Vietnam

Vietnam

You Buy Something!! 

It is at this point in the adventure that I feel it is important to point out to any of you who don’t know, that Erin will pet any dog. Any dog. No really.  In addition to this she can find a dog to pet almost anywhere.  This was exemplified extremely clearly by the Cambodia Vietnam border. While waiting on the Vietnam side of the boarder for our passports to come back to us and for the border officials to finish doing whatever mojo they do. Erin disappeared for a few minutes and re-emerged holding a puppy. Erin! Where did the puppy come from? Obviously it came from that sketchy ledge by the stairs over there. Look there are 6 more. So she spent the next half an hour playing with random puppyies and trying not to get her pants or her sandals too chewed on.

The first large city we stopped in was Saigon.  Here we witnessed a wealth of motorbikes not seen in other parts of the world. It was in this place that we learned once again how to cross the road…. Make sure there are not too many buses coming. Then just walk. Look at the drivers and keep a steady pace. Don’t run. Don’t go back. They will swerve around you. Wait. What? Yeah. Really. This was the standard road crossing procedure. Or as Erin and I like to call it. “Lets go follow a local time”. It is very useful to cross the street using a local. Especially if they are old. Then you can assume they have done this successfully many times before and you have a good chance of making it across if you just follow close behind them.  I would like to take this opportunity to state that these people will carry anything on the back of a motorbike.   It never ceases to amaze me how many people, bags, items of furniture, livestock ,bikes or all of the above people can carry on a single motorcycle.

In Saigon we went to the Cu Chi tunnels. It was here that we witnessed the greatest display of anti-American propaganda ever, in the form of a war education video.  It was hilarious in the political incorrectness of it.  Complete with sayings like. This simple farm girl who defeated 18 American tanks was given the American killer award. Or the Americans descended like demons upon the simple farmer folk. Oh yeah. It was good stuff. After the video we went to see the tiny trap door style tunnel entrances and then the large hole style tunnel entrances. Then… we went into the tunnels. Erin and I got as far as the first level. And decided there was no freaking way. So we went back out and stayed above ground. Bats were encountered in the tunnel. I have no regrets. Following the tunnels we went to the war remnants museum. The pictures and stories of the agent orange victims was enough to make you cry. The whole thing needed to be taken with a grain of salt or maybe a spoon full given that it was also heavily anti American but it was interesting to get their side of the story.

Following Saigon we got to have our first of 2 overnight train adventures.  We had a 17 hour train ride from Saigon to Hoi An. It was a very long night. Well it was less bad then say a 17 hour plane ride in many ways… well more in just one way. In that you had a bed and could lay down and sleep. The food was in a train car 11 cars away from us. It was a bit strange to walk all that way. When I got there I was glad to have packed food and just got the bottle of water I came for. I noticed a few things about trains at this point. The blue cars smell way worse then the yellow cars… for no reason at all. There was also the strange occurrence of people sleeping in what I can only consider storage closets with their bodies half in the closet and half in the hall way.  I’m sure they pay extra for that. By the end of the trip we had managed to sleep a few hours and were really ready to be getting off the train in favor of sitting in a car so we could finally get to Hoi An.

Hoi An was a neat city. We stayed near the “Ancient town” and had a good time wandering through the old streets and shops. We took some time in Hoi An to visit the tailor shops they are famous for and got some new clothing.  It was here that we spent new years eve. After a long and fairly expensive meal we walked down to the river. I floated some lanterns and we went back to our hotel room in time to panic over missing the new year and then have the last few sips of amarula.

After leaving Hoi An it was once again time for really long train adventures. After we got off this train we got on a van that took us to halong bay so we could spend the night on a Junk boat. Yes they really call them Junk boats. Even in the advertisements. Come spend some time on the Imperial junk boat…. Yeah… I don’t know why they call it that either. The islands were amazing and it was very beautiful to just watch them pass by on the boat. The cruse also came with some other activities. First we stopped to go climb around in some caves. The cave was really big and was fun to wander through. The next stop was for kayaking. This was also fun but there was quite the fear that we would tip into the water. It was not particularly warm out. In fact it was a bit drizzly and damp anyhow. So we didn’t really want to go in the water. After kayaking I did end up going into the water anyhow because. Hey why not. It was very cold and I got out very quickly.

