Chang Mai, Hue Hin, River Kwi
Another of my little updates to inspire your days. This one is going to be a little difficult as I seem to have done so much recently but have not had a huge amount of time to enjoy that luxury of sleep.
Crossing over the Friendship bridge from Lao to Thailand was a fairly uneventful experience, in-fact it has been the most organised and chaos free border crossing so far. The only thorn in our side was that we left Lao with around $100 US worth of the Laotian Kip, which is about 4 months
salary for the average person there. The street side currency exchange ladies, managed to give us one of the worst exchange rates ever and we walked out 1 minute later with $60Us worth of Thai Bhat. The only thing that puzzled us was that we could have sworn that we had got a good deal for about 4 hours until we went over the numbers and realised that we had been royally stitched!
Anyway we were heading to Chang Mai in northern Thailand and first had to make our way to a town of a reasonable Size to catch the bus there. The town in question was Udon Thanie about 50km south of the border. It is a town that gets very little tourism and within minutes of arriving we had a small crowed of people trying to help us in buying the ticket we needed. In the end a man in a restaurant indicated that we should wait for a moment, so as soon as we sat down he jumped on his moto and sped off down the street. 10 minutes latter he reappear with his sister who spoke English and she took us to the right ticket office and everything was now fine.
We still though had 5 hours to wait and our now friend 'Boom' took us off to see the orchid nursery. Here a man has spent the last twenty years breeding Orchids in order to be able to extract their essence for perfume. His orchid ‘Udon Sunshine’ is apparently the only variety with which this is possible. And they did smell fantastic.
The highlight for us however was his dancing plants. The good doctor in his spare time had managed to breed these plants that when you sing to them in a smooth even voice, move their small top leaves back and fourth. Batteries not required. It was absolutely incredible to see, and I found
out that these plants seemed to appreciate my singing! The alternative is I guess was that they were writhing in agony. The 30 Bhat (50 pence) you pay to see the plants is sent to the local hospital to help care for HIV/ AIDS victims. If you are ever in Udon, then do go and see this.
We arrived in Chang Mai the following morning and checked into one of the nicest places that we have stayed in so far. We were in Chang Mai for a little trekking and so signed up for a three day trek, with the guest house. WE spent the day catching up on a little sleep and headed down to the Night market to pick up a few things. The Night Market of Chang Mai is pretty enormous and cater almost wholly for the tourist market. The thing that surprised me most about Chang Mai was the number of Tourists. Over the last few weeks we have been for the most part, part of a small
contingent of tourists who got to know one another following more or less the same trail.
Chang Mai was full of new faces and we saw nobody we had seen elsewhere on our trips. Well that is not strictly true... Emma ran into an Irish guy she had met four months ago in Australia, and he ended up on the same trek. A strange coincidence, but it just shows you that so many people visit the same places for more or less the same length of time all over the word. There really are passageways through out the world which certain groups of people move through.
Anyway the trek started rather strangely. We got about three quarters of the way to the starting destination, about 15km from the Burmese border when the guide pulled over and asked if it would be OK if we went to another place to begin the walk as he said the queen was in the area and that the army would not let us through. We were a little sceptical, but if he had said nothing, none of us would have been the wiser. The reason it turned out later was that the previous groups guide got himself in an argument about opium transport out of the tribal villages and into Chang Mai, and had been shot and killed. We knew nothing of this until we got back after the trip, as I do not think that many people would have continued.
We got to our revised destination, a local Karen hill tribe and we all spent the night in a bamboo hut on a steep hillside. Our group consisted of about ten of us including this one guy Freddy who had quite possibly the slinkiest feet ever know. People complained so much that he had to leave his shoes not just outside the hut but across the other side of the path and in a bush! That night people were still complaining of the smell. But in the morning we discovered that there were a couple of cows tied under the hut, that kept very quiet, but their natural aroma seeped into the accommodation. Poor Freddy!
The Second day consisted of about 8 hours of walking. Ranging from crossing the tops of jungle covered hills and followed by moving though dark jungle streams. In the streams everybody got leaches attached to their feet and legs. I managed to get four and the bleed for two days as I burned them off before they were finished drinking my blood. After a little bit of river rafting, including a 6 foot drop off a waterfall we got to the second nights accommodation. The local people of the village
were celebrating a festival and we were all plied with Thai Rum and Whisky no matter how much we protested. The local costume was incredibly bright almost florescent pinks yellows and greens, and was a throw back to the good old days of the eighties. The evening ended with a lot of dancing and fireworks, followed by fierce hangovers in the morning.
