Author: Duncan Ridgley

D Day…December 2nd, 3.30am… Three continents, eight countries, 5,000 kilometres, and several breakdowns to cross by 20th December.
The grease was still clean on the jeep as the front wheel bearings and new brake callipers had only been fitted the day before. The new engine and diff oil would not make all the difference… but it would help.
The radiator still leaked and the main beam and rear t lights on the trailer where still not working. Croatian mechanics answer for fixing old rads and old electrical systems after nine months of begging was still a simple… ‘No’. Once the cruiser had made it to Egypt… the ‘can do’ attitude will have the jeep all fixed up and as good as new.
It was now… just a case of getting there.
We drove up the hill from Komiza, like we had done a hundred times before. Only this would maybe be the last time we would do this drive all together. We all felt a bit sad leaving our home…and leaving Sooty and Jessie, the two strays who had five stared it with us for the last nine months.
We drove in silence, thinking of what we were leaving behind… and what was to come.
In Bosnia, there was still a lot of snow on the mountains from the week before and… well you can’t drive past a ski resort covered in snow…
‘Can you Dad… I mean… we won’t see snow again for a wholes year Dad and oh pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaassssse Dad, can we go up to the Ski resort and play in the snow…?

Happiness is a snowball fight…

with your mates.
We stayed in the Bjelasnica National Park ski resort where we are keen to make a somewhere different destination sometime in the future.
‘Dad! Dad! Film me and Angus!’
On standing outside the main entrance to the 50 odd roomed hotel, I pointed my video camera up to Claudia and Angus to film them all smiles and woolly hats… only to find that they had set an ambush for me and threw two massive chunks of ice off the roof patio smashing all over the pavement area in front of the smiling receptionists.
‘Nice little children’
We pushed on and headed for Serbia. The weather turned shite and once on the other side of Sarajevo the quality of the roads deteriorated somewhat. The tunnels have no lights in them and are just carved out of the rock with no ceilings. The roads surfaces are ancient cobbled stones mixed with a patchwork of potholes, tarmac and concrete.
Due to no full beam, when we met a ‘train’ of lorries coming the other way in a half kilometre long tunnel full of potholes the driving conditions became, how should we say… unusual.
Through our research we hoped this would be the worst part of the journey in terms of weather and road conditions.
The going was slow and needed 100% concentrations. Game boy batteries were fully charged and every one seemed OK.
We’d be fine as long as the radiator and new wheel bearings held up. Breaking down in one of these tunnels was not an option.
After crossing the Serbian border where Angus and me had been stuck in no mans land a few months before, we set out to find a hotel.
As far as I am aware, there is no Lonely Planet guide book to Serbia… yet they have one for Antarctica… that’s probably because more tourist go to Antarctica, than come here.
We found the ‘hotel’ in town.
It was five stories high, 70’s communist concrete style, faded brown walls and 50 keys sitting in fifty little boxes behind the receptionist desk.
‘Do you have any rooms?’ Looking at all the keys….
‘Yes’
‘We are two adult… three children, we want one room’
‘No room… five people must have two double’
‘For the same price?’
‘No, double price’
‘Too expensive for us, two doubles… if you can not do both rooms for same price we go motel on highway’
‘…OK’ still no expression in his face.
We were probably the first customers to walk into his hotel for day’s… maybe years… and yet he was happy to not budge an inch on the price and let us walk out.
‘Maybe he knew the sign for the motel… was only a sign now and that it had closed down ten years ago…’
‘Do you have a treble room?’
‘Yes’
‘Is it OK two small children sleep on floor?’
‘Yes… you pay for two doubles…’
This guy had nerves of steel…
‘OK’.
It cost €32 for a room that had not been slept in… probably since the war.
The room lights did not work… not toilet seat on the toilet, it was on the forth floor.
50 rooms and this was the best he had to offer.
‘Were can we get some food…’
‘No… restaurant closed’
‘No, you don’t say… you do surprise me’
‘Any were in town open?’
‘No’
‘OK thank you for your help…’

Claudia and Angus ‘camping’ in the empty hotel in Serbia.
We strolled into town in search of tucker. The border town we were in was not exactly rocking…We split up in search of somewhere to eat and would rendezvous in half an hour.There were a few places… but the working men’s club… type place, actually had some people in it and it looked like someone had ordered some food that day…
We went in hungry and desperate for a drink.
‘You have food?’
‘Yes’
‘What you have?’
‘Chicken, meat, soup’
‘Pomme frittes?
‘Yes’
‘Beer?’
‘Yes’
‘DOBRO!’

The moment it was confirmed that chips were on the menu
We ate like Kings… the food as very good and the beer and wine flowed. The bill… a tenner.
In Serbia, the roads and hotels are shite… but the food it great!
Only 615 kilometres to go to our first stop!

It’s 5.30am and I’m on the ferry going to Split. I’ve done this trip probably twenty times this summer. Today the ferry is not the usual one… it’s the little one they bring out for winter, I’m the only foreigner on board. All the Europeans and Americans on the island have gone home for Christmas… the forecast for today is snow… Time to fly south
I’ve been thinking about the title for our last travel log on the island this year. At the beginning of the year I thought it would be a simple ‘We did it’… and have a picture of the house all done.
‘Oughffff’ followed by an impersonation of a gold fish mouth’… as they say on Vis.
It would have been finished… honest… but we had an inspection from the employment Dept… They rocked up with two armed cops and their clipboards. They were looking for illegal Bosnians working on Vis. I told them they’d probably all gone to Engleski.
They didn’t laugh…
They also didn’t find any illegal Bosnians on our site. All the guys we had that day (except Angus) were legit. They checked all my papers and went through my building permission docs and looked somewhat disappointed they couldn’t nail anything on me.
‘You have all your papers in order. This is good’ The inspector said slightly peeved with wasting two and half hours on the ferry to get here.
‘ I just need to see your business permit and we will leave’
‘Sorry’
‘Your business permit’
‘What’s that?’
The inspector gave me that… ‘You go through all this trouble to get your building permission in order, your employ all these guys correctly… and didn’t do the easiest bit and get a BUSINESS PERMIT’ look.
‘You don’t have a business permit?’
Mile,one of the ‘masters’ working on the site was by now doing impersonations of me being hand cuffed behind the inspectors back with the coppers trying not to laugh.
‘Dad… will they be real guns?’
‘Yes Angus…Sorry, I don’t know if I have a business permit, no one has mentioned to me about this’ In Croatia, if you don’t ask, they don’t tell you, even one-way streets…
A £300 fine and all building stopped until the permit has been obtained later… the inspector apologised for Croatian bureaucracy and told me that it would unfortunately be one or two days before we could get the permit and start work again.
‘ You have to fill in lots of forms and get them signed at the police station, it is just a formality.
‘I can handle that’ I thought, if this was England… it would be weeks.
‘You also need a copy of your criminal record from England and that’s it’
‘Oh shit’
On arriving home I called St Albans Police station.
‘ Hi, I’m a calling from Croatia and I need to get proof I am not a mass murderer to apply for a business permit’
‘Yes we can help you with that’
‘ Oh right…OK… that was easy…what do I need to do’
‘ I will send you a form to fill in and you then need to send it back to me with a cheque for ten pounds’
‘Can’t I pay by switch and do it all online’
‘No… we only except cheques’
‘I will loose 15 days’
‘Sorry’
‘OK, once you get the cheque then what?’
‘Once your cheque has cleared… we then apply for your record from Scotland yard’
‘How long does that take’
‘ You are guaranteed to get it within 40 days’
‘Your joking right?’
‘No’
‘Oughffff’
In Croatia they do everything by hand, everything is not on a central computer network… like the ‘National Police Computer’.
In Croatia it takes one hour to get a copy of your record.
The Croatian inspector apologised for the bureaucracy and the length of time it would take. The guy at St Albans police station was trying to sell me the ‘ don’t worry, you will defiantly get it within 40 days’.
Screwed by UK bureaucracy in Croatia…
I rang the inspector and told them that I would not have my record for approximately 60 days. I told him that the house had no roof on and asked if it would be OK if we covered the house with plastic so the inside didn’t get wet.
’60 days?’
‘Yes’
‘I’m sorry about that… really, yes, you can cover your house. Make sure your are finished by Sunday evening.’ We do not inspect at the weekends.’
‘Thanks’
It was Thursday… we had three days.
The ‘O’ team pulled their finger out and by Saturday evening we had completely finished the walls and… roof…all fully insulated and ready for the tiles.

