Back in Southeast Asia Again - (Bandwidth Warning)
Some of you may remember our previous journey, A One Way Trip Of Indefinite Duration, where my wife and I toured China, the Philippines, Thailand, and a little of Malaysia before we ran out of money and wallowed in poverty for a few months before finally turning tail and running home. Since then we haven't done much traveling, getting a job and starting a real life instead. But all of that stuff is really just a means to better support living, so now we find ourselves back on the beach in Thailand. This time, however, we're at one of the world's finest climbing destinations, and we've brought a few friends.
Things started out with little hassle, and we gradually found ourselves many hours and miles from home, with a brief layover in the Dubai airport before moving on toward Bangkok. Here's Dubai just after sundown.
Thailand offers about a gazillion things that are amazing and different from Alaska. Eating dinner on our first evening here, we watched the monkeys swinging and leaping through the trees high above the ground.
Our first night we nabbed a whole house for the group. It's a little more lavish than we're used to, but it gets us a roof over our head while we can explore the place and find more reasonable lodging.
And now moving on for the main reason why we're here! The climbing is spectacular, with karst topography offering giant limestone cliffs rising right out of the ocean. We hit up one of the easier walls right on the beach for our first outing. Here's Paul on his way up a short 6B+ (which is roughly 5.10c for you yosemite decimal system folks).
Here's Eric on the same route.
After the tide came in and pushed us off the beach, we moved around the peninsula to another wall, where Eric took on a lead to put a rope up on a route graded 5.
The topout gave him some challenges, with a two-finger pocket and not much else!
A 180 pano shows off a little piece of Phra Nang Beach, with Happy island looking on as Paul works his way up a 5.
A giant cave opens behind Paul, with enormous stalactites looming overhead. Later, when the skies opened up and dumped on us, this overhang was quite handy.
Looking down on Emily as she works her way toward the anchor, with Eric at the belay.
The sun goes down, closing an awesome first day of climbing and offering a spectacular scene for eager eyes to enjoy. Emily and Eric take full advantage of it.
A local Thai longtail boat cruises past the crazy wave-created boulders on the beach as the sun goes down.
And that wraps up my first post. Our plan is to stay here for a while and get our climbing fix, and then head on through Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, completing a few of the countries we never got to visit on our first trip through this area. Keep an eye out for more!
Things started out with little hassle, and we gradually found ourselves many hours and miles from home, with a brief layover in the Dubai airport before moving on toward Bangkok. Here's Dubai just after sundown.
Thailand offers about a gazillion things that are amazing and different from Alaska. Eating dinner on our first evening here, we watched the monkeys swinging and leaping through the trees high above the ground.
Our first night we nabbed a whole house for the group. It's a little more lavish than we're used to, but it gets us a roof over our head while we can explore the place and find more reasonable lodging.
And now moving on for the main reason why we're here! The climbing is spectacular, with karst topography offering giant limestone cliffs rising right out of the ocean. We hit up one of the easier walls right on the beach for our first outing. Here's Paul on his way up a short 6B+ (which is roughly 5.10c for you yosemite decimal system folks).
Here's Eric on the same route.
After the tide came in and pushed us off the beach, we moved around the peninsula to another wall, where Eric took on a lead to put a rope up on a route graded 5.
The topout gave him some challenges, with a two-finger pocket and not much else!
A 180 pano shows off a little piece of Phra Nang Beach, with Happy island looking on as Paul works his way up a 5.
A giant cave opens behind Paul, with enormous stalactites looming overhead. Later, when the skies opened up and dumped on us, this overhang was quite handy.
Looking down on Emily as she works her way toward the anchor, with Eric at the belay.
The sun goes down, closing an awesome first day of climbing and offering a spectacular scene for eager eyes to enjoy. Emily and Eric take full advantage of it.
A local Thai longtail boat cruises past the crazy wave-created boulders on the beach as the sun goes down.
And that wraps up my first post. Our plan is to stay here for a while and get our climbing fix, and then head on through Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, completing a few of the countries we never got to visit on our first trip through this area. Keep an eye out for more!
John Borland
www.morffed.com
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We spent a couple nights on Railay Beach before finding and moving into cheaper accommodations on Tonsai Beach. Tonsai is a very interesting place. It's not really Thai culture that you experience here, although that is sort of the underlying foundation. Tonsai attracts the climber crowd more than the (generally) more affluent "regular" tourists, and so there's a lot less in the way of amenities and a little more in the way of living free and relaxed. The bungalows here are maybe a little higher priced than other less tourism-specific places in Thailand at about $20 USD per night, and the showers are cold and the electricity only turns on at night, which explains why you haven't heard from me here for a few days.
Our arrival on the beach coincidentally coincided with a group from Elephant Slacklines in Singapore, which was awesome for me since I'd been hoping to find some slackers around here. They were here for a three-day slackfest, which featured a massively long line on the beach the first day.
