Post 4: What do trawlers do around Sellafield?

Nuclear fishin'

Being as it is so close to Christmas, this post is first and foremost a joyous Christmas greeting wishing happiness and good fortune upon all who happen to read it. That is except for the one person on the mailing list who I secretly hate. I don't wish YOU a happy Christmas at all! And if you don't realize that it is to you I'm talking to, you will soon - watch those funny tasting mince pies. he he he...

As it happens, I had this blog post half-written for ages and now that it's Christmas time I feel kind of annoyed that I didn't kick it off with a home-made crap joke with a bit more relevance to the time of year. However, I will grace you with one that I (I admit) did not make up, which combines the themes of Christmas and lawyers. These are two of the most topical issues for me right now (working in a law firm and all).

If Santa & Mrs Claus had a baby, what would they call it?

a Subordinate Claus.

Sorry. Just had to get that out of the system.

It will be interesting spending Christmas in Oz. I've maintained that the barbeque must feature prominently on the day, and we've got a whole turkey that I maintain will not see the inside of a conventional oven. Mix these unreasonable convictions with a case of beer, and it should make for an interesting meal. However, as long as plenty of booze gets drank and lots of photos are taken of the event, I'm not sure if I particularly care whether or not we completely cremate the stupid thing.

I have a few weeks off work to enjoy this sunny festive season of course. As I mentioned I'm working in a law firm (more accurately, a patent attorneys). It's great experience, and have come to rely on certain websites an awful lot more due to the nature of the work here. Wikipedia, for instance, is a saving grace as it is a fount of all sorts of knowledge. It is often used in the course of work when I need to educate myself as to the particulars of some technical concept, but it is equally useful for whiling away lunch breaks as a source of completely irrelevant yet strangely captivating military history. I have also used it to improve my knowledge of English punctuation; in particular, how to use semicolons. Of course, even if Wikipedia is my main net destination at work, it is impossible to escape the ubiquity of google. Their little tools are incredibly handy. For instance, the google search toolbar is installed in the top of my browser and now it has predictive text - it will guess what you're typing in the search box before you've finished, based on commonly searched phrases. Which is great. But the other day I wanted to search the phrase "is christmas a paid holiday?". Getting as far as "is c...", google got its own ideas what I had in mind - the first three suggestions being "is ciara really a man", "is ciara a guy" and is "ciara a hermaphrodite". Someone, somewhere, obviously has issues.

Traveling around here is fantastic, I have to say. Melbourne has a very comprehensive tram network, that amongst other things, picks me up right outside our flat, and deposits me on the doorstep of work. A questionable feature of the system however, are the tickets. You buy your blank ticket in any newsagent, get on the tram, and timestamp it in a machine on board. Your ticket is then valid for 2 hours. Of course, it could happen that one 'forgets' to stamp their card when they get on, and are lucky enough to be sitting beside one of the stamping machines when they eventually 'remember'. In this case, by the time the ticket conductor (who just got on and who was the reason such people remember to stamp their ticket) reaches these people, they will have a perfect, valid ticket like any other respectable citizen (or legal alien/tourist). I would like to emphasize that I am not one of these people - as I am an upstanding member of society - and that the culprits are mainly locals.

I'm not sure that even if you were caught that there would be much of a problem. The Aussies just don't seem the officious type. It's interesting comparing the place to the states. Everyone here picks up on the accent straight away, but unlike the US, everyone places it as well. And yes, they are friendly too. The only thing I can't get my head around is how they all use the greeting "How are you going?". It just doesn't sound right. I mean, it's either "How are you DOING?" or else "How is IT going?". Their greeting sounds more like an enquiry into your travel arrangements. To which of course, the answer should be "By your free bloody trams, of course!"

Post 3: Where in the sea are you most likely to get shot?

At the OK coral.

I hear it's getting a bit chilly back home. Before anyone goes getting jealous, it might be worth knowing that the first thing we thought when we got off the plane in Melbourne was "fuck it's cold". What you get for spending the preceding month on the equator, I suppose.


