Vietnam!!

So it seemed the entire time i was in Sihanokville in southern Cambodia it rained.. and when i checked the weather map for the next few days it said it was going to rain! So i headed off to the Vietnamese embassy for a 5 minute visa (beats the 3 day visa you get in Phnom Penh!) Afterwards i took a 'moto' (motorbike that you sit on the back of and enjoy the view while praying that you dont crash as the driver is crazy and you have no helmet) to the beach. Even though it was raining the water was so warm so i changed into my bikini and found some locals to swim next to (as the water was rough) and enjoyed the warm water. unfortunately i'd forgotten to remove the giant flashing 'prostitute' sign off my forehead before i got in so i was immediately followed by some local guys who looked at me like a tasty piece of meat.. after a few minutes i got pretty sick of this so got out of the water and moved down the beach!

The next day i started my 11 hour bus ride to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam! The bus had plenty of space though and there were some interesting people on board so when we got to HCMC we decided to find a backpackers together. We were immediately adopted by some Vietnamese who were 'helping' us by showing us the way to the hostel we said we wanted, but interestingly every hostel we went into was 'full' so we tried our hardest to ditch the locals and straight away found a dorm room with space. lesson learnt..

the city of Ho Chi Minh is pretty crazy, there are over 3 million scooters and driving through the city in the bus took us a whole hour. While there is so much traffic though it actually makes life not too hard as you just walk in front of traffic and it will part around youlike you are some sort of magical rock in a stream. Its the only way to cross the street here and so long as you make it obvoius what your'e doing and give them enough time to swerve they dont mind at all.

Our first day in HCMC the two canadians and one kiwi i was with went on a walking tour of the city to see the reunification palace, recommended by Lonely Planet. NOt sure why it was recommended as it was pretty boring and eventless.. so after that we headed to a market, had a quick look around and a local lunch of 'pho' or rice noodle soup which is yum (the locals eat it a lot), and then off to the war remnants museum, which was funny in that it sought to paint america as an evil wrong-doer, while giving the impression vietnamese soldiers almost werent involved in the war and obviously did nothing wrong at all! americans were torturers and evil, while the vietcon were freedom fighters and hero's...

was pretty tired after that so Brendan (one of the canadians and I) went and had a $8 massage.. gonna miss the cheap massages over here when im home!

the next morning i was up early to find we had a bus booked to see the Cu Chi tunnels out of HCMC. On the way we stopped at a village the government had set up for the war injured and agent-orange people, (they didnt say iton the tour but it was clearly to keep them away from society!). The people made a living out of making some beautiful artwork and bowls etc. but it was all a bit of a sad tourist show for me. many of the people would be more than capable of holding down a normal job if it werent for the fact that the vietnamese considered them disabled and thus unable to work!

Anyway the tunnels were amazing. We learnt about how the Vietcon had lived underground in elaborate tunnel networks for months on end to outwit the Americans in so many ways. in one place the americans built their base on top of an existing tunnel network so at night teh vietcon would sneak out and steal guns and ammunition, then shoot the baffled americans! they also took the tyres off tanks etc. and made sandles out of them, which were actually better than the american boots for the climate as it rains a lot in vietnam. they would sneak out and shoot americans, then put the shoes on backwards to run back so the americans were always tracking them in the wrong direction. they also found all sorts of ways to get rid of sniffer dogs which tried to find the tunels, by putting american shit on teh hatch to confuse the dogs, laying traps and putting chilli on the hatch to scare the dogs and ruin their noses. its amazing how well they did considering they had nothing and the americans had so much tecnology.

at the end of the tour we got to go through a section of the tunnels, which were so low even i had trouble crouching over and walking through. every 30 metres there was an air vent which they had turned into escape hatch for the benefit of the tourists. I had a headlamp so could see easily but not many people managed to make it to the end of the tunnel! Scary to think the vietcon managed to live in the tunnels for so long.

