TravelStream™ news feed for member dmilord on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/dmilord en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:58:03 -0500 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1204275780/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1204275780/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1204275780/tpod.html Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:58:03 -0500 From Vancouver to Bangkok and from there who knows...? Chronicles of Dylan and Karl's adventures through Southeast Asia.

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Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

It sort of looks like it's been a while since I last wrote sorry if this is long... The rest of Vietnam went by really quickly. We were ripping through the country at record-breaking pace and were always busy so it felt a bit rushed and tiring to me... First of all, it's a really long country so it takes ages to travel and second of all there's just so many places to see and things to do. After more than four months on the road I've figured out that I'm the type of person who likes to chill out and get the feel of a place for a week or two rather than zip from place to place, see all the sights and then book the first bus to the next stop... A valuable lesson to keep in mind for myself if I make another trip such as this one in the future which I'm beginning to think is quite likely.

Anyhow, the rest of Vietnam we made stops in Dalat, Mui Ne and then crazy Saigon. I think Dalat wound up being one of my favorite cities in Vietnam. It was full of hills and was a mixture of the craziness that I've come to associate with Vietnam along with a bit more of a laid-back, country feeling to it. Also, a rest from the tireless touts was very welcome. I think that other than in the towns of Dalat and Hoi An, the words I spoke more than any others were "No Thank You." But anyways, Dalat was a nice break and we also did some pretty cool stuff there. We signed up to do a canyoning / abseiling trip which wound up being a hell of a time and some much needed exercise as well. Basically, it involved some hiking in the jungle along a river until we would reach a cliff / waterfall and then we would anchor a rope to a tree and then scramble 20 or 30m down the waterfall getting soaked the whole time. We did a few of those as well as a couple of natural water-slides which were also pretty fun.

Another interesting thing about Dalat was that it catered primarily to Vietnamese tourists. We read in our "Rough Guide to Vietnam" that there was a cool place to see called 'the valley of love' so Karl and I rented some motorbikes and made it one of our stops... sigh. I was leading the way and forgot how to get there so I pulled over, pulled out my map and a nice Vietnamese man came up to ask us where we were going. It took me a couple of seconds to get over my emberassment before I mumbled under my breath that we (two guys) were lost and looking for the valley of love. He told us where it was, but I swear I saw a bit of a smirk... Probably all in my head, but still... Then we got there and it was the tackiest place I've ever seen. It would have been a nice place (a picturesque lake surrounded by hills) except for all of the statues of swans with their necks formed to look like hearts and all of that type of cheezy stuff. The couples together in the swan paddle-boats didn't help my sense of being in the wrong place either. The Mickey and Minnie Mouse statues at the front gate were a bit odd as well. So we decided to get the hell out of there in a hurry.

From Dalat we booked a way over-priced, but enjoyable overnight motorcycle tour with the Easy Riders, a group of older Vietnamese guys who do country-side motorcycle tours for a living. We got to see tons of small family businesses and how they made a lot of local Vietnamese products. The cooler places were the silk-worm breeding family, and the rice-wine making family who let us try a bit of their vile product. We went to tons of other families' homes as well which were pretty interesting including an engagement party. Despite being over-priced there really isn't too much of a way to see the more authentic aspects of the country unless you can speak some of the language or if you're living over there or know someone. So I'm glad we decided to do it. We also had all of our meals with these two guys and they told us some pretty crazy stories about Vietnam's history and about the war and about their families as well. The next day they dropped us off at Mui Ne for some kite-surfing action.

To make a long story short, kite-surfing is expensive. We both signed up for a 5 hour introduction course for a whopping $200 (about a week's budget) Needless to say when you're paying $40/hour to learn something that's quite difficult, every time I would mess up it was like I was being stabbed in the heart. Also, the conditions when we were there were pretty inconsistent so the first day was very windy and choppy and then the next day there really wasn't enough wind at all. I was looking forward to getting to Saigon and since the course was going to take an extra day I wound up getting a bit less than half of my money back since I didn't really see myself taking up kite-boarding at home anyways. So I went to Saigon to party and Karl stayed behind for a few days, loved it and picked himself up a brand new hobby which he'll be able practice back home in Penticton... luck guy!

Saigon was pretty much just another city, but a little different since it has 8 million people living there and 4 million motorbikes!!! I actually really enjoyed crossing the street over there because unlike cars, motorbikes can just dodge around you as long as you walk slowly and surely across the street. A couple of cool things I did in Saigon were seeing the War Remnants museum which showcased a lot of the atrocities of the Vietnam war, in particular the effects of Agent Orange which were really sad. But the main thing I think it showed was how pointless the whole war was and how much of a shame it was for so many people to be hurt for no reason. The next day I crawled through some of the Viet-Cong's very claustrophobic, secret Cu Chi tunnels (made larger to fit the fat Western foreigners!!) They were really impressive, both in their scale (I think about 200 miles of tunnels) as well as in their ingenius ways of not being detected. Some pretty messed up booby traps for any unwelcome visitors to the tunnels as well. After that I shot 5 rounds of an AK-47 which I could only describe as unsettling, especially after seeing the war remnants museum and crawling through the tunnels.

