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From Dawn till Dusk
2007-12-02 20:58:00
As we chugged into the port of Ensenada, Mexico the Pacific was oily calm and the first rays of dawn were breaking over the dark craggy hills of northern Baja California. Our Mexican naval escort had failed to materialise (we had some radioactive cargo onboard) and the harbour seemed a microcosm of Mexico itself, extensive development of new facilities on one side, rusting hulls of half-sunk ships protruding grimly from the water on the other.In town we checked into the ‘Ritz’ hotel, which was trading libellously on the reputation of it’s, ahem, ever so slightly more prestigious London namesake. Eager to get our lips around some Mexican nosh after the dire meat and mash monotony of the cargo ship we ate dirt cheap Quesedillas from a cheap, dirty and hygienically challenged food stall. As a result I enjoyed an almost instant bout of ‘Las Turistas’ within hours of making landfall, the first time my bum has exploded in nine months of travel (this is probably too much informat...
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Baja ha ha ha ha...
2007-12-02 19:35:00
Ten days into Mexico and we're already in love with the place, embarking merrily on a torrid if dusty affair with the horizontally laid-back people, wild, weird landscapes and grappling with our survival Spanish. I'm having a writing day today so more news will follow, the final Observer column from New Zealand was published today however so as usual there's a link to the Grauniad website here. I've also pasted the full text below with some appropriate pics. Speaking of which there are also the full New Zealand photo galleries and a few more cargo ship snaps in the photo archive for perusal. 20th Observer ColumnIn Queenstown, on New Zealand's South Island we made preparations for 'tramping'. This has nothing to do with unfortunates of no fixed abode but is the quaint Kiwi term for wilderness trekking. Many of the 'Great Tramps' were closed due to the threat of avalanches following late-season snowfalls and a recent earthquake. So we opted for the relatively benign Greenston...
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Llegar en Mexico...
2007-11-21 22:25:00
Well after fifteen nights at sea we have made it to sunny Ensenada at the north end of the Baja California. We even lived a day longer during the crossing as we traversed the International Date Line and enjoyed the surreal experience of two Fridays. The 'Mo'is coming along nicely however and enables me to blend in almost spookily seamlessly...Whilst at sea I've been busy playing aound with some new slideshows which I will post soon, but in the meantime here is the latest of my Observer columns about our hitching experiences and a glacier trek we made in New Zealand which you can also read on their website by following this link.19th Observer column:'Let's meet some Kiwis,' we decided, and set out for a spot of hitch-hiking on New Zealand's South Island. We had 200 miles to travel between Picton and Christchurch, so after taking the ferry across the Cook Strait, we deployed the time-honoured tactic of my girlfriend Fi proffering her thumb while I lurked on the roadside trying ...
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Down Mexico way...
2007-11-06 21:51:00
Well, we board our next cargo vessel the Hansa Rensburg this afternoon which will take us on our first big Trans-Oceanic crossing of the Pacific. We get a wee stop-over in Tahiti en route before landing in Ensenada, Mexico around about the 22nd November. The blog will thus be a bit quiet for a couple of weeks while we traverse the big blue briny...but hey there's plenty of material in the archive for you to look at - I bet no-one's read EVERYTHING!; )The 'Movember' tache, as you can see, is coming along nicely. Mexico here we come!www.lowcarbontravel.com

Movember rain...
2007-11-03 21:04:00
What a month! I have been kept away from the blog by being brilliantly busy ever since we arrived in New Zealand. Unlike us, time has flown and we are due to board our next cargo ship on Wednesday so are currently in Auckland tying up loose ends before departure. Conversely you can read about our getting here in my 18th (18th?!) Observer column that I've pasted the text of, and inserted a few relevant pics below.Other news is that following an entertaining meeting with long-lost cousins in Wellington I have been inspired to participate in 'Movember', a month long moustache growing contest during, you guessed it, November. A rather rakish photo of my late Uncle Bob and the fact that 'Movember' is quite big over here has led me to attempt to cultivate a big fat 'Dirty Sanchez' tache which should also be appropriate lipwear for our next stop, but one, in Mexico.You can sponsor me in this follicular endeavour by entering my registration number on the Movember website: 145492. It...
More About: Rain

