Easter in Koh Samui

Being in Thailand wasn't going to stop me from having an awesome time during the Easter holidays. A couple of stops at Tesco and a little ingenuity furnished me with all the ingredients I needed to celebrate this most auspicious of occasions in style. Bec's additions also ensured that the day would turn out to be amazing: she actually forged a scrabble board out of pieces of paper torn from her diary and sticky tape (what an amazing woman!). I started off the day with the traditional egg fight; although the eggs were pickled this time rather than the usual hard-boiled type. They worked equally as well, and one of my eggs, “El Diablo” (a mexican drug lord) ended up the victor, laying waste to Bec's “Evil El Bunnito” and “Jasmina, Temptress of Doom” (a belly dancer assassin).

I then feasted on (admittedly stale) croissants from Tesco. The pickled eggs were by no means edible, so they took a short leap into a long bin. We had also hired a chopper-style bike, a silver-black phantom in actual fact (extra exciting for any Meatloaf fans), so spent part of the morning riding around like a bat out of hell. Afterwards, we settled down to a game of scrabble, and I to gorge myself on my easter provisions: a Twinkie from bec, Tim Tams, and instant coffee, as well as hot cross buns, of course.

The hotelier was kind enough to supply us with a hot water boiler, so we have enjoyed tea, coffee, and instant noodles all week – it's nice to have homeboiled hot food! I also found some Deb instant mashed potato, which is horrible compared to the real thing, but absolutely scrumptious when one is without the means for actual mashed potatoes. After a long scrabble game (Bec thrashed me), we cracked open the South African shiraz that Bec had provided for the occasion (another gift, lovely belle!) and some peanuts. After a delicious dinner of garlic and pepper squid, I retired to the room to enjoy dessert: ice cream, chocolate cake and leftover tim tams. What a great day! Now we're off to Hat Yai near the southern border of Thailand (520 for combined ferry and bus from Koh Samui to Hat Yai) and to Malaysia from there. Hopefully we'll stay at the Bird's Nest once we get to our destination, which is my favourite haunt in Kuala Lumpur – although the bedding isn't so good, a kitchen is provided there for guests, which is all I need to make me immensely happy.

Koh Samui

After a day in Bangkok in between trips, we headed south on a combined bus and ferry ticket to Koh Samui (571 baht, second class) from the southern bus terminal in Bangkok. I had heard many bad things about private bus companies on Khao sanh Road, so decided to opt for a government bus. I managed to wend my way down to lie on the floor and got the most sleep on a night bus yet, despite the fact that it was not a sleeper. The floor was warm from the engine, and much more roomy than my seat.


Views from the barge on the journey to Koh Samui told me that this would be a fun stay, although upon arrival I found this to be the most expensive place I have been. The 100 baht taxi to Chaweng beach, the most touristy area of the island, took about 20 minutes, and we were left to find a hotel. There are no places under 400 baht in Koh Samui, although we managed to find the best of the 400 baht rooms at a place called Potts Guesthouse, which has a balcony, fridge, and sink in our large room. We rented a scooter (150 baht), and drove down to Na Muang 2 waterfall, along the coast road. The ride is absolutely lovely, and despite visiting three other waterfalls since then, none have trumped Na Muang 2 for beauty or seclusion. We have spent the greater part of two days there, sitting with our feet in a small off-shoot rivulet of the main waterfalls and reading, napping, planning, and exploring.


The other day thus far was spent on the beach, which has beautiful crystalline blue water. The island contains 2 large Tesco's, so because most of the restaurant food here is prohibitively expensive, we have taken to self-made meals. It is nice to be able to make my own meal again, even if it's just pouring yoghurt on top of my breakfast muesli, assembling a sandwich for lunch, or a salad for dinner. Today is Good Friday (Happy Easter!), so we have decided to stay here for Easter, and then make our way down to Malaysia for our 1st of May flight to Sri Lanka. I have been lenting for the last two weeks or so, so I am very much looking forward to Easter Sunday and the chocolate, cakes, and desserts that it will bring.