Another crazy experience in Saigon was sitting and eating dinner outside of a restaurant next to a whole bunch of some of the most emberassing excuses for people I've met so far on the trip (and there's been many!) First of all there was a group of 40 to 50-somethings who all worked in Saigon who seemed very strung-out and were all just hammered and talking shit to each other for no reason. At one point it seemed like things were heating up to almost the point of blows and the group of us sitting next to them were half-laughing under our breath and half-hoping that there wouldn't be any trouble. Thankfully they all left, but were only to be replaced by another group of douchebags. These guys were even worse. You could tell by the way they spoke and acted that these guys were complete losers back home and then they come over here, hook up with a few Asian prostitutes, and then think that they're hot shit. Then this illusion of power gets into their stupid little heads and they act like complete assholes to the local people. In my opinion this type of behavior is complete bullshit and it's a real shame that these amazing countries and their kind people have to put up with this type of scum. The worst part of it though is that I feel absolutely helpless to really do anything about it. Not the only time on this trip I've felt this way and unfortunately probably not the last. I'm sorry about the rant, but I think it's important for people to understand some of the darker sides of what goes on over here.

The day after this night out we booked ourselves onto a very unmemorable and poorly organized Mekong Delta boat tour which continued up the Mekong to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Good bye Vietnam.

Here are a few random things I noticed in Vietnam:

1) The people here honk their horns while driving more than I've ever seen in my life. I'm convinced that they don't even hear it anymore.
2) The people (at least in the country-side) actually do wear those conical (Rayden) hats.
3) The currency is called Dong... Dong!!! (Sorry, I know I've beaten that one to death...)
4) Vietnamese women wear pyjamas a lot.
5) While walking alone around Saigon at mid-day I saw a guy in a suit peeing against a telephone pole. About a half-hour later, I saw a well-dressed lady squatting right in the middle of a crowded sidewalk peeing while the people casually walked around her. Weird.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1202899140/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1202899140/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1202899140/tpod.html Wed, 13 Feb 2008 06:40:43 -0500 From Vancouver to Bangkok and from there who knows...? Chronicles of Dylan and Karl's adventures through Southeast Asia.

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Nha Trang, Vietnam

Our bus stopped in the city of Nha Trang at about 4:30 in the morning. At 5:00am they kicked us all off of the bus. So we wandered around in the dark for a bit with a few other people looking for places to stay, but pretty much everywhere was closed so we found a place to eat and wound up having a 2-hour breakfast until hotels started opening up. We found a brand new, reasonably priced place so we checked in and had a snooze to get over the night bus and of course the previous evening's New Year's festivities. We didn't do much that day other than book ourselves onto one of "Mama Linh's 4 Island Boat Tours" which we had heard was a party boat and a pretty good time. Then of course we had to watch a bunch of shitty movies on the"Star Movies" channel which seems to be the only english language tv station in any of the places we stay.

The next morning we were the first two people to be picked up on a bus taking us to the pier. We were expecting it to mostly be traveller's around our age so we were a little surprised when our bus picked up two elderly couples at the second stop. No big deal, we thought. Then when the third, fourth and fifth stops turned out to be full-on extended Vietnamese families (grandparents, little kids, and all) we started to think we might be on the wrong bus. Eventually the bus picked up a group of three younger Aussies and a Brit so there was still hope to make the party boat happen!

There was supposed to be snorkelling on the trip, but it was really windy out and freezing so we hit the Tiger beers nice and early and had a better time sitting up on deck watching all of the hysterical Korean and Vietnamese families flopping around in their life jackets. It was a complete circus since there were about 15 or 20 boats all anchored within a few metres of each other, with each boat having probably 20 or 30 people aboard. After that we had a pretty big buffet style Vietnamese lunch which was really good (even though we found a 'short and curly' in one of the bowls of rice... sick.) After lunch 5 of the crew members set up a sort of rock band with the drummer playing on barrels and pots and stuff. They also had a couple of guitars and a microphone and so they started singing some hilarious Vietnamese songs and then started pulling people on stage to sing their "National songs." So they got "Waltzing Mathilda" for the Aussies, "Yellow Submarine" for the Brits and apparently Canada was same-same as Australia so we didn't get a song. But the show was hilarious and definitely one of the highlights of the tour.

After that came THE highlight of the tour... The floating bar! Our hilarious guide swam out with a life-ring and a crate of really disgustingly strong wine and then had the passengers swim out with life-rings and get as many cups of wine as we wanted. Snorkelling didn't manage to pull us into the water, but the wine got us in there no problem. So us young folk along with the old Vietnamese men all got in the water together singing and shouting "YO!" (Cheers in Vietnamese) and "Chuc Mung Na Moi" (Happy New Year in Vietnamese) since those were pretty much the only things that we knew how to say. But the wine broke down all language barriers and so we all got along great anyways. By the time we all got out of the water, our guide was absolutely smashed and just saying the most hilarious things... I could tell that he was more used to this cruise being a party boat since he wound up hanging out with us the whole time. The reason that it didn't wind up being like that was because of Tet which I guess is the one time of year where local tourists exceed the number of foreign tourists. The rest of the trip wasn't much other than getting off at another lousy beach and playing a bit of volleyball and of course our guide being absolutely ridiculous.

After the tour we decided to meet up with the crew of people we had been hanging out with all day and hit up the main bar in town called The Sailing Club for a few jam jars. It was the first time in Asia we had to pay cover at a bar (60,000 Dong!!!), but it was worth it. It was really nice inside and the place was absolutely packed. There was a dance floor inside as well as one right out on the beach in front of the bar. I think the highlight of the night for me was watching these Vietnamese kids break dance and then having a dance-off against one of them which wound up being a draw. They also played pretty much exactly the same music as they had on Koh Phangan so it brought back some great memories and turned out to be a great night out.

