We only had about a week left before our flights back to the sterile normality of Melbourne, so we figured we should make the most of what's left of our journey. Good thing we picked Chiang Mai to end it in. The place is the adventure capital of Asia - everywhere you look there are ads for mountain biking, bungee jumping, tiger taming and god knows what else. I had only 7 baht to my name, so I went straight to an ATM and withdrew the maximum amount. Time to have some fun!
We found a guesthouse and sprawled the innumerable amount of brochures we'd amassed on a bed. We ended up booking a tour the next day that would see us ATV (quad bikes) riding in the morning and white water rafting in the arvo. We were picked up in a minibus early in the morning. The driver spins around and grins at us, saying "HELLO! My name is CRAZY!!!". Then he drops his voice to a creepy murmer - "...how are you?" . Crazy blared the Thai equivalent of Michael Jackson over the speakers and started singing along. After a 2 hour trip up north, with Crazy singing terrible Thai pop all the way, we arrived at Maetang River. There were a bunch of ATVs waiting for us; they were only 150cc, but they were very responsive and fun to drive. We did a couple of test laps to prove we weren't mongoloids, then set off after the guide down some offroad tracks. As I expected, within the first half hour Ariel had continued his trend of being utterly useless at everything with a motor, and rolled his bike. After the crash the guide started to ride at a sensible speed instead of his usual breakneck pace, so sadly things got much more dull after that.
Back to the river for lunch and then we got kitted up in our rafting garb. Basically we had to sit on the raft and obey whatever commands our steerer and guide up the back shouted at us. He told us when to paddle, when to stop, when to get everyone over one side, and when to duck inside the raft and hang on for sheer life. We are currently smack bang in the middle of the dry season in Asia, so sadly the water level was pretty low so the rapids were mostly nothing to rave about, but on a few occasions we went over some pretty massive drops and got some speed, which was undeniably fun. At one stage the raft tipped on its side, and after holding on for five seconds I eventually came tumbling out. This was probably more fun than the raft, but my floating dow the rapids was cut short when somebody chucked a rescue rope at me (what a jerk). As we pulled up in the calm, shallow bit at the end of the section of river, our guide suddenly screams "EVERYBODY TO THE LEFT!!!". We scramble to oblige, all the while feeling confused. The guide from the other raft rushes over to the right of the boat and capsizes it while we are unbalanced. What a bunch of smartarses.
Back in Chiang Mai we're craving more. I read about the Flight of the Gibbon, a set of ziplines through a rainforest canopy high above the ground. Ariel is too pussy whipped to come with me. I end up doing a day of riding, and the Flight of the Gibbon the next day staying at a homestay, while Ariel hires a guide to take him mountain biking for two days straight. At the mountain biking place they have four options, with 1 being a beginner and 4 being a pro going down steep single tracks ridiculously fast. I go for option 3. We get driven up a mountain (1500m above sea level) and we ride down the whole thing to an elevation of 200m above sea level when we get to the bottom. You cannot die without riding down a steep mountain. So unbelievably exhilerating. My group was excellent - a fearless English dude looking for thrills, a Norweigan backpacker, and a German couple who work as a travelling two-person circus. The track is fairly steep and extremely rocky, and because of the total lack of uphill sections we simply fly. The speed was an incredible rush. Just the concentration required, trying to analyse the track a head of you and choose which line to take or how to tackle obstacles on the fly while the world is whizzing past you is just intense.
We left the main paths down the mountain and started on some single tracks. These are really really narrow tracks with only one way down them, and ours wove through the trees. This is where we had to start tackling drops in the path. Often there'd be a series of tree roots sticking up that we'd have to jump, followed by a foot drop, usually many in a row. Suddenly our speed has been replaced by this highly technical riding, just trying to keep balance as we ride through this stuff that clearly isn't meant to be ridden through. Some parts were so steep that the bike would rise onto the front wheel only and start to flip over, simply by riding forwards. Eventually we broke out of the confines of the single track and emerged on the main road at the bottom of the moutnain, where we finally stopped for lunch. I was absolutely knackered, so it was a godsend.
I was the only person doing Flight of the Gibbon as well, so when we got back to Chiang Mai there was a taxi waiting to take me up to the village I would be staying in. An hour or two later when I arrived, there was nobody. After looking around a bit, somebody seemed to recognise that I was both lost and a white person, so I was probably looking for someone to help me out. Sooner or later a woman introduces me to the husband and wife who will be putting me up for the night. Neither of them speak a word of English. The house is very plain, but functional, made of bamboo and with only a couple of rooms. Soon after I arrive the wife (Lada) starts cooking dinner. She invites me to the dinner table and starts bringing out the plates of food for us to eat. When she's brought out four huge plates with different dishes on each, as well as a big bowl of rice, she stops and waits. Her husband doesn't sit down, nor does she. She waves at the food in front of me. Turns out, this is just my dinner. She goes off to watch TV and her husband sits on the bench where she was cooking and shovels his (much simpler) meal down. I wasn't even especially hungry and I had the biggest meal known to man in front of me. After half an hour I'd eaten my fill and had barely made a dint in each plate. Lada collects it and looks frightfully disappointed in me. Some scraps go to her dog and the rest gets thrown out.
The English speaking woman who introduced me earlier comes to the house to talk to me, and says "Part of your stay include a massage. Would you like one?". HELL YES I WANT ONE. Mountain biking made me pretty sore. I get my hour of bliss and then, at eight thirty, everyone goes to sleep. Strangely the foam mattress on the floor is pretty comfy, and I somehow have the best night's sleep I've had in weeks (the mattress at the guesthouse is like a rock). The roosters start crowing at 4am and don't stop and even this doesn't bother me.
In the morning a guide from the Gibbon comes up, looking sheepish. He explains that the reason nobody met me when I arrived was that all the staff were out getting drunk in the village. They were going to invite me too, apparently. Oh well. I join a group of people and get harnessed up. The course itself is very impressive; wooden platforms built high up these massive trees in the rainforest. They explain the building process. The locals build these terrible bamboo ladders (literally a piece of bamboo running up the tree secured by spikes of more bamboo hammered through it into the tree) and climb up to the top to steal honeycombs. They got the locals to climb up the desired trees and secure ropes so that they could start sending up building materials and slowly but surely make all the platforms and start attatching the cables that connect them all. As for us, well we just get a pulley snapped onto the wire and then we step out over the abyss and slide over to the next platforml. It's a lot of fun. At each station we get attatched to a wire which goes around the tree and we are free to wander around the platform and admire the crazy views. Occasionally there are suspension bridges or even a rope to rapell down to platforms below, but mostly it's the ziplines. We are each given a V shaped piece of bamboo to use as brake (you slam it over the wire and pull down) as we get set up to go across the longest wire. I take my step out and go flying for over 100 metres. As I approach the platform the guide there is yelling at me to brake. I oblige, then he yells at me to stop. I'm slowing down too much since the cable is going uphill now, and I've lost momentum. A metre short of the platform I stop, and go sliding back to the middle of the cable, stranded sixty metres above the ground dangling from a wire. I start pulling myself hand over hand, commando style, to the platorm. The pulley keeps squishing my hands, which hurts immensely. eventually I get withing reach of the rope the guide is throwing to me and the rest of the group haul me to safety. I learn my lesson and never use the brakes again,and even then I barely made it to most platforms. At the final platform we get attatched to a rope and lowered 45 metres down a tree to the ground below, whcih was pretty cool. I took a video on my camera on the way down, which I'll upload if I get the chance.
That's it on the adventure front. We did a cooking course, which was fun but not really interesting to write about (suffice it to say I can now do a decent green curry, one so spicy that even the Thai woman who taught me was unable to handle). Ariel convinced me to save ten bucks by getting a bus to Bangkok instead of a train. This was, of course, a stupid idea, since I now have to sleep in an uncomfortable seat instead of a bed. So once again, screw you Ariel. Now I've just got a day and a half to kill in Bangkok and then I fly home. Bangkok is pretty grungy, so I'm not really looking forward to it.
I'll write up the final blog on the plane and when I get home I PROMISE I'll finally get around to uploading some pics and scattering them through each entry.
Time to try to sleep. Night.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Dr. Jesus and Friends
Sadly, it is time to leave our favourite Commie hotspot, Vietnam. "Where to?", I pretend to hear you ask. Jolly good question. The answer is, of course, Laos. Well, Lao PDR as they prefer to be called. The place is just prenounced "Lao", the 's' is only there because some French moron mispelt the name of the country on some official-y looking document yonks ago. Called it "The Kingdom of the Laos" (as in plural) in French and things got lost in translation, leading to the retarded spelling of the country now.
Anyway (God I overuse that word), since we couldn't be stuffed sitting on a bus for 24 hours (no exaggeration, sadly), we decided to fly from Hanoi to Vientiane, the capital of Laos. The place is truly astonishing, in the strangest way possible. It has three major streets in the entire city (count 'em) running parallel and a bunch of little streets running perpendicular to connect them. That's it. It's absolutely tiny, it's the most chillaxed city on Earth (again, no exaggeration), and everyday life seems to consist of sitting down next to the Mekong River drinking Beerlao (the national beer - the best one in Asia, plus boasts a 99% market share of all the beers in Laos) or snoozing in the back of a tuk tuk (the drivers are so dedicated to chilling that they actually have hammocks in the back of their tuk tuks so they can take a siesta whenever the mood hits them). Vientiane is also known for being a great place for eating. It certainly is - pretty much every business is a restaurant or cafe, with the occasional guesthouse sprinkled in so you can take a nap in between gorging yourself stupid. We found bakeries with the most amazing chocolate croissants ever. We had some very respectable Indian food. We sipped good coffee in trendy cafes. Laos in general is more expensive that other South East Asian places, but it's still usually about half Australian prices. The only downside was that our guesthouse was the biggest shithole we'd stayed in for a long time, and after coming from our luxurious room in Hanoi it was a bit of a shock to find a bare room with two rock solid beds and nothing more. Except the rats. And the bedbugs. And the graffiti on the wall which warned fellow travellers to lock up food so the mice don't get to it, and not to use the pillow because of lice. Ewwwww.
Sufficiently chilled out, we took a bus four hours north to the notorious backpacker grotto, Vang Vieng. It used to be a tiny bus station on the way to the second largest Laos city (not saying much), Luang Prabang in the north. Now though, it's a popular destination in it's own right. Why? Because it is FUCKING INCREDIBLE. Probably my favourite place along with Sapa. So, we hop off the bus and were harassed by nowhere near the usual levels of hotel pimps. Good start. We realise that we've been dropped off right where a bunch of nice looking bungalows are. We find out there are two left, and they're pretty cheap, so we book one. Turns out to be exceedingly comfy (though my bed was mildly broken and had a ditch in the middle - again), and the privacy of your own bungalow sure beats most of the multi-storey guesthouses we'd stayed in so far. We walked into town (ten minutes to the centre, not so great) and look around. It at first appeared to be totally dead, but we soon realised that it's just very, very chill. Even the dogs are chill, they just lie around sleeping all the time. The restaurants are all mostly identical, and they're all decent (never amazing, never terrible). Instead of tables and chairs, they have slightly raised platforms covered in cushions and padding that you sprawl on, with a little mini table to hold your food and drink while you watch TV. It's amazing. Soooo lazy, but soooo good. For some reason just about every restaurant exclusively shows Friends. I've never found any appeal in the show, but somehow Vang Vieng makes it enjoyable and occasionally even funny. Some places also show The Simpsons or just pick movies, but they're the exceptions.
