Home, Sweet, Quiet, Somnolent Home

Wow. I actually made it back. So, Doug and any of the rest of you who were betting on this being the time I didn't come home, tough luck! The call of home has brought me back once more to England's Green and Pleasant Land (freezing though it is at the moment).

My last few days in Hanoi were spent split between a comfortable, alcoholic haze and occasional bursts of tourist acitivity. I went down for a daytrip to the Perfume Pagoda complex south of town (which was okay, with quite a cool cable-car ride up the mountain but not worth the time or the money it took to get there, let alone my having been sensible the previous night and hence missed out on possibly the biggest drinking night of my time in Hanoi *sighs*). I went to see Ho Chi Minh (aka "Uncle Ho")'s mausoleum. Which is a big-arse pile of granite (or some other deep grey rock) surrounding a marble chamber containing a hard-wood-and-glass coffin-type-thingy containing either a) the embalmed body of Viet Nam's independence leader or b) a wax-work, depending on which version of affairs you believe. And it's impressive enough, more for the guards than anything else, if a bit spooky. I went to the Jade Mountain Pagoda out on an island in the Returned Sword Lake (home to Viet Nam's equivalent of the Excalibur myth, only it features a bloody great turtle) in the middle of Hanoi. And, between all this, I socialised, largely on Halida beer.

So, it's all over red rover. 1 month in Viet Nam, 3.5 months in SE Asia, 5 months back living out of my pack, and 18 months away from home. I'm back in Caldecote, which is probably about as different from Hanoi as I'm likely to get. After a few days back, I've sort of got my perspective on things, so here's the results of my thoughts.

Things I will miss about Viet Nam:

- The smiles. There's something about the Vietnamese grin (admittedly more common down south than up north) which just lights up the person's face and makes the day seem happier than it was.
- Bia hoi. Yes, Vietnam's very own uber-fresh micro-brewed beer, available for the comedy price of around 10p a glass. Light on the taste-buds, light on the alcohol front, but a very nice way to get the evening going.
- Pho. As a certain well-known guidebook series put it, "the dish that built a nation". Slight hyperbole there, but it is one of the few ever-present things from where I travelled in Viet Nam (and one of the fewer good ones). And seeing how much it was in a Vietnamese restaurant in Cambridge nearly gave me heart failure.
- Hanoi Backpackers' Hostel. Yes, it's expensive for a dorm set-up in Viet Nam. Yes, it's run by Westerners (well, Aussies, but we can give them that much). But the atmosphere is fantastic, and the crowd there were some of the better friends I made in my time in SE Asia.
- Crossing the road. I was faintly terrified of this on arrival, but a month in country convinced me it's entirely natural that you should not worry about avoiding the traffic, just let it avoid you. The feeling of invincibility this imbues is intoxicating (and probably bad for your health), and it all just seems to make more sense. Of course, if I tried it in London I'd probably be dead in 2 minutes flat.

Things I won't miss about Viet Nam:

- The vendors/hawkers/touts. "You buy something?" is possibly the most irritating thing I have heard on my trip. I don't mind so much getting touted at if at least the person has something specific they're flogging, but having stall-/shop-owners decide that just because I happen to walk past their premises I'm going to become a customer is really annoying. Work out what I want and try and sell me something specific!! Or else just leave me alone. Grrrr.
- The motorbike-taxi riders along all streets where a tourist might be found (NB this also applies to Cambodia). "Moto-bike you?" does not count as a good sales pitch. Even if you do accompany it with the "hands on handle-bars" symbol that appears to have taken root in international sign-language to mean "Excuse me, good sir, but could I perhaps interest you in a ride upon a motorbike taxi to wherever you are going?". Just because I am white and I am walking somewhere, it does NOT mean I automatically want a moto.
- "Why not?". This is the ultimate irritating answer to the most commonly-used phrase in Viet Nam, "No thankyou!". Why do I not want to buy a motorbike ride/T-shirt/set of postcards/bottle of water/bag of marijuana/assistance in getting "boom-boom"? Could it possibly because I don't need said items? Or even just don't want them? As has been pointed out enough times, albeit in different circumstances, "No means NO!".

Things I will miss about South-East Asia:

- Cheap, cheap food. Wandering through Cambridge today I saw a hot-dog barrow selling its product for 1.65GBP. This is not so ridiculous in the UK, but that equals 50,000 Vietnamese Dong or 120 Thai Baht or something similar. I could get, in either case, a decent meal for that and still have change left over.
- Cheap transport. Again, I looked at transport to maybe go down to my old Uni town of Bristol and back. Cheapest fare would be around 35-40GBP return. This for a trip lasting around 3.5-4 hours. By contrast, a bus-journey of similar length in Viet Nam would cost maybe 4USD, or around 2 GBP. An overnight sleeper train from Hue to Hanoi, going nearly half the length of the country, cost me around 14 GBP. A sleeper from near Melaka up to Kota Bharu in Malaysia cost me about 6 quid. And all of those services had a good chance of being on time.
- Polite, enthusiastic small children grinning their heads off when you respond to a wave and a cry of "Hello!".

Things I won't miss about South-East Asia:

- Being unable to understand the vast majority of what's going on around me.
- Being totally unable to fit in in a crowd.
- Spending most of my time on alert for who is trying to rip me off at the moment (honourable exemptions from this to Malaysia and SIngapore).
- The incessant smell and noise of millions of motorbikes, especially the damned tendency to use the horn every 5 seconds or so.
- Nearly concussing myself on the door-frames of bathroom doors in the morning when I'm not paying attention.
- Minibuses. 'Nuff said on this one.
- The "walking ATM" syndrome. Just because I'm a Westerner, does not mean I have cash to throw around the whole damned time.
- Sweating my arse off the whole time.

Things I will miss about backpacking:

- The sheer pace and intensity of life. I have more experiences in two days on the road than I often did in 2 months at work at home.
- The camaraderie. Especially in Asia, where we all stand out a mile off, the sense of community amongst backpackers is very handy. And the recollections of people who've recently travelled to a place are generally a far-preferable way of getting info on there than reading the Lonely Planet.
- The freedom to go do what I want, when I want.
- The endless stream of new friends. If anything, this is generally my favourite thing about travelling.

Things I won't miss about backpacking:

- Living out of the same clothes week in, week out, for weeks and months on end. It's been such a shock to come back and find that I do actually have a wardrobe (both literally and metaphorically) again.
- The less-pleasant aspects of communal living (at least when in dorms). Snorers, early risers, people who feel the need seemingly to stuff their packs with plastic bags to rustle, people who seriously contaminate the air of a communal bathroom (and don't even have the decency to look sheepish), people who, shall we say, reach levels of intimacy not entirely appropriate to a dorm...
- Early morning departures.
- Traveller-snobs. You know the kind, the ones who think that unless you travel with less than 10kg of stuff, sleep in the cheapest flop-houses, avoid any concentration of more than 2 Westerners and are capable of surviving on instant noodles for weeks at a time, then you aren't a PROPER backpacker.
- Keeping track of an endless succession of exchange rates.

I think that about sums things up.

Those few of you coming up to Caldecote at the weekend, I'll look forward to seeing you then. Those down in London, I'm still hoping to get there next week, maybe on Wed or Thu night. Those in Bristol, it's not looking like I'll be there any time before January, as Xmas has people oh-so-busy. Those still on the road, I hope you're still having as good a time as I did. Even after a few days, it feels a little like a dream that's fading slightly from the memory, so I'm getting this down while I still remember it all.

It's been fun (well, mostly) passing on these tales, and I hope you've enjoyed reading them (I know some of you have). After this, I might drop out another e-mail once I have some more stuff updated properly onto my now-very-quiet blog, but otherwise that's it for another bout of travelling.

Take care, have fun, and happy travels, now and for the future.

Pat

In sight of the finish line

G'day again. It's been a while.

You'll be variously relieved or disappointed that this is probably going to be one of the last of these mails. Including today, I have 5 days left on this odyssey, so soon your Inboxes will be molested no longer.

So, back to what I've been up to. The quick summary would be: socialising, shopping, sweating, soaking up the beer and sailing around on a boat.

The train journey up from Nha Trang to Da Nang was actually pretty good - I got chatting whilst on the platform with a group of fellow backpackers who, it turned out, were on a trip with Intrepid, the company that my big sister Zara toured SE Asia with a few years back. I was a few compartments down from them but ended up sitting chatting with them for quite a bit of the evening. Turns out that two of them were from Huntingdon, about 20 minutes' drive from where I grew up, and that another was from the same suburb of Canberra (Yaralumla) as my cousins out there, and knew them from school. When I bumped into them again a few days later, it also turned out that one of the couples had recently done a trip through Africa with Acacia, the same company I used last year, and had had both my driver and my guide from that trip as drivers on their trip. It is, as they say, a small world, particularly when you're backpacking. So, that accounted for the initial socialising (which was more lucid than sometimes given that I'd decided I really needed a night off the grog).

The shopping bit was at Hoi An. That was pretty much everything I was expecting it to be. The Old Town was really quite picturesque, the weather was hot and sticky, and the tailors' shops were omnipresent and ridiculously cheap. By omnipresent, I mean that literally every other shop through the centre of town was a tailor's, and many of those inbetween were cobblers' places. Well, that's not 100% accurate - the shopfronts would take your order, including selecting fabrics, and measure you up, but the actual cutting and sewing went on elsewhere in town. As a result of this, I was initially quite cautious and ordered one or two things each at 3 different shops, as well as getting some replacement sandals and some sneakers made at one of the shoe-shops.

