This one time I went beyond the M25.
It was absolutely awful. Some of the natives could barely even spell cappuccino, let alone make one.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Fri 19 Apr 2013, 10:34, 8 replies)

Drugs and borders. Oh my.
On a trip to Paris with a group of about 10 people, we went from London on the Eurostar.

Jolly japes were had. One night, having enjoyed a medium rare slice of horse, sold as bouef, my friend Tim leans over and says 'You want to do some coke? Meet you in the bog'.

I looked slightly startled at him. 'Where the fuck did you get coke from?' I asked.

'Brought it in my sock', he replied.

'You fucking idiot. You went through customs with cocaine down your sock? Do you realise how much shit you'd have caused if you'd got caught?'

'Yeah, fair point. Sorry'. He said.

'Get rid of it, you twat, we're going home tomorrow'.

'Yeah, OK.'

So next day we're all on the Eurostar heading for London. Having a beer and chatting amongst ourselves, Tim leans over and says . . .

Yup.

Frogmarched to bog, I stood over him like a cross headmaster while he flushed it away.
(username failed moderation, Fri 19 Apr 2013, 9:11, 9 replies)

I went to Guatemala in 2009
and we stayed at Lago de Atitlán at a very pleasant resort called Iguana Perdida. But the trip was primarily a business trip, as the missus had to pay a home visit to a guy in San Marcos, up close to the Mexican border.

The trip was a long one. We started out by boat across the lake, where we picked up a taxi to take us to the bus station. From there we took a microbus with nice seats and air conditioning to another town, where we hired a motorized rickshaw to get us to another place for a bus.

It turned out to be a chicken bus (Google for that) driven by a guy with pinpoint pupils and a need for speed. Most of the road was paved, but in some areas it got down to dirt. We went through mountains around hairpin turns at about 120 kph, looking down into a 200 meter drop, and at least once the bus went up on two wheels.

Funny, but no driving or riding I've done since then has frightened me.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Fri 19 Apr 2013, 8:59, 1 reply)

Getting thoroughly searched coming into New Zealand
After god knows how many hours in the air (enough to watch the LOTR trilogy, at any rate) it was a tortuously long way from the plane to the open air where I could enjoy a cigarette. However, fate had decided to throw one more obstacle in our path. As we later learned, they had caught a number of young couples attempting to smuggle coke into NZ and myself and the (then) missus must have exactly fitted the bill, especially as I appeared to be in a bit of a hurry due to my nicotine jones. So while the rest of the passengers from our plane were waved through customs, we were diverted along another channel, where we found our bags waiting for us.

I've done a fair bit of travelling and I've had my bags searched a lot, but this guy was friendly and as he explained the situation we got chatting. When he found out my missus was a Kiwi, he said "Fuck! Shit, I'm not supposed to swear! Shit! Er, bother! Why didn't you go through the Kiwi line?" I said I was English, and he said that was fine as partners of New Zealanders count as Kiwis in that situation, even if they don't have a New Zealand passport. Anyway, then he got kind of excited about how his kit worked explaining that he was going to swab our bags for drugs and explosives, just like on CSI. And then he looked at us and said: "You guys smoke weed, don't you?"

We stopped. The missus looked at me. I looked back at him, trying not to give anything away while my mind did 360° flips over what to tell him. On the one hand, he seemed like a genuinely nice guy who had just sworn repeatedly in front of us when he wasn't supposed to, on the other hand he was a customs officer in an airport who was asking me if I took drugs. I'd have to be a complete idiot to answer yes.

"Yes," I said. "We smoke weed."

"Ah, fair enough," he replied, putting one of his swab tests back in his bag. "I'll just test for coke and explosives then." Then he gave me a wink. "You'd be an idiot to bring anything to the North Island anyway, we've got the best weed in the world here."

