Vietnam and Beyond

So we have been extremely slack on our blog and apologise very much for that.

We have just arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal after 10 days in Tibet. China bans Facebook and Blogs so we do have an excuse!

As you probably know we spent nearly 3 months travelling (partly by bicycle) in Vietnam, we hope to make a blog entry about this in the future but would like to concentrate on the more recent China and Tibet for now.

Nick and Jo who we were travelling with were much better at keeping their blog updated to be found at: www.crazyguyonabike.com/nickandjo We have updated our photos on the right hand side and are working on a China and Tibet entry as we speak.

We will endeavour to be more up-to-date from now on - so please stay tuned.

Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat is a massive complex of temples up to 1000 years old. The main temple is the most famous and is considered the largest religious building ever constructed. It is surrounded by a massive moat which is almost as amazing a feat of construction as the temple, which has no mortar or anything like that, just perfectly shaped blocks of stone that all fit together.

We decided to explore the temples by bicycle with Jo and Nick, to see the whole shebang involves doing two loops of 26 and 16km. We took three days to see everything and I think I speak for all of us, but by the end of the 3rd day we were bloody sick of temples. The favourite of ours was Ta Proem, a ruin that has been left to the elements to a certain extent with big trees growing all over the old buildings. Unfortunately now it is most famous as "the one from Tombraider, with Angelina Jolie".

At each temple along the path there was a massive bank of restaurant/souvenir stalls and before you had even got off your bike, you heard cries of "you want water sir?", "something to eat sir?" said in almost pleading voices...I guess when you have 25 restaurants all next to each other, all identical in every way, competition is fierce, especially in low season.

On day two, our visit coincided with celebrations to mark the one year anniversary of Angkor Wat being named as a UNESCO world heritage sight, we saw lots of school kids with musical instruments. We also had a long argument with the gate keeper at one of the temples because we didn't have a hole in our ticket. He couldn't give us our hole, only a perfectly round hole punched by the guy 5km away would do, so Nick rode back and got our holes for us. On the last day we also met a Polish guy on his bicycle who had cycled all the way from Poland! He had clocked up 20,000km cycling through Iran, Pakistan, India etc. amazing!

The nearby town of Siem Reap (which translates as Defeat of Thailand, no love lost there...I think the history is that Thailand and Cambodia were engaged is a battle for a temple on the border, which Cambodia won in the end, also I think the Thais invaded Angkor centuries ago) was tourism central. There were heaps of bars, restaurants, hotels, it was all a bit overwhelming. We found a nice local place to eat called Mr. Grill, which we morphed into Dr. Beef, and spent a few hours there drinking mini beer kegs at our table and eating grilled stuff. We spent our spare time playing 4-player canasta, it is 6-5 to the girls at the moment.

Anyways, I'll let the photos speak for themselves. Don't feel the need to make any special trips to see a temple now after seeing the mother of them all.

Cambodia - Part 1 - What do you mean it's 4US$

Phnom Penh - Siem Reap
July 1 - July 15 2009

As soon as I was on the mend (apart from the aforementioned hideous purple rash) we headed across the border to Cambodia, the plan was to make it to Siem Reap by Monday 6 July to meet up with Jo and Nick, good mates of ours who have biked from Singapore yep that's right biked, more about that later! We caught the bus on 1 July from Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) and after two huge queues at the check point (and an extra $4US dollars each for the bus guys to fill in our visa applications!) and a few hours, we arrived in Phnom Penh. At about 2 million Phnom Penh is much smaller than HCMC and therefore a little less insane. Phnom Penh is a pretty well established city and you can get anything you want in this city. What we wanted was the Lleyton Hewitt vs. Andy Roddick Wimbledon quarter-final on a big screen. Which of course we found in a bar with a friendly owner from Adelaide!

We spent a few days simply wandering around the markets of Phnom Penh saving the museums, pagodas etc for when we return with Jo and Nick. One of the most bizarre aspects of Cambodia is the dual currency the Cambodian Riel and the US dollar. You go to an ATM (usually an ANZ) and you get US$ you catch a tuk-tuk or stay in a hotel it's quoted in US dollars. Basically it seems to work like this, there is fairly consistently 4,000 Cambodian Riel to the US dollar (although obviously the official rate varies) most things are quoted in US$ if you need change that is less than a dollar you receive it in Riel so it is not unusual to get a mixture of Riel and US$ in your change - what the? Anyway we are used to it now and have learned to barter effectively using this strange mixture of currency.

