Hello and welcome to our website. Please click on this link to be taken directly to the latest images from our year long round the world tour and remember to have a read of the latest travel commentary below. Files W117 to W123 are new

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PART ONE

‘SHARK SHARK’ someone yelled, ‘Really big SHARK!’. Actually what they yelled was more like, ‘Blarp, Blarp, blub blub Blarp’ because we were Scuba Diving at about 18 metres down. To describe what it feels like to see a shark in its natural environment is quite easy, it is natural, scary, scary as hell but very natural. For sure you feel a bit like old Jacques Ceusteaux but it just gives you an incredible sense of freedom. Like I said in the last commentary, you are almost totally weightless and you can hover like spirit as you watch whatever it is you are watching, be it a 3 legged Turtle called George, or a Blue Spotted Ray or even some funny little Clown Fish or Moray Eel. I don’t want to sound like a tree hugging hippy but when you actually stop and take time to watch something as simple as the symbiotic relationship between a Clown Fish and the anemone that it lives in, it truly is a wonder of nature.

Essentially the anemone is deadly to any other fish, bar the Clown Fish. Its tentacles contain a paralytic enzyme that kills all other fishes. However, the Clown Fish is permitted to live death free providing that it first feeds and protects the anemone before feeding itself. You tend to watch with curiosity and disbelief as these funny little things take food and rush back to the anemone and feed it before their own young. Imagine if you you lived at home but you had to feed/clean/look after your house mate or you would be on pain of death? Kinda reminds me of the ex-wife.

Although, I guess one of the main reasons for wanting to dive is to push your comfort zone a bit further than you normally would. I keep reminding myself that for the first 9 months of my life I was breathing underwater inside my Mum, and of course being a Piscean it is the most natural thing to do, to want to be in or around the water. I just feel, safe for want of a better word even though being really quite claustrophobic sometimes I find swim through’s a bit difficult.

So as you plop over the side of the dive boat and head down to 20 metres or so below the surface of the water certain things do go through your mind. Of course it’s to conserve air, it is keep an eye on your buddy and not get lost but also it is that you are not in your own environment. Stuff gets bigger the deeper you go, teeth get sharper, things happen more quickly, so when Mr Shark decides to appear right next to you bubbles seem to find a way of escaping from the back of my board shorts. Another funny thing is Muslims. Seriously, Muslim snorkellers. Imagine if you will a deserted beach and palm trees and coconut groves and there coming out of the water in a full black, head to toe Burka, looking like a bloody SAS penguin in flippers is a Muslim snorkeller fully equipped with pink snorkel and blue face mask and bright Tango Orange life vest.

As I write this I have gone from a snorkeller to a PADI Open Water Diver and now onto an Advanced Open Water Diver with extended qualifications in Wreck Diving. All quite worrying when you think that Blondie doesn’t even let me look after the remote control to the television. Hoe hum, but maybe I have finally found what I am good at and what I am going to retrain as, Padi Dive Master is the next step and I might just come back out and spend the Winter learning to be one…watch this space. It just sort of becomes a bit addictive when you know that in the water here, normally less than 200 metres away from where we are diving at one spot lives a Bull Shark, and at another there is a Tiger Shark but probably best of all at the wreck that we dived there is a Whale Shark. I will keep you posted on sightings.

Speaking of posts, this is the penultimate post of our travels so it is going to be a long one. They take so much time to prepare and edit that it was starting to take over a bit hence the drop in frequency. Also as you may have noticed, the quality of images if getting harder as my Canon camera is absolutely naffed and now after a virus got into my laptop photo editing is almost impossible (new camera and new laptop when we get home).

