…Remember the good old days when things would just kind of work? when the violins would play, when the bureaucracy would get crushed under its own weight, when people would just nod and bow and nod and kneel?

I remember the good old days when I was a dictator. Some Frenchiphied country in the middle of the African continent, sometime in the seventies or eighties, sometime when the cars were still big and sucked down so much fuel that you damn well needed a six-figure income from your Swiss bank accounts to keep the Concorde prepped with fuel and flight attendants. Those were the days, heady for sure, back when the whole notion of “democracy” was something fancified that the Yankees would push upon the warm parts of the world once in awhile, but then quickly forget about their promises once the newest tour of Journey and Yes began filling their stadiums again.

Yes, you may think I’m full of shit, and that’s fine – every dictator needs to be full of shit to one extent or the other. The fact is that no one really knows, as a dictator, who you are or what you do – or where you came from . You think they want some kind of qualified well-spoken individual to lead them? Hell no – you’re the sacrificial goat, the iconic Jésus to their crucifix of a broken economy. This stuff doesn’t just happen because of your own volition – it happens because there’s that need from a society, that cruel need to push their urges onto someone other-worldly and expect them to solve it all.

Excuse me, let me mix together another gin and tonic. Yes, I sit here in the annals of my abandoned beach house in the Phillipines waxing poetic about those days in the African armpit, but they taught me a great lesson about expectations and the need to “go with the flow” per se – when the revolution’s happenin’, don’t chicken out. Let the wired young folk shoot themselves silly, and if you’re the last man standing, you’re likely to get the majority of the pie.

So it all rolls down like this. You side with the rebels, against some idiot who thinks he has the authority to run this country because of some stupid ritual called an “election’ – and in the jungle, drunk on stale beer and hocked-up Ouzo smuggled in from across the Mediterranean, you laugh in his general direction. The nerve! You know you can do better, people’s will be damned, once you’re in the driver’s seat this backwater of a country can get where it’s supposed to go.

So, you do the frontal assault. The rear assault. It all rolls down together, a big attack on the capital into the president’s palace, into the Presidential office and you end up pulling the trigger on the poor fool and leaving him gasping in a pool of blood on his own finely tiled floors. Hey, I never said this was easy or romantic – I just said you could do it.

Then there will be countless other young men (or women) of your age angling for the Presidency. You would do well to have already killed most of the most eager before you arrived at this crossroads, watching the former ” democratic president” breathe his last breath at your smelly sandals crafted from cast-off tires. You should have waxed a few of the smarter boys, and kept a few of the stupider ones as good cohorts with a solid strategy for when this moment actually arrived.

Then, upon the chaos of entering the capital and storming the Presidential Palace you can finally get those boys at your side and declare yourself “interim” president – which, in the grand scheme of things, usually means permanent. Hey, it’s usually that easy, but if it isn’t, remember the golden rule: surround yourself with stupid people.

Yes – that’s probably counter-intuitive if you’ve read too many management strategy books – but Hell if you’re going to run a country the way you want it run you gotta make sure the people who surround you aren’t smart enough to take you down. Lenin did it , Stalin did it, Clinton did it – those damned “intellectuals” get in the way of anything gainful from an average opportunist such as yourself. Off the useless smart people in universities, but keep the doctors – with the clear understanding that their intellectual pursuits should not delve into the realms of localized insurgency – and keep on keepin’ on getting this new nation of yours dragged up into the new echelons of public acceptance.

You, then, you smashing rebel leader you, should prepare yourself for the new role as Glorious Leader of the Great Nation of Whatever For Life, and the first thing to do is get a damned new wardrobe. Get shit that the other boys can’t – fine military uniforms tailored in Paris and Geneva, fine female bodyguards, strange automobiles from the collections of Saudi princes. Hell, this is your moment to shine and all that gold bullion in the former Democratic People’s Popular Bank of Fairness isn’t going to get spread around to your unelected cronies by itself, now is it? You emerge from a Éuropéan trip of “diplomatic peacebuilding” with a few million worth of great threads from the likes of the Champs Elysées and Old Bond Street and you’ll be damned if some peon (who fought beside you during the rebellion) is ever going to question you.

Sure, it’s all well and good, and for the first ten years I’d advise you to have an “election” of some sort. Keep it simple – one of your close rebel buddies gets to be the “opposition” but is getting so much graft on the side from your oil refineries that he will be happy to know that he’s scheduled to get banished to exile in Brunei the day after the votes are cast. Hey, hell, it happens – he’ll never be allowed to set foot in his homeland again, but a few dozen mercedes should shut him up well.

And then, here is your time to shine – you get the bodyguards, you get the queer military uniforms, the palaces, the splashy vacations in foreign locales and the fancy dinners for invited foreign guests. Hey, it all looks good in the press, the life is good, all Cuban Cigars and Ukrainian women. And McDonald’s burgers as well in my case, even though the closest burger joint was a thousand miles away. Hey, what do you think I kept the Concorde around for anyway?

Throughout the subsequent years and decades of your rule you should promote your most loyal lackeys and have anyone who even questions your choice of color in socks succumb to a painful death via a “fishing accident”, “poorly cooked fish”, “intimate encounter with a fish”, or essentially any excuse involving fish. This will help extend your time at the top – and oh what a time it will be! Wine and dine, languish and splash, these will be the golden years.

But, indeed, this shit usually ends up ending badly. Some other young upstart on the edge of the country will grab a gun and get a group together, and suddenly another revolution is brewing in the hills. Sure, you’ll fight, you’ll propagandize, you’ll threaten and you’ll sack your senior staff. Hey, we’ve all been there, we all did that – but the tides of time grind as they do, and eventually those rebels find their way into the city and into your Presidential Palace.

And that’s where you need to check your ego at the last minute, grab a metric tonne of that stashed gold bullion and fuck off to another locale, such as the Phillipines – those young rebel boys will kick down your Presidential office doors looking for blood and boy, if you’re there, you’ll be spitting up a gallon of it on those finely manicured tile floors of yours you had crafted some decades ago. These dictatorial jobs have a time limit, sister, and your exit strategy is the most important part of the plan altogether.

So I said take me on a trip, I’d like to go someday, I’d love to see L.A. again. Walking that walk, talking that slick talk – the long journey of being deposed begins with a single helicopter flight out. As for me – I found a cave nearby, then I found a fine thatch hut, and wound my way out of the African desert and across the Indian Ocean in whatever Junk I could find. I watch the world roll by these days; the military suit and the lapels are in the closet, however, just in case one day I do it all over again, in a pinch.

Well then – nine years ago. I don’t know about you, what you were doing around “that day”, the day being…. uh, well, something or other, I forget. I remember waking up in a central African mud hut and hearing people bickering about chewing gum, canned food, and how hung over they were from palm wine from the night before. And then I looked at the tee-vee, and saw these two big shiny towers from way over in head-up-your-ass-town (also known as “Enn-Why-See”) and a bunch of people running around acting stupid. Like, really: It’s the morning after your night of drinking, chill out already.

I just wanted to see some beauty before all this damage was done. But if it’s too much to ask, well Hell, we’ll just get back to it then, now won’t we? You know, dragging your ass out of the bushes, out of the brothels, the bars, the bowling alleys, and emerging from a twentieth century slumber of communism, fascism, random stupidity, rock and roll, and getting in gear for a new century where you gotta have your picture taken on every street corner, where the security agent gets to feel you up and almost suck you off while he searches around for white gels that might explode…. dude, not with you. I go to Bangkok for that, when they’re not fighting and such.