Penny and Angus squeezing in a bit of homework on site.
In Croatia when you finish a house and put the roof on, you roast a whole lamb… get fairly ‘arseholed’ and put a flag up to show the world you have finished and what nationality you are to your neighbours.
A Croatian, Bosnian,. Serbian, English and French flag (Karine is French) was suggested…
We roasted the lamb…
We had ‘puno pivo’s’
Angus and Zdenko put one large Croatian flag on the roof.

We have sort of… kind of… finished it.

The house and Penny on the water tank.
If your interested, you can down load a power point with loads of pictures of the house here.
www.somewheredifferent.com/smokova-house-plan.ppt
Tim and Karin the kid’s teachers… are excellent. They are enjoying life in Komiza and have quickly settled into the school routine. Angus rebelled for a few days wanting to continue working with me on the land… but when Tim started to design the battleground Angus needed to make on a big piece of cardboard he was hooked. Claudia has been asking for double maths homework and Sasha is advancing well with her French… Ok, so she has a private French, French teacher… who cares… she’s doing well at it and she is feeling good about her self.

Karine, the kids French teacher multi tasking;)
The day Tim and Karine arrived Penny started full time on the site with the beer swilling, swearing ‘O’ team from Komiza and me. ‘ Essy boo boo’ (did you score last night;) Penny is asked on an hourly basis with roars of laughter no matter what the answer is.
With no swimming and Penny and me being flat out with the house the kids have become a bit bored and are ready for Egypt.
We leave…hopefully on Thursday Dec 1st providing the new brake pads arrive from Vienna on Monday. We wanted to go the Libyan route, but the £1,000 cost for a ‘tourist policeman’ AND a ‘tour guide’ that had to travel with us… put us right off.
The thought of having to hold our farts in for days on end… or worse, having to share theirs!
Going the Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syrian, Jordan, and Egypt route is logistically a lot easer and before you all ask… there are no ferries to Egypt from Europe. All you need is a valid Syrian visa in your passport and a carnet for each vehicle and the rest you buy on the borders (well…that’s what we think anyway).
We estimate the trip is around 5,000km from Croatia to Siwa, which is on the far side of Egypt from Jordan.
The route

Below is our plan for the route and timings
Leave Croatia 1st Dec
Sarajevo 2nd
Serbia 3rd
Bulgaria 4th
Western Turkey 5th
Istanbul 6th
Istanbul to Cappadocia 7th to 8th
Cappadocia 9th
Syrian border 10th
Syria 11th and 12th (providing there is no problem with the American, sorry UN sanctions due to possibly start on the 15th)
Jordan 13th – 14th
Ferry to Egypt 15th
Cairo 16th
Alexandra 17th
Siwa 18th Dec till April 2006.
When I asked Sasha what she thought about the Itinery she said it looked great apart from the fact that I should have added in ten days for when the Land Cruiser breaks down… hence my trip to Split today for final checks and oil changes on the jeep before we go.
If anyone would like to know that our trip is going OK and that we move through the countries as planned, when ever I get to an internet café, I will update our contacts page www.somewheredifferent.com/contact.asp to say were and how we are. We will not have mobile phones and will only be contactable by email and instant messenger. My MSN instant messenger is duncanridgley (then) @hotmail.com.
I believe lighting does not strike a family twice… and our journey to our new home and Christmas this year will be very different from the last. I had a bad feeling about leaving for Sri Lanka this time last year… I have a good feeling about this trip.
My Mum and Dad, Dottie, Ali and Stu Pearson (yes I know… interesting combination) will all be sharing Christmas with us this year and… well… Inshala.
I’ve arrived in Split, there is snow on the mountains, time to go… so have a good Christmas and if any one wants to come out to Siwa for the full eclipse of the moon that passes right above us on March 29th, we should have a bed or two spare by then to put you up!
Cheers Duncan
PS there is a follow up documentary to the fist Tsunami programme we did in January last year on Channel 5, Dec 20th. During filming on the island, Claudia goes into one of how I baffed up sand and diesel all over the floor at Colombo airport, like she was telling a joke… should make interesting TV.

They have a saying here on Vis… ‘Pomalo Pomalo’… little by little.They say you need to do things in this way on the island… or they don’t happen at all.
We arrived in April… and this week we laid the first brick on our house… six months of Pomalo bloody Pomoloing and it’s now all beginning to happen.

Team at the beginning of June

at the end of August

Beginning of September

Middle of September

End of September ( there are 11 in the team now and they don’t even stop for team groups any more!)

What we’re aiming for
It’s a bit annoying, for if it hadn’t been for our difficult neighbour in Norfolk who held up the sale of our beach house (ten weeks in the end), the house would be done(ish) now at a much lower cost,and we would be scarily on target to leave for Egypt.
Teresa our teacher resigned in June… well Komiza is not Arugam Bay… and she didn’t want to return to Egypt this winter (its not everyone’s cup of tea!)
Penny and the kids went swimming everyday…for months this summer and…well…

It’s been great.
All this sun and sea was getting too much for us. We needed a holiday… so when Stu Pearson arrived at the beginning of August to spend some time on the beach… he was a bit thrown when we dragged him off to Bosnia for a spot of land fishing. Sasha who knew what was coming and was smart, went off to England for her summer holidays instead.
The first time we went to Bosnia we were all concerned, this time we just grabbed our passports and off we went to have some fun.

Stu and Angus above Sarajevo

Some one coming to see ‘who du hell’ we were, up in the mountains

Me and Angus looking for that perfect spot in the middle of nowhere… in the soon to be Bjelasnica National Park near Sarajevo.
About an hour after the picture above was taken we drove into a village whilst the road was being tarmaced. Instead of being turned back… they told us to just pull over and built the road past us. We had to wait until the tarmac cooled enough so it wouldn’t blow the tires and carried on ( you’ll have to waite for the ‘home movie’ for that one:).
We had a great time in Bosnia; we definitely want to get a place there one day. We found a wonderful half an acre plot for sale right near the new ski resort on Bjelasnica Mountain for 4,500 euros… tempting… next year…
We came back to Vis and Stu managed to get on the beach in the end. Dorothy ‘Dotty’ and her niece Ali came out for a couple of weeks and everyone seemed to get on really well.
As Stu, Ally and Dotty left…Emma arrived to stay for two weeks and no way was she going to bloody BOSNIA!
There are lots of nice things to see on Vis

The vineyards are everywhere

Rush hour
But Emma was having none of it.
The military ‘don’t film here’ locations and the ‘dodgy dentist’ house was where she wanted to be. She had heard the rumour about Sasha’s dentist and the dolls heads… and that was it…she had to see for her self.

