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Well we made it to Ha Long Bay, nearly Copt it a few times mind! Last time we spoke we were about a third of the way up the Vietnam coast heading north on our little wiener bikes, that's unfair really, those little 100cc step through scooters covered about 1500 miles from Saigon to Ha Long bay and with a few detours around the mountains on the way and they never missed a beat! All we did was change the oil twice and adjust the chain, the only issue we had was one puncture which we fixed and were on our way in in less than half an hour. Unbelievable really, in the past going on trips around Europe on bikes I spent thousands of pounds on BMW trail bikes and KTM's fully loaded with hard luggage ABS etc., not to mention the money I spent on Gortex jackets, trousers, expensive boots and helmets. If anyone had suggested travelling around Europe on a step through scooter in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt I would have laughed in their faces! It just goes to show how easy it is to over complicate things, all we needed was a rucksack, 170 quid for a bike, 10 quid for a helmet and 2 quid for a rain mack! Makes you realize how easy life can be if you don't plan s*** and just see what happens!
We made our way north from Nha Trang on the road that Mr. Google advised against and it turned out to be fine, a little bumpy but nothing compared to what we'd been on in the mountains. We made it to a place called Hue after a few days, an ancient town by the sea a bit like Vietnam's version of sherborne but a lot better and no old men with corduroy trousers on. In the Centre of Hue there was the old town full of Chinese wooden houses, originally it had been virtually owned by the Chinese as a trading port. We decided to stay for a couple of days as it was worth exploring (well that and the formula 1 race was on and we had star sports on our TV!) If you like clothes and shoe shopping then Hue is the place to come, there are hundreds of tailors and shoe makers for some reason so after a good look around all the shops and street markets we bought a tire pump and some oil for the bikes (a word of warning, anyone thinking of coming to Hue with their wife or girlfriend don't let your credit card out of your site!) It's a lovely place if you are coming to Vietnam though, plenty to do and see, markets boat trips temples and hundreds of bicycle rickshaws, watch out if you've got a fat arse though I saw a few embarrassed American tourists struggling to get in them!
So after a couple of days rest in Hue we headed off again, the traffic seemed to get worse the further north we got with more and more lorries and coaches. I think because Vietnam gets so narrow in the middle and there's only one major route to Hanoi you end up with every lorry in Vietnam on the same road. It started to feel a bit more like driving in India, a lot more horns beeping and having to swerve off road to avoid a coach overtaking two Lorries whilst a guy on a horse and cart pulls straight out in front of everyone. I think it must have been fate really, I mean come on, the day after I buy a pump, and we get a flat tire! I had been a bit concerned about getting a flat since we were up in the mountains and met a Vietnamese guy who was pushing his bike along with a flat and I knew how far he would have to walk as we'd just come that way, I felt sorry for him but at the time we were about to run out of petrol so we couldn't really help. We managed to repair the flat without even taking the wheel out, the wheel is so narrow that we could get the inner tube out with the wheel still in the bike, you definitely couldn't do that on a BMW! To be honest it felt good getting a puncture, that might sound a little weird to most of you but I spend half my life watching TV programs, reading books and scouring the internet for anything to do with bike travelling around the globe, you see it's all about the adventure of it , breaking down in the middle of nowhere and fixing your bike with nothing but a rusty nail and a few zip ties, everyone else seems to get punctures all the time but in all the trips I've done I've not had one bloody puncture! So even though I didn't need a rusty nail or a zip tie I felt pretty dam good. Mind you if we hadn't had a puncture repair kit and a pump and had to spend the night sheltering under a tree in the middle of nowhere it probably wouldn't have felt quite so good. I like adventure but I'm not stupid!
Although the traffic got worse as we headed north the scenery just got better, we went over some absolutely stunning mountain passes with winding roads overlooking the sea and even on the flat straight bits you were surrounded by beautiful green paddy fields with locals planting the rice in their lampshade hats and plowing the fields with oxen, it felt like you'd gone back in time a few hundred years, well except for all the bloody lorries. The tourist spots along the coast seemed to get further apart along the coast and as we could only do about 200k in one hit we ended up staying in quite a few towns with not a lot in them. Food was always a problem in these places, the only places to eat were street sellers which as I've already mentioned isn't really my bag. I know you're all probably thinking that I should savor the local cuisine but seriously that might be ok in the south of France, I mean there pretty good cooks but these f***ers eat cold rubbery dog meat with hairs still on and cold sticky rice washed down with an iced coffee!!
