vietnam and laos
sorry, long entry about my past week.
friday
last day of work before vacation. i love my new job. it's the most stressful and responsibilit-laden thing i've ever done. sometimes it feels like i'm drowning; completely underqualified and undertrained for my responsibilities. but then i pull my way through and i am really proud of everythign that i've been working on. anyhow, this week has been insane since i've done three weeks of work in one week to make up for my upcoming vacation. went for lao food from this cool trailer parked in the truman brewery parking lot. that got me all excited. at night i went with my friend sarah to this winetasting at this funny wine merchants/offliscence/random minimart on old street. we got pissed on nice chilean wine and cuban rum... for free! yay for free booze. i came home, did laundry, tidied a bit for gavin (who's flatsitting for me) then threw everything into my backpack and fell asleep for like four hours.
saturday
went to my first gay wedding. graeme and alan. since bam's in laos right now i went with rob. it was amazingly fun. it was in a field in kent. very elton and david. the groom and... groom arrived by helicopter. the ceremony was actually really beautiful (and of course all the girls there cried). lots of good food and booze. i however made excuses at midnight and headed back to the hotel since i had to be up at 7 am for my flight. rob on the otherhand still hadn't made it back to the room when i left. heh.
sunday
up at 7 am. my flight was delayed because of security, which is still really high. took me two hours to get through the queue and get my bags x-rayed. finally got on the plane. cathay pacific is rather nice. but 11 hours to hong kong... nowhere is nice for 11 hours. a whole day on a plane. god...
monday
hong kong airport is amazing. i think it's a norman foster building (don't quote me though). it's absolutely gigantic. the runway is right off the ocean, so as you're coming in to land you think that perhaps you're just going for a water crashlanding. i had a 2.5 hour stopover. i reset my watch to vietnam time, then realised as i was downing a bowl of noodles that i had 5 minutes to get my connecting flight. not 65 minutes. raced across the terminal leaving a wake of confused asian tourists (who never run). i was the last on the plane.
hanoi airport is nothing like hong kong. it's old and humid and slightly charmless. but it's vietnam! grabbed my luggage in that hungover jetlagged not-having-slept-for-three-days kind of way and look a cab to the airport to meet bam. vietnam is insane. the streets are complete chaos, with no discernable order for traffic. there are more scooters and motorbikes on the road than cars and they just make up their own rules as they go along. our hotel is nice but slightly generic -- but it has airconditioning! i brush my teeth (using bottled water) then we head out to explore. bam's been in vietnam for a week already so he's picked out all the things i'd like to see. the streets in the old part of town (which i think is a unesco heritage site, even though it's only about 50 years old since it was rebuilt recently after being destroyed in the war -- for the third time) are named after what they sell on the street. tinbox street is three blocks of tin merchants. shoe and key street has cobblers and key makers for four blocks. very strange. somehow all the shops seem to prosper though. it's totally different here to how i imagined it. it's so great. people are really friendly and amazingly lovely. the food -- especially the stuff from stalls on the street -- is incredible. bam's been surviving on fried tofu. i like the pho dom (tofu noodle soup) there's a constant background sound of horns from the motorbikes. there's a temple down every sidestreet. and things are incredibly cheap (hey you, wanna buy an elephant tooth? twenty dollars!). oh yeah, they use american dollars here. i hadn't expected that. the architecture is this cool french and asian mix. so... back to the hotel for a nap, then out for dinner. we're taking motorbike taxis everywhere (which is takign your life in your hands, but hey, we're on vacation!). we ate at this amazing 200 year old restaurant that only serves one dish: bun cha ca (grilled fish with noodles). it's amazing. they cook it at your table -- or rather, you cook it yourself over a mini coal stove, and you add whatever herbs and greens you think you want. it's good. really good. after we had a wander around the lake where apparently a legendary giant turtle lives (i gather he's a bit like the loch ness monster, being seen every decade or so). people are doing really weird stretching excersises and funny group aerobics everywhere, it's very david lynch-ian. i can't really figure this place out... everyone is constantly napping or eating, and i don't really understand how any type of industry or trade exists here. at this point i'm exhausted so it's back to bed.
