Cold water rushed into the porcelain sink. I splashed a little over my face and looked up at the mirror, seeing for the first time that day, the wide eyed look of sleep deprivation that tainted my features. One joint and I was already hammered. We'd only arrived in Amsterdam 30 minutes before. The long walk to our rendezvous in the Dolphin's bar in Leidesplien had served to provide only exhaustion and I was going to need to really smoke hard if I was to survive the evening.
Then I saw the sign.
A white piece of A4 paper, placed above the hand-drier in the men's toilets of the Dolphins...
I've waited for around six years to see those glorious words adorned upon paper in a bar or coffeeshop. Six years of smoking and drinking heavily, I've lost count of the amount of places I've been and never before have I seen the words...
During the cannabis cup,
WE ARE OPEN 24 HOURS
Oh yes.

The next morning, armed with a judge's pass, we made our way to the Pax Party Centre, to check out the 15th Annual High Times Cannabis Cup. Last year's event saw us flying out early one morning and running around the cup for one day, flying back in the evening. This year we decided to pace ourselves a bit!
The first thing to notice on arrival at the cup is that the Pax Party Centre is right next door to the local police station! Perhaps a hilarious coincidence or more likely, the venue was chosen for the irony value.
On the entrance, and dotted all around the building was another sign I quite liked: NO Cigarette smoking - Ganja/Tobacco combos’ ok.

Inside, the centre is made up of three floors. On the ground floor, the judges centre where talks and lectures take place on anything from growing techniques to cannabis legalities across the world. Had we the time to judge the 27 entering coffeeshops on their weed and hash entries, we would have placed our votes here, and at all times American 'judges' could be seen milling about with their fully stamped cannabis cup booklets, rating the strains.
The other two floors are devoted to stalls operated by all the players in the cannabis scene. All the big seed companies were there, showing off their cup entries, massive buds dripping with sticky resin. Huge cannabis plants cultivated by real experts.

As we needed to make an order anyway, we made our way over to the Dutch Passion stand. They had some great plants towering above, and behind a screen a large bud of their main entry 'Euphoria' with it's crystals glistening in the light.

The guys at Dutch Passion gave us a free sample of this and their other entry 'Skywalker'; which we immediately fashioned into a large spliff to set us up for the day ahead.
Wandering around the cup, we found stands containing all manner of innovations geared towards the consumption, understanding and advertising of cannabis. From funky little t-shirts sporting cannabis leaves and slogans, through to new types of pipes and vaporisers.

One of the biggest buzz words this year seems to be 'bubble (Ice-o-later/water) hash'. This is a relatively new method of making hash from the lower leaves and twigs of the cannabis plant. The bits that under normal circumstances would either be thrown away, used in cooking, or sold to desperate stoners for £60 an ounce (ahem, but that's another story).
With the aid of new 'ice-o-lator' bags (appearing on the site soon), these bits of the plant are mixed with ice and water. Using a system of filtration bags, each with a different screen size, the trichomes can be separated from the water, and compressed into top quality hashish. The hash is sometimes known as ‘Bubble Hash’, because if done properly, the resulting hash should actually bubble when heated. It’s incredibly potent and while the quantity of hash may only be about a tenth of the weight of the original plant matter, the amount of smoke produced from a very small amount has to be experienced to be believed!
The fact that there are differing names for this system, relates to the fact that competing companies appear to claiming responsibility for its invention. Apparently tensions were running high at the cup, although I never managed to find out the details.

Wandering around a bit more I ran into Joel, the owner of Sweetleaf. He showed me the new grinder cleaner that will soon be coming with all the Sweetleaf grinders. The rubber tube goes over the top of the grinder, and as you twist it removes all those little bits of weed that irrevocably attach themselves to the outside of the grinder, making it sticky and difficult to use.
As I stood chatting to him, a couple of guys from Sweetleaf glass asked if I would sign a petition.
It appears that Sweetleaf's glass entry (a hand blown piece, lovingly crafted and named the 'Triple Percolator'), had been omitted from entry into the cup. I listened as the disheartened glass blowers explained their story. While the percolator was in the display containing all the entered products, due to an administration gaffe at the cup, somehow they had been left out. In an attempt to get back into the cup, they were wandering around asking people to sign their petition. I did.


