Apologies, acknowledgments and requests

Blog neglect would not come close to explaining or excusing the hideous gap in posts this time. I can only say that I have been very lazy and have been all to consumed with the right here right now to bother maintaining this journal of sorts.

The truth is though, I have been writing, I just haven't bothered to publish anything. It was only when Marie and John (who were visiting last week) said that they enjoyed reading it and thought that I should continue with it, that I felt motivated to update the blog. Nice to have some encouragement.

A fair bit has happened since the last post in April, so I've dumped everything that I wrote into the blog and you can read through it if you are wanting to kill some time.

I have recently finished running a tour through Lao and Cambodia. The post directly below this one was a product of the Lao trip. The wet season turned out to be a really great time of year to visit Lao. Lush green jungle, rivers full of water, heaps of fruit in season and no smokey haze to obstruct the view. Really awesome!

I am suffering a little from decent music starvation, so if anyone can offer any recommendations for new music and/or books, this would be greatly appreciated! You could just click on the "comments" link at the bottom of one of the posts and mention your recommendation. It might save me from insanity caused by bad Thai music and bad backpacker books!

Cheerio,
Adam

Man left bound by debt after holiday

A man has found himself financially committed, almost beyond his means after returning from what he expected to be a refreshing holiday.

It all started when Mr. Peter Warrington signed up to participate in a group cycling adventure through the small South East Asian nation of Laos. “I had just finished my job in Singapore and wanted a holiday before starting my new job in Hong Kong” said Mr. Warrington from his small room in a poor, Hong Kong neighborhood.

The other participants had joined individually or in couples also, so none of the participants new each other. Mr. Warrington said that in the beginning it all seemed very pleasant and everyone made an effort to get to know each other, while traveling first to Northern Thailand and then on a boat down the Mekong River in Laos.

Mr. Warrington admitted that he may not have paid adequate attention to the suggested packing list, sent to him by the tour operator. This is possibly where the trouble started. One of Mr. Warrington’s fellow travelers offered him a sleeping tablet for the overnight train trip. Mr. Warrington was grateful for the tablet as he often finds it difficult to sleep in such situations. The following day, Mr. Warrington felt a prolonged drowsiness, at which time his fellow traveler offered an energy tablet to help Mr. Warrington wake up. The consumption of the tablets started to become a daily occurrence as the trip went on as they helped Mr. Warrington to enjoy the trip more.

There were unusually heavy rains during the trip and Mr. Warrington was offered a rain jacket as he had neglected to pack his own. The offer came from the same fellow traveler and was soon followed by an offer of a torch for viewing the Pak Ou Caves. Mr. Warrington accepted all these items, being under the impression that the “small fee” that was mentioned may have involved a beer or two.

Things took a nasty turn while the group were visiting the tiger enclosure near Luang Prabang. Mr. Warington was fumbling with his morning wake-up tablet (to which he feels he may be heavily addicted to since the trip) and accidentally dropped it. The tiger was quick to consume the pill that landed in it’s enclosure and shortly after became highly aggressive, breaking through the enclosure fence and chasing two small, blond German children who were traveling with their parents (not members of the tour). The children did escape with only the loss of one foot each as they climbed up a tree to safety, but the family have pursued Mr. Warrington for medical expenses, in addition to compensation for pain and suffering following the tragedy.

The rare Indochina Tiger required emergency treatment for a severe reaction to the tablet that Mr. Warrington inadvertently fed it. This came at considerable cost and the carers of the tiger needed to be compensated by Mr Warrington.

Mr. Warrington made a cash settlement with both the tiger’s care-givers and the parents of the injured children. His fellow traveler was able to provide instant cash for these purposes and assured Mr. Warrington that even a slightly high rate of interest may be worth his while to resolve the issue out of the courts.

Mr. Warrington’s fellow traveler was nice enough to offer a third type of tablet to calm the nerves after the tiger experience which may have further exacerbated the dependency issues that were already becoming apparent. “I just found that I needed more and more of these tablets to help me feel good” said Mr. Warrington. “If I didn’t take sleeping tablets, I would dream about the tiger and suffer terrible insomnia”.

At the end of the two week trip, Mr. Williams was presented with a bill for all the items supplied by his fellow traveler. The bill, inclusive of tablets, rain jacket, torch, emergency compensation-cash and “miscellaneous traveling advice” came to a total of $3.5million US. Mr. Warrington therefore had to sell his Singapore apartment and enter into a payment plan with his fellow traveler who he knows only as Mr. Monsante. Mr. Monsante is not known to authorities, although upon reporting this incident to authorities, Mr. Warrington discovered that there are various other victims of such situations arising from group tours. Det. Insp. Sringnaponakorn of Vientiane tourism crime division said that they had no evidence that Mr. Monsante had acted outside the realms of the law. “All the contracts and accompanying documents all appear to be in order. We do stress to travelers however to carefully peruse the suggested packing list and be particularly careful to seek a price before accepting items of assistance, even in emergency situations.” Mr. Sringnaponakorn said.

For the meantime, it seems unlikely that Mr. Warrington will be going on another holiday for some time, as he works off the huge debt owed to a Canadian company believed to be owned by Mr. Monsante. When contacted for comment, Mr Monsante defended his actions and said that he was just trying to help his new friend and things may have got a little out of hand, but he said that this was mainly due to Mr Warrington being a little naïve and neglecting to prepare for the tour.

Photos relating to China bound

1) The Yak 2) I don't know what they were trying to say


3) Safe path??? Who were they trying to kid? 4) Lijiang by night



5) About to enter the Red Dragon 6)View from Tea Horse, Tiger Leaping Gorge

7) The deserted island Quan Lan 8) Sunrise from our shack

9) Ben and I assessing the statistics on washed 10) The Chinese Sleeper bus experience
up thongs


11) Shanghai... well... a scale model of it
(not all the lights are working)

China bound

Gotta get out of Vietnam!

After working in Vietnam for around a month, running trips in the Northwest, I was looking forward to getting out. Vietnam is an amazing country and there are some endearing qualities in the locals, but there are also some rather frustrating qualities, being that around 40% of all transactions will somehow involve the local trying to inflate the price, or outright rip you off. The other 60% of transactions are perfectly honest and straightforward and go a long way towards repairing one’s perception of the country, but it is just such a task to have to constantly be on your toes and question prices on everything.

As a breather, a group of us including, friend, acquaintance and fellow tour leader decided to head to Halong Bay and then Quan Lan Island. These are two very contrasting experiences, because the first is done as part of a very well practiced, all inclusive two day tour. The second is an independent four hour ferry journey out to a very quiet little island where we stay in basic wooden shacks on the beach with our host who speaks about five words of English. They are both very relaxing experiences though and by the time we return to Hanoi we are well rested and ready to start the next section of our respective adventures. Ben is heading home to the UK for a couple of weeks before starting with his new employer GAP travel on a six months SE Asia contract. Sarah is exploring the coast of Vietnam before coming back up north and heading to China. Miss Guion and I are heading for China overland. We are catching an overnight train to Lao Cai and then going over the boarder to Yunnan province in China.

After bidding farewell to Sarah and Ben, we head for the train station. Things are running smoothly, the taxi driver even put his meter on without an argument and took us exactly where we wanted to go (a rarity). We arrive at the station with twenty minutes to go before the train leaves. We ask the man at the front of the station where to go and he motions us through the main entrance. The ticket checking lady motions us to board the train on platform one. It is only when we are getting our beds ready that things start to look a bit strange. There are another two people claiming to belong to the bunks that we are preparing and the train conductor tends to agree with them. We have boarded the wrong train and as we are scampering across to platform five, our train is leaving without us. So we now need to spend another day in Hanoi which is not really to our liking.

The following night, all goes to plan, we get on the right train and we arrive in Lao Cai earlier than expected. We consume a very average breakfasts at one of the tour sales offices posing as a café and then get a taxi for the boarder. I say to the taxi driver “Hekou please, China border” He says “OK…how much?” Miss Guion says, “put your bloody meter on” he says “OK” and then proceeds to take us about eight kilometers in the wrong direction!!! When we start circling a small town that is obviously nowhere near China, I start swearing at him and telling him to turn the meter off and take us to the border. All of a sudden, it turns out the little bludger can’t speak a word of English, despite making pleasant conversation while he took us for a ride into the arse end of nowhere. So we get out and grab our luggage. The little rip-off merchant starts to get aggressive and demands the money on the meter. He gets two local blokes that have been standing on the side of the road in on the act. He presumably tells them that these foreigners asked to come here (to the arse-end of nowhere) and now they don’t want to pay the fare. So before we get to blows, I pay the money and we get two perfectly honest moto guys to take us to the boarder. At the border, there is just one more problem. They have never seen my APEC card which substitutes as a Visa for various countries. A stern bloke in a messy green uniform barks “you wait there” and directs me to a hard, broken plastic char. After half an hour he comes back and says “OK, you go”. So we are out of bloody Vietnam! Not a minute too soon. We expect that things in China may be difficult, due to language barriers, but surely they can’t be as exhaustingly, commercially-dishonest as the Vietnamese.

When we arrive at the China side there is a lane marked “officials, diplomats and APEC members”. This is nice. I walk over to the counter and a small clean cut man in a neatly pressed communist-uniform hurries over to me. He salutes me and welcomes me to the Peoples Republic of China. He takes me to a small office with comfortable furniture and offers me a cup of tea while I wait. He apologises and says that they do not see many APEC cards here so would I mind waiting while they check the regulations? Not at all when he puts it like that. While his co-worker checks the regulations, he keeps me company and makes small talk about my country, his country and the weather. When all is done he walks me through to the exit and bids me good luck in my travels. I give myself a pinch to make sure that I am not dreaming and then I walk over to meet Miss Guion. As we are discussing our next move, there occurs, a horrible guttural sound, that sounds like something between an angle grinder, a pig in pain and nails on a blackboard. We look over in horror, thinking that somebody is dying right next to us, only to see a fairly well dressed man spit a huge lump of snot and mucus onto the footpath. Ahhh… we are in China!

We are in shock and disbelief. Hekou is like a showroom. The streets are clean and wide and nobody is sounding there horn every three seconds. Everything is neat and ordered. We go to the bus station and through my few words of Mandarin and some excellent miming, we obtain a bus ticket to Kunming. The ticket says 10.50, so we have an hour and ten minutes to wait for departure on this ten hour bus ride, or so we think. It turns out that China is an hour ahead of Vietnam. The whole country is. This is quite curious when you think about the breadth of the country. In the Western provinces it stays light until a surreal hour in the evening, while the East coast can enjoy a fairly normal daylight span.