It goes without repeatedly saying that the climbing on Tonsai is spectacular. The heat, however, is pretty intense for us Alaskans. We came with high hopes of climbing hard, and quickly found that our months of training in the gym before the trip didn't really prepare us for constantly pouring sweat in rather alarming volumes, which makes for very slippery holds and rapid muscle fatigue. We tried our best of course, which wasn't really enough for the more steeply overhung climbs on the beach. Here's Eric on a particularly tempting climb that eluded our attempts at ascent.
My wife and I passed our fifth wedding anniversary while here on this trip, continuing a trend of eating Thai food (or being in Thailand) to celebrate! One of our many favorite things to do is take romantic kissing pictures in cool locations. The hope is that someday these will make quite an album to show off to our kids someday.
The trail to the lagoon is quite an experience in itself. Established by locals and not very well maintained, it takes a haphazard approach up some seriously steep terrain, levels out briefly, and then drops off a few steep cliffs. The Thais have put in some fixed lines that allow travelers to safely negotiate the steep sections... lines that rub the sharp limestone and are caked in slippery red mud as hundreds of visitors traverse them each day. The trail turns back more than a few visitors, which is sort of a shame, because the Lagoon is pretty incredible. Here's Eric dropping over the edge on the last steep section.
I'm not really sure how a place like this is formed. The lagoon is a roughly circular shape, about 200 feet across, and entirely circled by towering limestone walls rising three or four hundred feet. Stalactites around the edges at the base of this giant pit indicate an age well into the tens of thousands of years, and somehow this vertical hole has been hollowed out of a veritable mountain of limestone surrounded on three sides by sea, and the water in the bottom is actually attached to the ocean in some subterranean hole in the back of a cave, and rises and falls with the tide. The air is still, and carries the jungle noises down from above. Bright noon sun clashes violently with the dark shadows around the edges, making the lagoon shine and adding enormously to the specialness of the place. When the tide is in the water is deep enough to swim in, but on our visit it was just on its way back, leaving the place pretty shallow.
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Back in the jungle on Tonsai we encountered a group of monkeys. These guys wander around all over the place generally wreaking havoc. They do the normal stuff animals do, like stealing food and messing on you, and then they add on to that with occasional aggressive behavior combined with a fairly good intelligence, the safety of numbers, and the general invincible feeling of someone who has the higher ground. They've been known to attack people as a herd, which is rare, but if provoked they'll also throw things at you from the safety of the trees, and steal your stuff when your back is turned, and other mean tricks. They consider smiling to be an act of aggression. Climbers we passed on one trail were keeping a wary eye on the monkeys in the jungle on the cliffs overhead, who were hucking a variety of things, including rocks, aiming for the people hundreds of feet below.
They're cute though.
I imagine being a young monkey just learning how to leap through the trees can be a frightening experience.
Oh yeah, direct eye contact is aggression too. If you get close to them and stare at them, they'll turn their heads and look away, anywhere but at you. Fortunately I think distance takes away some of my intimidation factor, so my long lens helped here.
I try not to post an overwhelming amount of climbing shots, but after all that is why we came to Tonsai, so they're important too!
Lizards are abundant, in all sort of shapes and sizes. I don't know them too well, although we saw some big ones that I heard referred to as monitors, and the shape seemed to fit. These little ones here are pretty much everywhere though:
After I'm not sure how long, we finally determined that the only time to comfortably climb is going to be bright and early in the morning. Or actually quite dark and early, as we walk out to the crag by headlamp and climb as soon as there is enough light to see the holds. The early morning temps are much more tolerable, and with a little ocean breeze we can reasonably expect to get in three or four hours of good climbing before we start to die.
I wish I'd been a little less tired and more willing to stay out late and shoot the fire dancers a few more nights, but I only snagged a couple random shots on our last night on the beach. This form of dance incorporates two burning balls on the end of strings, which are waved around in all sorts of sequences, and make for a pretty awesome performance on the beach in the darkness of late evening. This young Thai was practicing often during the day, and looked like he's off to a good start with his career!
There's a T-shirt that sells on Tonsai that says "I'm leaving Tonsai tomorrow", and on the back it just says "Maybe..." It's a feeling that really permeates the area. Most of the travelers here seem to have nowhere really to be, and with a place like this being so hard to leave, many trips are extended and many people find themselves waking up day after day on the tropical beach just doing the same old routine of "whatever they want" all day long, every day. It's a timelessness that could really take over your whole life if you wanted it to, and if you stop and sit down and think about it, is that really a bad thing? Most of us don't think so, and there's an uncertain few on the beach who are trying it out just to see.
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Looks like you're missing the best of the Alaskan Winter (California seems to be missing what comes down this way too).
Looking forward to your journey through Vietnam and Cambodia (and more climbing pictures).
Emily and her boyfriend Eric headed back to the states a few days after leaving us on the beach in Tonsai. Emily's trip was a bit short as she has been planning for months to participate in the Scott Firefighter Stairclimb in Seattle, climbing 69 stories of a skyscraper in full firefighter turnouts and mask. So partially in honor of the firefighters climbing stairs on the same day back in the US, and partially just because it's kind of a neat place, we visited the Tiger Cave Temple in Krabi. The cave is in the base of a large tower of limestone, which has a small temple and large Buddha at the top, and 1237 stairs to get there. We figure our altitude gain may have been greater than the folks in Seattle even with about a hundred fewer stairs, and the 90+ degree heat might at least make up a little bit for not wearing turnouts.
