"I´m headed back to Bs As. I do believe I have had enough"

Had enough of boozing that is... so, it makes the most sense to try and detox in one of the party capitals of the world, no?

No. Probably not.

I´ve spent the last week in the company of two fine fellows. A Geordie called Dick (who works in Peru) and a chap from the west country called Mike (whose name can be seen on the credits of such films as Harry Potter 5, Alien vs Predator and another few films whose names I will probably only rememebr when drunk) . Much fun has been had in and around the cities of Mendoza and Cordoba. This has included a paraglide flight (I can see why my esteemed amigo, Tom Moreton, is so hooked), a wine tour on bikes (they don´t mix too well... or too well perhaps), and, well, a lot of hangovers and as many hairs of dogs that bit me (in my head I think).

You see, those two drink like bloody monsters. To explain their approach to the booze i think its suffice to say that three of us met as we were getting som breakfast at about 10.30am - Mike and Dick both ended up having a fat steak and a bottle of fine wine. Oh, and a couple of cups of coffee...with cognac.

I´ve been fairly reserved with my imbibing and am pleased with my ability to say ´No´to a morning cerveza or a mid afternoon 5 litre bottle of vino. However, despite this the past week has been a drunken blur my liver is threatening to walk out on me. Therefore, I´m glugging down a litre of naranja and boarding a bus back to the fine city where all this fun began.

I´ll get things upto speed on this hear blog asap.

ARGGGHHH!!!

My ipod has only gone and knackered itself requiring me to "reset" the settings.This means that I have to lose all the music and videos on there...

Breath in through the nose...

"I´m too much with myself, I want to be someone else" - Lemonheads, Drug Buddy

So, this travelling lark is great fun and I´ve met some very interesting people along the way with a handful of irritating types thrown in for balance. Travelling alone it´s very interesting to see and experience how groups form and how you can quickly form bonds and friendship with folk that vanish as quick as they come. Bee-tsar.


I must confess I haven´t always tried as hard as I might to chinwag with other folk. However, this trip has once again proved my belief that often times it doesn´t really matter what you´re doing or where you´re doing it, it´s the people you meet and the interactions you have that make an experience.


Anyway - the point of this posting is that I have met a lot of people and when you meet these new people there is a standard list of questions that you MUST ask and answer before you can progess and have a conversation. These include:
- name
- where you´re from
- what you do when you´re where you´re from
- how long you are a) here for b) away from home for
- where you have come from
- where you will go to


Anyway - i´m tiring a little bit of my spiel and i have even got to the point where i can´t be arsed trying to say it differently to make it interesting for me. As such, I would like your help in inventing a persona that I might use when I´m bored.


If you have the time and inclination please shove your suggestions down in the comments on this posting and in a week or so I´ll create a poll (like the example in the Right Hand Column) and you the public can vote on who i become. The winner will get a southamerican themed prize.

Look Ma, I´m at the bottom of the World!

I spoke to a German chap who said that he didn´t like Ushuaia as it reminded him of Austria. Miserable git. Last time I looked Austria was landlocked and didn´t have the meeting point of two mighty oceans just below it:

I on the otherhand very much liked the ´Most Southerly City In The World´and, truth be told, wish i had spent more than my 4 nights there. Living in London its not everyday that you can walk along the street and look up and see snow capped mountains.

I stayed at a Hostel called Yakush which was very nice indeed and there were some good people there and also two people who were a bit freaky. One was an english chap in his early 50s who was the spitting image of Little Britain character Denver Mills (can´t find a photo anywhere) and the other a strange young german full of fantastical stories and a bizarre know-it-all attitude. You´ll have to take my word for it that they were weird... the only evidence i can offer is that they had both been staying in the hostel for about 6 weeks and while travelling independent of each other they had seemingly not paid to eat as they simply took turns to get up early and raid the kitchen and fridge for food that had become "free for all". (in fact, their plan cocked up one day as the kraut had mistakenly/ deliberalty drunk the very special Polish Beer that Denver had bought).

I also met a lot of people who were either going to Antartica, had come back from Antartica, we´re trying to get a deal to Antartica or we´re due to goto Antartica but their boat, the EXPLORER, had sunk a few weeks before. The tales I heard, the books i read and the photos i saw all point to the fact that Antartica would be an amazing place to visit and i toyed with the idea of blowing a cool two grand on a weeks cruise. However, I figured i would have to cut short my trip significanlty which might equate having to be in a place of work again so figured that perhaps it´s one for the future.

Instead of Antartica, Marcello from Napoli and I headed out for a sail boat trip on the Beagle Channel which was as brilliant as it was wet and windy. I also walked up the hill / mountain behind the city and was humbled by the view over Ushuaia, the beagle channel and down onto Chile.

Over a beer in the ´Most Southerly Irish Bar in the World´ (across the street - due south - was unsurpisingly another Irish Bar), Marcello and I swapped tales and discussed what we where doing next. He was headed to Bs As and I was, as advised by Darren Low, headed north, but where? Having never really been sure if I´m the outdoor type it made sense to put it to the test in some style and follow Marcellos advice to head to Chiles very own Parque Nacional Torres del Paine for a 4 day walk full of wind, rain and pain(e).

