thecrashpacker

Sorry travelbloggers - i've been away for a while. I have realised I havn't 'Dropped a Blog' for some time. Not that any of you lot noticed of course. Good, because that means you been out travelling and getting away from it all, and not reading my rambling attempts to deconstruct my global ramblings. Just in case you were worried about where i had got to, well...in the last year, I have gate-crashed Hollywood celebrity parties... spent a month in the backwaters of an Australia no-wheres-ville town... rescued a damsel from a sea monster attack... went snowboarding in Death Valley....avoided the Sicillian Mafia... got guestlisted into raucous London gaybars (despite being straight) and ruined Glastonbury for a lot of people. Some of which i will eventually write about, some of which i will forget. Not writing ... read more

Sunday morning. A Madrid hangover often involves a coffee in a bar while your fellow party animals carry on sinking cervezas. Not surprising as a working mans breakfast here often involves a beer or two. Madrid's markets are a Sunday ritual as much as Catholics have church and I have hangovers, and Madrid comes out on the street to stroll, see, sell stuff and just generally be part of their city. The Rastros - table-top sales and flea markets are around the south-west of the city. The main streets around Calle Toledo have the sellers of trinkets, football scarves and discounted homewares, whereas the dusty back streets are where the old men and women set up rickety tables and pile them high with piles of stuff. Some people call this stuff junk and sell it cheap, ... read more

In Thailand, when the captain of a boat says the weather is too dangerous to carry on, he starts laughing. Thats when I started worrying. Thailand's coast was far away behind us and the nearest real land was Burma to our Starboard - which is on the righthand side for you landlubbers. A looming grey cloud piled up over Burma and another storm was rolling in from the sea ahead, which is the Fore. Or the Stern. But it didn't matter right now, as the captain was looking very stern himself. His small wooden boat was being lashed with rain and wind. Our ferry journey started as a cheerful trip but now we had fallen silent, soaked and slightly seasick from the side to side pounding. The barefoot captain and his swarthy crew were gripping the ... read more

The magnificent villas of the past are still standing, sleeping and unbreathing. Dustily uncared for. These villas were the homes of traders who came here in the 1700's and 1800's and found their fortunes - Georgetown, the capital of Penang, has always been a masala of people and business - Indian traders, Armenian Jews, Sultans, Portugese, Dutch, English. Raffles spent much of his time here while trying to establish Singapore and the Chinese had a unique ethnic community here for over 500 hundred years. They all came, made money and proudly built homes, schools and temples. There is money here now but its not interested in staying here and making elegant places to live in. This new money just wants to go up, up, up. Just wandering around grubby Georgetown, you can find relics of the ... read more

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. Even the weather can't make up its mind here. Summers are notoriously damp and cold, the winters rarely shudder with snow or storms. And so somewhere in between these wet summers and warm winters lies ... read more