Yes it is true, after an incredible 11 months on the road we are now desperately trying to deny the fact that in less than 20 days we will be sitting at Bangkok Airport heading back from Heathrow and then good Old Bournemouth 367 days after we left. I have been putting together some statistics of our travels which I will let you see next time but it makes for quite incredible reading. So far we have crossed over 34 borders and been through a whopping 16 Countries. Are we reading to come back? Are we prepared for the credit crunch? Are we looking forward to it? Well I am sure you can work that out for yourselves. In short, No, No and NO. I always try to be careful when I write these things that I don’t sound all flash and devil-may-care in my attitude as I realise there are lots of people far less fortunate than us but when you lose your dream job, your dream flat by the beach and your Mum all within 6 months it just kind of makes you stop and realise that life is a one hit game. And, whilst we’ve still managed to keep a few shekels in the bank that it is time to keep on the road for a while yet. We have no idea what we are going to do but it is going to be great to catch up and see what difference a year makes to people. Personally I am terrified of going back and I really don’t know how I am going to deal with it. I have not once heard anyone say these words, ‘I am glad to be home’ unless of course it was Terry Waite or Nelson Mandela.

Okay, so since the last post we have gone up through Viet Nam and stopped off for a few days at the marvelous spectacle that is Ha Long Bay (where Top Gear ended up on their motorised scooters). This is a bay with close on 2000 island stacks that rise eerily out of the silent water to tower above you encircled by swooping Sea Eagles. We took a cruise on a Junk and headed out across the bay. The images with all the stripes and lights are captured by my camera by hand with no special camera trick other than turning the flash off at night and moving the camera from side to side whilst pointing it at another Junk moored next to us. Of course copies are available if anyone wants one.

Hanoi was really quite a sight with its million motorbikes and cyclos. It is known in Viet Nam as The Motorcycle City and we fully understand why. Morning, noon and night the City buzzes to the sound of honking and hooting. In our entire time in Viet Nam and Cambodia we did not see a single person fall off, until that was we arrived in Hanoi. At almost our first set of traffic lights a dude came skittering passed us and in slow motion bounced off the pavement and then drove face first into a rather large and rather stationary lamppost. I nearly wet myself. Then driving along another road this dude came spinning down the road on his bottom and then his face as he fell off in the rain. A real shame that I didn’t have the camera on as it would have made £500 from the fat bird on ‘You’ve Been A Cock’.

Getting to Hanoi from Hue was quite a journey. We decided that after being on a night bus where saw other buses crashing and various drivers falling asleep at the wheel we chose to let the train take the strain…mmm, yeah right. So a 15 hour train ride followed but our 2nd Class carriage turned out to have no seats, just fold down beds. Oh and not 4 people that we expected but none less than 6 people in our tiny little room. Daniel and Sara who we had been travelling with for almost a month managed to get a bunk with 4 people but it really didn’t matter one jot to Daniel who had gone to the local Pharmacy and purchased himself a carrier bag full of Diazepam which he was gleefully munching through the contents of like it was a bag of Smarties without a care in the world. Sara’s comment was great, she said, ‘he’s just sitting there staring at me looking stupid’, well after 4 cupfuls of Diazepam I was surprised he wasn’t sitting up on the roof looking at the stars. When they finally left and flew home we really missed them. The drugs here though are quite incredible, you just can get what ever you want over the counter, Morphine, Diazapam, Viagra, and it’s all strictly legal!! Not our cup of tea but its quite unreal that you just self diagnose and got to the pharmacy and just say, give me 5 of those, 4 of those and a box of those!u

A Night Bus.

They have a bizarre fruit in Asia called the Poo Fruit (Durien). It is sort of like a large spiky conker but it stinks, and I really do mean it stinks. Actually it stinks to a level that could only be matched by sticking your head down a toilet of a nursing home at 9am on a busy day when the choice of menu on the previous day was fish curry followed by cold bake beans and rotting cabbage. Truly the smell is vomit inducing but they all seem to love it. But where ever they eat it or carry it, it just makes you want to splurge. One trick that you learn whilst travelling is to be able to block your nose and hold your breath for 30 seconds at any given point.