We were later severely reprimanded by another, much less friendly customs officer who had discovered an undeclared tin of shortbread in my girlfriend's backpack. I love New Zealand.
( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Fri 19 Apr 2013, 8:47, 6 replies)

My first time entering the United Arab Emirates
I had been told that they were somewhat draconian about searching luggage for forbidden items, such as porn and sex toys. I had heard stories of women having their bags pulled open and vibrators confiscated by officials, so I was curious to watch the process. Did they pull open everyone's bags to look for naughty pictures and phallic shapes?

No. They put them through a scanner, and the guy running the machine never looked up from his smart phone.

I wonder exactly how they supposedly caught all these people?
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Fri 19 Apr 2013, 8:46, 1 reply)

I went to France once. Some kid burnt my neck. I didn't like it.

( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Fri 19 Apr 2013, 8:11, 10 replies)

You gotta love Indonesia...
On my way home from the Netherlands after a few weeks away training on some new manufacturing machinery, the Air Garuda flight made a few unscheduled stops. Instead of Schiphol - Den Pasar - Sydney, it was the Schiphol - Singapore - Djakarta - Den Pasar - Sydney route.

At Djakarta, we had to pass through security again for some reason. Just as at Schiphol, the metal plates on the side of my hiking boots and my belt buckle made the metal detector go off. Not just go off - mind you - an alarm sounded off, continuously, that made it seem made as if I had been hiding a large firearm somewhere on my person.

A tiny official looking man in a dark grey uniform and cap, with more gold and medals than a South American dictator, breath like a rhino's arsehole and built like a 5'3" Schwarzeneggar with Santa Claus' gut came toward me, but didn't utter a word. Not that anyone could hear anything with the metal detector's alarm drowing out everything.

He grabbed my arm in a vicelike grip and threw me (5'10", 85 kg) at a glass wall, face first. As I hit the wall, the reverberating boom of my impact made everyone stop and stare. Perhaps they wondered "Who was this bloke getting all this attention? " and maybe "can I have some too?"

Two of his cronies with assault weapons raised the guns at me as shorty gave me the most thorough pat-down, frisk and grope I have ever had in my life!

Bastard!

He didn't even buy me dinner...
(EffinNitWit asks his tobacco where his whisky is, Fri 19 Apr 2013, 3:58, 3 replies)

Watch who you cross the border with
In 2002 I found myself living in a backpacker hostel in the tiny kingdom of Swaziland with a mad rasta. Let's call him Jamal. Jamal was a crusty bastard with dreadlocks down to his waist, a dark Caribbean-emigrant complexion and the broadest cockney accent you've heard this side of Brixton, for that was where he was from. To say he "ran" the hostel would be doing his laissez faire attitude a disservice. It was more that he did nothing to stop people staying, and if they occasionally gave him beer money he gratefully spent it.

When the beer money was in short supply his backup vice was weed. Living in a country where decent weed literally pops up out of the ground meant that it was a very reasonably priced habit to have. He knew everyone who grew the herb within an easy stumble of the hostel and, when they had all run out (or got annoyed with him coming round sponging freebies) he would totter off to the park to score a matchbox for E10 (under a quid back then). The hostel was awash with the stuff and had cemented a legendary reputation which, ten years after its closure, still lives on in the memories of backpackers passing through the area. But I digress.

Jamal, somehow, had at some point got his shit together enough to acquire a Land Rover, which sat permanently in the driveway "waiting for parts". One day he announced that the parts - piston rings if I recall - had arrived in Johannesburg and that I was going to drive him there to collect them.

"I'm not driving a 700km round trip just for piston rings."

"Well obviously we're also going out on the razz, innit. I've got some cash off a deal I done in town and it's time we hit the big city lights, geezer!"

He had a point. Mbabane had pretty much no form of casual entertainment beyond drinking large bottles of local lager in dingy pubs with cages over the bar to discourage more enthusiastic patrons from serving themselves. Even the lone cinema had closed some years previously and I couldn't remember the last time I'd held a bowling ball. If Jamal did actually have some cash it might be a good way to get a cut-price weekend away.

"Alright, but you're buying the first tank of fuel this time, you slippery bastard."

