January 16, 2008

It's been too long!

Oh my goodness... I just went to see a friend's blog (she's just set up a new one as she's about to set off travelling for a while) and remembered through some misty memory that I have a blog. I can't believe it was March 2007 when I last posted something.

So many things have changed since then!!

Martin and I are getting married on 31 May 2008.... we've moved back to the UK after almost a year travelling around Asia. We're both working and living in Bristol. It feels like an age ago that we were travelling.

Ok, so I have decided to get my ass into gear with this blog thing again.

Watch this space....

March 10, 2007

don't make me stand any longer...

About a week ago Martin and I decided to make a "quick trip" to Huangshan - one of the most famous and beautiful mountains in China. At the time we were in Yangshuo, and estimated that it would take maybe just over 24 hours to get there. We thought we'd take a bus to Guilin (the nearest big city an hour away) and then catch a bus or train directly to Huangshan. Ha ha ha. That would have been nice.

What we've actually done over the last week is quite different...

We left Yangshuo around 9am on Sunday morning and arrived in Guilin just over an hour later. We went directly to the bus station to ask for a ticket... which of course they didn't have. We were told that the nearest place we could get to was Changsha, so we bought a ticket and waited for a few hours in the stinky bus station. The ticket to Changsha was ridiculously overpriced and it was only after a good long think that we realized we were in fact traveling on Lantern Festival. Good one.

We arrived in Changsha at about 11pm, only to find the ticket office was already closed and we'd have to find a bed for the night. We opted for the cheapest option - following a little woman to her "house-hotel"... we were shown to a tiny dirty "room" that held one rock hard bed and a small rubbish bin. The walls of this room were pieces of cardboard held together by sticky tape and there was no roof. She left us there trying to figure out how we'd both fit in this bed and how we'd keep our skin from touching anything in the room!!

Needless to say the amount of sleep we both got was minimal. We dragged our bruised (the bed was really hard!) and tired bodies out at 7am in order to get a head start at the ticket office. What a nightmare!! After waiting a good 20 minutes in the queue, the woman behind the counter shouted "mayo" (which means 'no have') to every destination we asked her.... and believe me we tried a lot of places!! The queues for the tickets were nuts (as they usually are in China) with people pushing, shoving and screaming at each other while others just jumped the queue and threw money at the ticket-providing lady in desperation!

After a while of standing there trying to figure out what we could do, a lovely young man arrived and offered his services in broken English. We explained that we were trying to get to Huangshan and after much discussion he suggested we just buy a ticket to Yichun. We looked on our map... no Yichun. I asked whether he was sure it was in this province and he said "yes yes it's a big city". Huh. Where was this big city on our map??
In the end we decided to trust him and were grateful as he helped us buy the ticket... another expensive one. We just hoped we'd at least be driving over a huge distance to make up for the price.

Our bus from Changsha to Yichun left at 9:30am, and we left quite happily thinking that we were on the last leg of the journey. But then we started driving further and further away from civilization and the only towns we passed seemed ghost-like. There were just a few people in the streets and most of the houses were abandoned. Scary.
Suddenly (only 4 hours later) we found ourselves driving into a big city and stopping outside the bus station. We were in Yichun already! Our friend was right - it was a big city, but the trouble was we'd only driven for 4 hours!

At the Yichun bus station we again encountered the "mayo mayo" and we started to feel rather pissed off. What were we doing wrong?? We decided to go to the train station and attempt to buy a ticket there...

At the station the queues for just getting into the ticket-buying-area were so long we almost turned around, but then Martin had a good idea... we played super dumb and got some of the guards at the door to help the "poor foreigners who speak no Chinese". A man led us to the ticket office and straight to the front of the queue!! Nice. We were told (again) that there were no tickets to Huangshan, and just as we were about to give up and just ask for a ticket back to Guilin, the security guard asked us to follow him. He took us past the crowds of people and into the waiting hall. There he explained in Chinese (which I had to pretend I only half understood) that we'd have to wait for 5 hours here but then he could help us onto the train. Good news!