Later that evening we spent some time singing karaoke and squid fishing. I suspect however we were not so much squid fishing as playing with sticks and string. But it was amusing.  It is at this point that I would like to make a comment about Vietnam and a strange phenomenon we discovered there. In Vietnam there is a woman with a cart or a store or a boat who is always trying to sell you something… the siren call that she gives to entice you into her shop is always the same “You Buy Something!” screeched at a level unfit for human ears. She is relentless. She is everywhere. No seriously. Everywhere. We encountered this woman on the street, in the caves, on the kayak dock.  Even in the middle of the night while you are out at sea trying to go squid fishing .  she is there in a boat staring up at you hopefully on the off chance you want some pringles. In this particular case I did want a chocolate bar. Unfortunately for both of us she did not have a kit kat.

After our boat adventure we set on out back to Hanoi and prepared for a long and daunting journey back across the ocean to Honduras. 

Cambodia

Cambodia

Cullinary Adventure and Excitement... 

Our adventure into Cambodia started first with a ride in a disco van from Bangkok. Yes A disco van. There is no other way to describe it. There was lights and huge speakers all over the inside of it. Thankfully as it was 6 am when we left. None of this was turned on. Cambodia was an interesting country. A lot of it was swamp land. This means a lot of it floods all the time. The people here seemed to have dealt with this by trying to put houses on stilts and make the most of it by growing rice. Lots and lots of rice. They also harvested crickets in the big swampy fields. Mmm crickets… yes I did try one. No I did not go back for seconds.  

Aside from the bug eating Cambodia had a few other very prevalent quirks. The first of which is that for a very poor country things seemed expensive. The reason for this is most likely that they did not have their own currency. Well they did but nobody used it. The American dollar is what they use in all the transactions. This created a problem because they only used the paper money and had none of the change. The local currency could sometimes be used as change but for the most part things were just rounded to the dollar. So things that in Thailand would have cost you .30$ were now 1$... this made it seem very expensive. However you could still get a massage or a manicure for about 3$ which made things feel cheep. The second really notable occurrence was the Tuk Tuk’s. yes they had some in Thailand… but they didn’t have them like Cambodia. In Cambodia you cant walk 5m without somebody coming up to you and saying ”Tuk Tuk!” and that’s it. Just people in your face yelling tuk tuk… really weird. Even if you just got out of a Tuk Tuk you will walk a few meters and be asked if you want another one. No! There were times when I wanted to just throw my hands in the air and go running down the screed yelling. I just want to walk!!!  Apart from the tuk tuk the most common way to travel seemed to be by karaoke bus. Yes karaoke. For reasons I can not explain and really don’t want to know most of the busses seemed to advertise for karaoke on board. We managed to avoid much of this but there was one particular bus that had very loud music in a language I really couldn’t understand. This may have been the over hyped karaoke. In all this however I have to say the strangest thing I witnessed in Cambodia was at a bus station. In many countries we have witnessed people carrying liquids in plastic bags. Drinks tied up in a bag with a straw like how you bring home a goldfish. But this was different. This man was walking past me with a shopping bag full to the top with water. It was not tied. He had no smaller bags. There was no discernible reason for him to be holding it. What are you going to do with that? How far are you going with it? How do you plan to put that down? What do you need that for? How are you going to drink that? Go to your kitchen and fill a plastic shopping bag with water and see if you can answer any of these questions for me… I cant figure it out. As the man sloshed past us I pointed it out to Erin needing conformation that I had just seen this. It was true, I have no explanation.

The first major activity was visiting the Angkor temples at Seim Reap. The day started really a lot earlier then anybody would have liked. But we all wanted to see the sunrise…. So we trucked out of the hotel at about 4 in the morning to wait around and be eaten by bugs beside a swamp waiting for the sun to rise above the temple of Angkor Wat.  We had front row seats but the view was disappointing. The weather chose not to cooperate and the clouds prevented a really nice sunrise.  We spent the next 10 ish hours exploring the temple complex. We made it through about 4 large sized temples. After the first 2 Erin was at here temple max but did her best to get through the rest of them. The architecture was beautiful as were the stories that surrounded the buildings. A lot of the carvings depicted seens from Hindu mythologies.  the most interesting of the temples was one that they had not fully restored. In this one they had left the trees growing though the buildings. In most of the temples these had been removed but they wanted to show what the temples had looked like before restoration had begun. I think it would have been much neater if they left them all like that. The roots growing through the stonework created a very interesting combination. I spent much of the day taking pictures of everything. After all was said and done I took nearly 300. It was a bit excessive yes but I was having a good time. It was a long and exhausting day that found us watching the sunset from a large hill overlooking the temple complex.

