Since my last update we’ve done a few cities, Hue (pronounced whey like curds and whey) and Hoi An (the Taylor Town) and just arrived in Nha Trang (Beach Side High rise Resorts) this morning.
Hue, it’s fairly small has a very cool old town surrounded by a moat and some big walls, cool bridges over the moat and a big lit up bridge over the river. Roy did a DMZ tour, I still remember doing it from when I was here with the oldies and can’t remember it being that exciting, Roy came back saying it wasn’t at all exciting. I did have quite a funny day though, I got a push bike and went exploring looking for some breaky. I cam round a corner on the far edge of town and some young guys were training their Roosters for some cock fighting. I stopped to take a few photos. They trying the “one photo, one dollar” I laughed “no way”, they seemed happy enough just to look at photos of them selves. ( not quite the spastic fits of laugher that over took they kids in ThaTek, Laos ) I got a few photos (New camera is a bit nicer than the old) as started to sprinkle some rain, and an older guy came round the corner who could speak a bit of English. He invited us all into some ones house to get out of the rain. We had a few cups of tea, a fair few of us crammed into the front room of some guy’s house. Once the tea was gone they pulled out the Rice Whiskey, a fairly strong tasting Metho concoction brewed in large earthenware pots. We finished off one bottle, and I paid the 80 cents for another bottle, and we got stuck into that. About halfway through that, my stomach lining started to remind me it was only 9am and I hadn’t eaten yet. I managed to get away a few shots later, promising to return that afternoon with some of the photos printed out. I got some omelette and bread into my now Metho filled stomach, wandered back to the guest house to select the photos to print, then to a local photo lab. After dropping off the memory card I walked out into a “hello, where you from?” “Melbourne, Australia” “oooh, uhhh, Springvale, I have family in Springvale” “yeah, cool” “ooh today is a happy day my Australian friend, we should go drink, and eat together” I’m a little hesitant, but with a bit of a buzz from the mornings whiskey I agree. He jumps on his motorbike, I’m on my pushy behind and we head over to the other side of town for lunch. It’s a fairly large undercover collection of plastic chairs and trestle tables, we order some food. A small esky filled with beer, water and a bit of ice is plonked at the end of our table. His English is really really good so we chatted a fair bit about Vietnam, Australia, our families and my previous visit to Vietnam. We put a reasonable dent in a massive bowl of some of the nicest fried rice I’d had in Vietnam, and some yummy prawn and veggie stir fry, and empty to beers from the esky. The bill arrives, and he pays ( against my protests ) and then he starts reminding how good it has been to talk and drink together, and how it would be great to tell his wife about me, over a bottle of wine or whiskey that I buy for them. I feel the little “click” of things falling into place, unluckily for him I haven’t been to the atm in a few days and only had about 100,000 dong on me (about $8.50). we head to a local shop to buy a bottle, and he leads me towards the expensive shelf of imports, I remind him of my previously stated cash situation and he begrudgingly accepts some weird looking Chinese whiskey in a funny shaped bottle. By my calculations he was still about $1 up on the deal, but I don’t think he would have been quite so generous at lunch if he had known he wasn’t gonna score bottle of import.
I’ll update on Hoi An, and put some photos of what I got made tomorrow.
Cheers
Will Cowan
Monday, October 31, 2005
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Ha Long Bay
Ha Long Bay was very very amazing. It’s the one place we didn’t get to when I was here with the oldies that I wished we had.
We caught the bus up to HaiPhong, and spent the night there. Had dinner at a little beer hall, it had a pretty amazing assortment of meats on the menu, from eel, snake, bear, turtle, pigeon and a few we hadn’t heard of. Roy had the beef, and I had the chicken, washed down with a few of the 3000 Dong glasses of beer. I had a fair wander that evening. I had an interesting conversation with some locals that consisted of passing my Vietnamese Phrasebook around and pointing at words, ld flip to the index find the answer in English and point to the translation, I played badminton with some locals lucky they were about 3 hours and 6 beers into their game so I didn’t go to badly, and got my self lost about 3 or 4 times. That night we went out to the big discothèque in town. 2 Security guards opened the big doors for you, you had to go through a big industrial themed air lock inside there was loads of bad music (Asian guys mc’ing over horrible dance music). The guys uniforms were this slight umpaloompa / Cabbage patch kid cross over, bad Hawaiian shirt but with bright orange overalls on, it’s also the first bar I’ve been to that had a bunch of podium dancers.