Waiting for 5 hours for a train you have no ticket for is not the best situation to be in, plus it was freezing in the waiting room... we sat there feeling very sorry for ourselves but still grateful that the guard had even helped us in the first place. Usually people in China don't want to deal with foreigners so we're left to fend for ourselves.

5 hours later we were escorted onto platform 1 by about five guards, one platform manager and one English speaking woman who they'd recruited as our translator. When the train arrived we were taken to the seating carriages and told to just get on. "But we don't have a ticket" I said... "It's ok you can just stand" was the reply. What?? This was a 12 hour overnight train!!! Martin told me I should just be grateful we got on the train in the first place but I was really not looking forward to standing for 12 hours.

It was just after 7pm when we got on the train... we found a small place by the door to put our bags down and that was that. Being by the door had two disadvantages - it was colder and filled with smoky boys, but it was at least less full of people than the actual carriage so there was a little space to move. We stood and stood and stood some more.

By 2am we'd moved into the carriage as the cold was really getting to me and the smoke was affecting Martin's lungs. There was pretty much no room to move in there and we were squashed up against other peoples bodies, faces, bums... whatever.

The only piece of good luck on that trip happened at 3:30am when we were told we could upgrade our "tickets" to a sleeper if we wanted to. After explaining that we didn't actually have tickets, the kind conductor helped us out anyway and gave us two sleeper tickets!! Yeah baby, I've never been so happy to be able to lie down :)
We only had a few more hours left on the journey but it was bliss to get under a duvet and shut our eyes.

We arrived in Huangshan city just before 7am and were flooded by touts offering their various services (food, hotel, bus) as soon as we walked out of the station. We took a bus to Tangkou (a small town nestled right under the mountain itself) and managed to find a cheap-ish hotel just next to the bus station.

Time for some sleeeeeep.....

February 28, 2007

Cambodia and Vietnam in a whiz...

We left Bangkok on Friday 9 Feb ready for a change. I was so excited because after a good 3 weeks (it might have been longer! eek) in the city I was ready to get out and see some stuff. I do love Bangkok though - it's clean, the people are friendly and it's a lot of fun. It's probably one of the most convenient places we've been to on our trip... and easily where we've spent the most money!!! But that said, I was sooo glad to get out of there!!

And into Cambodia...



Cambodia is a gorgeous country. Such a tragic history... and yet every Cambodian I met had the biggest smile on their face. Such nice people.

So our first stop had to be Siem Reap. We were extremely lazy and did what we would never usually do... we stayed in the hotel that our bus brought us to when we arrived. Such a mistake when you're traveling on a shoestring but it was late at night and I was not in the mood to walk anywhere with my backpack on. I did, however, manage to bargain them down to $4 for a night - and our lovely room had a tv and a BATH (I overindulged in this particular luxury!). In the end our hotel of choice actually worked out really well for us, we were in a quieter area so there was no noise at night (a treat not to sleep with earplugs!) and we were really close to a local market where we bought fresh baguettes, tomatoes, mangoes, naartjies etc everyday.

On our second day in Siem Reap we found ourselves doing what every tourist to Cambodia does... driving to the oh-so-famous wonder of the world - Angkor, the old cities of the Khmer empire. We arrived at 5:30am ready for the sunrise and proceeded to spent the rest of the day wandering around with our jaws open, the Angkor temples are truly magnificent pieces of man-made architecture. The entire empire was built over a period of 300 years, between 900 and 1200AD.

Map of Angkor area


Our first stop was Angkor Wat at sunrise. Angkor Wat is the principal temple of the empire, built between 1113 and 1150 by the King at the time. It was built mirroring the Hindu cosmology, with the towers in the center representing the home of the gods (Mount Meru), the outer walls representing the mountains surrounding the world and the moat representing the oceans beyond the mountains.

