Charlie Don't Surf

"Charlie don't surf" Well we do. But not very well.

Halong Bay, Vietnam

Also Halong Bay, some kind of hawk-type bird.

Top of a mountain at Cat Ba Island. The camera probably does not do justice to just how sweaty we all were.

"So, you reckon this boat will hold three people and two bikes? Ok then"

Water Puppet Theatre, Hanoi.

Check out my massive dong

Anyone want to try the dog?

As you can see, before he buggered off back to England, me and Tom went surfing in China Beach. It used to be popular among the American GI's when they were given leave as a place to surf too. These days it's not exactly Apocalypse now with all the helicopters flying overhead as we rode the waves (or tried to) but it still allows us to say "back in Nam when I was surfing" and that's all that matters. Obviously.

You may have noticed my reference to Tom leaving, yes he's gone as well now, leaving me forced to talk to Haya for the forseeable future. Although for the next three days I am killing some time in Hanoi as I wait for my Chinese visa. Why do I need a Chinese visa? Because next on the list is Tibet, possibly at the same time as the Shoton Festival aka Festival of Yoghurt. There's a good chance that I'll be going to the Mount Everest base camp where I can walk in the footsteps of the great one, Brian Blessed. He just climbs it for fun every now and then apparently. So this Monday I leave Vietnam for China. I can't leave any later than this because my visa runs out, something I didn't realise until the other day and then thought, 'hmmm maybe I should actually plan where I'm going next as I have to leave the country'.

On top of the surfing, China Beach, near Danang, was one of my favourite places so far in Vietnam. Somehow it was still pretty undeveloped in terms of hotels, restaurants etc. although you could tell it will be unrecognisable in a couple of years time by all the building work in its early stages. Only downside of the place was a very big angry looking dog wanting to eat me when I tried to have a look round Marble Mountain but hey, he'll probably be sweet and sour on a menu next week anyway.

Having not really had any problems so far travelling through Asia, and doing the odd group tour here and there, it was inevitable that we would see how things can go slightly wrong sooner or later. Basically we went on a 3 day, 2 night tour to Halong Bay and Cat Ba Island, which were beautiful places themselves, it's just that everyone involved in the tour from the booking agency, right through to our tour guide were completely corrupt! I won't go into massive detail but - long story short - we ended up having to go to the police to try and get them to do something about an agency that has obviously been scamming backpackers for a while. The "police" weren't remotely interested as they must have been suitably bribed a long time ago. But the tour did unite our group in a pretty sturdy hatred of our "tour guide". I think he flipped a coin each time before he spoke to us: heads he lies, tails the truth. Oh we had a lot of names for him, most of them four lettered. You hear plenty of stories about other people getting shafted, so once in a trip isn't something I'm going to worry about. Although I would like to see the receptionist of the Cat Ba Plaza tied up and bent over in an enclosure with an especially randy bull...

One of the best things about backpacking is the random experiences that are competely unplanned but utterly welcome. One such event was a few nights ago when we were celebrating the birthday of an Irish friend, Leanne. After we had hit a couple of bars we needed a new one and were walking along a road in the old quarter of Hanoi. When a large group of Austrian exchange students come along and tell us their Vietnamese/german guide is taking them for a lock-in at a bar called Half Man Half Noodle. As our friend Dave put it, a bar with a name like that sounds too good to be true. But it did exist and a lock in with a load of Austrian economics students we had.

Finally this week, I'm slightly worried. I need a haircut, but I'm in Vietnam. I need to find a barber shop that can speak the level of English I need to be able to tell them how I want it cut. This seems unlikely so I may just print out a picture of myself from two months ago and point to that. Next time you see a picture of me, I may have the haircut of an eighties footballer. Eeeek.

P.S. The picture format of the blog is a bit screwy again because Vietnamese computers think they know best. Wouldn't know best if I took a hammer to them...

