101 Challenges:

X-Factor International was a tricky one. We were to write our very own original song. This is a tad difficult when you have the musical ability of a tadpole and the singing qualities of a horse’s anus (it’s always nice to write anus).

Writing the thing began in India, way back in January. Lindsay used to write poetry (we know… try not to laugh) and so, it was only natural that he compose a from-the-heart and passionate song. Here’s some of the incredibly gay (no offence to homosexuals here – you lot can probably write a hell of a lot better crap than this) lyrics that he initially penned. Obviously hoping for a Grammy or some “Female Lyricist of the Year” award;

I’m a lost soul searching
You’re a lost soul found
A thousand rocks upon a shore
Out of sight, a thousand more

From out of the dark
In pours the sun
Closing the sad
Opening the fun

I left a home which was no longer mine
She’s the wind
She blows a fury
She can calmly breeze
She’s been everywhere

A solitary man finds a lonely spot
And counts the blessings that he’s got
He thinks to himself
Small man, small land, big sense of adventure
A lonely island, a secluded rock
Never racing against the clock

Everywhere she goes, she brings a party
She brings the will of the sun, sand and see
She puts a smile on everyone around her

Mystical land takes me by the hand
Shows me things I’d never seen
Every sight, a true delight
Beyond my wildest dreams

It’s better to regret what you have done
Than forever regret what you haven’t
Don’t follow, lead
Don’t starve, feed

Absolutely horrifically pathetic. We were actually cringing as we copied these Sonnets from paper to screen. Amazingly though, with the random and slightly scary juices flowing, on the 23rd of June, 2008, Lindsay finally penned the song of his life.

With the amazing help (and even more amazing patience) of Russell Smith, a fellow Scottish back-packer, we finally and miraculously (and over the course of 8 beers each) came up with the following (what we think is an) amazing end result. Lindsay still holds a mental erection over it.

Until the end of time, we’ll always be baffled at how the hell Lindsay came up with a song about a bloody pineapple. Pyschologists would have a field day exploring the insides of his head. But, the song’s great (even if we do say so ourselves) Watch out Leona Lewis!

Location: Bali - Indonesia

Details: When we see a single person that seems sad or lonely we'll dedicate 24 hours to becoming that person's best friend and soul mate! We'll eat with them, dance with them, walk, talk and dine with them... sharing the moonlight together and enjoying the sunrise as one (or three)

Outcome: Oh my goodness gracious us, what a disaster. We thought we were being clever by inviting the loneliest person in the world out to join us and be made to feel loved. We also decided to do this for a few weeks and not just a day. Instead he went home in tears and plaster.

Rather than search all over Asia for a lonely person which we had not came across yet we diced to invite our littlest brother Lyle over from Scotland.

He jumped on a plane and landed a few days later in Bali and us being great brothers were there to meet him with a loving sign.

The first few days started well as we gave him party after party night. It was during one of these party nights that Lyle's ego was to soar to great heights. He was party animal number one, the main man of the Bali clubbing scene or so he thought. His belief was based on how many ladies were at his side, laughing at his every joke and telling him how handsome he was. We are sure at one point he did even shout “who's the Man, I said who's the effin man?”.

We could not let his ego get any bigger and decided to tell him he was in fact surrounded by ladies of the night. He said “What? Vampires?” After we explained, Lyle's ego took a nosedive and he backed off, informing his party “you’ll nae get money outta me hen”. 

We knew we had to give this boy a good time and so decided to take him surfing. He hated it from the word go but we told him to persevere. He did, although he wished he didn’t. On about day 4 of surfing Lee smashed right into him when both tried to catch the same wave. Lee being older and wiser bailed (yeah we know surfer terms dude) just before the collision and Lyle did not. This resulted in two broken fingers and Lyle not feeling loved at all.

This unloving feeling would only grow on the subsequent visit to the hospital. As in all hospitals you have to wait to be seen. After we (Lee and Lindsay - Lyle wasn't in the mood to partake) had weighed ourselves, tested our eye sight using the eye chart and tasted all the coffees in the free coffee machine, we got bored; we were so bored that despite our concerns for our littlest brother we decided to leave him there and go for a pint. We think this is where the Loving You challenge may have technically failed.

Despite his broken fingers and being told he would be in plaster for 6 weeks Lyle still tried to enjoy himself. He was even game enough to climb a volcano with his arm in plaster and wearing flip flops, that boy has a death wish.

    

Location: Sepilok - Borneo

Details: Off to the national parks in Borneo we go to hug an Orangutan! Any funds raised throughout your stay in this area will go to saving these beautiful creatures from extinction.