tuesday
ho chi mihn tomb is only open until 10:30 in the morning. so we join the queue which snakes for about 800 metres to pay our respects. the queue moves really quickly, and after everyone wearing shorts and sleeveless shirts has been excluded and our cameras are confiscated, we turn the corner and can see the mausoleum. it's a wonderfully awkward soviet modernist structure in granite. way over the top, but what would you expect? all the military guards are in snow-white dress uniforms with gloves (it's like 40 degrees outside). we finally get into the tomb and up the stairs in complete silence. uncle ho is layed out -- so white he's almost transparent -- in a glass coffin. his wispy hair and beard is creepy. the line moves past fairly quickly and your audience with ho only lasts about 25 seconds. it's equal parts amazing and creepy as shit.
while we were in a slightly touristy antiques shop yesterday, we started talking to an american guy who runs another "much classier" antique shop. so we stop by. it's in the old part of town. we get invited in, offered tea, and the vietnamese manager takes us on a tour of the five floors they have of stuff. she's an antiquities expert who has studied with a lot of the different ethnic groups of vietnam (the hmong -- there are black hmogn, red hmong, flower hmong... they're classified by what the predominant colour or motif of their clothing is). she lived in the jungle for a year and learned how to do batik work with the flower hmong. it felt really privelidged to be getting this guided tour through what's essentially a musuem where you can handle all the delicate textiles and bronze-aged pottery. i'll never really forget that.
but we had to be a bit quick about it, since we had a plane to catch. a scary soviet-era atr prop plane... to laos! vientienne airport is impressive on the outside, but generic on the inside. vietnam airlines lost our luggage (with icebat inside!) so we check into our hotel with just handluggage. our hotel. how to explain... it's a soviet era concrete box. our room is about the same size as our flat in london, but with bright pink curtains and bedspreads, stained and fading rough tweed sofas and a full-sized avocado coloured fridge. you wouldn't believe it unless you saw it yourself. it's amazing. i have the best photos of it... i'll post when i'm back. i had the spiciest meal i've ever had in my life that night ("spicy seafood" -- yeah, no kidding!). it's hot here, and humid beyond belief, so keep the icecold laobeer-brand beer flowing. laos is beautiful. much calmer and more relaxed than vietnam. vientienne is the capital, but most of the roads aren't paved. it's right on the mekong river. i love it here.
wednesday
breakfast in the soviet hotel is amazing. completely surreal. it's served in the ballroom, which is painted with pastel scenes of life in laos. there's only about a dozen people in the whole hotel but the spread could feed hundreds. there's about 50 thingso n the buffet. there's a stage, and i keep expecting troubadour dwarves to jump up and perform or something.
we check out, head to the airport to get our now-found bags, then check into a hotel that used to be the princess's residence (ahhh, that's better). we rent motorbikes (seems less dangerous here) and head out to explore. lots of buddhist stupas (ceremonieal mounds) and wats (monestries) everywhere. laos was bombed really heavily in the vietnam war (the us tried to prevent munitions coming in from cambodia and thailand by decimating laos) so most of the really old stuff is badly damaged. the oldest wat in town is from 1830. it's beaufiful though. there are thousands of tiny buddhas in little niches , with hudreds of bigger buddhas in front of them. in the main temple, there's a gigantic golden buddha presiding over a pantheon of smaller golden buddhas from various eras (from 1980 to the 13th century). it's one of the few old buildings that survied french colonisation, the soviet regime and the vietnam war, but the wat is a wood structure so with the humidity and termites it probably won't last another 50 years.
then we took an hour-long journey up a semi-paved highway to the buddha park. this is somethign i'd never even consider doing in the uk -- racing along a dangerous and dodgey highway without a helmet. but it's really liberating and fun and i'm getting that "i'm on top of the world" feeling as we're doing it. the road snakes along the mekong, past huts on stilts and roadside foodstalls and rice paddies and endless people eating by the side of the road with curious dogs looking on. bam gets lots of waves from the people still not used to seeing white tourists. me, i have a shaved head so of course i must be a monk. the buddha park is an eerie colletion of giant buddha statues. okay. this will explain how odd the par is: there's a house-sized concrete pumpkin that you can go in and there are three floors; each floor represents a different plane of existence (hell, earth, heaven). there are creepy skeleton-like statues on each floor. oh, and even though it's bright sunshine outside, it's pitch black inside. we manouver around using the torch on bam's phone. freeky but incredible. one of the buddhas in the park is about 200 metres long (he's lying down). but my favorite statue is of a cat. not sure if the cat attained enlightenment or not. we grab communist icecreams (mine had a hammer and sickle on it, bams rocket icelollie was russian cosmonaut-themed) and watched scaggy chickens hunting for spiders in the grass. have i said i love it here already? we made it back to the hotel just for sunfall, and went for a swim in the pool. our amazingly posh meal in the nicest restaurant in town cost 30 dollars. for both of us.
