South East Asia Diary
Arrival in Singapore and Malaysia including Kuala Lumpur and the Cameron Highlands
Singapore and Malaysia pictures here
So, they nearly didn't let us board the plane in Perth! The lady at the desk got all funny about us not having a ticket out of Singapore, even though we could show her our tickets from Hanoi to Kathmandu and our Nepal trek booking details. She wanted us to have a train ticket out of Singapore and she made us feel like illegal immigrants for not having one. And she called in her supervisor to make us feel even more conspicuous and guilty. He agreed to let us through, though I suspect she was disappointed. Our luck on the plane wasn't much better. Not only did the in-flight entertainment system fail, but we were the last two people to be fed. Dave of course had his own particular way of complaining: "At least give us a gin and tonic while we wait!" Once the flight was over, however, our arrival into Singapore was smooth as you like. We've been in full-on monsoon mode ever since (after holding out for the storm to break in Oz) and the humidity has gone from practically 0% to around 96% (at least it feels like it).
We stayed in a little hostel in Little India, but that's where our luck with India stopped, as we got absolutely no joy in the chaotic Indian Embassy when we went to enquire about getting our visas.
Singapore is an interesting mix of cultures. There are fantastically-decorated Hindu temples alongside incense-filled Chinese temples, and the colonial influence is still very evident (the cricket ground in the centre of town is one example). This all sits in amongst the glass and concrete skyscrapers of one of South East Asia's mega-cities. Having said we wouldn't, we wound up at Raffles and were tempted into the Long Bar for Singapore Slings. Just the two, though, since they cost us significantly more than a whole day's budget. For a few minutes we felt more like Lords of the Manor than dirty backpackers!
We spent the rest of our time in Singapore people-watching, eating lovely curries and Chinese food, and watching the afternoon rain from the shelter of various bars.
The border crossing into Malaysia was relatively easy and we arrived in Kuala Lumpur and checked into the lovely Tiara Guesthouse. Having not had a television for some time, we tried to update ourselves on developments in Mumbai and Bangkok, keeping our fingers crossed that it would all be over by the time we arrived in either destination. We finally got our storm that day, though luckily we were already settled with a large bottle of Tiger when it started. The rain was pelting the roof so hard we couldn't hear each other speak.
We spent our time in KL eating tasty, unbelievably cheap food (we discovered roti chanai - delicious Indian pancakes serves with various sources), filing for our Indian visas (in total contrast to Singapore, there was practically no one at the visa agency, which worries us slightly), gazing at the Petronas Towers by night and by day, seeing the city from the radio tower and generally soaking up the atmosphere.
We decided to spend the five days wait for approval for our visas in the Cameron Highlands, four hours drive north of KL, though our bus was delayed by six hours due to a mudslide which brought a tree down onto the road. The highlands turned out to be a fantastic place to relax and we did several brilliant, if a bit challenging, jungle walks, which inevitably ended with us trudging down through a little village, ducking under the washing and stepping over the chickens, while waving back at the kids shouting hello at us. We also tasted the strawberries at one of the local strawberry farms, and walked up to the Boh tea plantation (a longer walk than we had planned, but well worth it when you find yourself in amongst the tea growing like a giant maze over the hills, and watch it being harvested by hand), where we had a brew and a piece of cake in their tea shop. All incredibly English! We even had tea and scones on our last day. Despite it not being butterfly season, we saw some specimens the size of small aeroplanes, but much more colourful, and watched (and listened to) the afternoon storms from our hideout on the hill (the clouds were often beneath us, rolling in through the valleys).
We are now back in Kuala Lumpur, but there's no sign of our visa applications getting approval from India (they might have been a bit busy with terrorism and the like this week...) For now we'll just have to eat the food and browse the markets for a few days more...
West Coast Malaysia and the Thai Islands
Malaysia and Thai Island pictures here
We left Kuala Lumpur and were glad to see the back of its hellish bus station. On the bus to Lumut, we met Sian and Ben, an English couple travelling in the same direction as us, and ended up spending much of our time on Pangkor Island in their company. A ferry from Lumut took us to the island, and then one of the infamous pink "taxis" took us on to Teluk Nipah, where Sian and Ben happened to be booked into a guesthouse next door to ours. Pangkor was our last stop before leaving monsoon zone, and the rain seemed to know this, as it gave us one hell of a drenching while we were there. As a result, we didn't spend much time on the beach, but we did see some incredible wildlife, including dozens of hornbills lined up on telephone cables waiting for the daily evening feed, monkeys doing much the same, just around the corner from the hornbills, and an incredible and completely unexpected Komodo dragon, around two metres long and looking very mean and prehistoric wandering out of the jungle during a downpour. We're still not entirely sure what he was doing there, as we've found no record of Komodos existing outside of Komodo island in Indonesia.
We also got to see Pangkor's bizarre Chinese temple with full size statues of Mickey Mouse and Pluto out the front. And when we could get a table in a restaurant (it turns out we were there in the Malaysian school holidays), we ate some lovely Malaysian food.
The rain persuaded us to stay no longer than two nights, and on the third day we got up at 6am to get back to the ferry port in time for the 7.30 ferry back to Lumut. When we arrived, we found the 8.30 bus to Butterworth was completely full, and we were very lucky to get the last two seats on the 9.30. The journey was uneventful, save for the occasional brilliant blue, red-billed kingfisher sitting on a power cable. We got straight onto the ferry at Butterworth and headed for Georgetown's highrises, whilst getting a great view of the longest bridge in Asia, which links Penang to the mainland.
Once you get into Georgetown's old colonial centre (which we did on foot, having failed to find the free buses), you forget the highrises exist and enter a quaint, lively town with impressive temples around every corner. We checked into the 75 Travellers Lodge and went about learning to dodge the mopeds and cars (Georgetown is pavementless) without falling into the deep gutters. You soon work up a sweat!
At the lodge, we met Mr. Lowe, made famous by the south East Asia Lonely Planet, and, true to his description of being well informed and full of useful information, he promptly told us that the visa regulations for Thailand had changed four days earlier to allow tourists entry by land for only fifteen days without a visa. We left our passports with Mr. Lowe and within 24 hours had lost another whole page to a sticker with an official seal and the commissioner's signature. The space is rapidly getting used up!
We spent our time on Penang visting ornate temples, most of them chinese and one with four-foot josticks burning outside and birds in tiny cages that can be let free for just a small sum of money! We were (and still are) baffled by the mystery of the curly-tailed street cats, and discovered Jaz beer! We also ate some great Indian food (a typical breakfast would be a sweet marsala tea and a roti canai telur, a cross between a pancake and an omelette) and managed to make arrangements for our Christmas in Bangkok. We also got some very "interesting" advice for India from fellow travellers staying at the Lodge. We climbed to the top of the lighthouse at Fort Corn Wallis (which felt very precarious) and watched people fishing at the water's edge (and found a "fishing tree" which had claimed the hooks of countless careless fishermen and looked like it was trying to land a catch from its branches. Despite the effort needed to stay out of the way of the traffic, Georgetown was a nice place to relax for a few days before crossing the border into Thailand.