Knees up mother brown

Yeah, I got bored of company and had to tie them to a railway track. I probably would get away with it too if I hadn't put it on the blog

Fishing boat off the coast of Nha Trang

Alcohol and water? Perfect combination, hand out free shots of a something that tastes like crap to everyone!

So me and Tom rented a swan canoe and took a trip on a lake together, what's not manly about that? Ok, quite a lot but it had to be done

Elephant Falls, Dalat. So named because all the mossy rocks at the bottom resemble elephants

This guy was one of the most absorbing people I've met and I could only understand about half of what he said.

The old Kho man from a Lat Village plays the Kambuot

Ok, so the blog has a different look to it this time because that is what this computer has decided. After a bit of fiddling around and swearing I have decided that the computer can have it's evil way. Until next time...

Anyway, since the last blog we've been blazing a trail up the east coast of Vietnam. By blazing a trail I mean taking our time to stop and visit all the best places of course. Since I can't check my last blog for some reason (aren't computers great and never at all frustrating?) I can't remember if I told you about our trip up the Mekong Delta. Some vague light of recognition in my cobweb addled mind says I did so I'll skip to Mui Ne. Actually, I've just remembered I mentioned that already too, so on to Dalat. (Something says I should never have a career in a position of life or death importance. Like Homer Simpson running a nuclear power station).

So, Dalat, yes. Dalat was the first time I've had to wear a second layer of clothing in a long time. It was up at fairly high altitude so it's possibly the coolest place, temperature wise, in Vietnam. Which isn't to say it's cold because this is Vietnam, not the UK, but all the locals were wrapping up warm in scarves and thick coats when it was still around the 20 oC mark. While there we went on a tour with an Easy Rider, one of a group of guys who owns a motorbike and drives about the town looking for people such as ourselves to offer a less touristy kind of tour to. Normally I don't accept offers from suspicious looking bikers, this is Tom's pass-time but the tour turned out to be amazing, especially the Lat village that we went to. I could have listened the old guy there (pictured above) all day, he had endless stories about being a doctor during the Vietnam war and all the local customs and traditions. The village that he was a part of are a catholic minority within Vietnam, a predominantly Buddhist country, I think influenced by the French. And, this is the best part, when he got married he cost his wife's family 5 buffalo! Seeing as we don't have many buffalo in England I may put my price at about 7 horses or 16 badgers.

More bizarre was a place we stopped called Crazy House, an ongoing project to build a hotel that looks like a warped nursery rhyme. The owner and creator is the daughter of the man who was Vice President when Uncle Ho Chi was in charge back in the 1960's. We were told she went to study architecture in Moscow and then began this hotel in 1990. She may well have studied architecture in Moscow but I imagine she also indulged in a side helping of Hans Christien- Anderson and more than a few hallucinogenic substances. 

Now we're in Hoi An, after a slog of an overnight coach journey. We came from Nha Trang, nice enough place but nowt to do other than the beach and a boat trip which was as much a booze cruise as anything. Ask the Australian guy that was carried off the boat with his shorts round his ankles at the end of the day.

Good Morning Vietnam!

Yeah I know, anyone who can make a conical hat look that good should be locked up

A boat selling rambutan ( a fruit that looks like hairy red testicles) on a floating market

Me and Tom thought this looked rude therefore funny, therefore you all need to see it/them

A trap used by the Vietnamese during the war. You kind of just fall in and get spiked a lot

One of the many helicopters used to "stop the spread of communism"

An artists impression of how Tom might look were he a Vietnamese teacher. Above him is a picture of Ho Chi Minh, or Uncle Ho as he's better known

A lot of the boats on the Mekong Delta have the two eyes because superstition states that a monster lives on the bottom, of the lake. If it comes up to attack and sees the two eyes it will think the boat is a friend and will leave peacefully.

So who's already finished the last Harry Potter then? Well, if you have don't tell me what happens because now Tom has finished his in some kind of record time, I will soon be starting said book. We've barely had a word from him in days on coach journeys, I think I may have even seen him shed a tear, although I can't back that up with any actual proof. It was impressive though how on the day of the worldwide release of H.P, you could pick up a dodgy copy on the streets of Ho Chi Minh city for about 100'000 Dong, or about £3.