One slightly surreal aspect of the Hoi An tailor experience is that, possibly due to the overwhelming presence of British travellers (or Aussies/Kiwis returning from living in the UK), nearly every tailor's has a few years' worth of back-copies of the Next catalogue, from which they will cheerfully copy anything, making it to your size. Another thing that takes a bit of getting used to is the fascination that the staff in the shops (mostly girls) have with Westerners and their pale skin. In contrast to the sun-worshippers of most Western countries, who would sell their granny for a good tan, many Southeast Asian peoples value pale skin. It seems to be a status thing, as darker skin is associated with performing manual labour outside in the fields whereas pale skin indicates a job indoors (probably better-paid). Whatever the reason, it means that one of the sights I will indelibly associate with Viet Nam (and to a lesser extent with Cambodia) is that of the local girls, riding their scooters, with wide-brimmed hats, masks to cover their faces, long-legged trousers and long glooves to cover their arms, all designed to keep them as white as possible.

At any rate, this means that one of the first questions many Western guys here, if apparently unaccompanied, get asked is "Where your wife?" or "You travel with girlfriend?". An answer in the negative tends to then result in much giggling and sometimes an offer to be introduced to a friend of hers. You also get a lot of comments on the line of "You so pale! You so handsome!". It would all be quite flattering were it not for the fact that most of it is blatantly part of the sales pitch - the girls in those shops are VERY well-practiced at persuading tourists to buy far more stuff than they originally planned to. I must admit that I ended up spending a little more than I had planned, though I didn't get overly carried away - my "No thankyou" routine got plenty more workout in response to the perpetual "You buy one more shirt?" entreaties.

In the time I didn't spend wandering around soaking up the atmosphere or getting fitted for clothes, I hung around with a Dutch guy called Arjan. We had met briefly in Nha Trang but, given that this was in the aftermath of the drunken boat trip, I couldn't actually remember where I had met him until he reminded me. Anyway, he had also been on the train up to Da Nang (though in a seat rather than a sleeper) and we got chatting on the minibus down to Hoi An and then ended up staying at the same hotel there. Given that we were both travelling solo, we also ended up meeting up for some meals, and having a few beers in the evening while he repeatedly thrashed me at pool (at one point I was on a 10-game losing streak...). However, Hoi An being rather less of a party-mad place than Nha Trang, most evenings there were a bit more restrained (our last night in town, as per usual, turned into a bit more of a party thanks to an American, two Aussies and a trio of Swedes).

From Hoi An, we were both headed up to Hue (that should have an accent on the e, but I can't be arsed working out how to get Gmail to do that - it's pronouned "hooway" rather than "hoo" or "hyoo"), which entailed another of the ridiculously cheap "Open Tour" buses - $2 in this case. This is the old Imperial capital of Viet Nam from the 19th Century, but nowadays is a relatively quiet stop on the tourist trail. It's also one of the places that make you think "if only", as it contains what is left of the Imperial Enclosure and the Forbidden Purple City. What is still intact (and what they've restored) is beautiful, but much of it was destroyed during the fighting around the Tet offensive of the Vietnam War, so you have the slightly incongruous sight of the restored throne/reception room next to bombed-out ruins that are now home to vegetable gardens.

Hue was notable for me primarily for being crazily hot and sticky, which made walking over the bridge to see the Citadel and Imperial Enclosure into a seriously sweaty venture, and discouraged me from doing much more exploring beyond that. The only other sight I saw much of was the DMZ Cafe/Bar, where I ended up meeting up with the Intrepid crew again, as well as several of my drinking companions from Nha Trang, and spent a certain amount of time losing to Arjan at pool again.

From there, it was another overnight train up to Hanoi, this one a much longer affair (about 13 hours), and again in the company of the Intrepid lot. This gave me the opportunity to finally drink up some of the duty-free vodka I'd got when crossing the Cambodian border (and carried around pointlessly for the last few weeks), but again it wasn't too late a night given that we were arriving at the ungodly hour of 5:30am. Luckily, I had contacted the Hanoi Backpackers' Hostel (my intended destination) in advance and they sent a bloke down to the station to meet me off the train, saving me the hassle of arguing with moto and taxi drivers at that hour in the morning (they're infamous in Hanoi for taking you to places that pay commission rather than necessarily to where you asked to go).

Once settled in here in Hanoi (for that is where I am now), I got myself booked on to a 3-day trip to Ha Long Bay, and then got on with the important business of getting to know the other denizens of the hostel - it is SO nice to be back in a hostel/dorm-based system, as it makes it so much easier to meet new people. It's not ideal for my liver, given that the combination of me and a bunch of other backpackers tends to result in drinking, but I only realised when I got here how much I've missed having this kind of atmosphere around me. The Ha Long Bay trip itself was pretty good fun. I had a decent group, the food was pretty good (apart from the miserable excuses for breakfasts), it was just a pity the weather wasn't that great - overcast much of the time, and pretty chilly, with mist on the first day that was dramatic for a while (rocky islands rising out of the mist) and then just irritating as it stopped you getting much of a view. We saw various caves, as well as climbing a hill (felt more like a mountain to me, but then we all know I hate hills) to get some lovely views across Cat Ba island (the biggest one in the bay), and seeing a hospital from the war which was built in a cave to protect it from American bombing (which was in operation for 10 years, yet another tribute to Vietnamese stubbornness and ingenuity).

So I got back to Hanoi a couple of days ago, and have since just been having a laugh here. There's a really nice bunch in the hostel, and I'm enjoying not moving on and not having to pack/unpack my bags all the damned time. Having talked to people who recently came back from there and informed me the weather is shite right now (= little visibility), I've decided not to make the run up to Sapa in the mountains, and just enjoy myself here.

And that's enough e-mailing for now. I'll probably write one more before I leave on Friday, but for now I need to go try and get a ticket for the water-puppet show.

Hope all is well wherever you are. Take care and have fun,

Pat

On the rails again...

Yes, it's time for another one of these occasional updates. Again I've left it for a while before writing, so buckle up and prepare for another long one.

Looking back, last time I wrote was in Mui Ne, just before going on a sight-seeing trip with a local moto driver. The sights in this case centring largely around the local sand dunes, many of them a rather fetching dark-reddish colour. Good for the colourful pictures, bad for my calf muscles (I hate climbing up dunes) and laundry.

That evening I met up with an Irish girl and an English girl who were staying in the same resort as me, and who had been on the same bus up. After wandering up and down part of the beachfront strip (which goes for kms in Mui Ne) we found a place we all liked the look of and settled in for some munchies. After this, Debbie (the English girl) was feeling knackered and headed home, while Suzanne (Irish lass) and I headed on for another beer or so, ending up in a bar called Wax. Being right down by the beach, this offered the possibility of chilling out on beanbags, drinking beer and looking up at the stars, which is far from the worst way to spend some time.

Our contemplation of the heavens was disturbed somewhat, however, by the occupants of the neighbouring table, who were engaged in that backpacker staple drinking game, Ring of Fire. I'm sure I've covered this before, so I won't go over the rules now (for one thing, they're rather malleable). The upshot was that I was explaining to Suzanne how the game worked, and the players invited us to join them. Well, it would have been rude to decline, wouldn't it? End result, a certain amount of dumb hilarity and accidentally staying up until 3:30am. When I had to leave on the bus at 7:30am. Yes, the curse of Last Night in Town (and my own stupidity) struck again.

As might be imagined, my mood the next morning was less than entirely sunny, and deteriorated significantly once it became clear that I was once again to be treated to the joys of a SE Asian minibus. You've all heard the bitching before about this, so I won't go over it again, but just say that I spent several very uncomfortable hours trying to sleep while scrunched up in my allotted space. And then, joy of joys, we rendez-vous-d with a larger bus coming down from Nha Trang, were transferred to a comfortable, properly air-conditioned coach with space to spread out a little further, and the morning began to improve somewhat.

This was due in part to the greater level of comfort, and also to the fact that we started up the truly spectacular road up to Da Lat. Now, for those unfamiliar with Vietnamese geography, Da Lat was the first "hill-station" the French built in Indochina (as their colony incorporating Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia was called) - similar to the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia and once again notable for the high altitude (~1500m - so about a mile) and the cooler climate. In this case, that translated to "Pat doesn't sweat the whole damned time, and actually has to dig out a long-sleeved top".

For this reason, I was quite predisposed to like Da Lat. The gorgeous mountain scenery (especially on the road up the pass to the plateau) and the relative lack of heavy touting from the local merchants etc were definite points in its favour. The fact that it is known as the Vietnamese "capital of kitsch" perhaps wouldn't be such a good selling point. As it was, I arrived there fairly knackered, sorted out some stuff on the internet, attempted to back up my camera to CD before giving up in disgust, had a pleasant dinner at one of the restaurants on the hill overlooking the market and then took an early night.

The next day I had signed up to do a tour around the sights of Da Lat and the surrounding countryside with Quyen, one of the town's famous Easy Riders. These are an originally impromptu (now rather more organised) group of local motorbike driver/guides, all of them capable of speaking decent-to-good English, and all well-versed in the local history and other information. This makes them significantly more expensive than your average moto driver, but much better able to convey what you're seeing, rather than just driving around and muttering monosyllabic responses.