As a sort of psychology experiment designed to safeguard our own sanity, I will record here that we were magically teleported into Thailand from Penang, which is just as well because it's a nine hour journey by road and we hear the Thais drive like maniacs. We met some lovely people during the teleportation, and some more advice for India (totally contradicting some of what we've already been told, but we're well used to that by now). When we arrived in Krabi, we checked into the City Hotel and headed straight to the bar across the road for a beer to help us overcome the effects of the teleportation.
We spent our time in Krabi picking titbits off the market stalls, taking walks along the waterfront, visiting the apparently new and unfinished temple on the hill (very ornate and its many steps lined with dragons, newly spray-painted gold), and admiring an incredible full moon, which we later discovered was the closest full moon to the earth in fifteen years. Needless to say, we ate some more fantastic Thai food and, on the third day, got up early to catch a longtail boat to Railay Beach. A longtail boat is a small wooden boat with an engine (from a lawnmower?) attached to some metal piping at the back which finishes in a small propellor. This whole makeshift-looking contraption acts as a rudder as well as a motor. though it might not sound like it, these are an officially recognised form of public transport, and are the only way of reaching Railay Beach.
The boats act as taxis, meaning the more people you have (they fit seven), the less you pay. The are touts everywhere along the waterfront trying to get you into a boat (this incidentally has been the case on every island we've visited since), and our skipper told us the lack of tourists since the "Bangkok incident" has been hitting them hard. With the result that we ended up chartering a boat to ourselves, as there were no other gringos heading to Railay that morning (we were expecting the shortage of tourists to make prices go down, not up!), but first we went to get petrol, or in other words take the boat the the closest spot on the river to the local Esso garage, where skipper disembarked and disappeared to buy a canister of petrol to pour into his lawnmower engine!
We were recommeded Railay Beach by Sian and Ben, and it didn't let us down. To start, the hour long boat journey gave us a view of the surrounding islands and all their wierd and wonderful shapes (one is called chicken island, and it does actually look like a chicken), then when we arrived, we found the beaches to be among the most beautiful and secluded we've ever seen. But first, we checked into our little "tree-house" cabin at Ya Ya Resort (significant, as some of you will know), had a light breakfast, and then headed to West Railay. The beach at East Railay is full of Mangroves and mud. This is where the boats come in from Krabi, and where the budget accommodation is. West Railay is where all the posh resorts, and the beaches, are. The water is clear, deep and warm, the beaches are pristine and the whole area is surrounded by tall, forest-covered free-standing rocks. When you're actually in the water, the view is stunning and you feel like you're in paradise. You can even buy ready-cut fruit (and just about anything else, including footscrubs - one woman was particularly concerned about the state of David's feet) from the beach vendors. Railay is known for being a hidden gem, but the secret must be out in Sweden, becuase the beach is lined with lithe young swedes. The climbing community also know about it, and we stopped to watch a few people having a go at the sheer limestone (though we saw plenty of monkeys doing a much better job). There are also some impressive caves.
The only downside to Railay is all the building work that is going on. The builders get to work early in the morning (and if the hammering didn't wake us up, it was the wolf-whistling mynah bird that lived next door - the price of being exposed to builders for so long!) and much of the east coast is a building site, making it difficult to get from place to place. That and the mozzies. Our room came equipped with mossie net for the bed, and the first thing a waiter does when you take a seat in a restaurant is to put a mozzie coil under your table.
But, if you can ignore the building work, there are lots of lovely places to eat, cute little bars with specially designed bamboo platforms with cushions for people to sit around candles. It's also here that we first discovered the delicious Thai pancakes (we've now banned ourselves from eating these - they can be very greasy and aren't conducive to keeping your beach body!) Someone we met in New Zealand recommended the climb to the lagoon at the top of one of the surrounding rocks, so we donned our boots and went to see what the deal was. The first part was fairly steep, but ropes had been put into place to help you up the rocks and tree roots. We got as far as admiring the view from the lookout, and then came across some very sheer descents, also fixed with ropes. There were a few other tourists looking over the edge uncertainly, and then a hard-as-nails French mountaineer (we assume) appeared over the edge and the gist of his advice was that if you weren't an experienced climber, you shouldn't attempt it. And the lagoon was dry anyway. So we didn't feel too bad about turning back and heading to the beach instead.
After three nights on Railay, we took the boat to Ko Phi Phi (a chaotic affair, involving a transfer to the ferry by longtail boat, which, though larger than usual, wasn't really designed for 28 people and their huge rucksacks. When we got to the boat, it was already very full - there doesn't seem to be any limit on the number of tickets they will sell!) and eventually found our guesthouse, Harmony House, at the top of town.
Ko Phi Phi Don is much bigger and busier than Railay and, though the Lonely Planet describes is as a perfect paradise (The Beach was filmed on neighbouring Phi Phi Lay), the water here is much shallower (often too shallow to swim) than at Railay (it's more tidal) and the beach tends to be more littered and subject to blaring dance or reggae music. That said, we spent a fair amount of time on the beach topping up our tans, and thoroughly enjoyed spending our evenings sitting in little outdoor bars watching the bad Nordic fashion go by, near misses between bikes and pedestrians (its as bad as Penang here, only there are no motorised vehicles) and counting people carrying buckets!
Ko Phi Phi was our introduction to buckets which, if you don't already know, are a Thai invention (inspired by alcohol guzzling tourists) for getting very drunk very quickly and very cheaply. They consist of a small bucket (or in some cases a full-sized one) typically filled with a quarter bottle of spirit (vodka, rum or whisky), a small bottle of redbull and a can of mixer. When you buy your bucket (which you can do at many stalls, shops and guesthouses), your bucket gets filled with ice and the contents of all the bottles and cans gets emptied in. You then walk around town or sit on the beach supping at your bucket from a straw. People carry these around like handbags.
When we weren't watching (or participating in) this spectacle, we were eating the most amazing Thai curries for one or two pounds a pop, watching sun set from the view point (where we also got to see some pictures of the island just after the tsunami hit) and walking along the beach at night to see how it had been transformed with banners, lasers, molotov cocktail-style lighting and fire jugglers (this is the land of full moon parties!). We also felt the need to invest in some 95 per cent DEET mozzie spray.