Now I don't want to dis Google maps but I think they need to do a bit more ground work here in Nam, one particular area near a place called Vinh Binh is a must. As soon as we arrived I knew something was amiss, mainly all the roads in the town which according to the map only had the one. It wasn't a problem when we arrived as we just had a drive around and found a hotel. The next morning however was a bloody nightmare, we headed off on one road and then stop and look at the map only to find Mr. Google had had a change of heart, it took us a good hour just to get out of the town. When we finally made it out, the roads seemed to turn into dirt tracks with a suspicious lack of traffic on, but ever hopeful we carried on. Now if we'd been in a car this would have been a major problem but as we weren't it was a bit of fun. The road narrowed to a path and we came upon a railway bridge, when I say railway bridge I don't mean the tracks were going under our bridge I mean we joined the track itself. At first I stopped and being a westerner was a bit confused, I mean one minute you're on a main highway and then you're on a bloody train track, I know my sense of directions not great but I was just following the sat nav. So as is usual in these events I sat there staring for a while wondering how the local council could let this happen and a local wizzes by me on his scooter and straight down the metal gangway down the side without batting an eyelid. It's always the same, no matter how much you try to think like a local and just go for it, your western brain has just had too much brainwashing. I mean in England obviously this would never happen, just the thought of allowing a vehicle this close to a train track without the correct barriers and lights would send the most hardened health and safety officer into a cold sweat. What if he fell off half way across and a train hit him, where were the signs telling the cars they couldn't go across (although for all I know they probably drive on the tracks) think how much the train company would be sued for and the council!!! The simple truth is there was no problem, there was a road (of sorts) a bridge and enough space to ride my bike down the side and there wasn't even a bloody train anyway!!! Oh my god what have they done to my mind!!!!!!!!!!! I should sue!
I was determined to take back my common sense from the evil western powers and later on I was handed a golden opportunity. We had again been tricked by that Google f***er ending up in a dead end on a river bank where there was a make believe bridge. After scouting about for a bit we found the main highway but unfortunately it was in the form of a flyover which was a good 20 feet above our heads. It would have taken us a good ten minutes to get up there by the conventional road method but with my new found common sense back in play we simply went down a dirt track and road straight up the embankment and squeezed through the barrier, job done, feeling good! After a few more days dicing with death we made it to Ha Long Bay which is pretty much right at the top of the Vietnam coast. For those of you who've never heard of Ha Long Bay, what the hell is wrong with you, don't you watch the discovery channel? Well it's a bay full of incredible rock formations, like mountains in the sea, you might have seen it in the James Bond "the man with the golden gun". We decided to stay in Ha Long for a few days so we could decide what to do next. From here there wasn't really anywhere practical to head for, the only interesting place would have been the northern mountains but at that time of year it would have been pretty nippy! Whilst we tried to make up our minds we went on a boat trip around the bay. As much as I wanted to see the bay I've always got mixed feelings about going on organized trips. I always feel like plonker having to be herded around by a tour guide with a bunch of badly dressed over weight tourists. There are always the same characters where ever you go, you get the standard issue fat American couple wearing Bermuda shorts, bum bag (just above his huge stomach!) and obviously a baseball cap. Then you've got the Chinese couple with the latest top of the range camera and a ridiculously oversized lens, Chinese women seem to have the most piercingly loud voices of any women I've ever encountered and they always manage to walk right past your ear at the very moment they decide to shout some obscenity at their husband. I could go on about the various nationalities and how to spot each one (for example Germans always where odd mismatching colors and the men always where speedos that can barely be seen underneath there huge beer belly's!) but i don't want to bore you, I'll just say that the worst are the Russians, they seem to be everywhere you go and the easiest to spot by far. The men are always huge, tall, wide and hideously ugly with big beer bellies and terrible dress sense and there girlfriends are always slim tall and gorgeous with hardly any clothes on! The worst thing about them is there attitude, they very rarely smile and seem to be rude to everyone. In India in a lot a of places especially any religious temples women are required to cover their legs and arm's up a bit, it is not strictly enforced but most women have the decency to wear trousers at least, except for the Russians. I lost count of the times I saw Russian women walking around a temple in a pair of hot pants and a bikini top or even worse a thong with a desperately embarrassed looking Indian tour guide asking them to cover up only to be completely ignored. Anyway back to the boat trip, unfortunately the bay was covered in fog the whole time we were there so we probably didn't get the best view but it did give it quite a mysterious look with mountains suddenly looming out of the mist next to the boat. We stopped on one island to go into a huge cave, normally I would have enjoyed this but the other million Chinese tourists and the fact that they had filled the cave with different colored neon lights, making it look like Santa's grotto all kind of ruined it for me. The best bit was when we unexpectedly stopped at a floating jetty and went out in a double seated canoe around some of the caves and into some sheltered lagoons.
