Mar 2007

Back in Thailand and after a mad dash to get our clothes washed and packed for the next leg of our journey, we got on a sleeper train bound for the northern city of Chiang Mai.

Travelling by sleeper is so much more civilised than by bus! The bunks are cosy and just about long enough to be completely comfortable to sleep in. Leaving in the evening and arriving in Chiang Mai the next morning we were rested and ready to tackle a new city! Compare this to sitting on a bus for 12 hours (or more) and arriving in the dead of night, and I know which method of transport I prefer.

After checking into our guesthouse, chosen on advice by a very nice American lady in an adjacent bunk, and having lunch, we rented a motorbike to explore the town with.

Chiang Mai is supposedly well known for its hundreds of temples and its walled and moated central area. Oh, and its Night Bazaar. After getting lost for quite a bit in the predominantly one-way traffic system, we made it to one of the alleged highlights of the Chiang Mai province: Wat U Mong. I'm afraid it really wasn't worth the drive out there. We then went to a temple where Melissa wanted to follow a meditation class, only to be disappointed by the fact that the next class wasn't for another week. After this we visited the alleged-most-visited wat in town. Again, it was disappointing!

After all this our spirits were a bit low, and we decided we would leave for somewhere else the next day, and in the evening we engaged in some therapeutic shopping at the famed Chiang Mai Night Bazaar. It's a large collection of shops and stalls selling mostly the same stuff (silk cloth, touristy clothing, various contraband) but with some really nice stuff mixed in if you look carefully. And all at "special prices".

So, the next day we got on a bus to Pai. Pai is a sleepy town in the north, not far from the Burma/Myanmar border. Accommodation there is much more basic (and cheap!) and the tourism industry is much less in your face. We stayed in a nice wooden bungalow, where we finally got to use our mosquito-net! After an unusually cold night (Pai is up in the mountains and gets cold at night!), we went on a two day trek. We drove for a couple hours up a mostly dirt track, bouncing and wobbling all over the place, after which we were to walk the rest of the way. The walk started up-hill in the blistering sun and wasn't the easiest walk I've been on! We stopped for lunch at the Pai river and swam in it's refreshingly cool waters, ignoring the fact a colourful snake had just swum past. We ate fried rice in bowls made on the spot from banana tree leaves (Melissa made one too!).

The rainforest in Thailand is actually very very dry at this time of year. Most of the ground is sandy or covered in dry foliage, and the plant life is not very dense or green at all. Also, the rivers and waterfall we passed were at very low levels. Anyway, at the end of day 1 we traipsed into a Lahu hilltribe village. We were welcomed by curious children and barking dogs. The Lahu grow their own rice (each family providing for themselves) and other vegetables and they sell oxen to raise money for other purchases. They also still do a lot of foraging and hunting. We stayed in a house on stilts and slept on the floor on mats. We were served with some excellent food, and while we were eating, several dead squirrels were brought in and were plucked in front of our eyes! Supposedly dusk is a good time to go squirrel hunting. At this time the attention of the kids had turned away from the white foreigners to the solar powered satellite TV in the adjacent hut. It was quite strange to see satellite dishes in a village where they grow and hunt their own food and don't have telephone lines!

I got up early in the morning (I was too cold to stay lying down any longer!) to sit by the fire and to go for a wander. I watched the Lahu grinding their home-grown rice in a man-powered mechanical pounder that works like a see-saw. They pound the rice to get rid of its shell and then dry it on large shelves above their fires. I went back to wake Melissa and after a breakfast of jam and toast we got to try some curried squirrel, and I thought it smelled like leftover Christmas turkey broth. One thing I will note is that they don't remove the bones, they just kind of mash up the whole thing, so that you are continually picking out bits of ribs from your teeth.

Back on the jungle trail we started the day hunting for food. Our guides were looking for the nests of a certain type of beetle. It digs holes and hibernates in them with its larvae. The larvae are the ones we wanted, as I hear they are good roasted. After a couple nests that had already been ransacked by snakes we found a good one! We were quite surprised by the number of hockeyball sized earth balls that came out of the hole, each with a quite large white larva inside. After this we passed another water-fall and some forest-fires! We walked particularly fast near the latter, while languishing in the cool mist generated by the former. We passed through another village at lunchtime and we all had a well-deserved snooze. We finally made it to our destination and were driven back to Pai.

The next day we ticked off the our final to-do-in-Thailand: the elephant ride. We got to ride an elephant for an hour and a half and half-way through we waded into the river, where the elephant bucked us like a bucking bronco (but on command) and we went flying into the water. We then spent another half our climbing back on and being thrown off. This aquatic fun was slightly offset by the fact that the elephants would do their business in the water right next to us. I would also say that an hour and a half is long enough on an elephant's back! It's quite uncomfortable and it really is high up. While going down a particularly steep hill, our elephant decided to stop every few metres and swing from left-to-right picking out the more juicy greens, with Meli and I hanging on for dear life!

