The Calorie Thief

There comes a time for every student when the purse strings tighten so much that they’ve got you by the neck and are slowly but surely choking you into a poverty-stricken asphyxia from which the escape is neither inevitable nor easy. It’s simple. The word student doesn’t apply to those who haven’t struggled through the quagmire of economic despair. And desperate time call for desperate measures.

I’m sitting in a restaurant counting my coppers in my head, and realise things are wrong when I stop at four. Minus four. Things aren’t good. But a poor student is one who needs, nevertheless, to eat. And I know what you’re thinking. Why, on earth, in times of penny drought, am I at a fairly well-established curryhouse with a menu in my hand? Whatever happened to 8p noodles? Well, I can only plead insanity I’m afraid; the problem I have is that this meal with friends has been planned for a number of weeks, and pulling the old cut-and-run trick would have been entirely unacceptable at this, the eleventh hour. I’m a student, yes, but I have moral standards. They’re somewhere, I promise.

Anyway, to take a swift U-turn and return to the crux of the matter, I’m penniless. There’s a waiter lurking in the corner of the room, and I know he hates me because I just asked him to bring the dreaded “jug of tap water”, with specific emphasis on the “tap” to ensure that no confusion resulted in a Strathmore Situation, which at this point would have been suicide. I decide that a budget of £3 could be adhered to, and proceed to lift my menu above eye level to conceal my unashamed plan from the waiter, and head straight for the “sides” section. Now, budget eating is all about the calorie count. Logically, the dish with the most calories, affordable with the aforementioned budget, should be the way forward, regardless of taste, preference or allergies. Things like a side salad are therefore rendered useless, and actually offend my situation and my pondering eyes. Something like a large naan bread, on the other hand, is student gold. I sheepishly read out my order in front of friends, who have lined up what can only be described as banquets in comparison. Curries, a number of varieties of rice, poppadoms, and even the famed Chef’s Challenge, which my friend orders with frightening ease. Perhaps she just doesn’t know.

This, you may be surprised to read, does not bother me in the slightest; rather, it fits in well with my plans for the evening. For now I can take on my new guise as the calorie thief, simply hovering like a vulture until stomachs fill and groan, and my companions turn to yours truly for due assistance. 

I’m halfway through my naan bread, and things are looking up. One of the girls sitting opposite me was a faller at the first, relinquishing her mild curry after a few spoonfuls, and then, like the true samaritan that she is, offering the rest to her friend in need. One has to be careful with keeping tact in these circumstances, however, as no calorie thief wishes to be exposed as the vagabond that he inevitably is. And so, I lean forward and go reverse psychology on my victim. “No, keep it, you’ll probably want some more in a minute”, I drool, whilst keeping focus on the meal that’s inching its way towards my gluttonous larynx. “Well, alright, I’ll just take a small bite, but then you’re having it back.” And the Oscar goes to…
I’m on my way.

Soon enough, an unexpected visitor arrives in the form of a discarded naan bread from the diner beside me. Unfortunately, my friend directly opposite appears to have cottoned on to my morbidly disgraceful plan, and decides to tease me a little. Playing with food not only riles me, but ensuing crumbs shed valuable calories from the given meal. And so, as my friend proceeds to tear into the naan with the intention of constructing a detailed map of Wales, my stomach growls and tells me that I’ve fallen some way short. Things go from bad to worse when I look across and find, to my horror and surprise, that the “Chef’s Challenger” is having no trouble with her epic feast. It’s all going wrong. Terribly wrong.

My subtle resistance is broken when the Wales naan is hung up for all to see on the metal naan rack which sits tantalisingly close to my jowels. I wait impatiently for all photo opportunities and naan-posing and laughter and hearty rumbles of post-meal satisfaction to pass before mercilessly grabbing the oven-baked “Land of My Fathers”, and guzzling it like a 4×4 with petrol.