But we’re still screaming, nine years later, after the Yankee-doodles thought the world was going to crash in on itself, when they realized that hey, this big ugly watery ball we live on is frickin’ huge and not everyone is totally keen on the ol’ rapin’ and pillagin’ of the stars and stripes. Apparently this appalled some Americans, as if we were in a popularity contest or something to begin with. I beg to differ, and the sooner those pussies get the hell outta that country and into the next, the better for America it’ll all be. We don’t need security cameras, bio-chipped passports, traceable credit cards, and the worst of all – bartenders that won’t let you drive home after 12 beers. This here is an insult to my freedom, damnit, and I’ll fight it tooth and nail until they drag me away in the rubber jacket. Again. For the third time. Actually I think it’s been more than that, but I lost count.

So you drag your sorry drunken malarial ass out of the jungle of some former French colony, doing your best to speak the only French you know and then saying “pardon my french”; though it usually doesn’t work quite well, people are more than happy to help eject you from the arse-hole of the continent. And you’re trying to get back to the good ol’ America of old, even though it’s changed irreparably because of crazy terrorists and all that – not to mention subsequent wars and fiscal disasters, but that comes later, and really you’re only concerned about the terror-factor of the whole white-knuckle flying experience.

Then again, flying’s never been safer, or so they tell you. Apparently it’s safer because of maintenance, or pilot training, than the olden days when they just checked your ticket and offered you a smoke once you got up the stairways to the waiting, really hot, flight attendants. You never see those birds anymore. Actually you do – the same chicks, forty years older, three divorces under their belt, tattoos all over their forearms, still serving you coffee, but now it’s with a scowl. Draw clear, boys, these post-menopausal demons are a bigger concern for your wellbeing than the apparent terrorizers.

So, finally, you get back on that western-world airline from probably somewhere in Yirrup and on over to the eastern coast of the You-Hess-Hay to check on your assets, and trying to figure out your next ditch dive location to crash for a few months. And of course you must do all of this quickly, as the feds aren’t as ridiculously slow at investigating as they were a decade ago, and they could catch up with you sooner than later. Naturally, in that American multi-culti style of easternism every culture and their dog (usually a dog) is on that plane, including a few folks from the desert sands with fancy bleached flippy-flopping clothing and weird keffiyah’s and headbands and turbans and other towels obfuscating their noggins. To hell with ‘em – they won’t cause trouble.

What you gotta look out for are the swarthy types – the guys with the gooey hair, possibly Greek or Italian but maybe just maybe Aye-Rabb, but you can only really know after talking to ‘em. I’m often a quiet drunk, so often I never get that far, but just listen in when they speak to the ticketing lady or while they’re on the phone. Any of it will work, any kind of heartfelt “goodbyes” will likely be spoken slowly, it should all be emotional like a bad episode of the Young and the Restless. Speaking of which, I gotta get the next few seasons – having been hung over in the jungle a few months, I lost track. That’s what sucks about hiding out from society, the lack of netflix. But I digress.

Once you’re on the plane, strapped in, alcohol’d up, and drifting into your own mental wonderland, it could undoubtedly happen. I think it happened to me once, maybe twice, on third-world airlines going from buttfuck nowhere to buttfuck further from nowhere: some crazy buddhists got up and started slashing people with their plastic knives, screaming ensued, then a few Danish special forces guys dropped them to the ground and kept them pinned. In fact, it turned out to be a good deal as the flighty was so ecstatic to be alive she handed out free booze! That vodka sure helped with the police reports too – but again, that’s another story.

What I mean to say is that in the event that the Danes aren’t around, which is sadly too often, you gotta do this shit yourself. They pull out their improvised weapons, yell various religious swearwords in your face, block off the bar cart – bastards! Then they’re kickin’ at the cockpit door, haven’t got the memo about the reinforced hinges, then threaten a flighty or two, and you just sit back with some popcorn and watch. But shit, then they kill the flighty and force their way into the cockpit, stab the pilots in the neck, and take control. Now it’s not just your average friday night brawl à-la Bangassou, suddenly you’re staring down a possible tower-crashing like the days of old. Hell, all that crap shoulda been behind us. They made a movie or three about those folks, and damned if they are going to sell me another half-baked patriotism DVD in this day and age.

Therefore, you must snap into your sober state and figure out a plan. Naturally if you’re like me you spend at least 20 hours a day totally drunk and/or high, you’ve learned to train yourself so you can “sober up” for minutes at a time for important things like border checks, flirting with a prostitute, or tying bedsheets together to sneak out of a fancy hotel. You remember all that martial arts training you had when you were eleven years old, down your last scotch and tonic, and quietly undo your seatbelt.

Now’s the time to make eye contact with any able-bodied male you can see. Try and get into a groove of making some facial gestures that can tip two or three of you off at the same time, to create chaos, especially if there’s guards around watching the passengers with their plastic economy-class eating knives. Then give him a wink, burst from your chair, and tackle them. Choke holds are good in closed spaces, be sure to knock them out, leave their future for those too wimpy to take action.

Then, onto the cockpit. Walla-whats-his-name is probably in there reciting shit from his Imam-from-Hell who said it was cool to crash planes into stuff, knock him off first. It’s tough to take on two folks at the same time, it helps to have a few able-bodied passengers help you out. But nonetheless, if you’re in this situation, be creative – pens, pans, bottles, smacking and whacking all the way. These are confined spaces, and fighting back when the majority of passengers are on your side can only go your way. Just watch out for your eyes. Gouged eyes hurt, take it from me.

So, you get to the cockpit with hopefully a broken wine bottle, or in the worst case you can split a beer can in half and slice into a few necks. Job’s done, you’ve lost a few thousand feet of altitude, just like bungee jumping in Kathmandu, but this time you’re sadly even more sober. Nonetheless with those dead pilots and dead terrorists, now you have a plunging plane and peanuts worth of time to get it back righted again.

Thus you simply remember the rule that pulling back on the stick makes the thing go up, pushing down makes it go down, just like that other “stick” you’re used to pulling on frequently, right? Pilots keep all sorts of manuals around in that tiny space of theirs, and once you get the plane level you just need to find the emergency frequency and yell that good ‘ol fashioned “MayDay” call – if you’ve done that as a prank too often in the past, then sorry, let someone who sounds more concerned do it.

After that, and with the terrorizers subdued, you just must be able to follow instructions from the radio, assuming someone’s heard you. How to fly, how to land, it’s a good chance to sober up for half an hour or so. If you’ve got the shakes like I do, use the intercom and ask if there’s an engineer or doctor on board, someone who’s done that book learning stuff, someone who can obey and follow instructions. Then head back to the first class lavatory and enjoy a smoke. Pass out the rest of your cigarettes to eager passengers, and if it’s a federal crime to kill terrorists and smoke on an airplane afterwards, then I don’t want to be right.

If there’s no answer to your mayday, then it’s best to check out those flight maps and see if there’s an abandoned tropical island somewhere around if you’re too stupid to figure out all those aircraft highways that should bring you at least close enough to a major airport to get some contact. I mean, you could do the whole-abandoned-island thing, but that show ended months ago and people were just right pissed off about the ending. Think about it – do you want to be that vain twit saying all those bad lines with people you don’t like for six years? I didn’t think so.