Bottom of the planet...
2007-10-21 10:54:00
Well we're on the nether regions of the planet now, not that there's anything particularly anal about New Zealand - glorious bungy twanging, Tolkienesque land down under that it is. I'll be blogging more about our stupendous adventures here soon, but you can read about our cargo ship journey here in my latest Observer column here. I've also just posted some new Australia photo albums on our Photo Archive here. Not enough? You can also hear an interview I did with New Zealand National Radio in a downloadable podcast here. Finally, as if this multimedia onslaught wasn't enough this blog has also just been featured on National Geographics Intelligent Travel blog which you can see here. There's also a rather cute film of Fi trying to wriggle (ultimately successfully) into a thick orange neoprene immersion suit on the cargo ship across the Tasman - embedded video below. Enough already?! So there's also a photo of me covered in volcanic mud to titillate. Enjoy.www.lowcarbontravel.com
More About: Planet , Bottom , The Planet

Festivals, fiery feasts & wombats on the Prom…
2007-10-11 23:24:00
And so to ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, cultural bo-ho capital of Australia where artful tattoos, piercings and black-clad beatniks abound and residents enjoy a distinctly European style climate (i.e. it’s colder and wetter than the rest of the country). We swapped our scruffy backpacker sleaze for a slice of inner city urban life, hanging out with Scottish friends in their 10th floor super central Chinatown apartment hotel. It all felt rather incongruous. We foraged down filthy graffiti covered alleyways, practically climbing over bins and Chinese chefs on fag breaks to find the cream of Melbourne’s inner city bars. Guided by the local knowledge of our Kiwi mate Ben (he of ‘handful of wet dong’ fame) we quaffed long-necked bottles of Coopers Ale in quirky surrounds, including the eclectic and frankly elusive Croft Institute. At the wrong end of a distinctly un-salubrious pissy passage the bar was styled in the manner of a medical research facility. Experimental glassware, cli...
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Opera, Oprah & sex with goats…
2007-10-11 00:48:00
On our last night in Sydney I booked a block of tickets for 8 of us to go and see Daniel Kitson’s show ‘C-90’ at the Opera House. Kitson used to compere the Brixton Comedy Club night so it felt appropriate for us to catch him on the other side of the world. On arrival at the Box Office to collect our tickets the cashier looked at me archly with a raised eyebrow. ‘You’re early’ she said coyly, in typical style I’d booked us in for the wrong week. Thankfully she very kindly exchanged them for practically the last spare seats in the house.With everyone arriving separately at the venue there was a chaotic few minutes immediately prior to the curtain going up as I ran around like a headless chicken trying to leave spare tickets somwhere for the late-comers in our gang to collect. We then confidently all marched into the wrong auditorium and attempted to expel the confused and politely indignant occupants from seats that were quite rightly theirs. When we eventually found th...
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Signs of bigotry...
2007-10-10 03:08:00
Warning: This post contains foul language. For those readers of a nervous disposition or who are easily offended here’s a link to the Tellytubbies site. Whilst driving through the country we developed a soft spot for the directness of Aussie road signs. “If you drink and drive you’re a bloody idiot” read one, “Belt up or suffer the pain” another. I wondered what it would be like if a similarly blunt approach was applied to other signage. “Walking on the grass? Then you’re a twat” or perhaps “Press buzzer for assistance or stand there like a bleeding drongo”. I gave a climate change communication masterclass at the Centre for Sustainable Leadership in Melbourne last week where one of the groups adopted this tactic in the promotion of a hypothetical ‘Car Free Day’ for the city. “Don’t drive your car into Melbourne fuck-face” read their slogan. I suggested they might want to tone it down a little. “We already have” came the reply “it used to say cu...
More About: Bigotry , Signs

