Read about the time, while touring the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, a villager rugby passed the skull of a sacred ancestor’s head.  I had commented on the charcoal markings on the skull and Villager casually scooped it up and side passed it so I could take a better look.  Catching the head, I missed the jaw and watched in horror as the sacred mandible bounced along the dirt ground like a flat stone skipping across a lake.  “Ooh God, what have I done?”  I was horrified.  “They still eat people up here.”  Wearing my innocent-three-year-old look I sheepishly apologised in a voice that pleaded for forgiveness.     

Luckily the villager wasn’t at all flustered.  He swiftly retrieved the sacred jaw and bought it back.  Returning the jawbone to the correct place he moved it up and down like a puppet, “Ohh I am very sorry about that,” he mocked in a cartoon character like voice.

After nearly a year of training Canisas to be a personal trainer, he left the Islander Travelodge Sport Club to set up his own “jungle gym”.  Canisas literally built equipment from bamboo and wood, and made both barbells and dumbbells by filling holes in the ground with concrete and popping a metal bar in it.  Once the cement had dried Canisas turned the “dumbbells” to finish the other side. 

Walking to lunch one day, I come across the entire PNG maintenance crew sitting heads bowed in shame in the middle of the freshly painted hotel swimming pool.  They had painted themselves into to middle and were stuck in the stifling midday heat waiting for the paint to dry.

The biggest career challenge was two and a half years in Beijing as the Fitness Manager of a “new fitness chain.”  Jason, the team manager of one of our clubs, fired our most popular personal trainer for “not being a team player”.  Being bought up with a communist mentality he thought all trainers should have the same number of clients, and viewed Leah’s advanced training, communication and people skills as an “unfair advantage” and forced her to leave. 

Before leaving China I went on one last biking trip.  One of my staff commented they thought I had “too many holidays” and that I “must have had at least fifteen vacations” during my China contract.  I counted them myself – there had been seventeen.  From freezing in minus thirty-six degree’s IN THE DAY TIME in Harbin, a city in China’s north, to streets filled with a clinking of human teeth on cooked goats jaw’s as Kashgar locals’ gnaw the 'special of the day'; goats head soup.     

I am now living in Pattaya, 147km south of Bangkok.  Pattaya is where the men who “could not get laid in a brothel” at home come to “finally be treated like the man they always knew they were”. 

The first time we met, Heinz, my 84 yr old neighbour, questioned why I was in Pattaya.  He informed me the only reason to be in Pattaya is for the girls…  Not being an expert on how sexually active an 84 yr old with prostrate cancer could be, there are shops in central Pattaya that sell nothing but the magic blue answer to “Mr Softie.” 

I would ask Heinz’s 24yr old Thai wife how good he is in bed.  But she doesn't speak English.  Which brings up another question; how did he ever ask her for marriage in the first place?  They have a weekly booking with a translator, the one hour a week where they can discuss important issues like what to do on the weekend or whether her mum really needs a new buffalo.  I assume you could always drag a translator along to “pop the questions”. 

Of course, there have been the men; the relationships, the crushes, the heartbreaks, the extended celibacy and the one-night-stands.  A global nomads constant search for hugs, affection, orgasms and love.  

This is a journey through the ups, the downs, the tears, the exhilaration, the frustrations and the seemingly endless search for adventure, a purpose to life, and “the one.”