It's COLD!!! :D

I just cannot qwell my excitement, so i had to mail and tell you that it's cold outside!!!! This is sooooo exciting, i haven't felt general coldness for 4 months - it must be, like 13*c or something. v v v cool. Today, well, this evening (it was a very pleasent -english summer -tmperature today) i've had hot chocolate, soup (really really strange soup - tomato, but clear and it looked like someone had badly failed to poach an egg in it - not good...) and i'm wearing my fleece! Oh, the excitement :D

I must explain i guess that we've relocated from Saigon, had one day on a rather nice 21km beach and went sliding on the dunes, and now we're in DaLat which is in the southern central hghlands (the mountains...) and so the climate it wicked. It's hot in the day but with a nice cool breeze and then i the evening it's cool-->cold . It's just soo nice and my hair has regained some degree of normality to - it's almost stranight and not frizzy! hehehe... simple things... :D :D

anywayz, i shall stop wasting precious minutes of your life telling you how wonderfully cold it is! (I've never been so pleased with cold in all my entire life :D )

Cambodia to Vietnam

The lure of Laos having proved to much for us (we never meant to go there originally... oops), we didn't have vast amounts of time to spend in Cambodia, so it was something of a whistle-stop tour for us (even more so than the rest of our trip...).
Having endured the second worst bus journey of our trip on a road closely resembling the surface of the moon and resulting in an experience they could probably have charged a lot of money for if they had called it an indepth vibro-massage, we finally arrived at Siem Reap - home of not a lot except the whole of Angkor Wat.
Despite the fact cambodia is supposed to be a relatively cheap country, we spent an absolute fortune here in just two days. Got a 3 day pass for all of the temples - $40!!! ouch! (which are spread out over a really huge area. The temples of angkor made a really refreshing change from thailand, cos they're mostly ruined and have none of the glitz and glam. They're also cool because they have insides and you can go exploring and the cambodians have never ever heard of health and safety - woohoo!! :D Just think about all the castles at home that are ruined and then take away all of the no entry signs - lots of big holes, rubble everywhere, andmassive arches that are falling down and have helpfully been propped up by one or two thin branches - quite scary, but very fun... there's also a couple of really cool temples that have been taken over by the trees and the roots have become part of the structure and vice versa. see http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=ta%20phrom%20trees&sa=N&tab=wi v v cool.

Having got priced out of seeing anymore at siem reap we moved onto Phnom Penh. Saw the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda - wasn't that impressed.

The next day we had a somewhat more sobering experience visiting S21 and the Killing Fields as a poignant reminder of the Khmer Rouge and what they did to cmbodia. S21 is a school which was taken over and used as a prison and interrogation/torture unit. They've left it pretty much as it was found and there are some intruging exhibitions with stories of the people killed there, surprisingly on both sides (Khmer rouge and resistance seemed to be killed in equal number in the end... :o( ). They had truely horrific methods of torture there and i think pactially everyone went through it too. I just don't understand how anyone can even contemplate doing that to sooo many people. They estimate that roughly 20,000 people that went through there and know of only 7 that left alive. hmm...
Next we went to the Killing fields whih is just werid. It's one of hundreds of sites across cambodia where people were taken and beaten to death and dumped in mass graves or simply buried alive and lft to suffocate. Nice... In the centre they've built a huge temple to remember them and the centre is filled with thousands of skulls that have been exhumed from the graves. You can wander around and there's signs saying what what was in each ("846 women and children, mostly found naked." springs to mind) there's bits of rags/cloths still half buried inthe ground, along with a few pieces of bone that weren't taken up. It's absolutely incredibly, in the worst way. I'd say may it never happen again, it's just a shame to think that there are parts of the world where things like this are still going on, and i really wish there was something we could do to stop them.

Having got thouroughly depressed, and since we were already eating into our visa for vietnamwe decided it was time to moved on.

...and so on to Vietnam....

We like vietnam. Its much more 'real' than Thailand. Having spent a mere 5 days in Cambodia we moved onto vietnam va boat - good choice given the 2 hour bus journey to the boat which was a little like being on a big dipper - i just don't understand how a road can look soooo smooth and be soooo bumpy!

Spent the last 3 days on an organized tour of the Mekong Delta doing alsorts of things that involved a lot of boats, a home stay, traditional food, tours, coconut sweets and banana wine... The places we were staying have no signs in english or french and no one speaks any english - so we have to try alot harder - esp. to get vegetarian food. think we might get a little stuck here - they don't do any vegetarian food - it all has crabs or snakes or weird stuff in it... hehe... i guess we'll live!

