Ger's Excellent Adventures

Roundabout route to Boston

ger — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 21:13:23 +0000

Whistler isn’t much fun in October and November — too cold and wet to mountain bike, and too warm and dry to ski. I had a week of meetings in Boston in early November so I decided to make a few stops on the way there, and it turned into a month-long trip.

First I stopped in Edmonton to visit my family for a few days, including a birthday party for my brother. Then I headed to Montreal to visit friends and attend Roger and Marjorie’s annual Halloween party, with a side trip to Ottawa to visit other friends and retrieve various things from storage to ship to Whistler.

One of the highlights of being back in these places (aside from being able to see family and friends, of course) is access to Vietnamese food: I have now gone for Vietnamese 8 times in the last couple weeks: twice in Edmonton, twice in Ottawa and four times in Montreal (all four of which were extra large bowls of pho at Pho Bang New York, all of them good to the last drop :)

I really wish someone would open up a Pho place in Whistler. I know rents are expensive but I think it would do pretty well — how hard can it be to make a profit when you’re selling $1 worth of ingredients for $7?

I had planned to take buses from Montreal to/from Boston but the schedules were unusually painful this time, something like 12 hours for a trip I could drive in 5.

So I booked flights on Aeroplan points instead; unfortunately due to Hurricane Noel my convenient 1:30pm Saturday afternoon departure was cancelled and I opted for an 8pm flight instead. Air Canada called me on my way to eat pho on Saturday afternoon, telling me the 8pm flight had been cancelled as well, with no other flights available today. So I had them route me through Toronto, leaving at 6pm tonight.

Our traditional post-pho digestif activity (playing video games) ran a bit late so I didn’t get to the airport until 5:30, causing me to miss my flight to Toronto. But that turned out to be a good thing because all the flights to Boston tonight ended up being cancelled, and the next flight there from Toronto would have been at 7pm tomorrow.

I really wanted to make it to Boston in time for tomorrow’s meeting, because scheduled for tomorrow is an all-day team meeting, which is basically my only opportunity of the year to interact with everyone on the team face to face — it’s usually my favorite day of this series of meetings.

The only way I could think to make it there in time was to fly to New York and take a 4-hr bus from there, so I had Aeroplan put me on a 7:50pm flight to Laguardia. I checked in, went to the gate and mooched some wifi from the Maple Leaf Lounge to check for bus options from New York to Boston. The only workable option seemed to be one of the cheap Chinatown buses leaving at 11pm, which should be easily doable given that my flight arrives at 9:19.

Upon arrival at Laguardia I watched the baggage carousel get emptier and emptier with no sign of my suitcase, then finally gave up and went to the baggage office to arrange for it to be sent to my hotel in Boston. The girl there said my bag was still in Montreal; I asked if it could be sent directly to Boston and she said no because it had to travel the same route I did. So I was supposed to call to arrange for it to be shipped to me after its arrival in New York. I didn’t expect to see it before Tuesday or Wednesday.

Just as I was leaving the baggage office a guy came in with my suitcase, saying one of the straps had been caught in the carousel. Woohoo! No need to wear the same jeans/tshirt/hoodie for the next week…

I asked about ground transportation options to Manhattan; I could take a cab (maybe ~$40?), an express shuttle with a bunch of stops, or public transport (M60 bus and the N train) and walk a few blocks.

(btw, I love New York! I was dreading the thought of flying into the US because of bad experiences with rude staff at LAX and in Boston, but everyone I talked to here has been really nice, and it’s an amazing city in general. I’d love to live here for a while.)

I figured I had plenty of time to make it to Chinatown so I’d take the cheap option, public transport. As I sat on the bus and train watching the minutes tick away (never really sure if I was going the right way), I realized my whole elaborate plan to get to Boston in time was about to be ruined by some unnecessary thriftiness — something I’d be sure to reflect upon as I spent the next seven hours dragging my suitcase around Manhattan killing time before the 6am bus.

Luckily, I arrived at the Fung Wah Bus station at 10:55pm, ran to the ticket window to claim the ticket I had booked online in Montreal, and boarded the bus just in time. (sans food, but fortunately I always have snacks in my pack — tonight’s dinner is almonds and a fruit bar)

This is the fourth close call I’ve had in the past couple weeks: I caught the bus out of Whistler with about 30 seconds to spare, I rented a car in Montreal and drove to my dentist appointment in Ottawa with 5 mins to spare, and returned it a few days later just a few minutes before I would have been charged $60 for an extra day.

I should arrive in Boston around 3am (actually 2am thanks to daylight savings time), early enough to get a few hours of sleep before my meeting starts bright and early tomorrow.

I love it when a plan comes together!

The Gibbon Experience, Bokeo, Laos

ger — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 01:50:54 +0000

The Gibbon Experience is an innovative forest conservation project in northwestern Laos, where visitors spend three days living in treehouses built 40 meters above the ground, reachable only by a network of ziplines and a few short hikes. The lucky ones get to catch glimpses of Black Gibbon apes who live in the forest.

A few months ago in ‘nam I met a guy from Montreal named Liel who said The Gibbon Experience had been one of the highlights of his trip so far, so I put it on my things-I’d-really-like-to-do list.

He had done it months earlier when the road and trails were much wetter so much of the adventure was just getting there — hiking barefoot through thick mud, etc — but after reading more about it online I knew it would be fun whether it was muddy or not.

It takes place in the Bokeo Nature Reserve, a 123000 hectare area in the province of Bokeo, which shares a border with Myanmar and Thailand.

I’ll quote a bit from the Gibbon Experience brochure:

Poaching, logging and slash-and-burn farming are destroying primary forest and its inhabitants in South East Asia. The team at Animo has long been looking for innovative methods to solve this problem.

A concept emerged: with the local people we build tree houses and a network of zip lines which guests use to scour the canopy in search of the elusive Black Gibbon.

