hello!

Laos has been good fun so far. when i say Laos i mean the town of Vangvien that we have been staying in the for the last week. the laos people are very laid back and exceedingly friendly. even the police (who show up every night to kick us out of the bars at eleven thirty, brandishing scary looking AK-47 machine guns) are courtious. we did tubing on the river with a good bunch of people. we were driven upriver a good way and dropped of with a tractor inner tube like they one we have at home. we were soaked on arrival becouse as luck would have it we arrived in Vangvien at the beginning of the three day water festival. the everyone in town became engaged in a massive water fight. leaving your hostel at anytime of day and you are set upon by gangs of laos youths and western tourists armed with buckets and water pistols. hordes of people lined the roads spraying all passerbys with water. it was impossible to go anywere with out getting soaked at least twice. thankfully it was all in such good fun that it wasn’t in anyway annoying. only the westerners taking it a little to far. (one guy chased me for two blocks as i darted in and out of resurants and guesthouses.) i managed to avoid most wettings until the last day of the festival. heading into town for food i passed a roadblock with only a minor squirt from a pistol. sadly i realised i had gone down the wrong street and would have to go back through the road block. this time they were ready for me. gambling i proffered my bag, claiming it contained my camera and my passport. (infact it did have my camera in it but i had sealed it in a water proof ziplock bag) this seemed to have the desired effect. a loas lowered his bucket and offered to shake hands. like a gullible fool i shook his hand while some fiend snuck up behind me and poured a bucket of ice water down my neck. i started off like a greyhound but halfway down the street realised i had lost one of my flipflops. the loas guy had scooped it up and was holding it aloft like a precious trophy. “you have to come back to get it!” he announced with a cackle. i did, but not without getting soaked by about twenty people, who had all taken an interest in the commotion. anyway, going to the tubing we had to travel in an open tuk tuk which ofcourse slowed down to a snails pace at all of the roadblocks. suffice to say we got drenched. the tubing itself was really good. you blissfully sailed down the river in your tube untill you got to a riverside bar. some chap would chuck out a piece of bamboo and you would pull yourself in. each bar was equiped with a swing. now these were not your regular swings, these were 30 foot drop monstrocities builts from bamboo and string. you clamber up to these teetering platforms and watch as a Laos guy does wild tricks, like holding on to the swing with his feet or something equally crazy, then its your turn and you are handed the swing and you look down, suddenly realise how high it is but then its too late and you are falling and swinging and its fantastic. this goes on all the way down the river for about five hours. great stuff.

headin up north tomorrow. 20 days left. doesn’t seem long.

julio

hello!

i went for the slightly more modern spirou coat. 🙂

lucy and i braving the deserts of Mu ne in vietnam.

a junk near cat bar island

the view from cat bar on our treck.

Ankor wat. pretty fresh.

this place was aloud to be reclaimed by the jungle. the trees spill down the walls like hot wax.

these enormous carved faces dominated another temple. i like this one in perticular on account of its sneer.

at cuchi tunnels they had a bunch of murals showing fecklas american soldiers falling into the traps they had divised.

one can only assume this guy was blind.

this chap must have jumped backwards into this one.

on the train to sapa. nice place, but very cold and misty. every one got ill unfortunatly.

im not sure if i can put any more pictures up at the moment. my memory cards are infected with some sort of hell virus which is turning everything into .exe things which all pc’s try and delete. not sure how to get rid of it with out losing all my pictures.

speak to you soon. i’ll see if i can get skype to work

julio

blog 10

cheers for the info! back in Hanoi after a tad disappointing trip to ha long bay. for some reason the weather has turned glacial here in ‘nam, with temperatures as low as 20 degrees! madness. our inept tour guide minions failed to inform us the it might be cold so we ended up freezing on the boat. the 200 or so islands themselves looked pretty cool, the mist giving them a magical air, and the kayaking and trekking on cat ba island was pretty good, but all in all a poorly run tour. on the plus side we met some cool people, that we made friends with so well worth the asking price.

