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!