Big shoes to fill

The morning after the buckets, beach swim and Burger King, 13 of us meet for breakfast on the beach, as the boys have organised a charter boat to take us from Koh Samui to some of the surrounding islands. Despite some hangovers masquerading as seasickness, we relish the beautiful weather, fresh air, stunning island scenery and ice cold beers. On Mae Koh island, we climb several hundred vertical ladder-steps to reach the lookout, and stop for a swim on the way back to the boat. The swim is cut short after an official from the island chases us, furiously yelling something in Thai. Numerous hand gestures and concerned looks later, he manages, “Ahh I can’t think of word. Ahh…shnakes? Shea shnakes!” Everyone makes it safely back over the barrier, and we all agree it’s a 10/10 day. Until the swells on the way home.

I nervously laugh the first few times the speed boat flies into the air and slams down again, knocking the wind out of us. The Thai boat driver doesn’t look at all concerned, but the ride back to Samui becomes less and less fun for the passengers (well, for me, anyway). When we hit another massive wave, I sustain my first battle-scar of the trip, in the form of a 20cmx20cm bruise in twenty shades of purple on my ribs as I fly off my seat and slam onto the floor of the boat. Nothing a Tiger or two can’t fix though. One for the ribs, one for me.

The next day is New Year’s Eve, and I meet up with Hanna for a traditional Thai breakfast of eggs Benedict and a flat white. We spend the majority of the day haggling for jewellery, and finalising fluoro outfits for the evening ahead – the Full Moon Party (even though it’s not technically a full moon tonight) on Koh Phangan. Tim arrives from Phuket in the afternoon, and we have pre-drinks in Emily and Chris’s room, followed by a moonlit dinner overlooking Koh Samui beach and posing for a host of photos capturing the 18 of us in the brightest hues of yellow, green, pink and orange. For another 20 Baht, we’re decorated in fluorescent paint to match the garish outfits, and board the boat bound for Phangan. A little Dutch courage (in the form of a Smirnoff strawpedo) is required for me to board another speed boat after the bruising incident of the previous day, but I brave the waters and the ride goes off without a hitch.

We meet up with Hanna and her friends and spend the evening at Cactus Bar – very reminiscent of our Otago days, with plenty of cheap drinks, broken glass, sticky floors, the latest Katy Perry and Lady Gaga tunes on repeat. There are a few minor hitches later in the evening, including a couple of hospitalisations; some friends of our party have their bucket spiked, and one of our crew falls on the cactus bushes adorning the entrance to the bar, requiring cactus needles to be extracted from her hands. The Koh Phangan Hospital is conveniently the only medical centre on the island and charges an arm and a leg (8000 Baht) for treatment, so there’ll be some sizable travel insurance claims when we all make it home – fortunately not on my part…yet.

I make an early-ish exit at 2am, thanks to Tim indulging in one too many buckets; he’s dangerously close to not making it back to Koh Samui, so I enlist the help of Anth and Gab to help me drag him back to the ferry terminal. We source a burger to sober him up, but he promptly regurgitates it as soon as we get it down him (ungrateful bastard). Miraculously, we make it back to Ark Bar in one piece, and after his initial resistance to come home early, Tim declares his love for all of us and repeatedly thanks us for the favour (not so ungrateful, after all). The early departure saves me from a hangover the next day, and all in all, it’s a super night –everything you’d expect (or not expect) from a Red Bull and vodka bucket-fuelled party on a small island with 20,000 fluorescent-clad backpackers.

As good fortune would have it, the remainder of our party safely make their way back to Koh Samui, with the last ones rolling in on the 7am speed boat and the 10am one-and-a-half-hour slow ferry – a truly painful experience, I’m told. We succumb to a Coffee Club brunch, bid farewell and go our separate ways for the next leg of the journey - most of the group are off to other areas of South East Asia, while Pete and I are making our way to India. This has so far been the greatest holiday I’ve ever been on, and we’re only up to day 6 of 59. The next 53 days have big shoes to fill.

The same - but different

They say a picture tells a thousand words. Do you know what else tells a thousand words? People who work in communications. The ones with a tendency to be overly verbose. The ones who sit in the loud corner of the office (or, more correctly, the ones who are the loud corner of the office). Those who list The Chicago Manual of Style and The Oxford Guide to English Usage among their favourite books. People like me.

Linguistic utopia

After miraculously completing a BCom at Otago, despite changing my major every semester, I ended up in marketing and communications – ironically, just about the only two subjects I never took a single paper in at uni. I’d tried my hand at everything from bio, chem, and physics, to economics, stats, German, Asia-Pacific studies, and Chinese business management. It’s a wonder I didn’t end up running a 24-hour takeaway joint after that last one...

In fact, bar a brief sojourn in Europe in 2008, I've spent the best part of the past five years telling stories about other people's day-to-day lives and trying to talk journalists into printing press releases about big corporates’ new products. Back in the early days of PR agency work (when I wasn’t on the eternal hunt for Wellington’s moistest date scone or rehearsing for yet another mesmerising performance of The Final Countdown with the Capital’s most celebrated air-band), I honed my craft writing about young apprentice builders at the top of their game, architecturally-designed, award-winning homes, the latest and greatest MP3 players and plasma TVs, opera singers who received laureates, innovative new fuels, and everything you never wanted to know about cement and concrete. I even learnt how to spell Feilding (not a case of ‘i before e’) and Taumarunui – thanks, Pete. It was then on to the bright lights of marketing building qualifications (riveting, really), designing cool websites for school kids interested in the trades, and learning how to say Proprietary Plaster Cladding Systems without getting tongue-tied.

These days, it’s heart-warming tales of bankers who went above and beyond in Christchurch, and the gentleman who spent 54 years and 8 months working for the same company before retirement. There’s always a story to be told, from new customer offers and systems outages to the occasional excitement of a temporary store closure due to maggots falling from dead pigeons in the ceiling. True story.

As thrilling as these largely Wellington-based stories have been thus far, it’s high time I ventured further afield for some new material and pictures to tell another thousand words (alright, several thousand, if I’m being realistic).  And so, I’m ditching my desk with a harbour view in the loud corner of the office for two whole months in search of the same - but different.  I'll be on the hunt for fascinating people to talk to and to talk about. Enter: Miss Communicate – the home of short stories and tall tales of misadventure and miscommunication on the Subcontintent. More specifically, I'll be traversing India and trekking to Everest Base Camp in Nepal. But not before I've made it through a week over New Year on Koh Samui in Thailand, with more than 20 friends and friends-of-friends. And 30,000 strangers covered in fluorescent body paint. Ladies and gentlemen, let the games begin