I’ll be honest, the reason why I really wanted to go to Da Nang was because of the line in Good Morning Vietnam where Robin Williams says “Da Nang Me Da Nang Me, give me a rope and hang meeeee!” which in my eyes is as good a reason as any to go somewhere.  So we flew from Ho Chi Minh to spend some time on the beach and what an incredible beach it is.  First brilliant part about Da Nang for us was our hotel.  We had paid for the 15^th floor beachfront room right on the beach and the view was just magic (was still $60)  Da Nang reminded us a little of Surfers Paradise in that it’s a long white sandy beach with high rises along the waterfront and restaurants and bars all along the beach.  The beach however is too hot to be on during the day so the whole town comes alive at night.

It also has a huge incredible bridge which is shaped liked a big Chinese dragon and on Saturday and Sunday nights it breaths fire and spurts laser light lit water from its nostrils.  It’s really a sight to behold…we are told… as although we were there on a Sunday night we thought it happened every night of the week at 9pm not just on the weekends and so didn’t see it.  Anyway, you live and learn.

The beachfront in front of our hotel had seafood restaurant after seafood restaurant.  These all had tanks and could well have been an aquarium as they were huge.  There were also probably 200 tables at each restaurant so it was a massive affair.  We decided to try our luck.

Now, as you know I don’t really eat seafood apart from prawns so we were slightly limited in what we could choose and even then the language barrier proved to be a real issue and we ended up pointing at things that vaguely resembled what the people at the table next door were eating and that looked quite good. We could have gone downstairs and specifically chosen the particular stingray that we wanted and they would have hauled it out and chopped it up in front of us before serving it with great gusto and a side plate for the bones, but we went for the barbequed prawns.  Everything started arriving and so did the staff to deshell your prawns and chop through everything at the table.  We also ordered a beef stirfry (which was understandably probably the worst beef stirfry we had in Asia).  It was one of those meals that you put down in the books as an experience but not necessarily for the food.

After the beach life came the Hoi An Life.  What a pretty little city.  We stayed right on the edge of the Ancient City which is a walled little town with a canal running through it.  They are famous for their lanterns and everywhere you look they are hanging in every colour.  They are in the trees, the hotels, the restaurants and in the night market stalls where you can buy them.  It’s also the number one destination for locals to come and have photos for their wedding album taken.  So at night when it is particularly beautiful you will see happy couples in their traditional gowns and suits with their hairdresser, stylist and two photographer’s in tow following them about all the main spots to take very loved up (but not actually touching) photos.

When we arrived, the receptionist told us that we were so lucky as we had arrived on the night of the lantern festival and so we needed to be in town ready for when that started (she also told us that although people will try and make you buy an entrance ticket to the ancient city just to say you are only walking through and not stopping – good advice that was).  Just after the sun goes down the cute little old ladies who have been selling bananas to you all day come down to sell little paper lanterns with lit candles in them.  You take them to the edge of the canal and release them and make a wish.  Hundreds and hundreds of little floating candles then go down the canal and end up… well who knows where but it is incredibly magical for the observer.  We felt so lucky to be there on the one night it happened to witness it and thought that it made up for missing the dragon fire water spout bridge.  Next day when we went to breakfast the waitress said “You are so lucky you are here just in time for the lantern festival tonight… make sure you are in town for the lanterns it will be very special”.  Appears that every night is lantern festival night in Hoi An!

We walked and walked and bought mangosteens in the market and ate amazing Vietnamese food and swam in the hotel pool when it was too hot.  We also did a huge load of laundry for $1 a kilo and got woken by the fire alarm at 7am (which was a good practice run for Nigel and I on how long it takes us to evacuate a hotel room). It was fine just someone burning the toast in the restaurant.

