Avalon

Both of us would admit that we knew very little about Laos before we arrived. It's one of those countries which occupies a more mysterious place in South East Asia, being a little more obscure in terms of a cultural identity compared with its more high-profile neighbours China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. With borders closed to foreigners until the nineties it's still a land relatively new to tourism too and as a result still feels pretty wild, but we'd heard nothing but good things about the place and its people.

Arriving after what had been a wierd last few days in Cambodia, we headed for Si Phan Don (Four Thousand Islands) in the Champasak Province - the legendary inland delta where the upper Mekong flows so wide that large inhabitable islands have been forged, some with villages on them and (four with electricity). For the majority of our trip so far we'd had a guide book with us for general info, but for Laos we hadn't had the chance as the last town we had been to had turned out to be devoid of shops selling anything useful, so we really didn't have any idea what to expect or really where the hell we were heading.

Once we had reached the end of our bus journey we were taken down to small longboats on the river which ferried us through the channels to the islands. Along with our new friend Sam from Essex who we'd met on the bus out of Cambodia we'd decided to stay on Don Dhet, which from the info we could gather had the best options for accommodation. Probably the best way to describe the small island which we were staying on would be medieval. It looked like the set of Robin Hoods Adventures in Asia - pigs, chickens, ducks and children wandered around a dusty village set along the bank of the river. Men and women fished, bathed and cleaned their clothes in the water as small boats floated past. There were no cars, just bicycles, and the odd moped (mainly ridden by six year old kids). Our huts were little more than wood panels nailed to four uprights and cost us about two pounds per night, but as locations go there are few five star hotels in the world that could match the magic of staying on that island. We all fell instantly in love with the place.

The next four days were some of the best we'd had while travelling - there is something totally liberating about being in a place that wild and far removed from the rest of the world, about being able to walk around shoeless and swim in clean river water, that you forget almost everything about home. Being on an island, we quickly met a bunch of guys in the bar near us too who we spent the evenings chatting, drinking arguing and listening to a lot of ACDC with. On a couple of afternoons we all headed out on bicycles to explore the island and its neighbour Don Khon which was genuinely one of the strangest and most beautiful places you can imagine. Around every corner would be something else that would litteraly make you stop in your tracks; the grail being an incredible thundering waterfall leading down to a secluded gorge with its own hidden inland beach. All of us were soaked from cycling in the heat so took at dip, only to find the water full of Doctor Fish (the tiny helpful fish that swim up to you and nibble dry skin from your feet). Sounds grim but, actually quite an interesting experience once you've realised its not a school of Pirhana trying to eat you...

It was tough to leave Don Dhet; I can imagine few places as idyllic. Several people we met were staying on and had either started to run up bills at the bar or shop or made the trek over the the mainland to get more money, and we could have easily done the same, but along with Sam, we made the decision to say goodbye and head north and see some more of the country. From the mainland we took a bus to Pakse, then the sleeper coach to Vientiane, Laos' capital. Yet again Asia's comedy armada of transport didn't fail to amuse, with our "sleeper" seats being basically a massive mattress at the back of the bus. Cosy.

There isn't really much reason to head to Vientiane if you don't need to; as a capital city it's not particularly inspiring and not particularly cheap either for S.E Asia. We had gone there however to organise our visas for Thailand. It's possible to obtain these at the border but they're only valid for fifteen days, so that meant a couple of early starts waiting outside the Embassy at seven AM along with three hundred other tourists, business people and expats. As usual, it was chaos. The rules regarding application had apparently changed a week or so before but the Thai consulate hadn't bothered update their website. Things got more entertaining still when some overly vocal Vietnam Vet from Brooklyn in the queue decided to get more than a little bit sexist and patronising with the wrong woman - Sam - and ended up getting a full on dressing down in front of the whole crowd. The guy may well have been spent two years in the jungle fighting the Vietcong, but he was definitely no match for a pissed-off Essex Girl.

Visas sorted, we had a night left before we were due to move on. Luckily, David and Zuzana, a couple we'd spent some time with in Goa in India were in town, so we met at a French Restaurant for some food and a catchup - the last civilized evening for a few days as the next stop was Laos' own Disney Land for grown ups - Vang Vieng...

View our pics here:

Southern Laos - 4000 Islands & Vientiane

Road to Nowhere

I am crap at gambling. It's well known amongst my family and friends. The limit of my gambling ability stretches mostly to the odd after dinner game of Newmarket played with two pence pieces, matchsticks or Lego. Whilst I have been known to enjoy taking things to excess once in a while there is absolutely no chance of me ever becoming addicted to gambling, simply because I am so bad at it. My own Grandmother, even in her now less than sharpened state of awareness (and 90 this year bless her!) could probably still take me at a game of Pontoon. I have, however, always held a sneaking admiration for high-roller gambling and those that throw themselves at the card table like their life depended on it.

Clearly, in the real world most gambling is nothing like the smoky backroom poker thrills of The Sting or the edgy broken-romance of The Hustler; it is almost always half cut punters lobbing a fiver on a weekend Premiership match, or rolly-smoking middle-aged divorcees glued to the 3.45 at Chepstow down Ladbrokes on a drizzly Wednesday afternoon. So when you do actually meet a pair of proper gamblers, in a bar, in Cambodia on a Saturday night it makes an interesting change...


"Please! Come and join us!" was the cheery invitation from the couple at the table next to us. We were on our third jug of Angkor beer outside the Temple bar in Siem Reap in Central Cambodia. The following morning we were getting up to visit the mighty Angkor Temples. At four AM. It was already eleven PM. The temperature hadn't dropped below 35c all day, and had reached a whopping 44c mid afternoon. It was unbelievably humid. There really wasn't much to do all day but hang out where the air con was. And the cold beer. Conversation in the bar had turned to places we wanted to see in Europe, and we were discussing Southern France. The couple seated next to us it happened to be French, and were keen to impart some patriotic travel advice, so we joined tables and ploughed on through further jugs of cold lager. It turned out that they were Gamblers "by proffessione", and were literally betting their asses around Asia, which they were clearly managing quite successfully seeing as they had been on the road for over a year and were staying at one of the better hotels in town.