As it was, I had really quite a fun day with Quyen, taking in views over the valleys, the old railway station (the oldest in Indochina, but now sadly connected to pretty much nowhere), ana amazing pagoda with a giant dragon sculpture made out of old beer bottle fragments ("the drunken Dragon", Quyen proudly informed me, sealing my love for the beastie), a local ethnic-minority village known universally as the Chicken Village (due to the presence of a giant concrete chicken in the middle of it - as with many things in Vietnam, there is a local legend surrounding the meaning of this, which is rather vague on the subject of chickens but involves star-crossed lovers doing a bit of a Romeo & Juliet), some waterfalls, the Summer Palace of the last Emperor of Viet Nam (Bao Dai) and the ever-so-aptly-named Crazy House. This latter was designed by the ever-so-hippy daughter of Viet Nam's second President, who studied architecture in Moscow and, I can only assume, consumed some very strange substances whilst there, as the place is like something out of Disney on an acid trip.

After all this, I was hoping to have a chilled-out evening watching the Premier League matches on Saturday night, only to find that hardly anywhere in town was showing the football (an almost-unheard-of state of affairs in SE Asia). Eventually I found a place, where I was the only white face present and many of the occupants were drinking tea and playing backgammon or some version of Chess or Go or something - despite which, the commentary was on in English, and the proprietress was very loudly welcoming "Hey you! You come in! You sit here! What beer you want?", meaning that I got to see at least one game with quite a good atmosphere. After that, I went in search of some food, and then discovered that, even on a Saturday night, pretty much everywhere in Da Lat closed down around 10pm. Muttering at this ridiculous state of affairs, I went back to my room, caught what I could of the following game on the TV (unfortunately with Thai commentary - don't ask) and then crashed out, ahead of yet another early start.

Yes, the usual pattern here of buses leaving at 7:30am was alive and well and I was, as ever, cordially hating it. I dozed through a fair bit of the trip up to Nha Trang, keeping myself awake for the spectacular descent back down the pass but crashing out across the back seat once we were back on level ground again. Though, Vietnamese roads being what they are, this meant I came perilously close several times to levitating bodily off the seat - things aren't helped by a lack of damping in the suspension on most buses here either, or by my tendency to sit at the back, where there's slightly more legroom but any motion of the bus gets exaggerated by a see-saw effect.

Nha Trang is the beach-and-party capital of Vietnam, certainly as far as the tourist scene is concerned. Principal activites include lying on the beach, eating, drinking, swimming, SCUBA diving and taking boat trips to the surrounding islands which range from the fairly serious to the near-enough out-and-out booze cruises. Me being me, I obviously went for one of the latter, where a bunch of Aussies and Kiwis had their usual bad influence on me and got me started drinking around 10am, from where it all went in the predictable way. Highlights, if such they can be called, included the performance by the boat crew as an impromptu band, the "floating bar" (drifting along on a life-ring in the South China Sea, drinking dodgy Da Lat wine dispensed by one of the crew on a big float) and the heartfelt sing-song on the way home.

In and around this, I have briefly sampled the delights of the beach and made more new friends crawling between the various bars in town. I won't got into all the sodden details, but you can safely assume I've had quite a fun time. But now it's time to move on. I get the train (having decided that I really can't face another overnight bus journey) in a few hours up from here to Da Nang, the main port of central Viet Nam, from where I backtrack briefly to reach Hoi An, a UNESCO World-Heritage listed town (it was a prominent medieval seaport) and the home of Viet Nam's most famous tailoring industry. Yes, I get to go shopping. Which is all to the good, as I am now in desperate need of (amongst other things) new shoes, my latest pair of sandals having had an accident and now being held together only by the wonders of gaffer-tape.

All fun, fun, fun. And I'm about out of news here (plus even I've got bored getting all this written down, so I don't want to make it any worse for you lot when reading it!). And I need to get some food before getting the train.

So, it's adieu once again. Until next I commit crimes against the English language via keyboard, take care and have fun!

Pat

Good Morning Vietnam

Hello once more,

Hopefully I won't get as carried away on this mail as I did on the last, but you never can tell. [So much for good intentions...]

As the overtly cheesey subject line will tell you, I'm now in Viet Nam ("home of the Viet people in the South" would be a rough translation). I've actually been here for a week, but I never quite got around to writing until now, mostly because I've been having quite a good time.

Specifically, I had a good time in Saigon, which is probably currently my favourite of the various major cities in Asia I've been to - okay, the traffic is mad, and the street-vendors and moto-drivers touting for business can be a little irritating, but (at least those areas I've seen) it's kept clean, it's got quite a bit of greenery around, it's in a decent state of repair and it just has that little bit of a feeling of grandeur. And Pham Ngu Lau (the local backpacker ghetto) is a million miles nicer than the Banglamphu area around Khao San Rd in Bangkok, and light-years ahead of the Boeng Kak lake area in Phnom Penh. And for those who are wondering, the province it sits in is officially called Ho Chi Minh City, while the central district (District 1 of 22) is still called Sai Gon, and it is this which appears on all buses and trains etc. And I prefer Saigon to HCMC as a name, so that's what I'm using.

My first day or so there were basically spent acclimatising, doing necessary things like laundry, working out my next steps travelling, chilling out and, of course, sampling the local beers. Oh yes, that's another reason I like Viet Nam - the beer here is generally pretty good, and about as cheap as Laos (although I haven't encountered the famed bia hoi shops yet, I managed to get Can Tho beer for about 20p a bottle when I popped down to the Mekhong delta). Yes, that's another thing I did while there, I popped down to see a little more of the great river that I've been bumping into on and off for the last 6 weeks or so - in this case, the Mekhong is damned wide this far down its length, and has plenty of islands in it, so lots of boat trips and taking in various local industries (coconut candy factory, rice paper factory, etc - note that these are family-scale factories, not big industrial things). And almost getting locked out of my hotel in Can Tho, but I still maintain that it was not unreasonable of me to expect the door still to be open at 11pm when I returned from the internet cafe I was at...

The only real downside of the whole Mekhong trip was that, as in much of SE Asia, although all the tour cafes in Saigon sell these trips, there's only a few who operate them, so you tend to get farmed around and shuttled between all manner of minibuses as you go along, and the fact that you booked one good trip through a company does not in the slightest indicate anything else you book there will be the same level of quality. In this case, it partly worked in our favour, as the guy in the bus I got switched to halfway through the tour was a much more interesting guide with better language skills. It is all a bit disconcerting, though, and a pain if you're carrying your main pack with you and keep having to lug it on and off vehicles.

Whilst in town, I also took in the most popular sites which, in the case of Saigon itself, are the Reunification Palace and the War Remnants Museum. The former was known as Independence Palace, and was the home and office of the Presidents of the Republic of Vietnam (aka South Vietnam or The Lackey Government of the American Imperialists) up until April 30 1975, when it fell to the National Liberation Front for Southern Vietnam (the NLF, more commonly known to history as the Viet Cong or VC). It's been preserved pretty much as it was then (which is to say, an extraordinary example of decent 60s architecture!), give or take the odd exhibition detailing the crimes of the South Vietnamese government and the American Interference in Vietnam (oh yes, and the tanks out the front, which are supposed to be the ones that broke in on that fateful day). As you may have gathered, most tourist sites here are fairly aggressive in following the Party line, which can be helpful for some people in providing an alternative view to the overwhelmingly American-centric one which we have been fed in the West, but which is also often extraordinarily one-eyed.

The latter trend is also visible in the War Remnants Museum, formerly known as the Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes Against the Vietnamese People. There is plenty here on the horrors of what the southern government and the Americans did, especially the use of Agent Orange and the like, and one of their key exhibits is about the treatment of VC prisoners in the prison on Cao Son island, yet there is (surprise, surprise) no mention of any atrocities carried out by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) or the VC. Still, there's also some fantastic war photography, which is made more poignant as it's almost all from photographers who died in the course of reporting the war. And to top off a fun day, after walking through town to get to the museums, I braced myself and took a moto ride back to Pham Nga Lau, which was just as much fun (and as occasionally terrifying) as I had expected - Vietnamese drivers go quite a bit faster than Cambodian ones, though there are at least more traffic lights in Saigon than in Phnom Penh.

My final day in Saigon was another one on tour, in this case the obligatory visit to the Vietnam-war era Cu Chi tunnels (or what's left of them). This extraordinary feat of human endeavour and engineering consisted of up to 220km of tunnels, running from the mountains where the supply lines of the Ho Chi Minh trail came to an end, through the villages of the staunchly Communist Cu Chi district, down to within about 30km of Saigon itself. However, not much of them survived the war, as the Americans and South Vietnamese, having failed to get rid of the tunnels any other way, turned the area into a "free fire zone" and lobbed artillery shells and dropped bombs all over the area to try and collapse as much of the tunnels as possible. Apparently, any aircraft returning to Saigon from bombing missions with ordnance left over were under instructions to drop it in the Cu Chi area.

