Templetastic!

Here I am, sicker than I've been for years, trying to ride my hired bicycle home from an epic day of temple-finding on my last joule of energy before the sun sets on the Cambodian jungle. But I'm getting ahead of myself - I'm still on the bus.

Skipping the crap, I'd taken this bus all the way from the jetty across from Don Det Island in Laos all the way down through Cambodia and back up to Siem Reap for those temples people seem to keep talking about and setting movies in.

This place, Ankor Wat, seemed to be the culmination of a gradual trend in architecture I'd noticed since the Kerinci Valley in Sumatra. Not knowing anything about South East Asian architecture I can be free to unleash my observations unfettered by expected trends... and to be unashamedly wrong.

In central Sumatra there is a particular, and super-awesome, style of vertically tapered building that as you head north gets flatter and blunter. In Malaysia they become thatched and exclusive to museums, and in Thailand they become temples and lose the taper altogether for a stick-on bit at the ends (also, they paint them yellow, like everything else) but retain their roof-layering. Around Chiang Mai this style develops a tall tumour-like growth that juts straight out of the roof, and through Laos this starts to dominate the whole structure, just like Ankor Wat. What am I talking about? Well I know of two major (Buddhist) empires in South East Asia - one with its capital in central Sumatra and the other at Ankor Wat. Looking at the temples at Ankor Wat it seems to me that the builders of the whole region got all their ideas from just these two places and today they all merge together. The only thing now is to check out Wikipedia to see if it all matches up.

Finally getting off the bus late at night in Siem Reap we found ourselves dumped inside a locked holding pen for half an hour while about a dozen tuk-tuk drivers, who had clearly paid to be there, hunted us down for our US dollars like fish in a barrel. The bus group was soon divided into those who liked paying $5 to travel 2 kms into town and the cool backpackers who held their ground at $2 and were willing to walk (although it turned out that tuk-tuks on the street outside were only $1). This group consisted of my Canadian buddies Matt and Troy, two female Canadians they'd met on the bus: Sherry and Christine, a Swiss mate of mine from the old boat trip called Sam and a new Dutch guy called Michael. We were to stay as a group for most of our time in Siem Reap.

A celebratory night of beering it up on saved tuk-tuk dough led to everyone else snoozing it for the next day. Not me though - I got up (sort of) early to hire a bike and buy a three day pass to the temple complex and proceeded to get my money's worth. Ankor Wat itself was the main temple to see, and it was pretty huge I guess, but it seemed basically the same as the millions of temples I'd already crawled through in southern India, including the familiar smell of bat turds. The best temple of the day was that famed temple being torn apart by tree roots. I reserved the 'Grand Circuit' for the next day.

Unfortunately, I woke up feeling completely shithouse. And it turned out I wasn't the only one: four out of our expanded group of nine had contracted similar symptoms over night. Now, I'd already bought a three day pass so I was damned if I wasn't going to use it, despite needing a toilet every hour and a half and feeling like my energy levels had jumped a trillion years into the future and had degraded into background radiation. The fact that I'd left all the tall temples for today certainly did not help, particularly when there'd be a sudden need for an emergency evacuation at the top, if you know what I mean.

In the morning I sporadically bumped into the others from my group, seeing the temples for their first and only day mostly also on bicycle, but the afternoon took me dozens of kilometres off to obscure ones, often swamped by vegetation, occasionally tempting me to ride right through the jungle for elusive shortcuts (these did not end well). By the end of the day I felt so dead I was willing to pay some annoying local kid to dig me a grave, but I knew he'd whack on an extra charge to fill it in again (the bastards know you can't do it yourself). At this stage I basically had to halt fingernail growth to maintain enough power for essential body functions and I was still over thirty kilometres from home.

During an evening in which I fluctuated violently from states of extreme cold to extreme fever, Sherry gave me a pill she could only describe as 'Indian medicine' (ultimately her native land). The next morning not only was I completely recovered, but I seemed to have been paid back all my lost energy from the previous day with interest (at loan-shark rates). So I used my final day's pass and rode way out east for a really early batch of temples which turned out to be some of the best yet (although I spent about three hours searching for about a dozen unmaintained temples only one of which I found - not even the locals know about them).

That night, to celebrate my triumphant return to full health... and Chinese New Year... I hit the town in one of my biggest nights yet. My Siem Reap group had all gone down to the beach by now, but who should I run into but my old Irish pals Morgan and Shane, both keen to repay me all the drinks I'd bought them when they were saving their dollars for Cambodian border bribes. Together with an English pair we drank and danced the night away to timeless classics such as the Black Eyed Peas' 'I've Gotta Feeling' and The Killers' 'Brightside'. I had just enough time to run home and stuff my possessions in my pack before hitting my 6 a.m. deadline to catch the boat to Phnom Penn.

I'd got this boat ticket, at eight times the cost of the equivalent bus ride, to compensate for my failure to float down the Mekong after Luang Prabang, but it ended up being not entirely worth it - not because the floating villages weren't surreal and incredible, nor because the vast lake connecting Siem Reap and the capital Phnom Penn wasn't a spectacular mockery of the ocean, but because I was so fatigued from the previous night that I could feel my brain consuming itself so as to allow my body to be fixed permanently to the boat's hull like a sea squirt preparing for its adult phase.