Emma RIGHT outside the dentists house
Thank you for your sending us some of your holiday snaps Emma, which I have included below.

Holiday snap no. 1

Holiday snap no. 2

Holiday snap no. 3

Holiday snap no. 4
As everyone left… live got back to normal.

Penny’s been ‘drivin all the old men… crazy!’

and gossiping on the grape vine

I’ve been getting locked out of the house…

…whilst Claudia’s been telling Grandma ALL about it.
We finally got some money through, I got the jeep fixed and I started full time on the house around the middle of August.
Due to the design of the house using large stones, the walls are over 40 centimetres thick and up to 60 centimetres in some places. Because of this the foundations are… quite substantial. Me and the ‘O’ team, Momo, Yanko, Zvonco, Zstanko, Guso (Angus) and Blagi (he’s from out of town) have mixed up and chucked in the ground, over 50 tonnes of concrete along with literally tonnes of iron.

They build houses to last for EVER here. Something the Romans taught them.

Yes… they had to put another plank down when I started to pour the concrete
Well… I think I can finally say I have lost my ‘builders cherry’. We’re not sort of building a house here or are just playing at it. We are half way through building a full-blown, highly complicated 150-sqm meter house out of stone. It has a 140,000-litre water tank and… you kind of have to get the walls right. We have dug down over 1 meter into solid limestone with our ‘Bugger’ (Croatian word for digger) using a massive jackhammer.
The Bugger got ‘buggered’ a few times which the kids thought was highly amusing.
Building a house with five guys that do not speak English is far easer and more rewarding than working in London….
For me…
Maybe not every ones idea of an alternative life style, but I get to work with my son every day…
It’s hard work but often fun…

The Friday afternoon ‘grill’ sessions with many Pivos!
and I get most afternoons off after I have had an hour or two’s kip….
I have learnt …
How to mix a ‘mix’ of baton (concrete).
How to get a sales person in the builders’ yards on the main land to not just say… ‘No’ and walk away. ·
Why the two plastic water tanks for the concrete were leaking every day until Angus pointed out that they were leaking down to the exact level of where the donkey’s mouth could reach.
How to manage a team of guys who don’t speak English.
How to make wine.
How to build a stone house on a remote island in Croatia
and basically… how to take life a bit easer.

Sasha has finally broken into the ‘it’ gang of Komiza and is now happy roller blading along the Riva in the evenings with her friends and is enjoying their company. Sasha’s 13th birthday party was in the Kavana Hum and a good time was had by all.

I’m in control and I will blow out all 13 candles… ne problema

The Komizain way of saying happy birthday.
Claudia has been in the UK for two weeks visiting Grandma and is enjoying the new art classes they all go to twice a week. The two stray cats that now live with us and the donkey at the bottom of the garden are keeping her busy.

Sooty and Jessie, the luckiest stray cats in Komiza

Claudia and Angus in training for Egypt
Angus comes to work with me most days whilst school is out and is building his own ‘mini me’ house on the land. He is watching how we do it for real and then copies using the same materials.

Angus on his ‘work experience summer’

Angus ‘mixing’ the mix
He beamed up at me the other day shouting
‘DAD, DAD, I’VE FINISHED THE WALLS!’
‘That’s great Angus, how did you do the windows?’
‘Oh shit!’
And off he went to take some stones out of his walls before the concrete set. We haven’t put the windows in the house yet. Ordered them yesterday.

Angus loves working on the land
Penny wanted a long hot summer on the beach. It was supposed to be in Sri Lanka, but it was still long and very hot. Penny is keen to join the ‘O’ team when Tim the new teacher arrives next week, and get fully stuck into the work.
I used to get odd looks when I told people my wife ‘Is a tiler’. People would say
‘What, like putting them on the roof and stuff ?’
‘No…Mosaics and different designs in kitchens and bath rooms, you know…’
‘ Oh… I see, sorry’
With that ‘still bet she is some well ard bird who’s knuckles drag on the ground’ look staring back at you.
I need to choose my words carefully when returning to England…

Penny plastering the water tank walls
‘What does your wife do?’
‘She is a tiler and lays stone walls’
Na
‘She is a tiler and works with stone’
May be I just tell them and then quickly show them a picture of her before their imagination gets to Neanderthal woman.
Penny is learning how to make walls…. out of massive lumps of limestone.

Close up of the walls of our new house
Why not…
Where as for me…
I used to me the MD of an interactive TV advertising agency… nobody understood that… now it’s easy, I’m just plain old Bill the builder.

Bill the builder on his way to work… I know… I know…
Tim, the kids new teacher arrives in Vis on Oct 14th and back to school they go with vengeance. The plan is for Tim and his girlfriend Karen to travel to Egypt with us for the seven months we will be there and the two or three months we will spend in Romania before coming home.
It’s been an interesting summer and, well it’s not over yet.
The house is nowhere near finished, the rain here on Vis this week is stopping us from building… and we leave in less than eight weeks for Egypt.
For me, when we arrive in Egypt it will replace what we lost in Sri Lanka… one very cheap, hot and interesting place to explore with the nicest people you could meet. Somewhere really diferent to live and experience a way of living that is still based on trust and family life, not credit ratings and MTV;)
We are still pondering our route…

Go through Libya and it’s a £1000 for visa’s + one guide and one ‘tourist policeman’ sitting in your jeep the whole way.We’d have to hold our farts in for hours. Or maybe worse!
Go the other way… and it’s a bloody long way. But it would be a great journey, eastern Turkey, Syria, Jordan and all that… which is after all, what we are here for.

My parents are coming to visit us in Siwa for Christmas, which I’m really chuffed about. Simon Jacobs is ‘definitely definitely’ coming out just after Christmas and it is rumoured the Stu, Dotty and Ali trio may rock up on the 20th of Dec. There are over twenty mosques in Siwa and… no churches…should be interesting!
I will then come back to Vis in January after the ‘mint tea levels’ in my blood stream have dropped enough to finish off the house here with the ‘O’ team so we can sell the house and keep going!
Hope you are well and see you soon.
Duncan…
I know… I go by two names… I know.

‘I fought the law and the…law won’
That song by the Clash has been going through my head a lot in the last few days. It’s probably something to do with the fact that we now get up at 4.00am and are on our land by 5.30am with pick axe in hand… breaking rocks. MoMole (Abbo’s double), Youngco and Mario… our Audweidesein Pet… on the rock and role Croatian workers start to drink beer around 6.00am. By 8.30am it’s around 30 degrees… and I am sweating so much it looks like I have pissed my trousers. The ‘boys’ being on their third beer… find it all rather amusing.
It’s great.
After two and half years of trying to get permission to build a house, starting with our beach house in Norfolk, then Arugam bay… then Siwa…we finally have had the nod and started digging the foundations last Wednesday. We have moved several tonnes of stone away from where we will build the house and have dug a 1 meter deep trench for the water tank foundations. There is a lot of ‘live’ stone and you literally put a sledgehammer in to it until it’s gone. We have started to build our house and feel confident it will be up and done…ish by October/Nov.

