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At university, there was an extraordinarily tall chap called Gordon who used to insist that the college authorities should purchase an extra-long bed to follow him around the various college rooms he inhabited throughout his degree. Anyway, when I told him I would be visiting New Zealand, he said I should look out for the famous Callendar-Hamilton bridges which his grandfather built along the west coast. Starting the fun bus trip south along this coast, we wound our way along a mountainous road, occasionally having to stop to make way for oncoming traffic to traverse some rickety single-track bridges across crevices in the terrain.

“Don’t worry,” I assured the group, “we’ll soon come across some Callendar-Hamiltons which will be far superior”. We’re now much further south, at Queenstown, and we have passed only cheap-looking bridges all the way down. Some or most of these, I am forced to conclude, must be Grandpa Hamilton’s. I really find it a bit much that someone spends four years demanding oversized bedroom furniture when his own grandfather wouldn’t even build bridges large enough for two-way traffic.

Of course, I’m ignoring the history here, and Mr Hamilton no doubt carved a little-used passage with limited funds and assistance. Now the road he pioneered is overflowing with traffic. I must admit we found his constructions very useful, so I shouldn’t complain.

Queenstown was described as one of the most beautiful places on earth (by the travel agent), and is known as the adventure capital of New Zealand. I was signed up for an early morning skydive today, and was very nervous (that I would miss the alarm clock). Unfortunately, bad weather means it has been postponed until tomorrow, but luckily I was able to arrange it for the afternoon this time.

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Some people - although surprisingly few - have expressed their disappointment that there have been only a small number of bulletins from my time in Australia. Well, let’s be clear, you don’t go to Australia on holiday per se; instead you travel in the capacity of emissary to the Queen. I’ve really just been checking up on the far corners of her Commonwealth, making sure no-one’s about to vote for severing ties in a referendum, and correcting a few mispronunciations that have crept into the local dialect over the last couple of centuries (not that I’d know any better, really). And with any time left over, I’ll cast a glance at the opera house or harbour bridge.

I am sorry to report only limited success on taming the natives, although I have had better results in reversing the corruption of third parties. For example, Herman the German, who spent a year working in Brisbane, will no longer greet you with an irritating “g’day mate”, instead politely shaking your hand while asking “how do you do?”. It seems the Europeans are far more amenable to change, and I will suggest to Her Majesty that we push abroad closer to home, perhaps establishing some form of empire from there.

The fun bus took me from Adelaide, through Melbourne, then on to Sydney. On the way, we passed through various national parks, and drove along the Great Ocean Road. The Grampians, so-named because ‘Grampians’ means ‘mountains’ in Scottish, provided some pleasant walks with interesting scenery. We even managed some cross-country skiing on the Snowy Mountains, so-called because… well, you really don’t need my help with all this.

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Condemned to stay in an uncomfortable hostel, our peers looked on jealously as Auntie Pauline drove us away to enjoy her extraordinary hospitality. She lives with Uncle Martin in a suburb south of Brisbane called Three Mile Island. It’s not really called that of course, but its real name is similar enough for my corruption to be recognisable to others and hilariously funny to myself.

We had made three overnight stops on the way from Sydney to Brisbane, each time the mix of people on the bus changing a little as others spent differing amounts of time in each location. To avoid having to learn names, we just addressed each other as characters from Neighbours. Responding readily to calls of ‘Karl Kennedy’ is an exhilarating experience I can tell you. Most self-respecting young ladies refused to respond to ‘Helen Daniels’ or ‘Mrs Mangel’ - and in the case of one girl from Essex, ‘Bouncer The Dog’.

Presented by the travel company as though it really existed, our first overnight stop had been at ‘Surf Camp’. As you can guess, this was just a contrived way of making money from a worthless piece of coast, but my scepticism faded as the relaxed and friendly staff taught us how to run into the sea with surf boards and splash about with them. One self-proclaimed “surfer dude” told me he’d been born on the moon, and I think he really believed it.

Fun though the lesson was, I thought it was sorely lacking a demonstration from a professional, so I offered my surfboard to a reluctant ‘Brad’ (not sure of his real name, but that will suffice). It turned out he was just as unable to stand on the thing as we were - apparently the waves weren’t quite right that day.

