Pack the Planet

A Year at a Glance

2011-01-18T10:01:00.002+11:00

A big and busy year to say the least.

We travelled through Munich in Germany and watched a lovely wedding in Austria. We played in the snow and explored the area in southern Austria. What a beautiful place.

We can back to England and found a house. We then threw ourselves into work, Drew into Managing a hotel and me into temping which was easy. By May we realised if we didn't make an effort it would all get away from us and we wouldn't have done anything. We headed up to Richmond in northern England for Helen's birthday. It was lovely to catch up with old friends again. At this point I started temping in a switchboard, which I found surprisingly fun.

For my birthday we headed to France to spend a week in the city of Love. We walked ourselves everywhere, spending my birthday at Disney Land Paris and then exploring the city. The Mona Lisa was actually pretty cool. I didn't actually think it was tiny. It was rather outshone by all the other wonderful pieces though. We got to see Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower at night, it's defiantly the city of lights.

We then came back and threw ourselves back into saving. We found out our landlord had been dodgy. Turns out he wasn't the real landlord at all. After Drew did some fast talking we managed to stay in our place at a highly reduced rate. Thanks Drew. We went out to catch up with Alex and Kieran in the countryside outside London. You don't need to go far out to discover what the UK you dream about is like. We made sure we got out to explore London and got ourselves together for our adventure to Spain.

We headed to Spain with magical images in our heads. Sadly I don't think we gave it enough time at the start. Yes it was wildly built up and our adventure sans GPS trying to find our hotel in the middle of the night when we flew in may have swayed us. We did a big loop. If you look at a map we started at Malaga and went all the way down to Gibraltar. We then headed up via Seville to Cordoba. Cordoba has won my heart and my favourite place, it seamlessly blends new and startlingly old. We stayed in the cutest old Spanish hostel in a house. It was the Spain I had been looking for. We then headed in a circle back round to the coast to Alicante and then up via Valencia to Barcelona. Spain was a country of lovely tucked away cheap outside eating between beautiful old buildings. The wine was cheap and plentiful and the food was always lovely...mostly.

We made time to head up to the lake district to catch up with Juliet's for a long weekend. What a beautiful area. I wish we had more time and maybe fingers crossed we'll get back there before we go. We got to finally go horse riding here. It was a dream and the night life was fun too.

We started to look forward to Christmas and I entered a competition to win 6 months kickboxing for Drew and I. I WON!! Seriously, now I had to do kickboxing. Talk about new year resolution. It's been on it's Christmas break so we've only had one class. But after we get back from the snow we'll be back in it!! I plan to rock a bathing suit by summer...well not really if I'm in England it doesn't get that warm.

Our lead up to Christmas included Snow!!! Real snow, it's piles up and is beautiful and lovely when it falls. In the city it turns to slush though. It's not pretty when it turns brown and gets icy. We made the best of it though. We always dreamed of a white Christmas.

The snow melted before Christmas though. I made a huge meal for Drew and I and two of our Housemates. The others are from countries that celebrate on different days. The food was amazing and yes, goose fat potato's are the best!! We partied into the night with the neighbours down the street and then relaxed for the rest of our long weekend.

After a lazy week at work we got ourselves together and headed into the freezing city night with a small bottle of whiskey and a determination to see the fireworks in central London even if we headed out late. We made our way and after being turned back several times we found ourselves in the square between Westminster Abbey and Big Ben with Winston Churchill in front of us. The fireworks went off with a bang and we were surprised by how amazing it was, it felt like we were in the centre of the world.

We have an amazing year ahead of us and no real idea of what we might do. We have some ideas and we'll see how they go. First up we are heading off to ski if France for a week next week. Hopefully we'll keep you updated more often.

We've done lots more than is listed here of course. But these are some of the bigger events in our year to date. Thank you if you're still reading this. We don't get any comments so we are never really sure if anyone is.

Haggis, Neeps and Tatties

2010-08-15T02:53:00.010+10:00

There is definitely a shortlist of the favorite places we have stayed on our travels, Jenny's Place in Chiang Mai, The Champa Lao in VangVieng, The Golden Temple Villa in Siem Reap and of course the place it all began, the Lamphu Tree Hotel in Bangkok. Having a bungalow on the private Cat Ong Island in Ha Long Bay can't be forgotten nor can having our own pet cat for a night in the Skye Backpackers in Kyleakin.

We had beautiful sunsets and thunderstorms from our bungalow balcony overlooking the sea at Coasters in Sihanoukville and we had a traditional home cooked meal when we spent a night in the tiny village of Ta Van with a family of the Green Zai cultural group in Sapa. We had almost the entire resort to ourselves when we stayed at the Hoang Anh Resort in Quy Nhon and of course we can't forget the fun and revelry of our first home in London, the Astor Hyde Park (even with its evil stairs of death).

The Castle Rock Hostel in Edinburgh is one such place that makes this list. We may have mentioned earlier that our Hostel was a funky place. The atmosphere was very chilled out, each dorm room had its own theme along with the communal areas, from the Internet room, called the "posh room" with a giant dark wood table, grand piano and open fire. Then there was the chill out room, complete with a functional record player and an eclectic collection of records. The biggest room didn't have a funny name, or maybe it did but I don't remember. It was just the common room, a giant table, a lot of couches, a pool table, a jukebox and of course all the tea and coffee we could drink.

We had settled back in easily after our three days in the Highlands, our dorm room hadn't changed and after spending the last three days traveling with our fellow inhabitants we had all developed a camaraderie among us. No one even seemed to mind when Prue sat bolt upright in the middle of the night and shouted "Sausages" before falling back asleep. We also had the largest room, which is why about 20 of our fellow tour companions ended up in a circle drinking on our floor on New Years Eve. But we'll come back to that.

The night before we headed in to town for a few drinks and dinner, we had just returned from the three day Bus trip and so we were all a little bit tired, but at the same time eager to continue with our new friendships. Edinburgh is absolutely packed at Hogmanay, so we had trouble finding a place to eat. Luckily our first choice was full as the second choice presented us with a special treat which probably saved us all third degree burns. But we'll come back to that too.

A few of us (not me), really wanted to have a crack at Haggis. After finding a pub with enough spare tables to seat about fifteen of us, we ordered a couple plates of Haggis, Neeps and Tatties. This came out presented as three piles of indiscernible goop. Mashed Potatoes, Mashed Parsnip and of course Haggis. After a few people had tried the Haggis and appeared to actually enjoy it I succumbed to Prue's coaxing and tried a small spoonful. To say Haggis is flavoursome would be an understatement, to say I didn't enjoy it would be a lie. I would like to categorise it into the special area with baked beans, bacon and eggs. That is to say, it is breakfast food.

Either way, it tasted quite good, mixed down with a Pint. Even better once one of the boys steered me away from Ale and into the direction of Tennents. I may have mentioned English beer is shit, thankfully I found Tennents, a beer that is at the very least drinkable.

We finished our meals and headed around to the bar for more drinks, that night in Edinburgh as part of the Hogmanay festival there was going to be a fire art installation in the street. we had seen the iron sculptures on our way down to the pub and it was our intention to wander back up there at 9pm for the lighting of the fires. The pub however had another plan for us.

The annoying thing about Scottish weather in winter is that for every five or six people, you will require one extra chair for every jacket. We had about four chairs for all of us, and it appeared that the girls had made a gentleman's agreement with a few locals that we would vacate the chairs as more of their party arrived. Looking over at the four locals on the table next to us, I noticed that they all seemed to be tuning up musical instruments. What happened next was truly amazing.

The four locals had finished tuning their instruments and one of them started playing a traditional folk tune, he was casually joined by the other three locals. Meanwhile one or two more locals shuffled through the doors carrying more instruments. The girls instinctively gave up their seats and we stood and watched as the new arrivals casually tuned their instruments and then just jumped straight into the tune adding extra layers of complexity.

Over the next hour or so, the entourage was joined by more locals who would each jump in and out of the songs as they felt fit. Some would even put down an instrument mid song just to take a sip of their pint, then pick it up and jump straight back into the tune. Eventually there were more than a dozen people playing all sorts of instruments (No Bad Pipes thankfully -Sorry Prue). The only coordination appeared to be that the person who initiated the song, would lead the tune. We were spellbound by the performance and cheered and danced for hours.

Fortunately our distraction in the pub caused us to forget about the fire installation. We ended up staying in the pub until it became apparent that we were going to have to move on to a bar that stayed open to the wee hours. I woke the next morning (read: early afternoon) somewhat hungover, but nether less ready to face an even bigger night ahead, New Years Eve 2009-10. We had come to Edinburgh for the Hogamany festival.

The impromptu band at the pub the night before had caused us to miss the lighting of the fire installation. When we remembered later we were disappointed. The next day when we found out what happened, we were relieved. Prue's Dad had said it even made the news in Australia. The severe winds that night wreaked havoc and mayhem in the streets as the wind threw embers all over the crowds, several people were treated for burns and the whole street was evacuated.

Sir Lumix the Resilient

2010-06-21T02:28:00.004+10:00

After a few drinks in the local pub, we spent the evening in Oban drinking in the hostel where we tried to turn Trivial Pursuit into a drinking game. As it was a 90's themed English version, not many of us knew or remembered the answers, so our thirsty attention turned to the pool and poker tables.

The first stop of the morning brought with it a back-handed treat as the bus pulled up at an old Castle set on top of a hill. Carnasserie Castle sat above us on the hill looking down at us with its non-descript but slightly disapproving stone cold eyes. From the carpark a small road led up to the top of the hill where the castle perched itself in the kind of way that a castle does, menacingly. I decided to call her Cassie.

The back-handed treat came as the first person stepped off the bus and went arse over tit on the ice covered road. The bastard castle didn't want to make it easy for us to breach its walls and we all shuffled very slowly to the top of the hill randomly chuckling as one person would start to slip and then take another person down with them as they reached out to grab a supporting hand.

A few bruised arses later we reached the end of the path and trudged through the snow to the interior of the castle. Cassie Castle was in pretty good nick despite its age, a renovators dream I suppose you could say. But Cassie had another evil trick up her sleeve. An icy path might be comical slippery fun, but when you mix a stone spiral staircase and ice, you get a lethal death trap.

It was exactly this point that we were glad we opted for the shock proof and waterproof Lumix camera. Prue lost her footing and slipped down the stairwell painting her legs and bottom with bruises with every stone step she hit. So too the camera bounced and fell like a slinky, hitting every step along the way only to come out the other side defiant at Cassie's wrath and with no more than a tiny scar. A proud war wound to show its grand-kids.

Prue on the other hand was mortally wounded in the assault on Cassie. She died a few hours later in the arms of a Prince and was buried in a hero's ceremony on a mound overlooking the castle. Cassie was disassembled stone by stone and rebuilt with soft rubber block. Ok, so it didn't quite happen like that but it sounds better than saying that Prue hurt her bum.

Had I known of the lethal brutality of Cassie Castle's icy steps of doom (not unlike the Astor Hostel's Death stairs of doom, a little colder though) I probably wouldn't have climbed all the way onto the top of the Castle. But I did, and of course I claimed Cassie in the name of the little known Clan Elmer. Instantly I was besieged by a volley of snowballs, but a comrade in arms aided me with the return fire until a garrison could be sent to the second watch tower... And yeah, I do love Castles....

Coming down from Cassie the Castle was for some as difficult as climbing the path up to her. But with the adrenaline of war and a fond nostalgic love of the movie 'Cool Runnings' I threw myself busward and horizontal on the world's roughest and coldest slip and slide. I didn't work that well, and I still ended up as wet and cold as the people who tried to descend the normal human leg walking way.

Our next stop along the journey back to Edinburgh was a grassy field home to the Kilmartin standing stones. Scotland is littered with Standing Stones and ancient Druids can face fines of up to £75.00 if they are caught. I don't know if anyone really has a confirmed reason for why the standing stones are placed where they are or how they are, sure there are lots of theories, navigation, worship, football goals.. etc.

But when faced with a giant ancient rock sticking out of the ground in the middle of a field, you couldn't help but feel a sense of importance and power. Yes modern technology is much better than the perplexing crap they did back then, but giant stones that seem to serve no purpose are pretty cool and kinda makes you feel like sacrificing a virgin or drinking goats blood or at the very least dressing up in a cloak and singing the chanting bits from Enigma.

Nearby were two more ancient sites, one a circle of stones with a small square pit in the middle and the other was a man made cave that looked like a small hill with two holes in it. Naturally Prudence Gael, avid adventurer and archaeologist was able to lend her expertise and once checked for booby traps we explored the nearby sites that were either used for burials or possibly a bus shelter.

Our next stop was Inveraray which has a really cool looking Castle. Unfortunately we didn't get to see this castle but we did get to have lunch. With only 30mins allowed for our lunch stop and everyone going to the same cafe, this became a little complex. Most of the good stuff was sold out before half the bus was fed, leaving a few late arrivals the option of pea soup or beans.

After Inverararararary we wound our way back through the hills and found our self at a small carpark nestled in a glen between more picturesque snow covered highland hills. The name of our stop was the "Rest and be Thankful" we were thankful for a short break, but we did not rest as the snow on the ground was Grade A+ snowball quality, and an epic snowball fight ensued.

As we headed east toward Edinburgh we found ourselves coasting along the banks of Loch Lomond. Prue couldn't help but find herself bursting into song with Neil, the only two occupants of the bus who knew the words to the archaic number one hit of 1841 - The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond. The Loch was beautiful, the song was as sad and depressing as an Emo kid's thoughts, funny how styles go around in circles.

The road along Loch Lomond was obviously the low road and not the high road, otherwise we would have drowned. Instead of this we found ourselves with a few minutes to spare to explore a very cute and obnoxiously quaint town called Luss. The weather was becoming very cold and bitter and we braved the elements to reach the banks of the Loch to find a few Ducks bobbing up and down on the waves, laughing at us in their thick duck down jackets.

I almost found myself stranded in Luss, as I found that Scotland has a strange law that won't let you buy cigarettes on a credit card and the ATM in the local general store wouldn't talk politely to my Australian debit card. To this day I'm not sure if Prue bothered to mention that I hadn't returned to the bus, but I found myself running across the carpark and jumping through the buses closing doors like an action hero.

As our bus continued East toward Edinburgh we found our self at our last scenic stop, the town of Stirling. Stirling has another awesome looking castle, but again we didn't get to see this, we did get something better. A modern castle (well if you call 140 years old modern). Ok, so it wasn't so much a castle as it was a tower that looked castle like, and granted it was really just a tourist attraction. But it was also the William Wallace monument, "cool" we all thought in unison.

I think we would have enjoyed the William Wallace monument a little better if we hadn't actually gone in, firstly we got hit with a pretty steep entry fee, but this was almost saved as they had free public toilets. Then after a climb to the top of the hill we found that the bitter ice cold winds we met at Luss were a lot more bitter and ice cold higher up. I should probably add that visiting a museum with someone that studied museums at university can also impact on the experience.

I was a bit dissapointed by the monument. Prue however, was mortified. "How would disabled people climb the stairs?" she asked as we climbed the narrow spiral staircase to the first of four levels. "How would big fat Americans pass each other on the stairwell?" she asked as we squished ourselves against the wall to allow people to decend the stairs past us. "Holy crap look at that" I said as I pointed to a large glass case holding what is alleged to be the actual sword of William Wallace.

The sword itself was probably the only part of the monument worth seeing. Firstly it was bloody huge, and if it actually is his sword (yes there is sceptisism) then it meant he would have to have been over six and a half feet tall. Much, much taller than Mel Gibson. But the really cool thing was that the leather hilt was said to be made of the skin of English soldier. That is some cold blooded gangsta shit right there.

We boarded the Macbackpackers bus for the last time after making good use of a rare free public toilet in Scotland and headed homeward. Neil broke out a few more good stories for us, but there was a hint of a somber tone in his voice, so we listened to him telling a ghost story and recounting the tales of his lost loves as though it were his dying breaths.

As we hit suburban Edinburgh we all knew that we were on the home stretch, shortly we unloaded again at the Castle Rock Hostel where we said our goodbyes to Neil and thanked him for his fantastic stories and his deep yet comical insight into the beautiful history and landscape of the Scottish Highlands. Then we thanked ourselves lucky that a Scotsman can remain sober enough to drive a bus.

And I am an Immortal!

2010-05-11T04:12:00.017+10:00

Skye-kylarkin on the Isle of Skye is a tiny town facing a bridge and most of the town centres around a giant carparking area surrounding the seaside/loch. the bridge leading to the island splits into two paths. One path leads into the centre of the town. Though it would be accurate to say the road leads through a carpark past a pub with a grocery store connected to it which also acts as the local postoffice and there just happen to be a few houses along the road.

The other path leads off into the mystical world of the Isle of Skye, an ancient land deep in the bowels of winter, frozen and covered in thick snow and shrouded in a mysterious thick fog, luminescent in the sunless morning light and like the icicles hanging from the mountain streams it drips with aeons of faerie magic from an age where a murderous barbarian could be a hero if not for the shame of defeat at the hands of a cunning and voluptuous warrior queen. But Neil's stories would have to wait, as now we had to get Hemorrhoid off us.

We opened the door to let the cat out and it lazily picked itself up and left the room as if it had decided on its own accord to leave the room. We found Hemorrhoid a moment later downstairs cutting circles on the kitchen floor while feigning affection in a ploy to get someone to feel obliged to feed him. Cats are smart like that, and also somewhat irritating, so naturally it works. There was a sense at breakfast that everyone was hesitating to finish their breakfast and head out of the cosy hostel to explore more Scotland.

That is because it was fucking cold outside.

We wound our way through the windy Skye hills around windy roads and wound up at Sligachan, a small frozen river ran from the mountains until it tucked itself neatly under an ancient stone bridge that was built wide enough for a car to pass over, proving great Scottish forethought as the invention of the automobile would have been stamped as witch craft in the days of the bridge's construction.

Neil gathered us on the bridge and we stood hand in hand in a giant circle as he switched over to "bard mode" and told us the legend of Sligachan. Enriched with more fairy magic than the Sydney Mardigra, the river below us was said to have magic healing properties, and if one were to fully submerge one's face in the icy waters for seven seconds, one would find oneself blessed with the fountain of youth. Sensing our scepticism, Neil promptly ran down to the water's edge, dragged himself carefully to a gap in the ice and face planted the water, while we counted to seven.

Despite fact that Neil didn't look any younger when he emerged from the frozen water, a few of us decided to give it a whirl after Neil said with sincerity that he was actually in his seventies. Dipping your face in a frozen river might seem like an easy way to attain immortality, however the remuneration for the prize is a strong kick in the face with the mother of all ice-cream headaches. My theory on the "icy river of youth" is that it works because all of the skin on your face stretches back towards your ears in a desperate attempt to flee from the ice-cold water.

Having attained immortality we fought off the urge to spend the next thirty or so years wandering the earth trying to figure out the meaning of life or grab a sword and decapitate our fellow immortals while listening to Queen. Instead we got back on the bus and headed south towards Oban, our second night's rest stop, while Neil continued his Barding ways and told us a fantastic story about a race of Giants who inhabited the hills and had a tea party on top of a mountain. With outstanding comic timing he finished his story by pointing to a road sign of a picture of a man holding a child's hand and said "see there are still giants in these parts today".

I guess you had to be there...

Our next stop was Glen Sheil where other than the pretty view from the car park across a loch, the highlight was a public toilet (which we had to pay for) that was decorated in Scottish history and had a clan map with all the locations and clan sheilds from Scotland. After finding the clans from my ancestry I decided it was a little weird to be taking photos in a public toilet. Then I remembered that I paid fifty pence to use the loo, so it was my right to snap out a few shots.

After passing a Loch with the imaginative name of Lake Lake, we arrived at the banks of Loch Oich. Another beautiful panorama spread out before us, a picture of absolute tranquility. We decided we should smash the peace with a rock and stood at the waters edge skipping stones across the silver surface of the Loch. Of course the Loch objected as best it could by denying us the perfect skipping stones, which it had frozen to the waters edge as if they were cemented in place.

Our next stop was the confusingly named Spean bridge, which wasn't a bridge at all. As far as I could tell it was a monument to a bunch of Commando's which I'm sure had a glorious and bloody tale to be told, one that probably involved a bridge, probably involved some fighting and most definitely involved drunken Scotsmen. Alas, I don't know the story, maybe I wasn't paying attention to Neil, or maybe it was just a crap story, maybe there is no story... Either way, if you really care you can Control-T and Google it.

From Spean-Bridge we had our first glimpse of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in all of Britain. At only 1,344 metres above sea level, it is slightly underwhelming, but it does look quite impressive covered in snow and ice with massive bare rock faces sticking out the sides. I like its name, no one bothered calling it Mount Hardcore or Mount Doom, just Ben. Actually, Ben Nevis means "Venomous mountain" or "Mountain with its head in the clouds", and yeah, I Wiki'd that.

Our next stop was in the uninspiring town of Ft. William where we ate lunch in a supermarket cafe. Which as you can imagine was crap, but they served eggs and baked beans for lunch and it came with chips. Ft. William is a bit of a nothing place, primarily used as a place to stay when you want to do interesting things in the nearby area. With that in mind we headed back to the bus to do some interesting things in the nearby area.

One such interesting thing was Glencoe. I think I missed the point at Glencoe. Glen means a valley, however I think I spent most of the time staring at the hills on either side of the glen as Neil told us the grim story of the massacre at Glencoe. In my defence I shall relate Glencoe to a pair of breasts, where men tend to enjoy looking at the sticky outy bits, and not so much the gap between them.

After a long days driving and stopping and looking and sitting and looking some more we finally arrived in the sea-side town of Oban. We took a short tour around town on the bus, which was mostly due to the fact that the roads were narrow and Neil missed the parking so we had to drive right into town and back again to find a place to turn-around. This turned out to be quite helpful as we were given a quick preview of the town's collection of pubs. Eventually we parked illegally directly in front of our Hostel and unloaded ourself upon it.

After picking up keys to our room, we took a quick stroll into town before deciding to head to our pre-determined pub of choice. It was at this pub, in the highlands of Scotland, that I had my first experience at not understanding someone speaking English. While doing my business in the urinal of the men's toilet a couple of locals came in speaking fluently in some kind phlegm derived language. Eventually I figured out they were actually speaking English, but to this day the only two words I have been able to translate are the ones they used between every other word, "fook" and "coont".

The Driving Scotsman

2010-04-18T20:08:00.013+10:00

The adventure began the night before in an underground bar called Frankensteins (Not Dracula's as previously posted) which had a toilet that played creepy sound effects. We were introduced to our fellow MacBackpacker tour companions by way of a meet and greet drinking session. It was here that we met Neil, a kilt wearing Scotsman with a hereditary gift for story telling. He was to be our bus driver, our tour guide and our entertainment for the next three days as we toured the Highlands of Scotland.

Neil would later explain to us that his family came from a Highland Clan renowned for its Bards. This was self-evident for as soon as the Bus has set off gliding down the icy hill he had switched on his mic and set about telling stories with as much humour and as many tangents as a Billy Connoly joke. He even began the trip with an apology for his use of profanity, but he explained that this was unavoidable as he was Scottish there was nothing he could fookin do about it.

We headed out into the frozen country side with every surface blanketed in thick white snow, the bus dug in or veered menacingly across ice patches, which added a slight alarm when Neil would interrupt himself from a story with a "Oops Shit!" especially alarming as we crossed the Forth Bridge, a massive suspension bridge crossing the ocean and completely concealed by thick fog which gave the impression that we were surrounded by a vast empty void, our only tether to the living world was the frozen bitumen around the bus and the vague shadows of railings through the fog.

We wound our way northward as the plains turned into rolling green hills, or at least we assumed they were green, somewhere deep underneath the snow. Scotland had been lavished with snow like a spew is lavished with sawdust. The further north we travelled, the deeper and whiter it became. The trees drooped as the burden of snow pulled every branch downwards. The snow even piled up on fence wire creating thin lines of white. The snow even covered the sheep, the sheep covered the fields and the fields were covered in snow. It was like a fluffy white layered cake, but Scottish... and not cake.

The snow was so deep that several times early in our trip Neil apologised that we may not be able to get to some places as the roads would be closed. Never less he would still try his best to find some "cool stuff to look at". The first "cool stuff" was the small town of Dunkeld, which is famous for being the muse place of Beatrix Potter and also for some very elaborate and violent story about Vikings and Scottish bravery that may or may not have been embellished a little for entertainment purposes by our Bus driving Bard.

Dunkeld was our first glimpse at a quaint little village in Britain, and very far removed from the mountain villages of South East Asia, the similarity was only in the name (It must also be mentioned that referring to a Scotsman as a Brit could find oneself being led to the carpark or shown the underside of a barstool). Dunkeld was also our first indoctrination into paying for a ticket to use a public toilet. But after two hours on a bus it was a necessary expenditure.

We explored the town a little and tried our hand at snowballs, but the snow was so cold it wouldn't stick together and was as useless as throwing balls of sand. The store in the village should have been called the "Mother Hubbard" as the cupboards were bare and on the way back to the bus I found myself ducking and weaving to avoid the patches of yellow snow behind the public toilet block, obviously not everyone thought it was a necessary expenditure.

Throughout the following days, the snow decided to prevent us from going to a lot of places. The first of which was Culloden, the site of the final battle in the Jacobite uprising. Unfortunately the road was snowed over and we travelled around it, missing out on visiting the battlefield but Neil treated us to a good yarn about it regardless.

Our next stop was Ruthven Barracks which was prefaced by Neil telling us we couldn't get there as the road would be snowed over, which was followed by a collective "ohh" from the bus to which Neil replied "fook it lets give it a shot". We arrived at the Barracks and set out to explore the old stone ruins. I was a bit of an excited little kid as this was the closest I'd come to a real Castle so far. Although it wasn't really a castle, it was still cool and could've have looked a bit castle-ish if you squinted and tilted you head to one side.

From the Barrack's hilltop we watched with amusement as Neil tried to turn the bus around on the narrow road and managed to get it completely stuck in the snow. With the help of the group he managed to get the bus free from the snow, moved it around a bit, got it stuck again and then got it out and turned around. I watched safely from the well guarded position of my hilltop castle, deciding to leave my garrison to help exactly one second before they finally got the bus free.

From Ruthven we headed into Aviemore where we stopped for lunch. Aviemore is a ski resort town, and was bustling with holiday makers. I found the place a little strange as there weren't any visible mountains on the horizon, yet there were skiers and snowboarders filling the lines in the cafe's. I reached the conclusion that Scottish people are known for being drunks, which of course distorts their vision making the ground seem uneven, they then ski down the slanty bits. This probably meant that the ski lifts would be no more than a few well spaced bar stools.

It would be an understatement to say that our next stop is the most well known point of interest in all of Scotland, but before we could reach the gift shop we stopped the bus on the side of the road and headed down to the icy shores of Loch Ness. It is fair to say I have a fair portion of scepticism regarding the myth of a gigantic dragon like sea creature living in the deep water of Loch Ness. Especially one with such a girly name.

But, being a little wise to possibility that Scottish people are occasionally sober, I decided to keep one eye Loch-ward and of course the camera was waiting in anticipation of getting a million dollar photo, or at least a soon to be discredited one. Loch Ness was beautiful, especially when flanked by snow covered hills and covered in whisps of mist, it is also fookin huge, so it was nearly half an hour before we reached the gift shop.

It was mid afternoon and night time was upon us. While still travelling along side the length of Loch Ness we turned off the road at Urquhart Castle. From the hill we could see a real Scottish Castle on the banks of Loch Ness, lit up brightly with yellow flood lights and mostly destroyed by time, war or lazy caretakers. We didn't have long to stop, as Neil was becoming nervous about the number of hours ahead of us driving on narrow and windy icy roads in total darkness. I was becoming nervous that he kept bringing it up.

Driving through the darkness was an eerie experience, Neil had gone quiet (well mostly) to concentrate on driving, so we listened to his favourite playlist of obscure songs while I stared out the window watching the trees and hills fade in and out of the darkness, illuminated by the moon reflecting on the snow and ice. Occasionally the lights of a small (and no doubt quaint) village would flash past until eventually we wound our way alongside another massive body of water, The North Atlantic Ocean, or Loch Alch, if you think lakes should be allowed to be connected to Oceans.

We had one last stop before crossing the Skye Bridge over Loch Alch (and the North Atlantic) to the Isle of Skye. There can be only one, and that is Eilan Donan Castle. We trudged from the bus into the bitterly cold night air to cross a short stone foot bridge leading to a small but mostly intact Castle which featured in a couple of wars, a whole bunch of romantic comedies, but most importantly, it was in Highlander.

At the time none of us knew that like Connor McLeod of the clan McLeod, who was an immortal, we too would be facing our own chance at immortality a small distance away on the other side of the Skye Bridge, but let's not get ahead of ourselves, as for now we have a bigger issue to face. Arriving in Kyleakin on the isle of Skye we quickly noticed that there was only two pubs in town, and one of them was closed. Luckily the open one was next door to our Hostel.

The hostel was pretty cozy (read: small but comfortable) and after grabbing one of the private rooms for an extra £7.00 we headed off to feed and water ourselves at the pub as quickly as possible. Our plan was well rewarded after finding the pub only had one cook, was already full of locals and didn't have enough available chairs for 20 or so hungry backpackers, especially after another bus full of more MacBackpackers arrived shortly after us.

We had to wait too long for meals that wern't really worth waiting for, however those on the bus that took their time in the hostel, were told by the bar staff they couldn't take any more food orders for an hour. So we ate our meals as slowly as they came out while a few hungry backpackers stared longingly at our forks and checked their watches.

While having a cigarette outside the pub I was interrupted by a young local Scotsman who had heard me say the word "dollar" and assuming I was American was ready to have a fight. Turns out he didn't like Americans and he definitely didn't like the English who denied the Scottish their right to be a republic by way of a conspiratorial voting manipulation and were a bunch of no good oil stealing bastards.

I didn't realise Scotland had oil, so I assumed that my drunken Scottish friend didn't like Americans because they would start a war with Scotland for its oil. Or maybe he didn't like Americans because he had common sense... and maybe he was sober, hard to tell with him being Scottish and all. Fortunately he had no negative opinion about Australians or Kiwis and encouraged us to spend money in their tiny island economy. I made a mental note to tell the couple from Chicago not to say the word "dollar" and headed back to the bar.

Back at the Hostel we settled down by the fire in the common room, where I managed to rid myself of my guitar withdrawals and have a nice cup of hot chocolate. Unfortunately time away from playing guitar hadn't improved my ability to play it, and any ability I had previously attained seemed to be content hibernating. Later on after pulling myself away from the coal fueled fire and the book I was reading I returned to our private room to find a fat ginger and white cat asleep on the bed.

The cat's name was Hemorrhoid, or Hemmy for short. Prue had been unable convince him to leave the room, so after filling the sink with water for the cat to climb into and drink out of, Hemmy nestled into the end of the bed and dozed off. Prue, who was suddenly missing our own cat Lucy was soon also in the land of nod. After a massive day of seeing the Highlands of Scotland, I too found myself heading for dreams, thankfully my dreams were enriched with more colours than just white. I like that...

Chapter 7: Can you hear the pipes?

2010-03-16T21:58:00.006+11:00

After having breakfast and saying our goodbyes we left the Astor Hyde Park Hostel and headed out. We'd decided to catch the number 10 bus instead of the Tube because it went directly to Kings Cross Station, we wouldn't have to change trains and it was a lot cheaper. We walked across the road and waited for the bus and climbed aboard realising straight away that we weren't going to be able to get upstairs let alone sit down due to our huge backpacks strapped to both our front and back.

We squished in and tried not to knock anyone out. The Bus made its way slowly up Oxford St, thanks largely to the second day of the post-Xmas sales and the resulting crowds. By now we were starting to worry as we were getting close to our departure time and we weren't even half way to where we needed to be.

We stood side by side waiting and waiting for the Bus to say it had arrived at Kings Cross Station and when it finally did we had less than 10 minutes till the train left. We ran into the station and found the automatic ticket dispenser. The easiest machine ever, using the credit card that we booked the tickets with 2 months earlier, we instantly grabbed out dispensed tickets.

We found our way into a huge open train station like I hadn't seen before. It had as many lines as the huge station in Bangkok or back home at Spencer St in Melbourne, but it was all made out of wood with vaulted ceilings. We walked past platform nine and three quarters to our platform, secure in the knowledge that we had a few minutes to spare and found our train and our allocated chairs.

We were facing backwards and sitting down, but that was the end of the similarities between this and any train we'd caught before. The chair had sturdy tables that came down off the back of the seat in front of us. Similar to an airplane, but more solid. There was a power point on the floor next to the window to plug in your laptop and free wifi! This was amazing.

As we pulled out of the station Drew Skype called his parents, though due to the overuse slowing the bandwidth it was easier just to use text chat. We played on the net, ate a dodgy meal from the food car. We watched the snowy English landscape change into a wild Scottish countryside marvelling as the flat lands changed into rolling hills so quickly once we were over the border.

People got on and got off the train as we stopped on our way to Edinburgh and we realised that there was a huge lack of seats. People were standing in the walkways packed together so tightly that they could hardly move with all there belongings at their feet stopping people from being able to squeeze past.

Overhearing conversations we discovered that you can book allocated seated or non allocated seated tickets. Non allocated seating was cheaper, but they still sold them after they sold out of allocated seating meaning that all the people with non allocated seating were standing up and like late day female commuters in high heels, all vying for the one seat that gets freed up each time someone gets off the train.

If you went to the toilet you'd come back to Drew or me trying to explain that the person sitting in the spare seat would be back and no, they couldn't take the seat. As amusing and oddly embarrassing as this was, we will never forget the people that had to stand up the whole way and will never book unallocated seating. What a horrible time they had with little kids crying and parents at a wits end. They couldn't even sit on the floor because they'd just have to get up for someone to go around them.

We pulled into Edinburgh station and as it was almost 3:30pm it was about dark. We made our way into the foodcourt at the station to find a map and a toilet (which you have to pay for in Scotland). The map was quite hard to find and the city was being descended upon for New Year. We tracked a dodgy map down with adverts all over it and found our way out of the station.

