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thecrashpacker - The Crashpacker

The Crashpacker i never meant to go travelling, I just went. You start moving and can't stop, and when you do the inertia swells in your head like sea until the tides take you off again.

I'm hoping to write here my current travel experiences and the past adventures that have happened to me - good and bad, clean and filthy, unbelievable and nearly all true.

From skateboarding in Belgium at 16 and sleeping under ramps and on benches with no money... jumping in the backs of trucks loaded with soundsystems and drug consuming maniacs heading to illegal Raves across Europe .... getting lost in untracked river tributaries on the Mexican border ... persuading Berlin club owners I was a famous DJ from London while me and a Catwalk Model were tripping on acid ... to a Snowboarding adventure on a Bulgarian army base which ended in me lying in a bombed-out hospital while a Doctor drilled a hole through my legbone with no painkillers, drugs or even soap and hot water and left me there for week.... its been fun and i'm going to try to write some of it down here while carrying on my own adventures.

I'm loving reading other peoples stories on travelblog and find it a really amazing place to research where i want to go in future, as well as just hearing normal peoples lives, away from the filtered and edited rubbish we are fed by the tourism industry and the cliched 'travel' sections of Sunday newspapers.


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Joined on: September 23rd 2008
Last Login: November 3rd 2009

Blog Entries: 29
Photos: 105
Recommended by 12, Recommends 8
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Blogs & Travel Journals

by thecrashpacker, order by Date newest first.

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England is a strangely backward place, where people say ''Nice Day'' even if it is raining. The English invented the rules for every major sport, yet rarely win any international awards - football, tennis, even cricket. We despise foreign places even though we had an empire that circled the globe - today, the most popular dish is an Indian invention of Chicken Tikka Masala. The English never say what they mean, preferring to say the opposite as a joke and hope you will understand - they will be overpolite to people they dont like and rude to the people they love. [View Full Entry]

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880 Words | 2 Comment(s) | 7 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s)
Published: October 21st 2009 | 74 Views | [diary=445453]

River Wye-29
River Wye-43
River Wye-31

I don't have a crystal ball. But in ten years time, I bet we won't be racing the world around on cheap flights. Lets all cross our fingers and hope that the price of oil goes back up and keeps going skyward. For the good of the world and our kids, lets hope 'Budget Flights' are just a silly passing fad. 'Pay peanuts and you'll get monkeys' is the old saying - I paid peanuts for my flight, and monkeys now are boarding the plane to Valencia. Clambering aboard, pushing and jumping over the seats. Howling and shrieking as their child-chimps [View Full Entry]

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919 Words | 8 Comment(s) | 7 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s)
Published: August 15th 2009 | 254 Views | [diary=425697]

A Near-miss!
wingtip in the rain
Sun setting on cheapflights?

Alcohol aids appreciation of art . We queued for 3 hours with a couple of cans of local cider - it seemed appropriate as Bristol is the home of scrumpy and Bristol is the home of everyones favourite street artist, Banksy. In the queue, his name was in the air like tropical mosquitos- 'Banksy...buzzbuzzbuzz... Banksy...buzzbuzz... Banksy' The waiting crowd - teenage students with backpacks, little kids in raincoats, mums and dads on day-trips - were all hissing the name and asking who he was, chatting about what the images meant, relaying what they had read in the paper about Him. [View Full Entry]

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1206 Words | 1 Comment(s) | 12 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s)
Published: August 7th 2009 | 119 Views | [diary=425813]

leftovers
bet they haggled the price down too
A digital slice of our own

50 pence just bought me a copy of 'South East Asia on a Shoestring' by Tony Wheeler. (Its not the original guide but a 1981 update) The first thing that is striking is the limits of the book - we're not going to Cambodia, Vietnam or Laos - these countries were all fighting at this time and were seriously off-limits. And Communist China? No chance! In Tony's words: ''If you want to carry on towards Europe...Chiang Mai is effectively the end of the road'' The Cold War was blowing through this part of the world in 1980 and the borders that [View Full Entry]

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724 Words | 5 Comment(s) | 4 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s)
Published: July 6th 2009 | 176 Views | [diary=415796]

