A Whole World of Top 5s

Ate: 84 delicious curries in a row before being ill after opting for a ‘western dish’; guinea pig for 1 GBP; Christmas Day lunch at a street stall; luke warm bee grubs; steak with red wine for a month… beautiful

Avoided: other travellers as much as we could; telling people what I did for a living; malaria… I hope; the worst of the recession… I hope; not a lot else!

Canoed: through 5m flooded Amazon rainforest; in bull shark and crocodile infested waters; 1m away from giant mating green turtles; across, not along, hippo channels; into some pretty awesome sunsets

Caught: nine more sardine than the ‘expert’ Amazonian fisherman; man flu twice; headlice; life-long love for Africa at the sound of my first fish eagle; a look at myself in a mirror after about six weeks and said to Hel, “blimey, how long have I looked like this?!”

Celebrated: the birth of nephew Loarn - and we didn’t even see the bump; winning first prize in a hotel Christmas raffle (a water filter); with a village for a boy who had survived malaria, typhoid and pneumonia at the same time; Youth day in Soweto; Hel’s birthday by painting a living room

Chased: by monkeys out of a Hindu temple; a storm blown school book along a beach with weather crazy kids; out of the jungle by hundreds of ‘in my face’ mosquitoes; the dream of having locks like Hugh F-W; by hundreds of ‘special price’ tuk-tuk drivers

Climbed: Kili for the year’s best sunrise; with three layers of thermal underwear; farting non-stop to acclimatise; while watching my snot freeze in -20 winds; with Team Thundercat!

Cooked: roast chicken that wasn’t char-grilled enough for the locals; up a storm while sheltering from one in Womba; my special spag-bol everywhere we stayed; pasta in three minutes on the Mighty Atom; while chatting man things with Chris on his bbq

Cycled: well out of the way of Helen; with no hands for the first time in a decade; slowly around an island on a bike called ‘turbo’; fast to avoid the Wat dog packs; up and down a beach everyday for two weeks

Danced: with Hel on phosphorous algae to make a beach light up; my ass off to Blue’s All Rise at a Hmong New Year party; the robot across a dance floor for western New Year; Wigfield style in the garden of a Shebeen on a Friday afternoon; like a traditional bull fighter, with my mother-in-law…

Decided: to make a difference; to canoe Devizes to Westminster; to take a year off every decade; it’s better to say yes; to get a cat

Discovered: Prime Meridian's origins and a new crime fighting power (he has a collapsible rib cage so that he can squeeze in and out of small places - very useful for both sneaking up and spying on those up to no good); I can wear a pair of socks for more than one day; it is much better for you to believe that people are inherently good not bad; Hel apparently has no fear; my hair is wavy/curly (depending on the humidity)

Discussed: Pooh, Piglet and inner nature a lot; why Britain has stopped being Great and what to do about it; impacts of colonialism in different parts of the world; what the future holds; a good name for a cat (Duka… Super Duka for me and Mrs Duka for Helen)

Drank: tea watching the second best sunrise of the year over Everest; way too much coconut milk for one person in one sitting; the best sun downer while illegally in Cambodia watching the rare Irrawaddy dolphin; to the good health and hospitality of the amazing guys at Hebron Children’s Home… after being dry for a month while living there; beer with 19 singing porters

Drove; through gravel so thick it might as well have been ice; on the world’s largest sand island like a man possessed; the Great Ocean Road; our home for a month; Helen up the wall probably/hopefully less than we both thought

Fell: out of a plane at 15,000ft; in love with India about twice a day; out of love with India about twice a day; off a log and into a river while showing off; over the front of my very dangerous flip flops and tore my toe ligaments

Found: most things in my pocket just after I’ve told Hel they are definitely lost; plan b, c, d easy to make and roll with; the house in India that my grandmother was born in
(technically Dad found it); maggots in more than one meal; my work mojo

Helped: jump start the same taxi twice; jump start a bus on a mountain; myself to five full plates at the all-you-can-eat Christmas Eve buffet; for a week as an IT guru at a local internet café; make an old man very happy by buying his blanket for a grossly inflated but entirely affordable price

Hiked: up to our knees in snow for eight hours; along beautiful empty beaches for 3 days; through the world’s deepest canyon; through the Sacred Valley; on the slopes of Mordor

Inspired: by the seemingly indestructible spirit of kids again and again; by how much you can get out of a day; by the forgiving nature of Lao people; by the sense of self worth the young nursing students had at medical camp; by the character of Nelson Mandela

Laughed: watching Justin’s face as Lydia told him what she’d just done with the bowl of warm water before he washed his face with it; apparently too hard and too often while watching Anchorman on a night flight; finally, a full four days after being traumatised from sitting through a four hour sex therapy briefing for counsellors; desperately trying not to show it while waiting for permission to start a school sports day race only when the teachers had all 30 kids set with a tin plate balanced on their head; unwisely when a very grumpy customs officer asked whether I knew how serious and dangerous the seed pod stuck in the grip of my boots was

Learnt: the true value and irony of time; how to describe my poo by referencing the types produced by different African animals; NEVER to suggest one of us is a stubborn driver and the other is a stubborn mule; all the Earth systems science that I didn’t learn for my geography a-level; that I need regular exercise

Listened: to Los Bosteros make the most incredible noise for the full 90 even though Boca Juniors lost to rivals Velez; to lions hunting buffalo; to a comedy porn couple three nights in a row in a seedy hostel; to 100s of women ululuing at a Hugh Masekela concert; to Mamas and Papas Afternoon Delight on my ipod a little more often than I should admit to

