2 years later...Im now living and working in New Zealand

Ok so its been 2 years since i updated this travel blog - hopefully that says something positive about me (like 'i have a life' lol) rather than 'im a lazy git whos not good about keeping things up to date'. And to be honest, i think ive managed to cram quite a bit into the last 2 years, including a bit of travelling, which i have conciously decided to include as part of my life ie i intend to go travelling for 3 months every year (around June/July/August), partly to avoid NZ's cold winters but thats another story in itself.

A story that started over 2 1/2 years ago when I first went to New Zealand and culminated last October when I got my Residents Permit/Visa, which allows me to stay and work in the land of the long white cloud for as long as I like. Which is handy, since i have no intention of going back to the uk to live (only to visit friends and try and encourage them to travel too, lol). So since NZ's winter months coincide with UK's summer, my plan is to go to visit friends in teh uk for a few weeks every summer and spend the rest of the 3 month period in Thailand, and also hopefully fit in one new country every year - Cambodia was the plan for this year, but finances have not gone as smoothly as i would have liked, so we'll see what happens with that.

A year and a day later...

So, what have i been upto over the last year and a day? Well its a very long list, so im gonna break it up into monthly chunks...but for a quick summary, ive spent about 10months in Khao Lak, Thailand, building houses for people who lost them in the 2004 tsunami, ive spent about 2months in England refitting my friends kitchen and ive just spent the last month in New Zealand doing more building work! So this entry is still a work in progress, but here goes with the list of months...

February 07 - New Zealand
Ive been staying in Kumeu (just north of Auckland), doing building work in exchange for free food/accommodation. I found this place using the helpx.net site, which i recommend for anyone wanting to see the 'real' nz and experience life with a local nz family/host. The guys im staying with are having their house renovated (the kitchen/dining room/lounge are being made into one open-plan area), and ive been working with their dutch builder most days. Occassionally ive also been to help the builder with a few of his other jobs, which all adds onto my existing building experience. While ive been here, ive also been on a few outing with my nz hosts - off-roading in a land rover, visiting a steam railway and tractor show and horse-riding, and ive also been into auckland city a few times and gone for some scenic drives.

All in all its been a great helpx experience, and i hope to do some more during my time here in NZ. Ive got about 4 more months left here, im going to be going back to Khao Lak, Thailand around the middle of June, to carry on with the building of Nam Khem 2, then im off to visit some friends in england for a couple of weeks, then back to The 'Nam until its all finished, sometime around Nov 07.

January 07 - Thailand
This was my last month in khao lak working at nam khem, but also my 1 year anniversary of having arrived in khao lak and started working at the nam. Also my birthday, apparantly im 27 this month/year, but it sure doesnt feel like it, altho im still not sure exactly what age i do feel, as 'age' is starting to lose any concrete meaning for me...

It was also Viki's birthday this month, and she also left Khao Lak/Nam Khem, after working here for18month...she had several leaving parties, including one at the nam khem 1 village. Viki was the project manager for the NK1 housing project (which was completed in Nov06) and is also a personal friend of mine.

December 06 - Thailand
Xmas day and Memorlal Day in Khao Lak. Penang visa run with mates.

November 06 - Thailand
Nam Khem 1 project finished, big on-site party on 8Nov with 'Job 2 Do' a famous thai reggae band, playing live.

Nam Khem 2 housing project started on M13Nov with Stefan as our new project manager.

October 06 - Thailand
Working at NK1, attending thai festivals with locals.

September 06 - Thailand, Malaysia
Back to work at Nam Khem 1. A weeks holiday in Kuala Lumpur and the Cameroon Highlands, Malaysia.

August 06 - England, Thailand
Finally, the day of my return to Thailand arrived - 24 August 2006! It was strange to be back, but good to see how everything has changed and progressed in my absence. I even ended up doing some office IT work, in addition to working on site at The 'Nam.

June/July/August 06 - England
I stayed with one of my mates from uni who had bought his first house in Cheltenham about 18 months ago (we used to share a house together when we were at Portsmouth Uni during 2001-3). I helped him with diy on his house while he was out at work during the day, and every Tuesday night we made the 4hour return journey to a small village in the New Forest for the 'local' pub quiz with all his mates. I ended up refitting most of his kitchen (including the installation of a double-glazed kitchen window) and painting the bathroom and hallway. He was getting the house ready for selling, so we wanted to totally revamp the old kitchen, which was about 20 years old.

So we riped all the units out, including the old cooker, sink unit and vinyl flooring, and laid a tiled floor, built and installed all new base cabinets, a sink unit with new drainer and mixer taps, a built-in electric oven with gas hob, and new worktops, wall tiles and wall cupboards, as well as relocating the washing-machine, enclosing the boiler and fridge-freezer in matching cupboards, and building a small breakfast bar. Painting the bathroom was relatively straightforward by comparion!