The Last day started with Elephants who got us out into the sunshine and we rode them through rives and down paths for most of the morning. The surprising thing about elephants is how quietly they walk. They are not especially fast but even when walking over gravel they appear to be a lot quieter than humans walking over the same surface.
The Elephants dropped us at the mouth of an enormous river cave, filled with snakes, bats, stalagmites and stalactites, the cave was about 4km long and it was rather wet as we scrambled through in the dark. My little torch was next to useless and all I was able to do was light up the
ground immediately in front of my feet, but it was enough, just.
Anyway It was a fantastic three days and I left the following evening for Hue Hin, about 4 hours south of Bangkok, we went down on the overnight train and got very little sleep over the night as it was rather uncomfortable. On getting back to Bangkok I had to say goodbye to Emma who was leaving for India that evening and carried on south to Hue Hin.
Hue Hin is a well developed costal resort favoured by the king of Thailand and local Thais. It has also been adopted by middle aged overweight couples on two week beach holidays. In addition it is full of men with their young Thai 'girlfriends' most of whom seemed not even to know the names of who they were with. It was a little depressing to see it so obviously so often.
However after all that it does have a great beach, white fine sand, and if you walk down to then end of the beach going south you come to the Monkey Temple. The Monkey Temple gets it name for fairly obvious reasons. There are plenty of the blighters hanging around. I have never had a good relationship with monkeys, starting from when I was very young and got savaged by a load of them at London Zoo when I had wondered off by myself. In India I learnt not to go near them when they were getting aggressive by the Taj Mahal, and in Vietnam one almost tried to take my finger off when I offered it a banana.
My next stop was back to Bangkok to head over to the Kanchanaburi and the bridge over the River Kwi. I went on an overnight trip as it sounded like it would be a lot of fun. On reaching the bridge we rafted under it without much of a song and dance other than working out how to fit 10 people onto a raft made for 6. The solution of course was to squeeze everybody on and hope that we had enough buoyancy to stay afloat. Two people fell in to the river as soon as we got mid stream and ended up swimming under the bridge. Oh well at least all that happened to me was my feet were a little wet.
The museum and the cemetery were very solemn reminders of the grim aspect to the construction of the Death Railway, which actually started (or ended) at the bridge. During its construction more than 12,000 of the 60,000 allied prisoners of war died from disease, sickness malnutrition and exhaustion. The Japanese kept no records of these deaths and it was not possible for anyone else to do so. The original bridge was downstream a thousand feet and made of timber, remnant of which are still in place at the museum. The film incidentally was actually made in Sri Lanka. After this we got on the train and chugged up to Nam Tok along the death railway. The whole route was built by POW's during the second world war and every rock was hand broken and placed by them in appalling conditions. The work included the construction of Hellfire Pass so named as work continued into the night, the area was lit by flaming torch light and as the prisoners approached they thought they were entering hell. Hellfire pass is carved into the side of a steep hill over the river and
a dangerous curved wooden bridge take the train across.
The rest of the trip was much more pleasant to think about and consisted of swimming in gorgeous waterfalls and sleeping in floating huts on a beautiful lake, with the odd elephant or two thrown in for good measure.
I am back in hot and steamy Bangkok and heading back to Chang Mai tonight for some Thai Massage and cooking courses.
Crossing over the Friendship bridge from Lao to Thailand was a fairly uneventful experience, in-fact it has been the most organised and chaos free border crossing so far. The only thorn in our side was that we left Lao with around $100 US worth of the Laotian Kip, which is about 4 months
salary for the average person there. The street side currency exchange ladies, managed to give us one of the worst exchange rates ever and we walked out 1 minute later with $60Us worth of Thai Bhat. The only thing that puzzled us was that we could have sworn that we had got a good deal for about 4 hours until we went over the numbers and realised that we had been royally stitched!
Anyway we were heading to Chang Mai in northern Thailand and first had to make our way to a town of a reasonable Size to catch the bus there. The town in question was Udon Thanie about 50km south of the border. It is a town that gets very little tourism and within minutes of arriving we had a small crowed of people trying to help us in buying the ticket we needed. In the end a man in a restaurant indicated that we should wait for a moment, so as soon as we sat down he jumped on his moto and sped off down the street. 10 minutes latter he reappear with his sister who spoke English and she took us to the right ticket office and everything was now fine.
We still though had 5 hours to wait and our now friend 'Boom' took us off to see the orchid nursery. Here a man has spent the last twenty years breeding Orchids in order to be able to extract their essence for perfume. His orchid ‘Udon Sunshine’ is apparently the only variety with which this is possible. And they did smell fantastic.
