George Wandering Asia

The Birmingham Effect

2006-09-07T01:25:00.000+08:00

I've almost forgotten that I just spent the last few months travelling. Something about Birmingham imposes itself on me whenever I come back here and I no longer feel like the George who studies at SOAS and spent half of last year on Borneo. A daytime TV show would suggest the problem is I don't know who I am when I'm here.
That's bull. Partly it's being back at home with prepared meals and parents being parental, partly it's that nothing exciting happens here and the rest is the fact I have television and internet here so the hours slip by without anything happening.

It just seems so bizarre to me that one month ago that it was the same me who was by the beach in Thailand, two months ago in Cambodia being scared shitless by history and elephants and three months ago in the middle of the Borneo rainforest swimming with crocodiles and partying to acoustic Indo-pop. It's somebody else who did all that then showed me the pictures and told me all the stories.

The curse of the camera is that my memories are now defined by the photographs I took and what I wrote in the notebook I took with me (ostensibly to write Arabic in, but the work thing never really happened so it took on another role). I'm not even sure that this matters though.

I don't like it here. Yet I'm not that sure I want to be in London either. Maybe I should've carried on travelling. In Thailand I found an advert from somebody who had a yacht. He/she was looking for crew members to join an itinerary-less journey with the vague intention of at least circumnavigating Africa and probably carrying on to South America. Food and necessities to be the only costs incurred. I should've taken the opportunity. When will I have one like that ever again?

Since getting back I have (in no particular order):

Run away from Birmingham to catch up with Al and try a Leicester curry (sorry Al, not as good as a Brum balti, but still nice)
Agreed to buy a bicycle.
Drunk a cocktail at Jim's.
Planned a trip to Snobs for tonight by texting half a dozen people (most of whom seem to be abroad right now). If the trip proves to be abortive I will not be overly surprised.
Changed the desk in my bedroom to one that I inherited recently.

This is what I have to show for nearly a week back in England. It would've been better had I found myself a job, but I'm going to Northern Ireland with family on Monday and not even the friendliest employer would take somebody on for just over a week.

This is the rather unsatisfactory conclusion to my South East Asia blog. Unsatisfactory because I'm not actually in South East Asia so it's something of a misnomer. Unsatisfactory also because there can be no list of the lessons learnt or the experiences experienced.

I'm back in Birmingham. That's it.

Nearly there

2006-08-30T11:02:00.000+08:00

My last day in Brunei and therefore in South East Asia. It's raining. Somebody has not explained to the great Victorian novelist in the sky that it's dry season here. Presumably the need for pathetic fallacy was so great that he decided to overlook such a minor detail as a two month drought when writing the novel of my trip.

This trip also shares the neatly circular character of a poorly crafted Victorian novel. I'm back staying in the Brunei Youth Hostel and last night I had a long conversation with the warden of said youth hostel about the Italian guy I was travelling with back in May/early June who I met at the hostel on my first day in S.E. Asia. Apparently he was a Japanese-crazed sex tourist. He seemed nice and I never noticed anything strange about him except that any time a girl was going for a shower he would offer to help her.

Mona took Bintangor by storm but now she's back in Finland and I'll be back in England very soon. I've gone a long way and spent a lot of money to see a lot of things just to end up back in the same place.

Thailand to Malaysia via Singapore

2006-08-26T12:12:00.000+08:00

After the kayaking we did come up with a plan of action. Koh Tao - an island in the Gulf of Thailand with beautiful beaches, secluded coves and amazing coral. Unfortunately the journey to get there didn't go too smoothly as we were sold tickets for a night boat that didn't exist and therefore ended up spending a night in a travel agency in Surat Thani after spending the preceding few hours drinking whisky and soda with the people who worked there (and a surprising number of policemen who were all eager to show us their guns) then a bizarre few hours in a bar listening to a somewhat crap local band do covers of O-Zone and Thai rock songs.
Fortunately we were able to move out to the island the next day and it was fantastic. So laid back. We turned up the day after full moon, which wasn't too clever as people were flooding onto the island after going to the party on Koh Pha Nga so we were very lucky to find a cheap bungalow the three of us could rent. We went snorkelling and ate a lot.

From there we took the boat and bus back to Bangkok. After seeing Lilli off to the airport Mona and I went around the Grand Palace compound then got on our flight to Singapore.

I didn't really enjoy Singapore last year, but arriving from the hustle and bustle of Bangkok I actually appreciated the ordered traffic, clean streets and polite but slightly withdrawn people. We wandered around for two days looking at the city, eating the food and generally soaking up the atmosphere. At night we stopped for one of the most expensive pints I've ever had at a restaurant looking out onto the river but it was all very pleasant.