This is our building site on our land… and that’s Momo playing with Penny’s bum!
You know these ‘No Going Back’ programs… I’m really glad we did not try and sign up for one. For our land… we have no water supply, no electricity, no architect/structural drawings, we had no road, we have not been able to find any builders due to arriving at the wrong time of year for building… and to top it all off we now have no money. Imagine then having to talk into a camera with some smart arse going ‘So Duncan… you’re a bit of a plonker aren’t you?’
We found a buyer for our house in Norfolk and have sold it for a tidy sum.
CU CHING! …as the kids would say .
Unfortunately the old bag next door on the beach then sends a solicitors letter to our estate agents saying we have stolen 5 feet of her land. As the UK is suing obsessed… it has taken me 5 weeks to calm down our agents and sort it out. Faxing a copy of a survey showing the land is clearly ours that it was produced in 1959 by the firm of solicitors she is using… finally did the trick. On top of that the Land Cruiser’s flywheel decided to…fly off the other day making the car ‘kaput’. We’ve had to hire a tourist car to get to our land at Smokova on the other side of the island.

Note the wheel clearance at the back

The combination of the two set backs has mucked our cash flow up and after spending 3 months finding some builders to work with us… they are seriously all in London… we will now have to let them go and hopefully get them back when the thud of cash finally hits… hopefully in the next week or so.
Never mind… it’s hot and sunny and the swimming is crystal clear. The kids and Teresa their teacher are slowly getting used to the 5.00am start and a siesta at 1.00pm. I remember going from being paid weekly to monthly… the first month you are skint for the last two weeks. Now we are builders we get paid… annually… one house a year. We’ll get used to it;)

The water is crystal clear on our local beach which is a 10 minutes walk from the house
Our Island life here on Vis feels… like living in the Outer Hebrides…but stinking hot and sunny every day. It’s a little beautiful island 15km long by 7km wide, two and a half hours out into the Adriatic sea.

Our two acres of land is just to the right a bit

We live in the small town of Komiza that has a population of around 1800 people

The main industry is fishing and… and it appears…drinking wine!
Everybody knows everybody and they are slowing… getting to know us. We have had some racial abuse, we have had some bullying, we’ve been f&*$%ed about by so many people…and government depts… but we are not giving up. We are getting to know people and making real friends. The kids now have one or two friends they play with on a regular basis and we are slowly blending in. We’re like the Japanese family that moves to that little island in Scotland. It takes awhile but we are slowly being accepted.
The islanders have gone from a population of 12,000 before WWII to 4,000 people with no contact what so ever with the outside world including the rest of Croatia from 1945 to 1989 due to it being a military base to a trickle of tourists during and after the Bosnian war to now… with over 500% more tourists than locals arriving every summer in the space of a few years.
Most English people here are either stinking rich…or give that impression. The locals are scared… we are the first English ‘builders’ to move to the island. Like in all our places we are the first English family to live here since colonial days. The islanders assume we are like the other English and are totally loaded and here to use and abuse their land.
We’re here to use a little bit… but we’re also giving a little back. We live here and are hiring local labour, unlike most of the foreign owners…we’re learning the language, we pick up hitchhikers, we’re clearing our beach and Angus is distributing bootleg software from Bosnia into the gaming fraternity in Komiza… Claudia has sewn a bed for the stray ‘dustbin’ cat she has taken in, we are digging our own foundations… they are slowly realising we are not ‘rich strangers’ and are being accepted.
School is out in Croatia and the kids are arriving on the beaches in there…tens…its getting busy and we are settling in for a long hot summer. In the evenings we walk along the ‘Riva’ and look out for English speaking flags on the yachts that are moored up. We have met some English and American families and a 22 year old Bosnian girl Sasha met in Sarajevo who has come to stay with us for a week or two today to help out on the land and have a bit of a holiday. The kids email address contacts and places to stay in the future are growing.

We have the ground floor of this place and a garden with lemon trees at the side

This is the veiw we have from our house

…and this is what it looks like when we get up at 4.00am!

Sasha has become the ‘head’ fire maker and has sussed it get’s her out of washing up!

Angus is in training for the ‘shoot them up competition at the local library

Claudia’s helping mummy with dinner often becomes more of a biology lesson… you have to gut your own fish here…

Claudia is also making some nice pictures with her canvas’s

She’s quite proud of them.
We’re nearly half way through our two years… it seems like a lifetime since we left and yet six months in Egypt then six months in Romania feels like another lifetime to go before coming home.
The last six months have not all been plain sailing… we didn’t expect them to be. That’s why they make programmes about people who do this kind of stuff.
Talking of which…
We are scheduled to be on the telly on July 21st, 9.00pm on ITV which gets confirmed two weeks before hand. We’re the first in a series of ‘SURVIVORS’. I spoke to one of the girls at the production company that made the film. They spent a month filming it in India. They built a huge water tank and ripped the walls away with the actors in it to get the affects. They built a house like the one we were on and ‘ had to rebuild it several times due to it getting washed away by the water canons’. I can’t image what the film will be like… but they say they have done everything they can to make it as close to what actually happened. If your interested, have a look at the press release from ITV.
If any of you are clever enough to video record… and then burn it on to a DVD… it would be great to get a copy so we could watch it some time (our postal address in on www.somewheredifferent.com). We don’t get ITV here in Croatia … and… well we don’t have a TV, we just watch DVD’s on our laptops. But don’t feel sorry for us… we missed the entire election!
We have a few people spending their summer holidays with us this year and if anyone else would like to, (see Vis web site) we can get you a really nice apartment right on the sea for around £30 a night and you can fly here direct with BA to Split.
Have a good summer!
Duncan