Bokeo Nature Reserve is rich in biodiversity: birds, insects, and mammals including bears, tigers, and migrating populations of wild buffalo and elephants.

By taking guests into Bokeo Reserve we raise both awareness of conservation issues, and funds for local agriculture transition and forest guard activities. […]

At present, Lao National Parks have no forest guards for day-to-day protection. Only the forest guards in the Bokeo Nature Reserve receive a salary; fully funded by The Gibbon Experience. They presently monitor one third of the 123,000 hectare reserve.

There were two trip options when I went: the Classic Experience and the Waterfall Experience; the Waterfall option takes you further into the forest and has more required trekking, 2-3 hours/day. I tried to book the Waterfall trip and even planned my travel dates around it since the trips leave on alternating dates, but due to a miscommunication with the office ended up on the Classic. It turned out that all the Waterfall trips were fully booked for weeks by the time I tried to reserve a spot so there’s no way I could have done it anyway.

But it didn’t really matter which trip I was on, because with the Classic Experience I had lots of free time to do all the extra trekking I wanted, including a visit to Treehouse #5 where the Waterfall people stayed. (treehouse #4 was temporarily out of commission, I think due to damage from a recent storm)

Small groups of people travel into the forest together on alternating days; in our group there were two families with a total of five kids aged 4-10 or so, an American/Thai couple, two English girls and me. The families were in treehouse #1, the couple in #2, and I was stuck in #3 with the cute English girls. Treehouse #3 was the best of the three in my opinion, though the others were better for playing on ziplines.

When I imagined the families and kids (many of them blonde) living in treehouses I was instantly reminded of a TV show I watched when I was a kid, Swiss Family Robinson (I probably saw the Canadian version.)

When I later learned that both of these families were Swiss, I nearly burst out laughing. I tried to remember what the show’s title sequence looked like so I could get them to pose for a similar picture, but couldn’t remember much about it.

After watching a video on how to use the ziplines, we were shuttled three hours from the town of Huay Xai on the Thai border to Ban Toup, a small village on the border of the nature reserve. We were joined there by a small monkey and a black bear cub who were both quite cute, and constantly at each other’s throats. They seemed fairly evenly matched now but I wouldn’t give the monkey very good odds once the bear has grown a bit more.

From there we walked for about an hour to a building near treehouse #1 where our meals were prepared, where we were each given a harness to use on the ziplines connecting the treehouses; these are like normal rock climbing harnesses except for an extra little roller/brake contraption and redundant safety rope and carabiner attached to them.

We walked to the first zipline leading to treehouse #1. The kids were taken across by guides on the first few zips but the older ones were allowed to go on their own after a while.

We spent the next few days living in treehouses, hiking through the forest and playing around on the ziplines. There are a total of seven ziplines leading to treehouse #3; I think the longest one is about 1 km long.

The treehouses were pretty impressive: each has running water from a nearby spring, there’s a shower and toilet, sinks in the kitchen and bathroom, and all the water is completely safe to drink. The toilet is just a normal squat toilet with nothing underneath it but a 40m drop to the forest floor. I heard there are pigs at treehouse #1 that help clean up the mess; on day 2 when we were eating pork sausages for dinner I remarked on this beautiful circle of life.

The beds were quite comfortable, with duvets and thick mosquito nets. The shower looked pretty fun because you could see right down into the forest through a bamboo grate, but I never used it because it and the toilet were constantly swarming with hornets. (except for few quick pees, when I couldn’t resist trying to piss the bees off, heh heh)

At some point within the first hour in the reserve something bit me on the finger (some kind of bug, not the monkey or bear), and my finger started to swell up, and soon the back of my hand did as well. It was really weird: one hand was its usual veiny self and the other had no veins visible and instead looked like a big meaty mitten. I was a bit worried because I had never had an allergic reaction to anything in my life, and I didn’t know how concerned to be about this one, or when or where the swelling would stop.

One of the Swiss ladies on the trip gave me some antihistamine cream and drops, and I had a couple antihistamine tablets in my pack; these all helped reduce the swelling. In the next couple days I had a few more fingers swell up from other bites, along with other small spots on my elbow and foot.

I wonder what kind of bugs these were: they looked kind of like a cross between a mosquito and a fly; fairly small, and easy to kill. I applied repellent regularly but don’t like having much on my hands because I don’t want it to get in my mouth or eyes when eating or wiping sweat off my face.

The views from the treehouses were fantastic, especially at dawn and sunset.

On the first day the guides told us there was a storm forecast that night, and if it got too windy we would have to evacuate the treehouse to the shelter on ground nearby. We were told to keep our harnesses ready and if they made the call to evacuate, to leave everything behind except our flashlights.

Around 8pm or so a big thunderstorm started, and for an hour or two we watched the lightning show all around us. Unfortunately it was just bright flashes, no cool zigzaggy lightning bolts. We counted the seconds between lightning and thunder and most of the time they were quite far away, 10-20 seconds or so. Once I counted only two seconds; I think that was the closest it got.

The guides were amazingly well-tuned to the weather: they told us to put our harnesses on because they could hear strong winds coming, when all I could hear were crickets and birds. Sure enough a while later it got quite windy, and they correctly predicted other weather events as well. When the lightning was distant enough from the treehouse we got the call to evacuate, “Now we go.”

The girls were pretty freaked out about ziplining away in the middle of a thunderstorm, but I wasn’t worried. The next day we talked about fear (in the context of some spiders that were sharing our treehouse) and I agreed that I didn’t like spiders much but as far as scary activities went, if I was convinced something was safe I had no problem doing it: things like ziplining and rock climbing are made safe by using quality equipment and redundant lines; ziplining when lightning is far away poses no danger so there’s no reason to be afraid. But I was glad they were there because it would have been a boring evacuation otherwise :)

We hung out in the shelter for a while and made a note to bring a deck of cards along next time. When the storm seemed to have passed we went back into the treehouse, had a snack of leftover rice from dinner mixed with some sweetened condensed milk, then set up the mosquito nets and went to bed.