Anyway the next day Brendan and I headed on a bus to the beach town of Mui Ne. After much wandering we finallyfound a bungalow on the beach and spent the afternoon enjoying the warm warm water. The next day we rented scooters and headed out to the Red Sanddunes to fly down on plastic sheets. After working our way through a hoard of kids and paying two to take us down (and being sworn at by other children we didnt give money to!) the kids walked us to a good spot and set up the boards for us to fly down. The kids were really cool (though sad they are not in school) and boarding down was a bit of childish fun.

After much more time on the scooter, riding along to the most beautiful sunset i enjoyed my 3rd swim for the day and crashed into bed exhausted! This morning I had a chill out day, reading my book , walking along the beach and enjoying many swims. Fortunately Mui Ne's surrouding sand dunes andhills seem to make the rains avoid the place so it has been beautifulhere. although i did manage to quite badly burn my arms on the scooter yesterday.

Anyway tomorrow i am catching a bus off to Dalat where apparently it rains alot and reaches the 'pleasant' temperature of 15 - 25 degrees! Gonna get the jacket and beanie handy i think as anything below 25 now and im cold...

hope all is well back home

much love
Ingrid

Ancient temples and starving children

Well the past two weeks have been fascinating. After a 17 hour bus ride from Bangkok to Siem Reap in Cambodia on a scam bus, that was cheap but then overcharged you for visa's and took the longest route possible on the worst road possible and dropped you straight at a hotel so you couldn't be bothered finding another one! Haha the hotel was quite cheap and nice but the next day we moved to another one closer to town with nicer staff and that didn't get people by scams.

Of course the thing you do in Siem Reap is explore the ancient temples of Angkor Wat. I felt a bit stupid for not knowing about the temples of Angkor before this trip as they are so amazing! they are about a thousand years old and just phenomenal in size, and so grand! The first day Owen and i rented a tuk-tuk and he took us round to quite a few temples,all different and yet all so interesting. part of what makes them so amazing is that they were all commissioned by kings and built in the kings lifetime,and considering people didn't live that long back then they all had to be built in 40 years maximum, probably 20.

one thing i didn't expect was the hordes of children waiting to pounce on you the minute you are out of the temple(fortunately they're not allowed into the temples). Children as young as 4 years old come up to you selling you bracelets,scarves, postcards, magnets.. and water. you couldn't leave the temple with out hearing 'hey lady you wanna buy water' at least once, and usually you heard '3 bracelet one dolla, scarf $2, of 2 scarf $3, of 4 bracelet one dolla' many, many times over. after spending 2 months pretty much not buying anything as i couldn't find things i liked i went nuts in Siem Reap as there was so much i loved! got 8 scarves haha (some are presents!) along with way too many bracelets and post cards that children talked me into and a few paintings and more.. expensive postage home! unfortunately you also get lots of children begging for money.someseem to do it for fun to see if they can make money out of tourists but there are many more who need to live. Tried to buy/give them food as much as possible but there is no safety net in Cambodia so there's not much chances for them.

Anyways the next two days i hired a bike and went to Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, the main areas, which was great as i got to take it slow and explore things at my own pace, taking a ton of photos! on the 3rd and final day of my ticket i got up early and biked out to Angkor Wat to see the sunrise. unfortunately it had been raining all night and it was completely clouded over so all that happened was it got light! us and several hundred others feel a little bit stupid. Later that day i went to see Ta Phrom which was the temple Tomb Raider was filmed in (though i wanted it last night and cant see the similarity really). Ta Phrom was amazing as it was left to the forest for several hundred years so while its been cleared out there are still massive trees growing all through the building. YOu wonder how the building still stands as the trees are the only thing holding it up in many places!

the next day a few of us took a tuk-tuk out to the mine museum, which is set up to teach people about mines in Cambodia. the guy who set up the museum was a child soldier for the Khmer Rouge setting up mines, he later ended up getting rid of them. he still works to demine Cambodia but a massive part of the country is still covered in mines and many people die every year from stepping on them. everywhere you go in Cambodia there are people maimed by mines with limbs missing, obviously having no way of working. at the temples of Angkor there are quite a few musical groups of mine victims who sell Cds to try to earn a living so they don't have to beg.

the next morning we were up early and took the bus ride to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. stayed at a nice guest house right on the river (built over the river) with water area right in the middle, a TV with DVD player,hommocks pool table and plenty of places to lounge around and drink.would have been a bit prettier if the water wasn't filled with garbage and you didn't feel like you were staying on a floating rubbish tip!

