By Drew (Woody) Wendeborn

Drew is one of the two Texans joined the whole taxi trip for a short while. Here's his take on a cab ride through the Western USA

I was shaking like an epileptic when I was introduced to Johno and Matt, amped up on caffeine from all the coffee I had imbibed that day, driving 16 hours from Wyoming to Portland, Oregon. Even though my job entails long hours of driving, I had just decided to take it on the road again for my 10 days off, this time in a beat up old taxi.

The two Brits had wandered out, dazed, at 2am from a local Portland music venue, the Goodfoot Lounge with my buddy from Texas. Jon Anders, whom I grew up with in the Lone Star state, had driven with these two guys up from San Francisco that day. After the typical introductions we ambled back to my small apartment where piles of clothes and backpacks were strewn amongst inflatable mattresses and a futon. The whole lot crashed hard, but I was still jittery and awake in my bed wondering what I had just signed up for.

The next day I spent being a terrible tour guide of Portland. If you've never been, it's probably the quirkiest place in America and I'm still just scratching the surface. I'll just let Johno's description stand for now. Yes, we actually went to a party for a dog.

Before, I start in on our drive down the west coast I'd first like to make a comment about Jon's American taxi. It looks great on the outside, but it's actually just a rats nest of wires and sun-cracked vinyl on the inside. It's already seen over 140,000 miles as a police squad car, and then as a legitimate taxi before now being flogged across the U.S.A. We tried to sort out most of the preventative maintenance before leaving town but in the end, we departed running on faith and bald tires.

Our drive down the coast of Oregon was, well, typically Oregon in the sense that it was raining and cold. The trek was made more enjoyable on account of the broken heater motor, complete lack of speakers, and an annoying intermittent beeping coming from the dash we'd yet to figure out. Nevertheless, we made good time to San Francisco and the boys from overseas got a taste of In-N-Out Burger and went to a hardware/ gun store along the way.

 After crashing on the kitchen floor of a generous San Franciscan, Sahill, our group split up with Johno, Paul, Leigh and Jon taking off for interviews while Matt and I played tourist. After renting cruiser bikes, pedaling across the Golden Gate bridge and having lunch in Sausalito, Matt and I scraped up what shreds were left of our masculinity and went to a pub.

“So you're telling me, that you give girls plastic beads and they get naked?!” asked Matt incredulously, “Yeah, pretty much. It works better in New Orleans though.” “That's brilliant!”

It was Mardi Gras in San Francisco, which pretty much meant it wasTuesday. We took 2 cabs and went to 3 parts of town, but it seemed that we had missed all the Fat Tuesday festivities. As I was lying, half-drunk on the gritty, carpeted floor of the shared hotel room, I felt exceedingly glad to be able to tag along with this eclectic group of travelers.(edit: Not the Irish kind, I soon learned there's a distinction.)

 Sunrise came all too soon and the group was split up again with Matt and I headed to Alcatraz and the rest off for a photo shoot. Growing up in the U.S., seeing Alcatraz for the first time was overwhelming. I remember watching Clint Eastwood get thrown in the “hole” in Escape from Alcatraz as a kid and now seeing it in person and imagining what it was like for the men who actually endured it was surreal.

San Francsico left our rear view mirrors with the long, winding, stretch of Hwy 1 in front of us. Big Sur  at sunset made for some stunning photos. It was along Hwy 1 that we picked up some unusual companions. Standing near a road sign, a portly, bearded and bespectacled guy held out the universal hitchhiking symbol. Johno's heartstrings were tugged and we pulled off to the side of the road. We would have had plenty of room for one extra person but then we noticed a huddled mass of blankets stirring nearby, from which appeared a tall, dreadlocked twenty-something guy and a shorter dark haired girl. Apparently, we couldn't say no, so the party of three (and their dog) clambered into the now fully loaded vehicles.

I don't want to be judgmental but being crammed into the back seat of a London taxi with a guy who hasn't showered in months is not especially pleasant. This group of former Occupy Eureka protesters had taken to the road toward Slab City, a drifter encampment in the SoCal desert. Our particular passenger didn't even care to ask why he was picked up in a sponsored, London taxi in the middle of California. After a few empty discussions on life perspectives, we dropped off the rag tag group in Santa Barbara and went on our way.

Now, I was not in a fraternity during college so I don't have much to go on, but UCSB has some of the best stereotypical frat parties I've ever seen. Once you get over the significant lack of household cleanliness, and have a couple or fourteen light beers in you they're not so bad. It's really just a bunch of guys with arbitrary rules trying to out do other groups of guys with similar arbitrary rules. I think a majority of world history could be described in the same way.

Venice Beach, LA

From UCSB we made our way south to LA. Sara, a Los Angeles native graciously showed us around and arranged some floorspace for us to sleep. It happened that we ended up at a quirky club in Santa Monica which actually reminded me a great deal of Portland.  A rock duo was playing when we arrived, complete with bow tie, horn rimmed glasses and sequin shoes. In the background on multiple screens, some sort of oddball vintage movie was showing. I was certainly not cool enough to be there, but I had a great time and met some really nice people.

Hollywood, was our first objective the next day. Unfortunately it was the day of the Academy awards so a proper tour of the Walk of Fame was not possible. We settled for some photos in front of the Hollywood sign, which didn't even look real after seeing it so often in films. Some sort of miscommunication happened afterward and the London and New York cabs headed North and East respectively.

Hollywood!

Vegas bound! The two taxis, after getting separated, headed toward our night's destination, Death Valley. We made it as far as the Alabama Hills where the London taxi crew got a motel and the New York taxi drove out into the desert for a night under the stars. Awaking the next morning, we were surprised to find we were surrounded on all sides by beautiful snow-dusted peaks.

Death Valley-bound

“It's a little suspicious to be driving a taxi without license plates through the Nevada desert. Where are you headed?” said the Sheriff. “New York.” I told him, straight faced. The sheriff’s face explained instantly, how dodgy this scenario looked from the outside. After radioing in all the license, insurance, and registration information the officer finally let us go when his intimidating ex-military lieutenant  showed up and claimed he had heard about It's on the Meter on t.v. (Maybe he gets Univision?)

From the Alabama Hills we kept rolling Eastbound toward Death Valley, stopping outside Panamint Springs to wait for a low pass F-18 flyby that had been arranged. Due to Air Force red tape and incoming weather, we ended up just standing around getting sandblasted on the valley floor. To quote a certain RAF pilot, “Bloody American Air Force.”

Since it wasn't strange enough to see two taxis driving through Death Valley, God went full ironic and made it rain in one of the driest places in the U.S. Climbing over the range on the East side of the valley, we made our way to a nondescript location in Nevada to meet up with Jeff from the Las Vegas Ferrari club. I rode shotgun in his yellow Lotus Esprit for the drive to the strip.

Then we went to Las Vegas. Nothing happened.

[Johno: Vegas - we met our host (in his Lotus) at one of the most famous legal brothels - to quote the ex-pornstar JR Carrington who worked there - "...so for that you get unlimited champagne, lobster, steak and sex..."]

On my flight back to Portland, I was thinking back to all of the places we had been. It was a whirlwind tour of the West Coast and while it was over for me, it was just beginning for the rest of the crew. We had quite a few good laughs, in particular about the differences between British and American culture. “Taking the piss out of” someone, I learned, does not involve a catheter. “Happy as Larry” has no direct translation and I still don't know who Larry is. Also, Americans, we've been pronouncing tomato, basil, and patronizing wrong, especially patronizing. 

Heart Attack Grill where Leigh ate off his hangover

Cheers!

By Johno

“I’m afraid that Hefenweissen is a Premium Bottle and so isn’t available on our Happy Hour prices” the waitress solemnly told Matt.
He mustered up his hammiest English accent, “Well, can you pour it into a glass for me and give me it on Happy Hour?”
“Ummm…”  she stood there, lip quivering, “…yeah, okay”. She was powerless against his accent, “there’s a… substantial price difference” she mused, “but I’ll… figure it out”.
And that was my first experience of the power of a charming British accent.