We had hired a driver for the day and he picked us up from Hoi An and was to take us to Ba Na Hills and wait for us and then drive us back to Da Nang.  He was a bit of a character.  We called him Tootie McTootface.  He tooted when he was passing someone, coming up to a corner, driving past someone on the road, driving straight through an intersection, when he wanted to show us buffalo and pretty much any time he thought that a jolly good toot was necessary.  He also loved 1990’s Boy band music and was especially fond of George Michael.  He was a bit of a Karaoke King too but only knew the chorus.  We had a good old singalong in the car that day me and him.  He also had very limited english which mainly consisted of “Oh La La Vietnam” anytime he saw someone carrying something large and awkward on a scooter (which happens all the time in Vietnam).  Dude on scooter carrying large red plastic horse “Oh La La Vietnam”.  Dude on scooter carrying sheets of plywood “Oh La La Vietnam” Dude on scooter carrying 6 foot palm tree… Oh you get the picture.

So Ba Na Hills.  It’s pitched as a quaint French Colonial Village high in the hills overlooking Vietnam.  And it sort of is, except its all fake.  When we arrived we were dropped off at a replica of the Forbidden City in Beijing.   This is reception and as you walk through the walls and enter what looks like the lobby of a massive hotel and ascend the escalators to the cable car entrance you start to wonder why you feel like you’ve got yourself into a queue at Disneyland that you don’t really know what it’s for.  The paths lead through lovely cultured gardens to the cable car system in a very queue like and systematic fashion.  We started to get suspicious.

Now the cable car ride is spectacular.  It’s about 5 kilometres long and runs right up and over the rain forest straight up the hill.  We were very lucky as the weather was perfect for us on the way up and when we arrived at the top we felt cool air for the first time since we’d arrived in Sth East Asia.

The first clue was the massive construction site with cranes and bulldozers that is building the next stage of the Ba Na Hills resort due to open in 2020.  It’s going to be amazing, huge and Gothic inspired and very European.  We then entered a European inspired Village that has been built from the ground up to resemble what could be a European Village somewhere at some point in time that was sort of French Colonial and kind of Italian Renaissance and very Gothic.  It has a Cathedral and a town square and for some reason a German Beer Hall, a Luge and a Wax Museum.  Even the temples that they have built at the top of the hill for meditation have piped music and seem to be more temply than the temples we had seen.

They have people dressed in European clothing to have your photo taken with (steampunk Victorian outfits, a giant slinky?? and other German and French inspired outfits).  They have bands playing the theme from Game of Thrones as well as an oom pah pah band in the beer hall.  The Vietnamese absolutely LOVE It.  They can’t take enough photos of themselves in front of all these wonderful things.  The Loudies also love it and hire costumes to wear while they are taking photos of themselves in this beautiful European Village… which it is… but it’s not.

We had a really awesome day though.  The crowd watching was hilarious, the German beer hall was fun (they had very good German Sausage Hotdogs) and the cable car ride was worth every cent.  It’s just really not what we were expecting.  Which to be honest sums up Vietnam quite nicely.  Things are never what you expect.  Maybe it’s because it’s only really opened up to tourism lately and not many people have been here before?  Maybe it’s because we really didn’t have any preconceived plans and ideas on what we were going to do?  I don’t know it’s just that the whole country surprises us at every turn.

We went back to Da Nang for one last night (one last chance for the Da Nang Me Da Nang Me line) and because I had reviewed the Hotel well on Tripadvisor after our first stay we were upgraded to the top floor suite and so decided that we could have room service and watch the world go by from our beautiful room.  And a pretty amazing world it is too.

 

 

 

So with the holiday weekend over and our trip turned backwards it was time to head back into Vietnam. We did this via Cambodia Angkor Air (that we called Shonky Air) from Siem Reap to Ho Chi Minh (Saigon).

This is the business capital of Vietnam and the streets are cleaner and less congested than Hanoi. The buildings are taller and the skyscrapers more shiny.

The main centre has a replica of Notre Dame right next to the central post office which a high school teacher from Perth told us was designed by Gustave Eiffel. We personally couldn’t see any resemblance to any other Eiffel inspired anything and spent a while making jokes about how much it didn’t look like the Eiffel tower. Right now when I google it I find that the Perth school teacher was full of shit, it’s not an Eiffel Post Office…. Aussies aye?!

On our first night we went out for a lovely meal at a typical Vietnamese restaurant, one that brings the westerners an iPad with photos of the food so you just point at what looks nice. We’ve found that it doesn’t really matter what you get in Vietnam. It’s all YUM! Fresh, light and really tasty. We have taken to just ordering something that we don’t know what it is and getting surprised when it arrives. It hasn’t failed us yet. Problem is that I won’t be able to ever order them again as we don’t know what they are.