Next day we went to these hot springs where you sit in mineral mud for 15 minutes, then have a mineral-water shower and then sit in a mineral-water hot spring for 45 minutes. The poster promised that "bathing in mineral mud is very interesting!" haha so we decided to give it a try. I was expecting it to be relaxing, but again it wound up being a complete zoo. There must have been 1000 people there all yelling and screaming and just being crazy. Vietnamese people outnumbered foreigners probably 50 to 1, but they still wound up putting me and Karl with 3 Aussie girls to keep the foreigners together as they always seem to do which was fine by us. No mud wrestling though unfortunately... So yeah, that was Nha Trang. Not the tropical beach destination I was hoping for, but it definitely had its charms and was a great time.

Next up, tacky Vietnamese tourism and extreme sports from the mountainous jungle of Dalat.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1202465700/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1202465700/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1202465700/tpod.html Mon, 11 Feb 2008 05:17:48 -0500 From Vancouver to Bangkok and from there who knows...? Chronicles of Dylan and Karl's adventures through Southeast Asia.

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Hoi An, Vietnam

So our 19 hour-long night bus ride from Hanoi down South to Hue turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. It wasn't even just the fact that it was long. . . well maybe it was, but that's not the point. The lousy thing about it was that it was just so much longer than it needed to be. The driver was driving really slowly, despite the lack of traffic and he made stops every couple of hours to eat when all anyone wanted was to just hurry up and get there. And blasting techno music at 7am when everyone's trying to sleep got a little under the skin as well. But seriously, enough of my bitching. This was our first really lousy bus experience and after almost four months out I consider that to be very lucky.

Our plan was to get to Hue at 6am (we got there at 2pm), check in somewhere and then head out on a tour to the DMZ (de-militarized zone) from the American War. Needless to say, it didn't work out like that so we decided to get out of Hue as quickly as possible since we had heard that the DMZ wasn't all that interesting anyways as well as the fact that it was still raining and freezing cold. We booked our bus to Hoi An for the next day at 2pm and so we had about 24 hours to kill. Seeing as we were tired and feeling pretty lazy we got on a cyclo which is pretty much like a rick-shaw (Ken-Bond, haha) except that it's powered by a bicycle. They took us around town for a while in the cold, telling us about their families and about the coming New Year and then of course they wind up asking "You want smoke?" and "You want nice girl?" We politely declined and then seeing as they weren't going to get any of our Dong they dropped us off a good kilometre or two from our hotel. The next morning though we got up early and got a motor-bike tour around the countryside to see a 300 year-old Japanese Bridge that's never had to be rebuilt as well as Tu-Doc's tomb and some nice pagodas. It was really nice seeing all of those things, but the best part was just the ride through the country, zipping by all of the rice paddies and seeing the very different life which they live over here. So Hue redeemed itself a bit and then we made our way down to Hoi An on a nice routine 4 hour bus ride.

Hoi An turned out to be a really cool little town. Lots of nice cafes and restaurants with patios and a river with a nice boardwalk, so it was a good place to just chill-out with a strong Vietnamese coffee and people watch. We were there during Vietnam's most important festival of the year called Tet which is the Vietnamese New Year. The vibe around Tet was really cool and it felt a whole lot more like Christmas does back home than New Year. It's a very family-oriented holiday so we met many Vietnamese families who were in Hoi An for just a few days from Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi to visit the rest of their family. Another cool thing about Tet is that most families decorate their homes with tons of flowers and plants as well as these orange trees which reminded me a lot of Christmas trees. So everywhere you look there would be people on motor-bikes hauling these flowers and orange trees. It's also a very supersticious holiday. For example, you're not supposed to eat shrimp on Tet because shrimp swim backwards which signifies lack of progress. And people don't sweep during Tet because it's sweeping the good luck away. You're also not supposed to give people clocks or watches as gifts because it signifies the ticking away of people's time. At least that's what wikipedia told me... I looked it all up the day before to make sure I didn't accidentally offend anyone by showing up at someone's house to sweep their floor while eating shrimp and then presenting them with a brand new watch!

While we were there we wound up going to a really nice tailor named B'Lan to get some sweet, custom suits and shirts made. She was so nice to us that she even invited us into her home during Tet to eat with her and her family. It was a really cool experience getting to talk to her. She told us all about her family and how she got to be a tailor. It was nice to actually get to interact with local people on a personal level.

The day before, we also rented some motorbikes and rode about an hour out of town to visit some old ruins which were pretty nice, but again the highlight was the ride itself. There were a few points where it was a bit sketchy driving in all the traffic, but it was all part of the fun. I gotta say, I'm loving the rice paddies over here they're absolutely everywhere.

For the big night itself, we spent a while in our hotel room watching some really shitty movies on the "Star Movies" channel which always seems to show the movies that big stars should be ashamed that they made... Then we headed out to watch the fireworks show which was pretty impressive and then to a bar full of travellers since most of the Vietnamese went home to be with their families. I wound up DJ-ing the first few hours of the party pumping such crowd-pleasers as Daft Punk, 50-Cent and Rihana. It was actually pretty fun and it got me a few free drinks as well. All in all another succesful New Year's.