When we came out of the tunnel onto the street we were immediately overwhelmed by the old stone buildings. We walked along past so many dark towering buildings that even with the map we were starting to second guess our ability to find our way. We turned a corner and asked some policemen who, with adorable Scottish accents, pointed us in the right direction.

We walked up a small alleyway and out onto what could only be the main street in the old town. It stretched as far as we could see down to the sea in one direction and up to what from this angle looked like more buildings on the hill. The afternoon sun had set by now and visibility was quickly slipping away, much like our feet underneath us on the slippery ice covered stone.

We followed the map and the Policeman’s directions and walked up past a lot of Scottish themed souvenirs shops and onto the quieter street that our hotel was on. We walked around the corner and noticed the amazing view that left us standing in the cold staring. It really was Castle Rock!

The huge castle standing on top of the hill in the middle of Edinburgh was monolithic and Gothic in the encroaching dark and we were left feeling overwhelmed by the sight. In the end the cold got to us and we made our way into the hostel and checked in. There was going to be a meet and greet tonight and we would have a few hours to kill before then. We made our way down to our room past the suits of armor and the huge murals on the walls. Our room was a huge open space with our bunk beds all pushed up against the walls leaving a large open space in the middle of the room.

We wandered outside and walked down through the town a little bit. We made our way out of the old town and over the other side of the parks where we walked into some of the newer shops and picked up some bits and pieces we wanted. Slowly we made our way back towards the hostel with more “oohing” and “aahing”. We slipped into a pub just up from the hostel and grabbed some dinner and a drink.

After relaxing a little bit we headed back to the hostel and met with some of the people we'd be touring with. We went down to a bar called Dracula's and had some free shots and some normal drinks. We chatted to some people and met out driver whose name was Neil, who would turn out to be the best tour guide ever! We had some competitions and won some Macbackpackers stuff and then made our way back to the hostel for bed. Tomorrow would begin out great Scottish adventure and we couldn't wait to get started!

Do They Sell Fridges?

2010-03-14T23:58:00.010+11:00

After the eventful Christmas Day we decided to head into the sales. Drew was kind enough to fully agree, but I think this had more to do with making things up for throwing up on the Hostel room. We headed down the stairs of death, had breakfast and then jumped on the bus. I admitted to Drew that I was hanging out to see Buckingham Palace and we agreed to head there first.

We caught a bus that got us close to it and then realising that there was people all over the place heading there, we got our first inkling that something was up a the palace. Most of the people were running so we ran to catch up. We arrived out of breath and saw an enormous crowd gathered with Police keeping everyone in check.

We wandered through the crowd who were all trying to see into the front area of the Palace. Police on horses repeated over and over "remember to keep a hold of your valuables, pick pockets are operating in this crowd". We weaved through the crowd and I looked down and noticed one of my zips on my bag had become undone. Luckily I'd been keeping everything in the main part, just in case this happened. Drew didn't believe that I hadn't left home with it open, but I maintain someone was a bit disappointed that I didn't have anything to give them.

We couldn't see over the crowd and being vertically challenged I decided to walk further along the front of the Palace and see if there was a spot that had less people trying to see through the fence. To do this we had to wait for marching bands to walk past while Police kept everyone from moving. We waited at the edge of the gates with the Police holding us back until the horse guards passed and we could move again. Grumpy Police kept people from stopping in front of the gates to take pictures without the fences by shouting at people "if you want to be able to see, you should have been here earlier". It was actually a lot of fun.

We headed up to the north side of the front fence and found a spot and after a while of moving and shuffling Drew and I made it to the fence to see guards with guns marching up and down the square while a military band played Christmas carols. The whole thing was an amazingly diverse show from the cheery Christmas music to the straight-backed-gun-toting-guards marching about. It turns out we'd ended up watching the Boxing Day changing of the guards. We had arrived fairly late though and it was over about 10 minutes after we finally got a good spot to watch from.

The crowd dispersed quickly and we headed north towards Oxford St. We had decided to walk as the distance wasn't actually that far. We walked up through Mayfair with all the old London houses that hark back to a bygone era. We found ourselves on Oxford St and decided to have some lunch. We found a little pub and went downstairs into their eating area and had some typical English pub food, Pie and Mash.
After a nice pint (or half pint if you're me) we headed off to brave the shops. It was horrible. I like shopping with female friends who can spur you on if you start getting tired or over it, but it doesn't work that way with husbands. We battled massive crowds like I've never seen before. It's like being at a over crowded music festival, but instead of everyone enjoying the music and having a good time they are practically killing each other trying to get to modestly discounted "bargains" that they probably won't want in a few days.

We walk into Selfridges because everyone said we should, the prices were less than 5% off and that still left things starting at around £150.00 for some makeup or a top. We walked out and past a line of about 100 people waiting to get into the Gucci part of Selfridges for the sale. Not being racist at all, but it was hard not to notice that all except about 4 people in the line were Asian. It was just amazing.

We went in Primark which we'd been loving, but the enjoyment didn't last very long. We couldn't move and the lines for the registers wound around the store. In the end, with my dreams of getting something nice for myself gone, we gave up and grabbed the first bus we could home. I won't ever go to the sales again in the UK, at least not on Oxford St. I've been and had a great time in Australia, but the massive crowds here make it no fun.

We decided to go out to dinner and ended up heading to an Indian restaurant around the corner. It was kind of pricey, but the food was really good and that was all we really wanted at this point. We stumbled home tired and full. After watching the TV for a while and contemplating the stairs we headed up hopefully one last time to pack our bags and get ready to catch the train to Edinburgh, Scotland early in the morning.

The Curse of Irish Dan

2010-02-27T01:49:00.005+11:00

We had planned to spend an Orphan’s Christmas with the rest of the wandering souls at the Hostel. We had an invitation to spend Christmas with people we knew, but logistically and financially it was not possible. The Trains and Buses are given a day off on Christmas day, and the Taxi companies are known to double their already expensive prices. Unfortunately there are no Tuk-Tuks in the UK.

After lavishing each other with inexpensive gifts, we trundled down the stairs of death and greeted them with a feeling of Christmas immunity while we made our way down to breakfast. Normally a Christmas breakfast involves a minimum requirement off eggs and bacon, we forgot to buy any, so we settled for toast and cereal. Some of the more organised Hostel Staff did have eggs and bacon, and they frequently taunted us with their delicious smells.

The dining room in the basement was buzzing with Skype users, so we joined the fold and sent home our Christmas cheers, the replies were slightly more cheerful due to the massive time difference which found the Australian Christmas well into its last drinks. I had been told sternly that it was far too early to start drinking and so I spent most of my time watching the clock as it slowly wound its way around to lunchtime.

We had paid five quid each to have Christmas lunch cooked for us by the Hostel Staff, who were a little frantic cooking for a large number of people and panicking that they didn’t have enough food. Lunch was due to start at 2pm, but apologies were made shortly before this time. While the dining hall filled with hungry backpackers, we made new friends among the people on our tables and therefore decided the time had come to have a drink.

Lunch had been organised by the Hostel Staff, who were mostly Aussie and Kiwi, therefore the spread was pretty much similar to what we were used to. Roast meat and vegetables were in plentiful supply, and by the time everyone had finished eating it was pretty clear that the Hostel Staff had over catered and would be eating leftovers for the next week. I vaguely remember someone discovering a full tray of potatoes still sitting in the oven later in the night.

With lunch done and the drinking underway the party kicked up a gear. The Hostel staff started the drinking games, therefore they are responsible for most of the blame. I started playing a home made team oriented board game, where rolling a dice landed you on a square, giving you an instruction or telling you to take a card. Unfortunately for my team mate and I we kept rolling on the square that said go back to the start, or the square one space after that said go one space backward.

By the time the game ended we were all well lubricated, I had run out of beer and started drinking the punch. My team mate and I were still on the starting blocks of the board game and therefore had the honour of wearing the “looser” stickers. But it didn’t matter because we were all having a great time. It was decided to scrap the board game and just take turns pulling cards. The tables were all pushed together in a giant circle and one by one each person read their card, then either drank or made a fool of themselves in some way.

At about this point I decided to make a run for the shops for more booze. The streets were quiet but there were a few people out walking around. Even on Christmas I failed to get any eye contact or greetings from passer-bys, a little disenchanting considering that even on Christmas day in South Yarra the Stuck-Up-Elitists tend to nod their head and say “Merry Christmas”. Anyway, the guy in the off-licence was friendly enough, still had booze on the shelf, and even said a small festive goodbye even though it apparently wasn’t in line with his religious denomination.

I returned to the basement of the Hostel and walked through the doors to find Prue drinking a shot out of the belly of a half naked man. The crowd looked at me, then looked at Prue, then looked at the guy, then looked at me again. The guy looked at me nervously thinking I was going to go ape shit, but I just shook his hand laughing while the crowd let out a unified sigh of relief, followed by more laughter and revelry as the games continued.

Prue made a close friend out of a girl after they pulled a card telling them to perform simulated sex, which they climbed onto the table and performed with much hilarity. I pulled the card telling me to drink a shot from the belly of my neighbour. I looked over at the guy next to me, and said “come on big fella”. He flinched and we decided that we’d skip the card by sculling our drinks as punishment.

After trying to instill more enthusiasm in the drinking games by writing new cards with an ever increasing level of filth and debauchery, eventually the games were abandoned before anyone had a chance to drink from their neighbours boot. Prue found her lost childhood by playing hand slapping games with her new friend, of whom I think may have had a small crush on Prue…Shhh.

Things were getting pretty messy late into the night. We had moved over to the pool table, and by some act of god, or perhaps an infusion of alcohol I found myself transformed into the Jedi Knight of pool. With the precision of a surgeon I cut up my opponents, wielding my cue like a wand I performed sorcery and trickery upon the table. After sinking five balls in a row to win a match (including one rather brilliant jump shot), Prue broke the glamour I had imposed by calling out “how the fuck did you do that?” to which I replied “Got my drunk game on”.

Indeed I did, as did everyone else, and around midnight the cracks started appearing among the crowds. Irish Dan braved the carnage and challenged me to another game, which seemed only a ruse to get a hold on my can of Beer when I wasn’t looking. This continued for my last two cans and after returning from a cigarette upstairs on the street, Prue forced a nearly full bottle of Red Wine into my hand, pleading with me to hold onto it so that Irish Dan would stop trying to steal it. Thus began the downward spiral.

Prue had gone to bed and I found myself outside talking shit to Joey and Adam (Pronounced Eeeedem) two Kiwi guys that worked at the Astor Hostel. Irish Dan was still lurking around with intent to pilfer the last of the wine. I wasn’t going to let that happen, so continued to swig away on the bottle. At some point I found myself sitting in a shopping trolley spinning around and around and then trying to smuggle a traffic cone into the Hostel. Joey and Eeeedem went downstairs to attack the tray of potatoes we’d discovered earlier. I took up arms and battled the stairs of death all the way to bed after a fun and memorable Orphan's Christmas.

The next day...

I blame Irish Dan. If he hadn’t been so intent on stealing our wine, perhaps I wouldn’t have drank the entire bottle before getting in the shopping trolley. I blame Astor for their drinking games forcing me to mix beer, punch, white wine, red wine and spirits. I blame the stairs of death for being deathly and I blame the off licence for opening. Maybe I even blame Prue a little for handing me the bottle of red. But I suppose, to be truly honest… it was mostly… alright, totally my fault.

I woke in the morning to discover I had made a cock of myself. At the end of the bed a purple stain gave a hint of something more menacing. When I looked at the floor beyond the bed, a giant purple splattering of an unknown liquid stretched out its stench in every direction. Needless to say Prue was not impressed. Luckily our room was next to the linen cupboard. I changed the sheets and hid the evidence, cleaned up the rest of the splatter and tried to diffuse the smell.

Now I just needed to diffuse Prue… Hmm, boxing day sales are on… Maybe we could go to Oxford street and go... err… Shopping?

Gifted

2010-02-26T20:15:00.005+11:00

There are times in my life where being a sneaky bastard has really paid off. During our expedition through South East Asia, Prue and I were plagued by one sad misfortune; the impracticality of purchasing anything. Unfortunately due to the fact we had to carry everything in our backpacks which were becoming progressively fuller and fuller. We could not buy anything, in countries that the regular tourists come to just to shop.

But Christmas was approaching. We had agreed to curb our usual gift spending and imposed a limit on our gift budget. The idea was to come up with a great present which cost very little. The first of the presents I bought for Prue while we were in Luang Prabang. Prue had fallen for a little silver necklace charm that was locally made. After first seeing it she regretted not buying it and set out to find it our last day in Luang Prabang.

However, due to circumstances beyond our control, we were unable to get any money from the ATM machines in town, we had managed to pay our Accommodation and buy tickets for the Boat trip north, but we were left with only enough money to buy dinner. That is until I walked 500 miles to find the only ATM in town that was still working, on the way back to meet Prue I spied the silver charm and purchased it for the same price Prue had negotiated. Then I asked the merchant to do me a favour and not sell anything to my wife if she came back… Sneaky.

Returning to Prue with a small fist full of Laos Kip, she decided we needed to take one more look at the markets. When we reached the stall with the silver charm, Prue immediately tried bartering the price of the silver charm down. Meanwhile I was standing behind Prue, making faces at the merchant and waving my hands around. The merchant obviously had no intention of honouring our agreement. Fortunately Prue’s bartering skills were becoming shrewd and not getting the price she wanted, she walked away.

Prue almost returned to the store a few minutes later, but as she had just purchased something else, I decided to take an accountant’s stance and told Prue not to spend anymore money in case we couldn’t get any more cash out. Turned out that we couldn’t get any more cash and spent the next two days fretting about money. Prue was still disappointed she had missed out on the silver charm, so the surprise was enormous when I drew first blood and gave her the hand made silver necklace from Laos.

The second gift was a leather belt from Thailand, a designer clothes item with vibrantly coloured Mini Coopers around it and a cost increasing signature of a designer. Prue first spotted the belt in MBK Shopping centre in Bangkok. The shop keeper wanted 1500Baht as first price ($50) and Prue could only barter them down to 800Baht. Prue gave up on the buying the belt, but saw it several times and entered into negotiations in different shops only to fail to achieve a reasonable price.

After making a quick exit from the hostile nightclub in Pat Pong, Prue passed the belt on sale in the Pat Pong market, where she managed to barter the price down to 300Baht ($10). She giggled with consumerist excitement as we jumped in a Tuk-Tuk driven by a lead footed 17 year old and were whisked back to Kao San Rd. The excitement was short lived as two minutes later Prue realised that we had left her belt on the back seat of the Tuk-Tuk.

It was our second last day in Bangkok, and returning to Pat-Pong was not an option I was fond of, although Prue suggested it more than once. We spent hours grazing through the markets looking for the belt again, only to find that it wasn’t to be found. There weren’t even any stalls or shops selling belts in the vicinity of Khao San Rd. A placed rumoured to sell everything.

So a sneaky plan was hatched in my brain, Prue had excused herself for an hour to pamper herself with her last cheap Thai massage. I worked both sides of the street of Khao San in a last ditched effort to find the belt as I made my way to the end of the street where there would be a Tuk-Tuk to take me to Pat Pong and back before Prue realised I was gone. The trick would be getting a Tuk-Tuk to Pat-Pong without getting dragged into a sex show or a den of hurt.

But you wouldn’t believe it if you read about it on this very blog. We had searched the street several times for the belt and never saw any belts anywhere. But as if by magic, at the eleventh hour a small stall appeared out of the humidity and there was the Designer branded Mini Cooper belt. I enquired its price and the reply was “1500 Baht”. Shit… I managed to only get him down to 800 before trying the elite bartering technique of walking away. I didn’t work.

My only other option was to make a twenty minute trip to Pat Pong, find the belt, barter the price then get out of Pat Pong and back to Khao San Rd without being accosted by Mr Bang or any other seedy Ping Pong Peddling type. All this in a ever decreasing 45min window.

I ran up the street again, hoping that another magical belt store had appeared, one with more reasonable prices. It hadn’t, I bit the bullet and went back to the only magical belt shop in Khao San, I managed to get it down to 600 Baht, but the price didn’t matter when I saw Prue’s reaction on Christmas morning as she opened her presents on the bed in our little private room at the top of the evil stairs of death in the funky hostel down the steet from Hyde Park somewhere in the centre of ice-cold London, on the other side of the world. Prue was happy, and being a sneaky bastard had really paid off.

iSkate

2010-02-22T01:03:00.015+11:00

We didn't do much during the day on Christmas eve, maybe we did, but whatever it was has been overshadowed by the evening. I know we missioned out to the supermarket and picked up some food and beverages for the celebrations on Christmas day. I remember asking the guy in the off-licence if he was open for Christmas and being surprised at his glum "yes" reply.

Before leaving the shop we watched as the doorway was cast in shadow and a massive beast of a man waddled through the door who kinda looked like a menacing trucker version of Stephen Fry. I was half expecting some kinda crazy shit about to go down, when all of a sudden the frightful looking man opened his mouth and a soft and gentle posh English accent wafted through the room. Lol, British people.

We had collected enough supplies that we wouldn't need to venture out on Christmas day. I was certain that we didn't have enough alcohol, yet Prue forcefully assured me that we "didn't need anymore alcohol you drunk bastard". Later the next day she was, naturally, proven wrong. So I was glad I'd inquired to the man in the shop about his opening hours. But lets not get ahead.

We bummed around for the most part of the day, needing a bit of a break from the constant go-go of the past days and months. But by mid afternoon the spirit for adventure (and boredom) overtook us so we headed off to Hyde park for a Christmas Eve outing at the fair ground set up in Hyde Park corner.

The Winter Wonderland has a Bavarian theme, you can buy all sorts of Englishised Bavarian treats. There are show rides, side show stalls, music and of course food and alcohol. During the day it is mostly occupied by kids and their parents, but at night, and especially on Christmas Eve the place is packed with young adult revelers, drinking mulled wine and singing "Last Christmas" over and over and over and... Seriously it gets played more often than a Nintendo DS on a School bus.

The main draw card for us was the ice skating rink. What better way to celebrate a winter Christmas than by ice skating outdoors in the middle of London's most famous park, right in the middle of the city itself. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same romanticised idea and there were no tickets available until the last session at 9pm. It was around 6pm so we had a few hours to kill.

We went on a couple of the rides, which were about as expensive as the Melbourne Show. One of the rides was a mini roller coaster that reminded me of the one at Luna Park and which made better use of a small space than a Swiss inventor.

Then we stumbled across an old arcade games area. I'm not talking old like Virtual Cop, Daytona and Sega Rally. I don't mean nostalgic arcade games like Pacman and Space Invaders. These arcade games were made of wood and metal but had no electronic parts, apart from a few with flashing light bulbs, yes bulbs not LEDs.

We traded our show ride tickets for a handful of "old pennies" and proceeded to pump them into the slots of the machines. The arcade was a lot of fun, even though there was no hero levelling or cut-scenes, no quick time events or combo breakers. There was however a classic feeling of fun similar to the one that can be achieved by giving a kid a large empty cardboard box. We got a little hooked trying to bounce the pennies off the shelf into the collection tray and dwindled away our tickets buying more pennies in a vain attempt to win back the lost ones.

We headed to the large Bavarian drinking area. Mainly because it was heated inside and we were very cold. Thus the decision to purchase some Mulled wine was inevitable, and horribly regrettable. We both cupped our hands around the warmth of the mulled wine and took turns pulling faces best described by the word "Byerchk!" The mulled wine tasted like shit, actually it probably tasted better than shit, but was nonetheless disgusting. So we washed down our mulled wine with Steak Sandwiches.

Eventually it was time to head to the Ice Skating rink, so we lined up with the hundred or so others in our session and received our skates. My skates cut into my feet but they were tight around my ankles so we walked over to the edge of the rink as best as anyone who tries walking in skates can and found ourselves among the first people out to brave the ice.

I hadn't skated in a couple of years, last time was at Bendigo's rink where I managed to nearly break my ankle in the last five minutes of the day, and limped around for a fortnight afterward. So with some hesitance I skated out, found my balance, tried a dash of speed and weaved around the first lap to find Prue hugging the boundary ten metres out of the gate. So I grabbed her hand and we skated around hand in hand like a bunch of romantics until she found her balance again.

Then it got chaotic. They only sell a number of tickets so that there aren't too many people on the ice, the problem is there is obviously still a few too many people, a quarter of the people can skate, half of them are terrible skaters and the other quarter never take their hand from the rail as they wind around the loop of the rink for the entire hour session.

The good skaters duck and weave between the masses of terrible skaters, the terrible skaters freak out and fall over, then a good skater weaves to avoid the fallen skater and freaks out another terrible skater who jumps out of the way and into the path of another skater so they both fall over. Then they pick themselves up, wash, rinse and repeat.

Meanwhile on the sidelines the incapable skaters are moving hand over hand along the boundary rail until they reach someone leaning up against the rail taking a break. The incapables freeze and cause a butterfly effect traffic jam through the incapables behind them. The incapable looks pleadingly at the person leaning against the boundary, who then either skates forward to let them pass, or gives them an amused look and watches the incapable skater try to reach around them to get past.

Prue and I manage to skate the hour without any falls, despite being the victim (and occasional perpetrator) of a few collisions. Towards the end of the session the crowd started to leave and ice got choppier. I tried to remember how to do power slides while Prue did pirouettes like a Ballerina. Ice Skating in Hyde Park, London in Winter, a strange and unusual experience, but a hell of a lot of fun.

Monopoly

2010-02-21T22:17:00.005+11:00

My god it is getting hard to remember what happened two months ago. Remembering was the point of this blog in the first place, oh well, fucked that one up...Hopefully at some point we'll catch up to where our ordinary life starts again so I can just glaze over mundane bits weeks at a time.

Our second day in London we did some stuff and looked around and yeah yeah yeah... That's about all I have at the moment. Not really, just need a starting point and things tend to flow together after that, bear with me...

Breakfast... The Hostel we were staying in was pretty fantastic, we had booked a private room for the five nights while we were staying there, this meant we didn't have to climb into bunks in the dark, we had a nice and comfy double bed, and a bit of privacy for Christmas. The draw back to this being the four flights of stairs we had to climb.

Four flights of stairs may not seem like much, especially to us as we had become accustom to the Asian guesthouse style of building narrow buildings that always have the cheaper rooms up near the top. But at our hostel, an unknown ancient evil resided in the stairwell. By the time you reached the first landing your legs felt like lead, at the second landing a miserable plant sat wilting and dying, its life obviously drained by the negative energy inhabiting the stairs. At the third landing the stairs got steeper and narrower. The hike up the last two floors should have come with rock climbing gear.

In the morning we went down to breakfast, and hoped that we wouldn't have a reason to go back to our room for something. Breakfast was basic but very handy. Bread, butter, spreads, cereal, milk, tea, coffee, cheese and ham were all laid out for the taking. They even had Coco-Pops! Some of the people were making sandwiches for lunch from the breakfast spread, we weren't that organised and/or hadn't tired of the novelty of pub meals yet. There was a large well stocked kitchen in the hostel, so we made a mental note to buy some food and at some point start cutting costs.

Watered and fed, we were ready to head out and explore, unfortunately one of us (It was Prue!) found a reason to go back to our room, so with a sigh that resembled a whimper one of us (It was me!) dragged themselves up the dreaded evil stairway of doom and destruction...Then we went out and did some stuff and looked around and yeah yeah yeah... Damn! Need visual cues.

We headed down to Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square and then down to Trafalgar Square taking photos and wandering around with that stupid touristy look on our faces that screamed "fresh from boat" We had arrived on the set of a life size game of Monopoly, unfortunately we didn't have enough available cash to purchase any property, which meant we couldn't build hotels, and we struggled to find the way to pass go to collect our $200.00, or is it £110.00?

Cliches aside it was really amazing walking around the stunning architecture and landmarks. You couldn't help but feel that you had been there before, even though it is probably just from seeing it in a movie or on TV. Being in London really makes you feel like you are in the heart of the world, or at least one of the other main organs. It has a sense of importance about it, that makes you realise how much influence the place has over the rest of the world.

London is full of English people! Believe it or not they are everywhere, at first we were walking around thinking "Jeez there is a lot of English people around", then we realised, "Duh, it is England". Still the accents are hilarious. We find ourselves walking around listening to people talk and snickering about their accents. Especially the school kids, not the ruff looking ones that swear all the time, but the ones that obviously go to Private Schools and have etiquette tutors. They're very formal and civilised and you have to stop yourself repeating their conversation back in their accent, or people in white coats might chase you with nets.

We walked down past the fortress entry of Downing St, where I picked out a few easy roosts for a sniper to have a shot, then we went past Westminster Abbey, but it costs money to go inside so we decided to leave that for another day never. Then we marvelled at the iconic Big Ben, which is reasonably big, but could have been bigger in my opinion.

We half crossed the bridge to get a look at the Thames, which I learnt is pronounce "Tems", thus proving the point that English people have weird English. Worcestershire is "Woostashire", Leicester is Lester, Undies are Pants and Pants are Trousers.

On the way back we passed the Horse Guards who were doing their afternoon parade, which wasn't very parade like. The men lined up and stood very very still until one guy came strutting out, yelled at them and then looked each of them up and down before yelling at them again to march off in a neat line. Then he repeated it with the horses.

We found our way back up to Trafalgar square, where Prue discreetly excused herself to go buy me a Christmas present, so I went on one of the fair ground rides. The ride I went on was one of those spinny round upside down whirly things. But while I waited at the top for the opposite side to be loaded I had a great view of the skyline of London, which I got a photo of before being launched forward and around and around in spew inducing rhythm. Luckily the chili con carne I had at a pub earlier in the day was quite stable by this time.

Prue and I really wanted to go see a movie, especially Avatar. There are several cinemas in the Trafalgar Square area, but one incredibly shit thing about London is the price of Cinema tickets. For Prue and I to see Avatar in Trafalgar Square it would cost us £14.00 each. Twenty eight cussing dollars! Each! We weren't upset to find it was booked out anyway, and as the next show wasn't until after 7pm we decided to head back to the Hostel.

London's Double Decker buses aren't as awesome as I thought they'd be. They're better. Sure the old ones look cool with their rear entry platform and the weird nose, but they're slow and noisy. The modern ones are comfortable and umm... modern. After each stop a display shows the next station and a ladies voice announces the same thing. Strangely she sounds like a more British version of the Eve voice from Command and Conquer ("Our base is under attack!") that we have on Melbourne's modern Met Trains.

We made it back to the hostel and Prue braved the stairs, I couldn't be bothered so I asked reception about nearby cinemas. There was one closer to us that was a bit cheaper so I went into the lounge and used the internet to find out if Avatar was on. it was, and it started in 45mins. This meant I had to run up the stairs of death, grab Prue, and go. We made it to the Cinemas and bought tickets that were still quite expensive and with twenty five minutes to spare we realised we hadn't eaten dinner yet.

We legged it up to the McDonald's and had our first UK Maccas. Despite a few subtle differences it was much the same as home, the numerical value on the prices were almost the same, only here it is in pounds, which makes Maccas a cussing expensive option. At almost ten dollars for a meal each, it blew away any hopes I had of getting popcorn with the movie.

Avatar was pretty awesome, though it has nothing to do with traveling, I feel the need to mention that it was a great film, and I think we'll have to go and see it again in 3D before it finishes, it is still showing about ten times a day over here. We haven't been back to the cinemas since then. Our new local pub is haunted each night by an Asian dude who sells pirated DVDs of all the latest films. Sure it is illegal, but £14.00 cinema tickets should be illegal too!

But consider this; if we do not pass go and do not collect two hundred dollars, the least we ought to do is go directly to jail.

The Long Walk

2010-02-13T21:33:00.000+11:00

After leaving our bags at with the hostel we decided not to waste our first day in the city. We headed back through the freezing streets and went back into the train station. We had thought about it, and decided that we would go to BUNAC (the company that we organised our visa’s with) and let them know we were here.

We consulted the huge and confusing tube map and figured out where we needed to go. We climbed on the circle line train and caught it to Edgware station and then changed to another circle line train that went the rest of the way past King Cross St Pancras to Farringdon. We swiped our Oyster Cards in their cute Ikea pouches and walked out of the station. It took us about 2.5 seconds to realise that we were completely turned around.

We’d heard people say that if you want to learn London don’t catch the tube. It turns out they were completely right. Travelling underground on a train plays havoc with your internal compass. We finally figured out where we had to go and turned left and headed up the road to find Bowling Green Lane. When we finally found it we went in and introduced ourselves to the girls in the office.

BUNAC has a great room filled with computers, printers, job boards and housing ad boards and we took it all in as they showed us around. We had decided to do our introduction talk with them after we came back from our holidays in Scotland and Europe. We partook in their free internet and then asked for a nice way to get down to Oxford St. We had been told there was some great shopping and we needed a few cheap basics, like clothes designed for hostile temperatures. The girl pointed out a shop called Primark and took the directions she’d given us as well as some maps of the central area of London. We’d killed an hour or so hanging around and BUNAC and it was even sunny when we headed out.

We walked for a little while and then realised that it was almost 1pm and we still hadn’t had any lunch. We came to a pub that looked fairly local and walked in to try out our first pub meal. In the end I chose the pie with vegies and chips and loved it. Drew didn’t have quite as much luck, but we were both happy to find that drinks were cheaper here (cheaper than Australia, not SE Asia). Drew had a beer while I had a Hot Chocolate hoping it would warm me up from the inside out. The sun might have been out, but you couldn’t even feel its warmth on your face. It was a most disconcerting feeling.

We finished our lunch and continued walking, following the directions till we found New Oxford St. We turned right and headed up a street that had a few office buildings and as we walked gradually more shops. We looked in the Carphone Warehouse (which doesn’t sell carphones, they do however sell mobile phones) and ended up heading to the old faithful Vodafone. We both picked up a sim and some credit and headed off.

The further along Oxford St we got the more crazy it got. There are hundreds of thousands of people all trying to shop there (Ok, it was three days before Christmas). I like shopping, but I’d never seen a crush like it. There are so many chain stores that by the time we found our way at the other end of Oxford St proper we had seen up to 6 of each chain, seriously!

We found the shop Primark that had been recommended to us and walked in to find a whole new world of cheap mass produced clothes. On the plus side compared to Australian stores they hadn’t seemed to have sacrificed quality along with the cheaper prices. We picked up some gloves and some long sleeve tops and after waiting in a line that wound half way around the store we escaped the craziness and made it to the Marble Arch corner of Hyde Park.

At this point we’d be walking for about an two hours and the sun was starting to head to the horizon, that if I’m completely honest it hadn’t gotten far from anyway. We walked across the park watching people walk their dogs, which fell into two categories; normal dogs and dogs wearing clothes that probably cost more than anything I was wearing. We smiled and marvelled at the craziness of finding ourselves walking across a snow covered Hyde Park in the middle of London when we’d been in the heat of Bangkok just 24 hours before.

On the other side of the park there was a winter wonderland that had a whole lot of rides and an ice skating rink. We decided that we’d come back and explore it more when we hadn’t be walking for two and half hours and didn’t have sore feet. We walked back towards Queens Park Gate which is the gate nearest the hostel we were staying in. By the time we made it home we were completely buggered. Our feet hurt and we didn’t want to have to move again.

We checked in and almost cried when we found out that we’d be staying on the 4th floor. The forth floor in a hostel that was in a old building in Kensington! That meant that the last flight of stairs was almost a ladder for servants only! Ah, our poor feet. We headed upstairs and practically fell onto the bed, after our bad nights sleep on the plane the night before and the extreme time zone change we were knackered.

Unfortunately it was still early, we’d promised ourselves to stay up until 9pm to adjust to the time zone. There was also the issue of dinner. We trudged back down the stairs knowing that meant we would have to go back up them later, and inquired at reception for local restaurants. The nearest pub was around the corner, a really nice old typical English pub with a slight air of snobbery given the neighbourhood. We ordered the Sunday Roast, which was dry and disappointing.

We headed back to the hostel and found a comfortable spot on the couches in the common room. Couches are pretty rare in Asia, where they tend to be made out of bamboo rather than big soft cushions. It was so relaxing to veg out in front of a TV and pretty soon we were nodding off. Once it was near enough to 9pm to make excuses to ourselves, we gathered up our spare energy and climbed the stairs to bed.

Chapter 6: London Calling

2010-01-29T02:34:00.002+11:00

After a long and not great flight we flew into London through the clouds and rain. We walked off the plane and made our way to the immigration desks. We lined up and gave our passports to the guy at the desk and he let us into the country, we wanted to stand there and talk to him just to be able to speak English without having to battle language barriers. He obviously didn’t have the same yearning and even though our visas had already been active for about a month we were waved into the country. We walked down into the bag collection, found our bags and made our way to the Customs area.

It was at this point that we knew we’d like the UK. We walked up to a door that led to Customs and were waylaid by airport worker. He asked us where we’d come from and we said “Bangkok”, just assuming he was curious, he then waved us towards the EU arrivals lane. We looked at the sign saying that EU arrivals and Drew turned and asked “is Thailand a part of the EU?” in a laughing voice. The guy topped Drew by blithely saying “oh yeah, we annexed them years ago”. Laughing we headed through the door and again found ourselves on the outside of the airport immigration doors walking straight out into the crowd and into London.

We walked about 15 steps before I asked Drew where he’s put the paperwork about the hostel. He looked and me and said “I thought you printed out the details about where we had to go?” Bugger, after some scrambling we located a help desk, who couldn‘t help, as they couldn‘t locate our Hostel on their system (they didn‘t even have google). So we headed toward the trains where we found an internet café along the way. We had to wait until they were open as it wasn’t even 7am yet, but a short while later we had our Hostel’s address, a map of the tube and updated our face book status to say we’d arrived safely.

We headed down to the tube and bought both of us an oyster card. This is like Melbourne’s new ‘Myki’ except that it really works. You fill it up with pre-paid credit and scan it whenever you get on a bus or enter and exit a station, in most cases it is cheaper than buying a ticket, and much, much easier. We jumped onto the tube and headed into Gloucester Rd tube station.

