Trip to Asia, Cambodja, Laos, Vietnam
triptoasia2001hello..now i am in the snow in davos....asia is over
ok...saigon is over..bankok is here. we are waiting for our planes to good old switzerland... we visited every warmuseum in saigon and even saw the room 4 "room of historic truths about the war" in the war remnants museum former called "Museum of imperial war crimes against the vietnamese people" or something of the sort.
it is our fourth day in vietnam. we arrived in a misty, balmy hanoi on saturday. the taxidriver from the airport nearly killed two girls on motorbikes and i nearly killed him. it was definitely the most unharmonic drive of my life. soon i learned, that vietnam's traffic IS chaotic. we learned that the vietnamese do stare at simones legs, that the wheather in hanoi is mostly overcast and really humid, that the vietnamese have an incredible gift in producing nitty-gritty stuff, that it is not necessary in any way shelling out some million dollars for van goghs sunflowers...since a real good copy sells here for only 15U$, that napster is not the only thread to copyrights, since any cd sells here for 2U$ and that riding a cyclo is fun if you just close your eyes. we visited halong bay where 300 islands create a landscape of harmonic beauty, where green islands stick out of the blue sea. we made the "must do" tourist trip and traveled with a bus from hanoi, jumped on a boat, tug-tuged to an island and got everything and more commented by a vietnamese tour-guide who seemed to have swallowed three big oysters.
today we took the airplane to hoi an, the former city of faifo. hoi an was the first port that got in contact with the west. in 1500 portugese merchants used this city as a base for their trade with indochina, japan, and china. it still is a beautiful city and i will visit it NOW...... see ya
after two lazy days in luang prabang we have to fly back to vientiane to get our visas for vietnam. hopefully on saturday we will catch an airplane for hanoi and then travel south along the coast..depending our time. somehow, with just some 10 more days left it feels like our travel into the heart of darkness is coming to an end. we nearly met our mr. kurtz in stung treng and soon enough we will be back in zurich and then in sao paulo.
we have already arrived in luang prabangh, north of laos. well i have left you in a customs officer’s room leaving Cambodia. He stamped our passports and we skidded down the banks of the mekong again to our boat, which took us to the other side. We have happily arrived in laos. I was very proud.
The little border village was not exactly the place you wanted to spend anything and we where quite abash when the customs official (this time the laotian one, sitting in his hut in a blue t-shirt, squashing flies in the heat) told us, that only tomorrow a pickup will take us to the main road going up north. It was actually only a handful of huts, some build on poles others directly on the dirt. In the restaurant mr. Goldtooth was counting money, using his cellfone, or a fake of it, as calculator. Under the table where 5 lizard rather environmentally incorrect tied to the table. Obviously they where supposed to end up in our chicken soup sooner or later. I tried to arrange some sort of transport to bring us out of this inhospitable nest but to no avail. We soon ordered some ‘chicken’ soup…….. and waited for godot. There was a party of monks arriving in a new, beautiful car. They parked in front of the restaurant and I tried to make some conversation with one of the younger monks, who spoke some English. I told him we wanted to go north and asked him for a ride. he was very friendly but told me, that they were going some other way. the whole party was an impressive sight. they acted with calmness and especially one older monk seemed to be very much of a venerable person. they entered the restaurant and their driver bought three of the five lizards. simone and i started eating and it was calm and hot. the monks only drank some blacktea on ice a common drink served for free in evey joint on near china. the monks started getting up, one after another and when they where all sitting in the car, the young monk made signs for us to hop on the car. he said, they where actually going to pakse and would give us a ride. we dropped our spoons and packed our bags and joined the three lizards on the back of the truck. sometimes eating noodlesoup actually brings luck, i am conviced....
after some kilometer the monks stopped and the driver came back with a knive grabbing one of our lizards. i thought: he wants to kill the poor beast in order to stop it from scratching the lacquer of his car. and he put the knive on the soft underbelly of the poor reptile and cut it loose....the rope that hold it. so, one after another, for the great joy of all monks and us, we set the lizards free. we never really found out why. probably they thougt of them as being reincarnated brothers or some of that sort. we liked the gesture and in definitely made our day.
three dusty and sunny hours later we arrived in pakse and checked in a nice hotel. we spent the the rest of the day exploring pakse and getting acoustomed to the calm and unintrousive way of the laotian people. we saw the new nippon-build bridge over the mekong, apparently the only one spanning the whole width of the fifth largest river of the world and some more buddist temples. next day we took the plane to vientiane the capital.
