Haven't we been here before?

Ahh Barcelona (yeah, the London update, which will be ha-ha-sterical,hasn´t happened yet. In short: settling in very well though, thanks for asking). City of sun, streets, wine, beer, food and culture.

My present from the lovely for my birthday was a trip to three places of my choosing (I know, I don´t deserve her; and no, you can´t have her). First up, Barcelona, for a week revisiting (for her, not me-I hadn´t been here before) her favourite city.

My borrowed guide-book triumphantly informed me that "Barcelona is a sunny city, enjoying clear blue skies for a large part of the year."And it clearly stated, with the mythical wisdom we seem to give these guide books when travelling, that "Grey drizzly weather, lasting days on end is VERY rare"

And so it was that I experienced a very rare Barcelona.

Late breakfast of coffee and cigarettes? Yes please (or as the ´locals´ say "si, por favor."* Barcelona is a city you can get lost in. Fortunate, really, when you are as directionally challenged as I am (I still, 2 months into my new job, get lost in the office-particularly humiliating when you are meeting external people at the foyer and get lost taking them to your meeting room). North? um... that´s where that shop was earlier, near the ... hmm. sorry, where was I? - maybe this is why i get lost sometimes.... anyway

Fear not! I had the lovely - a veritable compass. Better than a compass! North, south, east and home - she has it covered. And, unlike your silly little compass, the lovely remembers streets and places and reads maps and stuff. Finally, the baby shambles can see stuff in a new city beyond concentric circles around the hostel. Now I can get lost in a city (a passtime and a passion) AND know where I am and how to get out (a depressing practicality).

And this is broadly how our first days functioned- left right, left, right coffee and some toast. Stumble, stumble bar - talk and drink, eat and read ... stumble fumble ... home? (how did we get home? I thought it was north .... of ... here).

And so on, and so it rains. What can you do when it rains? most go to museums and galleries. And that´s PRECISELY why the baby shambles doesn´t! The lovely wanted to visit somewhere few tourists would venture and she knew exactly where. After a walk along the beach (in the rain) it was determined, from upon high, that we would venture to ... a solar park - a big, open park by the water, with a huge solar panel (the size of a soccer pitch) hoisted 10m up in the air!.

Yes, what could get away from the Foddor´s-bearing menopausal Americans and their brow-beaten husbands more than a solar park ... in the rain ... that isn´t finished yet ... only 20 inconvenient minutes by bus from the centre!

So we went. And it was cool (in both senses) and we walked around and the lovely stared in wonder at the vision and the construction, and I stared, smiling, at her wonder, in the rain.

And we both left happy.

On the second day I had brought shoes. One pair had ´contact earth´ a function that supposedly grounded me (in a static electicity sense, not metaphorically). I thought it was bollocks, but it turns out on day three, my ´contact earth´ was interfering with the lovely´s compass.

Some form of magnetic interference with ´magnetic north´ (unlike the true north of which some of you are painfully familiar) that they talked about in physics when you were day-dreaming about something more interesting and less important. Her cunning sense of direction was askew, what would we do?

We would get lost. Then we would (re)discover where we were again (by, for example walking past where we had eaten lunch 30 purposeful-walking-to-a-museum mins ago). Then we found a fantastic Bodega with huge barrells of beautiful cheap wine and not a care in the world. And we stayed there. Happily.

Haven´t we been here before? Yes, and hopefully many times more.

It's north of the thing ... right?

The Pete Doherty Tour II (from Laos to London)

I spent three relaxing, glorious days in Luang Prabang. A pretty andrelaxed World Heritage listed city. I accidentally got out too much money (there was only one cashier who did visa withdrawals (I didn’t have traveler’s cheques or anything) so ate at fantastic restaurants and had a ball. I decided to head to the capital for the weekend and organized to meet up with friends' of a friend there. But I needed to catch a night bus.

The good bus (with food and drink and leg room and no windows) would leave at 8pm, but arrive at 3am. The dodgy local bus would leave a bit earlier, but arrive at 5.30am. So I caught that. Knowing I would regret it (but I didn’t realize how much).

Third worst bus I have ever caught. The worst was a night bus in Peru that climbed from sea level to about 2km up on rock roads and made me sick for a week (pre Machu Picchu) – I can still remember the feeling of the freezing cold dirt in the air going down my throat at 2am. The second worst was during the day, climbing up “the world’s most dangerous road” in Bolivia. I can still remember the panic as, when the bus overheated, the driver almost ran off the bus without putting the hand brake on (we were half way up the windy cliff face that we had just ridden mountain bikes down). Rounding out the top three was this trip.

My curiosity was piqued when the driver handed out plastic bags (and the lady in front of me got one). I got a bit nervous an hour or so in when she opened the window to let some fresh (freezing) air in. For the next 8hours she coughed up phlegm from the depths of her ankles and spat it out the window (impossible for 100% of that to go out the window and not land on the guy behind her, right?). But it really troughed when I realized why people had accepted the plastic bags.