The storm started up again and around midnight the guides woke us up and told us to prepare to evacuate again. We put on our harnesses and waited a bit but it never got very windy so we were allowed to go back to bed; we elected to sleep with our harnesses on from that point.

The next morning around 6am we awoke to the sound of tons of forest life; after a while we could hear Gibbons singing as well, a sound I can’t really think how to describe. I recorded a bit of it but won’t include a link here because it might give people less incentive to visit for themselves.

I had planned to get up early to try to go for a guided walk around the forest because dawn was the best time to see animals, but after sleeping only a few hours and taking an antihistamine (a.k.a. sleeping pill) in the middle of the night to reduce the swelling in my hand, I decided to sleep in instead.

We had breakfast from the big plastic box of goodies at our treehouse and each of us ate as much as we could to give us energy to trek and zip around all day; later we learned we would be given a real cooked breakfast at treehouse #1, oops.

One thing that disappointed me about this trip were the guides we had: the marketing info says the trips include “Local guides eager to show you the forest and its inhabitants”, but I would replace “eager” with “reluctantly willing”. I asked a couple times about going for a walk to see animals or going for a guided walk the next morning, but only got confusion and “no animals” as a response.

I think the more experienced guides were assigned to the treehouse with the kids, so the ones we had were fairly new (a couple of them said they had had this job for 3 months), and the main issue was the language barrier between us. I expect the more experienced guides would have done much more in terms of teaching us about the forest, animals, treehouses and the conservation program.

In the afternoon I went for a walk on my own to try to find some critters to photograph, but all I found was a cool red bug, a giant black squirrel that I thought was a Gibbon from the way it was moving through the trees (far away; too quick to photograph), and a couple English birds.

We thought about zipping our way to treehouse #5 to check it out (a Canadian guy volunteering here said it’s really cool), but the only way back was a 2-3 hour hike and after getting back from lunch we didn’t have enough time or energy left to do it. It turned out to be a good thing we didn’t, because a storm came in around 5pm and we would have been right in the middle of the trek back around then.

The three of us sat in the treehouse watching the storm build; around 5:30 when the wind got strong enough to make the treehouse start to creak we decided to evacuate to the shelter nearby. This evacuation wasn’t nearly as scary as last night’s because we still had daylight and it hadn’t started raining yet. When the storm failed to materialize after a while Maria noted it might have been a premature evacuation :)

We gathered some firewood and the guides showed up shortly afterwards with dinner; unfortunately due to a miscommunication between them they had left most of the food behind and brought only the rice. So all we had for dinner was rice, and some bread, pineapple and a toasted rice snack we had taken from the bin at the treehouse. Good thing we had two breakfasts!

The meals we did eat were very good: each of them had white rice with about 3-4 different veggie dishes, all of them excellent. (though the standard way to prepare veggies in SE Asia seems to be to boil them to oblivion; I haven’t had nice crisp steamed vegetables in months. Though I’m glad they’re well-boiled here from a food safety perspective.)

The storm came and went but the guides said we would spend the night in that shelter, and one went to fetch bedding from the treehouse. We applied insect repellent and got tucked in carefully to prevent bites, but after about an hour I still couldn’t sleep due to concern of waking up covered in bites the next day.

Between fear of malaria (I had forgotten to take my malaria meds that day, for the first time in months), the mysterious bug I was allergic to, Sarah lightly snoring on my left and one of the guides getting a bit too cuddly on my right (unintentionally I’m sure) I realized I had no hope of getting any sleep there, so I decided to risk the wrath of the guides and waking the others and zipped back to the treehouse since I knew there was a thick mosquito net and comfy mattress and duvet there with my name on it, and since the weather was completely calm by that point.

As I crawled into bed I was greeted by a couple rat droppings on one of my pillows, which must be the treehouse equivalent of the chocolates you get in fancy hotels. I pushed that pillow aside, inspected the rest of the bed for other goodies and quickly fell asleep in the security of my mosquito net. I heard a rat rooting around and gnawing on stuff in the treehouse but didn’t think he would be likely to try to make his way through the mosquito net.

On day 3 we again awoke to the sound of Gibbons singing; the families staying in treehouse #1 actually spotted a few of them today. Sarah and Maria arrived in the morning after a sleepless night of listening to another rat root around and chew on garbage nearby; they had woken up shortly after I left and wanted to return to the treehouse but didn’t have a flashlight and the guide wouldn’t let them use his or accompany them back to the treehouse. I felt bad about leaving them there but they were both asleep when I left and I expected the guide to bring them back if they wanted to. Maybe he wasn’t awake enough to think clearly. (he apologized the next day)

We spent the morning playing and making goofy videos on the ziplines. Ziplining on its own is a pretty safe and easy activity, but when you add the distraction of video production it becomes somewhat less so. A few times I let my head touch the zipline; I don’t think I ever got visibly burnt by it but Maria ended up with a small mark on her forehead.

After a great breakfast at treehouse #1 we made our way out of the reserve, stopping to watch the monkey and bear scrap for a while. It was amazingly fun to watch; they’re both so cute and have such different fighting styles: the monkey is really quick and agile, and the bear is slow and clumsy but more powerful. This video always cracks me up.

All in all it was a fantastic experience that I would recommend to anyone, in spite of disappointment with the guides. I expect the guides would be better on the average than the ones we had, and I think they would have done the guided walks if I had pushed them a bit more. (but I shouldn’t have to)

I was really impressed with the general idea: I love creative ideas to problem solving where everyone benefits; in this case it seems that everyone is clearly so much better off that there’s no way the project can fail. I wonder how well it would work elsewhere; does it work here only because the location is exotic and local labor is inexpensive?

Elsewhere in their literature there was a phrase that went something like “It costs less than 1 Euro per hectare to transform an economy based on forest destruction to an economy based on forest conservation.”

