Christmas time in Laos!

I think we both started to feel a little homesick in the days running up to Christmas. That's probably a little selfish of us, since I know many people would love to be in our place right now rather than back home in the cold, but still, when you think of your families and friends back home decorating their trees, wrapping up their presents, lighting candles, attending Christmas parties, you can't help but wish you were there. Christmas should be a time for family.

Unfortunately, this year that wasn't to be, but we were determined to get into the festive spirit and bring a little bit of Christmas to Laos. Along with Laura, Andy and Zoe, our travelling companions of the past week, we shopped for presents for each other, found ourselves some Santa hats (which we were not allowed to take off, no matter how hot!), sang some Christmas songs and played some games, and -in the absence of a Christmas meal- treated ourselves to a very nice Italian meal, followed by some wine and cheeses back at the hotel. All of the locals respectfully wished us a merry christmas as we paraded around the streets of Vientiane in our Santa hats, and all in all it felt very Christmassy despite being thousands of miles from home!





Two days later we moved on northwards to Vang Vieng, famous for it's beautiful scenery and even more so for it's "tubing". Tubing basically involves sitting in a big rubber ring (actually the inner tube of a tractor!) and floating down the river. There's a dozen or so bars on the 2 hour route downstream, and if you feel like stopping for a drink you signal to one of the barstaff and they will throw you a line and fish you out of the river! It was a really unusual but fun day. We did plan to do the same again today but we are all suffering a bit, with bad backs, bruised bottoms and Laura's "tube-burn"... oh, and there's the hangovers too, of course!



Tomorrow we are all hoping to move on to Luang Prabang where we will be celebrating New Year. We heard from many other travellers that Luang Prabang is a beautiful city, so I'm quite looking forward to it!

Northern Cambodia - Southern Laos

Where to start? It's been so long since we updated the blog that I can't even remember everything that has happened since. But I'll give it a go...

From Phnom Penh we took a bus to Cambodia's second town, Battambang. It's a sleepy little town, nice enough but not a lot to do there. Our reason for spending a night there was that we wanted to catch a boat to Siem Reap the next morning. The boat ride was great; we sailed down a little river and waved to the locals who were fishing, washing, and swimming in the river. Just before Siem Reap we went through the "flooded forest" where big trees were growing in the middle of the lake. Weird but impressive.



Siem Reap was always going to be about the temples of Angkor Wat. The area of the temples is huge (apparently the largest religious site in the world), and there are temples that are overgrown with jungle, temples that have been restored, temples that are in ruins, temples on hills, and so on and so on... We spent three days in Siem Reap, which was just enough to see all the main temples but not to get completely templed out.



After Siem Reap we stopped in a couple of provincial towns in northern Cambodia before crossing the border to Laos. The border crossing was pretty relaxed; a couple of guys in a wooden hut asking for bribes. For a dollar we managed to buy all the necessary stamps on our passports and we were heading to Don Det in the 4000 Islands in southern Laos.



Don Det was great for a couple of days of relaxing. There are no temples or other must-visit cultural sites on the island, so we just stayed in hammocks most of the day, then went to watch the sunset over the Mekong river, had a couple of drinks and slept some more. Brilliant!



On our way from Don Det to Vientiane we stopped in Pakse and did a waterfall tour around the area. The tour took us to three different waterfalls; Tad Fan, Tad Lo, and Tad Something Else.



The next stop was in Tha Khaek and went to see a 7 km long cave that has a river running through it. We went to the pitch black cave with small motor boats and drove in darkness with just the guide's torch to help us navigate. Luckily our guides knew the place like their own pockets and we found the way easily, but when you are a few kilometers into a cave that is completely dark, in a small leaky boat you get a little nervous. It turned out to be an amazing experience anyway.



Now we are celebrating Christmas in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. It's a nice place, and we have some friends that we met earlier in our travels to celebrate with, so I think it will be a nice Christmas. Different, but nice!



Merry Christmas to everyone!