Fly the plane to the airport, and get the hell away once it lands. Make sure you leave a name and number in case of a subsequent lawsuit, though, those things can pay pretty good. Which buys you even more time getting wasted on palm wine in the jungle.

Careful where you swing that sail.

Yes, we can start with the obvious: the desert is a vast place, filled with vast people doing vast things like herding goats around. That’s not such a bad thing, mind you – they are damn tasty on occasion, and can keep you warm and steamy at night when the sun goes down and the herd is milling about just outside your mud hut. Take one in, get a-shakin’, and then the next mornin’ you’re on your way again, with one goat walking a little funny.

Of course it’s all fun that way, praying to whatever folks you be-leave in and moving the livestock all ’round the flatlands, bashing the bushes for a few extra coins here and there. Actually, quite Anne Frankly, the life sucks – you occasionally stop into some ditch-dive town of dirt herders and see a tee-vee and what do you see? Some dudes in flash cars and fat black guys in someplace called the Oosa eating more and more and more of those “boorgurs” as they call them. And then you stare at that dozen goats, your crusty man-dress that you haven’t had a chance to wash in a few months, and think “I gots ta get something better than all this”.

So, you look to the sea. Oddly enough you ain’t ever eaten fish, certainly not the swimming sea-going type, having goats all at your bidding for your entire life. But there is this vast thing on the horizon, a big blue undulating mass, beckoning you. You can stick some wood in it and get happiness – which is sort of similar to a goat, but just a little more complex.

Yeah, your buddies are looking out o’er the horizon with their boats and they talk about meeting these things called “da Flench” out there, and avoiding something called the “Neigh-Vee”, which you think is what one of your goats uttered once during those heady nights in the mud hut. But then one of your clan-membery types hands you a Kalashnikov of a rusted disposition, says get in the boat, and hang on. You bid goodbye to your goats, having given them to a random boy, knowing that you can probably track him down and butcher him if he strays too far. Hey, this sea thing might just work out!

Indeed, you have to learn quick – the speedboats are fast, but it ends up being a lifestyle much like that of a goat-herder – aside from the seasickness. Stuck for days or weeks on a rickety motorized piece of wood, punctuated by a half hour of absolute pandemonium as you spot some topless beached whale Europeans on the horizon, their sails billowing in the Indian Ocean wind, among other things billowing. You get your weapon ready to fire, but one of the more experienced types tells you not to pull the trigger as the thing might explode. Crappy weapons suck like that.

At this point, if they don’t shoot back, you just board and give all those poor white bastards a shit-eating grin, ask them about “hammbooorgers” back home in the Oosa and point your Kalashnikov all menacing-like at them and forget about the fact that it can’t fire. Then after a few days of that, as well as dodging the navy, you might get to make the ransom demands to whomever is doing the ransoming that week.

Indeed, the entrepreneurial bent of the entire exercise seems close to the goat-market, dragging the pasty white animals ashore and hawking them off to the highest bidder; and even though you only get a sliver of the whole take-home, it turns out that it’s way more than your dozen goats is worth. You re-appear on the coast a few hundred miles away from your herd and it doesn’t matter, really, as you get a few bundles of shillings that you can use for some more of that grean-leaf chewing gum that you’re certain is what everyone over on the other side of the world chews too. Spearmint, right?

But then I’m not so stupid to assume you’re one of the skinnies and don’t really give two shits about their socioeconomic situation, their aspirations for riches, and all that. Hell, them folks getting near your big-ass tanker or fancy yacht with their busted up AKs and RPGs isn’t an attractive proposition at all, you know, and the way they spin like mutherfuckers in the ocean with all their fuel, even if they don’t board they’re like a massive fuel bomb about to go off. You hit the wrong side of that rickety old thing with your guns and blammo, the whole thing can send shrapnel and goat-herder pieces all over the side of your recently painted hull. That’s no good, that’s not attractive. What are the folks at the Golf Club in Durban going to think when they see that massive black scar? Entirely unbecoming of a person of your stature.

And sure you’ll say “insurance” doesn’t allow you to carry weapons, just huddle down and pray they don’t shoot you or rape you, or both. And hey don’t delete all the porn off the laptop while you’re down below decks, that took me years to get! You may think it’s just okay to play along, hell you’re insured and all, but it’s just not very cool to let these dudes board your ship.

Therefore, while it may be more expensive, hiring a few crusty old PMC types who like a-shootin’ is a good idea when you’re sailing from Masawa to Mombasa. The guys are retired but their trigger fingers are still itchy, they remember the good old days of Mog ‘93, and no, that wasn’t a sporting event. Then again, some might disagree. So you hire the dudes and tell them to shoot anything on sight, drop them off in Mombasa, and continue down your way to high tea down near the Drakensbergs like nuthin’ ever happened. Makes perfect sense and all – pacifism is for people on the Pacific, fuck that shit.

On the other hand if you happen to be El Capitaine of a big-ass oil-barrelled vessel sailing south, you have bigger problems at hand. We all know the bean counters out at the headquarters of Transport Corp X don’t want all the bad publicity of the PMC types giving their PR guys overtime, and thus you’re basically a sitting duck floating along the ocean as the pirating types try and do their thing. Even worse is that you just know some of their “Diaspora” in Minneapolis, Toronto, or London are calling their buddies in Boosasso and giving up your coordinates. And while them goat herders aren’t the best at math, they can still fuck up a trigonometric function with the best of ‘em and figure out your trajectory pretty good-like. And then you gots real problems – because then there’s no vigilantism involved, it’s all up to the insurance broker down on Fenchurch Street and he doesn’t see a name of a fat guy with a family, he sees an Excel sheet. “Oh shit” is, therefore, an apt response on your behalf.

Though now with the navies of a few nations patrolling, your chances of getting mixed up in the kidnapping mess are severely reduced – yet when the speed boat’s a-speedin’ towards your hull like it’s Al-Qaeda or something you are already too late. But there’s one good thing about big bureaucratic corporations – it’s a don’t-ask-don’t-tell mentality. So what if you hired a few ex-Rhodies to keep you in the clear? You can add that time-honoured entry onto your balance sheet “Technical Expenses”, a credit with a few zero’s, and again drop them off at the next Kenyan docks. Indiscretions be damned and all that.

Finally you could always consider the Steven Seagal method of hiring a “cook” who, well, knows how to do more than just cook. Or go all Chow Yun-Fat on their asses and just do the dirty deed yourself when they board – there are plenty of movies that can act as great instructional videos in this respect.

But if you’re like that poor goat-herder-come-sailing-entrepreneur who is watching some white guy shoot back, well shit, this just isn’t fun anymore. They always say that only ten percent of fledgling ventures survive into the second year, and with the creative help of sailing folks who take extra precautions, that number could decrease drastically for desert people whom live along certain straits of the world’s waterways.

I swear one of these days I’ll stop writing, probably when my fingers get chopped off by some corrupt African cops, though at that point I bet you I’d try and just stump-stump some entries so you folks can still receive enlightening advice that all intrepid adventurers can use during their endeavors. Yeah, that’s it – it wouldn’t have anything to do with me stuck in a small African hellhole town on an obscure island off the coast of that same continent, bored out of my skull as I can’t even find a decent god damned beer as half the population is Islamic and the other half is so hopped up on local juice that they can’t even tell me where in the hell to get some: they just shrug, give me that half-toothless grin that the Africains like to give, drool a little bit, and get me pissed off.