thursday
bam loves baths and saunas. so we head out for a wat in the jungle for a traditional lao massage and sauna. the place is an open-sided house on stilts. it's literally down a dirt road and completely surrounded by jungle. the massage lasts an hour and a half. it's the best massage i've ever had. we have that funny "we're from london!" converstaion with the guys that work there. they make us really nice tea. then the sauna is a herbal steam sauna (which unfortunately we had to cut short cuz we had a plane to catch). the whole thing costs us 3 pounds. for the both of us. back to the hotel and a quick pack, then to the airport.
we're in luang parbang right now. the flight was on the ricketiest airplane i've ever been on. we flew over jungle for an hour to get here (the alternative was a 12 hour busjourney). it's really great here. totally peaceful. we checked into our hotel (which is The Poshest Hotel I've Ever Been In) and headed into town. dinner was bbq fish and veggie noodles in the night market. so so so good. infact, comparabel to the meal last night. i actually preferred it. then we just wandered. it's so cool here, i wish i could stay for months. there's three main roads in town. one is touristy, the others aren't. the power keeps cutting in and out (you can imagine how hard doing this entry has been with that). it's at the delta of the mekong and some other river, and there are mountains all around. we hiked up to a stupa after dinner which looks out over the town. then we found a cave that had buddha's footprint in it (which is about 1 metre long -- that boy had huge feet!). there are monks all throughout this town. in the morning, there's a ceremony where they come out to ask for alms and the villagers line up to give them rice and veggies. it's just totally serene and laidback here.
we went back to the hotel and went for a nighttime swim in the infinity pool. you can see the stupa on the hill that we climbed up to from the pool. our hotel is some total luxury hotel. i can't even begin to describe how crazy posh it is. our "room" has three rooms in it, with two balconies and a gigantic tub made of granite. its totally romantic and think everyone else here is on their honeymoon. there are magazines lying around everywhere with features on the hotel. it's one of those hotels you read about in conde nast traveller and wish you could afford to stay there. we're paying 60 quid a night for our room. ha!
friday
that's today. so far, i've had a huge breakfast and swam in the pool. oh and updated this. i won't be doing much more today. i might go find another lao massage. it's incredible here. a week into my vacation and i feel like my life in london is a million miles away...
friday
last day of work before vacation. i love my new job. it's the most stressful and responsibilit-laden thing i've ever done. sometimes it feels like i'm drowning; completely underqualified and undertrained for my responsibilities. but then i pull my way through and i am really proud of everythign that i've been working on. anyhow, this week has been insane since i've done three weeks of work in one week to make up for my upcoming vacation. went for lao food from this cool trailer parked in the truman brewery parking lot. that got me all excited. at night i went with my friend sarah to this winetasting at this funny wine merchants/offliscence/random minimart on old street. we got pissed on nice chilean wine and cuban rum... for free! yay for free booze. i came home, did laundry, tidied a bit for gavin (who's flatsitting for me) then threw everything into my backpack and fell asleep for like four hours.
saturday
went to my first gay wedding. graeme and alan. since bam's in laos right now i went with rob. it was amazingly fun. it was in a field in kent. very elton and david. the groom and... groom arrived by helicopter. the ceremony was actually really beautiful (and of course all the girls there cried). lots of good food and booze. i however made excuses at midnight and headed back to the hotel since i had to be up at 7 am for my flight. rob on the otherhand still hadn't made it back to the room when i left. heh.
sunday
up at 7 am. my flight was delayed because of security, which is still really high. took me two hours to get through the queue and get my bags x-rayed. finally got on the plane. cathay pacific is rather nice. but 11 hours to hong kong... nowhere is nice for 11 hours. a whole day on a plane. god...
monday
hong kong airport is amazing. i think it's a norman foster building (don't quote me though). it's absolutely gigantic. the runway is right off the ocean, so as you're coming in to land you think that perhaps you're just going for a water crashlanding. i had a 2.5 hour stopover. i reset my watch to vietnam time, then realised as i was downing a bowl of noodles that i had 5 minutes to get my connecting flight. not 65 minutes. raced across the terminal leaving a wake of confused asian tourists (who never run). i was the last on the plane.