What remains now has mostly been re-excavated for tourists (primarily domestic), and hence is not fully authentic. The bunkers are not underground but are shown dug into the ground, with thatched roofs over the top, and the tunnels that have been cleared are about twice the size they originally were - I'm not sure of the dynamics on this, but apparently thinner tunnels were much less likely to collapse than wider ones, so much of the original network was only 80cm by 60cm. Having nearly had a claustrophobia attack just from going 30m or so through the extra-large-for-tourists section they have there, I don't know how on earth the VC fighters put up with doing that for years. By the time the war ended, most of the surface villages and much of the ground cover were gone (victims of explosives and defoliants) and the inhabitants were pretty much all living in these tunnels below the ground. And it was a bloody struggle - of around 16,000 combatants in the Cu Chi area, apparently only about 4,000 survived to see the end of the war. As well as the tunnels, there were also demonstrations of various of the traps that the VC used to slow down and hurt Americans pursuing them in the area, and a shooting gallery, where visitors get the chance to try firing an AK-47 or M-16 rifle, or even an M-60 machine-gun. I chose not to do so, partly because I couldn't really justify the cost, but mostly because even from a distance away it was absolutely deafening. It makes me so glad we don't have conscription in the UK, as I'd have been an utter mess (and probably deaf) if I'd had to learn to use a gun.

As an aside, the day trip to Cu Chi also included a visit to the Holy See of the Cao Dai religion, an extraordinary mix of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and Catholicism, which is indigenous to Viet Nam, was started in the 1920s, and whose central tenets were apparently revealed in seances. Sounds wacky? Well, it is, just a bit. Particularly when the three principal "saints" are proclaimed to be a Vietnamese medieval poet, the Chinese revolutionary nationalist Dr Sun Yat Sen, and the French author Victor Hugo. And the temples are possibly the most garish places of worship I've ever seen (even more so than Hindu ones). Oh, and the symbol of the religion is the "All-Seeing Eye", except that in this case it appears to have an eyebrow as well. Really quite bizarre, but it was interesting to see some of the ceremonies of a comparatively "young" religion.

Anyways, after 5 nights in Saigon (and one down in Can Tho), it was time to move on, so yesterday I came up to Mui Ne beach, about 4 or 5 hours from Saigon, which is stunningly beautiful and apparently one of the best spots for wind- and kite-surfing in SE Asia. Having experienced the gusts yesterday afternoon down on the beach, and seen the resident wind-junkies doing their thing out on the waves, I can believe it. I'm off to see some sand dunes this arvo (and possibly slide down them as well), and then tomorrow I head on up to the old French hill-station of Dalat, the capital of kitsch in Viet Nam. I can scarcely wait.

So, until next I write, I hope you are all well. Take care and have fun,

Pat

Temples, fireworks and an awful lot of people...

[Warning! Pat has got carried away again writing this entry, so don't start reading it unless you have a while on your hands]

Hello again. Time for another instalment of "What I Did On My Holidays". The topic for this session is Cambodia.

So, I last wrote from Sihanoukville, where I had been busily doing bugger-all on the beach. Suffice to say that I continued that trend pretty much up to the point I left there last Wednesday - the only thing I did that didn't revolve around doing not very much was getting my visa for Vietnam, which I am still amazed that the consulate there processed in about 10 minutes flat. Other than that, much time was spent with my semi-regular drinking buddies there at the Dolphin Shack, and a most amusing night was had on Hallowe'en. Certain amount of ingenuity went into some of the costumes (and others were really scary, just not in a Hallowe'en-y way...), the beer was flowing and a dumb, fun night was had by all and sundry.

As a result of this, a less fun day was had by yours truly the following day when I headed up to Siem Reap. This involved a four-hour bus trip to Phnom Penh, 20 minutes sitting around being offered bottles of water, baguettes, fake watches and people's first-born children to buy (actually, I may have made the last one up), and then 6 more hours on the road up to Siem Reap, a trip enlivened by the poor Khmer (Cambodian) kid next to me getting travel-sick and throwing up on the floor. Which was another first for me on this trip, albeit one I could happily have lived without.

In Siem Reap, I negotiated my way through the usual throng of motorbike touts (enlivened in Cambodia by the addition of a little trailer/chariot behind many of them, causing them to call themselves "tuk-tuks", in homage to the infamous Thai transport), differentiated this time by the fact that they weren't trying to fob you off on some guesthouse that paid high commission, but were instead trying to get you to sign up with them as your transport up to the temples of Angkor the next day. Yes, Siem Reap, for those who didn't already know, is the base town for visiting the incredible complex of temples and other monumental buildings that were for many centuries the capital of the Khmer Empire. Adopting what is fast becoming my standard practice, I went with one of the guys who harassed and yelled at me the least, taking great pleasure at the looks of anguish on the noisiest ones' faces as they whined that "they talked to me first".

As a result of this, I ended up with a driver named Taea, who was to be my means of transport for the next couple of days. My first night in Siem Reap being pretty uneventul (nice if slightly expensive Khmer food, couple of drinks at Angkor What? bar, early night), the next day I started out on the exploration of Angkor. Slightly surprisingly, Taea suggested skipping Angkor Wat itself that first day and going around the so-called "Little Tour" of some of the other temples, so I took in the delights of the Bayon and Angkor Thom, Thommanon, Ta Keo, Ta Prohm, Banteay Kdei, Srah Srong and Pravat Sashan. Let's just say that by the end of that day I was far more familiar with Hindu religious architectural features and sculptures than I had been before.

This day also introduced me to the phenomenon of the local inhabitants of the area around Angkor, who run little stalls outside every single temple and will greet any new foreigner arriving with "Hey mistaaaaah, you wan' col' drink?/T-shirt?/guide-book?/souvenir?". In areas with a large concentration of stalls, this can result in an awful symphony of squawking the minute a westerner appears. In the case of many of the little kids the equivalent phrase is "Mistaah, you buy pos'card? 10 for 1 dollaaah. You buy?", any refusal to purchase usually followed by displays of an ability to count up to 10 in about 6 different languages and further entreaties of "You buy?". Further refusals will then occasion "Hey mistaah, where you from?". Providing the response "England" will then lead to being informed that the capital city is London, possibly followed by further trivia facts (one kid by Angkor Wat was a veritable walking geography lesson), and then by the exclamation of "Luvverly-jubberly! Top Banana!". The kids are adorable, but after a while you do start to wish they understood that "No thankyou" does not mean "Please continue to attempt to get me to buy your wares". Anyways, rant over.

The heavy haze (apparently due partly to forest fires) meant that the sunset was looking set to be utter shite, so we headed back into town soon after five, whereupon I had a pleasant early dinner at a place called Tell (the first German/Austrian/Swiss restaurant I can remember ever going to, and certainly the first one on this trip!) and then an extraordinarily early night, ahead of one of the Must-Dos of Angkor: sunrise at Angkor Wat itself. The only downside of this being that it entails awakening at the unfeasibly early hour of 5am, which, as most of you know, is something I am not normally predisposed to do (you're more likely to see me still OUT at 5am than getting up then).

I did it, though, and, even in spite of the hordes of tourists (mostly Asian package tourists from Japan/Korea/China etc) it was a truly majestic sight (and good for a few photos). Angkor Wat was also by far the most interesting of the temples to look around, seeing as how it has been maintained in much better form due to its continued use down the years - climbing around an extant building is much more satisfying for me than scrambling around a ruin trying to imagine what it's supposed to look like. This point was reinforced by the remaining ruins I saw that day, which were interesting enough but something of an anticlimax after The Big One, and by the end of the day I was pretty much "templed-out" (this appears to be far from an uncommon complaint), so I paid off my disappointed driver Taea (who had been hoping for another day's work out of me) and headed out for a celebratory dinner and a few beers.

Again, true to form, this evolved into "rather a lot of beers" thanks to a couple of American lads from my guesthouse, a couple of English girls we met in the Dead Fish restaurant (undeniably the weirdest place I have ever eaten - crossing a crocodile pit to get to the toilets, for pity's sake?) and, to top it all off, bumping into Marieke and Caroline again, my two Dutch friends from northern Laos. Cue me wandering home at some silly hour of the morning (patiently responding to every hail from a street-corner that No, I did not in fact want a tuk-tuk, nor did I want ganja, boom-boom or a ride tomorrow if these were offered), then sleeping in until around lunchtime.

That brings us onto Saturday, which was the first day of the 3-day Water Festival here in Cambodia. Now, I had read a little about this in my guidebooks etc, but had not realised quite what a big deal it is. Which is to say, it's a major national holiday involving everyone heading down to the rivers to watch dragon-boat racing, eat, drink, watch fireworks, eat some more, drink some more, etc. In Siem Reap this took the form of half the town crowded along the eponymous river while pairs of boats faced off in races. Here was one time when being a six-foot barang (foreigner - literally a Frenchman, but used for most foreigners) came in rather handy, as I could happily peer straight over the heads of several rows of people in front of me and, indeed, get photos from nearly the back of the crowd. So far so good. The intimation that the Water Festival might not be unalloyed good news for me was, however, broached that night by some of the ex-pats I met in town when I mentioned that I was heading to Phnom Penh the next day (= Sunday, yesterday) - namely, that everyone and their dog from all over Cambodia would similarly be heading for the capital and it might be a wee bit crowded.