Munich and The Dashwood

The week before I came away on my little jaunt Team Beeches had a weekend away break in the fine city of Munchen where we played a show. It was a fun weekend apart from the fact that like an idiot I left my Ipod (that i had spent over 6 months filling up with my favourite tunes) on the BA plane out there...


Nevertheless, we had a fine old time. The gig went.... well. Yes - It went well. We all enjoyed it anyway. As is our way, we made a few mistakes but managed to gloss over them and i think the crowd left thinking it was deliberate anyway. The best thing about the night was that we got our first ever rider: they gave us free beer and free food - a trend that I hope catches on in English venues.


Our hosts - Clem and Tini - were smashing and showed us around town. We saw lots of cool things - including a very ace scale model of the solar system at the musuem - and we got drunk in some cool bars where it was very weird to see people smoking (the smoking ban only started on Jan 1st this year).


We spent most of energy that weekend searching the city for some Appel Strudel for Tom. The look of pure joy on his face when he finally, and unexpectedly, tucked into a slice at the airport before our flight back would have made Popes weep and will live with me for a long time.


Sadly, I seem to have lost the photographs of the weekend while I was transferring the pictures to CD. I´m gutted as there were some classic snaps on there such as: the aformentioned "Drooling drummer grins over steaming apple pudding", "Folically challenged drummer and guitarist show off their slaps underneath the sign for ´baldstrasse´", "Look Lucy! a green a roof!" and "Me and a german midget girl share a smile and a post show pilsner".


This talk of lost pictures reminds me of the greatest lost photograph of all time - The Dashwood. Mr Ian Clark and myself were celebrating finding a twenty pound note at Reading Music festival in the late 90´s by slurrping some warm lager and talking in American accents when we bumped into DC Mike Dashwood (from televisions cop series The Bill) who was leaving the dance tent. Through a simple blend of conversation and lies we convinced him we were americans and that we were big fans of his show. The elation of his spreading fame was clear in his eyes (or at least his pupils were very wide) and he eagerly agreed to have a photo taken with us. Now, I´m not sure if it was Karma balancing out the discovery of the twenty squid, a vengeful god who - being a fan of the Bill - punished us for mocking the dashing dashwood, or simply that we were drunk as lords, but the bag containing the camera was stolen/misplaced and the greatest picture ever taken was for ever lost.

I like to imagine that the bastard thief who stole the bag developed the film and has "The Dashwood" pinned up on the corkboard in his / her kitchen and has a little chuckle in the morning while making (and hopefully choking on) their cornflakes.

Red Postcarded

Yes - my main man from the Holloway Tyre Service is correct, I am taking my sweet time about this blogging lark and currently over a month behind in letting you know where i am (Pucon, Chile) and what i´m doing (being hungover after getting drunk with a chap from Derby who is cycling from Alaska to Ushuaia)... as such i will try and blitz you through a few weeks in an effort to get you upto speed... but first...

Journey To Ushuaia

I was booked to leave P. Madryn on an Andesmar bus bound for Rio Gallegos (16hrs) where I would have 2.5hrs to sit around for my bus to Ushuaia - the ´Southern Most City In The World´(tm) (12hrs).

It didn´t start off too well as my bus was two hours late into P. Madryn. Things got worse as I didn´t even get a number on my card during the Bingo game on board the bus, they showed the Will Smith vehicle "The Pursuit of Happyness" twice (Awful) and we somehow clocked up another 40 minutes of delay - meaning I missed the connecting bus by 10 mins.

I wandered around a bit dazed and confused trying to figure out if I could litigate against Andesmar, and happened across a Swedish girl, two Slovakians and an Israeli who were in the same pickle. There were no more buses that day, the only flight was in Business Class and costed a fortune and so we had to accept that we were due to spend the night in this bland and windy town. We booked ourselves on a flight with the Argentine Airforce (LADE) the next afternoon and did what seemed like the only sensible thing to do when stuck in a crap town - get drunk in an irish bar. (Again, no irish people, but the people were friendly and they played some good old indie classics which warmed my belly).

The next day the wind howled around outside and nearly blew me off my feet as I walked out to get facturas (delicious sweet croissants) and orange juice. When I returned the slovakian girl asked the very short owner of this surreal little hostel if she thought the flight would be delayed or cancelled due to the wind. The tiny woman gave a big belly laugh and declared, with a wagging finger in the air, that "this is not wind!".

We made our way to the very modern airport - perhaps the nicest thing about Rio Gallegos - with every tree and lamp post looking like it might be uprooted and sent flying into the air. While we waited for the flight I taught the others how to play the card game sh1thead. The Slovaks told me that in their culture it was considered very lucky to get a bird poo on your head... this might explain whey they were not so upset at losing the three games we played.

The time came and we boarded the plane. It was old and rickety and I thought the wind we experienced just sitting on the tarmac might be enough to tear the wings from the plane. However, my prayers to every known god were answered and we took off without problem. The views of Tierra Del Fuego were almost as amazing as the monk outfits the LADE stewardesses were wearing... 50 minutes later we landed in the cold and snow of Ushuaia airport.