Vang Vieng

Vientiane (the capital of Laos) didn’t have much to offer, apart from a cold shower after our epic bus ride, some dodgy yet much-needed wifi and a shelter from the torrential rain. So we decided to only stay one night and after much deliberation decided to hire a motorbike to drive ourselves to the infamous Vang Vieng, rather than just hop on another coach.

This was one of the best decisions we’ve made and it was literally awesome. What we thought should have taken 3 hours, actually took us 6 and a half, as despite having spent the last 2 months of our lives in tropical rainy season, we hadn’t anticipated giant pot holes in the road, torrential rain or the fact that an entire stretch of road was flooded to waste-height. These just all added to the adventure though and we made it safely to Vang Vieng. The first half of the journey was fairly standard scenery, but the second half….oh my wow! What an incredible landscape!

Piling the bike onto a tractor to get through the flood

Three very jolly Laos men who were clearly thrilled to be helping

Vang Vieng didn’t disappoint either. We spent our first morning biking around the beautiful countryside visiting caves, water holes, and meandering through rice paddies, surrounded by giant limestone outcrops which just looked stunning!

The view from our £10 per night room...not too shabby!

The town is infamous for its Tubing. The idea is simple…you sit in a rubber tube and float down the river which is fun enough in itself, but then you throw in some bars and some cheap beer and you have yourself a tubing party (or a death-trap which-ever way you want to look at it!).

VV was once apparently a Mecca for drunk and drugged-up young people. It got so over-run with bars and the drug scene became so huge that apparently at the height of its popularity an average of 20 tourists were dying every year here by drowning, drug-induced heart attacks, or other similarly unnecessary accidents. However, according to our friend who wrote the Lonely Planet for Laos, one day the King decided to visit, so the entire operation was shut down overnight ready for his arrival. Nowadays the tourism has picked up a bit, but the dynamic has changed and according to a barman we met who’d lived there for 9 years…”It used to be full of 22-year old drugged up Ozzie lads, and now it’s full of 26-year old Koreans”.

Some phone piccies taken while I tried not to drop it in the water...

We really enjoyed it anyway, met some great people and enjoyed stopping off at the bars along the way to mainly mock drunk 21 year olds making fools of themselves by attempting to limbo and grown men performing the ChaCha Slide (sooo 2004!). Great fun though, and incredible scenery to accompany you as you float down.

Charline, Quentin, Tyler and Bro enjoying a beer at one of the bars

Quentin lost his flipflops further up river, and lo and behold they appeared on the feet of a local lady down river who claims to have had them 'for ages'. Hmmmm.

The World’s Longest Night Bus

So you know when your bus is supposed to take 15 hours, but it ends up taking 26?! Yeah, that. 

But on the plus side we did get to spend an entire day of our lives lying in mini pods on a neon-infused mega-bus between Hoi An and Vientiane.

Here is the evidence…

(Yes that is a TV and yes it did play Vietnamese music videos for almost the entire journey)

Yay we're in Laos!

The Dream that is Hoi An

Hoi An is probably one of the most beautiful towns we’ve ever been to. We simply loved it here, and were it not for the fact that we are running out of time and have so much more we want to see, then we would happily have stayed here for a week. In the end we spent four nights in this picturesque little town which is an endless maze of cobbled streets and old buildings, charming little cafes, tasteful bars, wonderful food and a lovely atmosphere of hustle and bustle. At night lanterns are lit throughout the old town giving it a wonderful soft-orange glow and a marvellous dose of charm. Little old ladies sell candles to tourists who then float them down the river, which (if you're not a litter-nazi like us) is really rather pretty. 