After about eight hours driving we arrive at a food stop and consume a delicious meal for about a dollar. The food in China is superb. These people seem to live for it, just like those in my adopted country of residence, Thailand. Everything has to have balance though and in this instance the balance is the toilet. I had forgotten exactly how bad Chinese toilets are. They are the worst in any place that I have been. The places that you would expect to have lovely clean toilets have pretty bad, smelly rooms with filthy bowls that are hardly ever cleaned. Bus stations and roadside stops are beyond comprehension. I have been in the company of people that have vomited at the sight of these toilets. They are truly unimaginable to those that have not traveled in China or in the number one toilet hell, India.


The toilets are a small price to pay for the otherwise wonderful travel experience that is China. We arrive to Kunming late in the evening. Kunming is a huge metropolis in comparison to the ramshackle cities of Vietnam. A very polite mini-van driver takes us to our hotel and we sleep the sleep of contented travelers, in the knowledge that we will soon awaken to a huge buffet breakfast, including Bao-tsa, the steamed bun with various fillings that can be found all over China. There is Bao-tsa with red been filling, Bao-tsa with green veg and tofu and Bao-tsa with any kind of meat you might desire. Miss Guion and myself are of the veg-aquarian faith and for this reason desire no meat or “Wor che su da”, a phrase that works well for us across the country.

Night buses ( a Chinese specialty)

Kunming, whilst impressive, is a little on the boring side. It’s big and has lots of people and there is heaps of shopping (especially for mobile phones), but asides from this not a lot to do, and a fair bit colder than we have been used to, so not entirely a bad thing that we are on a sleeper bus to Lijiang that night.

I’ve seen sleeper buses before. Some look new and spacious and flashy and some look old, claustrophobic and dirty. We were lucky to get a new one, but the spacious and flashy bit was a false impression. A sleeper bus is basically a single decker bus, with very thin bunk beds down each side (two high) and a row down the middle (also two high), then there are four more placed over the walkway which means that you can’t actually walk from the front of the bus to the rear of the bus without bending down to look at your knees and for me, I had to basically crawl. At the back there are five beds in a row across the back with a second level at the same height as the rest of the bunks. This is where the driver places us which is not such a bad thing as I can stretch my legs into the aisle. The man next to me speaks a little English and says he is Tibetan, but has lived in Lijiang district since he was a child. He also explains that he will try not to spoon with me, although not in so many words. I have never before slept in such a confined space. It was quite easy to sleep though. We seemed to stop for extended periods of time at toilet stops and roadhouses, but this was fine, we just kept dozing. We were due to arrive at 7am. When we pulled into yet another stop at 5.45am, Miss Guion got up to go to the toilet and reported that it was quite clean. We went back to sleep and awoke about an hour later in daylight. We appeared to be in the same place, but there was nobody else on the bus and Miss Guion, myself and the Tibetan man were happily snoozing up the back. There were a lot more buses around us and to in truth, it looked very much like a bus station. I got out and found a young guy cleaning a bus. I pointed to the ground and asked “Lijiang ma?” to which he looked at me strangely and nodded (as if to say, yeah… duh). So we had slept on for an hour on a stationary bus that had already reached our destination. But so had the local, so we figured it wasn’t so bad.

At the time I told Miss Guion that I would not go on another sleeper bus (I relented soon after). In hindsight though, it really wasn’t that bad. It was quite cozy really. The only problem being the contrast. If I was lying on my left hand side when I opened my eyes, I would see the attractive and altogether very pleasant face of Miss Guion (or at least the back of her well groomed head), but if I was lying on the other side when my eyes opened, a weathered, brown, whiskery face with a set of yellow chompers greeted me.

Lijiang – Old town and place of many sports shops

Our arrival into Lijiang was a bit surreal. We took a taxi and used our Lonely Planet map to show the driver where we wanted to go. We pointed to the inset section called “old town” and he nodded and took us to where the inset was placed over the normal map. We were a tad confused. There were old buildings and it was a town, but we had heard that it was a hugely populated tourist destination. There weren’t any tourists or tourist facilities as far as we could see. So while we tried to get our head around this, we stopped into a small eatery and feasted on vegetable dumplings and noodle soup. This delicious and wholesome meal came to a grand total of twenty one Yuan ($3USD). The food really is one of the best parts of traveling in China. Every town or province has a specialty and despite a strong emphasis on meat, there is always something for the vegetarians or veg-aquarians.

On a full stomach we had a lot more luck in our search for the old town and we certainly found the missing tourists. Hundreds, bordering on thousands of Chinese tourists converge on the old town and particularly the old town square every day to see demonstrations of Naxi dance and ritual. The Naxi are a minority people that are indigenous to the North and Western areas of Yunnan, which was originally part of Tibet. They wear colorful clothes and have some strange marital practices, where the male remains at his mother’s residence after marriage and all land ownership is in the hands of the women. Some women even take multiple husbands. I’m sure the commies have put an end to this or at least tried.

We checked into the Old Square Inn as recommended by my mate Eric. All the guesthouses here are very similar, with a strong trait being the paper thin walls. By this stage the volume that the Chinese feel the need to communicate at had started to grate on me. Even when completely unnecessary, they scream at each other... especially when they are talking on the phone. This combined with the clearing of the throat and nasal passages is enough to drive me insane.

We awake the next morning to go for a run. A small staff member greets us and informs us that the hotel is full today and could we please move to another hotel. Well… not really we say. Thinking that they have stuffed up their bookings and are trying to shift us in favor of a group, I immediately say ‘no we will not move.’ We go on our run and then come back for a shower. After our showers, we are sitting there reading and we notice that there is a lot of banging and crashing and shouting. Eventually I go to investigate. I find the hotel furniture being walked out into the town square. There are people taking everything out of the building and when I go to reception, the counter has been taken away. At this point, I realize that the hotel is being closed down. So I find the teary receptionist and extract my refund and we then high-tail it to another hotel down the road.

Tiger Leaping gorge and Hello baghorse

I have heard of Tiger Leaping Gorge for almost as long as I have taken an interest in China. Whenever I talk to a Chinese person about traveling in their home country, they tell me that Yunnan is the most beautiful province and that the gorge is the most important of sights there.

We were planning to take three days to walk the length of the gorge, from Qiaotou to the end. There are guesthouses along the way that we would be able to stay at and we left most of our luggage in Lijiang, so we weren’t carrying a lot with us.

The walk starts out in a fairly obscure spot which was marked on this occasion by a mule, standing in the shade, next to a large pile of his own shit. This caused me to observe this animal that has always puzzled me. I mean, it is a sterile animal, so why bother breeding it? And if the almighty one (or ones) did not intend to let this silly looking creature reproduce, then why let it get this far in the first place? While I ponder this, we start to round the bend and are met by an amazing view of the mighty Jinsha river, towered by a sheer cliff face and snow capped mountains. I am sure there are no words that can explain the sight adequately and this was only the start! As we climbed and climbed to the point where we were almost level with the mountains, the view became what can only be described as aw-inspiring. Indeed when we arrived at our stop for the night and found a good place on a balcony to take in the view, I did so in considerable awe. It is one of the sights that I will preserve in my memory for the rest of my life and when I am in need of some inspiration, I can think of this image and remember that if I stick out whatever is troubling me at the time, then I may have the opportunity to view something as amazing as this again.

At the Tea Horse which was our stop for the evening, we met Kerra and Nate, two Americans who were working for China Climb, a company based in Yangshou who run school rock-climbing trips. They were using the research of a trip as an excuse for a holiday and their company was appreciated. I think… I hope that I am a reasonable judge of character and I like to think that I know good people when I meet them, and these seemed to me to be good people. It is an obvious stereo-type to apply, that Americans are all loud, obnoxious and incensitive to other cultures. I can safely say though, that the Americans that travel (or at least the ones that I have met) are really cool people I think it’s the cool part of the population that travels, and they all seem to be from Washington State. We would run into Nate and Kerra in Lijiang and later in Yangshou also.

The following day, we continued on our way at an early hour and enjoyed breakfast at another guesthouse along the way. Here, I saw my first real live Yak. A huge, hairy creature, much more impressive than the silly looking mules that we kept seeing on the track.

The mules would be led by men who were hoping to carry either tourists or their luggage for a fee. Their approach was quite annoying. They would follow about three meters behind a tired looking walker as if willing them to give up and relent to “Hello baghorse” You see this is all they say. As you walk past one of them, they point to the animal and say “hello baghorse”. So after a while, I would try to beat them to it and wave to the animal while saying “hello baghorse!”

We had planned to take the high and less trodden track over the top and to our next stop of Sean’s guesthouse in Walnut grove. Unfortunately we couldn’t find it, so we decided to walk or climb down to the river itself. This involved a treacherous descent down something that the locals actually had the nerve to call a ladder. It was actually just a track, worn into the side of the cliff with steel cables, poorly anchored to trees and posts and things. My knees started to give me grief as I was possibly still a little tender from my recent accident in a Vietnamese truck. By the time we got the bottom I was grumpy and sore and probably didn’t fully appreciate the river, but it was quite impressive to see this huge volume of water, rushing through the narrow gorge, sending a cloud of spray up as it went.

We stayed at Sean’s guesthouse as recommended by lonely planet, which gave further weight to a theory that once a place is listed in the LP, they can trade on name and no longer need to attempt good service. The Tea Horse from the previous night and our breakfast stop at halfway house was far more impressive.

The path forward seemed to be cut from the best information we could obtain, so we called it a day short and headed back to Lijiang. We walked down to the road and hired a micro van. It was then that we realized that the majority of tourists came to visit the gorge in huge tourist buses and arrived at a visitors centre. There must have been twenty buses there when we where there and they kept coming as we were driving out. This gives a further appreciation for the amazing experience that was the hike.

So back to Lijiang, and then a sleeper bus back to Kunming, to start the next part of our journey to Guanxi province. This time we are three on the sleeper bus. I now have a small toy Yak that Miss Guion bought for me. He does not need a bed of his own though, so he is easy travel company.

Back to Yangshou and Hello Bamboo!

I had been to Yangshou three years or so ago, when I did my first charity bike ride through Guanxi province. On that occasion we rode into Yangshou in extremely heavy rain, but were able to enjoy sunny weather while we were there. Coincidentally, as Miss Guion and I landed at Guilin Airport, it was raining heavily and continued to do so all the way to Yangshou on the two hour bus ride. When we met up with Eric, he said that it had been raining solidly for the last few days. It just kept coming he said. Thankfully it ceased the following day and gave way to amazing warm, sunny weather.

