Nothing’s Familiar

Good day everyone, thought I best quickly post something, just in case you all spend you Christmas holiday funds paying for detectives to find me. Which I am sure you would all do, in a heartbeat.

I am in New Zealand now, staying at my friend’s cousin’s flat, 13 hours ahead of most of you stationary people and a few hours ahead of the rest of you smelly travellers. However I’m probabbly a lot wetter than the lot of you. Since arriving in New Zealand it’s rained, ridicioulsy heavily, pretty much every day. I’ve also spent a shed load of money travelling a little bit by bus, buying a new camera, bag, paying for dorm rooms, Internet and obviously doing the New Zealand’s world famous extreme sports.

So far I’ve sat on an inner tube, whilst wearing a full on gimp suit, floating down a dark, wet, cave, occasionally jumping down dark waterfalls and staring at glow worms. I’ve also scuba dived in “One of the top Ten dive sites in the world”, The Poor Knights Islands, which boasts a massive group of 2m wide Stingrays (obviously they had been eaten by killer whales just before I got there) and loads of sea slugs which are about 5cm long and full of colour (great….) I walked all day to view some waterfalls, got lost, missed the last bus and started to walk 6km back to my hostel before sticking my thumb out to get a lift, I got picked up after 20 minutes and got taken right to my front door – not bad for my first hitch hiking experience.

Thanks Kiwi dude, however you were.

Back at the hostel I met a crazy Taiwanese girl called Huei Ming, or Jennifer (if you want to remember her name and not pronounce it incorrectly). After I impressed her with my dreadful Chinese she explained she had rented a Rav 4 (a big SUV) and is travelling around New Zealand in it, so, I asked if I could travel with her. She agreed, then I spent the next 4 days driving around beaches, nearly crashing to look at sheep (they don’t have sheep in Taiwan) and basically having a great time. We visited a 90 mile beach, some huge kauri trees and took lots of photos.

Today, back in Auckland, I met up with my friends from England who had been travelling around South America at the same time as me. We had planned on meeting up at various times but kept on changing our plans, so, today we finally met. We had a few beers and agreed to do a bungee jump off the Auckland Harbour bridge together. I quickly popped to an ATM and took out $100, then went to buy a sandwich. The sandwich came to about $7, I opened my wallet and suddenly my heart dropped to my pocket, fell through the hole in my pocket and landed on my freshly flicked, hot cigarette butt on the floor….. Empty wallet.

I ran back to the ATM and sure enough the $100 had gone, I had just left it there, waiting for the picking. I quickly justified the loss of the money by thinking about the various things I hadn’t bought a long the way and just tried to forget about it. I then thought, WAIT..! Perhaps the machine had just eaten it? So, as cunning as a prune I returned to the ATM, withdrew $20 and waited to see what would happen. Surely enough the machine got bored of offering me money and sucked it back, success!

Perhaps the money hadn’t been stolen?

I found the ATM’s owner and explained to them what had happened – “You put another $20 into the machine?” they mocked. I agreed, then they explained they couldn’t do anything about it. I have to contact my bank in England who will put a claim against this bank in New Zealand and after duplicating forms, processing, sending back for queries, filed for pending and buried in soft peat I may get my money back, at some point.

Don’t worry I’m not going to ask you all for money.

However my real name is Ranjig Singabab, son of the Late President of Sierra Lionne. My fathers death has caused many problems for us as his $900,000,00- is locked into his account and we can’t access his funds unless we pay it into an off-sure account, for reasons I can’t explain. If you would accept this money into your account and transfer 80% back to me, you can keep the remaining 20% for your troubles. I hope you will accept this offer, and you will be remember in the hearts of the Sierra Lionne’s people for ever. Please supply me your bank details, pin number and address.

Thanks,

Oh and have a good Christmas!

Entering a new country involves leaving another country. Crossing with meat, vegetables and other animal products is usually banned, and if you are entering a pretty security consious country like Chile then your bags will get searched. In my day bag I had a lot of drugs for sleeping, these are usually illegal to carry into other countries without prescription but I wanted them so I was set on claiming ignorance, if questioned.
My rucksack was first to go through the scanners, fine. No problems. As common practice the Chilean border guards open the top of your rucksack look at the top item – in this case a jumper, then close it upset they havent caught you smugglin a three-toed-sloth into their country (if only they looked under my jumper).
After opening a few more zips, ignoring my medical kits, knives and woodern crafts they noticed my weaved juggling balls on the side of my bag.
The first women, aka “security whore” was determined I wasnt going to have my balls. She prodded them, smelt them and tried to squeeze the life out of them to find out what was inside. I picked up my other 3 and demostrated what they were for, unimpressed, she removed them hastily from my hands and passed them to another man – with a knife.
This man was mean, I mean he had your typical “I mean business” face and wore the security apparrel with officious arrogance. He put his knife to my balls, determined to penetrate them. I begged, he moved the knife closer, laughing as he did so. The knife flicked out of its body, reflecting the UV light into my eyes, forcing me to wince, I waited for the inevitable, removing the sweat from my brow as I did so. Then, suddenly, this overdramatised scene was interuppted by another secruity guard “Young whippersnapper” who had extracted from my balls what the Chilean authoritys had feared – a seed. The knifewielders smiled vanished, his knife slipped and clicked back into its body and I started to sweat more.
Someone of authority spoke, “You cant take seeds into our country”. I explained, pleaded, “only 2 of my balls have seeds, the other 2 contain plastic” .. We stared at each other, threatening each other with our gazes, refusing to break contact – but he was squeezing my balls, I remained strong trying not to submit to his underhand tactics. A fly landed on his sweaty brow, he pushed out his bottom lip and blew upwards with startling acuracy, the fly took off, circled around the room, then found another shit to land on.
Just as I was about to buckle, a miracle happened. “Security whore” discovered something in a womans rucksack of much greater significance. I heard her scream “sundried tomatoes” and that did it, man-of-authority released his steely grip off my balls, broke the stare and turned around defeated.

I had won, my balls entered Chile.

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