Aux and Lissa's Epic Cycle Journey

Gallery: hoi an-hue + dmz

lissaur — Wed, 8 Aug 2007 21:59:00 GMT

yellow...

ode to mountain biking

lissaur — Fri, 3 Aug 2007 20:34:00 GMT

i just read this, and pretty much have to put it on. cheers to the cool ones at http://www.groundeffect.co.nz

To jump, or not to jump

To jump, or not to jump: that is the mountain biker's question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The rags and chortles of outrageous riding mates,
Or to launch your bike off a ledge of troubles,
And by a clinched sphincter, survive? To jump: to land;
Once more; and by a landing to say we end
The knocks and grazes
That lycra'd flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To jump, to land;
To land: perchance to live: ay, there's the rub;
For in that leap of faith what second-thoughts may come
Of clipping free and bailing for the trees
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of such big drop-offs;
For who would bear the whips and thorns of the blackberry patch,
The giant gum's unbending armour, the proud man's shattered GPS,
The pangs of dislocated joints, the pretzel'd wheel's delay,
The insolence of others and the 'bagger' spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy sixteen-year-old-with-8-inch-front-'n-rear-and-no-mortgage takes,
When he himself might his timely demise make
With a soil-sampling endo? Who would take the pain,
To grunt and sweat under a weary granny-gear climb,
But that the hope of nailing that gnarly drop-off,
The undiscover'd nirvana that once found
No mountain biker ever returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear the opt-outs we know
Than crank hard at those ledges that we know not of?
Thus Wang Chung does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of car-park bravado
Is sicklied o'er with the pale thought of a yard sale,
And yumps of great hang-time and distance
With this regard our wheels hug the dirt,
And lose the catch of air.

hoi an is cool.

lissaur — Fri, 3 Aug 2007 20:11:00 GMT

nha trang is a mostly ok town, but its dirty belly is exposed for all to see as soon as the bars start closing, which is pretty early, and once all the touristy stuff has been done, it can be like watching a movie twice or three times in a row. our guardians have been working hard to keep us out of hoi an for some reason. we were stuck in na trang for a total of 8 days i think, a quite unnecessary length of time. 5 of these days were over a weeked to extend our vietnam visas for a month, but we met some cool cats and hung out drinking with them for a few days. after an especially frenzied drinking session i freaked out and tried to run home back to our guesthouse leaving our friends and lissa in a state of confusion. a motorcycle guy followed me for most of the way trying to sell me a trip home or drugs or something, i cant remember. i tried to give him the slip but was too far gone and gave myself the slip by accident, so ive been hobbling around for the last week with an ankle the size of a baseball. so. couldnt ride for a few days and instead spent them checking out coral reefs and cool fish.

when the swelling went down a little and it was time to hit the road lissa caught a bug in her nose which moved into her sinuses so that put off still further the 130 km of impending hillclimbs and descents to sea level. ok, catch a bus. we booked passage on an open tour bus to hoi an and checked out of our very cool guesthouse. bummed around all day drinking coffee and playing pool till 7pm when the bus was supposed to leave. waited half an hour cause it was late. it finally arrived and the guy who stands in the door to slow down traffic while the bus pulls over (he was actually the manager of the tour agancy, but we didnt know that at the time) had a row with the girls in the tour place cause he didnt want to take our bikes. it didnt look like we were going to get on. he yelled something at us in vietnamese and the bus started moving. pissed off at this point, lissa hammered on the side of the bus. he came out steaming and she said something like "where the fuck are you going?" he only understood fuck i think, and thought she was insulting him. "fuck you" he says, to which she replies "no, fuck YOU." he must have lost face because he took a swing at her. she punched him a few times, i got in the way and he attacked me, so i hit him as well. and it must have looked like he was losing the battle because the driver and some other guy piled out and a big fight started on the foothpath in front of a bus full of foreigners who all piled to the windows to see what was happening. anyway, we were unhurt but the fuckers ripped my favourite pants. we went back to our guesthouse in a rage, furious at all vietnamese men, and the guy who owns the guesthouse (one of the nicest vietnamese men ive met) put us up in his room cause all the others were full. we vowed not to catch another bus because most of the bus drivers are arseholes, and we are now semi deaf in the left ear from their unnecessary blasting of the horns as they pass us on the road. i dont know what is psychologically wrong with 40% of all vietnamese men (a revised estimate. we have met a few more nice ones lately), but they have no manners or subtelty and the social grace of an alsatian that has had its head swapped with that of an elderly male yak. they will stare blatently at the western women when on a beach and will often by hoiking and spitting up flem while doing this. i got one guys eye after an extended beachside hoiking session, and made vomiting motions on the sand. blank looks. he had no idea what i ment. from what ive heard indian beaches are worse, but these guys shit me up the fuckin wall.

we got up at dawn and went to the train station, but the next train departed at 11.45 that night and we would have to stay in nha trang (which by now was really irritating) for another 16 hours. we got on our bikes and cycled to doc let beach, 50 km out of town on the road north. that was an awesome catharsis. i listened to 3 tool albums and let the blood out. lazed on a much better beach than nha trangs for the afternoon, got up early and cycled north for 2 more days. some of the most beautiful country so far, well out of the gravitational pull of saigon, and much more scenic than the delta. the dreaded highway 1 really isnt living up to its name, another example of why cyclists should ignore the advice of motorists. i had mentally prepared myself to do battle with busses trucks and motorbikes every inch of the way, but this is not so. it looks hectic when youre sitting at the front of a bus, but a lot of the time they are traveling at the same speed as us because of the hills, which i am really starting to enjoy. this road winds its way the coast, rising to 200m then dropping back down to sea level. its beautiful to ride as its quite possible to grab onto passing trucks to scab a lift to the top of the hill, then pass them on the way down. technically its cheating (or so lissa will tell you) but why not make the most of an ephemeral source of free uphill mileage...

we caught a share taxi from qui nhon and arrived in hoi an that afternoon. this is the most beautiful town ive ever seen. it was the largest sea port in vietnam from about the 11th till 17th century i think (im prolly wrong, but it was for a long time) and was home to some wealthy chinese japanese and european merchents. the streets are really old, narrow and french, and there is a car ban in the inner city. yes. something that is needed in all cities i think. it escaped bombing during the war so is in original condition and not a shitty postwar communist reconstruction, and was granted world heritage status in 1999. there is a proliferation of good cafes and bars, and it specialises in tailors who promise "copies 100% original". sounds like same same but different, but we got a few things made. i dont think anyone passes through here without getting a suit made. im beyond that, but i got them to make me a cool vampire jacket and a whole bunch of other stuff. we just posted a whole heap of tailormade clothes to australia, and i think the postage cost almost as much as the stuff in the first place. pretty fuckin cheap.

we hired a motorbike today and rode 40 km out of town to My Son (80 km is just a bit too far to comfortably cycle on one of our many lazy days off). this is the site of some old champa ruins that would have been a hell of a lot less ruined before 1969. apparently the VC had a base near here, so the area was carpet bombed by everyones favourite country. silly communists, should have had more respect for the hard work of their ancestors, and built their base in an open field somewhere so the americans werent forced to destroy structures that had been standing 400 years before ankor wat was concieved. an interesting addition to a part of the temple complex that still had a roof was a couple of unexploded 500lb bombs, so there can be a marvel of the ancient worldside by side with a marvel of the modern world. cool.

aux.