We have now been in the USA for three weeks and supposed to have covered most of the West Coast, popped into Mexico, fixed up the car and smashed the technology blogs of Silicon Valley. However, the Customs and Quarantine service, the Mortal Enemies  of Overlanders everywhere, once more intervened to destroy our best laid plans.

Hannah the taxi actually arrived in the country almost a full month ago and the team (already anticipating port and customs delays after our Australia experience) touched down a week later. After a very expensive two weeks of constantly nagging the shipping agents and being told that we would be charged $100 storage fee per day for the privilege of not being allowed our car plus “around a fifteen hundred bucks” for the customs inspection itself we finally managed to get the car released from Oakland port and start working towards our goal of fixing the cab up after the 32,000 mile trek from London to Sydney and starting the long drive over to New York.

The only benefit of these agonising and costly delays was that we actually managed to have a decent look around the city of San Francisco, home to hills, trams, homeless people and of course, the Golden Gate bridge.

To be frank my first impression of San Francisco wasn’t great. This may have been mainly because we were staying in a dodgy neighbourhood and because I decided to take a walk on my own down a see a small punk-gig in the famed Bay Area punk scene. As I walked through the dim streets to the venue, snatching glances at the map on my phone, I actually felt amongst the most unsafe of anywhere on the trip so far.

But the following day my notions were reversed as I walked down to the huge Golden Gate Park and out to the ocean. On the way I took a rest at the top of one of wildly steep hills and a friendly old lady saw the map in my hand and asked me where I was heading.

“Out to the ocean?” she remarked, “okay, where’s your car at?”
“Um, I don’t have a car, I was just going to walk there”
“Walk!?” she scoffed, “Okay, if you go down here three blocks,” she said, pointing back where I just came from, “there’s a bus stop, you need to take the Number Five westbound”
“Okay… thanks, have a nice day now!” I said, pretending to tie my shoelaces until she was around the corner before finishing my epic trek down through the sprawling park and down to the beautiful Pacific Ocean.

The coastline walk provided stunning views of the famous bridge and the equally infamous island prison of Alcatraz that we had taken a boat over to for a look around the previous day. The chilly cells were a world away from on the sunny wooded slopes overlooking the bay and assertions that we could, “easily swim to the city!” were quickly withdrawn once we saw the frigid water and swift currents up close.     

Once the car was finally freed we headed south of the city to a great British Classic Car garage called On the Road Again Classics where they have an impressive collection of vintage sports cars and a full complement of knowledgeable, skilled and friendly mechanics. These guys really helped us out and over the next week or so we replaced the gearbox (or as they call it, the ‘tranny’), changed the brakes, rebuilt the whole steering rack, fixed the fuel leak, recarpeted the interior, replaced the blown front speakers and of course gave Hannah her new exterior facelift along with a whole host of other minor repairs and refits.

We also were saved from sleeping on the hard, cold concrete floor of the workshop for a few nights by awesome mechanic Dane and his great family Evelyn, Tommy, Shawny, Cadance and the others (sorry, I’m not too great with names) who took us into their home, cooked us dinner and let us sleep in on their sofas on more than one occasion throughout the week.
Bill, Tom, Dwayne, Dane and all the other guys at On the Road Again have totally sorted us out and I genuinely don’t know how we’d be fit to make the coast to coast drive without their great help and warm hospitality. So long, and thanks for all the pizzas, guys.

With the car ready to go the team had a weekend to kill before a number of press appointments in San Francisco so we decided to split up for a few days. Paul and Leigh drove over to Lake Tahoe for a cheeky spot of snowboarding whilst I joined Jon for a drive up to Portland, Oregon along with another long term taxi tag-along Matt (the guy who travelled with us through China and Asia and invited himself along for the USA).

For those not up to speed with the story, Jon is a Texan who we met whilst in Pakistan last year. He wanted to join us for the USA leg of the trip, but we told him he could only join if he bought a new York yellow taxi… so he did! ‘Skinny Margarita’, as she’s now called is an ex-cop-car turned typical American Yellow Cab.
Jon has an old childhood friend called Drew living up in Portland we took the drive to pick him up to join us for some of the drive across America…

But in the meantime we spent President’s Day weekend in the unusual city of Portland. This place is far and away the hipster capital of anywhere we have visited. The city is rammed full of vegan bakeries, second hand record stores and microbreweries. A walk down the street involves drowning in waves of waxed moustaches, fringes and nose rings. In one day we saw a guy taking his parrot for a walk, in the evening a spontaneous breakdancing battle broke out in the bar we were in and then we were invited to confusingly named, “Dog Party”.

Don’t get me wrong, the place is awesome. I’d recommend watching the excellent comedy show, Portlandia, if you’ve ever visited the place, it’s scarily accurate.

-

After a smattering of interviews back in San Francisco with the picturesque backdrop of the Golden Gate bridge (including one for a Spanish TV channel where they pretty much just asked us where in the world we could find the girls that were muchos jamon por dos huevos) we are now ready to finally get on the road and start the trip proper.

So just quickly for those at the back we now have two cars and six team members (four English, two Texan). By Saturday we should be safe and warm in LA then we’ll be racing across to Vegas, Texas and Florida for Spring Break.

Things are incredibly exciting with us, we fly to the USA on Monday to carry out the next leg of the journey.  This has all be enabled by Get Taxi, the company who came on board to sponsor the expedition to go the whole way around the World.  Check them out here, they basically run a service which allows people to hail a black cab from their smart phone or online.  It's very smart, give them a try!

So, where now?

Hannah the taxi should be arriving in Oakland Port, San Francisco any day now.  We’re going to collect it and then spend a week or so doing some major repairs (including fitting a new gearbox!).  After that, this is a our rough route through States (obviously we will be following the roads and not going in straight lines…):

West Side

You can see the whole proposed route after the USA here.  We will be flying to Israel and then, as per usual, taking the longest route home.  Get Taxi will be fitting one of their driver GPS units so you can also track us in real time (link to come soon). If you live in America, know someone who does or have any recommendation about random things we should visit (that are kind on the route) then drop us a line at info@itsonthemeter.com or comment on our Facebook.  We sometimes tailor our route if someone asks us to swing by for a cup of tea (or even a beer) in return for a ride in Hannah!  We've had 90 people in her so far, but she's the kind of girl who can never give enough rides...

We will also be auctioning off rides in the Taxi to raise money for the Red Cross, but we’ll cover this in more detail soon.

Rough Timeline:

30/1/12 San Francisco

15/2/12 LA

18/2/12 Tijuana, Mexico!

19/2/12 Vegas, baby!

25/2/12 Albuquerque

28/2/12 Austin

29/2/12 Houston

2/3/12 New Orleans

4/3/12 Memphis

7/3/12 Daytona Beach

10/3/12 Richmond

13/3/12 New York

20/3/12 Israel

We cannot wait for this next leg.  Spread the word!

Loads of love

Paul and the Get Taxi: It’s on the Meter boys

We were at the end of a 10 month odyssey, only a few days drive from the finish line and we had just discovered that we were off to the USA on route to circumnavigating the globe.  Avid followers of this blog may have got the impression that our final few weeks in Australia were a haze of parties, beer, BBQs and beaches.  And they would be right.  There were beaches...  and BBQs…  and certainly beer, but they lacked that all-important ingredient that binds these wonderful things together.  The sun.  The coldest day everrecorded in Brisbane had just passed and it was grey, cloudy, and for the first time since we passed through the high plateaus of Tibet three months previously, I was cold.

Santa, baby!

On the way out of Brisbane, we stopped by Adam’s place, a Brit who has been following us on Facebook from the beginning and had always promised us a BBQ and beers ‘if’ we ever made it.  But it was raining.  Never fear though, Adam had built his BBQ under shelter, so we sat in hoodies, digging into mountains of meat and beer, chatting.  Although we’re never ones to turn down an offer of a free dinner, Adam had something that set his invitation apart (other than the pool and huge house): his very own bar in his garden.

A bar, in your garden? We'll be right over! 