Lost: any feeling in my ass after sitting on a wooden train bench for 14hrs; my temper like a small child while getting whooped at cards by Hel; my phone in a moke (world's smallest clown car); my soft office feet; any sense that what I’ve done to date actually matters

Missed: an old school British Boozer; being able to eat broccoli when I need to; a cat we don’t have yet; decent bottle of red; music out of speakers rather than headphones

Played: khabaddi, stones and cricket at 3.30pm with class 2c nearly everyday for a month; football at 3,800m and scored a corker; crib with two people even more competitive than Hel and I; up in a slap stick double act for the kids; 3-a-side American Footy and scored a mouth-full-of-sand-SHOW-ME-THE-MONEY! 50yard touchdown

Queued: in a defiantly British manner in places where no one queues for anything and personal space doesn’t exist; until it was five minutes before our gate closed before pushing in; for a very, very, very long time to cross the boarder into Vietnam; to have our picture taken like Lady Di; for an hour to be the 394th person out of 400 to climb Wanyu-Picchu

Received: a Haka eyeball to eyeball; a big and very special Hebron Welcome; mixed reading from a Chinese Buddhist fortune teller; a prayer scarf from Pemba Sherpa; a massage far too far up the inner thigh by a Red Cross worker that looked like Odd Job

Rode: a horse called Mr Prickles; an elephant in a school playground; our luck at South Africa immigration with a one way ticket; a motorbike while balancing two rucksacks; shotgun with Daryl for a week (thanks Hel)

Sailed: alongside a pod of forty dolphins; through a snow storm in a fjord; for a bbq on a deserted island; to the paradise of Whitehaven Beach on my birthday; along a 1.2km long zip wire above cloud forests

Scared: by Ho Chi Minh’s embalmed body; by an over-friendly and over-sized Maori-wrasse on our first scuba dive; getting a massage in a women’s prison (only had two massages the entire trip and they were both traumatising); by police running past me to start a gun battle; an angry thai boxing crowd

Shocked: at the extent climate change is happening and being ignored; at the repeated ignorance and arrogance of western foreign policies; at the levels of corruption that people tolerate in their own countries (particularly developing);… ooopps all a bit serious... and to see a family of five with four chickens on a moped; how bad (ability and temper) I was at learning six simple tango steps

Slept: In strangers-before-we-left-but-now-friends' homes for 35 nights; in a campervan for 30 nights; in a tent for 24 nights; on a train/bus for 11 nights; at an airport for 3 nights

Spent: Over a hundred hours on buses in Argentina; millions of Kip a day in Laos; 10 minutes stood still and gob-smacked at the size of the world’s largest tree; a very nervous five mins thinking what to say after being asked to speak to a village at a wedding; a lot of time outdoors and loving it!

Surprised: to find myself leading a group therapy session for counsellors; how good I felt after 37 hours of no sleep; just how often people thought I wanted to buy drugs from them; to see my dad fall asleep while taking a photo out of the window of a moving train; how dark ‘pitch back’ is deep into an underground cave

Stayed: in an awful guesthouse just because it was called Sillichit; at the farm of a Lord of the Rings extra we met at a parking meter; for too long in Bangkok’s red light district; all day in the incredible Apartheid museum; calm and collected when I nearly trod on a tarantula (I lie… I leapt and screamed like a girl)

Struggled: to speak any language convincingly; to get out of bed on New Years Day; through a Shia/Sunni street protest; with the sight of bones and clothes poking out of the ground at the Killing Fields; with the breadth of the man sitting next to me for the 24hr flight to Australia

Swam: with cuddly reef sharks; dodging rubbish in the filthy Bay of Bengal; in and out of hot and cold springs until I felt faint; in a lagoon with toe-nipping cat fish; in my own pre-monsoon sweat

Swung: an ice axe like a man; for a man in Hanoi who grabbed me; wildly in my opinion about Americans; myself to sleep in a hammock; in cage in deep swells without noticing as too busy in awe of the power and beauty of great white sharks passing less than a meter away

Taught: 365 kids to sing London’s Burning; how to cook the world’s best cauliflower korma, Bengali style; that Americans will never believe that Niagara Falls isn’t the tallest, widest or largest waterfall in the world (and I’m going to be ok with that and hurrah for them); an English class badly; touch rugby disastrously

Walked: everywhere we could; through a colony of penguins; up Sydney Harbour Bridge in 70km winds and sideways rain; without hassle around Jozi when everyone said we shouldn’t; up the snout, through a crevasse, past a cirque and under a serac on Franz Josef

Watched: first B&I Lions Tests with a 70 year old legend, Joyce; Slum Dog Millionaire with a whooping cinema in Calcutta, complete with chai break; thousands of limes spill into the road after a head on collision; a lot of perfectly good songtheaws pass while hitching; Orca’s for two hours stalking seals on the beach, desperate for them to get one!

Witnessed: a humpback whale teach her calf to breech; an all night electrical storm with horizon filling pink lightening; a lioness hunt, kill and eat a zebra; week long Royal State Funeral; Hel stuff her mouth with live giant green ants in week two

Woke: every morning for a week to the eerie cries of howler monkeys; Helen twice a night when ‘en-suite’ actually meant in the corner; without a hangover for 99% of the year; to water buffalo wading outside the hut; as the only people who slept through an earthquake

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