The next morning we caught the ferry to Cat Ba Island, Vietnam’s only populated island and the gateway to Ha Long Bay. We caught up with James, Camilla and Maria, well a hotel hustler at the pier did his spiel about his hotel, then said “ohhh you know English man and 2 Swedish womans, uuuuummm Mr James, yes yes?” and he gestured to his hotel and from the top balcony the 3 were waving at us.
We had a day at the beach and another fairly big night of drinking games. The next morning, bright and early headed down to meet for our boat trip.
The boat wasn’t quite as plush as advertised in the brochure, but it looked nice and cosy. We had a very cool few days, doing the usual, watch amazing scenery, eat, swim, kayak, more amazing scenery (there are about 3000 islands dotted around this fairly big bay, jutting out of the ocean with caves and floating villages and stuff scattered in between), swim, jump off the boat, go through caves, eat, drink, swim, play more drinking games, swim (they have the wickedest phosphor fluorescent algae, like swimming in pixie dust) and then sleep. Then eat swim etc. We made it back to Hanoi yesterday evening and pretty much crashed out.
Over the last few weeks my cameras been getting very dodgy, loads of really blurry photos, during the boat trip instead of turning on it just sorta beeped at me. I’m guessing it got damp during the hill tribe trek, and again during this boat trip.
So today I lashed out, and bought a new camera, had to be done. If insurance plays nice I’ll be out of pocket about $200 due to the upgrade, but this will have to sit on my credit card for a while until it’s sorted out. On the upside, I’ve got a 7 mega pixel digicam now.
Tonight we catch the bus to Hue, it’s meant to be a fairly unpleasant 14 hour trip, but it’s a fraction of the cost of a sleeper train, so it’s got to be done.
Photos are online here
We caught the bus up to HaiPhong, and spent the night there. Had dinner at a little beer hall, it had a pretty amazing assortment of meats on the menu, from eel, snake, bear, turtle, pigeon and a few we hadn’t heard of. Roy had the beef, and I had the chicken, washed down with a few of the 3000 Dong glasses of beer. I had a fair wander that evening. I had an interesting conversation with some locals that consisted of passing my Vietnamese Phrasebook around and pointing at words, ld flip to the index find the answer in English and point to the translation, I played badminton with some locals lucky they were about 3 hours and 6 beers into their game so I didn’t go to badly, and got my self lost about 3 or 4 times. That night we went out to the big discothèque in town. 2 Security guards opened the big doors for you, you had to go through a big industrial themed air lock inside there was loads of bad music (Asian guys mc’ing over horrible dance music). The guys uniforms were this slight umpaloompa / Cabbage patch kid cross over, bad Hawaiian shirt but with bright orange overalls on, it’s also the first bar I’ve been to that had a bunch of podium dancers.
The next morning we caught the ferry to Cat Ba Island, Vietnam’s only populated island and the gateway to Ha Long Bay. We caught up with James, Camilla and Maria, well a hotel hustler at the pier did his spiel about his hotel, then said “ohhh you know English man and 2 Swedish womans, uuuuummm Mr James, yes yes?” and he gestured to his hotel and from the top balcony the 3 were waving at us.
We had a day at the beach and another fairly big night of drinking games. The next morning, bright and early headed down to meet for our boat trip.
The boat wasn’t quite as plush as advertised in the brochure, but it looked nice and cosy. We had a very cool few days, doing the usual, watch amazing scenery, eat, swim, kayak, more amazing scenery (there are about 3000 islands dotted around this fairly big bay, jutting out of the ocean with caves and floating villages and stuff scattered in between), swim, jump off the boat, go through caves, eat, drink, swim, play more drinking games, swim (they have the wickedest phosphor fluorescent algae, like swimming in pixie dust) and then sleep. Then eat swim etc. We made it back to Hanoi yesterday evening and pretty much crashed out.
Over the last few weeks my cameras been getting very dodgy, loads of really blurry photos, during the boat trip instead of turning on it just sorta beeped at me. I’m guessing it got damp during the hill tribe trek, and again during this boat trip.
So today I lashed out, and bought a new camera, had to be done. If insurance plays nice I’ll be out of pocket about $200 due to the upgrade, but this will have to sit on my credit card for a while until it’s sorted out. On the upside, I’ve got a 7 mega pixel digicam now.
