Light comes from the sun in little balls of energy called “photons”. Actually, in scientific terms the photons are not regarded as “balls” but as “quanta”, the plural of “quantum”. But you get the idea.

The solar cell consists of a silicon wafer with metal contacts on the front and back, as you can see in the picture below. When you put a solar cell in the sun, you have photons of light coming from the sun hitting the solar cell. Some of the photons bounce off (this is the reflected light) and some of the photons go right through the cell and come out the other side (these photons are low energy red light). However, some photons go part way into the silicon wafer and get absorbed by the silicon.

A solar cell consists of a silicon wafer with front and rear metal contacts. Here a photon of light has been absorbed and created a free electron and hole.

If a photon is absorbed in the silicon, it gives its energy to the silicon. Remember a photon of light is just a little ball of energy. This energy tears an electron away from one of the silicon atoms. You might recall that electrons are negatively charged and when they can move freely, they create an electric current.

Where the electron used to be, there is now a vacant place that we call a hole. The hole is positively charged. Because other electrons can jump into the hole, the hole can also move around just like the free electron can.

With lots of photons being absorbed, we end up with lots of these free electrons and free holes. If the electrons and holes smash into each other and recombine, then the electricity is extinguished. However, we structure the cell in such a way so that the electrons and holes move away from each other. The negative electrons all move up towards the front of the cell, while the positive holes go down towards the rear surface of the cell. Then you end up with the front metal contacts negatively charged, and with the rear metal contacts of the cell  positively charged. You can see that’s a device which is a lot like a battery- positive contact on one end and negative contact on the other. And just like a battery, if you connect a load, such as a light bulb or a music player, electricity will flow and the device will turn on.

1. Type of kayak: Sit-on or sit-in.  A sit-on-top kayak has a recessed area for seating and placement of your feet while a sit-in kayak is hollow with a cockpit that your whole lower body slides into. Sit-on kayaks tend to be more recreational as they are easier to pick up and use even by someone who’s never kayaked before, they may be more stable, and if you are worried about capsizing, then a sit-on-top option may be a good one. Basic sit-on-top kayaks can also be reasonably cheap. Sit-in kayaks allow more serious kayaking.  They tend to be faster and are better for touring and long distance travel as they offer more protection from the elements and more effortless tracking through the water.
2. Length: Shorter kayaks, 3 – 4 m (10 – 13 ft) are more manoueverable and are better for whitewater and use in the surf. They are also easier to transport, carry, and tend to be cheaper. Longer kayaks, 4.5 – 5.5 m (15 – 18 ft), are less manoeuverable but are faster since they are a sharper, more streamlined shape. They also have a better profile for tracking through the water more effortlessly. This means you use less effort to cover the same distance, or with the same effort you get to see more!
3. Hull shape and stability: A kayak with a wide, flat bottom will have greater initial stability which means less of a tendency to roll from its upright position. This may appeal to beginners who feel a kayak feels like it might tip over as they try to paddle. On the other hand, a kayak with a narrow, sharp cross section tends to have better final stability, which means that although it can tilt sharply, it is less likely to actually tip over. This is more likely to appeal to more serious kayakers who want good final stability for going over waves or wake. A wider, flatter kayak with good inital stability will also tend to be slower than a narrower, sharper kayak.
4. Material: For the most part, the choice is between thermoplastic and fibreglass. Thermoplastic kayaks are cheaper and more difficult to damage, whereas fibreglass is lighter and more expensive. Other more advanced materials such as carbon fibre may be lighter still but even more expensive.
5. Double or single: A double kayak can be great if your partner, child or friend wishes to kayak with you. Unfortunately, if their interest in kayaking wanes you might get stuck with an expensive unused boat! A single kayak for some might be seen as a selfish possession, for others it is solitary bliss. And kayaking doesn’t have to be an antisocial activity if you have friends who are into it or if you join a club.
6. Price: In general, to provide space to grow and ensure that the lesson lasts, go for the best kayak you can get for your budget. If you want a 5.5 m fibreglass sea sea kayak or touring kayak, you can expect to spend well over US$1000 and as high as US$2000 (convert). For a high end racing kayak the price can be higher than that. If all you want is a short, stable recreational kayak then you’ll probably have a fair bit of change left over from $1000 (convert). If the price is too high for you, consider going for a metre shorter. It will be a few hundred dollars cheaper, but probably still serve you well. As a final tip, you can often get great deals if you buy second hand and especially online.

