Drunk & Disorderly

I've often said/bragged that hangovers don't occur on holiday and listed many possible reasons for this including humidity,no work to worry about and Aussies having the drinking capacity of a tardis. Last night I unintentionally tested my "no hangovers on holiday" theory and I'm sad to say it joins "white boys can dance" and "senior citizens are wild in bed" as utter bullshit.It's just hit 5:30pm and I think I've been out of bed for about an hour which isn't how I had envisioned spending my last full day in Hong Kong. It's well known that I have the kidneys of a smurf and often suffer large hangovers that last so long that I develop bedsores but this is the first big one I've experienced on holidays and it won't be something that I'll be repeating.

I'll attempt to sift through the disjointed memories of last night and fill you in on what happened as it was actually a pretty good night. The plan was to hook up with the Welsh girl for a beer or two but then I found out she doesn't land until the 30th which is the day I fly out so that wasn't going to work. Instead I hit the American Embassy (McDonalds) for a snack and as usual there was no seating to be found anywhere as it's always packed. There was one seat spare next to another gringo so I asked if I could sit there which he happily agreed to. We got to talking and he was from Paris but was moving to Australia so we chatted about that and he told me to check out the nightlife on Lockhart Road in Wan Chai so that's where I headed last night. The taxi trip took about 15 minutes and I found myself on Lockhart road which was less busy than crazy Nathan road and had plenty of clubs/pubs. I had a burger and 2 pints of Stella at a quiet german pub (german pubs are everywhere!) and sat at a bench overlooking the road so I could scope out the nightlife (Scope is codeword for perv). I noticed a pub over the road had a decent amount of people crammed inside so I finished up my pint and headed over to the "Old china Hand"

The place was indeed busy and was full of tourists/ex-pats and one of them invited me over to his table where he was sitting with another guy (names were shared but I can't recall them). They told me a quiz night was about to crank up and would I be interested in joining and having nothing better to do I agreed. The quiz night had 6 sections with 10 questions in each and from memory the sections were "General knowledge,Sci-Fi,Sport,Celebs,History and Movies". I was pretty useless but did alright in the movies and celebs sections. The quiz went for about 3 hours and we drank through-out and were joined by a few other ex-pats and there wives. I often find that ex-pats can be pretty bitter/cynical and tend to lecture you especially on travel but these guys did none of that and were good fun. The quiz concluded and I laughed when the "Perth Eagles" got announced as being the 3rd placed team and we won a bucket of beer (6)...woohoo. All the other guys in my group screwed there noses up at the brand of beer and they joked that 2nd prize was 3 beers and the winner only got cursed with a single beer. Now by this time I had drank 5-6 pints of beer and should have passed up the bucket of beer and gone home but it was free beer dammit. The rest of my group retired for the night and STUPIDLY I drank the rest of the beer and found myself VERY VERY drunk.

I recall wandering blindly around Wan Chai and stumbled across some Christmas display outside a business and it had these giant golden balls which I decided to pick up and carry about. It was quite large and heavy and my drunken mind thought it would make a great basketball so I bounced it on the concrete which made a very loud crash and the bottom of the ball caved in. Some guy ran up and grabbed the ball off me and started yabbering so I did what most responsible drunkards do and ran for my life. Pretty silly of me really and hopefully there's not a warrant out for me but it's convinced me to ease up on the boozing!

I can't even recall how I got home but did get propositioned in the elevator by a prostitute who showed me on a calculator how much it would cost to let her infect me with an STD but I didn't take her up on the offer. Today was just spent feeling nauseous and trying to ignore a pounding headache but I feel alright now despite some dizziness which I've had for a day or two. I'll head out tonight and take some photo's before flying out tomorrow at lunchtime. Not having a window in my room is annoying as I waltzed out in shorts and shirt to find it was pissing down with rain but I don't have a raincoat anyway so I guess it doesn't matter heh.

I have plenty more to rant about but I'll do that once I hit Thailand!

I've landed in Hong Kong and for a city with so much technology/neon it was actually damn hard to find a net cafe but I finally managed to track one down. The flight to Hong Kong from New Zealand was plain horrible and it wasn't just the 10.5 hour flight time. The person next to me had an inconsiderate baby who chose to cry the entire trip rather than look out the window and perv on the stewardesses like I did. Babies should be classed as hand luggage and thus have to be stowed away in an overhead compartment in my opinion. Thankfully my Ipod helped to drown out the babies screams and I kept a close eye on his face and when his face screwed up like he was about to take an epic dump I quickly hit the play button on the ipod. This was foiled on take-offs and landing when the flight crew requested I turn it off so it wouldn't interfere with the flight system. I guess it's understandable as there'd be some panic if the pilot radio'd ground control for permission to land and got Dennis Leary's "asshole" back as a response. The buttplug seated next to me tried to calm the baby down by employing the "baby talk approach which was more annoying than the actual crying so I got this;

"WAAAAAAA"

"ooo who's a cutey wooty baby waby"

*Crackling Intercom*

"This is your captain speaking, we'd like to kindly remind passengers that baby talk is a capital offence and anyone caught will be ejected"

Ok so the last bit didn't happen but it bloody should!