That afternoon we got the bus back to Chiang Mai. In the evening we finished off some of our souvenir shopping at the Night Bazaar and found a really nice jewellery/crafts shop. The next day we mainly updated our blog, did some more shopping at the jewellery shop and walked around town. In the evening we got the sleeper back to Bangkok. A short, but fun time in the north! We would like to go back to Chiang Mai with more time and perhaps more money, because the thing about Chiang Mai is really that there is a lot to do, like cooking courses, meditation classes, massage schools, mountainbiking and other adventure sports. One thing that Melissa really wanted to do was a silver jewellery workshop. Maybe one day!

After Phnom Penh was Angkor, the ancient capital of a huge prosperous empire dating back to before 1400 which included most of Thailand and Cambodia.

It is located at the town of Siem Reap (which means Siam (Thailand!) Defeated). A $10 luxury bus trip (with hostesses and all) got us there. We managed to find accommodation in this busy tourist town in a hotel that wasn't quite open yet for business. We had to come back 20 minutes later while they put together the beds! The main reason for the droves of tourists that come here is for the sights at Angkor, although Siem Reap isn't too bad itself. We ate some really good food there, but were also reminded by the countries past and its poverty by the many begging land-mine victims and children.

Our swiss hotel owner found us a driver for a whirl-wind 1 day tour of the sights at Angkor. All the guidebooks we consulted said a day was never going to be enough and that at least a week was needed to take it all in! I dunno, I had seen enough ruined temples after a long day in the heat, but some of the more remote jungle ruins are supposed to be amazing and then it is also more about the surroundings and the adventure. The main sites we visited were host to throngs of tourist groups bussed in from all over the world (mainly Japan it seemed at times) who were jostled from site to site after the mandatory photo opportunities. We were disciplined enough to leave our hotel at 5 am, in order to witness the sun rising at the most famous of angkorian attractions, Angkor Wat. I wasn't that impressed, and all my photographs were awful because there was hardly any light, or cluttered with large groups of tourists. The temple is ginormous and I didn't get a sense of size until we got closer and it was quite amazing.

The buildings at Angkor are basically large (some huge!) man-made hills. Because of the lack of various architectural/physical techniques the buildings lacked true three-dimensions. There were no rooms-above rooms or large contained rooms. Here Meli disagrees with me! She says: the point of these structures isn't to have rooms, it's to be visually stunning and they act as giant sculptures themselves very intrictaely sculpted.. not man-made hills anyway!

Ok so maybe I was a bit harsh, a lot of the work was very good and showed hard work, devotion and amazing skill and art. On top of the many large structures you also have to imagine in all the palaces and houses that made up the surrounding city. Building in stone was reserved almost entirely for temples, while everything else was made of wood, and has long since disappeared. Also, we did have a really nice day scrambling all over the buildings! We climbed with difficulty and trepidation up some of the steeper "stairs" leading to the summits, and wondered what on earth you were supposed to do during the rainy season when they would be extremely slippery.

Lucky for us it didn't rain till the night, and boy did it rain! By the morning we were on our way back to Bangkok, but as it turned out, the roads weren't really suitable for wet weather either... The usual 3 hour trip to the border took about 10 hours, all the while slipping and sliding, getting stuck in the mud, waiting for other cars/vans/busses/trucks to come unstuck. We were travelling side-ways for quite a bit of the journey! And all this in an outsized minivan packed with 28 people (and all their luggage!). We were very glad to bet back onto the roads in Thailand.

Pictures up soon.

As mentioned before, part of our stay in Cambodia involved visiting the genocide museum at Toul Seng, and the Killing Fields just outside of Phnom Penh. Both of these places are a painful but necessary reminder of the atrocities that occured under the Khmer Rouge's regime.

Even though it has been weeks since these visits (I'm writing this a little late) I am still unsure of how to write about them. I guess it's best to start with the facts.