We organised a day trip out to see the Cu Chi Tunnels where the Vietnamese get to tell their side of the Vietnam War. I had read the reviews on-line and it appeared that most people really liked it and found it interesting and then another group find it really disgusting and brutal and didn’t appreciate the propaganda side of it. Especially they didn’t like all the different ways the VietCong managed to hurt, maim and kill the enemy Americans.

They give you a 20, 40, 60 or 100 metre option when they send you into the tunnels. I (thankfully) took the 20 metre option as it was understandably claustrophobic. The tunnels are only about a meter high in places and about half a meter wide and dark. As you enter the guide says “look out for the spiders and snakes!” The main issue I had was that we had just been watching a snake sliding about at the bottom of one of the tunnels they showed us from the top! Yep 20 was plenty thanks.

There’s a firing range in the middle and so as you walk through the site you hear the bangs and booms and rat tak tak of the automatic weapons. It’s all fodder for numerous “my time in Nam” quips and an inability to get the Full Metal Jacket soundtrack out of your head. Perhaps that’s why some people hate it.

It’s not a sombre memorial. It’s not a place to come and mourn those lost and the horrors or war and the after effects of it. It’s more like an historic village where they show you how they cooked without smoke, how they camouflaged the snipers as termite mounds and how they dug bear traps to impale the Yanks. They have models of the guerrilla fighters for you to stand with and have your photo taken and in the middle they give you tea and tapioca. It’s also not the Western side of the story, it’s a violently patriotic Vietnamese version that shows them living happily in the fields until the enemy Americans arrived and tried to take their way of life from them and their families. The guide said the difference was that the Americans were just waiting for their time to go back to their home, but the Vietnamese were defending their only home.

Each to their own but we found it interesting and Nigel got to fire an AK47 on automatic and so that was a bonus.

Next we are heading to Da Nang and Hoi An and if we have time the BaNa Hills.

“It’s like I’ve closed down all my apps”

That’s what Nigel said as he was lying back in the pool that we had below our balcony in Siem Reap.  “It’s like I’ve switched off all the apps in my brain and now I only have holiday mode”.    This is what week number three feels like for the both of us.  I have also swiped away all my apps and now only have two running in my head.  Wikipedia and Trip Advisor and Nigel has Google Maps.  I don’t know how we travelled before without Wikipedia, Trip Advisor and Google.  “Where’s the nearest convenience store?” “Best visitor rated Hotels next to main point of interest” “Are all KTV bars brothels?” “How do you cook Lotus flower?” “What are the side effects of Deet?” ”Are Thai Millipedes Poisonous?” “What’s the difference between jackfruit and breadfruit?” “What is the bird that goes Whoot Whoot in Laos called?” How did we ever cope?

Siem Reap surprised us, in a good way.  I think we were expecting something pretty Third World but it was actually fairly upmarket.  Firstly the main part of the Old Town (where we stayed) loves their neon lights.  It’s like Vegas on a really really small Cambodian scale but Pub Street (Tell it like it is Cambodia) is full of neon lit Pubs that all have happy hour running from 10am – 8pm every night with 50 cent beers!

Restaurant food is cheap and very good.  A dish of fried chicken and veges with rice goes for about $2NZD and we had an entire meal out one night for just over $10.  We also had a meal that cost about $80 so I guess it will depend where you go.  Breakfast at the hotel was really good and filled us up every morning with Pho and omelettes and fruit and home made yoghurt.

The reason that you go to Siem Reap is for the Angkor Temple Complex.  It’s a massive area that houses multiple temples (only one of them is called Wat).  We had a private tuktuk who took us everywhere and then waited for us to come back or drove around to meet us on the other side to go to the next one.  He cost $15 for the day to do this and was really great.  He had a little hammock that he would hang in the back of the tuktuk when we weren’t there for a nap and otherwise all the tuktuk drivers knew each other and they all chatted away while they waited.

There are two main issues with the temples.

