HUBBERS DOT COM BLOG

If you don’t believe me take a look at this news article on the BBC.

Yes you read correctly. There will be a house warming at the Tooting Bec Palace on Saturday 7th of May. We expect the house to be fully warmed up if not actually on fire by the end. Dress is strictly Chav so dust or your cheap market knock-offs and fake bling jewellery because the Tooting Bec Posse are going to say “al’wight guvnor” to our neighbours CHAV STYLE!!!

Click the image for some Chav dress ideas.

Today I am heading off to Malta for Easter with my friend Sophie. This is the forecast for the next 5 days.

I NEED SUGGESTIONS FOR A NAME FOR THIS GAME ANYONE

There is a game I like to play when I go on holiday with London friends. Every time you run into someone in a foreign country when you are on holiday and you did not know that person was going to be there everyone else in the group has to buy you a beer. No sooner had I finished explaining the rules to Sophie when she runs into two friends, Johnny and Michelle from Shepherds Bush. Gutted.

The four of us arrived in Malta drunk as monkeys at 3am and basically passed out.

I attended the London launch of a facinating book called Mind Hacks at Foyles Bookshop near Tottenham Court Road tube.

The presentation was very interesting and I bought the book which looks excellent.

It’s described as: “Mind Hacks is a collection of probes into the moment-by-moment workings of our brain with a view to understanding ourselves a little better and learning a little more, in a very real sense, about what makes us tick.”

Personally I prefer the old fashioned way to hack the mind – with drugs and alcohol. But that is just me. I’m a traditionalist.

Sat around Hvar town all day. Hvar is the island that receives the most sun in all of Croatia. The LP claims that Hvar gets 2724 hours of sun each year. Am suspicious of this claim since the day is overcast and grey. Caught the catamaran to Korchula with Dumby and Belinda. Runty and Belinda spent the entire journey making calls to their friends Ralph and Chuck on the giant porcelain telephone.

Their stomach situation didn’t improve when our bus from the port to Korchula Town was driven by Micheal Schumacher’s crazy uncle, who was on the run from the insane asylum. There is a debate on what the worst part of the drive was. A few of the passengers say it was the high speed driving in dense mountain fog through old village streets with only a foot spare on either side of the bus. Others say it was when the driver deliberately swerved into the path of an oncoming bus to freak the other driver out. It was impossible to get an accurate vote as many passengers were to scared to remove their hands from their eyes to vote.
Dumby did our eleven week Africa overland tour with Greg and I in 2003. Durung that time we literally played thousands of hands of cards. None of us have played since and we are relishing the chance to play again.

It is the end of the season here and all the bars are shutting down. We found an outdoor cafe that was having an end of season closing down sale and over the course of a three hour period we bought all of the alcohol they had left. The final round was a Baileys, Kahlua and milk thing with not much milk. Yummy.

This is one of the best days we have had on tour. I fully recommend doing the www.mitchstours.com wine tour. We met some fabulous people, ate some fabulous food and drank loads of excellent wine and other alcoholic delights. I even learnt the best new drinking game I have learnt since university.

THE NAIL GAME

The nail game goes like this. You need one big block of wood, one hammer with a big and thin side to the head and one nail per person. First you tap all of the nails a little way into the block and then every person gets a turn trying to hammer their nail in only using the thin side of the hammer head. It’s much harder than it sounds and every miss means you have a drink. Finishing last is a full vessel offence. Smashing stuff and the Runt cleaned up.

BYE BYE MORE STUFF

Runty left his bag at the Wombat hostel bar after the crawl. The list of stuff missing includes:
The bag itself

Sunglasses
Cards X 2

Chess (this includes the draughts and snakes and ladders)
Schnapps X 2

Runty is gutted that the world is so full of thieves when he is so honest. I agree.

Did a few of the sights in old Tallinn Town. It’s a pretty little place but not much to write about.

Swapped out of the dorm into a private room so our stuff was more secure. An Aussie couple who had just finished the trans-Siberian railway took our places.

