HUBBERS DOT COM BLOG

Tight bowling kept the Bangladeshis to a low 174 which we chased down in only 29 overs with the loss of one wicket.

Aussie cricketer Adam Gilcrest summed it all up the night before when he said “Bangers? Bangers? I have seen sausages who can bat better than that!”

Off the pitch I took a hammering in our match day drinking game. Scotty Styris took four wickets, two maidens and a catch meaning I had to do seven funnels. A pretty dire fate when the only beer available was Red Stipe.

Did the coffee and internet thing. Put loads more pictures on my flickr site. http://www.flickr.com/photos/hubbers/sets/.

Met up with the boys at the Mad Mongoose. They had been drinking rum (when in Rome) and coke all day watching the cricket on tv. They have found out why the local rum and cokes are so murderously strong. Coke is imported. But rum is made locally and as such is much cheaper. I joined the ride which ended up with me crawling in around 5am.

This morsel of information came form a local bar girl that self confessed ladies man, Runty, has been working his magic on. The other night he was at the bar and the publican asked him what he wanted. With his usual charm he loudly proclaimed that he wanted to be served by the hot bar girl. To which the barman replied “Do you mean my daughter?”

The nicknames of the crew are changing. Woza is now being referred to as Woza the Joke Murderer. No joke is so funny that Woza can’t murder it when he is on the rums. Judge had been through a couple of changes. He quit his bank manager job a few weeks prior to departure to prepare himself for the long days doing nothing. As a result he is extremely brown. I am trying to get his name changed to Judge Patel. He is angling for Jamal which he thinks has a more west indian feel. Some of the other boys want his nickname changed to The Hoff after it was discovered that he boasted to a local paper in New Zealand that he was the strongest swimmer in the group and his job was to save anyone who went overboard. Beige the big guy of the group is being called The Belly and his nickname has been incorporated into one of our regular songs. The original song goes something like this:

There is only one (insert name of cricket player who has just done something good)
There is only one (same name)
He’s walking along, singing a song in a Kiwi wonderland.

Beige’s version goes:

There is only two Fat Bellies
There is only two Fat Bellies
One is Runty’s bar in Hamilton
The other is a person with feelings

If you don’t find this funny now have a few stiff rums and I swear you will be in fits of laughter.

The guys with girlfriends on the trip are all missing their partners. The single boys on the trip have a different problem altogether. You see the cricket world cup hasn’t attracted many women to Antigua. Also the vast majority of crew on the expensive yachts here are men. This has earned the island the long held nickname of Mantigua.

Rum will also make you breath fire. Hummus met the local fire breathing nutters on the way to the club. He convinced them that they should give him a go. I’ll put the video on my revver site in the next few days.

Rum can also get you wedding invites. An English couple we met last night invited us to Jolly Beach for their wedding on Sunday. For some unexplainable reason Runty swapped his grubby backpackers shirt with the English guys expensive branded shirt. Runty plans to wear his nice new shirt to the wedding.

Rum will also make you send inapropriate texts. Runty was so smashed when he got home last night he sent the following text to every female in his phone: what are you wearing? please send photos. His mum was not impressed, she told him to stop drinking so much and behaving like and idiot. The bad news for me is I have been using his phone since mine unexpectedly stopped working in the first week on tour. This means that either my girlfriend or my mum (Runty wasn’t sure which) will have received this text. Mum if you are reading this and you got Runty’s text, don’t send him any photos, he is up to no good.

Is there anything rum can’t do?

Got shit for going to bed early. Most of the boat were out till the very early hours getting wasted. Our skipper, Woza, was almost unwakable and as pissed as a chook on the way to the game.

Massive trouble picking up our tickets from the players as no one seemed to know where the main gate was. Finally got in 10 overs into the game. The brand new Sir Viv Richards Stadium was an awesome venue and even has a designated party zone with a SWIMMING POOL for cooling off in!!! Our tickets were up by the press area with the toffs. There was even a waiter serviced, air conditioned lunch provided. I enquired if we were elidgible to partake in the fine dining at the lunch break but aparently we were not ‘dignitaries’. Unbelievable.

Bundy said he saw me on television for a full five seconds. The New Zealand commentator, Ian Smith, said I looked studious. Bundy said I looked bored!