Now..vientiane is a funny capital. it is a sleapy, cosy nest on the banks of the mekong (this river is following us..) easly concquered in a three hours walk. we liked it and stayed two days.
on sunday we where heading of for louang prabang, 420km thorough the hilly northern part of laos, passing by artificial lakes and caves. every valley showed off another hilltribe, living in another type of hut, wearing another type of clothes. the further north we came, the more they looked mongolian and some of them looked with a proud and rebelish glance at the passing car. the driver told us, that four years ago they were still living from robbery, ambushing passing cars. but now the army has it under control. we nodd and hope he is right.
we arrive late and after some gin and tonics (to fight off the malaria) we go to bed. next day we visit louang prabang.
tuesday we have left phnom penh by bus. hot as always we took two motorbike taxis which took us to the central market where the buses for khompong cham where said to be leaving. and half an hour later we really where on the first and only ordinary bus service in Cambodia heading north alongside the river mekong. we arrived noon, not after having stopped in a little town whose name I forgot where the locals tried to sell us some spider for lunch. they walk around with a tray full of the black furry friends, who are definitely dead and spiced up with some soy- sauce. having already tried the specialty of the day (a crunchy beetle in phnom penh) I decided to skip this hairy fast-food. we arrived in khompong cham and where rather disappointed. it proved that, when the lonely planet guidebook only mentions 4 to 10 lines about a place……do not visit it. we where already checked in with a toothless chinese woman’s guesthouse for 5u$ when we instinctively strolled to the banks of the river, just to find out, that the boat to kratie was leaving in 15 minutes. we ran back, paid 2u$ to the friendly toothless chinese inn-keeper grabbed our still unpacked bags, bought two tickets and entered a 30seater speedboat. having heard all sorts of stories about pirates on the mekong we felt a little uneasy about our bags being stored in the captains cabin but the boat-boy looked me in the eyes with a broad smile after I tried to make clear that I would drown him in the mekong if the bags where missing.
we where definitely the only foreigners and since we have left pp nobody has spoken a word of english or french with us. slowly we realized that the trip from the thailand border to siem riep where the norm and by no means negative aberrations. we arrived in kratie at dusk and got us a room with aircon in the best and only place in town. there was nothing resembling a restaurant anymore but a young guy trying to brush up his english started to talk to us and led us to the first food-stall in town. we ate a simple meal and everybody and his brother tried his two standard phrases of english on us. we knew that tomorrow we had to take another of those horrible truck rides, because the river’s water where low and there where no boats to stung treng, the last village before the laotian border.
what do you eat for breakfast in a country without bread or bakeries, no coffee of fried eggs. the answer is noodle soup….if you find it. we did not find in kratie that day. instead we found a crampy full pickup truck which made the ride on the pathetically bad road to stung treng in about 9 hours. we got us the best seat in the cabin, simone and I sharing the front seat, me having the gear switch between my legs and only minor part of my backside supported by anything. the cabin hosted another 6 people ranging from 2 to 60 years. on the back there was a broad range of monks other traveler counting some 18 persons plus baggage. it was really nothing you want to do on your holidays and we decided that we have had it. no more third world traveling for us….
however we still had to get to laos. in stung treng we found out that you had to pay 20u$ each for some silly paper otherwise the checkpoint upriver would not let you pass into laos, and that there where an array of smugglers, fisherman and ex-khmer-rouge offering transport by boat to the laotian border for prices from 7 to 50u$ each. our wheeler-dealer who knocked on our hotel door asking ‘gotolaomistel?’ wanted some 50u$ and after he already had brought us to some smeary chinese restaurant who served us a fried chicken consisting of only bones, we decided to look around otherwise. still being worn and torn by the ride we sat on the riverbank trying to digest the massive amount of chicken bones with monosodium glutamate. the old woman serving some sugarcane syrup cooled with ice from the mekong river did a good job and our spirits where starting to rise again. she started to talk to us and we could make out by her handmovments and the occasional word ‘lao’ that she was offering us a ride to laos in her husbands fisher boat. her having a trustful look we checked the boat and the husband and agreed on the sum of 25u$ to get us to laos. we where happy and went to sleep early missing on the wedding party who was playing some Cambodian love songs over the chord changes of ‘killing me softly’ that night.