We had a surprisingly warm summer, which was good, cos id got used to Thai temperatures and was really missing the hot and humid thai weather. I even managed to teach myself the Thai alphabet (well, the 44 constonants anyway, there are still 33 vowels to learn!), ie the english and thai names of the thai characters, what sound they make and how to draw them.

May 06 - Thailand
Again, mostly working at NK1, prior to my first departure from Khao Lak, to go back to england and visit a few friends.

April 06 - Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia
This month was mostly spent working at Nam Khem 1, with a week in Malaysia and a week in Indonesia.

March 06 - Thailand
I finally sold my uk house on 15th March, and finally had some money to live off and continue my travels, so i also donated some money to the TVC (the Thai-based NGO Im working with) for use on the Nam Khem building project. The rest of the month was spent working onsite, mostly tiling if i remember rightly.

'Nam Update

Ok so I havent exactly kept my blog up to speed with my activities here in Thailand, but would u really wanna spend every evening in a net cafe uploading pics & writing words, even if u have a slight perchant for computers...?? Ive guess Ive been here (Khao Lak) long enought to become a 'lil bit complacent about that, Ive actually been here 6weeks already, and mostly doing similar stuff as when I first arrived ie building houses.

However, the highlight of this week (for me, at least) was being the first farang to tile the first house in our construction village of Nam Khem. I tiled my own kitchen and bathroom back home in the uk, so it was kinda pleasing to be able to use similar skills to help the locals over here. Having said that, its been much harder, since we have limited tools over here (due to financial limitations) and the quality of some tools leave a little to be desired at times, lol! But despite all this, we have been making progress, and Im about half-way thru the tiling - there are some pics on my flickr site here, but not any tiling pics yet! Actually the preparation for the tiling (ie levelling the kitchen worksurface) took a lot longer than the tiling itself.

Other good signs of progress at the village - the week before last the first roof went up on the first house...theres a local thai guy whos a welder and hes been perched on the walls of his house welding the steel joists together in the blazing sun, with very little in the way of 'safety precautions', but such is the way over here...they dont exactly have a concept of 'health & safety', and they mostly just want to get the job done. Theres no tiles or anything else on the roof atm, but last week 2 more houses got their steel structure roofs, so our little village is looking more like a village of houses than a neatly arranged pile of bricks!

The other kool thing is that we (the volunteers) are working on one house just by ourselves (normally we work with the thai family members who own the house we are working on) since the owner is unable to work physically. The other week we spent a whole day screeding (levelling) the floor with the help of some local thais, and now we are building the walls using breezeblocks, which due to their larger size, means that the walls are going up at a terrific pace, so the house looks nearly finished already!

6 weeks seems a long time to have been here, and Im sure I shoudl have more to talk about than work, lol (back home in the uk, i used to be bit of a workaholic, lol). We only work on projects 5 days a week here, so I get the weekends to myself, which is kool. Last wknd was a bit of a lazy relaxing one, I just stayed here in Khao Lak and went to visit a couple of the local waterfalls with a friend, ate good food inthe local restaurants and went out to a couple of bars etc.

The wknd before that, I had to do a visa-run to Myanmar (formerly Burma) - when u enter Thailand as a tourist u only get a 30day tourist visa, so u need to go to a border, get a 'leaving Thailand' visa stamp, go into the neighbouring country and get an 'entry' stamp, and then return to Thailand to get your next 'entry' stamp valid for 30 days. Anyways, last time I went on a visa run to Malaysia, so this time I thought Id go to Myanmar with a friend, stay over night there and come back the next day. It seems liked a good plan...catch the public bus from Khao Lak to Ranong (3hours north), go to Thai Immigration to get the leaving stamp, go to the pier and hop on a longtail boat to take us across the water to Kawthong, the nearest Myanmar town, get an entry stamp there, stay overnight and checkout the town and then get the boat back to Ranong and get our 30 days entry visa from Thai Immigration. Well. What can I say. It all went smoothly til we got back to the Thai Immigration office in Ranong after spending the night in Burma. It turns out the Burmese officials had stamped our passports as having left the previous day, and didnt advise that we needed a further leaving stamp for the day on whcih we actually left the country. The Thai Immigraiton officials, however, were more fussy, saying we _had_ to have a leaving stamp that correllated to the day we actually left Burma...so they said we had to go back, spend another night (as the immigration office would be closed by then) and then get a leaving stamp in the morning before returning to Thailand...until we did that we would technically be illegal immigrants in Thailand, and would be liable to be arrested by the police if they stopped us and checked our passport for any reason. So we decided to do things their way, and ended up spending another night in Burma, but it all worked out ok, cos we got the required leaving stamp and finally got the 30day Thailand visa, yaay! [I hope that makes sense, lol, I will write about what we actually did in Burma another time - the highlight of the trip was hangin out with loads of local kids in this monastry, and visiting a temple with huge statues and 3D murials and lots of sitting Buddahs]

Im in Nam!