Phnom Penh is actually quite an attractive city with some stunning art deco and french colonial architecture and wide treed boulevards. The cities location next to a tributary of the Mekong certainly helps this as well. Unfortunately a lack of drainage infrastructure and rubbish collection can effect this ambiance, particularly in heavy rain. More on Phnom Penh later. On the 5 July we headed to Siem Reap where the plan was to meet up with Nick and Jo by Monday - they were riding their bicycles a couple of hundred k's from Thailand and were not sure how long it would take them. (The link to their blog, which they update way more often then us, is on the right under crazyguyonabike.com). It turns out that they arrived two days earlier and by 8pm Sat evening we were sharing some well deserved Angkor beers. Jo and I have known each other since high school and have had many an adventure in Oz, Asia, Africa and Europe and it has been great to catch up - we will travel together for a while now through Cambodia and onto the Mekong Delta into Vietnam. We have been so adventurous since we all met up that we spend several hours each day undertaking the guys vs gals Cambodian Canasta Championship (CCC)! Every now and then we drag ourselves away from the CCC to venture out to ride bicycles around Angkor one of UNESCO's most significant World Heritage sites (Angkor will be the subject of a future blog). Other people at our hotel actually participated in activities around Siem Reap like volunteer work at schools and orphanages and the like whilst we played cards and drank beer. This didn't last forever of course and we eventually began to again socialise with the outside world.

After a week or so in Siem Reap we caught a boat to Battambang according to the guide book it was to be the most picturesque boat ride in Cambodia. $18 US each for a boat ride seemed a bit steep but given it ended up being 9 hours maybe not! We were collected from our guesthouse at 6 in the morning the four of us and Jo and Nick's two bicycles, the Khmer guys walked us over to a ute that already had 6 people and their luggage sitting on the back, they piled in all of our luggage myself and Ben and then proceeded to put Jo and Nick's mountain bikes on top of all of us! Nick was directed to sit on the roof. Jo got a squashy seat in a minivan behind us! We considered this to be a bad sign for the boat trip ahead.

Ultimately it wasn't too bad (hint: take a cushion) card playing was not to be but the scenery was pretty interesting and we only broke down once, when the boat ran into a fishing net which was stuck in the propeller. The journey passed through Tonle Sap lake (one of the most productive inland fisheries in the world) past the floating villages which are villages built on boats that move up and down depending on the height of the river and then up a very narrow tributary which the boat didn't quite fit so we would crash into the reeds.

Spending time with Jo and Nick has made Ben and I very jealous of their much more independent method of transport (and made us realise how unfit we are!)

Ho Chi Minh Fever

June 1st - 14th

We flew into HCMC, Vietnam, on a very late night flight from Manila. We were relieved that the traffic was so light in this city...

Then the next morning, stepping out of our hotel room, after first being assaulted by jackhammers pounding on the other side of our wall, we were assaulted by everything else this city had to offer. Motorcycles EVERYWHERE, honking and weaving and mounting curbs and going the wrong way down streets. The roadside food, selling yummy tangy, spicy cuisine, a great changeup from the lacklustre FILIPINO food. Then there were the guys offering rides on there bikes - "Taxi sir?", "Motorbai sir?", "Where you go sir?"on every street corner and in between (they always seemed to approach me and not Taren). Then there are all the other people selling all sorts of stuff that you kind of need, but not really, and if you show the slightest bit of interest you are given the hard sell. There were also way more tourists here than wee had seen on any other part of the trip so far.

We visited the War Remnants Museum which tells the grim Vietnamese story of the American War (or the Vietnam War as we know it). Australia was mentioned on the information a few times, and we were one of the biggest serving countries in the war, but if you were from the US, you would have felt pretty bad about the things your government did which were described in the exhibition (chemical warfare for example). That's not to say the Vietnamese were angels by any stretch of the imagination - the stuff the Viet Cong were doing was pretty gruesome too. But when we left the museum, we were feeling a bit low as some of the pictures and descriptions were very tough to look at.

It was about the next day, the 3rd of June, that Taren started to show flu like symptoms - high fever, joint aches, headache, lethargy. After a couple of days of this, we took her to the doctor and they diagnosed Dengue Fever. The fever lasted about 8 days and a gruesome looking rash hung around for about a week or more after that (see gnarly picture). During this week and a half of rest and recovery we played a lot of Yahtzee, cards, read some books (Taren read a big fat stupid murder mystery thing in less than 24 hours), watched some TV, every now and then I would go out by myself and have a snoop around the city.

Once Taren had recovered enough, we ate some nice food together. One evening we went for a fish hotpot, where you boil up the raw ingredients in a big pot at your table. The waitresses didn't speak a word of English (which is great!) so we pointed at another table meaning we wanted to eat that too. The other table seemed pretty chuffed at this so they gave us a shot of vodka to celebrate, and we then watched what they did so we ate it properly (the trick is not to cook things for too long). They then offered us another shot or two, so wee bought a bottle too and repaid the favour a few more times, after a slowly eaten meal of a couple of hours we walked slowly home, there seemed to be twice as many motorcyles on the road this time!