Viet Nam, was wonderful. The people, the places, the sights, the sounds. Now without touching on political things it just seems to come back to the common denominator as we travel around the world, the Yanks, The USA, the Americans have got a lot to answer for. As the 10’s of kms turn into 100’s and then a couple of 1000kms as you travel from Ho Chi Minh City in the South up to Hanoi in the North you start to realise the utter crassness and stupidity to the burger munchers. What I mean by this is that Viet Nam has a lot of people, a lot of damn hard working people. The terrain is incredible and yet the Yanks thought they could take on these people and win. Experience in travel sort of opens your eyes to stuff that you can’t get from books. It is only when you sit and look at a mountain that cost the lives of 1000’s of Vietnamese and hundreds of Yanks, all for what? Can anyone tell me what they were actually fighting for? The war museums or more to the point war crimes museums as they like to call them are so propagandist that it just makes you laugh out loud, but, you cannot dispute what the Yanks did to people. You cannot deny the effects of what Agent Orange has done to these people as you still see things that you just try to look away from. Like I said before, when you come face to face with a man with no face, or someone with no arms or even half of their head missing, you cannot help but stop and think to yourself, is this acceptable? But then what do I know.

So, we were going to go into Laos but I wasn’t feeling great and to be honest the friends that had just covered the mammoth 46 hours of chicken busses, dug out canoes and mules rides all to go and float down a river with drunk back packers just seemed a bit too much, so we flew. Yup, we flew the 3 hours all the back down to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia where we stayed in a nice hotel for a few days whilst buying Marc Jacobs handbags, Aviator Sunglasses for £2 and of course more hooky DVD’s than old Dell Boy himself could muster from ‘Darn The Market Geeza’.

So, having a bit of time on our hands I got to speaking to a few other Professional Photographers and it turns out that Asia Geographic are having a huge photography competition based in Singapore. Now I’m not great at entering competitions as if I don’t win I take it personally and cry for days but Blondie has been working on me over the years and we have submitted a small portfolio that is really quite strong even if I do brag so myself. So time will tell. Being a Pro and earning money from images is a funny thing. It’s not something that I really talk about but as I make more money from it the desire to get ‘that one shot’ increases. The names of the famous snappers over the years don’t stick in your mind but the images do. For example, if I said Photographer Steve McCurry  and Model Sharbat Gula you would most likely look blankly at your computer screen.

If I told you that it wasn’t a posed image captured in a studio but was a bloke walking through a town in Afghanistan who just looked up, focused, and pressed the trigger and now it is one of the most iconic images ever captured on film (that funny old format we used to use) again if I said Jeff Widener you probably wouldn’t remember his name but if you think of the man standing in front of the tanks in Tiennemen Square in China you will remember one of the most iconic image of the 20th Century but the images record history and that’s what I want to do. At some point, at some time in the future, I really want the camera in my hand to record a moment in time that is remembered for all time. That’s my aim, well as a friend of mine used to say, ‘Aim for the stars and crash into the bushes’.

Image courtesy of Steve McCurry

PART TWO

After Kuala Lumpur we went to the incredible and fairly isolated Perhentian Islands off Malaysia’s East coast. A truly quiet and deserted island where the only thing to do is snorkel, dive and run away from the giant Monitor Lizards in the jungle. If these things bite you their dribble is highly toxic and causes immediate shock and agonising pain followed by death, kind of akin once again to dealing with the ex-wife. I took another PADI Scuba course and am now qualified as an Emergency First Responder with AED (Heart Defibrillation), I got 99% but then to be fair after 7 years ferrying fraggles in the ambulance service I would expect no less. So, my path to becoming a Professional Scuba Diver is on course. I’m not entirely sure what my goal is but studying again after so long is quite good fun. My Mum always used to say that if I liked something then I could set myself to do almost anything. It kind of makes you wonder where my life would have been if I had gone through with my dream of being a C130 Hercules Pilot in the RAF, now there is a scary thought. Skono The Bomber.

