Don’t stand so, Don’t stand so, Don’t stand so close to me……..

February 21, 2007

Don’t stand so, Don’t stand so, Don’t stand so close to me……..

Late Saturday night a Dutch Girl called Wil wanted a cut-off 2 litre bottle of water so she could fill it with paraffin - Gecko lounge has a thatched rood and general wooden related tomfoolery all around it - paraffin is not it’s friend due to the whole flaming ball of fire connotations that spring up when such a word is mentioned - so inquiries as to what this paraffin was for led to her explaining she was a fire dancer and needed to have a bucket sized ojeni to dip the block-ojeni into - this would then be set on fire and swung around her head and body attached to ropes.

Hmmmm...... how about “no fucking way what so ever???”

I remember going to some sort of really fucked up circus display in the North of Vietnam one time - they had these little Ewok women doing various acrobatic trapeze manoeuvre’s while suspended over the crowd below - swinging around with the rope attached to something they could bite down on so they were free to use their arms to spin a ridiculous amount of hula-hoops around their bodies - quite a sight - even more so when one of them set fire to the hula-hoops and started swinging about the place.

Awe inspiring as such things are - you do appreciate that it’s not exactly a safe situation - if it was the Cirque de Soleil or some shit you’d be confident nothing was going to go wrong and can watch wide eyed as the performance unfolds - but when you are in the back end of beyond of North Vietnam and some dodgy $2 circus show suddenly starts setting fire to trapeze swinging hula-hoopers it puts you on edge for your own personal saftey.

Same deal when sitting on the shores of Lake Nyasa and a half drunk Dutch lady with a funny hat says she needs a bucket of paraffin so she can start spinning flaming blocks on ropes around the place.

So I told her to go stand out by the lake shore and nowhere near anyone or anything that could possibly go up like a tinder house and then she could set fire to herself in peace.

But fair play to her - she really did know her shit when it comes to dancing around amongst spinning trails of fire - impressive indeed.

Even more so when we saw the shots where I left the exposure open;