It was around this time that the National holiday started, during which the media estimated that 150 million Chinese were traveling across the country. It certainly seemed as though they were all headed for Yangshou. This small town has already been hugely expanded by an all-round increase in tourism, but the massive influx of people was unbelievable. Rooms that had cost 100Y before the holiday were now being let out at 300Y and tickets were impossible to come by according to travel agents.

We enjoyed Yangshou despite the impending chaos and took a bike ride up the Yu river to visit some old bridges and take in the small villages along the river. This is where we met “Hello Banboo!” This is a favourite of the Chinese tourists. They ride up the river by bike, then they sit on a plastic seat, fastened to a bamboo barge and float back down the river. It looks very boring and over-done so we would choose to ride back to town when we were done. This didn’t stop them trying though. I think we must have encountered fifty hello bamboo that day.

Miss Guion took advantage of Dr Lilly’s acupuncture and hot cupping treatments to help her to recover from the various health imperfections that had been annoying her for the duration of our trip.

After a few days in Yanghou, we took a sleeper train to Shanghai. Our legendary Yangshou travel agent Uncle Sam sorted us out for this rare ticket and we were on our way.

Shanghai and Hello Watch!

Chinese trains are nothing short of fantastic! Clean and comfortable, there are no bad points. Before catching the train, I went and bought a heap of food to sustain us for the twenty two hour journey.

At Guilin station, we waited in a huge waiting hall with a section of the hall assigned to each train. In the minutes leading up to the train, everyone surges towards the doors and the minute the train arrives, they charge out towards the train. This is very much a Chinese thing to do. There is no such thing as a queue in China. Be it a line up for immigration at the airport, a line for a food stall or the aforementioned train queue. They just jump in and push and jostle. All lines seem to grow from the front in China.

Shanghai! It is a place that I have been waiting in anticipation to visit since I heard my cousin Walter talk about it. He said it was the fastest growing city in the world and you could feel it. The density of people is the first thing you notice, followed by the brake neck pace of construction and the number of flashy cars and flashy shops. It is just humming with growth. If you stand in the middle of the street at first light when there is less traffic, I think you can actually feel the city humming with growth and progress.

Shanghai has the best food. There is food everywhere and there are no shortage of vegetarian options. It’s cheap and it’s good. There are places with pre-prepared dishes that you choose. Miss Guion calls these choose your own adventure restaurants. There are seafood restaurants and entire streets that are just feeding frenzies. One night we eat at a small restaurant in one of these streets where you choose the ingredients and they cook them in a broth. I could go on forever about the food, but I think my taste buds remember it best.

The skyline of this huge metropolis is like something that you only see in science fiction movies. Screens that take up the entire side of a sixty storey building and the giant pearl TV tower which stands out above everything.

When I run along the bund I forget that I am running, because I am so occupied, trying to remember each of the buildings that make up the skyline. I will remember this city for it’s food, it’s skyline and the annoying little men who run after you saying, “hello watch, hello watch!!!” They are more harmless than “hello hashish” though.

There are so many things about Shanghai that I found amazing and it is without doubt the most impressive city that I have visited, but it is also the place that I say goodbye to Miss Guion and head back south to Bangkok. We were having trouble getting tickets to Beijing as planned, so I had decided to head back to Bangkok from Shanghai. After a ride on the amazing Maglev train to the airport, Miss Guion fairwelled me onto my flight. She will now continue on to Europe by the Trans Siberian Express.

As the plane takes off from Shanghai, one of the Chinese passengers stands up and tries to open the overhead locker. The flight attendant does her best to crash tackle him and place him back in his seat. There are throat clearing noises, incessant yelling and general loudness from the Chinese passengers the whole flight and just before the plane lands in Bangkok, a lady gets out of her seat and opens the overhead locker. I think to myself that I am ready to get away from the Chinese for a while. You see, any country can give you the shits and exhaust you when you spend a while there. Weather it’s the scamming attitude of the Viets, the laziness of the Lao people or the perpetual impatience and loudness of the Chinese, they will all get to you eventually. A damn good reason to keep moving around. I wonder what shits people about Australians?

When you are due for a holiday

Pic 1) Ben, Hoai and I, enjoying a "good to be alive" drink. We got through the hardest trip we've run!
Pic 2) The truck after some "repairs" to make it "drive-able" (repairs included bending the cab back into shape a bit)




They say that cancerians are homely people. That they need to have a proper home and are proud of their home. Maybe in instinct this is true. I have always been very content when I am in my home. Things are different now though. My home is Bangkok, but in the seven months that I have called Bangkok home, I have spent a cumulative total of about two or three weeks there. In reality, my home is wherever I sleep on any given day. Some places are more home-like than others and some places see a lot more of me than others.

Coming off the overnight train from Lao Cai in the North West of Vietnam, I am glad to see Hanoi again. It’s my temporary home while I have been working in Vietnam this last month or so. The first thing to be done is to go and order a decent breakfast at the café that the local office is based in. Then it’s across the road to the small building that is the Prince Café Hotel. A modest room with a relaxed feel to it is very welcoming after having stayed in a wide variety of small town hotels for the last two weeks. It is now one day until I finish the trip that I am running and I can then safely say that I am on holidays. I don’t have to work again until June, so it’s time for some independent travel.

I am finishing up the worst trip that I have ever run. I had a bad feeling about this trip before I started, but I didn’t know how bad I would be feeling by the time it draws to a close. It comes immediately after having led the best group through the same itinerary, so the contrast is amazing.

It started with the airport collection. Ben, Hoai and myself were in good spirits after our last trip so the drive out to the airport was relaxed and warm. Then the group arrive. They are all from Sydney. Most of them go to the same gym and as a group, they are on the loud side. As soon as we board the bus, one of them plugs an Ipod into some portable speakers and provides everyone with some hip hop followed by Kaysan which I thought a strange choice given their current location. It becomes immediately evident that this is going to be harder work than we expected.

The first day and second are uneventful, but hard work all the same. We spend most of it riding through torrential rain. When we reach the third day of riding, things are thrown into chaos. The Phai Din Pass that was a pile of sand and dust just a couple of weeks earlier is now a pile of mud. The start of the hill is a recently graded and hard packed section. The soil is of high clay content and it makes riding through it a challenge. A truck comes past where we have stopped and it has it’s wheels spinning and the rear end sliding out. As we get further up the pass, the mud gets thicker and causes five bikes to almost simultaneously break. They can’t be repaired, so the participants in question have to get onto one of the support vehicles. Then we get to a serious bog section. The truck takes fifteen minutes to get through. Ben comes down from the top and says that there are at least three more bog spots ahead that we are unlikely to get the vehicles through in a hurry. We make the decision to abort the ride and head back to Son La in the vehicles. It had only been two hours since we passed the super slippery section, but by the time we got down there it was mayhem. What we had in front of us was some sort of Vietnamese stand-off. A red local bus, packed to the ceiling with passengers and their cargo had attempted to descend, but had started to lose control, so had simply stopped. Behind him, a dump truck had encountered similar problems and was stopped in a position that blocked the road. In total there were eight vehicles including ours lined up behind these two. Then in the opposing direction at the bottom of the slope was a line up of buses and trucks. There was a heated argument between the driver of the red bus and another bus wanting to come in the opposite direction. In order for the vehicles to try and go up, the ones coming down had to go through, but the ones going down wanted the up ones to turn around and get out of the way, as they feared that they would collide when they started sliding.

So Ben, Hoai and myself begin some diplomatic efforts. To start with, we try to tell the drivers wanting to go up that there is no point and that the road is impassable ahead. Then we explain to the driver of the red bus that if he gets all the passengers off the bus, he will be able to control his slide enough that he will avoid colliding with the up traffic (and may reduce the risk of injuring his passengers). Into this mess walk three local officers in their green uniforms. They have a small wheelbarrow full of dry soil and rocks. This is just laughable. We would need around a hundred of these barrows. It does however give us an idea. We start to throw all the ballast rocks from the side of the road onto the slope. This way the vehicles will have something to grip. Eventually there are enough rocks on the road for the red bus to attempt a descent. The passengers wouldn’t get off because they didn’t want to lose there seat, so a severely overloaded bus goes careering down the slope, while sliding very much in the direction of the drop off on the side of the road. It gets through OK though which encourages the other down vehicles to try. What followed can only be described as ice skating with trucks and buses. At one point, a six axel petrol tanker slides past us without any of it’s wheels turning. Scary stuff! Eventually our vehicles slide down the hill and take us back to Son La.

We formulate a plan for an alternative route. It will cut Dien Bien Phu and see us traveling one day ahead of schedule. It involves trying to cut through roads where even the locals can’t tell us what the conditions are like. For all we know they could be tiny cart tracks, but we have to at least try. There must be something there if it was worth someone putting it on the map. So the following morning we set off on the support vehicles to try and get through. All is going well, the roads turn out to be in far better shape than our originally intended route. Then we come to a mudslide. This perfect road just disappears under a massive load of mud. Plan B foiled!

Plan C. Drive through another alternative route to our intended final destination in Sapa, then ride in reverse some of the original route. After thirteen hours driving we reach the cold, wet and foggy Sapa. We then battle through two days of riding in the rain to get to Old Lai Chau. On the third day, we plan to drive back to Sapa to conclude the trip and catch the overnight train back to Hanoi.

The drive back to Sapa is where my trip takes a very unexpected turn for the worse. I set off on the truck with Liem the driver. I prefer to travel in the truck because I get bus sick sitting in the back of a mini-van, and Liem is a nice fella who I figure deserves some company. He speaks no English, but we have fun anyway, just using miming and pointing to communicate. We leave a bit earlier to get to Sapa before the group. That way I can do the check in ahead of them and their luggage will be unloaded and waiting for them.

We’ve been descending a mountain pass for a few kilometers when we round a bend and face an on-coming six axel truck. On our side of the road there is a parked dump truck, so Liem needs to hit the brakes and bring us to a stop behind the dump truck. He brakes, shifts down a gear and brakes again. Only the second time, the overheated brakes fail and we go slamming into the back of the parked truck. My reflexes are quick enough to at least turn my legs to the side a little, so the impact is not front-on to my knees. All the same, the cabin gets crushed onto my legs and pins them into the seat and the foot-well. The excruciating pain of the twisted metal of the truck cabin against my legs is causing me to make some fairly unpleasant noises. I look next to me to see that Liem’s side has not suffered the same impact and he is able to get out of the truck. Some farmers run over with crowbars and start trying to pry the cabin off me. I realize my phone has coverage and I call Ben in the hope that he can call some sort of emergency services from Sapa. At this point, it seems as though the farmers efforts are not working and I might be trapped in this wreck for a while yet. The circulation to my legs is cut by the pressure and I start to panic, thinking about what possible long term damage may have occurred. As I am asking Ben to call Sapa, the farmers find the right spot of leverage and the pressure comes off my legs. Liem pulls me out and I fall in a heap in the small stream running along the road. The accompanying scream lands in Ben’s ear and I drop the phone. In hindsight, this must have caused him some distress. By the time I gather my composure enough to call him, the phone reception is not working.