We then took the bus to Johor Bahru (in Malaysia) from where we flew to Kuching, on Malaysian Borneo. There we went to Bako national park (to see proboscis monkeys, macaques, monitor lizards, pitcher plants and many many types of ant), Semenggok orang utan sanctuary to see its residents (who were very obliging for photographs) and also wandered around eating ABCs (ice with jelly, sweet corn, beans and many different types of syrup), pancakes and roti canai. We stopped at the Sarawak museum to see dead animals in glass boxes. Not exactly my kind of thing but it was a hot day, the museum's got nice architecture and it's air-conditioned.

From there we took the boat to Sarikei (although the man on the boat tried to discourage us from dismounting there as he'd clearly never seen a tourist wanting to come to these parts before), stopped for lunch (notice a theme developing here?) then took the bus onwards to Bintangor (town from last year).

Here I've introduced Mona to lots of different cafés, foods, friends and crazy people. As we were eatig breakfast this morning the town's most noted crazy man, Hasan, treated us to a speech about the importance of forgiving the white man for his sins before World War II because of the fact the white man had helped Malaysians fight the Japanese.

Tomorrow we're going to Sibu, from where Mona flies to Kuala Lumpur, then Bangkok, then Helsinki and I'll take the bus up to Brunei and fly home.

Thailand

2006-08-08T22:29:00.000+08:00

It's been a while since I last wrote anything as I've been running about Thailand. And it's all been rather fun.
Flew Hanoi-Bangkok (for something like seven pounds) and met Kabir at the airport, where he'd arrived shortly before me. We proceeded to Bangkok town by the first vehicle we could find - an airport limousine: this cost almost exactly ten pounds. Oh well.
Spent the first night in a rather swanky hotel which a friend of Kabir had organised for us. We wandered Bangkok and found a very stylish restaurant frequented by the youth of Bangkok. Ordered a Thai salad ("A salad can't be too hot, can it?" - Me to Kabir when ordering) and burnt my mouth off.

The next day Jim arrived and we all found a room in the backpacker area of Bangkok, wandered around the temples and got thoroughly frustrated with the annoying tuk-tuk drivers. Every single one of them pulls the same scams.
"Oh my God, don't you know.?Today is 'Buddha Day'. The temple is closed. Why don't you see standing Buddha, black Buddha? Open only today. Only 10 baht and I take you anywhere you want to go."
If we'd believed them then we would've ended up in shops being forced to buy things we didn't want, paying admissions charges to sites we didn't want to see and generally getting screwed every step of the way. We did see many temples though, and the Royal Palace.

Kabir and Jim then headed down south to the beach whilst I met Lilli and Mona in Bangkok and took them on boat tours of the city. We agreed we'd meet again in Chiang Mai (in the north). After gathering the two Finns I headed up to Sukothai (2/3 of the way to Chiang Mai, about 8 hours by bus from Bangkok) and saw the World Heritage site there (the first capital city of Siam, the birth place of uniquely Thai culture). Then we got rather bad news that Chiang Mai was flooded and that Kabir and Jim had settled in the south and weren't moving. So we took the bus back to Bangkok the same day we'd arrived and missed the bus to the south by about 20 minutes.

Spent a night in a very cheap hostel in Bangkok, watched 'The Beach' in a restaurant on the Khao San Road then took the bus to Krabi the next night. 16 hours from end to end. Evil journey, not helped by the annoying bus company dumping us not at Krabi town or Krabi bus station, as you would expect, but at Krabi wharf. This meant the only transport to anywhere else was run by them. Thus ensued an unpleasant bout of attempted scamming of us by annoying minibus drivers followed by a temper tantrum from one of the scammers when we refused to give in. It was a proper hissy fit with him shouting "You stupid stupid" pointing at me and another English guy who was in the same predicament as us then he threw a map on the floor, said "No more talking" and marched off.

But we got there in the end. A small beach town called Ao Nang. White sand beaches, frisbees, good food, white water rafting, a nice hotel, friendly people. It's been fantastic. Kabir and Jim have both now headed back to Bangkok to fly home but it was great having a group of five here for as long as it lasted. Tomorrow we're going kayaking and trying to work out where we'll go next.

All the rest of Vietnam

2006-07-28T10:42:00.000+08:00

I've been having problems updating the blog, some internet cafes seem to dislike blogger.com and either won't let you in or will crash the second you click "Publish Post". Which was rather frustrating.

In Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon as everyone still calls it) I decided to take my love for the cyclo to new levels and spend half a day on the front of one going around the main sights. Very touristy but I was ill and couldn't be bothered with walking. I went to where the American embassy once stood, hoping to see remnants of helicopters, gates with tank track marks on them and angry mobs of Communists. Unfortunately all I could see was a wall with a plaque on it. And the plaque was written in Vietnamese.