As I rip through Cardigan Bay and the Gower Peninsula, I look up at my friends, me with a dual expression of guilt and accomplishment on my face, them with a collective frown of disappointment on theirs. I’m a mess. But with 2,500 calories down me, my conscience is hardly in the mood.

Tricks And Phones (May Break My Bones)

Due to a number of unfortunate circumstances, most of which I remain completely responsible for, my phone decided to “lose” its battery and “drop itself” onto the floor of a nightclub a few days back. Waking up the next morning, I made a mental note of things I needed to do in order to get my general life back on track:
1. Make toastie.
2. Decide that food really isn’t going to agree with me.
3. Clean remains of toastie off of self.
4. Buy a new phone.

Despite this not being the happiest mental list I’d ever created, I was determined to sort everyting out, and later that afternoon I had made it to number 4, which was easily the most daunting of them all. And so, ever-so-slightly hungover, I went into Phones4U, a terrifically horrendous instutution, and asked to be given the “hard sell”. Needless to say, my hangover took a turn for the worse.

I was greeted by a very strange-looking gentleman going by the name of Alistair, though I suspected almost immediately that this was the name forced upon him by the humans that found him crawling out of his spaceship in the middle of the night. The alien life form was clearly interested in my custom however, because he sat me down with “one of their executives”, who set to work on trying to destroy me with phone jargon:
“So I hear you’re looking for a contract phone. Well, let’s start off by finding out a little about your 213s and your Yoddi 377s. At first, we’ll try to figure out if you’ll be suitable for Wiffle A or Wiffle B, and then fasttrack you to our ERTIG 5968 service programme.”

I sat there in silence, numbers and abbreviations banging against my skull. It felt like some sort of Chinese water torture. I was literally waiting for them to bring out the pail of water and the handcuffs, which for all I knew, could well have been an integral part of their ERTIG 5968 programme. Still, I managed to pluck up enough courage to continue, and was eventually presented with a few handsets. Progress. Or so I thought.

Each time I picked up one of the phones and had a quick look at it, my lovely “executive” (who was clearly quite bored with my dithering and undecided manner, in that he was simultaneously playing Minesweeper and Medieval Total War 2 whilst keeping half an eye on me) would look up from his computer screen and say “Oh, yes, lovely phone. I’ve got three of those at home myself.” I was beginning to lose faith, and needed desperately to get home to my bed and bucket, so I picked a handset which looked neither appealing nor customer-friendly, and told him that I’d like to take it with me.

“Fantastic news”, he mumbled, in between grunts of disapproval at his army’s defeat at the hands of the Anglo-Saxon warriors. I could see the finish line. But oh, no. How very, very wrong I was. Emerging from his top drawer was a contract form, which was placed down in front of me. I was instructed to sign, “here, here, there, over there, under there, in between this and this, just across my left kneecap and on either one of my testicles.” The rational creature inside me – who hadn’t had a great time of it recently – perked up and urged me not to be a fool, and instead to read the form so that I’d know exactly what I was signing up for.

I obliged, and set to work on reading every last bullet point, and I can safely say now, with the benefit of hindsight, that the rational creature inside me will never speak up again. The form was ridiculous. Page 1, Section A, Paragraph D4T5, Area 15, Table MX, Line 13 read something like this:
“Your new handset, the RTOEJFNE3439458 (in Midnight Blue) is now the property of the State of Kryogovina, and with your signature at the bottom of Area 15, Table MX, you will be contractually obliged to submit both yourself and no less than thirteen members of your family for extensive military training, with the condition that you will serve at leat 394 years and 6 months defending the front line of the Kryogovina/Ghetobngngangwong border from armed rebels. As well as this, you will receive 500 free minutes and up to 3000 text messages per month.”

And so I signed.

The hard sell worked. I crumbled under the pressure of a very experienced salesman and a very persistant hangover. What can I say? I’m a failure. Please give me a call when I’m lying in a bunker fighting angry peasants in some foreign land. In fact, don’t worry about it; I’ll ring you. I’ve got the free minutes anyway.