We have used the word “surreal” quite a lot on our travels, mostly for lack of a better word. But at various points we reach a moment of self awareness that seems fitting to the word surreal, of course the train wasn’t made out of bacon and the scenery wasn’t upside down, but we found ourselves realising that we were in a completely different part of the world experiencing fantastic things foreign to our senses. As the train pulled out of the long tunnel of the tube and headed overground, we were presented with rows and rows of English houses, all identical to the next, but slightly varied from street to street. Vivid memories of every British television show came to us with a single thought of “Oh my god it actually does look like that?”.

We had travelled from Bangkok, 35 degree tropical heat with humidity nearing the full 100 percent. Now the landscape was buried in a thick layer of pure white snow, it covered the rooftops, the gardens, the fences and even covered the pipes running along the walls of the train line. Icicles hung menacingly from gutters and pipes and every single tree was a mere skeleton, devoid of any foliage and dusted with a layer of icing sugar like snow. We pulled in at the first topside station, with a beep the doors opened and we were smashed in the face with an arctic fist of air. It was cold outside.

We arrived at Gloucester Road and headed out of the tube into the cold morning air. We had dressed appropriately for the weather, but our tropical tanned bodies struggled to adjust and we trudged our way to the hostel muttering things about the cold while marvelling at the grand buildings surrounding us. We had arrived in London, no, we had arrived in the expensive part of London. Thankfully our hostel didn’t carry any of the air of snobbery of it neighbours, the building was as grand as any other in the street, but the atmosphere when we stepped through the door was laid back, relaxed and greeted us in an Australian accent.

Back to the Beginning

2010-01-22T23:59:00.003+11:00

**WARNING**
The following blog post may contain sexual references, adult themes and traces of nuts.

We arrived back in Bangkok on the train very early in the morning. After being woken up and changing into some fresh clothes behind our privacy curtain we made our way off the train into the train station that we’d left from 2 months earlier. We walked outside and looked for a Taxi and after not finding someone who knew the bridge we wanted to be dropped off at we decided to try a tuk-tuk. The tuk-tuk’s were a welcome relief after so long away and it was nice to negotiate a price again and be able to tell our driver the way we wanted to go to get there. In the end we got a driver who took us straight there (at break-neck speeds) and was kind enough drop us off out the front of the 7/11 just near the hotel.

We walked/stumbled into Lamphu Tree Hotel and presented ourselves at the desk, it was about 7am. It was such a relief the be back and to have made it in one piece. I was so tired that I ended up dropping my bag and lying on one of the couches while Drew completed the check in. Luckily no one was in our room the night before and they let us check in early so we grabbed our bags and the one refugee bag that we had stored all our winter stuff in at the hotel while we travelled, and headed upstairs. Our room wasn’t on the top floor, but after a night on a train and an early wake up we dropped our stuff and had a sleep for a few hours. We got up at about 9am again and went downstairs to have some breakfast. After breakfast we walked back down to the boat ramp and paid our 15 baht and jumped on the overcrowded boat and headed downtown towards MBK. We had decided to do our winter shopping for Europe on the first day.

We figured we could have done it any of the 2 and a half days we had back in Bangkok, but we figured if we couldn’t find anything we had another day to try to find something. We entered MBK after catching the Sky Rail at about 11am. After walking around for about 2 hours and not really finding anything we decided to go item by item. That meant that first we looked for jeans and after about 2 hours and heaps of ‘not have your size’ we both finally found some jeans. Our budget had taken a hit though and now we had to find a jacket for me and a pair of shoes for Drew. We ended up getting me a Abercrombie and Fitch jacket at about the same price as a real one and this one was just a copy. By now it was about 5pm and we were both over bartering and trying to get good prices.

We still had to get Drew a pair of shoes seeing as the only ones he had were his semi closed in Teva’s. In the end it took us another 3 hours to find Drew’s shoes and we ended up with HiTec hiking boots because there was almost no other option. We left feeling like MBK was a horrible blight on the city of Bangkok and we were so over shopping. As soon as we got outside we felt better as the humid night air rolled over us. We caught a tuk-tuk back to the hotel and headed straight to bed. It was only about 10:30 at night but we felt as though we’d been shopping for days.

We woke up and had breakfast at a leisurely pace the next morning. Seeing as we’d bought all the winter clothes we needed we headed to explore some parts of the city that we hadn’t seen before. We jumped in a tuk-tuk and headed for China Town. The tuk-tuk dropped us off on a random corner in downtown Bangkok and we picked a direction and started walking down the street. We crossed the road and made our way into the winding mass of market stalls.

China Town sold everything from toiletries and food to clothes and household items. The smells as you walked around were a lot more potent as we walked through the now closing market. We ended up buying some cheap and dodgy gloves that would tie us over until we could get some proper ones in the UK and then headed back out of the market.

Over the course of the last two months I again and again met people who said we had to go to the sex shows at Pat Pong in Bangkok. I had been so against it when we first arrived that I couldn’t believe that by the end I was convinced that I had to at least stick my head in and see some sort of show. We jumped in a tuk-tuk and headed to Pat Pong and I was so nervous and really didn’t want to be there. Drew on the other hand couldn’t wait to see what all the fuss was about.

We found ourselves at a bar watching the market in the middle of the street set up. Drew had been befriended by a local guy and we knew it was some kind of scam, but Drew was happy to just chat to him. I on the other hand watched girl after girl walk past going into sleazy venues that were just beginning to set up for the night.

In the end Drew got me up and we followed ‘Mr Bang’ to an Australian bar! My god, they were everywhere! We went in and had a few boring drinks while Drew had an animated discussion with Mr Bang about his time in the Thailand Army. After about half an hour Mr Bang led us to a club and we were ushered inside and given seat and bought some drinks. We waited and sat around. In the end I ended up having to go to the toilet and sharing it with half naked women putting on layers and layers of makeup.

I made my way back to Drew and sat down asking if we could just leave. It was as we were thinking that might be a good idea as there were even more girls sitting around where we were kneeling up looking in the mirrors behind the chairs putting on makeup too. There was a matronly woman who was not performing sitting with her daughter and doing the paperwork. It felt like we’d got there way too early.

In the end the girls started performing, they all walked up on stage, their hands together bowing to each of the girls on stage and the picture of the King. They spent about 5 mins naked doing a man dance, moving back and forwards, around before the first girl started performing. All the girls were quite old by Thai standard, which means that they look about 25 instead of 15. There were girls that pulled strings out of their private areas that had sharp needles attached every inch or so and the string turned out to be about 5 metres long.

Not to be toped, girls followed with, smoking cigarettes, shooting bananas out onto the stage, bursting balloons with darts from about 4 metres distance, removing ribbon about 10 metres long and so on. In the end it was like going to the circus. Everyone was right about that, you don’t watch the girls in a stripper way, you watch them perform amazing feats and just have to clap at the end. We decided we’d watched enough and got ready to pay and leave.

This is when the girls and the matronly women descended. They tried to charge up more than we’d agreed for the drinks and then even though it shouldn’t have they tried to charge us for seeing the show and for ladies drinks which someone had brought over earlier and we’d sent back because we didn’t want them. Thankfully we’d been in Vietnam and Drew was able to cut through the scam that Mr Bang had laughingly walked us into. Drew grabbed the pen that they’d used to write the bill and cross out some of the things and change the prices on the drinks.

Thankfully Drew can be rather intimidating and in the end they let us go with what we thought we should have paid. It was the craziest thing I’d done while on holidays and I was impressed that I did it. Mr Bang gave Drew his card… Maybe just in case he wanted to be scammed again or attempted to be scammed. We headed back to Khaosan Rd and relaxed in the place that we once thought was the sleaziest place we’d ever been. It was now a haven and Drew went to have a relaxing beer and I went to grab what would be my last $5 for 1 hour proper Thai massage. We headed back to the hotel and slept our last night in Bangkok.

The last day in Bangkok we slept in and had a late breakfast and skyped our parents to say a last hello before we headed off to the UK. We wandered down Khaosan Rd and posted most of our summer clothes home and walked around and did some last minute shopping for some T-shirts and other miscellaneous items. We had some lunch and watched new backpackers wander down the street with wide eyes and it made us smile knowingly.

We headed back to the hotel for a last swim and as we had a free 4pm late check out we went back to our room, had a shower and got the last of our clothes organised, then took them downstairs and put them in the store again. We headed back down Khaosan Rd one last time and grabbed some dinner and then came back and changed into our winter clothes., sweating in the tropical heat We jumped into our Taxi and headed out the very busy road to the airport. It ended up taking ages because of the abnormally busy roads but thankfully the taxi had aircon for comfort in our winter gear.

We got into the airport which is an amazing new building of glass and steel. We walked to our checkin desk and lined up. When we got to the front we found out that we had been separated for the flight. It’s times like these that the two years of acting I studied really kicks in. I immediately started telling the guy that I was terrified of flying and I was meant to have an isle seat and my husband was meant to be sitting next to me. The guy tried to give me the usual spiel and I abruptly started to get teary eyed and guilt him into fixing it. He called his manager and in the end we got the middle aisle and the seat next to it and no one was seated next to Drew in the middle so we had three seats to spread across.

The flight was sadly not the best, the hostesses were so put out if you asked for some water that you felt you were interrupting them. The flight was really dry and as soon as we sat down they walked down the aisle spraying a spray that was meant to kill any germs as was required by the UK. We winged our way into London, the temperature dropping from a balmy 35 C plunging down to a -2C. We had made it.

Snakes on a Prue.

2010-01-17T01:04:00.002+11:00

We walked out of our bum massage feeling like new men, which was a little awkward as Prue is actually a woman, either way, we were walking with a new zest. We headed to the Chiang Mai night market, deciding to save our zesty walking for later, we jumped in a Tuk-Tuk. Arriving at the Night Market we were overwhelmed by the sheer size of the place, it is massive. The markets stretch along four blocks and are two blocks deep even going inside some of the buildings. At the same time we where overwhelmed by another sensation, hunger.

As sad as it is to admit it, but to our defence there had been a long time between drinks for us and the global food machine. There were absolutely none of them anywhere in Vietnam, and if they were in Cambodia or Laos, we never saw them or ate at them. Nearly two months since indulging at Khao Sahn Rd, we let ourselves give in to the dark side of cravings, walked straight past the market food vendors and their plethora of exotic culinary delights and pushed through the golden arch fronted double glass doors into McComfort Food.

Despite the massive size of the markets, every other stall sells the ‘same same’ crap as the one six doors down. Most of it is the generic mass produced stuff you get in all of the markets throughout Asia with the occasional stall selling local arts and crafts. Although having said that, every time we visit the markets we always find a shipping container worth of stuff we wish we could buy, we curse our backpacks which seem to grow fatter each time we repack them despite our inability to buy anything. So we promise again to return another day, possibly towing a trailer, then buy ourselves clothing and write it off as necessary equipment.

The markets closing around us we head back to Julies, exhausted after a massive day. Prue slipped off to bed to read and I curled up on a cushion in the communal area with a beer or two and channelled some blog energy from a few weeks past (We were only about two weeks behind at that point). Distracted by a Thai movie on television, I was bemused to see that Thai censorship laws involved blurring a gun when it was pointed in a man’s face and more humorously blurring the underpants of a fat teenage boy getting changed from his jeans into shorts. Julie’s has an honesty system beer fridge where you take a beer and write it in the book for your room. After the beer fridge was locked for the night, I went to bed.

In the morning we suffered another bad Julie’s breakfast, picked up our CD of off-road tour photos, dropped our bags for storage and headed out. First stop an internet café to dump the CD photos onto USB as our Netbook doesn’t have a CD drive, making the CD no more than a coaster to us. Walking out of the internet café we found a cheap Tuk-Tuk who would take us to a place called ‘Tiger Kingdom’ where we could do a bit more Tiger hugging, something I think we both thought was pretty awesome the first time.

Tiger Kingdom was a lot more upper class and fancy than the Tiger Temple we had been to earlier in our trip. Tiger Kingdom served gourmet food, had polished wood and pastel coloured furnishings and the Tiger’s roamed around in nicely manicured enclosures, the large ones in a central viewing area set a level below in the middle of the dinning areas. Given the décor it was no surprise to find that Tiger Kingdom was pricy, we were already counting pennies nearing the edge of our budget and with four days left. We considered leaving, then decided against it, stuff it we want to hug Tigers!

Incidentally the Tigers were actually quite cheap, but we had become so used to paying the local prices that while at the time it seemed expensive, in reality it was only about $15 each for us to hug some form of Tiger. Looking back now, after being in Europe for more than three weeks, I wish I still considered $15 expensive. Prue choose the hug-a-cub option, I chose to hug the big bastards. The cubs were super cute, as a non paying customer I had to stand outside and watch Prue petting and playing with the little cubs, of course when I say “little” I’m talking about something the size of a Labrador, a Labrador with razor sharp teeth and talons for claws. Cute, yes. Dangerous, definitely.

My tigers were the ones in the middle enclosure surrounded by the dining area. On the way there Prue was stalked by one of the big cats who followed her right around its enclosure watching her with creepy menace in it’s eyes. At my enclosure Prue went back to the dining area to get a photographic vantage point and I was led by a very large local man into the enclosure where I sat and patted two tigers, while one of them growled and stirred, making the large local guy move to place himself between the Tiger and me as quick as if he’d dropped a doughnut. Then I moved over near a small pool where another Tiger was jumping around chasing a giant cat-toy on a stick splashing water all over us, most of it went on the large local guy, but I guess he had a lot more surface area to wet.

Outside of the Tiger-Kingdom we thought about going up the road to the Snake-Palace or the Monkey-Castle (not their real names) but we were running out of time as our train to Bangkok was due to leave at 4pm and it was nearly 2pm. Heading to the Tuk-Tuk I spied a PR man from the Snake-Palace who had a small basket with a couple of vipers sitting on top of it. I had already tried on a pair of vipers earlier in the day while standing outside having a cigarette. Prue however, I had not seen holding a live snake, not ever.

As it so happens, there is a good reason for this, Prue is genuinely shit-scared of snakes, as was evident in the inability for the Snake man and I to convince Prue to hold a snake. Eventually the Snake Man distracted Prue with a snake in one hand and swiftly coiled the other snake around her arm. The range of facial expressions from Prue were absolutely priceless, one photo I took captures a still image of the essence of Prue’s thoughts, from “Oh my god! Get it off” to “Aaargh it is slimy” then “Hey this is kinda cool…no wait IT’S MOVING!!!”. It was the first time Prue had ever held a snake, I wonder if it was also the last. Not if I have a say in it.

We found our Tuk-Tuk man waiting patiently in the car park, and headed back to town. Back at Julie’s Guest House we paid our driver and asked him to wait awhile. When we returned half an hour later he was gone, but we conned another Tuk-Tuk driver by lowering our original quote to see if he’d honour it, he grudgingly accepted and we were whisked through the traffic to arrive at the station with about ten minutes to spare.

The overnight sleeper train was nothing like the ones we had in Vietnam. Instead of individual cabins with four bunks, we found that the sleeping pods were not yet assembled, instead large berths of spacious front and back facing chairs lined the edged of the length of the train, almost like a normal train, despite the frame work of ladders and storage shelves in the aisles. Prue and I both had top bunks so sat on either side of the train, but no one sat opposite so we were able to spread out and swap seats. Given that the bottom bunks were booked out when we bought our tickets we figured more people would climb aboard further down the line.

The train was pretty nice, we were offered a menu to choose dinner and drinks, then when the food was on its way, the stewards made tables appear out of thin air (they were actually under the seats) then after a reasonable dinner they took them away, I wanted to keep my table, but was only able to stall for as long as it took to set up the bunks of the neighbouring berths. Like an Autobot the seats slid together and a pod dropped from the ceiling to reveal two sets of bunks, which were hastily and professionally assembled and then made.

In our top bunks Prue and I played humorous games of peek-a-boo over the tops of our privacy curtains while we relaxed and read. Eventually late in the night a couple of locals boarded the train and settled in the bunks below us. I made a mental note not to kick them in the head when I went to the toilet or for a cigarette. You can smoke between the carriages or in the toilets of trains in South East Asia. In Vietnam although the third class trains were non-smoking, most people still smoked in their seats. After dragging myself away from the book I was reading, I went to sleep, and actually slept quite comfortably.

Meanwhile the train powered on towards Bangkok, each kilometre closing the loop, completing our circle.

Chapter 5: Thai Tiger and the Prue Special

2010-01-15T20:00:00.002+11:00

I woke up feeling seedy after my conversation with the toilet before bed, I couldn’t remember any of the swear words I was taught during my conversation with the locals at the bar, the bar that caused my seediness. A knock on the door told us that the departure of 9am had been moved forward to 8am. It was 8:05am so we told them to give us a few minutes and started running around packing and cursing, while wishing I could remember how to do it in Laotian. The old lady at the front of the Guesthouse waived our pickup back, told us to slow down, and took our breakfast orders. Eventually we had shoved our sandwiches into our packs and followed the guy picking us up to the border.

By sheer luck our guesthouse was just around the corner from the Laos Immigration, which was no more than a small window on the way to the boat ramp. We piled into a long tail boat and were across the river entering Thailand, where we checked in at the mirror image Thai Immigration window, then piled into a stinky Sawng Thaew (Ute with bench seats in the tray) and were taken to the pickup point for the minibus to Chiang Mai. We were dropped off at a guesthouse and after a bit of embarrassing confusion we stopped arguing with the driver who we thought was trying to get commission for dropping us at a guesthouse.

We waited at the guesthouse with a lady from Ukraine and a older couple from Netherlands who had all been on our slow boat trip from Luang Prabang. The Netherlands couple had taken the 8am pickup and had been waiting an extra hour, we were glad we took our time as we still had nearly an hour to wait till the bus left. We were ushered to a luxury 16 seater minivan where we were treated to the added luxury of being the only people on the bus. So with multiple doses of comfort the five of us spread out across the minivan and enjoyed the five hour trip to Chiang Mai.

We arrived in Chiang Mai and were dropped at the guesthouse from the same chain as the one we departed. Unable to negotiate a fair rate with a Tuk-Tuk we decided to walk and were able to navigate our way to the guesthouse we had picked, both from the lonely planet book and from being recommended to us multiple times on our travels. We arrived at “Julie’s Guesthouse” and after meeting people along the way who told us they were full, we were relieved to find they had a private double room for Prue and I, only for one night, but we might be able to change the next day to another room. Julie’s is a very chilled out hostel style place with a large outdoor communal area with couches, tables, cushions and a pool table.

The other benefit of Julie’s is the massive range of tours available to be booked from the desk, with heaps of folders and pamphlets to scan through. So great was the number of tours it actually took us more than an hour just to decide on a shortlist. We only had two nights in Chiang Mai, which meant only one full day to do a tour as our last day would be cut short to catch the overnight train back to Bangkok. Our options involved an Off-Road motorbike adventure with Elephants, rafting, a waterfall and a local village. There was a tour with Elephants, white water rafting, a waterfall and a trip to the “Long neck village“. The last option on our shortlist was the “Flight of the Gibbons” which is a series of zip lines spread out across the canopy of the jungle.

All of them sounded awesome, but eventually we ruled out the one with the “Long neck people” as we found out the people who lived there didn’t actually really live there, they were forced to live there by the Thai Government who wanted to keep them as a tourist dollar maker. They actually lived further north near Chiang Rai and had even applied and been granted refugee status to New Zealand but the government of Thailand wouldn’t grant them an exit visa. We decided it best to boycott the “Long neck village” which left us two choices, we left the decision until after dinner and headed out for a feed of Italian food which we figured would be ok because of the Italian guy sitting in the restaurant. But in SE Asia everything is “same same but different“.

After spinning bottles and flipping coins we finally decided that we wanted to do the off road motorbike tour so we booked it for the next day, even though we were going to be the only people on the tour. After the two long days sitting on the slow boat and another five hours of bus that day we were well overdue for a massage and headed around the corner to find a traditional Thai massage place. Making the most of the very few chances we had left for $5.00 hour long full body massages.

It was strange to find that massage in northern Thailand was more similar to Laos massage than the massages we had in Bangkok. In fact there are vast changes in massage styles across all of the regions of SE Asia, some subtle changes between areas and some changes are completely different styles from one town to the next. Sometimes it may also depend on who gives the massage as Prue and I have compared notes later to find we had different massages, sometimes amusingly different. Either way the massage in Chiang Mai was very good and we promised to return the following evening. After a few drinks back at Julie’s we retired for the night well relaxed.

We awoke recharged and rearing to go, Julie’s served us a cheap but mediocre breakfast and eventually we were collected by a Thai-Canadian guy in a white shit-box car. We arrived at the tour place to find it was no more than a house with a carport and a desk under the carport. There were a few scooters scattered around with fat knobby tires giving them a slight sense of the hardcore. Our guides for the day were “Bet” and “Debt” two very alternative looking locals who were great fun and they showed us to our bikes. On a side note it wasn’t until I started typing this blog that I realised the irony of the two names “Debt” and “Bet”.

My bike was a Thai made “Tiger” model scooter with a slightly larger frame and engine than Prue’s scooter which was a regular Honda “Wave” type model. But with chunky tires, of course. We took them for a quick test ride around the block and Prue found her scooter was a little too high to feel comfortable. Bet and Debt pulled a small tool kit off the front of my bike, hoisted up Prue’s bike, removed the wheel and a miscellaneous piece of the back suspension . Within 15 minutes Prue’s bike was back on the road, but now it was about 3 inches shorter, tailored to her height.

Shortly after that we were all on the road, Prue riding the Honda Prue Special, me riding the Thai-Tiger and Bet and Debt two up on their own bike, with Debt steering and Bet hanging of the back taking action photos of us. Not far out on the highway I realised why not many Thai made scooters are around in a country with more scooters than dogs and cats combined. Hitting top speed my bike vibrated like it was receiving a phone call, which sent numbing waves through my body from the foot pegs all the way to my fingertips. Holding the handlebars was made even more challenging by the fact that the front tire and the handle bars weren’t at right angles, making my left hand closer to my body.

Thai Technology aside, the fact that we were doing top speed on our way out of the city was a good sign that Bet and Debt liked to go fast and have a lot of fun. How they managed to go faster than us while carrying a pillion speaks volumes for their confidence because soon we were off the highway and winding through country back roads, small villages and sweeping mountain curves. After an hour or so of fun on the Thai roads we arrived at a little roadside collection of bamboo shacks alongside a river in the village of Mae Wang. We changed into our bathers, played with some kittens that belonged to the place and were picked up by a Ute shortly after, with Prue riding shotgun and me standing in the tray, surfing to our destination.

We arrived upstream from our bamboo shacks and climbed onto a bamboo raft. This bamboo raft was much different to the one we had on the River Kwai, which was huge and had a seat with a roof on it. This bamboo raft was no more than about eight long pieces of bamboo tied together with what looked like a rope made of shredded tire. We drifted down the river peacefully as our local ferry-man steered us with a bamboo stick like a Venice Gondola. The river had a few little rapids which were fun as we’d duck and weave through them as nasty rocks glided by inches away. Then the river would turn peaceful again and we’d glide along between the overhanging jungle, passing small bamboo villages and a bamboo bar reminiscent of Vang Vieng.

Towards the end of the river our Gondola man turned toward us with a wicked grin, pointed down the river and said “waterfall!”. About 30 metres downstream the river dropped out of sight slightly. As we approached slowly gaining speed he turned again and said “hold on”, an obsolete command as we were already gripping as tightly as possible to the nonexistent handholds. The river dropped us about a metre and a half and we managed to stay on the raft, trumped by our Gondola man who rode the waterfall standing up and still steering.

Back at the bamboo shacks at Mae Wang we changed back into dry clothes and sat for a local serving of lunch. Then we jumped back on the ‘Thai-Tiger’ and ‘Prue Special’ and headed off up the road to the Elephant camp passing many Elephants just standing around on the side of the road, and even saw a few baby Elephants being mobbed by cameras on the road side. I stopped to add another camera, then sped off to catch up with Prue, Debt and Bet.

The Elephant ride was pretty dodgy, instead of the Mahout riding on the Elephant he dragged it with a rope tied to its ear, all the time smoking a banana leaf cigarette. Our Elephant didn’t seem to want to go for a walk that day as it stopped every time the Mahout slackened the rope and would make a noise that could only be interpreted as “growling”, sometimes it made noises out the other end too. The Mahout would grunt back at the Elephant and tug on the rope until it moved off again. We paid 20 Baht to buy a bunch of bananas for the Elephant as we felt it wasn’t the happiest Elephant and could probably use some comfort food.

The hills are impassable, absolutely impossible to pass, they’re impassable. That memorable line from the early 90’s PC game “Return to Zork” flooded my thoughts as we switched our scooters from bitumen mode into off road and rode gangbusters up the first hill. Our directions were simple, “first and second up the steep bits, and don’t fall off”. Easy enough to say as we navigated steep and narrow mountain trails trying to follow the tyre line with massive erosion cracks up to one metre deep in some places worn from the years of seasonal rain. Don’t step in those cracks or you really will break your back, dropping a scooter in one would be just as disastrous.

The perilous cracks in the road were laughable compared to the steep cliffs and hill drops that flanked either side of the slippery dirt track, making crashing into a tree a preferential option. Thankfully we didn’t come asunder at any point, and fuelled by a injection of raw adrenaline we found ourselves navigating our off-road beasts up and down the twisty tracks at steady pace, grinning and “whooping” each time the back wheel tried to get in front of the front wheel. While posing for Bet and Debt who would stop 100 metres in front of us to get a photo as we skidded past them.

On the other side of the first mountain we found our self cruising into a tiny village called Ban Sam Lang inhabited by a family of twelve people from the “Karen” minority group. They spoke their own dialect, never travelled into town, occasionally traded with nearby villages as they were entirely self sufficient on the mountain. Bet spoke enough of their language mixed with a bit of Thai to have a conversation with them and we learnt a little about their way of life. I smoked a bamboo cigarette with the grandmother who at 84 years old was still going strong, and watched the daughter hand sewing beautiful scarves, who was married and nursing her new baby at the age of 14.

After saying “goodbye” and “thankyou” in their local dialect (which I now forget) we climbed back on the Thai-Tiger and the Prue Special and charged back over another mountain following Debt and Bet as best as we could. The landscape changed into tall woodland trees, the path narrowed to no more than two tyre widths and our confidence was tested as we reached the first obstacle, a river crossing. The crossing was just a tree trunk lined with bamboo slats stretching for about 15 metres across the river. We both made it across with ease, albeit quite nervously.

Shortly down the track we arrived at a much smaller river, this one had just a few tree branches stretching across it with gaps between each branch. Prue’s tire got stuck in one of the gaps and she tipped over sideways but was caught by Bet just in time to save her (and the bike) from falling in the river. On the other side they were satisfied there had been no damage so I lined up the thickest branch and cranked the throttle and used the sheer momentum to plough across the makeshift bridge.

A little while later Prue started struggling on the hills, and couldn’t change down gears. Scooters have cyclic gear boxes so every time she wanted to go back to first gear she had to go up to fourth to click over to first gear. Eventually sick of it, she pulled over and Bet and Debt used their best “bush-mechanic” skills to fix the problem. Prue’s foot peg had bent upward when the bike got caught in the bridge, stopping the gear pedal from going down far enough to change down. Debt and Bet grabbed a tree branch and bashed on the foot peg until they were satisfied.

Eventually the track turned into a dirt road which rose to the top of a hill and became bitumen road. As we turned onto the road the pace got faster again and we wished we had real motorbikes as we cruised around twisty mountain roads, stopping at a hill top temple with a panoramic view, a gigantic golden Buddha, carved rocks dating back hundred and hundreds of years and the longest name I’ve ever heard “Wat Pra Tat See Sam Debt Pra Budda Chin Na Wong“. At the top of the lookout we could hear chanting coming via speaker from a village in the town far below. We asked Bet what the chanting was, to which he replied, “Oh, that is the local news, tomorrow there is a meeting in town and a special event at the local temple, etc”.

We headed back down the 300 steps from the temple to where Debt was waiting with the bikes and headed off towards Mae Sa Park Waterfall, a picturesque waterfall hidden behind a valley of farmland. We stopped for a photo opportunity then jumped back on the bikes for the long trip home. On the way home we were treated to yet another beautiful sunset, and stopped on the roadside next to a group of Eucalyptus trees for another photo and a breather. Arriving back in the traffic chaos of Chiang Mai just as darkness set in and we played the Thai version of Vietnamese slalom as we kept up with Bet and Debt in crazy traffic all the way back to their home base.

Bet promised to drop off a CD with photos to our hostel the next morning and after dropping us back in the white shit-box car we said our goodbyes. We had such a fun day, but one thing was a certainty as we were walking like cowboys, it was obvious we needed another massage. After picking up our new room keys from Julie’s we had a shower and changed, then headed back to the massage place from the night before. We walked in and asked politely, with an air of embarrassment, for massages with a…err…umm… “special focus on our bottoms“.

Intermission: The Epic Bloggers

2010-01-15T03:12:00.002+11:00

G’day Everyone,

At the beginning it was relatively easy to keep our blog up to date, with long bus rides, train rides and evenings by the pool bar providing the hours required to write everything down. Eventually we started to lag behind like a online multiplayer on a slow internet connection. Meanwhile the events of each day seemed to become more grand and adventurous making each post longer. The blog’s intention was to keep our friends and family (Hello!) up to date with our adventures, but most importantly for us it was a medium for us to keep a travel journal so that we can remember, and even revisit through storytelling, the places we’ve been, the people we’ve met and the things that happened.

Looking back through the blog from time to time it already feels like the events of the first few posts happened in another lifetime. A short while into the blog the idea of publishing everything into a book for ourselves was mentioned to us, at the time it seemed a bit self indulgent, however as the blog grew and the adventures continued the idea of matching the posts to a collection of our photos and producing a full colour coffee table book started taking shape, then the shape grew larger and larger and we were all crushed under the weight of the book. Possibly.

At this point in time we are roughly four weeks behind and trying hard to play catch up. The problem has always been finding time to sit and write the blog. For the last month or so, finding any spare time is best spent doing as little as possible, like sleeping. Being on the road (holidays or not) for so long is physically and emotionally draining. We’ve spent the last week in Austria, where we had a fantastic time at Laura and Headley’s wedding, but decided that maybe we should let them have a break and some time to themselves, and seeing that as good advice decided to do the same for ourselves.

So here we are, deep in the south east of Austria staying in a homely self-contained apartment in an old farmhouse attached to the farm, in a place where not many non-German speakers (if any) have ever been before. The landscape littered with hills, forests, villages and churches and smothered in thick snow. You may read about it in a few weeks when the blog catches up. Our aim is to do as little as possible, and in this time we have been able to write a few blog posts, sort through photos and just relax in general.

The hard thing about writing the blog so long after the events you are writing about have taken place is remembering what actually happened. When you do arrive at the starting point for a new post the memory takes form chronologically with each event unfurling after the next. This is where the blog posts tend to become rather long, (and seem to be getting longer) as each event seems as important in the grand scheme of things as the next, whether they are or not. But we like to think that the small insignificant details add colour and flavour to the story, like red cordial in beer, it may not be the best idea but some people drink it.

So on that note, as we sit here by the heater in our little snow covered cabin in -3 degree temperatures, remembering events that took place in 35 degree tropical jungle. I’m going to have to ask you, as the reader to make a small allowance of us. Be patient with the frequency of our posts and their longwinded lengthiness. Remember that this blog is as much for us as it is for everyone else.

Thank you for following along with us, and please keep posting comments as it is really nice to hear your thoughts. For those of you who want, you can follow the blog by clicking ‘follow’ and providing an email, this will send the new posts straight to your email.

Your only other option is to just stop reading… Now.

Lots of love,
Drew and Prue Elmer

Slow Boat is Slow

2010-01-11T02:16:00.002+11:00

After a cheap breakfast we headed towards the slow boat. We now had 170,000 kip and no time to go up to town to try the ATM again, so we had no way of getting money. Nervous yet? We tried to put it out of our minds so we could enjoy our boat ride. We walked down to the boats which were lined up with their noses resting on the sandy bank of the Mekong. The boat is about 30m long and about 3m wide and looks like a long hollow pencil. We found our names sitting on a piece of paper taped to a pair of car seats that had been welded to a frame and placed on one side of the boat. Comfort was a luxury on the slow boat, as most of the other passengers were sitting on wooden pews or on the floor. We were thankful we had booked direct the day before.

Cruising down the river was peaceful and beautiful. The engine of the boat roared loudly but unobtrusively, and after a while became no more than a background drone. In the morning the mist was thick and didn’t lift till nearly noon, giving the surrounding hills an eerie and mysterious quality (probably because we couldn‘t really see them). Unfortunately this also meant the sun was unable to contact us. So we were quite bloody cold. Although, as I write this blog post, sitting in a snow covered airport in Munich, the cold of the boat ride seems almost laughable compared to our 5am hike through the snow to the train this morning. By comparison, the Mekong boat trip was quite toasty, yet at the time it felt really cold to us.

Eventually the sun did break through the fog and the mists parted revealing more grand mountains covered in lush jungle rising straight from the riverbank to the skies. We trundled along past fishermen and fishing villages and it seemed that almost the entire river was used at some time as a local source of life, although the quality of life may have been something foreign to us. Arriving at a small village we unloaded a few goods and a couple of locals, a herd of local women approached our boat holding what looked like fried guinea pigs, rats and even a cat. A dog was shoved in a sack and thrown onto the front of the boat, while we listened to the yelp from the village as another dog was slaughtered for dinner. We put on our best disapproving faces and glared at the locals as our boat headed off again.