Both were in their late twenties and about as charming as you would expect from two people in their dubious line of business; they reminded me of something from a Roald Dahl short story. She came from Vietnamese origins, pretty and with the adopted chic of a Parisian, he was funny, quick witted and slightly crazy (and no, I didn't wake up with a finger missing having bet the air tickets...). We sat, talked and listened to stories about various casinos they'd played and some of eccentric and absurdly rich people they had met (mostly Chinese...). They had spent nearly a month in Macao, and played at plenty of dodgy backroom games all over, and when they weren't playing for real they spent all sessions night cleaning up at online poker. A strange life. But interesting conversation, and you couldn't help admire the bizarre Jack Kerouac-meets-Gordon Gecko attitude to travelling they seemed to have acquired. The only problem was by the time we had finished up it was well after one AM. Which meant we had three hours until we were being picked up by our rickshaw driver to head to Angkor Wat. Merde.

A few hours later, defibulated and vertical again thanks to a near-lethal caffeine overdose at the rickshaw drivers coffee stand, we were sat bug-eyed along with a few hundred other early risers at the gates of Angkor Wat, waiting for the sun to rear its blazing head over the temple. It didn't take long before we'd totally forgotten about how rotten we were feeling and were soon immersed in the sheer overwhelming beauty of the temple complex in the dawn light. Changing quickly from black silhouette against a purple sky to golden stone against the morning sun, it became clear why Angkor has held such a draw over worshippers and visitors for hundreds of years. We spent the early morning wandering round the temples and its surrounds and later headed on to Angkor Thom, and the Bayon which were perhaps even more impressive with their intricate carved faces and bas reliefs.

As the day wore on and the temperature (and crowds) rocketed once again, we headed last for Ta Prohm, a magnificent, partially ruined temple set deep in the jungle, entwined with vast trees growing right through its centre. Ta Prohm had a genuine fairytale feel to it, like something from one of the creepy, early Disney pictures or Brothers Grim stories. It had also, as you couldn't fail to hear about a million times, been used in one the Lara Croft movies, and just about every American and Japanese tourist there wanted a picture taken climbing through the doorway that Angelina Jolie had burst through, mammaries first, in the film; "OK Barb hon, just make your fingers like a gun and poke your head out the door... Smile! Neat!" etc.

We spent another day in Siem Reap, which isn't a half bad town to relax in. Clearly the influx of tourists on package trips to Angkor has led to demand for more upmarket restaurants than previously existed and even the BBQ joints are pricey now, but there are still some excellent places to eat and you can still do it quite cheaply too. The Khmer Kitchen in particular was fantastic (we ate there three times) and knocks out some very tasty Khmer traditional food. Had we known where we were headed next we probably would have eaten a shed load more of it.

Kratie, in North East Cambodia can only be described as a bum hole of a town. Think of a dusty, post-apocalyptic Asian version of Royston Vaysey. After a lengthy and bumpy ride through some pretty wild and sun scorched Cambodian outback, we finally arrived in this small and very odd outpost. We were on route to the Laos Border, but had decided to break the journey by stopping hopefully to see the rare local Irrawadi Dolphins, which live in the Mekong river nearby and now number very few indeed.

After about half and hour in town we had decided that there was clearly some sort of cartel going on in Kratie in which the owners of the only three dumps of hotels had got together to price-fix ridiculous room rates for themselves, knowing that there is sod all anyone can do about it until at least the next day, when the bus out of there rolls through once again. We looked at all three glittering palaces of delight and decided on the best of a bad bunch, which only just beat the other two as it had a window and didn't stink of damp. For this pleasure we were charged about fifteen quid, which was about quadruple the sensible rate. Restaurants were basically non-existent. Street food looked inedible. The hotel staff had clearly never even encountered the advanced and complicated mechanics of The Sandwich. People looked at you real funny. In the back of my head Banjos were duelling. Still, we were in the middle of nowhere now so what did we expect?

Anyway, with nothing else to do we set out by moto-rickshaw to see some endangered dolphins in the wild. We got lucky too. We spent just under a couple of hours out on a huge and stunning expanse of inland Mekong with these strange looking but graceful dolphins, rising and then disappearing with just a soft snort, just metres away from us. A real privilege. I just hope they're still there in ten years time.

However weird and fascinating our stay in Kratie was, nothing could have prepared us for what was going to unfold the next morning. Our bus was booked to Laos, and at seven AM we were waiting outside the hotel with packs on backs as the usual mini-van that rounded up the ticket holders collected us and headed off to to drop us to the main coach about twenty kilometres down the road (dumping off the usual chain-smoking family member tag-alongs en route). We were in good spirits, looking forward to getting the hell out of dodge and arriving at Loas' fabled Four Thousand Islands, and had struck up a friendly conversation with a dutch couple, Jonas and Mika, who were heading our way. Twenty minutes later at the side of a dusty road in the hazy morning sun we boarded our coach and off we went.

Anyone who's ever been to Cambodia can tell you that Cambodians don't drive like normal people. Not even like Indians. Getting a bus in Cambodia is like entering the Canonball Run involuntarily. We have been on buses where the driver will actually get off the bus and drink three cans of lager at the toilet stop, before getting back on and driving like he has a gun to his head whilst simultaneously singing along to the words of whatever nightmare Karaoke he has decided to put on the over-head telly.

The roads from Krace to the Laos border were pretty bad and the driving was the usual level of insanity, but we figured this was just the same crap, different day. Until the deafening bang of crunching metal came from the back of the bus. We must have been travelling at seventy MPH - there were no cars in front or behind us, just field after field of maize, and then the bus started to rear violently off the road to the right, making the sort of noise you never want to hear on a bus travelling at that speed. We never did find out exactly what happened - whether the tire exploded, or a wheel detached from the axle or whatever - but the driver lost control and we started to veer off the road very, very quickly.