Confident as ever (and having already invested in my bus ticket), I ploughed on with my original plan, meaning I staggered out of bed late morning and got my stuff ready in time for the 1230 bus. This necessitated being picked up by a shuttle bus in town at 1130, and then spending the best part of an hour weaving through crazy traffic in Siem Reap as it made more pickups for the trip. This maybe could have warned me. The idea that it might not be entirely my day could then have been reinforced by the blown tire suffered by the bus (although this had the mitigating factor of watching a bunch of Cambodians doing their best pit-crew impressions whilst changing the wheel at the next mechanic's we got to). Despite this, my reaction on arrival at our final destination was fairly happy - it was earlier than I'd expected, given our tire problems.

This good feeling evaporated somewhat upon finding that we were not, in fact, in Phnom Penh. Due to the Water Festival, buses aren't allowed into the city at the moment. So we were still umpteen kilometres out of town, as one of the more polite, restrained and helpful tuk-tuk drivers I've encountered explained to us. I ended up sharing a tuk-tuk with a fellow Englishman, a doctor named Robert who was on temporary locum with a clinic in town, and we got the benefits of seeing the fireworks (which both of us found amusingly appropriate on November 5th) as we chugged our way along through the traffic in towards town. Apart from the worrying noises made by the gear-chain of the tuk-tuk any time it encountered such difficulties as a mild slope or patch of sand, all seemed to be going well until we made it to the bridge over the Tonle Sap river into town. And then we hit the crowds.

These were big crowds. Hundreds of thousands of people down by the waterfront in Phnom Penh. Many of them having come via moto (as you may be aware, balancing anything up to an entire extended family on a single 110cc motorbike is something of an art-form in SE Asia), and most of whom were now starting to head back to the rest of town after the fireworks. Meaning lots of motos and lots of people trying to get to motos. Oh yes, and Phnom Penh has hardly any traffic-lights. The traffic at junctions works largely on the basis of sounding your horn loudly and then making your way across as swiftly as you feel confident in doing, weaving around anything that gets in your way, and giving way to whatever happens to be bigger than you.

This is mad enough in normal circumstances, but when dealing with the Water Festival crowds it can get ridiculous. Hence, we made okay time getting down from the bridge to the clinic where Robert got dropped off, and were still doing alright until we reached the boulevard across which lay my guesthouse. Unfortunately, like any other major road, this had become a major exit point for anyone walking, driving or riding their way away from the river. Even more unfortunately, there were also numerous little food/drink carts still set up by the side of this road down which a tide of humanity was flowing. To cap it off, though, at the junction of Pasteur Rd and Sihanouk Boulevard, there were solid tides of people attempting to get through on foot, on bike, on motorbike and in vehicles from ALL FOUR directions AT ONCE.

The result? Gridlock. Nothing on more than 2 wheels was moving at all, and those were barely inching their way through the crowd. In the end, I abandoned my tuk-tuk steed there and set off to walk the approximately 100-150m which separated me from my destination. The crowd was still moving at this point, so I figured it would maybe take me 5 or at most 10 minutes. This would prove to be a bad estimate of timing right up there with "Don't worry, chaps, the war will all be over by Christmas". As I inched closer to the junction, the press of humanity went from tight to solid, exacerbated by the presence of numerous bikes and motos whose handle-bars (and, in the latter case, uncomfortably warm exhausts) had to be negotiated by the crowd and which, along with the food stalls and various stuck cars, led the whole crowd through ridiculously narrow choke-points. All of this while burdened with my main pack on my back and my day pack on my front, in temperatures which, despite being after dark, were probably still in the high 20s. Hence, the Khmers around me started off grinning, yelling "Hello" (especially the kids) and asking me how I was enjoying this, and finished up very worried at the presence of an enormous, obviously distressed foreigner who appeared to be sweating in quantities fit to float a dragon-boat. In the end, it took me half an hour to reach my guesthouse. And that's one half hour of my life I could do without ever experiencing again.

Given that the entire neighbourhood was log-jammed, I took the decision to stay and eat and drink in the Top Banana guesthouse (the kids at Angkor would probably have approved of that name), getting to know my new fellow guests. And yes, again this somehow conspired to have me staggering off to bed around 3am, hence today I have managed to back up my camera, walk down to the river to see up close the madness that is the Water Festival (and end up accidentally right next to the security cordon near the main pavilion, such that I was treated to seeing the arrival of the ambassadors from Germany, Japan, Brunei and North Korea among others, along with various bigwigs from the local government - I couldn't help noting that the Cambodian equivalent of the Secret Service appear to have quite natty taste in ties...), head back to my guesthouse while the streets are still passable, eat a ridiculous quantity of Indian food and write this utter monster of an e-mail.

So, there we are. I'm off to Vietnam on Thursday if all goes to plan, my last country en route back to dear, soggy old Blighty. 32 more days on the road and counting.

Hope all's well with all of you, wherever you are! Take care and have fun,

Pat

Fare thee well, Thailand

Hello once again, my friends, relatives and other correspondees.

Well, I've finally said my goodbyes to Thailand. I've left behind the land of Tuk-Tuks, Sang Som, Sawasdee and smiles, and am now in Cambodia. I'd probably have written sooner, but Ko Chang is another one of those places where internet is oh so much more expensive than it really ought to be.

Before that, of course, I was back in Bangkok, where I spent a couple of days shopping for supplies (there are more and better pharmacies etc in Bangkok, plus the farang-oriented tourist markets actually have sandals in my size) and watching football at a couple of the fake British or Irish pubs which infest the Sukhumvit area, where I was staying this time. One of these (the Londoner) was actually a brewpub as well, so I got the joys of a drinkable pint of bitter (which obviously put me in hog heaven).

That took care of the weekend, before on Monday I finally made the side-trip I'd been planning to Kanchanaburi. However, due to circumstances beyond my control (non-existent river express service in the morning, train delayed for public holiday in the afternoon), I didn't actually make either the trip there or back on the train as I'd planned to, instead getting rather better acquainted with Bangkok's southern bus terminal than I'd planned. Being Bangkok, this is naturally in the west of the city.

Whilst there, though, I looked around the Allied war cemetery and the Thai-Burma Railway Museum as, for those who haven't gathered it already, Kanchanaburi is the site of the famous Bridge on the River Kwai, part of the WWII Thai-Burma Rail Link, better known to the world as the Death Railway. Something like 16,000 Allied PoWs (mostly British, Dutch and Australian) died in making the railway, but it was only with this visit that I became properly aware that well over 50,000 Asians, mostly indentured workers (ie pretty much slaves), also died in its construction. Nobody actually knows the precise numbers, though, since the Japanese didn't bother keeping records of how many died (as they were forced to for PoWs by the Geneva Conventions).

Lightening the mood somewhat, though, was the discovery that the Bridge on the River Kwai wasn't actually on the River Kwai (or Khwae, as it's usually spelt in Thailand). The guy who wrote the book didn't realise this, but it actually ran for a long way alongside the Khwae, but the bridge in question crossed the River Khung. This wasn't an issue until the film became so successful and tourists wanted to see it. At this point, the Thais then had a problem - how to deal with this without confusing all the poor farang visitors. In true Thai style, they decided that the easy way around this was just to rename the river - so that section of the Khung was renamed the Mae Nam Khwae Yai (or Big Kwai River), meaning that the bridge now did indeed cross over a river Kwai.

So now the tourists can scramble all over the railway bridge there, getting out of the way whenever one of the occasional trains comes along (this isn't quite as daft as it sounds, given that there is a 10km/h speed limit over the bridge). Which many of them were doing. I didn't go all the way across, but did have a bit of a wander out on the bridge. It being a public holiday, there was a little tourist train running across the bridge, which was why the scheduled train was so late that I eventually decided to go get another bus.

On arrival back into Bangkok, later than I'd expected, I then faced the challenge of getting over to Khao San Rd, where I was due to meet up with Elin, the Swedish girl with whom I had had a slightly surreal drinking session my previous time in Thailand's crazy capital. Unfortunately, the bus station was mostly populated by taxi-drivers of the more mercenary persuasion, most of whom refused to turn on the meter and kept trying to get me to pay 250 Baht or more for a quick trip of a few km across the river. After about 10 minutes, though, I finally found a guy who was happy to do his job properly and use the meter (which meant the trip cost me 60 Baht, as it should), and hence was only about 15 minutes late.

Luckily, Elin hadn't upped and left, so I had my planned reunion, which ended up turning into another impromptu drinking session courtesy of friends Elin had made, namely two Irish girls she'd met in Bangkok and two German girls who'd been on her dive course on Ko Tao. Obviously, I was deeply distressed to have to go out drinking with five young ladies, so it wasn't any real surprise that I didn't make it onto the bus I had planned to get the next morning, and ended up staying an extra day in BKK. It also wasn't any particular surprise that I didn't drink at all on Tuesday night.

On Wednesday, though, I did make it to my bus (the Eastern bus station being luckily only a few Skytrain stops from my hostel, saving me any more taxi-related grief), and headed down to the little port of Laem Ngop, where I caught the ferry over to Ko Chang. There, I decided to sod being different, and caught the sawngthaew down to the island's main backpacker community of Lonely Beach. Though, as locals and guidebooks point out incessantly, it's not particularly lonely these days - Ko Chang is having something of a tourist boom at the moment, so there are guesthouses everywhere.