The Break Up

I’m on my way home, sitting on a train that’s surprisingly well-populated – the buzz from the crowds causes me to increase the volume on my iPod ever so slightly, so to give Jack Johnson the courtesy of being heard. I’m halfway through Track 2 (on that yellow album he did ; the one which everyone liked – I’ll freely admit that I’m not that big a fan as to know the names of all the songs yet) when, travelling across the carriage and penetrating through my headphones, I hear a girl’s voice say knowingly “I’m sorry. I think it’s over.”

A break up.

My hand reaches for the click wheel inside my pocket, and I ever-so-subtly press the pause button. This conversation is definitely not worth missing out on. I look up to locate the fair maiden and her soon-to-be single prince, and can’t believe my good fortune when I realise that she is sat just two seats in front, facing me. I’m so close, I could have wiped the tears from her face. But no, Conor. Easy now. You’re passive, here. You’re just eavesdropping. Just let it happen. And so I continue to listen.

The guy’s obviously an idiot, and I’m sort of happy that he’s facing away from me, so that the only impression of him that I can muster is one purely based on what he is saying, and not on what I presume to be a scruffy, arrogant, and downright ridiculous frontal exterior. She’s trying to persuade him that this is for the best, but the bugger’s clearly not going down without a fight, because he keeps leaning forward and whispering sweet nothings in her ear, to which she responds by looking longingly into his eyes. The encounter reaches new levels of tension when the girl flicks her hair back and looks decidedly away, as if to give him the impression that she has no more talk left in her. This is brilliant. I’m a horrible person – and am fully aware of this fact during and after the event – but this is brilliant.

I suddenly realise that, in the midst of my listening in, I’ve lost control of where my eyes are directed, and am shocked to discover that I’ve been looking at the very two people that I’ve been eavesdropping upon. Fearing that my cover may well have been blown, I put on my “definitely not butting in on your private relationship-based verbal exchange” face, which also doubles as my “no-nonsense walking down the street” face. I’m not sure it’s working, and also have difficulty in finding a spot of wall to focus on. Looking at the window’s out of the question, because I’m in such a position that doing so only results in me looking at the girl’s reflection, meaning if she should glance over at the window as well, our lines of vision would inevitably collide, catching me red-handed (or red-eared, as the case may have been).

I eventually settle on the emergency notice poster near to the carriage door, which is a good decision because I can now switch expressions and use my “reading about train safety whilst listening to Jack Johnson” face. Ultimately, it’s perfect, and, feeling as though my guise has been reinstated, I concentrate fully upon the break up again.

A few minutes go by, and she’s really having trouble closing the deal. I lose precious seconds as the conductor comes over the tannoy announcing the next station stop, and when all is quiet again, I hear the guy changing tact. He’s now trying to get off the subject and tell her about his day, and to my surprise, mentions that he watched Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. He goes on to re-enact, word-perfectly, a scene from the film, a move which turns all of my preconceptions – and my world – upside down. He’s not a miscreant after all. He’s a Home Alone fan. And all of a sudden, she’s in my bad books.
Why is she dumping this wonderful student of classic film? Is she not a fan of Macaulay Culkin? Does she not appreciate comedy of the very highest standard? All of these questions whirl through my mind and make me angry to such an extent that I decide to take a short break, and actually read the poster I’ve been looking emptily at. A few minutes later – with a concise knowledge of the emergency exits the train has to offer – I come back to the break up, and to the bombshell, “I slept with someone else.”

My jaw drops.

She’s actually said it. There is silence in the carriage as I become aware that everyone else in the vicinity is also eavesdropping, with more than a couple of my fellow commuters stealing my “no-nonsense walking” face. One man looks like a professional, and I swear to myself that I see recording equipment underneath his newspaper. No matter. This is serious. Perhaps I should step in and do something? No, Conor, remember. You’re passive. Resist the temptation. It’s not about you.

