Soul Kitchen

If there's one thing guaranteed to put a smile on Sammies face it's Thai food. Our first proper date was in a Thai restaurant and if we're too tired too cook after work then it's more often than not Thai that ends up on the menu. So, as you can imagine there was more than a little excitement about finally arriving in Thailand and heading for our first stop - Chiang Mai, the cultural capital of the the North and home reputedly to the nations finest and most authentic cooking.

Heading into Thailand from Laos had taken us a little longer than we'd planned. The proposed twelve hour bus journey from Luang Prabang to the Thai border had turned into a sweaty, sleepless and increasingly surreal twenty six hour slog involving a broken down coach, numerous changes of grumpy drivers, a distressed puppy rescued from an airtight box in the baggage hold, some overly aggressive border staff and a few mad dashes for connections, so we were fairly relieved when we finally made it to our hotel located on a small Soi near Tapae Gate. After grabbing a well needed shower and siesta, we got the lowdown from the hotel owner on where to eat and it turned out we didn't have to walk far at all - about twenty yards in fact.

From the first few mouthfuls of superb curry we monstered that afternoon, Sammies mildly concerning infatuation with Thai cuisine mutated into full blown addiction, with red curry soon being eaten for lunch and dinner some days. If there was a Betty Ford Clinic for Thai Curry obsessives then I would have been on the phone tout suite. Things nearly went too far when I found out from a local guy that curry is actually traditionally eaten for lunch and breakfast, as opposed to dinner, but we figured that three a day would probably be pushing it.

Anyway, suffice to say the food in Chiang Mai is very, very good. Thailand is obvioulsy a reasonably developed country though now and while we had expected to see more of the trappings of western society it was still weird to see McDonald's, Burgerkings, branches of Starbucks, Seven Elevens and even Tesco lining the streets, particularly after spending the last few months in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam which are largely devoid of big brands and tacky commercialision, but that's globalisation, and good or bad its an inevitability. Thankfully, Chaing Mai hasn't caved in and sold its soul completely. In fact, if you ignore the chains stores its a very charming place to explore. Cycling around in the city heat we saw more temples than you can shake a stick at and some fascinating old streets and buildings, but where Chiang Mai really comes into its own is the Sunday Night Market.

We'd been told this was pretty special and "quite large", but this turned out to be somewhat of an understatement. Literally from the door of our hotel located down a tiny side street, stalls extended as far as the eye could see, appearing almost miraculously over the course of a few short hours in the afternoon. By the time the sun had set, several thousand artists, craft and food sellers, musicians, hawkers, locals and tourists were packed into the crowed city centre, creating the feel of a street festival. Temples became food courts, symbolic perhaps of a dedication to food as much as religion, and stalls inside served some of the most delicious street grub either of us had ever eaten; home made mini fishcakes with chili jam, marinated BBQ chicken breast on a stick, fried quails eggs, incredible tempura prawns, fried seaweed, squid and octopus satays, spiced omelet in banana leaf, fish curries, papaya salads, sesame pancakes, a rainbow of amazing fresh sushi and too many other mouthwatering things to mention. This is the sort of food you can only fantasise about getting in a Thai restaurant back home, and when you're done wandering the sreets you can grab a beer and get a half hour foot massage right on the side of the pavement for less than the cost of a Big Mac...

Having spent a few days checking out the city, taking in an entertaining night at the Muay Thai Kickboxing and eating pretty much everything in sight, we decided it was time to go get ourselves an education. There are some excellent cooking schools in Chaing Mai and after a bit of research and asking around we found ourselves a well-recommended school for an afternoon class (Asia Scenic), which also turned out to be about fifty yards from our hotel (we were clearly staying on the right street!). From a large list of dishes we could select the ones we wanted to make, and once we'd made our decision as a group we spent half an hour in the herb garden learning about the various flavours that make up the distinctive taste of Thai food and how to use them properly. It was then off to the local market to buy the rest of the ingredients.

We opted for the classics figuring that these would give a better all round understanding, and between us we made fresh Spring Rolls, Papaya salad, Red Curry, Massaman Curry, Cashew Chicken, Tom Sab soup and Tom Yum. Learning how to make the pastes for the curry from scratch was probably the most enlightening part and thankfully everything turned out really well. The surprising thing is that its not actually that difficult to make good Thai food at all; the trick, much like most good cooking is balancing the ingredients and making sure they're super fresh and high quality, which is probably a little easier in Chaing Mai than Oxford.

Our next stop was Pai, North West of Chaing Mai near the Burmese Border. On the drive up we encountered probably the best example yet of managing to get totally and completely fucking lost. Pulling into a little service station on a steep mountain road halfway to Pai, one of the three bubbly Swedish girls who were in our mini-van asked "how far is the town from the beach please?" to which everyone looked at each other with some confusion and responded "what beach?", "the beach! The town is on an island yes!".

