Rather than retype everything, here is an email I sent out today whilst still 'in the moment':

This literally just happened, and I'm still mid-panic attack, but I have to tell people about it. Okay...

So yesterday I met my friend Sak from Shanghai in incredibly random circumstances - his boat was arriving at an island as mine was leaving it, we had no idea we were in the same place and no mobiles. Luckily we caught up on facebook and met up for a drink last night, which was great.

In the course of the conversation Sak, who has travelled in Malaysia more than me, gives me a warning:

"You have to be careful in Malaysia, you know? Like, they have the death penalty for even a small amount of drugs, and they use tourists to try and smuggle them. They hide them in your bag, see if you get through and then pick them up on the other side. If you get caught, you're screwed - of course you're going to say 'It's not mine' but even if you're lucky you'll still go to jail."

My mind went immediately to the sweet German couple (the non-smoking, moderate drinking types) I'm sharing a room with and I joke that they might be drug smugglers. We both laugh.

As I'm walking through the ferry terminal in Langkawi, out of the blue, Sak's words come back to me. I figure I might as well check my bags, knowing there's nothing there. I open a front pocket and can't see anything. I reach inside, and it's then that my hand makes contact with what is very clearly a plastic bag filled with white powder.

I'm not sure I need to describe how much panic I felt at that moment, but it's fair to say I was nearly crying, struggling to breath, feeling faint - about as scared as I've ever been. Not sure what to do, I make a rash decision to get rid of it as quickly as possible. I can't see a toilet anywhere nearby so I take a deep breath, walk as calmly as I can - given that every muscle in my body has just turned to icy jelly - over to the nearest dustbin. Looking around in what can only be described as a guilty, panicked way, I grab the bag and drop it into the bin, and start to walk away.

Now, as I'm doing this, I catch sight of something printed on the bag, the word "Trisara". It takes me five paces for the penny to drop, and for me to remember that I took a plastic bag of bath salts from the nice hotel I stayed at with my mum, the Trisara. It's another moment before I realise where I left it - in my bag's front pocket.

I'm not sure there's a lesson here - perhaps just 'don't be a twat' - but as terrifying moments go, this has to be up there...

Apart from that I'm now in Georgetown, Penang. It's completely unlike anywhere I've been before, with architecture in the colonial style which I've seen in movies but never in real life and strong influences of its Chinese and Indian communities. It achieves the rare feat of incorporating recognisable western features (malls, starbucks, mcdonalds) without seeming to lose any of its soul. Which makes it a pretty groovy place in my book.

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Langkawi, Malaysia

I'm not sure why, but even before the boat docked I knew I liked this place. There's something in the air here, a peace that was just missing in Thailand. Perhaps it comes from having fewer tourists, and the absence of the tarted-up Thai beauty that so easily attracts foreigners. Perhaps it's the money that flows to the island through its VAT free status, relieving the pressure on hotels, bars and restaurants to stimulate the local economy. Whatever the reason, the breezy atmosphere flowing off the crew on the speedboat into port showed a marked difference from the stressed out Thais who had ferried us to the end of their country all day. Thailand is a very friendly place, but there's something more here, the easy friendliness is natural, without the half-eye on your wallet that seems common in tourist areas of Thailand. Sitting down inside a bar with my new friends, a German couple who made the mammoth journey from Phi Phi with me and who ended up sharing a large hotel room (with a working shower, thank god!) with me to cut costs, a man approaches us. "Hello, my name is Carlton. I work in this bar during the day, although I am not working now. Welcome to our bar. Whilst you are very welcome to sit on your own, we would love it if you came and joined in the group." In a place like this it's hard not to wear a smile on your face.

Today saw more islands - a freshwater lagoon, eagle feeding (the island is named after its eagles) and pristine sandy beaches - and my education about Malaysia, courtesy of a Malay ex-Londoner on my boat. Until two days ago I didn't know Langkawi was in Malaysia, and knew very little about the country at all. She amused herself with my surprise as she told me a bit of its history as a British colony turned commonwealth country. The best she saved for last.

"You know this island used to have a curse on it? That's right. Until very recently. There was a woman, living here, whose husband went off to fight in a war. Whilst he was away she had a friend, a man, who she liked to spend time with. Another woman got jealous, and accused her of adultery. She was arrested, and although she protested her innocence, she was sentenced to death. When they cut her, however, they found her blood ran white, because she was chaste, and she put a curse on the island to last seven generations. In the 1990s it ran out, but until then noone wanted to develop here."

Perhaps that explains the scrappiness of the place. The road by the beach is still under construction, and on the pavement wooden planks stand every four or five paces to stop you dropping into the sewer system. There are few large hotels, and plenty of room on the beach, despite this being a Malay bank holiday, seeing lots of visitors from Kuala Lumpur. Still despite - or maybe rather because of - the lack of neatness, the island can't help but be a stunning place.