They are full of very loud Chinese or Korean tourists (buses and buses of them) all carrying umbrellas or big Vietnamese hats or hand held fans.  They all want to do nothing but get to the top for a photo and stop for an ice cream at the end.  And they are so loud!  When we first arrived in Vietnam we were talking to a local and she called them “Loud-ees” and that’s what we’ve called them ever since.  I’m not sure why they need to yell at each other incessantly and carry speakers playing music and just generally be LOUD all the time… but they do.  To be fair we have encountered large groups of Loud-ees all over South East Asia… it’s not just a temple thing.

Anyway, Loud-ees aside the other issue with Angkor is that it’s really really hot and incredibly humid and the temples are very tall to climb.  You need a lot of water and a lot of tolerence and some really sturdy thigh muscles.  It was a really full on day and by the end of it when I started to get a bit fainty and Nigel thought his eyeballs would bleed if he had to look at another ruin, we decided to head straight back to the Hotel for a swim.  That was brilliant.  I think that’s when we had the conversation about the apps until the afternoon thunderstorm hit and we left the pool to watch the lightning hit the buildings around us.  That was also brilliant – scary and really freaky but brilliant.

Our hotel had a group of real characters on the staff.  The two receptionist’s liked to have a joke with everyone all the time and remembered everyone by name.  As you walked down the stairs you’d hear “Good Morning Jenny!”  “Good Morning NeeeGarl!” (Everyone apart from english speakers always have issues with pronouncing Nigel) “Enjoy your breakfast, have a nice day”.  When you returned to the hotel they had ice cold towels ready for you as soon as you walked in the lobby.  “Welcome back Jenny, Welcome back NeeeGarl – did you enjoy your day?!” It was really sweet.

I needed to get our Vietnam Visas printed out so I went and asked Jessica at reception. “No, we only have a copier and not a printer, you will need to sort it out on your own” “Do you have any suggestions I asked?” “Nope”, she said” you deal with it, you wanted to come to Cambodia”.  “Is there another hotel that could help me?” I asked.  “NO! Hotels in Cambodia are not here to print out Vietnam Visas” she barked.  I waited, as I really thought I was dealing with a nutter.  “Only joking” She said “its $10USD for printing shall I put that on your room?” “OK” I said, thinking far out that’s a bit steep.  “Per page” she said (and there were 6 pages).  It was about now that the other receptionist started to giggle and I twigged that she was absolutely taking the piss.  Her completely straight face when she explained that you are in Cambodia now and this is what it costs did have me going though.  We’d been warned about scams etc. but you don’t expect it in your hotel from the lovely receptionist who knows your name and calls your husband NeeGarl.  Anyway, at the end she smiled and said “only joking Jenny, it’s going to be free”.

I got her back though when before I left I told her that our tuktuk driver wanted to be her boyfriend.  She believed me for about 30 seconds.

 

 

 

So we asked the two receptionists on the way out whether it was pronounced Lao or Laos.  They both immediately answered, in unison… both answers!  Then they proceded to argue with each other over whether it’s Lao or Laos.  Finally the other guy on reception came over and said “well they are both right”.  So this is what I can now gather.

It is the Lao People’s Democratic Republic.  They are Lao people.  The French called it Laos when they unified the Three Lao Kingdoms.  So all in all the Lao call it Lao and in English and French it’s called Laos.

As an aside, Nigel has a theory about why the monks have to ritually cleanse themselves after they are touched by a woman.  And it does involve multiple showers, three times a day to rid your male celibate self of all the ‘sin’.  I’ll leave that there.

This was the question we were asking ourselves before we got here.  Also, what is hello and thank you and how many kip do we get to the dong (lol international currency jokes right there).

Laos Airlines took us from Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang in an ATR72 plane (same as the ones you take to Invercargill.  The flight time was 1 hour from gate to gate and yet we still got a sandwich a water and a beer.

Luang Prabang International airport is like arriving into Nelson or Palmerston North airport except it has customs and immigration where they charge $31 USD per kiwi for visa on arrival (payable only in cash) and taking up an entire page of your passport (Canadian passports have to pay $50).  There was one queue for passports and we got to watch our bags go round and round the carousel as we waited for two people to authorise the visa that had just been issued and stamp umpteen pieces of paper including our passport (but everyone gets a job in a socialist/communist country).