We also said goodbye to Nick until we get back to the UK, albeit for a second time in Ho Chi Minh, we'd already had a bit of a leaving party in Sihanoukville on the South coast of Cambodia. It involved drinking a lot of cocktails, a whole menu's worth in fact. Which could explain why the next day when we said the first goodbye to Nick, it felt like something had crawled inside me and died. But then when we said goodbye for the second time it was Nick's turn as he reckoned he had Dengue fever or something like that (read: manflu). Anyway, if it was Dengue fever, don't expect to see him too soon as there is no known cure for it. His last meaningful action in this world would then have been to get me to take a picture with Tom's camera (so I can't show you the horror at the moment) of them having a big, and slightly wrong goodbye embrace. When I say slightly wrong I mean very wrong, because when I say goodbye embrace I mean the meeting of two beards in a brief "manly" goodbye smooch. I bet Nick slipped him the tongue.

Anyway, enough manlove, back to Vietnam. In Ho Chi Minh we went to see the war tunnels used by Guerilla fighters in that famous war of the 60's and 70's. This was where I discovered that I am a little bit claustrophobic. Not so much that you'd notice but put me in a dark, hot tunnel with just enough room to crawl on hands and knees and I'll look for the exit quicker than you can say "I love the smell of napalm in the morning". We also saw a lot of gruesome looking traps, the worst of all for me personally being one that spikes the armpits after you fall onto it. It probably wasn't the most deadly but come on, spikes through the armpits, it's just not cricket.

After Ho Chi Minh, we went on a 2 day trip to the Mekong Delta, where we stayed on a homestay with a Vietnamese family and helped out a bit on cooking some of the best food I've had whilst travelling. I'm kind of hungry right now so I won't go into detail for my own sake, I don't want to be charged extra for drooling onto the keyboard. It was gooood though. We also rowed a bit on one of the boats we took through the Mekong Delta where I was put to shame by a not quite elderly but old woman who rowed ceaselessly through the inlets we were passing through, while my arms wanted to fall off after less time than they should have. I like to put it down to the fact that she has been doing this all her life, not to the fact that university has ruined my physical fitness.

Now we are in Mui Ne, a small beach town on the south east coast of Vietnam. Yesterday was a good day of doing virtually nothing on a beach so today we had a roam to some large sand dunes around on moto's (scooters essentially). I can now drive a manual, who needs a license anyway?

Seeing Die Hard 4 in a Vietnamese cinema a few days ago was also a worthwhile experience because Die Hard 4 is a brilliant film! I can't think of a fourth film in a franchise that has been as good. Normally, by the time they make it to number 3 it's all gone to hell, let alone 4. Just consider the shite number 3's that Hollywood has put out this year; Spiderman 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and although I haven't seen it, I have heard that Oceans 13 was entirely unnecessary for all concerned. Well, if you haven't seen Die Hard 4 do it or Bruce Willis will drive a car through your house.

Qi est la daddy?

GRRRR!!!! Sometimes computers make you so mad you could maim a small passing kitten. This is one time. Because of some damn Cambodian computer I lost ALL of my Cambodian photos. There were some damn fine ones in there too. Anyway I've stolen Tom and Haya's so all is not lost, we had been to pretty much the same places anyway. It's just that my photos are my photos and well, this rant is going nowhere

Angkor Wat silhoutted against the sunrise. 

Bayon, the temple with all the crazy carved faces. Loved it. 

Francisco, our Chilean friend, shows us how they riot in his home country. 

Life is hard (again). On the right is my hebrew teacher, Haya. I have learnt how to tell Tom he has a stupid beardy face. 

Everyone loves a cheeky monk shot. 

Our reunion with Paul. We now all sport Changbands. Some would call them matching bracelets but that makes us sound like a bunch of French dukes, and this we are not. Well sometimes we are not.