We still weren't sure where to head next so we had a look online at some flights to check our options and found a flight to Bangkok for 60 quid and decided that would be interesting and booked it for 3 days' time. The flight was from Hanoi which was a few hours away so we booked a coach there and decided to get rid of the bikes in Ha Long as it would probably be easier to sell them here than Hanoi. I wrote out a note in Vietnamese using my phrase book explaining that we wanted to sell the bikes and we headed out to try and find a buyer. Our luck buying and selling bikes seemed to be holding as we sold them both before we'd even got out of the hotel reception. The hotel owner bought them off us, I should say stole really as he only paid 1000000 vnd each for them ( we paid 6000000vnd each for them) I wasn't really bothered as 6000000vnd is only 170 quid each so I would have happily given them away if we couldn't sell them anyway. If we had rented them it would have cost about 8 dollars a day so it would have cost a lot more and we would have had to take them back to where we started from. Bargain really!
Bangkok was not really what I expected to be honest, mainly cause there weren't scantily clad hookers everywhere, which is always disappointing! It was quite expensive for south East Asia and absolutely crammed with 20 something western backpackers all dressed in there cool alternative way, i.e. exactly the same as each other! (Ooh I'm very cynical today!) Having said that it's a nice place to stay for a couple of days, plenty of places to eat, drink and shop for s*** you don't really want, which is always fun. I'm sure if you look around there are places more along the lines that I was expecting, i.e. go go bars and dodgy drug dealers, not that I would approve of those sort of goings on obviously! We didn't have to wait long to see the more colorful side of Thailand though. We had decided to head along the east coast towards Cambodia and our first stop was a coastal town called Pattaya. Now I'm not gunna lie, I'd heard of Pattaya before and for those of you who haven't just imagine all those Vietnam films with the G.I'S on leave, love you long time baby!!! It's one crazy place, wall to wall sin, you can't walk more than five yards without hearing "you want massaaaage baby? come you come see meee!" It's quite amusing seeing all the ugly old men walking around with 20 year old stunners on their arms, most of them seem to be Australian for some reason. Clearly I was appalled by all of this and point blank refused to stay any longer than 4 or 5 days, maybe a week at the very most! In the end I managed to bear it for 4 days and we moved on to an island called Ko Chang a bit further east, it was about five hours by mini bus. We had decided that it wasn't worth buying any more bikes as we only had about two weeks left and we weren't sure if we'd get into Cambodia with them anyway, so from now on it was coaches everywhere, booo! The coach drivers in Thailand are a bit crazy, they seem to go flat out everywhere and as close to the vehicle in front as they can. The roads are all pretty straight and reasonably wide but very bumpy, it's a bit like being on an out of control roller coaster. Ko chang was a short ferry ride away and then a ten minute taxi ride to find a hotel. It's interesting how the taxi's and tuc tuc's vary from country to country. The Tuc Tuc's in Thailand for example are completely different from the ones in India, the Indian ones are crapped out old four strokes with spindly little wheels, basically they look very unsafe but the Thai ones are all two strokes with big bore exhausts and wide wheels. They are pimped to the max with tassels, chrome and fury dices. They sound like they should be on a track racing, very cool! Also in India it was either tuc tuc's or taxis, the taxis were either fairly new small cars or 40 year old Morris ambassadors, which were my favorite, very classy. In Thailand the taxis are either bright pink modern cars or the favorite's seem to be pickup trucks with a cage over the back and two bench seats down each side, these were cheaper. When we were in Pattaya I saw these pickup's with so many people in the back the tow bar was touching the floor! Any way that's enough of my nerdy public transport observations. Ko Chang was like a little mountain in the sea, very picturesque, lovely beaches but still seemed to be quite expensive. I like Thailand a lot and although it's a lot cheaper than England when you're eating and drinking out every night it soon mounts up. Of all the countries we visited it definitely had the most tourists so I suppose that's why it's quite pricey but it has a lot of interesting culture and I'm sure if you get out of the tourist area's it's a lot cheaper. It's difficult unless you have your own transport though. We only stayed in Ko Chang for two days and then we got a bus into Cambodia, to a coastal town called Sianoukville. I would have liked to of had a bike and explored Thailand a bit more but we didn't have a lot of time, hopefully we can come back again and have a proper look around one day. I have to say one of the best things about Thailand is the unbelievably beautiful women, no offence to any other nationalities but those Thai girls have got you licked!!