Yeah, par for the course. If I didn’t like the local color (ha!) then I should have never have come, but you know, I’m a vagabond wanderer, and occasionally you get stuck in these small stupid towns with names you can’t pronounce and the dude running the dala-dala dirka-dirka shared taxi-bus-matatu ride the next morning is nowhere to be found. So you find the local flophouse, harass the one dodgy and loose woman in town, and start smoking some local cigarettes and sipping that “Belgian” scotch you had smuggled in with your luggage. What can I say, I’m not different than the others.

But I’m not telling you anything new. You’ve all done it before, been there done that, gotten bored, got the “mzungu” t-shirt and picked a few tourist pockets yourself while hanging out in the African market. Hey, things do go both ways in these places, damned straight, and it’s worth your while to understand that the local yokels can be hosed out of their money just as effectively to them as they do it to you. My good old friend George W. Bush used to call this a “pre-emptive strike” or something to that effect, but I just call it by that good old fashioned British English word, pragmatism.

Excuse me while I sip some more cheap scotch and brush the small ants off my arms, stuck in this squalid room, listening to the occasional motorbike and squeaky oxcart outside rattle by, locals just down the hall mouthing off at the telee over the football game between two countries no one cares about. Hell, there’s little else to do, but I tell you back in that last town I had to get out quick. Real quick. Damn, ants are biting, get off!

Thing is that most of the local touts see it as a one-way experience, take you to be some rich asshole who just is wholly entitled to hand over more cash than usual, or even more cash than is unusual, for the opportunity to visit their blessed one-horse shit African (or Asian) town by God’s grace of allowing your crappy bus service to just ditch you in the middle of town unceremoniously until another claptrap with wheels (or legs) shows up. But I’m not bitter or anything; hey, it happens, and it’s a good chance to hide in the shadows and check out the local’s pockets intimately. (Not like that, you perverts! You go to Arabia for that!)

So sit back and relax and dilute your “orange flavoured drink” to just the right taste to suit your own, because I have plenty of sound advice for my loyal readers on that ever so elusive topic on how to, in fact, effectively rip off the locals. Profit before people, right? Who says you can’t feed off the urban wildlife and keep yourself going?

We can start with the easy stuff – jumping out of a taxi. Can work in big cities, but you have to know the neighborhood and what direction to run in. Don’t assume he knows the city better than you do – though he probably does – but just bolt. When that “idle” conversations comes up in the cab, always give a fake hotel address, fake name, fake nationality. Just fake it all, he’s not asking you for your benefit: he’s asking in case he needs to call up his brother in law’s cousin to break your kneecaps because you bolted before paying. Simple stuff, really, and this effective method of ripping off the locals is a good way to get some practice.

Step two, the old switcheroo. But let me swat these mosquitoes off my shoulders first, it’s tough with this level of girth to keep yourself bite free in tropical backwaters I tell you. Try pouring that “orange” drink on your bites if they do manage to nab you, it makes a great sterilizer.

Anyways the method is this: get him to give you the money, give him your money, give him back your money. Keep going around like this, negotiating the price, saying he needs change, on and on, around and around. He’ll get confused with his third-grade education, and eventually you’ll have both piles of cash in your hand, at which point you agreeably agree to his agreeable demeanor, shake his hand, and walk away. He or she will feel pretty good about the transaction for an hour or so, at which point he’ll get quite shit-crazy. Therefore I recommend fleeing by taxi, and following the advice I mentioned in step one.

Finally, there’s the old standby of the “free” hotel, or free as can be. This is advanced ripped-offedness so it’s important to practice the last two beforehand. Sure, when checking out you can play the money-swapping trick, or the taxi-jumping play, but it’s much easier to simply get up early and bolt. Seem too dumb? Fine, jump out the back window, see if I care. Do it around four in the morning before even the muslims are up and you’ll have plenty of time to get down to the dirty bus station and say “hey mans, you need need NEED to put me on that next dirka-dirka outta here!”

Yeah, it can be that easy. And of course there are other more exotic ways of ripping off the locals – feeding your tour guide to the animals, shoplifting, slipping cockroaches into the food at restaurants, but you’ve probably already done those or can figure them out for yourself.

I say it’s a good way to extend your vacation, by extending the same genuine hospitality back that they show you, and of course to get some cool free stuff. But excuse me, I need to go shower myself with some orange drink.

Making money on the arse-end of Africa.

Dirty hippies like to listen to new-age music and watch the sun set, a beating bloody red, undulating across the serengeti, almost as red as their eyes after some of that fantastic Tanzanian weed. I should know: once, back in the old days when I was something of a spectacular vagabond, I would wax my poetic side with them and talk about all of the great things one could find in this “new place”; new to us, you know, dumping our bodies in a hostel this side of Dar Es Salaam and pretending we’re Henry Morton Fucking Stanley or something. You know, we just drop our dirty bags down and start looking for drugs, like the grand adventurers of old.

Sure, it’s all glory and great bragging rights when you finally get up off your ass and go to the next spot for the same pattern, but in those meandering blathering discussions we had over the evenings it became plainly clear of one important thing: we were all running out of money. This is when the “peace and love” types would get all apologetic and start fumbling for the Swiss bank number of their trust fund, or the always-important Parent’s Telephone Number. Being a bohemian isn’t free, you know: philosophizing costs money, and it’s best if it isn’t your own. So they shake a leg, like they’re dancing, searching in their cargo pants in sheer desperation and out of a heavy fear that the beer and weed may stop flowing at any moment as the haze of hash made them forget to call daddy last week. And they only have a few hundred dollars for the next few days.

Yet those of us without the trust fund, or parental backing, need to be more resourceful to maintain a sustainable strategy of “studying the African sunset while simultaneously studying the psychosocial effects of toxins commonly available in East Africa”, as one of the wandering students said he was studying for his thesis. Yeah, I was just flat out broke and needed some money.

Then you realize one thing when you’re hung over and driving around in circles in a safari truck on the serengeti, these four-legged walking things have big tusks and big paws and rumor has it that the Asiatic types over in the Hong Kongs kind of like their bladders, too, to treat rare diseases like kidney failure or baldness. That’s when you look into your back pocket and realize that you need to get some cash. “If only I could use my rusty pocketknife and sell one of those leopard-paws for a few hundred, I’d be golden for at least a week or two more,” you say to yourself. And sobriety having departed long ago, you even start entertaining the required number of hostel hippies to take down an elephant and sell off the ivory to one of those Dubai-folk you saw at the airport.

Too bad it isn’t so easy. Leopards and dreadlocks just don’t mix, and I remember once out in the parklands an elephant sneaking up on a few of us cheap-like-free hostel travellers: it could have easily gored us all. An inconvenient truth for sure.

I left the stinky hostel after a week or two, but kept on my research of entrepreneurial endeavors in the African plains, and came to the plain truth that there is gold in them there grasses. Indeed it would take more than just a dirty hippy to take down an elephant, and maybe some of those dark-skinned locals or even a dozen; but after I had bolted from the hostel after rifling through a few room’s full of backpacks for some extra stashes of drugs and cash, and getting bruises on my ass on a dented minibus heading east, I began to formulate my plan for a bona-fide poaching operation.