We stayed in two delightful little homestays (in the first one we even got serenaded at breakfast by our rather crazy host who within 5 minutes of meeting us had told us in a very loud conspiring whisper that the North Vietnamese had kidnapped two of his dogs and eaten them…) and made full use of their free bikes which we pootled around on all day and all night. It was so nice to be back on a bike, and so liberating being able to travel wherever you like without having to haggle or part with our precious cash. We cycled to the beach, we got some clothes tailor-made (Hoi An is famous for this and it was an experience in itself), ate amazing street food, strolled around the shops wishing we could buy everything and drank copious amounts of iced-coffee in adorable little cafes.

Looking a bit Mr Darcy in his half-finished suit 

We also took a boat trip to the nearby islands and somehow found ourselves on a half-day organised tour with a boatload of Vietnamese. They were all dressed up to the nines with immaculate makeup, fancy hairstyles, big hats to hide from the Sun (why on earth you'd want to go to the beach when your hatred of the Sun is Vampire-esque in its severity) and some of the ladies even had a change of wardrobe for half-way through the trip. We rocked up in beach gear and I was having one of my distinctly spotty, sweat-moustache episodes and felt like the biggest tramp all day next to these pristine women without a bead of sweat between them or their carefully-tweezed upper lips. We spent the day trying to avoid Selfie-Central and escape the dreaded umbrella-wielding guide who the Vietnamese devotedly followed around like he was the Pied Piper, but did enjoy a lovely little snorkel, made a Vietnamese friend who has invited us to stay with her and a had lovely lunch for two on the beach (we were the only ones given our own table...clearly didn't want to mix with The Sweaty Ones).

Vietnamese ladies in what I swear must be standard-issue hats...

But anyway, in case you hadn’t guessed, we LOVED Hoi An-it is definitely one of our favourite places we’ve been so far, and we were sorry to leave.

Night Train to Hoi An

Night train to Hoi An

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to see any more time in South Vietnam so we hopped on a 17-hour night train all the way up the coast to Hoi An. The train was a cool experience! We shared a little scruffy cabin with a funny little Vietnamese couple who were very smiley and tried to talk to us all the time despite the fact that it was established within about 2 minutes of meeting each other that they didn’t speak a word of English and we don’t speak a word of Vietnamese. This in no way deterred them though, and they continued to speak to us, using a multitude of crazy hand gestures like some sort of deranged baseball coach to supplement their chatting, which still made absolutely no sense to us whatsoever. We would try and mime back at them to try to figure out what they were saying but this just invariably drove them into fits of giggles, and I swear just spurred them on. I’d love to know what they were trying to say.

We have slight getting-our-camera out paranoia at the moment, so no photos. Here's a picture of a train instead.

I swear someone was having a practical joke at our expense-The husband had an insanely annoying Trigger-Happy TV-esque ring tone on his phone which would go off about twice every hour, and would be followed by one of them gabbling down the phone in such a high pitch I was surprised bats weren’t flying through the window to have a chinwag.

Probably their most shining  moment though was at 6am when the first light hit the sky, they both sat bolt upright, threw open the curtains AND the door, and the wife felt this would be the perfect time to play music…yes MUSIC on her phone. As loud as it would go. As it happens I quite like Jessie J, but I don’t much enjoy being woken up by her at ridiculous o’clock when I should be fast asleep. I thought Brodie was going to explode, but he restrained himself to just a finger-on-lips shhhh and thankfully this was one hand-gesture she understood, but by that time we were both wide-away too. Ah the joys of travel! J

I also don't have any pictures of them, so here's a funny picture of some funny happy old Vietnamese people I found on the internet

Good Mooooorning Vietnam!

Ho Chi Minh (Siagon) is a crazy, bustling, racing machine with 11 million inhabitants and 7 million motorbikes (that’s a pretty serious bike to person ratio) and we loved it! 