You don't come to Vang Vieng just to lounge around watching TV though (excellent though it is). The whole town is positioned along the Nam Song river, and by God the locals know how to exploit it. At midday one day we went into town in our boardies and line up to hop on a tuk tuk to take us 3km up the river to go tubing. Tubing is the fine art of plonking yourself on an inner tube of a massive tyre and floating down rivers. Vang Vieng seems to be the only place in Asia to do this. So we hop off our shared tuk tuk (we had ten people in it. Pretty cosy) and jump into the river. Thirty metres downstream a guy chucks me a rope and drags me to a little bamboo ladder sticking out of the water, leading to A MAKESHIFT BAR ON THE RIVERSIDE. It's absolutely packed with other travellers. We get free shots and buy a Beerlao (they come in massive massive bottles, it's excellent). The bamboo bar also has a homemade wooden diving board, but it's being neglected in favour of the FUCKING GIGANTIC SWING ACROSS THE RIVER. There are ladders going up a huge tree to a platform up the top, where people line up to grab the trapeze-like swing, then bravely step of the edge and go flying. The thing is about ten metres up at a minimum, and people are getting some ridiculous air if they let go at the peak of the swing. I grab a tube again and float off, Beerlao in hand. Ariel tries this too, but because he is an idiot he loses balance, falls off his tube and gets river water in his beer. Not to worry though, there's another bar fifty metres down the river. And another, and another, and another. That's right, this 3km stretch of river is pretty much the greatest place in the world. Almost every bar has plenty of people there, all young, slightly pissed and exceedingly happy. And best of all, when you're tired of the bar you're at, you just grab a tube, jump off the edge into the water, and float until you get hauled into the next one.
The next bar has a flying fox. Awesome. I of course give it a shot. It's very high and a decent drop from the wire to the water, but it's great fun and the current takes me right back to the ladder to try again, so I go three times and force myself to stop. We meet a Morrocan chick and Dutch guy, both with unpronouncable names. More free shots, and this time free bananas too. Could this place get any better? I take my tube and jump off the edge with it and float across the river. Here they play Bob Marley and have another giant swing. This time I try it, and it's awesome. Ariel is still too much of a pussy to try it. I see people doing backflips as they let go of the swing. Looks easy enough. I decide to give it a shot. I swing to the peak of the arc, let go and lean back. Everything spins. THWACK! Seems I only got three quarters of the way round, since it feels like I just got punched in the throat. I'm winded, and my sandals have managed to dislodge themselves from the impact (they survived treks in mountains but not this, to give an idea of the force). Hurt like shit, but hey, I did a backflip! Later on we find a bar with an even bigger flying fox, and word gets around that if you hold on until the flying fox hits the end of the wire, you get jerked back and do a backflip whether you're trying to or not. GREAT IDEA! I try this as well, and as one might expect, I experience a massive jolt as all that momentum is stopped and another massive THWACK! as I land awkwardly in the water. It also hurts. Oh well. I down a shot of snake wine for the pain, and another one of beetle juice for shits and giggles. For the uninitiated; snake wine is seriously a jar of spirits with an entire dead snake floating in the bottle. The beetle juice was a new one for me, but as you might guess it was a jar of spirits packed to the brim with dead bugs. Both taste fucking nasty. I down a bucket to kill the taste of the spirits (it's just like Thailand again!). Now I'm pretty woozy, but this just makes everything more fun.
Float a fair way downstream, get talking to more travellers on the way, and find something amazing. A waterslide. Not just any waterslide though. This one starts crazily high, goes down steep, and at the last minute curves upwards. Oh, and the exit of the slide is 5 metres above the waterlevel. The whole way down is lined with tiles and squirted with water, so there's pretty much no friction (forgot to mention, all these swings and slides and shit are all free. Hells yeah). I lunge onto the slide, go down a breakneck speed and get launched out over the river. I go again, and this time I take my tube up with me (I'm pretty much the greatest genius of humanity for that idea), so that not only do I go even faster and fly further, when I land, I just clamber on the tube and I'm already on my way to the next bar.
Sadly all good things must come to an end. Our tube rental said we have to be back by 6pm or else start losing our deposit, which was pretty big. Somehow we only had an hour left, and had to paddle downstream as quickly as possible (the bars meant we only travelled 200m in 3 hours or so). After a herculean effort we got back to the rental place, 10 minutes late. We were charged a chunk of our deposit and sent packing. Still worth it. My only regret is only spending 6 hours tubing down the river. Basically, it is something that every person should do.
We were planning to spend a couple of nights in VV then go up to Luang Prabang, but VV turned out to be so amazingly awesome that we just stayed there for five nights and had fun. The street vendors sell amazing sandwiches for two Aussie dollars, so we lived on those for a while. We watched copious amounts of Friends. We discovered an organic farm that sells the greatest mulberry shakes and pancakes known to man. On Australia day we went to Steve's Aussie Bar (Steve is a fat middle aged bloke who wanders from table to table without a shirt, beer in hand, talking to everyone. Top bloke) and ate croc burgers, which are surprisingly tasty. To keep the Austrlalian feeling going, I brought some Vegemite along and smeared it on everything, and ordered a Milo. I then beat a pom at pool and was happy.
We decide that if we ever want to see Chiang Mai in Thailand before our flights back to Melbourne, we'd better leave. Neither of us are really in the mood for the cultrure and tranquility filled Luang Prabang, so we buy two tickets to get us from Vang Vieng to Chiang Mai, a mere 22 hours of buses. Fun. On the morning of our bus out of Vang Vieng, we wait for a minibus to collect us from our hotel. Once it is half an hour late, Ariel runs to the travel agent to find out what the hell is going on. Ten minutes later the minibus rocks up, so I hop on with both of our bags. The bus picks up a bunch of other travellers, but still no Ariel, so I convince the driver to swing by the travel agent to pick him up. But Ariel isn't there. Apparently he went back to the hotel. He lost his phone a few days ago, so I can't contact him. I try to get the driver to go back to the hotel and he cracks the shits at me. So we go to the bus station, where the bus to Vientiane and on to Chiang Mai is being loaded. The guy tells me to pay him more money to go back to the hotel. Another traveller leaps to my aid and gives the guy an earful, saying how it's not my fault and how they should pay, but the driver just gets more and more angry. I quickly thank the dude, pay the driver and get in. Back at the hotel, nobody has seen Ariel since he first left. Shit. I go back to the bus again. A cursory look on the bus reveals nothing, but just as I'm leaving I see a tuft of curly hair peeking over a chair right up the front. There's Ariel, asleep and totally unaware there was ever a problem. Wanker.
Four hours later we're in Vientiane. Nobody seems to know what our ticket is, or where to get our connecting bus to the border. Because of the delays our 1 hour stopover is now ten minutes. We find out our bus is leaving from a different terminal, so we spend four bucks on a tuk tuk there. Once there, people are even more bamboozled by our requests. We soon develop an entourage of helpful locals following us around. I call the number of the bus company and get a local to translate, but no help. The office of the station has no idea what is going on. So we spend another four bucks back to the city centre. We speak to a travel agent who tells us to wait out the front, in a completely different area than either bus station. It's now half an hour after the bus was due to leave, and we're pretty worried. Suddenly a tuk tuk driver shows up, says "Chiang Mai!", slaps a yellow sticker on our arms and waves us into his tuk tuk. We get driven back to the bus station that we went to half an hour previously. Our old entourage finds us and laughs uncontrollably. We are issued with some little tickets which I promptly lose, and waved onto a very shitty looking bus, which has so little legroom that I have to sit sideways just to fit in the seat. We slowly cross the border, but at least it is hassle free.
I strike up a conversation with the guy next to me. We've been talking for a while and gradually his religious references get more and moer frequent until he's actually saying "And you just open your heart and say that you love Jesus, because that is all you can do, you know?". He has a thick Polish accent, just to add to things. It comes out that he is a preacher as well as a businessman, and that he is acting as a travelling missionary. Ah. I try not to step on his toes too much (I'm an athiest) since he's pretty passionate about his stuff, but suddenly he goes over the edge. He starts telling me how all doctors and medication are useless and that if you have faith in Jesus you can never get sick. "I know people who have put all their trust in doctors, and have died. These doctors, they experiment on you, they know nothing. I NEVER go to doctors, I never get sick. I have Dr. Jesus". I wish I was making this up. He claims that faith and faith alone cures ailments. I tell him that if his arm gets cut off no amount of faith will stop the bleeding, to which he replies that he will just pray to Jesus and it will be fixed 100%, or at least in a few days. He very politely and cheerfully informs me that I'm going to hell if I don't embrace Jesus (who, by the way, loved me before I was born).
Not a moment too soon we arrive in Udon Thani, the Thai border town. We end up the car of some Thai dude who takes us to the second bus terminal on the other side of town, and we miraculously arrive at the bus we were supposed to be on all along. This was highly unexpected. It's a double storey monster with loads of leg room, fully reclining seats and air conditioning. After the day of utter shittiness, it's heaven. I'm typing up this entry from my mini laptop while everyone else sleeps. Not even the attrocious Thai pop blaring from the speakers or the crying baby can annoy me now.
Anyway (God I overuse that word), since we couldn't be stuffed sitting on a bus for 24 hours (no exaggeration, sadly), we decided to fly from Hanoi to Vientiane, the capital of Laos. The place is truly astonishing, in the strangest way possible. It has three major streets in the entire city (count 'em) running parallel and a bunch of little streets running perpendicular to connect them. That's it. It's absolutely tiny, it's the most chillaxed city on Earth (again, no exaggeration), and everyday life seems to consist of sitting down next to the Mekong River drinking Beerlao (the national beer - the best one in Asia, plus boasts a 99% market share of all the beers in Laos) or snoozing in the back of a tuk tuk (the drivers are so dedicated to chilling that they actually have hammocks in the back of their tuk tuks so they can take a siesta whenever the mood hits them). Vientiane is also known for being a great place for eating. It certainly is - pretty much every business is a restaurant or cafe, with the occasional guesthouse sprinkled in so you can take a nap in between gorging yourself stupid. We found bakeries with the most amazing chocolate croissants ever. We had some very respectable Indian food. We sipped good coffee in trendy cafes. Laos in general is more expensive that other South East Asian places, but it's still usually about half Australian prices. The only downside was that our guesthouse was the biggest shithole we'd stayed in for a long time, and after coming from our luxurious room in Hanoi it was a bit of a shock to find a bare room with two rock solid beds and nothing more. Except the rats. And the bedbugs. And the graffiti on the wall which warned fellow travellers to lock up food so the mice don't get to it, and not to use the pillow because of lice. Ewwwww.