The gist of it is that it’s both simple and complex: sure, it’s simple to hire a bunch of locals to go into the bush or the jungle and find some fancy animals to kill, but keeping track of them, and making sure they know who’s boss, is not so much. That’s why once I was in Tabora I set around to find a local I could trust – which involves getting them drunk and in a quiet place, threatening them within an inch of their life, and seeing if they bolt or not.

We went into business, with me orchestrating the international exportation side of our entrepreneurial venture – basically going back into the capital once in awhile to find some Russian and Arab business folks who bought our dead animal stuff and re-sold it over in Asia for even more. Had I been more ambitious I would have cut them out, but since I was still very much a weed-hound back then it wasn’t one of those things that I was interested in getting “high” about. Yeah, all that.

Getting the animals was an art: getting in is simple enough, but park rangers and landowners tend to know the noise of a gunshot from many miles away. This is why it’s important to feign some kind of ignorance: often I would go along with the hired hands and pretend we were on a “lost safari”- you know, pull out the camera and unwashed clothes, and distract the rangers or ranchers while the hired help quarters the kill and gets it back into our “safariland” vehicle as quickly as possible. We even invented a shell company just for this purpose; we called it “Sharon-Getty Tours”. We specialized in “sustainable green-friendly eco-safaris” for Israelis, and then jacked up our prices so no one would call. The ones that did call, I dealt with. I’ll leave it at that.

Once you’ve hunted down the animal with your local help, it’s best to take it off-site and have a professional butcher it up into “whole-beef sausage” that you can sell at the local expat markets, and of course sell off the ivory, kidneys, paws, and anything else sort of valuable to your international interlocutors in the capital city. It’s really as simple as that: though it’s always worth having someone watch your back when you negotiate with them, so they don’t rat you out to the Tanzanian police, or even worse, some of their hired goons.

Yes, it did happen to me. I had to flee the fancy five-star restaurant we were doing business in, jumping across tables, dish-dashes whirling all around me, bald Russian bodyguards tearing off their fake leather jackets to reveal silenced pistols. I crashed through the kitchen, dodging a few sub-par French chefs stuck on the wrong side of the Four Seasons employee transfer system, nabbed a motorbike in the back alley and disappeared deep back west into the wilderness. Sadly with my contacts in Dar Es Salaam compromised I was no longer useful to the domestic poachers, and at gunpoint I said my friendly goodbyes and well wishes. Their parting gift was a rusty bicycle and a genial wish in broken english to “get the fuck out of here and go south until you die from exhaustion”.

It didn’t quite work out that way, as fate would dictate, though these days when I interview at the local burger shop I can’t help but bring up my importing/exporting venture. You too can make big money in poaching, it only takes a few wild fantasies, a little bit of dry conversation, and of course a lot of nosing to the grind to get it right. Maybe one day you too can receive the gift of a rusty bicycle.

Touring lessons for our modern age.

I don’t want to be too presumptuous, but hell I will be. I’m damned sure if you’re in front of the computer often you’ve gained a few pounds in between pints of ale or gallons of ice cream, a few burgers, the occasional full-pig barbeque, dozens of hot dogs, and maybe some feral roadkill that you fried up too. That stuff rocks, trust me: a few spices, a little tabasco, and you’re golden. For about ten minutes anyways until the real king of the body, the stomach, rears its ugly head.

You’re probably chasing and crushing pimples like Dirty Harry day in and day out, waking up when you can (and damn it’s hard to wake up these days) to spew out a few dozen ice cream sandwiches and bags of Doritos down the toilet in between getting ready for your big adventure – heading down to the corner store. But I’m being presumptuous again, hell – the morbidly obese do get around sometimes, on occasion even go flying, and after that are usually subjected to the rigors of third world travel. It’s painful when you’re a normal size, but when you’re big boned, or as is often the case, just too damned fat, it becomes a bigger challenge.

So strap on your orthopaedic shoes and your tent with a hole in the top that you call clothing, because I do have some advice to give on this complex issue. Many dodge it, many pretend it doesn’t exist, many more just forget the nuances of the art of travel when they can’t even apply underarm deoderant without a handler or two; hey, that’s fine. Diversity builds contempt and all that. But the sooner you learn to handle yourself, and certainly not like that, the sooner you can have a good time on the road to hell in some third-world backwater.

I’m a bit of a reformed fat fanatic myself. In my early days of being broke and depressed I ate my way across America, riding a steady stream of barbeque sauce and deep fried hamburgers, pizzas, potato chips, and gallons of fountain drinks. No sooner had I eaten a town clean of its saturated fats than they ran me out, huffing and puffing, my loose clothing billowing in the heated desert and my upper arm flesh rippling like small waves on the shore. Yes, it was romantic in many ways, until I had to stop on the side of the highway and vomit.

That’s when I started taking the bus. First one greyhound, then another, then another. I never got ahold of the car thing until I thinned down, but that’s another story. Out at the old bus station there were plenty of hefty people and they provided me with some tips after we scuffled for the aisle seat. Of course, it still took a few minutes of fighting to grab each other’s munchies bags, but after a few attempted reach-arounds we were all out of breath. So I did what any whale would do – waddled down the center aisle and flopped on a seat. Or two.

Wedging that suitcase of precious munchies in between yourself and your seatmate is no small feat – you’re best to slowly edge yourself into the aisle seat (don’t even think about the window) and over the course of an hour or two start moving the fat folds over to their direction,b Because it gets painful when the people from the back of the bus come forward and flop your flab around on the way to the front. Trust me, I know. And of course the longer the ride, the more your seatmate is going to complain – offer up a few pieces of grub to them and they might stay calm. If they wave their nose in disgust, just act shocked – hell, in third world fuckedupistan why would they care what you smell like?

Then, of course, there is the long wait to wherever in the hell you’re going. This can feel like days, even though it’s probably only hours, because all you have to eat is whatever you brought with you. For a multi-day road trip, never trust the roadside diners: you’ll have to stock up on Donairs, pizzas, deep-fried mars bars, barbequed critters, and of course a garbage bag full of potato chips to survive. This kind of stuff shouldn’t be taken lightly: hunger pangs, hypoglycemia, sore and swelling feet, lymphedema, fecal incontinence, it’s all going to kick in if you don’t down at least one box of Ho-Ho’s an hour and shit, if you’re shaking like a Polaroid Picture from a lack of sugar while on a cramped bus, god help the poor bastard next to you who’s going to endure a whallop of vomit and your own girlified crying because you’re so pathetically hungry. Therefore if you’re as disgustingly fat as I think you are, I’d recommend you drop all pretenses and just wear a fucking tent already: it’s waterproof, it washes off easily, and it’s easily expandable to accommodate your own expanding self.

The less hungry whom sit around you throughout the journey may give you flack but hell, once they see how many hundred pounds you have at your disposal they’ll quickly shut up. Judo is great for fat people: learn to throw your weight around if they get all uppity. In fact, on occasion if you’re imposing enough to those people sitting beside you, you’ll get the seat for free. God bless human rights and all that – if it had gone the other way we’d be paying double. Or triple. Or quadruple.
Once on the other side if you’re exhausted after heaving your body bulk off the bus, a taxi might come in handy, but on the other hand, walking isn’t such a bad idea after all: thieves rarely target fatties, seeing them as kinds of omens or bad spirits or something, at least in the dirtier parts of the world. In this case it may come in handy to tye-dye that tent you’re wearing, to look all spiritual.