Pretty cool.

More photos of The Gibbon Experience…

Buses, boats and treks in Northern Laos

ger — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:52:15 +0000

After Luang Prabang I spent 10 days travelling around Northern Laos by slow boat and bus. I took a scenic boat ride up to Nong Khiaw, another to Muang Ngoi and back, then a series of buses to Huay Xai on the Thai border with a stop in Luang Nam Tha.

Getting around Northern Laos can be slow and unpredictable so after getting caught up with work in Luang Prabang I took the next two weeks off since I knew I wouldn’t be able to get much work done anyway. This was really the only part of my trip where I was able to do the carefree backpacker thing without worrying about getting online or timing my travel around my work weeks, which was really nice.

Northern Laos is known for its mountainous terrain and trekking opportunities, through villages of various ethnic minorities that make up a large percentage of the population. After seeing pictures of hill tribes in their colorful traditional dress I was excited to do a trek to take pictures and learn about and interact with them.

I did a two day trekking/kayaking trip on my first weekend in Luang Prabang that included stops in Khamu and Hmong villages but it was much different than I had expected — almost nobody in the villages wore any kind of traditional clothing, and when we arrived they usually just stared at us with confused looks on their faces. We didn’t learn anything about them or get to interact with them much at all. I think organized trekking trips would be better elsewhere, e.g. out of Muang Sing further northwest.

On this trek and throughout my time in Laos the air was constantly thick with smoke from slash-and-burn agriculture, which had to be the worst thing about my visit here. My eyes were constantly burning; in Luang Prabang I would spend hours working offline at Joma just because it was air conditioned, the only clear air I could find in town. The smog was so bad that last month Thailand declared a state of emergency in Chiang Rai, a province nearby. I enjoyed my time in Laos in spite of the smoke but would definitely try to avoid visiting during the dry season in the future.

From Luang Prabang I took a slow boat up the Nam Ou to Nong Khiaw; the only other passenger was a Swiss guy. It was a really nice trip, I would recommend it over the 3 hr bus ride even though it took 7 hours. Since we were near the height of the dry season the river was very shallow in places, and our driver did an excellent job navigating through shallow rapids upstream; it was pretty fun to watch, but looked really stressful for him.

At one point the water was so shallow he couldn’t use the engine any more, so a bunch of kids (about 20 of them) came running out to push us up the river for a few minutes; the driver paid them a bit afterwards.

When we arrived in Nong Khiaw I told the Swiss guy I planned to stay at a place that had been highly recommended by my fellow trekkers a week ago (Nong Kiau River Side) even though it was more expensive than the others, $25/night for two people.

On the way there we stopped by another place just to check it out and the room looked nice but at $20 it didn’t seem much cheaper than the one highly recommended to me so I told the Swiss guy I was going to continue across the bridge to stay there; he said he was going to check out one more place and would meet me across the bridge later.

So I went on my own to NKRS, asked to see one of the bungalows and was blown away by how nice it was: tons of space, beautiful furnishings, a nice big balcony with a hammock, awesome bed and bathroom, and only $20 for one person.

I grabbed a room, dropped off my stuff and went back across the bridge into town, laughing at my good fortune and thinking “ha ha, silly Swiss guy thinks he knows better than me”; I actually felt bad that I didn’t try harder to convince him to follow me, it was so much better than the other one we had seen.

I met up with a German couple we had met earlier in town, we tried to find the Swiss guy for a while without success, and as I was raving about the place I found for the same price as the one they had, they corrected my math: the one we had seen earlier for 20000 kip was only $2 USD, not $20. Doh!

Still, I was delighted to pay $20 for the place I had — it was by far the best place I had stayed in the last 4 months.

I had a very enjoyable evening of dinner and drinks with the Germans who were extremely well-travelled and had lots of good stories. We discussed such things as which countries are the best in which to get kidnapped, and what’s the cheapest haircut you ever had. Mine was $2 last week at this place in Luang Prabang; the German guy’s was $0.25 in Uzbekistan. (When he mentioned Uzbekistan I had to resist the urge to launch into a bunch of anti-Uzbek vitriol in my best Borat voice.)

I would have been happy to have spent several days there but didn’t have many spare days left so the next day I continued up the river by boat to Muang Ngoi, a small town about an hour away.

The only access to Muang Ngoi is by boat, so there are no motor vehicles there at all, and they only have power for a few hours each night from generators.

It has quite a healthy backpacker/guesthouse scene, the main attractions being its laid back atmosphere and do-it-yourself trekking. The accommodation all seemed quite similar: bungalows with balconies and hammocks overlooking the river for about $1-2 each; a few nicer places had private bathrooms and hot water showers for $5 or so. I chose a bungalow at Nicksa’s Place for $1.50/night.

The day after I arrived I went for a trek; 30 minutes away from the village are some big caves where people lived while the country was being bombed, and a little bit further were some small villages.

At the first village I ran into a couple I had met on the boat ride the previous day, and when I was at the caves I saw a couple girls from the boat, otherwise I didn’t see any other foreigners all day.

I found the first village pretty boring so planned to head back to Muang Ngoi but on my way back at a fork in the paths I reconsidered: even though the first village was boring I did get one of my favorite pictures there (kids watching TV through a crack in the wall) and I had nothing else to do today so I might as well walk another few hours to see what else I could find.

A bit later there was an unmarked fork in the path and I took the one that seemed to lead away from where I had just been; this turned out to be the wrong choice, and after wandering across dry rice paddies for a while the path became less and less clear so I gave up and turned around. I had a hard time finding my way back to the main path and ended up hacking my way through some thick brush for a while; when I finally stumbled onto the main trail my legs were all muddy and I was covered in thorns; just then a local guy came walking along, probably laughing at the stupid foreigner as he helped remove thorns from my back.