We held the Windies to a meagre 177 which we easilly chased with over 10 overs to spare. Not the worlds most exciting game but a vital win on the way to a semi final spot.

Ended the day in the Port England pubs celebrating loudly. By this stage Woza was hugging and kissing everyone in sight telling them that it’s not every day you beat the Windies in the West Indies and that this was as good as the time NZ beat the Saffas in Johanesburg at the last world cup. How many guys could say they had been to both games? This was followed by more hugging and kissing.

Massive treat for cricket fans when we saw the reggae band with Curtly Ambrose and Richie Richardson in it.

Out till the very early hours to redeem myself for the previous nights softness.

People have asked me how the sailing is going. Well the truth of the matter is we haven’t left St Lucia as all of our pool matches are based here. Today we are heading off at midday for Martinique on our way to our first Super 8 match against the Windies in Antigua. The plan is to anchor up at secluded beaches and chill.

Super 8 is the round after the pool matches. Initially there were 4 pools with 4 teams in each. After playing everyone in your pool the top two teams progress to the super 8 round where they play everyone except the other team that was in their pool. In our case that is England. The bonus is that our victory over the English means that we already have 2 points in the bank for the super 8 round.

After the Super 8 matches the top four teams go through to the semi final round which is a straight knockout.

The first days sailing was um interesting. We had had a big night the night before and we hadn’t even left the harbour before poor Runty was feeding the fishes his breakfast and probably some leftover rum over the back of the boat. Once we got into the straight between St Lucia and Martinique Judge was following suit over the port side of the boat. I thought this was quite funny until it got even choppier. This is where the real comedy started. I drank a Berocca for breakfast and let it loose in a huge stream of bright yellow vomit next to Judge. Beige said he was alright until then but when he saw the yellow vomit he lost his guts over the starboard side which was caught in the wind and landed on Woza who was skippering the boat. Woza, Hummus and Toddie were not sick at all.

The journey to St Annes in Martinique took five hours during which time I felt sick on and off. Runty said he felt sick the whole time and considered flying for the rest of the tournament. When we dropped anchor we all went for a swin off the back of the boat to was the smell of our sick off us. Or in Woza’s case he washed off Beige’s sick.

Broke international law and took the dinghy into St Annes to buy matches.

Beige and I were on the island for less than two minutes before we offered ganga mon.

Martinique isn’t playing cricket with the rest of the West Indies because Martinique is French. This means that they don’t play English sports, they use Euros and they require a seperate visa. We only had five US dollars and it took us several attempts to get one of the graduates from the Paris School of Customer Servise to take our money. The lady who evenyually helped did it with a bitter scowl that would have earned her an A+ on her final exam.

Spent the day recovering.

Rumours have started to circulate about what the English cricket team got up to after the match. Apparently several players and members of the management team got on the lash until 4am when, Freddie Flintoff, their star player, bribed a security guard at their resort and took a pedalo for a ride and capsized it and eventually had to be rescued. Probably not the sort of behaviour that their fans expect after they have parted with several thousand pounds each to come over here to support them.

I bet the tabloids are having a field day.

We also heard that some of the Kiwi team were drinking all night as well. The main differences being:

• Kiwis can handle their alcohol
• Kiwis can swim
• The NZ media isn’t likely to hang our team out to dry toi sell a few papers

In other games Ireland beat Pakistan which is the biggest cricket upset that any of us can remember. This is bad news for Pakistan who are now unable to finish first or second in their pool and will be going home soon. It’s great news for us though as they are our bogey team.

Made my flight withough losing my passport or anything else really stupid.

I finally got to the game and hooked up with the boys over half way through the first innings. My penalty for missing 35 overs was seven Denises. This might require some explaining.