The next day our bus didn't leave until 6:30pm and we had to check out at noon so we wound up sitting on the patio of "Treat's" Restaurant for six straight hours playing shithead (a card game) and eating a few meals. Good times. Now we're in the beach town of Nha Trang which looks a lot like what I imagine Florida to look like. The good news though is that we're finally back into good weather. It's the first sunny day I've seen in about 8 or 9 days and the first time the temperature's been more than 20C. I guess that's not much to complain about, but the last few months we've been pretty spoiled for good weather. Anyways, that's it for now.

Here's what was written as #7 on the list of rules for the last hotel we were in which I thought was pretty hilarious...

"Please do not bring pets, weapons, ammunition, explosives, stinky things, guests (even the prostitutes) into your room. Thank you."
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1202121000/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1202121000/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1202121000/tpod.html Mon, 04 Feb 2008 06:32:31 -0500 From Vancouver to Bangkok and from there who knows...? Chronicles of Dylan and Karl's adventures through Southeast Asia.

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Hanoi, Vietnam

I'm just going to point out that Vietnam's monetary currency is called "Dong" and that I find it hilarious... Wrinkly dong, old dong, used dong... The possibilities for jokes are endless!!!

Anyways, before landing in Hanoi I knew that NorthernVietnam was going to be cold, but I really wasn't prepared for how cold it was going to be. I got off of the plane in shorts and flip-flops and the 7 degree weather was a bit of a shocker. So for the next 4 or 5 days and nights, I wound up wearing two pairs of socks, two t-shirts, my Beerlao hoodie and a pair of wool gloves I bought for $1. I also wound up sleeping in this pretty comfortable silk sleeping bag that I bought for $3 since none of the cheap accomodation in Hanoi seemed to have any heat...

Other than the lousy weather though Hanoi was a pretty cool place. For the first time on the trip I actually felt like I was in a really different country. Thailand was slightly different at first and then Laos was quite similar to Thailand, but Vietnam so far has been completely different. The traffic is pretty crazy here except that it's 95% motorbikes in the street. To cross the street you just need to slowly walk across the road as the bikes veer around you. It was a bit intimidating at first, but now it's no big deal. The architecture here is pretty different as well. Some of it is very European, probably because of the fact that it used to be a French colony. Then, North of Hanoi there were all of these half-finished, abandoned-looking, hideous appartment complexes. Apparently they only built the frames of the buildings and are waiting for investors to come and finish them... It was actually pretty creepy looking. Other than that, there are signs of communism everywhere with tons of red hammer and sickle flags everywhere. Also, people try and rip you off a lot more than they did in Thailand or Laos. They often try to short-change you when you pay for things and try to give you lousy exchange rates if they quote their prices in US dollars. The moto-taxi drivers are also really pushy and will follow you around for a block or so before giving up. At first I'll always smile and say no thank you, but sometimes it's pretty tough to not to tell them to eff-off, especially if they've been really pushy or if you've just gotten off of a long bus ride or something. In the end though it seems better to always just stay polite since I'm just a guest in their country they're really only just trying to make a living. Oh yeah, and people here spit a lot. I saw an old granny hock a huge loughie the other day and it was pretty funny.

We didn't spend too much time in Hanoi, but we saw a fair amount of the sites anyways. In one day we went to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum and saw the man himself in preserved form. They seem to really love him in this country so it's sort of strange that they preserved him and put him on display from 8-11am despite his wishes to be cremated... After that we went to the Ho Chi Minh museum and to the "Hanoi Hilton" prison museum which were alright. Then that night we went to the famous water puppet show which was sort of like going to your younger sibling's school play. You clap, you laugh, but deep down inside you'd sort of rather be somewhere else. But it was all worth it seeing as all of those things combined only cost about $4. We also went to an amazing French bakery on the side of the street and had a great Chocolate Mousse for like 60 cents!!!

The next day we were booked into a boat trip through the local youth hostel to the famous Ha Long Bay. It's one of Vietnam's most visited places and I can see why. It's sort of like the vertical rock formations of Southern Thailand, but on a way, way bigger scale. So we went around for a while through the bay and then made a stop at this absolutely massive cave which was really impressive. Some of the bigger chambers were probably about the size of a large stadium and were all lit up in multi-colors. After that we put down anchor and had a really, really good seafood 5 or 6 course gourmet dinner followed by karaoke and a few games of King's Cup. Some of the people on board could only speak French so I sort of acted as translator between their group and everyone else which was pretty fun. That's another thing I've noticed about Vietnam is that there are a really high number of French-speaking tourists here compared to everywhere else. Then the next morning we cruised around the bay for a while longer before the 4 hour bus back to Hanoi, followed by what would turn out to be a 19 hour bus ride to Hue.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1201518660/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1201518660/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1201518660/tpod.html Mon, 28 Jan 2008 06:37:43 -0500 From Vancouver to Bangkok and from there who knows...? Chronicles of Dylan and Karl's adventures through Southeast Asia.

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Phuket / Koh Tao / Bangkok, Thailand

I've spent the last five days in Bangkok and the place is really starting to grow on me. This is our third time over here since we've been gone and each time it's been a bit better. We booked ourselves into a nice guesthouse with only 3 or 4 rooms and run by the nicest Thai man we've met on the trip. We're only spending half of what we normally spend in Bangkok and even though it's right where all the action is, it's sort of down a side-alley and has a front yard which I didn't even know existed here. Really cool place.