Angkor Wat - said to be the world's largest single religious monument


Close up


As we spent from 5:30am till almost 7pm there we got quite an eye-full of temples and architecture while we were there. It was seriously amazing, but I think I was most grateful to our tuk-tuk driver who spent the day ferrying us around!! It was baking hot and the number of stairs we had to climb was incredible. I felt like every temple /ruin we saw that day had at least 100 steps to climb. I'm probably exaggerating but when its 40 degrees in the shade, those steps are hell!

I love tuk-tuks!


One image that I saw over and over again in Angkor was that of apsaras... a female spirit of the clouds and waters in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. I thought they were really beautiful and thoroughly enjoyed myself trying to find them in the nooks and crannies of every temple we went to.



Another cool photogenic moment was when we climbed the Bayon, built in the exact center of Angkor Thom during the 13th century. This was the only temple built as a Mahayana Buddhist temple, but other local gods and goddesses were also worshiped here. All over the Bayon were these faces smiling down on us...



So once we had Angkor under our belt, we headed down to Phnom Penh in what we were told would be a "big luxury air conditioned bus". What we actually traveled in was a small 25-seater with no air conditioning and only partially functioning windows. All the luggage was put inside the bus, which added to the 'comfort' as everyone had to squeeze around it. The road was terrible, mostly worn-out tarmac and in parts just dirt road. Coming from South Africa I'm not averse to a bit of dirt road and a pot hole or two, but for almost 9 hours... help!

When we arrived in Phnom Penh we took a tuk-tuk to the lakeside area and found a cheap guest house for only $2 a night! To celebrate our budget-friendly accommodation price we splashed out on dinner - $2.5 each for an all-you-can-eat buffet!! It was delicious: lots of coleslaw, chicken, baguettes, soup etc and although we suspected it wasn't quite as authentic as 'traditional Khmer food' would be, it was yummy so we went to bed with full bellies and smiles on our faces!!

The next day we went on another sightseeing spree... this time to the Choeung Ek Killing Fields and the S 21 Museum in Phnom Penh itself. The Killing Fields is an area that used to be an orchard about 17km south of Phnom Penh, where the Khmer Rouge (an extremist Communist party that was ruling Cambodia at the time) executed about 17,000 people between 1975 and 1979. At Choeung Ek you can see many mass graves from which the bodies were exhumed and there are even human bones still lying around the various pits. Almost 9000 bodies were discovered after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, many of whom were former inmates in the S21 prison (Tuol Sleng).

Skulls at Killing Fields


After Choeung Ek, we drove back into the city and visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (S 21). This used to be a high school, but was turned over by the Khmer Rouge and used as security prison during their reign of Cambodia. Inside the museum you can see rooms and rooms of photos of the victims... very eerie.



The next day we sadly left behind Cambodia and headed to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) in Vietnam.



It was another long bus ride, but not so painful this time. We arrived in Saigon just after lunch time to rather distressing news. Congratulations to us, we'd arrived smack bang before Tet - Vietnamese New Year. We knew all about Chinese New Year of course, but didn't realise that Vietnam celebrates at the same time!! This meant the prices for accommodation, transport etc would double and there'd be loads more people visiting all the nice places. Bugger! But we took it in our stride and made a new plan... we'd try and get a bus straight out of Saigon that same night and head to Hoi An, where we hoped there would be less tourists than Nha Trang (the beach area we had wanted to visit). It took us a while to find a company that had any seats left but we managed it and had a ticket direct to Hoi An for that evening. Yay. We spent the rest of the afternoon pounding the streets in Saigon and enjoying the local food delights.

That evening we hopped on our Hoi An-bound bus and prepared ourselves for the 20 hour ride. The scene that met our eyes when we boarded the bus was crazy... the pavement and most of the street was FULL (seriously no space left) of people waiting to get on night buses to various parts of the country. When a bus pulled up the Vietnamese all rushed towards it and tried to squash on first... very similar to the Chinese who always seem to desperately need to be first getting on or off any form of transport and will do anything to be first (as if the train/bus would leave without them)!

We had a really good ride to Hoi An actually. We stopped for lunch the next day and Martin and I made friends with a lovely guy from Saigon called Thao. He helped us order some food (we were being overcharged by the waitress for everything until he stepped in) and wouldn't let us pay when we were done. A super nice dude.