Moving on, I came across a massive vaporiser and stopped to take a photo of it.
"Try it!" Shouted a white haired, wild-eyed gentleman; enthusiastically pushing the substantially sized tube towards my face... My protests were very few, and very quiet, "but I've gotta stay straight and take some phot... ahh what the hell!”
Inhaling deeply, at the large tube, I pulled my head back and could suddenly taste the sweet cannabis. If you've never had a vaporiser before (shame on you, we sell them on the site and they're fantastic!), it's not like smoking or taking a bong. It's kind of like smelling cannabis with your mouth instead of your nose. You taste an aroma... it's great. It’s also the safest way of smoking cannabis. The vaporiser heats the cannabis to the exact point where the THC vapour is released. This vapour contains little or none of the harmful carcinogens associated with the combustion and inhalation of cannabis.
"Thanks!" I said.
"Have another one!"
I took a second, more daring hit from the Vaporiser.
The gentleman explained that he was the vaporiser’s creator, and that he was basically at the cup for the sole purpose of getting people stoned. Great.

He led me over to the Serious Seeds stand, which proudly displayed the largest vaporiser I've ever laid eyes on.
I declined this one on the grounds that I may have difficulty walking afterwards, so he offered the vaporiser to other passers by whilst explaining to me how it worked. Half way through his explanation, he stopped suddenly;
"its working now isn't it?” he exclaimed.
"Sorry?"
"It's working now!", he grinned at me, "you only need two hits and you can feel it right here!", he made various motions with his hands to indicate the inside of his head.
He was right, I could feel a decidably stoned feeling milling about my brain, and things were starting to become a little fuzzy.
Christ! I'm mashed!

We wandered around a few more stalls, sampling bongs and vaporisers here and there. One of the coolest things we saw was an entire growing system, hidden within a discrete black cabinet, about the size of a small wardrobe.
Designed to house a single mother plant and six other plants, the system would allow a harvest every 6 - 9 weeks. The light was completely undetectable with the door closed; it emitted no smell and was basically the stealthiest growing system I have ever seen! For an initial outlay of 1500 Euros, you may never need to buy weed again!

If you like to munch on cannabis, but you're bored with the same old recipes, we found a Canadian man who makes cannabis candy bars; soft gloopy chocolaty bars that really taste great... as we munched on our samples, we decided to get back to the hotel, with a view to rest a little, before hitting some of the coffeeshops entering the cup.

The evening was spent wandering around central Amsterdam, visiting many different coffeeshops. While the styles and clientele of the coffeeshops can differ greatly, it’s very easy to allow all these to blur into one long stoned haze, and to be honest, that’s exactly what we did!

Waking the next morning at a ridiculous time, with more than a little cotton wool filling up the inside of our heads, three of us made our way to the Pax Party house... Somehow the previous evening at about 3am, we came up with the idea of trying to do every bong and vaporiser on offer at the cup. Dan rose to the challenge, although not really early enough, and so by the time we had managed to get inside, obtain the first beer of the day (we all have our little vices!), and roll a big spliff, we found ourselves with half an hour left before he and George would have to leave to get their flight back to England.
Half an hour, a plane to catch, countless bongs, and a video camera...
Dan hit the bongs like a trooper, taking hit after hit. We visited our friend with the large glass vaporisers at the Serious stand, sampled the massive bong at Sensi seeds, Dan took the most incredible amount of smoke from a glass bucket bong, but it was the last one that caught my eye, a small vaporiser that pushed the vapour into a large poletheyne cylinder with a valve at the end. Once the cylinder had filled up completely, the plastic valve allowed it to be carried around and smoked at will...
With Dan muttering incoherently in a horse whisper, desperately trying to obtain liquid, we made a made break for the Airport... As it stood, they had one hour until the flight… check in was one hour before the flight.