Hope this helps you. Don’t forget a lifejacket and dry-bag for your camera gear! Happy kayaking!

The first time I ever went to Norway, I visited my friends Maria and Todd in a town called Bodø above the arctic circle. It was January 2002 and the middle of winter. As such, and being so far north, there were 24 hours of darkness. Well, this is actually not quite correct. For about 3 or 4 hours of the day, there is a sort of twilight which allows you to see around you for a while, and then it gets really dark again. In fact, while I was there I didn’t see the sun at all for 3 weeks. My body clock got completely out of whack. I would wake thinking it was still the middle of the night, and find that it was 12 midday. And then my body would either want to fall asleep at 4 pm or not at all. On the plus side, it was extremely good conditions for viewing Northern Lights.

Except, that is rained nearly the whole time I was there. On the clear nights, we would drive up a nearby mountain for a good view, only to find that there was no aurora activity. After a few weeks of this, I decided that it was time to bail south and my mode of transport was to be the Hurtigruten ferry. On the way out to the dock at 3 am, I was completely stoked when the Aurora Borealis appeared suddenly as a big green curtain in front of us. On board the ship, I watched from the outdoor deck on my own as the lights faded and we started the trip south.

I had to wait 2 years to see the Northern Lights again, this time above the arctic circle in Finland in 2004. The weather here had been truly unbelievable, 7 days of the clearest driest weather ever with the temps starting to reach the early pluses. So I had been doing some serious Aurora hunting! My travelling companion Outi and I visited Outi’s cousin Kaarina in a beautiful city called Oulu which is about halfway up the length of finland, maybe 100km from the arctic circle. Leaving the house on Saturday night I was watching a plane leave a vapour trail across the full moon as if to scar the night right down the middle. Suddenly the sky lit up with Northern Lights, a huge green and red curtain which grew to fill the entire sky! I never had any idea something could be so beautiful. At one point a huge lilac flower opened above us as if summoning us to heaven. With the full moon and stars and everything else! Needless to say I annoyed Outi and everyone else by staying out half the night to watch for the aurora. We went to visit Outi’s grandma, seriously out in the sticks, in a beautiful place called Juorkuna. Apart from the full moon, it was seriously dark there due to no streetlights or city lights and with incredible clear weather so the scene was set. Unfortunately despite depriving myself of sleep and getting a sore neck from looking up and a cold back from lying in the snow I didn’t see much lights, only on the last night when a pretty green curtain lit up the frozen lake.

We then went to Inari again. This is way up in Lapland, wild frontier country. This is the quirky town where we met Pistol Packing Neo Nazi Homosexual Bikie Pete in 2003. Luckily we didn’t see him again- a good thing lest he remembered my failure to accept his invitation of a sauna in his summer cottage and jam donut he offered me, and then let his knuckledusters do the talking. Well, anyway, what a surprise to hop off the bus arriving in Inari and have Northern lights in a beautiful rainbow formation above us… another sleepless night.

The Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights forms in a region around the north pole while the Aurora Australia, the Southern Lights, form in a region around the south pole. Since there is less landmass and less habitation in the region in the southern hemisphere, most people that view the aurora do so in the north. Charged particles radiating from the sun travel at high velocities towards the earth and are accelerated towards the poles by the earth’s magnetic field. They then collide with oxygen or nitrogen atoms in the earth’s atmosphere, exciting or ionising these atoms. When the atoms return to their ground state, the excess energy is released by the emission of a photon of light. The colours of emitted light depend on the atom excited, and the excitation energy of the electron transition.

