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Laundry.. the stylish way..

Ever get stuck without clean (ok, or wearable) socks and undergarments..? I know I have - several times this year. In these tricky circumstances, you have limited choice.. You can find a friend of similar size, and borrow theirs (preferably without them knowing). You can ‘Go Commando’ and deal with the extra related chaffing.. Or you can do the sensible thing and WASH..

For this edition of the Travel survival guide, I’ll show you the correct method to cook your socks & underwear, to make sure they are safe to wear once again.

You will need a kitchen with cook top and clean pots (around 2-4L). You will also need something to stir the potent mixture with, I’ve chosen a wooden ladle here because I’ve found it works really well with dirty smelly cotton.

Firstly, fill the cook pot with water, mineral water for best results - I used Evian, as that was readily available where I was at the time, but you can use what ever you can get locally. Bring the water to a savage boil, and add soap to taste. Taste again to be sure of the mixture.

Next add your dirty dirty socks and underwear to the boiling water, taking extra care not to touch them with your bare skin.

Leave to simmer, stirring occasionally, until you can smell the freshness of soap in the air. This indicates they are ready.

Remove your clean socks & underwear from the broth, and discard of the boiling water carelessly (we threw ours out our 6th story window..).

Hang to dry, noting that colours are highly likely to run - if there is any colour left, that is.

If you need your garments in a hurry, try using the microwave to speed up the drying process.. And there you have it, fresh boiled socks.. Voilà..!

..With a savage hang-over and about 35 minuets sleep after catching the wrong train from Paris, My two good friends and I arrived in Berlin to a beautiful sunny morning (which was short lived, before the rain set in..). The first impressions of Berlin were excellent.. Firstly, the taxi we shared from the train station was a Mercedes..! It was a luxury a backpacker doesn’t regularly have. I just hope I didn’t stain the leather with the stench of alcohol seeping from my every pore..

The Hostel we chose was fittingly named ‘Helter Skelter’, and it lived up to it’s name with crazy guests and crazier staff. We arrived a day earlier than expected due to out train mishaps, but were still greeted with breakfast beers whilst waiting for our room to be hosed out from the previous occupants.

After half a days sleep to catch up, I set out to have a look around. Berlin seemed to be in an ever changing state, with most of the landmarks covered in scaffolding. The excessive scaffolding was not great for photos, neither to get an idea of how things actually look, and with the World Cup starting in a few days time, there were messy concert stages being erected every couple of blocks. The whole place was crazy with the lead up.

We took a few walking tours around the city, including one for the history of the Nazi party.. This was particularly dull as all we saw for most of the tour was car parks and photos of what used to be in place.. The tour guide was constantly saying “Now try to imagine…” - I didn’t pay to see car parks.

Berlin bustled with interesting bars and places to drink. We found one place we named the “Crack Den” because it looked like how you would imagine a crack den would look - only much more fun. Finding the place you wandered through a dimly lit park with graffiti on the neighbouring building walls, striped down cars, and people pissing on every tree.. To get into the building, you entered via a dodgy unmarked door, which opened to a staircase of five or six flights of stairs. Every single bit of wall on the way up, the entire way, was covered in about ten layers of graffiti, fliers and various anti political propaganda. Right at the top of the derelict, abandoned looking building, a missing door revealed a bar that overlooked the dodgy park and over a good part of the area. There was a projector being shone onto an opposing building displaying weird visuals and old movie bits. The screen was probably about 40m wide..! The bar was just a bar, thankfully there was no problem with crack junkies, just chilled out people from all over, relaxing in a unique environment with cheep drinks and good music. - I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere.

Berlin was a nice city to experience in its current state, but we left the day before World Cup started to escape the craziness and the inflation related to the mass influx of people. There was no way we were going to be able to see a match live due to the demand for legitimate tickets, and I’m kind of glad i turned down the $570US Australia vs Brazil illegitimate ticket I was going to buy on the Internet as apparently tickets are matched to your ID. All throughout Europe, it was guaranteed to be World Cup fever, so it wasn’t like we were missing out..

For my photos of Berlin click here.

I was nervous heading to Paris. And it wasn’t because of the fact that I had condoms stuffed with 5kg of crack cocaine slowly decomposing in my stomach*.. No, it was because the French are renowned for their intolerance of the “non-French speaker” in their own country.. I knew a few words, like Croissant, and Baguette.. and Frogs Legs, but not nearly enough to get by on. So before I left, I brushed up on my skills with a French phrase book that cost a total of $1.99. It wasn’t very helpful, and neither were about 50% of the French population I approached.. The other 50% were really great people, willing to help out the non-French speaking scum to great lengths..