Still suffering from carnivorous overload the next day, we loaded up the car with Leigh and Char’s 30 bags along with Johno’s friend Rob, and headed off in the pouring rain to the greatest testament to the Australian ‘call-it-as-it-is’ mentality to naming, Surfers Paradise.  Six months previously, we had met a couple of Kiwis on their honeymoon in Cappadocia in Turkey.  The new husband, Robbie, had promised that ‘if’ we ever made it to Oz (see the running theme), we would make us a ‘Hungy’. 

We had all looked at him blankly,

 

Paradise?

“It’s a Maori BBQ, bru, you bury the food in the mud then build a fire…  but we never bother with that, we just cut open a beer barrel and put a fire underneath it and cook it for the whole day whilst we get drunk.  It’s gonna be sweet, ‘ehy.”

They also happened to be one of the most fun couples we ever met and we looked forward to catching up again in their home in Surfers’.

A gift sticker from the Kiwis

But it was raining.   So we sat and played with their really big, ill tempered snake instead.

 

The most easterly point in Oz

On our whistle-stop, rain soaked tour of all the big names on the gold coast, we kept moving south, stopping by Byron bay then hot-footing it to Coff’s Harbour for the night.

A Giant Banana in Coffs' 

We had pledged to arrive in Sydney on December 10^th, with the plan of getting some press attention and having a bit of a do.  But as Sydney was no longer the finish point, we kept our ‘big’ arrival quite subdued. The taxi was not in a good way.  Her gearbox had been through the wars over the passed few months.  Obviously not helped by being taken up to 5200m, off-roaded for thousands of miles and pretty much abused in ways never conceived by its manufacturers, the main problem was actually a symptom of another problem.  The brakes. 

Byron

Our brakes were always a bit crap, and they got worse and worse as the trip went on, with little we could do (they are custom taxi parts, impossible to find abroad).  This meant to save them we tended to use our engine breaking to meter our speed, leading to wearing the gearbox out from the wrong side….  meaning that we could only accelerate or coast in neutral, anything else resulted in a skin-crawling crunch of metal.  Worried we would not make it the final few hundred miles into Sydney, we stopped in a town called ‘Newcastle the night before. 

 

On the morning of the big day, we left early to give us enough time if we needed a tow!  However, Hannah’s a tough ol’ bird and we limped into Sydney under our own steam at around 1pm, excited, and feeling slightly odd.

 

I had imagined this moment in my head numerous times.  However, in that imagination, it was the finish line, we were triumphant, we had finished.  But in real life it was just the end of a leg.  It felt odd, but, all things considered, we had still achieved what we set out to do:

 

We had broken the World Record, or possibly two.

We had driven to Sydney in a taxi

We were all still alive, and further more, all still friends!

 

The huge mass of steal and concrete that was the Sydney harbor bridge rose up ahead of us. 

“Shit, there it is.  Get the camera out”

We were suddenly over it, passing into the thriving business district south of the bay and trying to find the point where we said we’d park up for some pictures. 

 

We’d made it.

 

Who cares about how it feels, let’s party!

We’re in bloody Sydney and off to the USA!

 

Footnote:

Leigh and Char flew out of Sydney the next day, Crazy Craig (our longest and swearyest passenger) flew home from his travels the day we arrived in Sydney and met us in the pub that night.  Johno, Craig and I gave Hannah to the shipping company and then got on the 28 hour flight home to the UK.

 

Hannah is taking five weeks to ship to San Francisco, so we went home for Christmas and to buy a new gearbox (and a mountain of other spares) as she sits in the Pacific.  We go Stateside on Jan 30^th.

 

Next up: the new route!

Obama was in town, there were soldiers and police on every corner, our taxi was not technically road-legal and the windscreen was spider webbed with cracks.  We tried desperately to look cool and not draw attention as the cab slowly pulled out of Darwin, catching the smallest glimpse of Air Force One in the tiny airport.

Hot, humid and with the definite air of a frontier town to it, Darwin was one of the most hospitable places we had the pleasure of visiting.  However, ahead of us lay at least five days of solid driving through the famous Outback.  Ridiculously hot and unrelentingly inhospitable, stories were always surfacing about tourists going missing out there.

The roads were good though; the scenery unexpectedly green and bushy and the engine was running well.  Stocked up with three days worth of water and supplies, we camped in a national park with famous swimming holes.  We rose at sunrise for a quick dip in the clear waters, nervously avoiding the deep black bits for fear of the Crocs.  Although apparently there are none in the area, as soon as someone mentions it, you just get that little bit nervous and make up excuses as to why you’re sitting in the shallows…

Australian birds are stupid (I’m talking about the ones with wings… obviously. Shame on you for thinking otherwise!).  I can now comment with a fair amount of authority of bird behaviour around the world as a 1992 Black cab drives toward them (although this is hardly the best specialty topic for Mastermind).  Whereas most birds fly out of the way, Australian birds fly straight up and hover around Cab windscreen height, blindly waiting to be hit.  We think Leigh hit a small one on the drive to the camp site, but without stopping to search for evidence it can’t be proven.   As Johno was driving out from our camp spot, a much larger bird decided to play chicken (no pun intended) with the cab.  There was a screech of brakes (or there would have been if they worked) and a momentous thud.  Johno and I in the front seats rose from behind the dashboard, where we had instinctively ducked, to find our previously cracked windscreen was now well and truly smashed.  The culprit, a ‘bush pheasant’ about the same size as an English pheasant lay, very dead, by the roadside.

Fortunately the driver’s side of the screen was clear, but with the nearest town about 100km away, and the chances of them having a spare London taxi windscreen slim, we were forced to push on to Cairns in an even worse state.

Until you have driven in the Outback, it is impossible to really get a grasp on true desolation.  The sheer size of the country is palpable; the roads are straight and go on for as far as the eye can see, blending into a hazy mirage when they meet the sky.  A dead wallaby or Kangeroo litter the roadside every few kilometres, mown down by the huge ‘roo-bars’ on buses and road trains.  The heat pounded down as we drove for about 12 hours every day.  Stopping, camping in a rest stop and repeating.  The process was only interrupted by the odd ‘road train’ every few hours  50 meters long, four articulated trucks bolted together and thundering along at 70mph.  These monsters are just downright intimidating, especially as they cruise faster than our top speed and overtake on roads only wide enough for them, shoving us into a nerve wracking battle to hold line with half the cab on the road and the other in the dust.  Every day we drove through scorched desert scrub, every night a huge thunderstorm raged.  This was typical luck for us. Rain in the desert; yet again we cursed our bloody single-skin pop-up tents. 

It was Friday night in the middle of nowhere, but by picking up two hitchhikers (two girls, each carrying their body weight in beer, so the decision to stop was not a hard one) we accidentally stumbled on the biggest party for a thousand miles (around 30 people).  The entire workforce from a mango picking farm had the day off and were taking full advantage of it! The workers were travellers from all over the world, letting their hair down from their job, menial as it was, it paid well and allowed them to extend their visa for another year because they had done the mandatory agricultural work.

Leigh 'n' Char

We arrived in Cairns having not had a shower for six days, exhausted and smelling so bad we feared people would start throwing change at us soon.  All was good though. A few months previously we made a mad dash through Bangkok at dawn to find a TV station to do an interview with Australian morning TV.  We had got horrendously lost, but the interview resulted in an email from a chain of hostels called Base.  These guys assured us a place to stay in all the major towns.  They also promised brilliant parties and mentioned that they were in need of wet T-shirt competition pourers… as three red blooded twenty-somethings, this offer was hard to decline.

Table = Dancing

We turned up to Gilligan’s, one of their sister hostels, got put up in a brilliant room and finally washed.  Leigh’s girlfriend was flying in for the final few weeks, so he collected her from the airport, Hannah was deposited with Brando the Mechanic at Machete Motors, we met up with some friends from UK and we all went to the pub.  The pub turned out to be a very energetic bar in the hostel, so when a particularly good song came on (the Mighty Mighty Bosstones), some of us (mainly me) got up on the table and danced like a tit.  The bouncer was there within second and I clambered down looking sheepish:

“Where do you think you are, The Woolshed?”

“What’s that?”I replied. This was an odd bollocking from a bouncer.

“The pub where everyone dances on the tables.”