Phnom Penh

As you've probably guessed, this blog is going to be a depressing one, so apologies in advance for that! Yes, entering Cambodia proved to be another culture shock, although not as bad as coming into Vietnam. Phnom Penh, for an Asian capital, is actually quite relaxed and calm, which was a nice surprise. The striking thing here is the poverty. We saw scenes like this before when we were in Indonesia a few years back, but it doesn't make it any easier to deal with it a second time. Small children are constantly begging for food and money, and at night we saw whole families camped out on just a blanket by the side of the road. It breaks your heart, and you know that even if you gave them the whole contents of your wallet it wouldn't change a damn thing.

The sights around the city are numerous, but those which most tourists (including ourselves)come to visit are those linked to the history of the Khmer Rouge regime. Our first stop was Tuol Sleng, originally a school but taken over by the Khmer Rouge in the 70s and turned into a prison where thousands of innocent people were interrogated and tortured before being sent off to be executed. These days the site is a museum dedicated to the victims; there's a chilling account of the atrocities committed, photos of the victims and accounts from relatives of the victims and from the few survivors, tiny cells where the victims were held, and more. It's not for the faint hearted (I was close to tears on several occasions) but as with the War Remnants Museum that we visited in Vietnam (which had similar exhibitions on the Vietnam War) I learned so much history - history we really should be more aware of since it happened in our lifetime - and got a better understanding of, and sympathy for the people here and the current situation in these countries.

Our second trip in Phnom Penh was to the Killing Fields at Cheung Ek, which was the final resting place of the above victims. Such peaceful green fields, it would have been hard to imagine what had happened here had it not been for an enormous memorial filled with the skulls of the victims, which brought back all the sad feelings of yesterday's trip.


On a happier note, it's only 16 days until Christmas Eve!! It doesn't seem Christmassy at all here in spite of the efforts of some guesthouses and restaurants who put up christmas trees with fake snow (not really sure why since the majority of people here aren't Christian). Mikko saw a Santa Claus walking down the street the other night. Then again, we also saw an elephant :-)

Tomorrow we move on to a place called Battambang. I don't really know much about the place but it's a convenient place to break up the journey before we take a boat trip onwards to Siem Reap where we'll do some SERIOUS temple trekking!

Southern Vietnam

There was a time when I thought that coming to Vietnam was a bad idea from the start; the everlasting rain, the incredibly pushy hawkers, and the constant sound of mopeds was driving me mad, and I was ready to skip most of the country and move on. I'm glad we didn't though, because the last couple of weeks in Vietnam were absolutely lovely; we had glorious sunshine, the hawkers seemed to give up on us, and even the mopeds didn't seem too bad anymore.

Maybe it was just the weather that was getting us down before, or maybe we had just got a bit tired of moving about all the time for the last three months. Whatever it was, the curse was lifted by a tour of the countryside around Dalat in the "Highlands" of Vietnam, five days on the beach in Mui Ne, the buzzing chaos that is Saigon (officially Ho Chi Minh City), and finally a boat trip in the Mekong Delta.

In Dalat we took a tour out to the countryside and saw a coffee plantation, silk factory, rice wine making, and a lot of gardens and fields of flowers and veg. It was pretty nice change from hanging out in the bars and waiting for the rain to stop. And, of course, we sampled some of Dalat's famous(?) red wine.

Mui Ne was like a holiday from a holiday. We spent five days doing absolutely nothing. Swimming, eating, and some more Dalat wine filled the days quite nicely. The only touristy thing we did was a walk up the Fairy Stream to see some waterfalls. The waterfalls actually turned out to be a little trickle of muddy water but the walk along - and in - the river was nice.



After charging our batteries in Mui Ne we headed off to Saigon, which turned out to be another big surprise. I had imagined not to like the city at all after what I had heard from other travellers, but Saigon turned out to be quite charming in a slightly decadent way. If you can ignore the old fat western guys and their young local "girlfriends" the city is really nice and I wish we had a little more time to explore.



From Saigon we went to the Mekong Delta to take a boat trip around the delta and then on to Cambodia. The trip was fantastic! We saw some beautiful jungle scenery, waved to about a million little kids on the shores, screaming in joy at seeing strange western people. Of course there was also some crocodile feeding (what kind of a tour would not have it in the itinerary?), local music and singing (sorry, but that sounded like cats being strangled) and snake wine tasting. After all this fun we found ourselves at the most laid-back border crossing we have experienced so far. It was literally just a bloke by a fence, glancing at our passports as we walked past with beers in our hands. Nice!