About 7 years ago, I went to bed… woke up with terrible chest pains and thought I must be having a heart attack.
Penny rang the hospital “Hi, I have a 20 stone man with acute pains in his chest clutching onto a wardrobe… what am I supposed to do?” They assumed the worst and I had the full cardiac arrest treatment. The paramedics in the ambulance took it all very seriously. “ OK we’re going to check your pulse, hang on in there… pulse… is…perfect. OK lets check your oxygen levels…. 100%… OK… your…OK… so what your name.” I had no idea what heartburn was until then. I now know what it is and have had it a couple of times since, but at the time I thought I was dying.
They gave me a cup of something and it cleared the pain pretty quickly. I thought I’d never beat that for an overkill use of my local hospital services to cure a simple problem…
Never say never…
I left England the week after the Easter break. I had our new (old) Land Cruiser full of our kit as the rest of the gang were all flying to Croatia courtesy of the production company that flew us to exotic Manchester. I caught the 5.30pm ferry Thursday night and drove in France until 11.00ish, drove for around 15 hours the next day and around 15 hours the next, reaching Croatia after about 50 hours only leaving the jeep for calls of nature and to buy all the crap they sell in service stations to keep you awake. I probably ate more chocolate and crisps and drank more coke than I have ever done on a car journey. That’s because that was probably the longest car journey I have ever driven. I stopped to sleep, pulling the seat back and apart from that, drove all the way non stop.
That was until the radiator blew in Germany and I then had to stop at EVERY service station between Germany and Croatia. I pretended I was in the Grand Prix and timed my pit stops to keep me from going mad… but that’s another story.
I arrived on our little island of Vis in Croatia on the Sunday having waited 18 hours for the ferry on the mainland in the town of Split. We will stay on Vis now until the winter and have been there ever since, well… until today. We found somewhere to rent for 200 euros a month whilst we work out what we are going to do with our land and where and if we will buy some more to develop and ‘turn over’ at the end of the summer.
I had made a promise to myself on the way down here… whilst munching on the third bar of junk before 10.00am… ‘When I get to Vis, I am not going to eat any more chocolate, any crisps, any junk food!’ Yeah, I thought. ‘If ever I’m going to sort my diet out, now is the time to do it’.
I’ve kept to it.
I’ve not had a single bar. Not one… honest. I haven’t wanted one, it’s been great. We are trying to keep our costs down, as it’s nowhere as cheap here as it was in Sri Lanka where are budgets expected us to be. We have not bought any Coke, Seven Up, and anything that is full of sugar basically. We’ve all been eating healthy food, all the local produce of lettuce, tomatoes and well, lots of veg basically and not a lot else. We even gave up bread the other day; we’ve been like rabbits… on the eating side of things. I’ve been losing weight and we were given permission to build a house on our land yesterday and so everything was going sweet.
I have felt a bit dizzy now and again the last few days. I have had pins and needles in my right arm ever since it sat on the jeep door without moving for 50 hours. I have had the feeling of pressure on my chest and have been worried about my heart. I woke up in the night the other night with pains in my chest and a bit panicked that the only way off the island was by ferry the next day and there was no hospital on Vis.
Penny said it was probably indigestion (again) and I eventually got off to sleep. I still didn’t feel right the next day and went to the local doctors to check out exactly what sort of a set up they had there and if they had any idea what was wrong with me. I told them I had pains in my chest and they checked my heart on their… heart-checking machine. EPG I think is the technical term. “Your heart is OK, the results are fine, but you should go to Split on the mainland and have it checked out properly.” I left feeling OK and thought that I would go and have it checked the next time I go to Split, which would be in the next few days. I kept feeling dizzy, but thought nothing of it.
This morning I had no breakfast and went off into Vis town to get my radiator fixed. The first garage I went to looked at my jeep and said “ How old is this car?” “1990” “Mmmm, it is… a good car… but I suggest you buy a new one. No good for Croatia”.
Nice… The’ can do’ attitude is definitely lacking on Vis.
I dropped the jeep off and walked into town. I slowed down, I had time to kill. I was having a coffee with an old boy who was telling me about the old days on Vis and the way of life here now…and began to feel really dizzy. He had found someone who would listen to him and was not coming up for air…I had been straining my neck to look at him for half and hour without moving. I felt like I was going to pass out. I escaped by going off to the toilet. It was around 12.00 now and I walked along the quay, I felt really dizzy still, I could not shake it off. I went back and picked up the car. The ‘can do’ mechanic I eventually found had fixed it and so I started to head back up the hill to our village on the other side of the island.
The pass is steep and I was worried about feeling so dizzy and driving down the hairpin bends on the other side. I thought I’d stop at the top of the hill. I got out of the jeep, my head was swimming. I could not feel my mouth, I could not control my tongue, I thought I was going to pass out. I have never been knocked out or passed out… ever. When you have a 22-inch neck, you just really hurt in fights. I’ve never had my lights punched out and have always been really scared about passing out. Just as I thought, ‘I better ring Penny in case I pass out’, and was getting my phone out, my heart suddenly went BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG really quickly.
“Sasha… I think I might be having a heart attack!” “MUMMY, MUMMY DADDY… is …MUMMY daddy is having a heart attack… oh my god!” “BILL WHERE ARE YOU?” “I’m at the top of the pass, Penny. I don’t know what’s happening to me… F*$%&… I don’t like this! Get an ambulance or something!”
The guy with the JCB who is going to build a road to our land stopped in his big truck when he saw me and flagged down a car going to Komisha. “Can you get your self down to the doctors Bill?” “ Yeah a car has stopped… I’m coming down, go to the doctors, I’ll see you there.” I thought I was dying… it was really scary. I was so dizzy and my chest was hurting. My heart had stopped pounding but I was still really dizzy. The local boy took me to the doctors. I got out and could barely walk. They splashed water on my face to keep me conscious. “Come in here, we test your heart again.” The doctor who saw me the other day got on the phone and got another doctor to come down and see me. “It says you have had a small heart attack in the last few hours. Have you had pains in your chest” “Yes” “Have you had a heart attack?” “I don’t know, I don’t know what a heart attack feels like”. I explained what happened. “You have probably had a small heart attack in the last few hours. We need to get you to hospital”
The ferry is not until tomorrow now. ‘Shit’ I thought, this not good.
Penny began to look a bit worried, the BUPA numbers where sorted and she was on the phone. “ Don’t worry about that, we will get you to hospital” the doctor said. “The police boat will come for you”. The assistant made a quick phone call. “Ah, no police boat”. She made another call. “We have a helicopter coming from Split to pick you up, it will be here shortly”. “Penny, don’t worry about BUPA, I don’t think they will be able to do anything better than a helicopter…” “ BUPA are saying that you should not get in the helicopter until they know what is going on.” “Yeah, until they know they won’t have to pay for it! I’m going… forget them.” “OK, I guess your right”. I thought I must be in a bad way for them to get a chopper out for me. Maybe I’m going to have another heart attack.
Bollocks!
“OK the ambulance is here to take you to the helicopter” We all piled in and Penny and the kids got out at the top of the hill to get the jeep and go off to buy a phone card. I felt like I did in the Tsunami… what will be… will now be… just keep cool and do your best to stay alive. “OK see you soon guys” and off we went. The helicopter was a lot newer than the one in Sri Lanka… it also had doors on it which was nice. I got in and as we lifted off I suddenly wanted to cry, ‘a trigger’ I thought. It’s reminding me of the Tsunami and, bollocks it’s not fair, I shouldn’t have to go through this again so soon. I can’t die now, now that I have been through so much to stay alive.
BOLLOCKS!
We gained height and again the land moved slowly below us with the defining noise of the blades BU BU BU BU BU BU’ing above us. I thought about the last time I was rushed to hospital for my heart and how it was all a waste of time.
Here was hoping…
These pilots would kill me if I just had indigestion though.
We where in Split in 15 minutes, normally a two and a half hour ferry ride. Another ambulance, then into a wheel chair, all along with a drip full of sugar in my arm. Straight into the hospital, straight past all the people in the waiting area looking at ‘who’s come in the helicopter… he must be real bad’ on went the EPG or ESG or what ever they are called. Those suckers, you know, the ones you see in the films when the guy is at deaths door in his hospital bed. The doctors all looked concerned.
I was shitting myself.
The nurse from the doctors in Komiza, our little village on the other side of Vis island who had come with me suddenly said “OK see you in Komiza” and disappeared. She had half an hour to catch the last ferry home. In went the needles, in went a new drip. Out went the blood sample… dam, that hurt. ‘Does any one speak English here’ I thought. What if I need an operation or something… no one will be able to tell me what’s going on. “ Hello I am doctor (can’t remember her name) we are going to do some tests and will see what is wrong with you.” “OK, great” ‘OK so someone speaks English’. “ What happened? How long has the dizziness being going on for? “ 10 days on and off, as long as I have been on the island” “ Have you changed your diet?” “Yes, no sugar, no… bad stuff” “ I see…we have done a check on your heart. The up and down squiggles on the piece paper held in front of me obviously meant something to her.
“Your heart is perfect. Where are you staying on Vis?” “Komiza” ‘Thank god for that! I’m not dying!’ “You have probably changed your diet and are low on sugar”… followed with the ‘and so instead of eating a chocolate bar to get your sugar levels back up, you press the panic button and get a helicopter to fly across the sea to get you…’ look.
“May be you have a problem in your chest. We will x-ray you”. The x-rays were fine… they all looked at each other and moved on to the next REAL problem.
I’m now sitting in a room writing this little tale waiting for the blood tests to come back. Once they are back we will know for sure… I think… and then I assume I go off and try and catch a ferry back to Vis. Only I think the next one is in the morning. Maybe they will keep me in for they night. Any way… I’m going to live. I have had one car ride, two ambulance rides, on helicopter ride, two EPG tests, and loads of blood tests for having low sugar levels in my blood. Nothing a bar or two of chocolate would have sorted out.
Whooops…
Still… nice to know the emergency services work on the island. I’ll see if I can beat that and get a war ship out for a bout of chronic wind next time. Mmmm…better watch the wolf factor hey…
Ah… docs come back… my sugar levels are OK now…they would be, having had sugar water pumped into me for the last few hours; heart’s OK, tests all look good. It’s ECG’s I’ve been having, not EPG’s. They don’t know why I’m still dizzy. I subtly hinted that I have not had any food or drink since twelve o’clock and is as 6.30pm now, which was probably not really helping the ‘why are you still dizzy tests’.
Just had dinner… pasta, bread and a slab of steak, followed by a jam donut and unsweetened yoghurt. They are taking me off to the eyes ears and throat hospital to check my inner ear. They obviously do not know why I am dizzy, but I’m feeling a lot better now. Now I’ve had something to eat.
I’m beginning to think my chest pains may be from climbing that tree the other day… to see what the view of the sea will be like from the second floor of the house we are going to build. Better not tell them about that before they do my ear checks… they might throw me out of here!
16th April
I stayed in the nose ward overnight being the ONLY person who did not have a tube coming out of one of my nostrils. I’m back on Vis now. I faxed my scans to BUPA in England and they recon I DID NOT have a heart attack.
23rd April
I went back to the doctors and they made an appointment for me to be fully checked out in Split as I did not have all the tests done. I went back on Wednesday and stayed over another night. I had a running test I had a ultra sound test , I had another blood test. My heart is… bobro! ( Good). On arrival they wanted my BUPA no, for the insurance. On leaving, I was sent to the accounts department to give them my details. “You cannot use your insurance to pay. We just need your passport no. and you will have to pay in cash”. As she was writing out the bill I started to guess the total cost.
5 ECG’s
4 ambulance rides
3 different heart tests including an ultra sound and a stress test
2 nights stay over
1 helicopter ride
This could be real nasty…. I’ll just say I don’t have the cash and give them the BUPA no.
“That will be 43 kunas…”
That’s £4.30
Nice one. As anyone who’s children go to Aboyne Lodge will know, the value of getting a prompt reply to blood test can be huge. One of Sasha’s favourite teachers recently had a heart attack… and died whilst waiting for his blood tests to come back. Mr Swanson was a great guy and will be sadly missed by all.
Hope those pilots don’t live on Vis…
Cheers
Duncan