• Green – oxygen, up to 240 km in altitude
• Red – oxygen, above 240 km in altitude
• Blue – nitrogen, up to 100 km in altitude
• Purple/violet – nitrogen, above 100 km in altitude

I wrapped my camera bag around my shoulders, feeling strangely guilty that I had taken all my possessions with me. When the platform was moving back and forth as well, I finally realised deep down that this was an earthquake, but being from Australia, far from any tectonic fault lines and where the ground can always be depended on to be solid, I still couldn’t quite believe what my brain was telling me. “What the hell is going on?” I yelled over the racket to Brad, who replied, “I don’t know, an earthquake I guess!” I think there was somebody yelling stuff through the station PA system, but since we don’t understand Japanese, and because are brains are not calibrated to the sensation of the earth moving like it was the ocean, it took us that long to work out what on earth was happening.

The Yurikomome line is elevated above the ground level and so the platform we were standing on was one storey above ground level. I could see people on the street level looking startled and some people running. My own instinct was to try and get down to street level, but unfortunately the exit to the platform was a long ways down the platform from where we were standing. There was an escalator about 10 metres from us that had been bringing people up from the street level to the platform, and I decided that I even though the escalator was running in the wrong direction I was going to run down it anyway. However at that moment the shaking had become so violent that it was hard to stand up straight, let alone run, and all around me, Japanese people were calmly holding onto anything bolted down and not running anywhere. In fact, Brad had joined about 10 people who were holding onto recycling bins in the centre of the platform, so that’s what I did as well.

I figured that since the roof was triangular, and the recycling bins were directly under the apex of the triangle, that we were reasonably safe should the roof of the station collapse. When I looked up through the glass apex of the roof and noticed that skyscrapers above us were rocking back and forth, I wasn’t so sure however. It was at that point that I realised it was a pretty serious tremor to be moving skyscrapers around like that. The whole time the quake went on I was thinking calmly and rationally and in slow motion. And my adrenaline was really going, in fact it was one of the biggest rushes I’ve ever experienced. I had this memory in the back of my head that earthquakes rarely last more than 45 seconds, having seen the news and spoken to people from California and such places, so I kept thinking, “it’s nearly done, it’s nearly done”. And then sure enough, it got less violent, and then it was over.

As we evacuated the station, we looked up and saw skyscrapers all around swaying like trees in the breeze. This went on for maybe 10 minutes after the quake. So our first thought was just to walk somewhere where a skyscraper wasn’t going to fall on us. Very quickly, the sky was full of helicopters. In the end, we followed our train line to Shimbashi station, the huge JR station we had been heading for. We figured the trains there would still be running. They weren’t, and thousands of people had been evacuated onto the carparks and open areas outside the station. Just as we got there, about 20 minutes after the main quake, an aftershock hit (it was a 7 magnitude, we found out later), and the ground started swaying again. A 4 storey building quite close to us had a big VISA billboard on it, and the billboard was lurching like it was going to fall off the roof. People scrambled to get away from this building, but I noticed a guy sitting up in one of the windows of the building just sitting there like it was a normal day. A TV tower in the distance bounced back and forth as though it were a 30 cm ruler that somebody had flicked with their finger. I began to feel a queer seasickness, made all the more strange by the fact that we weren’t at sea!