At this moment Mr Tony Zen and his wife come past in a 4WD with their driver and guide. Mr and Mrs Zen have a first aid kit and they help me to get cleaned up. They then kindly give me a lift to Sapa. At a guess I thought that my knee may need stitches, but the legendary doctor from our group, later says they are not necessary. So today somebody was looking out for me upstairs! I have walked out of this with some lacerations, bruising and emotional shock. When I think about alternative scenarios, all stack up quite badly. Had the brakes failed coming into a hair-pin bend, Liem and I would not be here. If we had been traveling ten kilometers faster, I am sure that I would have been in that truck for a lot longer and would have two broken legs. If the parked truck had been bigger the impact would have been at head height and that would be game over. I am incredibly lucky and this is why I am writing this in my blog. I know it may alarm some people, but it is a large event and for that reason I need to air it to you all.

I’m sure you can see why I am happy to be finishing this trip. I am in need of time off and the mess that was this trip is a sign that I need a break. So it’s a damn good thing that
I have one!

PS: Despite my negative comments on the group, it should be noted that it did actually contain some really lovely people (it just also contained some others). Two of the most pleasant people were Norbert, a Real estate agent from Northern Sydney and the Doc (a lovely Vietnamese Australian lady who has a heart of pure gold:)

Road to heaven, Product Evangelists and Crazy Shit

I have boarded my flight from Bangkok to Hanoi and am now contemplating how to get myself into the very small space that is my budget airline seat. If I were wearing some sort of plastic suit, I could smear myself in grease and might be able to wedge myself in but there may still be problems with getting out. OK, I might be over-exagerrating a bit, but the seating space and particularly the leg room is not at all generous on Air Asia. I sit in very close quarters to a Canadian man. In the first few minutes of our conversation, he says that he’s living and working in Kazicstan. Kazikstan!! I can’t believe I am sitting next to someone who lives in Kazicstan! The first thing I say to this is of course “is it really like it appears in the movie Borat?” No he says, it’s actually a very nice place with steadily increasing property prices and an improving government. This gives way to at least twenty minutes of discussion around the merits of the movie Borat and the incredibly gross humor of the filmmaker, in particular the famous nude fight scene. I can highly recommend this movie, but I would not recommend watching it while you are eating.

I have managed to maintain a good level of movie viewing while I’m on the move. I can get decent pirate copies of movies on DVD and then watch them on the laptop when I have time. The frustrating part is that roughly every sixth DVD is a dud and the latest is Zoolander. I really wanted to watch it, but for some reason, it just does not want to work for me. I really want to find out what this blue steel business is all about.

It’s been around three and a half years since I visited Hanoi, capital of Vietnam and home to the body of the great Ho Chi Minh. After a lot of work in Lao an Cambodia, I now have two trips to run in the north west of Vietnam. The first is an open Charity Challenge with participants raising money for The MS Society, ICEE and Care Australia. Ten people, four hundred and something KMS, six days of cycling. Should be great fun!

The group is made up of a good spread of ages from 22 to 71 years old. One of the participants is Daniel Alvarez! Daniel is a good mate of mine who I met on a trip to China a few years ago. He has MS and for this reason cannot ride a bike, but he really participates in the personal side of the trip and is great moral support for all the riders. He is also fond of a drink or two.

Road to Heaven

“Today is a pleasant ride with some rough surface, but generally not too bad. There are some up-hills, but lots of down-hills as well.” It’s a really good thing that the people in this group are pretty tolerant and understanding. In hindsight, pleasant ride was possibly not so accurate. In further hindsight, some up-hills could be better described as thirty kilometers of severely damaged road, consisting mainly of powder dust, large craters, ditches and almost vertical climbing. Ironically, the Vietnamese name for this pass translates to “Road to heaven”.


The Product Evangelist and the Crazy Shit

The Vietnamese seem to be fond of trying to develop a significant stretch of mountain road all at once, where the most practical would be to do small sections at a time. As we reached around half way on this horrible mess of a road leading through remote villages without so much as a small shop in sight, we met the product evangelist.

The Product Evangelist was from Sydney. He was attempting to ride an ancient hired motorbike known as the Munsk through the Northwest. This did seem to us to be the slightly lazy option, considering he at least has a motor where we just have our legs. He had made life a lot harder for himself by forgetting to collect his passport from reception when he left his hotel that morning. He said that he had got around two thirds of the way to Diem Bien Phu when he had realized and was now on his way back. He also admitted that this had not been the first time. This seemed to us to be a bad case of vagueness. Something that many of us are well familiar with, but not quite to the extent of doing one thing multiple times, thereby making life considerably harder for oneself.

The product evangelist was kind enough to inform us that we had some “crazy Shit” up ahead and wished us luck. We gave him some lollies to help him get through the crazy shit and went our separate ways. He wasn’t lying. There was some Crazy Shit!! By the time we got to lunch, we were quite definitely on verge of collapse. Thankfully the ride after this was lovely and when we reached the small town of Tuan Chau were we were to pack up the bikes and get on the bus, everyone was well satisfied that it was worth doing the crazy shit to get to the nice stuff.

It is when we are sitting on the bus, getting through the last section of the road to Dien Bien Phu that we are stopped by a blasting site. Yes, they have decided to blast a section out of the side of the mountain, thereby blocking the road in two places. They are working to clear the rock with excavators, but this is a slow process. It also looks as though they have stuffed one of the blasts up and have damaged the road. In fact from were we Are standing, it looks as though the road may be impassable, but after an hour or so of work, they manage to successfully clear it and we are able to get through. A glance to the left side of the bus as we go through one of the sights was enough to scare the crap out of me though. We had literally half a meter separating us from a vertical drop of at least two hundred meters.

I know…. Lets change the name of all the towns

Lai Chau (Old Lai Chau) to Phong To… or is it Tun Dien? We Are supposed to be riding to Phong To. The map that we have shows a town 96KMS away called Phong To and this is where we are going. The hotel that we are leaving and the hotel that we are heading to are owned by the same people and when we ask how far they think it is, they tell us that it is only 75KM away. This is quite strange, although it is not the first time that the locals have made outrageous claims as to the distance between towns. We simply put it down to them not knowing how far between their own hotels.

It is not until I reach the 75KM mark of the ride, that the penny drops. The local government has decided that they now want to call this town Phong To. They have changed the name of Phong to Tun Dien. This means that we still have to ride the same distance as we planned (96Km), but then we have to find accommodation for thirteen people at short notice. All turns out OK, but seriously… who changes the name of towns and then gives the same name to another town?

Sapa – End of the line

Our last day of riding into Sapa involves climbing around 1300 meters in altitude over the space of 30 Kilometers. With legs still burning from the previous days tough 900 meters over 15KM, the ride to Sapa is sapping my energy. The road surface is decent though, and Ben is chasing with better energy reserves after sitting up the back the day before. We are obviously not in a race, but I am admittedly quite competitive with my cycling, so I take his quickened pace to mean a challenge. It is pretty neck and neck though, which is to be expected given we both do this for a job.

We get to the top of the hill and as we cross the provincial border, the road turns to crazy shit. I sit at the beck with the constant fear of someone coming off on one of the messy corners and hurting themselves. As I come around a bend I see a line of vehicles stopped with a bunch of cyclists at the front and a bike upside down. This is momentarily my worst nightmare and a large lump forms in my throat as the heart starts racing. It is a false alarm though. The traffic is stopped because surprise surprise, they have decided to BLAST A SECTION OUT OF THE MOUNTAIN!!!! GRRRR!!! The bike is upside down because Ben is trying to fix it. We are exhausted, sweaty, dusty smelly and all round over it. We just want to get to our hotel and these people have decided to block the road again! When we finally get moving, it is only for about a kilometer, until we come to a power line that has come down and is lying on the road. The trucks are just driving over it and nobody seems fed. Ben lays a whole heap of big rocks on the road to warn the traffic, but all the same, I think they will keep driving over it and will probably take a day or so to get around to repairing it. A rough roll into Sapa completes the ride and it is time to celebrate.

Daniel kicks off the celebrations with a signature dance move called the “Dan Shuffle” The celebrations ago on until about three in the morning with Daniel myself and Dimity being the last to bed. The next morning, Daniel goes for breakfast in the hotel, where the waiter says… “excuse me sir, Do you dance like this?” He does a lovely demonstration of the Dan shuffle and by this we know that Daniel’s move is now legend in the town and he is a celebrity in Sapa!

Helllloooo Lao! (again)

Back to Lao! It’s a good thing I like Lao, because I’ve been spending a lot of time here lately. I have two more trips to run in Laos before the season slows down. The first is a corporate Charity Challenge for a group called Computershare. They are raising money for Care Australia to use on one of their projects in Laos. They are apparently raising $150,000! That’s a stack of cash in anyone’s language. When I first heard of them, I thought they were some sort of charity that shares computers with the less fortunate.

I head down to the ticket office to get myself a train ticket to Nong Khai where I then cross the border to Vientiane where we start the trip. It turns out that there is one ticket left and only in first class. This is OK. I’ve been keen to check out first class sleepers as I imagine they will be something like the ones that used to run between Sydney and Melbourne for which I have a nostalgic soft spot. This would mean sharing a cabin with one other person, but how bad can that be? I will undoubtedly be sharing with a quiet, polite Thai person.

In the meantime, my good friend Mr Paul Harrison is coming to Bangkok from Melbourne for some sort of Rugby game. He will stay with me for night before his team arrives the next day. This works out well, because it is the last night before I need to head to Vientiane. I thought originally that I would have to leave before he arrived, thereby missing him. But thankfully we overlapped. Well… when I say thankfully… in hindsight maybe I should not be so thankful. Being overseas for a while might give one the feeling that things have changed greatly and maybe for some strange reason may increase one’s impression of their own invincibility. The truth is that the only thing that seems to have changed is that he can drink far more than me. This has always been the case, but only marginally so. There seems to have developed some sort of gulf however, where my lifestyle has ruined my immunity to the drink and his has somehow increased his. So needless to say, I got quite drunk and in the haze of various beverages I do remember thinking to myself that we should probably stop drinking from buckets as this is likely to assist with the surplus consumption.