Hoi An was a really lovely little town. It used to be an important international seaport town until the late 19th century and has managed to keep a lot of its old architecture. Walking around the old town part is fun, and you can still see a lot of old houses and bridges.



Another thing I loved about Hoi An, and even Vietnam in general, is that you can still see many women walking around in traditional dress. They always look so beautiful.

Vietnamese girls with traditional clothes and conical hats


The conical hats you can see (and buy) everywhere in Vietnam


We stayed in Hoi An for about 5 days, enjoying our lovely hotel (huge bathroom with bath, satellite tv, free internet, mini bar...) and spending a few days just doing nothing. But we didn't just sit around in the hotel room (honest!)... we also hired bikes and cycled down to the beach (more than 5km away) and spent the whole day swimming and lolling about on the soft white sand. Gorgeous.

Once we'd had our fill of Hoi An we took a 4 hour bus trip up the coast to Hue - the old capital of Vietnam from 1744 to 1945 when the last emperor abdicated. It's in an area of Vietnam that was severely damaged during the American war (or Vietnam war as we know it), but many architectural gems still remain in the city.

The citadel


We only spent a day and a half in Hue, but filled that time with walking around the city visiting the sights (all free as we didn't go into the expensive ones!) and eating lots of pineapple. "The pineapple lady" as we've come to call her was probably my favourite part of our time in Hue... she was a small local woman who sat by the river selling fruit and sweets. The first time we went there she couldn't believe we wanted a whole pineapple and kept offering us a stick each (each stick had 1/4 pineapple on it)... we kept refusing saying we wanted a whole new one cut up and could we have it in a bag. She spoke no English and we spoke no Vietnamese but it was a hilarious encounter. We went back to her 4 more times before we left so we built up quite a relationship with her. Everytime we saw her she had a grin from ear to ear and would laugh and make gestures showing her "chopping up a whole pineapple", while saying "chiah chiah" - our communal Engnamese sound-word for chop! She was great.



We left Hue on an overnight bus to Hanoi on Feb 21st, hoping that the capitol city would be cheap, fun and full of free things to do! The bus arrived at 5am and unceremoniously dropped us off in the middle of nowhere, leaving groups of foreigners stranded with no idea where to go. We made some friends and shared a taxi to the Old Quater, an area just north of a pretty Hoan Kiem lake with lots of hotels, restaurants etc. Searching for a cheap hotel at that hour of the morning is never fun, but when you come up with nothing cheaper than $6/night for a room with no bathroom, its pretty depressing. We don't mind sharing a communal bathroom, but we expect to pay a lot less than $6!! However, this we couldn't find so we had to settle for that as it was the cheapest option around (believe me, both us of did a lot of walking to try to find a cheaper place... even dorm beds were going for $5/bed!! Crazy).

That first day in Hanoi we were so tired we didn't manage to do much... we had a nap in the morning, then walked around unsuccessfully trying to find noodle soup for 10,000dong. That's what we'd paid everywhere in Vietnam so far, so we were being stubborn and refusing to pay double that just because it's new year. We did manage to find a place, but I must say the fishy-tasting noodles weren't exactly mouthwatering. They did the trick though! We also walked around a local market, bought more pineapples (I can't stop eating them!) and enjoyed people-watching by the lake.

The next day we made a more concerted effort at sightseeing... we must have walked about 15km around the city! First we went to see the old Imperial city, and managed to get in for free. Not sure how we did that, in fact, I'm not sure how we found the area in the first place - we got kind of lost and ended up walking for a lot longer than planned. Either way, we had a nice chat to a Vietnamese tour official there (who barely spoke English but tried so hard) and he gave us a free copy of a book on the citadel.

Next we went to see Ho Chi Minh and his mausoleum (Martin was looking forward to seeing him in the flesh!)...



Sadly, we'd picked a stupid day to go sightseeing as we discovered the mausoleum (and other sights) were closed because it was Friday. Bummer.