Well, all the cars and shops and everything were still operating as normal, so we thought we’d get some lunch and figure out how to get back to our hotel in Shinjuku. This was a mistake, because we could have caught a cab then, but very soon it became peak hour and millions of locals poured onto the streets. Everyone was on their phones, the networks went down, the trains were not running and we saw businessmen fighting over cabs. We were still pretty excited about our first ever earthquake experience and were discussing what magnitude it was. Since nothing appeared damaged, we figured it was about a 4 or a 5. When we went back to Shimbashi station after eating, we noticed many people gathered around a TV screen, and when we went to have a look, we were stunned to see huge tsunami waves approaching the coastline filmed from a helicopter. There was also a number “8.4″ surrounded by Japanese characters, which we realised was the actual quake magnitude (this was later corrected to 9.0). Hoping that she spoke some English, I asked the young girl close to us where the footage was taken. She replied “Tsunami”. I said “yes, where?” Then she showed me on her phone and it was a hundred (or a couple hundred, I can’t remember) kilometres north of Tokyo. Suddenly, I realised we were still close to the port, and we noticed that everybody was walking inland. So we joined the crowd.

We saw cracks in buildings, we saw one building that had lost all its glass, and we saw billboard spotlights that had crashed into the street. But the lack of any major damage was astonishing. I suspect that if the quake had hit closer to town, that much of the city would have dropped, particularly the low level brick buildings. But it is a testament to Japanese building standards and technology that the whole city could shake and sway like that but remain standing.

On and on we walked, guided by the compass on my iPhone, since we had absolutely no idea where we were. My ankles and knees, all strained from 2 weeks of snowboarding, were burning. I received texts from family members and friends back home, but could barely reply to any of them as the networks were jammed. We got a text from Matt saying he was back at the hotel. After 4 hours of walking, we finally arrived back there at about 8 pm. The elevators were out so we walked up 13 flights of stairs to our room. The stairwell was cracked and bits of paint and plaster lay everywhere. In our room, the kitchen was full of things that had fallen over and drawers that had come out and a speaker lay on the floor in the loungeroom. There was no sign of Matt and it was spooky. We had been in the room about 30 s when another aftershock hit, so despite being barely able to stand up on my sore ankles, we bolted back down 13 flights of stairs again, the building lurching.

It turned out Matt was in the lobby with his laptop in the restaurant, watching TV news on the earthquake with a bunch of other travellers. One group were performers from Cirque du Soleil, and people were clearly freaked out. The apolcalyptic scenes of tsunami destruction and wrecked nuclear power plants certainly didn’t calm anyone’s nerves. But the trains and airports were all closed and we knew we weren’t going anywhere for a while. Meanwhile, it was freezing cold outside and sleeping outdoors was not an option. So, we went out and got some sushi, drank some beer, and then braved the 13 flights up to our room to sleep fully clothed, ready for a panicked evacuation we feared would come at any time.

Sleep is not really the right word, because there was very little of it. Everytime I drifted off, a real aftershock or a dreamed one woke me. At 3 am, a huge aftershock made the building grind back and forth. It is a horrible sensation to hear the sound of concrete under stress all around you and to see solid walls jerking, knowing that you are 13 floors up in the air. I picked up an emergency bag containing my passport, asthma medication and made a beeline for the emergency stairs.

“No,” said Matt, “we stay.”
“Really?” I asked, pausing just long enough for the shaking to get stronger. At that point I lost my nerve and ran down the stairs to the lobby on my own. Part way down, on about the 6th floor, I stopped to see if the building was still shaking. It was, and I could see the walls of the stairwell moving and could hear cracking. So I kept running. But after spending half an hour in the lobby, I decided I had to return to the room. I found that one of the elevators was going again. My ankles on fire from snowboarding, walking 4 hours and running down flights of stairs, I decided to take the lift up.

“Is the building safe?” I asked the guy on reception as I got in the lift.
“Cannot guarantee!” he replied enthusiastically. “Good luck!” I found Brad and Matt wide awake with the TV going, laughing at me for my cowardice in escaping the room.