He made a “sleep” gesture, indicating I should follow him to a guesthouse in the next village, but I already had one back in Muang Ngoi and didn’t want to follow him because I expected he would want money for his guide service. But I did want to go in the same direction, so I walked behind him for a while. When we got there he led me to a guesthouse and I had to try to communicate that I already had a place in Muang Ngoi. He offered to lead me to a waterfall nearby and I tried to figure out how to get rid of him before heading there on my own, when luckily a bunch of his friends came running up and dragged him away to drink lao lao. It seemed from their reaction when they saw him that he had been away for a while, maybe attending school in the city or something.

I explored the village a bit and had started on my way back when a young girl came up and made a frisbee-throwing motion while pointing to the frisbee sticking out of my pack, so I played catch with her for a while, happy to have someone to throw with. We were soon joined by another half-dozen kids, and about 20 of the villagers came to watch for a while. One lady with a child in a sling on her back watched with a smile for a few minutes, finally worked up the nerve to ask if she could try, then threw it once and burst out laughing.

I played catch with them for about an hour before calling it quits so I could head back before it got dark.

On the way back I checked out the spot where I had taken the wrong fork in the path, and I still think my way looked like the better way to go.

The next day I caught a boat back to Nong Khiaw; I just missed the passenger ferry so I hopped on a cargo boat with a family transporting big sacks of rice etc. I had to pay a bit more than the normal rate, but it was still only $3 and I wouldn’t have to wait around for the next boat or sit knee-to-knee with other passengers.

On the way back we made about 4-5 stops to exchange goods with others on the way (one of the transactions seemed to be conducted in hushed voices at the far end of the boat — opium?)

At first I was a bit annoyed by the delays but then remembered why I was in a hurry to get back to Nong Khiaw, to go take pictures of people down by the river; the slow cargo boat was the perfect place to do so: no need to worry about the camera getting wet or carrying a pack around, or being conspicious while taking pictures; all the cool stuff I wanted to see would just come floating past. (though I only got a couple decent pictures)

I spent another night at Nong Kiau River Side, then took a series of buses to Luang Nam Tha, via Pak Mong and Udomxai.

Throughout most of my trip I rarely booked anything more than a day or two in advance but that all changed once I booked my return flight, because there were a few things I really wanted to do before returning home and time was running out.

So in Nong Khiaw I had gone to the bus station several times to confirm the route and schedule that would get me to Huay Xai in only three days. (maybe a total of 500 km or so; I can do that in three hours in my car at home :)

The morning I left I met a couple cute girls at the bus station who were headed in the same direction, Hanita and Veronica; we got along well and spent the next few days together. The first bus was scheduled to leave at 11am; shortly afterwards the guy selling tickets said there weren’t enough people so we’d either have to pay some exhorbitant fee per passenger or wait until tomorrow. (I forget how much the fee was, maybe $40 or so — I would have paid it since I had stuff booked later but don’t know if they would have)

I complained that I had explicitly asked him about this yesterday, whether the bus goes every day, or only when there are enough people, but he stuck to his story and there wasn’t much we could do about it. I don’t know if that was standard practice for this route, or just an opportunistic money grab.

We asked about alternate routes and he said if we made the short trip to Pak Mong there would be more options there and we might be able to catch a ride to Udomxai, so we did that and were able to make it there and even further, to Luang Nam Tha. And there was a daily bus from there to Huay Xai so I would be able to do the whole trip in only two days instead of three, woohoo.

We spent the day on a variety of local buses, none of them very comfortable. Some people complain bitterly about these trips but we agreed they weren’t that bad… so you’re uncomfortable for a few hours, so what?

We ate dinner that night at a place with a hilarious menu featuring delicacies such as:

Fish Koy
Nonpeer
Duch,chichken soup with soup
Insipid soup
Hard boiled soup
Geilled meat with drip water
Acidfy pork
Yo
Noodle pok pok
Cucumber pok pok
Papaya pok pok
Roast giant

In Luang Nam Tha we rented mountain bikes and spent a day exploring the countryside, riding past rice paddies and through about 3-4 small villages.

A few weeks earlier I started looking forward to being back in the Whistler bike park and today I was so excited to be back on a bike that I had tons of energy and was bouncing around on it all day.

At one point I turned off onto a side road to wait for the girls to catch up, and it was apparently the wrong road to turn onto because a guy holding an AK-47 yelled something at me before he realized I was just doing a little loop at the intersection.

It was a really fun day; the people in these villages were friendly, obviously accustomed to tourists passing through but not so many of them that it had become a big tourist trap.

One girl saw us stop for a second and called out “hey, come visit my house” because she wanted to practice her English. We sat and chatted for a while, much of it without really understanding each other but with lots of smiles and friendliness on both sides. She served us each glasses of water of unknown origin when we arrived, which we politely pretended to drink.

After we had gone through the last village on the short loop through the countryside I spotted a guesthouse/restaurant I remembered reading about in my guidebook reputed to be the best in the area (Boat Landing Guesthouse), so we stopped for lunch/dinner and ended up spending hours there enjoying the view and a really nice conversation.

It’s amazing how quickly you bond with people on the road: after just a couple short days together we were chatting away like old friends, much of it lighter stuff like travel, health and nutrition but also a few more personal things like family issues, and hopes and aspirations. Hanita and I were both near the ends of 5-6 month trips so I think we were both in reflective moods.

The next day Veronica continued north to Muang Sing (which sounds like an excellent place to do responsible trekking trips — if I had a few more days I would have liked to have gone), and Hanita and I caught a bus to Huay Xai, then she continued on to Thailand.

That trip was entertaining too but this is way too long already.

More photos:

Luang Prabang, Laos

ger — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 22:14:05 +0000

I flew from Siem Reap to Vientiane, Laos, and spent just one night there before continuing north to Luang Prabang, one of Southeast Asia’s most beautiful and well-preserved cities, a UNESCO world heritage site.