We spent 4 days here-two mainly trying to sort out our insurance claim and contact the Cambodian police (in vain) and another two being touristy and wondering around the streets soaking it all up, eating scrummy food and drinking ridiculously cheap beer. We visited the War Remnants museum (harrowing), the Cu Chi tunnels (muddy), the Reunification Palace (interesting), the zoo (by mistake), some random pagoda that we were recommended, but took us a decade to find due to our epic map-reading skills (although our detour did lead us to our first Street-Pho experience which was devine) and the pagoda was actually pretty crap (they had a giant turtle as a pet and so little water in the fish pond that the fish had to swim sideways), and did a tour of the Electronic Shops of Siagon in the pursuit of an external hard drive.

View from the rooftop bar 

The Cu Chi Tunnels (that's not me)

Entrance to one of the tunnels (that is me)

My conclusion from our recent Historical tourism activities?..War is a big fat pile of bullshit. There, isn't that profound.

Walking the streets of Siagon is an experience in itself-there’s no point in waiting for a gap in the traffic, so you just have to take a deep breath and walk. We were told before we arrived to “Act like a stone in a stream…walk slowly and predictably and the traffic will flow around you!” It’s absolutely true-our tactic is to grab hold of each other, do a little 3-2-1 count-down and then step out and just walk….you get this amazing rush of adrenaline and when you reach the other side you feel like whooping and applauding yourself for being alive! It’s actually pretty fun, and after a crappy few days with all of the camera business, a few life-threatening street-crosses was weirdly what all we needed to snap us out of our We’ve-just-been-robbed grump.

Yes, they even drive on the pavement when they can't be arsed to queue....

Yes, even the police!!

Our only complaint….Siagon is flipping rainy (it literally rained all day on one of the days and on one afternoon the entire street flooded knee-deep!), and while I don’t mind a bit of rain (especially when I have my trusty poncho), the bit that bugs me is that the whole bloody city is covered in shiny floor tiles. Who the hell thought floor tiles would be a good idea in a city with a monsoon season?! So in my must-wear-flipflops-at-all-costs defiance, I spent the entire time in Siagon slipping around like Bambi on ice. Joy.

The Jeopardy

Bro made the fatal mistake of saying…”We haven’t really had any jeopardy on our trip yet so far have we?!”. We clearly didn’t touch enough wood because lo and behold the following day his camera got stolen.

Any trip to the Cambodian Islands requires a trip to the infamous Sihanoukville....famous for being a magnet for inebriated Westerners and rather un-coincidentally famous for being a super-hotspot for muggings and thefts. We knew all this so tried to avoid going, but the bus timetables had other ideas so we had an enforced night at this beach resort. The annoyance of this was eased by the fact that we had good company in the shape of Emily, Chloe and Tom from Koh Rong who found themselves in a similar situation, and we managed to get a room with a pool and a free beer each thrown in for a glorious $6 between us!! Plus the sun finally came out so we had a rather relaxed afternoon by the pool with some delightful tattooed Europeans pumping out some marvellous Europop tunes (god I sound like a Grandma), followed by some beers on the beach, the World’s Biggest Pizza, and a few drinks with our jolly little crew.

You know you're staying in a classy joint when this is on the wall of your room...

It was 6.30am the following morning when the camera got stolen. I won’t go into details because it’s super boring, and we’ve just spent two days writing reports about it but essentially the bus driver of the minivan that picked us up from our hotel took Bro’s camera from his bag, including £100 cash, whilst he was driving (and we couldn’t see as our backpacks we in the way), and we didn’t realise until we’d reach Phnom Penh, by which time he was long gone. The doubly sucky thing is that our Cambodian visa ran out that night, so despite us delaying in PP while we tried to contact the bus company (who didn’t give a shit), the police and our embassy (all to no avail), we then had to get the last bus out of PP before our Visa expired. This means no Police report (despite trying our best from Ho Chi Minh City), and therefore potentially no insurance…we’re still waiting to hear on that.

After a lovely 4 weeks in Cambodia it’s a huge shame that our last memory of this country is a unhappy one. We know you get thieves in every country, but it does leave a sour taste in your mouth.