The next day is not pretty. For various reasons, Bangkok is not a good place to have a hangover in. This is magnified by the fact that I live in the same building as a children’s nursery. The little blighters start screaming their heads off around 7am. Paul decided that when he was feeling sick, a good place to spew might be over the balcony into the courtyard that I share with my lovely landlord and landlady. This must have been a wonderful surprise for her when she came out to tend to the garden in the morning. So a fairly sick looking Paul bids me farewell and heads for his team accommodation. I then have a few hours to contemplate the evils of drink before I have to get on the train.

At five thirty I drag myself, my bike and various bits of gear to a tuk tuk and then to the train station. I have some time to grab a noodle soup at the station, and as I am enjoying it, I think to myself that despite how bad I feel, I am in a good place with great food around me and really friendly people. Just think, as soon as I get on the train I can relax, out my feet up and read my book in the company of my polite, quiet ad friendly fellow train traveler.

In reality, my train companion is a little different to my expectation. He boards the train about an hour into a journey at Ayutthaya. He is a large Thai man with a large belly, well dressed in a polo shirt and business trousers with shoes so shiny that they match the greased and neatly combed black hair on his head. He looks shocked at my presence and proceeds to request of the carriage attendant that our beds be prepared immediately. He says nothing to me as he presumably doesn’t speak any English and my initial, pitiful attempt at Thai probably embarrassed both of us. I did actually feel for this man. Here he is… probably worked very hard and has over time managed to elevate himself to a point where in his fifties, he is able to travel in marginally greater comfort in first class. And here is a young upstart foreigner dressed in shorts, thongs and a t-shirt and looking decidedly unhealthy due to possibly some excess alcohol consumption.

Any feelings of sympathy towards the man evaporated very quickly. Maybe it was the snoring the whole night or maybe the guttural throaty sounds as he punctuated each snoring session with, snorting, groaning and sniffling every ten minutes or so. He actually sounded at one point as though he were a Cow in agony. He was like a fog horn! At some stage I went to the toilet at the end of the carriage and I could hear him halfway down the hall! On top of this, he must have taken something to help him sleep, because none of my attempts to wake him and shut him up worked. He only woke when carriage attendant shook him violently and told him that we were at his stop and that he needed to get off.

So I arrive in Vientiane all bright eyed and bushy tailed to start a new trip. Lack of quality sleep two nights in a row will at least mean hat I will sleep like a baby tonight. Some of our group arrives in the evening. Two of them have been victims of lost luggage at Bangkok Airport which is not unusual with the new airport. Hopefully it will turn up in good time.

It is about four thirty in the morning that I wake in a sweat. Shit I think, I have malaria!!! Shit… no hang on…. I have the flu!!! Damn it. This is what a few nights of sleep deprivation and unhealthy living does to you… you get the damn flu when you are about to start a big trip!!! No good! So I have to spend the first two days on the bus, watching everyone else ride. By the third day I am good to go though. The other tour leader Eric is one of the best in the business so this makes things easier.

The group size is proving to be challenging. In a lot of the smaller towns that we stay in they are unused to catering for large groups, so meals are late, rooms in insufficient supply. All this is being made even more difficult by the fact that my local guide Khian seems to have lost the plot a bit. He is normally good, but seems not to be coping with a large group. This might be partly because they are so into each other. It’s funny. Most people that come to Laos are really into Laos. They want to know everything and see everything. This group are interested in Laos, but they are really interested in the team aspect of the challenge. This is probably because they are from the same company and they have common ground and have some steam to let off.

The participants are from all over the world. The UK, Canada, USA, South Africa, Germany, Australia. This makes for really interesting group dynamics. The usual stereotypes do not apply. Quite often a big personality will hog the attention of everyone and the quieter ones might get lost in the craziness. In this group everyone gets to have a say and everyone participates. Those that have additional challenges such as lost luggage are surprisingly resilient and patient. Ursula from South Africa was without her bag for four days and simply got by on borrowed clothes and a bought helmet. Even when she spoke to the airlines, she kept an air of patience. This is good to see. It is certainly the way to get by in this part of the world. It is just not cool to lose your cool. I unfortunately cannot keep my cool when we get to yet another hotel that has insufficient rooms for despite our having booked them well in advance. This time it is because one of their guests decided not to check out. But we are bringing them a substantial amount of business with a big group. They should tell the bozo to check out or else! But this is Lao and the international rules of business do not apply here. You only do something if you could be bothered here. There is no need to get worked up about anything or go out of your way for anything. There is this word called “Sabai”. It means relax and you hear it spoken constantly. Even the greeting “Sabai Di” is basically saying are you relaxed? It is a really endearing quality of Lao people and makes them some of the friendliest you will meet, but when you are trying to do business it drives you bonkas!!!!

Anyway, the trip is going well asides from this. We head to Muang Khua up in the far north east near the Vietnamese border. From here we are traveling two hours by boat to a small village on the Nam Ou river then trekking for two hours to an even smaller village where we are visiting a Care Australia project. Muang Khua itself is a charming small town, untouched by tourism and with only a handful of buildings. The trip up the project is fantastic. The trip up the river is great with hairy moments through rapids and spectacular scenery. The trek is just as good and gives a feeling of true remoteness. When we arrive at the village, they put on a ceremony for us that involves sacrificing a chicken and tying some string around our wrists. It also involves the drinking of Lao Lao, the local home brew rice wine. Drank all over the country in varying strengths, Lao Lao is hard stuff and can make a mess of even the strongest drinker. The group have now discovered it, so happily, there are lots of Lao Lao moments for what is left of the trip.

So it’s an eight hour bus ride back to Luang Prabang where we have our final dinner and then hit the only bar in town to have some celebratory drinks. They close at midnight which might ordinarily put an end to the night, but not for the Computershare people, they take the party to the top of our hotel where there is a lovely rooftop garden. There is much revelry and drinking of Lao Lao. The next morning I am too ashamed to show my face to the reception staff Boun and Voung. I’m sure they will be annoyed for the late night noise and the mess that would have been left. To my surprise they are as friendly as always and simply want to know when I am coming back through. You see… this is Lao… you don’t want to get too worked up about anything.

Poipet - Land of dried fish

The blog has obviously been suffering from blog neglect. It’s been a while since I even thought about writing in the blog and even when I did think of it, I was just not of a satisfactory mood for it Whilst the blog is intended to be an accurate diary of sorts, there are things that the blog audience should be spared. There have been happenings recently of a sad nature, that now make me partner-less. I’m sure that nobody really wants the details though, so I shall spare you.

The following entry was actually written some time ago, but fell by the wayside in the hectic mash of trips etc.

Poipet! Even the sound the name makes on your tongue as you utter it sounds horrible. The place in the flesh is truly worse. You arrive on the Thai side into a jumbled market area. In our case, we have eleven bicycles in boxes on the back of a ute that we have traveled from Bangkok in. Ben and I are taking the freshly serviced and packed bikes to Phnom Penh to use in the next tour that starts in a few days. Typical of most places in Asia, a tout is the first to approach us. He is offering to secure a Visa for us to enter Cambodia and will only charge us $30 USD. The standard price for a visa is actually $20, but according to our new friend, it takes a long time and you have to que for ages. I have been in this part of the world long enough to know that this is probably for lack of a better word, horse shit. So Ben and I grab a few ratty looking blokes pulling carts and load our boxed bikes onto them. We trundle off towards the border with the smell of dried fish hanging in the air.

If I describe the Thai side of the border as a jumbled market, then no man’s land is just in-describable. It is dusty and dirty and there are vehicles trying to swap sides of the road with no real provision or system to do so. The hand pulled carts are the main method by which to transport anything across the border and they range in size from one person pulling them to a huge one that is being pulled and pushed by about twenty people. Many of them are operated by children and weather children or adults, all are very skinny and dirty.

We arrive at the Cambodian Visa window, where there are a number of Khmer men with fat bellies hanging around the window. One of them informs me that the Visa cost is $20USD plus 1000 Baht ($40AUD) “processing fee”. I tell him that the sign above the window says $20USD and so that is all I’m going to pay. He then offers to discount the processing fee to 100 Baht. I tell him to piss off and he tells me that it will take a long time. I’m sure it will, but there is no way that this sloth is getting any money out of me. I push past tubby and hand our passports and money to the uniformed man behind the window. We then have a seat and the visas come to us within five minutes.

We march off towards where the bikes are parked on the trolleys only to find that customs are looking at them with some suspicion and a another look which I have seen before… it’s the “oh shit I’ve never seen this before, maybe I should get the boss” look. It’s not a great one, because the boss of any department is always harder to deal with and less of a push over than his subordinates. So we are told to have a seat and wait for “the chief”. The chief appears after some time with a different look, but one that I have also seen before. This is the “what the fuck have I been dragged out here for and what the fuck are these foreigners trying to pull over me?” Look. This is fairly quickly progressed to the “I’m going to ruin your day” look.

Our story is that we are transporting the bikes into Cambodia for other people to ride. The other people are not in the country yet, but are flying in shortly. This is pretty much the truth. We could elaborate more, but why bother? The more details, the harder they are going to find the comprehension of the story. The chief informs us, by talking to his interpreter, that we are bullshitting him (or words similar) and that we are actually taking the bikes to sell in Phnom Penh. After trying for a while to convince him that we would not dare to lie to him and that our story is 100% genuine, he decides that he would like to see one of the bicycles to see if they are in fact used. So we go to pull Ben’s bike out of the canvass case that it is packed into. Ben’s bike has recently been ridden from Thailand, through Laos, Tibet, to India and has more than a few marks to show for it. The chief is not going for that though, he tells us, to open one of the others. It occurs to me as I am cutting the tape on the top of the box, that our man Ae at the bike shop that services and packs the bikes, is obsessive about cleaning the bikes and that last time I got my bike back, it looked new. I am praying that he has not done such a good job on these, but alas, as the shiny blue bicycle hits daylight, all is lost. Ae has not only made it spotless, but has also managed to pack it in the original packing that bikes come in when they are new. It’s like a goddamn beacon! The chief is furious, and he now really does believe that we were bullshitting him. He tells us that we have to leave the bikes here. We can build two and ride them across the border, but the others have to stay until we can get some sort of proof from an embassy that the people that are using the bikes are in the country. This is of course an absurd demand, but we are not actually in the strongest of bargaining positions.

So we build one bike while we desperately try to contact our fix-it man in Cambodia. If anyone can save us, this man can. He tells us to sit tight and he will send someone. In the meantime, the customs blokes have been getting creative and have decided that they want to type up a five page document in Khmer then get Ben to sign it and then fingerprint him to each page. This is starting to get scary.