From there I went to the 'Reunification Palace'. Which was the seat of the South Vietnamese government until it fell. Unfortunately the Politburo were meeting there so it was closed to tourists. The next stop was slightly more successful. The "War Remnants Musuem", formerly known as the "Museum of American War Atrocities"- but apparently in the new era of friendship between the two countries this name was deemed unsuitable. It contained a whole lot of captured American weaponry and exhibitions on the My Lai massacre and the use of Agent Orange. There were also plenty of photos taken by western war correspondents showing the suffering of both sides.

The Agent Orange exhibition was the most disturbing part though. First there were photos of horribly deformed people struggling to go about day-to-day tasks, then of the devastation wreaked across vast parts of Vietnam by the defoliation then napalming of vast tracts of land. At the end were two tanks containing a yellowish liquid. As I got nearer it became clear that a baby was being preserved inside each one. The babies were grossly deformed and were stillborns. One of them had a head twice the size of its body, and the head itself was only just recognisable as human due to the deformities.

That night I had a ticket on the 11pm sleeper train to Da Nang in central Vietnam, so I set out at 9.45 by walking confidently into the tourist area. During the day English speaking cyclo drivers abound there so it seemed the safest way of getting to the station without too much drama. Unfortunately I managed to find a cyclo driver who pretended to understand everything I said, set a price with me and set off confidently in precisely the wrong direction. I stopped him, tried out my Vietnamese "Ga Saigon" - Saigon station - which elicited only a blank look on his face. Then I tried "Station, I'm going to Hanoi" (Da Nang is just further along the same train line and it seemed to make more sense to name the capital and tourist mecca of the country rather than a small town a tourist might not be expected to visit). His face broke into a broad smile and responded "Hanoi, stasun. Yes I know. I know". Great. After a brief interruption from a motorcycle prostitute, who the cyclo driver sent on her way by saying something about Hanoi we were off. This time in roughly the right direction.
But the journey just took far too long. Then we crossed a river that I didn't know existed. And I knew perfectly well there were no rivers between central Saigon and the station. As I'd spotted two taxis parked up by the road I leapt off the cyclo, thrusting two dollars into the hand of the driver, he, in a rather confused manner, pointed towards the prostitute we'd met earlier, who was waiting for me outside the dingiest, nastiest, most blatant brothel I've seen and started yelling "Stasun Hanoi, I know, Stasun Hanoi there". I then grabbed a passing motorcycle taxi, gave him just over a dollar and told him to go to the station as fast as possible. I made the train with ten minutes to spare.

The next morning I arrived Da Nang nicely relaxed after a night on the top bunk of three in a cabin shared with a kind Lao family, who shared their snacks with me and laughed like hyenas every time I banged my head on the ceiling. Needless to say that happened a lot so it was a very merry journey.

From Da Nang it was a very pleasant 45 minute motorcycle taxi journey along the coast to Hoi An. Which is a very weird town full of tailors and tourists. It's a very traditional town with well preserved French colonial architecture and a strong Japanese influence. Absolutely beautiful. I spent a few days there and found a bar that played Habib Koité and which would sell me a cheap gin and tonic. I spent rather a lot of time there. I am also now the proud owner of a 17GBP tailor-made suit. I also spent a day at the My Son ruins - a kind of mini-Angkor Wat which was 60% destroyed by American bombing.

Took a bus to Hué, where I spent some time looking at the old Imperial Capital of Vietnam (until 1945), the citadel it was based in and the Forbidden City in the centre of the citadel. Much of Hué was also destroyed by bombing or fighting but what remained was incredible. My last day in Hué I had to swallow my backpacker pride and take a tour to the demilitarized zone which was once the border between North and South Vietnam and the tunnels which the Viet Cong dug beneath the border so weapons could be run from North to South under the heavily fortified demilitarized zone (somebody should explain to the Americans what demilitarized means).

From there I took another sleeper train to Hanoi, where I met Jim, Tamsin and Hannah, albeit briefly as they went off to Ha Long Bay yesterday. We went to the Temple of Literature, drank milkshakes by lake Hoan Kiem and drank beers in the rooftop bar of our hostel, which was a thoroughly pleasant day. The next day I went to the temple which is on an island in the middle of lake Hoan Kiem, watched some traditional water puppetry then had a massive dinner of squid fried with snails, rice and beer hoi (at about $0.15 US a glass). Now I'm waiting for the rain to subside before I walk to the shuttle bus stop to the airport, from where I will fly to Bangkok to meet Kabir.

Tomorrow (29th) Jim will arrive Bangkok, on the 31st Lilli will arrive and on the 1st August so will Mona. It should all be rather fun.

Vietnam, land of the crazy cyclo driver

2006-07-16T19:58:00.000+08:00

Yesterday I took the $4 bus from Phnom Penh (Cambodia) to Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam). Not very exciting but for the food poisoning my last meal in Cambodia gave me.
The border was relatively interesting, walking through no-mans-land towards the hammer and sickle/gold star flags.
Got to Ho Chi Minh City absolutely shattered and unable to eat so splashed out on an aircon room and slept for 13 hours to wake up feeling 100% again.

