Stuff

My generalisations and inexpert opinions of SE Asia:

- you can easily fit 5 people on a motorbike, or 2 and a few pigs.

- if you buy a ticket for a bus, it does not mean you have a seat, even for a 9 hour journey; children are never entitled to their own seat.

- cats, dogs, pigs, cows, goats, chickens, buffalo and ducks are all free range and very good at crossing roads.

- the French left the legacy of how to make good bread in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, so don't make the mistake of thinking you'll get skinny by just eating lots of rice and vegetables cos the bakeries are amazing.

- coca cola and pringles own the world and can be bought anywhere, even in tiny remote villages in the middle of nowhere, although the pringle flavours can be interesting: seaweed, crab, squid, hazelnut & blueberry?

- if it moves, it can be eaten eg: spiders, snake, crickets, dogs.

- if the temperature drops below 20*C, hats, gloves and wooly jumpers are required.

- when travelling on long journeys by local transport be prepared for fellow travellers vomiting a lot! even if the train, coach or bus is barely moving, for this reason all transport provides sick bags. Tiger balm is good to disguise the smell.

- when overtaking on a bend just beep, it will be fine!

- PJ's are a good look and are often worn out and about, especially by young Cambodian women.

- bum guns are great and much cleaner than using toilet paper, but be warned, high water pressure can be painful.

- if you need to blow your nose, don't waste tissue, just snort it up and spit it out.

- little white kids are much more interesting to photograph than waterfalls, temples or volcanoes, they are also nice to stroke, cuddle, pick up, pinch and occasionally
sniff.

Location: SE Asia

Dad, my new wallet's much better than your purse...

December 27th, 2010

...2am, Monday, there's a knock on the sliding door of our four berth cabin. The train has ground to a halt with a hiss of brakes. Time to get off and visit those charismatic customs lads at the Vietnamese border.
We boarded this locomotive in Hanoi at 9.40 in the evening and managed to get off to sleep pretty much straight away, safe in the knowledge that we faced this interruption in the early hours.

Nastassja Charlotte Leith, is always the most difficult to get started in the morning and we're the last off the train and into the bleak room where everyone stands around silent, having handed their passports over, cold and completely knackered. Three ugly bruisers stare out of a hatch, trying to catch a glimpse of tell tale sweaty brow. But all is in order and we're handed back our mugshots to continue on our journey to Nanning. As we turn to leave, the three little meatheads seem to lighten up and we are wished a happy new year and good luck on our journey.

An hour later, we have to repeat this bloody ritual, only this time it's for the Chinese Border police and we have to clear our cabin of all our luggage, take it from the train and present it to them at their xray contraption.
Gotta say, Stash and Oskar are absolute stars. They just get on with this, taking it all in their stride and no one, but no one is ever in a better mood than Oskar first thing in the morning, however early it is! His sister is a night owl, deffo.

Somewhere between five or six, I wake with golden sunshine seeping in through the curtain at the small window. I reach and peel it back to behold a backdrop of green landscapes, huge rock formations and lakes bathed in sweeping fog. It is quite beautiful. We are in China. So far, so good.

Christmas feels to be over for us already. That was a quick one, but quite a nice little one. Liz got hold of a simcard and a number which enabled people to call us for 4p a minute, so we spoke to our families and i got a call from my friend Murder, just before we left on Boxing night.
We'd visited a Cathedral that morning, a short walk from our hotel, a large nativity scene at one side of the entrance with a huge blue star trailing above. Inside, a woman sang and conducted a service in French.

We saw a tiny dog in a t shirt, sniffing around the stalls at the side of the road opposite. We had a running with a taxi driver who liked my earring and tried to charge us forty odd quid for a short journey to the Presidential Palace. Liz told him, " you are a bad man! " And he didn't get paid anything like he'd attempted to rip from us.

Ho Chi Minh lived and worked at this great pad between December '54 and September '69 and among other things on display are his bed in the house on stilts, fishpond, three of his cars and an orchard. It seems he was very well liked indeed. On the way in we had someone blow a school whistle at us and we stopped dead as if playtime was over. Someone barked and growled a bit, beckoning us to the ticket office where you have to pay if you are a tourist. ( How can they tell who is and who ain't? )

As always seems to be the case, we end up saying goodbye to Hanoi, feeling sad that we are leaving but extremely lucky and glad to have been. Our Christmas in Vietnam, 2010...and what a bunch of stars!