I went to see the Killing Fields, which is where many people died by the Pol Pot regime,and were buried in mass graves. there was a tower filled with skulls of people they had taken from the graves. I also went to see S-21, which is a school that was changed into a torture place/prisonduring the Pol Pot regime. they still had the cells people were put into, and photos of many of the people who died there.scary stuff. What i found more heart breaking though was on the bike ride home there was a little boy about 4 years old standing in the middle of a busy intersection in the rain holding a little brother, about 2 years old, in his arms. they were going up to cars and begging for money from the brand new lexus's etc. driving past and were ignored most of the time so i pulled into a petrol station and bought some food and milk for them. There are so many starving children on the street and yet you drive along and see brand new ornate temples being built with yet another giant golden buddha statue inside. built by donations from the community who walk past the starving children...

Anyway this morning i was up and caught a bus to Sihanoukville , a beach in southern Cambodia. thus far it has rained the entire time! hopefully it will be sunny tomorrow as i would like to lie on the beach and do some snorkeling.

anyway i think i have written enough for now.my plans nextare to getmy visa for Vietnam and head over that way. I have uploaded quite a few photos to www.bebo.com/ingridjones so check them out if you want.

hope all is well with everyone,

Ingrid

Burmese days

Well I havent managed to update my blog over the past few weeks as i have been in Myanmar and the government blocks this particular blog site..

anyhow have had such an amazing time in Myanmar. First we arrived in Yangon to find a contrast between the nice new air conditioned thailand taxi's to 1980's taxi's in Myanmar. i never managed to find a taxi with a working speedo or one that would come anywhere near passing a warrant. most of them were rust buckets that belched smoke and threatened to (and often did) break down at any time. unfortunately Japan stopped sending them imports and also stopped sending spare parts so not only do they have old cars they also have cars they cant fix!!

Yangon was so run down it was a real shock. lots of opulent large buildings from the colonial era that were covered in moss and dirt and hadnt been painted for 30 years. many of the buildings were literally crumbling but people still lived in them. the footpaths were in even worse condition, old concrete slabs that had caved in. In Mandalay they had concrete slabs covering drains, but most of the slabs were either loose, gone completely or half collapsed, meaning most of the footpath was unusable! lining the footpaths were hundreds of stalls selling all sorts of things (though if you dared stop and look you would be hassled to buy something). and everywhere we went men came up to us offering to exchange money!! They love US$ over there (though only crisp new notes, even a slight tear makes a note unusable). it turns out the government increases in flation so much that money is worth less and less there (making it impossible for people to save) so they all want US$ as its more stable.

the first day we arrived we wandered into a temple and were pretty quickly adopted by a monk (who turned out to be someone dressed as a monk or a very bad monk, as he asked for money which we later found out they arent meant to do!). anyway he was quite useful and took us to some of the big temples in the area and explained all about them.

the next day we had enough of Yangon so we headed on a bus towards Inle lake. somehow i read the wrong part of the lonely planet and thought the bus ride was 8 hours... 22 hours later and one very uncomfortable sleep on a bus we arrived in Inle lake! seems they dont have sleeper trains here in myanmar so you just get a bus with reclining seats.