Have just spent the day wandering around the city with a very friendly Swiss guy, with whom I've been practising what remains of my French, and a rather bossy American who abides by pretty much every stereotype going about Americans, though I haven't asked him whether he has a gun.

As for the crazy cyclo (like rickshaw but with a push bike attached) driver. He followed me down the road insisting that I go to a "good clean girl" he knew for a blowjob. "Only $20 and clean, yes. No problem." Out of interest (I assume) Jimmy (Swiss guy) asked the price for a whole night. At which the cyclo driver looked disgusted and marched off.

Now I have to work out a way to get to Hanoi (36 hours travel away minimum) whilst seeing some of the rest of Vietnam and arriving Hanoi on 25th July.

Dolphins and Elephants. Apologies to Suzy.

2006-07-14T16:55:00.000+08:00

From Phnom Penh I took a bus to Kratie. It's a tiny town by the Mekong where you can still see the Irrawaddy freshwater dolphin. Hired a boat, saw the dolphins. T'was fun. Thjen I ate algae soup and watched Italy beat France.
The next day I took a pickup truck to Sen Merodom. It's an even smaller town right by the Vietnamese border, up in the mountains. And it's cold. Like England summer cold.

But they had elephants, so that was OK. Went on a 5 hour wander through the mountains on elephant back. Unfortunately half way through the elephant and handler fell out - so the elephant decided she no longer wanted an annoying white guy on her back. 2.5 tonnes of elephant trying to shake you off is quite a scary feeling, but I was able to cling on so it worked out fine in the end. There was much whipping by the handler and trumpeting by the elephant. I was mainly laughing like a crazy man and swearing.

After the elephant my moto driver was late in picking me up from the Pnong village where I'd hired the elephant. Fortunately the locals took pity on me and gave me rice wine to drink and food to eat. This is where the apology to Suzy comes in. They gave me the food and I happily tucked in, then I got round to asking what it was. To much laughter they informed me that it was dog. It was really tasty too.

The next day I went wandering through farms, jungle and more Pnong villages. Which involved a lot more rice wine, some buffalo meat (not nearly as good as dog) and meeting some men who spend all day digging ditches for $2.50. For the day that is, not the hour. If they're really lucky they can hope to earn in one week what a spotty kid in McDonalds London can earn in two hours.

The journey back to Phnom Penh was a nightmate. It should take 8 hours in a pickup (the road to Sen Meredom is very bad - a dirt track at best, a river at worst). However, there were a few delays:

3 wheel changes
3 push starts
2 garage visits
2 police checkpoints
2 monsoon downpours
2 new wheel bolts
1 bribe paid
1 new battery
1 new hub for wheel

Now finally back in Phnom Penh for a few hours then it's a nice nine hour bus journey to Ho Chi Minh City tomorrow where, hopefully, Adam and I will meet up again. He's been in Siem Reap looking at Angkor Wat and the other temples that I saw last year.

Phnom Penh

2006-07-08T14:48:00.000+08:00

From Siem Reap I made my way to the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. It's a fascinating city. You arrive through the shanty towns on the outskirts then come into the centre which has a bizarre mix of French colonial, Buddhist religious and Vietnamese Stalinist architecture. The French architecture is suffering somewhat from the years, but the art deco 'Pasr Thmel' (New Market) is still amazing. Could do with a clean though.

I'm staying at a guesthouse by the lake in Phnom Penh. When I say by the lake I really mean on the lake. The restaurant/relaxing area is built out over the water and is a fantastic spot for drinking a large bottle of Angkor Beer and watching the sun set.

Yesterday I visited S21 - the main Khmer Rouge prison/torture facility in Phnom Penh. It had previously been a high school and from a distance it still looked like that. Then you saw the barbed wire everywhere. And as you go inside you see that the classrooms had had cells built into them and the walls at the end of each classroom had had a doorway knocked through so that guards could patrol up and down the cells with ease. Yet all the time you can see that these cells and doorways should not be there. This building still looks like a school, which just contributes to how disturbing the whole experience is when you see the torture equipment and the figures of how many people were killed there.

From S21 the prisoners were taken to the Choeng Ek killing fields. There are over 100 mass graves on that site alone. So far 86 have been opened and 8985 bodies found - the remains of which have been cleaned and placed in a memorial stupa like the one I saw in Siem Reap.
Outside were tiny Cambodian kids who begged for money by asking you to take a picture then saying "One, two, three, smile!" at which they would pose with peace signs and broad grins. Then would come the demands for money.

Adam's still in Siem Reap and Jim should be arriving in Hanoi on the 26th July so my plans are very vague right now. I think I might try and go elephant trekking somewhere in Cambodia.

Cambodia

2006-07-05T15:45:00.000+08:00

I'd forgotten how much this country scares me. Part of the problem is that I'm reading "Sex Slaves" - an exposé of the Asian sex industry, part that I'm not spending my time rushing from temple to temple and am just sitting back and looking at the country around me.