Outcome: Today we kind of completed the Hug-U-Tan Challenge. We say kind of because it was in fact Olly, our pet Orang-utan puppet (donated to us by Caroline Cross and www.mightybanana.com) who headed off to the Sepilok Orang-utan Rehabilitation Centre to hug one of his own. You see, Olly’s been living in the bottom of Lee’s bag for the past 4-and-a-bit months and crawled out this morning insisting that it should be him and him only that completes this Challenge as human’s shouldn’t really be touching his Aunt or Uncle or second Cousin Belinda.

The conversation heated up a bit and things could have turned nasty if it wasn’t for Olly’s diplomacy and calming influence. We finally agreed to surrender the onus of responsibility for this Challenge – Olly left the hotel and we stayed in bed. Together. Spooning again. This is no longer unnatural or awkward for us.

So, off little Ollykins went and after a nearly a full day of us worrying for his wellbeing, he returned all happy and proud of himself – the little smug b*stard. He explained in great detail and length of the beauty of his natural home, how his alcoholic and substance abusing brothers and sisters were doing well on their cold-turkey rehabilitation programme and then, how he got patted on the head by his grand-dad.

Technically he failed the Challenge and when we told him this, our ginger little friend went absolutely mental and wrecked the hotel room before storming off. We haven’t seen him since.

Location: Gili Islands 

This will be the last journal entry for a wee while. After being joined by our little bro Lyle, we’ve all taken a trip to the Gili Islands – just of the north-west coast of Lambok. Life on this island (Gili T) is slow paced (until night time comes) and the internet connections are even slower. This journal took 3 hours to upload so unfortunately there won’t be any more updates until we’re back on the mainland where we can get dial-up. Ooooooh.

The last few days have been spent perfecting our Pacman abilities. Lindsay’s thus far the bestest, with a grand score of 46050 – his proudest moment and greatest accomplishment so far in life:

Righteeho – we’re off to catch some sun, get pissed and do nothing for a few days. See ya!

Location: Bali

We appeared in the Scottish Daily Record newspaper yesterday after sending a few emails back and forth to a journalist who was very friendly and nice to us. We like nice people.

In exchange for some of our amazing words of wisdom – the Daily Record decided to reward our little project by donating £100 to the High Five Challenge. It’ll be great to hand this money over to some needy folk throughout the rest of our travels.

A woman’s magazine journalist quickly got in touch after reading the 2-page Record feature (that’s almost as big a coverage as Janet Jackson’s nips) and although we’re all too happy to appeal to the masses (mums love us) we’re even happier to say that once this article goes to press, they’ll be handing over £500 to our charidee efforts. Nice.

Any future funds from any forthcoming articles, features and what-not will be going to us. We’ve been over-spending on our daily £20 budget continuously since leaving 'home' and seriously and drastically require some beer funds. You’d think that coming from the home town of the great economist Adam Smith, we’d have a better grasp on the world of expenditure control – but we don’t. We’re bloody useless. On top of this, surely we’ve done enough good deeds this quarter of the year to make God keep our planes in the sky.

To all the people who’ve been in touch with well-wishes and nice little e-letters, thanks very much. It’s nice to be appreciated Mum (we know it’s you).

Location: Bali

And so… we never fell to earth from 36,000 feet in a ball of torturous flames to our deaths and Lindsay, after a 22 hour recovering 'downer' from the cocktail of sleeping pills and everything else is back on track. Lee’s grand too.

We’re pushing the boat out quite a bit here – staying at the Ari Putri hotel which is rather lavish and way too upmarket for the likes of us common hooligans. It’s costing about £20 a night to stay here. Too right is should – the room is bigger than Lindsay’s flat back home, the swimming pool is shadowed by Balese sculptures and gorgeous traditional cottage-style abodes. It’s very, very posh – and we feel stupid here.

Failing to kerb our over spending, we both decided that we’d get some tailor-made shorts. Yes, shorts. £20 is the sum Lindsay paid for his delightfully made to measure luxury garments (2 pairs) and Lee handed over £25. We get them on our return to Bali – can’t wait, they should be divinely exquisite.

This evening we collected Lyle – our little brother (who’s actually bigger than the two of us combined – standing at 7 foot 3 inches) at Bali airport (3 hours later than planned) So Mum, you can relax, he got to us all safe and well but with some suspicious piercings and tattoos of moustached men on his torso (only joking). He’s going to be our lonely person for our 'Loving You' Challenge. Watch this space!

Location: Kota Kinabalu Airport

As this part of the journal is being written, we’re sitting in Kota Kinabalu airport ready and waiting for our flight in to Bali. It’s 17:30 pm on Monday the 19th of May (see above journal entry date) and Lindsay, as always, is sh*tting himself at the thought of a 3 hour aviation adventure - and so, has just popped a prescribed 5mg Diazepam tablet and a 25mg (un-prescribed but never-the-less, given to him by a pharmacist so it’s all ok) 25mg Promethanzine tablet – we don’t know what these are but apparently the magical blue little pills make you sleep for up to 8 hours and, mixed with the aforementioned Diazepam and a nervous pre-flight concoction of 6 pints of San Miguel beer, Lindsay should be unconscious before walking through the boarding lounge. Hopefully – says Lee and all the other 67 passengers.