And so I sit there and wait. And then, with bad timing of the first degree, the train comes to a halt. It’s my stop. I seriously consider staying on the train, with an utter disregard to my whereabouts, but rationally decide to get off. As I walk from the platform, I press the play button, letting Jack Johnson strum away into my ears and walk towards home, wishing to God that I lived in the next suburb.

Tea With Mussolini

One of the ironic things about my experience of travelling is that the harder I seem to escape the madness of home, the more madness I find myself surrounded by, a irony that creates, ironically enough, yet another irony; I’ve now learned to embrace the madness, and so no longer need to escape it. Call it a Catch 22 or a vicious circle (or whichever cliché happens to be the bestseller this summer), but I somewhat fear that I’ll recognise normality one of these days and be completely terrified by it.

In any case, even before my excursion (with family, it must be said: there was no backpack, no dorm bed and wine from bottle rather than cardboard box) to Italy, I was more than aware of the insane quantities of food Italians take a pride in cooking up, whilst keeping the ingredients under the singular term “meal.” I was also well informed about the eccentricities of English ex-pats, having encountered – in the wild and in captivity – them before. Thus, I realised that going for an Italian dinner served by a Sicilian and an English native would be, at the very least, interesting.

Our first course comprised of various antipasti served by ex-pat Stephen, who introduced himself by stumbling towards me at quite a scary pace before managing to stop in his tracks to explain to me “the four genders of Italy.” I thought it safe to simply smile, nod, turn back to my plate and stare at the cured meat in front of me, thinking horrible thoughts so as not to laugh and spurt wine all over him and my equally bemused relatives. The cured meat in question was, in fact, delicious. The second course followed, and as quickly as the soup had been served the conversation turned, somewhat inevitably, to politics. I tried to debate with Stephen the intricacies and shortfalls of the English and Italian governments, but it seemed that he had a one-track mind (and quite a narrow track at that), his opinions consisting of – to sum up rather than punish you with the unabridged version – “Mussolini good, democracy bad.” My soup bowl was empty at this stage, and the rest of my cursed family had pooled together and started a conversation of their own, so I was left with no other choice than to focus on my wine and pray for the kitchen bell. When he finally departed on waiter duties, I worried that he’d judged me based on my anti-Fascist upbringing, and scrutinised over which of the four genders he’d placed me into.

Next up for the third course – a pre-main – was an enormous mound of incredible pasta, accompanied by another bottle of white, which in itself was accompanied by a lecture on the environmental movement, which nearly, nearly, tipped me over the edge and down the mountainside. Stephen was sure that the British Green Party were attempting a political coup back home by dropping sacks of vipers and porcupines from helicopters into unsuspecting English towns and villages below. The scary thing was that he was deadly serious, and the really scary thing was that when he’d finished, I almost believed him. Since my return I’ve made the conscious decision to carry with me a pair of pliers and a snake bite kit whenever I leave the house.

Four and half hours later, we were onto the main course, and I could no longer count the bottles of wine we’d been through on one hand (partly because there appeared to be a constant supply and partly because I could hardly see my hands in front of me anymore). The entree consisted of a platter of lamb, sautéed potatoes and a vegetable side or four. It was just divine. My words to the chef, the delightful Roberta, were “food bellissimo.” I’ve always been one for languages.

It was approaching midnight, and I was particularly worried as there was a full moon out and I could have sworn Stephen’s hands had become a lot hairier in the last 20 minutes or so. He also started talking about the bidet, and how he didn’t understand why anyone would have need for toilet paper with an appliance such as this available on the free market. I was struggling through my watermelon dessert (the sixth course, for those of you who are keeping count) at the time, and did a fine job hiding my crippling laughter behind my horrendously sized slice. Unfortunately for me and most of my internal organs – liver very much included – Stephen and Roberta had decided the night wasn’t over yet, and presented us with our digestifs, home-brewed lemon grappa.