Sometimes it's comic. I had a moto driver asking me if I want to go somewhere. I was just off to find dinner so I turned him down. As I got nearer he said "You want... boom boom" and then he started doing what can only be described as some kind of chicken dance. Not quite sure I want to know what connection the Cambodian mind makes between a chicken and paying for sex.

Then there's the sad/scary. A pimp with no arms below the elbow (probably from the small American made plastic land mines used extensively in Cambodia, they're so designed as to allow the rain during monsoon season to wash them into areas that were previously considered clear of mines and they get people working in the paddy fields quite a lot) used his stumps to guide me towards his brothel. As it was obvious I wasn't interested in his offers of "boom boom" he then offered me "pretty young girl" as though this would somehow swing me over. Presumably with some tourists it does.

That was last night. Today I went to a memorial to the victims of the Khmer Rouge. It's only a few km outside Siem Reap town so I decided to walk. It's on the site of a monastery/school complex which had also been a prison and hospital when the Khmer Rouge arrived. It started with a helicopter landing on the hospital (the Khmer Rouge didn't enter monastery compounds so people were normally safe in them, but the hospital was not holy ground), then the Khmer Rouge set up a full scale killing field in the compound. Anyone suspected of being educated/intelligent/rich/being too much of a city dweller was killed. And so were their families.

I was shown where people were stood at the top of the stairs in the hospital and their heads cut off, to fall down and show those waiting at the bottom what would be their fate. There were also the mass graves, where human bones could still be seen amongst the rubbish and dirt that had also been thrown there. Then there were photos. Some of the most disturbing images I've ever seen. Soldiers taking babies from their mothers arms and using them like clay pigeons. People having their chest slit open and their organs taken out to show to them as they died.

I was shown around by a man called Dara who worked as a volunteer teacher in the compound. His name means "star" and it was given to him by the monks who found him as a young orphan of the Khmer Rouge. Now he teaches other orphans, but whose parents died of HIV/AIDS or from land mines. The orphans live in ramshackle accomodation in the ex-hospital, which still has the modifications the Khmer Rouge made to facilitate the executions. Each orphan gets a mattress and a sheet arranged to give them a tiny amount of privacy and some protection from mosquitos.

And the memorial itself - a small stupa construction with glass sides containing the bones, skulls etc from several hundred people. You could see that many had been bludgeoned to death to save on bullets. And some of the skulls had clearly been thought worthy of bullets as well. All surrounded by people dying of AIDs, orphans and Buddhist monks.

Now a small child is trying to get my attention because he wants to play noughts and crosses. Presumably the opening to some attempt to sell things to me but there we go. [edit] Yes, books [end edit]

Sorry for this rather depressing ramble.

Leaving Laos

2006-07-02T15:45:00.000+08:00

I have safely arrived in Luang Prabang, after travelling Route 13. The FCO give this advice to tourists:

"A number of fatal armed bus attacks have occurred on Route 13, which links
Vientiane to the north of Laos through Luang Prabang [...] In February
2003, two foreign tourists were killed in a bus attack on Route 13. We
recommend that you only travel in daylight hours. You should be
particularly vigilant when travelling by road on Route 13 from Vangviang north
through Phou Khoun, to south of Luang Prabang [...] Local law enforcement agencies in Laos have limited capability to counter these threats."

Just how does being vigilant stop some guys with AK47s coming and shooting me? Great advice there FCO. Rather worryingly, on the way there we spotted one bus of identical style to ours burned out at the bottom of a cliff and another, clearly very modern but suffering from some damage, facing the opposite direction completely abandoned apart from a large number of shoes underneath the bus (not attached to feet).
I had been promised that all buses running north had armed guards, but for some reason our bus didn't.
The drive was beautiful, winding through the mountains of northern Laos with fantastic views stretching for miles through the mountain chain.

Now I'm in Luang Prabang, the ancient capital of Laos, which has temples everywhere. Last night I went for a walk along one of the tributaries of the Mekong and ended up on a very dodgy Soviet military style bridge perfectly set up for bikes/cars but with just 3 or 4 plans stuck to the side as an after-thought for the walkers. These planks weren't all nailed in place and moved around quite a lot, which is rather disconcerting when you're 50m up and every car that goes over the bridge makes the planks you're walking on jump up and down and wiggle about dramatically. But, of course, it had the most amazing views so that more than made up for it.

Then I ate some rice, drank some Lao Beer and headed back to the guest house to watch the football. In the 65th minute, with Wayne Rooney sent off and the score 0-0 there was a black out. Typical.

Anyway, Adam failed to book a flight out of Luang Prabang in time so he's going to try and make his way over land to Siem Reap in Cambodia (or Phnom Penh) where we will meet up again. Tomorrow I will fly there and will wait for him, unless I get bored.