After watching what was probably our thirtieth gorgeous sunset (it’s a hard life) we drifted slowly into the tiny village of Pak Beng, our stop over point for the first night. Climbing up the steep sandy bank we dodged the usual locals holding flyers for their guesthouses and made way for the cheapest guest house listed in the Lonely Planet. Finding the guest house or first question was to ask if they had credit card facilities or if there was an ATM in town. The man laughed directly at us and explained that not only did the town not have ATMs but the power was all run by generator and there were no phone lines. We gave him 80,000 kip, which left us with 90,000 for dinner and breakfast.

Trying to arrange breakfast we were told we could also pay with Thai Baht. We actually had a little Baht left over in my backpack and we dumped the horde of coins and notes onto our bed and counted out roughly six dollars worth. I also had two American one dollar notes stashed in my wallet and with our remaining Laos Kip we had roughly US$19.00, a small fortune by South East Asian standards. We had two options, the first was to starve ourselves until we reached the border the next day so that we would at least have enough to stay somewhere if the border was closed and there were no ATMs. Our second option was to throw caution to the wind and find a restaurant for dinner and use our Baht to buy breakfast hoping that there would be an ATM in the next town.

We stuffed ourselves with 90,00 kip worth of delicious Indian food. There are lots of Indian restaurants in Laos, and finding one in a tiny little village like Pak Beng wasn’t too unusual. The town thrives on the nightly stop over of travellers riding the two day Mekong cruise. Note the word “Traveller” rather than “Tourist”, as the popular Mekong route from Thailand to Laos does not cater for tourist luxuries. Our second day, we too were without luxury, as our boat didn’t have any comfortable car chairs welded to a frame on the deck. We had wooden pews, whose back rest’s were to far forward so you had to constantly push back with your legs to stop yourself from falling forward. We pushed the pews to the side and laid on our Backpacks instead.

There are two ways to do the Mekong river tour, the option we chose was the two day “slow boat” trip, with a one night stopover and a less than certain time of arrival at the Laos border before it closes. The Laos immigration closes at 6pm and the slow boat was expected to arrive at 5:30pm giving us just enough time to get over the border to meet a bus bound for Chiang Mai on the Thai side of the border. We really wanted to get to Chiang Mai as quick as possible as we now only had a few days left until our flight to London. So needles to say we were hoping to arrive in time to cross the border and avoid spending a night at the border town of Huay Xai.

The other option was the one day “fast boat”, this is know as the kamikaze approach, several people are killed each year on these. Basically it is a speed boat, but it is more like a fat canoe with a V8 engine strapped to the back. Passengers on the boat are given mandatory life jackets and helmets to wear, then they huddle together with grimaced faces as the boat hammers down the river dodging rocks like Luke Skywalker dodges trees on his speeder bike on the Endor moon. While this may be the much faster option, the looks of horror of the faces of the victims speeding by us, or at least the ones brave enough to look up, let us know we’d made the better choice. Well at least the safer more scenic and peaceful choice.

There is probably a element of jaded conspiracy paranoia about the next part of this story. But the facts show a scam worthy of the Vietnamese. The border for Laos closes at 6pm, however the Thai side of the border is open until 8pm. Everyday the slow boat arrives full of people wanting to cross the border and yet the border closes early and at about the same time that most people would be arriving at the border. We pulled slowly up the river between Huay Xai in Laos on our right and Chiang Kong in Thailand on our left. We could see the Laos immigration on the bank, about a one minute swim from the boat, and we could see the pier for docking our boat. But we only watched the minute hand on our watches tick over.

We arrived at the pier at around 5:30pm, this left us 30 minutes to disembark, grab a Tuk-Tuk and get to the Border office, plenty of time. No, our boat shunted backwards and forward appearing to be having trouble docking. The previous night docking had been no problem as we had literally lined up a gap between two boats and rammed our way between them until we reached the shore. But when every minute counted our boat waited and did nothing. We started getting really agitated and we believed that it was because these slimy fuckers were getting a kickback from the local guesthouses. The same guesthouses who had their representatives waiting with flyers on the shore.

When it reached 6pm and it was apparent that there was no way we could cross the border and would therefore have to spend our money on a Guesthouse, the boat magically worked out how to dock, and with a simple manoeuvre we were hitched to the pier and clambering ff the boat, our blood boiling. We pushed past the guesthouse representatives and walked up the hill looking for the Tuk-Tuk that was supposed to collect us a part of our ticket price. By the time we reached the top of the hill we realised we were on our own and as we had no money we had to walk 20 minutes into town.

Thankfully in town we found an ATM that worked, and with our pockets once again lined with gold we found a guesthouse, checked on our pickup for the border crossing and bus to Chiang Mai, then headed out for dinner and a couple of drinks. In the bar we met a couple from England who it turned our had been staying in Vang Vieng at the same time as us and in the same Guesthouse as us. Even more coincidently they had partied with Beau and still owed Ollie money. But of course that wouldn’t mean anything unless you read the earlier blog. After a few drinks with some locals where one of us got very drunk and learnt a lot of swear words in the Laotian language, we crashed out for our last night in Laos.

All of the remaining photos for our South East Asian Leg are now up on Drew’s face book, we are still trying to catch up the blog and we’ll post a link to all of the photos after we finish the remaining blogs for Chiang Mai and Bangkok. We are in Austria at the moment were we celebrated a magical wedding night for Laura and Headley last night, and as we are both a bit seedy today we’ve finally had some time to stop and catch up.

The Monks.

2010-01-04T11:24:00.000+11:00

With sad faces we headed out from Vang Vieng on another “VIP” bus. This one had fans too and at least Drew and I had a seat. We had a number of people saying it was a long and uneventful bus ride, but we had an amazing time. The bus wound through some amazing mountains that towered above the road and even though we were a long way up they were even taller. We wound our way up through the mountains past small villages perched on the sides of the narrow road. Some of the ones we went past had signs saying World Vision Australia or something similar. The beautiful green scenery moved and flowed and then flowed down into the valley that holds Luang Prabang.

Luang Prabang is a small town that has a long history which is strongly intertwined with the Buddhist faith. We arrived at the bus station and caught a group tuk-tuk into town. We found ourselves dropped in what we thought was the middle of nowhere. The street stretched for as far as we could see and there was almost no one around. All of us who jumped out spent a few minutes standing around trying to figure out where to go from here. Finally we mainly split up and after spotting a restaurant that we knew was on the main street we headed to where there seemed to be a market setting up.

We wound our way through the stalls and made for some hotels we had found in the Lonely Planet that sounded really nice. Sadly when we got to each we found that the room rates were around twice what the Lonely Planet had suggested. We were then directed off the main street to some more places a street or two back. Two streets back was the road that ran along the river and this sounded like a nice place to spend a few days we got some room rates and in the end these were even more expensive than the main street. Getting up to the hundreds of Australian Dollars. We stepped one street back to the middle road and found a range of midrange hotels. In the end we picked one on a cross street that cost about $20US but was one of the nicest hotels we’d stayed in so far.

It was late already and we decided to head to bed after grabbing some food. The next morning we got up to see arguably the most amazing and lovely cultural experience so far. The procession of the Monks in Luang Prabang has been happening for many many hundreds of years and probably more than that. The monks from each of the different Temples (of which there are heaps) walk in single file through the streets and are given food such as rice and in some cases fruit. This is how the monks are fed and they only eat two meals a day. So at the crack of dawn Drew and I stumbled downstairs and out onto the street to see several long lines of orange clad monks make there way along several of the roads.

Along each of the roads was a row of local ladies and men, both old and young. They sat on ratan mats with their feet tucked under them and in a practical fashion gave small handfuls of rice to the hundreds of monks that passed by them each morning, They sat back and chatted while waiting for the next temple’s group of monks to make it down their part of the street. After watching such an amazing thing we stumbled back to bed and (thanks to finally getting a comfy bed) we slept in very late. After waking and having breakfast we rented two very pink push bikes and went out for a ride around the town.

We rode all over the main part of the old town and made out way down to a funky new bar that had made it into the Lonely Planet before it was even finished. Utopia lives up to it’s name providing comfortable pillows and small tables so that you can lounge around and eat and drink in peace. It also comes complete with beautiful tropical garden and spectacular view of the river and mountains beyond. We spent a few hours chillin’ before heading back to drop off our bikes. They were great fun, though after 30 mins riding them back uphill we remembered why we loved motorbikes.

We wondered around the old town, had some dinner and after looking through the market started looking at the day tours available. We ended up deciding on doing something that was related to elephants again. We chose a provider that looked the most upstanding and non-dodgy of all of them and parted with a tidy sum so we could spend the day learning to be Mahouts. A Mahout is a person that works with elephants and the tour would include getting on and off and commanding the elephant all by ourselves. Drew and I organised to do it the next day.

We woke up and watched the Monks again and wandered up to the main street to see if it was any different there. This is where we were shocked to see people getting up close to the Monks and taking photo’s right up in their faces. It was a shocking and saddening thing. We couldn’t believe that people had such little respect for the culture and the people. We walked back down to our quiet little back street and sat and watched the ladies give out the last of their rice. We grabbed some breakfast and then were picked up for our tour.

We were taken out to a lovely site where the elephants were standing around with a huge group of tourists waiting to ride them. It was a long way from getting our own elephant for the entire day which is what we were promised. We made the best of it though and using the commands we were taught got the elephant to lift it’s leg up and push us up onto it’s back. Then using the voice commands we got it to take us for a small walk. We then waited and chatted with the others in our group. There were a few people from England and Australia including a mother and daughter, the mother was 84 and had kept having people say ‘but she’s still got all her own teeth’ to her.

They were all lovely and we climbed back on the elephants and headed out for a short trek through the jungle and along the river. We headed back and had lunch and then bathed our elephants in the river before they headed out to the jungle to forage for food with their Mahouts. We then headed upriver to a beautiful waterfall via a small speed boat. We all went swimming though the water was icy. Then after drying off we headed back down the river, half way down we actually ran out of petrol and after a brief flurry of hand signals with a local, a man came over and filled the boat back up. We headed back into town and found some dinner before crashing into bed after a very eventful day.

We again slept in the next day and missed both the Monks and the morning. After booking our slow boat up river the next day we decided just to wander around and chill out for the day. We ate at a lovely restaurant on the riverside and through the old town again. After walking up to the temple on a high peak in the middle of town with all the other tourists, we watched the sunset then we made our way down into the markets. We lined up with a bunch of freaked out backpackers and it was soon realised that something was seriously wrong.

The ATM was down and after trying several others and even a cash out option at a shop that used the same bank we realised that the biggest bank in Laos was down. NO CASH in a country without eftpos!!! I had just bought a lovely bag that took a large chunk of the small amount of cash we had left on us. We had no food and ended up having to eat noodles on the side of the road for 20,000 which works out to be about .80cents. In the end Drew got a small amount out of one of our cards but not enough to do much more than settle the bills at the hotel and leave us with about 200,000 Kip. We decided to head to bed, lest we spend more of that last lot of cash.

We woke up early again and after wash my hands carefully I headed downstairs to participate in the Monks procession. There are ladies that you can buy some rice off to give to some Monks along with the local. After negotiating hard I knelt down and participated in the ancient tradition. I placed rice and fruit in three different groups of Monks baskets we had a cheap breakfast and made our way down to the boats counting our last 190,000 Kip…

"Happy Place" - Part II

2009-12-28T02:06:00.002+11:00

The next morning in Vang Vieng we awoke a little groggy and organised ourselves for the tour. Unfortunately I didn’t know that the shared bathroom on the right had a hot shower. But using the cold shower bathroom on the left woke me up pretty fast. Sitting to breakfast was a moment in itself. During the course of our typical eggs and baguette breakfast, I think I looked up at the view and said “look at that” with dumb astonishment no less than twenty five times. Really, it was that beautiful.

We were collected for the tour and dropped at the tour office where we met up with Rachael who gave a little embarrassed smile and we also met a Israeli guy called Yossi. As we waited to leave we wondered where the other five backpackers where. Eventually we were ushered onto a jumbo Tuk-Tuk with about 10 Thai tourists. Arriving at the first stop we were a little pissed off. We were told the maximum tour size was nine people and that our tour would be full of backpackers like us. Instead there were about 15 of us, the Thai tourists ignored us, the tour guides had to explain everything twice and we were told that we were already running late so we would have to wait before we could enter the caves.

After walking through a serene little village we arrived at the first cave, more of an opening in the rock and only about 10m deep. This cave was called Elephant cave due to a large stalactite that actually did look like an elephant, albeit the slightly smooth surface suggested that there may have been a little bit of human intervention in its formation. After a children’s folk story about the local myths, we walked through the local village to the opening of another cave. This was known as “Water Cave” and the cave opened like mouth with a small river running out of it’s dark depths.

We had to wait while another tour went into the cave and came out again, and sat outside the cave on the smooth river stones and tormented the local ducks by throwing pebbles to them. No matter how many times a duck realises you are throwing stones to it, it still tries to pick it up and eat it, this possibly why ducks never invented the wheel. Eventually it was our turn to go into the cave. Prue decided there was no way her claustrophobic self was going in and was more than happy to wait with the ducks. So Rachel, Yossi and I climbed into the tubes, grabbed the guide rope and hoisted our way into the darkness.

After turning the first corner the cave was pitch black, we had a battery pack hanging around our necks and a miners headlamp. The battery pack was a little worrying as the whole thing was regularly submerged in water, but there is no such thing as OH&S in South East Asia and luckily I found myself not electrocuted. Caving was fun, dark, cold and wet, but still fun. We pulled ourselves through the cave on a rope for the first part, then after reaching a shallow part we walked hunched over for a bit, got back into the tubes to paddle against the current until we reached the end of the cave where we did it all again in reverse.

Back outside in the sunshine we were fed lunch which included a baguette each. This time the ducks were most impressed to find the things we threw at them were actually edible. Then we walked back through the village to the river where the kayaks waited. The tour guide pulled aside the Thai tourists and in Thai he explained in great depth the absolute basics of how to kayak. After 15 minutes he finished and walked over to us and asked if we had ever Kayaked before, we all nodded, he told us to follow the guides and he motioned for us to get in a Kayak.

The Kayaking was nice, we couldn’t really go very fast because we had to keep stopping to wait for the Thai tourist to catch up, which meant about 30 seconds of paddling, followed by 3 mins of drifting or back paddling. There were some little rapids to add a bit of excitement. But really none of it mattered when you stopped and looked around you couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the magnificent views. I’m probably banging on about the scenery a bit too much, but it is totally deserving of the praise. Eventually as we winded our way peacefully down the river for about 5kms, we slowly drifted towards the energetic sounds of a big phat throbbing subwoofer pumping away, we had arrived at “The Tubing”.

The setup is like something from Peter Pan, wooden platforms with rope swings and zip lines sprout from each side of the river launching screaming partiers high into the air before dropping them deep into the water. The platforms are covered with masses of drunken men and women, dancing like tribal warriors to the beat, in an epic orgy of hedonistic mayhem. The conservative nature of Laos people is forgotten in this place. We pulled our Kayaks up to the second platform and became almost instantly absorbed by the party atmosphere. After buying a beer from an eight year old boy I scrambled up the first rope swing tower and took the first of many high flying plunges into the river.

The Tubing place is a hell of a lot of fun. The tubes themselves are practically useless and can become a burden as they carry hefty fees for loosing them or returning them after a certain time. The entire place can easily be navigated by swimming around or walking. Most people never make it past the first bar, which is easily understandable as it is so much fun, there is no reason to go any further. By the time they do make it to the second bar they are usually shit faced. This was the condition we met the English couple from the night before in (Emma and Tim). Emma was so drunk that Tim couldn’t get her out of the tube, she was almost face down in the water, and eventually Tim decided it best to put her back in the tube and float home down the river.

Then we met Shaun and his girlfriend. Shaun was a typical bogan Aussie who had been deprived of Aussie contact, something we found strange considering the number of Aussies in Asia. Maybe the other Aussies were avoiding him. With a drunken slur Shaun threw his arm over my shoulder and asked me my name, he did this about five more times in the following hour that he decided we would be best friends and have a drink together. Every time I flew off the rope swing, Shaun would scramble up behind me. Shaun’s girlfriend was getting a bit worried as each time he went off the swing it took him longer and longer to get back up the river bank. Prue and Shaun’s girlfriend managed to talk each other into having a go on the swing, and flew off in tandem, squealing with joy.

I never did get to have that beer with Shaun, we all headed down to the last bar at the end of the river and as we got there we saw Shaun trying to get out of his tube, he was too drunk and couldn’t do it. Shaun’s girlfriend helped him back into the tube and they too floated home. At the last bar we caught up with the four UK girls from our nightmare bus ride and we partied until darkness started to set in. Prue and Rachael braved the gigantic slide and I flew from the biggest swing, getting so much air that I had time to look over at a guy on the bank who said “Whoa, that’s massive air bro!”, I replied with an even bigger splash.

After getting back to town we changed into dry clothes and met up with Rachael and Yossi again at the BBQ kebab place for dinner. Eventually we said our goodbyes and separated, Prue and I headed back to the Guest House to chill out. The town wasn’t as busy and wild as it had been the night before, I grabbed a couple of beers from the café and settled into the hammock with a book and sparked up a joint I had left over from the night before. After awhile my peaceful bliss was interrupted by a couple of American guys who were trying to get into the pants of a couple of Japanese girls, but they had some more pot so it wasn’t all bad.

Earlier in the night Prue had met a man outside the cabin who looked fairly geeky and in his late thirties, he didn‘t fit the mould of the backpacker crowd, in fact he stuck out like dog‘s balls. He was acting fairly nervous and freaking out about some unknown substance in his shake the previous day. When he wandered out to sit beside me on the balcony he was still sporting the same first impression. After a few polite introductory conversations the geeky man implied nervously that he wanted to get some “Marijuana” to calm himself down. I pointed him to the chilled out bar and explained the casual approach of ordering a beer. After an hour he hadn’t quite talked himself into it, and midnight was approaching, so I sighed, rolled out of the hammock, and offered to hold his hand.

Back at the chilled out bar again things were quite different, the place was quiet. I ordered two beers, two spliffs, pocketed one, gave the other to the geek and we sat down by the fire. The geeky guy sat uncomfortably and made obtuse observations rather than conversation. To make it worse, he didn’t pass the spliff, I didn’t mind, but a few of the hippy looking scruffians by the fire seemed to casually notice, especially after he had a few puffs and let it go out. When he got up to go to the toilet I found out that the hippy looking scruffians had been in Vang Vieng for eight days already. They looked like they had spent eight days going hard Vang Vieng style, their edges were frayed and they collectively stared at the fire, while staring through the fire, and probably well beyond.

One of the locals came over to the fire and motioned for us to stop smoking as it was nearing midnight. I tried to ask him if it had been much, much busier the night before or if it was my imagination. Language barriers struck me at a dead end, possibly because I had asked if it was “chocka block”, suddenly one of the hippy girls jumped to life and said “Chocka Block! Oh my god! Chockas!”. Apparently the poor little Kiwi hadn’t heard many colloquialisms of late, and was a little bit too excited by the use of “chocka block”. This made the geeky guy more nervous, possibly from not knowing what “chockas” meant so we returned to the Guest House, where I slunk back into the hammock.

Midnight in the hammock was another unique sensory experience, while the geeky guy and I exchanged puffs on his joint the sounds of the town blared on around us loudly. From our vantage point we could hear the bars of the island, with the two largest stereos playing their individual tracks, but from above the tracks blended together creating a messy hybrid song, like a B-grade remix. Then in an instant it was gone and there was no sound at all. The town was plunged again into silence and darkness. Then came the chaotic sounds of the crowds below. Rising from whispers to talking and then shouting, as if an imaginary force was slowly turning the master volume up.

The geeky guy found his relaxation in the peace and quiet and slinked off to bed, leaving me the rest of his joint, which I offered up to the American guys, who had failed to plant the finishing moves on the Japanese girls, who had also gone to bed. The American guys had arrived in Vang Vieng earlier that evening and arriving after dark had not seen any of the view. I spoke to them for a while, and took great pleasure in telling them they’d shit happy bricks in the morning when they see the view of the mountains. I didn’t see them in the morning, but I did see the view, again finding myself in dumbstruck awe while eating the typical omelette and baguette breakfast, pointing at the view and nudging Prue saying “look at that!”

We originally arrived in Vang Vieng after a spectacularly scenic bus ride. Two days later we were boarding the bus bound for Luang Prabang, another bus ride. This bus trip was heralded as one of the most hellish bus rides in Laos. We would have liked to have spent more time in Vang Vieng (I’d even consider applying for a Laos Citizenship and move there) but unfortunately our time restraints were still hitting us hard. So we pressed on to Luang Prabang on a bus that wasn’t at all hellish, unless you’d called it hellishly beautiful. We wound our way through more spectacular mountains, flying sideways around corners as usual. I suppose it is the corners people complain about, but mountains would be boring if the roads were straight.

“Happy” Place. - Part I

2009-12-27T05:53:00.001+11:00

Hedonism, a word that promises so much. In Vang Vieng it delivers. “Heaven” might be a better word, “Utopia” or “Paradise” also fit the mould. Whatever word you use, in Vang Vieng I found my happy place, and I think my life was cut into two parts; before and after Vang Vieng.

There is a lot of things wrong with the place. Drunken backpackers stagger the streets wearing inappropriate clothing despite the signs that ask not to offend the locals. All of the bars show endless re-runs of “Friends” or “Family Guy” and if you ask for a beer at most bars, you are presented a second “happy” menu listing a varying cocktail of drugs from the humble joint of Weed to a Magic Mushroom milkshake or an Opium pancake. The bars have a 12am curfew, forcing drunk and drug fucked backpackers into the streets with no where to go and the guesthouse we chose from the book was at the very top of the hill on a long dirt road covered in sharp rocks and pot holes.

It can also be said that there is a lot right with Vang Vieng. The streets and bars are full of easy going backpackers with a collective mission of having a good time and making new friends. The bars are relaxed affairs, with cushions and coffee tables the only furnishings, TV and music to zone out to, and the bar serves and endless plethora of poisons to suit all tastes. Although the bars close at midnight the locals still pop their head out from the door of their stores offering sandwiches and perhaps a beer to keep the party fuelled well beyond the midnight hour. And as our guest house was at the top of the hill, setting a relaxed atmosphere away from the party sound, with an uninterrupted view of the breathtaking mountains.

I guess it is just a matter of perspective… Some people love Vang Vieng and rave about it to their fellow travellers while sporting the souvenir T-Shirt. Some people don’t like Vang Vieng, put off by the reckless behaviour of the intoxicated backpacker crowd who dominate the tourist demographic. Whichever side off the fence you sit on, one thing is certain; no one can deny the magnificent setting of Vang Vieng.

We travelled to Vang Vieng with the knowledge that it was a party town full of backpackers, we assumed there was a river as we had heard about the tubing. Tubing basically consists of jumping in an inflated inner tube and floating down a river from one bar to the next, getting pissed. Allegedly a few people die from tubing every now and then, but we all know alcohol and swimming is dangerous. Fun yes, but still dangerous. So it was a great surprise to approach Vang Vieng with a horizon filled with some of the most magnificent mountains South East Asia has to offer.

Vang Vieng is only a small town but packs enough punch to get a map marker. The town runs along the edge of peaceful river lined with Asian jungle at the foothills of the Sawtooth Mountains, a gigantic and rugged mountain range which is described as “rising up like the back of a Stegosaurus”. The natural setting is enhanced by the laid back style of the town, with bamboo and other wood the prominent building materials.

Our Guest House was built in this style. For 30,000 Dong ($3.75) we booked into a wooden cabin like room with no more than a double bed covered with a mozzie net, a power point and a light. We had a shared bathroom and a communal area with a hammock, some cushions and a couple of day beds around a coffee table. Below the cabins, an open air cafe led to a steep stairway down to a bamboo bridge across the river to bungalows. The bungalows were almost three times as much (still cheap) as the cabin room. But when we saw the view from the top of our hill -where our cabins and café were- we instantly knew we had picked the best spot in town.

After settling in we walked back down the hill grabbed a meal at a café overlooking the mountains and wandered through the main strip. We sussed out a few tour operators. With the mountains, river and nearby caves, Vang Vieng is an adventure haven offering rock climbing, hiking, mountain biking, kayaking, caving and so on. We wanted to get a bit more out of Vang Vieng than just renting an inner tube and heading to the river bars, so we booked a kayaking and caving tour for the next day. The tour would end up at the tubing place where we would be able to swing off rope swings, fly down zip lines and launch from a giant slide into the river. I was exited about the tubing place, what man doesn’t like jumping off shit into water?

Prue had made friends with a girl from Brisbane somewhere between Vientiane and Vang Vieng and we ran into her in front of the tour place. She also decided to book our tour, and the tour guide promised us a small tour with five other backpackers who had already booked, so it all sounded perfect. We also ran into the Russian couple (who were actually Finnish) from the morning’s wait for the bus, in case you wanted to know; they were well. To make things just that little bit more perfect we walked back to our guesthouse just in time for sunset. Prue wanted to get to her Bag and left me two thirds of the way up the hill at a really chilled out looking bar with a sunset view. I walked up to the bar and asked for a beer…

The bartender placed a beer on the bar and a small tin which he subtly gestured towards. Written on the tin was another secret “happy” menu listing a variety of drugs served in interesting ways. I ordered a joint and he motioned for me to smoke over by the fire where two other guys sat relaxing. The fire was pretty much the perfect place to sit, I’d assumed they asked me to smoke there to mask the smell of the joint as drugs are still illegal in Laos. Either way I had a lovely fire and a perfect view of the sunset falling directly between two mountains, while the river and jungle spread out across the foreground.

I sat down, put down my beer and pulled out the camera, a man to my left looked over at me and said in a drawling voice “the sun”. He seemed pretty wasted, and so did the guy to my right, who then joined the conversation by saying absolutely nothing at all. A short while later the sun had dropped below the horizon and so had my brain. Having not smoked a joint in a long time, I found myself feeling pretty out of it. As paranoia and insecurity surrounded me, I decided it was time to bail out and headed back to the guest house to find Prue.

Back at the guest house Prue was chilling out in the Cabin reading a book. I laid down and zoned out for a while feeling myself drifting off into a higher plain of existence where I reached a realisation that the length of our lives was completely determined by our willingness to ignore the possibility of stopping and everything and everyone was connected by a gigantic rolling ball of energy that rolled around talking about me behind my back while I pretended I couldn’t hear it until it was satisfied I wasn’t interesting enough to pay attention to. Thankfully after a while I needed a cigarette, so I braved the exterior of the cabin, walked out the front door and ran straight into a half naked man.

Beau was from a small town that Prue and I both forgot the name of, somewhere in country Victoria. He was travelling with a guy called Ollie who later became quite an enigma, we never met Ollie but people kept mentioning him as if everyone knew who he was. Ten days later in the border town of Chiang Kong on the edge of the Thai-Laos border we ran into a couple who not only knew Beau, but had been staying at the guest house around the same time as us, and still owed Ollie money. Prue heard Ollie shouting and carrying on later that night, but never spoke to him, and the reason for his shouting comes later in the story. But enough about Ollie.

Beau had managed to pull a sense of logic back into the frame with his earnest country smile and humour, we chatted for a long time with him standing half naked in the doorway and me sidestepping like a boxer trying not to be very interesting in case the giant rolling ball of energy started taking interest in me again. Luckily I managed to stay under the radar, although I think I confused both Beau and Prue when I asked who the people over there were that seemed to know everything that was going on. “What people?” was the reply.

We let Beau put some clothes on, stepped around a drunken Aussie in a hoodie that looked like he’d ordered from the “happy menu” a few too many times, and the three of us headed down to the main strip for dinner. Once we got to the main strip we seemed to reach a point where we were at the epicentre of the town and couldn’t decide where to go from there. For a long time we stood in the middle of the street talking to each other and random people as they passed us by. Such is the spirit of Vang Vieng where every one seems open and carefree, strangers make eye contact, say “hello” and stop to chat and no one seems to be judgmental. Well except the locals, who are always watching…like a giant rolling ball of energy.

Standing on the street we ran into two of the girls from the UK who were on our nightmare bus trip from Hanoi, they were still wet, covered in texta, half drunk and raving about the fun they’d had tubing. Right next to us was a restaurant with a BBQ out the front showcasing an array of kebabs. Decision for dinner made, we walked in to find the exception to the rule about the locals watching you; the waiters aren’t. Service was impossible and sometimes comical. People would stand up waving their arms around like the ground crew on a Air Craft Carrier only to be thoroughly ignored. We sat with another couple who were friends of Beau’s (and also knew Ollie) and enjoyed delicious kebabs.

After awhile Rachael (the girl from Brisbane that Prue had met somewhere between Vientiane and Vang Vieng) walked past and we invited her to sit with us, her friend happened to be sitting on the table next to us, but as her friend had met a guy a few weeks earlier, she wasn’t getting much entertainment out of the new couple. I say sitting at tables, but really it was just a coffee table with some cushions around it. The relaxed style of Vang Vieng. Beau seemed to take an instant fancy to Rachael, but then again he also took an instant fancy to Sarah one of the girls from the UK when we met on the street earlier. I guess he was just toey.

After awhile we headed of to a nearby bar on the next street, a place pumping with dance music and scantily clad backpackers, most of whom were still wet, covered in texta and half drunk. We ran into the four UK girls again, they were rat shit drunk by now and forced their bucket upon us. Buckets were possibly invented by a bartender who doesn’t like serving the same person twice in one night. Or ever again. Basically you take a small bucket like the type you’d build a sandcastle with, pour half a bottle of spirits, fill the rest with mixer and ice then throw in a handful of straws to be passed around communally. Needless to say Buckets get you drunk properly, and in South East Asia a bucket costs about the same as one mixed drink from a Melbourne nightclub.

We ordered more buckets and played some pool. But we lost interest along the way and recruited a British couple to help take turns having shots. Rachael met a French guy who gave her pool tips. Prue and I laughed our arses off watching Beau and the French Guy sizing each other up, and competing for her attention. While Beau sunk the black ball using his toes and the French guy looked like he’d gotten the upper hand, I finished off our third bucket and we realised that midnight curfew was approaching and headed off to the chilled out bar I’d visited earlier.

Returning to the scene of the crime I found the chilled out bar was not so chilled out anymore. The place was chocka block with people. I walked up to the bar and ordered another beer and perused the second menu. At the stoke of midnight the music and the lights were cut off instantly. The entire bar shifted from a mess of noise and revelry into a dark open area with a lot of people standing far too close to each other. It didn’t just hit our bar though. The entire town was plunged into dark silence. The island, the main strip and our rocky little road up the hill were now all dark and silent. Well, except for the murmur of the crowds, who had no idea were they were supposed to go next and had no intention of getting there in any hurry.

Beau and Rachael had disappeared, and I walked with Prue and the British girl we’d recruited for pool back up the hill to our guest house. Standing around out the front of our guest house Prue called it quits and went to bed while I met a crazy Frenchman and we decided to head back into the streets. The streets were full of likeminded people, who were intoxicated in some way and had no where to go. We headed to the island, but as we got to the bridge we were told the island was dead, so we hang around the street some more talking to random people at every shop.

The shops all close at midnight and the store owners cover the front of their shops with tarpaulin. But as you are standing around chatting, suddenly a local face will pop out between the gap in the tarp and say “Sandwich?”. Supposedly the curfew isn’t normally enforced, but as the South East Asian Games are on in Vientiane there is a bit more regulation on the rules. However the locals are always keen to make a dollar and will even offer a beer or two while you wait for the sandwich. It all reminded me of the 3am Souvlaki trips back home.

Eventually I found myself in the middle of town, talking shit to people I don’t remember. Somewhere here I found Beau and Rachael embracing each other while sitting in a gutter… Nice. I left them be and wandered up to the terrace of a guest house where a few people where chilling out with some stashed beers and a laptop playing iTunes. I can’t remember the Crazy French guy being there, in fact I cant remember the Crazy French guy. A couple days later in Luang Prabang I was approached on the street by a French guy and his girlfriend who spoke to me as if they knew me. I took a gamble and mentioned something about Vang Vieng. They walked away and I said to Prue “Some French guy just talked to me and I have no idea who the hell he was”. Prue concluded it must have been the Crazy Frenchman that I had disappeared into the streets with, I concluded that if I couldn‘t remember him, why did we think he was crazy?

The streets were thinning and the backpackers were eyeing the locals hanging around with great suspicion. There are a lot of warnings around town about being caught with drugs after midnight and the people on the terrace seemed to be getting a good dose of paranoia that iTunes is illegal too. I decided to bail again, and trekked the long rocky hill back to the guest house, looking back to make sure I wasn’t being followed by a suspicious local, or worse a gigantic rolling ball of energy.

At the guest house I found a guy asleep in the hammock. I found out later that this was Ollie. Ollie had gone nuts when he got home and realised that Beau had the key. This was the shouting that Prue had heard through the night. Eventually Ollie had given up and slept in the hammock, a smart move as Beau wouldn’t be getting home with their key until the early morning. Beau had hooked up with Rachael and gone back to hers. Over near the café I spotted a blonde guy with curly hair sitting on a chair shivering himself to sleep. He’d lost his key and was also locked out, I dragged him up onto the balcony of the cabins and put him on the day bed then threw a massive cushion on him. He muttered a nonsensical “thankyou” and passed out, I went to bed and passed out shortly after. Hoping my good deed wouldn’t attract any unnecessary attention from certain rolling balls of energy...

...To be continued...

Chapter 4: Purgatory.

2009-12-18T14:50:00.002+11:00

We passed through Vietnamese immigration and found our self walking down a steep road flanked by mountains with a lovely creek at the bottom containing enough river stones to pave the garden footpaths of half a suburb. The Laos border was an easy going affair, we filled out a form, gave them the visa fee plus a $1 corruption fee for the stamp, and a passport photo and were waived on. Somewhere here I lost our two remaining photos and wondered if the next group crossing the border would have someone who looked exactly like us who could make use of them. Who knows, to Asians, us white folk all probably look the same anyway.

