Energy Sapa

"I'm not sure what I'm going to do, I can't put any weight on my feet."
"You're speaking as though I didn't break my toe yesterday."
"Touche"

I think it's fair to say that neither Goss nor I were especially well prepared for the two day treck in Sapa.

Really it all started when we decided to get the party boat tour of Ha Long Bay (I guess a purist might argue that it all started when I left Dan a few months back, he left with the words "it's a pity we won't meet Goss, weird things happen to Goss", so I had been warned) - incidentally that was the correct decision, most of the other boats we saw (and we got quite close to a few of them) were filled with somewhat older, more Russian couples.
Ha Long Bay is magical. I'd seen pictures before I went but in no way did they do the place justice (obviously I used this as the excuse for not taking my camera out of the bag).

Within the first few hours Goss and Kevin had managed to lose a sea kayak. Kayak's shouldn't sink, right? Fortunately they were within swimming distance of the cave / secret lagoon combo we were visiting.

We spent the first night on a junk on the bay; we tried to round up some of the people from the other boats to join our party but strangely none of the somewhat older, more Russian couples seemed that keen on joining us.

We spent the next day on the beach of a deserted island, which was fairly paradise-esque, or at least it would have been if the rocks and coral hadn't made toast of our feet.

Had a go at night time kayaking (which is obviously sensible), the bay was filled with phosphoresence. Mighty sparkly, I tell you.

From Ha Long Bay we went fairly much straight to Sapa where, dosed with painkillers, we spent two days hiking through the rice terraces. Now each individual rice terrace may be a heap younger and a heap less impressive than those at Batad, but the sheer number of them was incredible. A whole valley filled with big green steps. It must have taken ages.

There's six different hill tribes around these parts and members of each one follow you around trying to sell you pillowcases, which is a little annoying. We stayed in a homestay, allegedly with one of the tribes, but it was about the least homestay-y homestay I've stayed in (five "stay"s in one sentence; is that a record?).

After a few months of jaded cynicism where everything seems to be the same as something I've already seen, two bits of take-your-breath-away scenery in just a few days.

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Best new fact: the Dutch for snail is slugundhaus.

Boots with the Pho

I don't think I can live in Viet Nam, I just don't see noodle soup as an acceptable meal. And they absolutely thrive on that stuff here. they love there phos. I don't even like saying pho. I didn't mind it so much when I thought it was pronounced Po - I mean that sounds like a word - but it's pronounced a bit like fear and a bit like fur. It sounds like you started saying feather but found it was too much effort so stopped.

Another reason I'm not Vietnamese is that I'm just not very good at squatting. They love to squat here, just on the side of the road, squatting away as a comfortable alternative to sitting. If I squat for any length of time I lose feeling in my legs. Sopheak tried to teach me squat Asian style (that's flat footed, none of this Western, on-your-toes nonsense) when I was in Takeo. I fell over.

I'm still in Hanoi. I'm nailing the sites at the moment. Went to my first art gallery since Sydney. I hadn't realised how much I'd missed them. Is that weird, probably, but not as weird as this...

Weirdest Food:
In just about any other blog entry snake spring rolls would be a shoe in for weirdest food. Today it doesn't make the Top Three.

We went to the snake village yesterday (a 4x4 drove into our taxi on the way there, thankfully it didn't play out Shantaram-style), we got given a snake to play with. A small child tried to kick our snake in the face, which Goss thought was unkind, then realised how much of a hypocrite he was about to be proved. The snake had its heart cut out, which was put - beating away - in a shot glass, mixed with blood and rice wine. It had stopped beating by the time I got to drink it, I felt a bit cheated. The twitching snake was then taken away and chopped into a smorgasbord of dishes (sauted snake with lemongrass and ginger was ace, fried snake skin wasn't).

Incidentally, snake bile is surprisingly green and, unsurprisingly, doesn't make rice wine taste any nicer.

Hanoi Rocks!

Hanoi's pretty cool, I tell you, everywhere else is just nowhere. Although that could just be because getting here's been a long trip, it made me flip. Really long. No longer than that. I left you in Hoi An, whinging about the incompetence of travel agents. Well said travel agent proved their incompetence, which resulted in me trekking back to first Nha Trang (with the hope of intercepting Casey there on her way north) then Saigon (where i intercepted Casey).

So that was twenty-four hours of bus rides.