Tubing in Vang Vieng

2006-06-30T23:35:00.000+08:00

Adam and I arrived in Vang Vieng two days ago. It was a 3 hour drive from Vientiane in a 'VIP bus'. Which means a small bus with air conditioning (that they turn off five minutes after cramming in loads of white people and charging them $5 each for the privilege). But they do hand out wet paper towels with eau de cologne on them and water.

Vang Vieng is a tiny little town right up in the mountains in northern Laos. There's an incredibly beautiful view from our guest house balcony which I can just sit and admire for hours and hours. And we've had just the opportunity for that as it's been monsooning for two days now.

Yesterday we went 'tubing' down the river. You hand over $3.50 in town, the people running it throw you in the back of a tuk-tuk with a whole load of inner tubes of car tyres strapped to the top and you drive upstream. You then float downstream in said car tyre inner tubes. Lots of fun. All the way down there are bars, rope swings, children playing jokes on stupid white people and random men on small rafts yelling "Beer Lao" who, when you get closer, discretely ask if you smoke and hold up a plastic bag with a pre-rolled inside.

Unfortunately, as I said before, it was monsooning yesterday so we got extremely cold and wet. This forced us to make a couple of stop offs for Lao Beer and Lao Lao (local spirit, provided free in many places) just to warm the blood. It was amazingly beautiful though, floating down the river, looking up at the mountains, trying to stop my water bottle being stolen by kids (Adam failed - they then used it to collect mud - don't ask me why). It was a unique experience, and not just because my teeth haven't chattered like that in years.

Then we went back to the guesthouse and relaxed on the balcony watching the thunder storms over the mountains. Adam played guitar, I listened to Orishas and we shared out some of the grass that a man in Vientiane gave us for free as he was off to the airport and, for understandable reasons, didn't feel like taking it with him. A pleasant way to spend the rest of the day.

Then today we've just been relaxing in the rain. I was meaning to go for a walk up one of the smaller and nearer mountains, but the weather precluded that option. Fortunately Vang Vieng's restaurants have come up with a good way to keep customers inside all day - just what I wanted to do. They don't have normal tables and chairs but raised platforms with each eating area marked off from the others by a low fence, against which are strewn lots of cushions. You sit on the cushions and eat off a low table then lie back and watch the TV in the corner (normally showing Friends, The Simpsons or some VCD movie).

So that's Vang Vieng. Tomorrow Luang Prabang. I have a 9.40am bus booked to take me along Route 13. I leave Laos in three days and I have 200,000 Laotian (yes that is the correct adjective to describe something of Laos) Kip in my pocket. Admittedly only $20US but it's not exactly a currency anyone will want to buy off me elsewhere so I may have to splash out over the next couple of days.

Lovely Laos (and hints of Birmingham wherever I go)

2006-06-27T12:08:00.000+08:00

Arrived in Laos the day before yesterday. Currently staying in Vientiane but will move to Vang Vieng tomorrow to do some tubing then it's off to Luang Prabang to be cultural.
The journey here wasn't so fun, involving a 7 hour wait in KLIA, a night spent sleeping in a puddle on a concrete floor in Bangkok airport (which bears more than a passing resemblance to the old Bull Ring) just to get near to the Laos border, where I had to wait for a night because Adam booked flights so late the one I was on had sold out.
Then took a nice train journey right up to the Laos border, then a tuk-tuk to 'Friendship bridge' (which entailed a lot of grumpy border officials with a lot of AK47s and a massive thunder storm). I did get a cool visa stamped into my passport though.
From the border took another tuk-tuk ride, this time in a full monsoon so we got soaked by water spraying up off the road, in from the back, down through the top etc.

But Laos really was worth the wait. It's so laid back, the food's pretty good, a pint bottle of beer is $0.80US (and it's damn good beer for Asia) and the people are very friendly. Vientiane's a sleepy town, everything's shut by midnight.
Yesterday Adam and I rented bicycles (Adam's had no brakes, mine had dodgy steering, but at $0.60US for 24 hours you can't really complain about such things) and went for a ride to a temple. However, we took a wrong turn into a Buddhist monastery, where we ended up chatting to a monk for a long time and helping him prepare for the English exam he was going to sit that evening.
By the time we'd finished chatting and being shown around the monastery the temple would've already shut for the day so instead we went to the victory monument. It's modeled on the Arc de Triomphe but with Lao influences. Unfortunately the effect is less than attractive as they never actually finished it, so a large part of it is bare concrete and at certain points there are girders sticking out. The casts which would've been used to make the decorations are sitting in a stair well collecting chewing gum.
On the monument is a sign saying:

"[This...] is the Patuxay or Victory Gate of Vientiane, built in 1962, but never complete due to the country's turbulent history. From a closer distance it appears even less impressive, like a monster of concrete."