The cold morning air was still cold and morning air on the other side of the border and for breakfast at the border we warmed up with some Pho Bo (Beef Noodle Soup) and Deep Fried Banana, washed down with a hot coffee. Then we clambered back over the rice sacks and back packs and settled back into our seats for the second half of our bus ride from hell…

In Laos things started to improve dramatically. Sure we were still treated like second class citizens by the bus people, who yelled abusively at one of the girls from the UK when she asked if the blaring pop music could be turned down. And we were still crammed into the back of the bus as tight as a travel sleeping bag. Outside the bus however, the towns had turned into villages complete with woven roofs and thatched walls held together with bamboo. The roads were still windy, but despite the poverty the road quality had actually improved, a lot. The mountains towered above with massive rock faces that reminded us of the escarpments of Kakadu. But most importantly, as we stopped for a break in a roadside village the kids would wave at us and say “hello”, their parents would smile, and no one, not one person at all approached us trying to sell us something we didn’t want.

We finally arrived in Vientiane, capital of Laos, 22 hours after leaving Hanoi, capital of Vietnam. Tired and hungry we banded together and shared a Jumbo Tuk-Tuk into town from the bus station, which we haggled down to half the local price for all eight of us. The four Pommie girls wanted to go straight through to Vang Vieng and I happened by accident to find a minivan to take them there straight away. So we said goodbye to four of the girls we had shared the past day suffering with, and shortly after that we parted with the two French girls as we each headed to different hotels picked again from the book.

At precisely this moment Vientiane turned upside down on us. Reading the guidebook on the bus we learnt that Vientiane was playing host to the South East Asian Games. What we didn’t know was that it started the next day. For two hours we walked from Hotel to Hostel to Guest House, finding that not only had all of the prices gone through the roof, but everywhere was fully booked. Eventually we were far too tired to keep lugging our backpacks through the streets searching for a nice and cheap place. We paid $25 for a hotel room that wouldn’t have been worth $5 anywhere else in Asia.

To be fair on Vientiane we didn’t really give the place enough time to endear itself to us. Sure the people were lovely, fun loving and friendly, almost polar opposite to the rude and mercenary Vietnamese. That night Laos hosted the first soccer match of the SEA Games, unfortunately it was sold out, but the celebrations after they won carried long into the night. We ate dinner, walked through the markets and watched as Jumbo Tuk-Tuks arrived carrying people who were destined to walk the streets for hours looking for somewhere to sleep. About five hours after we arrived in the town we saw three guys we had spoken to when we first arrived, still searching for a place to stay.

So without allowing Vientiane to open it’s arms up to us, we booked a bus for the next morning to take us to Vang Vieng. We vowed to return to Laos and retired to our overpriced hotel for a reasonably early night. Prue originally planned to head to the Plain of Jars which we would have probably done after a one night stop-over in Vang Vieng. Unfortunately as we were (and still are) running very late from spending too long in Vietnam, Prue conceded that three days there and back wasn’t feasible in our tight schedule. So again we vowed to return to Laos.

We had heard of Vang Vieng being a place full of backpackers getting drunk and swimming on inner tubes. A few people had raved about the place and a few people had told us it wasn’t their scene, as it was between Vietiane and Luang Prabang we decided to break up the long trip with a well needed night out and headed there hesitantly the next morning on the bus. Another bloody bus.

When you book the VIP bus in Laos, we quickly learnt that you don’t necessarily get the VIP bus. We were picked up late and while we waited we chatted to a Russian couple (who were actually Finnish for some reason we called them Russian) that lived in Bangkok and had to holiday every sixty days so they could stay in Bangkok. Eventually we arrived at the bus in the last group, to find that the first people who arrived at the bus first had been waiting on the bus for the past hour. Learning this, we weren’t too upset that we waited an hour on the comfortable couches in front of our hotel.

As usual I waited beside the bus while I made sure our bags got on and I stepped onto the bus to find there were no seats. Prue was in the second row next to an Australian lady who’s husband and daughter sat in the front row. I had no row, nor seat. One of the bus guys pointed to “VIP bus” across the parking lot. A massive modern luxury coach with animated murals covering the sides and told me “one seat”. I pointed to the floor and smiled, not wanting to leave Prue alone on our 1980’s Shit-box bus. Our bus was the same price as the VIP bus we thought we were getting, and so did most of the people on our bus, who all stared longingly at the comfortable coach across the parking lot that had air-con. As our bus rolled out of the lot, I was ushered into the fold down seat next to the driver and was treated to a panoramic view for the next six hours.

Watching the oncoming traffic from the front seat, it was lucky our driver wasn’t Vietnamese, Cambodian or Thai. Laos travels at a much slower pace than the other three neighbours. Sure we spent some time narrowly missing oncoming trucks and buses on the wrong side of the road while winding around mountain passes. But the frequency in which it happened had become almost negligible, well except for the winding mountains which had increased in not only frequency, but also increased in grandness and splendour. Within two days in Laos we had already been treated to some of the most amazing scenery so far in our trip, and I had the best seat in the house.

As we rolled into Vang Vieng, we realised the real reason why people come here, sure the parties are a draw card, but the scenery just got even better. Stepping of the bus, I think I died that day...

Getting Out.

2009-12-18T14:46:00.002+11:00

We arrived at the office for our bus trip to Vientiane, Laos at the punctual time of 4:45pm. The lady we bought our tickets from was upstairs cooking dinner in a cute apron and motioned for us to drop our bags and wait to be picked up by the “Bus”. Unfortunately the sleeping bus from Hanoi to Laos only leaves every Tuesday and Saturday. Our visa was due to expire on Tuesday so without enough time for comfort we had to take the Sunday night bus, which was advertised as a ‘seated bus’, would take about 22-25 hours and had no toilet onboard. With no other option but an expensive flight or overstaying our visa which allegedly means we can never return to Vietnam, “fuck it” we thought, and booked the bus.

While waiting for the Bus to pick us up I was approached by a girl out the front trying to sell fruit and offering me to have a photo taken holding her baskets balanced across her back like giant scales. Not wanting to part with anymore cash, for neither fruit nor the scam laced photo opportunity (of which we had been warned) I kindly declined and entered into the usual street side conversation. “Where you from?” “How old are you?” “Is that your girlfriend? Oh Wife! Do you have baby?” While talking to the girl, her older sister joined us and they were most amused to find I was the same age as her older sister.

The older sister made a comment in Vietnamese and the three of them (as we were now joined by her younger sister as well) started laughing. With a confused look I inquired to the girl what was funny. She told me her older sister said I was handsome, I thanked her, then she said asked if I wanted “boom boom” and pushed her sister saying “cheap cheap”. The two younger girls started belly laughing while the older sister went bright red and hid her head in embarrassment. We spoke and laughed with the sisters for a while longer while we waited for the “bus” to pick us up.

Eventually a very pushy man came to the store on a scooter and the lady in the cute apron ushered us to follow him around the corner where a “taxi” was waiting to take us to the bus. We strapped on our bags and followed behind him as he hurried us around the corner then stopped a little way past the corner and pointed us to his scooter and another scooter alongside. With massive backpacks strapped to our backs and again on our chests, we looked at him and said “No Way! Taxi, not scooter, Taxi!”. Again he motioned us toward the scooters with a hostile command. “Fuck that!” we told him and headed back around the corner to the office of the lady in the cute apron.

She tried to convince us the traffic was bad and a scooter would be quicker, but also conceded the pushy man had duped her and wanted to put us on a scooter to save himself a dollar or two. We told the lady that there was no way we were getting on a scooter and we had been waiting at the office since 4:45pm, it was now 5:15pm and would have had plenty of time to get to the bus had we left at the original specified time. She motioned us again to wait, and went in to call a taxi for us.

The girls were still out the front and we joked and laughed with them some more, especially as the lady in the cute apron’s husband came out to say “taxi coming”. After asking him an unanswered question the girls on he street belly laughed some more and the one who spoke English explained that he didn’t speak English, he had only been taught to say “Taxi coming” by his wife in the cute apron. The street girl was the only one of the sisters who spoke English and she spoke it very well. When I asked her how long she had been learning she replied that she had been teaching herself for two years just by talking to tourists.

We were pushed into the taxi by another grumpy man, this time the taxi driver who honked his horn and sped his way through the hectic Hanoi traffic occasionally muttering harshly into his mobile phone and continuing his ranting long after he had hung up the phone. Meanwhile in the back seat Prue and I crossed our fingers as our stomachs churned from nervousness at the infinite problems ahead if we missed our bus out of Vietnam. Eventually we turned into the bus station, were pulled hastily from the taxi and with a single finger flick pointed in the direction of our bus.

We found our bus, an outdated looking orange bus with Laos plates and flashing neon lights throbbing to the beat of techno pumping from inside. Stepping onto the bus we were angrily ushered by the pushy scooter driver from the office, who mumbled something about us ‘costing him lots of money’ while I mumbled something about him ‘getting the fuck outta my face before I snap‘. As we were pushed over the top of rice sacks in the aisles our bags were thrown into a pile at the back of the bus. Thankfully we had one reprise as we looked to our seats at the back and sighed relief (quite verbally) when we saw half a dozen western girls cramped onto the bus with us. At least we wouldn’t suffer alone.

The two girls in front of us let slip that they were pretending to sleep so that they wouldn’t be forced to move to another seat, and we felt sorry for the French girls next to us who were under the impression the trip would only take 14 hours. As we settled into the cramped bus with a sigh of relief mixed with two parts dread and a feeling that we were unwelcome, the bus pulled away at break neck speed to begin our 22 hour journey south to the Cau Treo border crossing with Laos then on to Vientiane.

After settling in and opening a book to read, the bus driver decided the lights would go off and our overhead lights were also left off. Meanwhile the air-con was on full throttle (as it usually is) and the cold added to the discomfort. Discomfort which was increased further as twice on the way out of town we stopped to pick up more Vietnamese passengers, who each had more luggage (or sacks/boxes of food) and eventually our bags piled up alongside our legs in the aisle, and as every chair was occupied the aisle filled with people too.

We stopped for dinner at a dodgy road side cafe้, where Prue decided to stick to boiled rice for safety and the toilet could only be reached by running under a small waterfall from a burst pipe above the door. The food was shit but we needed something for the unknown length of travel ahead, and I met a guy from another bus also heading to Laos and we compared comfort. His bus looked nicer, but had people on stools down the aisle.

Had we been psychic we could have pulled a trump card on him. Not only did more people get on our bus at the rest stop (which meant at least three people were sleeping in the aisle), not only did someone steal my blanket… But 30 minutes down the road, no more than five minutes after we were joking with the fellow western girls about the hellish start to our trip, the lingering smell of urine was slowly replaced by the smell of burning rubber.

Gradually the smell became stronger and the bus slowed to a stop, Prue and I sitting directly over the back wheel looked down and declared “Oh shit the bus is on fire!” Black smoke billowed from the wheel arch and one of the bus operators walked over and poured water onto it, satisfied we set off again…Well, we drove for at least five more minutes until they admitted the problem was serious and pulled over again.

As a straw mat was unrolled under the bus and the bus guys started pulling out tools and a torch. I seized the opportunity to have a cigarette and a pee. I grabbed the camera and stood at the back of the bus while I watched the bus guys bang away at something, then scratch their heads, then other bus we met at the rest stop pulled over and gave our bus guys a jack. After jacking up the tyre and a bit more random banging the driver jumped back on the bus and started spinning the back wheel at full revs. The tyre stopped instantly when he hit the brakes and again they seemed satisfied so I got back on the bus and we sped off into the night.

The benefit of night time meant we couldn’t see the road. But we could feel it. In the darkness it felt like we were hammering along like a roller coaster as we were thrown from one side to the other with every corner on a road that was only corners. Prue slept fairly soundly as did a few of the western girls. I Probably got an hours sleep and when I did wake up from a sleep (usually waking while flying sideways) I had a crook neck from the contortionist like position I was asleep in and couldn’t move my legs because they were stuck under the feet of one of the French girls.

It was freezing on the bus as they left the air con on full all night so I pilfered a bit of Prue’s blanket, threw my hoodie over my eyes and sat back in the chair and escaped to the Dark Side of the Moon on the iPod. Just after 4am the bus stopped at a road block and we got off to go to the toilet (the toilet stops are all just on the side of the road, girls at the back of the bus), walking back to the bus I noticed that the driver and the other bus guys had rolled out straw mats next to the bus, and were climbing into sleeping bags.

Without any explanation all the power was turned off on the bus, and we stood there wondering “what the hell is going on?”. We were being treated like shit by the bus guys, none of them spoke to us or explained anything and when they did tell us something it was always with hostility. Eventually we were able to get enough single word responses to figure out that we were at the Vietnam border, which did not open until 7am. It was freezing cold outside and not much better on the bus. But as the bus was no longer flying suicidally around corners, I managed get about two hours sleep.
At about 6:30am the boom gate to the border opened and we walked in to the border control to find that we still had to wait until 7am to proceed. As the bus people never spoke to us and conveniently ignored us whenever we asked questions we spent a fair amount of time standing around not knowing what we were supposed to do.

When the departure counter finally did open the angriest of the bus guys told us to give him our passports and asked for US$1. The girls were all a bit sceptical as we were so tired of being scammed for money, but after a bit of an argument we pretty much conceited that we would have to pay the dollar for the stamp. I changed the last of my Dong into Kip and as our stamped passports were handed back to us, we turned our back on Vietnam and walked through the door to “No Mans Land” down the road to Laos, where the second leg of our bus trip and the fourth chapter in our travels would begin…

The Brides.

2009-12-16T23:46:00.000+11:00

With no more than about 12 hours to explore Hanoi we decided not to bother with a hotel. The tour office at Ocean Tours was nice enough to let us chill out upstairs using the internet, drinking free coffee (and Milo) and we could shower to freshen up. A few hours after we had arrived from the Sapa overnight train, we had refreshed ourselves, recharged our camera and netbook, dumped our photos, updated our internets, written postcards, changed our clothes, repacked our bags and chatted with the Aussie couple who’d travelled from Sapa with us. They were about to head out on the Ha Long Bay tour we’d done three days prior. We just wanted the cafes to open for breakfast.

The caf้s did open, and we returned to the fancy one and had more Nordic Eggs. I suppose I don’t need to re-list the lavish ingredients, buy I will note it only cost $5 each, including real coffee. With our energy replenished we headed out into the quiet Sunday morning. Hanoi is a crazy chaotic city with endless streams of scooters zigzagging in every direction in a mess of horns and exhaust fumes. Except on Sunday mornings. That Sunday morning everything moved at a much softer and quieter pace, it was almost peaceful without the constant blaring horns and ducking and weaving traffic. The exhaust fumes still lingered, they gathered and swirled to form a thick layer of rich smog.

We walked to the Theatre to buy a ticket to the Water Puppet show for later in the afternoon, with a stroke of luck we arrived at 9:30 to find that there was a Sunday morning show at 9:30. We paid too much for a VIP ticket sitting near the front that let us use our camera, but we didn’t realise we’d paid to use our camera, so while sitting inside the dark theatre, we did use our camera. But we did it like sneaky stealthy ninjas. Ironically almost none of the photos worked. Without the flash the puppets were too blurry and when we did use the flash it picked up too much mist in the atmosphere. Oh well, the video worked well.

The puppet show was amazing and good honest fun. Sure they are designed for kids, but it was definitely a spectacle which appeals to all ages. Basically a group of puppeteers stand in knee deep water behind a screen and use long poles to move puppets around on the surface of the water in front of the screen. The water is dark and gives the illusion that the puppets are walking on the water (or swimming, rowing, fishing etc.) and all of this is accompanied by a traditional musical instruments and singing performed by the band on the side of the stage.

After the puppet show we went for a walk around the lake, which was convenient as we were already at the lake and to not walk around it seemed a waste. The lake was quite pretty, despite the lingering smog and greenish sludge that alleged tortoise live in. But without the sludge there wouldn’t be a lake as the sludge is the lake. We found it hard to believe tortoise could live in the sludge, but the gardens around the lake were quite pretty and scattered with some quite obviously phallic and almost vulgar sculptures.

There were a lot of couples on benches around the lake, perhaps drawing inspiration from the garden art. There were people playing badminton as there almost always is, there were energetic forms of Thai Chi, contemplative students, squealing children on bicycles. But more than anything else, the lake was drowning in Brides.

It would be a funny thing to be a bride at the lake in the Old Town precinct of Hanoi on that smoggy Sunday morning. I could imagine that a bride returning to the professional photographer weeks later to see to proofs of the photos, would probably entail a humorous conversion at the point where you realise every single photo contains at least one other, completely different and unknown bride, lingering in a pose across the other side of the lake in the background of the photo. Yes, there were lots of brides at the lake, and shit food too. We ordered a drink instead and left the lake, sad that we didn’t spot a tortoise, and suspicious whether the tortoise saw us.

We walked around the streets for a while sucking in the energy of Hanoi mixed with a solid portion of smog, and found our way to a foot massage place situated five floors up stairs, that required a foot massage after climbing, so was actually quite convenient. Our feet and legs still ached from climbing the hills of Sapa and our foot massage (which actually covered shoulders head and back too) was so relaxing I drifted in and out of snoozing, trying hard not to snore while the lady rubbed away.

The massage was perfect but was let down by a few irritating details. The first being the guy sitting next to Prue who smoked a cigarette throughout his massage, not too pleasant when in a room with closed windows five floors up. The second was the massage lady who began her spiel by letting us know she was overworked and underpaid, the ended the massage by asking for a tip. I would have given her a tip if she had not asked, because the massage was good. By asking for a tip, they make you feel shit, you don’t want to tip them after they ask, so we didn’t.

The third let down was our lunch. We walked past a nice looking restaurant on the way back downstairs. The view from the balcony at the restaurant looked out over the street to an intersection of five roads. In Saigon we were treated to the joys of watching busy traffic from a vantage point, sadly being Sunday there wasn’t as much traffic, but it was still entertaining to watch and you always think any second there will be an accident, but it never happens. The view was nice, the food was shit, it reminded me of the lake, we could still see the lake. I figure it is the lake’s fault the food was shit, or it could be the chain restaurant we choose to eat in.

We wandered through the street stores and markets back to the travel office to regroup. Back at the travel office Prue remembered she wanted a pillow for the 24 hour bus ride to Laos. We wandered back through the street stores and markets looking for a pillow. It is a funny thing that when looking for something you never find it, but when you stop looking (or have found it) it is everywhere.

The streets of Old Town are named according to the things that are generally sold there. The street our travel office was on was called “silver” street, and there is a “shoe street” for shoes a “silk street” for clothes and a street for toys but we didn’t know what it was called, probably “toys street”. Either way we took a punt and headed to “cotton street” to find Prue a pillow, greatly reducing our chances of not finding what we were looking for.

After acquiring the pillow filled with cotton for a “cheap cheap” price, we wandered back to the sanctuary of the travel office. Prue comically tried to sell her pillow for double what she paid to every street seller that stopped us to buy something for double what it was worth. The shoe was on the other foot, and strangely it made walking “home” a lot easier. Back at our upstairs little haven at the travel office we reorganised our bags, showered, changed into clean clothes, updated our internets again, dumped more photos and I drank more free coffee adding free Milo into the mix for extra flavour.

Feeling fresh again we thanked our hosts at Ocean Travel for their hospitality and headed off around the corner to catch our bus to Laos. We were finally leaving Vietnam, though about a week behind schedule and with a sour taste left in our mouth from the aggressive money scamming personality of many Vietnamese. Regardless, Vietnam was a beautiful country and we met many lovely non-ruthless people Hopefully our bus would get us across the border before our visa ran out, so that we’d be able to return to paddle the caves of Ha Long bay, walk the hills of Sapa, peruse the stores of Hoi An , cruise the various mountain roads on an Easy Rider or just sit and watch the traffic.

These Hills Were Made for Walking

2009-12-15T23:29:00.002+11:00

We left Ocean Tours in a Taxi provided by them and saying goodbye they told us three times that the taxi had been paid for. This seemed like overkill to us as we’d heard him the first time. When we got to the station our taxi driver asked for cash. With our extensive knowledge of the dodginess of some Vietnamese people we smiled at him and laughingly told him that it was a nice try. He smiled a little and let us grab our bags and head into the station. We were pointed across a train yard and to our surprise we had to walk across the tracks to find our train. After crossing about 5 lines past parked and shunting trains we found our platform 9 and พ’s. We climbed on the train into a nice compartment with some locals and made ourselves at home. The bed was hard but the blankets were lovely and clean so we chilled out and read until the train headed off and then relaxed for a nice sleep.

We arrived into Sapa at 5:30am, after being woken up only about 10 minutes before we arrived we stumbled off the train expecting it to be freezing. But the station at the bottom of the mountain isn’t that cold so we were lulled into a false sense of security and decided that we’d think about warm clothes when we got to the hotel where we were to meet our guide. We walked out of the station and found a man holding our names and followed him to the bus that was to take us to the mountain. We headed up a long winding mountain road as the morning finally started breaking. We were thinking about taking photo’s and had decided we’d take them when we reached Sa Pa and weren’t on a moving bus.

Just after this conversation we headed into the cloud line and the temperature started to plummet. Mmm…maybe not changing wasn’t such a good idea after all. When we reached what we assumed was Sapa (as we hadn’t seen anything in the fog for about an hour) the door was finally opened to allow passengers out and we got our first taste of the freezing temperatures on the mountain. It was at this point that we also saw the colourful Sapa ladies who follow you around trying to got you to buy some of their handmade materials. We had been warned that they were like Hyenas and would follow anyone, but if you show you’re weak or wounded they would pounce on mass.

We were the last stop on the bus and we got off out our hotel and walked into reception. We weren’t staying at the hotel, but because our tour company also has the hotel stay there, they would store some of our luggage. When we got there tired from the train they surprised us with the use of one of their rooms for a hot shower and to rearrange our bags so we only needed our day trip bags and not our big backpacks. After cleaning up and organising everything we headed down for our free breakfast and to wait to meet our guide. There had been a girl in reception when we got there who was dressed in local traditional clothes. I had suggested to Drew that she might be our guide. Drew didn’t think so and I began to agree thinking that it was more likely it would be a normal guide like all our other tours.

After a great breakfast we waited in reception and were greeted by a bubbly, colourful local who said ‘hi, my name’s So, but if it helps you can just call me So So’. With a grin and a happy moment of her saying ‘and you’re short like me’ (So was actually about 3 inches shorter than me, I was a GIANT!! First time for everything), we headed off. We walked out of the hotel into the foggy day and were immediately set upon by about 5 local Sapa girls in all their lovely clothes. They didn’t seem to want to sell us anything, they just walked with us and chatted to us, in mostly perfect English, about where they were from and their names etc. We walked through town past the human like screams of a pig being slaughtered and down a steep foggy road with loads of people heading off for trekking just like us.

The thick fog created an image in our head that we were the only ones in the whole town heading off trekking. But when we stopped early at a toilet stop and saw the milling hikers and their entourage of locals following them down the mountain. After a quick break we headed off the road and down a muddy path straight down the mountain. The lower we got on the mountain the more the landscape opened up. We were about 5kms into the trek when you could really start to see the amazing impact that man has had on this environment. The hills were cut into stepped fields that went from the bottom to the top of mountains.

Walking down between them we saw water races, water buffalo and many other animals. It was winter though and there didn’t seem to be too much in the fields at this point. We were still with some people at this point, but mainly it was just So, who kept us moving at a blistering paces so that we were overtaking hikers left and right while the Sapa girls followed behind weaving horses and love hearts out of foliage to gain our affection. We’d walked about 9kms downhill when we reached the valley floor and So found us a beautiful route through the fields and along the river. Sadly this tactic, though beautiful, allowed me to both slip down a small hill and then further on I had the remarkable idea that I should take a dip in a creek. Luckily I only got one booted foot in before some of the Sapa girls came to my rescue. With a bunch of giggles from So we linked arms and made for the Lunch break at a village called Lao Chai village which was So’s home village.

The cultural group was the Black Hmong, So had married to a Black Hmong man at another village though. As soon as we sat down and waited for lunch the Sapa girls descended. We were kind of happy to get the hard sell out of the way early though and boy could they hard sell. They made my old candle shop forced selling look like kindergarten. After about 15 minutes of the hard sell So bought us lunch and the girls fell back. Drew and I discussed tactics and seeing as I wanted one of the bags that they made but nothing else we agreed that I’d buy a few friendship bracelets that looked a bit dodgy but we figure they would then have not walk 14kms for nothing. I picked my bag and a few bracelets and paid about $5 all up before sadly saying I couldn’t get anything else.

After lunch the girls didn’t follow us and we were left to wander the extra 3kms to our homestay. We passed through several small villages dropping past a school before we reached the village we were staying in. The village was called Ta Van which belonged to the Green Zai cultural group. The house was cute and clean and unlike what we feared (which was separate guest rooms) it appeared we got a curtained off area in their lounge room to sleep in. It had a lovely thick blanket and seeing as it was so cold they gave us an extra one just in case.

As it was only about 2pm I abandoned my wet sock and shoes to So to put by the fire and Drew and I headed off to walk around the village. We walked for hours, but sadly as it started to get really cold, my thongs weren’t doing the job so we headed back. We met another couple from Munich where we are headed before heading to Laura and Headley’s wedding and we had a great time chatting with them about places to go in Munich. The guy was really tall and helped the ladies pick some fruit from the tree just next to the house.

We chatted with So and she told us about her husband and her daughter. She also showed us some photo’s of her family that she had got from travellers who come before us. Her daughter had just turned 3 and was off to school already. As it started to get dark all the ladies in the family, some of the guys and both us and the other couple made our way into the kitchen and sat on tiny little stools around the cooking fire. So and the other guide Sinh cooked us an amazing meal as we watched. So and Sinh told us stories and myths from their different cultural groups and explained which traditions had been dropped with time and which traditions were still practiced today as well as many other insights into their cultural groups.

The mum in the house had just had a little girl 3 weeks before we were there and the baby sat in mums arms with all of us. It felt like a family dinner and we were invited. That’s what you hope for when you do a homestay and we were so excited that it seemed we’d been allowed in to their private lives with them. So double checked that we were ok with eating with the family as she’d told us that some tourists had chucked tantrums and didn’t want to have to eat with the family. We were happy to be invited and they seemed very happy to share the experience with us. After an amazing meal So brought out some homemade rice wine which she wanted us to try. I only had a little bit and I think it burned a hole in my tummy. Drew and the German guy had a few shots, but even they called it quits after that. With full bellies we all went back to our sleeping areas and after such a big walk slept like logs.

We woke early and So and Sinh had both made us a huge pile of pancakes and had some bananas to have with them on the side. It was lovely. After saying goodbye to the family and giving them our heartfelt thanks we headed off, me arm in arm with So and Drew bringing up the rear. Drew turned around early on and told some girls who started to follow us, that they were welcome to follow, but we wouldn’t be buying anything today. The girls melted away and we powered on passing other groups again and making for a bamboo forest that we had to walk through to get to a water fall and today was to be mainly up hill.

Sadly it was still pretty foggy and though beautiful we still couldn’t see the amazing views that we knew we were passing. After slipping and sliding our way to the waterfall we grabbed a photo with So and headed down for a bit to the village of Giang Ta Cha (Zan Te Cha) which is a village that has both Green Zai and Red Zai cultural groups. So made us a beautiful lunch again and then we headed across a local suspension bridge and up a hill to the road. This took us to our total of 25kms hiking and So organised our transport in an old army jeep back up to Sapa. The fog was so bad now that we could literally only see about 1m in front of the bonet of the car. We kept our fingers crossed as our driver flew around the corners only just missing trucks and busses coming the other way.

We got back to the hotel and dropped off our stuff and So said she’d show us through the local markets before we headed off. We wandered up through the markets and So showed us some items and told us the price we should pay for some of the things. She then finally said goodbye and after many hugs with me she left us to explore on our own. I ended up buying one of the scarfs that are traditional among the Black Hmong (So’s cultural group) and Drew and I bought some more friendship bracelets, though these one were actually made in Sapa and not China like we found out the ones we bought the day before at lunch were.

We headed back to the hotel and were again surprised to learn that we had access to a room again. After another hot shower and a change of clothes we headed down to the mini van and down the mountain to the train. We chatted with another Australian and American couple and then found our train car and basically crashed after a huge two days. We got back to Hanoi at 4:30am and seeing as we were on the same tour we shared a taxi with the Australian couple and rang the bell to be let back into the Ocean Tours office. We made our way to the top floor and relaxed for a few hours drinking free tea and coffee and interneting while waiting for the local cafes to open for breakfast.

Tofu

2009-12-10T23:18:00.001+11:00

When booking our tour for Ha Long Bay we took the advice we had reiterated to us by a host of travellers as we travelled north, -”you get what you pay for”. So we booked from the tour office that was recommended to us and were amazed to find that they offer traveller services, a hot shower, toilet, internet, a kitchen and a comfy place to hang out. From this tour office we were able to spend time in Hanoi with out staying in a Hotel. But no time for much the first morning,

After arriving in Hanoi at 6am from the Sleeper bus we were already on our way to Ha Long bay on a very comfortable tour bus by 8:30am. Our tour to Ha Long bay was great fun, on the way we easily struck up conversations with every one on the Bus. Offering advice to an old Irish couple who had just arrived in Vietnam, and swapping travelling stories with an English girl we had seen the day before in Hue. There was a French couple a German couple, an Aussie couple from a country town in Gippsland (who study in Melbourne) and another Aussie girl and Kiwi girl who had some great stories.

By the time we arrived at the boat and sat down to eat a banquet on the boat everyone felt comfortable like sitting down for a family dinner. The boat was really luxurious with three decks, a bar and restaurant and cabins to sleep about 12 or so people, all decked out in ornate dark wood. As we had booked last minute there was no room for us to sleep on the boat, so we were spending two nights on the island. The island was a private island with a small bar and restaurant and about 12 bungalows set in between the cliffs and the beach, while it would have been nice to stay on the boat, we were pretty happy with the island.

For our lunch on the boat we were served a feast of Crabs, Prawns, Calamari, Fish and numerous other culinary delights. The old Irish couple had been told by their travel doctor not to eat Shellfish in Asia and as they were going to Australia after Vietnam they were more than happy to just eat beef and chicken. So we were more than happy to make sure the surplus Crabs and Prawns didn‘t go to waste. The only annoyance on the boat was the drink prices were a little high. But complaining that beer is expensive when it is still only $1.50 is a bit pointless.

On the way through Ha Long bay we were flanked on either side by the most amazing cliffs and islands jutting out of the sea. Our guide told us their was 1969 islands in Ha Long bay, but Ha Long bay is just one of three bays covered in thousands of islands and spectacular scenery. Unfortunately for us on our first day there was quite a heavy fog, or maybe sea mist or maybe it was pollution. Either way the entire horizon was shadowed with the hazy silhouettes of the islands. But by the time we were halfway through lunch we were surrounded by magnificent views and it was a dilemma whether to finish eating the amazing food or run outside and take photos from the top deck.

After lunch we stopped in an inlet surrounded by tall islands but protected from the sea. The water was a calm and beautiful crystal clear pale blue. We hopped into to Kayaks and paddled amongst the cliffs and through an open cave to hidden lagoon, spending most of the time just drifting along with our jaws open bewildered by the scenery. Our guide said that each year he only ever sees two or three monkeys. We were lucky enough to spot two monkeys playing in the tree-tops high above.

Around 5pm we had to say goodbye to the other people we had met as they were staying on the boat and we were transferred to the island. Our transfer was another large, beautifully carved wooden boat which we had all to our self, with only the captain and first mate aboard. Prue and I danced around on the top deck as we basically rotated around taking in the 360 degree views for the hour and a half trip to the island. We arrived at the island and found another group already there but the people travelling didn’t really seem as much fun as our group from the boat. So after eating a yummy BBQ and retiring to our cabin we weren’t too upset to wake up the next morning to find everyone had left, and we had the entire place to our self.

Our own private island was actually exactly as nice as it sounds. We spent the day just chilling out, Prue sat in her rocking chair on the balcony and read a book while soaking up the view. I went for a bit of a paddle in the sea kayak, then played a couple of locals at pool while sipping Black Russians. For lunch we got a sea taxi, which was no more than a wooden dingy with an engine and an tarp for a roof, to take us to Cat Ba island.

Then after returning to our private island we were greeted by our group from the boat the previous day. Needless to say we spent the night laughing and drinking and telling stories of our travels on our own private island paradise. Our last day was spent cruising back through the cliffs soaking up the sun on the top deck of the boat, while soaking up the amazing views. The sea mist pollution fog had cleared a lot more and the depth and the sheer size of the islands was incredible and surrounded us in every direction with a magical view.

We arrived back in Hanoi and said goodbye to the Irish couple who were rushed off in a taxi to catch a flight to Hoi An. We made use of the travellers lounge area at the tour office and chilled out on the cushions and Skype’d home, repacked our bags and freshened up. Then we joined the Aussie couple for a quick dinner before another goodbye as they caught the sleeper train south to Hue. Again we had no time to explore Hanoi as by 9pm we were settling into the firm bed of the sleeper train heading north to the mountain village of Sapa…

Tomb Raider.

2009-12-08T00:03:00.003+11:00

After two hours sleep and with a heavy head we devoured a minimalist breakfast on the run to absorb the alcohol still afflicting us and jumped on the Bus bound for Hue. After an hour or so cruising from Hoi An and through Danang, the road opened up to a beautiful beach side mountain pass. Almost in unison with every one else on the bus (For the first time mostly full of Westerners) I reached into my bag and pulled out the camera, switched it on and lined up a snap. A collective “Ohhh” rang through the aisles of the bus as we drove straight into the mountain by way of a very, very long tunnel.

Twenty minutes later we emerged from the tunnel to look back over our shoulders to see our beautiful views disappearing behind us. It was at this exact point that we realised we had missed one of the moments we had looked forward to the most. Not long before leaving Australia the guys from Top Gear did a Vietnam special which heavily inspired our trip. There was a moment in the show where Clarkson and Hammond sat by the side of the road waiting for May to catch up while overlooking the most spectacular view. The exact spot was visible up the old coast road behind us to the left. The tunnel we emerged from had bypassed that from the right. Oh well, next time Gadget, next time.