The other side of Cambodia is not quite so friendly. As a result of years of fighting and oppressive leadership Cambodia has the unfortunate distinction of being the most heavily land mined country in the world.  We went to the war museum and the killing fields to see more closely the kinds of things you usually read about in a text book.  The stories we heard about families thrown out of their homes and forced to work in farm camps were heart breaking. The faces of the victims and child soldiers looking at us from the walls of the museum are the kinds of things that don’t go down easy. many years of slaughter and fighting have left Cambodia with a population that has just had to forget and move on. With many of the leaders responsible for the slaughter granted amnesty they have no choice but to leave the past behind.  So much of the population was killed that more then 50% are under the age of 18 with less then 4% over the age of 60.

Erin and I were fortunate enough to spend Christmas in Cambodia. We found ourselves in a beach town called soukomvill. Christmas eve we had a BBQ dinner on the beach and I had a chance to play with fire for the first and what looks like only time on this trip. Erin went with some people on our tour to an all night beach dance party on a private island.  We celebrated on Christmas morning with hot chocolate and amarula then headed out to another reclusive island for a day of lying in the sand.  The water was beautiful and clear and warm. It was a fantastic way to spend our Christmas. The next morning we got up early to call home on everybody elses Christmas and set sail towards Vietnam… once again in a bus with Karaoke on it. 

Thailand

Thailand

... Now with 50% more 80's music... 

After what was probably the most annoying airport stay ever we arrived In Bangkok sleepy, annoyed and hungry for noodles.  It was with this fire in our hearts that we descended upon our hostel and had a nap. Durring our time in Thailand we had 2 stays in Bangkok our first was fortuitously “One night in Bangkok allowing me to play bad 80’s music. Our second was 2 nights making the 80’s music less appropriate.

Our first trip in and around Bangkok was spent mostly looking for food. For some reason we had a remarkably hard time with this. Our wanderings led us eventually to the flower market where I witnessed some of the most spectacular flower based structures ever. There was block after block of beautiful and wonderfully underpriced flowers in all sorts of configurations. It was here in this vast array of flowers that we found food finally. Street food for me and for the first time since we left home western fast food for Erin, on the basis that any pot containing several duck carcases was probably not vegetarian.  It was later this evening that Erin and I took our first Tuk Tuk ride. For those of you unfamiliar with a tuk tuk, it is for the most part a motorcycle front with a covered bench seat in the back.  It is a very interesting mode of transport. In some ways it is seen as a bit of a touristy thing and in some places you will be charged more for the hair raising privilege. It is not that the vehicles themselves are inherently unsafe it is just that you end up with a lot less vehicle between you and the rest of the traffic. This makes it somewhat nerve racking given the way these people drive.  Despite some interesting run ins with getting lost, walking down sketchy roads and driving past really creepy human looking monk statues we made it back safely and went to bed excited for the next 2 elephant filled weeks.

The elephant volunteer project was an interesting overall very fun experience. As some of you may know I approach the subject of elephants with a certain amount of caution having had somewhat of a run in with one in Africa some years ago.  For the most part the elephants here were very gentle. The exception being one young male who after being forced to dance to beg for food from tourists has developed a tendency to throw rocks at people. He is not nice and will smack you with his trunk if he can.  I cant say I blame him to be fair most people would throw rocks if treated the same way. A lot of our elephants had heartbreaking stories that I might not go into detail about. The general overview is this. Elephants are wild animals. They don’t just let you ride them. They don’t just dance on the street for fun. They don’t like to work in logging camps. In order to get an elephant to do these things they are taken away from their mothers as infants and tortured for days until their spirits are broken and they can start being trained. Paying for elephant rides, to see their tricks, or feeding them in the streets tells these people that you support this treatment and want these practices to continue.  Instead, we paid to enter the national park and see elephants in the wild as they should be, afraid of humans not mad at them.