I guess when you're already at the monument it doesn't really need selling to you, but as tourist information goes this seems a tad stark. There was a good view of the town from the top. The whole effect of the monument, a fairly unattractive, mainly concrete monolith again seemed rather reminiscent of Birmingham. Perhaps this is what Birmingham would've built had it had anything to celebrate in the 1960s.

After this we returned to a bar in town and drank a cocktail each then retired to our guest house for a night of Lao Beer and gin rummy with a couple of the people who work there.

Next to the Mekong river are a number of nice little stalls selling traditional Lao food. Adam and I ate there are a few times, and it was very pleasant. Except for crazy/drugged to the eyeball people. The first time we ate there a large (Dutch?) man came over and whispered to us, very conspiratorially, (and slowly) "Can I ask you something?". We said to go ahead and ask, at which point he leaned forward and very slowly said "May I have one of those" - pointing at Adam's cigarettes.
This wasn't too bad so we came back the next day. I had ordered too much food so I was slowly finishing it off (waste not want not and all that) when a Laos guy with a very weird look in his eyes came over and started laughing. Then he started giving me a massage, then he grabbed my cutlery and finished off my food before running off after a tourist bus which had just pulled up nearby. He then climbed onto its roof and started pulling the bags off the rack on top- much to the consternation of the many tourists inside.

Bintangor

2006-06-18T18:24:00.000+08:00

I'm back in my lovely town of last year, Bintangor.
Very little has changed - the road between Bintangor and the nearest town with an airport has now got a bridge rather than a ferry. The locals are still excited about this 5 months later.
I'm going to a friend's 21st birthday party tonight.
Lilli and Mona have said they should be able to join me in August. No flights booked yet but it's looking good.
On Friday I wandered into SK Abang Amin (school from last year) at morning break. The shout rising up from the pupils as they saw me coming down the road was amazing. The biggest ego-trip I've had in a long time.
Played football for two hours yesterday evening. Was absolutely drenched in sweat by the end - so badly I couldn't even find a dry patch on my shirt to wipe my glasses. At least it made up for the fact I'd just had a five hour lunch of chicken curry.
So that's what I've been doing, nothing that exciting really. Fun for me though.

Comments (and the end of my time in Sabah - Northern Borneo)

2006-06-12T14:46:00.000+08:00

So, if you want to anybody can now make comments.

Just got back from the northern tip of Borneo - which was pretty dull really. But I had very nice seafood tom yam last night, which makes up for it.

People in Sabah (the state of Malaysia I'm in right now) in general have pretty poor English (when you get outside the city). This is not normally an issue as I can get by in Malay. However, many people here get embarassed because they can't speak English, so they address me in very rapid, quiet, embarassed Malay - which I have no chance of understanding.

After the north of Borneo I headed back to Kota Kinabalu to wait for Adam, which involved a lot of reading. It was very nice and relaxed. Then Adam got here, I met him off his flight, much to his surprise as he hadn't told me what flight he was on, then we spent a day on an island with a friend I'd made in KK. The three of us chartered a boat, went to Sulug Island and had it to ourselves all day. It was fantastic, apart from the sand flies. We ate nasi lemak (coconut rice with anchovies in a spicy sauce and fried peanuts - much nicer than it sounds) and ate water melon and pineapple all day.

A couple of things that occur to me

2006-06-11T17:53:00.000+08:00

Prostitutes.
Are everywhere of course. But I never thought one would find me in Brunei, such a controlled (and Muslim) country.
One on Pulau Labuan (Malaysian island) offered herself for RM50 - just about 7.50GBP.
And why do people in Asia always assume I want a prostitute? Do I look that desperate?
Probably.
Maybe it's the wonderful reputation that white people have built up for themselves in Asia.

Coaches.
Why do long distance buses always have carpet on the ceiling?
Had the most uncomfortable piss of my life in a long distance bus halfway between a coach and a minibus. It was going far too fast along narrow, bending roads, the door to the toilet had to be held shut and I was desperate. I think my swearing could be heard by all passengers on the bus. I wonder what they thought I was doing.

Football.
I have had several long conversations not in English or Malay but in football. The key to this language being to say names of footballers at each other then make suitable noises.
Eg. Wayne Rooney, then a concerned sigh.
Michael Owen, then an ambivalent shrug of the shoulders.
Ronaldo, always accompanied by a roll of the eyes and an impressed "whoah".
Much easier than learning the local language.
Shame I know nothing about football.

Drawing lines in the sand.
All the colonial powers did it at the end of empire. Malaysia was created by arbitrarily throwing together the Muslim peninsular with Christian majority Sabah and Sarawak (and Chinese Singapore originally). The peninsular developed rapidly, Sabah and Sarawak did not. Now people there have a good infrastructure etc but live in a place the only produce of which are bananas, coconuts, palm oil and wood. They live the simple life but have the benefit of a relatively developed country as well. This is obviously an idealised view as I went past a lot of extremely impoverished villages today (no running water/electricity - fishermen who anything they don't eat they sell to buy rice) but their situation would've been so much worse had they not been thrown together with the peninsular.
Yes, I have a worse than primary school level understanding of economics.

