fair winds and following seas

How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be from one minute to another - Alice Working on a ship, every time zone change that gives back an hour is a reason (obligation) to party. The parties here are completely bizarre, it's actually a little like being at boomtown festival, for anyone who's not been it's this little festival that builds all these stages and places to dance and drink in and some of them are tiny rooms and others are much bigger but with a twist like a concealed entrance so you think you're going somewhere smaller. I remember being at boomtown festival and walking past an unassuming caravan, it looked completely normal but then I saw 50 people piling out of it so I went through the door for a closer look, and it turns out the caravan was an entrance, they had put it on top of a hill and when you walked through the entrance led you down a tunnel into a huge room with a bone chandelier and cave girls dancing in bone c...

"In other countries a long wait at a train station is a dull thing and tedious, but one has no right to have that feeling in India. You have the monster crowd of bejeweled natives, the stir, the bustle, the confusion, the shifting splendors of the costumes--dear me, the delight of it, the charm of it are beyond speech." - Mark Twain  At a lot of the places we visit, if you arrive by boat you can immediately see the beauty of where you are. I'll always hold Thailand sacred for this, and Langkawi is similar, you'll first notice the clarity of the crystal clear waters, you can spot schools of fish darting around together from the edge of the boat or a bridge and sometimes the odd jellyfish, as you look towards the island there are trees everywhere as far as the eye can see, in mountainous clumps and towering over buildings and settlements, and beautiful white Sandy beaches. I find this far better than being driven in alongside buildings and you get a real sense of th...

Someone told me recently to savour the good times here because they are fleeting, I was sort of dismissive because I feel like I do this anyway but I held it fresh in mind recently when I came to understand exactly what he meant with regard to ship life. A lot of people are leaving the ship before we leave asia, recently I realised that we were having a change of crew on a show, and that an inside joke we had was likely to be lost. There's a scene change where I am stood opposite side of the stage from two of my colleagues and there's a “sexy snake” dance going on centre stage, we are all standing in the wings facing each other ready to take the props off, a few shows back I started dancing to the girl opposite and then her and a guy we work with would dance back and it cracks me up every time, this time even the production manager joined in from the floor above, I was in stitches laughing. Then I realised the girl leaves in 11 days and the guy is training up for another depart...

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving. Penang is exactly the sort of place I expect you'd want to end up if you class yourself more as a Traveller than a Tourist, the best thing about it is that although it's clear there are attempts made here to encourage tourists, those attempts manifest in a creative hub with plenty of its own culture. I often find popular tourist attractions tend to reflect the western world in order to attract westerners and make them feel welcome, I hear warning bells whenever I see a MacDonald's or a Starbucks, but that's not something you're going to get here. Instead you'll find an easy to navigate town bustling with flavours and colours, nothing's overly shiny or flashing at you, it's the colours that burst to the forefront, exploding out of flowers, bushes and temples and street food amongst cracked and uneven pavements and crumbling plaster that suggest you're getting something real and the...