Early morning flight

Why, why, why?

Up at the crack of dawn would be an understatement; we awoke at 3.30 for a 6am flight to Siem Reap having been told we must check in at 4am. Vientiane airport may as well be closed at 4am; but hold on, doesn't that board say check-in time: 04:00? Quick, while that security guard is still awake lets ask. With a cheeky little smile that I interpret as meaning 'another stupid tourist' he says:

"Sorry, not ready to check-in yet, you sit" he says pointing at uninviting and small black leather seats. I guess this is another example of the laid back Lao. I felt better when 'another stupid tourist', followed by another arrives five minutes later. Eventually at 04:20 the doors open and we check in.

Despite the fact that, according to Wikipedia, Laos Airlines have an atrocious safety record we arrived in Siem Reap on time and well fed, free beer was on offer but at 6.30am I really didn't fancy it.

After a quick nap, oh the years are catching up with me now: Nap! So, after my nap we went to Angkor Wat to watch the sunset. The sun began to set then all the tourists were ushered out. Hmmm..? What we didn't realise, and Lonely Planet didn't inform us, was that Angkor closes at 17:30, sunset occurs approximately an hour after that, DOH!

Angkor Wat

And again at sunrise

Me being me, I wasn't too impressed with the place at first glance. It looks exactly like the photos but the photos look better, does that make sense? Of course not! I'll rephrase: It is impressive, majestic, stunning. On a scale of which I cannot compare it to anything, the moat alone is 152m wide. ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY TWO METRES! WHAT THE FUCK? Puts Warwick Castle to shame. However, with 36^oC heat beating down and relative humidity nearing 90% walking around the ruins involves so much work that it would be easier to look at the photos.

We returned today, for the 5am sunrise, on our $20 ticket, of which each and every buck goes to a petroleum magnate, sick! Isn't it! Fair enough he is a Cambodian magnet but even so, that don't stick! GDP per capita here is $320 and this c*&t keeps all the cash; guess it's all about government corruption and scratching backs; this poor prole doesn't grasp the gravity of the situation.

After 8 hours on the site today my opinion changed. The intricacy of the carvings and dedication to detail all over these enormous temples is incredible. I'd like to post some pics but left my camera at home so i'll have to do so later. Long story short: A place worth visiting but maybe not in low season when the temperatures and humidity are conspiring against you.

Laos

Fifteen days in Laos is double the time originally allotted to the country but having made a sound group of friends kept us here longer. The group has now dispersed leaving me and Paul behind in Vientiane to board our overpriced flight to Siem Reap, Cambodia, on Wednesday evening while they all fly to Hanoi, Vietnam.

Luang Prabang was a lovely town to have visited, small; with a population of only 22,000, it was near impossible to travel up or down the main road without bumping into somebody we recognised- there was a real sense of family/community spirit here. Such a small and peaceful place was a great introduction to the country and characterises the place so well: Friendly and laid back; horizontally at most times. After only a few hours I got the feeling Laos will be the best place we visited and I stand by that, minus the capital.

Luang had several sights to behold but the sweltering heat, 37^oC plus, humidity and general lazyness of ones legs put off visits to temples located on the top of hills and museums perched atop a pile of steps. Having said that I hired a bike for two days and cycled around the 4km circuit that comprised the two main roads simply for the exercise. We also visited some waterfalls whilst here. Waterfalls doesn’t sound at all inspiring but any place where water collected in a pool deep enough to swim in was a welcome escape from the heat. Some of the falls were lovely; perfect turquoise pools surrounded by tropical vegetation looked stunning.

Mmmmm..... Waterfalls


Nightlife in Laos is somewhat tame with its two bars generally closing no later than 23:30. Because of the limited number of watering holes bumping into people was unavoidable and welcomed: Our ‘family’ unit grew and bonded until, having shed people traveling in different directions or simply too lazy to up and move, we formed a close group: The nomadic nine.

We moved on to Vang Vieng which has, according to Lonely Planet, become a right of passage for backpackers. The only real activity here is to hire a huge inner tube from a tractor tire and float down the Mekong. The floating was real boring, achingly so because my arms became paddles, but the stops on the river were something different. Bunched relatively close together were zip lines and rope swings into the river. The height of these swings increased as we moved further down the river; I was happy to swing from 20 feet, no more thanks! Not even the Dutch courage duped me to climb to the 35ft swing. Hilarity prevailed each time Paul used the swing, for some reason he couldn’t hold on to it. As his forth attempt approached the crowd grew silent in anticipation of yet another catastrophic belly flop; he didn’t let anyone down. It’s such a shame water and cameras don’t mix because the photos would have been hilarious.