Anyhow, I guess I'll update on what the last 10 or so days since Phi Phi have been all about. From there we took a boat over to Phuket just to check it out despite having heard bad things about the place. We stayed in the ultra touristy / sleazy beach resort town of Patong. It's like Khao San Road multiplied by about 10 and instead of being a fun traveller's meeting ground, it's a resort for vacationers and dirty old Western guys wanting to hook up with young Thai girls... and boys... and ladyboys. Everywhere you look there's an old white guy with a young Thai on his arm just sitting in restaurants or walking around and the first thing you notice is that they're not even talking to each other. It's a pretty sad sight, but unfortunately it's a big part of the tourism industry over here. There's also places where tourists line up to pay $5-$10 to get their photos taken with the ladyboys. Not my idea of a place to spend two days...

That being said, we didn't go there to stay there. We went to book a day trip to the nearby Phang Nga Bay, home to the infamous "James Bond Island" where they filmed a few scenes of "The Man With The Golden Gun" starring Roger Moore. So we went there which was pretty nice and we took some emberassing photos of us in front of this cool rock structure doing James Bond poses. It was cliche and emberassing, but we started a trend and within a couple of minutes there were a bunch of other groups taking the same shots... Also on the tour we were taken in sea kayaks into these crazy sea caves that would emerge into the center of these islands like some sort of river structure surrounded by walls of rocks on all sides with vines and mangrove trees everywhere. Really nice scenery, but sort of hard to explain. And being close to Phuket, the tour was absolutely jam packed so that there were even kayak traffic jams trying to navigate through the narrow caves. Also, we were probably the only people there younger than 30... Still though, it was worth checking out.

Next, the plan was to go back to Koh Tao to do our advanced diving course. Once we got there though Karl's ears were hurting from our Phi Phi dives and so he wasn't fit to go diving. So he split off to Bangkok early and I stayed behind and did the dive course. The dives we did were pretty cool, the highlights definitely being the night dive and the deep dive. The night dive was sort of creepy, but really cool as well. All the fish were really ghost-like and moving around really slowly since they weren't feeding or anything. We saw a pretty big sting-ray under a rock as well and some crabs and anemones that get more active by night. The coolest part was probably when we all got to the bottom and turned off our flashlights. It was almost fully dark, but when you moved your hands or your fins around you would disturb all of this phosphorescent plankton which would glow and sparkle in the dark. Pretty cool stuff. On the deep dive you get something called Nitrogen narcosis which is your body's reaction to the Nitrogen gast in your bloodstream under pressure once you get down to 30m. You get a feeling of being slightly drunk and disoriented which was sort of cool. My instructor had me do a puzzle at the surface which took me like 35 seconds and then I did it again at 30m and it took me almost a minute and 45 seconds... Other than that I learned some navigation and buoyancy on the other dives as well.

A few of the people I had been hanging out with during the dives talked me into going to ANOTHER full moon party since our dive course happened to end the day before the party. It seemed like it just wouldn't be right to not go since I was only about 40km away... The night was fun as always, but it just wasn't the same. The novelty had finally worn off. The next day I booked myself straight back to Bangkok on a night bus and we got to watch Die Hard 4 for the fourth time this trip except this time they were blasting it in Thai... I have to admit though it was pretty funny seeing Bruce Willis speaking Thai though.

Since being back in Bangkok I've seen a couple of movies (Hitman which was terrible, and Cloverfield which was amazing) and met a whole bunch of really cool people who unfortunately are all going in different directions than Karl and I... No worries though since meeting people while travelling hasn't really been a problem at all. Now I'm just counting down the hours until my flight laeves for Hanoi, Vietnam so that I can meet up with Karl and we can go on the last legs of our trip through Vietnam and then into Cambodia before coming home on March 14th. It should be pretty sweet since we'll be in Vietnam for its biggest festival of the year called Tet which is their New Year. Apparently it gets pretty hectic, but I'm sure it'll be a great time.

Next entry from 'Nam.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1198745160/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1198745160/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1198745160/tpod.html Mon, 28 Jan 2008 06:05:22 -0500 From Vancouver to Bangkok and from there who knows...? Chronicles of Dylan and Karl's adventures through Southeast Asia.

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Ko Phangan, Thailand

I don't even know where to start...

The internet where we've been staying is about 25cents / minute so I've been too cheap to write.

The last 8, or 9 . . . or 10 days (totally lost count) have been an absolute blast. We moved over to the party beach really not knowing what to expect and it by far exceeded whatever lack of expectations we had... or didn't have I guess. We were staying in a bungalow right at the end of the beach with an amazing view of the whole thing so every night we would get a group of us out on our balcony and just watch the throngs of people pour out onto the beach. For anyone who hasn't been to Haad Rin, I'll give you a little bit of a rundown. On the beach by day there's tons of people playing beach volleyball, beach soccer, swimming, skim boarding, Seadooing, nude sun-bathing and all that other good stuff. Just off the beach, there are tons of restaurants showing movies, tv shows, soccer games etc... So you're pretty much up to something at all times, whether you like it or not. On top of that, every place you go seems to be pumping hard-core techno music at ear-splitting levels. At first it's a bit much, then it grows on you... then it goes back to being a bit much all over again. I guess you really need to be in a red-bull type of mood to enjoy that type of music. Then at night, everyone goes to the beach and dances it up to the music all night. Not exactly a healthy lifestyle, but good times for a few days nonetheless. This is Haad-Rin Sunrise Beach in a nutshell.

So yeah, for the last few days, however many days it's been, we've been going back and forth between loving and not-so-loving this scene. For the most part though, it's been great. The best part was probably that we ran into a whole bunch of different groups of people we'd made friends with over the last 2 months so it's been a massive reunion.