We arrived at Hue and again as we alighted the bus we were instantly set upon by a horde of Hoteliers, Taxi drivers and Motor Bikers each one pleading, nay, pushing for our business. One went so far as to follow us all the way to the hotel area, nicely agreeing to walk on the other side of the road to leave us alone, yet still directing us from every corner to his hotel. Needless to say when we did get to his hotel, we chose to stay in the one next door, the one we had picked from our guide book.

Right next to our hotel was a delicious Indian restaurant, which we gorged ourselves at and compared favourably to every other Indian restaurant we’d been to, yes, even “Priya” near Watergardens. Deciding to spend only one night in Hue I walked down to the local travel agency and booked the sleeper bus for the following night to take us to Hanoi. We decided to use Sinh Cafe้ bus company as we had seen their buses and been recommended them as they were the most modern and comfortable looking option for a long haul trip. With our exit strategy planned we decided to make the most of the small time we had in Hue and see the sights. Opting for the relaxed approach we hired a Cyclo each to take us on a tour around the Citadel.

Hue was once the Center of the Vietnamese Empire, and previously home to the Emperors. The Citadel is the Palace of the Emperor, or at least it was, until the Americans bombed the shit out of it, as they do. We decided not to pay the $5 entry fee as it was late in the day and we were going to have more time to explore the next day, so we got our Cyclo drivers to take us on a peaceful trip around the Citadel and back through the town to the restaurant strip. So peaceful was the ride in our Cyclo I could help myself nodding off a few times in the middle of traffic. But hey, I’d only had two hours sleep.

Our Cyclo drivers organised to pick us up the next morning on motorbikes for a tour around, and we spent the rest of the night wandering though the town with a feeling of “whatever” about it all. I think around this point we were starting to get a bit tired of people trying to sell us shit, scam us, beg from us and con us, but then again we’d only had four hours sleep. After another pleasant (but not seedy) massage, we found a cafe้ next to the hotel for dinner and swapped traveling stories with a few backpackers, before retiring for a relatively early night. The Cafe้ we went to was called “Cafe้ on Thu Wheels” and specialised in motorcycle tours. Our enthusiastic and friendly host, became introverted and moody after we told him we’d hired a guide off the street. Oh well, next time Gadget, next time.

Checking out of our hotel brought up our reoccurring feeling of being ripped off. With the hotel charging an extortionate exchange rate for paying in Vietnam Dong, rather than US Dollars. After a small pointless argument we paid the bill on our Travel Card in US dollars and saved ourselves a few pointless dollars out of spite of being rorted.

Our motorcycle tour of Hue’s surrounding Tombs and Pagodas started with a hitch as Prue’s guide stopped for Petrol and I went ahead with my guide. After waiting about ten minutes for her to catch up my guide realised they weren't coming and left me waiting on the side of the road where I was mocked in Vietnamese by a small school boy after I refused to give him a cigarette. A minute or two later my guide came flying back around the corner and whisked me off to the site that Prue had been taken to. Ok, well organised tour so far.

The Tombs of the previous Emperors were quite impressive although the $5 entry fee at each site for both of us seemed a little bit high. Again we felt reinforcement in the feeling that everyone in Vietnam is just trying to get money out of us. The Pagodas were free to enter and the last one we went to was quite impressive although it housed a somber mood in a garage at the rear of the temple. There we found the Austin driven to Saigon by the Monk who Self immolated (Burned himself to death) in protest to the South Vietnamese Government’s treatment of Buddhists, the same Austin is visible in the iconic photo of the event.

After a few hours of riding around on narrow back roads our drivers took us to a local place for lunch where we were fed suspicious food that thankfully never made us sick and then they dropped us at the front gate of the Citadel. Trying to pay for the Guides started an argument as we believed we were paying $5 each for what was supposed to be a two hour tour. They believed that as the tour had taken nearly four hours (not our fault) we should pay double. Originally it was only going to be $8 each for the whole day. So we bluffed calling the Tourist Police and bailed out at the original price of $5 each. Needless to say our patience with the Vietnamese constant attempt to make us part with extra (or any) cash was starting to wear thin.

The Citadel was a bit disappointing, most of it was destroyed, so everything that couldn't be restored was still in the process of being rebuilt. The majority of the grounds felt like a work site, although a few areas that had either been repaired or were never destroyed were quite impressive. Hue was a lovely city with some amazing old sites to visit and I’m sure given a bit of extra time to absorb the atmosphere of the town we would have enjoyed it a lot more. Unfortunately a few irritable incidents put it on the back foot, and we boarded the bus eagerly looking back at the city of Hue with a strong sense of nothing much at all.

The 13 hour trip between Hue and Hanoi was relatively comfortable. I found myself about 4 inches short on leg room in my sleeping berth. Prue on the other hand slept fairly soundly. The ride itself was a lot smoother than some of our previous bus trips. The large Sinh Cafe้ coach strategically lined itself in the middle of the road and blazed a trail to Hanoi letting all other traffic flow around it. We arrived at Hanoi at 6am, walked around the corner to the office of a tour company we had been recommended, only to find that it didn't open until 7am. Not much of anything was open for breakfast and we waited patiently until the tour office opened, purchasing a three day tour to Ha Long Bay that left at 8:30am then treated ourselves to a delicious breakfast before setting off on our next adventure...

Facebook is working where we are, the photos from Hoi An and Hue can be found [HERE].

More photos should come in the next day or so now that we have facebook again. It takes a bit of free time to organise the photos and write the blogs and lately we haven't had much free time...

Primitive Vehicle Users Only.

2009-12-06T09:28:00.003+11:00

The Archaeological history of the places we are visiting is something that I am finding most fulfilling. At Quy Nhon we saw the wonderful Cham sites that were fairly unvisited yet largely restored. This makes sense as the Vietnamese people take great pride in their history. We were heading to Hoi An next and this promised to be interesting for it’s great old city centre and for the ruin that lie outside the city in a site called My Son (pronounced Me Sun).

We climbed on the train and travelled to Hoi An via Danang on a soft seat in air conditioning this time. This wasn’t by choice, the hard seat wasn’t available at the time we wanted to travel. It was only an extra 40,000 Dong so we were complaining. Surprisingly, we were again, the only westerners on the train. This is fun because we get to be the only ones immersed in with the locals. At the same time though we are getting to the stage where we want to meet some people who speak English and are in the same backpacker boat as us.

We decided that in Hoi An we’d make more of an effort to meet and hang out with backpackers and with that in mind our driver and his sister (who was in the front seat) talked us into staying at the An Phu hotel in Hoi An. The place was a cool old building that had been turned into a hotel. We walked in and were shown a few rooms and after picking one of the cheaper ones with a private balcony we settled in. There was something a bit creepy about the hotel though and over the course of the first day we saw bats, rats and cockroaches. Granted the roaches are pretty common in SE Asia, but the bat flying in the hallway and the number of large rats I saw gave me pause. We were there now though and we were only staying 3 nights so I decided to stick it out.

We headed into town which was just down the road from the hotel (which was another reason to forgive them the animals). The centre of Hoi An is like the South East Asia that we had read about in old novels and see in old movies but just doesn’t really exist anymore. After walking down the first street we quickly realised that tailors were the main enterprise in Hoi An. One after the other the tailors line the streets with mannequins out the front clothed in their designs and even more hanging from every conceivable location inside the stores walls and from the roof. With much bemusement and a chorus of “come in sir/madam, see my store” or “you want a new suit, I make for you 12 hours” we headed towards the river and grabbed an early dinner at a cute little restaurant called cordon blue.

I’d like to note that I am enjoying the fact that we are finally in a part of Vietnam where you don’t have to search to find Pho Bo (pronounced fo ba, or at least that‘s how it pronounced here). I’ve been told that it’s more of a dish from northern Vietnam so I look forward to eating more of the fabulous beef noodle soup in future.

We were treated to a sunset like nothing else we’ve seen so far I think. The strong pinks and oranges were breathtaking and the view from one of the bridges with it setting over the old city just reinforces all of the old SE Asia images you didn’t even know you had. Walking around the city at night is just beautiful and at night there seems to be a rule where no motorbikes are allowed to be ridden. This means that you can walk around in the middle of the street with just push bikes around you and everyone is dressed beautifully.

We later found out that another rule for locals states that in the old city ladies must be dressed either in traditional attire or at least in clothes that covers them up conservatively. No one seemed to bothered with it though and it really did add to the relaxed feel of the city centre. In the end we made it an early night and headed back to the hotel for a drink. It was at this point that we saw our first huge rat and a bat flying through the hotel.

We headed out the next morning with an aim to get me an outfit for Laura and Headly’s wedding in Austria. Thanks to our exploration last night we were able to narrow down the areas we saw that looked like they had nice clothes shops. We headed into the city centre and after wandering around and seeing all the outfits that everyone had out, I hadn’t seen too much that I was hanging out for. I liked some of the Chinese style tops and there were lots of winter jackets, but nothing that screamed out that it was what I wanted…or needed. Drew finally suggested a tailor that had some beautiful jackets.

It was just inside the door that I found a lovely knee length jacket in a forest green that did up on an angle and had a really cute neckline. This was my first time buying anything to be made and I was worried that the price would be more that we could budget, in the end the lady said $37 US and agreed to make it up in a dark red with cute black buttons. She also threw in a think extra lining for free and said to come back the next day to check it. This was amazing!

We headed off to be inspired by something else for the wedding and finally found a shop that didn’t look quite as nice but had some great examples in the windows. In the end we settled on Thai Silk, also in red. We came up with a nice design and then after some consideration I agreed to get a suit jacket to go with it that could double for work when we got to England. I looked and looked with the girls for a design for the jacket, but could only find a few parts that I really liked. In the end I picked some parts from other jackets and designed a cute pleated part at the back that I had dreamed up myself. I was a bit nervous, but in the end with the Thai Silk outfit and the suit jacket was $59 US. Pretty nice if I do say so myself.

With all the outfits I could possibly need ordered, Drew and I headed back to the hotel and rented a motorbike and headed down to the beach. I wasn’t really in the mood to swim so I paid 10,000 Dong and rented a sun bed. The beach is under reconstruction after a large typhoon which wiped most of the beach out. It’s being rebuilt by moving sand down to the shore and planting big palm trees to try to stop the sea washing away. The water was nice, but the waves were mainly dumpers and the rips were really strong. In the end it got overcast and cold so we headed back to the hotel and then headed to a second hand bookstore.

It was run by an American expat who stocked some romance novels!! Finally. I ended up buying the 3rd in the Clan of the Cave Bear series, the first in the Mercy Thompson series and a Susan Elizabeth Philips book called Ain’t She Sweet. I got a discount because we ended up swapping them for some of the books that we’d finished. We then dropped the motorbike off and headed out to dinner at a place we’d seen the night before called the Before and Now bar. It ended up giving us one of the best Western meals this far. The Brusetta was lovely and I had a spag boll that was fantastic. We wandered to a bar and had some drinks and played some pool and then headed home to bed.

The second full day in Hoi An we headed out on a tour to see My Son (pronounced Me Sun) which is one of the most extensive Cham sites in Vietnam. The bus was a really dodgy tour that gave us a bus with a hole in the floor, but it was cheap at $6 so we didn’t complain. My Son was meant to be one of the main capitals of the Cham culture that migrated from Indonesia many many 100’s of years ago. We got a ride from the gate up to the walking trail in old American Army jeeps. We had an a very enthusiastic explanation of the site from our guide and then headed up the track to the first site.

The site is extensively damaged and you can still see the bomb craters. The site is intriguing to Archaeologists because the bricks that make up the towers and rooms you go into are not held together by any visible cement or glue. The most recent suggestion says that they were held together by honey and some other ingredient from the forest. The site is quite overgrown and the parts that have been cleared are beautiful, but the extent of the damage is devastating. The buildings that remain have had a lot of work and there is still work going on with the help of UNESCO.

The buildings are a light brown stone and are all dedicated to a Hindu god. There were some intriguing stone alters that I would suggest would be sacrificial stones that were the same as some we’d seen at Angkor. The guide on our tour that we were only following and listening to occasionally finally confirmed my theory, though in Angkor they swore it wasn’t for sacrifice but they couldn’t tell me what it was for.

Site A at My Son was clearly at one time the centre piece for the culture. It would have been huge if the dimensions of the destroyed portions of the part that remains is an indication. It would have had a temple that was easily three or four times the size of the other temple we had seen at another part of the site. The floor plan looked like it would have been similar and the carvings that remain on the base were of a similar style to the other existing temple. This is one of the sad losses in the war with America, they had bombed this site and when they couldn’t destroy it they sent a helicopter in to hover over it and blast it till there was nothing left.

The VC never occupied the site during the war and the USA only destroyed it to make sure they couldn’t occupy it in future or for some twisted psychological reasons. After looking at some more destroyed temples and some bomb craters where temples were, we headed back to the bus and then got transferred to a boat for lunch and a cruise down the river back to Hoi An. We stopped by an artists village and watched some amazing wood workers creating wonderful things.

When we arrived back in Hoi An we went to the coat shop called 'Na Na' first. The jacket was beautiful and fit me perfectly first time. With many thanks and a spring in my step we headed to the next tailor to pick up my jacket and silk outfit. The jacket was perfect and the skirt was lovely, but it needed a little tightening. The top was nice, but sadly was nothing like what I thought I’d asked for. In the end they said they’d remake the outfit to be what I wanted and the jacket was so lovely that I ended up getting a work skirt to match, we agreed to head back there in four hours and pick it all up.

We ended up renting a motorbike and heading to the beach again. The weather was a little warmer so I decided to go for a swim with Drew, sadly it was still dumping and had a strong rip so I didn’t stay in long. We headed back into town and picked up my clothes that were all fixed and fitted perfectly and I dropped some clothes off that needed to be taken in, we were told to come back in about 2 hours. We then we headed out to dinner at the Before and Now bar again. The last time we ate upstairs in the restaurant and this time we decided to eat in the more relaxed bar. It was just as good as the first night. We just needed a few good comfort meals to allow us to continue on our way.

On the way back from the restaurant we walked past a cute skirt, I decided to try it on, it was a little too tight and the girl agreed to let it out a little. As it was already 9pm she said she’d drop it at our hotel reception for me, after she was finished. Then we picked up the pants I was getting taken in from the tailor which was the shop next to the hotel. We headed out to have a drink at a bar around the corner from the hotel called the "Why Not?" bar. This is not the only 'Why Not' bar we’ve seen, but they don’t have anything in common. (Well... Other than booze -Drew)

We had some drinks and started talking to the people in the bar, there were people from France, Canada, Germany, a fat guy from Russia that knew no English and a few Aussie’s. We drank and chatted for hours until we found the bar closing. We then got "free shuttle" to a place called the "Last Stand Bar". The 'free shuttle' was three to a motorbike so a girl I’d just met and I climbed on the back in the rain and headed for the bar located just over the short bridge from old town on Cham island.

It was a great night fun and the next time I checked my watch it was 3am. We were catching a bus at 7am and I hadn’t even gone to bed yet. I left Drew at the bar and headed home on a motorbike taxi and after picking up my package of clothes from reception, I headed to bed. I hoped Drew would come back before the bus left for Hue in the morning…

Note: At this point we are about a week or so behind in our blog posts after travelling to Hue, then to Hanoi were we took a tour to HaLong Bay and have just returned to Hanoi from a tour to Sapa. Later today we take a bus to Laos and we have a bit of time near the internet to hopefully catch up, Facebook is still not working so hopefully we'll upload a bunch of photos when we get to Vientiene in Laos.

Comfort Food.

2009-11-29T17:03:00.003+11:00

There have been a few times on our tip where we have found ourselves out of our comfort zone. While walking the streets of Dalat after dinner we stumbled into a night market in the middle of the road. The market was no more than a few rows of canvas bags spread out across the ground selling all of the seconds clothing. There wasn’t anything particularly special about the market itself, but as the vendors went about selling their wares they all had a unique chant like sales pitch which when combined with all of the market vendors created an orchestral rhythm. It reminded me of walking through Ankor Wat and listening to the band of landmine-victims playing local instruments on the side of the path. When you single out one instrument to listen to it, it just sounds like noise, but when collaborated as a whole it creates music.

Browsing the market stalls I turned to Prue and asked “are you out of your comfort zone yet?”. No sooner had she replied “no” with a shake of her head and a bewildered smile when suddenly all of the vendors starting yelling frantically and grabbed their canvas bags running and dragging them off the street, over the top of us, and retreating to the edges of the sidewalk. Within ten seconds the entire street had cleared of market stalls and while Prue and I stood in the middle of where the market had been, a truck with a tray full of baton wielding police officers roared around the corner charging into the empty space the market had occupied. Prue grabbed my arm and said “ok, now I’m out of my comfort zone” and with that we decided it was best to leave the area.

Mostly being out of your comfort zone doesn’t necessarily mean being uncomfortable. Uncomfortable is the only word I would use to describe our bus ride from Nha Trang to Qui Nhon, I might even add a curse word to the front of it. We were booked on a 16 seater mini-van for the five hour trip, 16 seats might work for tiny little Vietnamese, but when you try and shoehorn the two of us into the back seat, sealed in by two more locals, with one leg up in the air and our bags sitting on our laps in a mini van that decided it needed to be parked in the sun for fifteen minutes before leaving without the aircon on… Well it’s fucking uncomfortable

We had an opportunity to bail about ten minutes into the trip heading out of town, again the bus decided it needed to be parked on the side of the road for fifteen more minutes. Prue and I sat and debated whether or not we would get off, and after much debating we finally though “fuck it, lets get out of here”, we moved to get out, which would involve literally climbing over people. Suddenly fate raised its hand and bitch slapped us back down into our seat as the door slammed shut and the bus speed forward to Qui Nhon with 14 locals and us, crammed in the back sweltering, sweating, squished and so terribly uncomfortable.

We had decided to take the bus against our better judgment, as bus rides in Vietnam tend to be more like a death defying rollercoaster when compared to the safer and smoother option of the train. The train timetable didn’t have an appropriate departure time for us so we ended up crammed into our mini-van as we twisted and winded our way up through mountain trails along the beautiful ocean road, with gorgeous beaches and off shore islands on one side and gigantic mountains and cliffs on the other side. The Vietnamese could be forgiven for not bothering to visit our own Great Ocean Road, they have one, and it’s very bloody beautiful.

Or at least, we’re pretty sure it was. It’s hard to sit and enjoy the views. Not because we were squished uncomfortably into the back of the mini van. It’s hard to enjoy the view because you just cant take your eyes away from the road and the certain death that honks its way toward you at every turn, on every straight and always on your side of the road. Unless of course it is you who driving is on their side. We may have been under the impression our driver was Australian as he actually spent more time driving on our side of the road (the wrong side) than he did using the imaginary middle lane. Driving into darkness didn’t offer much relief either, as now their was no view to distract you from the road, and you are always wondering if the headlight of the scooter you are approaching head on to bully off the road, is actually a truck with one blown light.

It’s a bit of an adrenaline rush escaping death over and over, occasionally muttering an “oh shit!” or gripping the edge of you seat. It is truly frightening however, when the locals who seem mostly oblivious or desensitised to the road mayhem start popping their head up going “oh oh oh…” as the narrowest of margins saves you from being worm food. In the end we made it safely albeit uncomfortably to Qui Nhon.

Qui Nhon is a beach side city in the foot of the mountains and a place with little to no western tourism. it’s a bit of a shame that there isn’t much tourism as it is a lovely place. But I suppose it is made a little lovelier because of the lack of tourism. We were able to walk down the street without vendors pleading with us to come in and have a look, and we were able to sit and have a meal without peddlers walking up to us selling crap. We decided to do what anyone in a place without tourism would do, we checked into a resort.

Using modern technology we negotiated a cheap rate by bringing up the internet on Prue’s iPhone while standing at the reception desk, we found the resort mostly deserted as it is the off season and it kinda made us feel like the whole place was for us. So we relaxed in our complimentary bath robes, ordered Australian steak from room service, had a swim, a massage, a sauna and pottered around the quiet town of Qui Nhon, checking out a few nearby Cham sites. After two relaxing nights we set sail for the clothes tailor capital of South East Asia, Hoi An. This time we took the train.

2009-11-27T01:40:00.002+11:00

Facebook is working sporadically in Vietnam at the moment, so here are the links to a couple of new photo albums:

The first album is our days spent in Dalat... [Click HERE]

The second album is our days in Nha Trang and Qui Nhon... [Click HERE]

We'll post a new blog post in the next day (hopefully), at the moment we are in Hoi An, clothing tailors paradise.

Mot, Hai, Ba, YO! (1,2,3, Cheers!)

2009-11-25T02:29:00.010+11:00

We arrived back in Nha Trang to shitty weather, the clouds were thick and low and the wind was blowing with gale force, the patches of light rain came at us so far sideways it almost fell upwards. Prue and I were hungry from our long bumpy Bus trip down the mountain from Dalat and found the closest restaurant to have a burger each. We had an argument about spending time relaxing, Prue said she wanted to chill out and read a book, but I argued that I didn't want to spend all my time sitting in our hotel room. This statement when teamed up with our burgers, came back to bite us in the arse, quite literally.

Our first night in Nha Trang we learned quickly that the Gold Coast image that masks the appearance of the city, actually hides a deeply rooted dark side below its facade. We walked the street dodging the usual street peddlers and waving away the dodgy men on scooters who would offer all sorts of nasties, from massages with "boom boom" to Weed and Cocaine. Although we found a nice bar to chill out with a drink while we planned a tour for the day after next, we later returned to our hotel with the feeling that Nha Trang wasn't just the family friendly resort town we'd first assumed it to be.

Waking up the next morning we planned to spend the day unwinding and chilling out, maybe rent a scooter and see a few sights around town, but at a slow pace. Unfortunately our burgers from the previous day had other plans and by midday we were both feeling like shit and, well, feeling like shitting, a lot. We were pretty sure it was dodgy salad from our burgers the previous day and as I had picked out my tomato and cucumber I was only hit at one third strength. Prue however, having eaten all her salad like a good girl, was pretty much confined to quaters for the whole day.

The next day we were supposed to be picked up for a tour but as Prue was still really sick we postponed it for the next day, inevitably prolonging our stay in Nha Trang, the weather was still miserable and matched the way Prue was feeling, so I went out and explored the town on a scooter, checking out a few of the back-street locals only areas before stopping at one seaside cafe to drink dodgy coffee, then moving to another sea side cafe to drink more dodgy coffee.

Not all the coffee is dodgy in Vietnam, but when you are served coffee it comes as a glass with some condensed milk in he bottom and then has a metal contraption that sits on top of the glass and coffee grains are poured into. Hot water is poured into the metal cup holding the coffe grains. Then you sit and wait as drip by drip your glass slowly fills. Normally you also get a flask of hot water to top up your glass with. The coffee is usualy delicious (although the condensed milk makes it pretty sweet) however sometimes the coffee filter just doesn't work and you'll sit there for 20 minutes tapping the glass to get it to drip out, meanwhile it goes cold.

A little after lunch Prue was feeling a bit better so we jumped on the scooter to go and visit the local Cham site. The Chams were a local culture that inhabited most of Vietnam hundreds of years ago before being oppressed or moved out by the Chinese. Similarly to the Angkors of Cambodia the Chams built whopping great temples all over the country side and many of them still stand today. The architechture is different to the Angkors with the buildings constructed of small bricks similar in size to common bricks we use today and the style resembles the Indian Hindu temles with Spade shaped pyramids on the top. The Cham site was pretty cool although the dark insides of the temples had a very eerie atmosphere. It was interesting to see that many people still practise the Cham religion today.

Prue had only been eating dry biscuts and steamed rice, but for dinner I ventured out to get takeaway Pho Bo for her on the scooter. It was a new experience trying to cart home soup on a scooter which came in plastic bags, but I managed to get the bags home without tearing the plastic and the Hotel lent us a bowl and chopsticks, but the only spoon they had was a large ladle. With a smirk I left Prue to happily eat her Beef Soup and watch a movie while I ventured out to eat "real food" alone.

Our experiences with massages in our travels have been fantastic up until now, from foot massages in a market to blind massuers, We have found them to be such a great way to re-energise and super cheap. All of these experiences were tainted when we decided to get a massage in Nha Trang. Prue had found a nice cheap place (about $5 per hour) and it wasn't until we had reached the point of no return that we realised we were in a massage "parlour". The girls wearing short skirts was probably the first giveaway, then they asked for tips as they were not paid any money, the money we paid for the massage just got us to them.

Luckily I didn't have a cent in my pocket (as I'd been embarrisingly short on the bill when paying for my dinner earlier and hadn't yet been to an ATM) and Prue escaped with only a small tip. The seediest part was halfway through the lady massinging me pointed to my crotch and winked at me saying "massage?". I eagerly declined and spent the last half of the massage feeling less than relaxed, although it atleast explained why the massage wasn't actually very good. We left the place feeling slightly violated and went back to the hotel and watched "The Beach" on TV. Spending a bit of time locked in the Hotel room hadn't been so bad after we found the TV played two movie channels. the first night we were treated to a Lethal Weapon marathon, the next night was Karate Kid and Twilight, the last being a movie that I hated the first time, but still managed to get absoulelty sucked into. God damn Emo kids.

Waking to another day of shitty weather we grabbed a quick breakfast before heading out to our "four islands" tour. About 3o of us crammed onto a boat, the first island was no more than a pier that led to an aquarium on the island, with the rest of the island completely inaccesable. We didn't want to pay for the Aquarium so spent 45 mins sheltering from the wind, before we set off again for the next island. On the way we passed floating villages of lobster farmers before stopping just offshore from the island for some snorkeling.

I dove from the top of the boat into the deep water and swam off to snorkel around. I couldn't tell if the water was really cloudy as again my snorkel was pretty crap, but the coral and fish were really pretty, and I got some cool photos of the fish underwater. Prue stayed on the boat as it was still fairly windy and she didn't want to get sick again. As we moved to our next stop we were protected from the wind by the islands and the sun even managed to poke it's head out a little bit.

The crew served us a feast before entertaining us with their own band, featuring a makeshift drum kit a fender and a bass. The band was really entertaining although a little out of time with each other. They asked our nationalities and played songs to suit, we were treated to Waltzing Matilda and the Canadian (who was actually Brittish) got Celine Dion. The most impressing part was when they played a German and Russian song sund entirley in their own respective languages, and they finished the jam with a bit of table dancing to La Bamba courtesy of the Spaniard.

Thus began "Happy Hour", the crew threw a bouy with a seat in the middle and a metal ring all the way around it into the water. We jumped into the ocean where we were thrown rubber tubes to sit in, and paddled over to the bouy, in which one of our guides sat and we all held on to "The Floating Bar" (all of the Western people anyway, all of the Vietnamese tourists stayed on the boat and watched). The floating bar had one rule; you could not say the word "no". This caused a bit of a problem for Prue, having braved the water she didn't really want to drink much, and each time she was asked if she wanted a refill, her reply of "no" was swiftly followed by a call to skull. Needless to say the floating bar got a little messy, but it was a hell of a lot of fun.

Our last stop was an island that we had to pay to walk onto. Seeing as the other option was just sitting on the boat we decided to pay the money and I became instantly intrigued with the Jet Skis waiting on the beach. The Jet Skis cost about $15 for fifteen minutes and after negotiating with the operators who were only going to let us take turns on the back while they drove it, we managed to convince them that I would drive and prue would go on the back. Naturally they made me sign a waiver, a waiver that included paying damages if anything happened and they couldn't fix it.

The Jet Ski was fantastic fun, for about four minutes. Perhaps it was the fact we'd never been on one before, or because Prue was clawing at my sides or maybe it was the dozen or so shots of vodka at happy hour... Either way I managed to capsize the Jet Ski, and we couldn't start it again. They sent out a boat to pull us to shore, and the guy accidentaly kneed Prue in the lip while she was being pulled onto the boat, for whch she now has a cut on her upper lip. We nervously avoided the operators while they tried to get the Jet Ski started on the shore, and I was advised to back to the boat and "make myself scarce" while the operator walked around looking for me holding the waiver I had signed... Ooops.

Our last night in Nha Trang we went and had dinner at a place where Prue ate the first legitimite steak we had seen so far. I played some locals at pool (Vietnamese are BIG pool players) and then pretty much passed out back in our hotel room after booking a bus to take us to Quy Nhon at 3pm the next day. Ironically we woke on our last day in Nha Trang to find the weather had cleared up, the wind had died down and it was beautiful and sunny. That would be fucking right.

NOTE: Either the Vietnam Government has blocked Facebook or maybe it's Aliens, either way we can't access the full features of Facebook at the moment. This means there wont be any photos for awhile. Maybe I'll upload some to a different website soon, but for now there is none.

The Fish are Communist.

2009-11-21T16:38:00.002+11:00

Dalat is a quirky little place set in the central highlands of Vietnam at an altitude of around 1400m. Dalat is blessed with a climate of eternal springtime, the days are lovely and sunny mid twenties (with occasional wind and rain) and at night time the temperature drops to the mid teens. The landscape surrounding Dalat is covered with farms and greenhouses growing vegetables that are only available in this region and flowers, flowers and more flowers. All of this is set amongst panoramic mountains and valleys painted in a lush green hue. The city of Dalat itself is like nothing we have seen so far, more like the idealistic European mountain village, the city sprawls across the hills covered in French style villas, not just one or two, every house fronting the narrow and winding streets is in some way an architectural work of art.

Dalat is known locally as the Honeymoon city. Before we even arrived at Dalat we found the truth in the statement as we boarded the bus to take the “new road” we noticed that all of the other passengers on the bus were young Vietnamese couples, possibly on their honeymoon. Our other observation was that the level of wealth had risen amongst our fellow travellers and again we were the only westerners on our bus, a trend we have noticed while travelling through Vietnam is the rise in domestic tourism. With the bus mostly empty we spread out across two berths and enjoyed the scenery as we travelled the “new road” to Dalat.

The new road is the four hour trip between Nha Trang and Dalat, the other option is the “Old Road” which is a five to seven hour journey via Phan Thiet? The new road is actually quite new, only opening a year and a half ago and winds its way through the beautiful mountains and valleys, reaching into the clouds at its highest point and dishes out panoramic splendour at every turn. There is one catch… The “new road” is so new, they haven’t actually finished it yet. For the majority of our trip we bumped and bounced and gripped the armrests as we narrowly missed oncoming trucks, buses, scooters and bulldozers while the driver crunched the gears and mashed the brakes as bitumen gave way to gravel, and gravel gave way to dirt all the way avoiding giant holes in the road and certain death from a drop off the cliff. It was a great adventure though… Today as I write this we are on our way back from Dalat on the old road as two days ago the new road collapsed (again), and I must say from the two hours we’ve travelled so far, the old roads isn’t much better and is quite difficult to type this while sliding from left to right, not top mention being distracted by the view.

We were transferred to our hotel by the bus company and the ride through Dalat was another trip full of “ooohs” and “aaaghs” as we soaked up the atmosphere of this tranquil city. We chose our hotel from the Lonely Planet guide book based solely on the promise of Vegemite for breakfast, and were delighted to find a nice comfortable hotel. We hired a scooter for three days and set out to explore the town, our first stop was to the local markets as we were in urgent need of warmer clothing as Dalat was actually quite cool, especially when riding the scooter. Prue managed to get a pair of pants that were taken up for her while we explored the rest of the markets for a warm jumper each.

Our time in Dalat was spent mostly relaxing, Prue had caught a flu and was feeling shit, a flu she probably got from me a week earlier, although my ear had cleared up after poking it with toothpicks at a rest stop on the way to Dalat while a very friendly bird hopped around on our shoulders… Either way we spent our first two days going at an easy pace, heading out to indulge in the local restaurants and exploring the surrounding hills and town at cruise pace on the scooter. The traffic was a lot thinner in Dalat although the narrow winding streets created a new challenge when turning so we stuck to our mantra of “don’t look, just go”. With a decent wireless connection we also found time to Skype home and touch base with our family.

A couple of solo explorations of the town presented a few interesting occasions. Leaving Prue at the hotel curled up with a book feeling sick I ventured out on the scooter. Wringing the neck of the scooter I played “Vietnamese Slalom” ducking and weaving through the streets and hills of Dalat and at one point found myself launched twenty centimetres off the ground after getting air from a pothole down a dirt road that led to nowhere… On my pink scooter! My other solo adventure was to find a bar to have a quiet drink. Dalat isn’t well known for bars and even the guide book mentions its lacking nightlife. With this in mind I headed out to find myself a pub, I passed up the multitude of seedy looking Karaoke bars and local cafes and eventually stumbled on a place advertising a “Beer Dungeon” with free pool and music. Walking past the front I was pulled inside by an eccentric French-man called Nono with a genuine smile behind his long pointy beard. At the back of the building I was led downstairs to the dungeon hidden behind a large padded door.

The bar inside wasn’t much more than a brick room with a bar on one side, a pool table at the end and a few barstools scattered around tables. However the atmosphere was exactly what I was looking for, with a room full of like-minded travellers, an Aussie Ex-Pat publican, pumping tunes and walls covered in the scrawling graffiti of every traveller who had passed this way before me.

I found a little sanctuary to chill out before the infectious insanity of the bar absorbed me. I watched as Nono the French-man tried to convince an English girl that you can’t crush an egg with one hand by squeezing it, then watched as egg exploded in every direction across the pub followed by cries of astonishment and a barrage of insults from the Aussie Bartender who cried bloody murder as that was the last egg and someone upstairs had ordered a Carbonara 45 minutes ago. I had to defend my Bic lighter from being pocketed after it was explained that Bic lighters are a valuable commodity in Vietnam and upon the Aussie Bartender learning that I had a full black Bic at home in my backpack he swiftly offered me any bottle from behind the bar in exchange. Knowing the value of my lighter I declined his offer and left the bar at the strike of midnight and the start of curfew for the pub to close.