Then I got the train. Managed to get ripped off by a travel agent again (my own fault, I chose to eat my first meal rather than go to the station to get my own ticket), travel agent charged me for a soft sleeper and gave me a hard sleeper. For those of you who don't know, a hard sleeper is a wooden shelf and a pillow. It wasn't all bad, 'though, I got to share my cabin with a Vietnamese family and their chickens. I'd been a bit jealous of other travellers sharing enclosed spaces with livestock but now I've ticked that box. Twenty-nine hours and one Reunification Railway later I was in Hanoi, three hours early ("whoop" you might think, but you'd be wrong 4.30 is a rubbish time to arrive anywhere).

Went to Mo Chi Minh's Mausoleum. I didn't go in because a. I wasn't dressed appropriately and b. Uncle Ho was on holiday. Went to the Temple of Literature instead. More tortoises with doctorates there than most places.
Hanoi doesn't rock as much as it could as I still can't get a Russian Visa. And I hold the City responsible. Still, I didn't want to go to Russia anyway. It'll be really cold. Trans-Siberian, Schmans-Schmiberian. Who wants to spend three weeks on an icy train, hey? Hey?

I've got to get myself an ice cold beer.
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Kudos to anyone who spots what I did for my own amusement in this post. Answers on a postcard marked "I'm Way too Geeky" or "I Can Read too Much into a Two-word Title".

New Best Friends

I guess it was at about the three-month point on my travels when the majority of my emailing / facebooking switched to being to "new" friends: to people I'd met since I'd been away.

I guess this is hardly surprising. At the moment I have more in common with people that I spent two weeks in a Cambodian orphanage with, than I do with people I've not seen since Christmas. Maybe my "proper" friends think that their news (doing an extra three hours over time, say) doesn't compare with sky-diving, life-threatening moto rides through the streets of Saigon or even the more mundane things which generally don't make my blog (seeing a pig wandering through a petrol station, for example, or buying lygons at a floating market). Maybe they're too bogged down by work to chat (this time last year I would've been). Maybe that by writing a blog I'm missing out on personalising messages. Maybe that we only really have a memory of about three-months and anything before that is essentially irrelevant (several of my closest friends have left Britain for periods of a year or more, I doubt I emailed any of them more than a handful of times after the first couple of months). Whatever the reason, most of the people I communicate with are people that I didn't know a year ago.

I was chatting to Nou the other day; she asked if Dan was my best friend. She seemed surprised that I'd only known him a few months - "you know each other very well". Truth be told, at the time Dan probably was my best friend. We'd travelled together for about three months, been through a heap of stuff together - it's not with everyone that I've cycled death road, or shared a bag of insects, or walked the Inca trail, or been jumped by a gang of ladyboys - we were going to know each other pretty well.

It seems that when you're travelling whoever you're with is probably going to be your best friend, albeit in a completely disposable manner. Within 48 hours of leaving Dan I had met Anna, who was my best friend for a week. Then she left and Emma and Christen got promoted... You get the idea.

Shared situations (eg. being unable to cross a border because of a strike) mean that you form instant bonds with strangers which result in actions which in normal circumstances would seem ridiculous (eg. sitting in a gutter playing cards with people that don't speak your language or lending someone you've known for less than a week $100).

When I get back to the real world I have no doubt that I'll be able to reintegrate with my "proper" friends, even those I've had next to no contact with over the last year. What will be far more interesting is what will happen to the new 2009-vintage friendships.

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Two blog posts in one day. You can tell the storms haven't eased off... I walked down to the river just now, I didn't go too close as I couldn't tell where the road ended, I guess the boats were a bit of a clue.

Travel Agents = Evil

I seem to be drowning in a sea of incompetence on the old Visa front. Most unpleasant. It all started back in Cambodia in the days before I was trying to sort out the (cue the kind of music you play when a pantomime villain arrives) Russian Visa. The company that sorted out my Vietnamese and Chinese Visas for me managed to make a minor mess of both. The Chinese one isn't so bad, they've given me more than I asked for. However they only gave me a fifteen day Vietnamese one, which expires about now. First day I got to HCMC I put my Visa in for extension and was informed it would take four days. After six I got bored of waiting, so I've left Saigon with the promise that my Visa will be couriered to Hanoi where I can have another crack at this Russian bureaucracy. I think that this is the furthest I've been from my passport whilst in a foreign country. Wish me luck.

I had become desensitised to the Saigon traffic by the time I left. According to Casey the cyclo tour we took was petrifying. I just found it amusing that I could touch passing cars with my flip-flops. None of the life-flashing-before-your-eyes, stomach-in-the-back-of-your-nose nonsense of Thursday's moto deathchase.