Sufficiently chilled out, we took a bus four hours north to the notorious backpacker grotto, Vang Vieng. It used to be a tiny bus station on the way to the second largest Laos city (not saying much), Luang Prabang in the north. Now though, it's a popular destination in it's own right. Why? Because it is FUCKING INCREDIBLE. Probably my favourite place along with Sapa. So, we hop off the bus and were harassed by nowhere near the usual levels of hotel pimps. Good start. We realise that we've been dropped off right where a bunch of nice looking bungalows are. We find out there are two left, and they're pretty cheap, so we book one. Turns out to be exceedingly comfy (though my bed was mildly broken and had a ditch in the middle - again), and the privacy of your own bungalow sure beats most of the multi-storey guesthouses we'd stayed in so far. We walked into town (ten minutes to the centre, not so great) and look around. It at first appeared to be totally dead, but we soon realised that it's just very, very chill. Even the dogs are chill, they just lie around sleeping all the time. The restaurants are all mostly identical, and they're all decent (never amazing, never terrible). Instead of tables and chairs, they have slightly raised platforms covered in cushions and padding that you sprawl on, with a little mini table to hold your food and drink while you watch TV. It's amazing. Soooo lazy, but soooo good. For some reason just about every restaurant exclusively shows Friends. I've never found any appeal in the show, but somehow Vang Vieng makes it enjoyable and occasionally even funny. Some places also show The Simpsons or just pick movies, but they're the exceptions.
You don't come to Vang Vieng just to lounge around watching TV though (excellent though it is). The whole town is positioned along the Nam Song river, and by God the locals know how to exploit it. At midday one day we went into town in our boardies and line up to hop on a tuk tuk to take us 3km up the river to go tubing. Tubing is the fine art of plonking yourself on an inner tube of a massive tyre and floating down rivers. Vang Vieng seems to be the only place in Asia to do this. So we hop off our shared tuk tuk (we had ten people in it. Pretty cosy) and jump into the river. Thirty metres downstream a guy chucks me a rope and drags me to a little bamboo ladder sticking out of the water, leading to A MAKESHIFT BAR ON THE RIVERSIDE. It's absolutely packed with other travellers. We get free shots and buy a Beerlao (they come in massive massive bottles, it's excellent). The bamboo bar also has a homemade wooden diving board, but it's being neglected in favour of the FUCKING GIGANTIC SWING ACROSS THE RIVER. There are ladders going up a huge tree to a platform up the top, where people line up to grab the trapeze-like swing, then bravely step of the edge and go flying. The thing is about ten metres up at a minimum, and people are getting some ridiculous air if they let go at the peak of the swing. I grab a tube again and float off, Beerlao in hand. Ariel tries this too, but because he is an idiot he loses balance, falls off his tube and gets river water in his beer. Not to worry though, there's another bar fifty metres down the river. And another, and another, and another. That's right, this 3km stretch of river is pretty much the greatest place in the world. Almost every bar has plenty of people there, all young, slightly pissed and exceedingly happy. And best of all, when you're tired of the bar you're at, you just grab a tube, jump off the edge into the water, and float until you get hauled into the next one.
The next bar has a flying fox. Awesome. I of course give it a shot. It's very high and a decent drop from the wire to the water, but it's great fun and the current takes me right back to the ladder to try again, so I go three times and force myself to stop. We meet a Morrocan chick and Dutch guy, both with unpronouncable names. More free shots, and this time free bananas too. Could this place get any better? I take my tube and jump off the edge with it and float across the river. Here they play Bob Marley and have another giant swing. This time I try it, and it's awesome. Ariel is still too much of a pussy to try it. I see people doing backflips as they let go of the swing. Looks easy enough. I decide to give it a shot. I swing to the peak of the arc, let go and lean back. Everything spins. THWACK! Seems I only got three quarters of the way round, since it feels like I just got punched in the throat. I'm winded, and my sandals have managed to dislodge themselves from the impact (they survived treks in mountains but not this, to give an idea of the force). Hurt like shit, but hey, I did a backflip! Later on we find a bar with an even bigger flying fox, and word gets around that if you hold on until the flying fox hits the end of the wire, you get jerked back and do a backflip whether you're trying to or not. GREAT IDEA! I try this as well, and as one might expect, I experience a massive jolt as all that momentum is stopped and another massive THWACK! as I land awkwardly in the water. It also hurts. Oh well. I down a shot of snake wine for the pain, and another one of beetle juice for shits and giggles. For the uninitiated; snake wine is seriously a jar of spirits with an entire dead snake floating in the bottle. The beetle juice was a new one for me, but as you might guess it was a jar of spirits packed to the brim with dead bugs. Both taste fucking nasty. I down a bucket to kill the taste of the spirits (it's just like Thailand again!). Now I'm pretty woozy, but this just makes everything more fun.
Float a fair way downstream, get talking to more travellers on the way, and find something amazing. A waterslide. Not just any waterslide though. This one starts crazily high, goes down steep, and at the last minute curves upwards. Oh, and the exit of the slide is 5 metres above the waterlevel. The whole way down is lined with tiles and squirted with water, so there's pretty much no friction (forgot to mention, all these swings and slides and shit are all free. Hells yeah). I lunge onto the slide, go down a breakneck speed and get launched out over the river. I go again, and this time I take my tube up with me (I'm pretty much the greatest genius of humanity for that idea), so that not only do I go even faster and fly further, when I land, I just clamber on the tube and I'm already on my way to the next bar.
Sadly all good things must come to an end. Our tube rental said we have to be back by 6pm or else start losing our deposit, which was pretty big. Somehow we only had an hour left, and had to paddle downstream as quickly as possible (the bars meant we only travelled 200m in 3 hours or so). After a herculean effort we got back to the rental place, 10 minutes late. We were charged a chunk of our deposit and sent packing. Still worth it. My only regret is only spending 6 hours tubing down the river. Basically, it is something that every person should do.
We were planning to spend a couple of nights in VV then go up to Luang Prabang, but VV turned out to be so amazingly awesome that we just stayed there for five nights and had fun. The street vendors sell amazing sandwiches for two Aussie dollars, so we lived on those for a while. We watched copious amounts of Friends. We discovered an organic farm that sells the greatest mulberry shakes and pancakes known to man. On Australia day we went to Steve's Aussie Bar (Steve is a fat middle aged bloke who wanders from table to table without a shirt, beer in hand, talking to everyone. Top bloke) and ate croc burgers, which are surprisingly tasty. To keep the Austrlalian feeling going, I brought some Vegemite along and smeared it on everything, and ordered a Milo. I then beat a pom at pool and was happy.
We decide that if we ever want to see Chiang Mai in Thailand before our flights back to Melbourne, we'd better leave. Neither of us are really in the mood for the cultrure and tranquility filled Luang Prabang, so we buy two tickets to get us from Vang Vieng to Chiang Mai, a mere 22 hours of buses. Fun. On the morning of our bus out of Vang Vieng, we wait for a minibus to collect us from our hotel. Once it is half an hour late, Ariel runs to the travel agent to find out what the hell is going on. Ten minutes later the minibus rocks up, so I hop on with both of our bags. The bus picks up a bunch of other travellers, but still no Ariel, so I convince the driver to swing by the travel agent to pick him up. But Ariel isn't there. Apparently he went back to the hotel. He lost his phone a few days ago, so I can't contact him. I try to get the driver to go back to the hotel and he cracks the shits at me. So we go to the bus station, where the bus to Vientiane and on to Chiang Mai is being loaded. The guy tells me to pay him more money to go back to the hotel. Another traveller leaps to my aid and gives the guy an earful, saying how it's not my fault and how they should pay, but the driver just gets more and more angry. I quickly thank the dude, pay the driver and get in. Back at the hotel, nobody has seen Ariel since he first left. Shit. I go back to the bus again. A cursory look on the bus reveals nothing, but just as I'm leaving I see a tuft of curly hair peeking over a chair right up the front. There's Ariel, asleep and totally unaware there was ever a problem. Wanker.
Four hours later we're in Vientiane. Nobody seems to know what our ticket is, or where to get our connecting bus to the border. Because of the delays our 1 hour stopover is now ten minutes. We find out our bus is leaving from a different terminal, so we spend four bucks on a tuk tuk there. Once there, people are even more bamboozled by our requests. We soon develop an entourage of helpful locals following us around. I call the number of the bus company and get a local to translate, but no help. The office of the station has no idea what is going on. So we spend another four bucks back to the city centre. We speak to a travel agent who tells us to wait out the front, in a completely different area than either bus station. It's now half an hour after the bus was due to leave, and we're pretty worried. Suddenly a tuk tuk driver shows up, says "Chiang Mai!", slaps a yellow sticker on our arms and waves us into his tuk tuk. We get driven back to the bus station that we went to half an hour previously. Our old entourage finds us and laughs uncontrollably. We are issued with some little tickets which I promptly lose, and waved onto a very shitty looking bus, which has so little legroom that I have to sit sideways just to fit in the seat. We slowly cross the border, but at least it is hassle free.
I strike up a conversation with the guy next to me. We've been talking for a while and gradually his religious references get more and moer frequent until he's actually saying "And you just open your heart and say that you love Jesus, because that is all you can do, you know?". He has a thick Polish accent, just to add to things. It comes out that he is a preacher as well as a businessman, and that he is acting as a travelling missionary. Ah. I try not to step on his toes too much (I'm an athiest) since he's pretty passionate about his stuff, but suddenly he goes over the edge. He starts telling me how all doctors and medication are useless and that if you have faith in Jesus you can never get sick. "I know people who have put all their trust in doctors, and have died. These doctors, they experiment on you, they know nothing. I NEVER go to doctors, I never get sick. I have Dr. Jesus". I wish I was making this up. He claims that faith and faith alone cures ailments. I tell him that if his arm gets cut off no amount of faith will stop the bleeding, to which he replies that he will just pray to Jesus and it will be fixed 100%, or at least in a few days. He very politely and cheerfully informs me that I'm going to hell if I don't embrace Jesus (who, by the way, loved me before I was born).
Not a moment too soon we arrive in Udon Thani, the Thai border town. We end up the car of some Thai dude who takes us to the second bus terminal on the other side of town, and we miraculously arrive at the bus we were supposed to be on all along. This was highly unexpected. It's a double storey monster with loads of leg room, fully reclining seats and air conditioning. After the day of utter shittiness, it's heaven. I'm typing up this entry from my mini laptop while everyone else sleeps. Not even the attrocious Thai pop blaring from the speakers or the crying baby can annoy me now.
See you in Chiang Mai!
