Recently I went off travelling again, it’s been a while and this wasn’t a long trip (England and France) but immediately I realised how you forget all the travel habits that save you time and money. Smart on the spot decisions that mean the difference between a $10 or $5 lunch, or an extra 20 minute wait on train.

When you travel you have to be sharp, but we’re all on vacation and in relaxed mode, we don’t pay attention and certainly don’t want to hassle with seeking out the optimum solution, so we end up with expensive and inconvenient options. This always happens.

For example, I got into Charles de Gaulle airport and you just can’t rely on the French to advise you on the various options, like the English might. They sell you tickets and that’s it. If you asked for a ticket on the TGV, just to get into the centre of Paris they’d blindly sell you one, even though no such service exists. I later got some tips on this from edepartures.com

Not wanting to feel like a tourist I was rather blasé, I did enquire saying I was staying 3 days and was there a metro pass I could also get at the same time to save money. What they sold me was a three day pass for zones 1-6 costing 30 Euros. What they should have sold me was a single into Zone 1 (about 7 Euros) and a 3 day zone 1 pass (about 15 Euros).

After about a week you get into the zone of travelling, filling up a bottle of water in your hotel to avoid the blind robbery of 3 Euros at tourist spots. You figure out the transport system, what to leave behind in the hotel, where to get the cheapest snacks (local supermarket) to carry with you, and so on.

I recall on previous trips after weeks and weeks of travelling being so efficient that I had turfed out half my clothes, travelled with a small bag, learnt where to leave it, and how to get sorted with the most comfortable accomodation without tromping all over the city only to discover one is as bad as the other.

I went back to Thailand again. Why the same old country? Because it’s such good value. It’s cheap, offers a lot, feels comfortable and there’s always something new to see and do. It’s exotic, mad, friendly, full of like minded travellers, but you can also get off the beaten track.

This time I was in Phuket, I’ve been before and it wasn’t such a tourist trap. In fact the beaches were nice if you didn’t mind staying away from the popular areas, ignoring all the stupid Europeans in their speedos, and disgusting old guys with their 20 year old Thai prostitute companions. The trick was to hire a bike and explore Phuket, one beach at a time.

More details on Phuket island

Every time I come back here it’s a new adventure, this time I explored the northeast of the island, where you wouldn’t imagine you are on tours of Phuket, or anywhere near tourists. In the off season it’s even better, since everything is cheaper and no tourist crush. I was there a week and it only rained twice in Phuket, two serious downpours that were over in an hour.

Phuket is so well developed that it’s really fun and comfortable. I spent a day on Rawai beach way in the south which is nice, it’s not idea as a tourist beach island which meant I could sit right on the beach and eat of floor level tables with drinks and food brought to me, for less than $5, magic.

I struck up a conversation with an up-country girl who was in Phuket selling trinkets and sleeping on the floor of a temple. Everyone else was lazying and tanning, she was all covered up in the sun, sweating as she walked around peddling things. The locals all came to eat in the late afternoon, it felt like real Thailand and not some contrived resort island like Samui.

So, I was able to enjoy complete freedom, get around on a rented bike, stop off for lunch wherever I wanted, sit back and people watch in the busy Patong area, admire the girls (always an attraction in Thailand), and sometimes just find a deserted beach to relax on. That’s what I love about Thailand.

Phew! I’ve been to quite a few countries now, well more than 50 at the last count. OK, well I admit some of them I only ever saw from the transit lounge of an airport. I mean, who really wants to go to Sudan, Malawi or Abu Dhabi.

When I’m travelling and meet other travellers we often get talking about this and someone always says, wow that’s a lot of countries, which were your favourites. Well, here’s the official answer for anyone who wants to know.

Firstly, almost all the places I’ve been to have been special in their own ways, different, challenging, charming, cheap, beautiful, unusual… the list goes on. For example there’s not much to Jordan but desert, but Wadi Rum is something really special, and of course there’s the bizarre dead sea. Or how about Lesotho. Where? Well it’s all mountainous and I once trekked on a horse to a tiny village that was 8 hours walk from the nearest road.