We are now in Phnom Penh in Cambodia, but due to some vicious drinking games last night we haven't really done much sightseeing yet. Well, we have time, we're on holiday!

Northern Vietnam

We've been in Vietnam around 10 days now and we're still not sure what to make of it. Things seem to be improving, but overall we've been a bit disappointed with the country so far. In comparison to China, the sights are similar, the food is tasteless, it's noisier, less safe and you have to haggle for everything you want to buy, right down to a bottle of water. I know you have to expect those kind of annoyances in South East Asia, but I was kind of expecting something amazing which would compensate for that, and so far we haven't found it. Don't let this put you off going to Vietnam though; Mikko and I are definitely a minority, every other person we meet on our travels is loving Vietnam!



After Sapa, we made our way to the capital, Hanoi. Aside from the hostel, with its rooftop terrace and free beer, I don't think we liked anything about Hanoi. The worst part for me was the traffic; it's noisy and it's incessant, you take your life into your hands every time you have to cross a road (which is a lot, because most of the pavements are blocked!. You're so busy clutching your valuables and hopping out of the way of motorbikes and ignoring all the hawkers yelling "BUY SOMETHING!" that you have no time to absorb the atmosphere around you. We stayed in Hanoi just long enough to recover from the bad nights' sleep we had on the way in, and to book a 3-day tour out of there, to Halong Bay.

Halong Bay was nice! (Yes, honestly, in spite of my whining, it's not all bad!) We were picked up early in the morning and transported to the bay where there were literally hundreds of boats and thousands of tourists waiting to board them. We got one of the nicer boats, I think. We set off into the bay where there were hundreds of the karst rocks (the same type we saw in Guilin and Yangshuo back in China) rising almost vertically upwards from the sea.



It was beautiful, and very relaxing to be on the boat and away from the madness of the city. In the afternoon we went swimming for a bit (the sea was clean and warm!) and then went kayaking for a couple of hours. You could paddle through some of the caves which was fun as there were some pretty strong currents in there. The night was spent partying and sleeping on the boat.



The next morning we split into two groups (kayakers and rock climbers) and I went off to do more kayaking while Mikko went to learn to climb.



In the afternoon, after I'd had enough, I went to watch the climbers. Mikko did a great job. He sailed up the easier climb with no problem. He didn't quite make it up the harder one, but then nobody else managed it either. Maybe they deliberately make it that way so you don't get over-confident and go off climbing by yourself ;-)



We spent that night on Cat Ba island but unfortunately the tour didn't give you any time to explore there. We had another delicious meal of both local food and pizza, and the following day went back to Hanoi. I still didn't like it!!

From Hanoi we caught a luxurious overnight train down to Hoi An, where we've spent the last two days. It's been pretty rainy again and the river through town has burst its banks. The restaurant I'd set my heart on is somewhere under the water.



Hoi An is a much smaller town, and thankfully much calmer. It's main claim to fame is its shops; shop after shop selling tailor-made suits and dresses and all at a snip of the price you'd pay back home. I was quite restrained and just bought one summer dress, for 15 US dollars, very nice!



Tonight we're moving on again. We finally get to go to the beach!!! Mikko is hoping to do a diving course there but that scares the hell out of me I will settle for a few easy days on the beach, sipping cocktails and reading a good book. I can hardly wait!

From China to Vietnam

After all the fun we had in Yunnan province we felt a bit sad to leave China but we knew it was time to move on and head south. For one thing, the weather in Yunnan started to get a bit chilly and we thought that the beaches of Vietnam sounded quite tempting.

To get to Vietnam we took a 10-hour bus ride from Kunming to the border. At the border we had to leave the bus and cross the border on foot. This wasn't quite as easy as it sounds; our bus dropped us off at the bus station in the border town of Hekou in the darkness and nobody could speak enough English to tell us which way the border was. In the end I took my passport out and they seemed to get the idea. We walked in the direction we were sent and came to a barrier. Over the barrier we could see a road leading to Vietnam but short of jumping the barrier we could see no way in. Finally a friendly (no irony here) Chinese border guard came to our assistance and directed us to a small dark alley where the entrance to the chinese customs was found

The procedure on the Chinese side was pretty straightforward; the borderguard took our passports and asked why we didn't have Vietnamese visas, I opened the page of my passport where the visa was and she was happy, then she studied my passport for a while and asked me where I'm from, I told her Finland and she pretended to know that it's a country. Then we were off to get our passports stamped and stared at at another desk and motioned to go to Vietnam. As we had no idea which exit to take we asked another border guard where Vietnam is, she looked at us a bit funny and said 'you go over the bridge'.