We stayed in a gorgeous little guesthouse Thongbay Guesthouse (recommended by my friend Cameron) right on the river with views out over the water and an ant colony in the outdoor shower.  Each morning they serve the most enormous breakfast to your balcony with the best coffee in the world.  At night they will serve you dinner on the balcony where the fireflies come and dance around you while across the river the Laos karaoke bar gets into full swing.  All in all it’s a magical experience and one that makes it so special for us.

We spent most days wandering around the very small city and ducking in and out of cafes and bars when it started to rain torrentially.  Think Auckland in Spring (with jungle like downpours) and then the sun comes out literally 15 minutes later.

There are monks everywhere in their luminous orange robes.  They carry umbrellas rain or shine and you see them absolutely everywhere.  I had been warned that if a female comes in contact with a monk they have to spend days ritually washing the sin away so I was very careful not to bump into one.  There are temples on every hilltop in Luang Prabang and the tributary rivers wind their way down to the Mekong.  There are Bamboo Bridges (with little old lady charging the tourists to cross them) and scary bridges with extremely rickety boards nailed to the side of it that cross the rivers.  The streets are filled with people selling things from the pavement.  Flowers for the temples, bags of corn, live frogs, cooked river fish and anything else you could think of.

We took a beautiful slow boat trip up the Mekong against the current to the Pak Ou caves where inside you will find thousands of golden Buddhas.  It dates back to the 1700’s and has been a spiritually significant site since then, with people adding more and more Buddhas into the limestone caves.  It’s a really steep climb up from the boat but worth every leg stretching step.

They also stop the boat at a small village called Xanghai which is famous for making whiskey and rice wine (which is actually more like moonshine than whiskey).  It becomes even more interesting as they infuse the whiskey with scorpions or large centipedes or small poisonous snakes.  You can buy it by the bottle full or just get some out of a big jar.  Not sure if you eat the critter once you’ve drunk it but it’s a pretty extreme version of the tequila worm if you ask me… blurgh!

The boat then turns around and catches the downstream current and you hurtle back to LP while they serve a traditional Laos lunch.  All in all pretty good value sort of a day for $25!

The next day we hired a local tuktuk driver to take us the 30 kms through the villages up to the Kuang Si Falls.  Think a combination of the pink and white terraces with a beautiful tall waterfall feeding them, a bear conservation centre and the biggest carpark and food stall you’ve ever seen.  It was brilliant!

The walk through the jungle takes you through the bear sanctuary where have rescued Sun bears that use to be used to provide bear bile to the Chinese.  Beautiful lumbering smiley, look like Yogi Bear bears… They are native to the jungles here and if they were released they would be caught again and put in a cage for the rest of their life where they would have their gall bladder tapped every day.  Apparently bear bile helps treat gallbladder and liver ailments and is widely regarded in Chinese medicine… or you could just use the synthetic version like every other normal person you sickos!

You can swim in the falls (we didn’t) but there were groups of locals there hurling themselves off ledges into the limestone milky blue water.  There were lots of European backpackers washing their socks in the streams (FFS) and even a couple of what looked like models climbing up on the very edge to take a million posed for and obviously going straight to Instagram photos in bikinis.  It was quite the day.

Last night in LP and we went into town for a sublime steak dinner (Australian beef) and watched the world go by.  Walked back through the night markets and then tuktuk home.

We’ve loved our cruisy old time here in Laos, it’s such a cruisy town and really laid back people.  We realised we needed better work stories though when the biggest story of the day was when Nigel finally managed to eradicate the ants nest in our shower using a combination of water and Deet infused mosquito repellent which I have to say was a pretty impressive story that morning and had kept us entertained for days.

Off to Cambodia! P.S still don’t know if it’s Lao or Laos… I’ll ask reception when we check out.

 

 

What I love most about how we are travelling this time (as we use to travel) is that we actually have no idea where we are going, we are kind of making it up as we go along.  We do have a fairly good idea of what we want to see but no rules about how we do it.  That’s how we ended up in Chiang Mai.