Cambodia

after ages on on a bus, you get a strange desire for exercise. so we decided to cycle around from Siam reap to Ankor wat and potter around under our own steam. we set of at around 5 in the morning so that we could see the sunrise as it burst over Ankor wat. a somewhat harrowing ride on a bike with no lights. we cycled along, trying to avoid crater like potholes, the only illumination coming from the incoming cars that seemed to be bent on running us down. we arrived a full hour before sunrise. seeing a bunch of people laden with efficient looking cameras sitting outside the moat which encircles Ankor wat, i assumed wrongly, that this was the official sunrise watching place. after sitting there, taking hundreds of crap picture of the slowly visible Ankor wat, we realised that the sunrise had been and gone. vastly disappointing. still, the actual temple is really rather impressive. a vast mound of crumbling rock. the plan was to cycle around a few temple for the entire day. this was quite ambitious as we had failed to take into account the sheer distance between temples, and that there are approximately 2 million of them. we made it around quite a few but in the end i came to the conclusion that they were all, in fact remarkably similar and life is to short to be messing around trying to get to another heap of mouldering rubble, identical to one you have just spent a scorching hour wondering about in. some were very cool though. the one which has been aloud to be taken over by the forest is particularly neat. vast trees seeming to gain nourishment from the stone, bursting out of walls and roofs like fungus. this temple was unfortunately spoilt by a tidal wave of Chinese tourists. it was like wading through a chest high lake of cameras and baseball caps.

another i liked was the the Bayon. situated in the center of Ankor tom, it was a large temple with lots of massive carved heads everywhere. trying to get to the exit i found my self lost in the catacombs beneath the temple. it was dark and dingy with the occasional lancet of light coming from above. i eventually came to a inner courtyard with bizarre piles of stones stacked in improbably high towers. the air was very still and the sunlight seemed to be piped down from somewhere high up in the temple. very interesting. i would have studied it further had i not suspected i was trespassing on some sort of holy sanctum. i managed to find my way out, mostly by following signs that pictorially suggested death by rockfall or somesuch nonsense.

siam reap is alright. plenty of markets to wonder around in. that is if you enjoy the smell of rotting meat and fish, a popular scent that permeates every market stall regardless of what they are actually selling. or one can sit by the river and watch the local children bathe in the thick brown water.

Phnom pen was a bit more touristy. plenty of eateries selling “English grub”

Cambodia is remarkably hot. even the slightest movement will produce a good pint of sweat that covers the bod in an oily sheen.

Vietnam

had my birthday in Saigon. it was quite the nonevent.

we took the bus to Mu nie, a pleasant little coastal town with a long sandy beach. it seemed to be entirely populated by people kitesurfing or learning how to kitesurf. the sea was thick with them. i considered learning it myself but we were on a bit of a time budget at that point and we had to move on.

next stop Hoi an, the place of many tailors. i actually really like the town, quite a french air to it, with a riverside lined with benches. had a suit made. quite nice as far as i could tell. i also drew a design for a jacket and the tailor copied it almost exactly as i wanted. very neat. my obsession to own Spirou’s red jacket has finally been appeased.

after Hoi an it was a scintillating 17 hour bus ride to Hanoi. its nice enough as cities go. but quite busy. you dice with death every time you cross the street. it has a picturesque lake with a pagoda in the center, were one can chill. i managed to find a place that sold DVDs for a mere 50p a shot. i have 15 so far and i may get more if the budget allows. i also took the opportunity to get my watch mended. whilst in India i bought a old pocket watch as it is something i have always wanted. after owning it a mere week i managed to smash the 100 year old glass. using a morsel of my birthday money im getting crystal sapphire glass put in. should look fairly snazzy in the waistcoat pocket of my new suit.

next stop, a place called Sapa, north of Hanoi, then the bus to Laos, which is rumoured to take something in the region of 24 hours. It is also suggested that the bus will, upon entering Laos, almost immediately break down and strand you in the middle of nowhere. nice

love julio

i have a bunch of photos, but i can resize them here. ill try and put them on later.

hello! cheers for the best wishes. 🙂

is that calvin and hobbes compilation for me?! most abliged!

im in ho chi min city at the moment. seems pretty cool, going to see the kutchi tunnels tomorrow. then onwards and upwards.

films and series are very cheap here. if anyone wants anything let me know

love julio

the last week in ko phangan passed in a sort of daze.

the full moon party was a bit crap really. the days before though were lots of fun. that is to say, what i recall of them i would class as a fun of sorts. getting drinks at a bar had now become a bizzare practice, only to be done as a last resort. no, it was the buckets for us. lucy had opted out of the communal bucket sessions prefering beer, so that left Carson and me. not that we were complaining. sangsom had become quite seductive at this point. when properly mixed you could bearly taste the alchohol. we would sit, of and evening, and get roucusly sloshed in the privicy of our room, then, at a precisely timed moment we would unleash ourselves onto the beach.
the beach was a nice stretch of white sand, with glistening water during the day, at night it was lit up by the countless bars along the beachfront and the fire staff/poi blokes who were every where. the bars poured out a solid wall of music, the sands became the massive dancefloor of the biggest club in the world. thousands of people drifted to and fro in various states of intoxication. sometimes we would sit on our balcony of our guesthouse complex, which overlooked the beach, and people watch. picking out the more ludercrous from the crowds of humanity for our amusement.