Tonight we catch the bus to Hue, it’s meant to be a fairly unpleasant 14 hour trip, but it’s a fraction of the cost of a sleeper train, so it’s got to be done.
Photos are online here
Monday, October 17, 2005
We made it to Vietnam
We made it to Vietnam the 23 hour bus ride wasn’t too bad at all. There was plenty of space on the bus (no livestock either) we spent from about 5.30pm til 1.30am. I read my first book of my travels and knocked over “High Fidelity” during the first leg. Just as I finished, the bus pulled over. It was there that a Vietnamese guy who was really helpful told us we were at the border town and that the border opens at 8am and showed us upstairs and showed us our bedrooms. It was just a normal basic mattress and mozi net. Roy and I shared a room the two Swedes who we had chatted to had the other room and I’m guessing the non-farangs stayed downstairs.
We were woken up as to some fast talking Vietnamese woman who turned on a light upstairs (my initial reaction is “what the fuck is some one doing talking so loud in our guest house for”) the friendly guy advised us simply “we go now” and with in 30 seconds the bus driver was honking profusely hurrying every one up, never mind a quick freshen up or even a chance to go for a piss.
The border crossing was fairly standard show passport, give money, fill in forms, rinse, and repeat. We even had to stick out luggage through an airport style scanner. I have my serious doubts it was very effective as the guy manning the monitor was buttering his toast as my luggage went through, and the examination table has this massive big spider web stretched from the middle of the table onto the wall next to it.
So from about 9am until 6.30pm we sent getting from the border to Hanoi. I pulled out my laptop and me and Roy watch Motorcycle Diaries, it was a really good film, made me wanna do a bike mission again (only huge this time) , and also go to South America.
Compared with Laos, Vietnam is fucking busy, even the country side is packed. People here don’t have front yards, every square foot of space is growing some sort of crop. I had also forgotten what the air is like here, you can stare at the sun in the middle of the day it just looks like a orange full moon. I also had forgotten what a bunch of dodgy mother fuckers Vietnamese can be. The normal, “Free taxi to my guest house”, no we are meeting friends at this place, “OK I get mini bus for you to take you to your place”, 3 stops of “come see my guest house” or blatant lie of “OK this is your guest house”, it comes to fuck this we’ll just get out and walk.
But we finally made it, had a nice (but expensive) meal of Indian, and went out for a beer. It’s 11pm now so time for another beer, then we go explore the city a bit tomorrow then up to Ha Long Bay.
As usual I’ve bought a new sim card and chucked my old Laos one in the pile. My new Vietnamese phone number is +84915449586.
Tomorrow I’ll organize my photos a bit better and finalise my “Best of Thailand” and my “Best of Laos” collections.
Cheers
Will Cowan
We were woken up as to some fast talking Vietnamese woman who turned on a light upstairs (my initial reaction is “what the fuck is some one doing talking so loud in our guest house for”) the friendly guy advised us simply “we go now” and with in 30 seconds the bus driver was honking profusely hurrying every one up, never mind a quick freshen up or even a chance to go for a piss.
The border crossing was fairly standard show passport, give money, fill in forms, rinse, and repeat. We even had to stick out luggage through an airport style scanner. I have my serious doubts it was very effective as the guy manning the monitor was buttering his toast as my luggage went through, and the examination table has this massive big spider web stretched from the middle of the table onto the wall next to it.
So from about 9am until 6.30pm we sent getting from the border to Hanoi. I pulled out my laptop and me and Roy watch Motorcycle Diaries, it was a really good film, made me wanna do a bike mission again (only huge this time) , and also go to South America.
Compared with Laos, Vietnam is fucking busy, even the country side is packed. People here don’t have front yards, every square foot of space is growing some sort of crop. I had also forgotten what the air is like here, you can stare at the sun in the middle of the day it just looks like a orange full moon. I also had forgotten what a bunch of dodgy mother fuckers Vietnamese can be. The normal, “Free taxi to my guest house”, no we are meeting friends at this place, “OK I get mini bus for you to take you to your place”, 3 stops of “come see my guest house” or blatant lie of “OK this is your guest house”, it comes to fuck this we’ll just get out and walk.
But we finally made it, had a nice (but expensive) meal of Indian, and went out for a beer. It’s 11pm now so time for another beer, then we go explore the city a bit tomorrow then up to Ha Long Bay.