To get around in Krabi we rented some motorbikes. Normally this wouldn't be a wise thing to do, but... well... okay, it probably wasn't a wise thing to do. We zipped around on the left side of the road for most of the day without incident, and to celebrate we decided we needed our biker gang photo. The girls just can't take anything seriously...
The Bangkok scene is enormously rich with temples and palaces. Quite frankly it's enormously overly rich with the things. They're on every street corner and a few places in between, it seems. Today we toured a temple complex where we observed over 1200 Buddha statues, and we probably saw three times that many in shops along the road while walking around. Then we thought twice and skipped paying $30 USD to visit the Grand Palace, which appeared to have much more of the same. Having visited Bangkok before, there's really not much here that I'm that interested in seeing, but we checked out a few things for the sake of those among us who hadn't, experiencing the thrills of tuk-tuk rides and the expenses of being ripped off. The architecture is still cool at least.
The tuk-tuk ride is an experience everyone should have. A lot of these guys will rip you off and charge you way more than they're worth, and there's scams where they take you to the shops of their cohorts on the way to where you tell them you want to go, but hey, you can't find a ride like this anywhere but Thailand, so you've got to give it a go. We had five decent sized Americans in this little three-wheeled wagon, crammed in an uncomfortable pile and yet all grinning and happy to be there as we went whizzing through traffic and squeezing between buses and trucks, with the exhaust fumes, noises, and air pollution aggravating our senses. On our way home later this evening we took the ferry up the river, which was way faster, quieter, cleaner, more direct, and with no traffic, but... well... you just have to take a tuk-tuk at least once while you're here!
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I always got the impression SE Asia was littered with temples. I don't know why that is but I guess when I look around home, I see quite a few churches (one just opened next door to a nightclub in the neighborhood-and I mean right next door).
Fun times on the tuk-tuk
Looks like an awesome trip!
Since as you pointed out your in karst terrain, and that area is one of the best examples of its kind in the world, that lagoon is formed by a cave collapse, which forms a round depression. Depending on the size of the cave that collapses, it could be a small depression or a huge hole in the ground like this. The remnant passages are what connects it to the ocean and cause the interaction with the tides.
Caves rock, and the only thing keeping me out of the caves in that area are the spider
Now that we're several days into Cambodia, we've felt a certain sort of relief from the buy-buy-buy pressures of Thailand. Sure, the locals here also want our money, but they're much more polite about it, for the most part. After separating from Paul and Misty in Bangkok and sending them off on their journey home, Eric and Tracy and I jumped on a bus for the border. The Thai/Cambodia border at Poipet is frought with scams and ripoffs at every turn. We encountered our first scam before leaving Bangkok, where a taxi driver quoted us a respectable price to get to the bus terminal, and then proceeded to spend the next forty-five minutes on the drive telling us there wasn't a bus until the afternoon, and we should just take a taxi because the border would be closed by the time we got there and we would have to stay overnight in the border town. He was very insistent, but after visiting a tour company who told us the same thing, we managed to get him to take us to the bus station, albeit with him protesting strongly the whole way that we would be disappointed. Upon dropping us off there though, he disappeared pretty quickly and we never saw him again. Then we caught a bus after a very short wait and we were off for the border!
The bus drive to the border was a rocket-ship three hours of weaving and maneuvering through oncoming traffic at the highest speeds I've witnessed in Asia, and upon our arrival we were subjected to our next big scam. The bus drops people off behind a building marked with "Welcome to Cambodia" and "Visa Border" signs, where everybody is corralled quite convincingly inside and told that this is where they get their Cambodia visa. There are no other options, and they tell you there is no way to get a visa anywhere else. Fortunately we'd read about this online in advance, and walked around the building to the street and onward to the border. Along the way about a thousand locals stopped us and asked us if we had our visas yet, and told us we needed to get them first. Pushing intrepidly onward, we made it to the border where it was a quick and painless process to get our visas without being subjected to extra fees and hours of waiting, although most of the tourists waiting in line with us had been taken by this scam. We felt lucky on the one hand, disgusted and angry on the other, and a bit sad and frustrated at our inability to warn others, such as the nice family from Kyrgyzstan who shared our bus with us, but didn't speak much English at all and were headed for the visa border the last time we saw them. We were later to encounter a pair of European gentlemen who had done just that, convincing a whole tour bus full of people that a visa border was silly, and then facing the wrath of the scammers they had robbed. When we met them they were in a shouting match with a Cambodian tuk-tuk driver who was in some way affiliated with the scammers across the border, and their good deed followed them all the way to Siem Reap with threats of being left behind if they caused any more problems, and an issue with having to pay twice for a bus ticket. Scams are big business here.