The Half-Moon party turned out to be decent, but it was basically just a big dance-floor in the jungle... The beach parties though were out of this world. Everyone is in a good mood, there's good music, crazy fire shows and all of it is set to a beautiful backdrop of clear skies, the ocean and warm weather... Perfect. So every night, these beach parties would go on and every night seemed to get bigger and bigger working up to the Full-Moon Party which was on Christmas Eve. It seemed as if every single traveller in Southeast Asia was migrating here. Then came the Full Moon Party... You could tell that there was something different in the air on the day leading up to it. It could have been the abundance of people in town, but you could definitely tell there was a buzz in the air as well. We sat up on our balcony with a few of usjust watching things unfold at about 10 o'clock for a couple of drinks before we went down to join in the madness. At that point there were easily a few thousand people on the beach. By midnight it was probably closer to ten thousand people. So after a few Christmas carols, we put on our Santa hats, grabbed a few branches with leaves on them as mistle-toe and made our entrance. Absolutely brilliant. I don't even have the words, it was just such an amazing time. We snapped some photos and vids on Karl's camera which will definitely help to capture the epic night, but you really need to see it to believe it. The beach the morning after the party (people are still dancing their asses off at 9 in the morning) was a complete disgrace though. Everywhere you looked there were buckets, straws, cups, "sleeping" people, and other garbage. They must have had a pretty intense cleaning crew though because it looked almost presentable by the afternoon.

The next day we got a big group of us out to a British Pub-style restaurant and had a good old-fashioned Western Christmas dinner which worked well to cure the home-sickness. I'm definitely jealous that we got a white Christmas back home though! Now we're waiting for Nik to arrive and work ourselves up to New Year's which apparently is almost twice as big... Can't wait.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1201257000/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1201257000/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1201257000/tpod.html Fri, 25 Jan 2008 06:15:54 -0500 From Vancouver to Bangkok and from there who knows...? Chronicles of Dylan and Karl's adventures through Southeast Asia.

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Koh Phi Phi, Thailand

Okay, you know how when you go on a ride at Disneyland or something and there's a life-size picture of Mickey Mouse holding up his arm and saying: "You must be at least this tall to ride"...? Well the island of Koh Phi Phi is sort of like that, but instead of Mickey Mouse, it's a supermodel pointing at herself and saying "You must be at least this good looking to get on this island..." I guess I'm just trying to say that there were a whole lot of good looking people on the island, most of them Swedish... On the flip side though, there were a hell of a lot of fat, greased-up, sleazy, Speedo-wearing old men on the island as well so it was a bit of a contrast.

Anyways, enough of that. Phi Phi is hyped up as one of the most beautiful islands in the world for a reason... Because it is. The beaches are some of the best, finest white sand I've seen and the mountains and the overall shape of the island itself are beyond explanation. Just perfection. I'll put up some of the photos soon and hopefully they'll capture even one hundredth of how nice of a place it was.

That being said, it's also expensive, hard to find accomodation and pretty over-crowded. But nobody likes whiners so we still had an amazing time. Our first day over there we went on two Scuba dives and they pretty much blew our previous diving experience out of the water. The clarity of the water and just the abundance and diversity of the sea-life was just amazing. We saw a few turtles, we found Nemo, anemonies, jelly-fish, puffer-fish, cuttle-fish (weird bastards) and some pretty weird-looking coral and tons of other stuff as well. There were also a lot of what are called "swim-throughs" which are basically just these narrow passage-ways through rock formations that you swim in one hole and out another. Some of them were so completely packed with schools of fish that you couldn't see your hands even if you put them a few inches away from your face. To end our second dive, we also got to go into a pretty massive cave for our decompression stop and then exit through the roof into the sunny skies above. Just awesome.

Next day we went on a tour over to Phi Phi Leh island which is the uninhabited, sister island of Phi Phi Don island where we were staying. We stopped at monkey bay and got to feed a bunch of angry, aggressive monkeys. Then we went snorkelling and kayaking around a few amazingly picturesque, protected lagoons surrounded by razor-sharp mountains. Then probably the highlight of the tour was getting to stop at THE beach where they filmed "The Beach." Again there's a lot of hype about that beach, but once you're there you can really see why. During the day it's pretty brutal how packed it gets, but we were there a bit before sunset so there weren't too many people and the light was perfect for taking some nice photos. So we tossed the frisbee around for a bit, took a few really cheezy photos and then took off. I kept expecting Leonardo DiCaprio to pop out of the jungle or the water somewhere, but he never made an appearance... To end the trip, they served us dinner and anchored right in between two small islands so that the sun set right in between them and then took us home. All in all well worth the $15 we paid for the tour.

Next day we had to leave the island, but I realized that I hadn't yet gotten the mandatory postcard photo from the mountain viewpoint of the perfectly symmetrical bays with the mountains rising behind them. Karl went to snorkel with some sharks which I had already done the day before so the trip was a bit of a solo adventure. I got lost a few times and took a really awkward way of getting there through the jungle (I later found that there was a perfectly straight-up staircase that would've taken 10 minutes up instead of an hour and twenty!!! On the way up I had to make an emergency squat in the jungle and then when I got up I thought there were some branches on my neck, but it turned out that it was a branch with about 200 massive red ants making a nest of my head. After screaming like a girl for a minute and jumping all over the place trying to get them off of me I got myself under control and found the viewpoint. By that point there was only a half-hour until our boat was supposed to leave so I took my pictures, had a water and took off down the stairs. When I got back my skin seemed to be growing bubbles (I didn't even know that was possible) because of the 38 degree heat. We made our boat though, no big deal.