The Khmer Rouge, a self-procalimed communist regime that took power in the late 60's after a bloody civil war not helped by blanket bombings by the Americans to flush out the Vietcong, used what had been a high school in Phnom Penh as "Security Prison 21" also called Toul Seng. The words Toul Seng roughly translate to "Poison Hill" or "Hill of the Poisoned/Guilty" and this detention centre was used to detain and torture any suspected subversive citizens. In all between 10,000 and 20,000 prisoners were detained and tortured here, only 7 survived. The average life-span of prisoners once they were detained was between 3 and 6 months, after this they were driven a few miles out of town and killed at what are now called the Killing Fields. The prisoners were usually told to kneel in groups in front of a pre-dug ditch used as a mass grave, and then they were either bludgeoned to death or had their throats slit. This avoided wasting bullets. Their bodies were then doused with DDT to kill those still alive and to avoid the stench of their corpses from alerting the locals. Despite this horrific death it must have been a relief to some extent as their lives at Toul Seng were pretty gruelling. Each prisoner was either locked in a tiny dark individual cell or, more commonly, shackled by their ankles to a metal rod/pole with 4 prisoners attached to each metre of the pole. Unless taken out for torture, or a wash once in a while, the prisoners had to lie there neither moving nor speaking without a guard's permission. I will spare you the details of the tortures, needless to say they were atrocious. The vast majority of the prisoners posed no threat to the Khmer Rouge but this intensively paranoid and controlling government chose to see signs of subterfuge in the simplest of acts such as chatting to one's friends or even writing letters. Many one-time guards of the prisons eventually became prisoners. Even children weren't spared the horrors of Toul Seng.

Given the past of Toul Seng and the Killing Fields you will no doubt understand how chilling and moving visiting them was. Toul Seng looks like your ordinary high school except for the barbed wired. Then you walk inside the classrooms to see hundreds of mug shots of its prisoner - men, women and children, or tiny cells, or instruments of torture. It is a quiet place these days - the signs that discourage visitors from laughing or smiling are not needed as most people seem numb from imagining what happened here. The Killing fields too are peaceful now: just a field of ditches where the mass graves were dug up, and a stupa built in the middle of them to commemorate those who died here. Upon entering the stupa you are confronted, literally centimetres in front of you, and not behind glass, with the 8000 skulls found here. Skulls of real men, women and children who were ruthlessly killed. The thought of these skulls still disgusts me and moves me in equal measures.

When I try to think of one word that describes what happened at these places, all i can come up with is unimagineable. I can't imagine living in constant fear. I can't imagine the pain of being tortured. I can't imagine being so scared of the consequences of refusal that I would obey orders to torture and kill another human being. I can't imagine that anyone could be so twisted as to give those orders. I can't imagine what it is to kneel blindfolded in front of a mass grave, hearing people around me being beaten to death and waiting my turn.

But these things did happen, they happened within the last 30 odd years, and perhaps the saddest thing of all is that similar acts of violence still occur in places today.

We've been trying to fit as much travelling into our last 2 weeks here so it's been very busy. I'd initially wanted to squeeze in trips to Cambodia, Lao and Northern Thailand but we realised we just didn't have enough time and decided to leave Lao for another trip.

As time-pressed as we were we even treated ourselves to a flight instead of a bus to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. We headed out on the 16th of March, the day after Matt finished work. Our first day in Phnom Penh wasn't as productive as we'd planned: we took a nap, walked down to the Royal Palace only to find that it was closed, wandered around a little more and then had a few drinks and a bite to drink a lovely bar/restaurant called the Foreign Correspondents Club. As the name suggests, it's where journalists used to hang out in Phnom Penh (still do in fact). It has a very colonial feel to it, and has great views of both the river on one side and the beautiful National Museum on the other (being on the 3rd floor) and it was the perfect place to relax and reflect on the day.

Although we'd planned to do more that day, it was actually a good idea just to wander around and get a feel for the city before doing some serious sightseeing the next day. Phnom Penh, and indeed Cambodia in general, has a very different vibe from Thailand. Although there is a lot of begging and drink/food/souvenir vendors who are very insistent/agressive, the people seem a lot less jaded than Thais. I guess Thailand has had its fair share of tourism and social-economic stability for a while now whereas both of these are relatively new in Cambodia. The people are warm and welcoming in a very genuine way, much more so than Thais (despite the infamous Thai smile). Phnom Penh also has a lot of funky little shops and places to eat and drink (a few of which support NGOs that work in the area) which makes the centre of the city to explore.

The next day we found ourselves a tuk-tuk driver to show us around. Other than being cheaper than getting individual rides to where we wanted to go, hiring a tuk-tuk for the day meant we benefitted from the local knowledge of our lovely driver, Sal. By the way, a Cambodian tuk-tuk is quite different from a Thai one: it is basically a little carriage pulled by a motorbike!

We started with the Royal Palace. It is similar in style to Bangkok's Grand Palace but is much less glitzy and infinitely quieter.We wandered around the grounds and into the Silver Pagoda (thus named because of the silver tiles that cover the floor) and took in the beautiful architecture and grounds with only a handful of other tourists around.

Afterwards, Sal suggested that it was a good time to go to the Genocide Museum and Killing Fields, both testament to atrocities committed during the Khmer Rouge's reign. Visiting them was a truly harrowing experience, and Matt and I feel that an account of it deserves an entry of its own.