I know I only sent one a few days ago. But life in the donkey lane has been fast… ish recently. We’re all coming back to the UK on the 18th for a week. We’ve done a deal with a TV production company and they are using our story for a program in a six part series called ‘Survivors’ on ITV in the summer. They will be filming us all and then getting actors to jump into water tanks and stuff and if they can afford it they will even stick a Land Rover in there as well, seriously. I tried to sell them the ‘original’ one still full of genuine salt water…to make it more authentic like…they were having none of it. They had talked of flying us back to Sri Lanka and filming us there, they mentioned coming out here and doing our interviews in the dessert. They considered us all going to Malta, as there is a good underwater tank there but no… they settled on …wait for it… bloody Manchester! ‘Dad is that another country’ ‘No Claudia… its in the north of England’ ‘England, but I though we were going to go somewhere else’ ‘Yes…’
We where given the dates and… well I started to think, we can’t get planning permission here for a month or two, due to Iraq and the road to Bahariya being closed … it is a bit one horse towny here at the moment (there are actually two horses here we have now discovered) and so I asked the girl booking the flights ‘ Any chance you could drop us off in Croatia on the way back… to Egypt…like?’ ‘Um… I can’t see why not.’ ‘OK, forget the return to Alexandra, make it one way from Cairo to Manchester and on the way back make it London to Split in Croatia if that’s OK’ ‘You sure’ ‘Um… yes’.
So, were coming back for a week in a weeks time. I’m driving the jeep we bought that I was going to drive to Egypt to Croatia now over Easter and will pick up the others on the 31st of March from Split airport.
Another reason for the change is… we have decided to sell our beach house at Snettisham. It’s a shame, but we will never be comfortable on the beach there again. It has flooded twice in the last fifty years and is due for another soaking now. One major sea-bashing is enough for me at the moment. Croatia is booming, so the plan is to sell the beach house (it’s a beach house now, its grown up from being a caravan) and put the money into an old house on the island of Vis where our land is and spend the summer doing it up to put back on to the market next spring.
We will live in Vis for the whole summer, going off to Romania and Bosnia for a month or so at some stage for a break and to get the planning permission going over there. We will then drive through Turkey, Syria and Jordan to come back to Egypt for the winter in October and stay until the snow melts in Romania and drive back there for the summer of 2006, returning to the UK for good, a few weeks before term time in August.
Up until Boxing Day last year everything went according to plan, so far this year we’ve been all over the place, but we’ve got our heads around it now and… that’s the plan. If anyone would like to come and visit and stay at anytime we would love to see you. I will be looking to find some cheap accommodation in Croatia and Romania so if anyone wants to come out and visit you can be picked up from the airport and stay in some cheap accommodation nearby.
A lot of people ask me ‘ Do you have a tel number yet?’ Whenever we move around we always have a mobile number you can contact us on shown on the web site at www.somewheredifferent.com ‘contact the team here’. We have also been asked for some photographs.

The first one is us taken on the ‘mountain of the dead’, we saw some real Mummies in a tomb there today. Our town is in the background. We live in a house a few hundred meters from the old fortified town on the hill behind our heads called the Shali. It melted in 1929 when it rained for three days and is now a big open museum full of knackered old Siwan mud houses.

The second pic is our land. We have 40 acres of really nice land next to a lake 20km north of Siwa town and we think it’s great.