It is quite something to wake up on a Saturday morning with the sun shining, knowing that you have survived the night. We still had one more night to go before our scheduled flight to Sydney on Sunday, which looked like it would happen as the airports and trains were now reopening. Tokyo was very much business as usual that Saturday, it was pleasant on street level knowing we could run for an open space when the aftershocks happened, and we started to get used to the whole “unstable ground” thing. We even went out clubbing on Saturday night in Rappongi, the alcohol happily dulling our paranoia. There was no sweeter feeling than waking up with the sun shining on Sunday morning, jumping out of bed to an aftershock, hungover but happy that we had a day of sightseeing before flying home. The whole radiation issue was not exactly comforting, and a feeling that this was going to get worse before it got much better reaffirmed my enthusiasm for leaving that night.

I will always remember my Japanese earthquake experience and the lovely Japanese people who remained calm and at their posts to serve travellers throughout. I know that quite possibly many of these people had relatives who had been affected, or they worried about what was to come. You can donate to Red Cross to help them.

In Oulu we also went ice-hole swimming in a frozen river. It was so damn cold getting undressed in the snow, and then the water was only 4°C. Kaarina’s brother had a camera but only managed to photograph Kaarina since Outi and I weren’t in the water for long enough. I dived in in my boardies and it felt like an explosion had gone off inside me it was so cold. I ran out of the snowy river bank and couldn’t even feel my feet touching the ground. It was the strangest sensation! And it took about 2 minutes before I could feel my legs again! But afterwards with the blood pumping it was possible to stand around just in boardies in 0°C air temperature and feel totally warm. Bizarre.

Anyway, my ferry was full of old Finnish drunks and young Swedish girls with fake id. It was a pretty seedy affair really but you know, in that appealing way. After buying a beer to have a quiet drink by myself an old Finnish man came up to me and demanded in English ‘who are you?’ So I said ‘Matt from Australia’ and offered my hand, which he didn’t take. Instead we eyed each other for 30 seconds before he slurred ‘you little shit’. WELCOME TO FINLAND! Eager to avoid a confrontation, I skedaddled and sat down on a couch nearby. Well, who should be sitting right next to me but some Aussie guys I met on the Sognefjord in Norway! So much merriment ensued.

Anyway, I now find myself in Tampere with Outi. She is working in the Dolphinarium studying the communications between dolphins which is very interesting. As such her work involves all those filters and everything that us electical engineers studied in Signal Processing, Butterworth, Chebyshev; you guys remember those right? The dolphins are very charming. The dolphinarium is inside one of the biggest fun parks in Finland with the most beserko rollercoaster I’ve ever seen. We’ve been riding it for free.

On the weekend we went from Helsinki (one of the most interesting cities I have ever seen) to Tallin in Estonia (one of the most interesting cities I have ever seen), on another Baltic duty-free booze cruise. Who would have thought that barely 10 years after the collapse of the USSR that Tallin now is as capitalist as any city I’ve seen anywhere. The old town is beautiful and filled with beautiful women, beautiful buildings, grandiose nightclubs, bars restaurants and shopping malls! The new town however, is quite run down and still looks very eastern bloc. We met up with Hannes, one of Outi’s Estonian friends and he took us to a very shiny nightclub called Hollywood. The girls here would just about stop your heart. The day after that we went to Pärnu in Southern Estonia. Pärnu is a summer party spot for young Estonians but Summer is almost at an end now, and there didn’t seem to be that much going on. Another incredible place though.

On the 3rd day, I did 10 hours on 3 buses from Narvik to Alta, but I got to say if you are going to do 10 hours on buses Norway is the best place for it. I can’t find the words to express the beauty of northern norway, lets just say the scenery was utterly eye-popping the whole way with the most beautiful fjords and mountains. Several times the bus had to brake hard to avoid herds of reindeer on the road. Some are owned by Sami (native norwegian) people whose teepee style tents can be seen here and there.

We stayed with her Aunt and Uncle who have moved here from Finland, so the family speaks mostly Finnish. And it was warm and summery, in fact when I crossed the arctic circle on Wednesday it was 30°C!!!