So that we felt we could still achieve something useful, we made enquiries about trains to Chiang Mai for New Year and, once we found an agency with people who could communicate usefully with us (yes they were English), we discovered that the trains were all booked up from Christmas eve until 3rd January, which forced us to think. It turns out the only thing we can do is wait until we arrive in Bangkok and try to get seats on a bus. Spurred into action, we booked the rest of our accommodation in Thailand, and chatted to the girls (who turned out to know quite a bit - one had just finished a guidebook on Cambodia) about Laos and other countries we're due to visit.
The next morning, we took the early ferry to Phuket and checked into the Rattana Mansion. That was this morning, and we've been spending our time since then discovering the town (difficult on a Sunday, though we did catch a colourful and noisy procession that was causing havoc with the traffic). We will spend two nights here and then fly to Bangkok to start the second stage of our Thailand adventure. before heading off again, though, we'll be spending Christmas in the capital, and I'm sure it will be like no other Christmas either of us has known.
Bangkok, the Kwai River Bridge and Chiang Mai
Thailand (Bangkok, the Kwai River Bridge and Chiang Mai) pictures here
We arrived off the plane in Bangkok and got stuck straight into the gridlock traffic which we would later learn is the usual state of things in the city. We spent our first day exploring our immediate area (Sukhumvit, to the East of the old town), making enquiries about travel to Kanchanaburi (for the River Kwai) and Chiang Mai. We also discovered a little restaurant not far away serving draught Chang beer and excellent food, which we would go back to again and again during our stay in Bangkok. We got overexcited at seeing our first elephant being ridden down the street.
The next day (Christmas Eve no less), we hopped on the excellent, efficient and clean sky train and travelled to the end of the line to Mo Chit, then struggled to communicate with a taxi driver (after attempting to walk to the Northern bus station and then realising it was miles away.) Ten minutes of motorway and a few illegal u-turns later, we arrived at the bus terminal and faced the next challenge: dozens of desks and not a letter of roman script anywhere. After some slow and painful enquiries, we gathered that the only seats to be had to Chiang Mai (which we can now recognise in Thai script) on the 30th were on a second class bus leaving at midday. We bought two tickets.
On the way back, we stopped off at Victory Monument to see what the deal was with minivans to Kanchanaburi and, I'm ashamed to say, caused a great deal of confusion. I didn't expect Thailand to be our first real encounter with total non-communication with the locals. By then, we should really have decided to keep ourselves out of trouble for the rest of the day, but instead we went to visit the Laos and Vietnam Air offices to see what kind of commotion we could get ourselves into there.
The sky train lines in Bangkok end just where you start to need them most: at the edge of the old town. We can only imagine that they intend to extend the network at some point in the future. We started to walk towards the river using our map, but realised we were making very slow progress and jumped into a cab. The driver of this particular cab turned out to be the most confused yet and, despite the fact we had asked him to take us to one of the largest and most important temples in Thailand, not two kilometers away, he ummed and ahhed and turned our map this way and that, until the lights had changed and I, having had enough, had decided to get out and almost had the door taken off by a moped. So we were stuck with him for the duration, and, as it turned out, the journey was an inordinately complex one and he did well to keep us out of trouble (unlike one van and a bus who managed to wedge themselves together in the middle two lanes). At Wat Pho we saw the famous (and enormous) reclining Buddha, watched people dropping hundreds of one baht coins into little ceramic pots, one in each, lined up along the length of the wall, and walked around the wat complex (which is like a mini village) watching workmen giving some of the facades a makeover to make their hundreds of coloured tiles even brighter and sparklier.
We then walked to the Khao San road, aka Gringo Central, where the backpacking phenomenon began back in the eighties and where hostels, bars and stalls all compete for the attention of the droves of tourists. We didn't stay long.
By this stage, we had resigned ourselves to the fact that Christmas Day was going to be just another day (ok, I had resigned myself, Dave was really quite pleased about the whole thing). There wasn't a single decoration in sight at the hostel and, though there were the usual street decorations and carols, the only places that were advertising any sort of festive activity were the awful-looking English and Irish pubs, which we had no desire to visit. Having traipsed about so much during the day, we spent the evening of Christmas Eve having a nice meal and a few draught Changs and generally behaving ourselves. On Christmas Day, we treated ourselves to a day of doing nothing, mooching about our lovely hostel and the surrounding area, eating spicy soups and watching baby elephants go by in the 30 degree heat. I had been informed a few days earlier that my box of pressies had arrived home in the UK, despite the extreme unhelpfulness of the Malaysian post office they were sent from, and I made the mistake of calling home at 10am local time, when I imagined my whole family would be whipped up in a frenzy of unwrapping and sherry-drinking, but when in fact the most anyone had managed to do was have a cup of tea.
We did have one moment of madness where we drifted into the Bull's Head out of curiosity, only to be faced with a lot of drunk people wearing ginger wigs and Scottish berets, and Thai girls in Santa outfits, all accompanied by deafening music and raucous drunken shouting. We walked straight back out.
On Boxing Day, we took our minibus to Kanchanaburi (with very little fuss), arrived at around midday and walked a fair way to find our lovely guest house complete with pool and pet mynah birds (the big, talking kind, not the common or garden kind you find two-a-penny in the streets). After a delicious, cheap lunch in a local restaurant, we took ourselves along to the Death Railway Museum, which turned out to be excellent, with very well-thought-out exhibits, and very informative. This put us in something of a solemn mood, and we walked around the prisoner-of-war cemetery opposite in a reflective mood. We decided to leave seeing the bridge until the next day.
That evening we had a few beers in the Buddha Bar to shelter from a brief, violent downpour, and then dinner in a lovely little restaurant where we shared our table with another English couple, also on a rtw trip, and discovered banana fritters with honey and ice cream.
We should have had an excellent night's sleep that night, but were unfortunately kept awake by a very loud and aggressive lovers' tiff next door (a northerner and his Thai 'girlfriend'), until they were told to shut up by the Dutchman on our other side. In the morning, we took the walk up to the eponymous bridge over the River Kwai, only to find it turned into a tourist circus, with stalls full of tat and blaring music. The bridge itself was crammed with tourists all elbowing each other out of the way, a dangerous state of affairs seeing as there is nothing to stop you falling off the tracks and into the river below. Very un-dignified. We walked back a bit saddened by the whole thing.
We spent the rest of the afternoon having a generally lazy time by the pool, reading the papers and listening to the Thai-speaking mynah birds. Kanchanaburi is an oasis of calm in comparison with Bangkok and we took the opportunity to unwind. This also gave us the opportunity to ponder a question that had been increasingly bugging us since our arrival in Thailand, that of the sex tourism. We have been seeing more and more couples consisting of middle aged western men and young Thai women (or boys) and finding ourselves making the obvious (but probably not always accurate) assumption about the basis of their relationship. The initial curiosity at this spectacle quickly wears off when you start to see so many, and you eventually end up wanting to clamp your hands around the neck of every German or Brit you see with a young Thai thing hanging off his arm.