The silver linings?...Bro had backed up all of his photos/videos apart from the last 3 days, and as muggings go, it was probably the least traumatic kind you could experience, so really it’s just money and hassle at the end of the day. Hey ho!

Grumpy Old Woman Alert...

We’d written off the Cambodian islands as we’re here in rainy season and we were told the weather on the coast is notoriously bad. However, after speaking to one or two people who’d had a wonderful time there, we thought we’d hedge our bets and hop on a ferry to Koh Rong naively expecting remote beaches, crystal clear waters and relaxation (they’d been marketed as “like the Thai Islands before the tourists discovered them”). Unfortunately (admittedly through lack of research on our part), we arrived on what can only be described as a night club on a beach.

Our hostel-come-beach-bar, tastefully called 'Bongs'. It got 4.5 stars on trip advisor despite frequent reports of bug bugs, so that probably tells you a little about the expectations of the people staying there...

Yes the island is beautiful. Breath-taking even. And the beach clearly had once been stunning, but now the entire beachfront is crammed full of hostels-come-bars charging peanuts per night (we paid $8 for a bed and breakfast for 2!), and music pumps out from about 11am until the early hours of the following day. Don’t get me wrong, 21 year old Emma would have loved it (75 cent beers on tap!!), but 29 year old Emma doesn’t like getting woken up at 3am by her inebriated German neighbours (separated only by a partition) shouting to each other from the toilet “Jan! Jan! (Pronounced “Yaaahn”)...Wo bist du? Ich bin so betrunken, ich kann nicht sehen!”)…or something to that effect (in a ridiculously camp voice), or sharing the beach with sewage, litter, and the contents of Jan’s stomach from the night before.

It also rained. Lots. There’s not much to do when you’re stranded on a small island in the rain, and your communal space is shared with 20 hungover Australians.

A depressing fact is that this beach is actually home to a large native community who have lived here for generations. The village itself has now been pushed back behind the garish row of 30 or so guesthouses, and the tourists rule the town. We were told that the villagers largely appreciate the development as it provides jobs and income for an otherwise very poor community, but I can't help feeling that drunk westerners puking on your doorstep whilst your child tries to sleep against a backdrop of banging tunes, isn't a particular positive situation.

We did enjoy some beautiful walks though (one of which was supposed to take 45 minutes one way but ended up taking 5 hours in total and involved getting genuinely lost in the jungle…but that’s another story), and the island had some fabulous forest to explore. It also has some beautiful beaches that you can access if you’re happy to walk (and can turn a blind eye to the litter strewn across the otherwise beautiful sand), which are currently undeveloped. Currently being the operative word. Planning permission has been granted on most of the beaches of this island, and construction work is already started on some of the more remote beaches. There is also a huge road (the first on the island) being cut into the hillside like a giant sore, and we're told work on an airport is starting soon, undoubtedly opening the floodgates for a whole new wave of tourists and development. It's quite heart-breaking. A silver lining might be argued in that these islands certainly bring some much needed income to Cambodia in the form of cash-happy tourists, but the sad truth is that most of the accommodation is owned by Westerners, and any money going to the Government from what we gather is largely lining the pockets of corrupt Government officials, rather than being fed back into the economy for the benefit of the people.

Like Mantanni Island in Malaysia, you could still get a sense of what it must have been like before humans descended, and it saddens me to see the direction it's headed. We were devastated to hear that most of the development already there has been in the last 2 years...perhaps why it still has a reputation for being sleepy, quiet and un-visited (the reputation hasn't yet caught up with the reality perhaps?). It was a rather miserable realisation for Bro and I that we are a genuine part of the problem. The more people visit, the more it will be developed so this post is definitely more than a little hypocritical... Koh Rong certainly does feel depressingly doomed, and I once again find myself wondering what my future children are going to find when they explore the world....

We’d has the heads up from a friend we'd met earlier on that the neighbouring island was more sleepy than Koh Rong, so we’d finally had enough and decided to hop on a boat to Koh Rong Samloem.