BIT THAT I ADDED LATER: Made it to Chiang Mai ok. We got an entire pack of strawberry cream biscuits each. Tomorrow I'm booked in to spend half a day doing some off-roading on a quad bike and the other half white water rafting down some huge rapids. The day after that I plan to do a 2 day trip that takes me mountain biking for one day, and "sky trekking" for the other day (2km of ziplines and suspension bridges at the top of a rainforest canopy!). This is going to be fucking amazing.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
I'm on the Night Train
Me and Dad hop off the plane at Hanoi airport, eager to see how our favourite part of Vietnam from two years ago has changed, if at all. In the airport we see bus tickets to Hanoi (the airport is 15km away) for $20USD, we scoff and walk outside, and find seats on the same bus for 25000 dong (about $2). We buy tickets and waste forty five minutes waiting for the damn thing to take off. As soon as we're off we are accosted by an army of vulture-like moto drivers trying to flog hotels. One of the hotels is right on Hoan Kiem Lake, in the very centre of Hanoi, and he's offering a free ride to get there. We take a harrowing ride through Hanoi (my driver almost crashes into a parked car and Dad's nearly runs over an old woman on a bicycle) and arrive at the rather nice Hoan Kiem Lake Hotel, where the price per night has magically jumped up by $5. We haggle down a bit and eventually accept since the location is awesome and the rooms are legitimately excellent.
Hanoi certainly has changed. They've ruined the place by introducing such travesties as traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, green/red man signals, compolsury helmets for motorbike riders, and the number of cars has massively increased.
[I just completely lost my train of thought because I got caught up the song I was listening to and spent a full five minutes drumming on the table, swaying from side to side and playing air guitar during the solo. Rare opportunities to listen to music is making go mad. Seriously, I can only think in music now. Songs get stuck in there for days. What is this entry about?]
Um, Hanoi. Oh yeah, it's basically because almost orderly, but like with every Asian attempt to mimick the West, there's something not quite right about it. The road rules are really more of a firm reccommendation, and everyone is slightly unsure of themselves. The result is actually a more dangerous and less predictable traffic flow. Two years ago you could shut your eyes and blindly stumble across a horrifically busy street and you'd be fine, as all the bikes would just weave around you. It was chaos, but somehow the flow was never stopped and things just worked. Now the charm is fast disappearing. On the other hand, the sudden law stating anybody caught without a helmet will get a USD$20 on the spot fine meant the riders went from having no helmets to all wearing helmets overnight, which over here really is vital.
It wasn't all bad though. We tracked down two street kitchens we discovered last time round. First was bun bo nam bo, arguably the most delicious noodle dish you will ever eat. The price had doubled, but the meal was even better than our memory had led us to believe. I ended up eating here about five times during my brief stay in Hanoi. 60 Hand Dieu St, if you're ever in the region (do not miss under any circumstances). We also found the most popular breakfast pho bo joint in Hanoi again, and after eating dozens of bowls of the noodle soup from across the country, I can say with some authority that this place is the best you will find. Bat Dan St, look for the pho joint with a massive queue of people waiting for it, and a massive a cauldron full of broth. It's amazing.
Ariel rocked up and we went to see Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum, where the legendary communist ruler's preserved body is still displayed. Sadly, it was closed for Tet New Year. The Ho Chi Minh Museum was open though, so we went through the building learning about how awesome Uncle Ho is at everything. We had a couple of glasses of bia hoi on the way back (the cheapest beer in the world - not amazing, but pretty damn good considering it costs about fifty Aussie cents a glass at the most). Ariel, ever the snob, complained anyway.
From here we got a ticket on the night train up to Sapa, the mountainous region in the far north of the country. So at 9:30pm, I'm on the night train, read to crash and burn (I'll never leeeeaarn, I'm on the - ... sorry). We're in a little cabin with two double bunk beds, sharing with some Korean woman. The trip is ten hours or something, but the beds are good enough that it's really not bad. We get to Lao Cai, the end of the line, and commandeer a minivan loaded with Tet decorations to take us the remaining 35km to Sapa. We have brekky (scrambled eggs in a baguette, traditional Vietnamese food ftw). As we were eating we discovered the hotel/restaurant did trekking tours (we were too cheap to book one in Hanoi) at very cheap rates, so we booked a three day trek with two nights in homestays, leaving in an hour and a half. It was just the three of us and a guide. Our guide, Ker, was a twenty year old girl of the Black Hmong minority people. She was under five feet tall, like most of the locals. She took us through the incredible carved terrace rice paddies in the mountains and through a bunch of villages. The villagers, Ker's family included, are mostly subsistence farmers. They're perfectly content to simply survive, living off rice and veges for every meal, working by day and resting at night. Ker's family sell nothing, and trade little. Of the ten US dollars we paid each per day, Ker was getting less than 10% of that, and half of her wage she gives directly to her family. The Hmong have a bunch of massive water buffalos perfectly trained to plow the fields without the fuss, and to pretty much lie around all day doing nothing (they have the most HARDCORE stare ever. They look straight into your soul. They have big fuck-off horns and you know that they'll gore you if you annoy them).
16km later and we were at our first homestay. It was surprisingly civilised - a western toilet and a hot shower in a little outhouse, a TV, and relatively comfy foam mattresses upstairs. Ker, who does not have a TV at home, sat glued to the screen like a six year old for the entire duration of the stay (she was perfectly content to watch terrible Chinese slapstick comedy overdubbed with Vietnamese for hours on end). Even the ridiculous cold of the mountains was no match for the super thick blankets we had (seriously, the MOMENT the sun disappears the temperature drops to about five degrees).
After a breakfast of pancakes (Dad brought a much needed tube of Vegemite over, so I smeared it all over my pancake, and there was much rejoicing), we set off for day 2 of our hike. This time the terrain was extremely steep - up and down - through tiny tracks on the side of cliffs, often slippery with only the occasional foothold. The water buffalo stared menacingly at us from their perches around the track - for big, lumbering animals they can get to some ridiculous places. We saw local kids sprinting down the mountain dragging massive logs with vines that they had tied around them. Often the kids would have to jump as the log slid under them, lest they get crushed. If a log went over the edge there's no doubt the child would get dragged over too, but this didn't seem to phase them. Apparently this is all in preparation for Tet, which the Hmong people take very seriously, despite it coming from a totally different religion than their shamanist beliefs. After crossing a waterfall (a series of bamboo pipes diverted sizable streams of water into the villages) we eventually got to the main road and crossed through a freaking construction site (the Vietnamese government are building a dam, or a road, or something), so while the views took a turn for the ugly, the trekking got fun - we had to climb down a near verticle cliff - as we made our way to the very bottom of the valley to find our homestay for the night in the village.
On the way we came across a local dude asking for medicine. We were about to dismiss it before we noticed a wound on his leg that had been dressed by tying a piece of hemp over it with some vines. Apparently he hurt his leg chopping down trees (I'm assuming he got himself with an axe - ouch). The guy takes off the dressing to reveal a HUGE gaping hole in his leg, which had been stuffed full of tobacco, presumably to soak up the blood. Deep enough to hit the bone. Suddenly the first aid kit I'm holding seems very inadequate. By this stage a couple of other trekking groups have gathered and we have a full on discussion about what to do. Some people want to take out the tobacco and clean out the wound - but this risks dislodging the blood clot and starting up more bleeding, not to mention the incredibly unhygeinic conditions out on the path. The guy can't go to the local medical clinic because it is closed for the weekend, and the hospital in Sapa isn't free. After conversations back and forth between trekkers and locals, translated many times. We end up taking up a collection of cash from as many passerby as possible and getting the guy a motorbike into Sapa. The cynics in the group hated the idea because they thought he'd just pocket the cash and run (or limp! I'm going to hell), but we figured it was worth it to save him from infecting his wound and losing his leg. We watched him hop on the motorbike and ride off, then resumed trekking. I really do wonder if he went to the hospital - the money he got is an awful lot by local standards, he and his family could eat meat for dinner, or buy presents for the upcoming Tet. As an older guy he also would be likely to place more faith in dodgy local remedies than proper medical treatment, so there's every chance he'd leave his leg as is and live the life. On the other hand, the wound was in extreme danger of getting infected if he didn't get it cleaned out and stitched up. I hope for his sake that he did the smart thing - we got the Vietnamese speakers to emphasise the importance of the hospital pretty damn firmly.
After that saga was finally over and we were a good hour and a half behind schedule, we trekked on and soon made it to the village where we'd be spending the night. Ariel was still full of energy though, and demands a challenge be set for him. Dad points to a rocky area where a landslide had taken place, on the side of a mountain way off in the distance. "See the big waterpipe right at the top? Go climb in there, see what's inside. I'll give you 20,000 dong". We laugh at the ridiculousness of the prospect. Even Ariel knows it's a retarded idea. Then the annoying American woman pipes up, deadly serious, and says "Oh no, you can't do that! That's not safe! Oh my god". Ariel laughs, he has all the provocation he needs. He jogs off in the vague direction of the mountain, and is not seen or heard of again for half an hour. The guides are a combination of worried and amused "Where is CRAZY BOY?". Eventually I see a little black speck on the mountain. The stubborn fool is slowly but surely climbing his way up the loose rock churned up by a landslide. We get talking with some other backpackers, including yet more Aussie chicks, and a mother/son combo from Slovakia - the mother spoke no English, so we spoke through her son Zoran's translations. All the while we had the entertainment of a distant Ariel gaining and losing ground. Eventually he gets painfully close to the pipe, loiters around, and starts coming back down. FAILURE. An hour later he rocks up covered in dirt, demanding that we buy him beer.
Another guide, Chi, comes to the rescue and drags us inside to watch her cook stuff. Ariel has already left to bathe in the hot springs down in the village (he truly is a master of timing - he missed the entire cooking process and most of the meal). Chi was the wok master, cooking five or six dishes in a matter of minutes with just the one wok. She could control the temperature of the open fire most impressively, considering all you can really do is shuffle around the burning logs. Still, she could lightly blow on a stick and have it burst into flames (she's a sorceress, I swear). In any case, the meal was delicious. Ariel's arrived back midway through, thermostat apparently stuffed, and proceeds to spend the evening (6 degrees!) without a shirt on. By this stage everybody else thought he was a raging lunatic, myself included. I received many codolences; "I'm sorry you have to put up with him for so long. I know I couldn't do that", etc.
Remember how earlier I said we hiked down a huge valley from the road above? No? Too bad, I did. The next morning we had to do it in reverse. This was outrageously hard going, with every step of the way steep, steep uphill. I wasn't so much puffed out as totally out of energy after the past few days, so naturally I found it pretty tough. I have never been so glad to get shoved into a crowded minibus (which took us back to Sapa town, which after seeing nothing but tiny villages suddenly seemed huge and out of place). Another night train (I can never get enough!) and we were back in our hotel in Hanoi, lounging on the outrageously comfortable beds and generally feeling fantastic.
I'm happy now, the blog is pretty much only a day behind me, which is more than can be said of the rest of the trip. Now I just need the motivation to upload some photos and resize them and post them. And show a map of our route to give some sense to the entries.
Who am I kidding, I'll do that back in Australia.
Hanoi certainly has changed. They've ruined the place by introducing such travesties as traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, green/red man signals, compolsury helmets for motorbike riders, and the number of cars has massively increased.