Now, I am prone to the odd bit of over-exaggeration, but I genuinely thought that we were going to be mince-meat in about five seconds. It looked like as soon as the bus was going to come off the road into the drainage ditch we would flip straight over into the field and all I can remember was thinking "don't land on your bloody head" as I tried to stop Sammie flying over the top of me and through the opposite window. Somehow, instead of rolling fully over after coming off the road, we had smashed down the bank and ground to a halt and ended up wedged into the ditch. After a few seconds, someone shouted "is everyone OK in here?" (Gene Hackman from the Poseidon Adventure was obviously on the bus that morning...). All the seating had come free from the metal framing and I had landed full weight on the edge of a metal chair frame - large ouch, but thankfully no punctured lung. Sam, apart from a few grazes was fine, although white and looking like she had the worlds most over-active Thyroid, and we all climbed out of the wreck at the front. Every one quickly grabbed their bags from the hold which had broken open anyway and we clambered up the ditch and sat in the field, well away from the mess. Coolant, and god knows what else was leaking out of the roof and none of us fancied being close a mangled bus seeping fuel in the rising heat.

Anyway, after a bit of checking up, no one turned out to be hurt thankfully. Just very shell shocked. Not what you need before breakfast. Best of all though was the driver, who, behaving like a true hero, climbed straight out of the bus and legged it, full pelt down the road the minute it had crashed, waved down and jumped into the next car that came past, and disappeared, like some shit version of Kaiser Soze. It's stuff like that that makes you realise you really are a a very long way from home.

So, four Europeans, a couple of Canadians, a weird girl called Sam from Essex (we love you Sam!), a Cambodian woman and her two very freaked out and brave kids spent an hour in a field in god knows where, waiting for someone to turn up and get us to Laos. Sitting on the side of the road there it was hard to know whether what had just happened qualified as bad luck or good. Either way, our chips were still up and it was a hell of a way to make an exit...
 
View our pics here:
 

Siem Reap and the Angkor Temples

 

Kratie, Irawadi Dolphins & Crazy Bus to Laos Border

Message in a Bottle

The old adage that first hand advice from other travellers is better than any guide book is generally true, and often leads to the discovery of places you otherwise wouldn't have found, but obviously not everything you get told ends up being correct or applies to you. Much like the biased droning opinions of the daily tabloids, Ex-pats in particular often seem to develop a strangely bitter and skewed view of the country they've actually chosen to make their home. It's amazing how many times you'll get into a conversation with an ex-pat who's been living abroad for five, ten or twenty years, and after helpfully giving you some tips about places to go or stay, then uses it as an excuse to promptly launch into a half hour tirade/slag-off about how "bloody corrupt this bloody place is" and about how the locals "will smile at you, but stab you in the back at the first chance", which, is what we got a week before we left for Phnom Penh.


Apparently, according to the Wrinkly Western Oracle of Cambodian Knowledge we were lucky enough to receive a lecture from in the bar - Phnom Penh is a "dump", which no one in their right mind would want to go to, and also, loaded with "very dodgy people". "Why the f*ck have you lived there for for seven years then?" was my (not unreasonable) response, which met with a blank stare. This question always seems to perplex angry ex-pats. It's if they can't quite really remember themselves. Maybe it's true that familiarity does breed contempt, or maybe it's just that once someone considers themselves a local, they are entitled to happily bitch about their new country just as much as they did about their old one. Or, maybe, some people are just generally pissed off all the time.

Anyway, our mardy mid day booze hound pest was talking a load of bollocks. There is no doubt that corruption, child labour and poverty are still rife in the country. It's true also there are also there are some exceedingly dark and unpleasant individuals still lurking in Cambodia, but over the course of the four days we spent in Phnom Penh we didn't bump into any of them. In fact, we met some of the nicest, friendliest people one could hope to meet - the sort of people who actively go out of their way to make you feel at home as possible in their country (especially the bar girls funnily enough...).

You kind of know you're in for a good few days when just after arriving and driving round in a rickshaw for half an hour on a Friday night with a driver who has no idea where he's going and trying to find the restaurant you wanted to go to, you end up abandoning ship and walking into a back street BBQ joint full of pissed local office workers downing beer by the gallon, and toasting everything and everyone in sight.

That's basically how our four days and nights in Phnom Penh started. And finished. I may as well make it clear that the stay was somewhat devoid of the conventional cultural excursions that usually make up a city visit, and instead primarily focused on a drinking a lot of Angkor Beer and eating a lot of barbecued meat. This wasn't quite the way it was meant to happen obviously, but there we go. I could blame our new San Franciscan friend Mike, who's tireless thirst for premium strength lager has led me to review my previously held misconceptions about Tofu eating contemporary Californians, but the truth is Angkor beer (which along with BeerLoa is South East Asias best I reckon) is too damn good, and the temptation of chowing down on perfectly cooked plates of barbecued beef fillet every day just too strong.

Also, it just so happened that Phnom Penh was gearing up for Tet, which is local new year. Tet is a much larger affair in Vietnam (the Cambodians have another new year in May), with huge street parties, mass family gatherings, fireworks and other colourful happenings, but as a result Vietnamese prices go up significantly - part of the reason we'd headed off early for Cambodia. We'd been having our own private new years party for two days running now, starting at lunch times and finishing some time the following morning, so were already well practised for the main event by the time the evenings festivities came around. Now, most new years have some sort of linear pattern to them, i.e go to a friends for a drink, the pub, club maybe then afters or home. They don't tend to go like this:

- Go out at lunchtime to street bar, watch nine year old children have a turf war involving full-on punching

- Go to bar where your girlfriend gets propositioned for lesbian sex by a hooker

- Watch a very weird show in a shopping centre where a man in a an illegally shiny suit sings some appalling "pop" and pulls "dance moves" last seen performed by Des O'Connor in the late 60's

- End up ploughing through a crate of of beer and doing Karaoke on the side of a road with a bunch of unbelievably inebriated middle aged men, the most drunk of which turns out to be the local chief of police

How did I know he was the chief of police you ask? Because as we were being force fed our twentieth beer and egged on to sing more Karaoke (I actually sang to Cambodian lyrics, although not sure how this was possible), the guy dancing next to me kept pulling his shirt up to show me the silver pistol he had tucked in his waist band. My face must have given away mild disturbance I was feeling at the time ("Sam that f*cking guy over there keeps showing me his gun and grinning at me..."), as he produced a laminated card which, he explained in broken drunken English, was his ID as security guard to the Chief of Police who was slumped in a plastic garden chair two yards away, surrounded by a mountain of beer cans and fag butts, occasionally cheering and shouting incomprehensibly at the screen. Clearly if the "very dodgy people" of Phnom Penh want to get up to maximum dodgyness, then Tet is the night to do it. The police have far more pressing matters.