I think the very first travel photo of me and Nick in Heathrow airport looks like this except that we have no hair and are very pale. Now look at us. We are hairy hobos.

The bumping into random people from home continues. The two girls on the left, I used to go to uni with. Met them in Chang Mai, Thailand and then southern Cambodia. Small world etc bla bla bla

Angkor, I would be an idiot to try and sum that place up in words. It would just be a paragraph of wow, spectacular, ancient, grand majestic etc. and we don't want that.

So, yes Angkor and it's many ancient ruins and temples was all of the aforementioned superlatives and more. Getting up at 4am to see the sunrise was even worthwhile and I am a man who hates early mornings with vehement passion. Of course, it wasn't as simple as getting up early for a gentle cycle over to Angkor Wat, because after about 15 mins of riding the chain on my bike broke. Which meant a mad dash back to the hotel in a tuk-tuk, dump the bike, get back in the tuk-tuk and hope to get there in time. Which I did. Just. I think all the high pitched oo's and aah's of the hundreds of Japanese and Koreans around us when the sun appeared were apt.

A brief history lesson: Angkor was effectively the capital of the Khmer Empire 1000-ish years ago. (Give or take a couple of 100 years, I can't be bothered to wikipedia it right now). When London was merely a young whippersnapper on the world circuit with a population of 50'000, Angkor boasted 1 million. Over the course of several hundred years, temples were built; Buddhist temples, Hindu Temples, big ones, small ones, some with such intricate detail on such a massive scale that it is bewildering. One of my favourites was Bayon, which was massive in itself and was home to over 200 large carved stone faces.

Siem Reap (the base town for seeing Angkor) also taught us that myself, Nick and Tom should probably not share a room for 4 days ever again. The room may have passed as a hotel room when we entered it but it was probably a biohazard when we left it. Festering would be a good word to sum it up. So would stale. I have to hold my hands up and take a large share of the blame here, I was a bit ill one day and as a result sweated my own body weight during the night. Back home, if this were the case, one might change their bedsheets. I just changed the end I slept down the next night. Living the dream...

After Siem Reap was Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh. We spent a day at the Killing Fields and S-21 both stark reminders of the tyrannical reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge from 1975-79. In a nutshell, the man wanted to start society over again, from the beginning, meaning that he intended to turn every Cambodian into an agricultural worker, farming the land. A lot of Cambodian people were killed by their own countrymen, e.g. anyone considered too intelligent was murdered, which quite often meant just wearing glasses could get you 'disappeared'. One line that I took from the Killing Fields was "they have the human form, but their hearts are demon hearts", in reference to the Khmer Rouge.

Oh yeah, I'm now a card shark. Won a game of poker the other night that started off with 13 people. Went a bit flash with the winnings and bought drinks for anyone that wanted one. Then the money left over paid off my guesthouse bill the next day. Who says gambling is a mug's game?

Now we've made it back to the beaches, we're in Sihanoukville, in the south of Cambodia, just before we head into 'Nam. Somehow, we've managed to go over a month without a peaceful stretch of sand in sight. I say peaceful, it becomes less so when small children are convinced that you will buy whatever trinkets they are selling if they ask you enough times. Still, a beach is a beach.

Anything else? The phrase "what's he doing in there, reading War and Peace?" is now redundant as that is exactly what Tom is doing in there. I am learning a few lines of hebrew from our latest travel buddy, Haya. So far, (and without looking in my book), one of the best things I can say is 'Az ma? At baa lepo hrbe?' Which means 'So? Do you some here often?' Bars of Israel look out, lines that good are like a lethal weapon in my hands...

Keeping it Riel

Can't remember the name of this waterfall but it was Northeast Cambodia. And there was lots of water. This photo is from behind it by the way.

Different waterfall this time, a couple of children fishing in it.

We went to see the Irrawaddy dolphins (endangered species) but the photos I got look like amorphous, fat, grey blobs so here's a fat beardy blob instead.