So now that I've offended 90% of the female population of the world (well at least the small handful that are reading my blog anyway!) on with the story, Cambodia. As soon as we crossed the border you could see how much poorer than Thailand they were. Unfortunately for most people this makes travelling much more interesting. It's a strange cycle when you think about, well off people want to visit poor countries around the world so they can feel more adventurous but the more people that visit the more the more money is pumped into the country and the more the people are exposed to the iPod and McDonalds culture and then less people want to go. I heard a lot of seasoned travellers in Cambodia saying Cambodia is like Thailand was twenty years ago, so if you want to see it I should book your ticket now! It's defiantly worth going as well, the coach journey was great except I spent the whole time wishing I was on a bike. The people in Cambodia all live in small wooden huts which are built on stilts, so I'm guessing if you go the wrong time of year you might get a bit wet. Outside of the towns it was so wild, there were no factories, shops or anything modern at all, just hundreds of these little wooden huts. Under most of the huts there were hammocks hung up with little groups of people vegging out, women cooking on open fires and kids running around naked playing with an old tire and a stick. It was more like how I imagined Africa to be. As soon as we arrived in Sianoukville it reminded me of India, which is a good thing. Lots of interesting s*** going on, crazy make shift vehicles goats and dogs wandering the streets and generally a lot more atmosphere. Our journey from the bus to the Hotel was just as crazy. First off, when the bus stopped I wasn't sure if we were even in the right place, I kept trying to ask the driver but he just looked at me blankly and smiled and the more I tried to make him understand the more he smiled and nodded in sort of diagonal motion, a sort of a cross between yes and no. It didn't help that whilst this was going on a w****d of waiting taxi drivers were fighting to get my attention, all shouting that they knew where our hotel was even though I hadn't told anyone what is was called yet. So I got off the bus and showed one of the drivers the name of our hotel and immediately he said yes and took my bag. I could tell he hadn't really read the name but once he had my bag as far as he was concerned it was job done. In the end you just give in and hope it's right, a favorite of the Asian taxis driver is just to take you to a hotel of his choice as he then gets commission out of it, in Bangkok it's virtually impossible to get a tuc tuc anywhere without being taken to either a gem store or a tailor. However much you protest they insist saying "you look five minutes I get petrol, no problem, yes?" the only way out of it is to pay extra to cover the commission that they lose, but even then they don't like it. So back to our journey, after giving the guy my bags I turned around to see him sitting on a little scooter with my bag wedged against the handle bars gesturing me to hop on the back. This would have normally been fine but we had an extra bag of stuff we had been slowly accumulating on our journey so I had to hold it under one arm and try and hold on with the other all the time looking around to see if dad's driver was still following us! It was fun though to be honest riding around the back streets through the crazy traffic, they obviously weren't sure where are hotel was as we seemed to go round in circles for quite a while. Sianoukville is a nice lazy little beach front town with bars and guest houses all along the sea front. It's not very developed which I personally like, it has a nice dusty unfinished feel about it, rubble from building work everywhere and you'll be walking along the path and find a six foot deep hole where the path used to be, not a warning sign in site, if you fall down a hole hear it's your own bloody fault for not looking! Our hotel was a couple streets back from the beach so after the first night we moved to a bar/guest house on the beach front. There wasn't a lot to do there but it was nice to chill out a bit for a few days. The only thing that was a pain there were all the beach sellers, you get them everywhere but here there were a lot and because they were clearly so poor you felt twice as bad saying no. Most of them were kids ranging from as young as five, and believe me when a five year old girl comes over to your table just as your finishing your fry up and ready to start washing it down with a nice coke whilst surfing the web on your laptop and she looks like she's been sleeping in a hedge it's very hard to tell her you don't won't to buy one of her little bracelets! It would help if they weren't so bloody cute, I mean all kids are cute but Christ these little b*****s are cuter than a box of pink fluffy kittens. It almost makes you want to marry a Cambodian woman just so you can have your own little Cambodybaby!! To be honest they make English kids look ugly!