Indeed the cheap and hideously obese traveller has a challenge in this respect – trying to accomodate the weight of three people into the room intended for one. that’s why I eventually thinned up – well, that, and the meth habit. It really drops pounds, you see. I’d probably do it again, if I hadn’t blown my fortune somewhere along the way, and was left wandering around, vagabonding if you will, not exactly like James Bonding, trust you me; but I’m about to get on a Greyhound to play some Vegas Craps, and all jokes aside, I’m sure it will have plenty of shits and giggles in store. See you on the other side of the toilet bowl.

PBs’ very own crackpot, the inimitable Dean Farisian, reviews the latest offering from the Bradt Guides collection – The Bradt Travelguide to The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

I come from downtown, born ready for you, with too many gin and tonics to remember, in a kind of blathering sense. Yeah, I drink these things for a reason – Bombay Sapphire might go on and on about botanicals but the cold hard reality is that I’ve had a few bouts of malaria and the only way to really forget about them is by staring down a saturated lime juxtaposed with a garish lion-print carpet somewhere in central Africa, Kinshasa preferably, but whatever shithole that has a bar will do just fine. Damnit.

So it was with great excitement that I heard someone had finally come around to publishing a guidebook on one of my favourite haunts when I feel like contracting malaria, that being the Congo, usually the “democratic” one, but on occasion I’ve found myself surrounded by shady hookers in Pointe Noire as well, pretending I enjoy their company but not totally up on doing anything nasty with them as everyone knows how easy it is to stow a knife upside a garter belt. Indeed, it could have been my sort of downfall coming back to these places, dealing with incessant bribes and rambling retards all obsessed with stripping me clean of all currency I may have been carrying, shambling me off to some shiny hotel in the city’s center of Kinshasa when all I really wanted was the noise and the ugliness of the “African” quarter, as if it wasn’t all African to begin with. Sure, the Congos are a wealth of contradictions, but we’ve heard that all that before. What it comes down to is that you’re drunk, you’re stuck in a town in a country you wish you weren’t in, but someone’s paying you a mint to be there. That’s where Sean Rorison’s guidebook comes in handy.

I used it a few times already while dodging disease-ridden prostitutes and filthy refugees from Liberia while rambling around Kinshasa, and on occasion I found an illegal pirogue over to Brazzaville where no one noticed I was just looking for some damned peace and quiet. It worked well – decent maps, decent hotel listings, along with some useful observations that simply don’t exist anywhere else. I guess all the other writers are afraid or something, but I found this nice restaurant, the Nuna-far or something, while running around Brazzaville. No one spoke English there, though, so I sort of had to smack it into their heads. You’d be surprised how well it works.

There was that one time I was stuck in the Congolese jungle, some chartered aircraft had dumped us off in Bana-wana-whatever-the-hell the name of the place was, and I was staring down this group of stout-faced folk while the sun set and I was running out of liquor. They’ve got these great cheap booze shops in Kinshasa, but damned if you can find some good edible petrol further inland. Later on, upon reading the guidebook, I learned that this place was called Basankusu and these people were called Pygmies, and usually don’t eat drunken retards. It kind of soothed me for awhile, until I needed a smoke.

I’m guessing for all the poor souls stuck in The Congo, or the other Congo, or that other Congo, for some extended period of time, it will be something of a gift from above to have a book to help them out. No one knows a god damned thing about the place, aside from the fact it’s at war, people are dying, and always use a condom, even when shagging goats. Bring lots of condoms. Malaria’s everywhere, but then again, it ain’t the same for everyone. I’ve met some hippy-dippy types who pray to the spirit world and do just fine, and I meet some United Nations types who are just choking to death on their own fluids because they don’t want to dip into their expense accounts and just buy some damned meds. But then again, I don’t get free hospital flights to Jo’burg, and they do.

Otherwise the book came in handy several times, especially when dealing with corrupt assholes – who knew you were supposed to be polite with them? Apparently there are also numerous parks around the country, with animals still remaining, and hippie backpackers are heading back to Goma, a kind of nice place with a nice Indian restaurant, but too many people who are friendly and speak english for my liking. It also goes into detail about Katanga, the mining province where all the business types go, and has plenty of useful information on the central part of the Kinshasa Congo with all their sort-of-above-the-table diamond operations there. You seen one open pit mine with kids mulling around inside of it, you seen one too many.

It’s a good read when there’s no power too. I don’t speak much French, so the dictionaries do well – especially the Ling-lala and She-lubes-up stuff, which apparently is hard to find. Not like I never looked anyways. Also good stuff on going north in Brazzaville Congo, lots of swamps and jungles and apes who are just right pissed off that us other drunken apes are coming in for a visit all too often.

Sure, I’d buy another copy, since I lost my first one. Think I left it in a cab in Kinshasa when I was running out, didn’t want to pay the fare, ran into the endless crowds around Place de la Victoire and into the deep, dark, Congolese night. Punched out a few drunken locals, ran through a pack of chickens, made some women scream, ended up wandering aimlessly along the banks of the Congo River for a few midnight hours until sobriety hit and I just camped out in the bushes until dawn. Lost all my worldly stuff that same night, too. Had to start again. If at another time I was again in the same situation, and if it was in either Congo, damn straight I’d buy this book.

-Dean

Building Your Own Mountain Hideout: A Step By Step Guide

Way back in the day I was really enamored with all this society bullshit, this pushing and pulling, this tugging to reach higher plateaus of existence, schmoozing and smooching the stars and shagging random married women at film festivals; ah, it was the life, sipping champagne and smothering myself between the knockers of some so-and-so that you’d see in the gossip papers a few days later. I had the tux, I had the Bentley, I had the chateau by the sea where I flew my helicopter. It was all there, folks, some kind of high living as they called it, though after some years it made me want to puke, so I burned it all down and threw away the key.

In fact, that’s half the reason I started travelling, was to get away from all those fakes and into the grit of it all, you know, live like the low-life scum who always tried to break in and steal stuff from my fancy places of residence. You could surmise it was all fun for awhile, and indeed it was, but there was simply something about society that made me cringe after awhile.

Maybe it was all the lack of fresh air at those cocktail parties, or getting sneered at for wanting a burger instead of some food-fusion bullshit that they serve at these places that pass as “restaurants” these days, hey, I’m not a psychologist. I just got tired of it all, packed it all in, moved around a little, saw the lower levels of the world’s population and laughed with them, cried with them, fucked them over in bad business deals. I never said I’d lost my edge.

But even that’s not enough after awhile. It’s just a matter of time before most of us just lose it, snap, get tired of all this human to human interaction that’s bandied about as the be-all and end-all of our existence. Hey, I like computer games, living in someone else’s basement, attacking people online when they get out of line; I hate that whole working stuff, especially the fancy-kind of work where you don’t need to ask someone if they want fries with that. The disposable life’s for me, and while it took some soul searching to really make It clear, I can tell you well and truly that the dumpster is one of my better friends.