Inle lake was really beautiful. We spent the first day doing absolutely nothing as i developed bronchitis from everyone coughing and spitting on the street in yangon, and a cold uncomfortable night bus ride... but the second day we hired a boat and guide and they took us around Inle lake. the lake was beautiful with fishermen rowing their boats along (using their leg hooked around the oar). there were also villages built on the lake, and we went and saw a jewellery maker (that gets the dregs of silver from big places, melts it down and carves it into jewellery), a cigarette maker, a sword maker and a cloth maker.

everywhere we went we were remined that since the monk demonstrations and cyclone nargis they have had almost no tourists. it was unusual to eat in a restaurant and find other people there, and some shop owners talked about the fact that they had no customers for a week! It was eery to see so many taxi drivers, or boat drivers in Inle, as well as restaurants and shops just waiting around for the tourists who hardly ever came. this of coruse meant everywhere we did go they really hassled us, literally shoving necklaces and shirts in our faces, following us as we walked, and asking us to justify why we did not need thier services! sometimes we ran into the temples for shelter, as they cant come into the temples (they just follow you round the building waiting for you to come out..)

after a few more relaxing days at Inle we hopped on a bus to Mandalay. Now i would never have imagined it, but they managed to build a bus small enough to squish MY legs against the seat in front. we were put in a seat on top of the engine so the floor was raised as well, and there was no space to put a bag so it had to sit on my lap the whole time. Owen got the isle seat so he could at least put his legs out there. 10.5 hours of shere uncomfort, broken every 2 hours or so , so that they could throw water on the brakes to cool them down. by the time we got to Mandalay my body was well and truly aching from head to toe!.

the next day we took up an offer from a tri-shaw driver outside our hotel with good english, to take us on a tour of Mandalay. A tri-shaw is a bycicle with a seat on the side, that seats one person forward and one person backward. The drivers name was Starsky and he turned out to be a real legend (i particularly liked him as he treated me like a person, which was quite the opposite to most men in Myanmar who treated me like someone with the social standing of a rat, to quote george orwell in Burmese days). He took us to a few temples including Mandalay hill (which had 1755 steps up and down, and lots of buddahs, pagodas and temples along the way). Mandalay hill did provide an awesome view of the city! He also took us to a gold leaf making store, and out for 'local' food, and explained many things along the way, along with why he hates the government. not hard to see why when he had to pedal us over some appalling roads as the government refuses to fix them, leaving people to sort themselves out!

the next day it was my birthday and Starsky offered to have a friend take us in a taxi to a nearby town to see a few things. first we went to a wooden teak bridge which was 120 years old. quite an amazing feat for being that old and still standing in the water. of course along the way we had children trying to sell us bracelets and be our tour guides... on the opposite side we checked out another temple (which amazingly looked the same as all the other temples we'd seen..) and then headed back. next was a stop to a monestary where we saw hundreds of monks walking past in file having rice placed i their bowls as they went in to eat. Starsky explained to us about how they had riots here last year, and the police had come with tear gas and forced him to run away. tear gas on peaceful protestors...

next we went to a festival which was a Nat celebration (Nat is the spiritual belief they hold alongside buddism). there were tons of stalls and Owen bought me some flowers so i offered it to a Nat statue for good luck. as it was a special holiday women were allowed to put gold leaf on buddah (normally we're allowed nowhere near him) so i did that, and a she-male dancer gave me 1000 kyat so i donated that to another Nat statue. lots of good luck for the day!

after all this Owen and i were pretty tired and hot so Starsky dropped us off at a local flash hotel where we paid to use the swimming pool. was so nice and relaxing... and after dinner at the hotel Starsky picked us up on his tri-shaw and took us to a show for the 'moustach brothers', who are the only open voice of dissent in Myanmar. the brothers (and their wives) used to perform to the local public but after one too many comments about the government two of the brothers were sentenced to 5 back breaking labour years in prison. after they came out a group of tourists came to see them so they put on a show and when the police came along (as they were banned from performing) they simply said they were 'demonstrating' their show to the toursts, and it wasnt a real one as they didnt have costumes or anything on. this seemed to fool the police and they have been largely left alone ever since, touch wood. they even bought out the full costumes for us!