After a good day's travels, our last bus again dropped us off corralled into a corner in front of the hotel they were in cahoots with, and tuk-tuk drivers and hotel staff alike did all they could to keep us there. We squeezed out through a small space between a brick wall and the bus, and after turning down a couple more tuk-tuk offers we were home free, and quickly figured out where we were and found our way to a nice quiet street filled with guesthouses.
And that's where we started enjoying Cambodia! The next morning we headed to the local landmine museum. This organization was started by a single Cambodian man, Aki Ra, who was conscripted by the Khmer Rouge as a child and placed thousands of land mines throughout Cambodia. After the war, he started an effort to de-mine his country, and personally went around with a simple stick, finding and disarming tens of thousands of land mines on his own using his experience with them to keep from being killed. Eventually he started a landmine museum and a home for children who have been injured by landmines. Currently he has 36 children living and attending school there.
Here's a few deactivated mines on display:
The Khmer Rouge made mines and traps out of anything they could get their hands on that would blow up. Conveniently, the U.S. dropped hundreds of thousands of bombs all over the country for years, providing a whole lot of unexploded ordnance in farmer's fields and scattered through the jungle.
The museum is a little disorganized, but you get a little bit of an idea how incredibly horrible these events have been for this whole country. Even today, people are still being killed and injured by explosions from mines left over from a war over thirty years ago. Aki Ra and his team of de-miners are active every day clearing mine fields across the country, and everywhere we have been we have encountered numbers of people with missing limbs and scarred faces.
The website for the Cambodian Self Help Demining organization has a bit more information and places to donate money to help. Having been here and seen the efforts, these guys are making an enormous difference in countless lives, both now and for quite some time to come.
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Here's a caterpillar coming out of some sort of cocoon. Communication was tough, so I'm not real sure if this is an egg sack or what... I thought only butterflys came out of cocoons!
We checked out a bunch of butterflies under a giant net canopy, running around trying to get great angles or shoot great butterflies.
This center also houses a few other kinds of bugs, and we were delighted with our first opportunity to handle a live scorpion. Our tour guide was a little braver than us with handling this guy, but we all at least held him tentatively before giving him back to his cage.
This guy has wings probably about three inches from base to tip, and he was quite difficult to get a shot of because he rarely landed for long, and was skittish upon our approach. He liked this bunch of flowers though, so I camped out and poached a few hastily-focused shots while he fluttered around.
And of course there's a few other insects around too.
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With the coming of day, there were a lot of us still anticipating some fantastic colors, or something...
I personally gave up about halfway through and took advantage of a high ISO to just take a few nice shots, and then we ate breakfast at a vendor nearby and headed on to tour the temples.
As I said before, this place is truly incredible. These guys built towering buildings from giant blocks of stone using ropes and elephants as means of movement. Granted most of the stones are sized so a couple guys could reasonably lift one end and get something under it, so it's not quite as mysterious as the pyramids of Giza, but to consider piling these blocks hundreds of feet into the sky, and then think about building hallways and arches and such, it really is phenomenal.
Wikipedia tells me that people who study these things say that they must have built this place in about forty years. Looking at the sheer volume of rock that had to be quarried, transported, shaped, raised, and placed, I'm certainly impressed. Some of it has crumbled with time, but most of the architecture is still fairly well intact.
The walls tower overhead around the inner complex of the temple.
Steep steps that have long since been closed to tourists due to erosion lead up to the higher inner parts of the temple. Access is made now by a wooden staircase over the top of one of the old stone staircases.
As we wander through the halls and courtyards, the beauty of this place just continues to impress.
The central tower rises to impossible heights over the temple complex. Again, consider that we're already close to a hundred feet up where I'm standing here, and somehow these guys got all that rock way up there in the sky using ropes and elephants!
Moving on from Angkor Wat, we stopped at Ta Prohm. This place is fairly well known for being featured in Tomb Raider, and I'll admit that's where I first saw it and started wanting to go here. This complex has seen a lot more regrowth by the jungle than some of the others in the area, and so is a lot more run down, and to me, a lot more interesting to wander through. A construction crew was working on restorations out front, but much of the area remains in a bit of disrepair.
The neatest thing about Ta Prohm to me is the regrowth that the jungle has done. Trees that are evidently far into maturity have grown in and among and on the stone structures, wrapping them in roots and in some cases separating the architecture and toppling walls entirely. On a sad note, it appeared that most of these giants have fairly recently come upon hard times, showing a sparseness or entire lack of leaves that seems to me to indicate that our human tourism and restoration efforts have somehow damaged their source of sustenance.
I'd really like to see something like this grow in timelapse over a couple hundred years.
This too. This place is just one awesome sight after another.
A lot of the structures at Ta Prohm have been significantly damaged or entirely destroyed by time, but enough are left at least partially standing to really give the place a surreal fantasy feel. Places like this shouldn't be real, and I feel very blessed just to get to see this stuff, and walk around and look at things.
Here a root cluster dwarfs Tracy as she emerges from a darkened hallway. I can't emphasize enough how cool this place is!