All told, Malaysia was pretty cool - both the Borneo part and the peninsula (map for nerds included). We did about 40km worth of trekking through rainforest and I did one trek that was 2.4 km from end to end and 1.2km from bottom to top. It was possibly the hardest thing I've ever done, and Grainne says she wishes she'd got a photo of me when I got back - something to do with looking like I'd been freed from Dachau etc etc. We also did some hanging around on beaches, and one of us got some fantastic fresian patterning on our face due to the uneven distribution of suncream.

With the amount of monkeys we saw in Borneo, it was only natural to speculate as to the correct collective noun for a group of them. In light of our experience, it is quite obvious that the correct term should be motherfucker. As in "a motherfucker of monkeys". This relates in particular to a mangy species of macaque. Not only do they look inherently evil, but they will climb in through any unsecured windows and rifle through any unguarded bags to steal what they can. More insidiously, they loiter on walkways in large groups pretending to ignore passers-by. That is until you have passed about half of them and they have you surrounded, at which point they stalk up to you from every direction growling and bearing their teeth. I had wondered why these filthy cretins were called macaques, but after that experience, the phrase "soiled macaques" has undertaken an additional dimension of relevance.

Hanging out in rainforest isn't all bad though, and one of the highlights was visiting a 50,000 hectare national park with massive cave systems. It is so big and so remote that the park HQ can only be reached via a 10 hour boat ride or the recently-installed airstrip. I've already mentioned to some that I was reading "Heart of Darkness" again to psyche me up for journeying deep into the wild jungle. As a result, it was a bit jarring to find that the cafe attached to our lodgings had the "greatest hits" of Boney-M on the soundsystem - not exactly the untamed malevolent wilderness I had been hoping for. 5 days later and I was a wiser, older man. I had come in search of forces that could corrupt the soul of the stoutest of men and I had indeed found them. "Daddy Cool" 5 times a day? The Horror, The Horror!

Whenever a few days were spent out in the wilds, we would then devote a few days to taking it easy, and this sometimes meant that when hungry and tired we would sell out and plump for western cuisine in one of the many US franchises that can be found in Malaysia. This was not something we were proud of and as it seemed that the insect population of Malaysia wished to remind us of our guilt. Of all the meals we had there - from the myriad hawker stands and little local restaurants to the occasional US dining experience, the only time we shared our dinner with cockroaches was in Subway and Planet Hollywood. And no, that doesn't mean that Bruce Willis was visiting one of his part-owned establishments. Ha ha. Anyway, lesson learnt: go local.

Although going local is a policy that should be confined to cuisine as our first hotel experience in Kuala Lumpur will bear testament to. Normally when you follow the advice of the guidebook, you find yourself in some sort of hostel with other like-minded foreigners. When this is not the case, and you end up in accommodation frequented by locals, the experience can be spectacularly different. On this occasion, our book told us to expect laundry facilities and free internet. Instead we found a box-sized room reeking of damp and other things with a window onto the corridor and with pillows black from the mildew. Not the worst thing in the world except when the room is in a firetrap-cum-brothel and you have to share one of many floors with 30 neighbours who hang their washing in the hallway and who are mostly amputees, fat weirdos and toothless perverts (usually all of the above). Moving hotels is not an option when you arrive into town bleary-eyed at 2 in the morning so we had to just put the whole thing down to experience. As any moron will tell you (and as we knew, but were too tired to consider), you will not find particularly impressive lodgings adjacent to the main bus terminus of any major city.

That all said, we're now in Melbourne where there are much fewer monkeys and fat, armless old men. We hope to have a flat soon and also look forward to letting you know all about it once the weather hots up. In the meantime, anyone who feels inclined can drop us a mail to let us know they're still alive or alternatively, leave a comment here on the blog.

Post 2: Who's the crime boss of all lizards?

The iguanadon.

Many of you may have heard the story I was quite fond of telling regarding Singapore and tourism. The place has a bit of a reputation for being boring and quite "square". This is something of an issue for such a tourism-oriented country. When asked to comment on this situation, one former minister said "We need to take this accusation of not being fun very, very seriously". I think this sums up Singapore very nicely. As Grainne said, it's not not fun, but it definitely isn't fun either.