Apart from this we didn’t really do much the only other highlight was the cycle to a lagoon for a swim, again to avoid the excruciatingly humid heat, and visiting its caves: Caves set into the karst topography of the area which involved a lot of climbing through narrow passages in pitch black, with only flip-flops on and one small 20watt torch between me Paul and Becky. We bottled it. To humiliate myself further I should add that our guides were ten year old children also climbing in flip flops but as we all know, children are fearless.

Expanding on my earlier point: “laid back; horizontally at most times”. No better example can be found than the resort restaurant in Vang Vieng. The standard procedure for eating in a restaurant usually involves a pattern similar, if not identical to this:

1. Take a seat and be issued with menu.
   
2. Staff take my order.
   
3. Food arrives; munch, munch, munch. Yum.
   
4. Pay bill, decide whether to leave tip (haha! tip)
   

Instead try this:

1. Take a seat and after five minutes decide you should probably collect your own menu.
   
2. Wait for staff to take order.
   
3. Oh no the staff aren’t coming. Engage legs to walking mode, place order at counter.
   
4. Not always but very often the wrong food arrives, tell them so and they look so distraught; like telling a child they can’t have sweets.
   
5. Eventually the correct food arrives and it’s good.
   
6. Pay bill and decide how long to wait around for the correct change to be issued. Usually this is because they don’t have the currency to break your notes therefore they say “tip, tip”. All together now: “Non, non”
   
   OR
   
   Pay bill and be given too much change back and correct the balance for them.
   

Okay, so that is a shit story but the point I’m trying to get at is this: Laos is a very poor country with a GDP per capita of [according to BBC News website] US $470. In order for this resort and it’s staff to earn more money surely it would help if they perhaps paid a little attention to customers and take the order for them. Getting the order correct wouldn’t be a bad idea either, it would surely avoid wastage, oh and to ask for a tip after this?! I’m not trying to sound tight or terrible here, more reflective: If they could just wake up and put a little effort into their jobs perhaps they could earn more.

We leave the capital tomorrow, Wednesday, on a flight to Siem Reap, Cambodia, to visit the temples of Angkor Wat, they look really impressive: I just hope we can avoid the unexploded ordnance (thank you very much U.S.A) and bandits.


Relaxing after a lazy day in Vang Vieng

Photos from Laos

I've begun writing a blog entry but not completed it yet so here are some photos from Laos.

Bringing you up to date... Almost (Bangkok)

I tried to type something here yesterday and the sheer size of the task scared me away. Over two weeks without an typing will result in an economical entry but I will endeavour to mention most events transpired.

Way back to Bangkok
Bangkok itself isn't particularly memorable; we visited the Grand Palace, two of the thousands of wats; basically shrines/temples, the Tiger Temple, a floating market, the Snake museum and several bars. Bangkok was also where I saw Chelsea lift the F.A. Cup the scummers.

The Grand Palace was large, with lots of fancy architecture; mostly Wats and a gun museum. It looked nice but other than that I cannot really get that excited about it which is a shame as a lot of people there did. Because of the sheer number of Wats in Bangkok- and Thailand as a whole -they just blend into the landscape as a row of terraced houses do in Britain. A pointed fact being that British houses aren't gold plated and made from tiny mosaics of tile and mirror can be stated by Wat-lovers but I just tired of them. And now for the contradiction: Wat Po. This was good; a huge golden reclining Buddha lies chilling out as a steady stream of tourists whirl by trying to fit the entire guy into a 35mm shot.

The Grand Palace


To escape Bangkok we enrolled on a day long excursion to Kanchanaburi, 35km from Burma, to visit the floating, seemingly recession hit, market, the death railway bridge, the Tiger Temple and a Snake Museum.

Envisage a market, any market; think people shouting, low prices and an eclectic mix of both the old and the economically challenged. Next add one part Thailand, one part canal, stalls transformed into long boats, most, if not all that is sold is fruit and the cliental become a bunch of tourists there to gawp and spend either 50p on Dragon Fruit or 5 minutes arguing it's price before buggering off: You have the floating market. Okay, i'm being a bit negative on the old girl, she did provide an insight on how some Thai's probably once traded and made a living (about 50 years ago) but the exuberant foreign crowd made this little more than a exhibition. I did go four yards out of my way to purchase a mango and 'put something back' but it was quite a poor showing. Most of the purchasing power sourced either Sterling, Euros or Dollars. In fact, we managed to count, excluding the traders, maybe ten Thai's.