When it comes to working with elephants it is important to remember that elephants are big and they eat a lot. So this brings us to the dilemma of. What do you feed 6 elephants every day. The answer is banana trees. One could summarize working with elephants by saying you are basically moving banana trees from one place to another.  In an average day one elephant will eat 8 to 12 banana trees. Yes 8 to 12. Now for the most part elephants are picky so this means they do not eat all of a banana tree. They eat the leaves and love the really leafy part but for the most part will not eat the stock in the center. Opting instead to stand on part of it and slide their trunk up the centre to gather up the good bits. The food is then generally played with and smacked across their shins for what I have been told is to soften it so they can eat it and but I suspect it is just cuz they like to play with their food and really, who is going to tell an elephant not to? When it comes to the trunk of a banana tree we cut them up into elephant bite sized pieces. If you have never seen a banana tree it is structurally similar to a cinimon bun. You have a really sweet juicy part in the middle followed by a slightly less juicy bit just around that and so forth till you get to the crunchy outer layer that nobody really likes that much. Well if you are an elephant, particularly a very large very old elephant nobody is going to tell you to eat your crusts.  All the elephants prefer the center bit and some of the older ones will only eat the very center and a bit of the next few layers leaving for us a lot of banana tree to haul back out of the enclosure. Some of the elephants (particularly the one aptly nick named monster munch) will eat just about everything but the far outer layer.

Knowing now that an average elephant eats 10 ish trees a day and that we have some 6 elephants we need about 60 banana trees a day. This brings us to the banana tree harvest portion of our story. I would like to at this point note that banana trees are heavy and often frequented by large hairy spiders, ants and strange juices.  It is when you encounter these spiders and realize they are on something that is on you that you realize the trees are not to heavy to be thrown in terror.  The banana harvest starts out by getting into the back of a large ish truck with sides just high enough to sit comfortably against… well comfortably if you remember you are sitting in the bed of a truck.  Next you walk into a field full of trees that have already had the one crop of bananas they will produce in their life and you start hacking at them with a machete. And you stack the truck. I would like to point out that carrying a banana tree on your shoulder has some inherent risks in it. Most of these having to do with there being a lot of fluid in a banana tree that will flow onto you given half a chance. It is not pleasant.  Once you have filled the truck with banana trees it is time to go home. Since there are now banana trees in your spot you sit on top of the pile and try not to think about how perilous this is as you dodge low hanging branches on the ride home.  For the most part I found that it was possible to escape many of the branch related perils by lying down on the pile of trees. This has it’s own risks and makes it feel much more like you are going to fall off at any moment.

Now you may have gotten the idea that taking care of elephants is all banana based boredome.. see what I did there. If I recall English class correctly that was alliteration. Anyhow while it is true that much of elephant maintenance is banana tree based there are parts that are not. There is the washing of the elephants… picture a water fight with a house… yeah you get wet. There is also the swimming with the elephants where you are also likely to get wet. Every day we also get to try and make a toy that takes more than 5 minutes for an elephant to destroy… it is not easy to make a toy sturdy enough to withstand an elephant stomping on it for more than a few minutes to get the fruit out of it.

The elephant sanctuary was a very fun 2 weeks. We had a fantastic room mate who wrote a song about one of the elephants we had there. I highly recommend you watch the you tube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSx7xNGUsk0) I would also like to note that I made good friends with a girl from Australia because she showed me her ass…

I suppose I should elaborate on that one. She was showing me a mosquito bite. But she had a fire spinning tattoo beside said bite. It was at this point we both realized we fire spin and went running back to our rooms to get poi and contact balls so we could play. It was really really nice to have somebody to play with even without fire.  In addition to the extra curricular activities at the center such as movie night and karaoke fun time we had the pleasure of being in Thailand for the kings birthday. The people here really love their king. So for the kings birthday we all wandered into the nearby town to go celebrate with them. And boy was it interesting. One would think. Hey town sponsored event. Government funding maybe… perhaps the local authorities would be involved in the event…

