2006 - 1 ; Traveling through S.E. Asia.

Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia trip.
Jan. 10, 2007.

My friend Michelle left today, back to the USA after we traveled together for 7 weeks through Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. It was an interesting, fun, sad, and an eye opening trip for both of us.
We flew Nov. 20 from L.A. to Bangkok in a time-span of 23 hours, which included a lay-over of 4 hours in Taiwan. We lost a day of our lives in the process, but we’ll get it back in the end, so no worries about thatWe spent the first 10 days in Thailand. Michelle was quite surprised when Thailand ended up not being quite the poor, third world country that she had expected. Especially not Bangkok, with its brand-new airport, tall modern buildings and its excellent road system. We spent a few days in Bangkok, while waiting for our visas for Laos and Vietnam to get ready. We stayed near Khao San Rd; it is Bangkok’s backpacker ghetto, but a convenient place to start. It is full of cheap guesthouses, restaurants and all the stores you need to buy those last minute trip supplies. It was fun to take a boat over the river and visit the gorgeous royal Palace.
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A comfortable overnight bus brought us to northwest Thailand, where we went trekking for a few days in the area of Umphang, right next to the Burmese border.

To get to the specific area we had to take a 5 hour songthaew ride, which is a small pickup truck with 2 benches in the back, which will not leave until it is totally overloaded with people.


In Umphang we floated for 5 hours on a raft down a very pretty river, followed by a 3 hours uphill hike through bamboo forest. The first night we camped out in a tent, with all the camping equipment provided by the trekking company. By western standards it was pretty substandard, so we did not have the most comfortable night. The next day we ended up visiting a gorgeous waterfall.


We then hiked for 3 hours to a hill tribe village of the Karen people, where we spent the night in a home stay in one of the bamboo stilt houses.



Next to the village was another pretty waterfall with a great pool for swimming and some caves. The village was quite interesting to wander around in. On the third day elephants were supposed to give us a ride out. Two persons per elephant rode in a basket on its back. Michelle and I sat on the biggest and the oldest elephant, a grand old guy of 50 years old, who was in no hurry whatsoever to go up and down the steep trails. He kept the driver very busy in trying to keep him moving. After two hours Michelle and I felt sorry for the elephant and we walked the rest of the way, which then caused the elephant to pick up the pace a bit. We only had to use him again to help us cross a rather wide river.

Leaving the area again by songthaew became quite the experience. Of course it was full (which should be 12 people, but is always more) as we left, rather overfull, so Michelle, I and another Westerner climbed on the roof, much more comfortable than being cramped inside. Along the way we passed another full songthaew with engine problems. What do you do???? Make space and load up those people as well. I counted at least 30 people traveling like sardines on this little truck.
We also got more company on the roof, Burmese refugees, who told us a bit about their lives. Burma has been living under a military dictatorship for many years now, after they placed the democratically chosen leader under house arrest. All along the border on the Thai side are huge Burmese refugee camps; some of them contain as many as 50.000 people. Even though Thailand allows them to stay there, they have no freedom to go outside the camps. For any sort of travel they need a special pass.

The next country we visited was Laos. A very poor country that only recently opened its borders for foreign visitors. The mighty Mekong River flows right through it and for a big part forms the border with Thailand.

We hired a long-tail (outboard engine with a very long propeller shaft) wooden boat together with 2 French travelers. We boated down the Mekong River, which is very pretty in this area. It is not very wide with interesting shores, and frequent small islands and rocks in the river bed. After about an hour we turned north and went upstream onto the Namtza River (a tributary). What a gorgeous trip it was. Cultivated land and forests, many small villages with stilt houses, fishermen, children and water buffaloes along the shore. Everybody seemed very friendly, everybody was waving, after a while you felt like the queen of England.

This trip was UPSTREAM against a strong current and through class I and II rapids. Before this trip Michelle and I had done many a whitewater rafting trip together, but always DOWNSTREAM!!! The night was spent in a village at the midway point in a stilt house.

It was a national holiday for Laos, and the teenagers were singing and dancing around the village, trying to make us drink their strong and foul-tasting rice whiskey. This evening the boatman informed us nicely that the river was too shallow to continue and that he would drop us at a nearby village with road/bus access in the morning. That was not the deal we had made, and so we protested. He compromised by finding us a boatman with a smaller boat that was willing to take us further upstream. The next day we found out that he had not lied to us. The river was indeed shallow, sometimes less than knee deep, narrower and a lot more rapids and rocks in the way.
The boatman was in the stern with the engine, but in the bow stood 2 helpers with paddles and long bamboo poles. They sure earned their keep in pushing the boat out of the way of all the rocks and obstacles.It was fascinating to watch them work.