This internet cafe.
Is closing, they're sweeping the floor and closing the shutters. So I'd better go.

[edit]
This blog was posted from Kudat, the town right near the northern tip of Borneo, and it was boring. And empty. Three people in town were friendly enough to have a chat with. One of them turned out to be a lady boy who wanted to know which hotel I was staying in and started making hints about visiting me that night.
Oh the woes of travelling with long(ish) hair.
The other two were very nice girls, I chatted to them for a while and it was very pleasant.
The hotel I was staying in was over-expensive (almost 8 pounds a night - shock horror) and there was nothing to do. Needless to say I left again pretty sharpishly.
[end edit]

Lots of boats

2006-06-09T21:12:00.000+08:00

This blog is going to be rather craply written because I'm absolutely knackered from a day of travelling.
So to summarise the last few days.
In Brunei I spent a day looking at mosques and the water village then fled on the first boat to part of Malaysia as I was starting to get a tad bored. Had lunch there then took another boat to Kota Kinabalu.
Spent a couple of days there developing plans, meeting people and relaxing then took a bus to Sandakan (east coast of Borneo) where I visited the orang utans at Sepilok rehabiliation centre. They were happy swinging about, eating bananas and fighting it out for sugar cane with macaques.
Then a long minibus ride followed by another boat trip and I got to a jungle camp on the Kinabatangan River.

This place was amazing. It's somewhat basic: it has no electicity, water or anything much apart from a roof, mattresses on the floor and mosquito nets. To wash, there are buckets full of river water (which is an unenticingly strong shade of brown and which have the odd leech residing in them) and as you washed you had to keep a close eye on your clothes because the macaques can be somewhat mischievous. The people running it were all crazy and it was generally fantastic.
On the ride there we saw proboscis monkeys, macaques galore, various types of hornbills and an eagle or two. That night we went out in a boat and saw lots of monkeys, frogs and kingfishers sleeping. Also spotted a slow lauris, which is one of the cutest animals I've ever seen (and very very slow).
On the next day was up early for a dawn boat ride (more monkeys, hornbills etc - including a rhinoceros hornbill which are extremely rare) then a bit of a walk in the jungle. In the afternoon we took another boat ride, the main aim of which was to spot crocodiles. And we did. Many. But most of them you could only see the eyes.
In the evening a party happened - possibly because it was the birthday of one of the camp staff but I don't really believe it was - so we all sat about drinking Finlandia vodka and local rice wine and whisky and singing along to a guitar. At about 11 it became a good idea to take this party onto one of the boats and go for a trip out into a nearby lake (yes, where we had been spotting the crocodiles earlier) and sing, dance and drink in a rather small (but very stable) boat.
Next day missed the morning boat trip, but went for another walk in the jungle instead, spotting the tail of a civet cat in rapid retreat, a few leeches and not that much else. In the afternoon went on another boat trip, which turned into an evening cruise down the Kinabatangan as the engine fell apart. It was amazing sitting there listening to the macaques fighting, hornbills flying over head, proboscis monkeys honking and seeing the eyes of submerged crocodiles silently surveying us.
Then a guy from the camp took some of us on a night walk into the jungle. As we walked off he started proudly relating to us how, the previous night, "a spirit entered me, so i couldn't see anything - then i took my machete and started swinging it everywhere, then i fell unconscious". Then he laughed like a girl, said "ooh la la" and pointed out a rather large tarantula over my head. It was about big enough to sit on two hands together. Also spotted a scorpion, lots of tree frogs (very cute and very sticky feet-which i discovered after one jumped in my boot and I tried to remove it).

Which takes us up to today, which I spent travelling, first on a boat, then on a rather crappy bus. The engine was overheating badly, which the driver handled by using copious amounts of air freshener and stopping once to squirt the engine with a hose.

So that's the last few days. Four days til Adam gets here so I'm heading north to the tip of Borneo, and hopefully going to see a rafflesia flower (massive and stink of rotting flesh).

Brunei

2006-06-02T10:56:00.000+08:00

Arrived yesterday in Brunei - nothing much to report except how wonderful the food is and how good it is to be somewhere where you can wear shorts and t-shirt all day.
Got bitten by five mosquitos whilst eating dinner last night - a nice welcome back to Asia.

Today is Friday so most of Brunei is shut down, hence the internet-cafe-sitting. Also, I'm planning what to do over the next few days.

On another note:
London people and Dave, Matt, Yuddi, thanks for a fantastic last night in London, was great fun though I had the worst hangover - it lasted until I was over Ukraine. Dave, Matt, Yuddi- it was amazing of you three to come and see me and I hope you enjoyed the trip.