Accomodation was always going to be a bit dodgy in Hong Kong as there's quick a big gap here between budget accomodation and somethin' decent. I checked out some decent hotel and they blurted out "$200 a night" which made my wallet lapse into a coma so I headed towards the notorious Chunking Mansions. The touts quickly surrounded me and led me to a packed elevator where we took a slow ride upto the 13th floor. The room he showed me was like a cupboard as we went to go into the room to check it out a guy was actually leaving my room...what the hell?

The "cupboard" he showed me was downright horrible and I'm not the pickiest guy so I told him I'd get back to him if I ever needed a crack-den. I got into the elevator with 6 big scary black guys and while none of them screamed "Kill Whitey" it was still pretty uncomfortable. I moved onto Chunkings cousin which is the "Miridor Mansions" and a friendly chinese fella took me upto a room which while still hobbit-sized was much nicer and I agreed to his offer of 135HK which is about $25 (I think)

I felt pretty tired but decided to have a shower and hit the town but I wasn't anticipating the shower having no hot water. Being a tired smelly tourist I went ahead with the ice-shower and am confident that I came close to a heart attack. The shower and the toilet are actually in the same tiny room so if you chose to you could have a freezing shower while taking a dump...ingenious huh?

Nathan road where I'm staying is great at night as it's very busy and has more Neon than Vegas. I found some shady out of the way pub and took advantage of happy hour and knocked back a few expensive beers to prepare for my fave holiday activity "Wandering drunk around a foreign country". I finally stumbled into a nice little german pub and chatted with the two staff who were from Nepal and when I told them where I was from both went "ahhh Austria!"

I even tried swooning the hot female bartender by asking if I could have my beer in a baby bottle she was filling, heh think she thought I was serious!. Went to bed at around midnight and slept pretty well on the concrete matress but the aircon was really good and no hangover!

Without the lights on in my room it's totally pitch black so when I woke up I figured it was around 2am but checked my phone and it was 9:30am so slept later than I had thought. Spent most of the day wandering around on foot and checked out Kowloon Park and Mong Kok and the walking has made me realise how unfit I've become as my ankles are aching bigtime. I'm supposed to hook up with a welsh chick that I met from the forums for a beer tonight so should be good to have a drinking buddy. I get plenty of strange looks here as I could probably count on 2 hands the number of caucasians I saw today so a long frizzy haired (I washed it noooo) goatee sporting retard like me stands out a bit but everyone is very friendly. For example a friendly Indian chap stopped me today and said

"Hello young man"

"G'Day"

"Guess what today is?"

"Errr Tuesday?"

"It's your lucky day!"

"It is?"

"Yes *launches into some complex scam which I quickly caught onto and made some excuse about bowel movements and fled*

I hadn't walked more than 5 minutes when another Indian guy walked up and said;

"Hello!"

"G'Day"

"Guess what today is?"

"My lucky day right?"

*Dissapointed look*

No matter the country there's always scams going on but I find it amusing rather than annoying and always chuckle when touts try to sell me suits...I mean do I look lkike the sorta guy who gets around in a suit...tho a tophat and monacle might be a good look.

Well I've ranted enough and am sure this is booby-trapped with plenty of typo's and gibberish buit I'll update it tomorrow with some pictures. The guy next to me is chuckling into his webcam like a japanese school-girl, I'll leave before his "tee-hee's" become contagious.

I'm posting this from the airport in New Zealand and this crappy terminal has already nearly got me deported for obscene language. It has no mouse and instead uses a small notebook like square to navigate and they always nearly drive me to seppuku. I won't even go into details about the keyboard that is so soft that it feels like I''m typing on a baby seal.

So far things are goin'pretty smoothly, flight from Perth to New Zealand was a breeze and not bein' able to sleep on flights means I'm 50 pages away from finishing my new novel (reading not writing!)

Now it's just a matter of killing time before the long haul to Hong Kong departs which is about an hour away. On a weird note the guy on the terminal next to me is wearing a bright red neck comforter, not sure if he forgot to take it off after his flight or 'maybe neck braces are just fashionable in New Zealand?