Malaysia’s been great – but it’s now time to shake off the expenses that this country has and head happily and blissfully into pastures new. Bali is nearing and so too is our desire to chill out, relax, do nothing and watch Lindsay attempt and fail 82 times at getting laid.

Location: Kota Kinabalu

Today we arrived in Kota Kinabalu after spending a few days at Sandakan. We’re sleeping at the Summer Lodge and oh my Lord – is this not the greatest place on earth!?!

As shallow as we are (we’ve never claimed to be anything else) we found everything we’d ever need in this hostel – some come to Borneo for the orang-utans some come for the mountains, some even come for the luscious jungles. We’ve seen all that and they were ok – what we’d come back to this country for is this hostel.

What we loved about Borneo was, inside that god-send of a hostel, there were not one, not two, not even three, but four (yes, four!) computers all linked up to the webernet and all free to use! On top of this was a TV with every cable channel on earth and a free-to-use DVD selection and, wait for it… beer was only £1 for a huge can!

Naturally, we spent our remaining day playing Scrabulous (www.scrabulous.com) against each other, irritating the hell out of all the other guests by channel hopping non-stop for hours at a time (this should be a sport) and tenderly sipping away at golden amber nectar.

It’s a shame really. Kota Kinabalu apparently has some really nice places to see – but we Google-imaged them and were drunkenly content at that.

Location: Borneo

Today we kind of completed the Hug-U-Tan Challenge. We say kind of because it was in fact Olly, our pet Orang-utan puppet (donated to us by Caroline Cross and www.mightybanana.com) who headed off to the Sepilok Orang-utan Rehabilitation Centre to hug one of his own:



You see, Olly’s been living in the bottom of Lee’s bag for the past 4-and-a-bit months and crawled out this morning insisting that it should be him and him only that completes this Challenge as humans shouldn’t really be touching his Aunt or Uncle or second Cousin Belinda.

The conversation heated up a bit and things could have turned nasty if it wasn’t for Olly’s diplomacy and calming influence. We finally agreed to surrender the onus of responsibility for this Challenge – Olly left the hotel and we stayed in bed. Together. Spooning again. This is no longer unnatural or awkward for us.

So, off little Ollykins went and after a nearly a full day of us worrying for his wellbeing, he returned all happy and proud of himself – the little smug b*stard. He explained in great detail and length of the beauty of his natural home, how his alcoholic and substance abusing brothers and sisters were doing well on their cold-turkey rehabilitation programme and then, how he got patted on the head by his grand-dad.

Technically he failed the Challenge and when we told him this, our ginger little friend went absolutely mental and wrecked the hotel room before storming off. We haven’t seen him since.

He did leave some photos though:

Location: Sandakan

Today we left Mount Kinabalu and it’s cold and windy weather system and, after another four hour bus trip that was indeed seven hours (our 27th encounter with lying tour operators) we arrived in Sandakan – on the west of Borneo.

There’s absolutely nothing to do here but relax and that relaxation comes in the form of five tins of beer for 20 RM (that’s just over £3) which is an absolute bargain in these here parts – at the top of Mount Kinabalu we extremely reluctantly paid 20 RM (that’s just over £3) for one tin of beer. One was enough – and we savoured every sip. Here we are enjoying said beer with some very friendly locals:

Location: Borneo

Yesterday morning, after spending the night a-thousand-meters above sea level in the foothills beside Mount Kinabula in Borneo we woke up looking like we needed an almighty shave. This however was not the case. We were in fact wearing orang-utan costumes for the King of the Swinger Challenge – and this is how orang-utans get from KL to Borneo – by plane:



The challenge had not yet commenced but such was the cold, we decided to prevent hypothermia by wearing our costumes to breakfast. Naturally, we looked like twats.

The last 14 hours were like being back home in Scotland and sitting outside on a typical summers day. However back home we would be wearing a pair of trousers, a vest, T-shirt, jumper and a heavily padded waterproof jacket. Here we were preparing for a stroll into the clouds at over 4000 metres with beach wear on and our orang-utan costumes (we now refer to them as our thermals).



We had previously practiced wearing the costumes in downtown KL and we were quite concerned at the blistering heat that accumulated inside. We stupidly expected rainforest covered Borneo to be of similar climates. Oh no. It was cold, cloudy, wet and windy. We should have seen this coming as the signs were everywhere and they were from the Borneo tourist board:

Come to Borneo it’s Baltic
Come to Borneo it’s Brass
Come to Borneo it’s Brrrr
Come to Borneo it’s Bloody Freezing

Okay, so those aren’t real slogans but we think them very apt and are planning on contacting the BTB to offer our suggestions for their 2009 tourist campaign.