The next day, after a pad Thai breakfast (when in Rome...), we got on the minibus back to Bangkok and left our sleepy quiet town for the traffic and noise of the big city again. However, once back at the hostel, we discovered the huge, leafy roof terrace, complete with rocking chairs and sun loungers, and spent that evening watching the sun set over the high rises with a few bottles of Chang, feeling like we'd discovered another secret secluded spot.
The next day, we got to do something we'd been meaning to do for some time now: have a meal at one of the many 'soup kitchens' set up in the streets around the hostel. After a bit of hesitation over how the whole thing worked, we were motioned to one of the plastic tables and duly brought our lunch, seeing as there's only one thing on the menu anyway! This was one of the most delicious soups we had tasted yet, and all for a modest 50p! After another lazy afternoon, we had dinner back at 'our' restaurant (for about the fourth time) and then got drawn into a conversation back at the hostel reception, making us very late to bed (which turned out to be immaterial, as we were woken by a group of jet-lagged American girls in the room next door at 3am).
We managed to get to the bus station the next morning, after all the usual taxi problems, and got on our not-very-second-class-looking bus to Chiang Mai. The only other gringo on the bus was a Welshman who told us how he'd started out on a trip to South Africa by motorbike, but only got as far as Bulgaria before the engine packed in, and ended up in Thailand instead. We should have known better when the lady that sold us the tickets said we'd arrive at 10.30pm – it was a quarter past midnight by the time we actually arrived into Chiang Mai, and chilly! A tuk tuk with a speed junkie driver took us along the deserted canals to Finlay's Cottage, where luckily our hosts were waiting up to show us to our room. A lovely, quiet room with a huge, comfy bed. Heaven.
New Year's Eve! We spent the morning exploring lovely Chiang Mai and avoiding the very strong sun wherever possible. Preparations for the evening were clearly being made in the square – a good sign. We did a spot of shopping (ok, it was me, it was me!) and looked around a lot of wats, including an unusual wooden one, which we decided was our favourite. Over a fruit shake in a cafe, we decided we wanted massages, and found a parlour offering a one-hour all over body oil massage for 3 quid. It was heaven! After that, we grabbed lunch off the stalls in the square and went home to rest.
When we headed back out, we found the street blocked off to traffic and giant screens strategically placed all around. The main stage was properly rigged out with TV cameras and there were national Thai TV vans parked all up the road. We seemed to have managed to get ourselves to where the party was at for New Year's! After being scared out of our wits a few times by very loud fireworks being let off (yes, by drunken Brits) in the canal, we managed to get ourselves to a bar for a few beers, then had a light dinner before bumping into Heidi and Tom from Manchester buying Changs at the 7/11 (no stigma to drinking in the street here). We ended up spending the evening getting drunk with them in a rooftop bar, watching the lanterns sailing up past us into the sky (if you've never seen them, they're like mini square, tissue paper hot-air balloons) and making new constellations up with the stars. We even sent off one of our own, and tried to follow its path but soon lost it amongst all the others. At least ours didn't get caught in a tree and burst into flames, which happens more often than you would think.
A few buckets and a lot of Changs later, we were satisfying our late night munchies with spring rolls and wantons off the stalls.
Needless to say, the next day was spent doing very little. Having woken up with what we have come to call 'Changovers', we barely left the safety of the guest house, apart for a quick trip to grab lunch. In the evening, we bumped into Heidi and Tom who told us about the terrible nightclub fire in Bangkok, and we called our parents to reassure them. More lanterns were already being sent up and the town seemed ready to start partying all over again. We had dinner and went to bed.
We are due to head to Chiang Khong on the border on the 3rd January, and from there will negotiate our entry into Laos. We expect to be reporting back in a few weeks on treks, river trips, French patisseries and the like.
Laos!
Laos Pics Page 1 of 2
Laos Pics Page 2 of 2
So, with a new year to look forward to, we made it East to Chiang Kong on the border with Laos, drank our last few Chang beers with some new friends from the minibus, and headed into Laos on the slow boat down the Mekong that people had been telling us so much about. The border crossing involved taking a very small boat the two or three hundred metres from the Thai bank to the Laos bank, and then after very little waiting, we had our thirty day visas (we thought we were getting only fifteen!) and our entry stamps, and were officially in Laos. After considerably more waiting (enough to make quite a few new friends and crack open our first Beerlaos) and a series of nonsensical briefings designed to persuade us to "upgrade" to the bus or the fast boat, we finally piled into the boat that would take us down the river. We carried on piling in until there were definitely too many people on the boat, and the last few did a good impression of stubborn sheep refusing to be coaxed into a pen by a sheepdog. They eventually admitted defeat when it became obvious there was no second boat to accommodate them. The journey to Luang Prabang from Huay Xay takes two full days, so we had plenty of time to amuse ourselves by rearranging the furniture, swapping life stories, discussing the war with any French people to hand, and drinking plenty more Beerlaos. Watching the fast boats rocket past with their six crash-helmetted, plastic poncho-ed, cold-looking passengers was at least some consolation for our discomfort. The fact that there wasn't room to swing a Siamese cat didn't prevent us from making a stop to let on a hoard of small children with baskets of crisps and cookies - all selling the same things!
We arrived in Pakbeng at around six that evening and there followed the most chaotic and painfully slow luggage retrieval we have ever seen, with people poring over piles of backpacks in the pitch black, and then having to scale a steep sandbank to reach the town. When we were finally out of the melee, we checked into a cheap guest house with our new friends and set out for dinner at Mr. Sivilai's restaurant where David and I braved our first and last glass of Laos wine.
On top of the cockerels crowing intermittently through the night, and one very long and loud cat fight, David and I shared our room with a very noisy and active mouse (at no extra cost), and then dragged ourselves back to the boat at 8am the next morning. We were pleasantly surprised to see that two boats had been put on for the second leg, and we were able to enjoy the beautiful scenery much more comfortably.
By 5pm, we had arrived in Luang Prabang and were first off the boat with our bags (we had learnt our lesson in Pakbeng and had boarded much more strategically). After seeing a few very expensive guest houses, we managed to get a room in a nice and spacious, reasonably-priced one. Louang Prabang is a lovely, relaxing colonial town that seems to have quickly got its act together for the recent influx of tourists. There are gorgeous boutiques and restaurants designed more for the families and older holiday-makers in town, and a brilliant night market that has none of the pushiness and noise of Thailand's markets. We spent four days visiting wats, going for walks in the sun, watching the locals play boules, browsing the market and having dinner with our new friends from the boat. David also got to sample an ingenious invention: the Oreo shake!