....Now, I'm not sure how these girls manage to cross the road on their own or even why their parents actually let them out of their local neighbourhood without a minder, but it doesn't take a genius to realise that a town sitting at altitude, ringed by mountains on the Thai/Burmese border, several hundred miles inland is neither going to be on an island or have a beach (unless you're in Laos that is...). After a bit of explanation about the fundamentals of geography and map reading by fellow passengers, they realised that they were in fact travelling North and not South, where all the pretty islands with the pretty beaches are. They stayed one night in Pai and the following morning made the long journey down to Southern Thailand. Or maybe Central China. Who knows. Either way they probably should have given Pai a bit more of a chance, as although it does have a striking of lack of beach, its not a bad place to spend a few days.

If you are a hippy and/or enjoy spending large amounts of your time stoned and doing sod all except watching Dragonflies buzz around on the river and talking rubbish with people with massive beards, homemade shoes and knitted woolly hats, then the chances are you'll love Pai. It is the quintessential nouveau hippy-chic town. It's very laid back and has a gentle rural feel to it with a smattering of boutique (ah, that word again...) hotels dotted around. As a result it's easy to meet friendly people and very easy to let days slip away doing nothing, which has its own certain charm, but to be honest you do start to feel like you are slipping into a lower state of conciousness after a while. While we were in Pai we did make some new friends however - Guy, Justin, Sheree and Danielle who we spent a few days kicking back with and exploring the nearby waterfalls. We all decided to head back to Chiang Mai for a few more days of food and fun and couldn't resist hitting the market again before heading south.

So far, travelling through the wilder parts of Asia we had avoided any of the sporadic political flair ups that tend to characterise developing nations, so it was a tad ironic really that now we had reached Thailand, home of the Modern Eastern Package Holiday, that a crisis of sizable proportions was gathering momentum.

Watching the news the night before we left there was increasing tension in Thailand with the political protests in Bangkok. Televised meetings between the two parties in dispute over governance had been on six channels simultaneously in most bars and restaurants all day long, and after two days still they hadn't yet produced a deal. It was looking like the issues created by Red Shirt camps in the city centre weren't going anywhere for the time being and we were heading right into the capital the following morning. Perfect timing.

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Chiang Mai & Pai

Get your rocks off

Everybody, at some point in their life needs to purchase an Ornamental Samurai Sword, or a Tazer, a Machete, a foot long gas lighter that shines a picture of a naked woman on to walls, or possibly a gas Mask. At least that's you what you'd think looking at the shopping options in Vang Vieng.

There is definitely a direct correlation between how many pissed people there are in a square kilometre and how much utter crap is on sale - and there are a lot of pissed people in Vang Vieng. Probably one of the other main indicators in South East Asia that you are in the vicinity of a dense population of inebriated people, are Beer Vests.

Anybody who's been to South East Asia knows what these are, and for anyone who doesn't, I will explain - no, they are not a clever and novel way of transporting beer around on your person in warm temperatures, they are simply a cheap cotton vest which proudly displays the logo of the most popular beer in the country on the front and back in large letters. In Vietnam it's Saigon Beer, Cambodia it's Angkor, in Thailand it's Chang and Laos its Beer Lao...you get the picture. Basically it conveys to anyone passing this sophisticated message: "I like beer and I am holiday in this country".


Now I don't wish to appear like a grumpy bastard about this (I now own a beer hat, bought for fishing purposes only obviously), but the mass-wearing of Beer Vests does add an element of Zombieishness (is that a word?) to any place where wearers can be found in large herds. They are not unlike football shirts. In fact, close field study of Beer Vest wearers shows behaviour almost identical to the domestic football fan, and leads one to believe that the Beer Vest may in fact be a substitute for a football (also often rugby and American football ) shirt whilst abroad. Other common characteristics also re-enforce this hypothesis. Migration in large, predominantly male groups being an obvious one, a strong desire to fit in at all costs by doing stupid stuff, being sick in flowerbeds and shop doorways, high volume purchasing of aforementioned useless crap and, my particular pet trait favoured by the American breed - Hi-Fiving! Desmond Morris would have a field day.

Anyway, you may have thought this was rapidly turning into a tirade against the moronic behaviour of large groups of Westerners abroad in Asia (Sam can tell you I do have moments when I turn in to my Dad, and tend to get bit vocal about the sheer retardedness of tourists in foreign lands), but I would be a massive hypocrite if I told you we didn't behave like total idiots and enjoy pretty much every minute of our few days in Vang Vieng. It's a bit like going to a theme park - you know its going to be a totally plastic consumer culture experience, full of chavs and you are likely to return home having spent way too much money, but nevertheless once you're in and on the rides, you end up having a ball.

Vang Vieng itself is a smallish town in North East of Laos and lies on a beautiful stretch of the Nam Song River surrounded by hugely impressive limestone karsts. At some point in the last twenty years a farmer must have been changing a tractor tire by the river bank and slipped and fell in to the river with it. After a few moments of intial panic he realised that he was actually having quite a nice time bobbing down the picturesque rapids in the afternoon sunshine, waving to people, and thought, "if only I had about twenty five beers and half a bottle of free Tiger Whisky and some rope swings and a marker pen to draw dumb stuff all over myself, then this would be perfect", and so Tubing in Vang Vieng was born. And yay, the Tourons came in their droves.