a few days later we decided to head to Bagan, which was a recommended place to visit. 8.5 hours later in a bus with slightly more leg room (though filled with as many peple as you could possibly squeeze into a bus, with a few more on teh roof) we got to Bagan. I should comment about the roads along the way. to save money the government came up with quite a clever idea to only seal one lanes worth of road, there is then dirt on either side. everybody drives on the sealed patch and when you drive towards each other a sort of chicken game gets played until one person turns to the side at the last minute (usually the smallest one). the landscape was beautiful though, changing between rocky dry landscapes (with all the rocks beign removed by people on the roadside with pick axes, to be sent to china), to large open dry fields and then to grassy rice-paddy fields with lucious green landscape.

Bagan turned out to be a gorgeous city, one of the highlights of my trip (helped by the fact that Starsky talked us into taking a hotel at $18 a night with a swimming pool..as the temperature there seemed to be 40 degrees at least every day). there are over 4000 temples in this little city alone, some are grand old ones, and some are brand new ones. they are all made of red brick too which makes them much more interesting than the gold ones we have seen everywhere else! After a day at the hotel poolside we hired the worlds most uncomfortable bikes from the hotel and cycled along the roadside, looking at temples every which direction you could turn. after about 30 minutes there were quite a few in one area so Owen suggested we stop. We were looking around for a while when i found a secret stair case in one of the temples which allowed us to get to the top of the temple and have a view from above! was really spectacular. after a while we cycled back to have lunch and a swim (and were repeatedly followed by men on bikes trying to sell us paitings as we biked along! there were about 8 people that did that in one day! although really by us i mean Owen, they ignored me.. one time sexism worked to my advantage..). after our swim we headed to one of teh big temples close by (and regretted it as were followed by 8 people trying to sell us stuff the whole time!), but then cycled on further until we found another bunch of temples where we found one with a staircase. we sat there to watch an anti-climatic sunset. but got up before the sun the next morning, cycled back to the temple and watched the sun rise over 4000 temples around us. was so beautiful! like nothing else in the world it was really magical.

later that day we prepared ourselves for another night bus trip, but discovered a few hours into the trip that after some heavy rains they had flash flooding on the main highway! there was about 1km of road flooded out with what looked to be quite fast water. some brave tractors could make it across but our bus (which had already made its mandatory one break down for teh trip) had no chance. So for 2 hours we sat around eating rice and drinking tea at some stalls that happened to be right there (probably made for this exact situation..) and headed on our way. fortunately the bus wasnt full and the back seat of the bus had boxes in the foot area and one box plus my bag on the seats. so i removed my bag and could stretch myself out almost totally along the seat! actually had quite a good sleep.. and 5 hours after our 6am 'arrival time' we arrived back in Yangon. Managed to find my hotel and some hotel guests had enough US$ to change my money back (thank goodness!), spent a night in a room which had the sun streaming in (read feels like a sauna) that had windows right next to someones yard filled with rubbish (read wafting rubbish smells).. as the government came up with the clever plan of not having a rubbish management system, to keep some more money for themselves...

anyway i am now back in Bangkok for the night thoroughly enjoying computers that work, ATM's and variety of food, as well as other tourists to talk to! Really Myanmar is a beautiful country with such friendly and honest people, and its such a shame they are being made so poor by such an oppressive regime that even drives away the tourits. its very easy to travel the country and hardly give any money to the government, while giving lots to the locals where it is most needed. in the words of the moustach brothers ' we need tourists. tourists are the trojan horse that can get the message of our plight out to the world'. Its not a dangerous place to travel so long as you stick to where you are meant to be , and there are many things well worth seeing.

I will now head off as this blog is well long enough for anyone who has read it to this point! Tomorrow morning Owen and I head off to Cambodia to see Siem Riep (Ankor Wat), which i have heard is amazing. after that we will head to Vietnam for a few weeks which i am very excited about.

I have also just added heaps of photos onto www.bebo.com/ingridjones if you wanna check them out!

much love to all,

Ingrid