Later that day we also visited the Russian Market - not Russian at all but just where Russians shopped for souvenirs and local specialities in the 80s. To be honest, after some of the Thai markets of the same sort, this one wasn't that impressive and in any case after the Killing Fields we were in no mood for serious shopping.

We then went to the National Museum - a truly beautiful building that houses many statues, carvings and artefacts from the Angkor period - a good taster prior to heading off the Siem Reap the next day to explore Angkor itself!

So as you have heard, Melissa's contract is already up and she has been enjoying her free time (or getting restless with nothing to do!). I'm coming to the end of mine in two days, but I haven't had much to do for the past couple weeks.

Last Friday my boss and colleagues organised a very nice little send-off for myself and Mr. Terry (who was going back to Canada), complete with lots of food! Melissa was also invited which was nice. Ms. Montana (my boss) gave a very nice speech, and I got a really cool silver tie!

Anyway, back onto our travels:
Last Saturday (10-03-07) we finally made it Kanchanaburi. We had been trying to organise a trip there for a while. We decided in the end we would make it a day trip, but that we could stay overnight if we really wanted to or needed more time. We got the 7:45 train from the western railstation, where foreigners pay 100 baht wherever they are going on the Kanchaburi line, Lonely planet's gonna have to mention that!

So, just like the last time, when we got the train to Ayutthaya, our train stood still for almost an hour, for no apparent reason at a station along the way. Still, travelling by rail is the most romantic way to travel, and the scenery along the tracks is often much nicer than along the roads, because the roads are lined with shops and other commercial buildings for most of the way, while the train tracks are flanked by farmland. On this trip we didn't see many rice fields, but I did see lots of corn stalks and banana trees.

Kanchanburi is the capital of the Kanchanaburi province. Our principle reason for going there was because it is the location of the Bridge on the River Kwai, as portrayed in the film (and book) of the same name. Which we watched the night before of course!

The film is about a battalion of British prisoners of war that are put to work on the construction of a railway bridge as part of the railway linking Bangkok to Burma. They were building this railway to link East-Asia to West-Asia, because the seas were too dangerous to navigate. During the war the Japanese used thousands of PoWs and also even more locals to build this and other railways throughout the area. The engineers in charge were cruel and worked only towards completion of their work with no regard for the workers although in their defense they were under immense pressure from their superiors. Many thousands died while working on the railway, be it from disease due to lack of medical supplies and malnutrition, or from physical abuse. The railway and its bridges had to be completed.. In total, the construction of the "Death Railway" claimed the lives of 16000 POWS and aout 90000 locals.

After arriving in Kanchanaburi and avoiding the usual taxi touts, we walked over to the very close (but un-sign-posted) Thailand-Burma Railway museum. There we read about the history of the railway and about the conditions the PoWs lived in. They were horrible and it was a little unsettling, especially with the many pictures of emaciated and dying soldiers and the war cemetery across the street.

After this we walked down the street and we rented a motorbike (yes I can't get enough of them!). We drove down to the actual bridge over the river Kwai. For 50 eurocents we got a 15 min. train ride across and back over the bridge. It wasn't very impressive. It must have been a different sight back then. Most of the rainforest and difficult terrain has been cleared, and the backdrop isn't a lush humid forest, but a small tourist trap.

Anyway, we then drove 40 km down Highway 323. Although, I don't quite know what that is supposed to signify, as there was the odd motorbike going down the wrong side of the road! (no it wasn't us)

At the end of the road was Wat Pa Luangta Bua Yannasampanno Forest Monastery, also known as the Tiger Temple. The story of the place is that hunters killed a tigress and a rich Bangkok couple bought its cub to have it stuffed. The stuffing was botched and even though the cub was injected with formalin, it survived! It then ended up at the monastery where it lived to 7 months before dying of heart palpitations. A few weeks later two male cubs (just a week old!), intercepted from poachers, were brought to the monastery. Then two more males were presented by local villagers. Finally border police contributed four female cubs, also intercepted. You can find the full story on the website. Just go to www.tigertemple.org .

What attracted us to the place is that you can walk around with the tigers and touch them! Supposedly they have just grown used to captivity and being around humans and are not drugged, however they seemed very groggy and unresponsive! When it was time for them to go back to their cages in the evening, they had to be pushed and pulled off the ground! They are nocturnal animals though, so maybe they just wanted to sleep! Other animals adapt to living during the day, so I don't see how the tigers would more easily adapt to captivity and change their instincts than change their sleeping habits! The pictures should speak for themselves. There were also a whole host of other animals, all with no sort of barriers or cages, just running around. At feeding time you had to dodge oxen, wild boar and deer. The tiny little boar piglets were very cuddly!

Anyway, we are coming to the end of our time here. We have two trips planned before we leave. This Friday we leave for Cambodia, and the following week we will visit the Chiang-Mai in the north. More of that as it happens!