The highlight for us however was his dancing plants. The good doctor in his spare time had managed to breed these plants that when you sing to them in a smooth even voice, move their small top leaves back and fourth. Batteries not required. It was absolutely incredible to see, and I found
out that these plants seemed to appreciate my singing! The alternative is I guess was that they were writhing in agony. The 30 Bhat (50 pence) you pay to see the plants is sent to the local hospital to help care for HIV/ AIDS victims. If you are ever in Udon, then do go and see this.
We arrived in Chang Mai the following morning and checked into one of the nicest places that we have stayed in so far. We were in Chang Mai for a little trekking and so signed up for a three day trek, with the guest house. WE spent the day catching up on a little sleep and headed down to the Night market to pick up a few things. The Night Market of Chang Mai is pretty enormous and cater almost wholly for the tourist market. The thing that surprised me most about Chang Mai was the number of Tourists. Over the last few weeks we have been for the most part, part of a small
contingent of tourists who got to know one another following more or less the same trail.
Chang Mai was full of new faces and we saw nobody we had seen elsewhere on our trips. Well that is not strictly true... Emma ran into an Irish guy she had met four months ago in Australia, and he ended up on the same trek. A strange coincidence, but it just shows you that so many people visit the same places for more or less the same length of time all over the word. There really are passageways through out the world which certain groups of people move through.
Anyway the trek started rather strangely. We got about three quarters of the way to the starting destination, about 15km from the Burmese border when the guide pulled over and asked if it would be OK if we went to another place to begin the walk as he said the queen was in the area and that the army would not let us through. We were a little sceptical, but if he had said nothing, none of us would have been the wiser. The reason it turned out later was that the previous groups guide got himself in an argument about opium transport out of the tribal villages and into Chang Mai, and had been shot and killed. We knew nothing of this until we got back after the trip, as I do not think that many people would have continued.
We got to our revised destination, a local Karen hill tribe and we all spent the night in a bamboo hut on a steep hillside. Our group consisted of about ten of us including this one guy Freddy who had quite possibly the slinkiest feet ever know. People complained so much that he had to leave his shoes not just outside the hut but across the other side of the path and in a bush! That night people were still complaining of the smell. But in the morning we discovered that there were a couple of cows tied under the hut, that kept very quiet, but their natural aroma seeped into the accommodation. Poor Freddy!
The Second day consisted of about 8 hours of walking. Ranging from crossing the tops of jungle covered hills and followed by moving though dark jungle streams. In the streams everybody got leaches attached to their feet and legs. I managed to get four and the bleed for two days as I burned them off before they were finished drinking my blood. After a little bit of river rafting, including a 6 foot drop off a waterfall we got to the second nights accommodation. The local people of the village
were celebrating a festival and we were all plied with Thai Rum and Whisky no matter how much we protested. The local costume was incredibly bright almost florescent pinks yellows and greens, and was a throw back to the good old days of the eighties. The evening ended with a lot of dancing and fireworks, followed by fierce hangovers in the morning.
The Last day started with Elephants who got us out into the sunshine and we rode them through rives and down paths for most of the morning. The surprising thing about elephants is how quietly they walk. They are not especially fast but even when walking over gravel they appear to be a lot quieter than humans walking over the same surface.
The Elephants dropped us at the mouth of an enormous river cave, filled with snakes, bats, stalagmites and stalactites, the cave was about 4km long and it was rather wet as we scrambled through in the dark. My little torch was next to useless and all I was able to do was light up the
ground immediately in front of my feet, but it was enough, just.
Anyway It was a fantastic three days and I left the following evening for Hue Hin, about 4 hours south of Bangkok, we went down on the overnight train and got very little sleep over the night as it was rather uncomfortable. On getting back to Bangkok I had to say goodbye to Emma who was leaving for India that evening and carried on south to Hue Hin.
Hue Hin is a well developed costal resort favoured by the king of Thailand and local Thais. It has also been adopted by middle aged overweight couples on two week beach holidays. In addition it is full of men with their young Thai 'girlfriends' most of whom seemed not even to know the names of who they were with. It was a little depressing to see it so obviously so often.
However after all that it does have a great beach, white fine sand, and if you walk down to then end of the beach going south you come to the Monkey Temple. The Monkey Temple gets it name for fairly obvious reasons. There are plenty of the blighters hanging around. I have never had a good relationship with monkeys, starting from when I was very young and got savaged by a load of them at London Zoo when I had wondered off by myself. In India I learnt not to go near them when they were getting aggressive by the Taj Mahal, and in Vietnam one almost tried to take my finger off when I offered it a banana.