Third pic. The house in the middle is for sale… for £1,500. It’s very nice and is right next to the Shali, but it is made of mud… we are also looking at a stone house where the picture is taken from for around the same price that we can do up to look the same but will know it won’t bend if the heavens open up.
Will hopefully be up for a beer on Easter Friday in St Albans or Welwyn before I head off for Croatia for the summer. If anyone’s around that night, let me know. The beer ran out here two days ago and as the off licence is a mere 4 hours away, I will pretty well hanging for a beer by then.
Cheers

Its, 4.10am on 31st of Dec. The date of this travel log should have been the 26th of Dec and the content more cheerful. We had arrived in Sri Lanka on the 12th and we spent a couple of weeks getting ourselves sorted and buying a jeep before going over to Arugam Bay. We bought an old Land Rover and had a few problems getting it to work well enough to go across the country. We finally got it going and arrived in Arugam Bay at 7.30am Christmas morning. We nearly didn’t go for Christmas and was going to stay in Colombo, but we were on a mission to get there so the kids could have Christmas on the beach. Penny and the kids spent the day chilling and swimming in the sea and I spent it fixing the last few problems on the Land Rover with my new found local mechanic. We had dinner in the evening and opened our presents.
I woke up the next day around 8.00am. I thought… this is the first day or the rest of my life and all that… or at least whilst I am in Arugam Bay. I had done a deal with myself that if I did not have time to go for a swim every morning… then I was doing something wrong. This was the first day of living that dream, I finally had the time! Angus came down with me and was a bit scared so he sat on the top of the beach which was about 5 foot above the shore line. I went for a swim and came out. I had my breakfast and had my laptop already sitting at the breakfast table ready to do my ‘and so the journey ends’ travel log. I had my back to the sea and Angus was near by. I was talking to Sri the girl who jointly owns the Galaxy Hotel and has spent the last year building it up. We were chatting away and… her face looked concerned as she looked out to sea, I looked around and saw the sea bubbling up 30 feet from me. I said ‘ is this normal for here’ Sri’s face said it all, I got up and now saw a 10 foot wall of shit moving towards me at about 10 miles an hour. I started running and realised we had a tidal wave hitting the beach.
‘PENNY, GET OUT OF THE HUT, RUN FOR YOUR LIVES, A WAVE IS COMING’… ‘ANGUS ANGUS WHERE ARE YOU’. Penny popped her head out of our little wooden hut and lucky for once in her life was on time and left with Sasha who had been playing on her new phone and Claudia who had been playing with the sand just outside. It was now about 20 seconds after I still had a fried egg on the end of my fork. We were running down the road behind the Galaxy away from the sea. I still had the laptop in my hand, looking back I could see the wave taking all the huts with it and thought it was about time I let go of the laptop.’WHERE IS ANGUS?’ ‘ PENNY!’ Angus, when he wants to, I know, can out run me, he was in front, he had seen the sea coming in and didn’t need any encouragement. We were all together when we got to the road, there was nothing on the other side what seemed like for ever to climb up. There was an army Land Rover and we piled the kids in, the water hit us, Claudia was on the bottom of the Land Rover as people climbed in on top of her. We all clambered for the roof. The first time I thought we might all die is when the vehicle then just lifted up and flipped over throwing us into what I can only describe as a fast moving flooded river. I fell in and came up for air moving along with the current. We were now probably a few minutes into it. It was like a real bad dream, I was not in control of the plot… but I was in control of me… I saw Angus starting to go by me, I grabbed his hand and not like my night mares I had hold of him and was not going to let go. We flew along bashing into vehicles, fridges, bits of woods, and clung on to anything that was floating. We had no idea where we where going and I had no idea where the other three where, you didn’t have time to look around or yell, we where dragged under by the current, I pushed Angus’s hand up so he might still get air, I swallowed a load of sand and water, yet was calm and new I would come up again. I clung to various floating debris and as the wave finally started to lose its power we slammed into a palm tree and I put Angus on top of the crap that had built up around it… and hung on. I looked back and Penny was doing the same. She had some how managed to pull Claudia out from the bottom of the Land Rover and get her on top of it within seconds and hold on to her for the last 300m.
‘PENNY… WHERE IS SASHA? PENNY… PENNY.. WHERE IS SASHA?’ Penny was looking frantically fifty feet away from me, we could not see her, the sludge was now down to 4-5 feet deep. Do I dive in? Where do I dive in ‘SASHA WHERE ARE YOU’ That was the worst moment of my life, what I did in the next few minutes could save or lose Sasha’s life. Sasha had fallen in and rode the river ride on her own. She managed to grab hold of the back of a fridge that had been wedged between two trees and had stopped her ride a hundred feet or so before us. A plank of wood had slammed into her and she had to pull a nail out of her foot whilst holding on. The water level went down. A very nice guy called Stefan from Sweden saw her situation and gave her a piggy back over to Penny. I will never forget seeing Sasha appearing out of nowhere on Stefan’s back. Stefan, you are my night in shining armour, thank you very much for what you did. We grouped together. We were calm, no one was crying, ‘Dad… what was that’ ‘It was an earthquake at sea Angus’ I’d seen a documentary on tidal waves a year early. I had wanted to watch it to see if they happened in Sri Lanka. Up to now they had not.
‘ Eese OK now, we go back beach… OK now’
Think… think…. Oh yeah…the documentary also said there is often more than one wave . ‘GET ON THE ROOF’ ‘I don’t want get on the roof daddy’ ‘GET ON THE ROOF!’ We had no clothes on, just swimmers and pants… I pushed Penny up on a roof and she dragged the kids up. ‘HELP ME, I’VE BROKEN MY LEG’ A woman was on the ground near by ‘Don’t leave me down here to die’. ‘BILL THERE IS A NOTHER WAVE COMING! GET UP HERE NOW…BILL!’ What do I do, do I leave here… do I help her… fuck I haven’t got time to work out what to do ‘GET UP, HOLD ON HERE… GET UP THERE’. I shoved her up and she was dragged onto the roof. I then started to clamber up climbing on the jagged bricks sticking out but they kept on breaking under my weight, the doctors have always said being too heavy could kill me…. ‘BILL GET UP HERE’ ‘DADDY GET UP HERE THE WAVEIS COMING’ I could see it now, it was 20 feet away. I got up there some how. Woosh… it swept through the house filling up to about 5 feet and then resided away. Bendu, the Sri Lankan guy who had got up there with us said ‘It’s Ok now, we go back now..’ ‘You said that 20 minutes go. We’ll stay here.’ Woosh, another wave. I took a lot of the tiles off and got a firm footing on top of one of the outer walls. ‘Guys you better come off the top of the roof. If any of the walls go you will go with it’ ‘I don’t want to move Daddy’ ‘GET OFF THE ROOF!’ They clambered down, even Helen (we knew her name by now) and stood on the edge of the house.
‘Daddy, can I have a sprite tonight?’ A big beaming smile from Claudia trying to make fun of the situation, what a star. We had another four waves hit the house over about an hour… each time the water would go right down showing the grass. What to do, what do we do? Do we stay, do we move, the house is not going to take much more…. and then it happened, a massive wave came in bringing a wall ten feet high of shit. It hit the house and it shook, rushing through it only a few feet from ours. This is the second time I thought we might all die. I climbed up the roof where they had all been sitting after the wave had gone to see where we could go, and the other side of the house… had literally disappeared, there was not rubble on the floor, it had just all floated away. We had Andrew with us by now, he was a very capable German we found in a palm tree 20 feet away. Everyone was saying we should make a move to some high rocks after this one as the house won’t hold another wave.