So now I've pissed off the other ten% of the country by telling them their kids are all ugly I'll move on. We decided to hire some scooters and head off to a waterfall I'd seen in the guide book, the scooters were only six dollars for the day so we got them for two days. So off we headed to get some petrol, unfortunately we only got about half a mile before two coppers stepped out into the road and waved us in. "You have license?" this didn't worry me as I had my international drivers license ready to go. However dad had left his in his bum bag in the hotel. Mine was ok and seemed to keep him happy so I offered to go back and get dads but he said the offence was for not carrying it. Then he pointed to the front of dads scooter "you have light on" apparently this is illegal in Cambodia as well? "You pay fine" I asked how much "where you from" I wasn't sure how this was relevant but told him anyway "how much fine in England?" so I told him "one dollar" they all pissed themselves laughing "fifty dollars" I said twenty five and he seemed more than happy, I should have started lower! Still it didn't cost me a penny and to be honest kept me highly amused for the next few days. Unbelievable really we'd travelled thousands of miles by bike in India and Vietnam and then got stopped after half a mile on two bloody hire scooters! And they stopped us again the next day in the same spot, they must just wait there stopping tourists all day. Next stop was the capital of Cambodia Phnom Penn, only a few hours away by coach. It's a big city with plenty of craziness to look at, we found a nice little hotel next to the river running through the center. We were hoping to get a boat up the river to the next stop siem reap but we were told the river was so low this time of year it was impassable. Cambodia seems to attract the more rough ass type of traveller than a lot of places, we met quite a few dodgy looking middle aged blokes there, mainly they seemed to be Australian. Most of them had young hot Asian girls who looked young enough to be their daughters with them and all of them especially the Australian's sat at the bar drinking and swearing about the how there country had been taken over by f***ing immigrant b*****ds and the good honest Australian working man has been forced out of his f***ing country!! One group we unfortunately ran in to whilst having a cup of tea at a bar one morning (not sure the tea impressed them!) consisted of four of the most vile Australians I've ever met. The ring leader had a huge grey goatee beard down to his waist, a bald head and about three very stained teeth and none of the others looked much better. One of them started up a conversation with us as follows "what are you guys, bloody poms?" Luckily Dad was sat closer than me so I pretended I couldn't hear for most of the conversation. "Your country's gone too f***ing s***!" he said "your f***ed!" they all found this highly amusing and laughed like he was chubby brown. They weren't being nasty in any way it was just drunken banter but it was only about ten in the morning and they all gave me the creeps to be honest. After about ten minutes of Pom jokes the ring leader started to tell Dad his life story, it went something like this. " well I been here about ten years, got a kid with a Sheila here, took the f***er back home to oz though to get away from the crazy b****! Trouble is see I'm addicted to p**** at this point he made a little triangle with his hands and waggled his brown Tabaco stained tongue in the hole he had made" Can't get enough of it, same every time, I pick up a hooker in a bar then fall in love with the silly c**t, The first one I met, I came back from Oz and found her with some ol fella about seventy!" by this point I was trying not laugh too much as he didn't seem to be smiling a lot and Dad was nearly in tears. "I should have killed the c**t really, I f***ing could of I've already done stretch for murder!" I stopped laughing we paid the bill and said our goodbyes, "maybe we'll see you bloody poms later?" not if I can help it mate!