[I just completely lost my train of thought because I got caught up the song I was listening to and spent a full five minutes drumming on the table, swaying from side to side and playing air guitar during the solo. Rare opportunities to listen to music is making go mad. Seriously, I can only think in music now. Songs get stuck in there for days. What is this entry about?]
Um, Hanoi. Oh yeah, it's basically because almost orderly, but like with every Asian attempt to mimick the West, there's something not quite right about it. The road rules are really more of a firm reccommendation, and everyone is slightly unsure of themselves. The result is actually a more dangerous and less predictable traffic flow. Two years ago you could shut your eyes and blindly stumble across a horrifically busy street and you'd be fine, as all the bikes would just weave around you. It was chaos, but somehow the flow was never stopped and things just worked. Now the charm is fast disappearing. On the other hand, the sudden law stating anybody caught without a helmet will get a USD$20 on the spot fine meant the riders went from having no helmets to all wearing helmets overnight, which over here really is vital.
It wasn't all bad though. We tracked down two street kitchens we discovered last time round. First was bun bo nam bo, arguably the most delicious noodle dish you will ever eat. The price had doubled, but the meal was even better than our memory had led us to believe. I ended up eating here about five times during my brief stay in Hanoi. 60 Hand Dieu St, if you're ever in the region (do not miss under any circumstances). We also found the most popular breakfast pho bo joint in Hanoi again, and after eating dozens of bowls of the noodle soup from across the country, I can say with some authority that this place is the best you will find. Bat Dan St, look for the pho joint with a massive queue of people waiting for it, and a massive a cauldron full of broth. It's amazing.
Ariel rocked up and we went to see Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum, where the legendary communist ruler's preserved body is still displayed. Sadly, it was closed for Tet New Year. The Ho Chi Minh Museum was open though, so we went through the building learning about how awesome Uncle Ho is at everything. We had a couple of glasses of bia hoi on the way back (the cheapest beer in the world - not amazing, but pretty damn good considering it costs about fifty Aussie cents a glass at the most). Ariel, ever the snob, complained anyway.
From here we got a ticket on the night train up to Sapa, the mountainous region in the far north of the country. So at 9:30pm, I'm on the night train, read to crash and burn (I'll never leeeeaarn, I'm on the - ... sorry). We're in a little cabin with two double bunk beds, sharing with some Korean woman. The trip is ten hours or something, but the beds are good enough that it's really not bad. We get to Lao Cai, the end of the line, and commandeer a minivan loaded with Tet decorations to take us the remaining 35km to Sapa. We have brekky (scrambled eggs in a baguette, traditional Vietnamese food ftw). As we were eating we discovered the hotel/restaurant did trekking tours (we were too cheap to book one in Hanoi) at very cheap rates, so we booked a three day trek with two nights in homestays, leaving in an hour and a half. It was just the three of us and a guide. Our guide, Ker, was a twenty year old girl of the Black Hmong minority people. She was under five feet tall, like most of the locals. She took us through the incredible carved terrace rice paddies in the mountains and through a bunch of villages. The villagers, Ker's family included, are mostly subsistence farmers. They're perfectly content to simply survive, living off rice and veges for every meal, working by day and resting at night. Ker's family sell nothing, and trade little. Of the ten US dollars we paid each per day, Ker was getting less than 10% of that, and half of her wage she gives directly to her family. The Hmong have a bunch of massive water buffalos perfectly trained to plow the fields without the fuss, and to pretty much lie around all day doing nothing (they have the most HARDCORE stare ever. They look straight into your soul. They have big fuck-off horns and you know that they'll gore you if you annoy them).
16km later and we were at our first homestay. It was surprisingly civilised - a western toilet and a hot shower in a little outhouse, a TV, and relatively comfy foam mattresses upstairs. Ker, who does not have a TV at home, sat glued to the screen like a six year old for the entire duration of the stay (she was perfectly content to watch terrible Chinese slapstick comedy overdubbed with Vietnamese for hours on end). Even the ridiculous cold of the mountains was no match for the super thick blankets we had (seriously, the MOMENT the sun disappears the temperature drops to about five degrees).
After a breakfast of pancakes (Dad brought a much needed tube of Vegemite over, so I smeared it all over my pancake, and there was much rejoicing), we set off for day 2 of our hike. This time the terrain was extremely steep - up and down - through tiny tracks on the side of cliffs, often slippery with only the occasional foothold. The water buffalo stared menacingly at us from their perches around the track - for big, lumbering animals they can get to some ridiculous places. We saw local kids sprinting down the mountain dragging massive logs with vines that they had tied around them. Often the kids would have to jump as the log slid under them, lest they get crushed. If a log went over the edge there's no doubt the child would get dragged over too, but this didn't seem to phase them. Apparently this is all in preparation for Tet, which the Hmong people take very seriously, despite it coming from a totally different religion than their shamanist beliefs. After crossing a waterfall (a series of bamboo pipes diverted sizable streams of water into the villages) we eventually got to the main road and crossed through a freaking construction site (the Vietnamese government are building a dam, or a road, or something), so while the views took a turn for the ugly, the trekking got fun - we had to climb down a near verticle cliff - as we made our way to the very bottom of the valley to find our homestay for the night in the village.
On the way we came across a local dude asking for medicine. We were about to dismiss it before we noticed a wound on his leg that had been dressed by tying a piece of hemp over it with some vines. Apparently he hurt his leg chopping down trees (I'm assuming he got himself with an axe - ouch). The guy takes off the dressing to reveal a HUGE gaping hole in his leg, which had been stuffed full of tobacco, presumably to soak up the blood. Deep enough to hit the bone. Suddenly the first aid kit I'm holding seems very inadequate. By this stage a couple of other trekking groups have gathered and we have a full on discussion about what to do. Some people want to take out the tobacco and clean out the wound - but this risks dislodging the blood clot and starting up more bleeding, not to mention the incredibly unhygeinic conditions out on the path. The guy can't go to the local medical clinic because it is closed for the weekend, and the hospital in Sapa isn't free. After conversations back and forth between trekkers and locals, translated many times. We end up taking up a collection of cash from as many passerby as possible and getting the guy a motorbike into Sapa. The cynics in the group hated the idea because they thought he'd just pocket the cash and run (or limp! I'm going to hell), but we figured it was worth it to save him from infecting his wound and losing his leg. We watched him hop on the motorbike and ride off, then resumed trekking. I really do wonder if he went to the hospital - the money he got is an awful lot by local standards, he and his family could eat meat for dinner, or buy presents for the upcoming Tet. As an older guy he also would be likely to place more faith in dodgy local remedies than proper medical treatment, so there's every chance he'd leave his leg as is and live the life. On the other hand, the wound was in extreme danger of getting infected if he didn't get it cleaned out and stitched up. I hope for his sake that he did the smart thing - we got the Vietnamese speakers to emphasise the importance of the hospital pretty damn firmly.
After that saga was finally over and we were a good hour and a half behind schedule, we trekked on and soon made it to the village where we'd be spending the night. Ariel was still full of energy though, and demands a challenge be set for him. Dad points to a rocky area where a landslide had taken place, on the side of a mountain way off in the distance. "See the big waterpipe right at the top? Go climb in there, see what's inside. I'll give you 20,000 dong". We laugh at the ridiculousness of the prospect. Even Ariel knows it's a retarded idea. Then the annoying American woman pipes up, deadly serious, and says "Oh no, you can't do that! That's not safe! Oh my god". Ariel laughs, he has all the provocation he needs. He jogs off in the vague direction of the mountain, and is not seen or heard of again for half an hour. The guides are a combination of worried and amused "Where is CRAZY BOY?". Eventually I see a little black speck on the mountain. The stubborn fool is slowly but surely climbing his way up the loose rock churned up by a landslide. We get talking with some other backpackers, including yet more Aussie chicks, and a mother/son combo from Slovakia - the mother spoke no English, so we spoke through her son Zoran's translations. All the while we had the entertainment of a distant Ariel gaining and losing ground. Eventually he gets painfully close to the pipe, loiters around, and starts coming back down. FAILURE. An hour later he rocks up covered in dirt, demanding that we buy him beer.
Another guide, Chi, comes to the rescue and drags us inside to watch her cook stuff. Ariel has already left to bathe in the hot springs down in the village (he truly is a master of timing - he missed the entire cooking process and most of the meal). Chi was the wok master, cooking five or six dishes in a matter of minutes with just the one wok. She could control the temperature of the open fire most impressively, considering all you can really do is shuffle around the burning logs. Still, she could lightly blow on a stick and have it burst into flames (she's a sorceress, I swear). In any case, the meal was delicious. Ariel's arrived back midway through, thermostat apparently stuffed, and proceeds to spend the evening (6 degrees!) without a shirt on. By this stage everybody else thought he was a raging lunatic, myself included. I received many codolences; "I'm sorry you have to put up with him for so long. I know I couldn't do that", etc.
Remember how earlier I said we hiked down a huge valley from the road above? No? Too bad, I did. The next morning we had to do it in reverse. This was outrageously hard going, with every step of the way steep, steep uphill. I wasn't so much puffed out as totally out of energy after the past few days, so naturally I found it pretty tough. I have never been so glad to get shoved into a crowded minibus (which took us back to Sapa town, which after seeing nothing but tiny villages suddenly seemed huge and out of place). Another night train (I can never get enough!) and we were back in our hotel in Hanoi, lounging on the outrageously comfortable beds and generally feeling fantastic.
I'm happy now, the blog is pretty much only a day behind me, which is more than can be said of the rest of the trip. Now I just need the motivation to upload some photos and resize them and post them. And show a map of our route to give some sense to the entries.
Who am I kidding, I'll do that back in Australia.
Up the coast
I got pretty slack on the blog front for a while, so the next couple of entries will be written retrospectively, meaning the general lack of interesting stuff can be blamed on my rapidly fading memory of precisely what went down.
Where were we? Let's assume nothing else happened in Saigon and that Ariel and I are now leaving. Excellent. Since we are (were) in the very south of Vietnam, we logically could go no direction but north. We find this nifty place called Sinh Cafe, which rather bizarrely sells not coffee and snack-like fare, but bus tickets. We board an overnight sleeper bus bound for the beach paradise of Nha Trang. The sleeper bus is quite frankly one of the strangest vehicles I've ever been on. It consists of three rows of half-seat-half-bed things, stacked two high, along the length of the vehicle. Generally each seat-bed is self contained, but right up the back there are no less than five beds squashed together (top and bottom levels), the outer ones having a good half metre less leg room than every other bed in the bus. Since me and Ariel obviously didn't book our ticket until the day before we left, we ended up with the bottom level at the back of the bus, with a grand total of fuck all room. Luckily nobody else got in the back with us, so we could stretch out and be comfy-ish.