Our boat has a crew of eight. Myself, Runty, Woza, Beige, Hummus, Toddie, Judge and Denise. All except one are hard drinking sport loving Kiwi boys. The final member of the crew is Denise a four foot long plastic tube with a large funnel attached to one end. This is the vessel from which all punishment drinks will be consumed on tour. And I can tell you that losing your passport and missing 35 overs is reason for plenty of punishment. All in all I think I got of pretty lightly with a meer seven funnels on arrival. One for every ten overs missed (there was talk of one for every five) and four for wickets and catches taken by Scotty Styrus. Each of us has a nominated player whose number is on the back of our shirts. When that player does something good like taking a catch or running someone out then you owe a funnel. When they do something bad like dropping a catch or getting out then you owe a funnel. As you can imagine it keeps the drinks ticking along nicely. I thought I had cosen well with Styrus as he has had a bad run of form lately. Buy not today. He took a number of catches and wickets and had a brilliant spell with the bat (more funnels) and was eventually made man of the match (another funnel). At least I got off more lightly that our skipper Woza who has the Kiwi Captain, Stephen Flemming won the toss (one funnel) and made several key decision as captain which eventually led to a convincing victory. Woza was overjoyed.

Walked home with a large number of very quiet English fans.

Later that night we went to a large street party and rolled in between 12 and 3.

My life in London has been punctuated by four major tours of different parts of the world.

• 1999 Western Europe
• 2001 Middle East
• 2002 Africa
• 2004 Easter Europe, Iran and India

So far my efforts have taken me to 67 different countries and today I am off again. This time I plan to notch up a few more sailing around the Caribbean following New Zealand’s fortunes at the Cricket World Cup.

Whenever possible I will try to put some photos on my http://www.flickr.com/ site.

A DISASTEROUS START

Despite all my boasting about places I have been etc I made the worst possible mistake on the way to the airport. I lost my passport! An hour of frantic phone conversations with disinterested train pions later I had it tracked down to a police station in central London. About the same time I tracked it down the guy who found it texted me and told me where it was. Not only a good samaritan but also someone with the initiative to jump on Google and see if there was anything else he could do. Top Bloke!

To make a long story short I paid a taxi driver a small fortune to drive it to Gatwick in a record breaking two and a half hours. Record breaking because that might be the longest that journey has ever taken. British Airways were a lot more helpful and got me on the afternoon flight to Barbados (68) with a connection to St Lucia (69) the following day.

On the flight out had a few drinks to calm the nerves.

Spent the night near the airport so I would be ready to make the short hop to St Lucia tomorrow morning.

To celebrate New Zealand’s national day, Waitangi Day we did the Circle Line Pub Crawl along with several thousand Kiwis living in London.

These days most Kiwis start at Paddington and head anti clockwise for eight stops until Westminster where there is a mass Haka on Parliament Square across the road from the houses of parliament. Interestingly in police state Britain it is now a criminal offence to protest in Parliament Square without a permit from the local cops. Luckily the cops are pretty good natured about the whole thing and they let us behave like twats without ruining everything.

Having completed the CLPC over ten times we consider ourselves experienced campaigners and we decided to do it old school starting from Baker Street (to avoid the crowds) and going clockwise stopping for a beer at every single one of the 27 tube stops. My memory failed me some time after Westminster but I have been reliably informed that we successfully completed the entire crawl, again. Legends.

The day started badly with me jumping on a tube heading in the wrong direction at the second stop. Other than that the only mishap was Russell who took a running jump down a dozen stairs and is now on crutches.

Rachel and I made it to Sweden for new years. This winter was unusually hot and there was hardly any snow in all of Europe and Sweden was no exception. It sounds strange to say it was disappointingly warm but there was no snow so that is how it was.

The Swedes are the nicest people. The log cabin we rented in Mora on Lake Siljan was owned by the nicest couple called Peir and Anita who ambushed us on our first night and forced us to drink Glogg (Swedish mulled wine) heated and served with raisins and almonds. Yummy.

And we nearly managed to ice skate on a frozen lake but it was raining on the day we tried and no one else was skating and we didn’t want to fall through the ice so we chickened out. Book book book.

Photos on Flickr

We just spent an amazing weekend celebrating my flatmate Brett’s Birthday in Sicily. We hired an old villa that was in the middle of vineyard just 20km from Corelone where the famous godfather movie was filmed. The villa was handed down from generation to generation and so the owner had taken care of every little detail to make sure our stay was fanastic … this included a surround sound stereo pool system so you could dance on the dive board.

We spent 3 awesome days relaxing in the sun and enjoying some great wine and sicilian food, topped off with some nice visits to, quaint towns, roman ruins and the beach