The monks are an important part of life here and, though we didn't quite manage to get up at 5am to take part in the act of giving alms (which, it turns out, is a bit of a tourist circus anyway), we did see plenty of monks hanging out in internet cafes checking their Facebook. Though we had planned to do a trek in this part of the country, we finally decided to just enjoy the town and relax, and, as we had arrived a few days earlier than planned, we agreed to make a detour to Ponsavanh to see the Plain of Jars. Saying goodbye to our friends, we took the early local bus and endured some truly awful music and eight hours of twisty mountain roads - almost as disappointing as the lizard that had made its way into our lunch during the night. When we got to cold, cold Ponsavanh, we met "Chicken" at the bus station, who turned out to be an ex-monk from Louang Prabang, and he took us the three km into town, showed us a good guest house and sold us a tour for the next day. We ate dinner in the only indoors restaurant in town (and were gradually joined by every other gringo from the bus) and got an early night.
Our tour turned out to be excellent, and apart from seeing lots and lots of the mysterious jars over the three sites (for anyone that doesn't know, they are huge 2000-year-old stone jars scattered across the countryside, perhaps as burial urns, perhaps as rice and whisky storage, no one really knows), we also got a feel for the damage done by the huge bombing campaign by the US during the "secret war" that left parts of the country riddled with UXO (one third of everything that was dropped didn't explode properly). The long term effects of this are far wider than you would imagine - not only can people not farm the land because of the risk of disturbing landmines and the like (and as a result, have had to resort to alternative means of survival - some of the beasts on sale on the foodstalls are pretty interesting), but whole jungles have been wiped out by napalm and agent orange and very little will grow on what's left of the land. There are huge craters strewn across the hills. UXO has become a part of everyday life and bombs are recycled in some resourceful ways (we ate our lunch with aluminium spoons made from old drop tanks). By the end of the day, we were ready for our shots of Laos Laos whisky made from fermented rice in a local village.
David and I turned out to be allergic to our bed in the imaginatively named Nice Guest House, and got very little sleep the two nights we were there. We still managed to get up at the crack of dawn, wearing everything we owned, to get the early bus to Vang Vieng. And after a fuel stop and another stop to change a flat tyre, we were on our way.
Vang Vieng turned out to be even more touristy and awful than the guidebooks make out, with bar upon bar blaring out endless episodes of Friends and The Simpsons and offering fry-ups and Sunday roasts, and the East-Coast-of-Oz crowd walking around half naked or crammed into tuk tuks loaded up with "tubes" (actually the inner tubes of tractor tyres) ready to go on their tubing pub crawl down the river (as a result, there are a fair few walking about with their arms in slings or their faces smashed up). We decided to take no part in any of this and spent our time walking through the dry paddy fields among the mountains on one of the river islands, including climbing one of the smaller peaks with the aid of lots of bamboo ladders to explore the caves up there and get an excellent view. We also celebrated David's 30th birthday! (but decided to steer clear of the many "happy menus" on offer in town).
The bus to Vientiane was yet another story of chaos and incompetence involving us being redirected from one bus station to another, at one point via every guest house in town when the minivan we had been told to get in had to pick up eight other people. We thought we'd never find the bus, but finally made it with minutes to spare, only to find it was very nearly full already and, despite the enormous letters painted on the windscreen, very definitely not "VIP". We arrived at around 2pm and left the dawdling hoards to get into town first and find a room. There wasn't a lot available, but we managed to find a very nice (and quite expensive) room and agreed to downgrade the next day.
Vientiane gets a lot of bad rap, most likely due to the all-too-common "it's not cheap so it's rubbish" school of thought, but we found it to be not a bad little capital with a great cafe culture, plenty of lovely colonial architecture and set on a bend of the Mekong - perfect for watching the sun set over Thailand with a Beerlao!
At the risk of sounding like beer bores, we have developed a particular fondness for Laos' national (and only) beer. It tastes better than any other Asian beer and doesn't give us hangovers. And it's typically under a pound for a 640ml bottle! Vietnam has a lot to live up to.
We're spending our time in Vientiane soaking up the last of our Laotian experience, spending hours in lovely French cafes drinking good (finally!) coffee, watching sunsets and eating some good curries. We also walked up to the Northeast of town to see That Louang, the most important (and very gold) national monument in Laos, a stupa built to house (so it's said) a piece of Buddha's chest bone. I thought it could have done with another lick of that gold paint.
And so, as Dave put it today to a jealous friend, we're off to Angkor Wat at the weekend! All we need to figure out now is how to get to the airport at 4am on Sunday!
Laos has been a very worthwhile late addition to our itinerary, and is certainly a country we would recommend to people thinking of coming to South East Asia. Though places like Vang Vieng are an anomaly, and depressing to see, it will be interesting to see how the country adapts to its newly thriving tourist industry. In the meantime, we are preparing ourselves for a dose of horror and sadness in the coming week by reading accounts of the Khmer Rouge's murderous reign in Cambodia.
Cambodia - Angkor Wat and The Killing Fields
Cambodia Pics Page 1 of 2
Cambodia Pics Page 2 of 2
Having commandeered a tuk tuk driver to come and pick us up at 4am (he was very punctual), we got to the airport with plenty of time. Once we realised we were actually leaving from the domestic terminal (as we were flying via Pakse), things got significantly more basic. Most of the people on the flight with us were groups of older French people on organised holidays. After all the nasty things people have said to us about Laos Air, the first leg went surprisingly well, even if the propeller, which we were next to, was rather loud. We were even fed breakfast and coffee. At Pakse we went through immigration and back into departures, having found no bureau de change to change up the last of our kip (things really were basic). In the end, Dave managed to change it with the lady knitting in the shop in the corner of the departures lounge. The next leg was just as smooth (we were fed again) and we arrived into Siem Reap to find Sak waiting to take us to the Palm Garden Lodge in his remorque-moto. When we arrived (we did wonder at one point where the hell Sak was taking us, and it was a very bumpy ride on terrible roads), I had to wonder if I had made a mistake with my booking - we were greeted into the beautiful guesthouse with cold towels and a glass of orange juice. Having seen our room we had to check the price, but it seems this is just what you get for 15 dollars in Cambodia. They even had a long list of free extras. I was still working in Laotian prices!
We went out to explore Siem Reap, which is a lovely little town with side streets full of cute little restaurants all competing to serve the cheapest draught beer in town, a totally non-touristy central food market (an assault on the eyes and nose). Even the street urchins trying to sell you postcards are charming and can recite a list of facts and figures about any country you choose to say you're from. The only thing you have to be careful of is the crazy traffic. These people have no sense of fear. That day we had our first taste of Cambodian/Khmer food and realised we were back up to Thai standards.