Guess I should head off and get on my plane!

A single week stands between me and three months of holiday bliss and as expected the days are crawling. I keep getting asked if I'm excited or nervous about the impending trip but the truth is the combination of Christmas and the frantic work-related rush that this time of year brings on hasn't given me much chance to think about it. I'm sure the day before the emotional floodgates will open and I'll experience both an excitement induced boner and a nervous man-weep but really I just want to get the show on the road. I'd like to say allot of planning has gone into the trip but in reality I've done more day dreaming than planning.

I started having second thought about my "by the seat of my pants" approach to travel and fired off a few emails to Thailand hotels enquiring about vacancies. I'll be landing just before NYE so I knew the place would be packed but figured I'd be able to scam a room somewhere. As expected all of the hotels came back informing they were fully booked but one had a cancellation and was happy to accommodate an unorganised retard like myself. It was a bit over budget at 1250 Baht a night but I figured it was better to have somewhere to dump my bags than having to stomp around in the sun hoping to find a room. A guy from another forum even checked out the hotel and said it was very nice but was smack in the middle of the gay area so I guess its "Queer Eye for the disorganised guy".

Starting this blog has actually reminded me how much I enjoy writing, sure I'm not very good at it and it's no doubt littered with spelling and grammatical errors but I do like sitting down and excreting my thoughts. I'm hoping it'll also encourage me to get out and do weird and wonderful things like eating strange foods and indulging in local customs like basket weaving, bukkake etc!. Also a good way for friends and family (mum I was kidding about the bukkake thing honest!) to keep up with what I'm doing as I'm pretty bad when it comes to postcards and phonecalls.

Anyway I'll try to sit down and knock out another update before I leave but if not my first one will be from Hong Kong.

Only two short weeks until I leave for my overseas trip where I'll spread my lame humour and test foreign public nudity laws. Having already organised my flights and opting to worry about accommodation until I arrived at a destination which I told myself was being "adventurous" which is really code for "Stupid & Disorganised" I only had a few items left to sort out which were;

Vaccinations- I figured getting myself inoculated against any foreign diseases that would attempt to lay siege to my system would be wise so I booked a doctors appointment. The doctor suggested that I get shots for Typhoid Fever, Hepatitis A, Cholera and Tetanus as well as a range of tasty pills to protect against Malaria and toilet-glue (diarrhoea). We then had the following conversation;

Doctor- "You should have these shots at least 4 weeks before leaving on your trip, how long until you leave?

Myself- "Errr 2 weeks?"

Doctor- *Chuckles" "Bit disorganised aren't you?"

Myself- "I kinda like to look at it as being adventurous!"

Taking his advice I decided to have the full range of needles and probably should have also demanded the “Heart-Attack Prevention Needle” after he presented me with a bill for $400. I wasn’t expecting a hefty bill like that but paid it without a whimper as I’d prefer to pay the money than get struck down by some crazy disease and spend the entire holiday in bed cursing myself for being a tightass. The doctor only had the Tetanus needle on hand so he jabbed me with that and I have to return tomorrow for the rest of them.

Now that I had the needles out of the way I went shopping for a backpack as suitcases were blacklisted on this trip as I planned on roughing it for most of the trip and wheeling about a suitcase just isn’t practical. I scuttled into a camping store and some young fella’ quickly convinced me that http://www.blackwolf.com.au/engine/SID/1000029/AID/100141.htm was the bag for me. It had a detachable daypack which I was looking for and space for a water bladder which I quizzed the young salesman on;

“Now this water bladder…will it only take water or could I put other liquids in there?”

“Any liquid will be fine, I myself put Gatorade in mine”

“So I could put Bourbon in there?”

“Ummm yes I suppose you could?”

“You’ve got yourself a sale!”

The backpack also is front-loading so you don’t have to open from the top and rip everything out to get to an item at the bottom. The pack is adjusted to fit the shape of your back by 2 metal rails which you bend to match the shape of your back and they also leave painful red welts on the back of your legs when slapped as my room-mate found out (twice).

I also went shopping for an Ipod but the 60gb model I was after has been snapped up by the Christmas shopping frenzy so I might have to bite the bullet and get the smaller 30gb. Only other items left on the shopping list for my big trip was a new pair of shoes (mine are falling apart) and a pimp hat.

My stomach is grumbling so I'll cya next update buttplugs but before I leave here's evidence that you shouldn't buy young folk beer at NYE celebrations! (this picture was the result of exposure to a SINGLE beer, guess they're not breast-fed beer like us Aussies!)