After what had been four of the funniest days we'd had while travelling, and having thoroughly enjoyed Phnom Penh, which is in fact a lovely city, we said goodbye to Mike (for now!) and with livers possibly resembling Foi Gras headed West to the coast for some beach time. Sihanhoukville (fittingly re-named Hookyville by a friend...) is Cambodias equavalent of the Costa Del Sol, and named after one of their beloved Royals, King Sihanhouk. The King whose attractive habit of letting the hairs in his facial moles grow to stupid lengths was unfortunately responsible for much copycatting by Cambodian men, who also seem to think this bizarre habit is both sexy and stylish. Sam would visibly wince at seeing these, and I have to say I wasn't too keen either on having chats with blokes who looked like they had spiders trying to escape from their faces. It took a lot of restraint to prevent myself having Tourrettes-like outbursts and shouting "Do you actually realise how weird you look?!"

The main beach in Sihanhoukville is Serendipity Beach, which sounds nicer than it is. Don't get me wrong, we've been on worse, but neither of us could work out what all the fuss was about this place. Bar after bar literally packed onto the beach so close to the tide line that there was about two metres of space to walk down. Unfortunately this was mostly taken up by overweight retired German men who looked like they'd been eating Medicine Balls for lunch. So, we made an executive decision to get off the mainland and out of Hookyville asap, and head for the islands.

The main island that everyone seems to go to is Bamboo Island, about an hour off shore, with ok beaches and lots of little huts, but we took the advice of an old bar owner who told us to give it a miss and head instead for Koh Ta Kiev, which he informed us was far more beautiful, totally deserted except for a few huts and as close as you could get to island paradise. We were sold.

The next morning we were due to catch our long tailboat which would take us about two hours off shore to the island. The only problem was that the morning hadn't exactly started well for two people that were about to spend four days in together on a very small island. We'd had a massive row. The zip on Sam's bag had split from the material and she had asked me to have a go at fixing it the night before. Rising to the challenge I got the superglue out of my travel tool kit and fixed it. Job done. Bed. The only problem was the next morning it transpired I had actually managed to glue the zip solid shut meaning Sam now couldn't shut the bag at all. (I am now offially banned from any form of DIY). Shouting ensued, followed by generalised argument about budget, overspending, etc etc. A deserted island was the last place either of us wanted to be. But, as ever, these things never last too long, and after motoring through the crystal clear turquoise water on a beautiful sunny morning we finally saw our island come into view. We had dropped the entire boat load of other travellers off at Bamboo island, and it was just us two heading for Koh Ta Kiev, which felt kind of special.

It's not often the reality lives up to the hype, but this really was an island paradise. Five beautiful, dark hardwood huts set along a pristine deserted white sand beach. A small wooden lounge bar full of hammocks with a cafe run by two very stoned and very cool French guys. No fridges, no TVs, no phones, no internet, no stress. Just a generator switched on for three hours in the evening, a sheet rigged up for showing films on projector, a small kitchen that cooked simple rice and fish dishes, a box of cold beers on tab, a couple of canoes and fishing rods and about ten other good people to spend the days with. Its places like this that make you realise that Einstein was really right about time being relative.

To say we didn't do much would be an overstatement. We played cards, read books, talked about books and films with the other guys, who were a mix of Swedish, Canadian and American, fished, and lazed about in the warm sea. Some Ray Mears style foraging was done for wood to build fires and in the evenings we sat around on the beach chatting with a few bottles of rum. As if all this wasn't enough, the view of the stars was about as impressive as it could be; zero light pollution - every tiny pinprick of of a star could be seen. The sea also turned out to be phosporescant too, which only added to the magic. Cliched as it all may be, it was genuinely one of those experiences that you'll never forget. So, if you do get to Cambodia, and you want some real island paradise life, then I seriously suggest heading to Koh Ta Kiev. Just don't tell anyone else.

View our pics here:
 

Phnom Penh

 

Sihanhoukville and playing castaways on Ko Ta Kiev Island!

Welcome to the Jungle

Like everyone else who's read Graham Greenes' classic novel about love and war, the Quiet American, I suppose I had built up a semi-romantic ideal of what Saigon would be like before we had arrived. Of course it's no longer like it was. For one thing it's named Ho Chi Min City and is now a thriving, modern metropolis; home to what seems like a billion mopeds that clog the streets at every turn and avenues lined with super-brand stores like Versace, Luis Vitton and Diesel. Some parts of the city have remained relatively well preserved and hint at the colonial past; the famous Continental Hotel however had undergone a "makeover", which clearly hadn't done it any favours, but ce la vie, things move on. I'm sure there are still certain Americans who still think coming to London will be like walking on to the set of Mary Poppins.


Saigon failed to charm either of us in the way that Hanoi had done, but that's not to say we didn't like it, its just that we both particularly fell for Hanoi. Like most of Vietnam you can't fail to eat incredibly well wherever you go and Saigon didn't let the side down. Once again, we found ourselves spending large portions of our time on street stalls in the evenings and having long lunches in back alley restaurants, where you could dine on plates of superb shellfish, eel cooked in Bamboo tubes and amazing noodle soups all washed down with cheap beer or some half decent chilled wine. We were also lucky enough to have found ourselves an excellent budget pad on the top floor of a building off the main drag with an entire roof terrace to ourselves. OK, so it was up nine flights of stairs, with no lift, and come six thirty seemed to be home to half the bats in Saigon, but it was good to have some respite from the heat and craziness of the city below.