I had been told by a friend that Tubing was "about as much fun as you can possibly have", but nothing actually prepares you for the chaos that awaits when you arrive at the first river station. Pulling down a dirt track from the town with the tubes tied to the top of the jeep, you head straight into a massive party on the riverbank where house music is belting out, and a couple of hundred half-naked people are dancing and chatting on a wooden platform with a packed bar loaded with beer and serving free whisky. In front of you is a huge zip-slide swing with people somersaulting off it every thirty seconds and landing practically on top of each other. Looking downstream is a view resembling a Bachanalian version of Neverland - wooden tree house style platforms hang from the banks filled with people partying, while painted kids attempt to lasso tubers with bottles tied to ropes, trying to pull them out of the current and into the bars to join in the carnage. All this set to an almost mythical backdrop of towering mountains and stunning countryside. Like much of Laos, you really couldn't make it up...


Anyway, without going into all the gory details, we had, as expected, one of the funniest and most mental days we've ever had. The pictures below pretty much say it all. I don't think I've ever seen as many grown adults behaving as immaturely or having such a good time. You cannot fail to meet stacks of people on the way down the river too, and by the time we'd reached the final station in the hazy late afternoon sun, we had assembled a small hyperactive tribe with whom who we headed back into town and then on to party early until the next morning at the rammed, notorious Bucket Bar.


In total we were in Vang Vieng for four days, which by the end was enough. There are seemingly only two states in the town, drunk or hungover and its gets a bit repetetive after a while. So, Sam, Sammie and I grabbed a minivan to Luang Prabang, in Central North Laos - a winding but straightforward journey that should have taken six hours or so had we not had a weirdo driver who insisted that he stop three times in the creepiest places possible in the middle of nowhere, because "I very tired now please, sleep sleep". We would have argued, but decided on balance it was probably best not make a tired man who was bad at driving anyway keep going in the dark, along roads that had five hundred foot sheer drops down one side...


If there is an antidote to Vang Vieng, it is Laung Prabang. It's by far one of the most chilled out and serene towns you could imagine. After travelling through the rest of Laos which is ruggedly beautiful but sparse in places, it came as a real surprise - it was far more sophisticated than we expected, with some beautiful shops, restaurants and galleries. The word Boutique (which is now officially used on everything ever) springs to mind, but not in bad way, and although the town has been classified a UNESCO World Heritage Site (which can easily turn somewhere into a living museum) it still feels pretty authentic and isn't too over-commercialised.

Much of its charm lies in its location on the banks of two unbelievably picturesque sections of the Mekong and Khan Rivers and its architecture is fascinating too - a combination of Colonial French and the tradional Indonchinese style. Many of the old houses have clearly been bought up by wealthier Asians now and are immaculately decked out inside, and with most people leaving thier doors wide open it's hard not to be nosy...


We spent four days in and around the town - there are plenty of little places with hidden gardens and terraces with views over the Mekong you can hide away for the afternoon with a book and a decent glass of wine (the best of these being the Utopia Bar which is well worth finding if you go). There are also some excellent places to eat (which we did a lot of as usual), many of these in the superb evening market which takes over the main street in the town. You really can pick up some amazing handmade things very cheaply and we both decided we're coming back to do some serious house shopping once we've topped up the bank account and er, have a house...

As far as adventures go Luang Prabang was more civilized and low key than the rest of Laos; we did however do a few trips out of the town - one to the pristine Kuang Si waterfalls which were shockingly blue and and refreshingly cold, and one too the Pak Ou caves which are famous for holding thousands of statues of the Buddha. This actually turned out to be well over hyped and somewhat traumatic. The entire journey down river consisted of the three of us in a small boat with an overly excitable twenty stone American woman who kept going on about Lady Gaga, the X-Factor and Kelly f*cking Clarkson, and a tatoo-covered, seemingly mute Eastern European Neo Nazi who looked like he was ready to murder one of us at any minute. By the time we'd reached the caves we were more terrified of the American woman than we were of the Neo Nazi.

Climbing two hundred steps to stare at a load of old Buddhas for half an hour did little to help too, and things only got worse when we re-boarded and the American Nightmare nearly capsized the boat. She then gave us all a ten minute lecture about why should couldn't make it up the steps (Hockey injury my arse), and promptly proceeded to grab my hand and plant it firmly on her bare sweaty varicose knee, stating "Can you feel it?! That's my knee cap honey, it's totally detached!". Its not often I am speechless, but this was definately one of those times. It certainly made me wonder what the hell had happened to the Neo Nazi before we got on the boat anyway...
 
 
View our pics here:
 

Vang Vieng

 

Luang Prabang

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...

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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...
 
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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.

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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...


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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