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Born in Portsmouth, Martin is the son of a Royal Marine Commando and a school teacher.
With two older brothers and a younger sister the family was forever on the move, from the South of England to Singapore to
Scotland and back to the South of England, where Martin finished his education and promptly ran away to join the circus! Well,
not exactly the circus but a safari park owned by a circus family!
Working his way up from being a trainee keeper ("a security guard on a gate keeping
animals in and letting cars out") he worked at the famous Royal Windsor Safari Park; Gansendorf Safari Park in Austria and
finally John Aspinall’s Howletts and Port Lympne Zoo Parks in Kent, where he had the enviable position as Head Keeper for the
Asian Elephant breeding group, a position that took him around the world, meeting elephant keepers, trainers, specialists,
veterinarians and zoo directors until finally he landed in Thailand, a country that quite literally took his breath away and a
country that was destined to actually become "home" and even if it meant no longer working in close proximity to his beloved
elephants, at least they weren’t too far away from his front door!
Another passion that has remained consistent throughout his life is his love of
motorcycles: as a teenager pleading a loan of his brother’s 49cc Garelli moped to buying bashed and crashed BSA Bantams for a
tenner and terrorizing ramblers in the local Sussex countryside to over polishing but never actually getting "on the road" his
first "real" bike, a 1962 250cc AJS (a period when he decided the "Rocker" image combined with the "Greaser" style suited him
perfectly, meaning he never washed his Levis and everything else was studded leather!) Martin has owned, raced, toured and
scratched almost every style of machine on (and off) the road, culminating in the year 2000 when he purchased his schoolboy
dream: an Electra Glide…. in Blue!
This was long after Martin had become an expat in Thailand, but was the beginning of a
still active love affair with Harley-Davidson motorcycles ("in England to own a Harley you’ve got to earn enough to have a house
with a garage to keep all that chrome out of the bloody rain, sleet, hail and snow!") which he indulges in as often as he can
either touring the length and breadth of Thailand on a fully dressed pearl white Ultra tourer or scratching around local town and
country lanes on his custom built 60’s style cafe racer with his biking brothers in the hugely popular Nagas Motorcycle Club.
Martin met Pon in 2003; they were married in 2004 and together run the Ace Café in Jomtien Beach, Thailand.
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