Eight hours later we arrive in Nha Trang, where it is very early morning. We check into a hotel and start exploring. Nha Trang really has two sides to it. The one you are first introduced to is the touristy side - a long stretch of beautiful beach, decent enough waves (although they're all dumpers), impressive scenery, big hotels (a freaking Novotel!), wide main road, huge sculpture, backpacker-filled bars, etc. After walking a few kms we broke through to the oft ignored, but much more authentic side of Nha Trang. Here we found the rabbit warren of hectic streets, frightening street food, and huge markets; basically, where the locals live. We promptly got very lost and wandered around for several hours (our map was handily located back at the hotel - which we could not find). During our adventurous afternoon we found a 19 metre tall white buddha statue (complete with swastika), some ancient Cham ruins, a school with an elephant inside for no readily apparent reason, and saw a truck drive past with a person in a Mickey Mouse costume and a bear chained to the roof. Yeah, we didn't get it either. Eventually we managed to get directions to the main street and make the long trek back to our hotel. That evening we retired to Bar Oz (it was a fraud! Totally devoid of other Aussies) for some cheap Biere Larue and fish and chips (stunningly good for an Asian attempt). A laptop was hooked up to the speakers, so Ariel quickly hijacked the playlist and put on his favourites, pissing off the entire bar in the process by continually cutting tracks short as he found something better.
The next evening we had finished soaking up Nha Trang and hopped back on the sleeper bus for an 11 hour journey north to Hoi An. This time we were again at the back, but up top this time. Also, the other three seats were occupied. By three huge German dudes. So we had the five
biggest people on the entire bus squashed together in unbearably close quarters for eleven hours. Swell. The dude next to me, Tiek, had a fondness for rolling halfway onto my bed while he slept, so I spent a good deal of the time on my side trying to force him away with only the power of my mind.
EMERGENCY INTERRUPTION: HOLY SHIT I THOUGHT BED BUGS WERE JUST PART OF THAT STUPID SAYING BUT I JUST SAW ONE CRAWLING ACROSS THE BED I AM CURRENTLY WRITING THIS BLOG FROM. DIE, FOUL BEAST, DIIIIEEEEE!!!
Sorry. Kind of breaks up the flow of the piece. Anyway, Hoi An. Hoi An is a tiny little town on the coast, roughly in the middle of Vietnam. It was once a major trading port, but now it is just a really chill little town. It has managed to resist development seemingly for centuries, as the whole town still consists of traditional little yellow houses. It sits on a river, which is literally exactly the same level as the footpath, so the main street gets completely flooded at the slightest provocation. After all the hectic places we'd been through, Hoi An provided us with some much needed relaxation. Hoi An has its own (excellent) specialty dishes which cannot by obtained anywhere else in the world (even in other parts of Vietnam). We found a restaurant called Duc Sin Hoi An (literally "Hoi An Specialties") and tucked into a delicious bowl of Cau Lao. My favourite vietnamese dish (VERY big call), it contains super amazing noodles (made from the water of a particular well in Hoi An and totally unique), delicious broth, tender pork slices, cruncy croutons, bean shoots and lettuce. Hoi An also has some very pretty but rather bland steamed shrimp dumplings called White Rose, and some incredible fried wontons with an absurdly tasty salad on top. The place is gastronomic heaven, and I was very sad to leave it (without a final Cao Lao too!).
Hoi An is also the tailor capital of the world. If you heard that every second store in the whole town was a tailor, you would call bullshit, but astonishinly it is absolutly true. I got a snazzy business suit, a shirt, a silk scarf and some hilariously stupid looking but oh so comfortable red silk/satin pants made up for about $200AUD. If you go for crappier fabrics you can get suits made up seriously cheap, but I ended up getting quality stuff. When I was here two years ago I got an awesome three piece pinstripe suit, gangster style. Cool stuff.
Ariel had to fly back to Australia for a rather unneccessary Uni entrance test, and would be gone for a week or so. My father, who sorely missed old 'Nam from his visit two years ago, pounced on the opportunity and flew over to travel with me for two weeks during his time off work. We met up in Hoi An and got yet another Sinh Cafe sleeper bus to the next hotspot, Hue. We ended up on the some bus as my German buddy from the last trip, Tiek. Fortunately we weren't sleeping next to each other this time (ugh).
Two cities down, why stop when you're on a roll? Hue! Hue was the imperial capital of Vietnam before the title was transferred to Hanoi, and the architecture shows this. Similar to Nha Trang, Hue is split into the old and new halves of town, in this case by the Perfume River. The old part of town is the Citadel, basically the local part of town, flanked by high stone walls and a massive moat, with only two bridges connecting it to the rest of Hue. Me and Dad walked in, hoping to see the inner Citadel (the old home of the royal family, now mostly in disrepair). It hadn't opened yet, but a friendly cyclo rider showed up (cyclo = bicycle thing with big chair at the front for the passanger, with the driver at the back pedalling like a madman) to show us round. He asks for twenty thousand dong each. After some bargaining we agree on fourteen thousand each, with him and another rider so we had a cyclo each, for a one hour tour of the Citadel. This goes well, and we see a ruined old bunker left over from the war, and even have a shot at riding the cyclo. We get dropped off at the inner Citadel, and hand over our 14k each. We are met by a blank stare. "Forty!" claims the driver. Woah ho no. Aruguments insue as the dude tries to convice us that we agreed to a much inflated price. I had previously demonstrated the number on the screen of my phone so as to avoid confusion, so I try again but the guy is dismissive (FUCKING HELL MORE BEDBUGS!!!!). He lights a cigarette, looks on the verge of tears and goes off to loudly complain in Vietnamese to the other cyclo riders. The other rider gives us the look of death. Shrugging, Dad grabs the correct cash and places it on the seat and turns to leave. The dude snatches it, grabs Dad's hand and shoves it back in, screaming "SOUVENIR!". After ten minutes of utter confusion, we shrug and go into the Citadel. I've never felt shittier or angrier about getting something for free.
Citadel was impressive, but our foul mood marred the experience. We get lost as we leave but eventually find our way out to the bridge across the moat. We stop for a delicious lunch at a restaurant run by a deaf mute. The bathroom was hidden in the wall halfway up the stairwell. Awesome. We leave and go into a stationary shop to get a notepad. I feel a tap on shoulder and turn around to find an extremely irate cyclo driver. It's the second rider from before. He's shouting for his money. The store keeper kicks him out. We'd just got over the shit feeling from before, and here he is to renew it. Again we try to explain the agreed price, which he denies and starts sprouting some bullshit about price per kilometre. A helpful local with some English skill steps in to resolve things. He shuts up the rider and turns to us, saying "Just give him twenty thousand". It's more than agreed, but we don't care. I offer the note to the rider, who glares at me furiously for a good ten seconds as he contemplates whether or not to take it. He snatches the note and leaves immediately without another word. The other rider is nowhere to be seen. Moral of the story; get cyclo drivers to write down their agreed price and fucking sign the paper. I wish it were overkill, but we heard stories of cyclo drivers jacking up prices and ripping people off so commonly (Ariel's "free ride" ended in money being snatched out of his wallet) that it sadly isn't.
Anyhoo. The next day we book a day on the boat to visit the various tombs of the emperors scattered around Hue. Some of these were seriously impressive - huge, lush parks with grand temples in them, as well as more subdued structures on the lakes where the emperor supposedly sat and wrote poetry. Others had courtyards full of stone statues of soldiers and elephants. The boat side of things was a fair bit more dodgy. Heaps of places around Hue offer boat trips with different prices and itineraries, but they all take you to the same two or three boats. On the one boat there were people who paid as little as $3 and as much as $15 for exactly the same thing. Our ticket for motorbike transfer to one of the tombs was a scrap of paper with "MO TO BIE" scribbled on it. Over the course of the day four items on the itinerary were skipped without explanation and we still finished over two hours behind schedule (people with flights or trains to catch were forced to pay an extortionist taxt fare - the cynic in me says the late timing was very deliberate for this reason). At the beginning of the trip, about ten people were ushered off our boat and onto a smaller once. We then passed a police check point, and just minutes later the small boat rejoins us and the ten people hop back on. Nothing suss! Still, sunset over the river on the way back was beautiful, and we saw some cool shit despite all the dodginess. After three nights in Hue we called it quits, and since we couldn't be arsed with another twenty hours of buses, we grabbed a quick flight up to Hanoi, the real capital, where we soon met up again with Ariel.
Phew! A week and a half of travel wrapped up in one entry, well done team. By team I mean me. Self congratulation is a wonderful thing. There's a while yet before the blog catches up with wherever I am now though (OOOH MYSTERIOUS). Next up is Hanoi, and also some excellent trekking in the mountains of Sapa. And then... nah, I won't spoil it. Pretty pics if I ever get them onto the PC (or ever find internet access).
Later dudes.
Where were we? Let's assume nothing else happened in Saigon and that Ariel and I are now leaving. Excellent. Since we are (were) in the very south of Vietnam, we logically could go no direction but north. We find this nifty place called Sinh Cafe, which rather bizarrely sells not coffee and snack-like fare, but bus tickets. We board an overnight sleeper bus bound for the beach paradise of Nha Trang. The sleeper bus is quite frankly one of the strangest vehicles I've ever been on. It consists of three rows of half-seat-half-bed things, stacked two high, along the length of the vehicle. Generally each seat-bed is self contained, but right up the back there are no less than five beds squashed together (top and bottom levels), the outer ones having a good half metre less leg room than every other bed in the bus. Since me and Ariel obviously didn't book our ticket until the day before we left, we ended up with the bottom level at the back of the bus, with a grand total of fuck all room. Luckily nobody else got in the back with us, so we could stretch out and be comfy-ish.
Eight hours later we arrive in Nha Trang, where it is very early morning. We check into a hotel and start exploring. Nha Trang really has two sides to it. The one you are first introduced to is the touristy side - a long stretch of beautiful beach, decent enough waves (although they're all dumpers), impressive scenery, big hotels (a freaking Novotel!), wide main road, huge sculpture, backpacker-filled bars, etc. After walking a few kms we broke through to the oft ignored, but much more authentic side of Nha Trang. Here we found the rabbit warren of hectic streets, frightening street food, and huge markets; basically, where the locals live. We promptly got very lost and wandered around for several hours (our map was handily located back at the hotel - which we could not find). During our adventurous afternoon we found a 19 metre tall white buddha statue (complete with swastika), some ancient Cham ruins, a school with an elephant inside for no readily apparent reason, and saw a truck drive past with a person in a Mickey Mouse costume and a bear chained to the roof. Yeah, we didn't get it either. Eventually we managed to get directions to the main street and make the long trek back to our hotel. That evening we retired to Bar Oz (it was a fraud! Totally devoid of other Aussies) for some cheap Biere Larue and fish and chips (stunningly good for an Asian attempt). A laptop was hooked up to the speakers, so Ariel quickly hijacked the playlist and put on his favourites, pissing off the entire bar in the process by continually cutting tracks short as he found something better.
The next evening we had finished soaking up Nha Trang and hopped back on the sleeper bus for an 11 hour journey north to Hoi An. This time we were again at the back, but up top this time. Also, the other three seats were occupied. By three huge German dudes. So we had the five
biggest people on the entire bus squashed together in unbearably close quarters for eleven hours. Swell. The dude next to me, Tiek, had a fondness for rolling halfway onto my bed while he slept, so I spent a good deal of the time on my side trying to force him away with only the power of my mind.