What do we do, we go down and a wave comes we’re dead. We stay here and another big wave comes and we’re dead. I remember looking up and seeing a load of birds that looked like vultures and all I could think was ‘you lot can fuck right off’ ‘OK let get down! Lets go!’ We could see the rock 200m away through the trees and it was shit or bust. Get to dry land and move to what we thought was the final level of the game we where in and win a price… our lives. We clambered down stumbling through rubble, grass and god knows what else was under the knee deep water. We kept falling over, I had Sasha’s hand, Andrew had Helen, Bendu had Angus and Penny had Claudia. We where not going to lose anyone again on the next wave. Whilst walking in the open a helicopter came over… Sasha was so pleased to see it and thought it was going to rescue us, we waved madly and Claudia did one of her best screams ever to try and get attention. It flew past, it saw us, it kept going. If any one thinks Sasha is a sweet innocent little princess, think again, you should here what she called that helicopter when it was disappearing out of site. I was shocked.
We had to swim across two rivers currents to get across and we… finally got there. We clambered up and just sat on dry rock and felt absolutely chuffed to bits. We were ALL going to live!’
Helen was in agony and the kids all gathered round to keep her conscious, Andrew and Bendu went off to get help and came back with a tractor and trailer.about twenty minutes later. We all got out and headed for higher ground where there was a hospital of some sorts. There we dead and dying bodies, people screaming, people walking around like nothing had happened. The kids had seen people drown in front of them… not a word… on their best behaviour. Helping others doing as they where asked the first time… smiling… amazing..but obviously deep in shock.
We grouped together and realised what had happened. It was disappointing to learn it was not a local thing for the obvious reasons as well as the fact that we would be very low on any ones ‘get me out of here’ list. We started finding places to boil water and look for food. The bridge we were told that connected Arugam Bay to Pottervil had gone. We were stranded. It really was ‘ ah… another sneaky level to the game, it’s not over yet, you win when your out of here… not just the water!’
We heard there was another, even bigger wave on its way. I thought, if this hits in the night, I just don’t… think I have the energy to do all that again… we need the facts, not gossip. ‘Where did you here this?’, ‘CNN, my sat .phone is working’. Annie, an ex BBC hack piped up. ‘Bloody CNN, they often get their facts wrong, bet that’s bollocks’.
‘Annie, can you remember the switch board no. for the BBC?’, ‘Yeah’. ‘Where’s that guy with the phone’. Anne called the BBC and after persuading the receptionist that she really should put her through to the news desk even though she did sound a little annoyed, they confirmed that there was no more waves on there way.’ I remembered the switch for News International and checked with the Times and my old paper the Sun. ‘We’re surrounded by crocodiles, its terrible!’ Annie was not impressed ‘You can tell you’re an ex bloody Sun man… there’s no crocodiles here!’ ‘Annie, someone saw one face to face today… and we need to get our story out there’… the penny dropped and we both rang up news desks telling them our story… telling them they must get on to the Foreign office and get some helicopters to get us out of there.
Even Sasha did her bit ‘You got to get us out of here’ she pleaded with a BBC reporter. We had boiled water, coconut milk and a slice of lobster for dinner. The Army were very helpful but did not get the joke that if they had lobster they must have some Champagne sooooome where hidden back at camp. An NGO with some sneaky supplies took pity on Angus and offered him some sweet bread and pineapple jam. ‘Do you have any honey?’ The guy stared back… Angus smiled ‘Pineapple jam will be great’. We sat around a fire and all hoped something would come and save us. Penny was my source of energy, she had kept calm through the whole thing and had sat up stroking the kid’s hair keeping them calm and their spirits high, I am so proud of my wife and my children, we should have all been dead, but we stuck together and worked as team. I will never forget the courage and stamina they all showed that day.
It started to rain and we huddled into a porch next to the morgue full of… people grieving and yelling for their loved ones in their sleep, it was very morbid until one of the locals let off an amazing raspberry inches from Angus’s face that echoed around the room… we couldn’t help it, we were with three kids… we all got the uncontrollable giggles. At daybreak it had stopped raining and so we all went back outside. They must have thought us in very poor taste.
I felt like absolute shit, I had no shoes, no T shirt, just my swimmers and a sheet tied around my neck looking like a bad toga party effort. I picked a tree that would be in the shade, I lay down with Angus and we cuddled up, I had still not slept and having not slept Christmas Eve, was completely knackered.
Bub bub bub bub bub bub bub bub bub bub, ‘Fuck me I thought, it might have actually worked!’ I stood up and in came the first one. It landed at a place one helicopter had landed the day before to take out one of the Sri Lankan ministers. Dam… wrong place! We started walking down to the other area; Sasha was in agony due to her nail injury in her foot. There where 30+ people there, ‘This person should go first’, ‘Well I think my family should go first’ … there was no one in charge. The head of the Task Force who I had become friendly with the night before was not around. The area kept filling up with people. Another helicopter flew over head…. it can’t land her I thought, it must land further up the hill. ‘I think we should go back…’ ‘ Daddy, I don’t want to go back…’ ‘Lets go!’. We left, I was not going to say, ‘Get the wounded up the hill’ for every decent person there, there was another that would be on that chopper in no time’ ‘I thought, bollocks to this, it’s every man for himself, I’ve got to get my family out of here, all these people are single, they can be heroes, I’m taking care of my family before a load more perfectly healthy people who didn’t even get wet get on. We clambered up the hill, we guessed right , a chopper landed and there was about 40 people just staring at it, there was no one in charge and no one new what to do ‘RUN, RU N, RUN FOR THE HELECOPTER’ ‘ RUN!’ The pilot saw us coming and I tried to have that ‘we’re next on the list, honest mate, look’. We threw the kids on and Andrew saw we were there, he held back and then saw that no one else was getting on ‘ANDREW GET ON’. He did a very nice running jump onto Penny’s mashed up leg and we were off.
We lifted up and we just all smiled and started yelling with happiness. We flew over Arugam Bay, or at least where it had been. Most of the hotels had completely disappeared. The restaurant where I had been eating my breakfast less that 24hours earlier was now a patch of sand.
Angus has seen solders on our trip, he seen army camps and he has seen tanks. The helicopter that lifted us out was exactly the same as the ones you will see in any ‘Naam’ film, same age with no doors and one massive machine gun on each side. When the gunner with live ammunition smiled and shook his hand he new this was the icing on the cake. If you have been following our journal all along you will know that Angus has now learnt first hand what running around like a headless chicken means, he knows not to drop the ball… and he now knows exactly what the the saying ‘Go with the flow’ means.

I have always said you never really get to meet the real people of a country until you have a small problem like a blow out… and you find out if they really are nice people or not. Sri Lanka is a beautiful country and the people here are… very special. We have had so much help from so many people before and after the shit hit the fan. We are gutted we are leaving, but we need to put our kids first and make them feel safe again as soon as possible. We don’t know what we are going to do next… for the last three days it has been about survival and getting out of here. See you all soon Duncan

Hi Guys,
We are all alive with a few cuts and bruises. We were all having breakfast and chilling out when it happened, then my dad said run for your life. I knew he wasn’t joking because I saw a wave coming. We ran and we were dragged by a wave for about 300 metres. We held onto fridges and ovens for our lives. We climbed onto a house and then it collapsed so we ran for our lives again and climbed a rock. We were safe. We were then picked up by a tractor with a trailer and went to the nearest hospital and then slept the night were we were safe. We then got a helicopter to Ampara the highest point for miles around. We went to the hospital there and got are tetenes injections to kill any dieses.
We are now at someones house. A persons house who we had saved. We went to the British High Comission were they gave us a piece of paper to show who we are and now we need to call all the air lines to see which plane has spare seats. We should be back in England in under a week and we will come and see all of you at some point and we will be living with family.
Loads of love Sasha