Enter the Tasman...
2007-10-04 03:53:00
Well, blink and you'll miss it but we've been in Australia for over a month now. Our french cargo ship 'Latour' to New Zealand sails tonight (Thursday) from Melbourne...into the notorious Bass Strait between Oz and Tasmania then across the turbulent Tasman Sea. So I'll be offline for a few days - unfortunately missing all the rugby world cup quarter finals (dammit). But you can check the sea conditions of our voyage via this rather natty website: Ocean Weather. According to this the significant wave height (the average height of the highest third of the waves over a 12 hour period) is around 6-7m. Should be fun...; )www.lowcarbontravel.com
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Spiders and snipers...
2007-09-28 03:51:00
As we headed south from Rainbow Beach we passed through the unfortunately named town of Gympie. The drive was a long one by UK standards, but probably perceived as pretty pathetic by Aussie ones. In the old days distances in Queensland used to be measured by the number of beers you would quaff at the wheel en route; ‘How far’s that mate?’ would provoke a response along the lines of ‘Oh about four cans’. Driving up a knife-edge ridge road we climbed onto the Springbrook Plateau, our van making indignant straining noises and releasing foul burning smells like the Human Torch with chronic constipation. From the top we could see over the remnants of what is the biggest volcanic caldera in the southern hemisphere, rocky peaks surrounding the crater that once flooded this landscape with lava. The sharp spike of Mt Warning dominated the area, known as ‘Wollumbi’ or Cloud-gatherer in aboriginal it’s the first point on the Australian mainland to receive the first light of a n...
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A man called Hope...
2007-09-26 01:22:00
Our campervan escapades continued as we headed north on the Steve Irwin Highway. Huge hoardings advertising his ‘Australia Zoo’ bore 20 foot tall images of a wide-eyed Irwin, a mock-shock expression on his face, grappling with a largely disinterested looking crocodile, accompanied by his signature exclamation ‘Crikey!’. Irwin was to David Attenborough what our Wicked camper van is to a Rolls Royce, crass, colourful and comedic but utterly devoid of class. His heart was in the right place though…and I shall avoid making a tasteless Stingray joke here.We took a rainforest walk as the Kookaburras cackled among the trees like a bunch of coked up PR bunnies in a Soho ‘style’ bar. Other birds made a ‘Peeow-Peeow’ calling noise, like a cheap sci-fi laser battle in the branches above. Strangler figs in various stages of development squeezed the life out of their unfortunate hosts, thickening roots enveloping the helpless tree beneath. The process almost inexorable from the...
More About: Hope , A Man

It's a Wicked world...
2007-09-25 03:06:00
Our inaugural cargo ship sojourn ended in the Port of Brisbane. We edged our way gently through Moreton Bay escorted by a pod of dolphins as the sun tore a spectacular crimson sunset across the sky. The weird-shaped crags of the Glasshouse Mountains created surreal silhouettes along the horizon. Above us the shadow of the earth edged into the creamy moon as an auspicious lunar eclipse welcomed us to Australia. The romance of this moment was only slightly undermined by our obliviousness to this celestial alignment – we thought it was just a thick cloud until the Aussie customs officer pointed it out later. Our hulk loomed along the ‘runway’ of harbour lights guiding us up the deepwater channel to the wharf, the closest thing to landing an aircraft we’re likely to experience this year. A tiny fishing boat was heading straight for us unaware of our 30,000 tonnes of danger bearing down on them in the darkness. ‘Give them a blast of the horn’ ordered the Captain. The thundero...
More About: World , Wicked

Karaoke cruise...
2007-09-23 01:21:00
My latest Observer column has been published today and there's a live link to their website here.I've also been updating the Google Map and the Photo Archive - adding more pictures from Cambodia,Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and the good old MV Theodor Storm.www.lowcarbontravel.com
More About: Karaoke , Cruise , Kara

Life on the ocean wave...
2007-09-17 01:11:00
It was with some trepidation that we’d boarded our container ship the Theodor Storm for the ten day voyage from Singapore to Brisbane. We were the only two passengers on the 30,000 tonne vessel, joining a crew of Russian and Ukrainian officers and Fillippino merchant seamen. Relations amongst the crew seemed entirely amicable but tensions on a voyage at the end of last year led to the Fillippino bosun killing the Russian second engineer. ‘He wouldn’t have died’ noted Pavlo the Ukrainian second officer who had joined the crew since the incident, ‘but he was left injured for several hours unreported’. Nice. We sat on the ship for 36 hours in Singapore whilst loading was completed having been encouraged to board somewhat prematurely by the enthusiastic shipping agent. Instead of sipping cocktail slings in town, we had an extra day and a half on the ship watching cargo being loaded. Hmmmm.Once at sea we quickly found a routine based around mealtimes, at which we were fed wit...
More About: Life , Ocean , Wave , The O