Culturally and historically, Saigon was also fascinating and we were keen to use our time there to learn more about Vietnams long history of conflicts, the war with the US for me having the most relevance being brought up on a diet of 'Nam action films and references. So we donned our touron badges and piled on the bus with the middle aged Germans and took a couple of excursions to check out the sites (hiring a moped would have been tantamount to suicide...). As it happened the tours were really well organised and properly informative. We first visited Cu Chi - a couple of hours outside the city and home to the notorious VC Tunnels.

Now, if you don't know much about these, they are the huge network of tiny underground tunnels that the rural Viet Cong dug and lived in for years and used to outwit the US military in the region. Besides the total remarkabilty of anyone being able to live solely in dark, cramped, boiling claustrophobic holes and caves for years on end, barely ever emerging to daylight, the sheer ingenuity of their tricks and traps is overwhelming. Faced with the worlds most advanced and well funded military, they used only their knowledge of the land and what they had to hand in the jungle to scare the living crap out of the invaders. Lethal traps were set everywhere that were basically invisible to the US soldiers, and tiny trapdoors that could only accommodate the small frames of the VC would fly silently open in the ground, enabling them to stealthily take out soldiers - the enemy paralysed by fear and unable to work out where fire was coming from. As the guide told us, many US soldiers later claimed that they felt like they were under attack from ghosts. In addition, they used tactics like rubbing US military soap (that troops had carelessly thrown away) around entrances to dens to throw the army's dogs off the scent - being familiar with the smell of it on their US troops they padded on. They also learned to cook underground, making small kitchens that they only used in the early hours of sunrise when the jungle was covered with mist so no smoke could be detected.

There is no doubt that what happened in the jungle there was horrific and while both sides inflicted terrible fatalities on each other, you can't help have a sense of respect for a simple rural people, who, faced with a far superior military might, still managed to outwit the enemy with nothing but guile and basic hardcore determination. We both did the long crawl down one of the tunnels in the dark (which were actually made bigger for westerners to get their bulky bodies down) and I can tell you that it is far from pleasant. The idea of living in one for years, facing the potential of being bombed or shot every day must have been a grim way to live, although it was pretty amusing to watch a rather unpleasant overweight Bermuda-clad French couple emerge from the hole at the end looking like they were going to need CPR. Cruel but funny.

During the afternoon we visited the War Remembrance Museum, and if the tunnels weren't reminder enough of the trauma of war, then this was a real kick in the head. The full scale of the horror of the damage done was laid out in graphic photographs, models, and piles of armaments. Quotes from brain dead soldiers and shocking news reports accompanied the images - the scale of the US brutality toward the Vietnamese (and Cambodians) was almost incomprehensible and shows up politicians like Kissinger and Nixon for the absolute excuses for humans beings that they really were. Worst of all were the sections on Agent Orange - it's not often you can hear people audibly gasping in public museums. Its testament to the nature of the Vietnamese that little over thirty five years after such appalling crimes were committed (some of which you can still often see on the bodies of men in the street), that they've open their arms to the US and have managed to successfully move on.

The rest of the day took in the slightly bizarre Independence Palace, which reminded me of a cross between a seventies Corbusier designed college faculty building and the lair of one of James Bond's nemeses; the interior being decorated in a totally un-ironic kitsch retro style, with a games room and even a dance floor with bar on the roof. Down below in the basement lay a catacomb of somewhat sinister telecommunications cells and an operations centre complete with giant maps dotted with pins showing territories lost and won. Doctor Strangelove came to mind - "You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!".

We left Saigon after four interesting days headed for the mighty Mekong Delta, somewhere I'd always wanted to see. Unfortunately the trip this time included a fairly artificial representation of life on the Mekong, being dragged round "working villages" to "see villagers go about their daily lives" (alarms bells always ring when this phrase is used...). Can I also say that while over the amazing month we travelled Vietnam, we came to love many aspects of the culture, but folk music is not one of their strong points - think stray cats and out of tune violins. Luckily for us the scenery and company were excellent, and we met our new travel bud for the next crazy and slightly messy week - Mr Mike Beatty from San Francisco.

After a night stop over in a small delta town, we headed out at sunrise for the second part of the trip, the floating fishing villages, and then onto the badass of a journey that would take us all the way over the border and into the heart of Cambodia - nine hours on a slow boat up the Mekong. If you think you've ever been hot before, then think again, nine hours in one hundred degree heat, sat on the stinking dirty engine of a small dilapidated river boat squashed in with thirty other people is HOT. Thank god for endless cold beer and Californian positivity...


View our pics here:
 

Saigon, The Mekong Delta and Slow Boat to Cambodia

Roll with it

One of the funny things that happens when you spend several months living out of a backpack and sleeping in different places sometimes every other night, is you develop a few rituals to get some sense of organisation in your life and to try and prevent every room you stay in from resembling a second year students bedroom in the space of two hours of your arrival. It's probably fair to say this applies more to a couple travelling together than a single bloke/girl/bunch of mates on the road, as you've already developed some domestic habits back home to stop each other from going berserk on a regular basis, but bathrooms in particular seem to have become an area in which we've just kind of unwittingly established some rules.

Wearing contact lenses, I take over one side of the sink while Sam has the other (generally tidier) side, and toothbrushes are always left with the heads hanging off the side of the sink to stop any nasty little buggy thwangs running all over them in the night. I've even become quite good at putting the top back on the toothpaste, which is a good thing too, as it's never pleasant to wake up to a two metre motorway of army ants coming from a hole in the wall on the far side of the bathroom to stock up on a lifetimes supply of Colgate.


You may have noticed also from previous blogs that I seem to have a bit of a mild obsession with describing the idiosyncrasies of various hotels, home stays, shacks and dives we've found ourselves in, and bathrooms are probably one of the most interesting of these (you may well disagree). For some reason, Asia, in its long history of innovation (they had streetlamps while we were living in caves! etc..), seems never to have worked out any sense of bathroom ergonomics. Granted, Asian people do make use of bathroom facilities in different ways which we are all pretty clear on, but I still have not understood why in most bathrooms, which are the size of postage stamps, they continue to put toilet roll on a holder which is ALWAYS in the line of fire of the shower.