We then saw the one-pillar pagoda (which is nothing to write home about) and then it started to rain. Goodie. I started to worry about Martin catching a cold and us not being properly prepared for this (we gave away all our winter clothes when we left India). We started to walk back to the Old Quater when we saw something that made me forget all about how cold I was... a tiny little kitten was just sitting on the pavement crying and shivering. It had no mummy (that we could see) and was just stranded there, poor little dude. We played with it for a while and then left it near a wall before it got too comfortable sitting on Martin's lap.

We got back to our hotel in time to organise some food for the next day's bus trip to China. We'd managed to find a not-so-good-but-do-able deal on a bus straight to Nanning the next morning. We stocked up on sausages, cheese triangles and baguettes... what yummy sandwiches.

You can find baguettes all over Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam - a trend left by the French colonialists


So our trip through South East Asia finished on Sat 24th Feb when we arrived in China again. It's great to be back in a land where I can speak the language (well some of it anyway) and I know some of the culture... almost feels like home in a wierd way.
We're in Yangshuo at the moment and loving it!! We've got a divinely cheap hotel (Y40 for a triple room with bathroom inside) and the surrounding limestone hills and Li river may just keep us here longer than we think :o)

February 02, 2007

Thailand and Laos pictures

We've just finished a whirlwind 8 day tour of Laos, would have liked to have seen more but we're heading back to Bangkok tonight! Going to meet up with friends Ross and Rea from Taiwan - so excited :)

Last time we were in Bangkok we stayed 2 weeks, waiting for visas and enjoying the warm weather. We did some of the sightseeing things too... spent a day visiting the Grand Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha (which is actually jade!). We also did a one-day tour taking in the floating market, bridge over the river Kwai and a big pagoda/stupa thing. We loved Bangkok, everyday I ate piles of fresh fruit and veggies... such a wonderful change from all the heavy breads/rice in India. We spent some time shopping for things to have when we get home and even got tailor-made suits for when we head back to the working world!

In Laos we did the three very touristed places (it can't be helped when you're on a tight schedule!!) and packed in as much as we could. I feel like we've been on a bus for the last 8 days!! We headed to Vang Vieng first, and did some tubing down the river, which was tons of fun outside of the fact that the sun barely came out and we froze!! Then we went to Luang Prabang, saw a few wats (temples) and the Mekong river... all nice but we found it very expensive so stayed only one night (we sneakily shared one single bed in a dorm and snuck out early the next morning before we were found out!!! tee hee). Next was Phonsavanh, where I ate a worm ("snack food" we were told) and we took a day tour to see the Plain of Jars... beautiful. The Plain of Jars is a group of historical sights containing thousands of stone jars (a kind of sandstone I think) dotted about the countryside. Nobody really knows how old the jars are but they are believed to be about 2000 years old. It is thought that they were built by an ancient Mon-Khmer race and there are various theories as to what they were used for - one is that they were used to hold rice/wine for celebrations and another is that they are funeral urns. All very interesting.

Now we're in Vientiane (capital of Laos), which is a nice little city but again, too expensive for us. We're struggling to stick to our daily budget these days, which is a little stressful, but hopefully we'll have enough to last till we get home :o)

Here are the photos - they should be bigger this time so easier to see!

Big beard boy at the Chatuchak weekend market in Bangkok


Me showing off the painted walls inside the Grand Palace


Us in front of some God-guard things at the Palace (note the recently trimmed beard and hair - much better!!)


A lady selling her wares on the floating market


Bridge over the River Kwai


On the bridge (jealous Dad??)


Food from Bangkok (cheap and yummy!)


Tubing down the river in Vang Vieng, Laos


The tubing was fun, the views were gorgeous, but the river was COLD! 4 hours of this and my feet felt as cold as they did at Everest Base Camp!!


Most beautiful picture taken of this gorgeous kid in Laos


Me don't like to eat the worm, but me eat it! Gross! (actually it tasted a bit like a Chinese tea egg, wierd)


Chilling next to the jars (outside Phonsavanh, Laos)


Oi, don't fall down the jar... come back fool!

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