We relaxed all afternoon and then attempted to have a light dinner in a cheap little place up our road, but ended up with so much food we had to give half of it to a young man begging on the street. We had started to see a few landmine victims in Laos, and there they seemed mainly to be working, but here the problem was much more evident and many had ended up on the streets.
The next morning we were up early, ate our free breakfast, picked up our free packed lunch and headed off with Sak to Angkor Wat, picking up our three day passes on the way. Remorque-motos aren't quite tuk tuks, but are definitely the way to get around in Siem Reap. They're basically a kind of quaint little carriage for two towed by a motorbike. Simple but absolutely romantic! And so we got our first view of Angkor Wat, which we have been so excited about for so long. This was always going to be a highlight, right from the moment we bought our round the world tickets, and it certainly didn't disappoint. We spent three days exploring some of the hundreds of temples scattered over a huge area, ranging from 9th to 13th century. Though we won't remember all the names, we will recall the hundreds of metres of exquisite carvings, huge stone faces staring down at us, Escher-like temples with impossible staircases and secret passages, trees growing out of walls and contorting the stone bricks in their grip, armies of stone elephants, statue-lined bridges leading to secret stone civilisations straight out of Indiana Jones, Hindu gods and Buddhas competing for space in the same temples (and suffering from centuries-old vandalism), temples that have been turned to ruins by an over-ambitious king deciding to add a wing or replace a wall with a giant reclining Buddha... We felt like royalty in Sak's remorque-moto and the wind in our hair helped us to cool off from the sweltering heat. Along the way, we met some charming kids, a few of whom moved us to parting with our money. We were impressed with their intelligence, excellent English (learnt from the tourists) and faultless selling technique. One little girl wowed us by counting to ten (ten postcards for a dollar, you see) in six languages.
On the third day, we watched sunrise over Angkor Wat, which was lovely but it was sad to see so many Japanese tourists fussing over their cameras and forgetting to savour the moment.
Tiredness had been catching up with us and Siem Reap was a perfect place to rest and replenish ourselves with the delicious Khmer and Amok curries, mango salads and coconut milk soups. We had changed up 20 dollars' worth of Cambodian reils, just to say we had handled the money, but we might as well not have bothered. Cambodians would much prefer dollars and many menus don't bother with reils at all (or show some prices in dollars and some in reils, depending which gives the rounder figure). There are no US coins in circulation, so often you get your change in a combination of both dollars and reils.
Palm Garden Lodge presented us with its last pleasant surprise by giving us a free packed lunch for our bus trip to Phnom Phen. We spent much of the journey killing mosquitoes, which seemed to have invaded the bus in their hundreds, and turned everyone into involuntary clappers. Though we couldn't understand any of the well-meant English commentary, we caught sight of some lovely green rice paddies and felt like pop stars upon arrival in Phnom Phen, where the tuk tuk drivers are so keen to give you a lift, they are kept behind a railing, waving their arms and shouting.
We checked in to the Sunday Guest House, went for a walk and discovered that the capital is a very different place from Siem Reap: smelly, dirty and with roads you wouldn't dare to cross unless you were feeling strong. On out first circuit, we didn't find anywhere we felt we might be able to have dinner, or even a beer. We ended up having beers and dinner in the guest house (where they served Beerlao!) and watched The Killing Fields, which prepared us perfectly for the next day.
The Toul Sleng museum was just a walk away from our guest house and, until you get there you forget that the infamous centre for detention and torture of Khmer Rouge prisoners was once just a school. You also forget that it all happened just thirty or so years ago until you see the beggars (acid burns, limbs missing, general disfigurement) outside the museum, who look like they might well have been victims of torture inside. It's a quiet, solemn walk around the exhibits and photographs. We bumped into Liam and the girls again and freeloaded in their tuk tuk to the killing fields (it was quite heavy with five of us), engaging in small talk to try and distract ourselves from the behaviour of the traffic around us. We saw the skull-filled pagoda and the strange sight of hundreds of butterflies flitting in and out of the mass graves. Though many bones have been excavated, some are still visible just beneath the earth.
We headed back to town and found somewhere to sit in silence, drink beer and eat a chilli dish with a meat you wouldn't recognise as chicken unless you'd been told (we couldn't help thinking about the bunches of chickens we'd seen all day hanging from their feet from handlebars of mopeds - we eventually realised they were still alive). We went home fairly subdued and watched some tennis before heading to the excellent little bar across the road for food and beers. It was only when we got home that we realised that something or other sharp from the chair had ripped my new hand-made cotton Thai shorts practically to shreds. I'm not doing too well. We'd also just discovered that I'd been charged 250 dollars for an ATM transaction that failed in Siem Reap (now under investigation by HSBC). We went to bed.
Things didn't start too well the next morning when we were woken at 5am by the monks' drumming. We did find that things had got very festive, however, when we went downstairs for breakfast to find the reception had been transformed for Chinese New Year with a tree, mini shrines and whole table-full of delicious food. We headed up to the riverfront only to find it boarded off for building work and, seeing as the Royal Palace was closed for another two hours for lunch, explored the (very gritty) market and then found a bar to have iced coffees and play scrabble. When we eventually got back to the Royal Palace, we weren't surprised to bump into Liam again. We waited for ages in the huge queue, then discovered the admission was twice what we thought it was, and that I had to hire a skirt as my shorts were too short! We took a look at the throne hall, then went to see the silver pagoda (though the emerald Buddha looked distinctly plastic) and scale model of Angkor Wat before heading back to see the gardens, only to find them shutting the gate on the main courtyard, declaring it closed. We went back to the main gate to complain, only to be told the site was closing early because it was a "Buddha's Day" (we'd been there 25 minutes). We demanded a refund but were dismissed with a shooing hand.
We walked back angry, buying an India Lonely Planet for ten dollars on the way, and saw two moped crashes and then a huge crowd gathered around a third, including bodies on the ground. We'd discover the next day that all hospitals close on New Year's Day and the nearest A&E is in Vietnam!
That evening, we retreated to the bar across the road where we could be sure of good beer and food.
We had an early start the next morning, but the loyal monks woke us up with their drums anyway. The bus journey to Ho Chi Minh City was six hours, which would be fine if the air conditioning worked! That said, most of the immigration procedures were done for us, which almost made up for us arriving all hot and sweaty.
We have now settled into a nice guest house, having spent one night in an overpriced hotel where our room wasn't available until 5pm (two more hours to wait after that hot bus journey) and where our promised discount had shrunk by the time we came to pay.
HCMC seems to be a city right up our street, with plenty of colour and bustle and delicious smells (even if things are running at half speed because of New Year). Convinced that our fellow trekkers back in the UK are all in a training frenzy in preparation for the Annapurna Circuit, we have booked ourselves into a room at the top of four flights of stairs - all the good food and beer is making us fear for our fitness!