At some point in mid-March I became a bit fed up with living in SE Asia: tired of staying in cheap places, struggling to work, and eating the same food every day. I considered pulling the plug on Cambodia and Laos and spending the rest of my time in New Zealand or Australia but sucked it up and stayed, and I’m glad I did because I really enjoyed both Cambodia and Laos.

Laos (pronounced correctly, it rhymes with ow, or cow — the French added the ’s’ at the end so they would have something there not to pronounce) has the dubious honor of being the most-bombed country in the world. Between 1964 and 1973 the US waged a secret war here as part of their conflict with North Vietnam. They dropped more bombs here than all the bombs that were dropped on Europe by all countries combined during the Second World War: two million tonnes of ordinance, one plane load every eight minutes, 24 hours a day for nine years, one tonne for every person in Laos at the time.

I saw a number of bomb craters here and there, and old bomb shells were visible all over the place, used for garden planters etc. Thirty percent of the bombs dropped here failed to explode, and today they continue to kill or maim hundreds of people every year, often children who think they have found something fun to play with.

I didn’t expect the telecom infrastructure to be any better here than it was in Cambodia where I had struggled to work over agonizingly slow internet connections, so I was pleasantly surprised to find some really fast connections in Vientiane and Luang Prabang. I ended up working from Luang Prabang for about two weeks.

Luang Prabang reminded me a lot of Hoi An, Vietnam, but seemed to be in much better shape; maybe it’s further along in the restoration/preservation process.

It had a great selection of French and French-influenced restaurants and cafes, so I spent a couple weeks eating almost nothing but Western food — lots of lasagna, pizza, and salads. One of my favorite places, Le Cafe Ban Vat Sene had a set menu for $6 that included a big green salad, fresh baguette, choice of lasagna/pizza/spaghetti, fruit salad and espresso or tea, with perfect service in a nice setting. And it was just a couple doors down from the fastest net cafe I could find.

I would begin every day with excellent coffee and fruit/granola/yogurt at Joma, then walk across town to work at my favorite net cafe. All this comfort food quickly helped me get over being sick of Asia. Spending a bit more to stay in nicer places helped as well. Normally I try to avoid Western food but it was so good here I couldn’t resist.

One night after dinner a lady that had been hanging around nearby asked if she could join me at my table; I said OK, though I was wondering what she was after; she had a pretty short skirt on and it seemed strange how she was hanging around outside the restaurant. We chatted for an hour or two; I asked a few questions here and there to try to figure out what she was up to but whenever I asked what she did she was really evasive, making me even more suspicious.

Finally I told her I was going to go work a few more hours and said good night, and she said something to one of the waiters who brought over her business card, and it turned out she was the owner of the guesthouse and restaurant, one of the nicer ones in town at that. I apologized for being so suspicious and standoffish, and explained that most of the friendlier locals I had met on my travels usually ended up trying to sell me something (generally only the case in more touristy places, like here), and it was a shame that I had to treat the genuinely friendly ones with such suspicion.

I went there for dinner again the next night and we chatted some more, and she invited me to come along with her the next day into the countryside to see a new property she was developing, I think it was going to be a new resort or something. I declined since I was still a bit wary and wanted to work instead, but I’m still wondering what she was after, if anything.

In addition to its beautiful colonial French architecture, Luang Prabang has a really cute night market mostly consisting of textiles made by various hill tribes in the area. I was wishing I was better at shopping for this kind of thing. Most women I know would have loved this market.

Just when I thought the market couldn’t get any cuter there was an extended power outage one night and the entire thing became lit by candlelight.

(the market was beautiful but I had a hard time getting good pictures of it; this is one place where a tripod would have been handy)

Luang Prabang also has dozens of historic temples (wats) but I was pretty watted out by the time I got there, so I spent only minimal time visiting them.

A couple mornings I got up early to watch monks collect alms and to check out the fresh produce market:

At first I was hesitant to take pictures of the alms collection but I saw some guidelines posted at one of the temples and it sounded OK if you followed a few basic rules: don’t use a flash, don’t get too close, and generally act respectfully.

The day before I left I saw some kids getting a head start on Lao New Year celebrations by hurling water at people driving past (boys targetting girls and vice versa); the girl in the last couple pictures below was extra cute so she was basically knocked off her bike by the flood of water sent her way.

More pictures in Luang Prabang…

Temples of Angkor, Cambodia

ger — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 12:16:55 +0000

I spent six days exploring the amazing temples of Angkor near Siem Reap, including Angkor Wat, The Bayon, Ta Phrom, Banteay Srei, and several others. I was going to write about each of them as a separate post but that would take forever so this is just a quick summary.

The city of Angkor was the capital of Cambodia’s Khmer empire for a number of centuries starting around 800 AD.

This blurb in my Lonely Planet helped put it into perspective:

The hundreds of temples surviving today are but the sacred skeleton of the vast political, religious and social centre of an empire that stretched from Burma to Vietnam, a city that, at its zenith, boasted a population of one million when London was a scrawny town of 50,000.

Most of these temples were built 800-1000 years ago, from blocks carved and transported from far away — a massive undertaking in itself.

I didn’t know anything about Angkorian history before I came to Cambodia. I have learned a fair bit about it since but can’t possibly do it justice here so I suggest reading about it in wikipedia if you’re interested.

Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat is the most famous of the temples, and the largest religious building in the world. Just the moat surrounding it is two football field lengths across. I visited it several times to take pictures at different times of the day.

(the pictures above don’t give a very good idea what the temple is like — I have been trying to avoid taking too many boring wide angle landscape pictures and as a result have very few of them of Angkor Wat, oops)

Ta Phrom

Ta Phrom is another popular temple, made famous in part by its appearance in the movie Tomb Raider in 2001. It has largely been left in the crumbling overgrown state in which it was discovered, with massive silk cotton and strangler fig trees growing all over it and tearing it apart. (Actually, the trees are monitored and somewhat controlled, but it is done in a way to give the impression they are not)

On one visit I caught these trees trying to sneak in over the wall:

“Hey!” I shouted. “Where do you think you’re going?” They froze in their tracks. “Haven’t you trees done enough to this poor temple? Get out of here, leave it alone!”