A short time after tenderly negotiating my drink and trying to explain to Stephen that back in England, socialists and other males were indeed grouped as one gender, we managed to get to the car to say our kind goodbyes. As we drove away from the house and into the night, I cast a glance back towards Stephen, who was howling against the moonlight and giving us the Fascist salute.

Riding The Rail

I’ve never really seen the appeal of long-distance train travel. Riding the rail, I figured, was a time-waster compared to the quick and easy method of flying from A to B (or whichever letter might be next on your itinerary). Trains were ugly, slow, frustratingly unreliable creatures, whilst planes were on-time, rapid, and downright handsome. Ah, but that was before Amtrak. I have now been enlightened to the truth; that train travel is awesome.

True, trains are still slow and frustratingly unreliable creatures, and to be honest, I still happen to think they’re pretty ugly things, but there’s so much more to rail travel than that. My love affair began in Los Angeles, and my infidelity carried me to Seattle, Chicago, and Boston, where I was officially ready to turn around and walk out on my marriage to the skies. Eloping with Amtrak was one of the best things I did on my travels. If only the Channel Tunnel guys could get their act together and make a train line under a proper stretch of water, like the Atlantic Ocean.

The great thing about riding Amtrak across the United States is that because it’s such an expansive land mass, travelling from big city to big city can take an exceptionally long time, which dramatically increases the chance of 1) a near-death experience, 2) an encounter with crazy hobos, and 3) a troublesome conversation with Border Police. Fortunately for me, I had all the time in the world, and probability proved itself to be right, as it always seems to do.

I’d been on the train for around 14 hours when I realised that I’d made the right decision. The train had come to a fairly quick stop (given that it was moving forwards at about 7 miles an hour at the time) at a small town in Montana, a state in which there are less than a million inhabitants, and a town in which none of those million seemed to be. After hearing the announcement that there would be a “designated smoke stop”, I had hopped off the train, not for purposes of lighting up, but to make a short phone call. Of course, given my track record for blindly putting myself into ridiculous situations, the train began to move (at a much faster pace than it’s entry into Ghost Town No. 312, Montana) away from the station while I was still chatting. What followed was a Western-style pursuit, which eventually ended up with me having to dive into one of the railcars with the aid of an extremely senile Amtrak employee, who seemed to find the whole event quite hilarious. I too, shared the laughs, though only when I had counted all of my limbs to make sure none of me had been left behind.

Safely back in my seat, another few hours passed before my subconsciousness began to itch for more close shaves. Not one to let my id go hungry, I wobbled over to the lounge car in search of social interation. It wasn’t long before I was involved in a poker game with some of the “characters” (to put it very, very mildly) of the train, including two middle-aged men who were, to my mind, in direct competition with each other as to who could drink the other under the table (or off the train). Also dealing cards and gambling matchsticks was a fairly young guy who was drinking a very strange concoction which he called “Locci”, but which looked suspiciously like marijuana and Sprite. I certainly wasn’t in the mood for it, whatever it was, and decided to keep my conversation to the more normal (or less insane) members of the group. It was absolutely terrific, and, as I bluffed my way to a lifetime’s supply of matches, I thought to myself, “This is so much better than flying.”

The final hours of the mammoth journey from West to East were interrupted by U.S Border Police, who quite rudely woke me up from my deep and dream-filled sleep, poking me on the shoulder and asking me which country I was from. Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but forming intelligent and truthful answers to important questions is not really my strongpoint when I’m in between sleep and awake. What I do know, however, is that they are not a patient bunch, and clearly one of them had reached the end of his governmental tether when I had trouble getting my words out:
“Sir, which country are you a citizen of?”
“Fleeby”.
“Sir, I won’t ask you again, which country…”
“Fleeby.”
Needless to say, awake Conor had to dig asleep Conor out of a pretty substantial hole.

