Quite Random

Pills

I am surrounded by small re-sealable bags containing anti-malarials, three different kinds of painkiller, big pills to give me much-needed vitamins, small pills to bung me up, and more small pills to unbung me. A Chinese lad in school had less pills than this and we mercilessly took the piss out of him for being a hypochondriac. He’d do his best to ignore us but I think he was mentally scarred. It’s OK though because he had pills for that as well.

I’m still not sure what clothing to take, but it doesn’t really matter as before too long it will all stink anyway. That’s what hours of waiting around in airports, sitting in tuk-tuks, drinking in mucky bars and giving piggy-backs to fifteen children will do for you. Wouldn’t have it any other way, except for maybe the airports.

The cat is being extraordinarily friendly. This means she doesn’t know I’m leaving, or I’m sure she’d be glaring reproachfully at me.

Scatterbrain goes to London

One last trip to London for shopping, bye-bye drinks and sweating on the Tube today. I’m indulging in my speciality, which is panicking about trivialities – this time it’s that I forgot to buy dioralyte. This is a ludicrous thing to panic about as there is a Boots on Khao San Road, or I could fashion my own dioralyte by dissolving sugar and salt in water. Still, gotta worry about something stupid, it takes your mind off the really big questions.

I’ve been fiddling with the blog and the photos on the right now do a cool thing when you click on them. Well, I’m easily pleased.

Danger is my middle name

I have in the past bemoaned the way that the UK has become very, well, safe. Ambulance-chasing lawyers have seen this nation become nearly as litigious as the US, with everything from health and safety legislation to ultra-cushioned adventure playground surfaces meaning that it is extraordinarily difficult to do yourself a mischief. Stupid people have to go to extraordinary lengths to kill or maim themselves by tombstoning off piers or cliffs, and the last time I saw an English child with a fat scab on his knee or his arm in plaster was probably about the same time I last saw white dog poo.

There is just no middle ground, no moderately risky activity any more. It’s either tea and cake and Midsomer Murders, or suicide. How is Darwinian natural selection supposed to work in these ridiculous conditions?!

So it’s going to be a great change of scene in Cambodia, where it is quite a lot easier to get hurt, or dead. Take last month’s plane crash in dense Cambodian jungle, where 22 people died on a decrepit Russian plane piloted by an Uzbek. The pilot’s final conversation with the control tower went like this:

“We are flying at an altitude of 2000 feet.” (pilot)

“You are flying too low. Given your current location, you should move to an altitude of 4000 feet.” (control tower, Sihanoukville)

“It’s no problem; I am familiar with this area.” (pilot)

There was no more communication after this point as the pilot promptly flew the plane into the side of a mountain.

That may be an extreme example, but there are plenty of other ways to buy it, mainly by going anywhere near the roads, as well as the various diseases one could contract. This means that bitching health insurance which gets me airlifted all the way home if need be was one of the first things on my shopping list for this trip.

So, Ambulance Chasing Lawyers For You, could I get 100% of the compensation I am entitled to? Not on your nelly, mate.

Dangerous things that happened to me last time I travelled to Asia:

• Had bricks thrown at me and ran risk of being knifed by irate drunken Vietnamese moto driver
• Fell out of a toilet in a bar in Siem Reap, received nasty bruises to abdomen
• Sat in the back of a motorcycle rickshaw that was not securely attached to motorcycle, very quickly flipped back 90 degrees to see stars with feet stuck up in air
• Ate a cricket

Keeping in touch

I’m jealous of some of the beautiful travel blogs and websites I’ve seen around the place, which make mine look feeble in comparison. I’m thinking mainly of Phileas Blog, but also Palin’s Travels, The Man in Seat 61, and Tales of Asia. I set up a website for my round the world trip in 2005, but this time round I’m using this, my current blog, and I’ll do my best to keep it up to date with photos, videos, and regular updates. I tried to minimise mass emails the last time, and I won’t send any this time. It’s not because I don’t care, it’s because I don’t like them.

Sitting in the office on a cold Tuesday morning, an email would come in from a friend who had just got off a ferry in Thailand or skydived in Australia, and it would invariably be ignored or disappear out of view under twenty more pressing messages that morning – not because you didn’t care again, just because it’s a cold Tuesday and you had work to do. Once in a while you’d respond to the travelling friend with a ‘sounds like you’re having a great time, don’t drink too much, all is the same as usual here, it’ll be exactly the same when you get back’. At least that’s a response I got a few times while I was away last time.

The thing is – life does go on at home, it’s not the same as usual, stuff does happen and things do change. People who come back from a prolonged period of travelling miss a lot of things and fall out of step with friends. You may have been showering in waterfalls or eating dragonfruit, but all you really were was separated.

Last time, my trip was a big thing for me, the first time in my life that I had really travelled anywhere, and I won’t lie, a life-changing experience. I don’t really know what to expect this time any more than I did last time, but my perspectives are different, where I’m going is different, what I’m doing is different. I’ll keep in touch.

Too much stuff

After I got back from backpacking last time, I had this great idea – get rid of all of my possessions and live with only what I could carry. It worked for me when I was travelling, so surely I could maintain this back at home, and remain a free spirit, unencumbered by unneeded possessions, ready to move at any time, like that dude out of Kung Fu.

Did I get rid of all my stuff? Did I bollocks.