Asian bathrooms are basically "wetrooms", i.e, room with sink, toilet, bucket and pail and a shower, which drains away to a hole in the floor. More often than not the shower, of temperamental pressure, will fire all over the bathroom covering the sink, mirror and toilet; so inevitably you get used to taking the bog roll out of the room or wedging it somewhere stupid to prevent it getting soaked and a resultant trudge down to reception/local shop to get a replacement. Sam has far more brains on this sort of retarded behaviour, so its usually me that ends up finding these scenarios a pain in the arse. I don't know if it's because (particularly in India) they just don't give a shit about toilet paper (pardon the pun) that they do this, but it still bizarrely pisses me off. Maybe I will write to the Daily Mail about it.

One thing that did cheer me up on this lovely subject however, was a story Sam told me about a tenant she had while working back in Oxford who had a bit of bathroom trouble of his own. An Indian guy who'd been hired for some contract work by a English company had come over for a few weeks, and they'd paid for his accommodation in a smart short rental apartment. After receiving a call from the downstairs residents who were not happy people, they headed over to investigate and found that the Indian chap, thinking things were just as they would be back home, had decided to take his traditional shower and stood in the middle of the bathroom on the tiled floor while using a bucket to pour water over his head. Unfortunately English bathrooms don't work quite the same way, and the result was several gallons of water slowly leaking through the downstairs owners lounge ceiling. I guess everybody gets a little confused sometimes...

Anyway, Asian bathroom oddities aside, we had arrived in Dalat, which was another stunner in the Lonely Planets continual ability to get things totally fucking wrong. As far as we could ascertain, other than sitting atop a considerable range of mountains and being the home to Vietnams cheap and actually quite drinkable domestic wine, it had no particular redeeming features. However, we had met the lovely Stephanie from Holland on the bus up, who became our travel companion for the next several days and we had a great time knocking back the local plonk, taking some motorbikes out to the countryside for a few jollies (see pics for girls looking like female version of Seventies cop show CHIPS) and visiting the weird, and aptly titled "Crazy House", which looked like it had been designed by disciples of Guadi and H.R Geiger on a bad acid trip. All in, location aside, we had funny few days.

Next stop was Mui Ne, which was reached by without doubt the worst road we've ever been on. Parts of it actually looked like it had been ripped open by an earthquake (a combination of flooding and extreme heat seemed to be the real reason though), with two foot deep tears in the road in some places, meaning a relatively short windy bus ride ended up taking hours, and probably induced Sciatica in half the over thirties on the bus.

Mui Ne is basically a very hot, very long beach town with a small fishermans village at one end. It's popular with the Vietnamese for holidays as it has some very smart resorts, but also with Aussie Kite-surfers who come for some of the best Kite-surfing in the country along with Nha Trang. Some days there are so many kites on the water you wonder how they don't end up decapitating each other. We had come for a few days R&R though, and quickly met up with some people from Saarf Laahdan who we spent the following afternoons soaking up the sun and drinking round the pool with.

One of the main attractions nearby are the massive dunes, which look like something from the set of Starwars and are big enough to actually sledge down, so a bunch of us set out on motorbikes at five AM one morning to check them out. We overshot by about twenty miles and ended up a a tiny Vietnamese village where we encountered a few "fuel-based issues", i.e someone couldn't get the fuel cap open (not me for once). The locals obviously found this totally hilarious, but it was all resolved quickly and humorously after a trip to the village mechanic.

As it happens, getting lost on the motorbikes on a deserted ocean road at sunrise turned out to be a far better experience than the sand sledging itself, which was run by a group of initially pleasant ten year olds, who rapidly turned into a mini version of the Mafia once the tip turned out to be less than what they were angling for. There probably isn't much that beats the absurdity of being blackmailed to pay cash to a group of semi-psychotic pre-pubescants for the return of your flip-flops on the set of Starwars. I was half expecting Obi-Wan Kenobe to pop out from a bush and tell us to head for the service station before the Sand People came for us...

Anyway, having successfully escaped the wrath of the Vietnamese cast of Bugsy Malone, with funds still intact and flip flops on feet, we headed back for a tour of the "quaint" little fishermans village. We only stayed for about three minutes however as it stank so badly of salted dried squid in the late morning heat that it made it impossible to walk round, so it was back to Mui Ne for a swim and beers, not before grabbing a quick shower to get rid of the stench of rotten fruits de mer. Of course, I forgot the golden rule about the bog roll again, so it was off down the shop for me...
 
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Dalat and Mui Ne

Who Stole the Sole?

We were on our way to Hoi An, reputed to be one of the prettiest towns in Vietnam; old cobbled streets, colonial French architecture and HQ to the best tailors in the country, but first we made a flying visit to Hue, Vietnams old Capital and home of the Citadel of the Nguyen emperors and the Forbidden City.

Hue, (pronounced Hway as in "Haway the lads") is a fairly laid back but not particularly attractive town with mostly drab concrete utilitarian buildings set along the (deceivingly) romantically named Perfume River. It is however easy to forgive them this, as being very close to the North-South divide it was the site of some of the worst bombings in the US/Vietnam Conflict and some gruesome mass executions by the VC. Much of the city incurred the full wrath of American fire power, including a lot of the old monuments central to the history of city. Reconstruction is still taking place across the town and when we visited the Forbidden city and Palace parts if it were actually being worked on to restore it to its former glory. Nevertheless, the Citadel and the Forbidden City and Palace (located in its centre) remains very impressive and still evokes much of the sense of power and ceremony that must have existed there when the Nguyen Emperors ruled.

The following afternoon we headed on to Hoi An on one of Vietnams super efficient buses, passing en route the notorious battle sites Da Nang and China Beach. In stark contrast to Hue, Hoi An is as attractive a town as you could hope to find in Vietnam; incredibly quaint, with beautiful old houses crammed into a maze of streets. Cafes, restaurants, art and jewelery boutiques make up literally every other building, and there's a bustling row of food stalls with superb fresh produce and seafood straight from the market just fifty metres away.