This one is a 360+ pano from atop a partially collapsed wall with a bit of a view of the whole complex of Ta Prohm.
One of the trademark sights of the area is this tree, rising enormously above the main entry to the area. You can see though that there's not very many leaves up there. I'm a little sad, but I realize that this place can't remain in its current condition forever, and I think the presence of so much humanity has hastened the demise of these trees, which are of course an enormous part of what makes this place so special. I'm happy I got to see it like this though, before these powerful roots become just a bunch of rotting duff.
One other place we visited before reaching a state of exhaustion the required us to call it quits was Bayon, another enormous stone complex which features a whole bunch of faces carved into its towers. Things are pretty decayed here too, but it's quite impressive.
And that wraps up my rantings about how awesome Angkor Wat is. If you ever get the chance to visit, don't pass it up!
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Cambodia in the seventies was kind of a rough place. I didn't know much before visiting except that a lot of people died, but apparently at some point after the U.S. stopped bombing the snot out of the entire country (that took a few years of carpet-bombing) the Khmer Rouge moved in and sort of ruined everything. Pol Pot, the leader of this movement, had the idea that people should be simple and live simple lives, like farmers, so he upset the whole country and any city dweller got sent to live out to the villages by force. The infrastructure was sort of broken, so nobody had enough food or supplies, and people were affected pretty negatively by that, as you might imagine. Then the Khmer Rouge started killing everybody who didn't fit the simple living type. That meant people who disagreed with them, naturally, and also people who were bilingual, people who wore glasses, people who had higher education... Pretty soon, and I mean in a period of three years or so, one out of four people in Cambodia was dead. It was kind of bad.
After a while the Vietnamese showed up and saved the day, ousting the Khmer Rouge and kindly setting up a new government for Cambodia. The U.N. for some reason felt that this wasn't okay, and continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge as the government for Cambodia for something like ten years, even though those guys were fighting a losing guerrilla battle, and I feel it was pretty clear they shouldn't really have been in charge.
The place we visited in Phnom Penh was the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. This place was originally a high school until the Khmer Rouge moved in, and then it became a prison camp. People were brought here and housed in small cells while they were interrogated by torture until they confessed to whatever story was invented for them, and then they were executed. They estimate as many as 20,000 people went through this camp alone, and there were a bunch of these camps across the country. The Khmer Rouge cataloged every case with photos, and the museum is a haunting display of the faces of people who were about to die. When the Vietnamese showed up, there were only seven prisoners alive.
A few short paragraphs is not enough to tell what it's like visiting this place. I don't know whether I should really try or not.
We followed the Tuol Sleng Museum with a trip to the Choeung Ek Killing Fields, where prisoners from the area were taken to be murdered and buried. Bullets were too expensive, so they were knelt at the edges of mass graves and killed with whatever was at hand: farming implements, axes, even the sharp-edged stems of the sugar palm trees were used to slit throats. Children were picked up by their feet and their heads smashed against tree trunks. Bodies were dumped in big holes and covered with chemicals that would both mask the scent and finish off anybody who wasn't dead. This place went with little attention for a number of years after the genocide was over before it was rediscovered, whereupon many of the bodies were unearthed for investigation, and a memorial was built over the place. Rains still wash bones and teeth from the dirt, and the giant memorial stupa in the middle of the grounds contains some 8000 skulls of the victims as a reminder of the atrocities that took place.
Pol Pot and his cronies have yet to be punished. Pol Pot himself died naturally under house arrest in 1998, and another of the guys in charge just passed away this month of natural causes. There are trials currently going on for that guy and a few others involved for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The next day we took a bus to Vietnam, and evidently as far as I can tell somewhere along our last bus ride on a sleeper bus, the guy next to me stole my camera and a flash from out of my lowepro, which was compressed under the head of my mattress, under my head as I slept. So that answers your questions of why there are no photos with this post! As you can imagine, my spirits are a little dampened of late. I guess taking pictures means a little more to me than just taking pictures.
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I decided that instead of borrowing Tracy's camera for everything I want to shoot, I'm just gonna stretch my creativity and use my gopro. It's a little sub-standard for quality, but whatever, I'm not really concerned at this point.
We headed out on a pleasant afternoon tour yesterday, with our first stop being a small and pretty stream that we were to walk up, enjoy the scenery, and walk back. A short distance up the stream, however, these dudes are selling ostrich rides at five bucks a pop. I'm pretty sure they make really good money, for locals.
Who wouldn't pay five bucks on an impulse to ride an ostrich?
The stream was kind of nice. Shallow warm water on a sandy bottom that we walked up barefoot, and wild sandstone formations from the ancient dunes it has washed its way through over time.
Our second stop was a fishing village, which was kind of impressive. One oddity we've noticed is the use of giant bowls as fishing boats. We see people furiously paddling these ungainly craft out on the ocean all day, and we're not really sure why they'd rather use a giant bowl than a boat designed to glide through water smoothly, but it seems pretty widespread. You can see them beached at the bottom of this pano.
Our main destination for this tour was the giant sand dunes a little northeast of Mui Ne.