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Phi Phi Island

I really wanted to be principled here. A long time ago I remember reading about the impact of filming The Beach in Thailand, a beautiful island torn upside down to make room for cameras, lights, generators, and to turn a naturally beautiful beach into a natural looking wonder. I was all ready to follow it up with the final insult, the tourists who now come trudging through to see the beach where Leo ran amock (or am I misremembering?), and just maybe they'll find a lock of his hair or a broken flip flop inscribed with his name, hidden where the less observant searchers missed it.

All of that is probably pretty accurate mind you. Maya beach, stunningly - shockingly - set away in an enormous natural harbour of high rock faces fluffed with greenery on all sides, loses the impact it had on screen in the face of packed tour boats and smaller motor boats. It's now a box to tick, on every Thai traveller's radar. Still, when there's so much beauty around, it's hard to care less.

From Maya the boat tour (I'm no less guilty of these crimes than anyone else) shows us a small harbour where small, safe sharks swim alongside swordfish and other wonders of the sea. Next Bamboo Island, around which the sea is a perfect sapphire crystal lit up by showers of fish striped yellow and black, silver or violent purple. Shooting past small islands, shining beaches or fertile rocky outcrops, we reach a cove where monkeys will come right up to you, sitting on sand as soft as flour, hoping to steal your food or a sip of your drink.

The reason I'm in Phi Phi, an island I'd never heard of until a week ago and whose beauty leaves me a little lightheaded, is because of Danny Wallace, author of Yes Man. His memoir of a year of positive thinking saw him wind up in amazing and surprising places, and inspired others to do the same. One guy he spoke to was inspired enough to end up travelling the world and sends him a postcard from this very island. It's a great book, and chimes with my own experience - the unbelievable chain of events that sprang up in Hong Kong purely through positivity and saying yes to new experiences. If anyone's suffering from Winter blues right now, I'd say forget the movie (Hollywood adaptation with Jim Carrey - yawn) and pick this one up!

Tomorrow Langkawi Island, Malaysia. Till then...

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Looks like I'm staying in Phuket another week. Gawain's here, so I'm going to move in with him, play some golf, do a bit more reading. I've got a small pang, a 'you should be doing the difficult thing not the easy thing' which is encouraging me to go to Bangkok or Phnom Penh, but right now I'm pretty certain I'd only be doing it to satisfy a sense of guilt, rather than feeling particularly keen about seeing either place. The same feeling took over in Japan, and I didn't spend any time in Tokyo, but I've got one eye on next month, when I'll be doing a lot of intensive travelling, spending no more than four days in any one place, and usually just one night. The one thing that really has struck me about moving about is the feeling of being absolutely lost when you first get to a new place, a sense of being 'lost in the world' as opposed to lost in a place, and it takes a moment to catch up.

The advantage of my plan at the moment is Gawain's place has no internet, which means I can't distract myself with ringing people from home, email, facebook, blogs, newspapers and the like. It always amazes me how powerful the urge is to keep staring at a screen, no matter what's going on around you, and it's good to spend a bit of time incommunicado.

Max has started a blog! For those of you who don't know, he's my brother Wills' best friend, and a genuinely funny bloke. To find out about meeting Chelsea Davy, his man-love for my brother (flitting between Scrubs and Brokeback) and truly great puns check out max-sittingontheblog.blogspot.com

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We Apologise for the Inconvenience

I've been quiet a few weeks now. There are reasons for that; I'm travelling with my mum for her 50th birthday, so it's all a bit personal, I'm staying in nice places and having fun rather than doing anything I think worth writing about, but most of all I just haven't really felt like writing. Today I feel slightly more inspired.

I'm a bit anxious about talking about some of the things I'm up to at the moment. Everyone I speak to in the UK tells me the weather's miserable, the economy's miserable, the news is miserable and they're not doing too well either. Next to that, just telling people where I am feels like gloating.

After three months of mid- to late autumn- weather, and a week of central-heating-free winter, I've taken a step into the sunshine and started to work on my tan. Australia was boiling, but not to my mother's taste (not exactly mine either, with the average weight comparable to America's Southern states). Deciding that Manley Bay and Noosa Heads were, respectively, 'like Clapton on Sea' and 'disGUSTing', we rerouted to Phuket (via Melbourne for the tennis), which she is exceedingly happy with. It suits me, I love the place and sets me up in the right area for my trip with Alex. That trip is getting ever closer - just over two weeks away - and with the prospect of forty days of island hopping ahead of me, and having changed countries five times already this year, I'm quite keen to hang around Thailand for a while, relax a bit and forget about moving too much. If I wasn't a lazy sod I'd probably have worked out how to get to Cambodia and back by bus, but another week in the sunshine to shake off a bit of traveller's fatigue won't do me any harm.

Top Five Books (in my head right now):
1. The Uninvited - Geling Yan: A comic tale, and Geling's first in English, about a laid off factory worker who stumbles upon free banquets thrown for journalists. He just wants to be left alone with his shark's fin soup, but his dreams of legitimising his deceit draw him into a world he's not equipped to deal with.

2. The Delivery Man - Joe McGuinness Jnr.: McGuinness has been dubbed the new Bret Easton Ellis, and there's definitely a scent of Less Than Zero in this story of self-destruction and teen exploitation. Painful and impossible to put down.

3. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig: a multidimensional journey through America, philosophy and the struggles inside one man's head, you'll want to reread it before you're halfway through!

4. Rice - Su Tong: Family infighting and generational competition captured in startling prose by one of China's greatest living novelists. His great skill is refusing to judge the cruelty his characters display to one another.

5. The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen: would be higher, but I haven't finished it yet. Franzen makes you feel the blows of every little frustration in his characters' lives, bringing sympathy out of conflict and self-recognition from self-pity.

Depending on where you are in the world, for tomorrow, Happy Australia Day, Happy Chinese New Year and, to my mum, Happy 50th!

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Back to School

Speak to most people about Japan and they usually tell you about the same things. "The toilets are amazing there," is a common one, and even more importantly, "It's so nice and clean, everything's so pristine". There's evidence to back this up. Some toilets do have heated seats, incorporated bidet functions and cute pictures of water squirting at your bum. Most places are very clean, the floors swept regularly and antibacterial handwash and wipes readily available.

Like most of the impressions I've brought to new countries, these ideas are easily dispelled. Whilst many of the toilets do have space-age functions, just as many are converted squat toilets, with a plastic seat just thrown over the more traditional trench design. When I visited Suzaka Higashi today, a midlevel highschool where Katie teaches English, any notion of absolute Japanese perfection was dispelled when I saw the dirty crumbling concrete and worn down air of the building.

Which isn't to say it wasn't a nice school. Both staff and students were exceptionally friendly, and the school seemed well organised, from the way desks sit on different levels in the classroom, like seats in a cinema, so students at the back of the room can have an unobstructed view (and can be spotted emailing on their mobiles by the teacher) to the idiosyncratically Japanese musical intercom that announced the start and end of classes.

What struck me most was the differences from Western children. Each day begins with the students cleaning the entire school, entering each room, including the teachers' offices, in teams and taking different jobs. Despite this, during lessons the students seemed to sometimes ignore the teachers entirely, turning their backs to continue a conversation whilst Katie was presenting her lesson. Japanese teachers have no means of punishing their students, and some of the older heads just let the kids get on with it.

I was there making a presentation about the UK, and to answer some questions. Katie assured me that I had to mention David Beckham and Harry Potter or they'd ignore me, so I shoehorned them in to my slideshow about London ("This is Leicester Square, famous for movie premieres. David Beckham goes to watch movie premieres here. The author of Harry Potter is also from London, and many of the scenes in the books take place here.") They were left cold by Asia's favourite footballer, but at the mention of Harry Potter a whisper of excitement spread through the room like I'd told them he was here to visit.

After the classes I took in written questions from the students and wrote answers for them. Most asked me if I had a girlfriend, or if Katie was my girlfriend, much to her's irritation ("No you cannot write 'Katie wishes'"). Some asked what I thought of Japanese food, or what my favourite music was. My favourite question by far though was this one: "Do you prefer summer or winter?" Right now, in sub-zero temperatures, unable to feel my toes, but with three months on warm beaches and in glorious tropical climates to come, the answer seems pretty simple.

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I am writing this from my friend's living room in the mountains near Nagano, Japan. The ski slopes made famous by the Winter Olympics are barely an hour's drive away. The city I'm staying in, Suzaka, is a satellite of the larger city of Nagano. With a population of just over 50,000 it barely qualifies as a city. It certainly has the feel of a village. The girls I'm staying with, Soleil and Katie, are teaching here as part of the JET program, and after four months out here can hardly go anywhere without recognising someone they know - often their students, kitted out in tight black leather jeans and bouffant hair to make Noel Fielding jealous. The buildings are low, as is the build quality, with no central heating and thin walls. Soleil describes them as 'glorified cardboard boxes'. It makes them exceedingly cold, but there's a fantastic kitschy feel to them that I can't help but love.

Japan so far is almost exactly what I expected. At passport control a woman overstepped the waiting line. When she was called back by the attendant there was exchange of bows, the woman repeatedly covering her face in shame, that reflected the overwhelming mutual crushing embarrassment of the whole situation. In a queue for train tickets I started to sneeze, and the man standing behind me immediately took three steps backwards and gave me the 'Is he contagious?' look. On the train ticket inspectors bowed each time they left the carriage. Among the low houses in Suzaka, off the beaten track for tourists and Western visitors, restaurants are marked imperceptibly Kanji (Japanese character) writing in their windows, and already I've seen children stare when I've walked past. It strikes me as quite an inaccessible place, more so even than China. Even throwing something out is near impossible without an understanding of Japanese, since the bins are assorted into at least five different recycling options, with no way of telling between them.

Still, there's something lovely about this city. It has the impact of a ski village, fresh faced cold and clean air, with snow-peaked mountains on all sides, without the short term triviality of a ski resort. The quiet streets and shut-down feel, during the day and at night, give it a sleepy quality that's very calming. It's a nice change after a series of megacities, and the throbbing nightlife of Phuket.

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