After dinner I went out to do emails and write my blog etc. I left Runty in the safe hands of the three forty-something Stoke City supporters from our old dorm. When I got back to the pub at 11pm he was nearly legless but Stoke City were just starting to hit their stride. I put Runt to bed and he handed me the drinking baton for the Kiwi team. Another hour of beer swilling and the Stoke City boys started taking their shirts off and singing football songs. At this stage I have to say that I was still pretty confident of being able to put them into the ground. Especially given the Kiwi drinking teams unbeaten record against every nation we have come up against on tour. But by 5am when the club below the Radisson kicked us out I had to call it quits and snuck off to bed. I thought it was a draw but apparently Stoke City still had one trick up their sleeve. On the way home they picked up a hooker and took her back to their dorm that they share with the Aussie couple and two other guys and took turns shagging her in front of the whole room! Final score Stoke City 3 New Zealand 0.

This is all I have left of the stuff I wrote in Africa after a digital disaster destroyed my PDA when I got back to London. Pretty sad but them’s the breaks.

All in all I travelled from Nairobi to Cape Town in 77 day and experienced everything you could hope to experience. Highlights and memorable events included.

• Amazing wild life. We spent days and days slow driving our truck through game reserves seeing all maner of striped and spotted goats
• I read a book a week and when I ran out of my books that I took I read other peoples books that I would not normally have chosen and loved them all. Book of the tour was ‘Into Thin Air’ by Jon Krakauer an account of the 1996 season on Everest that left eight climbers dead. As tragic as it was hard to put down.
• ‘Someone’ bought half a supermarket bag full of weed for ten dollars in Kampala. Amazing value ;)
• Played hundreds of hands of 500. My best performance was going nearly 1000 under from too many stupid stoner mistakes (we were playing that you couldn’t go out the back door) with the oposition (if you could call them that) being 60 away from victory and coming back to win with the final hand being a high risk ten no trumps. I am unlikely to ever play that well again.
• On the houeboats on Lake Karibu our truck drank 1008 beers, two bottle of spirits each and smoked a whole cob of Malawi gold in THREE DAYS!!!
• One morning leaving camp the truck breaked heavilly and as I looked out the front window there was a half naked African guy with half his head removed lying on the road. The injury looked fresh and was probably caused by the last truck we passed heading in the other direction. The really wierd part was that his brain looked orange.
• Camping on Sessie Island in Lake Victoria. Stunning.
• Walking with Lions in Botswana
• Sand Boarding down massive sand dunes at 70kms in Swakopmund Namibia. A day after us a guy from another truck broke his collor bone doing the same thing.
• Hiking up massive dune 47 in Namibia
• Hiking into the inpenetrable forest in Uganda to sit within meters of the mighty silverback gorillas.
• Eating everything under the sun at a resort in Namibia
• Doing two bungi jumps off the bridge at Vic falls. Finding out that my legs have an unstoppable involuntary desire run back up onto the platform once I have jumped. Funny to watch.

Sorry for not writing earlier team. I wrote a big one a few days back but ran out of time when the truck parked up outside the Internet café and started honking.

In short all is good. Have arrived in Kenya and am touring around the countryside visiting villages and game parks. Have seen a huge number of animals in their natural habitat including hippos, crocodiles, pink flamingoes, water buffaloes, rhinos, baboons and assorted other lion food. No big carnivores yet though.

Most days here involve a drive and some sort of sight seeing. Then we park the truck and pitch tents and set about our various duties for dinner and the like. The next day we cook breakfast, break camp and get trucking for the day. Everyone is really pulling their weight and all is going smooth as.

The people here are really friendly as and broke as fuck. The other day I tried to haggle with a guy for a pair of sandals to get the same price as another guy on my truck and instead of coming back with a counter offer he just choked up the cash and looked heartbroken. We have visited a number of villages where the living conditions have been so bad even the chief sleeps on the mud floor of a stick hut (like the second little pig) in animal hides. Worse than that the poor bastard had three wives and 20 kids so he probably never got a moments peace. There doesn’t seem to be the pressure and scams that you get in a lot of other poor countries which is good but you just feel shit about the way these guys live so you end up giving them what you can anyway.