Vietnam - Saigon, The Mekong Delta and Hoi An
Vietnam Pics - The south
If the sleepy post-tet period was perfect for mooching around HCMC, it turned out to be the worst possible time to take a tour to the Mekong Delta. Things didn't start off well when we went to the Sinh Cafe office in the morning to get our bus, only to find about 300 other people crammed together on the pavement also waiting for buses and tours. After much confusion and fraying of tempers, we eventually got on a bus (with 50 others) about one hour after our due departure time. Things ran slightly more smoothly for the next few hours, but, even though we did see some interesting things on that first day, including a visit to a coconut candy and rice products workshop, the overriding memory is of the chaos that ensued later that afternoon. The problem of there not being enough seats on the buses that were due to take us to our hotel in Can Tho was eventually resolved after much waiting around, but then things started to look even bleaker when we got stuck in traffic and stopped moving altogether. Our driver didn't speak any English, but eventually someone got on our bus and explained that every year during tet, people travel home to their families in droves, resulting in gridlock on the roads. It turns out we were actually in a 4km-long queue for a ferry to take us across the Mekong. After about twenty minutes of not moving, we abandoned the bus, negotiated the steady and terrifying stream of mopeds to get to the side of the road, and started to walk.
Mopeds in this country are ruthless and their driving style incomprehensible. Even though adults wear helmets (since they brought in fines a few years ago), the Vietnamese believe that wearing a helmet inhibits the development of small children's brains, so you see babies and children wedged between their parents with no protection whatsoever. We had one blind woman, one deaf man and some small children in our tour group, so we must have been quite a sight as we trooped up the side of the road, shooting evil glares at any moped that got too close. When we boarded the ferry as foot passengers, it became clear why the main traffic wasn't moving: the mopeds flooded the main space of the ferry before any cars or vans had a chance to get close. At one point, there must have been a rumour circulating that the other ferry was leaving first (there were two, arriving and departing at roughly the same time, just to make matters worse), because people started speeding back off the ferry and screaming in such a way that any normal person would have been convinced we were sinking.
When we arrived in Can Tho at 8pm, four hours after leaving Vinh Long (it should have taken half an hour), we didn't feel much like exploring the town. A few people made an attempt at lodging a complaint while we went and found a local soup restaurant with its own resident bat.
The next day was much more successful, and the boat tour much more what we had expected, with lush green landscape and a floating market that was actually functioning. However, it was still a relief to get back to HCMC and to the relative calm of our very friendly guesthouse. We didn't venture too far the next day, taking advantage of the buzzing atmostphere and excellent little restaurants all within a few streets' distance.
From HCMC, we took the hop-on-hop-off bus to Dalat, which we had been told was similar to the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia. In fact, though both are set high up in the hills, the similarity pretty much stops there. As in all Vietnam, there's not a moment's peace in Dalat, particularly compared with the sleepy Malaysian highlands, and the volume of mopeds is mindboggling in this little town that must once have been a breath of fresh air away from the city. We were bemused by the apparent lack of tourists and by the fact that we found a delux double room with fantastic view over the allotments for $10 in a brand new, almost totally empty hotel. This turned out to be a stroke of luck, as David, who had just recovered from a cold, was stuck down by a tummy bug.
We did, however, manage to walk around the huge lake (I got burnt to a crisp) and to visit Mr Viet at the Stop and Go Cafe (actually a house surrounded by an orchid farm). Mr Viet, it turns out, is something of a star in a sort of bohemian-intellectual sort of a way, and he showed us his poetry and various articles written about him in different magazines, over a breakfast of croissants and iced coffee.
Having been hassled almost to submission by Dalat's infamous Easy Riders (no matter how beautiful the surrounding countryside, I am NEVER getting on the back of your bike!), we headed to the beach town of Nha Trang, just a one night stopover before heading up to Hoi An. Suddenly there were a lot more places geared for Westerners (including an incomprehensible number of Italian restaurants), though we preferred to sit in the local Beer Hoi establishment (think mini plastic tables and chairs) where the beer is 15p a glass. The beach, sea and islands at Nha Trang are beautiful, so long as you don't peer too closely into the sand or water, and we braved the midday sun to walk along the waterfront and watch the local women boiling up crabs and lobsters. Whilst whiling away the time until our overnight bus on the second day, we met some friendly charaters from Scotland and Canada and spent the afternoon chatting and drinking with them.
We had caught sight of some of the overnight buses when in HCMC and, though we'd heard mixed reports, were excited to try them out. As it happens, ours was really quite comfortable. The set up is basically a dorm with bunks on a bus, and as long as you don't get seasick and don't pay too much attention to what's happening on the road, you might even get a decent night's sleep. I was in the unfortunate position of being in a top bunk and having two members of staff sleeping on the floor either side of me, so I had to be spiderman just to get down to use the toilet in the night.
We arrived in Hoi An at 6.30am and within one minute of walking, had found a lovely double room for $11 that was available immediately, so we dropped our stuff and went to find breakfast.
Ever since I ripped my shorts beyond repair on a wicker chair in Pnomh Phen, I have been eager to get to Hoi An, the world capital of made-to-measure clothes, to get them copied. Having been recommended a tailor at the hotel, we dropped the shorts off straight away and went to explore the town.
Hoi An is as beautiful as everyone says it is, with lovely colonial houses all adorned with Chinese lanterns, the most picturesue food market we've seen in Vietnam, ancient covered bridges, a beautiful riverfront. They were even broadcasting Mozart through the streets when we arrived, and mopeds are banned from the centre in the evenings (bliss!). We also happened to be there for the monthly full moon festival, when the river is lit up with hundreds of multi-coloured paper lanterns and the streets are filled with people drinking, eating and watching various street performances. There also seemed to be more people than ever setting up the traditional shrine-like tables outside their houses and shops, filled with incense and offerings to the ghosts that are honoured by Confucionists (the only "religion" allowed by Communist Vietnam, which chooses to describe it as a "culture custom" rather than a religion).
On our first evening in Hoi An, we met Mr Phong over dinner, and after reading the many testimonies and letters from people who have been on his tour, agreed to let him take us to see his village the next day (even though it meant getting on a bike, which naturally threw me into a panic). Mr Phong met us at our hotel the next morning and I was comforted by the faces, even whiter with fear than my own, of the two English lads who were on the tour with us, and who had hired bikes of their own. We took route 1 very slowly though, and aside from a few hairy left turns, it was quite a lot of fun and there were even green paddy fields to admire either side of the road.