Ah, but I’d leave him too, for a little peace and quiet. I’d wager that all of the suburban garbage in the world wouldn’t make up for some decent hunting and trapping skills – kill your own food, make your own clothing. Live far away from all those assholes and the entire notion of commerce. It’s all icing on the candy-cake of the apocalypse, raining down on us sooner or later, maybe in a few years if the Mayans were right, if not then fuck ‘em – I’m getting out anyways.

The private chateau was indeed pretty isolated but you needed a butler, a helicopter, and a steady stream of ingrates to keep the thing going. What any self respecting anti-socialite really needs is an obscure mountain hideout, and I mean obscure – not some bullshit cabin in Aspen or Whistler, or some namby-pamby tropical island in the Bahamas that you bought for a cool five mill. That’s pedestrian, that’s posturing, that’s a waste of my time.

I’m talking real isolation – think the Canadian territories or Siberia. I’d hesitate to say Alaska as it’s been overrun by gun-toting Yankees who will try and play their “home of the brave” homeland security card on you sooner or later, but if you can carve out a hideout just behind the frozen mountains up there, then do so. The key is the remoteness – no vehicles should be able to get within a day’s hike, or climb, of the hideout. Caves are best, but are often occupied. Hidden cave systems are worth their weight in platinum. I had a line on some but a random Saudi dickhead beat me to the punch.

You’ll need supplies. If you have money to burn, just buy a flatbed truck, fill it up with stuff, and get it near there. Bring piles of human labor, maybe some construction guys, to manufacture it for you, if you’re all up in the luxury stuff – but the problem then is that they’re going to sell you out. Fuck that, I say – learn the tools of the trade, and build a modest camp where no one can find you. Haul up a generator or two if you really feel the need for electricity. It was all going well until Benjamin Franklin fucked it up, and I still don’t know why in the hell we bother with the stuff. Live by the sun, die by the sun, I say.

Guns are an option and I’d advise having a few around, with a few thousand rounds of ammunition, but on a daily basis you’re a dipshit if you think you’ll be hunting with a rifle or two. Get yourself a crossbow, fashion your own bolts. Learn how to melt pewter and lead, learn how to take down elk with an arrow at fifty yards. It’s silent, and it’s healthy. And if anyone dares fuck with you in the backwoods, you can save your ammunition for when it really matters – when you need to lay waste to bandits and hikers and then loot their stuff.

You’re also looking at long winters, which is fine in my opinion, as there isn’t any reason to leave your house anyways. Build a fire or two. Have gallons of gasoline sitting around just in case you can’t get the damn thing ignited on its own. Do like the ancients did – pick berries in the fall, grow vegetables in the spring, preserve your meat for the winter. The northern lands are excellent for this. Go down into the tropics and you’re competing with all sorts of problems, not least of which are rebels in the jungle – though you can subjugate them and probably become their leader after awhile. But that’s another story for another time.

Ultimately the mountain hideout is a great idea once you tire of society and, in my opinion, is the best escape from the fast life that people seem obsessed on living. Let them have their possessions, ruled by bills and protocol, stuck in a rat race on the slow road to hell, watching themselves age in a foggy mirror and wondering where the time went, what happened to their health, and how they’ll ever leave the corner they’ve painted themselves into. Out in the woods you’re free, living your own way, unless of course you get within five miles of my own hideout and then I’m not really sorry to say that you’ll be picking lead shot out of your ass for months to come.

Lessons from the French school.

Back in the day there was a guy called Chad, and also a country, somewhere down there in the dirty sands of Africa, where a bunch of those little kiddies ran around playing and screaming and falling over stuff and sometimes even picking up guns to kill each other - yes, it’s a nasty business, that war, and lots of those wimps in the “First World” as they call it feel all squishy inside when they see a tyke with a Kalishnikov on the television. They say “oh, that’s terrible, it can’t be happening, they’re just children after all”, as if the mediaeval world from which this nasty modern planet of ours burst out from under has actually receded into the horizon, into the history books, into the dark grey annals of times gone past where the witches were burned and the men sent off to death, while the women and children tilled the fields until they all died at the ripe old age of fifteen. What can I say: we’ve made progress there, but in other ways we’re still very far behind.

But, of course, amongst the poor warmongering tribes where the world still spins around the moon in the painted desert, where spirits still live with you in your mud hut and where half of your siblings won’t see their fifth birthday, where the capital cities have painfully long names that no one in their right mind would try to remember, where water is scarce but bullets are abundant, kids grow up pretty fast. They never have a chance to play PS2 until their eyes bleed, to get folds of flab under their underarms from sitting and eating cheese puffs and listening to their stomach gurgle while whatever bullshit the television feeds them kicks it up a notch and they are forever trapped in the suburban dream of accumulation, inflation of the body, obsession with increasing income, and to ultimately getting that two car garage so they can do it all over again to another generation of vegetables – no, they’re stuck out there in the real world, between the earth and the sun, living life at its most base. Some pansies from Paris saw their simple lives on television and decided they needed to be “saved”. Or something.

Thus, buying and selling children has become something of a cottage industry in the Saharan region, saving kids from their own environment and growing up with skills that they may actually use for survival once the entire world goes up in flames. Better to inundate them with ignorance and an obsession with Dolce and Gabana than have them learn to hunt and wage war. When once they could have been the generation that built a desert nation from the ashes of a global holocaust, now they’re stuck in cheap flats in Parisian suburbs hoping no one throws a Molotov through their window. Life is a twisting game, and that one’s a dead end; but according to their saviours, they’re “safer”. From some things, anyways, like consciousness.

Thus, we get a few groups of people heading to visit their buddy Chad and take the kids aside. The ruse is that you have a school somewhere, just over the ranges. Making up a fake name, some business cards and official looking documents, will undoubtedly be more than enough to convince the poor villager to part with three of her fifteen children. She may not even notice. Tell the kids they’re going someplace magical, give them teddy bears and toys, maybe some sweets to get their brains hooked on first world foods. Then pay off a few people at the airport, and you’re on your way.

It really is that simple. These African countries generally don’t care much about what you do with their kiddies – they’re too busy making them. Some villages are chock full of kids, ripe for the pickings of the white folks there to save them. Smuggle the kid through to another country if you’re unsure of immigration laws. Pal up with a cargo outfit that ships aid in and out. Really, once the kids are in your possession, it’s smooth sailing on the blowing sands.

The other option is simply to head to the old slave markets of Mauritania or Niger and foot the bill up front. Some Jesus loving types do just this, since money is an abstraction after all, compared to leaving a child for slavery. Of course, no one ever asks the kid if they want the slavery of the Bedouin tribes living from day to day in the open desert, or the slavery of the nine to five grind in a nameless corporate compound. And once you’ve discovered which one you prefer, it’s usually too late to do anything about it.

Good kids should only cost a few hundred dollars apiece at the slave market – peanuts compared to the Air France flight back to Paris, and the fake documents proving it’s your adopted kid. For under a grand you’ve got yourself another inductee into the Western World. Congratulations.

This avenue for getting yourself your own army of kids to do your bidding is undoubtedly cheaper than the alternative, legal adoption, or the worst of all possibilities, marriage and family. But naturally you need to question your motives – why ship the kid back? Why send him or her to a life of indentured servitude in the corporate brothels of Western Europe?

Catch and release, I say. And I’d wager that if you went down south and started shopping for slaves, your epiphany would likely end with you in your own Bedouin clothes, building your own tribe, with your own contingent of child soldiers. It’s a vast area out there and your own fiefdom isn’t such a far off dream after all. It’s always a question when one visits Chad – are the whiteys saving the children, or vice versa?