Hiking in the fjells around Lakselv, one of my boots fell apart. We had a roll of duct tape handy, and that lasted for a day, then in Inari in finland I managed to find some contact adhesive and performed a rather nice fixit of my boot which lasted for another week until the sole/soul fell out of it. The fjells were amazing in Lakselv, it was so arid and quiet… the weather was amazing and we did some midnight swimming next to a lake where we camped. The water temp was around 14ºC which is very warm for up there. Before midnight we climbed a peak to the north of us and had an amazing view all the way to the fjord. Toward the ocean it was perfect sky and to the south we could see mist and lightning on a warped, twisted, mountain landscape. It was soo, sooo eerily quiet. Outi, a biologist, started talking about wolves and bears and when I heard a wolf barking in the distance it was pretty freaky. We could even hear a reindeer bell, but not see them, and we could see for miles around. Incredible!

When we hiked up the fjell, the air was thick with mozzies, dirty great big ones. We only had a one piece tent, basically a tarp above us, and as I slept I had to cover more and more of my face with DEET, first my ears, then my nose and forehead, then my chin. The buggers were ravenous. Eventually I buttered myself completely apart from my lips cos I didn’t really want to put DEET on my lips. When I woke up, I had the fattest lips you have ever seen from a thousand odd mozzie bites and looked an unsexy Mick Jagger.

Inari in the Finnish part of Lapland was a wierd place. A crossroads for Russian whores, Sami people, gays and lesbians and reindeer herders. It was here that we met Pete the homosexual neo-nazi biker. He had 3 stitches on his knuckle and insisted that we drink a beer with him which we cautiously agreed with for fear he might have some of his bikie mates in town. He mentioned that the gang was in trouble with the police in Finland and when I asked why, he started telling us of a bank job they did and how he used a magnum shotgun. He had a pair of knuckledusters in his pocket, which was worrying enough, but I was thankful the magnum was not produced. He told me about how his gang hates Russians but they love the Germans who had  saved the Finns from Soviet invasion at the start of WW2. Strangely (or maybe not) for a right wing psycho, he was paying 100% attention to me and not Outi, who was sure he was attracted to me, and as he went for a bathroom break she bet that he would invite me to his house afterwards. Sure enough, when he left he invited me for a sauna at his summer cottage and gave me his phone number. Bizarrely, he said that if I made the trip he’d give me a jam donut, which surely is not a euphemism for anything other than a jam donut. Thanks Pete but I’ll be right I think mate.

After Inari, Outi had the brilliant idea of overnighting at the biological research station in Kevo national park. It was out in the sticks on the edge of a beautiful big lake and spruce forest. The buses that go up there also deliver all the mail at the same time, so after the bus driver dropped off the mail and us, the mailman picked us up in a longtail style motor boat and took us across the lake to the research station. On the form they gave us, they asked what sort of research we were doing. I thought about writing ‘Australian ornithologist’ but thought that might prompt questions so I put ‘Photovoltaic research’ knowing that no-one would bother asking about that. And the place was great!! They had all these row boats so Outi and I went rowing to all these secret beaches along the lake. At midnight we saunaed in the traditional smoke sauna and jumped in the lake with the midnight sun red behind clouds on the horizon.

Sadly Outi and I had to part ways after another night at Inari, we had so much fun and will continue to party in southern Finland in August. I went north to Kirkenes in Norway (7km from the Russian border) and she went south.

At Kirkenes I jumped on the Hurtigruten coastal steamer bound for the Lofoten islands. Last time I took the hurtigruten it was winter and uncrowded and I thought how much fun it would be to share the experience with many others in summer. How wrong I was. The boat was filled with English and German pensioners. All I could see was grey hair and all I could hear were Thomas the Tank Engine and Hogans Heros accents. I thought that probably a few of these guys fought each other in WW2 and I wished they’d start again now. I don’t know what’s worse: Pete, the mozzies in Lapland or elderly english aristocrats on the Hurtigrute. I was very very lonely until I met a Canadian named Nadine (my age) and we ended up hanging out for 4 days.