Location:Hanoi - Nanning - Guilin

Christmas evening / Christmas day ( sore throats, gongs and new suitcases )

Christmas eve pm
Complete and utter beautiful Bedlam

KFC Santa, water puppets and balloons

Two very excited children
Liz on rice wine punch, Hotel Xmas party

Christmas party cake, Stasha's new case
The beautiful folk of Le Pub, Xmas dinner

Location:Hanoi

Happy Christmas 2010

So here it is then! We've all made it to another Christmas, though none of this brood have ever been this far away from home at this time of year. This evening on this Christmas eve, the staff of the Hong Ngoc hotel are laying on a party for all guests, food and drink aplenty promised, kicking off at 7pm. Be rude not to have a bit of that really, so we'll end up at that when we return from a water puppet show we've booked, being held somewhere near Sword lake. Then we can crawl off up to bed when we like.

Today started with hotel buffet breakfast, Oskar had two bowls of coco pops for mains and cake and chips "for desert".

We walked some of this off passing girls selling balloons, students trying to sell us toothpicks...one guy, a walking shoe repair kit, was knelt squeezing glue along the sole of my apparently damaged sandal before he'd even introduced himself! I made it more than clear I wasn't up for anything he had on offer but then he pulled a rag out,quickly daubing black polish onto it and proceeded to give my left one a good buffing. He finally got the message and left with his cloth between his legs.

Our second attempt at visiting the Revolution museum almost failed when we turned up twenty minutes before it closed it's doors for lunch. We were allowed free entry but had to run round and enjoy an abbreviated tour, taking in a guillotine put into place by the French in the late forties. This removed the head of many a Vietnamese revolutionary. Many of the photographs taken at various troubled times throughout The Franco-Viet Min war when the Vietnamese were led by Ho Chi Min, are nothing short of disturbing, more than illustrating some of the diabolical behaviour of the French soldiers. Happy days.

Ok, time up. You've had your twenty minutes, now be gone! Go visit that green, murky lake where them turtles are supposed to hang out. Go. Now!!
Walking back and Liz was in need of a huge, Christmas eve wee wee, so we stopped at some public conveniences where hanging, were seven or eight bird cages.
"Oh not again," I thought to myself, but these birds were fine. All very well looked after by the toilet lady who would shout "Oi" to anyone who attempted to wee for free, a strawberry in each and every cage.
We crossed a bridge and found the remains of the giant turtle found in the lake many years ago. Preserved in a glass box, it really was as big as they say.
Hanoi air is filled with Christmas songs, Wham's "last Christmas" and all the familiar stuff from the past, so it was nice to lunch in an English run bar that played The Smiths, Bowie and The Specials.
Right, The Man on reception let the kids borrow his iPhone which he downloaded the new Harry Potter movie onto for them, so now that they look done with it, cracking up to a Mister Bean Christmas special on tv, I'd best return it. It's Christmas! Here we go then! Over and out.

Location:Hanoi

Sleepless in Hanoi

23rd December 2010



Awoke at two in the morning to find Nadine perched at the end of the bed. She didn't offer any explanation as to why she was there, in fact she said nothing at all. She simply wanted to keep me awake for the hell of it. So I went to the toilet and read some more of my book by Andy Summers until I was allowed to sleep again.

Today we all got up earlier than we've managed in a long time, went and had our buffet breakfast which is quite an amazing experience, has to be said, bid farewell to the Man, quite the nicest hotel guy we've had the pleasure to meet, which is saying something, took to the streets and went in search of some last minute Christmas gifts.
It is quite a mad thing trying to walk anywhere around here, traffic comes from all over the place, yet sticking to a path for more than twenty feet is almost impossible. Apart from a total lack of any parking restriction, which means scooters and bikes park up all over any walkways you may try and take, there are quite often people sitting out cooking with Woks of boiling fat, people making clothes, people burning bits of paper, people just being people...
That's not to say it isn't fun though.
We visited a big old Vietnamese house with three resident minor birds which kept the kids amused for quite some time, taught us all how to say hello in Vietnamese! Lovely Bonsai trees...