The fix-it guys arrive after about half an hour and the serious negotiations begin. For the most part of the next three hours, Ben and I have the pleasure of watching the chief bark orders and petrified staff. Upon visual assessment of the chief, we ascertain that he is a man of expensive tastes. He has a gold, diamond studded ring, accompanied by a similar bracelet. He sports a large gut which is topped by a loose flabby neck, supporting a bulbous head with greedy looking eyes. These eyes are partly hidden behind jewel encrusted glasses. We can guess what this man has been up to. We are a mere distraction. He must milk a lot out of his job. You don’t dress like this on a public servant’s salary. Ben dubs the chief and his team, the “The Fat Boy Brigade”. Quite fitting really. They are an exclusive but far reaching club, with members all over Cambodia, sitting on street corners on arm-chairs under umbrellas, in bars of questionable repute, shooting past in cars that are worth more than 500 ordinary Cambodian’s annual salaries. The Fat Boy Brigade! They are milking this country and anyone trying to get ahead, or even those that aren’t.

These fat bludgers are surrounded by the Casinos of the Poipet no-mans land. Golf carts with names like “Golden Paradise Casino” painted on the side, wait eagerly to snap up cashed up cosmetically altered gambling patrons from places like Phnom Penh or Bangkok. These giant structures sit surrounded by rubbish covered, dirty, dried fish smelling filth and in clear view of the wiry cart boys that slave away for a few dollars a day. There is no doubt that of the money that we pay to get our stock transported , these boys see hardly any of it,. I’m sure the fat boy brigade have seen to that.

Our fix-it guys have won! We have to pay a “$50 import tax”, but we can take our bikes. The only other thing is that to save face, they have to compile another six documents that have to be translated into written English and then signed and fingerprinted again. Ben is seriously concerned about all this fingerprinting stuff and the preparation of the documents takes hours, with the assistance of about eight staff all having their say as to how it should be done.

So we pick up our boxes, pile them onto some more carts. When we get into Cambodia, the vehicle that was supposed to be waiting for us has got sick of waiting and has presumably taken another fare. We eventually manage to get onto a bus that we share with some very tired looking back-packers. They have apparently been waiting for ages for the “VIP Bus” that they paid for. We take up half the bus and the back-packers are very understanding, while they have to cram in with bikes between them.

The road from Poipet to Siem Reap, is possibly the worst in South East Asia. This road is the main overland link between Bangkok and Phnom Penh and hence would appear to be a crucial trade route, but it is still unsurfaced. This is quite strange when you consider that all other major roads in Cambodia are now surfaced and some of them very well maintained, So why is this road so horrible? In the wet season, there are times when it can take a whole day to traverse this route. A truck might get bogged on a bridge or just simply break down. This just brings everything to a standstill. In the dry season however, it is just dusty and very rough. The bus averages about 40KMH. Every now and then, Camry’s with the steering wheel on the wrong side and no number plates flyes past, only just managing to stay on the road for the vibrations that are throwing them around. These cars are usually stolen from Thailand (hence the steering wheel being on the wrong side). The drivers just run them in to the ground using them as taxis.

So on the question of why this road is the way it is. There are a number of theories. One that I have heard is that Bangkok Airways who operate the monopoly route from Bangkok to Siem Reap, pay comfort cash to the Cambodian Government to leave the road as is, thus increasing their passenger numbers. I have heard this theory before actually traveling this route and have thought it to be fairly far fetched, but now that I see this and I have over the last few months experienced the way the Cambodian government operate, it seems maybe not so far fetched after all. Bangkok Airways operate six flights a day in each direction and all are generally quite full. If this story holds any water then, it is just another indigtment against the useless, vulgar people that administer this country. Cambodia has virtually no manufactured exports. This contrasts against most of it’s neighbours such as Vietnam or Thailand who are now big manufacturers and exporters. There are presumably a number of reasons for this such as the lack of a strong and guaranteed power supply and lack of infrastructure in many areas, but you would think that the lack of a decent road link to Thailand would have to be a factor here. If I were thinking of importing a Cambodian manufactured product to Australia, I would consider the supply chain options. Sihanoukville is Cambodia’s main sea port, but it is pretty small and reputed to be quite hopeless with things going missing or getting delayed for weeks. This means that I would have to get the stock to a Thai port. To do this, I would need to use the Siem Reap Poipet road. This would basically put an end to the thought process because of the state of the road and I would then be better off seeking the product in Vietnam which has an excellent sea port. So once again, the fat boy brigade are stifling their country’s development.

While I am pondering this, our bus gets a flat tire, so we limp into a small town to get it repaired. While they hoist the vehicle onto a stump of wood in place of a jack, we get talking to the local kids. As with any well traveled tourist route, they have good English, not from school, but from the travelers that come through. We play their favourite game, where we name a country and they tell us the name of the capital city, the population and in some cases the name of the head of state. They are cluey kids, maybe they could take over the running of their country.

We dock at the our hotel in Siem Reap (home away from home) at about eleven in the evening and have a quite beer over which we ponder our day. The next morning over Breakfast, our fix-it man explains that the chief that we came across is actually Hun Sen’s nephew. Hun Sen is the man in charge of Cambodia and has been for a long time. He is the big cheese, the head honcho, the man who shuts down whole roads when he moves around town so as to guarantee personal security.

Home to Bangkok - City of King loving and satisfying shopping experiences

Back in Bangkok, bleary eyed and hungry for a good Green Curry with Fish balls. There is of course the obligatory traffic jam coming back from the Airport. I always wonder what would happen if there were an emergency. How would the emergency vehicles get through the traffic. The emergency lanes are used by the general traffic also, so there is literally nowhere for emergency services vehicles.
My sister has arrived and is at the house after being let in by Jason. The house is intact and is a welcome sight for me who has been in hotels for almost three weeks now. Jason has decided to move out to an apartment with Fohn (his girlfriend). They have been together for around a year and a bit by my count and there has been a lot of travelling and commuting between them while Fohn has been living near her Uni.
I have decided that it is time to buy a laptop. I left my original laptop in Melbourne with Kate, so I need a new one. I drag Julia off to Panthip Plaza to sift through the hundreds of shops in search of the laptop and associated gear. Panthip is six large floors of anything computer related. They sell pirate software and DVDs, computer hardware and accessories. They have things that you wouldn’t even thought to have existed. I am on a mission to find the best deal on a Sony Vaio as they currently make the smallest and lightest laptop around which is a priority in my line of work. I can choose from seven Sony shops, so I work my wasy through them to work out what the best deal is. At the first of seven shops I am greeted by a smiley young female shop assistant. I enquire what the differences are between the 69,000Baht version and the 94,000Baht version. The more expensive one has upgraded ram and a little scroll thing to help you scroll pages. The cheaper one comes with a free 17 inch plug-in plasma screen. The shop assistant informs me that if I buy this one I get a flee Prasma Scleen with my purchase. This sounds pretty hot ! I wonder what the more expensive one comes with? “A pen” my shop assistant friend informs me. “A pen?” I ask. So I buy a cheaper computer and you give me a screen worth maybe 9,000 Baht . I buy an expensive computer and you give me a pen worth maybe 500Baht. Makes no sense. Anyway, despite the free screen offer, I want to find the best deal, so I keep shopping. It becomes apparent that the price will not vary, the point of difference are the free gifts that are included such as the prasma scleen. After visiting six Sony shops I find undoubtedly the best deal. One Laptop, thlee flee bags, a flee set of ealphones, a flee mouse, a flee prasma scleen, flee wileress intelnet for six months, flee extended wallanty and flee flash dlive. The shopping experience in Bangkok seems not to be the price difference but how much crap we can actually give our customers. I am not complaining, considering the last laptop I bought in Melbourne came with nothing. To top it off, as I am leaving, they tell me that if I am leaving Thailand in the next thirty days, then I can claim the VAT refund which is like duty free. How good is that??? Another bonus! I loveshopping in Thailand!
That night, Julia and I are enjoying a pirate DVD on my flee prasma scleen when a loud siren goes past the house. I don’t think a lot of it and put it down to a petty crim being chased. When the third siren goes past, I stop the DVD and decide to have a look at what is going on. The action must be close, because my street leads into a very tight network of lanes and ally-ways known as Soi. The soi maze at the end of my bigger Soi lead to the Chao Phraya river, which therefore means that the action must be between here and the river which is only 500 metres away. When we go into the street we realize that there is a house fire. A huge column of smoke tinged with red flames rises from the soi maze. Jason, Julia and myself bolt over to look. Jason’s new apartment is roughly where the large colemn of smoke is coming from. The apartment block is surrounded by traditional Bangkok wooden houses packed in so closely together that you can usually shake your neighbours hand while you are lying in bed. We round a corner to the street of the apartment block to find that the fire is actually a wooden house next door to the apartment building. It is a fierce fire and flames are leaping as high as seven stories. The fire trucks are pitiful They are utes with some leaky hoses and some very useless looking firemen manning them. The leakiness of the hoses is of little consequence at present as they can’t actually seem to find any water to put into them. There are ahlf clothed firemen running around screaming at each other and by-standers. There are also fireman groupie girls running around yelling at the firemen. It is a complete mess. There are people running from the direction fo the fire with bags of clothes and there are taxia dn motos trying to get into the location of the fire. There are so many bystanders that the mixture of all three are blocking the whole soi.

We decide that it is a good move to get out of the way And then head over to the other side of the canal to have a look and not get in the way. As we are walking out, about another twenty utes, bikes, cars and a truck come screaming down with sirens blaring and lots of useless looking firemen dangling from them. Some of them are taking wrong turns then having to reverse. Some of them aren’t actually fire vehicles, but have sirens so seem to be getting in on the action. The problem would seem pretty clear though, they can’t find any water and there is no way of getting more vehicles to the fire. There are other Sios that reach the fire and as we walk up Samsen Rd, we realize that there are in excess of a hundred vehicles surging their way down the sois to the fire. When we get to the canal, we can see that they are getting pumps set up to pump water onto the fire, but this is about twenty minutes to half an hour after the first truck arrived and the fire is now huge!
The following morning while Jason is out for his morning run he over-hears the locals talking about the fire. Word is that one of the buildings was a guesthouse. A backpacker smoking a joint knocked a candle over which started the fire. Eight houses were destroyed which in this part of the world houses a lot of people. It is sad to hear and frustrating to hear that a foreigner caused it, because it further deteriorates the reputation and image of foreigners in the area. There are unfortunately a lot of losers that come through the area and those of us that are longer term can sometimes struggle to be separated from these people in the local’s eyes.