hanoi airport is nothing like hong kong. it's old and humid and slightly charmless. but it's vietnam! grabbed my luggage in that hungover jetlagged not-having-slept-for-three-days kind of way and look a cab to the airport to meet bam. vietnam is insane. the streets are complete chaos, with no discernable order for traffic. there are more scooters and motorbikes on the road than cars and they just make up their own rules as they go along. our hotel is nice but slightly generic -- but it has airconditioning! i brush my teeth (using bottled water) then we head out to explore. bam's been in vietnam for a week already so he's picked out all the things i'd like to see. the streets in the old part of town (which i think is a unesco heritage site, even though it's only about 50 years old since it was rebuilt recently after being destroyed in the war -- for the third time) are named after what they sell on the street. tinbox street is three blocks of tin merchants. shoe and key street has cobblers and key makers for four blocks. very strange. somehow all the shops seem to prosper though. it's totally different here to how i imagined it. it's so great. people are really friendly and amazingly lovely. the food -- especially the stuff from stalls on the street -- is incredible. bam's been surviving on fried tofu. i like the pho dom (tofu noodle soup) there's a constant background sound of horns from the motorbikes. there's a temple down every sidestreet. and things are incredibly cheap (hey you, wanna buy an elephant tooth? twenty dollars!). oh yeah, they use american dollars here. i hadn't expected that. the architecture is this cool french and asian mix. so... back to the hotel for a nap, then out for dinner. we're taking motorbike taxis everywhere (which is takign your life in your hands, but hey, we're on vacation!). we ate at this amazing 200 year old restaurant that only serves one dish: bun cha ca (grilled fish with noodles). it's amazing. they cook it at your table -- or rather, you cook it yourself over a mini coal stove, and you add whatever herbs and greens you think you want. it's good. really good. after we had a wander around the lake where apparently a legendary giant turtle lives (i gather he's a bit like the loch ness monster, being seen every decade or so). people are doing really weird stretching excersises and funny group aerobics everywhere, it's very david lynch-ian. i can't really figure this place out... everyone is constantly napping or eating, and i don't really understand how any type of industry or trade exists here. at this point i'm exhausted so it's back to bed.
tuesday
ho chi mihn tomb is only open until 10:30 in the morning. so we join the queue which snakes for about 800 metres to pay our respects. the queue moves really quickly, and after everyone wearing shorts and sleeveless shirts has been excluded and our cameras are confiscated, we turn the corner and can see the mausoleum. it's a wonderfully awkward soviet modernist structure in granite. way over the top, but what would you expect? all the military guards are in snow-white dress uniforms with gloves (it's like 40 degrees outside). we finally get into the tomb and up the stairs in complete silence. uncle ho is layed out -- so white he's almost transparent -- in a glass coffin. his wispy hair and beard is creepy. the line moves past fairly quickly and your audience with ho only lasts about 25 seconds. it's equal parts amazing and creepy as shit.
while we were in a slightly touristy antiques shop yesterday, we started talking to an american guy who runs another "much classier" antique shop. so we stop by. it's in the old part of town. we get invited in, offered tea, and the vietnamese manager takes us on a tour of the five floors they have of stuff. she's an antiquities expert who has studied with a lot of the different ethnic groups of vietnam (the hmong -- there are black hmogn, red hmong, flower hmong... they're classified by what the predominant colour or motif of their clothing is). she lived in the jungle for a year and learned how to do batik work with the flower hmong. it felt really privelidged to be getting this guided tour through what's essentially a musuem where you can handle all the delicate textiles and bronze-aged pottery. i'll never really forget that.
but we had to be a bit quick about it, since we had a plane to catch. a scary soviet-era atr prop plane... to laos! vientienne airport is impressive on the outside, but generic on the inside. vietnam airlines lost our luggage (with icebat inside!) so we check into our hotel with just handluggage. our hotel. how to explain... it's a soviet era concrete box. our room is about the same size as our flat in london, but with bright pink curtains and bedspreads, stained and fading rough tweed sofas and a full-sized avocado coloured fridge. you wouldn't believe it unless you saw it yourself. it's amazing. i have the best photos of it... i'll post when i'm back. i had the spiciest meal i've ever had in my life that night ("spicy seafood" -- yeah, no kidding!). it's hot here, and humid beyond belief, so keep the icecold laobeer-brand beer flowing. laos is beautiful. much calmer and more relaxed than vietnam. vientienne is the capital, but most of the roads aren't paved. it's right on the mekong river. i love it here.
wednesday
breakfast in the soviet hotel is amazing. completely surreal. it's served in the ballroom, which is painted with pastel scenes of life in laos. there's only about a dozen people in the whole hotel but the spread could feed hundreds. there's about 50 thingso n the buffet. there's a stage, and i keep expecting troubadour dwarves to jump up and perform or something.