We managed our way across the bridge and reached Lao Cai, the Vietnamese side of the border. There three different people stared and stamped our passports without a word, then pointed at a piece of paper we were supposed to fill in with no pens, reluctantly gave us one pen to share and finally stamped the piece of paper and made a point of not welcoming us to Vietnam

As we left the building there were a number of shifty looking 'taxi drivers' offering to take us to places we didn't know. After a bit of bartering we took one of them up on his offer to drive us to Sapa, a little town in the mountains about an hour's drive away from Lao Cai. We probably paid far more then was the going rate for this journey but we got to Sapa just in time for dinner and booked ourselves into a fairly nice hotel



Sapa is quite an interesting place after China. The town has a very European style of architecture and they sell lovely hard crusted rolls (both thanks to the French colonialists, I guess). After the tranquility of the mountain towns of China, Sapa is a bit hectic, everyone and their grandmother is trying to sell you stuff. In fact, they are selling such random stuff that their most common sales pitch is 'you, buy something'.



Sapa is a beautiful place though, and if you can ignore the hawkers and the millions of mopeds it is a nice place to spend a couple of days. We have done a couple of half-day walks in the area and the scenery is pretty wonderful. Last night we also splashed out and spent 30 euros on a meal and a bottle of red wine (the first time we had any wine since Finland!), which was a nice change from local food and weak lager



Tonight we are going to catch our first Vietnamese night train to Hanoi. We are travelling in relative luxury compared to Chinese trains since we are in a compartment of only four people. What that is like in reality remains to be seen...

Around Yunnan province

Hi again! Quite a lot has happened since we last wrote. Our first stop in Yunnan province was Kunming. It's not a particularly interesting city and to be honest we weren't really inspired to explore it much since because of the constant torrential rain, but anyway we needed to go to Kunming to apply for our visas for Vietnam, and because Kunming is the main transport hub for the rest of the province. From there we moved on to a small town called Dali but since the weather showed no sign of improving there we pushed on to the northwest since we knew we'd have to come back the same way later. So, we went to Shangri-La. It's a really beautiful Tibetan village surrounded by the snowcapped mountains of the Himalayas and close to the Tibetan border.



If you're not going to Tibet (and we're not) then this is apparently the next best thing. It's a beautiful place and the people were really friendly. The only small problem was that night times were freezing; we were wearing gloves and sleeping with electric blankets which was a bit of a shock to the system after the 30 degrees heat of Yangshuo just the previous week! After two days in Shangri-La we moved on to Tiger Leaping Gorge which was one of the things on our "must do" list for China. We weren't dissappointed!



Tiger Leaping Gorge is a 2-day trek in the mountains. We walked with 2 others; Nancy from Canada, who we've been travelling with since Kunming, and Neil from Australia, who we met in a bar in Shangri-La. It's hard to describe how beautiful this place is. Neither words nor photos do it justice. It's simply stunning; every way you turn there is a view, be it a waterfall, a snowcapped mountain or a valley of pine trees.



And to top it off, after a week of cold and rain we were blessed with glorious sunshine once again. The trek was the best part of the trip so far and possibly the most amazing scenery I've ever seen. At the end of the trek nobody was in any hurry to leave the gorge so we stayed a night at a hostel at the end of the route, rested our aching legs and treated ourselves to a few beers!

The next day we moved on to the town of Lijiang. It's a nice town but it's somehow spoilt by the hordes of tourists passing through (yes, I realise we are tourists ourselves, but still...). Also, after the beauty of Tiger Leaping Gorge, I think any place was going to be a disappointment. We went to see an orchestra playing local Naxi music. Unfortunately that was disappointing too; the musicians' beards were more impressive than their music!