Floating Market


After the market we visited the snake museum at which we saw 'man hold cobra', 'cobra sharp TEETH, look AT the poison', 'watch as Mongoose fight the Cobra, LOOK AT THE MONGOOSE! Cobra can die in 5 minutes and Mongoose always winner' and of course the famous 'man who take on three snake AT THE SAME TIME'. The M.C. added to the entertainment here, he spoke good English but had a habit of littering his announcements with inappropriate over emphasisations. Watching a mongoose beat a Cobra in a fight was impressive, I never would have thought it. Later came the 'man who take on leaping snake; snake can leap 3 metres', perhaps purposefully the performer decided to slip over while spinning the snake and tossed it in our direction resulting a mass exodus of the front rows as the snake attempted to hurdle the small 3ft wall.

Stoopid Cobra Man


We took a brief detour to the death railway bridge; 258miles of railway between Bangkok, Thailand and Rangoon, Burma, was built by the Imperial Japanese Empire during World War II, to support its forces in the Burma campaign. Constructed by Prisoners of War (POWs) the name comes from the staggering number of deaths during the project: 116,000. It was simple a bridge and there wasn't really much of the history available to explain the devastation of the project. I did however find this humourous artwork on the museum wall:



Artwork in the Death Railway Museum.


Next stop was the Tiger Temple, here the Tigers are serene with the bliss of morphine and other opiates, sorry, I mean, er... [sic]

Next stop was the Tiger Temple, here the Tigers have, over the years, lived in peaceful co-existance with Buddhist monks. The lifestyle at Wat Pha Luang Ta Bua (yes it's another Wat) has calmed the Tigers as they too experience the benefits of the monks' tranquil teachings, restricting chains and allow tourists to gaze into their distantly glazed calm eyes. As the Tigers were being walked back to their cages, ah the cage: Standardised peaceful buddhist co-existance, one broke free and made a runner for the cages. As expected everyone shit themselves, "Stand still and tiger will not hurt you" were the calming words from a trainer. Yeah right, I thought, a huge cat is coming at me, 'I think i'll stand still'. Anyways, they caught him and chained him and humiliated him by allow us tourists to take turns walking him back.

Chiang Mai
Moving north we made Chiang Mai our next destination, here we took a day long Thai cooking course and pushed ourselves to some kind of limit with a three day jungle trek. The cooking course was great; every dish I cooked I ate so was stuffed. I can't wait to get home and try the recipes out.

Jungle trekking was also great fun. I was initially reluctant to take part: Climbing and Descending through dense jungle in 35^oC heat sounded painful; it was, but it was also extremely rewarding when we reached our destination. oh, and the beer: I've never worked harder for a ice cold beer than I did during these three days.

The first day consisted of an hour long Elephant ride during which the Elephant made damn sure we knew who was boss by spraying us with water every time we ventured close to rivers. I never really appreciated the size of these magnificent animals until, when asked to climb onboard, I had to walk on, and across, her head, then shoulder-blades before taking my seat in the cage.



Time to cool down


We were blesed with a friendly group of people to trek with and on the first evening we had several beers and generally talked a lot of shit. Day two was a solid six hours of walking with a one hour swimming break at a waterfall. Again, followed by beers. Day three saw us abandon our walking shoes (after two hours) and pad up for white-water rafting. As the 'captain' explained the instructions I was distracted by two mating Elephants in the distance. The instructions kept coming and so did the Elephant until eventually both went silent and where the Elephant disembarked we, on the contrary, boarded our vessel. The monsoon rains hadn't yet hit so the river wasn't too deep and it made for a pretty unadventurous course but it was still fun, swimming in the 3ft deep water was the best part.



White-water rafting.


Our next stop is Laos, and as mentioned in my previous post we were transported to their yesterday on the slowest, most uncomfortable boat that could have been designed. We arrived in Luang Prabang on Thursday 31st and after forty-five minutes of looking for a room, in the baking heat, carrying 20kgs, we found one. Amazingly we met up with the Irish lads from Kuala Lumpur before we set sail (tourist trails are exactly that!) and have been hanging out in rather un-Irish style the last couple of nights: Sober. OK, that brings the blog up to date. Hopefully I won't get so far behind again, though I know this to be a Fallacy.