Still travelling with my two troublesome mates from Sydney, we eventually found our way around Paris, seeing most of the famous landmarks.. We contemplated at length on building the Ifle Tower ‘mark 2′ right next to the real Ifle Tower, only four times the size. For this venture we were going to need full financial support from a rich Arab or Texan, in exchange we were going to give them full advertising rights for both the North and South faces - so long as they named it the “The Tower of Arabia” or “The Texan Tower” or something like that.. I’m glad most of these ideas go no where fast..

We had grand schemes to help improve the country aesthetically, but there was nothing we could do about the weather. It was actually colder in Paris than London, and we were even luck enough to get hail whilst walking the streets on our first day. Again, not what I expected from summer. Anywhere.

While in Paris we made it to the Famous Moulin Rouge Show, and if you check out the Video section of this site, you might see some of what goes on there.. You’re not aloud to video or take photos during the show, so these were done kind of slyly..

Next stop was Berlin, but things had been too easy for us for too long.. For some reason, even with three reasonably intelligent people in our party, we still managed to fuck up our journey to Berlin. Somehow, we managed to get on the train a day early, and after a brief argument with the correct ticket holders (there was going to be blood), we negotiated with the conductor to let us on anyway. We didn’t need the sleeping cabin we paid extra for anyway, as we spent the entire night in the bar carriage. And after drinking the train dry, it was easy to pass out for the few minuets left of the journey in the busy corridors..

Overall, Paris was a beautiful city - still had military types roaming around with sub-machine guns in full view in certain areas, which is never cool, but after South America, I’m less shocked each and every time - we’re very lucky back in Oz to not have that.

(*oh, and it was a joke about the crack.., just in case some of you didn’t get it..)..

See my photos from Paris here..

My short time in London was excellent, but came with mixed emotions for me.. I’d been in Spanish speaking countries for the last three-ish months, and although it was a real treat to be able to communicate fluently again, for the first few days, i really missed hearing the language i never really got used to..

The city of London is a wonderful city, bloody expensive, some of the locals told me. Try doing it on the Australian dollar.. So after researching options to sell a kidney or liver to extend my stay, but soon realised I couldn’t be in London for too long, unless i started earning the pound, or took a quick trip to China to profit from what god gave me…

For the last three months I’ve been sweating non stop, day & night because of the heat, and to be honest, It was preferable to the cold that welcomed us to London. The lovely London Drizzle and every-day occurrence of miserable grey sky was enough to turn even the most sickeningly Prozac-happy person to depression.. And this was suppose to be their summer..!

So, I met up with one of my best mates from Sydney in Mexico, and traveled with him to London.. We were already causing chaos in Mexico.., then to make matters worse, we met up with another good friend from Sydney, and the three of us were seriously bad news, but we did our bit for the community. One early morning, we set up our own Vodka drinks stand down at the local oval where all the runners were trying to be healthy for the start of the weekend.. Most of them were quite disgusted, but we did have a few “good sports” who drank (straight from the bottle) on every lap with us..!! Fantastic people..

One day we took a field trip down to Brighton Beach because I met a really interesting guy in Costa Rica who resided there and invited us to come stay. Now this might be biased because of the wonderful beaches we have in Australia, and the fact that I’d just come from the Caribbean, but Brighton Beach was the most depressing beach I’d ever seen.. It was raining, bloody cold, and it felt like a hurricane was just about to hit the coast. Apparently they do have one nice month in the year if your interested in going - just choose carefully. Once acclimatised to the misery, Brighton was quite a fun quirky place (..the pints really helped by the way).. Heaps of narrow ally ways filled with art, music and unique shops, and by luck, the Brighton Festival just happened to be on at the very same time we arrived - so we still had plenty of fun.

A few days later we arrived back in London for more trouble. Within about five minuets of arriving at Camden Town where we found the cheapest accommodation we could (about $75 Australian dollars EACH), we were accosted by a peddler and were almost stabbed.. It’s funny, ‘cos we weren’t. Eventually we found our dodgy dodgy dodgy hotel after giving him (and his dog named Terror) the slip. It resembled a by-the-hour whore house, complete with blood stained corridors. We dumped our stuff and went out to wander the streets as soon as possible. Later that night, the room was not the same. we found a place that offered take-away drinks (9% alcohol half-liter tinnies), so after about 5 or 6 each.. well, the photos say the rest..

Anyway, London was fantastic.. Just hard to stay out of trouble, and hard not to go broke..

Check out my Photos selection from London.

