Every now and again you bump into someone you know somewhere totally random and out of the blue. I once inadvertently sat opposite a record-label-owning acquaintance in a tube train, for instance. And there are a fair number of tubes going around at any one moment in time. Still, I know quite a few people who live in London so, sooner or later, I was bound to see one of them amongst the 7,000,000 I don't know. This sort of occurrence wasn't something I was expecting to happen on the other side of the world, though.
Walking down the main street in Auckland, I felt a tap on my shoulder, and turned to be face-to-face with an old school colleague, Matt Travell. He had emigrated a year before and I happened to walk by his office as he was heading in. It's a small world and all that. Except it's not. It's even smaller. You only need to get sixteen people in a room together until you are more likely than not to have two with the same birthday. Try to work that out.
Someone else tapped me on the shoulder in Auckland. I hadn't ever met this person before though. They asked if I was going to the Roger Walters gig, without even the slightest attempt at an introduction. I said no, because I wasn't, and they left. Never to be seen or heard of again. I didn't know them from Adam, nor they me, and I was oblivious to the fact Roger Waters was even in the city. So I guess I've developed a Pink Floydy (Floydish?) hue over the past few months. At least from the rear.
One of the folk I shared a room with in Auckland this time around was a chap called Nobu, on a week-long holiday from Japan. He told me he had lots of English friends, but that I was the first Englishman he had met who wasn't stupid. I didn't argue. I found him to be a very perceptive chap, our Nobu.
Enough of that. My next task was to get myself to the coast of West Africa, and it was going to take two-and-a-half days. Flying out of Auckland, for twelve hours, would bring me to Bangkok. Quite perfectly, the flight was very mildly booked, so I had a three-seater to myself which would serve me well for the intended body-clock reset. I'd be crossing six timezones on the half-a-day flight.
After a few weird sleeps I arrived in Thailand, six hours earlier than four in the morning. And seven hours later than 3PM. Unfortunately, the way things worked out there, I had time to do little more than while away a few hours near to my Bangkok hotel. I say Bangkok, but I was actually about 25 miles from Bangkok. Like spending a night in Maidenhead.
Luckily, google earth showed me to be positioned just a few blocks from a park. I headed there and picked out a spot shaded by the fronds of a palm tree, alongside a small lake, where I made my acquaintance with some local wildlife. The spiders were keen jumpers - one little translucent chap religiously scaling me throughout the afternoon, no matter how many times I ushered him away. I shared the bank with a two-foot long lizardy fellow for a very short while, until he made his way into a pipe feeding the fountain at the lake's centre - too quick for me to capture a holiday snap of the two of us. I considered following him in there but could barely get my nose in the opening, let alone a whole head and a pair of shoulders.
Now, many's the time when I've found myself startled by wildlife. Even living all my years in the UK. There's the two obvious childhood spider incidents (scorched into my memory) and that time when a squirrel flung itself from a hedge, face-first, into my chest. There may have once been a riverside battle with a gibbon, but my memory is hazy on the matter. However, none of these quite compares to being startled by three five-foot long dragons arrowing forth at me from beneath a bush. Just look at the silly Englishman getting scared by harmless park lizards...
All I'll say is, Japan only needs to make them 25% bigger, and Matthew Broderick has a sequel in the bag.
Making the short walk back to the hotel, I was confronted with a huge pop-up market, transformed - in the space of a couple of hours - from seemingly run-down collection of hardboard constructions into a bustling and vibrant place to buy, sell and barter; stalls stretched away as far as the eye could see. As with all things, hindsight once more proved its' decisive mastery, leaving me wishing for even a single extra day on the fringes of this South East Asian metropolis.
From there it was the little matter of flying another seven time zones into the west: nine hours to Nairobi, four hour sit (in terminal limbo), six hours to Accra, one hour sit (in plane), two hours to Freetown...
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