Gallery: around na trang

lissaur — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 14:33:00 GMT

and other randoms from naam

Gallery: dalat to na trang

lissaur — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 21:30:00 GMT

best ride so far.

dalat to na trang

lissaur — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 15:24:00 GMT

the bikes are running smooth now after getting refited in saigon with some new spokes and relined brakepads. turns out that after all my searching it is next to impossible to buy shimano pads for disc brakes, so at their insistance, i didnt really want to, they took our worn pads and put some new shit on them, and they work just as well as the real thing for abour 2 dollars each instead of twenty. only in asia could this happen. we left dalat yesterday, after a day that was just like wellington summer. about 23 degrees and sunny. this is only possible because of its elevation, at 1500M its the tallest city in naam, and has a spectacular climate. the vietnamese people that we met all warned us how cold it is, and its really funny to see them walking around in ski jackets and beanies while the tourists luxuriate in shorts and tshirts. there are heaps of vietnamese tourists there, most from saigon, and i guess that to them its like a ski town.

we were tempted to do a tour with thses dudes called the easy riders but it was really expensive (by asian standards) so we decided to stick to the plan and cycle up the coast instead of going via the highlands. really glad that we did, because yesterday we had a 110 km ride from 1600M (there was a bit of uphill) to sea level, including a 33 km downhill that was fuckin extreme. lissa broke her pannier bag (managed to fix it with a random bolt that she found) and we got 4 flat tires. we managed to survive all day on the pancakes and bacon that our cafe lady tu ann made for us in dalat (i love that town, best breakfast so far in the trip) and the chocolate and dried tomatoes that were supposed to be strawberries (someone doesnt know what they are talking about) because there wasnt much food to eat en route. we passed a really old vietmanese guy running down the road thankfully in the direction that we were heading, completley naked. he didnt even have footwear. didnt want to look back to see lissas expression. i guess it was hot so why wear clothes... i guess. we stopped at a small village where an old french railway crossed a river, and i checked out some french pillboxes guarding the approach to the bridge from viet minh attack. i like the french style, their bunkers have little medieval type turrets on them that give them a little more charm than should be possible for a machinegun emplacement. the bridge over the river was still intact but the tracks are gone. i tried to walk out on the metal girders, but some kids were playing with my bike and i didnt want them to reset my cycle computer so i had to return. i gave one of them my ipod to listen to (prolly the strangest thing to happen to him all year). the afternoon wore on and we outran a thunderstorm while trying to catch up with some other cyclists who passed lissa as i was off exploring. we finally limped into town on 2 flattening tires as it got dark and met this crazy dude who used to be a translator for the yanks during the war. he found us a sweet hotel for cheap. wanted to collapse but he kept going on about nzers during the war and stuff so i managed to get rid of him by giving my email address, then had to repair 5 inner tubes before i could lie down. fuck. should have done that ages ago and not let them build up till i had no spares left but theres nothing like a really good procrastination i guess. now its 11.30am and about 35 degrees. just cycled 50 km, got another 50 to go till we get to na trang and a curry. might have a sleep and wake up this arvo when its a bit cooler. just bought 2 icecreams for about 15 cents. not like our ones, they make them with coconut cream not milk, so they taste really coconutty. not bad when you get used to them though.and cold! the ride this morning was awesome. up the 'dreaded' highway one, which is better and wider than pretty much all combodian roads, in the direction of na trang. rugged hills this morning and flourescent green rice paddies. as we ate breakfast this morning on the roof of our hotel a couple of migs (i think mig 27's) took off and cruised over the town playing around burning gas. they accompanied us, circling around for the next 30 km before we outdistanced them and they disappeared in the haze. prolly the coolest sendoff and ride out of town yet. just looked at the turoa snow report, all 5 days are snow!!! havent seen that before, you guys must be hgaving some reeeallllly shit weather. haha.

aux the midnight landscaper

Who want my chopstick

lissaur — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 18:45:00 GMT

we have spent the last week exploring the mekong delta by bike. first impressions were that it was a plastic laden swamp surrounded by urban sprawl, and that all of the mystery and interest that surrounds the last stretch of this awesome river system had been pillaged and raped by the last 3 generations of inhabitation by the virus with shoes. the first 2 days were spent trying to get escape from the traction beam of highways motorbikes and communist era construction that surrounds saigon. we reached mytho, the first big town out of the city, and the town with the most corrupt police force in the country (thereby making it one of the poorest towns in the country). we stayed at a hotel that was the strangest i have ever experienced. our room was on the second floor, and was massive. about 12X12 square metres. it had concrete walls that were covered for most of the room by rows of old doors with a glass pane and veneer panneling. the floor was of the same red and white tiles that are present in S21 in cambodia (the prison where 30,000 political prisioners were held, beaten, and killed), giving the place an eerie feel. the roof leaked, and in the bathroom the shower water flowed backwards into the bedroom into a drain in the corner. we had a small room next to the doorway that had a massage table in it for some reason, and there was a solitary loudspeaker hanging on the wall with nothing attaching it to anything useful. we did manage to find a place to have icecream though, so had desert and watched the bats circling in the roof of the small cafe next to a big lake. people who are on a one day tour of the delta only get to see this town, which is really sad because its shit. cantho, the next stop, is a little better. we found a cool guesthouse (where we stayed for 3 days cause i got a little ill, and i only discovered the hot water on our last morning), and much western food because i think this is a major tourist destination. we signed up for an 8 hour boat tour of the canals in the region in our weakened post biking state that the guesthouse owner took full advantage of.