Vietnam was full!  Think Easter weekend in New Zealand.  Everyone traveling and staying in hotels and most things closed for the holiday break.  So we decided to hop off to Thailand and swim with elephants.

Chiang Mai when I first heard of it back in the 90’s was the place to go to and ride elephants for days in the jungle.  Chiang Mai has resurfaced as the chilled out hippy eco friendly capital of Thailand.  It’s all Eco tours and sanctuaries and funnily enough jungle zip lining (with the longest zip line in Asia).   I’ll be honest I was too scared to do the zip lining.  Poor Nigel had to miss out but I just knew that if anyone was going to pay hundreds of dollars to go zip lining and then chicken out when push came to shove it would be me.

We stayed at a small guesthouse of about 6 rooms slightly outside of Chiang Mai central.  Run by a childrens foundation.  They rescue kids from appalling conditions in Myanmar and the hill tribes of Thailand (who legally have no status in Thailand) and bring them to a children’s foundation village where they support them in going to school, learning English and they help out in the Guesthouse.  It’s one of those quaint little places where there is Grandma, Mums, Dads, Aunties, Uncles, kids singing Jingle Bells, babies, dogs, cats, frogs and the odd millipede.  Everyone helps out with everything and it’s very chilled out and relaxed.

We spent a day at Lanna Kingdom Elephant Sanctuary (which is one of those magical days that stays with you forever).  This sanctuary (apart from being the number 1 rated attraction in Chiang Mai on Trip Advisor) was absolutely brilliant (I can’t vouch for every elephant sanctuary in Thailand as being the same but this one was top notch).  They have a maximum of 15 people per day to spend time with the elephants. There were only 10 people on the day we went (we were lucky enough to strike low season while we were there).  Any other time of year you need to book weeks in advance as they are very strict about how much tourist time the elephants can have.

Each elephant had its own story.  Many coming from the logging camps where they had been branded, had scars from the chains around their necks and had spent 35 of their 40 years of life in absolute hell.  The baby elephant (2 ½ years old) had been rescued from a circus.  It had been beaten into learning tricks which it now couldn’t unlearn.  One of them was to give people a kiss by sucking the end of it’s trunk on your check and then not letting go.  Another was to bow when the mahout (elephant guardian) said a certain word.  The elephants can’t forget how to do these tricks that they were taught under horrible circumstances, which makes you assume they can still remember the horrible life they use to have.

But now they are living in pretty much heaven.  They eat 17 hours a day.  They wander freely in the sanctuary when the tourists aren’t there. They each have a 24 hour 7 day a week mahout who is there to care for them.  Feed them, keep them clean and happy.  The baby of the group as evolved to become the leader.  She is the first one in the line of elephants to head off to graze or to the mud bath where you get to hop in with them.

Nigel and I were in literally up to our waist in mud.  The other tourists were a bit squeamish about getting in but not us!  First elephant in and so were we.  I think we picked the wrong part of the pond though as it was literally up to my waist.  I couldn’t move.  Both of us were stuck in the mud right next to this massive elephant who was rumbling with happiness when we smothered her in mud all over her back.  She started flapping her ears at me when I went too close behind the ears so we ended up shovelling it high up on her back.  When they were finished (and believe me when the elephant wants to move on the elephant moves on), the larger female helped to push the baby out of the pond.  This female had adopted the baby after she lost her own baby a year ago.  She was honorary aunty to the little one and looked after her the whole way.

From the mud bath we walked with them to the fresh water where they gave us scoops and brushes and told us to get in and scrub the mud away.  Again up to our waist in water next to the tonnes of animal.  It was a truly magical experience that we won’t forget.

We also managed to squeeze in a Thai cooking class. One where they take you on the motorbike sidecar to the market and choose the ingredients and then back to our guesthouse where they set up an outdoor kitchen for us to make pad tai, red chicken curry and Thai pork salad.  We loved it (although had no idea how much sugar goes into Thai cooking… we will leave that behind when we make this again in NZ – when I say ‘we’ I mean Nigel).  Made enough food to feed an army and then sat in the open air restaurant while the thunder and lightning and torrential rain hit us full force.

We had such a relaxing time in Chiang Mai, so serene and chilled out.  Off to Laos next and our third new country this trip.