Well you would probably not be able to guess what the outcome was. There was the speeches and the monks giving prayers and blessings to the king. Annnnd then came the fire works. They did not have to go far to get to us. Probably 20m away behind the sound truck was where they were being launched from. There was not even a sound delay as they exploded over head. It was vaguely terrifying. Next on the list of unsafe fire activities was the paper lanterns. This could have been just a really neat adventure if not for the power lines. Yes power lines. Lots of them criss crossing over the crowd. Now some of you may see where this is going but for those of you who cant. Some of the flying lanterns got stuck in the power lines… but no worrys we’ve got a guy with a long stick to try and poke it out. Turns out the stick was not long enough so he got a stack of plastic chairs. Where was the fire department. Where was the ambulance… where was the guy with a longer stick. Eventually the lantern floated down on it’s own but not without first seriously considering burning through another of the power lines. And then started the big fountainish fire works right in the middle of the crowd of people… not 2m from said power lines. It was a night full of fun and fire related close encounters. Amazingly nobody got hurt and the monks packed up the sound truck and drove home.

Nepal

Nepal

Otherwise Know as… Dammit Im cold 

Nepal was a very interesting country. So close to India, surrounded on 3 sides by India and yet so not like India. Nepal can best be described as everything I wanted out of India only better than I had expected. This is not to say it did not have a few… quirks? The pre paid usually safe and good option cab we got from the airport to the hostel was… pushed up to the front of the cab line… and I was fairly sure it was not going to make it into the city. Good thing it was mostly down hill from the airport.  Once at our hostel we realized we were in the heart of thamel the lively business and tourist district of the city. It was amazing. There was little shops selling everything from prayer flags to super heavy duty trekking snow suits. There was an abundance of clothing shops selling what have to be the coolest pants on the planet.  The unfortunate part about these clothing shops being they are clearly designing clothing for people half my size. The people here are not only on average a foot shorter then me but they are a lot thinner. It was a most annoying phenomenon for me to wander through a shop prepared to buy just about every item of clothing in it only to have them be not just a bit to small but significantly to small.  But persistence won out and I did manage to find a collection of really fun clothing. Apart from shopping ( which we did a lot of) we also embarked on a 3ish day hike in the mountains near Kathmandu valley. Day one of our adventure saw us climbing stairs for the better part of 4 hours. Yes stairs. In the mountains. It has come to my notice that in other parts of the world they treat their mountains differently than we do in Canada. Back home we have tons of space so we see the mountains as something to be looked at and occasionally hiked up or slid down. Not here. Here they see it as valuable real estate. People build things all the way up. To be fair we were not in the really crazy mountains and were nowhere near mount Everest or those mountains. But still these were high enough that back home nobody would have bothered to build on them.  Regardless we found ourselves walking up stairs. I have to say climbing stairs was way harder then just walking up a mountain would have been. It was a really nice walk however and it was neat to stop and have lunch at a little tea house along the way. It was just after this point that we acquired a dog. I am not sure how this happened but at some point we noticed that a cute little dog was following us. Well more like leading the way and wagging his tail. Little did we know that this dog picks people up along the path and follows them up the mountain every day. That night we stopped at around 2pm at our hotel for the night. It had a beautiful view and the sunrise the next morning was fantastic. But for a minute lets talk about how boring it is to sit around for 6 or 7 hours till you think it is reasonable to go to sleep. Because we knew we would be hiking neither of us was bringing extra stuff. No books, no ipod, no cards nothing. In the end we bought a deck of cards each and spent some time playing among other games Vs solitar. Yes. Solitair against eachother. This degenerated into cheating and then things got really ugly.  So after an evening spent playing cards and drinking our body weight in tea we were faced with going to bed. This may not seem like a daunting task but you never saw this room. We have pictures but it is hard to really do justice to this space. The bathroom is really not even worth going into detail about other then to mention there was a window at about shoulder height with no glass in it going into the hallway and a huge window at about chest height looking into the bedroom.  It was special to say the least. I would now like to say something about how cold it was. I know it is ridicule worthy to say we were freezing at 5C but honestly we were freezing. This probably has a lot to do with having until very recently been in a country where the average temperature was damb it’s hot.  So after putting on every item of clothing we brought and climbing into sleeping bags under some extra blankets we tried to go to sleep. It was about at this time that erin mentioned how indefensible our location was. And that the lack of windows that lock or really windows at all in the case of the bathroom ment that anybody could come in. with that thought now resolutely lodged my my head I decided to share with her that given how witchcraft works we are not safe even if we had locked doors and a moskito net. After spending the better part of the next 10 minutes laughing we went to sleep.