We had our fun dancing in the dunes for a while, and returned to our jeep completely covered in sand.
As the sun went down, we visited some dunes of a different color, where the local activity is sledding, and there's a ton of kids all over the place ready to sell you a few runs on a sled, and even show you how it's done. Here's Eric riding off into the sunset.
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From what little I remember from the war, the Khmer Rouge were definitely not nice people. The stories of the killing fields was something I read about years ago and to this day, it's something I can't grasp. I can't begin to wrap my head around the notion it happens even today.
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Police visit #1:
First off, of course, I had no high expectations for dealing with police over here. I resigned myself to spending very much time running around and jumping through hoops, and I got what I expected. I started in Mui Ne, where the police were eating lunch behind the police station, and the whole place was empty. Eventually I got the attention of a lady who looked official enough, who listened to my story and then told me to come back later after she talked to her commander.
Police visit #2:
Still the same day, so not too much time wasted here. Back to the same police station, where a man I assume is the aforementioned commander ignores me and I'm waved to a seat in front of the lady I spoke with earlier, where I wait only a short while until she waves me over and explains that because I don't know the bus company that I arrived on, the police can do nothing. Her reasoning is that they can't start an investigation with the information I had, and therefore they can't file a report. I walk away asking myself if an investigation starts BEFORE all the information is obtained, or after?
Police visit #3
A little internet search based on the street corner we bought tickets from, and I think I've figured out the bus line. I go back to the police station, speak to the same lady, give her written information on the bus, my seat, and what happened, and she says she'll ask her commander and get back to me at my guest house. I give her my information and leave. I think the commander doesn't show up for work until he wants to. Needless to say, we never heard from the police again, and we left the next afternoon.
Police visit #4:
Back in Saigon, we speak with police at a small kiosk on a corner. They point us down the street and around another corner to a bigger police station. Once we get there, we are waved to a back room and speak to an officer at a computer. I tell my story, and during the telling he has difficulty understanding me over the other conversation around us, so I step up behind his desk. His computer screen shows that he's playing a strategy game online, and he continues moving his units around as he talks to me. Fortunately at this point I am armed with much exact information on dates, times, and even have the brochure from the travel company. At length he tells me I must report the theft with the company, and then bring their report to the police station.
The Travel Company
Fortunately again, the travel company is right around the corner. The lady there is very apologetic and kind, but expresses that they have no such system for reporting of thefts. Obviously not, they're a travel company, not the police!
Police visit #5:
He's still playing his game, and I don't think he expected us back so soon. I explain things, and he eventually turns around and reaches into a cabinet filled with what looks like clothing and blankets, and pulls out a police report form. I sit down and fill it out in detail with everything very precisely written. This takes a while, and when I'm done I give it to him. He passes it on to another officer, who says that I need to go get the receptionist from my guesthouse to come translate what I've written. Off we go!
Police visit #6:
Our receptionist doesn't look too excited, but she comes with us, speaks to the police, borrows my pen, and begins writing, occasionally asking me what a word means. As she gets to the list of stolen items, an officer leaning over her shoulder questions her. They talk back and forth, and he walks off. She explains that he said that because the camera was stolen on a bus to Mui Ne, I need to go to Mui Ne and report it to the police there. She says she's sorry, and she leaves. I head back to the gamer and explain that I have already been to Mui Ne, and they told me they couldn't help me. He says they can't help me here, with much finality in his tone. Maybe it's my lack of experience in the methods of bribing corrupt officials, but he denies my question of the possibility of paying a "fee" to get it done here. He tells me my only other option is to talk to my embassy and goes back to his game. We leave.
At the embassy:
I found this visit kind of humorous. Tracy had been wondering what an embassy was like and wanting to visit one, so she finally got her opportunity. Downtown Saigon isn't really that big, so we walk a couple kilometers, abandon ALL electronic devices (we're loaded with them) at the door, and navigate our way to where the US citizens go. We take a number and wait a while and talk to a girl behind the glass. She listens to our story and is sort of confused about why the police thought she could help. Her official advice from the counter of a U.S. consulate is that because the bus is not in the jurisdiction of either the Saigon or Mui Ne police, I should tell the police that the equipment was stolen at a market. She names a market; I guess it's quite believable that a camera would be stolen there. -But don't go back to the same police station, she says, those guys will know you're lying. I tell her I'm not interested in falsifying an official police report. She says the only other thing I can do is write out an affidavit, and have it sworn and sealed by the consulate, which will cost $50USD. I take the form, and we leave.
Back to the embassy:
After a little thought and discussion, we decide that this is probably a good idea just to have some documentation, so I fill out the affidavit, and the next day we return to the embassy. The process is painless, I speak to a different gentleman, and we walk away with a stamped and sealed sworn affidavit that I had some camera gear stolen from me in Vietnam, and the police refused to help me. I just hope this does the trick for insurance and any proof I'll need in the future!