We arrived safe and sound in the town of Muang Namtza, where we hired a guide to take us hiking through the jungle to an Akha hill tribe village.

The hike was gorgeous, but because it had rained the night before, it was in places very muddy and slippery with lots of leeches trying to dine on us, some of them rather successfully.


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The people were welcoming and friendly and we ended up having great interaction with them through the use of the digital camera. They loved having their picture taken and then seeing themselves on the little screen.

The village was very interesting; women were coming back from the fields with baskets full of food or firewood on their back.An ironsmith was making a machete, pigs, chickens, goats and dogs were all living below the stilt thatch-roofed house.
Little kids were taking care of the littler kids and carrying the babies on their backs.

The hill tribes love to chew on betel nuts, which discolor their mouths and teeth red and black, which takes away much from their otherwise attractive appearance

An unlucky chicken was sacrificed for our dinner and 3, very young, girls came, fully dressed in their traditional outfits in the evening to give us the worst and the roughest massage we’ve ever had. But they were so cute; you just had to adore them.

By bus and after visiting a few small towns, we circled back to the Mekong River, where we took a wooden speed boat back to the same town as where we had initially entered Laos.
From here we took a much larger tourist boat for a 2 day trip down the beautiful Mekong River

to the historical city of Luang Prabang, the major tourist attraction for most visitors to Laos. It is a nice city.
We were fascinated by tons of young monks walking down the street in their orange robes carrying umbrellas. They did not seem to mind having their picture taken, but none were willing to stop for it. So we almost felt like paparazzi, trying to keep shooting to get the one perfect shot that was not blurred by their motion.
Luang Prabang had the best handicraft night market I’ve ever seen. The area specializes in silk weaving and they make just the most beautiful things. Michelle was spending half her budget buying clothes and home decorations.
The city is quite nice and 3 days were spent in no time. The road took us south through gorgeous mountains with cute little road side villages, consisting of bamboo or wooden stilt houses with thatch roofs. We got to the area of VangVieng, which lays in the middle of beautiful karst (rock) hills. The town itself is trying to be a tourist center and to cater to the western tourist, which is a disaster. S.E.Asian food is excellent, but their version of western food is a sad imitation. However the scenery around the town is stunning. The first day we kayaked down the river, took an inner tube into a 200 meter (600 feet) deep tunnel cave and played around on a flying fox. Great fun. The next day we hired a local guide and went motorcycling around the area. The hills are full of caves, but the guide took us to a village that never sees visitors and a few village men took us through the rice paddies and jungle to a gorgeous cave. They made a bamboo torch to light our way, which created a great effect.
By van we traveled south to the small, peaceful capital city of Vientiane. The Mekong River was very wide here and not nearly as interesting looking. Vientiane also had a small and very quiet airport, from where we took a one hour plane ride to Hanoi City in Vietnam.
The contrast could have hardly been bigger. Hanoi city is large, noisy and extremely busy. Motorcycles everywhere.

If they are not driving down the road, then they are parked on the sidewalks, blocking it and so forcing pedestrians to walk on the street. Crossing the road is a whole new ball game. There is no way that you can wait for an opening in the traffic, it just won’t happen. So you cross the streets the way the locals do. You slowly and steady start walking across. Due to the huge volume of traffic, everything goes slow, and the motorcycles and cars will work their way around you. It is very freaky in the beginning, but it is effective and we soon got used to it. We stayed in the old quarter of town, a very interesting area. Each street caters to a certain product. So you just figure out what you want to buy and then you go to that particular street, where practically every store sells that type of product. Silk Street was the most interesting to us. Smack in the middle of this super busy area is a pretty and peaceful lake, a great place to wander around in the evening. There was a street show with excellent acrobats and a little theater had a cute water puppet show for the grand price of $ 1,25, which included a little paper fan. Neither Michelle nor I are city lovers, but with all its craziness, we liked Hanoi City.
We took a bus north to Halong City. The houses in North Vietnam are quite unique. In the old days property taxes were assessed according to the width of the building. As a result all the houses are very narrow, maybe about 3 meters (12 feet) wide and they are mostly 3 story buildings. In contrast they are very long towards the back. The fronts are beautiful, very nicely decorated with open patios in various bright colors. The huge sides are plain concrete with none or just little windows. In Halong City we organized a trip into Halong Bay, an absolutely amazing area, which is dotted with approximately 3000 islands.
Most of them are just karsts, granite rocks sticking up from the water in beautiful formations with many large caves. A tour boat took us around these islands and into one of the large caves and dropped us off at one of the few inhabited islands, the island of Cat Ba. Cat Ba has one small-sized town and some small villages, lots of caves and a national park. We ended up hiking to some of the beaches; a walking path was built all along the sea, and we climbed to a high peak along a narrow jungle trail with a great view of the surrounding area.