For our last day in Dalat we hired an Easy Rider Motorcycle guide named “Joseph” to take us on a tour around Dalat and the surrounding countryside. I rode my trusty pink scooter and Prue (still not feeling well) rode on the back of Joseph’s ‘big’ 125cc Honda. Big bikes aren’t common in Vietam (or much of anywhere in SE Asia) the Police ride 250cc bikes which are considered “big” by locals and I had a chuckle when negotiating our guide as he asked if I could handle a “big bike” like his 125cc. The main reason is the cost of the licence for a larger bike being roughly the equivalent of US$1000.00.

Joseph spoke English, French and Vietnamese and was an absolute gold mine of local knowledge as well as a very informative political commentator. Wherever we stopped he would tell us stories about the war, the government and its communist doctrines. I felt a little left out as Joseph liked to talk so much he Chatted away to Prue while cruising through the winding mountain trails surrounding Dalat. Of course I could hear none of this following behind on my scooter, but Prue filled me in the important parts later on. We visited a local temple with a gigantic flowing statue of a Dragon that largely resembled Bendigo’s Sun Loong and travelled out of town through the hills covered in tiered fields of Vegetables to a scenic spot by a lake.

Travelling up again into the mountains we stopped at a panoramic lookout of the valley and mountains with a small town perched in the cradle of the hills in the distance. Joseph explained about the effects of Agent Orange and how the Pine Trees we were seeing everywhere were planted by the US many years later as they had destroyed the jungle with napalm so that VC Snipers picking off convoys using the mountain roads had nowhere to hide. We slowly wound our way down the mountain dodging the occasional truck and into the small town occupied by the local ethnic group Kho (Koho).

We scrambled down a make shift staircase engraved into rocks, clambered over and between more rocks and squeezed through a small opening to reach a cave behind the Elephant Waterfalls where the spray swept back on us cooling us off. Then we clambered back around to the front of the waterfall along a path, that wasn’t really a path, more like a collection of stepping stones placed at random heights and the challenge wasn’t just finding the next one, but also trying not to fall off the slippery and muddy stones.

Back at the top of the falls we chatted to Joseph for a bit while we caught our breath and he told us stories of Police corruption before directing us to some local Kho people weaving ornate designs by hand. Prue fell in love with one of the scarves (which she bought for about $10) once she learnt the larger pieces can take up to two months to make. We were then treated to a massive spread of lunch in a nearby café where we sat next to a small lake full of very hungry fish that ate all of the scraps that the local dog didn‘t want. Our lunch was a large spread of about a dozen different local dishes which were place on the table for the three of us to sample. Our meal cost just 30,000 Dong each (about $1.70).

After lunch we went to a Silk factory where we saw silk worm cacoons being turned into rolls of fine silk, we rode through the fields of coffee stopping to watch an 84 year old lady weaving baskets and then riding through hills covered in greenhouses we called in to wander through the flowers and watch the local family prepare the flowers to me shipped off to the markets in Saigon. We had a fantastic day with our guide Joseph and his relaxed pace and wealth of knowledge made the day so much more enjoyable and after a cruise back through the mountains and into Dalat, our day was topped off with a trip to the Crazy House.

The Crazy House is one of Dalat’s tourist attractions, it is actually a house and the lady who designed and built it still lives there, she also rents rooms out for the night like a hotel. But the Crazy House is not a house. The crazy House is like its namesake, absolutely crazy. Prue giggled and squealed like a four year old as we explored the labyrinth of free flowing staircases leading to rooms with strange themes like the kangaroo room which has a large sculpture of a kangaroo with sinister looking glowing red eyes. There are no square traditional rooms or windows as everything has been rendered and sculpted with concrete and gives the place an almost organic feel.

After eating dinner for our last night in Dalat I dragged Prue to the Dungeon Bar “Subterrain” where we played a few games of “Prue’s-rules-pool” and chatted to the Aussie bartender where we played “who do you know that I know” only to find that even though we both lived in the same places in Melbourne we didn’t know anyone. Prue gave Nono the French-man optometry advice (as you do) and we left again just on the strike of curfew leaving behind my trusty (but almost empty) blue Bic Lighter to much thanks and shouts of victory by Nono the French-man.

As I type this I’m still on the “old road” bus heading back to Na Trang, we’ve survived the hazardous mountain pass road, dodged cows, scooters and ox drawn carts while bouncing up and down all the way back to the coast. We have started heading north sitting behind a truck while the driver continues to mash his horn at all of the oncoming traffic. The TV on the bus is playing the Vietnamese version of “Dancing with the stars“ and again we are the only westerners...

Sorry 'bout the long post, we have photos to post but Vietnam has no access to Facebook at the moment, although the Government has denied blocking it. Will put some photos up again when it is working.

The Soundtrack of SE Asia (Long Train is Long)

2009-11-18T04:34:00.004+11:00

We decided to spend the day just wandering around Saigon and seeing some more of it’ sights today. We wandered out of the hotel after another breakfast of a fresh bread roll and some jam. We stood on the edge of the road trying to figure out how to tell who was just riding a scooter and who was actually an ex om motorbike taxi rider. We took a guess that the ones sitting around with peaked caps were the people we wanted to speak to and approached them. They jumped into action on our approach and we agreed on a price to take us to the Jade Pagoda that we’d been told was amazing. After flying through the Saigon streets on the back of a motorbike we were much more in sync with the city. It is really an amazing place when you just go with the flow.

We got to the Jade Pagoda and realised that it wasn’t just a tourist attraction, this place had a steady stream of worshipers that were moving around us going about their prayers. The building was quite unimpressive when you saw it from the outside. But once you got inside the rooms were filled with beautiful statues and amazing carvings and wall frescos. There were many Taoist myths and stories that seem to be shared across many religions in the area. There were some amazingly vivid pictures of the 10 levels of Hell. We took our time and slowly and respectfully made our way around the area and then finished by patting the mane of a giant horse statue and ringing it’s bell for good luck in travel.

We headed out and our riders had hung around so we negotiated another amount to take us down to the water front area. About half way they stopped off at the Notre Dame Cathedral which is opposite the beautiful post office built by the French when they were in control of Saigon, The drivers let us jump off and go into the post office (which was open on a Sunday) and post a card home.

We then headed down to the water front which we’d been told was amazing and beautiful and after saying goodbye to our bikes we wandered for a bit, the area was silent. There was nothing much happening, no one was around and all the shops looked so stuck up that we couldn’t be bothered to really stick around. We had lunch at a Korean food place that turned out to be very nice and pretty cheap and then started walking back through the city towards our hotel. We shopped at some local places and had a drink on the way.

We headed back to the hotel and tried to book our tickets for the train the next day. Sadly the train station office was closed so we figured that we’d just risk it the next morning. We wandered around the area and I had another blind massage. This one was pretty hairy. No one spoke any English and the only thing I can say is “thank you” in Vietnamese. After getting through it and heading for a dinner of Pho Bo, Drew and I went to the Crazy buffalo.

This is a bar that specialises in cheap drinks and the soundtrack of South East Asia. The music varied from classic hits of the 80's and 90's such as some classic Red Hot Chilli Peppers and AC/DC to I Swear by All for One. I hadn’t heard this song since probably my year 8 high school dance. There has actually been a lot less soundtrack of your life going on in Vietnam and never was it more prevalent than in Thailand where every second song you heard led to the conversation starting with ‘omg! I remember this song’ and then proceed to remember all the words much to your own dismay. Drew wanted me to mention that the toilet in this place was crazy and that in the boys urinal you were peeing on a LCD television.

The next morning we got up early and headed to the train station with our fingers crossed that we’d be able to get a train. So with much nervousness we checked out of our hotel and after being told it was booked out and to catch the bus we made it to the train station. We walked in and were immediately pointed in the right direction and headed to the ticket counter. We grabbed a numbered ticket and were about to sit down when one of the lovely train ladies approached us and asked what train we were planning to catch? We told her and she checked and double checked with us that we didn’t mind that it meant we were in 3rd class and only had fans and windows that could be opened. We told her that sounded perfect and she did a bit of a ‘ok, well if you’re sure’ and helped us buy our tickets.

Each ticket cost us 95.000D which works out to be about $5 US to get both of us from Saigon to Na Trang. We headed out to the train and we ushered aboard. We found that there was a family in our seat and the train guy was trying to get them to move for us, but we insisted that we’d just find a spare seat and with many smiles on both sides, as I don’t think they understood we found our seat. It was another lovely hard wood seat number like on the Thailand trains, but this one wasn’t nearly as busy. We made ourselves at home spreading out in our booth and watching all the locals get on the train.

Pulling away from the station we opened our windows and prepared for our journey. We were surrounded by families with kids and Drew played peek-a-boo with a kid who was about 6 for most of the trip. We had some of the food off the trolley’s they brought around and enjoyed the experience and the people. Drew went down to the dining car at one point and on his return said that without a doubt we were the only western people on the train. They smiled at us and we all had our non-verbal conversations. When Drew and I were taking photo’s of the countryside and marvelling over the rice paddies and then the mountains and then the sand dunes and the sea some of them jumped up to see what we were so excited about. It was great to see their faces light up when they realised that we were just appreciating the country. We got into Na Trang a bit after dark and after both waving enthusiastic goodbyes to the kids and their parents and having them shout first attempts at “good-bye” back we headed to our hotel.

Yet again we had no booking, but on rocking up we got a room with what we guessed would be a great view of the ocean but it was to dark to tell so we headed out to dinner. We didn’t spend too long out in Na Trang. It didn’t feel like Asia at all and was like a western resort town. After much discussion we decided to head to Da Lat the next morning and booked a bus with the hotel before we headed up to bed for the night.

Chapter 3: Good morning Vietnam

2009-11-15T13:02:00.002+11:00

We left the peaceful tranquility of Shianoukville via the service of the Mekong Express Bus Service. We opted for one of the (slightly) more expensive buses to ensure we had aircon and a toilet. Unfortunately our planning back fired somewhat as neither of us used the toilet on the Bus and after spending about eleven hours on a heavilly airconditioned bus, I finally got off the bus having a hard time breathing, and as I'd already had a cold and a blocked ear (plus the sunburn) I was feeling quite miserable by the end of the day. The bus was nice and comfortable, we even got served free water, breakfast and cake-ish things, but not being able to close the vents for the aircon and having only warm weather clothes made it a very long trip, although we were treated to a viewing of the movie "Taken" which was broadcast with the english soundtrack and very ammusing Engrish subtitles.

The bus trip took about four hours from Shianoukville to Phnom Pehn where we had a three hour stop over. We went back to the Foreing Correspondents Club (FCC) again for lunch, and it still remains the nicest place we've eaten on our trip, although it does feel like we are out of place when sitting on the balcony at the FCC, as you feel it is a members only type of club even though it isn't. From Phnom Pehn we had a seven hour trip across the border into Vietnam to reach Ho Chi Mihn City. The border crossing was made smooth by the bus company who took our passports to be proccessed at each point, and gave them back to us as we needed to be presented.

Crossing the border from Cambodia into Vietnam was the reverse effect of our crossing at Poipet two weeks earlier, the roads widened and became smoother, the streets had gutters and street lights, and there was a noticable lack of rubbish strewn around. Not that we could see all that much as it was night time as we arrived, but almost the whole way from the border to the center of Ho Chi Mihn City (HCMC) was urban, with shops and houses fronting the highway, broken up only occasionaly by a rice field.

We alighted the bus in the centre of HCMC's tourist precinct. A hub of cafes, restaurants and tall narrow hotels all with flashing lights and hosts standing on the stoop waving us inside. I suppose it is obvious when you walk down a street with gigantic backpackes strapped to your back at 10pm at night that you are looking for somewhere to stay. Almost everyone on the street tries to guide you, the pedal taxis and moto-taxis ask if you need a ride, the hoteliers come out on the street and try to chauffer you inside and the local barstaff wave brochures advertising their happy hours. I suppose I should also mention that the streets are also full of people who want to sell shit to you, and it is "shit". Usually cheap sunglasses or knock-off zippo lighters, but occasionaly random people walk up to you with a handfull of chewing gum or some other random peice of crap you don't need, but they're are pretty sure that you want it and your dissmisal is just an elite form of haggling.

The hardest thing to ignore is the beggars, they have been everywhere on our travels so far, we even have them at home obviously. The beggars here come in different forms, mostly people who are obviously poor looking will stand next to you untill you look at them then make a prayer sign with their hands and put on their saddest looking face. These ones can be easliy ignored as they are only about level 2 novice beggars. The next step up are the child beggars, usually around level 5 apprentice, the lower leveled child beggars will mimick the prayer/sad face combination where as the higher level child beggars will grab your leg and say "dollar" over and over until it wears you down. Child beggars can sometimes work in pairs, where an older sibbling will torment the younger sibling in its arms until it cries, then get your attention for a bonus multiplier of sadness and "Awww".

The real heart string pullers are the victims beggars, these guys can range anywhere from a level 10 Journey man with a missing leg or arm who is usually the victims of a land mine and go up the a level 20 Battle Mage the shortest straw drawn victims of the terrible atrocities of this country and the use of Agent Orange. I guess it seem a bit heartless to see all of this with a sense of humour, but there is no way that we could make it through our travels if we allow ourselves to be affected by every single beggar, the weight of the emotions would be heavier than our backpacks, and the toll on our wallet would drastically shorten our adventures. So we smile back and say "hello" and hope that the NGOs continue their good work to help these people so they they stop relying on the emotional tourist dollar.

Our first morning in HCMC (Still known as Saigon to everyone but the officials) we woke to the local soundtrack a cacauphony of scooter exhausts and horns. The streets are a chaotic mess off traffic, it is the most amazing thing to watch as about a billion scooters flanked by a handful of busses, trucks and cars travel in every single direction, interweaving with absoulutely no sense of formal road rules, yet the absoulute chaos of everything work perfectly with a harmonious fluidity. We join the traffic on the front of a cyclo, a chair mounted to the front of a bicycle. Our first stop was the Reunification Palace, the palace occupied by the South Vietnamese goverment during the war years and was where the liberation army drove their tanks through the front gates. We were lucky enough to arrive just as the last English propaganda filled tour was leaving for the day as the "Palace" was being used for official purposes later in the day.

Our next stop was the War Remnants Museum, a museum dedicated to the memory of the attrocities commited during the war years, we went expecting to find it very heavily weighted with propaganda supporting the North Vietnamese and luckily we weren't dissapointed. After passing through the front garden full of Tanks, jets, artillery and a Cessna with rocket launchers... We walked in to the museum filled with photos of some of the tragedies of the war years. The photos show the truths of the war, with photos taken from both sides of the fence and a large section setup by an American that documents the timeline of the war through powerful imagery and personal stories. It is somewhere along this point that I realised that I didn't know much about the Vietnam war other than what I had seen in American films, what I know now has profoundly changed my outlook. I guess the North Vietnamese propaganda worked as I am trully disgusted at the United States and found myself a little ashamed that we as Australians had some part in the war.

After a long day of deppressing war shit, we headed home via the local markets. The market was a massive building housing hundreds of tightly packed stalls selling everything from local souvenirs to clothes, shoes, and very smelly spices. Walking through the clothes stalls the vendors would grab your arm and physically pulll you into their stores to view their goods. A fantastic place to shop although again we had the sad realisation that we couldn't buy anything unless we wanted to carry it with us for a long, long time. We did buy a few more clothes items and I was most dissapointed to get home and find the Versace shirt I bought didn't fit.

After a night out for dinner in the nearby restaurant we organised our second day to do a tour down to the Mekong Delta region. Although our one day tour only reached the tip of the region we crossed the mighty Mekong river by boat, then changed to a few smaller boats to travel down the small canals that traverse the tropical islands. Our tour was the most "tour like" tour we have been on so far. After a rest break 45mins into the bus ride we were already calling it a souvenir tour as most places we stopped were tourist traps that probably paid the tour companies some type of commision for bringing the punters.

Netherless we learn't about the many uses for coconuts and were shown how coconut candy was made, even bought some for later. We paddled down one of the canals in a row boat, which would've been fantastic if it wern't for the fact that every row boat we passed in the opposite direction held out money and pointed to our row boat steerer saying "tip, tip". Then we listened to local music, sampled strange tropical fruits, honey tea and banana whiskey. I even tried a bit of the Snake infused whiskey, just a minute or so after holding one of the large pythons that would inevitably end up as the whiskey. We headed back to Saigon and ate dinner in a restaurant where the hosts cooks a BBQ in the middle of your table while drinking uber cheap beer at two for one prices.

Today we decided to chill out in the morning, before we head out to explore a bit more of Saigon and organise our train tickets for tomorrow, we are hoping to head for Na Trang or Dalat. Saigon is an amazingly intense city, with action packed traffic, lively bars and nightclubs and a general hustle and bustle we haven't really felt since leaving Bangkok. Although though Vietnamese people are quite nice, we are looking forward to moving on as our first impressions of Vietnam have been a little underwhelming when compared to the warm hospitality of Cambodia or the fun loving Thailand...

The story so far...

2009-11-14T21:58:00.002+11:00

We've come quite a distance in our travels, below is a public link to our photos so far:

Bangkok, Thailand.
Day 1
Photos [HERE]

Bangkok, Thailand.
Days 2-4
Photos [HERE]

Western Thailand.
Days 5-7
Photos [HERE]

Bangkok, Thailand to Battambang, Cambodia.
Days 8-10
Photos [HERE]

Battambang, Cambodia to Siem Reap, Cambodia
Days 11-12
Photos [HERE]

Angkor Temples, Siem Reap, Cambodia
Day 13
Photos [HERE]

Siem Reap, Cambodia to Phnom Pehn, Cambodia
Days 14-16
Photos [HERE]

Phnom Pehn, Cambodia to Shianoukville, Cambodia
Days 17-20
Photos [HERE]

Don't forget to add coments after our posts, it is nice to know people are reading.

Holidays on Holidays

2009-11-11T17:29:00.002+11:00

We sidestepped the Tuk-Tuk cartel as we rolled off the bus at Shianoukville, and found ourselves with a cheap ride (although we had to keep our voice down so that the cartel didn’t know our driver had lowered the locally set high fare) to the hotel we had picked from the Lonely Planet, Coaster’s. We booked into a Bungalow which is basically a wooden hut up on sticks about 3m off the ground, with a couple of fans, mozzie nets, a bathroom and a balcony with an absolutely beautiful view of the ocean and the surrounding islands.

We have decided to take a break from travelling and just chill out for a few days by the beach. Which is pretty much all we have done, moving from beachside restaurants with sand under our toes to beachside bars with sand under our toes. We hired a scooter on our second day and braved the local police and their arbitrary tourist laws like riding with lights on during day and charging fines for not having a Cambodian licence, basically fund raising and fines are barter-able. We rode down to another quieter local beach for a relaxed lunch, then back to another beach later for a swim while we watched a beautiful sunset over the ocean. Then we headed down the another beach restaurant with sand under our toes and ate a delicious serve of Barbequed King prawns.

Let’s just sidestep for a second here: Now I know that I may look stereotypically the part with my long hair, beard and my occasional wearing of a Pink Floyd T-Shirt, but at least two or three times a day since we have been in Cambodia, someone on the street will subtly offer me Marijuana. Sometimes it is not so subtle with them pulling out a bag just to show me that their stuff is legit. We had both read stories about police offering tourists drugs just to then arrest them and give them a large fine or threaten with jail. But just like the street peddler they will say, “you change your mind you come see me”. It is also common for pizza restaurants to have a partitioned menu with normal pizza and “happy” pizza, which we assume has pot sprinkled on it as an ’erb.

So while relaxing on the beach eating our king prawns we noticed a lot of people sitting around smoking joints, one old Khmer guy was walking along the beach smoking a big joint while talking into his radio, no not a walkie talkie, just a radio… As you do. It is obviously a part of the local culture, and we even noticed a lady going through the tables selling pre-rolled joints while helping to maintain the barbeque. Although there is quite an alternative tourist culture is Shianoukville, with lots of fire-twirlers on the beach and Doof Doof that starts at about 12am and goes all night. Our first morning we woke at 6am and watched the sunrise before going back to bed, only to be woken 20mins later by some Argentineans next door, who were getting home to re-supply their coke-heads.

Our third day we took a boat out to the local islands where we snorkelled around the coral and relaxed on more beaches while being fed a beautiful barbeque of local fresh ocean fish. It was another wonderfully relaxing day in paradise although we both got sunburnt really badly. We look like Pommy Backpackers at the moment as we are so very pink, and so very sore. My troubles are made worse as my left ear is blocked after getting a water logged ear and then making it worse with a cotton bud. I may have fucked my ear drum or something, shit happens. We also realised how spoilt we were at the Great Barrier Reef, the fish and coral here were really nice, but they were no way as grand and colourful as what we saw at the Great Barrier Reef.

Today is our last day here (maybe). We’d like to stay longer as it is so lovely just chilling out on the beach, but it is probably time to get moving again and tomorrow will start a new chapter as we take a bus back to Phnom Pehn and then onto to Saigon/Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam by tomorrow night. We hired a scooter this morning but haven’t used it yet because we have both been so busy doing absolutely nothing at all. Maybe we will go for a cruise then retire for the afternoon in one of those beach side bars with the sand under our toes…

Sorry about posting three posts in one day but we've been quite busy doing absolutely nothing.

Photos for the last week can be found right HERE.

Prue vs. The Hostesses

2009-11-11T17:27:00.000+11:00

With a lot of encouragement I managed to drag Prue into the bar across the street from our hotel, the same bar I had entered the night before. Instantly we were set upon by a pack of young Khmer girls who greeted us and ushered us to a table where they sat with us staring at us with polite smiles. Prue shifted uneasily in her seat as we ordered a beer for myself and a margarita for Prue. The girls tried making conversation with us and Prue tried to find out the score asking them if they were paid to talk to us, but we struggled to translate the questions, so after much deliberation between the Hostesses they replied with “Do you want a Tuk-Tuk?”. Prue’s margarita was neon blue in colour and like myself the night before she swiftly sipped her drink and we bailed from the bar to find a less awkward place to enjoy a drink and get some dinner.

After two nights in Phnom Pehn we’d seen enough, it’s not that the place wasn’t interesting, just that it wasn’t very nice. We boarded a coach the next morning and headed south towards Shianoukville. We paid and extra $2 ($7 total) for the Airconditioned bus with a toilet and free drinking water, we didn’t see any drinking water but we were treated to some first class Cambodian Karaoke on the TV screen, the first half hour of the trip we pissed ourselves at the cheesiness of the Khmer music videos and especially the song called “New Zealand” we had no idea what the song was about but it was fun singing the only English words of the song “New Zealand” as they popped up on the screen.

After Karaoke we were treated to a Cambodian comedy show, we had no idea what was going on but the laughter from the Khmer people on our bus and the indecipherable madness happening on the screen made it quite entertaining. The laughter was stopped as we drove past a collision on the way out town, where a scooter rider had a very bloody forehead, a wound that probably would have been avoided had he been wearing a a helmet. We stopped at a rest point about halfway through the trip and found disappointment that there were no kids with Tarantulas hounding us to buy fruit, but we did find some of the yummy fried bananas we had in Battambang.

The second half of our trip on the bus became somewhat of a surreal experience… As soon as the bus had fired up the engine and roared off down the highway (road from Phnom Phen to Shianoukville is a very good road surprisingly) on came the TV and we found our self watching a 90’s Jackie Chan film dubbed into Khmer with English subtitles. The opening scene displayed the word “Melbourne” and we both had an “oh shit, no way” moment as we realised the film we were watching was not only filmed entirely in Melbourne. But when they filmed the movie Jackie Chan had stayed at Darling Towers our former work/home. We ended up watching the whole movie, shouting out locations as we recognised them and had a truly strange experience thinking about the coincidence of it all while we rolled into the beachside town of Shianoukville…

Tragedy and Majesty

2009-11-11T17:19:00.000+11:00

Tragedy and MajestyWe headed off late in the morning after a sleep in to have breakfast in Phnom Penh. After dodging the flocks of Tuk-Tuk drivers we found a nice little place to eat around the corner from the hotel. With a good breakfast in our bellies we headed back into the scrum to pick a driver. We ended up choosing a driver that spoke English in a great Aussie accent and it took us ages to figure out he was in fact from Phnom Penh. He’d been taken under the wing of some Aussie ex-pat and he spoke a bit like a local from central Australia or maybe north of Perth. He had Australia and Perth written on his Tuk-Tuk as well as the inside part of the roof being covered in stickers of people with him and of him with his family and many other interesting things.

We headed out to the Killing Fields to see the sad history of the people of Cambodia. I don’t really know what to say about the Killing Fields except that I believe it’s is a place that everyone who visits Cambodia needs to visit. It is hard to write about the experience, it’s not like Battambang where there was so much to say about that day that we could gloss over it. We knew that we’d have to take our time and pay our respects and on entering the site we both got chills. When you first walk in you see the large Stupa that was built to hold the bones of the dead that had been unearthed. Only about a third of the site has been excavated so far and they know that they have only taken out a small portion of the dead. We took our time at the site, reading all the information and looking through the small museum on the site. Drew and I were profoundly affected by what we saw and read. This is a testament to the character of the wonderful Khmer people who have overcome huge adversity to become the wonderful, welcoming and happy people we are meeting everywhere in Cambodia. These sites are both a stark reminder and a memorial and we are grateful we chose to do it.

We headed to the Royal Palace in our Tuk-Tuk (The only one like it in Phom Pehn) and said goodbye to our charismatic driver. The Royal Palace is another awe inspiring place and the wonderful buildings that we were allowed to see were amazing. I hate to draw comparisons, but I don’t think it was on the same scale as the pimped out Thai Palace. It is however, amazing in more subtle ways. The artworks inside on the walls are from many hundreds of years ago and the fact that any of it survived the Khmer Rouge is amazing in itself. So many places we’ve visited have been breathtaking despite people apologising that it was more amazing before it was destroyed by the Khmer Rouge. We love it anyway. The Royal Palace did have something that the Thai King didn’t have. The Royal Palace has a huge building that has a floor completely made of Silver Tiles. Most of the tiles were covered in carpet so you could walk through the Pagoda to see the wonderful museum quality objects that the King has made available to be viewed, but you can still see the silver tiles. Even though you’re not meant to step past the rope and onto silver floor Drew and I did possibly inch forward a little too much just to stand barefoot on the floor.

We headed back to the hotel and dropped some stuff off at our room and then headed out to see the night markets. We may have got to the markets a little early but we wandered around with all the locals looking at the food and clothes and many other items available for sale. It was slightly underwhelming when compared to some of the markets that we’d seen already so we headed off down some dark back streets checking out the local parts of the city…

Mr Handsome and Mrs Beautiful

2009-11-07T19:22:00.003+11:00

The Temples of Angkor are amazing, it truly is an exhilarating place. I guess some people don’t really get into it as we noticed many times that people were just walking along snapping off photos and (like the Sai Yok Noi waterfall) most of them never actually stopped to look at what they were taking pictures of. Prue and I on the other hand have spend the last three days clambering up steep staircases, ducking and weaving through dark hallways and jumping over giant square stones like Lara Croft and most of the time humming the theme to Indiana Jones.

We organised a Tuk-Tuk driver to take us for the day, and Mr Thea would happily drive us from place to place and then wait (sometimes for hours) in the back of his Tuk-Tuk until we came back ready to explore the next place. Arriving at a new temple always meant that there was a group of street peddlers waiting to pounce on you as soon as you got off the Tuk-Tuk (and usually before you got off) with calls of “hello sir you wanna a cold drink, only one dollar” or “maybe you think about it, you come see me when you get back”. Most of the peddlers are quite young and they speak in a sad voice and give you puppy dog eyes to play on your emotions, quite often they follow you all the way to the temple gates, but they were always polite and although it did get a bit bothersome at times it was also a bit of fun walking along saying “no thanks, no thank you” or “Te Oh Kun” which is the Khmer for the same thing.

The Khmer people as a whole (especially the younger generation) are very good at speaking English, much better than the Thai people we met. It is easy to have a basic conversation with most of the people you meet, the younger peddlers are always quite happy to ask you questions about where you are from, and like the Bangkok reply “Sydney -Kangaroo” here in Cambodia we get “Australia, capital Canberra” or “G’day Mate”.

Siem Reap is one of the first places that we have felt comfortable, possibly a combination of the lovely hotel we stayed in, the warm friendliness of the Khmer people, and the westernised/bastardised strip of town brought about by the tourist hordes. The markets we full of local clothing, crafts and souvenirs and it became a little depressing thinking about all of the magnificent things we could buy if it weren't for the fact we’d have to lug it around in our backpacks for the next few months. We originally booked to stay three nights in Siem Reap but after our first day we decided to extend one more night, Unfortunately our hotel was booked out but they were nice enough to take us around the corner to an equally priced but not quite as nice hotel for our last night before catching the bus to Phnom Pehn.

The bus to Phnom Phen was a bumpy ride, saying that the roads in Cambodia are shit is somewhat of an understatement. Reading a book was a bit of a challenge as you’d constantly we bobbing your head up and down just to keep your place on the page. We stopped for a refreshment break about 75kms from Phom Pehn and met the coolest peddlers so far of our trip. The place we stopped had a toilet and a restaurant and was full of stalls selling all kinds of nasties like giant crickets and tarantulas. But it was again the kids that mobbed us that were the most interesting. They all carried a bag of fruit to sell to you and even though we didn't want any fruit it was so hard to say no, as they played up the poor street urchin so well.

While I was standing around I had a great conversation with two of the girls, who asked me a thousand questions in almost perfect English (although with a slight American accent). And then one of them pulled a live tarantula out of her pocket… Yikes! Most of the kids carried around pet tarantulas, we assumed it was to attract the tourists, but it was nice to know that one of the girls named her tarantula “Happy”, thus probably sparing this spider from ending up like its brothers and sisters in the frying pan. At least for now.

Phnom Pehn is another big bustling city, although unlike Bangkok there are no large skyscrapers and we haven’t seen any modern central business district. To be honest, from what we've seen it is an entire city of slums, with the exception of a few nice bits, surrounded on each side by not so nice bits. We are staying in the riverfront precinct, which is something of a western hub. Full of bars, clubs and restaurants all with very western names to appeal to tourists and ex-pats, Our hotel is nice, after walking down the street from the bus station and looking at a lot of shoddy hotels, we finally found one that was nice for only $30 p/n, apparently it has only been open for ten days so everything is new and modern.

After visiting the National gallery (very amazing) we went to the FCC (Foreign Correspondents Club) for dinner. At the FCC we had our most expensive meal so far, around $30, was also the best (western) meal we have had so far, and it would have been quite easy to spend more money there. The FCC was the local hangout for journalists during the time of war, and the place was full of well to do looking westerners… And us.

After returning to our hotel last night Prue decided to jump on the internet downstairs (no free wireless at our hotel) so I walked across the road to have a drink at one of the bars. As soon as I walked in the door of the bar I realised instantly three things were our of place. Firstly; I was the only customer. Secondly; all of the people in the bar were young attractive women (with the exception of possibly two or three lady boys). Third; all of the women were smiling at me and saying hello...

I’d stumbled into a hostess bar, the situation became very weird and awkward as I quickly drank my beer while four or five girls sat around me staring at me and making polite conversation, while another ten or twenty watched from nearby tables, I felt like the last sausage on the barbeque. I guess it would have been fun had the place had a lot more customers, but as the girl explained to me it was seven thirty and the place would not get busy till ten or eleven o’clock. I wasn’t waiting around I went back to the hotel and we both had an early night, drifting off to sleep listening to hustle and bustle of Phnom Pehn, and waking in the morning to find it is still there…

Photos from the last few days can be seen HERE.

In Awe of Angkor

2009-11-03T23:37:00.003+11:00

Today we woke to find it was pouring rain and the day looked to continue in the same fashion. Yay! Our first day of Monsoon rain... Unfortunately the rain had to happen on the day we finally get to see Angkor Wat and its surrounding Angkorian Temples. Oh well, we jumped in our Tuk-Tuk with the rain shields up and headed to the Temples via a quick stop to buy two umbrellas.

This is pretty much where today's blog finishes, I'm not going to try to use words to describe what we saw today. We literally spent the entire day with our jaws gaping open saying things like "Oh my god LOOK at that!"or "Holy Fucking Shit!" all with childlike grins on our faces and utter bewilderment at everything. There are no adequate words for today and the pictures definitely wont do justice. We will be returning to the temples tomorrow (hopefully in the sunshine although the rain did keep away the mass of crowds and gave everything a very serene beauty) and we will definitely try to return to the temples of Angkor in years to come.

Enjoy the photos from today HERE

Cambodian Snow

2009-11-02T22:19:00.000+11:00

After our crazy experience getting into Cambodia and the sorry state of the town as we drove in we weren’t hoping for much today. We had organised a motorbike tour of the sites surrounding the city. This turned out to be a scooter tour as actual motorbike were thin on the ground. We came down after eating a great breakfast of hot fresh baked rolls and in Drew’s case an omelette, and met our guide who was sceptical that I could actually ride along with all the other guys sitting out the front who ran the motorbike rentals. We climbed on our little machines and headed off into the unknown.

Riding through town was a double challenge. Firstly there’s the problem of riding on the wrong side of the road which is a challenge in itself. Drew suggested I tie something to my right hand so I wouldn’t forget. But opting for guessing that I would get it after a while I rode after the departing guide. The second challenge is the riding in the traffic. It’s like a cosmically huge version of chicken. Basically you have to know where everyone around you is, but never make eye contact. If you make eye contact then you give way.

We headed out of town and road down some small back roads to a local temple that was a mixture of new temple building and an old walls that went all the way around and were carved to display the churning of the sea of milk. It was very cool, but on returning to our bike we’d discovered that Drew had gotten a puncture in his back tire and we needed to go and get it fixed. Our guide wheeled Drew’s bike into a tiny little grouping of shacks on the side of the road around the back of the temple. We discovered that the little shack that we’d pulled up to was in fact the local mechanic and a kid of about 16 was brought over and started to work on the back tire. We sat down in the shade and watched his attempts to manually get the tire off with hand tools, we were very impressed.