awoke at the prescribed hour of 6am to a full tropical downpour. we donned our john ponchovies that we bought on the ride out and waited for our no english words guide to show up. when he finally appeared the rain had stopped so we ventured tenderly out into the murk and onto his wooden boat. we spent an hour cruising the market, drinking coffee from green plastic cups with straws (the first coffee ive ever purchased on a boat from someone on another boat... whole new cafe idea there) and eating bread before our guide headed us off up some random canal. when the stilt houses thinned out a little, the trip began to take on the appocalypse now type surreality that i was hoping to find so i sat on the prow and watched the palms and plantations glide past. we had lunch at a small place on the bank and lay in hammocks till it was time to head home. the trip back was definately worse, as the pollution in some of the canal networks is really bad. our propellor blades got fouled by plastic bags 5 or 6 times. each time he stops the engine, picks the shreds of plastic off then throws them back in the river. i would have thought he would at least realise what caused the problem and take them home to put in the bin. not so. people here really have no idea, and the sad part is that there is no hope. the kids throw rubbish in the river just as much as adults do, so there is obviously no concept of environment, even among those who go to school. kinda makes me pray for holocaust.

next day, rode to long xuen (or something) which is pronounced long shun or shin (or something), still cant make myself understood. i say "long shun, this way?" blank looks. "long shun." point this way. blank looks. point to long xuen in the book. "oooooh long shun." goddamnit thats what i said. well its a boring town with 2 good things. a mall selling fruitjuice cashews and chocolate. ooooooh yeaaaaaaaaah. and a church that looks like a cheap version of the temple of nod (C&C) without the legs. i took a photo at night that gives it a reddish glow, and makes it look most nodlike. instead of the scorpion tail, there is a long concrete arm reaching straight up that grasps a cross. the whole thing looks grotesque, but at least its something different. next day we rode to chau doc, our destination on the delta. we found a cool guesthouse with a restaurant right on the river, and had some food. many package tourists on intrepid tours, but not much else going on. we packed up our bags the next day and i attached a massive bag of our washing to my handlebars (off balancing my bike considerably) and we set off to check out a new guesthouse that looked the shit and was sposed to be 6 km out of town and 200 metres up a big hill called sam mountain. there was no guesthouse. there wasnt anything except a big fuck off hill. after riding 4 km up that with our full panniers and a bag of washing swing unpredictably from my bars we reached the top expecting another road down the other side, and just maybe a guesthouse where we could get some breakfast and do our washing. nope, only one road up and down. we looked at the view (which seemed entirely unworthy of the energy exerted in lugging 20kg each of shit to the top of the hill) and said a final goodbye to cambodia which lurked somewhere in the distance then cycled back down, stopping every 200 metres to spray water on our brake discs to cool them down. went back to our old guesthouse, and gave them our washing. couldnt be fucked riding the next day, so we rented a motorbike and burned out to 2 million dollar hill. that was a bit of fun. never ridden one before but i picked it up pretty quick and only scared the crap out of lissa a couple of times with my "dodgy" driving. this hill is thus named because the americans dropped 2 million dollars of metal and stuff on it during their little conflict. we visited the VC base which is really cool. the hill is a natural fort. its a maze of boulders and caves, some boulders 30 metres across. the americans would storm in, lose heaps of troops neutralising the place, then leave. the VC would then reoccupy their old positions. seems a simple tactic, yet apparently the yanks didnt grasp it because they had to capture the hill a few times. this is evident by the huge while letters painted on the rocks up the hill to show rally points or captured positions i guess. the letters have been crossed out in black paint by the reoccupying VC. must have been really demoralising for the americans. i tried to climb to the top but only got about halfway up cause i didnt want to fall into a chasm and set off a landmine or boobytrap. (and i was shit scared of big spiders and snakes). the extent of the attacks is ovbious from the damage to the rocks. in some places the massive round boulders have huge chunks blasted out of them and the scree and rock debris lies everywhere between them. there is the necessary firing range nearby, and communist flags flying all around the hill, so that you have no illusions about who won the battles.

back to saigon by bus this morning. it was a painless (by comparison) 7 hour journey, and we arrived to another downpour. it seems that every time we ride into this city it has to be raining. we managed to find our way to the backpacker ghetto much easier than the first time, and followed a random guesthouse tout to his family guesthouse that has a really cool room for really cheap. tomorrow get the bikes fixed up. have to fix some spokes and hopefully pick up our new disc and brakepads. hopefully. i have an alternative plan though, because i think the chance of them getting everything right is about 19%. after that, bus to dalat in the highlands. that way we get to ride downhill to na trang. thats the idea anyway...

aux.

Gallery: charlies delta

lissaur — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 18:30:00 GMT

stuff

the great rickshaw mission

lissaur — Sun, 1 Jul 2007 23:27:00 GMT

so i had to venture out into the world yesterday. needed to buy some brake pads for our bikes, and the one bike shop that id spent 2 hours finding the day before had nothing, despite the fact that they had a pretty nice cannondale with really nice discs. had a moment of irrational thought, and considered buying it, ive always wanted one of them. that passed. i showed the dude my corroded rear disc that id rescued from lissas corrosive self destructive brake pads. he said "shimano. good. no problem" even taking into account the language barrier, it didnt look like he was willing to find a replacement for me. so he tuned up my bike a little (good to get something out of my little adventure) and i paid him 20,000 dong (about $1.30), went home and we had a curry. next stage in the mission. id had a cycle rickshaw driver hassling me for 2 days, finally took him up on his constant offers (for some reason its the rickshaw drivers that are the most persistant). i gave him the packet that my one spare set of brake pads (an old set, a bit worn, not very bright bringing them instead of new ones) had come in, and he said yeah yeah no problem! really enthusiastic. he showed it to a guy on the street who recommended a bike shop to him and off we went. ive been getting more stares than usual from people because ive just cut a new mohawk with my leatherman (it took 2 hours. they are really small scissors). its really funny to look back and catch them gawping at me. despite the fact that some pop musician over here is wearing a tshirt with sid vicious on it in his ultra emo music video. he must have had the "more lock and loll" guy from lost in translation as his bland manager. all the music vids follow the same formula. they seem incapable of originality. young guy with pretty cool hair (nobody here outside of these music videos would ever cut their hair like that) has just been dumped by his girlfriend, he spends at least 10 seconds of the video texting (never calling) her on a new phone that he shouldnt really be able to afford, and moping around looking gloomy. she comes over, and they go for a ride on his moped out to a place with really nice scenery. the scenery is the only thing that ever changes in these videos. sometimes ankor wat (when in cambodia), sometimes a rice paddy or forest.they sit for a while in silence (about 8 to 12 seconds) then she leans on his shoulder and they both smile and are happy again then theres some cheesy romantic shots, interspersed with him singing on stage, looking like a rocker gone karoke. thats about the end of it.