We agreed we'd leave at lunchtime on Friday. One of the guests overheard our conversation and asked if she could hitch a lift, and I agreed. Kerry was a bubbly Californian girl who had just got back from researching the Lonely Planet guide to Namibia. As an aside, this sounds cushy as hell. Her budget was US$65 a day which was a fortune at the time and all she had to do every few days was make a tour of a random selection of hotels and ask to see the rooms so she could conjure up a credible sounding review. The rest of the time was "causal research" which basically meant doing whatever the hell she wanted and writing about it. Top travel tip there, I'm telling you.

Friday was hot, as usual, and my un-airconditioned Golf wheezed up to the border through a dry, dusty haze. We stopped to get our passports stamped and were delayed ten minutes while the immigration official interrogated Kerry about her tongue piercing.

"HOW! How do you eat?" she asked, goggling at Kerry's mouth as if she'd seen the shape of Jesus in her epiglottis.

"I put food in my mouth," she said mysteriously. "And I chew."

That revelation dispensed with we piled back into the little car and drove through South African customs. And that's where things came unstuck. After six months of living with the guy I'd forgotten what Jamal looked like to the uninitiated. Dreadlocked, wearing a stained t-shirt with a beer logo on it, tucking into his fifth can of said beer rather than putting on his seatbelt and loudly proclaiming, "well THESE cants are clearly going to give us uphill, look at that big fucker, his wife clearly got out of the wrong bed this morning" and so on didn't make him the least conspicuous person with whom to be driving through a border. Even less so when you're leaving... a country... that's famous for growing... ...oh shit.

I literally, don't laugh, hadn't thought about this. Was Jamal crazy enough to try and bring some stash for the journey? Definitely. Was he enough of a bastard to put me at risk by doing so in my car? Well, thought I; I suppose we'll find out. And find out we did as the enormous guard waved us over to the inspection area.

And here's the thing about southern Africa. It's all a big laugh - weed's a quid, everyone knows someone who grows it, the papers pad out any vaguely related story with patriotic asides about "tourists who flock to the kingdom of Swazi Gold" - but actually, in actual, real fact, it's completely illegal. And when you've got an African police force subsidized by American money with a specific remit to enforce marijuana prohibition, they don't mess around. You can find yourself in gaol in a heartbeat and African gaol is not somewhere for a skinny white Brit to find himself if he values, well, any kind of bodily integrity. I started, figuratively, to shit in my pants.

"Where are you going?" the guy barked while making a show of re-inspecting my passport.

"Johannesburg."

"Open the bonnet."

I complied, and his mate radioed in the chassis number to check it wasn't stolen.

"You, get out," he said to me. "Show me the boot. And you," he stabbed at the others with a large finger, "you don't move." He walked round to the back of the car with an imperious and haughty look on his face. I'm onto you, his face said. I'm going to take great pleasure in watching you get bummed in the holding cells.

I knew the only way to proceed was to comply fully and not wind the bastard up but at the same time I had convinced myself that Jamal had brought a cheeky bud along somewhere in the car and was physically trembling. Jamal was smoking a fag and grinning like a loon.

"Go on mate, sort him out; I ain't got all day to sit at the border."

Did I mention I hate Jamal?

The boot had three bags. Mine, I knew, had nothing of any consequence in it and the guard rifled through a pair of jeans and some shampoo without a word. Next was Jamal's bag. Now I figured he wasn't dumb enough to have something significant in his bag but at the same time there was every chance he'd have a pipe, or some loose tinfoil or some bloody thing which would then make them search the car and that would definitely turn up whatever it was the dozy gimp had secreted in some painfully obvious hiding place.

The guard rooted through various items of unlaundered underwear with a look of mild distaste while I held my breath and tried to look casual.

He found nothing to upset him.

Oh, thank everything holy, I thought. And now only Kerry's bag - just a few bras and last year's Lonely Planet and OH MY JESUS GOD WHAT IS THAT???