EMERGENCY INTERRUPTION: HOLY SHIT I THOUGHT BED BUGS WERE JUST PART OF THAT STUPID SAYING BUT I JUST SAW ONE CRAWLING ACROSS THE BED I AM CURRENTLY WRITING THIS BLOG FROM. DIE, FOUL BEAST, DIIIIEEEEE!!!
Sorry. Kind of breaks up the flow of the piece. Anyway, Hoi An. Hoi An is a tiny little town on the coast, roughly in the middle of Vietnam. It was once a major trading port, but now it is just a really chill little town. It has managed to resist development seemingly for centuries, as the whole town still consists of traditional little yellow houses. It sits on a river, which is literally exactly the same level as the footpath, so the main street gets completely flooded at the slightest provocation. After all the hectic places we'd been through, Hoi An provided us with some much needed relaxation. Hoi An has its own (excellent) specialty dishes which cannot by obtained anywhere else in the world (even in other parts of Vietnam). We found a restaurant called Duc Sin Hoi An (literally "Hoi An Specialties") and tucked into a delicious bowl of Cau Lao. My favourite vietnamese dish (VERY big call), it contains super amazing noodles (made from the water of a particular well in Hoi An and totally unique), delicious broth, tender pork slices, cruncy croutons, bean shoots and lettuce. Hoi An also has some very pretty but rather bland steamed shrimp dumplings called White Rose, and some incredible fried wontons with an absurdly tasty salad on top. The place is gastronomic heaven, and I was very sad to leave it (without a final Cao Lao too!).
Hoi An is also the tailor capital of the world. If you heard that every second store in the whole town was a tailor, you would call bullshit, but astonishinly it is absolutly true. I got a snazzy business suit, a shirt, a silk scarf and some hilariously stupid looking but oh so comfortable red silk/satin pants made up for about $200AUD. If you go for crappier fabrics you can get suits made up seriously cheap, but I ended up getting quality stuff. When I was here two years ago I got an awesome three piece pinstripe suit, gangster style. Cool stuff.
Ariel had to fly back to Australia for a rather unneccessary Uni entrance test, and would be gone for a week or so. My father, who sorely missed old 'Nam from his visit two years ago, pounced on the opportunity and flew over to travel with me for two weeks during his time off work. We met up in Hoi An and got yet another Sinh Cafe sleeper bus to the next hotspot, Hue. We ended up on the some bus as my German buddy from the last trip, Tiek. Fortunately we weren't sleeping next to each other this time (ugh).
Two cities down, why stop when you're on a roll? Hue! Hue was the imperial capital of Vietnam before the title was transferred to Hanoi, and the architecture shows this. Similar to Nha Trang, Hue is split into the old and new halves of town, in this case by the Perfume River. The old part of town is the Citadel, basically the local part of town, flanked by high stone walls and a massive moat, with only two bridges connecting it to the rest of Hue. Me and Dad walked in, hoping to see the inner Citadel (the old home of the royal family, now mostly in disrepair). It hadn't opened yet, but a friendly cyclo rider showed up (cyclo = bicycle thing with big chair at the front for the passanger, with the driver at the back pedalling like a madman) to show us round. He asks for twenty thousand dong each. After some bargaining we agree on fourteen thousand each, with him and another rider so we had a cyclo each, for a one hour tour of the Citadel. This goes well, and we see a ruined old bunker left over from the war, and even have a shot at riding the cyclo. We get dropped off at the inner Citadel, and hand over our 14k each. We are met by a blank stare. "Forty!" claims the driver. Woah ho no. Aruguments insue as the dude tries to convice us that we agreed to a much inflated price. I had previously demonstrated the number on the screen of my phone so as to avoid confusion, so I try again but the guy is dismissive (FUCKING HELL MORE BEDBUGS!!!!). He lights a cigarette, looks on the verge of tears and goes off to loudly complain in Vietnamese to the other cyclo riders. The other rider gives us the look of death. Shrugging, Dad grabs the correct cash and places it on the seat and turns to leave. The dude snatches it, grabs Dad's hand and shoves it back in, screaming "SOUVENIR!". After ten minutes of utter confusion, we shrug and go into the Citadel. I've never felt shittier or angrier about getting something for free.
Citadel was impressive, but our foul mood marred the experience. We get lost as we leave but eventually find our way out to the bridge across the moat. We stop for a delicious lunch at a restaurant run by a deaf mute. The bathroom was hidden in the wall halfway up the stairwell. Awesome. We leave and go into a stationary shop to get a notepad. I feel a tap on shoulder and turn around to find an extremely irate cyclo driver. It's the second rider from before. He's shouting for his money. The store keeper kicks him out. We'd just got over the shit feeling from before, and here he is to renew it. Again we try to explain the agreed price, which he denies and starts sprouting some bullshit about price per kilometre. A helpful local with some English skill steps in to resolve things. He shuts up the rider and turns to us, saying "Just give him twenty thousand". It's more than agreed, but we don't care. I offer the note to the rider, who glares at me furiously for a good ten seconds as he contemplates whether or not to take it. He snatches the note and leaves immediately without another word. The other rider is nowhere to be seen. Moral of the story; get cyclo drivers to write down their agreed price and fucking sign the paper. I wish it were overkill, but we heard stories of cyclo drivers jacking up prices and ripping people off so commonly (Ariel's "free ride" ended in money being snatched out of his wallet) that it sadly isn't.
Anyhoo. The next day we book a day on the boat to visit the various tombs of the emperors scattered around Hue. Some of these were seriously impressive - huge, lush parks with grand temples in them, as well as more subdued structures on the lakes where the emperor supposedly sat and wrote poetry. Others had courtyards full of stone statues of soldiers and elephants. The boat side of things was a fair bit more dodgy. Heaps of places around Hue offer boat trips with different prices and itineraries, but they all take you to the same two or three boats. On the one boat there were people who paid as little as $3 and as much as $15 for exactly the same thing. Our ticket for motorbike transfer to one of the tombs was a scrap of paper with "MO TO BIE" scribbled on it. Over the course of the day four items on the itinerary were skipped without explanation and we still finished over two hours behind schedule (people with flights or trains to catch were forced to pay an extortionist taxt fare - the cynic in me says the late timing was very deliberate for this reason). At the beginning of the trip, about ten people were ushered off our boat and onto a smaller once. We then passed a police check point, and just minutes later the small boat rejoins us and the ten people hop back on. Nothing suss! Still, sunset over the river on the way back was beautiful, and we saw some cool shit despite all the dodginess. After three nights in Hue we called it quits, and since we couldn't be arsed with another twenty hours of buses, we grabbed a quick flight up to Hanoi, the real capital, where we soon met up again with Ariel.
Phew! A week and a half of travel wrapped up in one entry, well done team. By team I mean me. Self congratulation is a wonderful thing. There's a while yet before the blog catches up with wherever I am now though (OOOH MYSTERIOUS). Next up is Hanoi, and also some excellent trekking in the mountains of Sapa. And then... nah, I won't spoil it. Pretty pics if I ever get them onto the PC (or ever find internet access).
Later dudes.
Monday, January 12, 2009
I Miss Saigon...
Not really, I just like terrible puns.
So, after a New Year's Eve of partying harder than has ever been seen by mankind (people wanted our autographs after seeing us burn up the dancefloor, we definately didn't fall asleep at the hotel or anything, too tired to even go outside, oh no ho ho. Not us. Never. Stop looking at me...), we ditched Phnom Penh and headed off to the place officially known as Ho Chi Minh City, but actually called Saigon by practically everyone. We tried our usually party trick of stumbling blindly into an unfamiliar city and hoping to happen across a cheap hotel for the night. It just so happened to be the 1st of January, and the intellectuals in the audience might recognise this as the first day of the year, coincidentally placed straight after New Year's Eve. This meant that everything was full. Even smarter people might realise that Saigon, being a somewhat tropical place, doesn't give two shits about this whole "winter" thing and goes on being hot all year round, apparently to spite unsuspecting Australians. So, here we were, sweating in the heat, late at night, in an unfamiliar city, on new year's day. It took us two solid hours of walking back and forth, getting lost and going in circles questioning every hotel owner to try to find rooms. Fortunately we were in the backpacker district, so literally every second was a hotel or at least another business but with a few rooms to rent. This only served to infuriate further, as they were taken as well. We knock back a place based on price, and when half an hour later decide in desperation that it'll do, it's been filled. Eventually we ended up above a LAN cafe (way above, top floor) paying for a room with an extra bed since it's all they had.
By day Saigon operates much like any big city, so long as you replace every vehicle of every kind with a 110cc motorbike and instruct to the riders to ignore any and all road rules. Then chuck in the occasional bus, taxi or truck, and you've pretty much got Saigon traffic down pat (the traffic is so inherently dangerous that our taxi driver had a clove of lucky garlic on the dash to keep him safe. Yeah). We slurped pho (beef noodle soup - awesome) and sipped coffee (served in a glass of ice, ridiculously strong and ridiculously sweet - we're talking equal parts sugar and ground coffee. When you're down to your last few mouthfulls, you refill your glass... with tea. Strange, but it kind of works), then headed to the Reunification Palace. This place was the HQ of the South Vietnamese and the Yanks during the Vietnam War (or American War as these guys call it). The Viet Cong knocked the gates down with tanks and forced the Allies' surrender that ended the war, and the Palace has been turned into a museum to mark that occasion. The tank that rolled over the gate still sits on the lawn. It was fairly interesting, but the highlight was easily the Northeners' ultimate "fuck you" to the south - a golden statue of Ho Chi Minh erected in the main lecture hall (of the South HQ), in front of the North Vietnamese communist flag.
On the way back we stopped for some coffee with three local dudes. One of them is extremely friendly and chats away with us as we drink. One is silent. The other sits in the corner smoking. He sports an enourmous tattoo on his bicep, showing an evil looking face with fangs, swirling into mist. The happy guy points to him and says "Dracula! Dracula!" and laughing. The guy rolls his eyes, then bares his teeth at us, revealing some impressively pointy canines. "So, Mr. Dracula, what do you do?" I ask. Dracula doesn't seem to speak English, but the happy guy points at him and says "Mafia!" and grins. Awesome, we're having coffee with the mafia. Dracula offers me his smoke, which smells slightly more potent than mere tobacco. I politely decline. Ariel and I gulp down the remainder of our coffee and hightail it back to the hotel. What can I say, we're pretty hardcore.