Jumped into a couple of cycle type Tuk Tuk things and asked them to take us to the cinema, where we watched the latest Narnia film. Best thing about it is the score by David Arnold. Harry Potter and the deathly hallows, which we saw yesterday, is absolutely brilliant. I had never seen any of the previous movies all the way through but the kids love them. I was blown away by it, didn't want it to end!

On the way back we passed Sword lake, where turtles live and occasionally pop up
and bring good luck to any lucky soul who sets eyes on them. A very large specimen, some two metres in length, was spotted some time back. Lucky the one who saw him.
Cartoon Mister Bean! Spot on!

Location:Earth

Them Stinking Pink Eggs

21st December 2010...Ooh, it's getting close isn't it...

So anyway, it turns out those pink eggs are in fact dyed to keep them apart from the normal ones which won't poison us. When I asked a male stripper what and why, he basically said they were kind of black inside and not very nice with it. A Chinese thing that has made it here to lovely Luang Prabang. So he didn't exactly sell them to us.
We loved Luang Prabang a lot. We loved the Indian restaurant over the road from our hotel, which we may have visited three or four times in six days, we loved the ladies who just about ran our guesthouse, the atmosphere, the people, the guy who took us to the waterfalls that Stash and Oskar dived into, he and his little boy who ran us to the airport when we left, Jo Ma bakery, the night markets, the music spilling out into the ever so slightly chilly night air...

...the spider who inhabited our bathroom the whole time we were there, the moon bears we saw at the bear sanctuary,the Australian lady we met at the post office who ended up hanging out at the same guesthouse with her mum and two sons...

...yes, it has been very good to us. But now to Hanoi. Farewell giant Buddha, beautiful sour Nadine and stinking pink eggs, hello crazy, insane, mesmerising Hanoi.

Laos looked utterly beautiful from the sky, like we were floating over another planet.
Came back down to this one with a crash, but by day two, we're back on form, Stash knocking street dealers down in price for some decorations which later grace our lovely hotel room, which we shouldn't actually be in. We had another but the television didn't work after i destroyed the ariel trying to get a better picture. Liz charmed the guy on the desk, explaining that the kids would die without tv for the Yuletide period and after giving up on trying to fix the set, they moved us to a new suite, quite a lot bigger, with a balcony and computer. So, home for the next five nights. Thankyou Mister nice man on the desk. Thankyou Elizabeth.
Thankyou Laos.

Location:From Luang Prabang to Hanoi

17th December 2010

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...they say a snow year's a good year...

Location:Luang Prabang

Nadine and her tiny prisoners

16th December 2010...

Christmas is coming. Actually it's here! It's everywhere and it's bloody brilliant! Santa stands beside the doorway of our guesthouse here in Luang Prabang. He's as tall as me! We've stuck up a few decorations in our room. Liz has set up an advent calendar on her iPad for Nastassja and Oskar. Every morning begins with this before they get dressed. At breakfast today we were served by young Laos geezers in Santa hats. Who says they don't celebrate it here!?

Last night we watched "Enchanted" and "On her Majestys secret service". Both have a very Christmas vibe. Oh shit, this is actually starting to make me feel homesick. I'm starting to long for the freezing cold 5.30 am starts back in Morden. I want CK and all the boys at Kennington Park. I want Mummy! But hang on, what's this? Pink eggs?

We spent much of today, post Pink eggs shocker, doing a very relaxed walking tour around the town, stopping off at a few temples where the monks hang out. One group had a pet monkey called Mickey who they'd adopted from someone bitten a few times too many by the little feller.

One of the monks in particular, seemed to know how to handle the little monkey who is probably in very safe hands with these men of very bright orange robe. These guys even have orange towels, you could see them hanging out on their washing lines.