The guard's meaty hands had stopped dead. Under a couple of layers of neatly packed clothing he'd found a small cuboid object, about six by four inches and brilliant white. It was clearly some kind of substance which had been roughly shaped and shrink-wrapped in clear plastic. My heart dropped through my ribcage and landed on my balls. In a single moment I knew that we weren't going bowling in Rosebank that evening; no, instead we were the ones that were going to have fingers shoved up us before being tossed down a corridor. I mean, Kerry? The sweet young American who'd told me my shirt looked cool? Kerry? The girl who wouldn't even try a joint the night before because she didn't want to fail her annual drugs test a month later? Oh, yeah, nice one pineapplecharm, really smooth; now we know the truth, you dumb mug. God, you think you know someone...

The guard slowly, agonisingly, savouring-the-momently, lifted the white package just high enough to reveal the label. "Tampax".

He physically recoiled, hands first and then his entire body in one massive snapping movement as if he'd spotted a snake. "Shit!" exclaimed the man who, half a second ago, had been the very picture of African machismo. Then he slammed the boot. "Okay! You go now! Go!"

So in the end I did come dangerously close to literally shitting in my pants, only it was from laughter. The sweet, sweet, relieved laughter of a man spared anal gang rape by a tampon.
( pineapplecharm D d M Y, H:i, Fri 19 Apr 2013, 1:59, 5 replies)

Drug smuggling into Heathrow.
In 1996 I went to the UK with my mum to see my grandparents - it was kinda like a last hurrah as Grandad was already showing signs of Alzheimers.
At the time I was working in a large industrial kitchen with people from all over the world - Poles, Singaporean, Chinese, Vietnamese and Burmese.
One of the Burmese ladies, Cathay was a love lass - her and I constantly flirted (despite her son being barely 2 years younger than me). Anyhoo, Cathay and I got on like an exploding fertiliser plant.
Once she heard that I was headed overseas for a few weeks she sidled up to me and asked me coquettishly if I would do her a big favour. Of course I would.
She asked me to take a care package of "Burmese goods" that weren't available in the UK to her sister who lived just outside London. Too easy - there can't be that many Burmese people in London with Cathay's sisters name and London isn't really that big now is it?
Part of Cathay's care package consisted of some tamarind paste which easily looks like hash, some sort of pickled fig thing which I imagine greatly resembles street grade homebake heroin and some mushrooms which I can vouch I swear were blue meanies.

As we disembark the plane my mum's chastising me for being prepared to do this for someone else (full of the giving spirit was my mummy). I saunter up to the red gate having filled out my form holding the plastic bag full of goodies. The customs monkey waves at the bag (and I see with hindsight now my backpack as well) and asks if I packed it myself. "No" I reply refering to my Burmese Drug Bag. He then completely ignores said bag and asks me to start unpacking my backpack. Backpack you say...

By the time he's dug out the spare cigs and 4" lock-knife I had hidden in the boots at the very bottom I'm starting to wonder about what's going on here. He's laid out in front of me - my can of lighter fluid, spare flints in a film container and a couple of decent knives. "This was your carry on?" he asks. "It's my only luggage." says I, proudly thinking how efficiently I had packed. "Apart from this." - I wave Burmese Drugs at him. Which he ignores. He gives me a stern telling off for carrying these things onto a plane, tells me he could confiscate them but lets me keep 'em anyway and assists me to repack my bag then sends me finally on my way with a warning not to take any of that stuff onto a plane on the way back.

So after settling into the OAP's I make Like Dick Whittington and off to London I go. With drug bag in tow. I stayed with friends, one of whom expressed amazement that only I could be relied on to be found waiting for them in a park after they finished work getting drunk and stoned with a bunch of strange Irish people.
I eventually found Cathay's sister, she was younger and just as pretty as Cathay but didn't offer to share any Burmese drugs with me.