But they just stood there staring at me.

The Bayon

The Bayon is probably my favorite of the temples at Angkor, due to being very photogenic, fun to explore, and one of the least crowded (but I may have just been lucky with timing.)

It has dozens of towers, each with several enigmatic smiling faces carved into them — usually 4, one in each direction, but sometimes only 2 or 3.

From far away it doesn’t look like much, just a pile of rocks:

As you get closer the face-towers start to become clear:

closer still…

In addition to the face-towers it had a series of confusing enclosures and galleries that were really fun to wander around and explore.

The Bayon also has large sections of bas-reliefs depicting historical events and subjects from Hindu mythology. Unlike Angkor Wat’s these were out in the open making them much easier to photograph due to the direct sunlight:

Banteay Srei

About 20km north of Angkor is Banteay Srei, a temple known for the intricacy, quality and depth of the lintels carved into every surface at the relatively small site. I was glad to have brought my zoom lens with me because much of it was roped off making it difficult to get close — a good idea considering how many stupid tourists I saw rubbing their hands over the bas-reliefs at other sites.

Angkor Thom

In addition to these major sites I visited a number of others in and around the walled city of Angkor Thom.

These are just a few of the hundreds of pictures I took here; see the rest of my photos of the temples of Angkor.

(Also, I have a few very uninteresting pictures from Siem Reap.)

From Siem Reap I continued north, to Laos.

Day 4: Back to Siem Reap

ger — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:37:09 +0000

On the last day of the trip we stopped by another few Khmer Rouge points of interest before riding back from Anlong Veng to Siem Reap. Aside from one fun section of singletrack through the jungle it was a pretty boring ride so I took a few pictures to liven things up.

I got up at 7 and we were on the road 10 minutes later. First we stopped at the Cambodia/Thai border crossing just a few minutes away.

Lis showed me a neighborhood of empty houses where a couple weeks earlier everyone had been forced to leave due to ongoing border disputes with Thailand.

Next we rode on a paved road down the mountain towards Anlong Veng, stopping to see some statues carved out of boulders by Khmer Rouge soldiers.

We had breakfast at the same place we had eaten lunch the day before, then continued on to Ta Mok’s residence.

Sophal was bad so we locked him in a cage.

(I had a turn in the cage too but my pose wasn’t as good as his.)

When I was doing my time in the cage I got the tune of Rusty Cage by Soundgarden in my head, which was great because it’s one of my favorite driving songs and we had a long ride ahead of us.

We stopped at the market in Anlong Veng:

Then we stopped for gas just outside of town. I don’t know what the vehicle pictured here is called, but they were all over the place in the rural areas we visited. They seemed like pretty versatile vehicles: good for cargo, people, animals. Their top speed seemed to be about 3 kph.

After refuelling we hit the road for Siem Reap, about 140 km away I think. It was pretty boring: a couple hours of the same flat dirt roads. When I got tired of humming/singing Rusty Cage I kept myself busy by taking a few pictures:

Last night I asked Lis if there was any fun riding planned for today and he said not really, but he’d try to find something.

So after lunch we turned off the main road onto some smaller side roads for a bit, then onto some great singletrack through the jungle. There were two paths winding through it, a wider sandy one and narrower hard-packed trail off to the side; occasionally they’d cross paths and switch sides.

I tried the sand for a while and found it difficult as usual so I tried to stick to the hard-packed trail, but I was also trying to keep up with Lis and it was hard to do both.

Once when I was too indecisive about which path to take I rode straight into the bushes between them. It all happened so fast that I forgot to take my hand off the throttle, so I just kept accelerating until I was stopped by the jungle. I burst out laughing, and when Sophal came up to ask if I was OK I could hardly stop laughing long enough to answer him. He helped extract me from the trees before I could think to ask him to take a picture; too bad, it must have looked pretty funny.

We caught up to Lis and stopped a few minutes later to buy water from these cute kids:

A short while later we were back at Hidden Cambodia’s office.

They washed my bike and it was barely recognizable afterwards:

All in all, an excellent trip!

See more photos of dirtbiking in Cambodia, or a chronological view of photos from today.

Day 3: The mystery of the mango tree

ger — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 10:16:04 +0000

Last night’s rain made for some muddy riding today — fortunately, just enough to make it fun, not enough to make it tedious or difficult. After breakfast in Thailand we made our way to Anlong Veng, the last stronghold of the Khmer Rouge who controlled the area until they were overthrown in April 1998.

There’s a small border crossing into Thailand near Prasat Preah Vihear, and visa requirements are waived for people making short day trips to either side of the border, so we planned to go to Thailand for breakfast — Lis was craving chicken and sticky rice, and I was craving pad thai, which is now my second favorite noodle-based breakfast after pho.

Last night I had asked Lis if I would be able to take more pictures of the temple in the morning, and he kindly agreed to shift our breakfast an hour earlier so I could take pictures when the light was best. (around 8-9am)

Unfortunately due to the change in schedule we had to cross the border before it opened for the day, but that was pretty easy, as it’s not exactly a high-security border. (Apparently there are checkpoints further along the road into Thailand that are more strict.)

On the Thai side there’s a paved road right up to the border. I was wishing I hadn’t seen it because it kind of ruined the feeling of being in the middle of nowhere. I knew it was there before we went, but seeing it was different than just reading about it.