Off we went to Byron Bay, which had the distinguishing attribute of actually being on the map - and put there by none other than the grandfather of our own Lord Byron (these two men also known as Jim and Paul Robinson respectively). The daytime entertainment options were to further one’s surfing capabilities; to walk to the lighthouse (the eastern-most point of mainland Australia); or to take a trip to a town called Nimbin. I chose the lighthouse trip, being careful not to step too near the edge since legend insists a man called Harold Bishop lost his glasses there many years ago. The trip to Nimbin was eliminated as soon as I heard that it is famous for its tolerance of drug-taking - there is only one road in and out of the town, so a lookout post can call ahead in case the police are coming. It was ruled out as much on account of this blog’s anti-drugs stance as for my disbelief that such incompetent policing is possible in a supposedly civilised country. Undercover cops, anyone? This really is not the sixties.

After one night in Surfers Paradise (so named precisely because it is anything but), we looked forward to the final leg to Brisbane and the long-awaited stay with Auntie Madge and Uncle Lou. The charming hospitality of this family cannot be overstated, and I must thank Todd [Andy] for inviting me to stay with them - even if it was because he couldn’t be bothered to talk to his long-lost relatives himself. We both agreed that it felt like we’d been hanging around each other forever, so I booked on a plane to Adelaide to get the hell out of there.

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Flying into Sydney overnight, I was fairly tired as I queued to pass Australia’s stringent entry checks. They were ostensibly concerned about introducing new apple diseases into the continent, but it turned out that the x-rays and bag searches were just an excuse to have a bloody good chat to welcome the new visitors. I was invited for a full bag search by two customs officials, and jokes exchanged both ways covered topics ranging from bombs and terrorism, to drugs and orchard plagues, going via “don’t steal my stuff you cheeky convicts”. As I told them on my way out, it was a much better experience than being selected to queue in ‘Lane X’ when I was leaving the USA. “We try our hardest,” they said. “To be ineffective?” I thought, readjusting a colony of carrot-eating ants in my coat pocket.

I met an English chap called Andy when I was on the west coast of Thailand a month or so ago - we had been the only western people in town so we decided to strike an alliance. Our paths parted, but when I was in Bangkok a few weeks later, I occasionally thought I saw a figure with his distinctive gait in the distance along the road. It turned out to be him as I eventually bumped into him face-to-face - although actually, his face is less recognisable than his walk. You can never be sure it’s him unless he’s on the move. Anyway, he would be arriving in Sydney a day after me, and we arranged to meet up there.

With a lack of sleep, and various illnesses between us, we managed to turn a few days in Sydney into a fairly miserable experience - made worse because we didn’t seem to be able to leave. The plan was to head up the coast towards Brisbane where Andy’s Auntie Pauline would greet us with open arms. But in our lethargic state we couldn’t decide between the choices of public bus, tour bus, or hiring a car. Realising we weren’t going to break the deadlock, we thought that signing up to an organised pub crawl might shake things up a bit. This turned into a perfectly pleasant, if slightly raucous evening, and on our way back into the hostel we showed our key cards to the night manager and tried to engage him in friendly conversation using some hilarious jokes no doubt time-worn by the Austrailian customs officials - crazy banter concerning our intent to burgle the place etc.

Anyway, in the morning we knew we didn’t have our Sydney escape plan ready, so we asked to extend our stay. We were told politely that the night manager - an American, it turned out - had been slightly unnerved by our hilarious gags, and recommended against our continued custom. Well, our retaliation to this unfortunate decision was two-fold: (1) renounce our YHA membership, and (2) invoke everyone’s favourite legal weapon, the race-hate laws. I’m not at all familiar with Australian law (and forgot to demand my copy of Hansard before customs) but I presume they have something similar to the UK’s, intended as a bit of a catch-all. Of course, the trick to this as a white male is to be ready with your patter so they don’t have time to question exactly which race has been persecuted. Believing we had left the power-dizzy employee to have an embarassing conversation with his manager about the difference between US border patrol and the YHA reception desk, we spilt onto the street with an intent to sort out our journey plans more hastily.