“WHERE’S THAT???” everyone replied in unison.

It was around the corner and bloody brilliant.  They even had shelves for your beer at table dancing height.

Beer shelf

We had made it to Cairns, all the hard sections were finished, and all we had to do was drive to Sydney.  We were on the home straight and in a jovial mood.  This was allied with the near-confirmation of new sponsor getting onboard and the chance to extend the trip beyond Sydney…

Great Barrier Reef

We did some interviews (again involving a 4am start for breakfast TV), we fulfilled our dream of diving on the Great Barrier Reef and Brando called a few days later. He’d had a good go on the brakes and steering and his mate has replaced the windscreen.  We swung by to borrow his welding gear and gave Hannah a make over.  It was Saturday, so Brando finished work by midday and settled back with his mate, ‘Fat’ (or Stan to his mum), and two fridges full of beer.  100% Aussie.  By evening all the work on the cab was done and we were all kicking back, listening to great stories about wrestling crocs, the fact that Fat’s heart is the same size a horse’s, tips on how to fly through a car windscreen and use your face as a brake and how not to get bitten by a shark whilst snorkelling.  Fat had had enough after about eight beers, drove home and was soon replaced by Brando’s annoying Neighbour, an ageing woman with far too much willingness to share personal problems with people she had just met.  I successfully avoided her by chatting with Brando about his daughter.  He showed me a picture of her when she was a few hours old

“what’s she holding”

“that’s her fust twennytwo, mate”

“a gun?”

“yeh, but it’s owwnly a smaall one, she’s only liddle…”  my face must have expressed what I was thinking

“It’s not loaded” he quickly reassured me. 

I wasn’t reassured.

Meanwhile Annoying Neighbour cornered Johno and asked in the kind of way that indicates that you don’t have an option

“dya wanna see moiy cats?”

“umm…”

“Daaant worry, aam not gonna rape ya”

So with an invitation like that, he was over to hers, meeting her cats and being deafened by her sound system, on which she perpetually played Johnny Cash at full volume.  The old couple next door, aged somewhere between 90 and 105, started shouting for it to be turned down. After shouting at each other for a bit, she turned it down a fraction and left it playing as they came back to Brando and I.  The granny fixed Johno with a disapproving stare as he walked away with Annoying Neighbour.

“I know what you’ve been up to, don’t you try and deny it”

He returned to us, scared and blushing.

With toy boy accusations, Annoying Neighbour getting even more inappropriately with her sharing as she cracked another pre-mixed Jim Beam and coke, and with Brando falling asleep, it was time to leave.

This guy made even Johno look weedy

Dutch Alex and his Daughter

We collected the cab the next day and Brando wouldn’t take any payment, so we placed a few crates of beer in his fridge.  He was a genuine Australian and a hero through and through. We headed South with two new passengers, Leigh’s girlfriend Char and Lila, an old friend from University who happened to be in the area.  We had received an email from a Dutch family who saw our cab in Cairns.  They lived at Flying Fish Point, an hour or so South and they were planning to drive back to Holland along a similar route to us and asked if we could come to dinner.  They also mentioned that he was a chef and we were only too willing swing by.  We rocked up, and had a delightful evening eating and talking about the real nitty-gritty aspects of overland travel.  It felt good to recap the challenging parts of the expedition with people who had it all before them, especially so close to the end of our trip. 

Ten months on the road and still sane...

The man at the bar at Magnetic Island said it was free drinks for ladies...

Sad to say good bye, we headed off south to Magnetic Island for a couple of nights, and then spent a night with some good friends from home who had just relocated down under.. We stopped at 1770, where Captain Cook had first landed in… 1770, surprisingly enough!.  My parents were staying there, so we met them, which was nice as I hadn’t seen them in ten months, but soon we were back on the road, headed to Brisbane.

QUT Press Day

One of our most invaluable sponsors was our old university, Aston, who had supplied us with a workshop, support and money.  On the day we left the campus, the Dean from Queensland University of Technology, a partner institution in Oz, happened to be there and promised us a big welcome if we ever made it to Brisbane.  Unlikely as this sounded nine and a half months earlier, we rolled into Brisbane and QUT had arranged a press event in the town centre and a celebration including all the tea and scones we could scoff.

Johno gets arty 

"Don't look up my feathers"

This jovial mood was carried over when we received an email, finalising a new deal with a new sponsor.  At the flat of Corrie, (one of my oldest school friends, who now lives in ‘Brissy’ and works down the mines) the lads and I finalised the contract with Get Taxi:

We were not finishing in Sydney.  We are now circumnavigating the World!

Next up, the arrival in Sydney, the new Sponsor, the new plan and the new route

By Johno

The team met up back in Australia ready to be reunited with Hannah for the final leg...

“Criiiikey!” yelled the leathery old man. 

I had been in Australia for less than fifteen minutes and `already ticked off half of my mental list of stereotypes. There were fully-grown men wearing baggy singlets and backwards baseball caps playing eighties arcade machines whilst sun-bleached mulleted kids tore around and an aborigine with a huge white beard wandered past in a daze. 

Long distances!

All I needed now was a guy in a hat with corks hanging off it, a boxing kangaroo and a lovable rogue to tell me, “that’s not a knoyfe maate!” 

The ship carrying our car had been delayed again and although Leigh and Paul had postponed their departures from the beach paradise of Bali I had decided to stick with my original flight and come over to check out Darwin, Australia’s most northerly city and home to about 130,000 people from sixty different nationalities. 

Old Model T chassis - probably in better nick than Hannah

I was staying with a very nice Couchsurfer called Paula who cooked a delicious Kangaroo stew and told me about life in the far north as we walked her dog around streets which seemed unfeasibly clean and ordered after our months spent in India, China and Asia. 

I borrowed a bike and a spent a pleasant few days exploring the little city on two wheels. I even stumbled across our shipping company and popped in to ask when we would be able to get the car. 

Crocs about!

“The ship is in on Wednesday,” they told me, “just pop down then”

Coincidently this was also the day Paul and Leigh arrived and so, laden down with rucksacks we walked down to the docks, rather naively expecting to be driving away that afternoon. 

We were soon hammered with a harsh punch of reality when we were told the container still needed to be unpacked and we might, possibly be able to get the car back “sometime next week”. 

We could hardly believe it, especially after all the previous delays but had no choice but to go and check into a hostel and haemorrhage money whilst we discovered exactly how expensive having a minimum wage of £10 an hour makes everything in Australia. 

Toilet Toad!

Thankfully after some gentle nagging we persuaded the shippers to get the car out and inspected on Friday. I had just read a news story about two Bangladeshi men who had sneaked into a container to smoke a crafty joint and accidently been shipped over to Singapore. One of them soon died of thirst and the other arrived barely alive. The story was really driven home as I found myself pushing Hannah out of the sweltering metal box under the beating sun after the battery had predictably gone flat on the sail over. 

Reunited!

As it is essentially a huge island populated with a load of deadly creatures, the Australians are understandably very serious about maintaining their uniquely isolated ecosystem and quarantine is a very big deal. We had all heard the horror stories about tourists being fined hundreds of dollars for accidently bringing a banana into the country but our case was slightly different and we were rightly worried about Hannah’s filthy innards. 

Flat battery... obviously!

We had spent days cleaning all of our stuff and washed the car at least four times over in Malaysia. We had even paid through the nose to get the whole container fumigated in Singapore in an attempt to finally wipe out the various nests of ants we had somehow acquired in India but in the end it was a little bit of mud that undid us. 

The quarantine officer literally took less than a minute to tell us that we weren’t coming in anytime soon as he felt under the rear wheel arch and came back with fingertips covered in dirt. 

Now the car would have to be cleaned ‘professionally’ for us at the extortionate cost of $75 an hour and to rub our noses in a little more we were told that they wouldn’t be able to get it done until at least Tuesday. It was going to be a very expensive wait. 

We've been stuck in worse places!