Angkor

Although my worldly experience is limited to but a region of South Asia, New Zealand, and New Caledonia (soon to be remedied!) the temples at Angkor Wat were without a doubt the most amazing thing I have ever seen, surpassing the ruins at Hampi and the Taj Mahal for wonder. These ruins immerse one in a surreality usually only discovered in the imagination, or an especially well-realised video game. Traversing the paths cut eons ago, I amused myself pondering how life would have been, living in such a splendour at the height of its power. The prolific carvings are amazing – especially Bayon, which has faces of Brahma carved into every projection, and Ta Phrom, where the figs moved in when humankind moved out. My three day ticket only saw two days of use (one day = 20USD, 3 days = 40USD), as I felt I was in temple overload by the second day. The stupendous immensity of the ruins meant that, despite their wonder, I had seen enough of them in two days of exploring. It would take a learned architect to see a great architectural difference between the less well-known temples.


Amok is my favourite thing about Cambodia, closely followed by the aforementioned ruins of Angkor. The dish is a superb concoction consisting of a strong lemongrass base with turmeric and Thai Ginseng, as well as the local Ngor leaves. On the last day in Siem Reap, instead of scouring more temples, I took a course in Khmer-style cooking at Le Tigre du Papier (12 USD, 3 hours). This course involved making one appetizer, a main, and a dessert. Obviously, Amok was to be my main dish, with a banana flower salad for an appetizer and steamed pumpkin custard as the dessert. Apart from the dishes tasting amazing, I also learnt some great presentation tricks: the salad was served on the shell of the banana flower, while the Amok was served in a banana leaf basket. I've also learnt to make tomato flowers, rudimentary carrot roses, and chilli orchids. After the lessons of this year, I don't think I'll ever have a boring meal at home, or a boring dinner party! Sadly, our time in Cambodia had come to an end – back to Thailand to relax on a beach in Koh Samui!

Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh. The most homely-feeling capital city that I have ever visited. The food has many of the delicious options of Thai cuisine, but also includes a wonderful slant of its own, a lime-and-peanut infused Khmer slant to well-known Thai recipes. Two novel specialities included Khmer curry, a yellow curry with a unique blend of galangal and Chilli, and Amok; a local dish made from a lemongrass-based curry paste.


We took a slow boat tour along the Mekong delta to get to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The tour included a visit to a crocodile farm, saw how rice paper and coconut lollies were made, and visited a Cham village, which is the muslim minority in Vietnam. Apart from the rice-paper making, the trip was not particularly interesting, although the slow boat turned into a fast boat, so we got to Phnom Penh in record time. The trip was no comparison to the lovely meandering slow-boat journey to Luang Prabang from Thailand.
The day after our arrival, we decided to go and visit the Killing fields. As an important part of Cambodia's recent history, I thought it would be a necessity in order to understand the current shape of the country, as well as humanity, in general. What I found was shocking – stories of mass killings of bound and blindfolded civilians using rudimentary implements like sugar cane machetes and garden hoes, and a 'killing tree' used to kill children. Although I have heard stories about Pol Pot's regime back at home, the in-your-face reality of what happened left a much larger impression.


After finding an Indonesian restaurant, where I had a huge bowl of delicious Gado Gado (steamed vegetables with peanut sauce) for 2 AUD, the next stop was the national museum, which housed many ancient Khmer artefacts. It's so much more interesting to walk through a museum housing items that are thousands of years old, instead of the limited history housed within the walls of an Australian museum. The visit to the museum only whet my appetite for what was coming next, a visit to Siem Reap and the magnificent Temples of Angkor.

Missed Saigon

Two days in busy Ho Chi Minh was the end of our stay in Vietnam. We arrived at 6pm, so booked into a more expensive hotel than usual (20 AUD) so as to avoid roaming the streets at night laden with backpacks. The Boss Hotel was decked out with the largest minibar I have ever seen, including small meals in its menagerie of edibles. Instead of employing the hotel's facilities, we decided to order mexican in. Foreign food is the advantage of capital cities, as we were bored with Vietnamese cuisine, which is basically a watered down version of Chinese. The mexican wasn't very interesting, though – I had been craving a chilli con carne, but had forgotten that noone makes it like my father! This one was watery, with the odd red kidney bean floating around in the non-viscous red-coloured soup.