Appears it is pretty common for locals to get motion sickness.

Obviously this wouldn’t deter you from catching a bus at night …. Nooo
It would just mean you would accept you were going to vomit, at leastonce, so you’d bring your own bag, or vomit in a bus-supplied plastic bag. And then hold on to it, you know, for the rest of the trip, just in case. Oh it was a pleasure.

It is always nice to identify a low point of one’s trip. Mine was at 2.30am. the window in front of me had been open for four, chilling, hours. The wind was slicing through my wool jumper and I had been having a silent war with the old lady in front of me for two hours. The game involved me deftly shutting the window for literally minutes of warmth. She would then reach back, open it up and prove her need for it by hocking a mouthful of phlegm out the partially open window. I had four sheets of A4 paper in my pocket (a Demos piece on aspiration) and used it to fashioned a shield between the window and the seat. As I started to fall asleep (basking a the warm feeling that was a heady combination of no cold air and the glow of the ingenious use of Demos research) my low-point arrived as she threw my shield out the window and spat out something the size of Saturn (unfortunately the gravitational pull was insufficient to create an orbit for some of its 'moons', who crashed into the constellation of my face.

What goes down, must come up, and the rest of the weekend was absolutely fantastic. Taken under the wing of two expats I was shown the delights of Laos. This included a walking tour to Laos’ leárc de triumph (aka the vertical runway as it was made from concrete the Americans donated for a runway), a laos massage, an expat party and a Laos wedding – and that was just on Saturday. Sunday was whittled away at old temples, lovely coffee, beers at sunset by the mighty meekong (that is less mighty in January, and a bit more meek than kong) and a dinner of dumplings in a kooky restaurant with squawking birds. ThanksClare and Cait.

My final morning in Laos was spent having a glorious coffee and croissant for breakfast, before jumping on a bus for Thailand. When I got to Bangkok I had my final meal (a lovely hot Tom Yum soup) grabbed my bags (which hadn't been stolen) and high tailed it to the airport for a flight to my new home with the lovely .... London

ThePete Doherty Tour (A baby shambles) Part I (To Luang Prabang)

I like to travel by the seat of my pants. Partly because I like to think that’s the best way to travel, partly because I don’t like to be ‘locked in’ to any particular plan, but mainly because I am an intensely disorganized guy and like to label my incompetence something more palatable .. I call it ‘spontaneous’ … yeah... I’m spontaneous.

So an hour before I left for the airport I realized that I was going to arrive in Bangkok at midnight with no guidebook (as I left it in a friends car), no hostel booking, and no real idea. So I was convinced (thanks date) to call somewhere and book. They were full, but the next place dutifully took down my booking.

I had (obviously) left my camera in Australia (it is with you, right Mr and Mrs Cohen?), so I brought one duty free as my flight was in final call. Not realizing the battery would be flat and that an Australian connector probably wasn’t going to be the same as Thailand.

I got into a cab and realized I didn’t have directions in Thai for the hostel. And they don’t read English, and I don’t speak Thai. But I knew roughly where it was. Shouldn’t be a problem.
A very long time later I arrived, at about 1am. There are three hostels together, and not a lot else in this area. I walked past the nice one (that was full) to the other one (that had my booking). Only they didn’t (they don't know how to 'take' the booking, let alone how to'hold' the booking). And they were full. And it was 1am. And I was tired. And she offered me the massage table (which turned out to be generous, but was weird at the start as I thought she was offering me a massage). I ended up getting the last room at the other place. I was last minute and lucky. My theme for the week.

At 9am the next morning I spent an hour online trying to figure out the best way to get to Laos. At 10 I realized it was a flight that left at 12.30. At 10.01 I realized I didn’t have enough money on my credit card. At 10.30 the bank registered my transfer, let me buy a ticket. As I got into a taxi at 10.45 I realized I hadn’t asked the hostel guy if I could leave my bag with him for a week, that I didn’t have enough Thai currency to pay the taxi driver (and the departure tax) and at 11.30 I arrived at the airport and got on the flight.

Arriving in Luang Prabang airport is a funny thing. It is a single runway that ends next to a kinda house. But customs is where it gets odd. You need two passport photos and a very specific amount of US currency (varies by country) for the visa. I obviously didn’t have the photos but I had cleaned out my currency draw at home and put it in my pack. I had 60 Canadian, 500 pesos, 1 quetzal (Brazil), 60 pounds and $27US. The first queue you gave them your photos that everyone had. I explained my predicament (not that I am an idiot who doesn’t read visa info, but that they had mysteriously disappeared). They would sort me out for a $1. Sweet, now have $26

Next queue was the visa. There three pages of typed text that was a price list. I have never seen anything like it. Canada was $22, UK and almost all of Europe was $30, US and Switzerland were $35. It was bizarre. Australia: $25!

Taxi ride to the city: $1US.

Got a very nice hostel, had my first shower for the trip (I didn’t bring a towel, but this hostel supplied them (and soap…. Which I also didn’t have). They also had an international converter (so that’s where my photos start).