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Today we visited the war relics museum in Saigon, where we happened to encounter a fellow smugger, easily identifiable by his smuggy strap. Our tour of the museum was quite interesting, having little to no knowledge of the reasons and happenings of the Vietnam war prior to coming here. I can't help but draw parallels between the photos we looked at on the wall and the war we currently have going on. I also can't really see the reasons for going to war. I know I don't have the whole picture, and there's a lot of people who spend their lives deciding these things, but there sure has been a lot of damage and killing done in this part of the world, and for what? Reading up on the short bit of history in our travel book, Vietnam has been occupied and disputed violently going back as far as the year 900. Maybe there's something in the water?
The museum is mostly a few war relics, as the name implies, and a multi-story building with photos from the war.
Some of the captions for the photos are fairly heavily weighted with propaganda, but I suppose you can't really blame these guys.
All in all, this was an educational afternoon. I wish we learned a bit more about things like this in school in America though. It seems like a lot of our history is barely and only narrowly touched on, and we don't really have a broad perspective unless we dig for knowledge ourselves. I guess I see the same sort of thing with travel though - us Americans seem to think the world outside is a dirty and scary place, and the people who are most fearful and resistant to going places are universally people who have never been outside our comfortable country.
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Our plan originally was to traverse Vietnam in a northerly direction, then head west through Laos into northern Thailand, and head back to Bangkok and home. Sitting on the beach in Mui Ne was nice for the couple days after the theft, but I found that I didn't want to rent motorcycles and travel the whole country with a motorcycle guide. I didn't really care if I ever made it to Laos anymore. I wasn't even interested in deep water soloing in Ha Long Bay, and the thought of visiting tigers and riding elephants in Chiang Mai didn't really excite me much either. All the fun had gone out of life, and to be honest, I just wanted to change my ticket and go home. In fact we looked at various ticket changing options with the idea of doing something dramatic to improve the mood, like going to Paris or Cairo for our last couple weeks. The costs for those changes were a bit much though, so with spirits about as low as I've ever experienced, we headed back to Saigon to see Eric off on his journey home, and determined to wing it from there.
The police experiences listed above were our main focus in Saigon, but we were also able to find some cheap tickets on Air Asia to get back to Bangkok, so we did that with the thought of heading north and just resting ourselves in Chiang Mai. We made a couple of middle-of-the-night phone calls home though, and the lovely and wonderful ladies who provide our insurance assured us that if we were to buy a camera locally, they would reimburse us when we got home. Armed with that knowledge, we visited the MBK Center, a giant western-style mall with a whole quarter of a floor devoted to electronics and cameras. We perused the selection, which included some pretty neat things like spy video cameras in ballpoint pens, and eventually sat down over a cold glass of water to talk with the friendly staff at Fotofile. These guys know service like very few other places I have been in Asia, which was especially nice for a change.
And so, yesterday I walked about five kilometers through the busy streets of Bangkok carrying a translucent plastic shopping bag with a very visible box for a Canon 5D MkII inside.
I feel better now.
Tomorrow, Lord willing, you'll have more pictures!
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Thank you for sharing with us.
Marcelo
We headed out this morning to visit the Tiger Kingdom. This is one of those places where, among other things, people come and pay a good chunk of money, and then cuddle with tigers!
I'm sure the money raised here goes to some conservation efforts, or making these tigers have great lives, but let's be honest: We're only here for the pictures.
After cuddling with the little guys for a bit, we sat down to watch these two adults have a bit of play. I guess it's play anyway, I think if a human were involved it would be a little fatal...
This photo kind of scares me!
The facility has one lion. All of these cats are pretty good at doing what all cats do, which is sleeping. Evidently they spend something like 15 to 18 hours a day sleeping. It's a rough life.
Next we moved on to the medium sized tigers. I don't remember exactly how old these guys were, but they were a little livelier bunch than the toddlers.
Our guide would boss these guys around with a little bamboo stick whenever they got sassy. Just a tap or two on the face and they'd settle down.
This was a really wild experience for me. I've always liked cats, but have never been so close to such huge felines. They're incredibly beautiful animals.
To think that I'd get the chance to take macro photos of a tiger's nose...
Finally we moved on to the full grown adults. This guy was about three or four times as thick in the chest as me. I imagine an encounter with one of these things in the jungle would be swift and terrible indeed!
Did I mention the word "beautiful" yet?
So yeah... Not a lot to say and yet such an enormously awesome experience. Definitely a major highlight of the trip (and maybe life itself) for me so far! And well worth the money, too. Also, it probably goes without saying, but it's awesome to be working with a real camera again!
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This one is a Burmese Python, I believe, and our guide let us play with it and shoot it wandering around before putting it back in the cage.
Next up: The King Cobra. Okay, so I've seen video of cobras on TV, and they seem pretty neat, but fairly normal, like rattlesnakes, right?
Yeah... like rattlesnakes except they're longer than a car! This guy is about four meters long, and the guide tells us this is a medium sized king cobra! I had no idea these guys got this enormous. Imagine running into this thing out in a field... Sheesh!
This much smaller cobra was in a glass cage. This is a good thing, because evidently one of the things these guys like to do is spit venom in your eyes, which of course blinds you, possibly permanently.