And so my holiday romance came to an abrupt end – Boston was the last place I saw my beloved Amtrak, and we’ll probably be apart for a while. Sure, rail travel’s not like it used to be. There’s no jazz quartet playing away in the Dining Car anymore, and passengers don’t wear top hats and tails when they go for their evening meal. But I don’t care; I’m quite happy in my hoodie and jeans, watching the world go by, eating my microwaveable cheeseburger. Long live luxury.

Time Travel For Dummies

It would be a significant stretching of the truth (in that I’d be lying) to tell you that one of the main reasons I came travelling was to experience time travel, but, stepping out of Los Angeles International Airport some 7 hours before leaving Fiji, was quite exciting. Thanks to the wondrous workings of the International Date Line, I was given a second chance at May 8th. In my completely unworthy view, a miracle of sorts had occurred.

All this warping myself through time got me to thinking. And, as usual, given the increasingly-prominent evil corner of my mind working its way to the front of my everyday consciousness, most of my conclusions related to committing crimes and eluding capture. Technically, you could, let’s say, rob a bank in New Zealand, jump on a plane with the loot, arrive in L.A to inevitable questioning, only to be able to pull the time travel trick out of your criminalistic sleeve and say, quite truthfully, “But at 11pm on Tuesday I was right here in this room.” It is, in essence, the perfect alibi. Technically, you could shoot someone (now we’re hitting the big time) across the Date Line from a boat, and the bullet from your gun would hit your intended target on the day before you actually fired it. If anything else, it makes a good prison story.

Ah, how these are but technicalities. Sadly, it’s unlikely that these alibis would have any other effect than to amuse those questioning you before sending you to the cells. In all honesty, travelling across this imaginary line, scribbled from North to South in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, isn’t as amazing as it may seem. True, it is quite something that I got to witness the same sunset twice, and it’s certainly something that, whilst in Fiji, I was able to watch a Wednesday sunrise before those in Hollywood had watched the Tuesday sun disappear, but the confusion set on by jet-lag outweighs the advantages (“why the hell isn’t it tomorrow yet?“).

This being said, however, the intricacies of the time and date system throw up some practical and less sadistic uses. Phil Collins, bald drummer, used it to good effect when he performed at Live Aid in 1985 in both London and Philadelphia on the same night. Phileas Fogg, on his return to London after his quest to travel the world in 80 days, thought he had arrived one day late, thus losing the bet made with his friends, but had, in fact, arrived just on time, due to his gaining a day crossing the Pacific Ocean. And, perhaps most importantly of all, I managed to stay awake long enough to fully experience my first, and hopefully last, 46-hour day.

Here endeth the lesson on Time Travel for Dummies. I trust that you’ve learned something. Unless, of course, you’re reading this before it was written, in which case you’ve probably not learned very much at all.

Flying High And Flying Low

I’d always heard that New Zealand was the country in which you’re supposed to do things that you’d never do elsewhere, so with that mantra, and the immortal words of the indefatigable, legendary Ron Burgundy (“When in Rome…) in the back of my mind – where he always seems to be – I set about on the Stray bus stumbling around waiting for my opportunity to churn up some lovely adrenalin.

It took almost two weeks, but thanks to some healthy peer pressure from my fellow strays, and a 2 for 1 voucher which didn’t exactly slow down the decision, I found myself taking off in a small plane which I knew I wouldn’t be landing in. Sitting uncomfortably on the cold, hard floor of the aircraft, an almost complete stranger strapping himself to my back and adopting a position that I never thought I’d be part of (I could stoop lower and bombard you with double entendres, but I think I’ll take the higher ground – so to speak – and stick to the falling out of the plane part), to say I was nervous would be a huge understatement.