So, after diving in the Perhentian Islands and meeting some really cool people like Sicco, Alet, Jono and a Sea Otter called ‘Beaver’ we headed back to KL and then onto Thailand and the wonderful remote and isolated island of Phuket and Patong Beach. Of course I am joking. This place was akin to Eastern Australia. I don’t mean to be controversial and I am really sorry if this upsets anyone (Ted M please don’t ban us from the island), well this is no more controversial with my writing than I normally am but it is vile, just vile. Sixty and Seventy year old men walking around with girls who barely look old enough to be out of school uniform, then there are the social misfits that come here to buy-a-girl-for-the-week and man are they trying to give them ‘their fill’. Everywhere you look there are ‘Kevin’ types fawning over Thai girls and just not giving a damn about it. It is not an uncommon sight to see geek’s and freakily unattractive people all but having ruddies everywhere you look. As you walk along the beach road in Patong (a region of Phuket -pronounced POO GET by the way) you just see these types sitting there licking the faces of the girl sitting there saying ‘love you long time, you so funny, you take me home, me very good, give you massage’. I know this is a bit of a stupid thing to say having worked in London and having had clients in SOHO so I’m well used to seeing ladies of the night but here it is just a bit worse, quite a lot worse.

For example, I went out to the 7-11 store (oh Blondie actually asked me what time the 7-11 opened, that would be a 2:1 from Uni that would be????) so there I was walking down the road passed one of these massage parlours where they all sit outside offering you all sorts of things. Well trust me when I say this, when 12 women all dressed in micro-dresses and lycra boob tubes all tell you that you are so handsome and big that ‘they all do you for free all at once as a special’ it made me act like Ron ‘The Truncheon’ Jeremy him very self!!!!!! Actually, I screamed out loud, dropped my bag of shopping, tripped up the kerb, narrowly avoided delivering a particularly nasty head butt to the oldest one who was about 16 and ended up running through my hotel lobby opting to take the 8 flights of stairs in 39c rather than running the risk of waiting for the lift, 12 women I say, 12, all at once, 12 women! I don’t think even Simon ‘Redtube’ Plummer could muster that much testosterone, well, I wouldn’t have more than a tenner on it actually after his current World Record! (Norris McSquirter must be turning in his grave wanting to record this one)

Well another incident was when we went out for a quiet evening silflay (yes that is a word) and we were approached by a guy Thai chappie who thrust a clipboard under our noses yelling ‘PING-PONG’ at the top of his excited voice. ‘You watch PING-PONG SHOW’. I explained to him that I wasn’t really into Ping-Pong and further went onto explain that I was more of a Tennis man myself, even demonstrating my quality backhand. Bizarrely he then told me that this was not a problem as rather than producing a PING-PONG ball from her vagina that his ‘lady’ would…….and I quote…….’POO A BANANA for an extra £2.30′, what can you say to that? I mean really, what can you say to that? I suggest that next time any of you are in a senior management meeting, Orange guys listen up, seriously, try this one. The next time someone in the meeting is being difficult and everyone is searching for a business critical solution then just stand up, straighten your shirt and tie before stating, ‘I could always poo a banana or fire a ping-pong ball out of my fanny’……er actually, that is possible why I no longer sit in on those meetings. Ahh those sweet memories of actually suggesting to the Director of Orange Customer Services that he pay for me to have a Chauffeur driven car.

Oh before I forget, congratulations to Blondie who is now officially a ‘PAID MODEL’. Some of our images are now being used in magazine and marketing around the world such as this one (Yes that is her coming out of the water all Bo Derek styliee)

Anyhoo, back to Patong Beach. Now for those of you that love Phuket just skip this bit as no offence is meant and this is just my opinion. But this place was just strange. The next time you deal with your IT department and you look at all those freaky looking people, those guys who just live quietly and don’t get noticed, those guys that you see standing at the bus stop holding a plastic bag with ’stuff’ in it, those people who don’t go to the gym, those guys who don’t go to the office party, those guys who just fade-to-grey, well they come here and get laid. Simple as that, they save up there money, tuck their T-shirts into their tight shorts and get on a plane and come here to cruise the streets. I mean even Stephen Hawkins could get laid here. It is just where Nigel and Gavin from accounts go on holiday to have adult relations with young women. I know people have a right to have it off, or ‘Bonk’ as Nick Clements always used to say but these people just have no decorum and they just do not know how to act with women.