Junk?
Not so much shoestring anymore
Modern travel porn

NoHo, SoHo, Tribeca, NoLita - New Yorkers love their geographical acronyms - NoHo - north of Houston, SoHo - south of Houston, Tribeca - the triangle below Canal Street , NoLita - north of Little Italy... Maybe it's because the rest of their city is boringly street-named (we were staying on the corner of 1st Avenue and 1st Street... I mean, come on! Think of something more original!) So the little streets and blocks develop personalities and identities that make living in this mad metropolis easier to handle - they even call parts of it a 'Village'. So when our friend [View Full Entry]

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888 Words | 6 Comment(s) | 10 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s)
Published: May 16th 2009 | 258 Views | [diary=399366]

sexy sunsets
New Yorks huddled masses of lenses
love is a lens

I live in a country where if you drive in a straight line for 3 hours, chances are you'll end up in the sea. England is a small island and we're not used long journeys, in fact Brits are pretty suspicious of large distances - because we don't have any! The looks on people faces when i told them we were going to the Alps on a coach veered from a stare that said 'That will hurt, you absolute fools' to a frown that said 'Thats not possible , you absolute fools'. But the deal was there - £199, coach, hotel [View Full Entry]

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667 Words | 1 Comment(s) | 4 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s)
Published: May 1st 2009 | 157 Views | [diary=395264]

sunny Alps
sun and snow!
May Day with Stalin

Londons Burning! Rioters close down the City! Mob Smashes Bank! This i had to see, so I strolled up to the front of a line of riot police and asked the copper how i could get the 149 bus to London Bridge. Breaking through the angry mob wasn't hard, a straggling line of scruffy students, trendy looking folk and the odd out-of-town hippie with dirty dreads and dull combat trousers. All standing around, trying to crane their necks to see over each over to look down the front. Across Bishopsgate there was a line of policemen, shoulder to shoulder, glowing brightly [View Full Entry]

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762 Words | 2 Comment(s) | 3 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s)
Published: April 2nd 2009 | 269 Views | [diary=387016]

rowdy crowd!
Floodlit theatre

Seasonaires are an odd bunch. Bright, young things, following their dreams to the mountians and spending six months of winter working in menial jobs so they can be there, every day, skiiing or snowboarding. How amazing it must be, back home, to announce to your friends and family 'I'm off to do a season, eh?' How great it looks to us as we arrive in our chalet and they tell us tales of 'last weeks powderdays, eh?' and how they are 'going out to hit some sweet spots this arvo, eh?'. (BTW, Nearly every seasonaires voice has the ozzie/kiwi habit of [View Full Entry]

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858 Words | 3 Comment(s) | 4 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s)
Published: March 23rd 2009 | 208 Views | [diary=383899]

Sun and Slopes
Photo 3
P1050009

sunrise from Gilmans point
sunrise from Gilmans point
6am at nearly 6000metres!
Hitting the peak of Kilimanjaro is a shock, a relief and an ecstatic rush all rolled into one. The orange horizon burned my eyes after hiking for 6 hours in the dark, my fingers were frozen, lips ripped apart from the wind and sand. My boots weighed ten times what they did when we set off 5 days before, my head was throbbing from the thin air up here. But still it was amazing. Having trekked through monkey-filled mountain rainforests, from soaking cloud layers to parched, dry deserts and up the steep volcanic ash fields to the frozen glacier walls, i [View Full Entry]

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863 Words | 0 Comment(s) | 4 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s)
Published: January 19th 2009 | 601 Views | [diary=364874]

Sam and Tom
the crater and trek to Uhuru
scree skiing!

There she is. Standing firm through the thin blanket of clouds over the African planes, a great big square chunk of rock dumped in the middle of Africa. Kilimanjaro, viewed from my airplane window looks amazing. The cloud line is barely halfway up the slopes and she looks a barren, lunar wasteland above, with hardly any snow covering or vegetation. I'm going to climb that! ME? Am i sure? Surely theres no air above the clouds? Surely the wind will blow us all off? Will we be higher than this plane? But for now, my worries must wait and brood. This [View Full Entry]

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404 Words | 0 Comment(s) | 3 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s)
Published: January 3rd 2009 | 263 Views | [diary=359589]

end of the year...2009 to go!
Killi - in my sights!



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