Length - Grandad carked it in 1998, so about 2 years from when he was diagnosed to when he died.
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Fri 19 Apr 2013, 1:17, Reply)

I went to Australia for a few weeks holiday
and never came back - been 8 years now, it's a terrific place!

tl;dr I'm an immigrant
( ferret -> twitter.com/syfyautocorrect <-, Fri 19 Apr 2013, 1:12, 4 replies)

ça va

(woocfot friends with Sacha Distel, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 23:14, 1 reply)

At the end of a month-long business trip to Ukraine.....
...The three of us (two company directors and me) were celebrating our successes in a small restaurant in the bustling metropolis* of Melitopol, together with our translator, Oleg. We'd hired him as he spoke fluent English, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Russian and German. he was a dignified elderly gentleman who seemed to command respect and even deference in every native we met.
As the vodka flowed and many toasts were made, we got into the yarn-spinning and self-congratulation that always happens in the company of good friends. Oleg spoke up.
'I'd like to do my party piece'. We sat and waited politely for a song or one of those interminable Russian poems, but Oleg had different plans. Turning to my boss he said 'Donald, you are lowland Scots, you went to a public school where they tried to change your accent, you've lived for a long time in London but your basic accent comes through'. We clapped - he'd got it exactly right! Turning to the technical director he said 'Paul, you are a north London boy born and bred, I'd say Enfield?'. we were stunned, once again he was spot-on! He faced me. '***, you are a Midlander, not as far south as Northampton, not as far east as Leicester, definitely not a brummie - I'd say you're from Coventry - but at least one of your parents was Welsh'.
We were shocked - he was, once again, spookily correct!
We laughed and clapped and asked him how the hell he could have worked it out? I mean, we'd only seen him in work time, we'd not engaged in idle chit-chat so how could he know.
'It was once my business to know, sort of my job' He explained.
We got really sober, really quickly when he went on 'I was a colonel in the KGB, I taught accents to our operatives in the sixties and seventies'.
No wonder the locals were so deferential.

TL;DR - we hired an ex-spy as a translator.

*It's a run-down shithole BTW.
(Captain Placid 24/7 ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 22:46, 5 replies)

Diarrhoea in Siberia
That is all.
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 22:08, 14 replies)

Mother of Satan
Oh dear, oh dear.

I'm known for failing security on multiple occasions.
I've done the "forgotten to remove scissors" trick. I've done the "over the acceptable volume of fluid" thing. Nothing beats my brush with a more significant problem:

We were off to Swtizerland. Skiing, in fact. A normal, white (ish), Uk resident and his son. I'd decided to take the laptop (oh the days before the Kindle/ipad etc etc). I was asked to take the laptop out of my bag at the security point and it was inspected, swabbed and put to one side. I quietly said to my son something along the lines of, "Its only a problem if they start looking a bit 'funny' at us".

one minute later, the machine spits out some results and Lo! they start looking a 'bit funny' at us.

It had tested positive for TATP....

There were many questions.
There was paperwork.
The laptop was confiscated until our return.

Foreign travel is now a bit more complicated than it was. Its especially fun on leaving the country we have just visited. Most recently the Egyptian border police were more than slightly interested in my passport.

length - about 4 years...
(gearanach #wankwankwank, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 21:50, 3 replies)

Nigeria
I was sent to Nigeria to carry out fault finding on equipment that takes water straight out the ground and makes it safe to drink and then distributes it to the rooms in a very posh hotel.

It was not a straightforward arrangement:

The hotel hired a UK company run by Nigerians who themselves were UK residents, who's only service was that of a middle man, sourcing UK contractors to carry out work for Nigerian customers.

I had a single meeting with said middle man. The plan was to fly out on my own and meet him at the airport in Lagos, and he would escort me to the job.

So I gets on my plane at Heathrow and then 5 hours later i'm in Lagos airport.

Baggage found and customs checks done I found myself in the departure lounge. On my own. I went outside... F U C K

As a 22 yr old(at the time) I had never been abroad alone and had NEVER been to another country on business and had only seen tourist-y sights.

Stood at the door was a man with a rifle. I assume that the military provide security for the airports. I stayed close to him. I have no shame admitting I was scared shitless.

Locals were coming up to me:

local1: 'Do you need a taxi?'

Me: 'No thankyou, my friend is coming'

Local2: do you need to use my phone?'

Me: 'No thankyou, my friend is coming'

Local3: 'Do you need any money changing?'

