afternoon starts with a couple of mile run at 4, then some skipping, before sparring with some of the thai professionals. the gym is full of various nationalities and abilities, lots of professional fighters from the uk and america and eastern europe, some thai champions and many fitness levels.

training is as hard as you make it, sparring is particularly tough as you spar in rounds with pushups in between, so breaks are small and rare, but there is a lot of room to train as you like. there’s loads of equipment, bags, weights, bars, ropes, tires, pads, matts, hammers, you name it. the first day i was nearly sick, i was happy to get to the end of the session. andy, the owner has been teaching me loads about stretching and correct posture which is really good. i’m not very good at it i don’t think, and hitting people isn’t really my thing, or being hit, but i like challenging things fitness wise and this is pretty high on the challenge list.

thailand so far.

me and jen just returned from tesco lotus with loads of food, losing a baguette on the super highway in the process, which was slightly frustrating as i was really looking forward to it. bread here is non-existent really, obviously you can get it but it’s not really the same as in the uk, it’s a treat, or would’ve been. there’s so much choice of food here it’s overwhelming, in the last 3 weeks we’ve had food from every nationality possible. the best has to be the thai snack food. the thai way of eating is to graze all the time, they eat small portions often. it’s an understatement to say there are lots of food stalls, they’re just everywhere. every few doors is a food place, there are fish stalls, meat stalls, fruit stalls, rohti stalls all just driving around, stopping every so often in the street. it strikes me that there must be so much food being produced in this country just to fuel the food stalls and restaurants. it’s quite hard to emphasise the amount of food there is everywhere.

that’s something i have noticed particularly about thailand, there are businesses everywhere. millions of them. there seems to be jobs for everyone. our building has 24 / 7 security that direct traffic, water the path (i’ll come to that later) whilst guarding the gate. there are people who sweep the roads, people who sell the sweeping brushes to sweep the roads with, people who water the roads, people who hold ladders, people who collect cans, there are just loads of people to do loads of jobs you never knew needed doing. it works well, i don’t think anyones wages are high though. it says a lot about the way thailand works as a country though mostly. it’s a very lucid society, things seem to happen fluidly and regardless of bureacracy and opinion and simply through need. such as buildings, there’s no uniform style to a lot of the buildings, they’re mixtures of materials hashed together to make a shop or house or cafe. thailand loves to build stuff, they put up structures in fields, at the sides of roads, just for somewhere to sit out of the sun. sign-posts have little roofs over them, road entrances have a gold archway over them. even vehicles have things built onto them, bikes with roofs and sidecars, pickups with bamboo cages.

transport and driving here is…an adjustment, some rules are just a bit optional really, such as traffic lights. cutting people up on the road isn’t considered bad driving here, more of a must, you’ll never get abuse for cutting someone up like you would in england. if you ever see images of driving in asian countries it’s always of busy roads with no obvious lanes and bikes weaving in between cars, that’s exactly what it’s like. it works though, as long as everyone is driving in the same way and not aggressively.

so to watering the paths. in chaing mai it hadn’t rained since mid-december until last thursday. the pollution in the air has been thick and the days begin with a hazy sun fighting its way through smog and fumes until finally making it’s way through in the late afternoon. the government said that watering the roads and paths will keep dust and pollution from flying up into the atmosphere, so thats what people do…water the road and stuff. everyone does it, everywhere. i think some people are even employed to do it. i don’t think it really helps that much, and in the last week there have been two freak major storms on a night, one that ripped trees and billboards up on the main road to chiang mai old city. the fork lightning was awesome, we had to abandon the bike in the middle of town in favour of a songtaew though because the roads are deadly in the wet.

scratch cooking.

andy bond of asda just revealed to every listener of radio 4 that more people these days are scratch cooking. what this means is cooking meals from scratch. i’ve never heard of this surprising phenomenon before, but i will certainly be looking it up on wikipedia.

obviously i do actually know what this is.

the act of simply cooking obviously now refers to piercing plastic film and pressing microwave buttons, so we need a term that actually describes the very essence of what you are doing when you cook something with actual ingredients.

once i’ve scratch cooked something, i like to sit down, making sure i max chew my food before total digesting it.

then have some xtreme pud.

‘the resistance to fracture of a material when stressed’

when i woke to light smatterings of snow on the tent and the sight of my breath swirling away into the roof i knew things were going to be hard. sunday 1st february (or 32nd january) was a morning i’d spent thinking about, looking forward to, fearing, for months, it marking a point at which once it was over i simply had 4 weeks to pack a bag and go to thailand. it was now here and it was instantly apparent that it wasn’t going to be any kind of walk in the park. tough guy 09, i bought a t-shirt before the event, if i didn’t get to the end i’d have to burn it, tenner down the drain.

crossing the line, i was surprised as much as i was happy, and the medal and tin foil blanket made it all worth while, the free cup of tea was wasted however, shivvering it all over my nithered hand. i’m not sure i’ve ever felt a feeling quite like the one you get after you’ve waded through numerous lakes and puddles on a day with a -8 wind chill, to put it bluntly, my balls ached, and so did numerous other people’s i discussed it with at the time. passing groups of crying men, twice my size and hearing a constant ambulance siren shipping out the hyperthermia sufferers , people complaining of the worst cramp they’d ever felt, all i can remember thinking when was the last time i had cramp; it was in the north bay, i had to take 16 or 17 waves on the head until it had stopped hurting, drowning may have been a distinct possibility at that moment.

mainly though, i don’t think i actually thought about anything specifically for the whole time it was going on, to the point of it seeming almost like i wasn’t even there doing it. i’m glad it was really hard though and that it was really cold,  from a personal level, to do it on a mild day with the sun out i couldn’t have felt i’d pushed myself all that much, it is after all fun, tough guy in summer is loads of fun, adding the element of cold though takes it to a level of fun you get when something is just a bit beyond your comfort zone and coming out of it unscathed is a mixture of joy, relief, pride and lots of other human emotions it’s impossible to express after the fact.

bring on january 2010.

we are in.

it’s been a long time coming and technically it’s not finished since we have no phones, internet or steps from one level to the other, but electric angel is in it’s new office. we’re number 1…museum terrace.

our desks look out to the south bay, we’re spoilt for dinner-time choices, opting today for pork and stuffing baguettes with crackling, we have loads of cool new stuff, like software, monitors and writey-pen-mouse-thingy’s called bamboo’s, the creative blood is pumping and i will hopefully never miss a surf in the south bay.

working today, our first full day, with no phones going or internet to play with, was a highly productive one for me as we’re currently working on the publicity for this years scarborough literature festival, with a deadline looming and the possibility of working this weekend, i flashed through loads of work, fueled by espresso and them seaviews. it could be a curse, being able to stare out there and drop everything to get in the sea, i know it won’t though.everytime i look out i realise that having such an amazing place to work only serves to fuel your creativity.