Nick prefers to look at the world through pink laced curtains

Up close and personal with a water buffalo

Is there a better name for a whisky?

These blogs have been lacking wanky sunset shots recently so here you go

You may think the population of a small Cambodian village surrounds this car but no, that's who was riding in it. They got stuck. A few times.

Don Det was not what you might call a party island so god knows why menu item no. 14 is quite as chemically enhanced as it is. You could also make any item on the menu "happy" and you just had to specify how "happy" you wanted it...

Sorry to disappoint you but nothing much has happened today. We've had a 10+ hour coach journey from Kratie to Siem Reap and I managed to nap throughout much of it. So, there you go, nothing to see here, go on, go and do whatever it is you were meant to be doing before you thought ""hmmm lets see what Mark and co have been up to..."

Ha! As if I wouldn't have anything to tell you about. Imagine! The mere thought that in over a week since the last blog nothing would have happened is just silly. For a start we're in Cambodia now, we crossed the Laos-Cambodia border about 4 or 5 days ago. The passport office was essentially a wooden shed in the woods, down a dodgy back road but we got through with a minimum of "administration fees"(read: bribes), only a dollar or two each side of the border.

The last place we visited in Laos was in the far South, an area called the Four Thousand Islands. Of the four thousand, we stayed on one called Don Det. Not a great deal happens on the islands, which is undoubtedly the main attraction of them for many people. Including ourselves. It's quite easy to do nothing when your room has a balcony with several hammocks and overlooks a large expanse of the Mekong River. Most expanses of the Mekong river tend to be large actually. And quite swirly. Oh and while we were there, Tom "accidentally"milked a stray dog. Psh, "accidentally".

From the border crossing we headed North East to an area called Ratankiri where you go see/swim in a few big waterfalls and swim in a volcanic crater lake. Not many backpackers make the journey this way during the wet season (i.e. now) because it is a bit of a trek at the best of times. This proved to be the case. Not so much on the way there but certainly on the way back as we had to get out a couple of times to help out other vehicles that had gotten stuck in the mud roads that service this area of Cambodia and were therefore blocking the path of our bus. By this time I felt experienced in the field of getting vehicles unstuck as we had helped a large Cambodian family get out of the mud the previous day. I mention this because I had to leap into the back of a pick up truck at fairly high speed.

Such death-defying recklessness came about as me and Nick had chosen to jump up and down on the back fender of a pick-up truck to give it better grip on the mud. (This seemed the intelligent choice as opposed to pushing and getting liberally spattered with mud). SO, the truck gets the grip it needs and starts to speed up. The both of us think we'll just hang on until the driver stops. But he's decided he wants to be well clear of the mud and proceeds to bounce the truck over the mud track quite fast. Anyway, the upshot of this rambling is that I had to dive, kind of head first, with Nick pulling one arm, into the back of the truck as I would otherwise have been thrown off the back. Those watching from behind just saw my legs as they dangled gracefully about off the back of the truck until the driver decided it might be time to stop. Arnie himself would have been proud of such an action scene. I'm not sure what that gives me on the "I could have died" stories count but if you don't come back with at least a couple, other backpackers will shun you. Oh the shame.

Finally for this week, I was talking to a couple of Dutch girls who were on our boat trip to look at the Irrawaddy dolphins yesterday. One of them asked if Tom, Nick and myself had become hippies while we were travelling, or always looked like this! Whilst making a kind of hand motion gesture that described our long hair and general beardiness. I'm sure it was a compliment although I couldn't tell as one of them, as I had earlier pointed out, had the kind of demeanour that wouldn't seem out of place in the Gestapo.

And quote of the week comes from Tom: "I don't fancy Danny Grewcock, I just love him" (For those not into their rugby, Danny Grewcock is a player who would get more games if he weren't generally suspended for maiming other players. Tom should never be allowed near him for the safety of all involved.)