Time Travel...
2007-09-09 16:16:00
Just to confuse and further befuddle everyone who is bewildered by our apparent ability to move more freely through time and space than a heavily greased geezer from Gallifrey here are the links to my latest two Observer columns:Mud-wrestling in Dalat - 26.8.07Old Malaysian Dying Farts - 9.9.07There was a minor hiatus in the publication of these articles due to a clash of content when the above piece on Dalat somewhat overlapped with a feature article also on Vietnam by Lynn Barber. To avoid Vietnamese overload my column skipped a week, creating a bit of a backlog. The column is thus about 3 weeks behind where we are now, the blog content about a fortnight and the Google Map almost up to date. All clear? Probably not, just enjoy the content and don't worry too much about the chronology...www.lowcarbontravel.com
More About: Travel , Time , Time Travel

Thai me up, Thai me down...
2007-09-03 02:55:00
At the Cambodian/Thai border we swapped our dusty, rusty bus for a rather swanky new mini-van, the relative prosperity of Thailand compared to its impoverished neighbour immediately apparent. Brick and concrete houses replaced wooden shacks, there were shops instead of stalls and large numbers of bigger, newer more expensive vehicles thrummed along smooth, surfaced roads. The driver whizzed us along at a cracking pace, our nerves only tested by his repeated and unsuccessful attempts to snatch a mosquito from the air whilst doing 120km an hour. But as we hit Bangkok the red mist descended. Mr ‘Cool, Calm and Collected’ became ‘Captain Exasperation’. Swerving in and out of the thronging lanes of Traffic, constantly seeking the tiniest advantage in the motor vehicle melee, it was hair-raising stuff as he tutted, sighed and noisily vocalised his frustrations. We flew along raised highways that snaked through the city skyline, then plunged down amongst the gaudy tuk-tuks to roll...

Photo slideshow highlights...
2007-08-30 03:25:00
Now I've got the hang of this Youtube lark here's a little movie slideshow of some of our favourite photographic moments of the last six months. For the full archive you can also visit our photo website through this link. www.lowcarbontravel.com
More About: Photo , Highlights , Slideshow , How High

Angkor What?
2007-08-30 03:04:00
Welcome to boomtown Cambodia. The massive lure and cache of the enormous temple complexes a short hop down the road around Angkor made Siem Reap’s development inevitable. There’s a definite ‘goldrush’ air about the place as Cambodians cash in on their historic architectural treasure trove. It was sporting a new airport, with a marina in development and a rash of big blocky hotels. The latter for tour groups that fly in and out for their temple fix without bothering with the rest of the country. Someone had described the central bar street to us as ‘like the Costa del Sol’, although this seemed a tad harsh as we saw no public vomiting or lobster red Brits (it was raining however). We hired bicycles and rode the 7km or so to the temples along a muddy orange road that the persistent precipitation turned into a mixture the consistency of salmon paste. As well as temples Angkor is actually a series of huge walled cities, palaces and various other peripheral shrines, stupas an...

You're crazy for taking the bus!
2007-08-29 07:40:00
Want to know what it feels like to drag your sorry arse overland, bar one particularly nauseous and turbulent journey across the Bay of Biscay, from London to Singapore? Well, I've edited a few video clips together to a tune by the geezer who did the 'Something about Mary' soundtrack to give you a flavour...enjoy!www.lowcarbontravel.com
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Phnom Anon
2007-08-29 07:20:00
When Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys wrote ‘Holiday in Cambodia’ it was intended as a black humour joke, riven by civil war and a despotic regime the country was not exactly a prime leisure destination. Given the brutalisation of Cambodia and its people in relatively recent history it is unsurprising the country still carries a slightly haunted air. Unlike the harrowing but cathartic Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, Cambodia has been denied the opportunity to heal the wounds of the past. Indeed, the wounds are arguably kept open and raw by the continued presence of members of Pol Pot’s murderous Khmer Rouge in the current Government. The surviving architects of the ‘Year Zero’ programme have escaped justice and remain unpunished. Their warped plan to return Cambodia to an agrarian communist state relied on normalising extreme torture, casual violence and mass executions to bend the people to their will. An institutionalisation of terror that is all th...
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All at sea...
2007-08-19 02:31:00
Well folks we're just off to the Port of Singapore to board the 30,000 tonne 213 metres of fun of the cargo ship MV Theodor Storm which will take us to Brisbane Australia in about a week. So after the recent flurry of posts the blog will be quiet for a bit. The journey should be interesting, not least because it seems that last year one of the Filipino crew murdered one of his Russian compatriots (News Report). Nice. We will endeavour to keep the peace at sea...www.lowcarbontravel.com