As usual I’ve bought a new sim card and chucked my old Laos one in the pile. My new Vietnamese phone number is +84915449586.
Tomorrow I’ll organize my photos a bit better and finalise my “Best of Thailand” and my “Best of Laos” collections.
Cheers
Will Cowan
Saturday, October 15, 2005
Good Night Laos, Good Evening Vietnam
Well, the lat few days I've spent on the back of a motorbike, just a random cruise. Picked a few spots on the map and tried to get there. Laos seems allot drier than i expected, long straight gravel roads and an amazing amount of eucalyptus trees make it fel quite homely.I met some really nice and interesting people, the only people down there who can speak English are those who have come to Vientiane to study, so not many. They were very friendly and very eager to get a bit of English practice in. It was especially cool because of the Mekong River Boat Racing festival that’s happening in a few days. Each place I went to had a little sideshow alley games and there were loads of people out. There are a few photos of the trip here. During the trip i managed to go a full 24 hours with out seeing another white face and in Thahkuk where i stayed there were 2 tourists and 5 Europeans in the whole city. As you would expect, there wasn’t a internet café in sight, so the competition winners who have been waiting since Wednesday can now have their moment of glory.
Julia Goulia, with her slightly morbid but excellently written Haiku
Death. Dodgy Thai food.
Gravy bum, vomit then dead.
Tragedy, despair.
Takes out the first prize, and receives a yet to be found secret bonus prize.
Dave the Tree ( also known as David Relf ) posted a spirited little limerick and takes out the runners up prize with…..
There once was a man called Will
Who wasn't the run of the mill..
An elephant he rode
His plumber's crack showed
My word did he feel like a dill!
To every one else, thanks or entering, to people who didn’t enter, you’re a bunch of slack bastards. I‘ll get in contact with the winners and work out how to get the prize pack. You also have to choose a lucky rock, so I’ll take some better photos of those in Hanoi.
Oh yeah, this evening we take a 23 hour bus ride to Hanoi, Arriving some time tomorrow evening. If some cunt spews on me I’ll fucking stab him. But I’m hoping for a nice relaxing trip the normal dose of chilled tunes, a few beers and some sleeping tablets should make it fairly pain free……
cheers
Julia Goulia, with her slightly morbid but excellently written Haiku
Death. Dodgy Thai food.
Gravy bum, vomit then dead.
Tragedy, despair.
Takes out the first prize, and receives a yet to be found secret bonus prize.
Dave the Tree ( also known as David Relf ) posted a spirited little limerick and takes out the runners up prize with…..
There once was a man called Will
Who wasn't the run of the mill..
An elephant he rode
His plumber's crack showed
My word did he feel like a dill!
To every one else, thanks or entering, to people who didn’t enter, you’re a bunch of slack bastards. I‘ll get in contact with the winners and work out how to get the prize pack. You also have to choose a lucky rock, so I’ll take some better photos of those in Hanoi.
Oh yeah, this evening we take a 23 hour bus ride to Hanoi, Arriving some time tomorrow evening. If some cunt spews on me I’ll fucking stab him. But I’m hoping for a nice relaxing trip the normal dose of chilled tunes, a few beers and some sleeping tablets should make it fairly pain free……
cheers
Monday, October 10, 2005
Vientiane, Laos
Well we Tuk Tuk'ed and kayaked down to Vientiane, It was a nice enjoyable trip, a few bigish rapids but nothing scary. It sure was heaps better then getting spewed on in a local bus. The day before had been really good, we got dropped off up river and kayaked down, the scenery was fucking amazing. Crazy hills jutting out of bright green rice paddies, It was a fairly relaxing and beautiful few hours of paddling. We stopped off to do a quick inner tube mission into a cave, an underwater river. The cave wasn’t amazing but it was still a cool experience floating about in an underwater river is aways gonna have atleast novelty value. We had lunch and then saw the Elephant Cave. The Elephant cave was pretty lame, like if it was at a mates place you would think it was cool, but when a tour guide takes you there it was a bit “oh is this it, ohh, ok” it did have a Buddha statue and stuff in it, and one of the rocks looked a bit like an elephant.