The highlight of HCMC for me (Ben) though was the waterslide park, so much so that it deserves a whole blog post of its own...

The Philippines Part 2

The Visayas

10 - 17 June 2009

Hi again, Ben here in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, just getting my act together and writing about the rest of our Filipino adventure.

In the last episode, we were in Manila searching for yellow folders and poker games (none were found). What we did find was traffic, nice food, rain and a very interesting city to wander around in. Since we had a deadline because we had to book an onward flight out of here for immigration, we decided to skip the 66 hour return ferry ride to Cebu and took a $30 1 hour flight instead. Here is a bottle of rice wine next to a beer bottle. The rice wine we carried all the way from Banaue, a pick-me-up for the long bus ride to Manila.

Cebu was the old capital of the Philippines and is much further south in The Visayas. It is a good launching point for many of the other islands in the area which we were after. We spent the night there and got a ferry the next morning to Tagbilaran on the island of Bohol. Security on the ferry was tight. There was a giant X-ray machine (I think the operator was asleep). There was a man with a drum stick poking around in our bags as well (I don't think he was looking) and there was even a sniffer dog! (I think he was stolen from the pound)

We stayed in Alona Beach, a short tricycle ride from Tagbilaran and had some beach time. Taren was getting massaged by a lady within about 3 minutes of laying down. The water is warm and very salty here, so much so that when I went diving I had to carry almost double the weight I usually do to stay down. The beaches are nice enough, but they are no better than any Adelaide suburban beach.

The cute little furry fellas are called Tarsiers, called the world's smallest monkey they are actually a nocturnal member of the lemur family. While I went diving, Taren went of a trip to the Tarsier sanctuary. They look a bit like Gollum I think. You could fit two in the palm of your hand!

I went on a couple of dives here and saw some amazing coral and a lot of your typical tropical fish. There was a big school of jackfish swimming in a tornado formation, lionfish, clownfish etc etc. but the highlight was all the colourful corals. The dive trip was me and a family of 7 Americans from North Carolina, one of the women had a brand new digital camera she wanted to use. And boy did she use it...to give herself an excuse to kneel all over the beautiful colourful corals (and even a lionfish! Yes she knelt on a fish!) and knock at least 5 big chunks off, decades of growth. And that was just when I was looking! I felt like throwing her overboard on the way back, but she probably would have just stepped on something else, so I let her stay on the boat.

After Alona Beach we had one of those travelling days: 40 minute tricycle ride to Tagbilaran dock, 1 3/4 hour ferry trip to Cebu City, 10 minute taxi ride to the bus station, 4 hour bus ride to Maya on the north tip of Cebu island, 30 minute banca (a local-style boat) to Malapascua Island and then a 20 minute walk or so to BB's Guesthouse, where we deservedly had a King beer.

Malapascua is a small island with no cars (just motorbikes) only 2 km by 1 km in size. There were some nicer beaches here, in the main part of the island there was the 'tourist' beach, which was nice enough, and then the 'local' beach, which was covered in rubbish. I don't know why they can't just have a little bit more pride in their island and clean the whole thing up! Here is a picture of a man training up his chicken for cock fighting we presume. They list the two national sports here as basketball and cock fighting in the Lonely Planet.

I did a couple more dives here, saw a 4m Thresher shark (quite a rare shark I hear) on a dive at 6am, then later that day went on a second dive where I saw a whole buch of cool stuff: 4 frogfish (a fish that can walk and swim, dating back to prehistoric times - pictured) pipefish, pygmy seahorses and spotted shrimp, no turtles unfortunately, and no clumsy divers destroying everything either.

Taren and I spent 3 nights here, one of which saw Taren get bitten by a mosquito (more about that in the next post). This was a nice little quiet island, I'm sure it gets a bit busier in the high season. They say it will be the next Boracay, which is an island closer to Manila with more tourism and a party scene.

Later on we flew back to Manila and got caught in a real downpour, ankle deep water over road intersections, bags getting soaked. The next day I think we went to the movies (saw Drag Me To Hell - it was good), and at about 11pm the got on a plane to Ho Chi Minh City, where I write this post from.

Thanks for reading, see you next post!

Ben

The Phillipenes, or is it Philipines, or Phillippines... oh whatever Part 1

Northern Luzon

1 - 10 June 2009

It's been a while since the last blog entry, I know. We've been on the move around the Philippines (that is the correct spelling) flat chat. I'll limit this entry to our travels in the North.