Cu Chi Coup
2007-08-18 03:34:00
‘My full name is Pham Van Hai, so my given name is Hai. This driver is Son, very good driver and our mechanic Pung. In Vietnam it is very important to have a mechanic on the bus. Let’s hope today he has nothing to do’. So we met Hai, our guide to the Cu Chi tunnels, the extensive underground complex that enabled the Vietcong to keep a major base within striking distance of Saigon during the American War. Resembling a Vietnamese Ronnie Corbett, Hai had almost perfect comedic timing and a rather dry sense of humour that alleviated any potential tourpidity we might have been feeling.As we left Ho Chi Minh City he pointed out landmarks on the way. ‘To your right is the zoo. At night-time it is very dark. Is good for flirting. You know flirting? Is not like floating market, is very different. Young people find dark place to be romantic. They do some sentimental talking. Sometimes the hands go somewhere’. At the tunnels themselves Hai took great glee in slagging off all the mist...
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Follow the Ho Chi Minh trail...
2007-08-17 02:32:00
In the swarming streets of Ho Chi Minh City we sought comfort in a cold beer as the brooding sky threatened to unload a downpour of Biblical proportions. A mobile food stall passed, a wheeled steel cabinet behind a bicycle, bearing strings of wrinkled dried squid that hung from a vertical display rack. We watched rapt as the Vietnamese guys we’d been talking to at the next table ordered a couple. The vendor grilled the squid over a burner in the top of the trailer then passed the hot, dry flesh through a mangle attached to the side before serving the crisped up cephalopods in a cardboard tray with chilli sauce. We couldn’t resist. ‘Smells like dog food’ Fi said, but it tasted sensational, warm, chewy, salty and spicy. Hot mangled squid - our new favourite streetfood.Shortly afterwards our Vietnamese friends paid, stood up and sped off somewhat wobbily into the traffic on their motorbike. Tabs are easily settled here, they simply leave your empty beer bottles under your table...
More About: TRAI , Trail

Mui Ne isn't everything...
2007-08-16 05:38:00
A couple of more conventional but thoroughly relaxing days in a little wooden bungalow by the sea in Mui Ne helped to top-up our batteries (rechargeable of course). In spite of this I experienced my first real ‘low’ point of the trip – not bad for five months in. The come-down from our exciting bike ride, the cheesily stereotypical, though beautiful, beach front location and the smattering of elderly, unattractive white geezers with nubile young Vietnamese women combined to depress my mood. The taint was short-lived however, we rented a moped from the waiter at a local restaurant to explore the seafront and surroundings. We were initially tentative and cautious on the bike, haunted by the horror stories of blistered exhaust burns, tarmac grated bodies and the series of painful operations our unfortunate friend Anna endured after being hit by a truck in Thailand. Within an hour or so we were of course hooning around everywhere at full throttle. Admittedly our top speed wasn’t...