We arrived in the evening when the town looks at its best - everything lit up with rows of red lanterns hanging from the facades of shops and houses, and restaurants filled with the scent of Vietnamese cooking. We also managed to stumble on a specialist wine cafe where we ended up ploughing through a few bottles of Bordeaux with a couple honeymooning at one of the expensive resorts on the edge of town. By the look on their faces when told them we were paying twelve pounds a night for a smart hotel with pool I gathered they they were probably paying ten times as much - even we had been surprised at just how cheap good accommodation is in Vietnam.


The next morning we set out on bikes to check out the town properly, which by the light of day was totally different. Although still quaint, we both felt it somewhat resembled a vintage version of Bicester Village Retail Park in places (but without the kids in Kappa tracksuits smoking their mums Bensons in the car park). Being a UNESCO heritage site you get the sense that the town is somewhat fossilised, which in some respects is great as it retains its old appeal, but the downside is that it feels very touristy and a little artificial. However, it does have some of the best cooking we found in Vietnam and as ever we were more than happy to while away the afternoons in restaurants or down at one of the street stalls; one of which produced the best Shrimp Wantons either of us had ever had - so good we went back three times.

Hoi An is also a lager drinkers paradise. It's not often you can go out with a pound, get eight pints of lager and still come home with change for a Wagonwheel. At those prices it could well be the next big Stag party destination, if groups of hammered blokes were into buying pashminas and handmade Mangowood tableware in between bars that is...

Anyway, the sun had finally reappeared with a vengeance and we were now well into the Southern half of Vietnam. Sams S.A.D had miraculously disappeared (personally I put it down to the healing power of cheap lager), so we headed on for Nha Trang - Vietnams big, brash seaside town for a few days of kicking back on the beach. Pulling into town at five AM it seemed strange to see locals on the promenade doing Thai Chi, out jogging and exercising - clearly they get up early here we thought, but by nine AM it was easy to see why - temperatures had soared to plus thirty and by lunchtime it was so hot that you could barely stay out for more than an hour without looking like Michael Winner in a Sauna.

Several people had said to us that they hadn't liked Nha Trang, that they found it too commercial and developed, but as ever these things are subjective and we both took took a liking to the place. Yes it is built up and modern, and little old style architecture exists but its not pretending to be anything else and we've both found that despite the general preference of travellers toward rural environments all the cities we've been to we've had a great time in. I guess we're more urbanite than we thought!

For a big city, Nha Trang has a surprisingly good beach - clean, golden sand with turquoise blue water and a good inland wind making it a kitesurfers paradise. There are also two superb upmarket beach hangouts; Nha Trang Sailing Club and The Louisiana Brewhouse, which is as far as I know is the only micro-brewery on a beach in Asia. Of course there was some sampling to be done so I ordered the full Beer selection menu and had my first pint of Ale in nearly five months. On balance, I'm still pretty sure Ale tastes better in a decent English pub with a pickled egg on a hazy Autumn Sunday afternoon, but I wasn't complaining. So, we went posh for a few days and got waited on hand and foot while lazing by the pool and on Saturday night hit the mega beach party that the Sailing Club puts on, and had our first encounter with South East Asias notorious "Buckets", which are essentially a bucket or massive jar loaded with whisky/vodka and red bull.

Now, its pretty plain to anyone that hard liquor is not meant to be drank out of litre buckets but we didn't want to be rude obviously. Unsurprisingly it turned out to be a fairly wild night of dancing on the beach which involved me getting into an absurd argument with an even drunker French man who stole my flip flops (I'm sure there's a joke about a French man and flips flops?) and me then trying to rip them off his feet while he tried to run away. Myself and a new Canadian compadre tried to hunt him down unsuccessfully (mainly down to the fact that neither of us could see straight), so, alas that was the end of my authentic Brazilian Hiavanas...goodbye my friends, you have served me well. I hope you enjoy your new home on a smelly Frenchmans feet.

If you were to rate hangovers on a scale of one to ten, then the following morning would probably be about a fourteen. I was unable to leave the room for a whole day and in the words of Withnail felt like "a pig shat in my head". It was pretty evident that we had not been consuming buckets of Grey Goose and Highland Park, probably more like formaldehyde and ethanol, but a good party is a good party and I'll always treasure those four hours that I can't remember from the night before...

We did eventually pull ourselves out of our self induced pits of despair, and before we left for our next destination had time to fit in an afternoon at the mud baths (see pics for attractive couple looking like they're covered in cow shit), visit the marine life centre and also eat possibly the best fish and chips ever, made with beer-battered fresh Sturgeon cooked by an Aussie Ex-pat who looked disturbingly like Alf from Home and Away. Maybe it was a little more exotic than the traditional Cod, but sometimes all you need after a big night out is good old fish and chips...

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Hue, Hoi An & Nha Trang

Ain't no Sunshine...

The Australian guy next to me on the bus to Ha Long Bay was looking decidedly ill. We'd exchanged a few words when we got on the bus which pulled out of Hanoi at seven thirty AM, but I could tell he really wasn't up for a conversation - he had that dead-in-the-eyes look that you only get from a savage hangover and you'd only got to bed three hours before. There were five guys who had all been staying in the Hanoi Backpackers Hostel in town and judging by the sound of it they had gone on a proper bender the night before. Pretty much at the first pit stop we arrived at to they all piled off and grabbed more beers and it was only ten AM. From then on it was drinks all the way to the ferry to Cat Ba island, and while amusing to start with by the time we'd got there everyone on the bus looked like they wanted to batter .