The following day was met with a much nicer hike. We could just about make out mount Everest peaking its face out over the shorter closer mountains. The best part of this hike was probably the absence of stairs.

Following our hiking adventure we had what I would call adventures on public transportation. Starting off from the tea house were we spent night 2 we walked down a hill to catch a public bus. Now everybody in the known universe knows that public busses are crowded and not overly comfortable. I have never before however been on a bus where it was acceptable when no other seats were available to sit with the driver on your lap. I had thought that no matter where you went there was probably some rules or general guidelines that everybody followed when it came to road safety. Oh how wrong I was.

Following our transit adventure which involved jumping on and off everything from busses to very small tripod like trucks?  we finally made it to the temples part of the adventure. First on the list was one of the largest buddest temples in the world.  It was really an impressive sight with a lot of detail around the edges and smaller temple buildings around the main structure. The part I found strange was the huge number and variety of shops and hotels right on the temple grounds. It was weird to me that just a meter of sidewalk stood between a huge temple and everyday life.  That day consisted of another 2 temples putting us at just over Erin’s max tolerance for buildings. The only thing that got us to the 3^rd temple was the promise of monkeys, and even then she waited outside because the monkeys could be found outside the walls just as easy as inside.

The next adventure involved tigers. Well it was supposed to involve tigers. Just like our last unsuccessful tiger adventure. This adventure started with drinking really really delicious masala tea made by some guy on the street while waiting for yet another public bus.  Seriously though I had about 3 cups of this stuff.

It was again on this trip that I noticed that the only thing worse than the way people drive is the way they build roads.  First of all it is important to note this was a narrow twistey mountain road with a rock face on one side and a drop into oblivion on the other. The last thing you want in this situation is a big chunk of nothing in your road way with nothing but a few branches warning you that now is the time to swerve.  Second of all, and I may be wrong but I doubt it. Mixing ashphalt at the side of the road with a shovel is not going to give you a good mix. Just saying maybe you would have less holes in your road ready to flip the unsuspecting driver into the river if you paid more attention to your pavement.

After arriving in Chitiwan national park we had lunch and set off on our jeep safari. Yes a jeep safari. Not an elephant safari. No we are not afraid of elephants, we just don’t want to ride one. It was remarkably hard to convince people to just please get us a jeep. Not everybody thinks it is a good idea to ride elephants. And if more people didn’t think it was a good thing we would have far less of them being  mistreated and chained to posts for most of their lives. But that is a rant best left for later. So off we go on our jeep crazy man who knows more then 2 species of birds. ( kingfishers and peacocks) as we drove to the park we felt like this was going to be a safari reminiscent of India. We drove up and then back down the same paved road through some trees and called it a “safari” Im not sure if I would have been impressed with this interpretation even if I had not been to Africa… but having just been in Africa we were still really unimpressed. We did see some deer and a few really large crocodiles. As well we found kingfishers ( being as previously mentioned a mythical bird that exists all over the world when somebody cant remember the actual name) peakocks, storks and the occasional bush pig. Still no tigers.  After driving back down the same road again we arrived at the lodge for dinner and then a dance show. Oh what a dance show it was.

Still a bit wary of local dance shows from the pigmey incident we went to this hall that had a real stage and seats and even a painted set background. This might be good we thought. Oh optimism.

In retrospect the best part of the whole evening was probably the announcers voice.  It was naisley and flamboyant with very painstakingly articulated words that still managed to have an accent.  The dances were for the most part really good and looked like they had been practiced and were preformed with skill and smiles. As far as the dances went the best ones are probably a tie between the fire dance and the large man-sized straw peacock dance.  No. I am not going to explain any further then that you get to make your own assumptions.

After leaving the national park we again went back to thamel for some last minute shopping and said good bye to Nepal. I for one would for sure be back… if only because eventually I am going to need new pants.