The day after we arrived we went to visit the genocide museum and the killing fields (sounds fun doesn't it!) for those of you ignorant pigs who don't know Cambodia is sadly most famous for its grim history of mass genocide by the Khmer rouge and it's crazy leader Pol Pot. I'm certainly no expert and my internet connection isn't working so if I get any of the details wrong I apologies. Pol Pot started a communist party called the Khmer rouge sometime in the sixties and over the next twenty or so years went on to murder thousands of innocent Cambodians, anyone with any money or who was in any way educated were simply killed and those that weren't were used as slaves in work camps. I can't really do the story justice, it's almost impossible to imagine how much suffering he caused and the worst part is he was never brought to justice. Although the Vietnamese eventually invaded and stopped the genocide he and the Khmer rouge remained in power right up until the eighties and Pol Pot died of natural causes in 1994.The genocide museum was an old school that got turned into an interrogation prison called s21 where people were taken and then tortured until they signed a confession to say that they were against the party. Then they would be taken to the killing fields and disposed of in mass graves. In the center of the killing fields now there is a huge glass monument filled with all the skulls of the bodies exhumed from the graves. It's a chilling place to visit, all the graves have been emptied now but the holes have been left for people to see. As you walk around them you can see bits of clothing and bone fragments that still get washed to the surface in the rainy season.
Next on the list was the world famous Angkor Wat, come on people surely you've heard of that! You need to start watching the discovery channel more! Well anyway I'm pretty sure it's currently the eighth wonder of the world so you should be ashamed if you've never heard of it. The city next to it is called Siem reap and was another days coach ride from Phnom Penn. Angkor wat itself is just one of many temples that make up an ancient city which in its hay day was supposed to have had over a million inhabitants, this was all about the same time when the people in England were still trying to work out to start a fire sat in their damp little cave. Because of Siem Reap's status as home to the eighth wonder of the world it's a right rip off town, it doesn't help things that Cambodia uses almost exclusively US dollars as the main currency. If you get money from the cash machine it always comes in dollars here, their own currency is called Riel but the only time you get any is when you need change under a dollar as they don't have any US coins so you get it in Riel. It's all very confusing and annoying as it means they charge more for everything because the least it will be is a dollar! A good comparison is in India you could probably get a tuc tuc driver to ferry you around an entire day for about ten quid but a three hour round trip to Angkor wat and the driver wanted twenty five dollars, he didn't get it mind but that's not the point! Mind you I do like the new variation on the tuc tuc hear, it's a scooter with a tow hitch welded to the back seat pulling a trailer with two seats in, clever b******s aren't they! Overall I wasn't really blown away by Angkor wat anyway, it was impressive but not very interesting after the first few ruins. I hate to keep comparing everything to India but Hampi is a lot better, mainly because all the locals still live in and around the ruins. I mean you still have people washing their clothes on the steps of the river temples and monkeys living them too, how cool is that? One thing I did really like were the temples where the trees had grown over the ruins, you could see roots had completely taken over the building like giant spiders web, very cool. So after four days at siem reap and a much lighter wallet we got a bus back to Bangkok to get our first of our flights home. Originally we had a return flight booked from India but because we had left and only had a single entry visa we could only get back in if we stayed within Mumbai airport but unfortunately we couldn't find a flight that worked out the right time so we wouldn't have to wait too long. So we decided to get a flight from Bangkok to Kuala lumpar and then a flight to Stansted London as this was pretty cheap.
So that's it, as I'm writing this were in Kuala lumpar and tomorrow we fly home, boo! As sad as I am that it's all over I'm looking forward to going home a lot, can't wait to see everyone and stuff my face with mash potato washed down with PG tips!!! Overall the whole trip has been amazing, everything I'd hoped for and a bit more, to be honest I never expected to cover so many countries, I wasn't really expecting to go out of India. India was definitely our favorite country, there's something very special about it. It's hard to put your finger on what it is, maybe it's the people, they are so friendly and totally bonkers at the same time. Indian people remind me of those big dopy dogs that are always so pleased to see you, you could kick one square in the nuts and he still roll over and want you to rub his tummy. I think the main reason I like it though is that it's just so bloody crazy, anything goes in India, there aren't many rules and the ones they do have don't make any sense. In a nutshell it's the most colorful, bonkers, and friendly place I've ever been and I hope one day I can go back and see the rest of it. Mind you it's not perfect, you'd need all those beautiful Thai girls for that!
See you all soon and thanks for reading, peace out folks!
- comments
Kirstie What a great blog Uncle Lee. We are all very excited that you are both coming home. Can't wait to see you both x x x x x x
Didler Got hold of rod yet for glasto tic