The new (and rather beautiful) view from our new little chalet on Koh Rong Samloem...now this is what I'm talking about! It was so delightfully stormy that it had a lovely fresh breeze and reminded me of England!

This turned out to be a great idea, as despite the rain still lashing down and despite having to endure an incredibly hairy boat ride in very choppy seas, we ended up tucked away in a small sleepy cove which is only inhabited by the local village and a handful of travellers, who mainly like us were not fans of the Beast that is Koh Rong. We met 2 lovely Irish girls and a fellow Brit who had fled Koh Rong for similar reasons to us, so we all whiled away our time chatting about Father Ted (it was all rather Craggy Island-esque!) drinking coffee, exploring the shoreline, and curled up on the veranda of our little hut with a view of the sea while the storm raged around us. We even had a sudden 45minute burst of sunshine where we of course all dived onto the sand and got royally sunburned. Standard Brits.

The Killing Fields

I am ashamed to say that until we had a brutally enlightening conservation with a very friendly American back in February in his rental car in Christchurch, New Zealand, I had no idea that the people of Cambodia had such a horrific and devastating history, the worst events of which happened only in the decade before I was born. I’d heard vaguely of Pol Pot and knew that his name often appeared in sentences containing the likes of Mugabe, Amin and Hitler, but I couldn’t have told you where he came from or why his name was often included in such sinister company.

So I couldn’t have told you that between 1975 and 1979 Pol Pot was the head of a bitter and merciless regime known as the Khmer Rouge who ruled over Cambodia.

I couldn’t have told you that this “Khmer Rouge” enforced a strict Communist state in search of a Utopian ideal which included the eradication of anyone of intellect, with education, with Western ideals, city people who were affected by ‘Americanism’ or anyone remotely at risk of being against his regime, in exchange for a peasant workforce who he named the ‘Old People of Cambodia’ who work for the collective wealth of the people.

I couldn’t have told you that they were responsible for killing approximately 2 million innocent Cambodians (from a population of 8 million) in a period of only 4 years.

I couldn’t have told you that millions of Cambodians were forced out of the cities, separated from their families and made to work in horrific labour camps, often working over 12 hour days in the direct sun with only a few spoonfuls of rice as sustenance.

It baffles me that this seems to be such a little-known and little-understood smear on the history of human beings, and how the leaders and perpetrators of this regime have still to this day, not had to answer to their sins and stand trial, let alone pay for them.

Bro and I have just finished reading a book called ‘Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Land’ which chronicles the history of the Cambodian (Khmer) people from 1970 – 1998 when the book was written. It sounds like the Cambodian people have been monumentally let down by each of their respective Governments, from the International Community, including drastic failings by the UN to rebuild a devastated people after the toppling of Pol Pot’s regime in 1979 and unfortunately by themselves. Due to the International Community and vested Nations’ inclination to prioritise their own objectives over the interests of Cambodian people, they seem to have been let down time and time again. The Khmer Rouge remained in power for a decade even after Pol Pot’s regime was toppled by Vietnam in 1979, and to this day only 1 of the leaders of the regime has successfully been convicted for his crimes and this only after a long-drawn out trial which concluded in 2011, and even then he only received 35 years imprisonment for crimes of genocide. Yes that’s 35 years. Thousands of Khmer Rouge members simply slid back into society never to be made to answer to their crimes. 

The current Prime Minister Hun Sen is even an ex-Khmer Rouge Guerrilla (who defected in 1977).

So it was with some feeling of trepidation that Brodie, Alycia, Jeremy and I took a trip to what are known as The Killing Fields, a few kilometres outside Phnom Penh, something that I think any visitor to this scarred city must do. Choeung Ek, as it is called, is the final resting place of 8,895 innocent Cambodians. Most were brought here after being forced to ‘confess’ to being an enemy of the state. Of course almost all of those killed here were perfectly innocent citizens, who simply for some reason posed a threat to the Khmer Rouge ideal. A famous Khmer Rouge maxim is "Better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake."  Which may go some way in explaining how they managed to wipe out a quarter of their population in less than 4 years.