Waiting for trams in Amsterdam can be quite frustrating. While they run quite regularly, and far more efficiently than any London transport could possibly hope to; Amsterdam, being completely flat, is very windy and therefore very cold.
Waiting for a tram when you’re in a big hurry and every second counts is a very agitating experience... especially whilst extremely stoned… Luckily they just made it... I'm told Dan held himself quite well on the journey home.
I made my way back to the hotel.

We'd decided to try and get around every coffeeshop entered in the cup, preferably in one evening. (The best laid plans of mice and stoners!) It was nice to see some of the lesser known coffeeshops that I hadn't been to on my previous excursions to Amsterdam. Some of the entries into the cup are very small coffeeshops that you can imagine aren’t normally visited by a great many tourists. Little out of the way coffeeshops where the Amsterdam locals hang out. The coffeeshops were full of interesting people, most seemed to be from Canada and the US. We spent the evening and most of the next day going around as many coffeeshops as possible... the main difficulty was in getting so stoned that it was impossible to navigate. We found ourselves wandering around Amsterdam in a stoned haze, desperately trying to make sense of the map in the cup guide... After a joint of ‘Knockout’ purchased in ‘De Kuil’, I found myself so stoned I was literally hallucinating... I couldn’t even remember why I was in Amsterdam, let alone get my head around map reading and finding the next shop… But still, I had Jacqui doing the map reading, so all I had to do was follow her…. Except she was completely out of it as well… We caught the wrong tram three times altogether!
When we thought we could take it no longer, (and when we managed to find our way!) we went back to the hotel, to get ready for the awards ceremony in the Melkwig in Liedesplein.

The ceremony was laid out in a massive stage in the Melkwig venue, and was very similar to movie and TV awards you may have seen, except every single person there was stoned!
From my ‘vantage point’ (a better description would be ‘tiny spot of floor at the back that I managed to squeeze onto and claim as my own for the duration of the ceremony) at the back of the upper level, I watched the proceedings, snapping photos where possible, and filming the event with my digital camcorder.
As each winner was announced, they would amble onto the stage amidst claps, cheers and the occasional yelp, and accept their award with a little speech. The winners are listed on our Cup Winners page and photos of the ceremony can be found here.
After the ceremony, the stage was cleared for the musical act of the evening, ‘The Fun Lovin’ Criminals’.
Much as I enjoy the band’s music, and would very much like to see them live, I was way too stoned and way too hot to stay in the main room; and I attempted to make my way over to the bar for a very much needed beer and spliff ensemble, coupled with an essential move to a sitting down position. (I’ve since heard that the band are getting dropped from their label… so I missed what will probably be their last gig… hindsight being a wonderful thing!)
One quick spliff turned rapidly into about five… and myself and Mark stumbled back to the hotel.
The next morning before our plane journey, we bid a fond farewell to Amsterdam, smoking the last of our weed in the Dolphins coffeeshop. We got to the airport, and wandered through passport control. Whilst going through the metal detector, I rather stupidly left my pocket computer in that very place, and of course set the alarm off. I was immediately searched by a large Dutch security guard wearing an ‘I’m very serious about my job’ expression.
My pockets were full of random crap, and emptying them out produced a roll of about 300 EDIT stickers, some cards, flyers and lighters, a grinder, a couple of empty baggies, and leaflets from damn near every single stall at the cannabis cup… in amongst these rather obvious giveaways, was a half smoked spliff! How the hell did that get there!?!
Stopping only to quickly shit myself, I immediately engaged the security guard’s attention and tried to keep his eyes away from the little pile of cannabis paraphernalia with the half a spliff sitting on top for all the world to see.
Thankfully… (oh so very thankfully), he didn’t notice… or if he did, he didn’t care… I obviously wasn’t planning to hijack a plane!
So I was very happy upon reaching the carpark at Luton airport, to be able to experience one more little bit of Amsterdam skunk, before I had to trundle home, pick up the phone and try desperately to score an eighth of low grade English crap.