We arrived at the Thai market area even before the first vendors had shown up for the day. We waited a few minutes until one showed up, then helped them unload their truck and generally made nuisances of ourselves while they tried to set up their shop for the day: asked them for coffee, helped ourselves to some ice cream while we waited for breakfast, …

Everywhere we went I enjoyed watching Lis and Sophal interact with the locals: they seemed to know people wherever we went, and even if they didn’t they seemed to have no hesitation about joking around with people, jumping into the kitchen to help cook, etc. I know they have been to these places many times and know people at each place, but I don’t think they knew these Thai vendors and they seemed just as friendly with them. I wondered if this instant familiarity was a cultural thing, or a Lis and Sophal thing. Cambodians seem pretty playful in general: server girls and hotel staff were constantly flirting with me everywhere I went.

I had some good Pad Thai, played with the vendors’ cute puppy named Cocoa, made a few phone calls home using my cheap Thai SIM card, then we walked back across the border in heavy fog. I abandoned my plans to take more pictures of the temple due to lack of sunlight since I had already taken a bunch the day before, but I realized afterwards that I probably could have gotten some cool shots in the fog.

After worrying last night about a possibly slippery ride down the mountain, I actually became quite excited to start riding down. We collected our riding gear from the place we left it yesterday; the pants that I had carefully hung under a tarp mysteriously found their way onto the grass a few meters away, so they were soaking wet and very cold. I braced myself and put them on; if I wasn’t awake before, I was now!

Riding down was no trouble: not the least bit slippery, and overall very fun. I had a couple “yikes, I’m going way too fast for this section” moments but was able to slow down and regain control in each case. (those moments are what makes these kinds of sports fun)

I was disappointed to reach the bottom so soon, and thought about asking if we could go up and down again. I should have — I’m sure the guides would have been accommodating as usual.

We spent the next couple hours riding on super fun muddy roads, which weren’t nearly as slippery as I expected. I had tons of fun weaving around potholes, choosing the best path through and around puddles and deep patches of mud, and avoiding other vehicles — as usual we were the fastest and most mobile vehicles on the road, so I tried to be nice to others working their way through the mud on scooters etc, and left the easiest paths open for them whenever we passed each other.

At one point Lis came to a stop near someone who seemed to be stuck in the mud on their scooter, and I thought he was going to go over to help them so I parked my bike next to his so he could lean it on mine, because the kickstand wouldn’t work in the soft mud. It turned out that he was just getting back on his bike after a minor wipeout, and when he went to kickstart his bike I wasn’t expecting it and the force knocked me over into the mud — my only wipeout today :)

Once in a while I would find myself flying towards a puddle of unknown depth with a lot of speed and think to myself “uh oh, hope this doesn’t send me flying over the handlebars”, but after standing up to absorb some of the shock with my legs, the bike soaked up the rest of it with no problem.

Another hazard was trying to wave to all the friendly children: whenever kids heard our loud bikes coming they would run out of their houses to wave and say hello. With Lis leading the way all the time they had plenty of warning, so by the time I got there they were out in full force. Much of the time due to the mud and potholes I didn’t want to take my hand off the handlebars to wave back because I was barely in control with both hands, but I couldn’t just ignore them. Sometimes they would even jump around while they were waving; how do you ignore enthusiasm like that?

The fun muddy riding ended around 11:30, after that it was back to boring flat dry stuff. By noon the sun and wind had completely dried my clothes. I considered myself lucky to have gotten a taste of riding in mud, considering we were near the height of the dry season.

I’d really like to come back to ride in truly muddy conditions during the wet season, partly because the riding sounds fun but also because I think the photography would be a lot better then as well: everything would be greener, the temples would be more overgrown, you could get nice pictures of lush rice paddies and wet temple stones after rainstorms, etc. I doubt that I’ll get back here again within the next year or so but would like to soon. It sounds like Sep/Oct is a good time to visit during the wet season.

We stopped for a snack of volleyball-sized grapefruit, then continued on to Anlong Veng. We ate lunch at a nice place overlooking a marsh with Ta Mok’s residence visible in the distance.

Ta Mok, a.k.a. The Butcher, was the leader of the Khmer Rouge’s army during its most brutal years, responsible for many massacres and thousands of deaths. He was arrested by the Cambodian army in 1999, and spent his last few years in prison in Phnom Penh, awaiting trial for genocide. His trial was repeatedly postponed and he finally died of natural causes in July 2006.

After lunch we rode on a paved road up the Dangrek escarpment to Pol Pot’s grave site. He died under mysterious circumstances in April 1998, and was cremated here on a pile of tires and garbage before the government could inspect the body.

Then we rode a short distance on some really fun singletrack to his former bunker, strategically located near the Thai border so he could flee the country if needed.

I never really got this story straight and haven’t found much info about it online, but apparently the Khmer Rouge leaders were supposed to have had $2 billion in cash or gold stashed away someplace, and nobody knows what happened to it. I think it is supposed to have been under Ta Mok’s control in the end, but I’m not sure. (I may research this more and update this text later)

When we arrived at Pol Pot’s bunker we saw a bunch of army guys digging a big hole next to it; apparently the night before someone came and dug up a mango tree, looking for something. The army guys weren’t sure if the mysterious diggers had found what they were looking for, so they were continuing to dig in the same place to see if they could find something buried there. Lis said he thought it seemed unlikely that last night’s visitors found whatever they were looking for because the hole had been filled in afterwards: if they had found what they wanted, wouldn’t they have wanted to get away as soon as possible?

We hung around for a while watching them dig; I was half-expecting to see them discover a chest filled with $2 billion. I considered offering to help so they’d split the loot with me if we found it, but chickened out.

After a while we rode back down the way we came (still fun) and turned off to our guesthouse in a really cool setting on the edge of the escarpment.

I had a bucket shower, laid in a hammock for a while, and had a couple beers with Lis and Sophal. I was tempted to say “OK boys, let’s pound back a few more beers, grab some shovels and ride back to dig up that treasure” but didn’t think they’d go for it.

We had another good and filling dinner, then turned in for the night, dreaming about Ta Mok’s gold.

See more photos of dirtbiking in Cambodia, or a chronological view of photos from today.