on the night of the fullmoon we discovered that some enterprising street vender had upgraded the buckets from pidly two pint sized ones to massive ones you would use in some sort of floor mopping operation. it was the work of a moment for us to purchase this monstrocity and pour in a bottle and a half of the good stuff. retiring to the balcony, the night progressed in a faverable fashion. some of our fellow guesthouse users had bought dayglo paint and were painting each other. somehow we got hold of it, and in a trice we had doubed ouselves in garish paint, being somewhat drunk, our artistic ability was slightly impared, and the results were less that pretty. with that it was a matter of moments before i had got a cowboyhat from a minion on the street and Carson, against my advice, had got a police womans hat. thus aquipped we made for the beach. despite all this preperation it was a bit of an anticlimax. non of us had that great a night. there were just too many people. tens of thousands all fried to the tonsils.

plenty of mad stuff going on though.
on a previous evening i recall finding Carson at a perticualy large crowd of people. burrowing through we came to an open circle of sand in front of a bar. across this the barstaff had strung a large flaming hoop. the rules to this game were simple. picking your moment carefully you take a run up position, sip some of your drink, then sprint up to the 4 foot wide hoop and leap, headfirst through the inferno. the barstaff would raise or lower the hoop seemingly at random, and many a fool collided with the hoop sending sparks and flaming debrie cascading onto the sands. we watched the petrol soaked chunks as they continued to burn merrily.

“thats pretty dangerous.” i remarked as i kicked out the nearest flames. Carson took a contamplative sip from his bucket.
“yeah.”
i didn’t have a drink at this point. i vaugly recall hurling my half full bucket from me in a fit of passion earlier in the evening. i was begining to feel this was a mistake.
the staff had taken down the hoop and were squirting it with petrol from washing up liquid bottles. thus refueled it rose again, a majestic burning wheel. billows of heat washed over us.
there was a moment of stillness. visions of my hair flairing alight filled my head. with one hand i took hold of my locks.
“lets go!” i said, charging for the hoop.
no doubt to onlookers, i described a perfect parrabolic curve as i sailed though the air, intersecting with the exact center of the wheel. the flames licked at me but didn’t catch hold. pure serenity, then i landed with a soft thud on the other side. i looked up to see Carson bursting out of the fiery gateway. impossibly he had jumped through with his bucket and not spilled a drop. we rose to general applause. we did it again and again just for the hell of it, and laughed wildly as others took the spills that we avoided. here and there someones foot or a flailing arm would mash into the side of the hoop, their screams drowned out by the happy laughter of the crowd. two fools mistimed their approuch to such an extent that they jumped from both sides of the hoop at the same time, meeting at the hoop in a bone dislocating crunch and a shower of sparks.

good times. good times.

leaving ko phangan, we parted ways with Carson. quite a shame really. he had acompanied us on and off since malaysia. he was heading back to ko lanta and us to bangkok. bangkok was a lot nicer than i thought it would be, but incredibly hot. we spent a few forgetable days there and got a bus to combodia. we had been warned many times not to get a bus to combodia, but for some reason we got a bus. no idea why. it just seemed easy. anyway the road from the border to siem reap is an absurd bit of madness. if you wanted to design the worst, most pot holed, dust bathed road in existance then you would be wise to take the bus to siem reap, and jot down a few notes. hellish.
people told us that cambodia was not that great, but in fact it isn’t too bad. ankor wat, was sutably impressive. and the people seem nice and friendly.

anyhow, next stop vietnam.

juliio

a few pictures of ko lanta.

fire poi on the beach, gets a bit boring after a while 🙂

our home away from home, it looks a bit bare, but it had only been running a month.

this chap pi’er was a saint in human form. making as much as he needed to get by he would give the rest to charity, he would make no money on all the stuff he sold us, he set up a cinema so we could watch dvd’s into the small hours and he tried to teach us tai history. jolly good chap!

another look at that secret beach. not bad.

snorkling was classy. hordes of fish. we all got a tad burned though.

a starfish drifts in the warm crystal waters. its one of the hard body kind which i had not known existed.

a team of entrepid explorers stand victorius after braving the cave of utter darkness on a snorkle related escapade. the cave took us to a secluded beach surounded on all sides by hundred foot walls of rock. t’was used by pirates to to hide their bulging treasure chests, im told.

a sunset, of which there were many.

a trained Padi profesional who has bested the very sea itself! i had to shave my upper lip on acount of the bristles letting air into my mask and thus potentually compramising the mission.

the ants here are large and unfriendly. the spiders are hidious and massive. may they both perish in their eternal struggle for dominance.

fireworks at a party supernova like exploding suns.

will blog from cambodia