As we sat and watched people walking passed the restaurant we were eating at a rough snap shot of people walking by put it at 70% white male with Thai female 100 times more attractive than them and in most cases less half their age. I would love to know what goes through their minds. For sure, old men’s wives die and they are lost so they look for company with no strings, for sure there are people who cannot interact with women and choose to pay for it, that’s all perfectly understandable but what I don’t get is the comments that you hear people saying as they walk down the roads. Horrible, just horrible. Right moving on.

It is a,(add a long thinking pause) a bizarre place. This place was utterly destroyed by the awful Tsunami a few years ago. You just walk into shops and faded photographs show waves crashing onto the beach as high as trees and terrified people running for their lives in every direction. The aftermath shows people riding jet-skis up the road that we are staying on, even to this day signs of the devastation are not that too hard to find, and yet, when destroyed, they rebuilt, they rebuilt into a seedy, sordid nasty little hub of nothingness. Don’t get me wrong, if ever Fanny Ping-Pong firing games become an Olympic sport I am in absolutely no doubt whatsoever that these fine young ladies will be able to fire a fanny ball at over one hundred paces, but for the time being, if it’s all the same! The thing that made me laugh the most was these guy offering all their nasty little shows didn’t offer the shows to me, the offered it to Blondie. Apparently they must have had a problem with the front doors to their shows and they said we, ‘Guarantee you back door entry?’

One small thing that we just don’t get about Thailand is this, you can get a hotel room as big as any Hilton suite that I have ever stayed in at over £1000 per night for, ready for this, less than £20 a night, but a beer costs £5, breakfast costs £5, sunscreen costs over £10, and even the hooky gear costs more than the real gear in the UK, like I said, a weird place. One of the great things though is that you get a pool on the roof so to avoid being hassled on the beach all the time you can just sit there and chill watching the world go by from the safety of the roof. Although when this happened I felt pretty terrible. There was a young kid playing with an American football in the pool all by himself. He was possibly about 6 years old. He was from Nepal and was just having fun as kids do. He threw the ball and it landed near me, so I threw it back, and then he threw it back until a game ensued. He was pretty good and I was pretty useless so I just started messing around.

As I yelled at him to go long he just sort of looked away. From the second I threw the ball I knew it was going to go wrong. The kid looked away at something just as I threw my hardest and most vicious and accurate throw of the whole game. As the ball got closer to him he still didn’t look back at me, right until the ball was about 12 inches from his face. I just had enough time to see his eyes widen in fear as the ball thundered into his 6 year old face. In slow motion the pointy end of the ball smacked into his chops right between the eyes felling him like a small tree hit by a lorry. The worst thing that you can do apparently when you almost kill someone else’s child is to get a fit of the giggles. The father who witnessed the vicious ball v’s face incident glared at me as I left the pool and sat back on my sun lounger with Blondie tutting at me as I did so calling me a child killer.

Oh and as I write this something has just happened right outside our hotel that sort of backs up what I said about Patong……a man just got shot dead. Yes that would be dead, deceased, no more, gone, finished, ‘ello Polly, dead. Apparently four people were shot in a Thai Mafia dispute over land, so that’s nice. Unfortunately, when we were in the hotel we managed to break a glass, as you do. When I told the guy on reception he went absolutely nuts. Seriously, he was hysterical and kept yelling at me to pay something like £20 for the 50p cup. Unlike me I stayed really calm and told him he was being a ’silly little man’. At which point he went super-hyper-ballistic and started leaping up and down on the spot, which of course I found funny - he didn’t. Then he starts yelling at me to go outside and ‘KICK-BOX’, which, regrettably made me chuckle even more that this man the size of a 12 year old wanted to fight me.