We wrapped up the snake exhibit with a live snake show. These guys danced around with various poisonous snakes, all the while emphasizing how deadly the venom is and that if bitten you'd be dead within an hour. I'm not really convinced that they were too concerned about death, based on how they were treating these things.
Cobras are pretty beautiful animals too.
They demonstrated milking venom, which was quite interesting to watch, but I blew the focus so I won't bore you with that shot.
And then of course they go and do things like this, just seconds after dodging a venomous strike... I don't think I understand snakes very well!
This guy was some sort of jumping snake, and he did that quite well. He'd get about four or five feet of reach in a strike.
I didn't get a chance to ask how many times these guys have been bitten, but I assume when you do these shows a couple times a day there must be a few hits!
They're pretty nonchalant about it though!
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I would love to try the sea climb - then jump off when you go as high as you dare, it loos awesome !!
Our tour started with feeding the elephants bananas and sugar cane. This doesn't really satisfy the hunger of an elephant, but it's pretty fun to do, and the elephants seem to enjoy the interaction almost as much as we do. Here's an elephant kiss.
Walking through a herd of these giants is a pretty awesome experience. These guys were chained by an ankle while we fed them, but mahouts were wandering through with their charges heading to and from the water hole or other areas of the facility, and huge bulks were moving around everywhere we turned. Our sandalled feet seemed like they may have been in a bit of danger, wandering around with the likes of these:
The elephants here were grouped in a large herd, rather than a line, so to distribute the snacks evenly and not just feed the beasts in the front row we had to grab an armful of goodies and walk the gauntlet, with trunks reaching at us on all sides and grabbing at the delicious treats we carried. Elephants can be kind of sneaky! They definitely know where the food is, and they want it.
Needless to say, at this point I was very happy that I was no longer limited to using a gopro. How terrible would that be???
Here's a happy elephant going for some more sugar cane. This may be comparable to running a football through a line of opponents... it's really kind of a fun game.
Elephants are of course quite cool to look at up close like this. Evidently their skin is about 2.5 inches thick, and will stop a shotgun slug, but it is quite susceptible to infection, so where a shotgun might not kill an elephant right away, it very likely will after a year or two. These people have seen elephants in pretty much every condition, and in fact they had two here that could not be safely approached by anyone but their mahouts because of the bad treatment they'd received in the past at human hands.
Did I mention I'm super stoked to have a camera again?
Evidently the eyesight of elephants isn't too good, and in fact there were a couple here that were almost completely blind. Those ones had to be fed directly into their mouths, because they can't see to reach out and take treats from our hands. Their eyes are pretty interesting though, they seem to stand out pretty boldly with an almost red color to them.
Elephant trunks are kind of awesome, in a lot of ways. This is the fuzz on the top of the trunk.
Even though this is an experience I have been waiting for a long time, I can still admit there's a certain amount of intimidation with an animal this large!
The mahouts use a very simple tool to control their elephants, which consists of a short handle and a small sharp hook. We're told that while the elephant and mahout have a very close relationship, an elephant won't have much respect for a mahout who doesn't have a tool in his hand. With it present they'll follow instructions pretty well, but I guess if it's not there they don't care to obey much.
This one I had to take because, well, who hasn't ever wondered what the bottom of an elephant's foot looks like?
After our delicious introduction we were instructed in the basics of elephant command. Tourists at most elephant riding tours in this part of the world are treated to a ride in a howdah of sorts, a large bench tied onto the elephant's back. This idea never really appealed to me much at all, seeming like a much less personal interaction with the animal and kind of a "cheap" touristy way to go. We selected our elephant tour with that specifically in mind, and were not disappointed in having done so. Our guide explained that while an elephant can certainly carry a lot of weight, they're better off not carrying it all concentrated in one place like that for a long period of time, and the elephants here are ridden bareback always. Here's Tracy practicing the movement of mounting an elephant.
It's a little ways up there...
We then headed out on a short walk through the jungle. The guide explained that the mahouts are pretty busy all the time, taking the elephants out for a walk like this twice a day, and bathing them in the pond at least ten times daily to keep them cool in the hot sun. Pile onto that workload the extra care of providing food and shoveling manure and all the basics of animal care, and I respect these guys and the energy they put into the care for their animals quite a lot!
Notice that hairy head in the last photo? Those hairs are super thick, enough so that if you place your hand directly on them there is a potential that they'll stab right into you! The trick is to move your hand in from the side and lay them down a bit when leaning on the elephant's head.
Their ears are used as giant fans which they constantly wave back and forth, and supplement by occasionally sucking up an impressive quantity of saliva into their trunk and then spraying it back onto their sides. Getting covered in elephant spit is all part of the experience though.
Our tour ended with a bath at the pond, which the elephants seem to enjoy immensely.
Our elephant was evidently 40 years old, and seemed to have the routine down pretty well on our tour. She treated us pretty well.
And that's it for elephants! I'm afraid I probably won't have much else to put up either, but we'll see how the trip home goes.
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