Easily swayed for a ride

“Cycle to Phnom Penh???? You must be nuts” I say to Ben. It’s a long way with some long days and you need to be in a good state of mind to do it. So I of course cannot resist the challenge and an opportuni ty to do some solid riding after the stop start riding of supervising the Oxfam Challenge. My housemate and fellow tour leader Ben had just finished a tour in Siem Reap also. I have seen my group off on the plane and have had a day to recover, so off we go to Kampong Thom, Kampong Cham and Phnom Penh. 365 or so KMS in three days. I have done it before on my own and swore I would never do it again.

Chalenge craziness

Despite thinking that I may need therapy, I seem to have survived the experience of leading the Oxfam challenge. Our sizeable group forged its way from Thay Ninh in Vietnam to the border with Cambodia and d then across said border to Srey Veng and Prey Veng and eventually Kampong Cham. The minute you hit the Cambodian side, it is clear that you are nowhere near Kansas and most definitely not in Vietnam any more. The standard of living between the two countries is immediately noticeable. One of the differences is that there is a lot less traffic. The motor bikes are older and the children all ride bicycles to school. There are very few cars around, but those that pass us do so at a high speed , so it is important that the group keep to the side of the road.

The group have been very patient. The local operator has a really good system where we leave one lot of bikes at the border and pick up another lot on the other side of the border. This is possibly the worst thing that you can do, because the riders have just taken two days to get used to the bike that they are using and we now need to change them over. The situation is not helped by the fact that the bikes just have not been maintained.

We hit Kampong Cham in high spirits. It is a spectacular place to ride to due to the large Japanese friendship bridge that spans across the Mekong and lands in the middle of the town. At the end of the bridge there is a modern service station that sells ice cream, so I stop everyone here before we head to the hotel. There are gaps between the riders, I think largely due to the heat. Our resident funny man Virgillio comes flying in doing a superman impression on the bike wth his arms stuck out the front t and his legs stuck out the back. It looks impressive until he clips the plastic bag full of baguettes that the baguette lady has been trying to sell for the extent of the time that we are there. The crispy delicious bread goes flying all over the concourse and Virgillio is so shocked that almost eats the asphalt. He didn’t eat it though, and a good thing too, because he has just purchased ten dirty, oil spattered baguettes and will need the space in his belly.

The following day’s ride is a highlight. It starts off on nicely sealed road and then turns to nicely graded dirt. After about twenty kilometers it turns to not so nicely graded ballast and rubble. Despite the road being a really great and interesting ride, it also brings some bad memories . I rode this section on my own in March and it was a lot rougher then. At the time, my panniers broke (good quality deuter) and left me holding one five kilo one under my arm and another strapped wit ocky straps to the back. All the same, it is a great ride with a pass through a minority Cham muslim village and a stop over at a soccer field where everyone has a chance to pit themselves against the nimble Khmer kids who can make scissor kicks over the head look easy.

We arrive in Phnom Penh exhausted but satisfied. The group are in need of some civilization after being out bush for a few days. Some are busting to get the famous foreign correspondent’s club , some are busting to check out the infamous nightlife of the capital of the country that I call the wild west of Asia. It really is a different place. There are great little open air food stalls where you can eat a meal for less than a dollar, there are markets where you can get some great fruit or rip off brand-name merchandise, there is fast internet if you need to talk to someone on Skype. There are also a large supply of evils such as drugs, prostitutes, prostitutes, prostitutes and guns. A hell of lot of guns are getting around Phnom Penh. They are unfortunately used quite often too, usually only to hold someone up and not discharged, but after a few stories it is enough for us to warn our passengers and for us to be careful ourselves. This of course goes completely over the head of Shapelle Corby who is found walking around the city at four in the morning on her own. There is such a thing as outing your head in the lion’s mouth and this girl really doesn’t need any more help with her misfortune and mishaps. Much of the group including the other leader Mr. Eric are out til all hours at the Heart Of Darkness which is well known as the last stop on the venue map for a night out in Phnom Penh. Eric can do this though, because I have volunteered to take the optional ride to the Killing Fields and S21 Genocide museum.

I wrote about the killing fields and the genocide museum in the blog from my last adventure over this way. The museum especially is a really confronting and distressing experience. It was originally a school, but the Khmer Rouge turned it into one of their main interrogation facilities. There are thousands of pictures from those that were guests there and were then sent to the killing fields after providing the information that their interrogators wanted, normally the names of their families and colleagues’. This was their strategy for identifying those that they would then systematically catch, place under interrogation and then kill. In this manner, they killed educated people and former government workers by the hundreds of thousands. It is a must for anyone who visits Cambodia as it will in my opinion go a long way to helping one understand why things are the way they are around them even today.

From Phnom Penh we transport our hung over and tired passengers to Siem Reap by bus. We now only have one cycling day left which is out to a pre-Angkorian temple Batay Srei. There is by rumor (from the boss) a road that leads further out to a place called Phnom Kulan with such wonders as a waterfall and a temple that is not crawling with thousands of Korean and Japanese tourists (both seem to be unlikely given the flat nature of the country and the number of said tourists in this part of the country). Needing to find out though, I grab Shane who is the strongest cyclist in the group and Anna who is a strong cyclist also, but has been kindly sitting at the back lending her moral support to the stragglers. Sensing that she would actually like a decent ride, I suggest that she join us. We head out on rough dirt to a gatepost marking the entrance to the National Park. After failing to negotiate a discount in the expensive admission fee, we start a decent climb up into the hills. After about fifteen Kms of climbing and dropping, we reach a waterfall with an amazing Buddha image carved into the rock under the water. The water is fantastic, fresh and strong. There are two levels to the waterfall and there are no other foreign toursists to be seen anywhere. We then visit the temple which is still under use and has a great view from the upper level that houses a large rock carved reclining Buddha.

We are enjoying our time at the temple and falls so much that we miscalculate time and end up riding back in the fading daylight. To make it worse though, the heavens open on us and dump more rain than I think I have seen for a few years. We arrive back at the hotel soaked to the bone and running late for the final night celebratory dinner.

The final night is always the wildest for a charity group. They have reached the end of their massive ride and can make a mess of themselves without having to suffer the physical consequences of getting n a bike the next day. This group are no exception (unsurprisingly). They are out until four or five in the morning and my riding buddy from the day has to be carried back by three of his fellow challengers, while spewing all the way. It looks like he hasn’t worked out that you can’t go that hard after a 130KM ride finishing in a flood. I have learnt this however and despite a ribbing from all concerned, I leave and make an early line for bed at midnight.

There are all sorts of stories floating around the next morning about who spewed , who had to be carried home and who snogged who. It seems I am actually running some sort of Contiki tour! My group have earned the name the rabbits from the hotel staff who I am sure are completely horrified by the behavior.

Dessert temptation

“You can have two flavors for the price of one!” She says. “Great, I’ll have Caramel and Apple” I say. She tells me that I can choose one of eight different waffle shells. I choose one and it adds a dollar to the price. She tells me that I can choose two toppings. After choosing my toppings it comes as only a small surprise that this has also added to the price of my expanding pile of dessert. I end up with a dessert the size of a dinner and a bill of $6 which is a lot in this part of the world. This was bound to happen if I’m waiting for an hour for a flight to Saigon. You see… this is my vice. Everyone has a vice. Especially in Thailand. The most common among western blokes are either the women, the alcohol, the drugs, the cheap cigarettes, or all of these. My vice however is ice cream. The most dangerous of all, because whilst the three most common ones are in plentiful supply just about everywhere in Asia, mine is not in some places. Scoop ice cream is rare, so I generally settle for Cornettos from the seven eleven, but there are places (believe it or not) that don’t have a seven eleven. So I am therefore a sitting duck for the enthusiastic representative of the Super Scoop Corporation.

With my stomach full of expensive dessert, I waddle over to the departure gate and board the flight to Saigon, home to eight million or so Vietnamese and the economic centre of the country. Hanoi in the north is the capital, but Saigon (officially Ho Chi Minh City) is the commercial hub. It’s been almost three years since I was in Vietnam with my god friends Harro, Milly and Cally. We spent ten days traveling from north to south along the beautiful coastline. I’m back here now to meet the thirty seven participants of the Oxfam Challenge. We will ride from Saigon, to Tay Ninh, then onto the Cambodian border. From there, we head to Srey Vieng, Prey Vieng, Kampong Cham and then Phnom Penh. We then catch a bus up north to cycle around the temples of the Angkor.

I have a day before the group arrive, so I meet up with the other leader for the trip and the local operator. Eric is Canadian and has been leading intrepid travel groups for a couple of years. He has now switched to running just the charity challenge trips. Vreak is the local operator. He’s a really nice Khmer fella who likes a beer and has a good assortment of Rugby tops including the Wallabies and the All Blacks. He has just scored himself one of the new leader jobs for Intrepid Indochina, so he is doing his last trip for his current employer (and our local operator) Buffallo tours. We have a team bonding session with dinner and a few beers. I pull the plug early and get lost on my way back to the hotel and add half an hour to my trip.

The next morning I rush around to buy a couple of things from the market. I’m wearing my upside down numbers t-shirt that Julia gave me. It has an upside down five on the front of it. The Vietnamese stall holder ladies think this is the funniest thing they’ve seen for a while. Some silly whitey who doesn’t know which way to stick numbers on. They cackle themselves silly and point it out to their friends. “Hey mister! You have five wrong way! I have six right way on good t-shirt! You buy from me… very good price. Help you with your number!” I’m glad to have provided the locals with some amusement.

Saigon is just a mass of motor bikes. The density is overwhelming and to cross the road is a form of sport akin to bungee jumping. The density of population provides for a fascinating picture, with street food vendors everywhere and open air barbers, you can find entertainment to last hours by watching a square hundred meters. It is hilarious to watch newly arrived tourists from Australia or other sparsely populated countries practically have a nervous breakdown just from trying to get from one end of a street to another. You can see a look of sheer terror in their eyes as they defensively try to block with their arms as they attempt their first street crossing. You see, once you get the hang of it, it’s OK. You just have to walk in slow, well-defined steps across the road, making eye contact wherever possible. The motos simply filter their way around you. This does not apply with buses though. They will just run you over.

It is now time to pick up the participants from the airport. Some bleary eyed Australians, a kiwi and an American emerge from the airport with a bewildered look as they grapple with their destination. Some have been traveling for around nineteen hours with connecting flights. We are almost ready to head for the hotel, when it becomes apparent that there is trouble in immigration. While I am picturing Shappele Corby being on my cycling trip, Eric works out that the trouble actually relates to a piece of tape that someone has attached to their passport. This is an indication. This person may have significance in the coming days. Quite often there are people who just have stuff happen to them continually on a trip. It’s as if they are absorbing all the bad luck in order to protect the rest of the group. We will refer to this individual as Shapelle Corby in order to satisfy privacy concerns. So we have a small amount of time in Saigon before we ride at the crack of dawn to start the challenge. I get my entertainment, watching from the hotel lobby as a group of the new arrivals make an attempt at a road crossing. They succeed, but one comes very close to being squished which is worrying. It’s Shapelle Corby.

