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'Tis a satslurday morning and I'm waiting for my dirty stop-out house
guest to return.... so I'll rise to this challenge Howellsey and think
of Fridays past....

- we always used to knock off work at 1630 in Antarctica on a Friday but
each group of expeditioners would take it in turns to 'host'
fourthirties. Homebrew with the pommy boffin usually ended up with a
pile of drunk ockers smoking in my fumehood so they didn't have to brave
-40C for a fag!

- lying on our backs with homebrew / whisky in the snow at ridiculous
below freezing (ie Antarctica again) watching the aurora australis and
trying to figure out exactly how much was real.

- drinking millet beer at +40C on the islands in Baringo in Kenya with
the Njemps and trying to dislodge the image of the chickens with their
shitty feet scratching through the fermenting millet outside.

- driving over to Baringo on a Friday to escape the dust of Bogoria and
cracking a first real cold Tusker at the Thristy Goat as the nightjars
start to flight and the first hippos wade from the water.

- in fact demolishing a crate of Tusker with a couple of people I'd
never met before in the back of a ute on the edge of the Mara and not
being able to pee for ages because we got surrounded by hippo.

- lying in the natural thermal pool at Bogoria with an icy G'n'T and
staring up at the stars while fireflies dance in the periphery

- a cold Castle after the dust of a long drive through the Kgalagadi, South Africa

- smuggling a fine bottle of pinot noir into the kayak and swigging it
straight from the bottle on a beach in Abel Tasman, watching the fur
seals cavort and the sun set.

- Tassie chardonnays by the bucket on the super yachts after a Sydney Hobart race

- I could never drink on a Friday when I was in Melbourne because I had a
game the next day so it was Saturdays down Brunswick St with the boys
after....

- Swiss schnapps in a sauna in Arctic Sweden with a couple of other
naked individuals, and after plunging into the partially melted lake
outside and lacerating shins etc on the bergy bits, we managed to fling
half a kilo of charr fry with the lake water we'd scooped in a bucket
onto the sauna coals.... now that stank!

Mmmmm, many good times travelling with a little help! Thanks for jogging a few memories

Well now, what a question! Dare I say too many memories (or rather 'partial' memories) to list here? Here are a few...

It's a well known fact that sailors like a bit of a tipple, and I have to admit to conforming to the stereotype. During the big sail from Turkey to India there were several hard drinking experiences, although I must add that these were only on land as we do not drink and sail. (The exception to this rule was on Jamie's 40th birthday, half way between Aden and Salalah, when he had one beer and I had a shot of Laphraoig to mark the occasion.)

When our convoy of eleven yachts arrived in Aden from Eritrea -- after a hair-raising passage through the pirates in the Gulf of Aden -- we congregated on the biggest yacht and spent all night religiously toasting our safe arrival... In Salalah, while we waited for Indian visas to be issued, we put the world to rights with the crew of HMS Chatham over a number of days... In Mumbai we surprised the retainers at the Royal Bombay Yacht Club by the number of alcoholic drinks a few British sailors can put away in one night... In Panjim Jamie drank 'the drink of brave men' while I sampled the local toddy, a drink so revolting it needed to be washed away by several bottles of Indian wine.

I've lost count of the number of double-vision dawns I saw come up with inebriated customers in the hot spots of Hong Kong... For me, Vienna will always be the place where I passed out and slid slowly down the wall of a disco when I was 16... The visa run from Turkey to Rhodes was like groundhog day, inevitably ending up in Mandala for gallons of Retsina... Last year we drank so much Rakshi in the mountains of Sikkim, Jamie and I barely made it back down at dusk, much to the amusement (and slight concern) of our young guide.

Şerefe!

Party pooper alert.  Sounds like a lot of fun has been had.  Now, time for reflection if any of you are sober enough.  Could these experiences have been just as good or better without the demon drink?  Can just as much fun be had with ice cream and chocolate cake?

Sitting with our friends on a balcony overlooking the Nile watching a magnificent sunset with a liter bottle of Barardi and numerous ice cold cokes celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary before going down to the bar and drinking the supply of Cointreau dry, with coffee,  thus sending the barman off to Luxor airport to buy new supplies. 

Come to think of it we drank so much in the bar on that trip that the bar staff bought us presents when we left!!!!

now there, denhamj, what a fascinating notion?  can ice cream and chocolate cake create the same experiences as the juice of the grape or other such generosities?  i'm afraid that decorum prevents me outlining some of my experiences involving ice cream and chocolate (no cake - is that a "sadly" or not?) but the grape variety has caused much entertainment including one memorable occasion when after a party of some note, i noted the love of my life looking a little indisposed.  when i suggested that actually throwing up might help, he looked at me like i'd just shat in his boots and said "i'm a public school boy!  public school boys dont "throw up"!"  be told pamela!!!!

A few spring to mind:

- in the bar of a hostel in Ushuaia (bottom of Argentina) with a Northern Irishman, a Belgian, two Dutchies, and an Argentinean (all who I'd just met) - staying up into the early hours drinking cheap malbec and singing along to brilliant songs like Britney Spears' song "Hit Me Baby One More Time" covered by Travis (it's actually brilliant).