Although the place we were staying did have a hot tub it also cost more for one night in a grotty dormitory bed than we were used to paying for a full week in a private room back in Asia, so we racked our brains for options. I had met a local woman on the plane over from Singapore and she had invited us over to her house for dinner so we thought we’d cheekily ask her if she minded us camping in her garden for few days. But this suggestion was immediately torpedoed when we realised that our tents were still stuck in the car, along with most of our other possessions, in fact we had been living out of hand luggage for almost three weeks. 

Sounds familiar!

We got the bus to Bernadette’s anyway; the offer of a meal from her son, an award-winning chef, was too great for us to resist. Unfortunately he had not actually been informed of his dinner guests (and after working all day probably didn’t fancy cooking for three random English guys who crashed his house) but Bern cooked us up a delicious meal.

On hearing of our situation, within a second she invited us to stay at her place, use her car whenever we liked and go for dinner with her friends. She really was an absolute life-saver and we all thought of her as our adopted Aussie mum, especially after she cooked us an absolutely amazing roast, the first one in nine months. 

Relaxing with a G&T at Bern's

 We spent a few days watching TV, lazing around, seeing the sights, giving some talks to the kids at the school where Bern was the head teacher and even catching an AFL “Footy” game in the savage heat and humidity. 

Footy game!

Next Tuesday came and we shuffled down to port for the second inspection and nervously followed the inspecting officer around as she directed a guy with a jet-wash to clean off some still stubbornly dirty nooks and crannies before finally passing us and freeing Hannah. This was not before we had parted with the better part of a thousand dollars in cleaning charges and fees and even more annoying for two reasons. Firstly, all the dirt, seeds and other crud they cleaned off the car just blew into the sea and portside anyway and secondly when  we mentioned we needed to change our oil the officer, Holy Environmental Protector of Australia™, just suggested that we drive into the Outback and drain the old oil straight out into the dirt.

Amazing skies

Now all that stood between us and the open road was the small matter of getting the car registered and insured so we could legally drive on the Ozzy roads. After a bit of a wild goose chase around the various offices, not helped by half the city being on lockdown due to President Obama’s flying visit we found ourselves undergoing an unwelcome roadworthiness test. Anyone who has even skimmed any of the blogs will be aware that roadworthy is probably not the best way to describe Hannah and it was no surprise when we were presented with a comprehensive, two-sided list of what we needed to get fixed before we could be issued the necessary paperwork. This included front brakes, back brakes, flat battery, flat spare tyre, welding and of course, the windscreen that was in a bad way after an encounter with the over enthusiastic car washers in Malaysia. Apparently any cracks longer than ten millimetres needed to be repaired. As you can see from the picture ours were slightly outside this limit.

BBQ with Bern's freinds: great food and company

As it was now Thursday this meant another weekend of invading Bern’s house and another load of delays pushing us ever-closer to our 10th December Sydney finish date. 

Alas the call of the open road proved far too strong and after studying our carnet documents and some forum posts we figured that posts on online message boards are always completely accurate. With this in mind we somehow convinced ourselves that we were legally covered and decided to start the drive over to Cairns and get all the work done there.

Back on the road!

So with our dodgy brakes and spiderwebbed windscreen we said our final goodbyes and thanks to Bern and drove off past the parked up Air Force One and into the vast Outback.

Next time: Thunderstorms in the desert: typical ITOM luck, Machete Motors, diving and the East Coast!

We made it to Sydney!

But this isn’t it…

We did it!  We have driven a black cab from London to Sydney and broken the World Record for the longest ever taxi journey in 296 days.  It has been the adventure of a lifetime, bloody hard work, scorching hot, freezing cold, thrilling, dirty, smelly, scary, funny, boring, exhilarating, and most of all, fun.

But this isn’t it.  We were contacted by a company called GetTaxi, a start up company who allow people to order taxis from their smart phones (check them out and get their app here), who said they would fund us to drive all the way back to London.

We said no.

Hannah would not survive the journey back through Asia (and we weren’t sure we would either!). However, we said we would drive around to London, through the USA, then Europe and back to the UK, they said ok, and we confirmed it only a few days ago.  We asked the folks following us on Facebook if they thought this was a good idea, 98% of people agreed (2% were our mates being annoying).  So this is it.  We’re driving Hannah onto a ship to San Francisco next week…

And then we’re going to circumnavigate the World in a Black Cab 

We'll add an updated map soon.

Massive Thank You

We could not have got this far by ourselves.  There are too many people to thank, and I’m sure there will be many more to come

• Our 20+ sponsors who made this possible.  Without your money, parts, gear and help we would be sat in my garage at home with a slowly rusting black cab.  A special thanks has to go to Performance Direct and the Non Standard Awards

• Our friends and family who supported us the entire way (don’t worry, we weren’t sure we’d make it this far either!)

• The Couchsurfers, friends, and randoms who gave us a bed, a feed, a workshop or a patch of grass for our tents, without you, we’d be on park benches and would never have made it.

• Every person who smiled, waved, honked or taken a picture of us as we were driving along, it really keeps us going.

• GetTaxi for allowing us to go further

• Every person who has donated to the British Red Cross on our behalf.  You’ve helped us raise £10,000 so far for their really rather awesome work.

Now, we made a pledge to drive to Sydney in a black cab.  We have now done this (and it was not easy!), please, please, please donate a little something to the Red Cross on our behalf (£10, for example, is the same as a few drinks down the pub).

We would really appreciate it, but not as much as the thousands of people they help.

Click on this link to do so www.justgiving.com/itsonthemeter

We’ll see you on the way, or back in London at the finish line in Covent Garden, London mid April

By Johno 

After a sodden but stunning Ankor Wat the journey continued on to Thailand and her capital, Bangkok.

Bangkok is lodged firmly in traveller folklore. The name conjures up visions of bustling, steamy backstreets where wizened old women sell fried insects on wooden skewers whilst in the smoky rooms above people of questionable gender do even more questionable things with table-tennis balls and hordes of short fat men bet wads of money on bare-knuckle boxers, fighting to the death.

It was into these preconceptions that we drove, keen to separate the myths from the reality. 

Unfortunate Ant!

We were staying Joost and Benz, a Dutch-Thai couple who lived on the outskirts of the city and who are planning on driving from Thailand to Netherlands (see here) and so were keen to pick our brains. Once we eventually found their place in the sprawl of South East Asia’s third  largest city we got settled in and Joost offered to show us the ‘seedy underbelly of Bangkok’. It actually turned out to be more like the overpriced empty bar-belly of Bangkok but as always it was cool to experience the city from a resident’s perspective. 

We had arranged to meet up with some friends we had met at tubing in Laos and so the next evening, after the usual day fixing up the car we found ourselves on Khaosan Road, the backpacker centre of South East Asia. Although Joost and Benz declined to join us as they found the mass of flashing lights, 7-11s and screaming hawkers too touristy we reasoned that we are tourists and so loved it.

The packed road seemed to suck in backpackers for miles around and within a few hours we had bumped into three other groups of travellers we had met over the last two weeks and decided to seek out the real sleazy underbelly of the city, packaged up with a free drink and transport offer for susceptible tourists .  A less respectable blog would go into juicy details but needless to say what we found involved a dartgun, some balloons and some impressive no-hands target shooting. 

Rave taxi with Holly and Kat!

The reason we bumped into so many recently-made friends may have been that the backpacker hordes were gathering in Bangkok before swarming en masse down to the island of Koh Phangan ready for the monthly Full Moon Party. This huge party is held on the beach of a beautiful tropical island and famed for attracting tens of thousands of revellers from all over Asia. 

After Paul and I had picked up our hand-tailored suits, made to measure by Bangkok’s finest in anticipation for our eventual return to the ‘real world’  we picked up two new passengers, Holly and Kat whom we originally met at Tubing in Laos. The five of us sped south to catch the ferry over to the tiny islands and found ourselves a reasonable, if minuscule, room ready for the revelry. Although we were there during probably the quietest month of the year we still had an epic time partying until the sun came up over the beach and we bumped into a load of ‘old’ friends including Sarah (aka FTDJ) and Diana from Laos, the Scouse Boys from Vietnam, Frenchy from Cambodia (now attached with a girlfriend!) and Alexis from Thailand.