Me: 'No thankyou, my friend is coming'

I was ready to resort to my all-purpose backup plan; start crying, ring my mum and get the first flight back to the UK.

After 30 minutes he did arrive and the rest went OK.

Oh and I saw my first dead body. Apparently in Nigeria if you run somebody over and they survive you can go to prison. If they are dead then you get no further bother.
(Frample Tromwibbler climbs an obstacle like old people fuck, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 21:00, 2 replies)

I went to Britain once.
Seemed a bit tatty.
( Dr Preference AjcuiVd289, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 20:53, 1 reply)

if you ever want to set up an international drug/gun running cartel,
do it via Klaipeda in Lithuania. I arrived from Tallinn via Riga and was expecting oh, I don't know, customs or a passport check or something.

Nothing of the sort. It was as if we'd all got off a bus on the outskirts of some provincial town centre.

by the way, I never told you this...
( janet aylia y'all motherfuckers need jesus, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 20:21, 2 replies)

The Noble New Zealand Pigeon
It's the small things that matter most in foreign travel. The things that are almost familiar, but not quite.

Roaming through the big museum in Auckland, NZ, I came across a nice exhibit festooned with sepia-toned prints and dedicated to the New Zealand Pigeon, the world's largest pigeon. It was the first time I had ever seen the adjective "noble" applied to a pigeon, but, after all, it was no ordinary pigeon, but the world's largest!

A week later, I was walking with several people on a path in Paparoa National Park when, lo and behold, there was the noble New Zealand Pigeon in its natural habitat! It looked miserable. It might be in its homeland but it didn't look at home.

This Westland rain forest looked kind-of scruffy, like a second-growth rather than an old-growth forest, with a very dense understory absolutely jam-packed with twigs and trunks and ferns and who-knows what else. There was simply no room here for a large bird at all. The pigeon panicked at our approach, and began battering itself against the unforgiving vegetation. We tiptoed past to save it from injury.

So, I picture the imprisoned New Zealand Pigeon patiently waiting out the decades until the trees grow taller, kill off some of the undergrowth, and restore a measure of nobility to its crowded life.
(Perv With A Dog had his eyes pecked out by scrub jays on, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 20:13, 1 reply)

I got off the boat.
You should NEVER get off the boat.
( stuj (^(^;;^)^) GO TEAM SPIDERS!(^(^;;^)^), Thu 18 Apr 2013, 19:53, 3 replies)

China
As part of a "Cultural Exchange" a group of Head Teachers were invited on a trip to Zhuhai, near Macau, and then on to attend a conference in Beijing. I got lucky because someone was ill and I was available, last minute (ish - I still needed a visa). Chance of a lifetime, and one I wasn't going to pass up. I was partnered with the No.1 Primary School in Zhuhai, and boy, it was!

Schools are ranked, with the brightest children going to the best school. Teachers from all over the city came to watch these paragons of excellence deliver an Authority pre-prepared powerpoint presentation with a headset mike and lightsabre, err pointer. The teacher never moved from the front of the room, there were 55 to a class, all of whom spoke English. Yep, every one wanted to say "hello" and "thank you". The Primary school of 2,500 children (that's not a typo) all exercised at 3pm. In lines. In the school yard. One line skipped, one line waved a table tennis bat. Then they swapped. For an hour. I have to say it was a very disturbing sight.

The school bought a brand new car to drive me around the city. It was driven by the Party Official, who is the No.2 in the school, ensuring that all lessons toe the party line. We were accompanied everywhere. When we came down to breakfast, our interpreters were there (one each). We never went anywhere unaccompanied, they even stood outside the loo! When we finally hit the hotel, our cars, drivers and interpreters dropped us off. On the one night we escaped for a game of snooker with one of the interpreters we were followed, very obviously. It didn't stop us getting hammered though.

Socialist State? I don't think so. Average price of the flats around "my" school was a million. Pounds. The Head lived in a large, luxurious subsidised high rise apartment. The authorities flew her son back from Beijing for one night to meet me! The stereo in the flat was out of this world, yet the abject poverty in the city was very evident wherever you looked.