ok, so we cruised around for 20 minutes checkin out the bike shops in the area around district 1 the backpacker area. nothing there, but he seemed to be doing better than i had the day before because people at least understood what he wanted and helped by telling him where another bike shop was that could maybe find what we were looking for. we eventually exausted all the options, and headed off on the long ride through the MANIC traffic towards cholon district, chinatown. we had a cyclo race on the way with 2 hippy girls with dreads who were somehow crammed into another rickshaw (maybe they were anti fossil fuels and too poor to get one each). we also managed to badly cut off a flash as black mercedes at the lights that was being driven by some dick who looked like a banker or cocacola company exec or something. good man my driver. the rickshaw is the king of the road when there is a white guy stuck out the front, noone will fuck with you, so my dude made full advantage of this, cleaving his way through the motorbikes at the intersections. we got to chinatown after some mild hearing loss due to the horns. it was a huge long street, as dirty as chinatown always is with accumulated junk and scum, and was literally dedicated to just bicycle and motorbike parts. i felt like the king riding through town (except that noone was bowing their heads in recognition of my greatness) because all eyes were on me. i have never been stared at in unison by so many people, i kinda felt like i should stand up and make a speach or something. people tapped their unobservent friends on the arm so that they could share the moment and gawp together. the face muscles got tired from making eye contact and smiling to get some reaction beyond the simple stare, so i gave up and just stared back. after a few failed stops, my driver came back and pulled me into a shop that had disc brake sets stashed away at the back. i showed the guy the packet, and said shimano. shimano. he said no, no, tried to sell me some chinese rubbish, whole new caliper mechanisms, entirely different from my own. i decided finally that everything was fucked, and we got the hell out of there. on the long ride home my driver managed to cause a motorcycle crash as he pulled out to pass a bus in parallel with another rickshaw doing the same thing. all the scooters were squeezed into a bottleneck, and the two at the end collided and fell off. kinda like and we all rolled over and one fell out. i think the guy was ok, he landed on the grass median strip thing in the middle of the road. couldnt really tell though cause my driver didnt give a shit and just cruised on. on the way he managed to get through to me (in his really good english with an accent so thick i could barely understand him) that he was a political prisoner because he spoke english when the VC took control of saigon in 1975, and he spent time in a prison where he was beaten with AK47's. he pointed out all the old political prisons along the way, as well as his old highschool and the place where they brew saigon beer (a really understrength brew that makes up for it by having a big bottle for cheap. kinda like the guy in the mercedes i think). we finally got back to backpacker street with not much resolved other than cancelling a whole load of bike shops off my list. i took lissas bike this morning to the first shop that id been to. it was open even though its a sunday, and a different guy was working. i showed him the packet, and he said "i can order, it take 10 days". just like that. fuck. so he is getting me 3 sets of pads and a new disc trom thailand or japan or whereever the hell they come from. i left the bike there to get a tuneup and took a moto home. will ride the mekong delta, and by the time we get back to HCMC they should be almost ready. with any luck. but i reckon ive paid my dues where luck is concerned with the previous days wasted effort. fingers crossed.

an update on what we are actually doing, we went to cu chi tunnels the other day, paid out 70,000 dong each to the army for entry into the complex, and walked through the forest for a while in the pouring monsoonal rain listening to distant AK47 fire from the shooting range. a very authentic naam experience. we checked out a video that was straight communist propaganda. very funny despite its subject. "the cute sweet gentile young girl puts down her books and raises her gun even when she is sick, against the ruthless americans. she is given highest americankiller award for killing one hundred and seventy of americans. even while defending her homeland from the cowardly enemy who rains bombs on her brothers and sisters she still has time to play, and harvest the rice to feed the brave freedom fighting soldiers". no shit. it actually said that kind of rubbish for half an hour. wondering what the shy american girl in our tour thought of it. she prolly wasnt listening. we also went to the chucrh/temple that is the centre of the cao dai religion. these guys worship victor hugo as a saint, and their relioion is a mash of christianity, taoism, buddhism, hinduism, and maybe some muslim stuff i think. its as hypocritical as all the rest though because despite it being illegal or immoral or whatever to kill, they actually had their own army, the cao dai army, who fought against both the north and the south during the war and was even led by their pope. haha. the south crushed them in the end, and the pope fled to cambodia where he died in 1973 i think. they now have no pope, because they think that noone is worthy, and his seat of throne or whatever remains empty. the church was built in the 1930's and some of their symbols are a backwards swastika and an eye surrounded by a triangle. not the third eye though which would be altogether far too spiritual, but either the left or the right because it has an eyebrow. they have all kinds of garish pink and green and blue dragons, and i think they are all on crack.

enough from me. time for a curry. aux.

Gallery: naam war stuff

lissaur — Sun, 1 Jul 2007 22:59:00 GMT

naam. cu chi and war remnants museum

Gallery: Siem Reap to PP

lissaur — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:16:00 GMT

ankor+cool temples and shit

Good Morning Vietnaaaaam!

lissaur — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 16:05:00 GMT

hey! well we are now in saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City depending on who you're talking to (anyone who works for the government or is of a vaguely communist persuasion will prolly try to shoot at you if you call it saigon). its really cool to be here, its a pretty mad city, like bangkok but more traffic (it shouldn't be possible but i think its true), theres about 4 million motorbikes here, and the ride into town was an adrenaline rush. playing roundabout russian roulette with motorbikes on a fully loaded mountain bike should be an olympic sport. some guy just fell down the stairs behind me with a photocopier. cool.

so its been awhile since we last posted anything, must be a week but seems like a month. we left phnom penh by bus, because again we were running low on time, and showed up in sihanoukville 5 hours later (it would have been a 4 day ride). this seaside town is cambodias only beach place and port (due mainly to thailand and vietnams territorial encroachment over the last 200 years) and is a pretty good place to do nothing for extended periods of time. apparently its not up to thai and naam beach resort standards, but after 3 months in the heat with not much swimming, it was pretty damn good. white sand and very cheap cocktails. we headed out to the islands and did a day of snorkeling around collecting shells and what not. didn't see many fish, but it was good to get away from the peddlers and massage lady who for some reason was really offended by my toes. lissa caved and had her nails cut and waxed and all that. as soon as they see one of their number make a sale however, the vultures descend, and we were soon surrounded by a horde of small children, ladies, and lady boys trying to sell us bracelets, books, lobsters, and whatever the ladyboys sell. i didnt hang around long enough to find out, would rather sit in the wave breaking line and watch them break over my head. i played that game for many an hour. its awesome. the beach comes alive at night, when all the bars start cranking out $1 or $2 cocktails, and there were usually 4 or 5 lightening storms strobing away in the distance, and at our bar a dude with a firestick who was fuckin awesome. they use petrol instead of kerosene, which is just a little more dangerous, so i stopped using his firestick after i figured that out, and just watched. glad i didnt do any fire breathing.