Ferry to the Koh Phangan 

A big mention also has to go to Woody and the staff at the awesome Club Nine who kept us watered and indirectly provided brilliant entertainment through one of their drunken punters; a huge tattooed, Essex beefcake who liked Hannah so much he decided he would like to make love to her exhaust pipe. The sight of a bald bodybuilder with his shorts around his ankles, blubbering, “It’s not normally this small, I don’t know why I can’t get it up!” will not be easy to forgot, however hard  I try.

The 'roider

A hearty congratulations also to Nimrod and Nivi, and a massive thanks for taking time out of their honeymoon to have lunch with us and thanks to Tony the Chef at the Rasananda for providing what was probably one of the best meals of the whole trip. 

Full Moon Party

Our next country was Malaysia and as we crossed down onto the peninsula it dawned on me with the suddenness of a snapped shoelace how close we were to the end;  less than a week’s driving lay between us and putting Hannah on a ship over to the fabled Australia. 

After a few days recuperating with Dan, a friend of Paul’s up in Pennang we tootled down to the capital, Kuala Lumpur, where we admired the huge twin towers and other skyscrapers tinged with Islamic influence then decided to continue down to our penultimate country, the city-state of Singapore. 

Showing some schoolkids around the car

The reaction from Malaysian motorists was staggering. As in the Czech Republic their drivers just seemed to love the car so it seemed like the right thing to do when one of the cars urged us to pull over in the next service station. We had just suffered a major tyre blowout (although luckily the first of the trip) and lost a load of time replacing the wheel and rejigging the roofrack so we weren’t too concerned with our schedule when they kindly offered to buy us lunch. 

The Floating Mosque - viewed from Dan's place in Pennang 

Over the food they asked us all the usual questions: how did you come up with this idea, where has been your favourite country, before moving onto some deeper-than-usual ones; how do you feel you have spiritually fulfilled yourselves on this journey? 

After some questions of our own we found that, far from being crazy missionaries, they were in fact motivational speakers on their way to a conference in Singapore and they wanted to use us as an example of achieving your life goals! A few photographs later we waved them off, happy to have inspired some other people.

Twin Towers in KL

One of the main things we had heard about Singapore was how horrendously expensive it was so we had decided to stay just over the border in the Malaysian city of Johor Bahru, known to everyone as JB whilst we got Hannah and all of her contents scrubbed up clean to pass the rigours of Australian quarantine. Here we could all bunk down in a welcoming homestay where the beds may have been hard as rocks but they cost a mere £3 a night. The owner was off on an extended holiday and had entrusted its running to a long-term-travelling American- Spanish couple called Tom and Emma. They made us right at home and didn’t mind when we spread all of our dirt-encrusted tools and spare parts over their yard for washing. They even helped us clean Goofy. 

Emma, Tom and the team

One of the main things we had heard about Singapore was how horrendously expensive it was so we had decided to stay just over the border in the Malaysian city of Johor Bahru, known to everyone as JB whilst we got Hannah and all of her contents scrubbed up clean to pass the rigours of Australian quarantine. Here we could all bunk down in a welcoming homestay where the beds may have been hard as rocks but they cost a mere £3 a night. The owner was off on an extended holiday and had entrusted its running to a long-term-travelling American- Spanish couple called Tom and Emma. They made us right at home and didn’t mind when we spread all of our dirt-encrusted tools and spare parts over their yard for washing. They even helped us clean Goofy. 

Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning

When I was a kid my dad accidently misspelled my name on a form as ‘Joho’ and ever since I pointed this out I have been called Joho by my family. So when a ‘youth collective’ blog based in JB and called Joho Lover got in touch and asked if they could come over for an interview and some photos I positively jumped at the chance. 

When they arrived and gave us Joho branded shirts and stickers I could hardly believe the hilarity; I spent the whole chat giggling away to myself. 

Leigh and Paul, and everyone else for that matter, didn’t find it so funny.

Emma and Leigh cleaning up Goofy

And then, quick as a flash, one of the major milestones of the trip was upon us; the car had been thoroughly cleaned inside and out (or so we thought) and was towed through the streets of Singapore to the port where it was loaded into a container and onto the ship for the eight day sailing (or so we thought) over to final leg of our journey. Or so we thought.

With the car safely packed on board we had over a week to kill until we all had to meet up again in Darwin, North Australia so I decided to take this rare break in our busy schedule to fly over to Hong Kong with my new suit for a job interview.

Leigh and Paul meanwhile were both also busy and had flown to the beaches of Bali, as apparently detouring to this island paradise is cheaper than flying direct to Darwin 

Singapore 

[Paul: When we get a few days off from the trip we always try and go our separate ways to get a break from each other (9 months living in the same car, sleeping in the same room and eating the same food can wear you down...).  Bali was no different, so after spending a few days on Kuta beach (Bali’s answer to Magaluf), I decided it wasn’t really my kind of place so I headed to the much quieter islands off the coast of Lombok (where I was also guaranteed not to bump into Leigh).  Two days later, chilling on the beach I hear the familiar voice behind me, “Alright dickhead”.  We’d accidently gone to exactly the same place!]

Next up: The team reunites but are missing one crucial member...  Plus: is the end as close as they thought...?

By Paul Archer

Since we had left Europe five months previously, we hadn’t really drunk alcohol nor had much contact with Westerners.  Eastern Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan were dry countries, and aside for a small handful of evenings in random places in Nepal and China we hadn’t partied much all that time.  Now we were entering the Backpacking circuit of South East Asia and it looked like things were going to change. This circuit seems to be the process of flying out to a country where alcohol is dirt cheap, morals are loosened in the constant pursuit of hedonism as the sun shines all day, interjected with the odd temple visit and elephant ride to show one’s parents that they’re expanding their horizons and are experiencing culture.

We had just arrived in Vang Vien for the ‘Tubing’ experience; floating down a river on a rubber inner tube and stopping at countless bars on the way, it definitely fell into the hedonistic categories of backpacking activities.  Feeling like we deserved the break, we immersed ourselves into tubing with gusto!

My two sisters had flown in from England to meet us and all six of us made our way with our tubes to the top of the run.   There were hundreds of westerners on a wooden jetty, all drunk, all in swim wear and all raving it up to British dance music; this was a world apart from central Asia and bloody brilliant! 

Avoiding actually floating down (The river was in flood, flowing dangerously fast)[Johno: for Paul, Leigh and the girls, not for Matt and I]; the first three river side bars provided enough entertainment for us as we danced around, invented the gin-and-tonic-and-snake wine (complete with a real snake in it) cocktail, the beer bench and had too many laughs to count.  Rising a bit dusty late the next day, we found Matt (who had no recollection of where he stayed) and went and did it again.  Floating down this time as the river level had decreased, we played on the numerous swings, slides and river surfing devices that litter the side of the river.  Tubing was one of the strangest, simplest yet brilliant tourist attractions ever invented and something which seems to be putting this lovely little country firmly on the tourism and backpacker radar.

It does, however, have its drawbacks and some of them pretty serious as we found out.  Swimming around in a flooded, muddy river in the tropics can be harmful to your health (aside from infecting any mosquito bites or cuts you may have into a puss filled mess), deaths by drowning as drunken tourists try their luck at swimming with no tube are regular and we later met a girl who had to spend weeks in hospital as flesh eating bacteria was surgically scooped out of her leg.  

We bounced along from Vang Vien, feeling a little worse for wear after our ‘Tubing’ experience, heading for the Laos capital, Vientien. The capital is a relatively unremarkable place, a few pretty French colonial buildings house various different business fronts and restaurants, all being run in the laidback manner that makes up life in Laos.  Driving was becoming a challenge for me, I had managed to lodge a piece of glass deep in the heel of my foot and it was really starting to hurt.  I had to get it removed before it got too infected (very easy in the climate), and after attempting an operation in the hotel room, it was too deep in so I limped to the city hospital.  The air was heavy with bleach and rows of beds lined each wall; some with curtains pulled around and you could hear the sound of retching and the odd moan of pain and agony permeate through the thin fabric barrier.  Most of the equipment seemed to hark back to Florence Nightingale’s era and paint flaked everywhere, showing the bare concrete or rusted metal beneath.