12,000 feet and a lot of deep breaths later, the door of the plane opened with a confidence-shattering creak, and the air rushed in to greet us. My tandem master, who had both worringly and reassuringly tightened the straps connecting us during the ascent, shuffled me to the edge, where I was instructed to look at the wing-camera and smile. Now, I’m not going to give you the website address where you can see the photo for yourselves, but I will tell you that my expression is somewhat a mixture of the woman from Psycho as she realises her fate, and the “before” guy on the constipation adverts. It goes without saying that it’s a pose that won’t be adorning the mantlepiece at home. Panic, however, was an emotion I was not, fortunately, given the chance to fully digest, as before I knew it, I had been thrown from the plane and was in the process of tumbling at horrendously high speeds towards the hard, hard ground below.

Despite the unavoidable fact about skydiving – that you’re hurtling at 200 km per hour towards an earth that, without the aid of a parachute, will flatten you like a pancake – fear isn’t something that goes through your mind at the time. After the initial barrell rolls, which only last for a few seconds, it’s an extremely peaceful experience. There’s no rollercoaster feeling. My stomach, to my surprise, stayed with me all the way down. This being said, though, incontrollable screaming and “wohooo“-ing is all part of it – I guess there’s something about flying through the air with a man on your back that just makes you want to let the whole rest of the world know what you’re doing. Skydiving’s a lot of fun, and I would definitely recommend doing it. Just make sure that you give yourself 3 to 4 months of adrenalin-free recovery time afterwards.

Just over a week later, I found myself standing on the edge of a platform 48m above the Lake Taupo river, with an elastic band wrapped around my feet, being told to “jump!”. I’ve never been one to listen to my own advice anyway.

Bungee jumping is about 78 times as scary as doing a skydive. The main reason for this is that you’re flying low (an issue encountered by many in a different way, I’m sure), which means that you see the ground coming towards you at a terrifying pace. Even though the speeds at which you’ll reach during a skydive are much higher, there’s no feeling of “yep, definitely going to die here” because the ground is so far away. Apocolyptic-related screaming: now that’s the sound you’ll make doing a bungee jump.

The other thing about doing a bungee that makes it a lot harder than rolling out of a moving plane, is that, you have a choice to make when you’re stood there. There’s an alternative way down, one that involves sturdy steps and not instant death. A battle ensues between body and mind; the former urging itself over the ledge, and the latter urging itself away from it. It’s a tug-o-war for the ages. Fortunately for me, my mind often decides to switch off without prior notice, so I was able to jump from the platform whilst keeping my brain in the dark. If my brain had been functioning that week, I have a feeling I would have chickened out.

So there I was, flying towards the Taupo River, with a bungee cord and trail of urine following shortly afterwards. OK, that’s not true. But let me tell you, it was a bloody close call. Flying low, and lower, and lower, I realised during the descent (and numerous ascents, such is the nature of bungeeing) that my nerves had all been for nothing. “This is a heck of a lot of fun” I thought, along with “Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”. My brain, it seems, had woken up about halfway down.

So I’m now a self-classified adrenalin junkie. It’s the funnest addiction to have. When the men in white coats come and tell me to go to rehab, I’ll be sure to tell them “No, no, no.”

Snoring The Ocean Blue

I’ve never really thought of myself as being the sailing type. I don’t know my port from my starboard, or my goosewing sail from my main sail, and I’m pretty sure that if I was given the responsibility of tying a reef knot, most if not all of the vessel I and the helpless souls travelling with me were sailing on would end up submerged in the big deep. I don’t even have the hat. However, in the vain of throwing caution to the wind – which seems to be a recurring feature of my trip – I joined 24 other nautical novices on board Habibi, a mighty fine sailing boat, on a trip around the Whitsunday Islands off the Queensland coast. And, me hearties, what a weird and wonderful trip it turned out to be.