the people that we met there gradually started to drift away, and i was getting close to complete liver failure, so we caught the bus back to phnom penh, and spent the last day going to the market and doing stuff that we had been meaning to do all week. went to the rifle range finally (memories of the killing fields and whatnot having been smoothed over) and paid the army heaps of money to fire an AK, throw a grenade in a lake (freaking lissa out... haha) and fire a chinese handgun that kept jamming cause it was chinese. the dude used a stick to clean it out, and i was just about to fire it again when a cambodian guy next to me reached across and grabbed the stick. i almost shot him in the arm. the security precautions were pretty lax, with barangs (foreigners) walking around with loaded assault rifles and shit. it freaked us both out, so we left. they have a menu of guns to use at that place, included m203 grenade launchers, m60 machine guns, rocket launchers, all kinds of shit. just reinforces the fact that as long as you have the money, everything is legal in cambodia.

time to leave, so we loaded up our bikes. my panniers are now completely full, time to do another mailage home of stuff not needed. we went to the supermarket (!!!!!) and stocked up on goodies for the ride. bought fruit juice (!) mars bars (!) dried fruit, cashew nuts, salt and vinegar chips. fuckin awesome. such luxury. and headed off towards some town that i can't remember the name of. hit a road after 30 kms that was being rebuilt and was very glad for the very gay looking nike sunglasses that i bought for 4 dollars (all sunglasses look gay on me). they saved my eyes from dust laceration. we evenatually got to a river and caught the ferry across, with some guy chasing us for like half a km and onto the ferry trying to sell us more sunglasses (even though i was wearing mine already). he wouldnt give up, and bargained himself down from 4 dollars to 1 dollar, all the time scraping the glasses with a screwdriver to demonstrate how strong they were. if i was going to buy them before, that would really have stopped me. so we stayed for the night in this town that was accidently flattened by B52's just after the american war because they thought it was a KR stronghold. they killed 170 people and offered 100 dollars to the family of each person killed, and fined the pathfinder pilot 700 dollars. it would have cost them more for the petrol used by 2 or 3 of the B52's on the raid. cambodian life is cheap. the town didn't have much going on so we cycled to svay rieng, cambodias easternmost town early the next day. it rained on us heavily just before we got into town, cooling things down considerably. we were a bit fed up by that point so we settled for the first guesthouse that we found, and were shown around the town by a 21 year old guy with really good english and a growth deficiency that left him looking like he was 10. he didnt tell us how old he was at first, and i thought it a little strange when he said that his girlfriend had broken up with him, and he was going to university soon, and he wants to be a manager when he finishes studying. he showed us an awesome restaurant where i ate 3 mains. was hungry. got the cambodian version of fish and chips for dinner. no newspaper though, everything comes in styrofoam packaging here. its better for the environment.

left svay rieng really early the next day wearing wet clothes because my bag is full of dirty washing, and cycled to the border. i gave all my remaining riel to a lady who was begging. it was a massive wad of small denomenation notes, prolly adding up to about 75 cents. she looked pretty shocked. we bought a kilo of strawberries from some lady at the border, and ate them for lunch. at the border we were told that the cambodian visas that we were corrupted into buying at fuckin dong kralor (the great visa scam saga) were in fact fakes, and the real ones that we had been told were fake were in fact... real... what are the odds. the official rolled her eyes when we said we were scammed at dong kralor. if i see that fucker with no ear again im going to chop his head off. the border crossing was especially painless, not even the full bag search that we had been told to expect. smoothest crossing so far. we said goodbye to the crazy country of cambodia and its insane people and continued on a smooth smooth road into naam. we bought the strongest coffee i have ever tasted, almost impossible to drink, at a small cafe then smashed 40 kms through progressively heavier traffic into the center of saigon where... it started raining again. the moped drivers all stop to put on their ponchos, making the roads look like they are full of motorised ghosts who have all just been paintballing. after 2 hours of riding around in the wet, we finally figured out where we were (LP maps are not very good) and got a guesthouse then randomly met up with a couple of girls who we had been hanging out with in sihanoukville. had some beers and i bought some Hunter S books from one of the many book peddlers on the streets. have to find a post office today, cause i have no intention of carrying them any further.

i need a fruitshake, so going to sign off. might visit the war relic museum this afternoon, a museum that is pretty much dedicated to american war atrocities (they have a justifiedly one sided view of this stuff) then might head back to phalang street and drink some smooth saigonbeer.

aux

Aux's Misanthropic Rant

lissaur — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 19:05:00 GMT

ok so im going to skip most of ankor wat and what not, its awesome, but theres heaps written about it, and its too much to write about. we saw a massssive spider while wandering around looking for a lazy buddha, and i fed him some big motherfuckerbitemeontheankles tree ants.they were surprisingly good at avoiding the stick that i was holding out for them to climb on. they must have a bigger brain to go with those pincers and knew that i was going to feed them to shelob. the coolest temple in my view was the one that was used to film indianna jones and tomb raider, as it has been left in the same condition that it was discovered in by the french. its gradually being reclaimed by the bush, and there are some huge trees that look like ents tearing apart the walls and buildings in ultraslow motion. wish i had one of those film speed controller jobbies cause it would look spectacular if you could speed it up. only annoyance here was the aircon minibus japanese tour group who strolled through and took turns taking photos of themselves for 5 hours at the base of the biggest stone destroying tree, so i had to wait for them to take a photo of the tree with no humans to ruin the picture.

we parted ways with tom and jerry who we had met up with at the internet cafe right after posting the last post, and got up at 4am to cycle the 105 dirt road kilometres on the first leg to batambang, the second biggest town in cambodia. the road was in bad shape because its the road to the border with thailand, and an unnamed airline has bribed an unnamed government not to upgrade it so that more tourists would fly. was good though, because the bikes ate it, and there are no other dirt roads left here (dirt roads being the main motivation for bringing heavyass mountain bikes). we had a good laugh when we stopped for lunch and i gave some local kids some cheese (they have real cheese in siem reap!!!) they have never had cheese before and didnt know what the fuck it was. they didnt like it though. haha. just before we got into town the heavens opened, and the dust turned to mud in 1 minute. even better to have MTBs but our tyres still got clogged, and it was all i could do to thrash my bike around to clear the mud and keep riding. lissa didnt fare so well, and walked her bike into town swearing like a sailor. i kept out of her way and we found a nice aircon hotel for her to lie down in while i cleaned the horses. next day was a sweet 65 km hop to batambang, which is not as good as the lonley planet (lonley liar as its dubbed by most people after a month of using it)made it out to be. we managed to find a good place to get a fruitshake and a fish amok, and ran into our cartoon animal friends again. did a tour with them the next day out to some caves where the KR killed about 10,000 people by cutting their throats and pushing them through the roof. then went to the bamboo railway, a really cool contraption built by the locals cause theres only one train every 3 days, so they took some old wagon wheels, built a platform of bamboo, strap an engine on and you have a good ehough train to transport stuff 10 km down the track to the next village. the whole thing is dismantled when the real train comes through. cool.