Other than that have enjoyed many local beers, which are all good and the tan is coming along nicely.

Sorry for not writing earlier team. I wrote a big one a few days back but ran out of time when the truck parked up outside the Internet café and started honking.

In short all is good. Have arrived in Kenya and am touring around the countryside visiting villages and game parks. Have seen a huge number of animals in their natural habitat including hippos, crocodiles, pink flamingoes, water buffaloes, rhinos, baboons and assorted other lion food. No big carnivores yet though.

Most days here involve a drive and some sort of sight seeing. Then we park the truck and pitch tents and set about our various duties for dinner and the like. The next day we cook breakfast, break camp and get trucking for the day. Everyone is really pulling their weight and all is going smooth as.

The people here are really friendly as and broke as fuck. The other day I tried to haggle with a guy for a pair of sandals to get the same price as another guy on my truck and instead of coming back with a counter offer he just choked up the cash and looked heartbroken. We have visited a number of villages where the living conditions have been so bad even the chief sleeps on the mud floor of a stick hut (like the second little pig) in animal hides. Worse than that the poor bastard had three wives and 20 kids so he probably never got a moments peace. There doesn’t seem to be the pressure and scams that you get in a lot of other poor countries which is good but you just feel shit about the way these guys live so you end up giving them what you can anyway.

Other than that have enjoyed many local beers, which are all good and the tan is coming along nicely.

Love to you all please circulate to everyone not on the list…

Hubs

Up at 6am to go to the camel market at Birqash which, according to the Lonely Planet, is at it’s most frantic on Friday mornings. I’m guessing the Lonely Planet was not far wrong. There were several hundred camels, stinking, braying and hopping around on three legs. The fourth leg is tied up to prevent them making a get away. This is like the camel handbrake. This doesn’t stop them trying though and it quite common to have to make way for a frantic camel hopping past on three legs with a screaming Berber guy giving chance with a big stick. The whole experience was not short on humour and was extremely memorable.

Best of all I met a great finish couple. The girl works at the finish embassy and I was invited to a house warming party later that night.

Spent the afternoon exploring kooky Coptic Cairo (just like regular Christianity only with more black) and cruising the Nile with the fins.

The party turned out to be eight people hell bent on getting drunk in an apartment 22 floors above the Nile. The view was spectacular. When the drinking was done we headed out to the Africana nightclub in Giza. The Africana caters to the large African community in Cairo and specialises in playing African and r’n'b music. I had heard that the club was full of beautiful Namibian prostitutes and one of the guys who worked at my hostel tried to tell me not to go, as it is quite dangerous for tourists. Obviously this made me even keener to have a look. In the end I had a good time but I don’t think that it really lived up to the hype. I hit the wall around 2am and was pretty much just filling in time waiting for the others to leave. I blame this failure on my part on a combination of excessive alcohol consumption and the shortage of sleep the night before.

Made it in at 5am and was gutted to find out that the cute Russian girl staying in my four bed dorm had had a shag and the other two boys got to watch. Gutted. Again.

The plan for today was a sound one:

1. Wake at 5am (organised with hostel the night before)
2. Go to the Giza pyramids on the cheap microbus
3. Organise a horse to take me Sakara, thus avoiding Giza entry fee, taxi cost, getting great ride across desert and best of all getting inside Giza for a sunrise photo of the pyramids.
4. See inside the Great Pyramid (missed on first visit)
5. Ride desert
6. See Sakara
7. Taxi home

This is how it panned out:

1. Woken one hour late at 6am by hostel. Forgot to factor for bloody ‘Egyptian time’.
2. Expensive rushed taxi to pyramids
3. Find out the new horses I am seeing don’t go to Sakara but figure that I will take one for 40 Egyptian pounds to get the sunrise photo and taxi to Sakara. Sort a good price with driver and arrange to meet him at 9am.
4. By the time the world’s crabbiest horse is saddled the sun is so high you could read a roman clock. Then I find out that I can’t get the photos I want anyway because despite the fact that I am inside the Giza complex I am not supposed to be there until 8am so we have to hide behind some hills.
5. But at 8am I see inside the great pyramid so all I good. All is very very good.
6. Get back to stable and find that my taxi has gone and another has been arranged. One guy says my driver had family trouble and another says he has car trouble. This has scam written all over it but since the price hasn’t changed I can’t see what the scam is or how they got my driver to leave a sixty Egyptian pound fare behind. I kind of feel for the original driver as he seemed like a nice guy. It felt dodgy so I decided to arrange my own transport.
7. The new driver turns out to be a really nice Christian Egyptian called Michael who takes me to Sakara and Memphis. Which were two more amazing pieces of the Egyptian puzzle.

ADDITIONAL: THE SOLUTION FOR DEALING WITH THE DIRTY SCAMMING CAIRO TAXI DRIVERS

This advice arrived from two different sources (the Evil Fins and and Australian friend) just as I was about to leave the Cairo. Great timing. When you get in the taxi don’t ask for the price as this marks you as a new person in town and is just asking to be ripped off. Instead just get in the cab and tell them where to go (the place that is). When you get there get out, give them what you think the journey is worth (your hostel can help with this) and leg it. In some cases they may yell and scream at you but as long as you give a fair price then they don’t have a leg to stand on.

A MAJOR CHANGE OF TRAVEL PLANS

I have decided to flag going to Iran via Saudi and UAE. The visa situation was a bitch for Saudi and Iran. Instead I am doing a loop of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Israel before heading out into the Mediterranean to see Cyprus (luvin it, luvin it, luvin it) and Crete before heading back to London via Athens with Easyjet.

HIKU

Willie said it best
He said, “Just can’t wait to get
On the road again”

Basket eagle mouth sphinx (That’s my name in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics)

CAIRO TO AMMAN

Wel come! Where you from?

This is a traditional Egyptian greeting. Also it has come to my attention that a large percentage of the population here think that welcome is actually two words and as they say, when in Rome…

I wanted to stay in Cairo until Saturday so I could watch the All Blacks v the Wallabies on Saturday morning but I wasn’t sure what I would do for the next couple of days as I thought I had pretty much seen everything by now. Boy was I wrong. After my morning at the pyramids I spent the afternoon cruising around the city and meeting the locals. I saw the citadel and a big bunch of mosques. Some of the places I visited must have been a bit off the beaten track because the appearance of a six foot four guy in a floppy hat caused quite a stir.

Am starting to get a handle on the Egyptian sense of humour. Mostly it involves doing something annoying but harmless to someone and then sitting back while everyone has a good chuckle. People who stick out like sore thumbs are the perfect candidates for these pranks. Especially if they are a bit off the beaten track.

I had a great business idea this afternoon. There is a niche market here for honestly named shops. Let me explain. In Egypt a papyrus shop is never called ‘The Papyrus Shop’ instead it will be called a ‘The Papyrus Institute’, ‘The Papyrus School’, ‘The Papyrus Warehouse’ or ‘The Papyrus Museum’. Anything but ‘The Papyrus Shop’. This is just another example of Egyptian lies and I think there is a real opportunity for people who name their shops honestly.

A KIWI, AN AUSSIE, A YANK AND TWO POLES (ONE HAD ALREADY PASSED OUT) WALK INTO A BELLY DANCING CLUB

That night the aforementioned suspects went to the belly-dancing club just up the road from my hostel. The club reminded me a lot of a regular western strip bar. It was badly lit and smoky with a bunch of tables crowded around a central stage. The drinks were vastly overpriced and the punters were the usual collection of overweight middle-aged blokes knocking back a fair bit of grog. The dancers even had that ‘stoked to be alive’ and ‘doubly stoked to be up here in front of you fat losers’ look on their faces. Where it differed though was the music was Arabic (obviously) and it was live. And they had singing. Sometimes by the regular male singer sometimes by the dancer and sometimes even by the punters. And people got up and danced, sometimes with the belly dancer and sometimes with each other. The other major difference between the belly dancing club and a regular western strip bar was that the girls kept their kit on. Gutted.

Got in at 3am.