So to make up for the perceived lack of fun, we decided to fly to Borneo via the Man Utd sponsored Air Asia (or maybe the relationship is vice-versa, I'm not sure). This meant a trip just over the Singapore-Malaysia border to the town of Johor Baharu from where we would fly some 300 miles over the South China Sea to Borneo.

The fun duly began as it appeared that we were incapable of budgeting our time as well as our money. The bus took us to the border where you have to get off with all your stuff and reboard on the other side. The time issue being what it was, we ignored the bus and flagged down a taxi. When he heard that we had to be at the airport in 45 minutes he laughed at us. Not a good sign. Nevertheless thanks to his road skills (driving right up on the bumper of any car in front that wouldn't get out of the way), we just about caught our flight.

The flight seemed normal at first - as I said before, just like Ryanair except that the air hostesses had slightly more risque uniforms. However as Grainne became engrossed in her book, I became engrossed in the light show going on outside. It was smooth going as we were above the cloudline, but the lightning going on all around us outside was a trifle worrying. I did the noble thing and kept this info to myself as James Ellroy kept Grainne distracted. However the thunderclouds were impossible to ignore once we were due to land as we we had to fly through them. I like to think that I've done a fair bit of air travel in my time, but I've never experienced anything like this. We were shunted all over the place - it felt like we were in some huge arial tumble-dryer. What was most unpleasant though, was the thick cloud rushing by right up against the window, conveniently lit up by the wing lights of the plane. It served as an uncomfortable reminder of how bloody fast we were travelling as we were being shook all over the place.

Everyone else on the plane (locals to the last one) couldn't care less and the kids were all screaming with delight. My ego took a bit of a hit with that one.

Nevertheless, we go down in one piece and made it to Kuching, the cat city (I'm not sure whether this "cat" is a noun or an adjective). We've been here two days and - backpacker cliche to follow - everyone is remarkably friendly. Like the elderly Indian gentleman who stopped us for a chat and, upon finding out that we were from Ireland, gleefully told us how shit our football team is (and their manager - "Staunton - the Liverpool player"). That really made my day. You'd like to think you could escape such painful home truths in rainforest islands halfway accross the world. Unfortunately not - I drowned my sorrows in "pints" of Guinness as we watched WWF in the local bar.

Having seen the orangutans, we're off to national parks and beach resorts for a combination of exertion and relaxation. Should be out of the loop for the next while, so y'all can be thankful that there won't be another post for a while.

Post1: Why could Nicole Ritchie not take any aspirin for her headache?

Coz Paris eat 'em all.

So, to deviate from the more traditional means of annoying friends by group-mailing them tales of exploits from exotic locations, it's been decided that a blog will be set up instead. The reason? It shows we're comfortable with modern technology/it makes us look cool/it annoys people less than group mails because getting a message saying that there has been a new essay posted to a blog is more easily ignored than having same essay actually sitting in your inbox - take your pick.

Of course, photos are required too, and we've decided to set up a gallery with flickr (a big 2 fingers here to bebo, facebook, myspace et al).



Currently it's 11.30 ish pm on Monday the 9th. Been in Singapore since..um..Wednesday, I think. The jet lag really took its toll & knocked us out for a good day and a half. We got a private room which was sparse, clean and had a/c and a DVD player. On the other hand, it felt like a cell, with floor to ceiling concrete and no windows. When you woke up you had absolutely no idea if you'd been asleep for 3 or 13 hours.

We've seen most of what there is to see of Singapore, which is a crap place to start your holiday if you have not yet mastered the art of budgeting. Then again, we haven't had to buy a drop of sunscreen because of the beautiful haze - the result of all those forest fires dem Indoneejits have been starting on Borneo and Sumatra.

Tomorrow we're flying off to Kuching which is the capital of one of the 2 Malaysian states on the island of Borneo, and also the epicentre for all the bad air at the moment. We're gonna get ourselves some of those fetching construction masks and take off for some resorts. We'll be travelling around there for a few weeks and then back to Singapore before the onward trip to Melbourne. Thanks for all the well wishes and enquiries into our well being (for me, this amounts to a drunken message saying "Dude, are you in Australia? CCCCHHHUUUMMMPPP!").

Anyway, will post again with more information that you'll probably only want to read if you're slacking in work.