Anyway, if you insist, here are five countries I’ve singled out that have left a special impression, and they are in no specific order

Thailand
I’ve been a few times, it’s cheap and caters well to tourists but also has this intriquing charm with its incredible cultural legacy of Buddhist temples and so on. But the beauty of the Andaman coast is the best of all, scenery unsurpassed for dramatic effect. Then there is the ever smiling people and the girls…need I say more

Ireland
That’ll be grand, I’ve been back loads of time despite the rain and bog. I just love Ireland’s charm, it’s beauty with rolling green hills and rugged coast. Even sitting in a pub drinking Guinness while is rains all day, you can listen to didlyaye music and always have chatty company. I love celtic music and the general happy go lucky mood of the place.

New Zealand
Another scenery gobsmacker, if you’ve ever seen Lord of the Rings, but the thing I like about this place is how easily it’s set up for backpackers, and the down to earth atmosphere of the place. Everything is an adventure to the kiwis and they do it well.

France
80 million visitors a year can’t be wrong. Everything about France is lovely, well nice on the eye, from the grandeur of Paris to the natural sight of the Alps. The food is also great and the French aren’t as unfriendly as you would think. The thing is, there is just so much to this country, from Brittany to the Pyrenees and the Atlantic to the Med.

Dominica
Where? Not to be confused with the Spanish speaking Dominican Republic, this is one of the understated Caribbean islands, that has escaped hordes of American tourists, and flash resorts. It’s affordable, humble, and blessed with some dramatic volcanic scenery perfect for hiking. My best memory was smoking some fine local stuff with the locals in poor fishing village at Scotts Head then going snorkelling straight off the beach, magic!

Recently I travelled through London Heathrow, supposedly the 4th busiest airport in the world. What a disaster! I can’t imagine why 65 million people a year would want to put up with such crowded, poor facilities, and to think this city is going to host the 2012 Olympics, come on.

I hear they are going to open a shiny new terminal 5 in March next year, and it’s not a moment too soon. This airport is aparently built for a present capacity of 48 million, which means an extra 17 million travellers are being seriously short changed.

I arrived at terminal 3 via a bus from Gatwick which put me down at the ‘central bus station’ and I followed signs to a lengthy undergroud tunnel with no travelator before emerging in a lift (lots of heavy luggage) in a crowded lobby with low ceilings and temporary partition ahead of me saying check D – G to the left (actually they were to the right) and soon found myself in a long round about trek across uneven pathways through the parking lot doing a huge loop through a construction site to arrive at the main taxi entrance and an equally busy check in terminal which was claustrophobic to say the least.

Now, this was only 6.30pm, 3 hours before most evening fligths depart and 100 minutes before ours, and I was puzzled why we were the last to check in, then I discovered the queue to get through security, a mass crush like something you would imagine outside a Beijing supermarket sale. Crikey, we’re all being terrorised, if only Bin Laden could see us all now. What a poor excuse for an airport.

In the end, with all this security ‘bruhaha’ (learnt that word in England), and remembering those mad moslems had just tried a stunt on Glasgow airport, we all suffered, perhaps 45 minutes in stuffy queue (don’t the Brits just love queuing) with everyone having to remove their shoes and go through body searches and the lot. Clearly this airport wasn’t designed for this! No wonder there was renovations and expansions going on in this rambling excuse of an airport.

In the end I had no time for duty free shopping (despite the usual trick these days to get all pasengers to run the ‘duty free mall’ gauntlet in order to get to departure gates. I had to run (I always seem to have to ‘run’ at this airport) and just made it to the gate in time.

So much for airports and air travel these days. 

Hello fellow travellers, thanks for coming by.

 This is my relaunched blog, it used to be on all sorts of things that bugged me, which is why I called it Suckytubes. It’s an old surfing term for ‘a bad day at the office’, well, not quite - but you know what I mean when you’re all geared up and life keeps throwing you curved balls and disappointments. That’s what it was like when I was a student had would finally get down to the beach to surf, only to discover there were no decent tubes and surf sucked. Nothing you can do about it really but complain and rant to your buddies.

 Anyway, I did lots of blogging and it became popular (this blog) then I went off travelling. At first I wasn’t interested in seeing a computer or internet cafe. I went all over but my favourite is Asia and especially Thailand where I ended up for ages (even though there isn’t any real surf there

So, the blog is back, finally I got down to it and had so many experiences about travelling and so I’m going to start putting them up here.  All sorts of things, the best places, the cheapest and tastiest meals, the idiots you sometimes meet, the rip offs and hassles, the girls…well lots of different stuff, but I guarantee it will always be interesting travel stuff.

 So, keep coming back, and get your butt out there and get travelling yourself, it’s one heck of soul journey.

 Dr Zogg