We came to the foot of a very large hill called Pho Si. Liz had wanted us to come here for sunset. Here we were, early afternoon and it was extremely hot at this point. We toyed with blowing this one out till later but a pretty lady called Nadine beckoned us to where she was seated. In front of her were several tiny cages, each housing a pair of very small but perfectly formed birds.
She smiled and began to explain that these tiny birds were her prisoners, but if we were to pay her 20,000 Kip ( about two quid ) for one of the cages, we could then take it to the top of these huge slopes and set these poor creatures free, bringing us all much, much luck.
" Go on my bald Prince " she purred, " everything deserves a second chance."
So we payed for two cages and proceeded to carry the four prisoners up some 190
Steps to the top of the hill. It was incredibly hot and we were in grave danger of melting, so before we turned to liquid we pulled at the tiny bars of the cages until there were gaps big enough to allow escape. And then they were gone.
I heard Stash and Oskar whispering that they wanted to spend their Christmas money on freeing the rest of the birds down there with Nadine, so beautiful yet so ugly.
High up there on the hill was a cave, with a big fat Buddha sat inside it. Turns out, when real live Buddhas walked the Earth, they were in fact giants. We saw the footprint of one of them up there on the hill and it is huge, with toes as big as eggplants.

There are also the remains of a Russian anti aircraft cannon which may have been instrumental in bringing this Buddha down. I wonder if I can talk Liz and the kids into going for a curry tonight?

Location:Luang Prabang

Cakey Wakey

This country is seriously laid back. We had rushed to breakfast at 6 to allow a stupid amount of time to make a 7.30 bus and we were still in danger of not making it in time. Things just happen at a different pace around here, when they happen.
Breakfast finally appeared, so we shovelled our omelettes and boiled eggs down in the fifteen or so minutes we were left with and bid farewell to Mrs Bon Appetitti (her spelling, not mine),her two beloved dogs and a single puppy. We had spent two nights at her small, slightly run down but friendly guesthouse while searching for that big 7km cave that runs through the mountain.

ALL ABOARD THE SKYLARK!! It's six hours of joy to Vientiane. Six hours of people clearing their throats (we're talking fully fledged snorting up a green one) and for our entertainment, music videos with themes that seem to be set around domestic situations, for instance, man gets up and writes a shopping list, (into chorus) man visits a supermarket. Another featured a girl who gets a bit of a runny nose. Has to be said, some of the music is quite interesting.
Nastassja ended up sitting next to a lovely Laos girl who had a pretty damn fine Anglo Saxon tongue. She took a few pics of Stash on her mobile and bought her a bottle of orange from the refreshment ladies who randomly board the coach for a mile or however long it takes to walk up and down the bus selling their stuff, before hopping off again.

Things is getting very festive in these parts and the kids are very excited.  So too are we, though it's still weird passing through shops and bars with decorations and Christmas trees when you're in shorts and tee shirts.

So, Vientiane.  We stayed a couple of nights in a sexy hotel, found a good Indian. Did a bit of a walking tour which took us along Th Lan Xang, a street described as the Champs Elysees of Laos. Visited a bloody humongous Sunday market where we attempted some Christmas shopping.  Got told to put my camera away as we passed the U S Embassy,  I was pointing it at That Dam,  one of the towns oldest Buddhist stupas.  Bit of a Khmer vibe to that one actually.

Walked along the riverfront, not much river there at present though, where art thou Mekong?
It's just a really nice little town to spend a couple of days in. The end.

Now, we decided to try our luck with a night bus for the next leg of our journey, so we specifically booked a VIP bus which included a pickup from our hotel at 6pm to shuttle us to the big fancy bed on wheels. Actually, it didn't have bunks, they're not allowed on that stretch as the roads are too bendy. So, we're on this Nightbus and amazingly, tonight we have all the seats we've paid for, one each. This is a first, normally the kids get squeezed together into one seat if they're lucky, South East Asian transport companies always overbook by at least ten people. We're 5 minutes into the journey and a guy asks where the toilet is located. Unfortunately there isn't one because the coach dudes have piled all kinds of luggage, boxes, tables and crates in front of it. It's rammed down there and there's a rope thing tying the emergency exit shut. I start to feel for the German guy sat a few seats away from me, he's just coming to the end of another can of Beerlaos. That's gonna hurt in about half an hour! Oh, but here comes a man with a cake each for us all, something nice for us to munch on for the long journey. You can't take a piss when you want to but you can have a nice cakey wakey.
Oh and of course, as sure as eggs is eggs, at around 12.30 am, the plastic stools come out and are placed down the centre of the bus as another ten poor sods hop on to join us for the journey. Love em.
As the darkness began to lift at around 5.30, we were treated to some spectacular views of the mountains shrouded by fog. At 8 o'clock sharp, some thirteen hours after we'd left our hotel, we arrive in Luang Prabang Province. Soon be Christmas.