My bed was basically a green vinyl surface to lie on, obviously designed for the average Laos patient’s height as my few feet stuck out a few feet over the edge.  A doctor smiled a big grin, nodding that he would be with me in a moment and he turned to the patient beside me.  He was no more than a metre away from me, a middle aged, over weight patient with a boil of some variety blushing, bulbous and red on his lower back.  The doctor injected some sort of anaesthetic into the lump before taking his scalpel and delving deep into the boil.  The anaesthetic clearly had little effect as he moaned and the doctor cleared over teacup full of bloody puss from his back and threw the waste into a bin a few inches from where my head stuck out from the short bed.

This, combined with the shit state of the hospital was too much for me, I tried to get up and leave, landing heavily on my bad foot and wedging the glass further in.  Remembering that this was the best hospital in the country and refreshing my memory, painfully, why I was there, I reprimanded myself for being a pussy and settled back down.  Once the doctor was finished, he washed up, bought over a fresh tray, put on fresh gloves and went about anaesthetising and cutting open my foot with brand new needles and scalpels (I checked each one myself, much to his puzzlement).  Cutting down about 2cm into my heel, he rooted around and came up and showed me what he found.

“You want?” he asked me, holding it in front of my face.  All I could see was a bloody pair of tongs.

“Want want?”

“Glass, see…” I could just make out the tiniest shard, 2mm squared.

“No thank you” not really sure how I would store it for safe keeping “I think there is more, that seems too small to cause that much pain”

He looked, there wasn’t.  I was just a pussy.

I was given antibiotics, spare bandages and Paracetamol and sent on my way after parting with $7 for the lot!

We all went our separate ways for a few days, Johno, Matt and Leigh went to Vietnam stayed with my sisters, all meeting up with Hannah to head to Thailand.

As soon as we passed the Thai border, the roads improved dramatically. Smooth duel carriageways cut through the country allowing us to cross from North to South where beautiful beaches and islands lay.  Things are never easy when you’re driving Hannah though, even with the smooth roads we had to repair a ball joint on the steering arm, fit a brand new shock absorber and replace a suspension plate before we got to the southern island of Ko Chang where we were going to chill for a few days.  There I met a lovely English couple, Iain and Mish, who offered to show me a great place to stay. Wood huts lined the palm fringed beaches and we sat in a bar and drank beer with white sand beneath our feet.  They turned out to be some of the most interesting people I’d met on the whole journey, they lived in Cambodia and volunteered for a charity out here called www.mloptapang.org. They are working to stop the child sex trade, rescuing children and teenagers and giving them an education.  Iain’s job in particular shocked me.  In his own words he’s a ‘dodgy looking bloke’, his greasy black hair is down to his chin and he has the red complexion of a man who drinks a vodka orange for breakfast.  His job is to act as a ‘John’ in sting operations to catch madams peddling underage sex, and also to go with the police to arrest Western men in the act and to make sure they don’t get the chance to bribe their way out (apparently a mere $2000 is enough to ensure the police and the child’s family get paid and heads look the other way).

Oh, and apparently his other job before this was as somewhat of a rock star, he played session bass guitar in the bands Massive Attack and The Prodigy (and to my delight, four shows with one of my favourite bands, The Smashing Pumpkins!).

A few beers turned into a few more and we agreed that we would give them a lift back to their place in Cambodia.

A few days later, after Hannah had had enough of the sea air, we picked up Iain and Mish from their hotel and headed for the Cambodia border, it was 10am but Iain had stocked up for the ride with beer and cigarettes.  We had easily enough time to make theirs by nightfall, which was a good thing as both headlights were broken from their dousing in Laos.  However, as we rolled off the ferry, we carried on rolling!  The brakes had sprung a leak so we had to keep refilling them with brake fluid every few hours.  The border then turned out to be a nightmare, border guards inexperienced with foreign car paperwork incorrectly stamped everything and it was almost three hours before we were off again.  Leaving Thailand’s smooth road behind, we bounced along the potholed strewn, but empty, coastal road to Sihanoukville.  Darkness fell, we were still 100km away from our destination and we were stuck in the middle of nowhere with no lights.  We only had our two spot lights in the middle of the bumper so we looked like a motorbike to the trucks that veered onto our side of the road not expecting a full sized car to be coming.  I used every torch I could find in the car and lashed them onto the car along with high visibility vests and our warning triangle to give the impression of our real size.

Angkor Wat

Three nerve wrecking hours later, having succeeded in not hitting any wayward pedestrians, wild dogs or articulated Lorries, we arrived in the town and was introduced to the folks who lived in Iain’s hostel.  It was a random mix of the loveliest people, united by the fact that they were all complete wreck heads who had come to the town for a few days and ended up staying months.  There were students, rock stars, lighting rig fitters, bums, drug addicts and even a contestant of ‘Britain’s Next Top Model’.  The town had a great ‘Wild West feeling’, where hedonism met the numbing poverty and unbridled corruption of Cambodia.  As part of a grand scheme for supplementing the local law enforcement’s wages, it was illegal to drive during the day with your headlights on (although, ironically, not illegal to drive at night with them off…), which was not so good for tourists on scooters which had the headlight permanently switched on.  A fine of $150 was slapped on the unsuspecting rider, which often got paid (although $5 would usually do it, or less if your skirt was short enough and you smiled sweetly, I’ve been told).  All of this and $0.50 a beer meant that Sihanoukville was a big, wild party town.

Cambodia was ravaged by one of the most brutal regimes on the 20^th century until 1979.  Pol pot and his Khmer Rouge cronies killed and starved 21% of the country’s population, often for no real apparent reason, picking out anybody who posed a possible threat; famously killing everyone who wore glasses, a sign of intelligence and therefore a threat.  Driving north from Sihanoukville, we visited the S-21 museum.  An old school which was used to interrogate and detain 17,000 prisoners.  There were only seven known survivors.  This was a grim and sobering experience, but well worth a visit, especially when you realise it really wasn’t that long ago.

Our destination was Ankor Wat, one of the seven wonders of the world. However, we had no map of Cambodia (in fact, we have no maps of anywhere, we left them back in England and after a few weeks without any we decided we’ll see how long we can go without using a paper map.  We’re in Australia as I write this).  We knew there were two routes from Phnom Pen to Siem Reap, the town by Ankor Wat.  We took what looked like the fastest route, but it soon turned into a very wet, tiny causeway across a lake.  The whole country seemed to be in flood.

Buddah Face, Angkor Wat

We turned around and went the other way and proceeded to get truly lost for the first time on the expedition.  It took us two days.  On the way we met a French man and gave him a lift.  Kevin (imaginatively nicknamed ‘Frenchy’ by us) had a deep tan, long curly hair, an acoustic guitar and was so laid back he was virtually horizontal; he worked for months in Oz and was making the most of the strong currency to travel around Asia and using his French charm to sleep with as many impressionable young backpackers on the way.  Eventually arriving in Siam Reap, we were dining on a Cambodian frog speciality (very tasty indeed!) as  Leigh bet me $10 I wouldn’t put my face into the fish tank used for ‘fish foot messages’.  I acquired my $10 with gusto, (although I also acquired a slight fishy odour too) and it clearly looked like fun as Leigh asked another fish message place advertising ‘no Smile, no pay’ if he could dunk his face too.  The man just smiled and Leigh submerged his face into the water filled with little fish and bits of foot skin.  To all our entertainment, the fish swam the other way, clearly hungry enough to eat people feat, but not for his face!  The owner asked for the full message payment, Leigh laughed, and he replied with ‘see, you smiling, you pay’.

 Ankor Wat was one of the most impressive places I’ve seen on the trip.  Sticking out fo the jungle, we spent the day driving to various different temples within the huge complex.  A picture paints a thousand words, and I’ve already been blabbing on for too long, so here are some of Johno’s shots…

Going Tomb Raider

Next up, the rest of South East Asia

By Paul Archer

Don’t forget, you can subscribe to get this blog straight into your inbox by putting your email address into the ‘Join It’s on the Meter’ box at the right hand side of our website.