Communism makes bowling easy

Bowl for your country, comrade

Laos is a kind of hybrid, somewhere between communism and capitalism

The Marvirak Chey Mutrea Buddha. Depicts Buddha as he meditated under the Boddhi tree, hoping to attain enlightenment. (Sometimes I accidentally learn something)

The Laos Arc de Triomphe

A cave used during the secret war to hide in from the bombing. There were probably less Japanese tourists thirty years ago. Probably

A bit of a stroll through the rice fields

Site 1 at the Plain of Jars

Why did the chicken cross the road? To get away from the American Imperialist and his puppet soldiers! HAHA! Ok, so it's not actually a funny joke, barely even passable as a joke if it weren't for the time honoured 'why did the chicken cross the road'. But then communism isn't known for producing the comedy greats. Although Stalin's moustache was quite funny. Then again, if you met him and laughed at it he would probably have you killed on site.

We went to the Laos National Museum yesterday, in Vientiane. It was, until a few years ago, known as the Laos Revolutionary Museum, a source of pride for the Laos people, illustrating their heroic struggle against the tyrannical west and highlighting all that is great about communism. Well, they may have changed the name, but the inside retains its revolutionary 'charm'. Many pictures depict the many heroic battles fought by the people, first against the French about 100 years ago and then the "puppet forces" of "the American Imperialist". By the time you come out of there you are calling each other comrade and have a strange craving for vodka.

One thing to be said for Communism though, it does make you get a ridiculously good score if you go bowling. I managed 180 on our first game, aided by a lane that would give you odd extra pin here, maybe a spare there. Perhaps it is good for the morale of the people to score well and be happy. Having said that my score did drop to a more realistic level with each game we played.

Before reaching the capital we spent a few days in a town called Veng Viang. Known mainly for it's river tubing, this is exactly the reason we went there. River tubing involves sitting in a large inner tube (of say, a tractor tyre) and floating down a long section of a river. But with bars dotted all the way down. And each bar has a giant rope swing or zip wire for the progressively more hammered backpacker to throw himself into the water from. It's a winning combination! Needless to say, it's probably the most fun you can have with an inner tube and a river as long as you don't do what one guy did and launch yourself into water less than 6ft deep, whilst trying to somersault and end up biting through your own lip. Then you need to find the nearest hospital in a country not exactly world renowned for it's top notch health care. No injuries here though, if it's not an aborigine curse I'm just not interested these days.

After Veng Viang we made a detour to the Plain of Jars, an area of Phonsavan covered in three separate sites of large stone jars that date back thousands of years. Nobody is exactly sure why they're there either. One theory is that they were used to distill rice wine and whisky in. If that were the case then ancient Laos was party town.

Sad news for anyone that knows how much time me and Dan wasted at university with a quick game of Pro Evo (a football game for the playstation) every now and then: Slightly lost the other day after a trip to the Cambodian embassy, we stumbled across a shop full of kids playing Pro Evo and all kinds of other games. The lure of playing a cheeky game of Pro Evo in the middle of Laos was too much for mere mortals to handle and so we scuttled sheepishly in there and had a couple of games. We shouldn't have been proud of this but we were. It should have remained a dirty secret but hey, we're all adults here.

P.S. We have been reliably informed that in Laos the word Tom means 'gay'.

The "Secret War"

Before deciding to go travelling I didn't really know where Laos was. Now, as I am in the capital Vientiane, I do. 

From one day to the next you can discover the existence of something completely new to you, something you were totally unaware of before. Like America's foreign policy in this part of the world during the 60's and 70's. Everyone knows about the Vietnam war but many, myself included, had never really heard of a "Secret War" against Laos. A bombing campaign which drops the equivalent of a ton of explosive for every person in a country seems a little excessive, even by U.S standards. "Secret" because, somehow, it was more or less hushed up at the time. How you keep something like subjecting a country to history's most intensive bombing campaign is beyond me but then so is the success of Pop Idol contestants (shudder)...

Not going to go on, the pictures explain it better anyway.