Another Khmer Rouge saying is “If you want to remove the grass you have to kill the roots”…and it is because of this second statement that thousands of women, children and babies were amongst those victims of Choeung Ek. Prisoners weren’t detained there, they were simply driven in in busloads each evening, processed, and walked out one by one to the freshest mass graves, and one by one killed by which ever means possible (bullets were scarce and valuable so many different brutal methods were employed). Then their bodies were dragged into the grave. Over 50 mass graves were discovered here. The site is surreally peaceful and is very sensitively put together. You are given headphones as you walk in, and a softly-spoken Cambodian guides you gently around the site amid the dappled shade of trees. The same trees that watched the brutal massacre of those thousands of innocents a mere 40 years ago.

After Pol Pot’s regime was toppled, the site was discovered and Cambodians went about the gruelling business of retrieving the many remains of the bodies, and as such, the mass graves are now only evident by deep depressions in the ground. However, as you walk around, you begin to notice fabric peaking through the soil beneath your feet. Even though most of the bodies were recovered, many remain buried, and during the rainy season the water table rises, and clothes and even bones start to emerge at the surface. We didn’t feel it was appropriate to wonder around wielding cameras, so this is the only photo we took. You can see some fabric emerging through the soil.

Feeling rather emotionally drained, we then took the taxi to S21. This is a former school in the Capital which was taken over during the regime and used as a detainment camp and torture prison. 

Again thousands of innocent Cambodians were brought here and made to confess to all sorts of crimes under extreme torture and duress. 15,000 people are believed to have lost their lives here, and only 6 people are known to have survived. Visiting this prison is an extremely harrowing experience. The KR were extremely diligent at documenting their crimes, and the photographs of thousands of their victims can be seen on the wall. Many of them taken on arrival, many of them taken after death. 

I know this has been a very heavy post, but I make no apology for it as this an incredibly important event in recent history and is a harrowing story which I feel needs to be shared. The Cambodian people has suffered so very deeply, and the shadow from these events still lingers over this tattered country. It makes you marvel even more over this gentle people’s admiral resilience, and over that well known Khmer smile. 

Kampot

After a few days in Phnom Penh, we caught the bus to the small town of Kampot which is a lovely sleepy French colonial town, nestled on the bank of a river. It was here that we spent two lovely days enjoying the local cafes, bars and eateries (all very charming, and all very cheap!), and riding around on a zippy little scooter. $3 of petrol lasted us an entire day (and we were given free cookies when we filled up! Happy days), and we enjoyed tootling around town, visiting bathing spots on the river, and driving through a National Park. 

Me on the moped

The National Park part involved driving 40km up a massive hill through actually some quite nice jungle (the only stretch of which we’ve really seen in our whole time in Cambodia), to what was supposed to be a beautiful viewing site at the top! Cambodia being Cambodia though, apparently some rich people decided it would be a good idea to build a giant casino at the top. Yes, that’s a giant Casino 40km into the middle of a National Park. Apparently no-one ever goes to it though as it’s a) flippin’ expensive and it’s fair to say that Cambodian people are by and large pretty hard up, and b) (did I mention this?!!) It’s 40km into a National Park!!!

Unfortunately we never got to see this monstrosity, or the wonderful views we were promised, as we were about 37km into our drive when the big fat black clouds above us let rip, and a giant lightning bolt flew out of the sky and hit a tree not far in front of us. We’re not stupid and we didn’t fancy a barbequing so we swiftly turned on our heel and fled back down the hillside in the rain.

A fab day though, and a nice little adventure. We'd defnitely recommend Kampot if you're headed that way. 

The beautiful sunset looking across the river from Kampot