HOLA!!!!!!!!!!! met some awesome people here in Barcelona and would you check out the weather ? proper quality.... (a week's solo backpacking has been a welcome change from a spooky weekend spent alone in my 1,200 capacity halls, kakking myself every time the flats creaked or made a noise...) apologies in advance for any typos - keyboard is littered with crazy "¿", "Ñ" "ç" etc... In fact, a lot of things are new to me here - first time I've stayed in a fully developed country and it's a bit weird because it's like these people know what they're doing.... another [View Full Entry]

---

---

EMAIL HOME - 3/4/05 dobry den’ from Prague everybody! we’ve been having such a ball in Czech rep. this week, 14 of us, our hostel is tremendous, the architecture - incredible, the beer’s cheaper than the water and I’ve slept a total of 15 hours in 4 days. Saw two of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen this week. First, we were walking past the telecommunications tower at night and noticed that there were giant, black babies crawling up it, with slots for faces - it was seriously freaky! Would hate to see it if I was on LSD - they'd [View Full Entry]

---

---

Solo Adventure in Egypt - Tom Grundy EMAIL ONE of TWO: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 19:21pm, Cairo. Hey dudes I'm in bloody Egypt aint I?! am minus any underwear and cash cards, but have been gallivanting around the pyramids, the nile and all manner of museums. Read on….. It was pleasant charter flight, full of package tourists - was at Brum airport from 4am. full of screeching children checking in for Lapland, Santas everywhere, everyone in festive santa hats! was dying to tell one of the squirts grabbing my leg that they were being lied to an [View Full Entry]

---

---

Sponsored hitchhike to Morocco - Tom Grundy “Nous faisons l’autostop au Maroc pour un organisation benevole” I ineloquently announced to a burly trucker with my GCSE French spluttering back into life. All the truck drivers on board fitted the stereotype neatly yet, despite their tattoo-ridden, bearded, meaty, brink-of-violence appearance, they were all incredibly friendly and sympathetic. Interrupting myself part way through the next line of my inarticulate appeal, I realised my first victim was blatantly British. He laughed an [View Full Entry]

---

---

"Development work in India" by Tom Grundy To be fair, 45ºc is just unnecessary. There’s really no need for such blistering heat - particularly when you’re a ginger fair-skinned Brummie. When I landed in Delhi this summer, India was approaching the end of its worse heat wave in decades. The hot and sticky humidity made my month of backpacking around the North a bit of a sweaty struggle. However, during an unexpectedly productive four weeks of solo travel, I went paragliding off the Himalayas, rafting down the Ganges, took an elephant rid [View Full Entry]

---

---

Tom Grundy A hygiene freak, I hated hot weather, emitted impressively high-pitched squeals in the presence of most insects, and didn’t like children much. Initially, teaching in a rural Ugandan school didn’t seem particularly alluring. Nevertheless, I’d dropped out of University ten days before Fresher’s Week with an unprecedented desire to do take a year out to do something radical and worthwhile. That very day, I signed up for a four volunteer month project with the reassuringly expensive ‘Africa Venture’ gap yea [View Full Entry]

---

---