Lofoten is mind-blowing. Mountains and beaches. Nadine and I stayed at an old fishermans cottage at Stamsund which is now converted to an HI hostel. It also had free rowboats and tips on fishing so you could catch and cook your own dinner if you wanted. I settled for rowing around in the ocean with the mountains of Lofoten on one side and those of the mainland on the other.

Well, then we went to Bodø and now Trondheim and she just left for Oslo. I’m staying at the student house here which is a great interesting old building but the beds are terrible. I think the mental hospital took them to the tip 20 years ago and the student centre found them at the tip or something. But that’s ok- Trondheim is very, very good.

Entrance to Christiania from Copenhagen

You’re not supposed to take photos inside Christiania, according to some die-hards…. but I’m not crazy about such “rules”. So this is what it looks like inside.

Walking the streets of Christiania

One night on a boat in the Maldives, pre-Indian Ocean tsunami, I had had enough of it and asked the captain of our boat to sail to Male’, 1.5 hours away, so I could get to a hospital. The problem was that it was 2 in the morning and we were anchored in a complex chain of reefs which were difficult to negotiate, and the boat had light to navigate the reefs. Actually, we were moored off the island where the Club Med resort is, so we thought first to try reaching them with a sat-phone. They didn’t answer. So I had to endure a 3 hour wait gasping for air on my bed before the sun started lighting the path through the reef maze for us. Then it was 2 hours sailing to get to the capital, Male.

The private hospital was very good. The Indian doctor gave me a hydrocortisone injection into my fist, which did the trick immediately. She also told me to stop taking my nebuliser cos I was shaking when I got to the hospital from too much ventolin.

The Maldives is an amazing place!! Beautiful little islands all over the place and excellent surf breaks everywhere you look. And the animals- you should see the flying fish, turtles and dolphins.

Because we stopped to party there a couple nights, we got to know the lady running the Club Med- a rough old french bird called Mirean. One day my asthma was bad again and dreading the prospect of another middle of the night trip to Male hospital I went ashore at Club Med to check out the medical facilities there. When I got to the infirmary, the french nurse couldn’t speak much english but told me the doctor (also french) was on the way. When the doc turned up, she was really annoyed because someone had told her it was an emergency and dragged her off the beach to get there. She was really angry and arrogant.She told me that they could treat asthmatics but that I wouldn’t be treated in an emergency since I wasn’t a guest of the island. I went and talked to Mirean the GM, who told me that yes of course they would treat me in an emergency and that if they couldn’t, they could put me on a speedboat to Male at any time of night. She then went and abused the doctor, threatening to sack her and everything!! The doc was very nice to me after that and even sold me some cortisone tablets for 6 bucks US and no consultation fee! I had to ring up Mirean again and ask her not to sack the doc, but I wasn’t sorry that the doc copped a serving because she was so rude to me.

The surf was sometimes a little messy so far due to tradewinds. And I didn’t surf as much as the other guys because of my chest. But we had Jails pretty good on our first day, 4′ with bigger sets. Jails has a section which is pretty hard to make and causes a lot of the larger waves to close out. I went over the falls on a big one and thought I was gonna hit the reef for sure and it scared me a bit. Also surfed smaller Sultans which is a long right with a steep takeoff and shoulder. We visited a traditional village on Thulusdoo where there is a heavy break named Cokes, cos there is a Coke factory on the island. We even went to a local school and talked English with a few enthusiastic kids. After being incapacitated by an inability to breathe properly, you appreciate everything life has to offer all the more.

I am still tossing up the best supplies to take with me to remote locations to ensure I am not restricted by asthma. Cortisone or prednisone tablets I suppose are the best thing to have in case of reaching that stage where it is difficult or impossible to inhale medication. Injections seem to work the best, but I am not sure of the practicalities in travelling with syringes, not to mention being able to use them on yourself.