Thats Nam Khem to be precise, a small town settlement in southern Thailand, near Khoa Lak. Actually its more like reclaimed swamp land, on which we (tsunamivolunteer.net) are building some houses with the local Thai villagers. So its a bit of a work in progress, we've got about 30 houses in various stages of having the walls bricked up, one house whose foundation have just been laid, various holes for septic tanks and a blazing hot sun that beats down on us relentlessly (theres no shade for the wicked!).

I realise Ive not updated this for a while, so heres a little background on what Ive been upto. After my visa run, I returned to Thailand, and spent a few days on Phi Phi before heading north up to Khoa Lak - its about a 2hour bus drive north of Phuket. Im here because I saw an advert for tsunamivolulnteer.net aka The Tsunami Volunteer Center. They are running a number of projects here in Khoa Lak and the surrounding area, best to check their website for an indepth guide, but Im on the Nam Khem house-building project; theres also another construction project called Tap Tawaan, where they are putting 'kitchen extensions' onto existing homes; theres a longtail boat-building project at Cape Pakarang; a furniture workshop cleverly called Thaikea (that Thai+Ikea) and theres several school teaching projects here too. All in all, the (mostly) farang volunteers here are doing a damn good job of rebuilding the local community and empowering the local Thai people to sustain themselves in the future.

More later, that was just a quick update. Must upload some pics too :)

Georgetown, Penang

I arrived in Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia, this afternoon, having lost an hour crossing the border due to time zones. Its really strange, but I always feel like Ive come back home whenever I enter Malaysia, its just really cool here. The only time I was ever homesick, like in my life ever, was the first time I left Malaysia to go back to the UK, way back in '97....I really must find some way of staying here and getting a proper job, that would be so cool.

Anywyas, this afternoon I got my hair cut, nowt fancy, just a bit shorter all round; this Malaysian hairdresser must have spent like an hour washing/cutting/drying my hair, all for the princely sum of RM19 (<>

Im staying at the same cheap little guesthouse that I stayed in last time (back in Sept 05), and it was really kool when I walked in and the owner recognised me and so did another staff member :)
Which reminds me, I really must make a note of transportation that I use, guesthouses that I stay at and good places to eat - it would be handy to be able to find out how much bus X to town Y costs and how long it takes etc, cos its really hard to remember, plus everyone always tries to charge farangs (=foreigners) more, so it would be good to make a note of actual real prices once I find them out.

Went to see a film this evenning, The Garden State, was surprisingly good considering I knew nowt about it before; actually Ive seen quite a few good films lately, including The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and The Butterfly effect [more later].

Thailand > Malaysia Visa Run

Ok, so I kinda havent updated my blog for like a month, but I been busy chillin! Anyways, Im here now, altho not for long, cos Ive just started my visa run - today Ive come from Khoa Lak in Thailand to Phuket, Im off to Hat Yai (also in Thailand) by bus in 1hour, then Im gonna cross the border into Malaysia at Padang Besar, and spent a couple of days at Penang, before heading back up to Khao Lak again (altho I might also visit Phi Phi island on the way back up).

Ive spent the last 3 weeks on Phi Phi, doing a bit of voluntary work and showing some of the local Thais how to do things with their computers. I also spent Xmas and New Year at Phi Phi, which was really kool, will try and back-fill in some details later on.

Im currently in a very funky net cafe in Phuket (funky cos its got leather comfy chairs, black glass tables with frosted glass screen so everyone gets a bit of privacy and nice lighting), having just wandered round the local market that I chanced upon as I was walking down this street to see where it lead. I was debating whether I should get my hair cut at the hairdressers next door, altho not sure if they would understand me enuff for it to work out ok, seeing as my Thai is rather poor, and not many people speak English, but then again its only 200baht (3GBP) so I cant really complain... I wanted to grow my hair so I could have it braided, but Ive been told its still not long enought (it hangs about 2inches down my neck at the back, if that makes any sense).

Selamat Datang ke Kuala Lumpur!

Ok, I finally managed to get away, yes that right, this morning (Fri 16 Dec 8am Malay time) I arrived at KL airport and am currently sorting out transport up north to Thailand. I really cant believe I made it, the last few days have been totally mental and well busy and rather sleep-deprived too. Ive had over 3 days with no sleep (Mon-Weds this wk). then the 12hour flight where I didnt really sleep much and Ive now lost 8hours of potential sleep (due to time differences)! So I have a few errands to run in town, book my transport and then get some serious kip in!
I did finally mange to do 99% of the diy and pack everything away into boxs for the storage/removal men to come round and collect next week, so the house is looking rather empty, but I feel so much better for finally having finished 99% of everything - over the months I seem to have developed a habit of starting lots of stuff and not exactly finishing it! I have a separate diy blog where I can bore u to tears about all the work Ive done on my pad, but thats for another time, lol. Im just glad I managed to escape the UK and get to spend Xmas in Thailand, yayyyy.