Next on the agenda is Cu Chi Tunnells. This is where the VC soldiers dug hundreds of kilometres of an underground tunnell network where they lived for weeks on end as they fought the Americans. The place is hilariously full of propaganda and one sided story telling. They showed us a documentary showcasing the VC heroes, several of which were "rewarded a medal for killing Americans". The tunnells are seriously narrow, nobody but the super tiny Vietnamese could hope to squeeze through. Some have been widened for tourists to go through, but it's pretty tacky. Anyway, we saw some cool traps used to generally mangle Americans (ironically, most of the VC landmines, blades and spikes that they used to make traps were manufactured from bomb fragments left over each time the Americans bombed them), most of which involved falling into spike pits or having hooks impale your feet. One was even designed to let you fall straight down so that you land on two spikes which impale your armpits. Nasty. No tour in Vietnam is complete without plenty of buying opportunities, so naturally they tried to sell us a handful of bullets at outrageous prices to fire out of their AK47s or M16s or bigarse machine guns. Vietnam isn't exactly known for its safety standards (neither is Cambodia, where for $1000 you can apparently buy a cow, then shoot it with a grenade launcher and watch steak fly).
Been rambling for a bit now, so let's wrap this up. Next entry will deal with our trip up the Vietnamese coast to the north. No more ludicrously hot weather, woohoo!
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Boring towns and mass genocide
After recovering from our night of merriment (ho ho ho), a full day ordeal, we got a few more ours of Wat-ing in, then took off for Battambang in a taxi with some other Khmer dude. We arrived to discover... nothing. The town was dead. Not a soul roamed the streets. There was one streetlight every few hundred metres, leaving the streets shrouded in darkness. The taxi driver took us to his hotel of choice (where he receives his cut), and after checking our trusty Lonely Planet guide we discovered that there were only about two hotels in Battambang anyway so we accepted. At $5 a night for the two of us it's easily the best value place we've been, although the million flights of stairs and confusingly laid out building hardly helped. This turned out to be the best part of Battambang. During the day the city is actually packed with people, but there is still precisely jack shit to do. We got a tuk tuk twenty kms out of the city to find something worthwhile - the jolly Killing Caves, a place of wonderment and happiness. We hiked up the mountain to get to the caves where the Khmer Rouge (top blokes) led some 15,000 people to the edge of a cliff leading down to the caves below, smashed them in the face with bamboo sticks, and let them fall to their deaths during their four year regime in Cambodia in the seventies. We walked down into the caves and found a little shrine full of the skulls of the fallen. Eerie. Back to Battambang and then immediately out of the boring little place.
Next we hopped on a bus (SUPER COMFY!) full of locals and nicked off to the country's capital, Phnom Penh. This place is a pretty big city, with a cool contrast of dirty poverty and glitzy shopping centries. Cheap accomodation is conveniently located above a mozzie infested swamp, so we decided to splurge and get some decent accomodation by the riverside, the happening part of town. We got the most awesome hotel ever (owned by an Aussie dude), and somehow knocked $10 off the price of the room, but they were only available for one night, so we sadly packed up and went to an infinitely worse place (for the same price) elsewhere for the next two nights. We rode seven or eight escalators and went into a rooftop restaurant in a fancy tower to get a view of the city, and had fun explaining to the waiters that we had no desire to actually eat at their establishment, but rather stand around on their enourmously high balcony. We got drenched in the hottest and heaviest rain I've ever experienced. I wished I had some soap and shampoo with me, as it was a far more pleasant shower than the dodgy cold one in the hotel bathroom.
Depressing though we knew it would be, we felt obliged to visit the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng, the two worst sites of the Khmer Rouge brutality. The Killing Fields were where the Khmer Rouge led their prisoners to mass graves. To save on the cost of ammo, each victim was smashed across the head with various instruments. There was even a tree where infants and children were beaten against. The strange thing is that the fields are beautiful. It just looks like a pleasant meadow with green foliage and butterflies, and a rather large number of holes in the ground. It's a surreal mixture of appalling and pleasant, and it messes with your head. In the centre of the fields is an enoumous stupa filled with 8000 human skulls, and a pile of rag-like clothes that the victims were wearing when they were murdered.
Tuol Sleng was even harder to endure. It was a high school that the Khmer Rouge converted into a prison where they "interrogated" suspects. Of the tens of thousands of people sent into the prison, seven made it through alive. Seven. The place has been retained much as the Vietnamese found it when they drove the Khmer Rouge out in 1978. Each classroom has a steel bed and a cast iron "beating stick" next to it, complete with a photo on the wall of the dead, bloody and mangled body of a victim on that very bed that the Vietnamese took when they discovered the place (it was hurredly evacuated by the Khmer Rouge as the Viets approached). There are walls and walls of photos of the faces of the dead, included six year old kids and elderly women. There is a billboard listing the rules of the place, including "you shall not cry at all", which is punishable by even more torture (lashings by electric wire. Nice dudes). Needless to say, we left feeling pretty glum.
Tune in next time for MORE tales of mindless brutality as our intrepid travellers make their way to Saigon, Vietnam!
Next we hopped on a bus (SUPER COMFY!) full of locals and nicked off to the country's capital, Phnom Penh. This place is a pretty big city, with a cool contrast of dirty poverty and glitzy shopping centries. Cheap accomodation is conveniently located above a mozzie infested swamp, so we decided to splurge and get some decent accomodation by the riverside, the happening part of town. We got the most awesome hotel ever (owned by an Aussie dude), and somehow knocked $10 off the price of the room, but they were only available for one night, so we sadly packed up and went to an infinitely worse place (for the same price) elsewhere for the next two nights. We rode seven or eight escalators and went into a rooftop restaurant in a fancy tower to get a view of the city, and had fun explaining to the waiters that we had no desire to actually eat at their establishment, but rather stand around on their enourmously high balcony. We got drenched in the hottest and heaviest rain I've ever experienced. I wished I had some soap and shampoo with me, as it was a far more pleasant shower than the dodgy cold one in the hotel bathroom.
Depressing though we knew it would be, we felt obliged to visit the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng, the two worst sites of the Khmer Rouge brutality. The Killing Fields were where the Khmer Rouge led their prisoners to mass graves. To save on the cost of ammo, each victim was smashed across the head with various instruments. There was even a tree where infants and children were beaten against. The strange thing is that the fields are beautiful. It just looks like a pleasant meadow with green foliage and butterflies, and a rather large number of holes in the ground. It's a surreal mixture of appalling and pleasant, and it messes with your head. In the centre of the fields is an enoumous stupa filled with 8000 human skulls, and a pile of rag-like clothes that the victims were wearing when they were murdered.
Tuol Sleng was even harder to endure. It was a high school that the Khmer Rouge converted into a prison where they "interrogated" suspects. Of the tens of thousands of people sent into the prison, seven made it through alive. Seven. The place has been retained much as the Vietnamese found it when they drove the Khmer Rouge out in 1978. Each classroom has a steel bed and a cast iron "beating stick" next to it, complete with a photo on the wall of the dead, bloody and mangled body of a victim on that very bed that the Vietnamese took when they discovered the place (it was hurredly evacuated by the Khmer Rouge as the Viets approached). There are walls and walls of photos of the faces of the dead, included six year old kids and elderly women. There is a billboard listing the rules of the place, including "you shall not cry at all", which is punishable by even more torture (lashings by electric wire. Nice dudes). Needless to say, we left feeling pretty glum.
Tune in next time for MORE tales of mindless brutality as our intrepid travellers make their way to Saigon, Vietnam!
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Holiday in Cambodia
After ditching Koh Phangan, we decided to head to Siem Reap, Cambodia. We told a neighbouring backpacker this, and his response was “Why don’t you go somewhere closer, like Antarctica?”. That guy was smart. We got a taxi to the other side of the island (minivan with five people over capacity, fun), then hopped in a pretty sweet catamaran (prior to this we’d had super shitty ferries) to take us via Koh Tao island to the mainland. Four or five hours later, we arrived on land and could finally stop feeling seasick. We narrowly avoid missing the bus (Ariel has a fondness for going wandering at the exact moment our transport arrives), and stay on it for eight or nine hours to get to Bangkok. The movies on the bus made the ride pretty easy. Surprisingly, Meet Dave is a decent movie. Unsurprisingly, Barely Legal isn’t.
A short cab ride with two Swedish backpackers later (they claimed to be from Bali to confuse the driver), we were in Khao San road, the seediest place in Bangkok, but home to the cheapest accommodation and therefore all the backpackers. We stayed in room above a bar in a dodgy alleyway for 250 baht between us (maybe six dollars each). I checked my Lonely Planet before nodding off at 3am to discover that the train to the Cambodian border leaves at five to six in the morning, so we slept for two hours then forced ourselves out. Six hours on a public train (470km for $2, now that’s value) with minimal sleep. Tuk tuk to the border, via two or three stop offs for local arseholes to try to con us into buying fake visas for the border crossing. Every shop in the area was a “border checkpoint” or “visa service”, more scams than you can poke a stick at. Eventually we made it to the border, only to discover it wasn’t much better. Form after form, corrupt police officials demanding bribes, this place had it all. One form required a passport photo (which they conveniently neglect to tell you), and when the tourists inevitably don’t have one they get charged five bucks to get one taken, only they never actually take your picture because they don’t care and it’s just blatant profiteering. The captain in charge tried to charge me ten dollars worth of baht extra because I wanted to pay in US Dollars (which the signs actually tell you to do). Half an hour of arguing using hand motions and writing stuff eventually wore the guy down and we made it through relatively unscammed.
We met an Aussie chick called Elaine, and realised that if the three of us shared a taxi it worked out cheaper than getting a crowded and slow bus to Siem Reap, so we did that. Worst road ever, pretty fun. Driver scored us a free tuk tuk to some accommodation, which turned out to be the best place we’ve stayed at so far. Stayed on with Elaine and became travel buddies for a couple of days.
Oh yeah, all this Angkor Wat stuff happened on Christmas day. Probably the weirdest Christmas I’ve ever had, something Ariel, being Jewish, didn’t really understand. We met up with Elaine again and hit the town. Pizza and beer, an excellent Christmas dinner by anyone’s standards (and paying fifty cents for a can of Asahi is fucking awesome). The owner of the restaurant was the happiest guy in the universe, and came out with massive CD wallet so we could pick some music for the place. Next we picked the only bar that was packed with people. Angkor What? is an excellent place (“Promoting irresponsible drinking over the festive season”), full of young travellers, and good drinks. Every surface is COVERED in signatures and messages from past patrons, and the music selection was pretty awesome (an extreme rarity in south east Asia). With a nod to the Thais, the pitchers of various drinks were served in big buckets. Five bucks for ridiculously strong rum and coke (we’re talking full beer glass of spirits). We got some buckets and got chatting to some more Aussies (they’re everywhere!), then danced around like maniacs. After an hour or so, Elaine drags me away from playing pool and getting travel advice from drunk Scottish dudes and takes me outside, where I find Ariel lying on the ground moaning, surrounded by concerned looking locals. He’s thrown up on himself. The other Aussie guys were cool and had paid for a tuk tuk to get us back to our guesthouse, so I walk an extremely intoxicated Ariel back to the room, where he collapses in front of the toilet in the bathroom and refuses to move.
Today we’ve woken up at noon and have once again wasted half the day that we were meant to be spending at the horrendously overpriced temples. We’re gonna wind our way down Cambodia and spend new year’s eve on the coast.
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