After that, we went back to Dali which is where we are now. There's not a great deal to do here but it has a pretty old town and the hostel we are staying at is a wonderful place to just sit back and chill for a while; I think we were really ready for that! And besides, there was heavy flooding in Vietnam last week so it's probably best to wait for them to clear up a bit before we move on.

November 6th was Mikko's birthday, before we left to go hiking for the day I asked Dave and Song from the hostel if they could arrange a birthday cake in the evening. They came back with the most beautiful cake I've ever seen with all kinds of exotic fruits on top.



Mikko was surprised and happy, and after a while very full of cake. We also had the best company that night; the hostel staff, Neil, Nancy and also Max, a guy we met earlier on our tour in Mongolia who suddenly showed up at the hostel, so it was nice catching up with him again and exchanging travelling tales.
Mikko had plenty of Tsingtao's bought for him throughout the evening and a great night was had by all. Needless to say, we didn't do much the following day!

Top 10 - Weird China

China has been quite an experience. Here are our Top 10 oddities so far:

#10 - Recycling. There are recycling bins everywhere, but the system still needs a little developing.



#9 - Audiences. What ever happens, where ever it happens, and when ever it happens, there's always an audience.



#8 - The police. It takes a real tough cop to look hard in one these golf carts.



#7 - Beer Pong. The true king of games. Throw a pingpong ball into your opponents beer glass and make them drink it (just the beer, not the ball).



#6 - Outdoor haircuts. Cheap and cheerful, but no mirrors anywhere in sight.



#5 - Trains. Travel in Chinese trains can be a real experience. Especially in night trains, if you get the top bunk.



#4 - T-shirts. You can have your favourite psycopath (Hitler, Bin Laden, Ballack, etc.) printed on your t-shirt.



#3 - Condom dress. If t-shirts aren't your thing, there's always the dress made entirely of condoms.



#2 - Advertising. Recognise the bearded fellow in this restaurant's banner?



#1 - Toilets. A clear winner. A trip to the toilet in China is never a boring one. The picture below is the ladies' in Dali, Yunnan.

Yangshuo

After visiting the big cities of Xi'an and Guilin we were looking forward to moving on to Yangshuo, a small town (at least by Chinese scale) in southern China.



I was expecting a sleepy little village, but as it turned out about a million other tourists had had the same idea before us and we found ourselves in a Chinese equivalent of Torremolinos; the main street had shops selling everything from fake watches to t-shirts with "I'm Mental" printed on them. And of course there were bars around every corner offering English breakfast.



But even if the town was not very authentically Chinese, at least it was really beautiful; there is a river running through the town and all around are karst peaks rising almost vertically from the ground. The weather was also lovely and warm, so we thought this was a good place to chill out for a few days, and not do any temples or museums.



In Yangshuo we also bumped into Janne and Hilde from Norway, who we had met earlier in Beijing. We all went on a kayak tour on the Li River, which turned out to be a fantastic day. We paddled downstream for about 3 hours and stopped for lunch in a little village on the way.



In the village I got talking to a local woman who wanted to practice her English. She had a little handwritten book of phrases that visitors had taught her. My favourite phrase in the book was "Do you need opium and hookers?" I wondered what she thought that meant, but I didn't have the courage to ask - after all, there's a limit to how much opium and hookers you can get into a kayak.



After kayaking we happened to notice a sign "English teachers wanted" in Yangshuo. We thought that this might be a fun thing to do for a few weeks and went in and asked about the job possibilities. They seemed pretty interested in our services and we got ourselves an interview for the next day; they wanted us to teach a class and see how that went. So, there we were the next morning, standing in front of a class of Chinese students doing our best to get them focused on learning English and not on the fact that we are not married (this seemed unthinkable to them). We ended up teaching two classes, and we had a lot of fun doing it. The students were really nice and curious about us and where we came from. In the end we didn't stay on as teachers because the school was only able to offer us part-time positions, but we had a great time nevertheless.



The next day we went back to being tourists again. We rented bicycles and drove to another river nearby. There we got our bikes on a bamboo raft and sailed down the stream for a couple of hours. After the rafting we picked up our bikes and headed off to Moon Hill and the Water Cave.



Moon Hill is a semicircular hill that you can climb in about an hour. The day was very hot so the climb seemed pretty long but once we got on top of the moon the view was worth the sweat and tears.