next day our friends left, so we hired motorbikes and drivers who took us around the local villages explaining how they make stuff. went to a fruit growing place, the guide tells us this is mango tree, this is green oranges, this is happy grass, this is jackfruit. wait a minute, back up. what? most of the locals are allowed to grow one or two weed plants to make happy soup with.

we decided to leave the next day after eating a couple of dinners at an awesome riverside restaurant that angelina jolie apparently goes to. glad for the fuel cause it was slim pickings from then on. next town 40 km on was called Krakor. immediately thought of anna (nz) for obvious reasons. its a shit town but has a floating village nearby out on the lake that we did a tour of by boat. they have everything out there, boats with pigs and chickens roosting on them, cellphonecard shops, floating petrol stations and all that. no bars though, theres a niche. it would have been an awesome place to sit up and have a beer. there was even a boat full of crocodiles. our guide didnt speak the english though so not sure if they was food, or had just been pulled out of the lake so they wouldnt eat the children who swam around naked in the green water.

in the next town we ate dinner at one of the only restraunts (recommended by LP) where i got a bony leg of a dead bird and some chips, and spent the next 3 days payng the hefty price for this horrorable food. i got awfully familiar with our floor tiles. with nothing to eat in this hole of a town i bit the bullet, took a buttplugdrug and we cycled 92 km to phnom penh. it was bad but thankfully i dont remember most of it. in PP we found a chemist that sells salt and vinegar chips!!!!!!! they also gave real grape juice!!!!! and of course cheeseburgers, and even a kiwi bakery where we bought a pie and a sausage roll!!!! i think they got the wrong idea when they were in NZ though cause they had silver table service, the staff loitered nervously in their waistcoats and ties(????) as we awkwardly ate our pies and TF with knives and forks, and there was no music. a very strange dining experience.

our guesthouse here is on the lake (a massive pond full of plants) and has a free pootable that has seen a lot of me, and a bar on the water that is an awesome spot to watch the daily lightening storms. its a pretty confortable pad so we havent seen as much of the city as we should have, but we headed out yesterday to check out the scenes of the recent holocaust which is now a major tourist attraction (people really are sick). im wondering what the dudes who were killed would have thought of having a rifle range for rich tourists (where you can fire grenades, ak47's, rocketlaunchers, all kinds of shit) almost within sight of their mass graves. got back and some guy asked us where we went today. "killing fields" "oh ok, did you have a good time?" "yeah i fukin loved it, havent had a better day out in years." they dont really understand sarcasim but what the hell. didnt your father or aunt or cousin die here? doesnt it feel strange selling this to me? there are signs on the big temple full of skulls saying respect our dead, remvoe your shoes, and yet near one of the recently exhumed pits there is another pit full of garbage. how about YOU guys respect YOUR dead, and dont fill their mass fucking grave with the filthy product of your own consumersit fucking existance. whats the point though? they have little concept of recycling, and they usually try to give you 3 plastic bags for every piece of fruit or bottle of water that you buy. its not going to change either, hun sen (the primeminister (read dictator/vietnamese puppet)) is now 50 something and says he will not retire until he is 90. the corruption here runs pretty deep (actually right to the bottom, that being the deepest of the deep), and until hun sen is gone, i cant see anything getting much better for either the people or the environment. we met a tuk tuk driver today who said he was being paid 28 dollars a month as a university lecturer. an old american tourist gave him 2000 dollars to buy a tuk tuk, and he can make 25 dollars a day on a good day in the peak season driving tourists around the killing fields. incredible.

aux

Full points to anyone who knows what Misanthropic means...aux explained it to me, not sure if we spelt it correctly. okilidokily

Lissa

Siem Reap to Phnom Penh

lissaur — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 17:08:00 GMT

well well here's what we've been up to since our last installment...in a nutshell we have

- cycled 400kms or so from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh

- explored the temples of Angkor by bike over 3 days...awesome!

- cycled in the wet and rain twice, both times my bike got really muddy and both times my brakes stopped working...not good

- ate 7 or so meals, all of which we had no idea what we were eating...as a result aux spent 3 days getting familiar with our guesthouse toilet

- visited a massive floating village where everything from houses, local supermarkets, restaurants, and even petrol stations were all afloat on the Tonle' Sap lake

- ate at a remote restaurant where we were sure we were surrounded by the mafia and/or ex Khmer Rouge

- did a tour on the back of motorbikes to see how the locals make money...fish factory, rice mill, rice paper making, rice noodle making, and numerous other things made from rice...best part was the fruity rice wine...mmmmm.

- saw the Killing Caves in the north where the Khmer Rouge threw people into during their reign of terror

- watched a few movies on hbo channel, fun and games, and even watched some CNN to see whats been going on in the world

- a few days ago we had our first real meal after being on the road...yuuum curry, pizza, burgers, and an interesting interpretation of caesar salad

- saw the Killing Fields and prison S-21 where thousands of people were killed and tortured under Pol Pots regime...depressing

- played a few rounds of Snap with a kid on the street

well thats it i'll leave the rest up to aux :) who is currently riding around Phnom Penh with our crazy motocycle driver trying to find a place where he can repair my front disc in hopes that i'll be able to brake sometime in the near future. ok love you all long time

Lissa xx oo

Gallery: random pics from way back

lissaur — Wed, 30 May 2007 00:46:00 GMT

yea yea

Corruption and Chaos

lissaur — Mon, 28 May 2007 22:59:00 GMT

hey dudes! much has happened since last writing, well. starting in pakse i think, maybe a week or two ago (time passes quickly, and im not sure how many weeks ago we were there) we biked south for a lesurely 40 km ride to a town on the wrong side of the mekong called champasak. it was the capital of laos for a while i think, and was a pretty big town back in the french colonial day but not much goes on there now. we arrived to the ferry port in pouring rain, and were ushered onto one of the hundreds of homemade boats that ferry everything across the river. its pretty much just two old canoes with some planks across them and a scrubcutter with a propeller attached to the back of one. the boatdude bailed out one side as we pushed our bikes on, then bailed out the other side while starting the engine. not the most promising of beginnings, but we had a sweet trip across thinking all the way what a good idea it had been to buy travel insurance. we disembarked on the other side and were met by a very happy (for no descernable reason) guesthouse guy who we chatted to for a bit in bad french before he towed us to his guesthouse behind his tuktuk, him laughing all the way. i think that town did some strange things to his head. we hung out there for a day, and met a british guy and a german girl (tom and jerry) who we ended up traveling and drinking with for the next week. we biked out to the towns one attraction, an angkor era wat, all the way cursing the shoddy chinese bikes that those guys hired which broke down exactly halfway, and proved impossible to repair. anyway, had a few beers and checked out the temple (its important to get the order of these things right) which turned out to be the best one so far. khmer construction being far superior to the thais. just a taste of whats to see tomorrow. excuse the pun. ha.