At any rate, I had a pleasant couple of days down on the island, split between lazing on the beach reading books, eating and drinking good food at a restaurant/bar and guesthouse called the TreeHouse and (on Friday) taking a snorkelling trip out to some of the other islands just south of Ko Chang. And, once again in typical style, I ended up on a big night out, having met some fun people, the night before I needed to leave. Such that my travels on Saturday, back to the mainland and over the border into Cambodia, were not as comfortable as they might have been. That night, I stayed in the little town of Ko Kong, where I ended up eating and sampling Cambodian beer in a little ex-pat bar called Bob's, where I met an assortment of the local characters, led by Bob himself, a garrulous old Aussie, and including Percy (a 73-year-old, foul-mouthed old merchant sailor from England, with a collection of anecdotes that would make your toes curl). Astonishingly, the fish there was Barramundi, which I had hitherto believed indigenous to Australia, but apparently they grow in the rivers here as well.

Then today I have caught the boat down the coast to Sihanoukville, Cambodia's main port and beach resort, where I have acquainted myself with the joys of being transported, along with my pack and daypack, on the back of a motorbike, and vegged out by the sea. So another couple of days' beach-time beckon, with a brief interlude tomorrow where I need to pop into town and get my Vietnamese visa.

And that's the lot for the moment. Apologies this has turned into one of my epic compositions. Hope you are all well, wherever you are!

Take care and have fun,

Pat

One of those days...

Hello again,

Occasionally, just occasionally, when travelling, I have the odd day when I wonder why I am doing this. When the Gods appear hell-bent on making my life unpleasant, and when what can go wrong, will. It's never as bad as it seems at the time, but it can send my (normally pretty low on the road) stress levels back to what they were when I was working and more.

As those who were nattering with me on MSN yesterday may have gathered, yesterday was one of those days. Quick (well, quick for me) summation follows.

'Mare yesterday involved:

1) Being misled by the guy who sold me a ticket from Don Dhet (island in the middle of nowhere - well, actually the middle of the Mekhong in the 4,000 Islands but at times might as well be nowhere) to Pakxe, such that I was waiting around for an hour and a half in Nakasang (the local port town) for my ride north to Pakxe to depart.

2) Said transport being a sawngthaew (converted pickup/van, with two bench seats facing each other in the back and, in this one, another bench inbetween - suffice to say, even for a Thai, that would be cramped). I did know this, but had not fully comprehended the horror of being in said vehicle for around an hour and a half waiting (yes, I could have got out, but laboured under the misapprehension that we would be leaving at any minute), plus at least two hours on the road. Hard seats, little or no space, chickens on (initially) the back platform (before they were transferred to the roof), being offered fried-grasshopper-on-a-stick by vendors when we paused at one place, etc etc. An experience I could happily forego repeating.

3) When crossing the border from Laos to Thailand (on, admittedly, quite a nice bus) there wasn't a bank/exchange booth (unlike the crossing I made up north), meaning I had no alternative but to get scalped by the bloody bus driver for changing my last Kip (the Kip, bless its little, cotton, undervalued socks, is utterly unexchangeable anywhere outside the Lao People's Democratic Republic)

4) Arriving at Ubon Ratchathani (the terminus of the Northeastern railway line in Thailand), making another sawngthaew ride (happily a rather briefer one) down to the train station to discover that all sleeper berths that night were sold out (there had been almost a full train available when I checked a few days earlier before going into the near-internet-free-zone that is Si Phan Don, the 4,000 Islands). All second class seats that night were sold out. The only thing available on the trains that night was 3rd class seats. Deciding that my bum couldn't handle this (11 hours or so on a hard wooden bench, no air con, and the prospect of screaming Thai kids or, if my current luck held, maybe more chickens?), and that I have about a day's slack time, I enquire about trains the next day (today). No second class seats until the evening trains. Luckily, a couple of sleeping berths, one of which I get.

5) Walk away from the ticket office, and suddenly realise I could probably have got a bus in the morning. Curse inwardly.

6) Realise that I've just landed myself a day (and a night) in one of the least-touristy, so least-English-speaking, parts of Thailand. And the train station is out of the centre of town. Helpful lady at the info desk provides me with a map. I head off to try and find a guesthouse.

7) Map is not terribly useful. Almost no street names on it. Not to scale. Of people I meet, they either a) can't speak English or b) have no idea where we are on the map.

8) Realise that I am, in fact, lost, after dark, in a city where apparently nobody speaks English.

This would be pretty much the nadir of my evening, before a nice old Thai gentleman (who has to get out his glasses to find that he can't tell where I am on the map either) is able to get me going in the right direction. The reason for this, not terribly reassuringly, is that I am asking for directions to the River Moon guesthouse, and it turns out this is the ONLY guesthouse in town. Hence, by asking for the GESS-ah-touse (the joys of Thai pronunciation of English - you cannot pronounce two consonants together without an intervening vowel), I find my way there.

The lady out front speaks English. It's cheap (cheapest place I've stayed in Thailand). These are the good points. The principle bad point is the bathroom. It's shared, and the worst I've had in Asia. The cockroaches are only a minor nuisance. We are down south of the river, actually in a satellite town of Ubon whose name I can't ever write down properly, and there is nowhere I can find that is open to sell food except a 7-11. I eat a 7-11 hotdog and some kind of horrific facsimile of a "chicken" sandwich (after the lovely baguettes in Laos, Thai over-sweet bread is a horrible shock to the system) for my dinner.

Looking back today, it's already starting to look more like another dumb anecdote of the trip. At the time, it was taxing, stressful, upsetting and (the early bits) seriously bloody uncomfortable.

In any case, prior to that I had a very quiet, chilled-out, peaceful few days down in Si Phan Don, which revolved mostly around lying in a hammock, trying not to get sunburnt whilst reading trashy paperback novels (finally, a situation where a Dan Brown novel actually qualifies as being more useful than a roll of toilet paper), chowing down on Lao food and Beer Lao in the evenings (for the few hours that the power is on), meeting more new acquaintances (I would call them friends, but we never really got time to talk for long enough, such that I don't even have any e-mail addresses from there). One day I actually got all enthusiastic and energetic and hired a bike, to ride over the old French railway bridge to one of the other islands and look at some waterfalls.

As you can see, not the most event-strewn section of my trip, but really quite pleasant and relaxing (just in time for yesterday to go and undo all that good work at chilling out...). Oh, and I saw some ancient ruins called Wat Phou on the way down there, which were quite impressive, if rendered a little harder to enjoy properly by the scalding heat. Did I mention the weather's been absolutely scorching recently?

So, now I burn yet more time on the net whilst waiting for my train, trying not to be deafened by the sounds of the local kids playing online games around me (yes, it's one of THAT kind of internet cafe, rather than one that charges you a fortune for the herculean task of burning a CD and features Israelis loudly arguing with the owner about how it ought to be cheaper), and reflecting once again on how much better it would have been for me if I'd followed my resolution to learn more than the most very basic of Thai (things like "How to ask for directions", for example...).

A few more days of lunacy in and around Bangkok beckon, before I head down for a last dose of the Thai islands on (probably) Ko Chang, and then head on into Cambodia.

Hope all is well with all of you (those I haven't been bending the cyber-ear of on MSN). Take care and have fun,

Pat

Life in the slow lane

Hello again,

Another note, probably a briefer one this time, as I'm passing time until my bus goes down to Pakxe. I'm now in Vientiane, the capital of the Lao PDR, and sleepy is an insufficiently descriptive word for the place. In the time since last I wrote, I've seen the madness of the final day of the Ban Sum Awk (sp?) festival in Luang Phabang, involving carrying lots of ceremonial boats made of bamboo and paper and covered in candles (I know, sounds like a recipe for disaster) down to the river, lighting the candles, and setting them loose to float down the Mekhong. All while fireworks and firecrackers go off all around you (with some of the local boys taking vindictive pleasure in throwing them right next to falangs). Ironically, the festival is supposed to celebrate the retreat of the rains at the end of the Wet season, so the monsoonal downpour that kicked in just as it finished up was guilty of slightly bad timing!

The rain then proceeded to play merry hell with the plans I had, together with Giles and Jane (an English couple), Lukas and Katrin (a Swiss couple) and Caroline and Marieke (the two Dutch girls I mentioned in my last mail) - all off the slow-boat I took into Luang Phabang - to go and see the Kuang Si waterfalls the next day. In the end, we did get there in the early afternoon, but only had about an hour there before the rain kicked back in, and the water was running very high (and very brown, due to all the silt being washed down), so the swimming holes were a real no-no. Bit of a shame. Though I did get to feed a tiger (who has an enclosure there after being rescued from poachers), which is something you don't do every day.

On leaving Luang Phabang, I headed down on the "Express VIP" bus to Vang Vieng. The quotation marks are because, unlike many of the VIP buses in Malaysia and Thailand, this one was below the standard I'd expect even of National Express, it had severe difficulties finding 2nd gear at times, and generally creaked along the road in a slightly unnerving fashion. The scenery on the drive was spectacular, though, as we made our way through the mountains of north-central Laos - mist-shrouded peaks and outcroppings, draped in emerald-green forest, with rivers snaking through valleys and gorges below. Gorgeous.

Vang Vieng is similarly blessed in the looks department (at least in terms of its surroundings), nestling on a river in a valley flanked by mountains and interrupted by occasional limestone outcroppings rising suddenly from the river's floodplains. If you've seen classical pictures of Chinese valleys with big knife-edge rocks sticking out of them, well, that's what this is rather like. Except that they've turned the village/town there into a tourist centre. Infamously, most of the restaurants/cafes in town serve almost exactly the same food and drinks, at almost the same prices, and all of them either show DVD movies or (more often) perpetual DVDs of Friends or The Simpsons. "Happy" shakes and pizzas (generally featuring interesting varieties of mushroom) also abound. It's all a bit of a shame, really. Amusingly, though, the town bus station is on a disused airfield just behind the main development, which you walk across to get into town.

