Exactly one year ago today I flew from Auckland to Bangkok having closed a chapter on 11 years of working for The Radio Network, 10 years of living in my downtown apartment and 20 years of life in New Zealand. With a childhood spent in Malaysia I’ve often felt the pull back to South East Asia and that’s why I decided to start my year of adventures in that part of the world. Here’s what happened:
I broke a rib rooftop-sunbathing in Bangkok with nine culturally-insensitive topless European girls while the Red-Shirt protests echoed from the streets below, swam the famous Maya Bay off the south-west of Thailand (The Beach), jungle-trekked in the oldest rainforest in the world in Penang, Malaysia, rang the doorbell of my 1980s home in Kuala Lumpur (no-one was home), reaffirmed why Singapore Zoo is as good as zoos get, saw the world’s largest Buddhist temple of Borobudur in Java, climbed an active volcano in east-Java, discovered a hatred for Kuta in Bali but a love of Ubud, got ripped-off by a fake taxi driver in Hanoi, Vietnam, delivered school books and got hit by a motorbike in Laos, walked to the top of The Peak in Hong Kong, explored an abandoned French palace in the Cambodian highlands, cycled Vancouver’s Stanley Park in Canada, rode terrifying natural waterslides in North Vancouver, celebrated a North American Halloween like never before, won $500 in a karaoke contest, worked for $8.80 an hour, saw the famous costumes of Diana Ross and the Supremes at a music museum in Seattle, got evacuated from a category five cyclone in Queensland, Australia, flew over the Great Barrier Reef in a 10-seater sea-plane before landing on the water and snorkeling the reef, played approximately 120 tennis matches, ate my weight in watermelon seven times over, made a chunk of great friends, annoyed plenty of bogans, started a blog and generally speaking, had a pretty amazing time.