In the morning, it turned out that the cheaper rooms were only 2 blocks away – silly us! We grabbed a place right next to the mexican restaurant from which we had received a free delivery the night before. That night, we went out to see the Vietnamese theatrical special, water puppets. I had seen them last time that I was in Vietnam, and they were just as great this time, with many different creatures paddling about in the water, as well as smoke and sparklers at the climax. The next day, we ventured onwards to Cambodia.

Hilltop Dalat

   Our bus to Dalat was delayed by hours. After waiting at one bus station for a couple of hours, we were mysteriously taken to another bus station. A short wait there and we were away – my theory is that they forgot about us entirely and had to engage some quick thinking to get us on a bus to Nah Trang. The bus, however, was very high class – we were given bottled water and towels during the bus trip. The trip over the hills to Dalat was beautiful, with waterfalls cascading down the mountainside as the road winded through heavily forested ranges. We were left a bit worried at one point when the bus had to drive on the wrong side of the road for a period – a glance out the window let us know that there was no longer a 'right' side of the road – it had broken off and fallen down the mountainside. Hopefully they'll get that fixed up soon, although I'm not sure if anyone knew about it, as there were no warning signs or witches hat to mark the danger. I'm just glad our bus driver was properly alert!

The reports about Dalat were right – all the buildings look heavily European inspired, and the prevalence of bakeries and cafes indicate the french influence on this Vietnamese holiday town. Unfortunately, only Vietnamese coffee with sweetened condensed milk is available in these cafes, which is nice only on occasion. We rented a scooter and rode down to the lake around which Dalat is built. Paddle-boats were being rented for 60 dong for an hour, so we acquired one and spent a nice hour paddling around the lake. After that we headed to the Datanla waterfalls 5km from town. When we arrived we found that a rail-luge had been built to get down to the falls. It was great fun speeding down the mountainside and rocketing around hairpin corners – the best way to get to a waterfall that I've ever experienced. The waterfalls themselves were nice, although the walk back up the mountain was a lot more tiresome than the luge down! We stopped off on the way back to town for a coke at a cafe overlooking pine forests, after which we returned to town with the plan of catching a vintage steam train to a village. The train turned out to be 90,000 dong, and after the luge and waterfall entrance fees I felt I could spend my money better elsewhere. So instead we headed to the flower park on the north site of the lake, which was beautiful. A myriad of differently coloured flowers surrounded us, as well as large bonsai boganvillea and ficus. We will soon head to Ho Chi Minh, as I feel we have done all that Dalat has to offer.

Nah Trang

   After another sleepless night on a 14 hour 'sleeper' bus, we were lucky to find a hotel that would allow us to check in at 5 in the morning. Tired and grumpy, we slept for a few hours before heading down to the famous beach at Nah Trang. It was absolutely wonderful, in a bay with small waves and coarse sand. While the touts on the beach return to try and sell you the same thing too often, the beach is a nice place to hang out for an hour or so.
The rest of Nah Trang just seemed like a normal city. After a lazy day, I had designs on finding the mexican restaurant in Nah Trang so that I could have some Chilli Con Carne.

   I miss it as it is one of my favourite meals at home. We walked three blocks to get to the mexican restaurant, where we were greeted by a labourer who let us know that the mexican restaurant was no longer running. Bad online reviews of the place (El Coyote) may have had an effect on the popularity of the place. Chilling on the beach gets boring quickly, so we were ready to catch a bus to a french-inspired town in the highlands of souther Vietnam called Dalat.

