The Further Adventures of an Idiot Abroad by Karl Pilkington Read Free Book Online Page B

out.
    LUKE : It’s a taboo you’re messing with, something symbolic here, you know.
    KARL : Yeah, well, they’re messing with my symbollocks. How can we move this on because this is getting more and more awkward as time goes
     on?
    We were getting nowhere, so we came to a compromise. I would wear the type of nambas that the children wear, which was more of a grass skirt than a knob wrap. I don’t understand why they
don’t all go for this option. It must be easier to go for a quick pee wearing the skirt than it is when wearing a nambas, where you have to learn the art of origami to wrap it back up
again.
    Two fellas measured me up like tailors on Savile Row. They made a type of band that tied round my waist and then attached big leaves to it. Once I was dressed, the chanting started. We danced
around a tree. Then, I was told that John, who was the chief’s son, would be taking me over to the island where I would be staying.
    John said we had to get some leaves. This time, it wasn’t for clothing but for shelter. He got out his machete and hacked down some big leaves the size of surf boards and we carried them
to two little boats we would be using to get over to the island. The weather was chronic. The rain was heavy, and there was a cold wind. Luke pointed out the island. It didn’t look as big as
any of the ones I had flown over in the seaplane with Paul. It looked like a tiny muffin, but I thought it might be big, maybe it’s just far away. Luke said it was called Ten Sticks island.
During WWII the American military used the island for target practice.
    It took about twenty minutes to get across the choppy sea as the current was dragging the boat out into the ocean. One or two of the big leaves blew away but I wasn’t going to start trying
to retrieve them. I was proper pissed off now. Everything I had been through and this was the pay-off! This was nowhere near what I’d pictured when I picked this trip off the Bucket List. It
was nothing like the Bounty advert.
    I got to the island to find it was just as small as it had looked. I suppose the fact that the US military used it for target practice should have been a clue. I’d seen roundabouts bigger
than this. It didn’t even have sand. Sharp rocks and broken shells covered the ground. There was no point in me showing my disappointment in moaning. John was struggling to understand me, and
by the look on his face he wasn’t very happy either.
    I found quite a good spot to make the shelter. It was a little bit protected from the howling cold wind that was whipping in off the sea. John had started to build a frame for our shelter, and I
used my anger energy to shift some big boulders that would help to keep it in place.

    Building my own home has never been an ambition of mine. Me and Suzanne fall out when we have to work together on picking a shade of carpet, so there’s no way we’d
still be together if we took this on. I watch the TV show
Grand Designs
quite a lot. It’s a programme where you see a couple go through the whole house-building process from the
design on paper right through to moving in. It begins with a happy couple who are excited and full of positive thoughts and eager to get the project going, and then you witness them age over a year
as they end up having to live in a caravan as the project runs well behind schedule. The wife, who at the outset is full of smiles, wearing lots of make-up and hair freshly done for TV, ages
overnight as you see her sat with her kids eating Pot Noodles wearing a hard hat as the builders bring more bad news that the ship carrying the special environmentally-friendly tiles they wanted
from Sweden, rather than the normal ones from the local Topps Tiles, has sunk and has now delayed the project a further three months. Music from Coldplay is used as we see the wife crying because
she hasn’t been able to have a bath for four months and Kevin the presenter telling us the build has now gone 35% over