Pairs of sandals lost or destroyed: 6.

Next stop, sleezy Phuket.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1200315540/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1200315540/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1200315540/tpod.html Mon, 14 Jan 2008 08:43:37 -0500 From Vancouver to Bangkok and from there who knows...? Chronicles of Dylan and Karl's adventures through Southeast Asia.

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Krabi, Thailand

The Raileh beach area is an place full of extremes. It's a series of bays and penninsulas surrounded by sheer limestone cliffs and only accessible in two ways, one of which is by boat. The other way I'll mention a bit later. Also, everyone that you see here is super fit and not in the Kits Beach chotchy type of way either. Most of the people who come here are climbers and all of them seem to be in really good shape. The rest of the people here are travellers looking for a nice beach in a beautiful location, or people like Karl and I looking for a bit of beach and a bit of climbing as well...

So we spent our first couple of days just enjoying the scenery and chilling out on the beach and watching the crazy climbers do their thing. The second day I wound up going for a swim for five or ten minutes with my stuff in plain sight and when I got back my wallet along with Auntie Debit and Uncle Visa and 3000Baht ($100) in cash was all gone... :( Needless to say, it was a bit of a downer especially since I really had no other way to access money. I have to say though that the experience as a whole has turned out to be a positive one. I realized how amazing my parents are for helping me through the whole situation and arranging for replacement cards to be sent over here. Also, Karl's been a true champion about the whole situation and has been helping me out until I get my replacement cards. So all in all, it's just changed my perspective on things a little bit. After all, it could have been a lot worse. It could have been my passport or my camera with all the photos on it, or any other of a thousand things that could have gone wrong so far... Money is money, no big deal. So thank you, thank you, thank you to Mom, Dad and Karl for helping me through a bit of a hard time... But enough of the sappy stuff.

The next day Karl and a few people we met went on a kayaking trip around the bay and to some nearby islands while I took care of my situation. I also booked us into a 3-day climbing course where we would learn top-rope climbing, lead-climbing as well as multi-pitch climbing. The whole thing wound up being an amazing experience combined with being a bit of a terrifying one, at least for myself. I've always been a bit scared of heights, but being up 30m and leaning back off of a sheer rock face with nothing but jagged rocks below you and a thin piece of rope holding me up took things to a whole new level. I won't go into the details of multi-pitch climbing, but that aspect of things added to the fear as well. But, enough of all of the whole fear B.S. The whole "face your fears" things was one of the reasons I wanted to take the course. Mission Accomplished...

The day we finished we sat down on the beach for a couple of hours around sunset and just watched the really hard-core climbers do the really short / extremely difficult climbing routes. Our instructor went on a couple of these routes and he was like a monkey up there. He was a little Thai guy named Sami who probably weighed about 115 pounds and about 5 foot 3. But when he was up there he could twist himself around upside down, sideways, inside-out, you name it and he did it all effortlessly. As we were watching him strut his stuff on the rocks, we found out the second way to access the beach we were on. All of a sudden we look up to the top of the rock face about two or three hundred metres up and we see some dude launch himself off of the cliff, fall for about 2 seconds or until he was about halfway down the cliff and then open up a parachute about a second before splattering himself on the ground. Then about 20 seconds later another guy did the same thing, landing about 20m away from us... Definitely a pretty cool thing to see. Apparently these guys come to this beach every year and stay for about a month. Then a few minutes after that we saw this couple do some crazy cirque-du-soleil type of stuff. The guy would hold up the girl and she would be doing handstands on his raised up feet and other crazy stuff like that. He didn't put her down for about 20 minutes either... Oh yeah, and earlier that day we some probably the craziest thing of all. We see this one guy climbing a route right next to where we were climbing and we notice that he's going up with some rope, but he's not clipping into any of the bolts. We watch him for a while and he winds up free-climbing the whole way up (easily 100-150m). If he had slipped and fallen at any point, there isn't even any question that a quick and gruesome death would ensue. Complete nutcase. Again, a really extreme place.

All in all, our 7 or 8 days staying on Tonsai Beach (just next to Raileh) were really great. A nice break from the party scene of Koh Phangan. Getting our climbing done was also a really great experience and we got to hang out with some really great people that we've met who know who they are. And getting robbed... Well, it sucked, but as i said earlier it opened my eyes up a whole lot so no regrets. In the words of Bobby McFarrin, "Don't worry, be happy."

Stay tuned for more from the most beautiful place I've ever seen (other than Buchanan Tower)... Koh Phi Phi...

PS - Congratulations to all the NIBS on a succesful I-Week.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1199359380/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1199359380/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1199359380/tpod.html Sun, 13 Jan 2008 06:50:55 -0500 From Vancouver to Bangkok and from there who knows...? Chronicles of Dylan and Karl's adventures through Southeast Asia.

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Ranong, Thailand

Take the Full Moon Party on Christmas Eve, multiply the number of people on the beach by 3 and you've got Koh Phangan New Year's. The whole length of the beach was shoulder to shoulder and I've never seen so many people peeing into the ocean at once in my entire life.