next place, 4000 islands. took a share taxi down there cause we were too lazy to ride, eventually landing on dong khong, the largest of this massive group of islands in the middle of the mekong river. we watched a few thunderstorms, biked around the island, and drank many a beerlao (there is not much else to do there) before heading to don det, the busiest of the islands. there are hundreds of bungalo guesthouses, most for $2 a night, complete with spiders the size of my knee. there are heaps of riverside restaurants, all with the same degree of indifferent to bad service, and a bakery that was our salvation run by a guy from perth. dont know how he managed to survive on that island, but he was a pretty laid back guy so i guess he likes hammocks a whole lot. we boated out to a rock in the middle of the river and perched on that to watch the endangered irrawaddy dolphins swim back and forth about 200 metres away, and checked out the largest waterfall in SE asia. its the mekong. fucking massive amount of water falling a few metres. i got attacked by leeches when i tried to swim near it so i gave up on that idea and spent the rest of the afternoon checking all my pockets for the little fuckers. next day i was getting a bit bored of hammocking so i inflated my spare bike inner tube and walked to the end of the island, jumped in the river and floated down. it was moving quickish so no leeches here, but i was just getting near to our guesthouse, paddling to get out of the way of a boat, i looked around and there was a stick poking out of the water. i didnt remember there being a submerged tree there so i looked again and it was moving, with a little tongue flicking in and out tasting my smell on the air. not a stick. it was the head of a fucking watersnake about 1 metre away from me, just cruising past. i swam like never before, got up on shore and ran the remaining distance to our bungalow. not swimming in the mekong again, im sick of it. jellyfish.

well, had enough of slacking, getting so lethargic that i was damn near horizontal when standing up, so we caught a watertaxi to the mainland and biked to the border, a mission in itself. there are no signposts so after asking a few people we managed to locate a small dirt road, just off another small dirt road, with a suspicious amount of traffic and about 10 million big puddles. in fact it was more river than road, and turned out to be quite trecherous as lissa discovered. wet clay is not your friend. we got to the border after overtaking several tourist busses, go the bikes!, paid our bribe of $2 (it was a weekend) on the lao side, got to the cambodian post, and this ugly guy with one ear (either a victim of the khmer rouge or he pissed off the wrong guy demanding a bribe) tells us that our visas were no longer valid because they were issued 2 months ago (despite the fact that they still had 1 month to run) and since then their format had changed. a "T" (for tourist) that on our visas was stamped on is now printed on as a part of the visa card. weary of a scam we argued with him for an hour before he took us to his leader (some fat git minus a uniform who had just got out of the shower) who informed us of the same thing. not valid, have to buy new visa for 20 dollars each. so we argued with him for an hour as well. getting nowhere, we dicided to take a photo of each of them along with their names and numbers, buy a new visa and when we got to phunm penh report them to some authority (which probabily doesnt care either), but we were getting low on options. they didnt like having their photos taken, so we argued with them some more, eventually reaching a compromise. one guy at the visa post bought us one personally (we must really have pissed them off) and we bought the other one, with the condition that we write a letter saying that he bought us one and that we all require refunding. that is going to be fun to argue when we get to phnom penh. nothing relieves 2 weeks of pent up apathy than having a blazing row with a border official. i hate cambodian officials more than anyone else right now. corrupt bastards. cool thing was that in the hate and confusion, he forgot to demand a bribe from me, so the visa really only cost 18 dollars. sweet.

finally got on our way late afternoon, hottest part of the day, and biked the 60 km to stung treng. had some cold ankor beers and checked out our guesthouse. i didnt realise how sick i was getting of beerlao, so its been really good to switch to the cambodian brew of choice. lissa remains faithful to laos though, i guess she didnt drink as much of it as me. our guesthouse had no rooms available cause we were late getting in, but they offered us a bed on the roof for a dollar. hard to refuse that, so we took it. it would have been really cool but i think we had a bug in there with us, and that little bastard bit me 61 times. the son of a bitch must be glad i didnt catch him, because i would have tourtured it to death with a red hot needle. next time.

we caught a bus next day, and drove across two thirds of cambodia, to Siam Reap, the major tourist destination, containing the famed temples of angkor. it costs a shitload to see the temple complexes, and i think all of that money goes directly into hun sens' governments fund, if not his own personal bank account. another example of the government of this country fucking over its people. im wondering if the ancient angkor people saw what kind of profit he would reap from their achievements, maybe they would have stayed in bed.

this country is amazing. its actually mad. im sure everyone here is clinically insane. the bus ride was an experience, we saw some motorbike rider on the side of the road, not moving, maybe dead, the bus overtook horses pulling loads of wood on carrages, oxen pulling carts, and all manner of strange transport options inbetween. the roads have only been paved for about a year or 2, and the volume of traffic is amazing. the bus driver just blasts his horn to warn people and cruises past them with barely an inch to spare at ridiculous speeds. it was more entertaining watching the road in front of us than the in drive entertainment (some strange physical comedy standup thing on a tv screen). the bus got in finally, and they let us off to collect bags as they opened the gates, tuktuk drivers swarmed in like a dam bursting with the names of all the foreigners on cards (the guesthouses sell our names to them). they tried to take us to their guesthouse about a thousand times. these people are far more persistant than the ones in laos, some guy tried to buy my bike off me for a hundred beers. i like his thinking.

it rained today, and the street turned into a river. everything here is mad. the street kids are really onto it, instead of begging they sell postcards. they ask where you are from then named the capital city of NZ, the prime minister, the population and im sure he knows our chief exports. he challenged me to a game of tic tac toe, with the condition that if i won he would play me at foozball and if he won i would buy his postcards. of course, he won one game, and we drew two. the whole game is rigged, he is too good at it. lissa says i got scammed but i was happy to buy his postcards. real sharp kids. it makes the lazylao people look really bad. if only the cambodian people can get rid of landmines and corruption (a next to impossible task i think) then they will have a bright future. have only been here 2 days, and im already struck by the country. we are buying passes to the temples of angkor tomorrow, so im sure its only going to get more interesting.