One child one family? Nope. If you're rich, you just pay the fine. There were quite a few children with siblings at the school. There are "rules" whereby a family may have more than one child, but here it was just another rule to keep the proletariat under control.

The purpose of our visit, as we eventually discovered, was to pick our brains regarding educating thinkers and leaders, there's plenty of workers, but very little initiative. Everyone knew their places.I saw one little boy, obviously autistic, struggling during the exercise class. When I enquired I was simply told "he won't be with us for much longer. It was a mistake".

Highlight? Being able to become a Hero of China, by walking six forts on the Great Wall. Being from Lincolnshire, we opted for the steep, rather than the flat bit of the Wall, as we don't see much in the way of rises out here. Sitting up on the Wall, alone, was a bit of a moment. I just sat and reflected. Well, that and the fact that I was totally knackered walking up massive gradients in 35 degree heat. And even though we were allowed "Free Time" on the Wall, we were followed.

So after all that, would I go back? Yep, like a shot. The tour's arranged for the autumn.

td/lr: Went to China, its just like Conservative England. With noodles.
( The Lone Groover has mal des nuts., Thu 18 Apr 2013, 19:34, 4 replies)

Since they retired
My parents, who'd always been your typical British package holiday tourists, jetting off to the Costa Del Sol once a year, have become serious world travellers. I envy them a bit, but enjoy the reviews from my Dad.

The Pyramids: 'Not actually as big as I expected'
The Acropolis: 'Shabby'
Beijing: 'You could get better Chinese food from a takeaway. Nice people though. Almost impossible to get a pint in an actual bar.'
Amsterdam: 'I liked it, but your mum kept having to wash her hair because it smelt of cannabis. The prostitutes in the red light district all looked a bit ropy. Your mum thought so too. Not like Bangkok...'
Eastern Europe: 'Great beer. Awful food. Like something my grandma would have cooked in the 50s.'
San Francisco: 'In hindsight, I probably should have shaved my moustache off before venturing to the local bars alone.'
Thailand: 'Wonderful! Full of Australians though. If you think about that, and add in London, it makes you wonder if there are actually any bloody Australians left in Australia.'
Rome: 'Eight Euros a pint. Eight Euros! Fantastic though. The Vatican's amazing. Very imposing. Makes you realise where Dan Brown was coming from.'
Edinburgh: 'We parked the car, opened the door, and your mum was going to step out, but there was a human turd on the pavement! I could tell it was human because it still had a bit of toilet paper stuck to it. We had a look around the castle and everything, but that experience certainly took the shine off.'
Mexico: 'A hellhole. Like something out of a sci fi film where there's been a nuclear war and everything's gone to pot. We got back onto the coach to California as soon as we could.'
Mauritius: 'The best holiday I've ever had. A beautiful place and lovely people. Eat the hottest food I've ever experienced. About half of them are homosexual, at a guess.'

He was right about Rome and Eastern Europe, though. I've yet to see the pyramids or the Acropolis.
(SnowyTheWereRabbit the Leporid from Hell, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 19:29, 7 replies)

Most of the spastics here don't even leave their homes, let alone the country.

( Fucking hell Jeff I am not a robot, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 19:28, 4 replies)

haha, like anyone still reads this

(King Zog of Albania lives in Kensington, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 19:23, 1 reply)

FIRST

(King Zog of Albania lives in Kensington, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 19:23, Reply)

I've been abroad.

( Dr. Shambolic je suis charlie, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 19:19, 8 replies)

Fifth!

( 2 Can Chunder Word to your mums, I came to prod bums, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 19:07, Reply)

Fourth
Or fifth, sixth or seventh!
( The Lone Groover has mal des nuts., Thu 18 Apr 2013, 19:02, Reply)

3rd
(jono_h, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 18:51, Reply)

So, you like, want to see my holiday photos?

( Fork Has lost his bash virginity!, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 17:49, 1 reply)

First!

( Turquoise Hexagon Sun has just dropped acid on, Thu 18 Apr 2013, 17:46, Reply)