I'm currently in the middle of Viet Nam, right where the storms are. I overnight bussed (incidentally, best buses since Chile, maybe even better) up to Nha Trang. Now I don't mean to sound grouchy but i don't think I saw Nha Trang (a beautiful but ultimatly generic beach resort) in its best light. I just don't think beaches and rain mix that well.

We went for a spa day instead. How very David Beckham? Goss amused himself by pouring mud on my head, in fairness it was pretty funny.

Am now in Hoi An. I quite like it here, despite the rain, it's got something of the Paraties about it. It's chock full of tailor shops and it's taking a whole heap of willpower not to get some unnecessarily garish trainers handmade.

Cu Chi Coup

Think it's safe to say that I'd've been rubbish in the Viet Nam war. Those VC tunnels at Cu Chi are pretty scary I tell you. Apparently the one I went down was only 7 metres. It seemed somewhat longer. That way madness lies...

Following my last Blog entry we met up with our Mekong tour guide (you remember? The one that made us sing on the bus), she took us out for a night of karaoke with her friends. Which was ridiculous. Goss scored a very respectable 99% singing a song he'd never heard, in Vietnamese (he didn't come close to such dizzy heights on any other occasion, not even when he cracked open his best Phil Collins). Incidentally, if anyone's taking notes, I've now sung karaoke in five languages on this trip.

We went to a water park yesterday. The ride there was the scariest moto journey so far. I felt the fear for the first time in a while.

A Calipo Now

Viet Nam's currency is ridiculous. It's called the Dong and it's not worth very much. I got very close to my first million costing night out.

Had a full day in Saigon, two people tried to rob us (separate incidents: one pickpocket; one bag snatch), being unusually cautious at the moment.

Just spent two days on the Mekong delta. The Mekong's a big river, I'll tell you that for free. We saw a lot of boats. We went on a fair few - seven in two days, maybe more? One was pointless (small, slow motorboat up a canal, then back down it, no reason at all, apparently), another was ridiculous (boarding a slippery boat from a ramshackle platform in the middle of nowhere at night).

We went to Unicorn Island (That's a misnomer, I didn't see a single unicorn. Did see mudskipper fishes - which are probably stranger than unicorns). Our tour guide forced us to sing on the way there - which was all a bit Sunday School outing.

Good Morning Viet Nam

I'm in Saigon.

Said good bye to the kids. It wasn't quite as traumatic as the first time. Still pretty bad 'though, but a 14 year old girl did give me a heart-shaped key ring, so, you know, every cloud...

As it was our last night Nou took us to karaoke, she'd even gone out and bought some English songs for us. How sweet is that?

Arrived in Saigon yesterday evening. Think I've only been ripped off three times so far, which is nice.

Weirdest food: snails

Eeeeeek

Last day at the orphanage. I've been worrying about today all week. I can see me being a bit of a mess later.

Most people you meet whilst travelling you can be fairly certain that you'll see them again, what with Facebook and the internet and the fact that everyone's always comes by London, but the only way I'm gonna see these guys again is by coming back. And that means I have to leave again. Which makes me an emotional wreck. It's a bit of a Catch 22 thing.

I guess I could pay for one of them to come to England but there's just no way of saying "I'm going to pay for a Cambodian school kid to come and visit me in England" which doesn't sound weird.

I've been up at crack of sparrows a few times this week to do the school run (some of them are at school 6 til 6 - that's a long day by any standards). The kids seem to get a bit of kudos in the playground by bringing us farangs with them. Judging by the wide-eyed terror some of the kids were looking at me with I'm guessing not all of them have seen white folks up close before.

Mermaid and Chips Twice, Please

I'm better. Head's better. Foot's better. I've finished the course of antibiotics. I can drink again.

Or at least I could if someone hadn't stolen the beer. Someone broke into the guesthouse and stole two DVD (broken) players and most of the crate of beer I'd bought before I got sick. Which is understandable, but I had emptied it into the fridge so they had to steal it one can at a time: it would have taken them ages. The especially ironic thing is that I'd've given the beer away if someone had asked as I saw them as 24 cans of temptation in my antibiotic-induced fug.

I've been practising my Khmer. I've got surprisingly good, given my normal inability to pick up languges. Although people don't always seem to teach me the most useful words. I "was taught "hide"before I knew "have". Obviously I've completely embraced this I can now say "I'm hungry, can I have mermaid and ginger, please?"and "I want the moon on a stick."