Story so far….

June 1, 2005

Tea is what I've been learning the trade of since I was 19 after a fucked up failed attempt at university - where I indulged too much in the life but not the actual attendance - early on I didn't take this as a serious job as I was meddling in other things, looking forward to the weekend and clawing my way to payday - the crunch came at the end of 1999 and my boss was trying to decide if he should sack me or preserve with trying to school me in the trade

Lucky for me, instead of giving me the boot he took up the offer of the guy who ran the Malawi office and I was sent to work there for 6 months (and Kenya) to see what I was made of - turned everything around and plucked me out of a destructive existence - Malawi was the best 6 months of my life - back to basics, breath taking beauty, rich climate, a huge lake making up half country, good friends, lots of adventure (like the Mozambique trip) but also a wake up call to tell me that I'm lucky to come from a country where life is not such the struggle it is for the average bear living in Malawi - once I came back to the UK I knew the way to get back there was to do my best to make this a career for life and got dedicated to the task.

After a while longer in the UK the opportunity to set things up in Vietnam came along in 2003 - the first season was bastard hard - trying to get samples, contracts, shipments, documentation in order - myself and two guys called Tri and Bach - we had to build a customer base via phones/email and travel around to discover new producers - all within a very small office, shitty internet connection, one line for phone fax and email, no storage space for all the samples, evil virus ridden computer, the place prone to flooding... man, basically the first year was very hard work but it took off - next year as part of the Vietnam sales side of thing, they sent me on a world trek to visit our other offices (we have 11 around the world) and our customers - over three/four months I jetted/trekked through the following trail of Rotterdam, Karachi, Peshawar, Dubai, Mombassa, Dar Es Salaam, Zanzibar, Saigon, Hanoi, HongKong, Toronto, London, Moscow and then back to Hanoi. I met some amazing folk, went to strange places, had some big nights out and learned a lot - once back in Hanoi we moved our office upstairs and got everything we needed for the office and went from shipping out 1000 Metric Tons to 5000MT.

I had some wild adventures in Vietnam - we did some rough travelling into the mountainous north to see tea plantations and we did a road trip all the way from Hanoi to Saigon seeing the whole country - crazy shit happened in the office too, a guy brought live snakes there and killed them to make snake whisky for me as a leaving present - fucking cobra in my office hissing at me - we also went to a snake restaurant were you eat every part they can cook - they kill this angry fucking long nasty looking bastard at your table by cutting out it's heart - then they put it in a shot glass - fucker is still beating - then you gotta down it in one - all the while the snake is still wriggling around - once you've gotten over the still beating thing it's no worse than drinking the worm in Tequila.

During all of this I was with my girlfriend Hanh who was an English teacher and also worked for a tea company - we didn't live together but saw each other at weekends and some evenings - it was a casual thing and we didn't talk the future too much - but it grew into something pretty strong - but not strong enough in the end - so when I was moved to Jakarta I had to leave her - thoughts along the lines of getting settled and then her coming across existed - but life moved to fast and before I knew it she was part of an arranged marriage, looking after her new husbands dying parents and pregnant - turned things upside down here and I crashed my car whilst wasted with a girl in my lap - but now I'm taking it easy and after talking it all through and figuring out the way I feel by writing about it.

Jakarta is a stop gap - I've written a few posts about life here over the last month - it's a smash of commercialism, idolising the western way of life and a breakdown behind the scenes of the basics you need to keep a huge city of 12 million people running - on the surface they seem to have the model set up - tall towers, flash cars, booming business and many answers to questions of desire - but underneath it all the its congested, corrupt, chaotic, polluted, lacks a central heart and has a lot of vice, crime, terrorism and stupidity bubbling under its surface - the gap between rich and poor gets wider and wider every day and no one seems to be running the show. My main problem with the place is that there is no where to be under the sun - take a walk, sit and read a book - simply get some god damned fresh air in your lungs - also of all the places I've been this lacks the most character and individuality.

Basically the place is a stepping stone to the next stop which will be either Rotterdam and the head office for a while or Africa again - to run an office on my own I need to take more responsibility for the internal side of things - financial reports, adding up the numbers, staff issues, expenses/wages/costs etc - but I'm a trader at heart and love the chase of sales - also learning the trade is a constant thing as you pick up the tastes and appearances of the teas from all over the world and store it away for reference when blending/buying/selling - therefore spending time in each country where it is grown and sold means you learn so much to make you a better trader.

Ultimately the idea is to get back to Malawi and run the office there - have a bar by the lake - a hammock - a regular supply of whisky - a fine woman who inspires the eye and mind and a ton of mischievous clumsy children.

and a monkey.

Spo | June 1, 2005