After the rather frazzling experience with the Cuban immigration / emigration system, I prepared myself properly before attempting my next destination. This time I had my story straight, crossing all the “i’s” and dotting all the “T’s” on the immigration forms, and I even wore respectable clothing to enter the country this time. Mexico’s immigration system however, was a kind of satisfying experience (similar to an amusement park ride). I walked straight through all security check points with not so much as an unfriendly glare from anyone.. The nice security officer at customs even told the x-ray baggage scanners to hurry up and not to bother with scanning my baggage properly.. Very welcoming people…

Mehhh-i-co is a huge place but in the few weeks there, i saw only a very small part of it. First up, I went to the tourist mecca, Cancun, where i met up with one of my best mates, Brad from Sydney, to search for some exhaustive Caribbean relaxation - much needed, mind you. After, Cancun, we tried out the gigantic Mexico City - which was fun.. Cancun had some of the nicest waters I’ve ever seen. It was comparable to the Whitsundays, Australia, with glowing aqua colours that stretched well out into the ocean. Don’t know about you, but for me these kind of environments, are paridise, and from the first time i saw it, i knew we were in for a wicked time. To make matters worse, the cheep Tequila and $1 Coronas went down all too easily in the heat. Way too many of them..

One down side of Cancun, the place attracts millions of drunk and totally out of control (mostly American) tourists.. To be honest, the behaviour of some of the people there was an absolute disgrace - It did look like they were having alot of fun.

Also, on the trip from the airport to my initial hostel, i noticed that the resort district looked absolutely disgraceful (much like some of the tourists =). All the top resorts such as The Hilton and The Sheraton were badly in need of repairs, something you rarely see with prestegious buildings.. I learnt later that there had been a massive hurricane that basically wiped out the entire area - so i guess, in hind sight, they had actually done a pretty good job of fixing the place back up - but it was still disappointing.

From Cancun, we visited some spectacular Mayan sites, learning a lot of useful facts about the Mayan history and culture.. Did you know that they worshiped snakes, loved skulls, lots of blood and sports..?!?
Back in the 1500 Priests used to sacrifice ‘lucky people’ by cutting their hearts out, alive.., then threw the confused bodies down a massive flight of steps where awaiting villagers would remove the limbs from the bodies and sell them at the markets!! Really really great stuff.. They used to play a ball game, where the captain of the winning team won ‘the Ultimate Prize’, which was to have his head choped off.. What a culture!!!

from Cancun we flew to Mexico City.. First up, we couldn’t get to the hostel we had arranged because of massive protests going on in the area, so we had to stay in a different hotel for a night. There were people parading around naked and all kinds of other shit going down.. Eventually there was a break in it all, and we made it to the hostel we were booked into… But on the road of the hostel there were about 500 full riot police with sub-machine guns standing every 10 meters.. Scary stuff.. On the last day in Mexico city, a big fight broke out right in front of the hostel between the police and some of the locals.. Real good entertainment - from 8 stories up, but I wouldn’t want to be in the middle of it all..

Mexico city was a surprisingly nice city, and was not nearly as bad as everyone makes it out to be (apart from the riots that is.. =) The people were surprisingly friendly and helpful, where they could be, and the city actually had some really great architecture to check out..

So, Mexico is yet another place i will have to go back to another time to further explore. . Go check it out if you haven’t already.. To see some of my photos from Mexico, Click here.

Emergency Hotel Exit Drills..

This could save your life one day. Recently whilst staying in a luxury resort few days, a good friend of mine and I decided that if we were to light a fire (accidentally of course), we wouldn’t know how to get out of the building if the lifts were not working..

So after a case of beer and a bottle of Tequila, we went for an exploratory search on the hotels emergency exits and staff corridors.. I’d recommend you do the same for the next hotel you stay, because if you do accidentally start a fire or for some reason a fire breaks out, you will want to be the first ones out.. Safety first, as i always say..

Unfortunately for this Travel Survival Guide, there are no photos of my own for you to view - it was a stealth mission. But if you ask the nice people at hotel we were staying at, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind sharing their security videos and photographs with you..

So there are a few things to remember on these sort of missions., firstly, it is advantageous to smell as much like you have been doused in rum as possible to throw any staff off your trail. They will think a bottle of rum has fallen over and broken somewhere and will hopefully turn around to call a clean up crew before they see you. It is also advantageous to remember what room number you are staying in or be able to think quickly enough to make up a valid room number, in the unlikely event that you are approached or stopped by hotel security. Remember, it is important to explore as much of the hotel as possible in the shortest period of time, which will prepare you in the event of a real fire.

It is also wise to have your story straight.. or to have no story at all. This will increase the success rate of these missions, remembering you should be running these drills in every place you visit from now on.

All that is left for you to think about is actually exiting the building or complex in a quite and orderly fashion, and some time later making a successful re-entry of the building, preferably using the main front entrance (making sure to wait for the concierge to open the door for you to allow you to enter).

Remember, safety first. Good luck.

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Itùs definqtelly NOT stqndqrd issue::11
The hqrdest Iùve found to use so fqr::
Iùve got heqps of stuff to tell you qll,; but zhen i find q nor,qm keyboqrd qgqin::
check these bqbies out à]ç)_&锑(-è___çà)ù*%$£^:!;
more soon::