My next stop was back to Bangkok to head over to the Kanchanaburi and the bridge over the River Kwi. I went on an overnight trip as it sounded like it would be a lot of fun. On reaching the bridge we rafted under it without much of a song and dance other than working out how to fit 10 people onto a raft made for 6. The solution of course was to squeeze everybody on and hope that we had enough buoyancy to stay afloat. Two people fell in to the river as soon as we got mid stream and ended up swimming under the bridge. Oh well at least all that happened to me was my feet were a little wet.
The museum and the cemetery were very solemn reminders of the grim aspect to the construction of the Death Railway, which actually started (or ended) at the bridge. During its construction more than 12,000 of the 60,000 allied prisoners of war died from disease, sickness malnutrition and exhaustion. The Japanese kept no records of these deaths and it was not possible for anyone else to do so. The original bridge was downstream a thousand feet and made of timber, remnant of which are still in place at the museum. The film incidentally was actually made in Sri Lanka. After this we got on the train and chugged up to Nam Tok along the death railway. The whole route was built by POW's during the second world war and every rock was hand broken and placed by them in appalling conditions. The work included the construction of Hellfire Pass so named as work continued into the night, the area was lit by flaming torch light and as the prisoners approached they thought they were entering hell. Hellfire pass is carved into the side of a steep hill over the river and
a dangerous curved wooden bridge take the train across.
The rest of the trip was much more pleasant to think about and consisted of swimming in gorgeous waterfalls and sleeping in floating huts on a beautiful lake, with the odd elephant or two thrown in for good measure.
I am back in hot and steamy Bangkok and heading back to Chang Mai tonight for some Thai Massage and cooking courses.
Laos
Yet another one of my little updates on where I have been and what I have been up to.The story today starts from where I left you last in Hanoi. From Hanoi we were making for Savanakhet, in Lao. After 24 hours on buses being abused by chickens sacks of rice and peeing kids we arrived in Savanakhet. As soon as we arrived we wanted to keep moving, but being late we decided to try and find some where to spend the night. There was nothing we could find to commend this place to us, the few travelers we met said that is is the first place in Lao that they did not enjoy. In fact the only thing of a positive note was that we could see Thailand across the river.
After a night in an exceedingly dodgy hotel, with power cuts that affected only certain rooms of the hotel at some times, the shower refused to work and everywhere were ants and cockroaches!
Surprisingly enough the next morning we decided to leave and went straight to Vientiane the capital of Laos. The trip was eight hours and passed through the most remarkable of scenery. gorgeous mountains filled with beautiful jungle every turn made by the bus we found ourselves wanting to stop and have a quick hike into the undergrowth.
Vientiane, is quite possibly the steepest capital city I have ever seen.
There is little traffic, 80% of the cars on the roads were ambssidorial, and the rest were from the EU or UN. Many of the streets were not lit at night and combined with the extensive open sewer system, walking around at night can be hazardous to your hygiene.
A couple of days by myself and wolf were spent in Vientien, seeing the sights and taking things slowly after spending the best part of a long time in non-stop movement. Meeting friendly monks, visiting enormous golden stupas, and chatting to people we met.
Through chatting to other travelers ver heard about this town Vang Vieng, which was not mentioned in our guide books but was supposed to be a outdoor haven. Taking the bus, we ended up on this strip of dirt that served as the bus station and airport for the village. We should only see a few huts and were wondering if we have been the victim of a prank. But sure enough after crossing the runway building appeared and we were is this tousity village filled with backpackers.
We managed to spend six days there kayacking, cycling, swimming in deep lagoons, tubing down the river, exploring enormous caves going back 2km in some of them, and trekking in the jungle searching for more caves.
To say the scenery is spectacular is not going nearly far enough. If you can try and imagine the most georgouse of tree covered steep sided mountains, Jungle below the mountins with all the strange sounds, cries and screeches. Through the jungle is the river, with red and purple dragon flies skimming over the surface. All is pristine and all is beautifle.
But unfortunately I was rapidly running out of time, having spent more time than I should have in Vietnam. I left wolf to continue his adventures in Laos starting with Luang Probang. I headed back to Vientiane with my new friend Emma.
We arrived in Vientiane, and every hotel we tried was full except one witch ended up being more expensive and less hygienic than the one in Savanakhet. We are making our way for Chang Mai, Thiland for some dancing plants and jungle trekking.