We munched a massive breakfast as we knew we would need the energy to climb to the overnight station Laban Rata (3200 metres or so up the “hill” as Lindsay called it).

Our fellow climbers were amused at us wearing our ancestral outfits and a few did ask why. Lee advised them that on the internet it said to wear climbing gear and so that’s what we were doing and said they were stupid for only wearing thermals and fleeces.

And so, setting out with Sir Hillary Edmund in our thoughts, we reached the base of the “hill” with our guide Pinget and 2 porters (Sherpas). We pulled down our masks and adopted our roles as orang-utans and started to monkey around excited at being home again.

The next 5 hours were spent on the Reebok Step master or that’s the way it seemed. 99.99994% of the journey was up hill and was basically large stairs. Granted the steps were more exotic than the ones in our mums hallway but she has carpets so weren’t sure which is better. The steps ranged from wooden slates to muddy banks, to simply jutting out rocks. We missed 96.9772% of the views as we had to look constantly at our feet via the tiny slits in our mask that were our eyes.

Thankfully due to the suits the heat did start to warm our cockles and alas we did feel like we were in Borneo. Every now and again we would stop for a break at one of the resting stations. We would never stop for long though as we would hear the rustle of leaves and the thumping of animal chest which made us fear that if we stopped any longer we would be sodomised by an ape mistaking us for the real thing. Lindsay, funnily enough, wasn’t too concerned though.

After hitting around about the 2500 metre high mark, we entered the clouds. Instantly the temperature dropped and our previously warmed cockles shrank. The winds picked up dramatically and roared and whistled all around us. We still had some way to go and it looked like rain was on its way so we decided to hurry.

Unfortunately our speed was hampered by other climbers wanting to get pictured with the local wildlife. Us!

For the first 500 photos we posed with broad smiles (pointless really as we had huge masks on) and shouts of bananas rather than cheese as that was more appropriate. The next 500 photos were met with silence, major grimaces and whispered f**ks and s**ts under our breaths. All of this was done under our masks so we did not offend or give a bad impression of orang-utans:

The next 1500 metre climb was pretty much all the same. Eyes down looking directly at our feet, trying to control our breath in the thinning air and just ploughing on. It didn’t matter that we weren’t looking around as there was nothing to see but clouds that rolled past all around us. We touched clouds!



We reached the overnight rest area and celebrated with a beer. We may have had more had they not been ridiculously high prices (£3.50 for a small can) but since we were at a ridiculously high height and some poor dude had to climb up here with them we guess the price is pretty fair.

Around 4 minutes after reaching this place the weather got even worse. The wind was trying its best to rip the roof off and came shooting through every gap that the poorly made building had. The rain battered the place and we were convinced if the wind didn’t get the building then it was only a matter of time before we and the building went white-water rafting down the “mountain” as a knackered Lindsay was now calling it.

When darkness fell and people started to hit the sack we were informed that our residence for the night was actually in a different building - a further 7 minutes walk up the mountain. If this was any other country in the world we would not have been allowed on the mountain in the first place and as inadequately prepared as we were, we’d never be allowed or even expected to undertake the journey to our beds.

Having no waterproofs and not wanting to get what we had wet, we hiked up our shorts in a sort of Julian Clary way, grabbed black bin bags and pulled them over us just poking a hole big enough for our heads. Our bags were cradled inside with our arms. We didn’t plan on falling but if we did we figured our noses could stop our faces getting damaged:

We opened the door and started to make our way further up the mountain with Mark, Matt (a Canadian) and Vanessa and Kate (English and Australian).

Matt, Kate and Mark were reasonably prepared i.e. they had jackets. No stairs here, instead slippery granite rocks and flowing water from the continual pouring of rain. For some reason rather than being scared we were laughing at how dangerous it was, we think we were delirious.

Thankfully we made it without a scratch - a complete and utter miracle really. We didn’t even get wet - well apart from our shoes and socks but luckily there was a gas stove so ingenious Lindsay boiled them dry in a pot – great ingenuity but the subsequent stench throughout the chalet was horrendous.

This day, despite all the dangers, stupidity and coldness - was immense. We loved every minute of it and can only recommend you come to Borneo (it’s bloody freezing – surely the BTB will go with that one) with your orang-utan costume and climb Mount Kinabalu. Here it is above the clouds (taken on our outward flight):



The rest of the tale remains a secret for now, that’s telly darlings. Needless to say we are down, alive and despite our legs being in absolute agony, we’re looking forward to our cockles warming and growing again.