We set off on a bus in the morning to the Cu Chi tunnels where we start our ride. The tunnels are from wartimes when the Vietcong used the tunnels to defeat the US. On the bus I overhear a conversation between two of the participants. One says that she has not actually been training on a bike, but more so an exercise bike. The other says that she broke her ankle when she came off a bike in her early teens and therefore has a bike-phobia. This is concerning to say the least, considering that these girls are about to ride 480KMS in humid 32 degree heat. I turn around to see that the one who trained on an exercise bike is Shapelle Corby.
My concern was well warranted. One of the to girls appears not to actually be capable of riding a bike and falls off within the first fifty meters. The other is just slow. These two are going to help me to practice my sympathy and encouragement techniques, both of which are a little lacking. To add to this, the bikes that Buffallo have provided are in a horrific state of disrepair. This means that it is even harder for the participants than it has to be. Grasshopper Adventures goes a long way to saving the day though, by delivering six bikes from Phnom Penh. The problem with the bikes is because the company that supplies them are not bike people and therefore just don’t get it. It is important for the companies that are involved in these trips to be people that ride themselves and understand the importance of getting the equipment right. All this talk of bikes reminds me of the things that I miss at home. I miss Kate a lot (of course), I miss my road bike a lot, and I MISS SCOOP ICE CREAM!!!!!

Better go to the beach

I have decided that I need beach. As many of you may be aware, I am prone to procrastination. I knew I wanted to go somewhere between the end of my last trip and when I meet my next group, but I just wasn’t sure where exactly. Maybe Hoi An in Vietnam or Chiang Rai in Northern Thailand. In the end, I procrastinated so much that it was Monday and I was due to fly to Vietnam to meet my group on Friday. So I have opted for Koh Samet. I will hang out there for a couple of days, then come back here and fly to Vietnam.

RIP Cat

On a sad note, some of you will be aware that Cat Platt-Hepworth passed away three days ago. He was suffering from what is thought to be a stomach Tumor and died of a heart attack after arriving at the Vet. More than this I can’t say, except to say that the cat gods decided it was time for him to go and that he will be sadly missed.

The first group (photos to follow shortly)

It has been some time since my last update. This is mainly because I have just discovered that tour leading can be hard work, and was bound to be so, on my first trip. I collected my group from the airport and we then drove to Kanchaniburi. After visiting the war museum and allied cemetery, we headed the next day up to Tong Pha Phum where we stayed on floating raft houses. These are very basic but good fun and being out in the sticks was good after the craziness of Bangkok. A run the next morning with one of my passengers was a good start to the day, followed by the giving of offerings to the monks who visited on a boat. Monks are not allowed to prepare their food, so they are reliant on locals to provide offerings each day in exchange for a blessing. The monk will eat one meal in the morning and then one before midday. They then need to wait until the next day before they can eat again.

We then took a boat ride to Sangklaburi which is near to Three Pagoda Pass (site on the Burma Railway) and the Burmese border. This area is largely populated by the Mon people who are a minority people that the Burmese regime has a distaste for, but the Thais allow many of them to live on the Thai side. At various times in history the Mon people have sided with Thailand and for this reason the Thais seem to have a soft spot for them (as soft a spot as governments have for refugees).

This was our first day cycling which is an interesting experience because it’s were I get the first indicator of how quickly the group will move and what sort of training they might have done. It seems that I have possibly the largest age variance of any trip I have ever heard of. The youngest member of the trip is 22 years old, the oldest 79 years old and a fair range in between the two, including one absolute legend called Terry who is 74 and is willing to give anything a go. They are all here with a dual purpose. You see they are from the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. They all have different links through volunteering to simply wanting to raise some money for a good cause. Hey have each raised a minimum of $5000 for the shrine in order for them to be able to partake in the cycling challenge and to take part in the pilgrimage to pay respects to the fallen solidiers of the past on what is known around here as the death railway. All have some sort of military connection such as Graeme who actually fought in the second world war or Jay who is a member of the Royal Australian Navy. They are about as far spread in cycling speed and ability as I have seen, but a truly determined bunch.

Following our visit to three pagoda pass, we embark on our hardest day cycling. The ride is only about 70KMS in length, but it is all off road and consists of big hills running through dense jungle. It doesn’t take long for the first incident to occur. One of the younger riders hits the front brake too hard and goes flying. Landing on a rock, he breaks his collar bone in two places and dislocates his shoulder. We have to immediately get him to hospital which is a bumpy two hours drive away, so Willy takes him in the ute while the rest of us keep moving in the direction of Hae Mak Amen Waterfall.

We get there, but only after Terry comes off and hits the cheese grater, taking skin aff all protruding joints and his forehead. Jay who is the strongest rider in the group has to be part of the action, so he goes for a double samasault while still attached to his bike with clips. He sustains some more cheese grater style injuries and starts to take on a commando man

Kup kup kup kup kup

Sawadee krup! Kawp kon Krup! Krup? Krup.Krup?? Krup!!!

It really does sound as though every sinle word is followed by a kup. The "r" is silent, so it sounds like kup and for ladies it is Kaa. After you say pretty much anything in Thai you need to say this word. You see little children being constantly coached by their parents. "Come on.... krup... krup.... say it... krup.

My landlady is a lovely lady but she runs a childcare centre in one of the buildings in the compound, and from about 7am each day, as children arrive you can ear a whiney voice trying to teach the children to krup or kaa correctly.

I feel as though I am starting to settle in. I have worked out where the laundry mat is, where the nearest decent Massaman curry is and where to get drinking water. I bought a mattress for about $50 (new and double size). I braved a public bus to get to the nearest department store to get a pair of runners and I have found a place that does a fantastic thai massage. I mean theres a thai massage place evey fifty metres, but this place seems to be the place to go. Thais seem to frequent it, so thats usually a good sign with anyting here. Anything with an abundance of whiteys is proabably not as good as it could be and is probably costing too much.

In an effort to keep my fitness up, I have started running. I leave at about 6.30am and run along the almost overflowing river, past the main public bus stop in this area and then do a few laps of the park. The park sounds lovely doesn't it? Well, it's not so lovely. There are stacks of homeless people who leave rubbish everywhere and urinate on all of the not so abundant trees. It is pobably better described as a homeless persons paddock, but it is something to run around without the threat of being run over by some crazy tuc tuc.

I am living in the banglampu area which is in the older part of the city and houses the notorious Khao San rd. I am far enough away from said backpacker and feral depot that I don't have to contest with too much crap, but I am close enough that I have all the necessay mod cons and access to the necessary travel resources for work.

I share a house with three others. we have a good set up with bike storage underneath and a small office. The four of us will not see each other often as we are all tour leaders for either Grasshopper or Intrepid Travel.

It has dawned on me tonight that when you don't chat to a lot of people around you and when you don't understand what everyone is saying, you miss out on things. It turns out there is a big festival on tonight. I don't really mind that I've missed it as I have to be up at 5am to collect my customers from the airport. The unfortunate part is that my street leads towards the river and so there is a permanant traffic jam outside my front door with some bastard traffic policeman who is way too whistle happy!!! If I were in Australia I would go and tell him to give it a rest, but alas, if I tried, he would probably lock me up.

Arrival in sweat city

Stepping off the over airconditioned plane and airport into the night air of Bangkok can only be described as stepping from the fridge to the sauna.

The first job was to get the bike from oversized baggage. Of course the new airport is having teething problems and of course the oversized baggage is one of the more oversized problems. The first logical place to seek your oversized item would be the garage sized doorway at the end of the carousel with a sign stating "oversized baggage". Unfortunately the three baggage handlers wearing yellow polos and the one official looking guard could not speak English, but they managed to motion us to a doorway of identical appearance about fifty meters away. Upon arrival at this doorway, three new sets of yellow polos and a guard did the same thing and motioned us to a third doorway. A third set of the same then just shrugged and nervously chattered to each other.

Sensing they were under threat, the occupants of the third doorway and the second doorway closed their doors and merged wit the staff of the first doorway. They then all sat with their backs to the waiting owners of the oversized baggage until eventually the items turned up. This is of course only the start I am sure. I know I'm in for more of this in the coming months to a much greater scale.

After finally getting to m new place of residence, I crash out for the night, only to be woken by my neighbors woking something for breakfast at 6am, but this is OK, because I need to be up anyway to start researching a trip that we are about to run.

We head out to Kancaniburi province after meeting up with the local operators Nutty and Willy. These two jovial blokes are the logistical people for the trip. Even though I can't understand what they are saying to the various people, I can tell that they've got a great rapport with all the hotel and restaurant staff. While Jason and I are having early nights after one beer, these two stay up to polish off a bottle of whisky and smoke cigarettes. This does not however affect their ability to get up in the morning, even if they are a bit smelly and slow.

We've covered a fair distance to Kanchaniburi city to Hellfire pass on the Burma railway line to three pagoda pass and back around a huge lake to the Erawan National Park and then on to the Ayutthaya area which is under flood.

It is amazing coming from a country that is bone dry and desperately in need of water to a country that has far too much water. The net depressing result though, is exactly the same. No crop, no harvest and presumably a shortage in food at some point. The cause of the flooding is not rain in these areas so much as rain that has been falling during the now finished wet season in the north and has flowed down the four rivers to the Chao Phraya River. This river then runs through Bankok and on to the Gulf of Thailand. According to the locals, the water is being held back in these tributaries so as to protect the city.

So in Ayutthaya we are on our way to inspect the homestay that we will be using for our group. As we drive along a road with houses under water on each side, things are not looking good for the homestay option. In Russell Quoit style, I decided it's time to call an old mate for a natter (refer to photo).




















The homestay turns out to be one of the older style wooden houses built on stilts. This means that it is just above water level. We jump in a boat and paddle out to it to find the house perfectly intact (just surrounded by water). It might be a very cosy evening when fifteen of us have to stay there.

So it's time to hit the road! I for one am quite happy about this as I am eager to get back to Bangkok and get my new place of residence sorted out before I start the first trip. I have been unable to get a SIM card on my travels and thus have been unable to speak to Kate. This makes the displacement feeling far worse.

An hour and a half mini-van ride and we're back in Bangkok. Hot seething urban mass that is Bangkok.