Aux

aaaah, saw the coolest thing as we cycled into cambodia. A 5 year old kid sitting on top of a massive water buffallo that was wallowing in a large puddle of mud in the middle of a rice field. he yelled 'heeeeeeeeeeeeloooooooo!' and i almost fell off my bike...again. then we saw 3 local teenage boys cycling the same route that we were...except they only had one bike between them, and they were all placed precariously on the rusty machine. they all gave us big smiles and a wave. a cool intro to the country, especially after the border incident. well off to Angkor tomorrow....oooooh yes the art history geek in me is going to reappear for the next few days, fun fun fun.

ok love you all long time

Lissa :P

Gallery: Vang Vieng & Vientiane

lissaur — Thu, 17 May 2007 22:47:00 GMT

Northern Laos Photos

Gallery: Biking the Bolaven

lissaur — Thu, 17 May 2007 22:07:00 GMT

Bolaven Plateau Southern Laos

Biking the Bolaven Plateau

lissaur — Thu, 17 May 2007 21:39:00 GMT

Sabaideee!

well well, we started our bike ride from Pakse to the Bolaven Plateau early Sunday morning...well not really that early because the time it took for the indian pancakes and samosa's to arrive it was really mid morning, then if you count the extra 15 or so km's in the wrong direction on the wrong highway then i guess you could say we actually left around lunch time. aaah, but with our belly's full and the mountains in view, and then eventually being on the correct road, all was looking sweet. We didn't get very far I must admit, we cycled 45km's or so, at a constant uphill gradient, and ended up talking to a young Laotian guy for awhile...perfect english i might add...by this time it was mid afternoon. so we cycled a few more km's came to the MOST awesssuuuuuum waterfall i have ever seen. There were actually 2 falls, both approximately 150metres high - we couldn't see the bottom! - and even when we clambered down (aux climbed, i clambered...fell 3 times and came back looking like a muddy monster from the deep, aaah) we could barely see the river. very impressive. will post photos soon. we ended up staying at the falls at a little resort bugalow type thingee. cost more than most of our accommodation in asia, but by western standards was still pretty cheap, and we figured it was our 2month anniversary of travel so why not :) was nice to stay somewhere really clean, and not be afraid about taking your jandals off in the bathroom. the area was so beautiful, lush green forest, birds singing, cicadas humming, and the falls in the background. and the monsoonal rains came in around 5ish, pure bliss. oh yea and there was a frog in our bathroom...very cool. would have loved to stay longer, but accommodation at that price would cut our trip in 2. so we ventured on to a little spot we had heard about called Tad Lo. cycled 90 or so kms across more mountains. the whole upper half of the plateau is covered in coffee plantations, very nice! most of these plantations were set up by the french, but they pulled out during the 60s so the laotians have kept up the hard yakka. about 90% of the coffee in laos comes from this area. part of the ride was down a muddy dirt road, so much fun as it was all down hill :)

arrived in Tad Lo late afternoon. we had heard about a cool place to stay at $2US a night. found the infamous pad, run by a extremely funny local lady named Pap. The place was extremely extremely basic, pretty much just 4 walls made out of flax and bamboo, a bed, and a shared bathroom made out of the same materials. quite a change from the previous nights accommodation at 1 tenth of the price :) but the bungalow came complete with the usual veranda and hammock. we were pretty much in the middle of the village, by this i mean our neighbours were other villagers, pigs, cows, chickens, lizards, spiders, screaming children, and 1 or 2 other backpackers who had also ventured off the usual backpacker trail. we ended up staying 3 days, reading books, eating, drinking coffee, and lazing around in hammocks and checking out the falls. lotsa fun. we woke up every morning to cows mooooing under our room, quite frightful actually. one morning Pap told us her life story...very very poor english, so it involved numerous amounts of hand gestures, facial expressions, and our own imaginations. she ended up sitting us down the next morning, and put white cotton friendship bracellets on us. apparently the Laotian people wear them for good luck, the monks bless them somehow, and then whoever puts the bracelet on you says a little chant/prayer thing wishing you good luck and ties it on for ya. very cool. anyhoo these bands are meant to ward off bad spirits and bring us extremely good luck (sok dee in Laos) and Pap reckons it will bring her more customers....haha. it probably will too as we will be recommending it to other people we meet along the way. these Laotian village women are vigorous entrepreneurs, maybe Barry Trump should put one of 'em on his show.

So we left Tad Lo this morning, with slightly heavy hearts :( and cycled an undulating road all the way back to Pakse where i now sit. fun ride, lots of lush forest once again, but the plantations were all banana, papayas and a shit load of pineapples. aux bought one and road with it on his handle bars until some kid yelled out hello and waved, and aux did the same thing...mr. pineapple went rolling down the hill and ended up with a puncture wound. he's still edible i believe, if a little less juicy.

anyways come to the south of Laos! we are loving it :)

Lissaaaaa

Nightmares

lissaur — Sat, 12 May 2007 21:14:00 GMT

well, we are sitting in Pakxe watching the monsoon come down, should finish soon cause its been raining for about an hour now. we had a 5 hour bus ride this morning. should have biked but there were no towns on the map and the thought of 230 km without a good curry was a little daunting. Pakxe seems to be a really cool town, although every review ive read of it puts it squarely in the shithole category. will have to see what happens after dark. i have a feeling that bed time here hits at about 7 pm. will have to consume some beerlao before all the bars close.

I"m getting a little tired of being stared at. there was a lady and her 8 year old kid today on the bus who were turned around in their seats pretty much the whole trip. every time i looked up from my book there were eyes. some lao people are in a permanent state of shocked confusion it seems. they gape at us with wide eyes and mouths slightly open. it makes me wonder if they are actually thinking anything because there is no movement in the eyes or glimmer of recognition. just nothing. i kinda want to use the classic "am i wearing something you own? THEN STOP FUCKIN LOOKING AT ME" line, but i dont want to waste it. it must be used sparingly and appropriately.

next few days will be a detour into the lao wilderness, heading east towards Tad Lo, an awesome sounding town with many waterfalls, river elephant trekking and chilled OUT guesthouses with hammocks and all the shit. wouldnt be surprised if i get stuck there for the rest of my life, but should be back to a place with internet access in a week because it will be necessary to change money soon, and today is a saturday so nothing is open, and there will be no places to do it out in the wilds. apparently this is one of the main cofffee growing areas in laos, with some real good arabica, a tradition started by the french in 1920, and continued by the laotians after the french left in 1965, not wanting to get the crap bombed out of them. will be sure to stop at every opportunity for coffee consumption.

check out my cool map. paint is a wonderful thing.

Aux

Haha, aux is going to have nightmares for weeks, just those constant eyes PIERCING PIERCING...aaah yes its very strange, in Thailand people stare but wave and smile at the same time, yep no problem. Here they GAWP, so we have gotten into the habit of waving or saying heeelooooo! if they respond thats good, but 70% carry on staring and don't even notice you've done anything...no souls no souls...

we've been writing on this alot lately as the last few towns have been quite uneventful,which is no problem. have been trying to learn some of the language...it took me all of yesterday evening to get "can i put my bicycle on the bus?". Rocked on up to the ticket counter this morning all prepared with my little phrase, then they ended up just calling someone over who spoke english...what a shame.

Lissaur