We'd been told before we took the ferry to Cat Ba Island that it could be a bit "badly organised", but that had turned out to be an sizable understatement. What it was actually closer to was herding cattle onto a floating container and then barking orders at them for the next four hours. Ten metres off shore the captain announced "you bring you own drink you pay us five dollar to drink". To which there was much disagreement and shouting of "this is bollocks mate" and "you are very bad men" etc.etc. They clearly waited until everyone had bought themselves a few beers and then imposed the surcharge when there was nothing you could do about it.. We refused to pay as did a Portuguese couple with kids we sat with. We were then blanked for the rest of the trip. Their own beer was extortionate and the food provided was crap, but the Aussies didn't give a toss though and after abusing the captain/pirate king got thoroughly pissed again on the roof of the boat while trying to pull a group of Swedish student girls. The stop at the cave on the way was equally as fun - with "you go in cave now - come back in half hour we leave, be quick". Inside the island cave which was clearly impressive (once,) a host of coloured lights on cycle illuminated the walls in pinks and greens. A (presumably calming) backing of what sounded very much like the theme tune to The Gallery off Tony Hart played through speakers mounted on stalactites. It was difficult to move without someones camera in your face or bumping into Japanese tourists queuing up to have their picture taken together on a pink Stalagmite that looked sort of like a Dolphin. Ha Long bay is a real spectacle - no doubt about it, but it is tourist hell. They really need to sort out the local mafia idiots who manage the boats over.

Cat Ba itself is a strange place. The largest island in the bay, its like staying in an out of season Minehead or Skegness. Think Vietnamese League of Gentlemen. Modern-ish glass fronted hotels called things like "Hotel Holiday View" and "Hotel Happy Land" look out onto a harbour and rows of small restaurants knock out very average food, as if they cant be bothered. Maybe they can't - as far as we could see its a pretty dull place to live. At night women would stand singing Karaoke in bars on their own, no audience, just them. I'd imagine you'd go a bit mad. Apparently its rammed in summer with mainland locals but the rest of the year is just a steady trickle of travelers passing through for to check the bays out.

It started hammering it down the day we arrived, adding only to the dreary English seaside town feel, but we booked a trip out Lan Ha Bay anyway, undeterred and not wanting to waste the trip. We were taking a boat out with half a dozen other guys to do some Kayaking around the limestone Karsks and towers of the bay and a few were planning on climbing and doing some deep water soloing (free climbing on rock over deep water). Luckily we got a boat with a great crew this time and an even cooler bunch of people to spend the day with - it was a real laugh. Our Kayaks were full off rain water after hours out on the sea, and climbing was called off due to conditions being too bad, but it was amazing to get out into the bay all the same, paddling around amongst the floating villages with their fish pens and sea-dogs that had never seen land. We didn't waste any time leaving the next morning however and grabbed the fast boat back to the mainland and sanity...

"I've got S.A.D. Definitely". We were in Nimh Binh, a few hours south of Ha Long and it had now been raining non stop for the last four days. "It's making me depressed". Sam was convinced that the lack of sun for all of ten days since we'd left India was taking its toll and she now had Seasonal Affective Disorder. It had been chucking it down solidly - proper cats and dogs. "Raining all ze animals!" as I'd once heard a Frenchman so eloquently put it. We had come to Nimh Binh to see the the famous caves at Tam Coc a few miles away but there was no chance of that now - the idea of more rain, spending a miserable day in plastic dollar macs sitting on an open top rowing boat and getting soaked to the skin was just not appealing. The town itself was not exaclty charming too; an industrial, grey looking place made worse by the dismal weather. You got the impression that even if was sunny, the locals would still struggle to raise a smile. So we did all you can do when your plans are rained off in a strange town - hole up in the hotel, read, talk rubbish to friends on the Internet and watch whatever American trash happens on HBO/StarTV/Discovery. I did feel slightly better after speaking to Edd from back home who was currently riding out one of the worst winters in recent years in Kiev. A ball busting minus thirty, coupled with a failing boiler and a drunken landlord who seemed to only break things every time he came round to attempt to fix them. Even though it was raining like something out of the old testament, Nimh Binh it wasn't really cold, and we were separated by 55 degrees. I'm pretty sure he would have swapped places right then.

A duff afternoons travelling is still better than an average afternoon in the office, and all was not lost. From the wreckage of the trip to see the caves we did manage to forge some entertainment in Nimh Binh, notably meeting Mr Lee, a ninety year old Vietnamese gent who now lived in San Francisco, while we were in a coffee shop across the road. He had moved to the US in the mid sixties and was back in Nimh Binh, his home town to visit family. He was without doubt the best turned out Vietnamese chap we'd met and certainly a contender for GQ's best dressed man of the year - if they had an geriatric category. We sat and had a couple of whiskeys and he chatted away about America, Vietnam and his business in San Francisco. In between he made organised notes about something or other in a leather notepad with a fountain pen in the sort of handwriting that you only ever see grandparents use. He was a fascinating old guy, and we could have spent hours talking with him and sipping whisky, only I suspect he would have drunk me under the table.
The other saving grace was the hotels menu. We'd considered venturing into the town to see what we could find on the street stalls, but by the time what was left of the sun had gone down it looked like a scene from Bladerunner; neon lights shrouded in rain - sour faced women with umbrellas everywhere and rats scurrying from one side of the road to the other, so we ordered in. The menu, had everything, pork, beef, eels, snails, frogs, catfish and even snake, which I probably would have tried if hadn't been $30 a plate. The bottles of green liquour with pickled cobras that lined the shelves of the hotel didn't do much to sell it either, so fancying something different we ordered the frogs legs along with a few other dishes. Now, I've eaten frogs legs before, in France as a kid and in the UK, but these were something else. They were huge, like the legs of some amphibian that had spent too much time hanging around Selafield or Chernobyl. I asked the waiter, who spoke good English whether these were actually frogs legs "They are specially farmed! Big frogs!". He wasn't wrong. It was hard not to imagine Olympian size frogs that could jump twenty feet in the air. I expect they must have very high walls at the farm just to stop them escaping. Anyway, they were good, a bit like chicken as everyone says but a bit more, well...froggy.
It had been a weird few days. It was still raining heavily the next morning and showed no signs of improving. Sam had a permanent frown on which said "I didn't sign up for this". It was time to head South.

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Ha Long Bay, Cat Ba and Ninh Binh