we check out, head to the airport to get our now-found bags, then check into a hotel that used to be the princess's residence (ahhh, that's better). we rent motorbikes (seems less dangerous here) and head out to explore. lots of buddhist stupas (ceremonieal mounds) and wats (monestries) everywhere. laos was bombed really heavily in the vietnam war (the us tried to prevent munitions coming in from cambodia and thailand by decimating laos) so most of the really old stuff is badly damaged. the oldest wat in town is from 1830. it's beaufiful though. there are thousands of tiny buddhas in little niches , with hudreds of bigger buddhas in front of them. in the main temple, there's a gigantic golden buddha presiding over a pantheon of smaller golden buddhas from various eras (from 1980 to the 13th century). it's one of the few old buildings that survied french colonisation, the soviet regime and the vietnam war, but the wat is a wood structure so with the humidity and termites it probably won't last another 50 years.
then we took an hour-long journey up a semi-paved highway to the buddha park. this is somethign i'd never even consider doing in the uk -- racing along a dangerous and dodgey highway without a helmet. but it's really liberating and fun and i'm getting that "i'm on top of the world" feeling as we're doing it. the road snakes along the mekong, past huts on stilts and roadside foodstalls and rice paddies and endless people eating by the side of the road with curious dogs looking on. bam gets lots of waves from the people still not used to seeing white tourists. me, i have a shaved head so of course i must be a monk. the buddha park is an eerie colletion of giant buddha statues. okay. this will explain how odd the par is: there's a house-sized concrete pumpkin that you can go in and there are three floors; each floor represents a different plane of existence (hell, earth, heaven). there are creepy skeleton-like statues on each floor. oh, and even though it's bright sunshine outside, it's pitch black inside. we manouver around using the torch on bam's phone. freeky but incredible. one of the buddhas in the park is about 200 metres long (he's lying down). but my favorite statue is of a cat. not sure if the cat attained enlightenment or not. we grab communist icecreams (mine had a hammer and sickle on it, bams rocket icelollie was russian cosmonaut-themed) and watched scaggy chickens hunting for spiders in the grass. have i said i love it here already? we made it back to the hotel just for sunfall, and went for a swim in the pool. our amazingly posh meal in the nicest restaurant in town cost 30 dollars. for both of us.
thursday
bam loves baths and saunas. so we head out for a wat in the jungle for a traditional lao massage and sauna. the place is an open-sided house on stilts. it's literally down a dirt road and completely surrounded by jungle. the massage lasts an hour and a half. it's the best massage i've ever had. we have that funny "we're from london!" converstaion with the guys that work there. they make us really nice tea. then the sauna is a herbal steam sauna (which unfortunately we had to cut short cuz we had a plane to catch). the whole thing costs us 3 pounds. for the both of us. back to the hotel and a quick pack, then to the airport.
we're in luang parbang right now. the flight was on the ricketiest airplane i've ever been on. we flew over jungle for an hour to get here (the alternative was a 12 hour busjourney). it's really great here. totally peaceful. we checked into our hotel (which is The Poshest Hotel I've Ever Been In) and headed into town. dinner was bbq fish and veggie noodles in the night market. so so so good. infact, comparabel to the meal last night. i actually preferred it. then we just wandered. it's so cool here, i wish i could stay for months. there's three main roads in town. one is touristy, the others aren't. the power keeps cutting in and out (you can imagine how hard doing this entry has been with that). it's at the delta of the mekong and some other river, and there are mountains all around. we hiked up to a stupa after dinner which looks out over the town. then we found a cave that had buddha's footprint in it (which is about 1 metre long -- that boy had huge feet!). there are monks all throughout this town. in the morning, there's a ceremony where they come out to ask for alms and the villagers line up to give them rice and veggies. it's just totally serene and laidback here.
we went back to the hotel and went for a nighttime swim in the infinity pool. you can see the stupa on the hill that we climbed up to from the pool. our hotel is some total luxury hotel. i can't even begin to describe how crazy posh it is. our "room" has three rooms in it, with two balconies and a gigantic tub made of granite. its totally romantic and think everyone else here is on their honeymoon. there are magazines lying around everywhere with features on the hotel. it's one of those hotels you read about in conde nast traveller and wish you could afford to stay there. we're paying 60 quid a night for our room. ha!
friday
that's today. so far, i've had a huge breakfast and swam in the pool. oh and updated this. i won't be doing much more today. i might go find another lao massage. it's incredible here. a week into my vacation and i feel like my life in london is a million miles away...