Location:S E ASIA

A small little something, Nastassja Leith

Animals is what I love. I will love them till I die. I could write about them, type about them, anything about them; I wish I had a pet, dog, cat, mouse, hamster, rat, gerbil, chicken, duck, pig, cow, horse, fish, frog, turtle, tortoise anything I will love them till I die remember how you treat them and never beat them.

I love pets by Nastassja XXXXXXX

Currently on our iPods and DS things...

Liz is enjoying The White Album, by The Beatles
Oskar is rocking out to A Thousand Suns, by Linkin Park
Stash has been playing Mario Cart on her DS, so has Oskar
Bob is doing everything he has by Jaga Jazzist, especially
Toccata. Also, Obsession by Killing Joke and the brilliant
Everything Everything album.

Oskar and Nastassja's blog about the cave

...back in Laos

Stash says, " We went to this massive and extremely long cave but the day before that we were staying in a massive and extremely 'tall' hotel
On our last day there we had our last buffet breakfast and then enjoyed not a very nice squashed mini - bus journey to a bus station where we caught another squashy bus journey to Laos. We then was dropped off in the middle of know where on the side of the road with heavy bags then having to walk for miles with our bags on our backs, looking in villages trying to find this mysterious guest house with a swimming pool. When we did get there we found out there was no swimming pool at all but it was a nice hotel and it had wonderful staff and the person that we liked the most was the one that did the cooking,cleaning and took us to the most amazing cave in the world which Oskar is going to write about."

Oskar says "I am not!"

Stash says "yes you are!"

Oskar says "fine then, we went to this cave. It was 7 km. Deep under the mountain we got wet not so wet. But it was very good. Sorry I am just going to laugh my head off. I am going to write now. When we came out of the cave we stopped for a break at a little place where we found a lost chick this lady gave it to us and we had fun stroking and holding this cute little chick and now it is tucked up in a cute little bed."

Some pics of the cave, both inside and out

This is us rowing back into the cave after a Pepsi break!

Thank you for listening ,see you on the other side bye

Location:Tham Kong Lo - Laos

Malaria

God I feel terrible. It makes no difference whether I sit back, sit forward, stretch out or ball up, everything hurts. I woke up at four this morning with a temperature and flu like symptoms and frankly the last place I want to be is on this train doing a ten hour journey.  Liz did query malaria at one point, but i don't think it's that.
Poor Cheryl Cole (or is it back to Tweedy?)
This journey takes us to Vinh, where we'll spend a night or two before carrying on back across the border into Laos where there is still much to see, taste and smell.

So, that was three wonderful days and nights in Hoi An, which turned out to be a bit of a high note. Though it rained the first day as hard as it snowed in England, the old town was charming, lit by hanging orange lanterns and decked in places with fairy lights and Christmas trees. The people are wonderful, especially beautiful were all the ladies at the tailors, who measured us up for some clothing, as were the fine ladies who cobbled us some footwear to replace our ugly crocs and flip flops.

Then there was the receptionist at our hotel which became the kids favourite stay to date. I think the outdoor pool helped. Luckily the weather warmed up on the second day.
We found a great cocktail bar on the last night, all purple lit and playing great music. We had one in there and then Stash and I went and hit the nightlife nearer our hotel, leaving Liz and Oskar to pursue a night time Vietnamese cookery lesson.

And now it's bloody miserable, only four hours into this journey, though the stuff going on through the window is pretty special. Sometimes it looks very much like bits of England out there, but hang on, that's a row of palm trees so maybe not.
It's Christmas carol karaoke on the screen in the carriage (Vietnamese style) for our entertainment.
The ticket man walks through the carriage wearing a head set microphone and as he talks into it his voice comes out through a speaker he has strapped to his waist.
Oh and now we could quite easily be next to the A5 in Milton Keynes...but there are some water buffalo...and some ladies wearing those funny cone shaped hats.
Hmm, i wonder if they really do love you long time...

Location:Vietnam

Suits you sir

If I was many miles from here, I'd be sailing in an open boat on the sea
Instead I'm on this window ledge, with the whole world below

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Location:Hoi An