Once he got the tire off with our guides help, we discovered that the long nail that went in the tire didn’t just puncture it, but also ripped a huge gash in one side and put a few dozen holes in the other side too. In the end it was decided that it was unfixable as the gash was about 5 inches long. The mechanic’s sister roared off on my motorbike to get a new inner tube. Our guide walked us across the road and we watched an old couple work on frying food up. The guide selected a fritta that had shrimp fried into it and a fried banana for us to try. We were surprised by how fantastic it was and when the guide said he was getting some fried sweet potato for later we readily agreed. The girl came back with my bike and after the inner tube was replaced and the whole back end of Drew’s bike was screwed back on we headed off with a wave of thanks.

We headed up to Phnom Sampeau first and (after parking our bike and wiping the red dirt off from the roads) headed for the summit. We walked up the curving road to get to the top and stopped half way to see the killing caves of Phnom Sampaeu that were used by the Khmer Rouge to dispose of people that had disobeyed them or were no longer useful. The guide sat us down and explained how the old building (a small square school house) was used as a prison and more than 10,000 people were kept there over the course of the war. The people were disposed of by being thrown down into the caves and died at the bottom. Our guide explained that with the other shallow cave the people tended not to die straight away and there was no escape from a slow and sad death. He also explain many other torturous things that happened there and I don’t want to explain it here. I’ll just say that it’s very sad. We went down into the caves and there are memorials to the people who died, including clothes and bones. The majority of the bones were cremated and only a small number were kept to be used as a reminder to the future generations. Our guides father was killed during this time and he is an only child and his mother never remarried.

With massive lumps in our throats we headed up to the old temple at the top of the hill. The temple is still in use and the monks were chanting and preparing for the full moon day the next day. It had amazing views and there were local children being taught in one of the open rooms as we walked passed. After the massive hike up the hill we were so tired and decided that after looking around we’d go straight down the staircase that we could have walked up and had lunch. By halfway down we realised why the guide said to walk up the road and down the stairs. They were uneven and slippery and it would have been much more tiring climbing them than walking down them. We had lunch at the little place where we left the bikes and mine was a fantastic soup that had two minute noodles in a home made broth that was fantastic and morning grass (this ones for you Mac) as my vegies. It was actually fantastic and we then headed off to our next place to visit.
We were riding along when we started to see more and more piles of chillies on the side of the road. Our guide pulled over and explained that it was chilli harvesting season. The chillies were laid out about half an inch deep on huge blue and green tarps creating a sea of colour as we rode along. The smell of chillies were in the air and it was a magical experience. We made our way to Phnom Banan and then climbed the 358 steps almost straight up to Prasat Banan, an 11th century temple complex. It is an amazing temple group that look a lot like Angkor Wat does, but in much a smaller scale. Some of the temples have only just been rebuilt after they were destroyed during the Khmer Rouge rein of terror. It is an amazingly atmospheric place and it was like a different world when you reached the top after climbing all the stairs.

We then rode through many small towns, waving back at little kids on the side of the road and were challenged when we had to ride the scooters across a suspension bridge, great fun all round. We reached the Bamboo train (nori or norry) and decided to go for a quick round trip. The train is just two train wheels and a bamboo frame on top. The rule is that if they run into a train coming the other way the train with the least amount of stuff is dismantled and moved off the track to let the other train through. We got to do this which was a bit of an adventure. The train goes really fast and sometimes the home made track has big gaps leading to very sore bums when it hit’s the gaps.

After we got back from the train we road on through the country side and came back into Battambang from the other side. We said goodbye to our driver and again headed out to see more of the town. I found my first seeing hands massage and decided that dinner could wait and had an hour massage by a blind man who couldn’t understand very much of what I was saying, it was actually heavenly and only $6. Drew and I then headed off to find a restaurant that we’d been recommended called Gecko Café. It’s run by an American man and it only employs young people who are the soul supports of large families and orphans. It was a great place and we had a odd moment where we were listening to Nora Jones being played and were just thinking about how odd the experience was of listening to songs you’d heard before in a completely different surrounding (while eating Mexican food). It was also as we were sitting there that we noticed that hadn’t seen many people over the age of about 25 and we were reminded of the horrible price Cambodia has had to pay for the peace it has today. We walked home with a renewed love for the country and we we’re very glad that were able to see more of Battambang as we might not have appreciated it if we hadn’t.

Chapter 2: Scams, Shams, Slums and Salmon.

2009-11-01T01:23:00.001+11:00

Cambodia... Where the slums got so much soul.

We alighted the train into the sweltering heat of Aranyaprathet just on the Thailand side of the border between Cambodia. A pack of Tuk-Tuk vultures set upon us immediately and another couple travelling on the train with us negotiated a 40 Baht ride to the border, so we followed suit. Arriving at the border we noticed one thing. Where the fuck was the border?... Jumping out of the Tuk-Tuk a few sleazy (Bangkok suit seller style) men started waving forms for us to fill out claiming they were the visa organisers and we needed to get a visa then they would take us to the border. We all instantly new something was dodgy especially because the sign on the building said "traveller's agency" and after about five minutes of second guessing them and checking the Lonely Planet for advice we jumped back in the Tuk-Tuk and told the driver to go to the border.

The driver reversed, drove 100m up the road and turned into the Embassy of the Kingdom of Cambodia. Again at the embassy we weren't sure if we were being scammed or not but we noticed that one of the guys from the travel agency came in with the passport of another European man who had been at the travel agency. Basically they get you to fill in the form and pay, then they take your passport to the embassy to get the visa adding a few dollars commission. We decided just to go ahead and do the visa at the embassy but the other couple from the train still felt suss so they went straight to the actual border. Leaving the embassy a man in a Salmon Polo Shirt tried to convince us to get a taxi from him on the other side of the border, we politely declined saying we'd get a bus and jumped back in the Tuk-Tuk.

When we did make it to the border we found the other couple and learnt that you could actually just get the visa straight from the border and for about $5 less. Oh well, shit happens. The border crossing itself was long and hot process, lots of standing in line, going to a counter and then moving on. The area between Thailand and Cambodia was a no man's land and reflected an instant change in the level of road maintenance as well as general wealth. Cambodia being the much, much poorer of the two.

In PoiPet on the Cambodian side of the border we were accosted by the man in the Salmon Polo again, he had followed us over the border and led us to the last checkpoint where we got our Cambodian stamp (another long hot queue). Leaving the border he directed us to the free tourist shuttle that would take us to the bus station. Arriving at the Bus station there were no buses to Battambang and that a taxi would cost us about $20. We checked the Lonely planet guide again and found that the bus station was actually run as a monopoly and were notorious for scamming tourists with expensive trips.

Again we bailed from the station taking our fellow travellers with us back to the main road. Problem. The Salmon Polo Shirts followed, they didn't just follow us they chased us constantly trying to negotiate a price to travel. By the time we arrived back at the main rd (about 200m from the bus station) the four of us had an entourage of unmarked taxis and men in Salmon Polo Shirts fighting with us and each other for our fare. We found another smaller bus company, but the buses only departed in the morning. We tried to ask a police man for help but he just took off only to return two minutes later with another taxi following. BYYAAAAAGHHH!!! While they were distracted negotiating with us, the other couple (who were heading to a different location) took the opportunity to bail unnoticed and we wished them a silent "good luck".

Eventually we negotiated a 500 Baht fare ($16.66) in a share taxi where we had the back seat to our self. Considering Battambang was an hour and a half drive from PoiPet and the taxi had aircon, this was a pretty sweet deal. Then the next problem occurred, right hand drive, right hand side of the road. This was our first experience with wrong side driving, and especially considering the driving style of the region with the imaginary third middle lane, and the fact that when the driver wasn't indicating to overtake he was mashing the horn, and the constant overtaking while cars or trucks are rapidly approaching the other way... Well lets just say it was a bit unnerving.

A lot more people in Cambodia are on Scooters and a lot more things are piled on the scooters. We've been having a lot of fun counting the number of people or the amounts of stuff that we've seen thus far, which includes one guys with a solid wood bed on the back of his motorbike and a family of three with the mum holding up a IV drip which was going into the arm of the kid in the middle.

When we arrived at Battambang it wasn't really as we expected, to be quite honest it's a bit of a hole, and kinda smells like a combination of fish and Echuca?? We didn't realise we'd been spoiled in Thailand. Battambang is desolate and feels like a busy version of the wild west. If there wasn't so many scooters you could easily imagine a tumbleweed rolling down the dirt/concrete/paving/etc street.

We walked into a hotel that we found in the Lonely Planet and booked as walk in and got a lovely and huge room with a great ceiling fan, TV, balcony and hand carved heavy wooden furnishings for $10 US for the next two nights. Then taking the recommendation of Lonely Planet again we went to dinner at 'Smokin' Pot' which is a great little restaurant that did great food. We copped out and had western food (breakfast/hamburgers) for dinner seeing as we hadn't eaten all day.

We've booked to be taken on a motorbike (scooters) tour of the sights tomorrow and we've even got an English speaking guide for the whole day, all for just $24. Hopefully we'll see some of the temples and evidence of French Colonialism and the lush areas of Battambang of which we are still sceptical as to whether they exist., either way we get to try our hand at wrong side driving, on a motorbike, in Asia...

More on that and possibly a link to photos in the next post...

Samboon and the Angry Man (Atleast we’re out of the Tree)

2009-10-31T21:10:00.002+11:00

Well it has been a little while between blog posts now and we've had quite the adventure. I am currently sitting on the train in 3rd class (cattle class was the only option). We are heading towards Aranyaprathet the border town between Thailand and Cambodia, in an hour or to we will cross into Poipet in Cambodia.

When we last posted we were about to head into the Jungle on a three day, two night tour. Our first day heading due west from Bangkok took us to the War Cemetery at Kanchanaburi, the cemetery is one of five that contain the graves of Allied soldiers that where killed while being held as POWs by the Japanese during the second world war. There was a large section dedicated to Australian soldiers and reading the inscriptions on the grave stones was really moving as they‘d had personal inscriptions from the families added. When you think about these young men working on the Thai-Burma railway and never coming home it’s hard, but when you read ‘sleep now my son, daddy is proud of you’ or ‘put of flower of his grave for me, mum’ it makes it that much harder.

We then went to the “new” bridge over the river Kwai, the original bridge was actually 300meters upstream but as they bombed the shit out of it towards the end of the war, no trace of the original bridge remains. Was still pretty cool to go there although the museum at the location was poorly arranged and other than seeing an Ex Japanese Military BSA and a Triumph painted “Triumphn” we were pretty disappointed.

After the museum we rode the “Death Train” along side the river and through the jungle to Sai Yok. It was a little unnerving getting on something called the “Death Train” but it was actually pretty nice. In case you are interested it was called the “Death Train” due to the 100,000+ people (POW’s and local forced labour) who died building it.

After riding the train we were dropped off at Sai Yok Noi waterfalls for a two hour swim. The falls were beautiful and was the first time we had seen clean water since leaving Australia. The whole place is full of tourists and locals alike, although we kinda felt it was only us and the locals actually swimming at the falls, as most of the tourist just spent their time posing for the camera in various different positions.

Our accommodation for the two nights was a guest house floating over the river Kwai. It was a fairly basic room with two firm beds, an aircon that didn’t work and our bathroom had a view of the river through the floor boards (Just to remind you that all the water ends up in the river. Yes shit too). The guest house was really relaxing and had a nice dining area that was great to just chill out with a beer and watch the river run by, floaties and all. We met a few Pommie travellers and swapped stories about Bangkok and our itineraries.

We were offered the chance to go and bathe with Elephants before breakfast the next day. Seriously it was the most fun I’ve had so far. Our Elephants name was Samboon and our driver was Tun. We both climbed onto Samboon and Tun led him out into the river (Yes the same river our shit goes into) then Tun shouted various commands and Samboon would either spray us with water or dive to the left or right trying to throw us off. It was so much fun I think we laughed the entire time. Samboon was really cheeky and seemed to be having a ball as sometimes he’d dive or spray without any forewarning.

After a shower and dodgy breakfast we went for a peaceful drift down the river on a bamboo raft, then went back to visit the Elephants for a Jungle trek. The jungle trek was really cool, Prue commented that she felt like an English princess or Lord for me conquering the land as our driver Chai led Mukhun our Elephant through the jungle.

After the Elephant riding we headed over the “Hellfire Pass” just near the border to Myanmar/Burma. Hellfire Pass has a museum setup by the Australian Government, and we both walked out of there with massive lumps in our throats after reading the letters sent by the POWs building the railway and seeing footage of the malnourished prisoners in the camp. Walking down through the pass itself was a very sad experience. The sheer size of the cutting made for the train must have been a painful and soul breaking experience for the POWs and really emphasised the strength and courage of those that did survive.

We returned for lunch at the river guest house (lunches and dinners were buffet style and very good, but breakfast was just an egg and dry toast) then headed off to Tiger Temple. We approached Tiger Temple with a bit of mixed emotion as we had heard reports of it being under investigation for doping the Tigers to keep them placid. If that is the case I think the tigers looked quite happy to be doped. Seeing the way they behave gave us the impression that they weren’t doped at all as once or twice one would get a bit agitated and let out a roar, and we were told on the previous day that one of the tigers had swiped a guys shirt leaving a muddy paw print. He was happy though as he had a souvenir and wasn’t going to wash his shirt again.

We were lucky enough that after posing for photos with the bigger tigers and then heading down to the cubs, we were actually locked in a enclosure type area with the cubs as they led the larger tigers past. During the time they were separated, the Monks let us play with the cubs, Prue got to hold the leash for awhile, and as I was scratching one of the cubs head you could see how like cats they are as it threw its head back just like any pet would.

We spent another night at the river guest house and chatted with more travellers, this time some Germans girls, an Elderly Aussie couple from Mornington and a solo Aussie girl. Our tour was a bit hectic and for t he last day we were supposed to go and visit a place called Erawin Falls, but as it costs 500Baht to enter the falls we decided to just chill out at the falls we had already been to which were nearby and didn’t cost anything to enter so we spent the 500 Baht bathing with the Elephants again. It was just as much fun the second time, and as soon as we saw Tun and Samboon we ran over and climbed on before anyone else could. Simone the Aussie girl also came to the waterfall with us and it was nice to just relax and go at our own pace, as the pace of the tour thus far (to quote one of the German girls) felt like school camp, with a very angry and bossy teacher/tour organiser.

After we headed back to Bangkok we decided just to hit the pause button, we spent the rest of the night chilling out again, having dinner on KhaoSarn Rd and getting a Thai Massage. The next day pretty much followed suit, but was a bit of a fuck around as we had to collect our visas for Vietnam and find out about the train to Cambodia. We missed the morning office hours of the Embassy by fifteen minutes so we went to the station by taxi, but the traffic was too bad so he dropped us at the subway, when we got to the station we found out there was no pre-booking for tickets and only 3rd class was available, then took a tuk-tuk to MBK again for absolutely no reason other than to kill time until the embassy reopened. Then after a short stint shopping on KhaoSarn Rd again we got home tired and overheated and hadn’t really accomplished anything. Aaargh Bangkok.

We managed to catch up with our mate Karina from Darling Towers on Friday in Bangkok, funnily enough we sat down to eat dinner and kept an eye out for her in case she went by, funnily enough it wasn’t till after we finished dinner and Prue went of to get a massage that I found her sitting right across from us on the other side of the road. Was good to catch up with her briefly, but a 4:30am wakeup call meant we had to hit the sack.

Oh well, we will be off the train soon and into Cambodia, and I guess if you read this message that means we made it somewhere that we could upload it to the web…

(After note: In Cambodia, the border was a interesting experience, details later, at Battambang, more free wireless at out Hotel WOOP!!!)

By Any Means

2009-10-26T21:12:00.002+11:00

I had a dream last night, something about Lady-Boys having their Adam's apple removed at birth so that you can't really tell what sex they are, the dream ended with someone at Darling Towers filling the Torana up with mud and then chopping the roof of and converting it into a motorbike. I wasn't really happy about that, but that is all quite irrelevant...

When we wake up in the morning here we feel lovely and refreshed, we shower and dress for the day, then head out of our airconditioned room for the buffet breakfast. It is at about this point that the wall of heat hits you, and your forehead starts leaking sweat like a cold bottle of water in a sauna. It is under these conditions that we set out for the day with the aim of sampling a few of the local forms of public transport.

After finishing another delicious and filling brekkie we walked off toward the river looking for the local ferry, it operates similarly to the Brisbane ferry system, but unlike the gigantic Brisbane Sea Catamarans this was just a long wooden boat with a massive engine and a lack of regard for any kind of water safety, overcrowded is an understatement. The boat charges down the river as fast as it can until it is about five meters from the next mooring, where it throws reverse on full throttle and slams sideways into the dock. Then there is a scramble as people jump on at their own risk.

It was actually a nice "cruise" down the river, and interesting to see the culture of water side living from the very rich to the very not rich. After we jumped off the ferry we found ourselves in Downtown Bangkok, a completely different world to the one we'd left behind in old town. You could almost confuse the business district to Melbourne's CBD, well except the market stalls on every corner, the public liability dangers at every step and the fact that everything is written in Thai.

After getting a bit lost we found our way to the Sky rail, basically a mono rail that serves a small portion of the city, with a ticketing system similar to Melbourne's, but the trains are a lot more modern with comfortable airconditioning and televisions featuring advertisements every five meters along the train. The Sky rail took us directly to MBK Shopping centre, Bangkok's version of Chadstone, only a lot bigger and cheaper and everything is available in legit or ripoff versions.

We shopped for awhile and then jumped back on the Sky Rail to get to the Vietnam Embassy. We have to apply for our Visas for Vietnam, and the embassy has a very cold and cruel atmosphere, after all of the warm hospitality of Bangkok, I sure hope Vietnam isn't anything like its embassy portrays. We have entrusted our passports with the embassy for the next few days, and as we are heading into the jungle for a few days tomorrow, I am hoping we don't need them.

Our last mode of transport for the trip home was by another ferry, this one was down the channel and was quite obviously a more "local" form of transport. The ferry operated much the same as the river ferry, in that it charged along as fast as it could towards each new pier. Only on this ferry, it went slightly faster and only had about one or two meters clearance on either side at every point in time. Also cornered like a demon.

Eventually we have found our way home for a very well deserved swim in the pool as today was probably our hottest one yet. Think we might get a meal and retire early tonight for our trek into the jungle at 7am tomorrow, we have booked a tour featuring Tigers, Elephants, floating markets, waterfalls and death trains... yep Death Trains... Wont be another post for a few days (probably) so you'll just have to read this one again.

Enjoy the photos from the last few days HERE

sexual inuendo at the zoo!!!

2009-10-26T13:44:00.003+11:00

Today felt hotter than any of the others so far but that didn't stop us from getting out in it. We decided to go to the zoo today and those who are big on animals getting the best in life then look away now. We got a note this time from the hotel saying how much we should pay so the tuk-tuk didn't rip us off. It actually worked too. We got to the zoo after paying 50 baht which is a pretty good price. After wandering around the zoo for ages we decided that, A. the Melbourne zoo doesn't have very many animals and B. the muddy floors and no aircon for so many of the animals had to be pretty sucky for them.

We made our way back to the arena in the middle to watch a kids acrobatic show and elephant show. Again if you're against this I'm sorry, the elephants were very cool and did all sorts of tricks. The Kenya's wild boys show was very cool too and the pics will be up on facebook soon. The overall feeling we got from the show was a massive amount of sexual innuendo was squeezed into a very short show :) The were doing the show to music that ranged from pussycat dolls to Thai pop we had never heard. But when the performers we thrusting their hips and pretending to be having sex if they landed on someone made for a laugh worthy and entertaining experience. I'm not sure the mum's in Australia would have been as cool and entertained by it as the Thai mums were though. At one point they even had the male and female elephant pretending to have sex.

Anyway after leaving the zoo we headed to the Golden Mount which is meant to hold some of Budda's remains. It was an amazing experience. At the base of the Golden Mount we had our first 'we'll have what they're having' experience of food. This shop didn't have a menu and spoke very little English. Totally cool with us but meant that we ended up eating what I think consisted of chicken, oysters, egg and bean shoots with chilli sauce. Was very good but I couldn't eat all the oysters. Very fishy!

We then made our way to the top of the Golden Mount with all the locals and tourists ringing all the Buddhist bells on the way up. The top was an amazing stuppa which had been there since King Ramma II had it made. We jumped on the back of a private tour a German couple were taking and found our way out onto the roof. It was an uninterrupted view of the city and all the better because we walked up so many steps to get there.

We made our way back down and had the happy experience of realising we could walk home because we now knew our way around this part of the city. We then got back to the hotel for a swim and watching a rain storm pass and then we headed to Khaosan rd for dinner and my first 30 minute Thai massage. It was amazing and only cost 100 baht. That's about $3.30. Very happy walk home as my beaten up body finally felt good.

I promise we'll post photos soon.

What price you pay?

2009-10-25T22:43:00.002+11:00

Khaosan rd is crazy, loud and very alive. This is my first real chance to try to barter. I must admit that at this point I'm not great at it. I'm hoping to get better though. I never imagined that I'd own some of the knock off clothes that I now own.

The sleezy suit makers are the people the freak me out the most. They just never take no as an answer. They try and try and they might remember you from your last pass 2 mins earlier but they'll try again, picking up from the last part of the conversation you've had with them.

Almost everything and anything is available to buy in the markets in Bangkok, well touristy stuff is anyway. I had to tell Drew "No" at least a dozen times as we passed stalls full of Ninja Stars, butterfly knives, tasers and high powered laser pointers, all for sale for less than a dollart or two. Customs must have a field day with people bringing this stuff back in to Australia, not just the weapons but the ornante carvings made out of elephant tusks, or face masks made from tiger skins...

When I got back to the hotel I figured out that I'd only spent about $10 au. That's a pretty cheap shopping spree. We're currently eating dinner on khaosan rd. I'm in a bar but there's still a dog lying at my feet and it's a well fed one if I do say so. After abandoning the craziness of Khaosan rd we wandered back to our local bar (rolling r bar) and listened to a great lounge trio play song after song, some in English and some in Thai. Very chilled end to a great second day.

This was yesterday, sorry but our wireless was down this morning, have had a great day again today at the zoo but that post will have to wait awhile, photos may come later too.

Thailand, More like Tuk-Tuk land. (And cats)

2009-10-23T23:46:00.003+11:00

Today we woke up and we became immediately impressed by our hotel when we were reminded that our $50 per night rate includes a full buffet breakfast... I had three different kinds of eggs and Banana Pancakes!!!

Leaving the hotel we set out to explore the local streets but at the very first corner we were approached by a guy who asked us where we were from, upon hearing us say "Australia" he quickly said "Aaagh, SYDNEY!" and hopped around like a Kangaroo, this exact experience happened to us no less than three more times later the same day. The man then gave us a list of all of the places needed to go and then hailed a Tuk-Tuk for us and told the driver not to charge us anymore than 20 Baht (About 66 cents AU).

I was proud of Prue as she threw caution to the wind and rolled with it as we jumped in the Tuk-Tuk on a whirlwind tour of Bangkok. Firstly, everything they say about the crazy traffic is completely true, as we found ourselves regularly travelling on the wrong side of the road and even on the footpath at one point. Secondly everything they say about Tuk-Tuk drivers taking tourists to local sales traps is true. But one thing must be said, the Tuk-Tuk driver gets given fuel for taking tourists to the local sales places, so long as we were able to say "No Thank you" it was absolutely no harm and we got a fantastic tour of some of the local sites, while the driver waited patiently for us.

After a couple of hours of roaring though the streets of Bangkok visiting attractions, temples, tailors, statues, travel agents, more temples, more tailors, more attractions and a jewelery store (at which Prue ALMOST bought a $150 ring) we finally said goodbye to our Tuk-Tuk driver as he dropped us off at the King's Palace, we even gave him an extra 20 Baht as we felt bad after doing the currency conversion.

At the kings palace we found out two things, the first was that (like some Bendigo nightclubs) you can't get in wearing shorts, this led to me being lent a pair of ugly Pants to wear over the top of my shorts, adding to the amount of sweatiness and tripling my ugliness. Secondly the King is fully pimped out. The palace is.. umm... well... Palatial. An absolutely amazing place which can not be described in words (So I wont). After the Palace we hit our first market stalls and passing through stalls full of unrecognisable meats skewered on sticks, we settled down for food that was cooked while we waited and was reasonable recognisably, very yummy and even had a unsecured wireless internet connection nearby.

Getting back to the hotel we had a swim in the pool and have been relaxing with a drink ever since. Probably a long winded post today, but it really was a truly epic day, a wonderful experience that has been possibly the best way to start our epic journey. You can see some of the photos from our day Here.

Chapter 1: Long ass plane ride and a Crazy Taxi...

2009-10-23T04:23:00.003+11:00

After 8 hours and three shit movies on our Thai Airways flight we finally made it to Bangkok. The airport is a concrete and steel labyrinth which seemed to stretch on forever but we made out into the Bangkok air without any hiccups, customs didn't even bother scanning our bags, we just got pushed right through the door. And my god was the air a blast to the senses, similar to walking out the aircon doors at Darwin airport but we were hit by a very warm thick air. No poo and flowers smell though...

Got a Taxi to the hotel and quickly realised why everyone remarks about the chaotic traffic in Bangkok as the taxi driver sped us along at full pace (Averaging about 120km/hr) while making left hand turns from the right hand lane. The taxi driver managed to rip us off 200 Baht, but his driving was a bit of an experience and he was a very friendly guy so we didn't mind as we parted ways without actually knowing that whether or not we were in the right place.

But after walking around the next corner we found our sanctuary of the hotel, settled in then we have grabbed a quick drink why we write this, and now off to bed... In THAILAND??!!

A whole new world!!

2009-10-22T15:52:00.002+11:00

Wow, that couldn't have been easier. After a mountain of running and screaming and trying to pack for two years and get it into a backpack we're through the magic gates and into the international world. Thanks to everyone for the sms's and missed phone calls. We've had no phone credit to call anyone back for days and there's no point in getting a $20 recharge when you're leaving your sim in Australia.

Drew is in awe of the $50 cartons of PJ's, but was strong and didn't buy any. I'm in awe of the fact that they still make those shitty colourful woolen jumpers. Eat your heart out 80's fans, that's the real 80's for Australia!!!

Hugs all, chat soon.

Inside 48 hours, two sleeps left...

2009-10-20T17:08:00.002+11:00

We are done. The bags are packed, we are ready to go. Time to relax and say goodbye to our friends and loved ones. The weight of the world has been lifted from our shoulders since finishing our work and moving out of our home in Melbourne. Prue has unpacked and repacked her backpack for (what she says is..) the last time. There are no more last minute must have purchases to be made and no more boxes of crap to be discreetly hidden in our parents wardrobes. We finalised all of our affairs, and set the mobile phone voicemail to deliver a message of our absence. Even the cat has settled into its new home.

I cant emphasise enough how much of a relief it is to finally switch over to "holiday mode", sure we still have a healthy dose of anxiety when faced with so much uncertainty ahead, but a strong sense of freedom and adventure has started to pump in our blood, and a slightly larger than expected payout from our work has added a bit of excitement about the endless possibilities ahead.

But for the moment we are just going to enjoy our last 48 hours in Australia with our friends, our family and maybe a few of our favorite beverages.

The Final Seven Days.

2009-10-15T09:08:00.002+11:00

Today marks another milestone as we approach our departure in one week's time. We have finally moved out of our tiny caretaker apartment and shoe horned our remaining "shit" into an even tinier apartment upstairs. The computer is gone, the Xbox is back in its box, the internet is disconnected, we've watched all the recorded TV, thrown away all the stuff we couldn't give away and the apartment had been scrubbed 'till it shines like new. Our lists are looking a lot smaller now, as we only have a few last minute affairs to settle and then pack one last load into the car and get the fuck outta Melbourne...Well at least until our flight leaves next Thursday.

We have taken advantage of the good exchange rates (although slightly prematurely) and locked in some flights and accommodation for the European leg of our trip. At this stage we leave the tropics of Bangkok just after midnight on the 22nd of December and arrive in Mid-Winter-London at about 6am. We have booked 5 nights in a double room at Astor backpacker hostel near Hyde Park in Kensington, where we will spend a cold and lonely orphans Christmas. From London we travel by Train to Edinburgh in Scotland Where we have booked a package deal for a tour of the Highlands of Scotland, plus accommodation and passes to the Hogmanay festival at New Years Eve.

On the 4th of January we have booked a flight from Edinburgh to Munich in Germania, the locals call it Munchen... lol, Zose cwazy Germans! Then after three nights in Munchen we take a 6Euro flight to Vienna (Wein) in Austria where we will attend Laura and Headley's Wedding and hopefully someone will take me skiing despite the fact my insurance won't cover it... Sorry Prue, you'll have to watch. Then I guess we'll find our way back to the UK and begin looking for somewhere to live and someone to pay us.

Seven days to go.... OH FUCK!

Introduction: One month till GO!

2009-09-22T21:30:00.003+10:00

Today marks the one month milestone. A combination of emotions overwhelm us, excitement at the thought of the adventure that lays before us, nervousness about the possibilities of everything ending up seriously FUBAR (an emotion that is spurned on by every single horror story we have heard over the previous months) and stress, layers and layers of thick and meaty stress. But above all of these emotions is also a great feeling of finality and closure. I guess I kinda feel like a prison inmate who has only one month left to go until they are released back into the wild. For the three years we have worked as the caretakers for DT's there has always been a slight sense of entrapment about our position. But we can see the end in sight now and with just over three weeks left in the DT's Cell Block I think our holidays, no matter how epic they may be, are well deserved.

Which I guess brings us to the plan (or at least Plan A). One month from today we fly to Bangkok in Thailand, exactly two months later we fly to London where we have organised a two year working visa. That's pretty much all that is set in stone at this point. Upon landing at Bangkok we have booked ourselves 5 nights in a very nice looking hotel called Lampu Tree House and we will use the days in Bangkok (I'd like to call it Bangers from now on, but I won't) to do some shopping and integrate with the asian cultures and odours.

From Bangkok we intend to travel east into Cambodia to visit Angkor Wat and Phom Phen, then Head south east to Vietnam and Ho Chi Mihn. From Old Saigon we will hop on and off the train up the east coast to the north via Da Nang, Hue and Hoi An until we eventually reach Hanoi and Halong Bay. (BTW Please exuse any and all spelling mistakes)

At about this point we'll have to do a bit of backtracking south through Vietnam to find a border crossing into Laos that won't cause death or impoverishment, to eventually reach Vientienne. Heading north through a paddock with some old arse jars in it we will reach Luang Prabang and from there we hope to hop on a slow boat up the Mekong to reach an isolated border crossing at the Northern tip of Thailand.

Returning to Thailand we'll have to go south to get north into the mountains and visit the hill tribes around Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai, then we will make our way back to BANGERS (sorry) to organise ourselves for the European leg. Or at least that is the plan.

So here we are one month before we leave sitting in a baking tray ladling ourselves with sweetly rich amounts of stress. We have managed to clear out most of our house, pretty much everything we own has now been packed into boxes and shipped to friends and family or turfed out into black garbage bags. But by god do we have a lot of shit. We are on track to get everything organised before we need to move out of our apartment, but the stress involved has been a little uncomfortable, and it is quite common to sit here for a few minutes making lists in our minds of all the things we still need to do until blood starts pouring from our ears.

But the lists are getting smaller...

2009-09-19T19:27:00.003+10:00

THE PLAN:

Step 1: Pack.
Step 2: Travel.
Step 3: ?????
Step 4: Profit.

Thursday 22nd October 2009
Depart: Melbourne, Australia 5:05pm
Arrive: Bangkok, Thailand 10:35pm ( 9hrs 30min )

Tuesday 22nd December 2009
Depart: Bangkok, Thailand 12:15am
Arrive: London, England 6:20am ( 13hrs 5min )

Prologue: Part 2- Made Lists

2009-09-08T19:09:00.002+10:00

So we find ourselves several weeks after our first post and things are actually starting to move. We have our working visa's for the UK. The turn around time was a long and draining 1 working day. Yes, you read that right. We were warned from the start that the visas could take a full 3 months to come back. Well I guess the UK must just really like us and want to have us over there...maybe.

We find that we've finally made those lists that we were talking about last post. I mucked around with some informal written lists. It turns out Drew is even more anal than I knew. After sticking my lovely colourful hand written lists on the wall Drew decided that it needed to be done properly and promptly replaced them with widely spaced, well designed printed lists. I think this is an introduction to a part of his psyche that I didn't know about.

We are at about 6 and a half weeks from our depart date and we are at the silly point where I couldn't tell you if we are making good time on our packing and organising or if we are woefully behind. Injections are next week and it looks like we have to get all of them at once. That's going to be one massively numb arm. I've also, not yet, given notice at my second job, they might suspect something when I can't even lift my arm to serve customers next week. Well at least I know I am giving notice to them next friday. That means I can stop stressing about it then and continue...packing

Prologue: Part 1 - Making Lists

2009-08-19T23:04:00.005+10:00

I guess it all starts with typing something... Now that has been done I suppose we can begin.

It took us about an hour and a half just to come up with the name for this blog. "Pack the Planet" was Prue's suggestion, a play on words originating from the quote "Hack the Planet" from the mid 90's movie 'Hackers'. We were leaning towards "Loosing Face" because we know that was something we'd have to try very hard not to do while travelling through Asia. We threw around a few other silly names before eventually settling for "pack the planet" cause...Y'know...we're backpackers... and we...um...are travelling around the planet... Yeah.

It is about 9 weeks now until we leave and we still have quite a lot of things to organise. We sent away our Visa applications today and we have begun the arduous task of sorting out all of the shit that we have accumulated over the years as we begin to pack everything for storage, throw away the crap that we really dont need and never ever use yet seem to manage to keep holding onto even though it serves no purpose at all. Eventually all our worldly possesions will need to fit into two very fucking heavy backpacks.

Looking around our tiny apartment as we type this it is easy to be overwhelmed at the scope of the task of getting ready, but luckily for us Prue has been quite busy making lists...