Once we put a bit more thought into it, we managed to narrow down the choices fairly easily. Hiring a car was written off (and the pun here will jump upon you quickly) when Andy remembered that in the UK he had crashed cars as though it was a hobby - in fact, he was under a self-imposed ban. We looked into the public bus network, but when we started to plot a draft itinerary it turned out that we were completely unable to reconcile the place names on the timetable with anywhere on the guide book’s map. So, we signed up for the slightly more expensive organised tour pass especially designed to take young English tourists up and down the east coast. Before we knew it we were on the happy bus sailing north towards the sunshine, and hopefully to somewhere more welcoming to the ethnic majorities.

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I arrived in Hong Kong, settled into a cheap hotel, then went out to meet a friend, Oliver, who is working for Deloitte on secondment out here. We met up for what he billed as an “orientation briefing”, but which, to an onlooker, would have been described as a veritable piss-up. Either way, it was good to have someone to show me around.

Now it is an unfortunate and recurring theme on these pages that finding a good internet connection is no easy task, especially if you’re unwilling to pay for it, and no doubt I raved to Oliver about how my small and cheap hotel supposedly provided a wireless service. So,imagine my disappointment when I discovered that indeed I could detect their network, but - and I’ll avoid the technical details - it was in the unfortunate state where I couldn’t get on to the internet; most probably restarting the hotel’s modem would have fixed the problem. I reported the situation to the owner and asked if he could restart it for me - you know, switch it off then on again. He replied with some kind of unintelligible joke but I was hopeful that he’d get round to it at some point. A couple of requests later and it became apparent that he was unwilling to help. He said the modem was locked in his office, and he gave some - again unintelligible - reason why he was seriously unable to restart it for me. Short of breaking into his office, or hoping for a power outage, it looked like I wasn’t going to get the thing working, then.

When I was in Phuket with my cousin last week, we had some reason to recall a story from a family holiday in Spain where my grandparents had a house. Up until a certain point, we were known to frequent a seafood restaurant, a little further south along the Costa Blanca. On the occasion in question, let’s say I was ten years old, and unable to judge these things in advance at that age, I needed to use the lavatory during the starter course. Struggling to locate the light switch, I saw a large lever on the wall outside, but thought that such a big fixture couldn’t possibly be the toilet light switch. Eventually, I found the correct switch on the inside and went in. Beginning my return to the table, I suddenly wondered what the larger switch would have done, so duly went back to it and pulled it downwards. The whole restaurant was plunged into darkness, the ovens turned off, and general chaos broke out amongst staff members. Oh, how we laughed at how I ruined all the food! Oh, how we never went back there…

Anyway, it has occurred to me (and, no doubt, to the astute reader also) that a similar accident here might resolve my internet problem; at the moment I am paying extortionate rates for the privilege of typing these words. I have located a candidate for a switch that could possibly control the power for the entire building - the entire fifteen story building, no less. It is in a corridor guarded by CCTV, but I think I can overcome that and other operational hazards. All I need to know from any electrically-enlightened readers is the following:

• If refrigerators turn off will it ruin the food?
• Will it set off the fire alarms interminably?
• If power is cut to the lifts, will they plunge in darkness to the ground?
• Will people die?
• And most importantly, will it fix my internet?

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Leaving Bangkok with a hangover for the sixth time (indeed, for the sixth time in any medical state), I was quietly excited about arriving in a new city, Singapore. As a holiday-maker in Thailand, it is all too easy to become perpetually incapacitied through drink, and consumed by other high jinks, so I was looking forward to opening a brand new guidebook and having a proper look around…

The Singapore I could see was impressive - a bit like Canary Wharf but done well. With no natural resources, and not so long ago being just another smelly Asian city, Singapore demonstrates what can be achieved through good governance alone. Next time a third world country begs you for money, just tell them to pull their socks up.

The cleanliness and order maintained in most of the city is a result of strict law enforcement, often imposing heavy fines on anyone breaking ’school rule’ level regulations. One companion thought a £500 fine for cycling through a pedestrian underpass was a bit steep. A keen disciplinarian, I see it as a £0 fine provided you simply don’t cycle dangerously. Still, with some arbitrary laws it would be a bit of a minefield. If it was illegal here to be called Dan, say, I’d have been caught red-handed.

I’m going to Hong Kong next where my solution will be to refuse to pass customs until they’ve let me study the local equivalent of Hansard.

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