The Water Cave was also a great experience. You take a boat to enter the cave through a small hole in a hill, but once you are inside you can get off the boat and walk around. The place was absolutely huge, I've never seen a cave that size, there were enormous stalagtites and stalagmites everywhere and little streams and pools here and there. We even got to go swimming in one of the pools, which was nicely refreshing after climbing the Moon Hill.



There would have been even more to do in Yangshuo but we felt that it was time to move on and head to the west. We are now back in Guilin, trying to find the best way to travel to Kunming, Lijiang and Dali in Yunnan province of China. But that's another story...

Going South

From Pingyao we moved on to Xi'an, it's another big city famed for it's 'army' of terracotta warriors, built some 2000 years ago, apparently to guard the tomb of a dead emperor. So we went to check that out, it was a very impressive sight. Like with the Great Wall in Beijing, I'm fascinated by the scale on which the Chinese build things and the great effort involved, and I often find myself asking what was the point, and was it ever really worth the huge effort?! But they are really spectacular sights, so I'm not complaining, and we're definitely enjoying!!



Besides the warriors, Xi'an has some nice old city walls that you can hike or bike around, and a picturesque muslim quarter; it was nice to browse the shops and eateries there. There are also plenty of temples but we skipped most of them, having had a bit of an overdose of temples in the past week. Oh, we also got another massage! No scars or bruises this time; our faith in Chinese medicine has been restored :-)



Then on from Xi'an we faced a 27 hour train journey to Guilin. Due to the long time we would be spending in the train, we tried to get soft sleeper tickets (equivalent of 1st class) but they had sold out, so we went for the next best thing and they had sold out too. So, we had to settle for a simple seat reservation. At 220 yuan (about 20 euros) for a 27 hour ride we figured we had a bargain and we could put up with anything that 3rd class travel had to throw at us. Well, it was certainly an experience, I wouldn't necessarily want to repeat it but it was far more interesting and entertaining than travelling in 1st or 2nd class. The train was jam-packed full of people, we were the only tall white ones so of course we caused quite a stir! Some people had reserved seats (like us), but some didn't, so they either squeezed themselves onto the side of someone else's seat, or they slept on the filthy floor, or in one case, in the sink! (I wish I'd taken a picture, but it was 3a.m. and I wasn't exactly thinking straight...)



I've developed a huge admiration for the way the Chinese behave; everyone in the train seemed more than willing to sqeeze themselves into the tiniest spaces so that a complete stranger could have a bit of their seat. I didn't give up mine but I had one sleeping baby after another dumped on my lap so that they could get a bit of rest! Another thing I really admire is that they are always happy and smiling, and never seem to complain about anything. At one point I was getting really annoyed by one girl sitting opposite to me who never stopped talking and laughing, it was 6 a.m. and the whole carriage could hear her. But rather then coming and telling her to shut up, the other passengers were coming over to our seats to listen to her stories, we had a huge crowd and everyone (well, everyone except the two grumpy white tourists!) joined in the conversation. I really admire their positivity, and I made a mental note to myself to try and be more tolerant of people in the future... let's see how long that lasts!

Throughout the day, as we travelled further south, the scenery outside became more hilly and interesting, and kept us entertained. Still, when we pulled into Guilin I think we were more than happy to get out and stretch our legs, get some fresh air and have a good wash! :-)

The next day we explored Guilin. It's really nice and warm here (about 26 degrees) and it's much less hectic and more scenic than the previous cities. We climbed one of the karst peaks in the city centre for some nice views of the city, had a walk along the Li River and visited the Reed Flute Cave, Guilin's main attraction. It's the biggest cave I've ever seen, with some really impressive stalactite and stalagmite formations all lit up with eerie fluorescent lights.





Then it was time to leave Guilin and move on to Yangshuo. It's an hour and a half bus ride away, and it's supposed to be even more beautiful. We'll keep you posted!

By the way, we added some more pictures in the Mongolia Gobi desert blog. Thanks to Scott Appleby for taking and sending us the pics. It's probably a blessing that we had no camera in Mongolia because these photos are better than anything we could have taken!

Also, I'm a few days late, but HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my Grandma, Barbara Porter, who's an avid reader of our travel diary. She's just turned 85 years old. Congratulations, Grandma! xxx