We just arrived in Ho Chi Minh/Saigon yesturday and are exploring today and doing general admin-y stuff... It seems like a really nice city and has a nice selection of shops and galleries (with copies of just about every famous painting ever) and cafes - we like. It's gonna be expensive for us though, if we not careful, because all the street sellers totally have us down to a tee. I explain; in every other country we've been to there are quantities of street sellers that wander around the cafes and bars and try to ell you random stuff while you eat, which is fine cos they're mildly entertaining in their persistance and are selling things like wooden frogs, hats with bells on, bracelets that are too small, bamboo flutes or jaw harps, or comical giant working lighters - now you can understand how we could resist purchasing suh items with little difficulty (except perhaps the giant lighter, which appeals rather a lot (you can just imagine it - "you got a light?" "well, yes, actually *reveal giant scary lighter*)) It would be quite cool, but given that it wouldn't fit in my bag, i'd never have the nerve to actually offer it to anyone, and given that the airlines don't like normal lights, they might object to one that's at least a foot high... However, every street seller here, goes around the cafes in the evening, when you winding down with the most ginormous pile of really decent books at really cheap prices - last night we bought four when we'd not meant to buy any!! We're totally doomed! (but it is rather cool :D )

In the next few days we're going to visit the famous tunnels the Vietnamese used in the war (specially enlarged, now, for fat westerners!) then head up the coast until we get to Hanoi and Ha Long Bay where w plan on ending our tip together! Then off on my own to 'merica and NZ!!! It seems soooo close to coming home now but i still have just oover 6 weeks.... hmmm... weird.

Life's a beach!

After a couple more days of exploring Chiang Mai - which is a lovely chilled out (and quite refreshing to be abvle to walk around it without having a bucket of water chucked down your back (ala songkran))- we had decided on a whim to visit Laos aswell... just cos everyone everywhere said we should - damned peer pressure.... !? hehehe... so of we wander to get a traditional slow boat down the mekong to the middle of Laos (Luang Prabang). This is reportedly one of the most uncomfortable horrible things you can choose to do since it's two days of 7 hours sat on wooden benches with no leg room, but it was actaully a really nice couple of days - read books, sat doing nohthing and then read some more - fun :D

Laos is, like everyone says, a wicked country - we original;ly missed it out or plans because it didn't l;ook like thetre's much to do there - and there isn't really, but it''s an awesome place just to be - some how we spent over a week there without even meaning to - i've no idea wheer the time went! Um... we saw some more temples, watched the sunset over the mekong, went kayaking ont he mekong with two girls that we 'knew' (sat together on a bus for 10 mintues) from chiangmai and had run into again... then visisted a cave and thw Whisky village where they make Laolao -lao rice wine - and very nice it is too! The only problem with laos is that just about all the locals are in bed by 10pm... soooo early and there's a lack of anything much to do in the evening - except Hive - so i guess that just makes it easier to meet other foreigners... weird place though - because you all get the slow boat in together, you cant wander around town with out there being someone you know or some one to say hi to - v nice atmosphere.
After Luang Prabang we spent a couple of days in Vientiane - Laos' capital. Which is much like luang prabang, but bigger and with less of the charm... didn't stay there too long, then headed back to thailand to get to the beaches... :D

So, after another 16 hour bus/boat journey (last night on train back we worked outthat we've spent upwards of 90 hours on long distance buses etc so far!) we arrived on Ko Phangan and first sepnt 2 days up the north of the island reading and relaxing in hammocks. Theer after we headed down to the 'party beach' of haad rin. After being initially a little disapointed (alright beach,. but ive seen better, and not much to do in town) we soon got into the swing of things. Get up at 11am/12pm and laze around on the beach until around 6pm when you get dinner and maybe watch sdsome of the 24 hours friends or simpsons episiodes that some cafes play - then maybe move on to another cafe/bar anmd watch one of the nightly free films on offer. Head down to the beach around 10.30pm where there are plenty of bars and you can sit on the sand and watch the fire shows (with fire poi/puy and fire staffs and some of the most beautiful talented guys you're ever liekly to see on a beach). After that, me and nna being little obsessed with puy, we went and asked the guys if we could use their paraffin and then spent the rest of the night playing with the fire puy - sooooo much fun, although we did end up going back every morning completely covered in soot and stinking of paraffin... hohum... great fun though. On our last night there we went to one of the islands half moon parties (since we don't have time to stay til full moon - alas) which is actually not on the beach but in a cool forest setting with lots of glowy uv things - wicked place for a party.

After that, despite our initial questions as to whether to go to the beaches at all, we really didn't want to leave - sooo much fun - but cambodia and vietnam beckon and thus we found ourselves on a lovely over night train back to bangkok last night. Now i'm really really tired.

I guess we'll probably go to cambodia either tomorrow or day after, and spend as little time as possible doing angkor wat and pnom penh and around so that we can use all our visa for Vietnam for the remainder of our time...

I can't believ how quickly time's going - me and anna have been travelling for a month already, which is prastcvailly half our time to gether and then i've only a couple of weeks and i'm home again!!!