Egad! Has it been that long? I'm actually long past Tahiti now (left early an' all) but what the hell. Have a guide to the odd little place in the form of a silly analogy...Most of you, I know, have not been to Tahiti. There are many reasons why this should be the case, mostly connected with it being very expensive, very far away and populated almost entirely by honeymooning couples and rich snobby Frenchies.On the whole, you are more au fait with the Fre...

With windy Wellington still blowing about my baffled brain and the effects of a night in the only Welsh bar in the southern hemisphere (fittingly situated in a former public toilet) still giving me reason to complain and curse like an angry Glaswegian who's hammered a nail into his hand, I made my way into New Zealand's South Island. The South Island is a lot like the North Island, only exaggerated. Where you can jump off stuff in the North, you can jump off...

"Mate, you're an idiot. That's daft even by our standards, and as you might have noticed, we can be pretty crazy round here." Such were the words spoken by Ian, the fine Kiwi gentleman in the pub as he handed over my enticingly pint-shaped prize for becoming the first man anyone, be they backpacker, local or tourist guide, had known to be dumb enough to walk New Zealand's famous Tongariro Crossing in flip-flops. Sweet. As. Such is the re...

If the East Coast is the backpacker trail and Western Australia is the ‘real’ Australia, then the Northern Territories is where it just gets Weird. As if being ravaged by more lightning than anywhere else on the planet and being inhumanly hot and humid for far too many months of the year wasn’t enough, Darwin has spent most of the time since its foundation getting itself destroyed. First came the cyclones, two of them, spaced just far enough a...

An unabridged, unedited and unexpurgated snapshot of an interminable period of emetic, enforced eavesdropping – a torture befitting the nastier activities of Uzbekistan's chief gonad-crushing goon, President Karimov. If only there had been light and warmth elsewhere in the strange little town. "Make sure I understand everyting yur sayin' or I'll look like an idiot, innit" Poor Norman Mailer never knew what hit him, my attention to h...