Upon first viewing of the Habibi boat, my impressions and concerns were based on the fact that it looked as if it could fit 6, possibly 7, slim and underfed backpackers, and here, stood in front of us, was a man going by the name of Skip (original, being a skipper and all) organising sleeping arrangmenets for 25 of us. I was half-expecting him to say “right, ok, Conor. You’ll be sleeping directly on top of Pierre over there, and make sure you don’t roll over in the night because Julia will be balancing on your chest.” Clearly, I thought, I would have to get to know the rest of the group very quickly indeed. As it turned out, however, Habibi was deceptively roomy, and by the time we had set off and dumped our stuff below deck, the 25 of us lounged around up top and felt like we had whole oceans of room to ourselves. Three hours of sailing and a good amount of casked wine later, and I actually would have been fairly happy to be squeezed in between any two of the rest of the group (Julia and Pierre included).

The actual sailing proper began on the morning of the second day, when I was rudely – I thought, anyway – awoken by the violenty rocky movements of the boat. Once I was up on deck, I noticed that we were travelling through what I saw to be weather comparable to that which sunk George Clooney and his pals in “A Perfect Storm”, but what Skip regarded as very mild indeed. Clearly he had had more experience of seafaring than I had, because after seeing the towering waves and what they were doing to our boat, the colour had drained from my face and I was staring at the floor trying desperately to drift off into a much calmer world in which I was stood on extremely solid, non-moving ground. Fortunately for me and most of my internal organs, we weathered the storm (take that Clooney) and we all got a chance, in the afternoon, to witness some absolutely stunning scenery, the pinnacle of which was a sunset to die for. There’s really something about watching the sea lap in front of a sky scorched deep orange by a sun melting into the horizon that makes you sit back and realise there’s nowhere else you’d rather be. It was as close to perfection as I thought nature could muster.

Needless to say, perfection – or generally anything close to it – is a temporary experience, and I was treated to the very opposite end of the scale that night, when I was kept very much awake by my worthy room-mate, an otherwise agreeable German guy named Tomas. The thing about Tomas, poor thing (actually no, not poor thing; I refuse to give him any comfort or sympathy for his ‘issue’) was that he had a slight – and by slight I mean enormous – tendency to snore. Now, snoring’s a tender subject, I know; it’s the sort of problem that you can have without even knowing it, meaning that if you are a victim of a violent snorer (and believe me, it’s a fate worse than most), it’s very possible that you’ll only be getting a taste of your own medicine. Even so, I’m pretty sure that my lungs and general vocal capacity are unable of creating a snoring pattern of such volume, pitch, and texture as Tomas. It was like listening to a humpback whale crying for it’s mother. It was like someone trying to start a Formula One racing car with a megaphone being held next to the engine. It was as if a group of bears had gathered on the boat and were fighting over which one of us to take home for an afternoon snack. As you have probably gathered, the sound of Tomas’s snoring kept me awake long enough to note down many a simile to accurately describe the performance. It was so excrutiating that I would have happily volunteered myself to hop off the boat with the bears to become their dish of the day.

All snoring aside, the actual sailing went off almost without a hitch, and I have to say the highlight, if I were to choose one, would be the snorkelling. Wearing a full body stinger suit is gratifying enough – it’s one of the few opportunities to be completely clothed in rubber without fearing inclusion into a sadomasochistic cult – but seeing the Great Barrier Reef in front of your gazing eyes is quite something else. Without even diving deep into the abyss, I was able to see coral of outstanding beauty, and shoals of fish with more colour and character than anything I have ever seen before. When one of the group spotted a reef shark, we all experienced that unbeatable dual feeling of adrenalin rushing through your body, and your bowels turning swiftly to jelly, at the same time.

By the end of the trip, I, and the rest of the group, were happy to report that we’d all had a fantastic voyage. Skip had revealed his true identity (as a result of an intensely fun last night which also included a game called “top swap”, which I’d rather not expand on), we had seen some of the greatest coral reef in the world, and we’d even learned some new boating terms. I’m still not a sailor, but if anyone ever asks me to “luff up”, I’ll know to head for the main sail instead of dropping my shorts.