I just moved out of London, with a van-full of stuff, and I can’t even think how I ended up with half of it, but most of it is now in boxes, in the bin, or in the nearest charity shop. It’s strange that it takes moving to actually get rid of this stuff, because the test for whether you really need something or not is whether you have moved three times with it still unused and sitting in the bottom of a cardboard box next to a Des O’Connor CD a mate gave you for a laugh in university twelve years ago.

Possessions I’m throwing out and should have thrown out ages ago:

• One of those big inflatable exercise balls that are apparently brilliant for all kinds of exercise but which in reality I nearly killed myself just trying to sit on,
• Two filofaxes, both blank, including very useful diary inserts for 2002,
• Several CDs with free software on that came on the front of computer magazines,
• Joss stick holders,
• Juggling balls (I can’t juggle now, never could, never expect to be able to),
• A computer which compared to current technology is the equivalent of a giant abacus, which makes a noise like an overenthusiastic leaf blower when struggling to run Windows 98.

So I’m looking forward to being away, and living once more with only what I can carry. I have my trousers with the removable legs. I have my plug adaptor. I have my portable washing line and universal sink plug, Imodium (sweet blessed Imodium) and Berocca, washing bag with the hook, Wet Ones, and disinfectant hand rub. All of the necessities.

Except travelling, you still accumulate crap, it’s just different crap. Any backpacker worth their salt should return with a completely different set of possessions to the ones they left with, except for three or four things they thought they’d need but never used. My portable washing line and universal sink plug were life savers, however the door wedge and ball of string weren’t touched at all.

Things you may accumulate while travelling but should probably never be brought home:

• Sandals – they will usually be host to a legion of evil bacteria and may kill the family pet on contact.
• Fire sticks – you may have learnt to juggle flames on the beach at Koh Phangan, however attempting this in your back garden at home will likely result in the death of the family pet, damage to your parent’s prized shrubbery, or the neighbours calling the police and reporting you for being the arsonist hippy you are.
• Didgeridoo – if I had a fiver for each sweaty backpacker hauling a didgeridoo through an airport arrivals lounge while I was away because they bought one of a bloke at a hostel in Byron Bay and ended up stuck with the thing, I’d have about fifty quid. This coupled with the fact that the digeridoo will end up propped up against the owner’s piano gathering dust for the rest of its life means it just isn’t worth it.
• Indian shirt – it worked while you were sat in the Himalayan foothills with nothing but sitar music and Israeli trance ringing in your ears, however back in England it makes you look like a yoga teacher who doesn’t shave and sells crochet hats at music festivals.

10 more instant ways to improve your life…

…or toilet wall wisdom, or more blindingly obvious advice you don’t need.

Yet another list hits the Internet, with more pearls of wisdom designed to help you improve your life. You need to improve your life even if you hadn’t realised it. Luckily the Internet is here to help, and even better all the answers can be summed up in ten succinct points.

This is the equivalent of the pearls of wisdom you find on the toilet walls of a backpackers bar, the email that tells you to forward some saccharin nugget of Hallmark-greeting-card philosophy to everyone you know, or the kind soul who corners you at a party and tells you precisely how your life is shite and how you can fix it.

So being the community-minded soul I am, here are my ten ways to instantly improve your life:

1. Avoid or block out the minor irritations in life by putting a healthy distance between them and you, or simply doing your best to ignore them. For me, these currently include lists on websites, Facebook applications, people who tell me what’s wrong with me at parties, Flickr, people who are more drunk than me, and the use of the phrases ‘LOL’, ‘ROFL’ and ‘PMSL’. You can’t magic these things away, you may as well deal with them through denial.
2. To avoid stress, try being short-tempered, judgemental, and intolerant. Not only do you not need to suffer fools gladly, you can confront cretins wherever you find them and have it right out with them, right away.
3. Seriously have a think about this religion thing. It’s all made up, it does nothing but offer false comfort and division, and you’ll find you’re perfectly capable of being a happy and moral human being without it. And you don’t have to sing hymns, or accept wafers from old men with hairy nostrils unless you’re related to them.
4. Appreciate all of the complete arse-heads you meet or see on TV. They remind you just how totally brilliant your friends and loved ones are.
5. If an item of clothing doesn’t feel completely comfortable, get rid of it now. It will never make you feel better and if you wear it out it’ll ruin your night.
6. Ignore lists like this. Think for yourself, and remember that if you’re too useless to live happily through simple common sense, you can always distract yourself from your problems by telling other people what’s wrong with them at parties.
7. Accept that you can’t always succeed, or finish what you started. Take, for example, this list.

Eye eye

This is a close-up photo of my retina, taken by my optician as a benchmark for comparison as I grow older. This is a healthy retina. On the left is where the optic nerve exits my eyeball to my brain, the dark patch to the right is the macula, the section of the retina (with the fovea at the center) responsible for my detailed vision.

If the human eye were a camera it might have a resolution of around 80 megapixels, but it doesn’t really work like that – the only part of the eye that sees things in fine detail is the fovea. The fovea primarily consists of a high concentration of cone receptors, the kind of optical receptor that detects colours, but only work in relatively bright light. The rest of your eye has more rod receptors, which are great at detecting lower levels of light, but can’t manage colour.

This is why you can’t see faint stars if you look directly at them, and why they all look white when they’re actually all kinds of colours. What you see and what is actually there are not the same. The human body is pretty impressive really. Don’t even get me started on perception.

Apart from having my eyes inspected, I’ve now had booster jabs for hepatitis and other nasties, and had my teeth checked. 18 days to go.