Back in Hoi An

   After an uneventful few hours on the bus, we arrived in Hoi An. Hoi An was my favourite place in Vietnam from my last trip in Vietnam. Last time, I had my first suit tailor made, discovered mango lassies, and chilled out in floating restaurants on the river when I wasn't down at the beach. Sadly, the floating restaurant has been removed in the time since I left (either that or it stopped floating). The Hoi An I found when I arrived was much more kitschy than I remember.
It is clear that Hoi An had undergone a massive cleanup to make it more touristic. 

   The shops down the main street are all freshly painted in a lemon colour, and on the main street, cheap tailors have been replaced with boutique clothing stores and up-market cafes. One of the cafes stocked a delicious range of desserts, including chocolate mousse cake, tirimasu and apricot tart, and also provided a large choice of crepes. I made it my home whilst in Hoi An. Apart from the kitsch, the general feel of Hoi An hasn't changed. Down side streets there are still the cheap tailors, although they weren't as cheap as last time. I had a red wool-polyester blend coat made for $43 US, two shirts made for 12.50 US each, and a light grey casual blazer made for 30 US. They all fit splendidly, and the tailors seemed to do a better job than the last time I was there. Hoi An still boasts the best lassies I have ever had, and was a lovely place to spend some time in relaxing. After four days and many fittings, my new clothes and I were ready to continue traversing the Vietnamese coastline, down to Nah Trang.

Which Hue to go?

   Two boring days in Vientiane were the end of our trip in Laos. There was little to see: a half-finished Laotian version of the Arc de Triomphe was the only major landmark. Although it was a very well-clipped city, capital cities in general don't have a great amount to see. There was, however, a strong french influence. We stayed on Rue Francoise Ngin. The street we were on and the one parralel to it to the west were both filled with french patisseries and small cafes. I ate more cake than was healthy, banoffi pie, blueberry cheesecake, and tiramisu amongst them. The lack of cake everywhere else made me go into a frenzy at the sight of the delicious desserts. Our main task in Vientiane was to decide the next path to take – we could either head down to Phnom Penh, Cambodia via Bangkok, where we have already been, or pay money for a 55 USD visa and travel down southern Vietnam. As I don't like backtracking and was excited to see vietnam again since my last trip here when I was 16, we chose to head east to Vietnam. The bus trip was supposed to be a 22hr trip to Hue.


This didn't seem to make sense at first, as geographically it's not that far, but considering that it always leaves 2 hours after the reported time, stops at the border for 3 hours and includes various other meal breaks, this time frame made more sense. In reality, travel time was around 14.5 hours – a 7.30pm departure and a 10am arrival. After shaking myself out of a trance-like half-sleep which was the best rest I was able to get on the bumpy bus, we had to pay a exit fee for Laos – 30,000 kip. No worries, I thought, getting out my wallet, which contained 340,000 kip. At least, it used to – right at that moment I discovered that while I had been trying to sleep, some sticky fingers had snuck in and removed all the cash from the wallet. As I got over my dismay, Bec had to pay for us both. The amount stolen was about 40AUD, the equivalent to a day and a half travelling in southeast asia. To be honest, I was just glad that they hadn't stolen my travelex cards, or anything else, like my camera, from the bag. However, it heralded a poor end to my stay in Laos, and reinforced my disinterest in visiting Laos again. After receiving back our stamped passports, the border crossing itself got a bit hairy - we had to disembark from the bus and walk across the border to get the Vietnam border stamp. As we were getting our stamp, the bus drove off without us. Negative reports we had received of cross-border buses had us worried that we were to be left at the border. A little confused, I found the bus 700 metres down the road over a hill. I don't know what the purpose of this little sojourn was, I was just glad it was still there. Another few hours drive in freezing drizzling weather brought us to our first city in Vietnam: Hue. Hue is the famous location of the Tet offensive in 1978 – the only city that the North Vietnamese army held for more than a few days. Visiting the citadel was much more interesting now that I wasn't a supercool teenager with more interesting things (like texting and facebook) on my mind. I now had space to be amazed at how it was that a ramshackle army of guerillas were able to overtake a fortified town from a much better equipped and trained army.