You can pretend you’re checking important work mails and actually read about Hannah’s adventures!

It’s sods law.  If you fill all the fuel tanks in one country, the fuel will be cheaper in the next one. That’s the way it always works, and succumbing to the strange superstitions that develop over long months on the road, we rolled over the border filled to the brim.

Entering Laos, we were in a jubilant mood; the sun was shining and the atmosphere had changed immediately.  China had been… an experience, a country without parallels.  But, Tibet aside (which had been the most mind blowing, beautiful county), China was restricted by constant rain, six, twelve hour days, a week spent driving and our inability to really communicate with people other than through our somewhat challenging guide (not to mention the communal toilet habits!). The food was brilliant, always something new and interesting (although not necessarily tasty…) sated our appetites most nights (to this day I dream about waking up to a good bowl of dumplings and a tray of chilli vinegar!) but by the time we reached the border, we were up for a change.

As good a deterrence as you're likely to get

Bushes and long grass had grown high around the border bungalow, only being cleared for a full sized volleyball court positioned behind the hut.  The visa guy provided us with a visa and immigration stamped us through.  By the time we had finished, the whole building had come out and started to play volleyball.

Immigration told us we needed to pay him for ‘overtime’ for doing our passports (all of $7).  We work on a no bribery policy, generally being in no particular hurry, we can normally wait out difficult police and border stops (although we have had to bribe occasionally when there is no other option).  Although it is an insignificant a mount of money, I don’t want to set or reinforce a precedent for future travellers. We refused to pay and a padlocked barrier was put down in front of the car.  Apparently it couldn’t be opened until the next morning.  Although not averse to camping on the border, we had no food or water.  The volleyball players said border was now shut and we needed to pay ‘overtime’ for the man to open it and carried on with their volleyball.

The answer to this problem was abundantly clear; we would have to play them at volleyball to get through.  Maybe if we irritated them enough, they would let us through?  Grabbing the ball I announced with a big smile that I was playing; all of them versus me, if I win they open the gate.  They seemed up for it (but they didn’t have much of a choice; I had the ball), so I gave it a smack and it went right into the net.  My plan was flawed from the beginning; I don’t possess the slightest iota of volleyball playing skill.

They won hands down and the gate remained firmly shut.  Smiles and jokes carried on, but I upped the irritation.  Every time I got the ball it ended up in the long grass (due to skill or lack of… you decide) and they eventually broke (i.e. got bored) and one of the guys opened the gate, and we entered Laos.

It was dusk so we drove to the first village and found a homestay.  We grabbed a bite and checked out what is classed as nightlife in a village of a few hundred in the middle of the Northern Laos’ Jungle; a building on bamboo struts serving beer to ten local lads and playing very loud Laos karaoke and videos by a Japanese hair metal band called X Japani … (I ask you to finish reading the blog before clicking this as you may find you'll spend the rest of the day watching these guys on youtube, revelling in their awesomeness and trying to decide the singer's gender... I know I did: )

Our destination was Vang Vien, home to a weird activity called, simply ‘Tubing’.  Rapidly becoming a staple on the South East Asian backpacker’s circuit, the model is simple; you take a tuk tuk to the top of a river with a car tyre tube and float five miles into the town, stopping at as many of the riverside bars on the ways as possible.  My two sisters were flying out from home to get a ride in the cab and we arranged meet them there.

I woke the next morning and something wasn’t right.  Numerous battalions of some bed bug type animal had fed viciously on my torso, turning it into a scattered landscape of small red and incredibly itchy bites. To make matters worse, we had used all our anti histamine tablets in the dust mite infested hovels where we had stayed in Tibet to stop us sneezing all night long.  Covering myself in ineffective aftersun cooling cream, we headed south and I itched.

Before long I stopped and had a wee; it wasn’t just my torso they had bitten.

The landscape in northern Laos is excellent, rising small hills; you can see thick green forest meeting the horizon.  Hills get higher as you head south and volcanic outcrops stick vertically up from the forest with trees hanging on unfeasibly steep slopes.  It doesn’t seem possible for anything to grow on anything that steep, and you’d be partly right.  Although the road from the border is initially very good (the bit built by the Chinese) it soon descends into a game of sporadically paved, pot hole filled, hairpin lined truck chicken.  Landslides block the road every few miles as the unfeasibly attached trees discover that as soon as it rains, their base on a near vertical slope is untenable and they all fall down along with a lot of mud onto the road below.  Land movers work tirelessly during the wet season to clear these, often just leaving deep mud tracks for you to simply drive over the land slide.

Off-Road Heroes!

Arriving at one particularly substantial one, we found a small truck had slid out, blocking the road for all.  This was it, the moment we had all been waiting for.  A legitimate reason to use our winch!!!  It had taken over two weeks to attach and cost £500 and had never been used (apart from one half hearted time in Turkey when it seemed more fun to winch then to push).  Leigh and I jumped out and immediately Leigh fell flat on his ass in the knee deep mud.  Momentarily stopping being off-road heroes to take be piss out of our mud-caked team mate, we then looped a tow rope around its axels, winched it back onto the road, dug away the remaining mud and guided him out.  Cheers rung out from the three or four observers and the winch had proved its worth.  

Our muddy feet (note Johno's pristene clean ones, apparently the photography has to stand on the car and not help the Off-Road Heroes)

A bit further along, a car drove right at us, it looked like some sort of vintage car and all we could hear was the sound of an old ‘honk’ horn (of the variety naughty comedians used for sound effects when they squeeze ample women’s breasts in the ‘60s).  It veered over, and there sat a beautiful Argentinean car from the 1920s.  It belonged to a barking mad family, who had spent the past eleven years driving around the world in this awesome car.  Such a long time, in fact that they managed to have four kids on the road.  Unfortunately we couldn’t hang around and have a chat, they had to be in China the next day and after our reports about the road ahead, they knew they had to get going.  We knew that no matter now hard our break downs are, and how long we’ve been on the road, there’s always someone out there who is doing something harder.  Check them out http://www.argentinaalaska.com/eng/

We stopped at the pretty market town of Luang Probang for the night then set off on our way with loads of time to make it to Vang Vien before nightfall.  Soon there was a clunk, a grind and the familiar sound of metal on metal, out set all our teeth on edge and Leigh exclaiming in polite, four letter words his disappointment at yet another thing on the car breaking.  The brakes went spongy and we stopped on the side of the road.  The brake calliper had fallen apart.  Chief mechanic Leigh announced that the pin holding it together had gone and now nothing was holding the brakes pads in.  Chief blaggers, Johno and I, traipsed along the road in search of something pin like.  Our fluency in sign language (or possibly that we were holding a brake calliper in our hands) allowed us to get directions to a village mechanic.  A pillar drill and an angle grind on a piece of metal lying on the floor of his workshop later and we had a new pin.  Back we traipsed to find that Leigh had found that we were also missing a plate of some sort.  No problem for the It’s on the Meter crew, an iced coffee can, some pliers and a hammer were brought into the mix and we were off.

The caliper plate from the working brake

Arm Chair Mechanics

Winding along the lanes, straw huts on stilts lined the road, children played and chickens tried their best to get squashed under the wheels of black cabs.  Each village had a tap on the main road, and as the day drew on, we would get a glimpse of everybody’s evening washing rituals as they hung around the only running water available. 

Our setback meant that darkness fell, and with it half the sky.  Water fell as one big torrent onto us, forming sudden deep rivers in the road as our twenty year old rust bucket sprung a few leaks, our two motorbike lights we had bolted onto the cab as headlights had failed and the only lights we had were spot lights as the road turned into a pot holed, water filled mess.  With nowhere to stay we had to push onto Vang Vien at a crawl, driving over small bumps, only to discover two foot deep holes behind them with clank as our decrepit suspension maxed out for the sixth time that day.

We eventually got to the village by 10pm to find it was not the small village we imaged, but a full blown tourist hot spot, heaving with drunken backpackers.

It was time to put our party boots on.

Next up fun with ropes and beer, gin-and-tonic-and-snakewine (complete with real snake), minor surgery in the worlds worst hospital and road side rock stars…

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