Now I’m not small, and I’m not afraid of many people (having been beaten senseless at school most days by boys much bigger than me, unless he was going to take a poo in my back-back or give a particularly nasty wedgie or god forbid Read Admiral - I wasn’t really bothered). I have even studied Kick-Boxing myself and not a lot of people know this but I even have a couple of Belts to my name, and have been taken around the ring a few times, er, as is in had a few in the ring, hang on that still doesn’t sound right?? Anhoo he then ran off to get something that I guessed was either a gun or a stick, so I told him to send the Police up to my room when they arrived but asked him to wait for a bit as I wanted a nice bath, at which point he nearly disappeared up his own bottom with rage. Silly little man but still highly entertaining just laughing at a very angry person, try it.

However, the very next day, after the shooting and the Kung-Fu dwarf we got on a bus to take us right from Thailand’s West coast to the Island on the East coast called Koh Samui. Well, we had been on the bus for about 25 minutes when two guys sitting opposite Blondie pulled out a handgun. Yes, that was a handgun. Not a handbag, a handgun. And no ordinary handgun, a 9mm GLOCK. Now she saw it first and asked me if it was real. Well it is a bit difficult to tell unless it’s in your hand as replicas are so good nowadays, but when I saw the butt of the gun I said that it was a fake as it didn’t have the 20+ round of ammunition magazine inserted into it. At which point, bloke number 2 then opens up his fanny pack sitting on his lap and pulls out a fully loaded magazine (complete with 20+ rounds of ammunition), he then thumbs the top round in the magazine to make sure its free and sprung loads…………………and then…………….he pushes the magazine into the butt of the gun and loads the bloody thing. There we are, sitting on a bus in Thailand 15 hours after 4 people are shot (1 dead) right outside our hotel, and there, less than 3 feet away, are two blokes with a loaded semi-automatic handgun, a 9mm handgun with the stopping power of an elephant against a tree, and it’s pointing in our direction, just sitting there on his lap, safety on thank God .

Now, here’s the thing. Terrorist attacks in Jakarta, same in the Philippines, bombs in Bali, and there we are in Phuket. What do you do? Well Mr Andy McNab, Mr Chris Ryan and even Dave Courtney come to that taught me a thing or two and they all say the same thing, ‘If someone pulls a shooter they have to have the balls to use it, but if they pull it on, you have a choice, make the first move, or let them make the first move and then make yours super fast.’ So, Im sitting there in my boardshorts and flip-flops (actually they were flip-flips, I managed to get two left feet ones), but what do you do? Seriously? What do you do? Do you jump up and yell GUN and risk being shot Forest Gump stylie in arse? Do you grab the gun and risk shooting off your own testicles in the ensuing madness? Or do you just sit there? Answer, the latter. One hour later he just calmly gets off the bus, 20 minutes later his mate with the bigger fanny pack also gets off and the guns were gone.

We told the man at the bus station when we got off and he went white. ‘Very bad, very bad, very very bad, why you not tell driver? This happen before and very not good’ oh thanks for that I thought. So, we aren’t sure what happened and whether we just used up a life but I can tell you, looking a loaded semi-automatic handgun, and a 9mm GLOCK at that, at less than 3 feet away with the ‘noisy end’ pointing at us is right up there in the scary travel stories.

On a nicer note Blondie and I celebrated our 4th Anniversary together a few weeks ago so Happy Anniversary to my wonderful girl.

Well now that our incredible year long, around the world tour is almost at an end we have had people asking us lots of questions about the trip, so we thought the best thing to do would be to give you some fact-stats. Everyone always asks, ‘Which was the best bit?’, or ‘Where did you like the most?’ and it is just too hard to tell so next time you will get all the answers.

So all that remains to say is thoughts to all of you with Swine Flu, best regards, welcome to all of our new followers and see you in a couple of weeks with our last travel commentary, until the next one!

Love

Chris and Blondie xx

Currently in Koh Samui, Thailand

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