The next day we hired motor cycles and drove all around the peaceful island and visited Hospital Cave where the communist rebels under Ho Chi Min had a hide-out from the Americans.


The third day we hired kayaks for a day and paddled to some of the islands, beaches and to a floating village with fish farms.
We were very lucky; it was winter in this area, but we had gorgeous weather with temperatures around 22 C (72 F).
We ended up back in Hanoi City on Dec. 24, Christmas Eve. Even though communist systems shy away from religion, and even though Vietnam used to be mostly Buddhist, Christmas eve was celebrated with a humongous crowd of people circling around the, normally so quiet, lake. The management of our guesthouse had organized a little party with snacks and booze, which was an escape from the madhouse outside.

Christmas Day was spent on the train from Hanoi to Hoi An, a 16 hour ride. Choices were hard or soft seats, hard of soft beds. The bed compartments had 3 levels. Michelle and I said: “Oh, 3rd level will be o.k.” Luckily the girl that arranged our tickets ignored us. All that was available were hard beds and she placed us on the 2nd level. They were bunk beds, 6 to a compartment with 3 cm. (1 inch) thick pads, not enough head room to sit up, but the 3rd level had hardly any space at all and was too high to be able to look out the window.

The train was old and noisy, but overall it was not a bad ride.
Hoi An is an historical town in the center of Vietnam, a very pleasant place with a river flowing through it, high school students have to cross it with the local ferry, and old-style traditional yellow-colored houses.
It is a town filled with dress maker shops. They display examples of their work, but everything is made to size, a great place to buy tailor-made clothing for a fraction of what it would cost in the west.

Instead of another 16 hour train ride, we spent $ 12 extra and bought ourselves a one-hour plane flight to Ho Chi Min City (formerly Saigon). Another mad house, so much traffic and so much pollution, that it gave me a sinus infection. However, the restaurants had excellent food, even though all the food in Asia had been great and Vietnamese is our favorite anyway. Vietnamese food has all the great flavors, but not the extreme hot spiciness that Thai food has. Of course, being in Vietnam, you can’t help but think about the American-Vietnamese Wars. Occasionally we had conversations about it with the locals. Contrary to Michelle’s expectations, there seemed to be no grudges towards Americans at all, and we only experienced friendliness and helpful attitudes. A museum is dedicated to the war: “War Remnants Museum” and we spend an afternoon there. It had helicopters, planes, weapons, etc. There were many pictures that had circulated in magazines and papers in the west, but also pictures with the physical disfigurements due to Napalm and Agent Orange. Some of the jails and torture apparatus were on display.
In the city a striking after-effect of the war are the Pedi-cabs. Many of these are operated by former professionals, doctors, teachers, etc. The communists did not allow them to practice their professions anymore, many were send to “re-education camps” a misnomer for slave-labor camps and now they only have their Pedi-cabs to try to eke out a living. Many have no place to live, so they sleep on the seat behind their bikes at night along the street.
From Ho Chi Minh City we traveled west into the Mekong Delta. A vast plain of waterways, rice paddies and river towns. We went to the town of Vinh Long, where we arranged a 2 day boat trip to An Binh Island. It was just Michelle and I + a female guide on the long-tail boat. It took us to one of the floating markets, although either it was very small or almost finished by the time we got there. On the island are many little factories where all kinds of local products are made, coconut candy and coconut wood ware, rice paper and cakes, noodles, bonsai trees, etc. etc. She took us on a tour of several of these factories and they were actually very interesting.

The island is criss-crossed by paths and small roads and we took an hour bike ride around them, followed by one and half hour boat ride through very narrow channels. The small boats are rowed standing up with the oars crossed.
Even though Michelle and I are used to rowing our own boats, this was such a different technique, that we were hardly able to keep a straight line, which the locals found hilarious.