The first day there, I just chilled out, and ended up meeting up with Giles, Jane, Caroline and Marieke (and a pack of Argentines, also off the slow-boat) at a place called the Smile Island Bar. Which, unsurprisingly, is on an island in the river, reached by a bamboo bridge of uncertain engineering merit (though there are MUCH worse ones in town). There, we sat about, drank a few beers, and played petanque, or boules if you prefer, which was slightly surreal but rather good fun. The second day, we went on an organised trip up to some of the caves north of town (the whole area is limestone-based, with some extraordinary caves), followed by walking through the countryside, followed by tubing down the river. Yes, the number-1 most-popular thing to do in Vang Vieng is to get a bloody enormous tractor inner-tube, and sit in it and float down the river. Beautiful countryside, and the added fun of various riverside bars along the way, who will happily stick out bamboo poles, pull you into shore, and then ply you with beer and attempt to persuade you to use the various zip-lines, swings and platforms which have the common denominator of you ending up in the river, from various heights. Unfortunately, we were running slightly late by this point, so only had time to sample the first couple of these, but it was good fun (even just to watch - I only used the first zip-line, before my usual aversion to getting dunked in water re-asserted itself).

The day after that, my now-regular companions and I chartered a minivan to get us down to Vientiane (accompanied by our driver singing along to Madonna!?!), where I have been the last couple of days, most of which have been spent doing not very much. Notable things I have done are pretty much limited to exploring the Morning Market (the biggest in Laos, dealing with everything from eggs to silk fabrics, to washing machines, via the usual food stands and T-shirt vendors "Hey mistah! You want T-Shirt? We got XL!") and going to see the Patuxai (Victory Monument), a huge 1960s concreted arch, modelled vaguely on the Arc de Triomphe, which I climbed to get views over the capital (what there is of it). Amusingly, the interior floors of the Patuxai are also now given over to souvenir and T-shirt stalls.

So, tonight I head down to southern Laos, on an overnight bus (I keep vowing off these, and end up taking them again!). And I've just realised that I'll be home in 8 weeks' time. 56 days until I'm back in the UK. My, how time does fly!

On that note, those of you in the UK, I shall probably be having some kind of celebration for my birthday soon after I get back - either the weekend directly after (the 16th/17th December) or between Xmas and New Year (maybe the 28th?). Said celebration to happen in Cambridge (depending on numbers, possibly in dear, sleepy old Caldecote). Anyone wanting to attend and having strong feelings one way or the other on date, do please let me know. That said, I'll probably pop down to London town at some point, and also over to Brizzle, so I will hopefully catch up with more of you then.

Until next I write, take care and have fun!

Pat

Taking the slow boat...

Hello again, my many and various friends and other readers!

I've swapped countries again, and now write to you from the Lao People's Democratic Republic, commonly known as Laos (pronounced with a silent 's'), or amongst some backpackers as Laos, Please Don't Rush. Yes, if Thailand can occasionally seem like it's operating on a different time system, and Fiji frequently so, Laos apparently takes this to whole new levels. I've only been in the country a couple of days, so haven't seen enough to judge, but it seems plausible.

Those couple of days basically encompassed the trip down the Mekhong river from Huay Xai (where I crossed the border, which at that point is the river, from Chiang Khong in Thailand) to Luang Phabang. The last day or so in Chiang Mai I spent doing some cookery classes (yes, I now know how to make Thai curries properly, woohoo!) and occasionally wandering around the markets. I didn't do the Hill-Tribe trekking in the end, partly from time constraints, partly because I don't have shoes any more and didn't think my sandals were really up to that much walking, and partly because the weather forecasts were universally iffy (although, it turned out, mostly wrong).

I also kept up my usual record of having one of my best nights out in any particular place on the night before I have to leave - I'd got all my stuff packed up, and popped down one of the local bars that I'd earlier seen advertising live music that evening, just to listen to a band for a bit, got invited over by a girl whose birthday it was to have a a drink with the group she was with, and ended up out in a place glorying in the name of "Spicy" until around 3 in the morning. Subsequently, I didn't get up and check out quite as early as I'd planned, meaning that when I got to the bus station all the early buses were booked up and I couldn't get on one until lunchtime, meaning that (when I'd made my way across northern Thailand to the border), I arrived just too late to get across to Huay Xai that night. Which was a slight problem as I was on the last day on my visa. Meaning I got a 500 Baht fine (about 7 quid or so) for overstaying by a day when I crossed the next morning. Ah well, that'll teach me to go out drinking the night before leaving somewhere. Actually, who am I kidding, it blatantly won't...

For the trip down the Mekhong, I took the advice of people everywhere (apart from a few demented petrolheads) and forewent the joys of the ultra-fast and ultra-dangerous speedboats for the pleasures of the slow boat. This takes two days going down the great river, serving as a bus service for some of the local villages by the river as well as carrying hordes of backpackers, which meant it had the unintended pleasant consequence of providing a whole new bunch of people to get to know, something that Thailand's guesthouse-based scene (as opposed to the hostels I'm more used to) is not all that brilliant at. Hence, my travelling companions included the usual numberless host of fellow British, a stereotypically Irish lad called Liam who spent the best part of both days drinking lao-lao (the local rice moonshine, which smells like meths!), a couple of Dutch girls, a Swedish lad, a German-American girl called Jessie who'd been studying in China and a trio of French girls who gave me plenty of practice for my rusty francais.

The weather was mostly good (we went through occasional light squalls of rain, but there were always blue skies in sight a little further on), the boat was less hellish than some guidebooks lead you to believe (ie those on both days had seats, the second day they even had cushions, and the toilets, while less than pleasant, weren't the hole-in-the-deck variety that I'd halfways feared) and the company was pleasant, making the trip significantly more enjoyable than most of the buses I've taken recently. The overnight stop in Pakbeng was amusing, mostly because there wasn't a lot to do in the village other than have a few more beverages, so a lot of us got quite merry - for all that I regard lao-lao with deep wariness, I am already getting quite fond of Beer Lao, and the prices here compare VERY favourably with those in Thailand. The fact that we were there the night before a big Buddhist holiday also meant that all the local kids were running around throwing firecrackers everywhere, which was hard on the nerves at first (and not the nicest way to be awoken in the morning), but actually quite atmospheric.

So, now I'm in Luang Phabang, Laos' second city and former capital and, well, it's basically a very beautiful riverside town - the population's something like 20,000, so it's not exactly a teeming metropolis, which is great after the madness of Bangkok. Planning on staying here a couple more nights before I start heading on south through Laos, most likely staying at Vang Vieng before I get to the capital at Vientiane. All good fun.

Hope, as ever, that you are all well and enjoying yourselves wherever you are. Take care and have fun,

Pat

Crazy times in the City of Angels

Hello again,

Wow, I actually managed not to write any kind of mass-communication for a week or so whilst on the road. And, while a week may (as the saying goes) be a long time in politics, it seems like forever when you're travelling. In that week I have:

- ended up singing duets in a beach bar on Ko Phi Phi with a Swiss girl
- watched an awful lot of football
- had a distinctly unpleasant overnight bus journey from Surat Thani to Bangkok
- unknowingly had my spare credit card stolen in the course of said unpleasant journey
- praised various souls from my bank (for possibly the first time) for noticing some dodgy transactions coming up on said card and putting a freeze on it
- experienced the madness of Krungthep, the City of Angels (better known to most foreigners as Bangkok)
- specifically, experienced the madness of Khao San Rd, the beating heart of Bangkok's backpacker scene, albeit one with high blood-pressure that would need a defibrilator kept to hand
- got drunk and practised my German (again)
- had a very bizarre (and totally unplanned) evening out on the town in Bangkok in the company of a Swedish girl called Elin (and no, to those of you who will reply with the obvious questions, I didn't)
- contemplated buying a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "No, I don't want a f*%king Tuk-Tuk!"
- refused even to contemplate joining EVERY SINGLE OTHER backpacker in Thailand and getting a "Same Same But Different" T-shirt
- bought the cliched "flag-patches" for most of the countries I've been to to sew on my backpack
- realised that I've been to rather a lot of countries now and this is going to result in an annoyingly large amount of sewing to do
- marvelled at the comfort, price and service on the Thai State Railway compared to the nightmare that is the British train system (thanks a bloody million, Mr Major, you w*&ker)
- marvelled about the comfort, service and security on the Thai State Railway compared to the Thai Robber-Baron Backpacker Express VIP Bus Companies
- had a fascinating conversation over dinner with a Burmese gentleman on said train, which has convinced me I definitely want to see Myanmar/Burma, but not until those idiots who currently run the country are gone (amusingly, Burma's press is apparently not allowed to report on the coup in Thailand, as the Burmese junta is worried that the moderate way the Thai generals are going about things, and their credible timetable for putting things back in the hands of civilians, would make them look bad...)
- decided that Chiang Mai is a very nice place that I would like to spend more time in, then cursed that my Thai visa runs out on Thursday, so I do indeed have to go over the border into Laos pretty much straight away

And that's about where I'm at. Hopefully gonna do some kind of a cookery course while I'm here, just got to decide between the 3 million or so different schools (possible slight exaggeration there, but not by that much). Apart from that, gonna chill out and carry on with redecorating my backpack.