After half an hour chatting and drinking tea with Mr Phong (who fought for South Vietnam in the war and spent a year in "re-education" afterwards as a result), we had answers to many of the questions that had been buzzing around our heads since we arrived, and knew much more about the events of the war, the reality of people's convictions compared with official accounts, the contradictions of a Communist country functioning within modern capitalism, the customs of Confucionism... We then took a walking tour around the village, meeting friends and family of Mr Phong and visiting their homes. We watched people harvesting tobacco and making dove traps and, as it was Sunday, we even got to see a cock fight! We were cooked a fantastic (and huge) lunch by Mrs Phong before heading back to Hoi An on the bikes.
I rewarded my own bravery with a spending spree in town, adding two winter coats and a dress to my new wardrobe (I've had to throw out half of my old clothes to be able to fit the new ones in my rucksack).
We have decided to spend an extra day in Hoi An before heading north to Hue and then to Hanoi. We've also booked up our Halong bay and Sapa tours, which are the last things we'll do before heading to Kathmandu. Nepal seems very close all of a sudden!
Vietnam - Hanoi, Halong Bay and Sapa
Vietnam Pics - The north
Our journey to Hue went reasonably smoothly, though it is slightly strange travelling during the day in a sleeper bus and there was an unexpected stop five minutes after we left for us to see the "marble mountain" and get hassled by shop owners trying to sell us awful tacky marble horses and the like. We arrived in Hue at around midday and found a suitable room (after getting stuck in one hotel lift), then headed out for a noodle lunch. Unless you're willing to get on the back of a crazy Vietnamese person's moped to seek out the tombs etc out of town, there is only really the citadel to see in Hue, and we decided to leave that for a day and relax, catching up on sleep and taking it easy. The next day we crossed the river (and some pretty hardcore roads) and entered the old walled city to get to the citadel within. We paid our entrance fee (there are actually separate queues for foreigners and Vietnamese people) and spent the next three hours or so wandering around the derelict grounds, down long deserted boulevards and finding little hidden pavilions over fishponds where the queen used to sit and think. The citadel is a haven away from the mopeds and you could spend all day exploring it. It was a very hot day and we even stopped to watch an elephant cool herself down with water from the moat. The rest of the day was spent relaxing and playing games in the apparently infamous "Cafe on Thu wheels". Thu was so entertaining and the beer so cheap that we stayed all evening. At one point, one of Thu's nephews completely disrupted our game of Yahtzee, rubbing out all our scores, hiding the dice and writing all over our score cards, much to the amusement of his mother. Since then we have come to realise that Vietnamese children get more or less no discipline and are left by their parents to run riot. This makes them incredibly irritating.
The next day, we wiled away the hours until it was time to take our night bus to Hanoi. The roads between Hue and Hanoi turned out to be pretty bumpy and more than once we were woken up by being flung off our beds. We were met with gloomy weather in Hanoi and, once we had got off the bus, by the "Voice of Vietnam" blaring out Communist propaganda in the streets. We managed to find a nice hotel that had a room available straight away (and out of earshot of the Voice of Vietnam), and went out to find breakfast. We have been spending our time in Hanoi walking the streets trying not to get run over, sitting in little street bars watching people try not to get run over, and generally trying to understand how the Vietnamese manage to avoid crashing into each other at every junction. Our hotel is set just off a crossroads that is home to four or five beer hoi bars (the 13p-a-glass draught beer, which is undrinkable, but luckily they also sell reasonably priced bottled beer), all offering a perfect vantage point to watch the craziness.
After one day in Hanoi, we went on our Halong Bay tour. Halong Bay is about three hours' drive East of Hanoi, a World Heritage site and arguably one of the most beautiful places on earth. We didn't disagree. Apart from one night on Cat Ba island, we spent most of our time, (including one night in a cute little cabin), on a junk (a very attractive wooden boat with ye olde style sails which unfortunately we didn't use) meandering amongst the sandstone formations and marveling at the effect of the mist on the cliffs lining the horizon. We saw some floating villages (one with a bank, a school and a pub!) and took a trip on a small boat to get closer to the gigantic rocks. We saw some impressive caves and went for a short trek in the jungle in Cat Ba national park. We also met some cool people on the boat and braved the ambitious beer prices. It was a relaxing three days. Just a shame that the mice living in the walls on the boat kept us from sleeping.
After one more night in Hanoi (and a moment of panic when we thought our hotel had lost our backpacks), we went on our tour to Sapa. We started by taking the night train, which everyone commented was just like the Orient Express (though I'm sure no one there had ever been on the Orient Express). We shared our cabin with a couple of Australian girls who, fortunately, were just as keen as us to get to sleep. Though the beds were very comfy, the motion of the train wasn't exactly conducive to sleeping and our night's rest was patchy at best.
We were roused by, well, rousing music at 5am, met by our tour guide at Lao Cai station and taken by bus to Sapa where we checked in to our hotel and had breakfast. Tom, our Vietnamese guide, then took us with a few others down to the ethnic minority villages in the valley and, on arriving, our minivan was mobbed by the Black H'mong and Red Dzao women who spent the rest of the day following us, asking us questions in English and trying to sell us their wares (though Tom advised us not to buy anything). The scenery was incredible, with terraced paddy fields covering every spare inch of land and impressive mountains rising all around, including Phanxipang, the highest peak in South East Asia. We saw lots of wallowing water buffalo and a lot of very cute black piglets. So that we didn't have to get back to Sapa for lunch, Tom bought ingredients and we went to the house of a Dzao family where he cooked us an incredible lunch of local vegetables, dried buffalo meat, tofu, chicken and spring rolls. After lunch the Red Dzao girls tried out some of their well-practised sales skills on us, to no effect, and we walked back to the village, where Dave and I tried to sneak in a bit of training for our hike by walking up the nearest (small) peak, which is tastefully covered with little gardens and walks to viewpoints. Over dinner that evening, we happened to bump into Kate and Chris from the Halong Bay boat. The four of us were the only non-French people in the restaurant.
The next day, Tom took us to Cat Cat village. Again, we had beautiful weather and more gorgeous scenery. We had some time to relax in town and watch the mist start rolling in before the bus took us back to the train station and we settled into our cabin (shared with a couple and their five year old son - I don't think those cabins are designed for five!). Unfortunately, everyone had been doing a bit of walking in the heat that day and the coach smelled less than savoury, but we managed to get some sleep nevertheless. We arrived back in Hanoi at 4am and eventually managed to find a little man with our names on a piece of paper, who eventually took us back to town.
We have been spending the rest of our time in Hanoi generally getting more and more irate at the Vietnamese, who really do seem intent on running us down. I think after two more nights, we will be more than ready to leave, which is a shame, since our original impression of Hanoi was much more positive than we had expected, given other people's accounts.
We're getting increasingly excited about the trek (I'm particularly eager to be up a mountain path where no moped can venture), and are all set for our flight in a few days. All we have to work out is how to comfortably spend a night in Bangkok airport without forking out 200 pounds for a hotel room.
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