We spent the night in a nice guesthouse, and the next morning visited the local cement factories. The bricks are baked in huge kilns, with fires fed with rice husks; the ashes then make perfect fertilizer for the rice fields. Talk about recycling! Poor people though that have to spend their working lives in the heat and smoke of these factories.
The next Mekong Delta town we visited was Can Tho. We arrived here on the evening of Dec. 31. Vinh Long and Can Tho both have beautiful waterfronts along the river with nice restaurants and bars. We spent our New Year’s Eve spoiling ourselves with an excellent Vietnamese dinner in a gorgeous river side restaurant. The next morning we hired a long-tail boat to take us to the floating markets. It was an all-day affair with a very early start. The markets were absolutely fabulous. All the little wooden boats filled with fruits, vegetables and other products floating around. Our boatman planted his boat in the middle of it, and we just stood there gaping at the sights and taking a million pictures.

For lunch he floated us into a small side canal, where we ate in the gazebo of a nice restaurant. Upstairs a group of Vietnamese people were celebrating the New Year with Karaoke. When Michelle and I investigated where the music and singing came from, we were pulled in to their party and had several toasts with them, before we could wrestle ourselves away. The Mekong delta is subject to tides and after lunch the water was high enough to boat through the local country side.
We finished the Mekong Delta visit in the border town of Chau Doc, probably our least favorite town; it had a large local market selling lots of raw fish and meat, talk about bad smells!!!

A speed boat with about 10 people took us via the 4 km wide Mekong River over the border to the Cambodian capital city of Phnom Peng. Cambodia was subject to the horrors of the killing fields by the Khmer Rouge in the 70’s and even after their overthrow it had a lot of political instability until the late 90’s. It has only recently opened to foreign visitors (just like Laos). Although Phnom Peng is a pretty city with a lot of beautiful buildings, palaces, temples, monuments, and a nice water front, the poverty and horrors of war are much more evident here than anywhere else. We saw practically no beggars in Thailand and Laos, more so in Vietnam. But here there were so many, often with missing limbs or terribly disfigured as a result of the wars and the remaining landmines. In this country you are warned never to go off the beaten track, there are still thousands of landmines buried, especially in the border regions. It will take many more years before they are all cleaned up and in the meanwhile they still claim about 800 victims per year.

A local restaurant played documentaries of the land mine problems and the years with the Khmer Rough, films made by the French restaurant owner. They were very thought provoking. To bring it all more home to us, we visited the genocide museum “Tuol Sleng”. It is in 4 formerly high school buildings that were made into a prison, torture and death chambers by the Khmer Rouge.

It is estimated that 2 million out of a population of 8 million were murdered by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. In 2001 I visited Auswitz in Poland; this place was very reminiscent of it. Humans conflict terrible deeds in the name of ideology and religion!

On a much happier note, we visited the national museum, which displays many of the items found in the country’s biggest treasure: the ancient temples and cities of “Angkor Wat”. We reached Angkor Wat by traveling by bus to the town of Siem Reap, where we rented bikes, which was a great way to go around the ruins. We’ve heard stories of people spending 3 weeks exploring these ruins, but we were happy with just one day, and with only seeing the major highlights. Angkor Wat itself is a huge temple, absolutely amazing, but what thrilled us more were all the huge stone faces of “Bayon”

and the jungle overgrown temple of Ta Prohm, used in the movie “Raiders of the Lost Arc”. A picture tells a 1000 words, so no sense trying to describe the scene.
Angkor Wat made for a long and busy day, and we rewarded ourselves the next day by doing practically nothing, relaxing, reading, and down loading pictures onto the computer.

We boated for a day south on a river with many floating villages, including a "float-in" church, where a service was in session as we passed.



Which brought us to Battambang, our final town in Cambodia.


The next morning we shared a taxi with 4 locals (regular sized vehicle) + the driver to the Cambodian/Thai border. We then spend the fortune of $ 1,25 on the 5 hour train ride back to Bangkok, where we ended up back full-circle in the backpacker’s ghetto of Khao San Road. Michelle found a way here to convert her left-over Baht (the Thai currency) into Thai products and now she is on the plane on her way back to Colorado.

I am writing this story in the house of a friend of mine in Phuket in the south of Thailand after an all-night bus ride. Tomorrow I will catch a plane to Aceh, Indonesia, where I will visit my tsunami friends for 5 days, then I will go for a few more days to Langkawi, Malaysia, before I will come back here.
The beginning of February I will become a member of a sail boat crew and the 6 of us will sail from Phuket to Greece, where we expect to arrive by April.

I will try to write stories of the sail trip and place them on this web site, whenever I can.