What to do when you wake up beside a Dead Hooker.

It’s happened to all of us at one time, I suppose, stuck in a musty Bangkok sex club with numerous young girls all ogling at your overweight belly under a sweaty t-shirt, you feeling like the man you are, all three hundred pounds, the sex king of the street, or at least your table; yes, there may be other German types there looking for young boys, or various other sleazebags into sick things like underage youths, but you’re different – you could choose to go somewhere that the voluntary crowd goes, you know, down at the backpacker bar and hit on all of the middle aged European ladies crossing Thailand as some sort of spirit-of-grand-adventure, or whatever those types do with their divorce money, but you’re better than that. No, you want local talent, and your manly looks and incredibly suave grooming skills have all of the ladies slowly sauntering over in your direction after the madame of the room screamed at them to snap out of their bored narcoleptic catharsis brought on by a lack of uppers, downers, or the ether of the moment, and kick their macking skills back into gear. Of course, they don’t really need them – they just need to be there to fawn over you for awhile, until you drink too many five dollar rum and cokes and decide that taking one, two, or all of them back to an overpriced private room is the best course of action to complete your evening.

But you knew all of that. A southeast Asian sex tourist destination is filled with experts of the libidinal persuasion, and you’re likely one of them. There may be money involved, but it’s more of a comfort money – after all, these teenage girls really want your loving skills, are totally into you (why else would they have said so), and just love whatever new and exciting positions to which you may introduce them. Want to be a butt pirate? No problem! They will enjoy the glamour of you plundering the depths of their plumbing to discover what they ate last night – a hamburger, or a chocolate chip cookie, perhaps? Only you and her will know for sure. Of course you’re using protection. I, above all people, know you’re not that stupid.

But naturally, things will progress. You’ll land some of that spectacular Thai weed that the hippies are always going on about, you’ll score some more of that cheap rice wine, and sooner than later you might find yourself going a little flaccid. Hey, that’s fine – it happens to all of us. But since you’ve paid this girl for the whole night, why not do a little exploration? Indeed, she may be feeling a little frisky after having you for several hours already, and since you are the Man Machine she has dreamed of, you need to think of something to keep her occupied. Just like in those banned porn movies, fisting is a great way to bond with that special someone, or if they’re not present, that nine hundred baht special someone of the moment.

Mistakes can be made, however. Perhaps she feels unwell after such fun and you notice that a ring is missing from one of your fingers. You’re both trashed, and you pass out – it’s been fun, you leave her with cash in her cleavage, she says she needs to rest up before moving on. You pass out graciously. Light seeps through the misty windows into the stale humid air of your rented bungalow in the early morning and you fire up a cigarette, head to the bathroom to unload some digested beer and stare yourself down in the mirror. Out of the corner of your eye, you notice that this girl, who should be long gone, is sitting motionless on your bed.

Yes, the dead hooker problem always throws a wrench into the early morning. You really just wanted to get out of here and onto the next chicken bus to Chang Why and onto bigger and better bongs, beefier hits to smash your consciousness upside the head with some skull-shattering buzzes that the drifters of old reminisce about in the old folk’s homes, the alcohol recovery farms, and the looney bins of the nation from whence you came. Not a bad way to go, really. But the problem is that your initial foray into the self-congratulatory sex tourism scene of the Bangkok underground is putting a wrench into your plans now that this nameless girl from the dark jungles and rice fields of the places where the lonely planeteering buses don’t go, has croaked from massive internal bleeding. Maybe she’s bled all over the sheets of your bed for the night, maybe she hasn’t. If you’re lucky, her death will be from some sort of drug she ingested last night and it will have been quick and clean and painless.

So the first mission of yours should be to snap out of your drunken funk and hung over self and get down to business. Quite likely, since you’re as smart as I expect you to be, you’ve left all of your real luggage at the other hotel on the opposite end of town and have no incriminating items scattered around this throwaway fleabag room. Maybe the madame is down the hall and you’re wondering if she will notice before you can get out into the needlework of the city, onboard a tuk-tuk to anywhere but here, screaming at the mad driver who knows that something has gone horribly wrong and he’ll get a rearry rearry big tip if he just guns it and gets your ass back to safety in the cleaner confines of Tourist Town, Thailand, before anyone notices. If this is your plan of action, and it’s not necessarily a bad one, I recommend you run a block or two away from the dead hooker’s residence and entrance so that the cabbie can’t trace you back to wherever the bad stuff happened. And of course, don’t tell your cabbie to drop you off at your hotel’s doorstep – he will have far, far, far too much information to incriminate you. If he passes by your hotel, just point a few more blocks past it, around a corner or two, then jump off, pay him good big nice tip, and be on your way. Maybe wander around for awhile. After all, some of these places like to send people out to follow their customers – you never know who is in with the cops, and tipping them off can be one way to squeeze even more cash out of a proud sex tourist. Make your return far less than obvious, and anything but conspicuous.

Of course, the other option is that the madame is watching your bedroom and you’re stuck in a bind. Perhaps they’ve had this happen before, you know, where the dirty western tourist kills one of their girls and they demand some sort of compensation. Luckily the law is on your side here – or rather, the law is against both of you. Negotiating a payment for the life of the girl, who they will likely measure at only a few hundred dollars since she will usually overdose on something poorly cut or just offs herself in her slave-like living conditions in between evenings cavorting with creepy fat Europeans after a year or so. Not a bad price to bail your ass out, really. Cheaper than some American jails, let me tell you, but that’s another story. In this way the bouncers get off your case, perhaps even get you a driver and a clean route out of the city while they watch your back. Dead hookers are bad for business. You’ll avoid the whole body-dumping detail that any self respecting ditch-dive southeast Asian brothel will have already mastered from years of trafficking young girls in and out of their disease ridden doors. All in all, it wasn’t a bad night, you could have done worse, and you could have done better, and you can move onward and upward to the next chapter of the planeteering guide that is helping you wind your way through this magical mystical wonderland of cheap drugs and shady sex. Just don’t tell the wife and kids back home – after all, technically you’re at a sheet metal conference in Little Rock, right?

Of course, the worst possible scenario is that you have no out and have no helpers. Your name may be on something – which brings us back to that ring. It will likely be worth it, in the long run, to put your hand back up there and retrieve it. Blood will be the least offensive of the bodily fluids present there; further, contraction often occurs after death, though if she was lucky enough to die in her sleep (rather than awake, and really, if that happened, count your stars you were too drunk to remember the previous evening) then all of the muscles down there should be a little bit easy to deal with. Wash off with running water, and be on your way. It’s best to make her up like she’s “just sleeping” and pay the bill, and move on – this will buy you valuable hours as you find a way out of the city. And of course the first plan of action with regards to the nearest tuk-tuk driver that you flag down in a fit of panic and madness applies here as well.

Naturally, all of this means that in a bawdy house of self congratulatory sex, remaining elusive with regards to your real name and proper location of existence are paramount. They’re role playing to an extent, and you should be too. But of course, the love machine that you are, you may be pressed into providing some deeper details of your life, and I would recommend refraining from this practice as it can only lead to trouble. After all, it’s the girl who is interesting, and learning about her life and turn-ons should be the focus of your evening. Remember – have some fun, but always plan your way out.