Hope you're all well! Take care and have fun,

Pat

Another new experience...

Hello again,

Well, I've done a fair few interesting things in my times on the road, but this would have to be the first time I've ever been in a country when it has experienced a coup d'etat. All a bit weird seeing the news from Bangkok last night, especially as, in true backpacker style, most of the farangs here were far more interested in dancing and getting drunk than what was going on (a lot of them didn't realise until today that anything had happened, and some of them still seem rather confused at the concept that the military's taken over the government).

This all made for rather a strange end to an awesome day, in which I gave in once again to my growing fondness for SCUBA. This was helped by absolutely perfect weather (bright sunshine, little to no swell, and great underwater visibility), and led to two of my more memorable dives, largely due to the fantastic marine life. We saw a couple of turtles, a leopard shark, three octopi, a moray eel, at least 3 reef sharks and, of course, shedloads of tropical fish and coral. What's more I didn't come close to panicking once, which is a healthy development.

I then had dinner at the remarkably cheesey "007" restaurant in town (no prizes for guessing the theme), where I watched the unbelievably cheesey film Stealth (this makes Top Gun look like an ultra-realistic docudrama) - as so often in Thailand, many of the cafes and restaurants show DVDs in the afternoon/evening as a way of drawing in the punters. The bars tend to have things like fire-shows (people swinging poi balls or staves with the ends set on fire) or muay thai boxing for the same purpose.

And that's pretty much the way life is here on Ko Phi Phi. People lounge on the beach by day, or dive, or do snorkelling trips (or cliff-jumping, for the clinically insane), then go out and party at night, and ignore most of what goes on back in the real world (apart from the sports). At any rate, it looks like I won't be going up to Bangkok this weekend as I'd planned - everything seems pretty close to under control at the moment, but I'm gonna give it a few more days before I run the gauntlet through the capital.

Hope all's well with all of you! Take care and have fun,

Pat

Which bit of "Monsoon" was I unsure about...?

Hey guys,

Just a quick note, as I'm having all kinds of fun looking up Visa requirements and the like.

I've now swapped coasts of Thailand, and gone from that facing the Gulf of Thailand to that looking out on the Andaman Sea. Specifically, I'm now in the port of Krabi, ready to go and explore the beautiful islands which lie offshore here. The only slight fly in the ointment is the weather - we're still in the tail-end of the SW Monsoon, and there's apparently a pesky typhoon hanging off the Philippines or something, so it swings from "hazy and quite pleasant" to "vertical torrential downpour" in a matter of minutes, on a semi-regular basis. Which makes planning things a little interesting, but I've decided just to bite the bullet, and head out to some of the smaller, close-in islands tomorrow on a daytrip. I'll probably head on to Ko Phi Phi the day after that (I toyed with the idea of going to Lanta, but there doesn't seem to be a huge heap to do there other than lie on the beach, which my normal inclinations and the climatic conditions render not ideal without a fall-back option).

In the meantime, I continue to struggle along, stumbling through a few (very basic) phrases of Thai and reverting to pidgin English at need. And smiling a lot. Smiling definitely earns brownie points over here. Any kind of signs of grumpiness doesn't. So I'm trying to work to my "If you can't affect it, then don't stress over it" ideal, and not get annoyed by any of the demonstrations of what I now instinctively think of as "Fiji-time". You never know, the UK might just get back a slightly more serene version of me in December. Or I might be a raving maniac by then...

Take care and have fun,

Pat

Lunar Lunacy

Sawat-dee, my friends, relatives and other random correspondees!

No mail for a few days, but I am now firmly ensconced in Thailand. Had a bit of a 'mare with the trip up here but all rather more chilled now.

I'm currently on Ko Pha Ngan, having spent a few nights staying on Ko Samui (although the middle night was actually over here, in the lunacy that was the Full Moon Party). Before that, I had a few nights in Penang (Georgetown, to be specific), which were actually pretty quiet.

The night I got there it was midnight before I could check in, after a hellish trip up from the Cameron Highlands which lasted at least 2 hours longer than I'd been told it would, and left me wishing for the usual ridiculous air-con, as the bus I was on was rather too warm and sticky for my liking (and the gentleman sitting next to me was somewhat pungent). The next day I slept in a bit in the morning, then went for a wander around town, before looking around the Cheong Fatt Tse mansion in the afternoon, which was fascinating if a little lengthy at times (the lady showing us around was a bit of an enthusiast, and I had a lot of sympathy for the non-native English speakers, as she chatted away at a hell of a pace!).

That evening, I met up again with Lies, who'd been on my bus up to the Highlands, and went for a really nice Indian meal. I'd been thinking I might go out for a bit after that, but the atmosphere in a lot of the places I looked at just wasn't that lively (and in a few it was a bit TOO lively), so I headed back to my hostel, dodging the beckoning ladies of the night who infest Chinatown on my way home.

My last day in Penang, I wandered around the old centre of town and then tried to go up Penang Hill, only to be informed on my arrival at the foot of the funicular railway going up there that the track had to be closed for unscheduled maintenance, and would not be open until the next day. "Bugger" quoth I. So that day didn't really accomplish much, but I at least had a fun evening, ending up having a few beers in the "Soho" pub in town, the downstairs of which is your usual pseudo-British pub, but the upstairs looks like it's been lifted from some mad faux-Edwardian gentleman's club or something, with elaborate wallpaper, chandeliers and the like. Tres bizarre. And I ended up chatting and drinking away (slightly longer than I'd planned) with a trio of Irish lasses and a whole posse of RAAF boys, who were on exercises with the Malaysians over in Butterworth (other side of the strait from Georgetown).

Then came one of the longer days of my travelling life, as I headed up into Thailand. Looking around Penang, I was unable to find anywhere willing to sell a "normal" coach ticket, everyone was flogging Minibus ones, so in the end I had bitten the bullet and got myself a minibus ticket to Surat Thani in Thailand. Approximately 8 hours away from Penang. Leaving at 5am. Yuk. Yuk yuk yuk. My mood upon rising at that hour of the day is never exactly cheerful, and it deteriorated rapidly once I was shown into the back seat of the minibus, next to a German-Hungarian couple. My head was resting against the roof, and I had to either tilt sideways or try and lean back to avoid it bumping the whole time, the latter complicated by the absence of anything remotely resembling legroom. NOT a happy bunny.

By the time I got to hop out of said vehicle for a break, just before the border, I had a noticeable crick in my neck and had failed dismally to get much sleep. This after around 2.5 hours. The torture continued through to Hat Yai, the main transit town on the Thai side of the border, where I discovered that I was to be swapped into another, different minibus for the leg up to Surat Thani. This time I wasn't in the back. Hurrah! My neck got some relief. Unfortunately, I think there was actually even less leg-room in the middle row of seats, which didn't help my legs or my attempts to sleep one bit (neither did the Thai girl who kept dozing off, falling against my shoulder, waking up again, and then dozing off again).

On arrival in Surat, I found that I gave up on my original plan to try and sort myself out a decent boat ticket independently of the damned minibus company and just bought a ticket through them. Which then resulted in more "hurry up and wait" sitting around, before a quick trip in a sawngthaew (a pickup or minivan with bench seats in the back) and a further transfer to a coach, all of which confused the hell out of me and meant I only realised too late that I had left my shoes on the second minibus. Aaaargh!

After a dozy car-ferry ride over to Samui, and another of what are becoming increasingly frequent sawngthaew rides, I finally made it to my accommodation, on Bo Phut beach in the north of Samui. There I had some good food, a couple of cocktails and beers, and promptly crashed out. The next day I lounged a bit on the beach, swam in the sea for a bit (until getting put off by some of the stuff floating in it), legged it back under cover just in time to dodge a rainstorm, and headed off in the evening on the first speedboat over to Ko Pha Ngan.

The moon was bright, the water was like a millpond, and the speedboat had power to burn, so I had a great time on the way over. On arrival, the sun was already down, the neon and flourescent paints were out in force (along with the ever-present flower-garland- and glow-stick-sellers), and the night was just getting started. And it turned into a fun night, albeit a long one. I spent much of the early part of it hanging around with a bunch of South Africans, before eventually bumping into some of the people I'd met on the Perhentians - Ricky was pissed as a fart, and already at the "I love you guys" stage, which was quite amusing, but I was disappointed when the girls who'd originally persuaded me to shift things around and come to the Party just completely blanked me when I went over to say Hi. Ah well, never mind. After that, I hung around with various random people until the sun rose, when I finished off my bottle of water (yes Mum, I was actually moderately sensible, and didn't drink to excess) and headed down to brave the surf and get onto the next speedboat back to Samui. Where I crashed out and slept for most of the day.

Today I was back on the move again, bringing my stuff with me back over to Pha Ngan, where I'm about to do the logical thing for a Saturday night and go find a bar showing the football from back home. Ah, bliss!

And that's where I'll leave this, as it's turned into a bit of a monster e-mail and everywhere here in Had Rin (the main backpacker enclave on Pha Ngan) seems to be in a cartel that keeps the internet prices fixed (at quite a bit more expensive than Malaysia!).

Hope you're all well, wherever you are and whatever you're doing. Take care and have fun,

Pat