Our first few hours in Clark and Dau bus station were bewildering to say the least. They drive these brightly painted jeepneys everywhere as minibuses. The traffic was appalling and it doesn't help that they all use their horns to express their feelings toward the traffic.

We overnighted in Baguio where our first meal was spaghetti with pesto (very Filipino!) and then snaked our way up into the mountains to Sagada. The weather at the moment is quite wet, being wet season. Spectacular scenery, check out the piccies!

Here's a photo of me shitting my pants climbing through a slippery limestone cave, coated with a film of bat poo at times. Joking aside, it was the best day trip ever! You could never do a trip like this in Australia without signing a mountain of disclaimers first. Some of it was genuinely dangerous. The guide did the whole 3-4 hour caving walk/slide/crawl/wade/rappel/climb with one arm holding the rope or rock and the other hand holding a big-ass lantern on his shoulder, and all the while he was telling us like a Twister spinner to put our left foot here, our right hand here and even at times acting as a stepladder for our clumsy selves.

We went to the town of Banaue (pronounced banner-way), where the blue-ribbon scenery began. These rice terraces are 2000 years old in some cases. The real stunners were a few hours hike away in Batad (pronounced bat-ad). This little village has no road, only a foot trail to get any supplies in. You could really appreciate the isolation. Our hotel room only cost a few dollars and it was the best view of any so far. We walked in with some friends we met in Banaue, Michael and Gisele, and together we walked down a very steep set of steps and through some rice terraces to an amazing waterfall where we swam for a while. All the recent rain made it a real gusher. Then we climbed back up and had pizza and beer for dinner. I wonder what the peasants are doing, eh Dad?!

A couple of days later we headed down to the megopolis of Manila. You couldn't have imagined a bigger contrast between Batad and Manila. The first, with no cars, not even a road, and a population of only 1 or 2 thousand depending on who you asked. The second, one of the world's biggest traffic jams, plenty of roads, even 3 train lines, and over 10 million people.
We hardly slept on the overnight bus on the way, mainly thanks to the bus breaking down at 3am and having to change onto different ones, but we soldiered on without crashing on our hotel beds and saw some of the sights Manila offered. There is the old Spanish-styled suburb of Intramuros with a big stone wall and some old churches and buildings surrounded in a beautifully manicured golf course. We ate handsomely for very little (they have a lot of pork here, a contrast from the mainly Muslim Malaysian Borneo). We sipped a martini from the 28th floor of a fancy hotel at sunset. It was nice enough, but I missed the mountains a little.

The next day we headed to Cebu in the south of the Fyllipeens for some beach time...

Kota Kinabalu, Sabah

The Harvest Festival - May 31, 2009

As mentioned in our last blog entry we left Borneo on 1 June, however I thought I would put up an additional posting on our last night in KK.

It turns out the Harvest Festival was on - an annual event where the local indigenous people celebrate the rice harvest.

We heard about a big party out of KK in an area called Penampang. We hailed a bus for the half-hour trip, concerned that we wouldn't know where to get off our fears were alleviated when we found the place, the Harvest Festival is basically as big as the Royal Adelaide Show only very, very different. No fairy floss and scary rides but plenty of Tiger beer and beauty queens! Yep there's the annual Harvest Festival beauty pageant. We didn't arrive until about 5pm and much to Ben's disappointment we missed the pageant by what seemed like only an hour or so, but he was able to get a pic with this year's beauty queen.

Ben and I had been discussing how handy it would be to have a set of portable speakers to play some tunes, remember this wish.

After the interlude with the beauty queen, we went into a strange portable house from which they were promoting cigarettes for Kent. We had to sign in (presumably to show we were over 18) and then played Ninendo Wii on this big screen, when we finished we got to pull a ping-pong ball out of a hat, the ball corresponded with a prize list on the wall. Here's me with our prizes! At the Harvest Festival wishes come true!

After this windfall we thought it was time to join the locals in some merriment. We headed to the rowdiest tent and bought a bucket of Tiger beer. Unfortunately we were seated in the middle of two karaoke sets, somewhat confusing to the senses.

A guy sitting next to us took a liking to Ben and gave him another Tiger beer. There also were roving magicians from the Sabah Magician's Club with some impressive card tricks. The karoke drew our attention when this bloke belted out a passionate version of Blue Suede Shoes.

When we finally decided to leave the nights festivities all the buses had finished and we negotiated RM20 (about $8 - instead of the usual RM3 - $1) with a bus driver heading the other way to take us back to KK, saving a very long walk. The Harvest Festival proved to be an entertaining way to end our trip to Borneo.