- swigging cheap Argentinean champagne out of the bottle when we landed on the Antarctic continent at Cierva Cove (someone had a cold sore, so passing the bottle around wasn't the best idea...).

- sipping cheap Chilean champagne on a terrace overlooking the hills in Pisco Elqui, set in an idyllic valley in Chile, inland from La Serena. It was our honeymoon and the hotel owner gave us the champagne as a gift. Delicious wine from there too (Falernia!).

- opening a can of cold beer at the end of the Landmannalaugar to Þórsmörk trail in Iceland, after doing a spectacular (and booze-free) five-day hike.

- sipping cocktails in the rooftop bar of the Emerson & Green hotel in Stonetown, Zanzibar, with one of my best friends.

- discovering a rather scarily strong cocktail in a cool Japanese bar in TriBeCa in New York City - a saketini - it's just sake and vodka - very crisp and very nice. There was only the barman, my hubby, another woman and me but they were very interesting and the music was great.

- getting free Malibu and chocolate milk after a day's skiing in Formigal (Spanish Pyrenees) with my best friend. Sounds vile, but it was yummy. Honest.

- Drinking hot chocolate with whipped cream and rum when back on the warm ship after lying in a hot water trench in the black sandy beach in Deception Island (Antarctic Peninsular) - we also all ran into the cold sea - great fun.

There are many, many more, but that's enough for now. Don't want to paint myself as too much of an alcoholic!

I don't drink lots when I'm travelling but there have been some memorable tipples

• a truly brilliant irish coffee somewhere in the jungle in Peru (I think it was Puerto Maldonado)
• drinking Pisco sours on the roof of a hotel in Pisco - I was saved by having to get up at 5am for a boat trip otherwise I might still be there!
• a big mug of vino caliente defrosted us wonderfully after hours clinging to the top of a boat on Lake Titicaca
• a truly stupendous wine tasting tour in the Barossa Valley, great fun!
• some sort of hot cinnamon cocktail thing in the Electric Pagoda, Kathmandu

Not so great memory: a group of us accidentally getting a whole bunch of people from a 'dry' town in South Africa drunk - we were only trying to be hospitable but hadn't understood the local culture properly. That was awful.

I did bring some unicum back from Hungary with me as I really liked it. It hasn't been appreciated by others though!
My two favourite drinks from travels weren't alcoholic though - Masala Chai from Nepal and the truly addictive Stoney Tangawizi from Tanzania. Oh, for a Stoney's right now...

Thought of two more, both in Austria.

Jaeger tee, very strong hot drink, lovely.  The people we had met up with were so intrigued by the alcohol content he lit my drink and, yes, the flames lasted a long time.  That was not a nice hangover. 

On another trip to Austria we met up with some locals and were dragged off to a local Beerfest.  Don't remember a lot about it, litre steins of lager went down very quickly and I don't know how many were drunk!

This might surprise some of you but I'm with denhamj, I think just as much fun can be had without it and I very rarely touch a drop nowadays. I would much rather be ready to get up bright and early the next day. Definitely ice cream and cake for me :-) 

Since I do not like ice-cream and loathe chocolate cake, I'm more than happy to stick with my demons thanks! Plus I've only drunk enough twice to stop me being up at the crack of sparrows and out'n'at it the next morn.
One of those was (like Angela, just remembered) in Lithuania in a remote area around Lake Dusia. I was there around midsummer and being a John of some derivation was immediately roped into a 24h pagan festival role. We drank beer for the first 10-12h, sat in the middle of an oak forest, me with a wreath of oak leaves on the noggin. Then unfortunately we got around to the fact that beer was for boys and that mead was for men. Each family had flaggons of their own home recipe mead.... so a mead-off ensued. The one that killed me was so tannic because of the acorns in the recipe that it felt like my stomach had been stripped. But hell it only laid me out until 0830 when a passing dog decided to bring me around quick sharp by attempting to hump my leg.... quite a surreal experience to awaken too, especially as it was a dachshund!

J - thanks for brightening up my morning - this is why I need to come on here more often :-)

Way too many, but a few memorable ones spring to mind:
- high on adrenalin and reaching the top of Mt. Kinabulu at 5am, I yelled 'Where's the champagne?' whereupon two Dutchmen handed me a bottle of fizzy to sip from;
- rum 'n coke, as if on tap, from Carnival Sunday to midnight on Carnival Tuesday in Trinidad my native home;
- so much kava in Vanuatu I felt I was at the dentist;
- juicing up on vodka and writing the 'Tao' of life and all that in The White Desert in Egypt;
- G & Ts lying on a jetty watching the sunset and stars in New Georgia Island in the Solomons;
- out of my head from the native hooch in an Iban longhouse in Temburong, Brunei; 
- and a year of behaving badly with the Brunei Hash Harriers down-downing enough Fosters to sink a small outback town.
Happy days.