Near the end of the trip we arrived into the area of the river where they do the tubing. The general gist (It’s the main thing people do in Vang Vieng) is you hire an inner tube, get a Tuk Tuk to drop you off up the river a bit, jump in and float down. Of cause one of the greatest things about Laos is Beer Lao, and some of the great places you get to drink it. This is definitely one of them, you get to float down a river with little bars along the way, and each bar has something special to get the tourists in, a big swing, flying fox, or just something high to jump of into the river. The people at the bars have huge bamboo poles they use to help drag people onto dry land so they can drink more Beer Lao. The bar we spent a bit of time at had a fairly good sized flying fox and you could also jump off the platform the flying fox was attached to. It reminded me of down b the river during Earthcore, big stereo, sunny weather and loads of beer. It was fucking cool. I think it takes most people about 4 or 5 hours to do the trip, although that only involves about half an hour of floating time.
I also got to teach an English class that evening as well, it was pretty cool. I was nervous and didn’t really have a lot to say. I did months of the year with the little kids, they were pretty cool, very eager to learn. I started doing telling the time, and clocks and shit with the older ones, but then just talked about Australia and what I’m doing travelling around. Nearly all of them were very shy and didn’t want to ask any questions, but bit by bit a few did. I sorta ran through my answers and wrote them up on the whiteboard and helped explain any of the less common words I had used.
All in all it was very cool, I could really imagine doing a solid two weeks next time I’m in the area. It would be heaps better once you get to know the kids and know what sorta levels they are at.
For the lat few days we have just been chilling out and drinking in Vientiane, we spent a bit of time with an aussie called Kate who we had met kayaking. She is just about to finish 2 years of work in Cambodia, and said it was all pretty amazing there. Mainly we have been drinking at this Mexican bar with Rowena and David from England. A few Beer Lao and then a mission to some other bar for a few more Beer Lao. Today we applied for our Vietnamese visas and then tried to head out to the Beer Lao brewery, but were too late to take a tour. Hopefully we’ll get another chance.
Tomorrow I hope to get a bike nice and earlyish and go motorbike up to the Plain of Jars, I’m thinking I’ll spend the few days it takes for our visas to get processed. It would be nice to be out of the cities for a while.
Cheerio,
Will Cowan
Near the end of the trip we arrived into the area of the river where they do the tubing. The general gist (It’s the main thing people do in Vang Vieng) is you hire an inner tube, get a Tuk Tuk to drop you off up the river a bit, jump in and float down. Of cause one of the greatest things about Laos is Beer Lao, and some of the great places you get to drink it. This is definitely one of them, you get to float down a river with little bars along the way, and each bar has something special to get the tourists in, a big swing, flying fox, or just something high to jump of into the river. The people at the bars have huge bamboo poles they use to help drag people onto dry land so they can drink more Beer Lao. The bar we spent a bit of time at had a fairly good sized flying fox and you could also jump off the platform the flying fox was attached to. It reminded me of down b the river during Earthcore, big stereo, sunny weather and loads of beer. It was fucking cool. I think it takes most people about 4 or 5 hours to do the trip, although that only involves about half an hour of floating time.
I also got to teach an English class that evening as well, it was pretty cool. I was nervous and didn’t really have a lot to say. I did months of the year with the little kids, they were pretty cool, very eager to learn. I started doing telling the time, and clocks and shit with the older ones, but then just talked about Australia and what I’m doing travelling around. Nearly all of them were very shy and didn’t want to ask any questions, but bit by bit a few did. I sorta ran through my answers and wrote them up on the whiteboard and helped explain any of the less common words I had used.
All in all it was very cool, I could really imagine doing a solid two weeks next time I’m in the area. It would be heaps better once you get to know the kids and know what sorta levels they are at.
For the lat few days we have just been chilling out and drinking in Vientiane, we spent a bit of time with an aussie called Kate who we had met kayaking. She is just about to finish 2 years of work in Cambodia, and said it was all pretty amazing there. Mainly we have been drinking at this Mexican bar with Rowena and David from England. A few Beer Lao and then a mission to some other bar for a few more Beer Lao. Today we applied for our Vietnamese visas and then tried to head out to the Beer Lao brewery, but were too late to take a tour. Hopefully we’ll get another chance.
Tomorrow I hope to get a bike nice and earlyish and go motorbike up to the Plain of Jars, I’m thinking I’ll spend the few days it takes for our visas to get processed. It would be nice to be out of the cities for a while.
Cheerio,
Will Cowan
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