Show me the Mui Ne...
2007-08-13 13:28:00
So we set off on a 70km primarily downhill white-knuckle cycle ride from mountainous Dalat to Mui Ne, the fragrant fish sauce capital on the coast. This started with a two hour van drive to, almost, the top of the hill, during which our young guide Hai introduced the driver, himself and our other seemingly random female passenger; ‘This is my girlfriend…and my lover’ he said with a salacious grin. She looked about twelve, although most Vietnamese are much older then they might appear.We began our 70km descent with an unexpected 5km ascent, winding sweatily up a jungle-flanked road, monkeys swinging curiously past in the branches above. “Snak!” (sic.) exclaimed Hai with a warning as a skinny brown serpent slithered its way across the tarmac between us. I wasn’t hungry and didn’t fancy a reptile aperitif anyway. Just before lunch we were rolling at speed along a road with a 'breath-robbing' view down the mountain to the coast. Hai gestured and shouted ‘Small hill com...
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Tourpid adventures...
2007-08-06 02:06:00
Here's the latest Observer offering, all about hunting down embalmed communists, and the delights of Vietnamese tour group excursions. As always I've pasted the full text below or you can read it on the Guardian website here.We had a moment of mourning the other day, finally realising that Fi's quest for a 'pickled leader' was doomed to fail. We'd been determined to glimpse at least one embalmed communist: Lenin in Moscow, Mao in Beijing or Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. Alas, it was not to be. Long queues did for Vladimir Ilyitch in Red Square, Mao was being refurbished in time for the 2008 Olympics, and Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum was closed on our free day in Hanoi.To raise our spirits and sharpen our reactions we hired bicycles in Hanoi, joining the teeming throng of two-wheeled chaos in the streets. Strangely the stress of crossing this relentless stream of traffic as a pedestrian is moderated once you become part of it. If you can't beat them, join them and go with the flow.The sha...
More About: Adventures , Advent , Ventures

Banks, tanks & breakfast with rats...
2007-07-30 12:27:00
Returning from Sapa to Hanoi at 5am on a Monday morning we’d run out of cash, so I ventured off on an ATM mission only to find after six different machines that our wonderfully ethical accounts at the Co-Op Bank had blocked our cards. Again. There was a certain irony at sticking my ethical bank card (‘We don’t invest in the Arms Trade’) into the ATM of Vietnam’s ‘Military Bank’. There’s one for the ‘Moral Maze’ to discuss. Needless to say it didn’t give me any money, realising what a pinko-leftie-greeny I clearly am. On the overnight bus south to Hoi An that evening the DVD player was blasting out a glittery stage show of Asian power ballads. One of the singers, in all seriousness apparently, appeared to be wearing a green glove puppet on his left hand for no possible artistic reason that we could fathom. Imagine a Vietnamese Ronan Keating with his fist up Kermit the Frog. Or maybe not. After a stop at the ‘motorway services’, a dilapidated open-sided shed ...
More About: Breakfast , Banks , Brea , Rats

When I was in 'Nam...
2007-07-27 06:40:00
At breakfast the other morning in Hanoi we overheard an older Australian guy complaining to his daughter about his visit to the police station to report a theft. ‘It was terrible, no-one there speaks a word of English!’ We hesitated in pointing out to him that we were in Vietnam and English whilst undoubtedly a passport to profitable work in the tourist industry isn’t officially the national language. We recalled our own previous linguistic exasperation at the hot baths in Budapest where we’d been utterly befuddled by the arcane entry system. Not a soul spoke English and our Hungarian had not been improved by the handy cut out and keep ‘Useful Phrases’ guide from a subversive tourist map. This contained such essential phonetic bon mots as ‘Egen, hall saga von’ (Yes, it smells like a fish), ‘Fi AH shag em’ (My bum hurts) and the immortal line from the Monty-Python Hungarian Phrasebook sketch ‘Meg foug hah tom AH popshit dat’ (Please may I fondle your buttocks)...

In SPIEGEL Online...
2007-07-24 13:32:00
For any German speaking readers out there an interview I did with SPIEGEL has now been published on their website here.For those without mastery of the German tongue, just for fun, I have put the text through online translator babelfish and this is the result...(which sort of makes sense-ish). I particularly like the way 'Ed' translates as 'Od'...; )The Britisher OD Gillespie orbits the world by ship and course. For it and many Gleichgesinnte tardiness is not a restriction, but a return to the actual sense of the travel - into the world to dive, instead of away-flying over it."The departure building", answers Tony Wheeler, world-strolling founder of the Lonely planet publishing house and half God of the baking packman movement, if one asks it for its favourite place in the world. The Kribbeln in the belly before the flight into far of countries, the knowledge, in only few hours of thousands of kilometers removes at another time and climate zone to arrive: For many here a substan...
More About: Online , Spiegel