next day we got it right….we found the place to eat some noodle soup and even found some coffee that tasted definitely disgraceful. however the world smiles with a good breakfast and we really found our fisherman with his son, a non-leaking canoe and one of those noodle soup squirreling outborders with the crankshaft directly connected to the propeller. we hopped in and on we went…up the mekong. it was a four hours ride up the river, which meanders and splits up in an area called the 4000 island, on that stretch. we saw how the locals live here, fishing with fixed nets and planting rice and corn on the banks. we even saw an eagle, sitting majesty-like on a dead tree. shortly after departure the marvelous contraption, our noodlesoupquirler started to cough…and it coughs and it coughs….after some time the fisherman made signs, that he will go ashore and change??? the motor. we landed next to some canoes just like ours and without shouting two men emerged from the scrubs and after some explaining helped our fisherman to exchange motors.
the sun was getting very hot by eleven o’clock and we stopped at a steep bank. looking up we could see a hut with a hammock and a sign saying ‘immigration’.
we paid 5 more dollars, humbly bowed our way into a customs officer’s room in front of 10 ak-47 wearing a uniform showing him to be a survivor of at least 5 indochina-wars in the ranks of a general...
another hot day. the embassy of laos just charged us 45US for one visa to visit their country. when we asked a official to give us a receipt for our passports they denied. later we remembered that we had to talk to an official to see wheather their IS actually an open frontier between cambodia and laos.
when the official came, the two guard (that wanted to charge 45US) became very nervous and produced a receipt and in two hours we will get our passports back...probably for a lesser price.
unfortunately the official said, that the frontier is not open....or their is not enough water to ship the mekong or something of that sort....we will see...
Hurra..We are sitting in Phnom Penh in an internet cafe and it is the first time that we are able to get connected again. from bankok we took the train at four a'clock in the morning leaving for Amaya-Pradeth, the border town. we left behind bankok, with it's giggeling girls that give you a (traditional...the other is not to be written about) thai massage that makes you cry out loud, it's restaurant that close at 9 o'clock and only a local can find and it's bladerunners apearance.
the train is open and soon the morning cool fades away and a dampy heat starts to reign. little cosy stations awake for the few seconds when the train stops and the diesel engine idles, a conductor jumps of to feed his favourite pet dogs hidden under a bush. they await him as he probably always throws off food from the morning train from bankok. around noon we arrive at the border and jump on a rather supicious contraption which must have been a pick up truck before it decided to be reincarnated as a biiiig bus able to carry 40 persons. the border town is rather unimpressive and the more you get to the cambodian side the more it get like mad max III. after an endless file of forms to be filled out you finally enter the kingdom of cambodia.....just to get hassled by a lot of rather dubious figures with ostentively showed gold watches selling trips o a pick-up to siem reap...where all the foreigners want to go.
what now follows is a brief introduction into the negative effects of globalization on otherwise friendly rural populations. we ( and everybody else who did not look like a very poor cambodian citizen) pay 15 US for the trip to siem rieap on the back of a pickup in 7 hours ...only to be carried to the hotel of the drivers uncle, outside town, with no means of getting away. It was a lousy welcome from a wonderful country.
next day we start and rent a little motorbike, buy a 3 days pass and start to visit the ruins of Anchor Vat, the city of temples or the temple of cities build by the khmer between 800 and 1200. in a time when in europe they build still rather modest churches the khmer build temples many times the size of the colliseum. we spend 3 days walking and driving in a region about 30 by 30 km where all the temples are splattert on a landscape completely flat. we see the clever irrigation system that allowed the khmer people a rice production and we saw the reliefs telling the story of each king. every king started a new temple, which was the center of a city. only for temples the khmer used stone, for profane buildings they used wood. thats why we know absolutely nothing about daily life,since in the temples they only wrote about hindu and buddist religion. ok...time's up....internet cafes are expensive and I write more soon......
Ok, it's our third day in bankok. it is raining. we just got our visas for cambodja and wait for tomorrow to come. at five o'clock our train will leave and six hours later we will arrive in the kingdom of cambodja. in these few days here in asia we have already learned that eating out on the road in little stalls is better ( and definitely cheaper) than in restaurants, that in bankok elephants have parking lights attachached to their tails and walk on the sidewalk, that taxidrivers do NOT speak anything but ancient cantonese, that the king of thailand called himself HRH the crown prince of siam and lived in a three storey building made from teak wood and that the thai people worship him like a god, that he draws his godlike powers from the possesion of a white elephant (the royale white elephant (nothing to do with cheeseburgers)) and a white crowe and a white monkey.
Heute bin ich noch in Davos und in 5 Tagen reise ich ab...nach Bankok