The lead-up to New Year's was pretty calm compared to the few days before Christmas and New Year's. We moved to the quiet beach just 10 minutes walk from the party beach so we had the privilege of a few full night sleeps before the big night. We were splitting a whopping 800B/night ($26) so we also had the luxury of a fridge to put our Changs in and a TV. So needless to say we watched a lot of soccer and movies in those few days. Finally the big day came and the two of us along with Nik who joined us from home as well as Matt and Dan decided to get classy and wear matching costumes to the beach that night. So we all picked up some sweet Full Moon Party t-shirts, orange headbands, green wrist-bands and some fluorescent war paint and hit the beach in style. Oh yeah, and I had shaved my goatee into some pretty epic handlebars a few days before to add to the classy factor. The night was another crazy one to be sure, but you can only party on the same beach so many times before it starts to get old. Still though, a great night filled with fireworks, the countdown and all that good stuff. Oh yeah, and my fifth pair of flip-flops bit the dust as well... and they were good ones too.

The next day was pretty much just taking it easy and watching soccer with the other guys before getting ready to leave the island. Our Visas were about to run out so we booked ourselves a trip to Ranong on the Thailand/Burma border so that we could cross, come back and get issued another 30day Visa exemption. Our boat to the mainland left at seven on the third so on the evening of the second we decided it would be best to just not go to sleep since we were already on a bit of a funky sleeping schedule and wanted to have a bit of a tearful farewell with our good buddies Matt and Dan. So we slept most of the 8 or 9 hour bus / boat journey up to Ranong and then as soon as we got there we got thrown on two motorbike taxis, rushed to immigration to exit Thailand, then rushed to the ocean to take a 45-minute boat ride into Burma. When we got to Burma, these two guys welcomed us off the boat and right away started trying to sell us Viagra, "Lady Viagra", guns, and bombs... I'm pretty sure they were joking about the last two though. We walked into the Burmese immigration, they stamped our passports in a few seconds and then off we were back into Thailand through the same immigration who just stamped us out of the country an hour and a half before... All in all a pretty chaotic situation, but it all worked out. The next day we hopped on a bus down to Krabi to get us to Tonsai beach just off of Raileh beach which is a world-renowned rock climbing mecca to meet up with some friends who had left Koh Phangan before us.

Stay tuned for more from Krabi...
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1197820020/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1197820020/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/dmilord/southeast_asia/1197820020/tpod.html Sun, 16 Dec 2007 11:29:20 -0500 From Vancouver to Bangkok and from there who knows...? Chronicles of Dylan and Karl's adventures through Southeast Asia.

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Ko Tao, Thailand

Hi All,

Scuba diving was amazing. I don't really know how I can put it any differently. And if you're looking to dive (without it costing a fortune!) Ko Tao is the place to go. As soon as you get off of the pier all you see are dive shops advertising courses and selling wetsuits... We started our course a few hours after getting off of the ferry so there was time for a bit of a nap. We met our instructor Barry who was a total legend. He's an ex-millitary British guy who's 40 and has been living on the island for four years and isn't planning on leaving any time soon. Really nice guy and completely professional as well. For anyone who's tried Scuba diving it's definitely a bit of a strange feeling at first, but he made it seem as if he was in total control the whole time. Our group was myself, Karl and a Scottish / German honey-mooning couple. They were quite a bit older than us, but we got along with them pretty well.

Our first afternoon and the morning of the second day was all in the classroom, so we learned all about buoyancy and safety and all that boring stuff. Then we went into the ocean just off the shore in about 6 feet of water and learned all of the basic skills. So we did things like taking off our mask underwater and putting it back on and clearing the water out of it and other simple things like that. The next day we went for our first two real dives. We went down to a max depth of about 17m and saw tons of coral, barracudas, morray eels, sea cucumbers and all that good stuff. But the coolest part was probably just the feeling of floating around and being somewhere that humans are privileged to get a chance to be. The next day we went on two more dives and then wrote our exam. We both wound up getting 96% on the exam, but we got some pretty stupid questions wrong... Apparently you're supposed to check for breathing and a pulse BEFORE you give someone oxygen... Oh well. Then from that moment on we were PADI Open Water Certified which means that we can dive anywhere in the world to a depth of 18m. Our plan at the moment though is to get our Advanced Diver Certification so that we can go down to 30m and do some night dives and stuff.

Anyhow, enough about diving. The rest of the time on the island was pretty relaxed. Our second night there we joined the couple in our group on a trek through the jungle to a private beach. They met someone on their boat to the island who was staying in a resort there so we bought some salmon, sausages and some vegetables and had a BBQ over an open fire on an amazing secluded beach. The food took forever to cook, but it wound up being probably one of the best meals we've had in Asia because we worked our ass off to make it. Other than that though, we really didn't do anything. The weather was pretty lousy so there really wasn't all that much to do. From the looks of things though, we'll probably be back.

Now we're on Koh Phangan after a roller coaster of a catamaran ride over from Koh Tao. The sea was so rough that people on the lower deck were puking everywhere and off of the sides of the boat as well. We were up in the open air enjoying the ride though, so it was all good. We're staying right now on the SouthWest coast of the island in a pretty nice place right on the water. Tomorrow we're leaving to the full-moon party beach called Haad Rin and we're going to be staying in an awesome hill-side, oceanview room at the end of the beach at Paradise Bungalows. Tomorrow night we're hitting up the Half-Moon Party in the middle of the jungle and then next week we have the Full-Moon Party on the 24th and then Christmas and then of course New Year's. So far I'm really liking this island. We rented some scooters today and just spent most of the day cruising around the island. More news (and hopefully some good stories) after the half-moon party. Time to watch the Chelsea - Arsenal game...
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