But Phnom Penn was an eye-opener. The first thing I did in my dazed state after alighting from the boat was to walk straight into a brothel named 'Candy' and ask for a room. I realised with a start where I was half-way through this request, but it was already too late to back out. The ground level of this establishment was some kind of 'swinger's bar' and everything a den of sin should be: dark and dingy, lewed posters, seedy music, scantily-clad dames of the night wrapping themselves around anything a penis might be attached to and, as always, a loud pair of Americans telling each other how they're not violent people but they keep finding people they've just beaten up.

I was taken to see the room at the top floor and I was amazed at how awesome it was. Extremely clean, well-designed and built, balcony with a view - I had to have it. And before you ask, it did take a fair effort to convince the hotel girl that I wanted the room without a happy ending, but I succeeded.

It being still quite early in the afternoon, and having regained some of my energies, and most importantly of all it being Valentine's Day, I decided to jump on the back of a motorbike and see Pol Pot's Killing Fields. Now, at least one person has suggested I use this blog to try to encapsure the exact horror and disgust I felt at being at the scene of thousands of indiscriminately murdered Cambodians. But this is a feeling I get when I think about this period of the country's history - actually being there didn't really enhance it for me, except as an anatomy lesson from the skulls. The simulated wolf-cries loud-speakered over the bones didn't help with the sombrerity either. I went back and watched 'Bee Movie' on HBO for Valentine's Day night.

In the morning I took another boat to Chau Doc in Vietnam, which I enjoyed a lot more than the previous day's. This one had contained an awesome bunch of backpackers like a mini version of the boat in Laos and we traveled the narrow waterways of the Mekong Delta across the border, drank a few beers and listened to one backpacker describe his adventures both traveling on a makeshift bamboo train in Cambodia and horse-touring in Mongolia while another one played Spanish classical guitar. What a trip.

As for my contribution, I've noticed something happen to me over the months when I talk about Australia, and in particular Victoria, to my fellow-travelers: I've become tediously patriotic.

"Have I mentioned that in VICTORIA there are beaches that are so remote you can walk along them for days without seeing ANYONE ELSE? Or that in VICTORIA we have a place called the Kiewa Valley that has the BEST MILK EVER MADE? Or that there's a band from MELBOURNE called Architecture in Helsinki that is Bruce Willis' THIRD FAVOURITE BAND IN THE WORLD?!!"

"Yes Felix. You've told all of us all of those things already many times." It must be part of some sort of creeping homesickness lurking back there.

After hitting the meagre night scene of Chau Doc and then cramming into a single hotel room to save money we all went our separate ways the next morning. Three of us took the bus to Ho Chi Min City which ended up taking all day and introduced me for the first time to drinking coffee. It must be the way the Vietnamese make it because I'm hooked. It only took 26 years (although I'm still yet to try it without ice).

In Ho Chi Minh City we quickly found the local backpacker area and settled into a hotel above a silk shop. Within minutes I'd managed to spot from a restaurant balcony my four Canadian friends from Cambodia and Laos, all now traveling together and up for a big night. I was up for one too, because tomorrow my old pals from home were about to join me for an epic three week cycle tour through southern Vietnam.

Two Trips To Cambodia

Before coming to South East Asia everyone I talked to would tell me that above all else I absolutely had to go tubing at Vang Vieng. It was for this reason that I was dreading the end of the bus ride to get there. It's not really my kind of thing but but I felt a sort of duty to at least be able to say I'd done it. I was imagining it would be full of hundreds of western bogans spending the day fluctuating between two high levels of inebriation. I was right. But I soon realised that that was okay because I was one of them.

For those yet to experience the psycho-weirdness of tubing at Vang Vieng, the idea is to float down the town's river in an inner-tube stopping at various crazy riverside bars full of pumping music, rhythmically-challenged dancing, free-flowing alcohol and people throwing themselves at the mercy of Laos' nascent medical system by 'zip-lining' into supposedly deep pools in the otherwise shallow river, all set amongst beautiful but barely noticed karst mountains. There are also landmines.

Turning up alone I soon ran into a couple of Irish buddies from the boat trip and suddenly I was in the mood to party. Skolling a few half-litre cans of BeerLao plus some free shots to bring us up to at least the lower quartile of inebriation we quickly got into the swing of things by joining a game of mixed mud volleyball. Surprisingly, we all decided to play the game seriously and my team ended up not only winning decisively but also avoiding serious injury resulting from the many sharp shards of glass nestled in the more viscous levels of the mud. By the time it was all over it was almost dark and the further three kilometres of rapids still to be negotiated by our inner tubes forced us to discuss the very real possibility of hypothermia.

Not to be deterred, later that night we ordered a large $1 bottle of whiskey over dinner that turned out to be only 20% non-alcohol and let the night of parties, dancing and buckets (the fluid goes out of them, not into them) fade into amnesia. I woke up suddenly at 8 a.m. and knew that I had to leave that place. Immediately.

The bus ride to the Lao capital of Vientiane was eventful only in that I managed not to throw up. Now when I hear that Vientiane is like something out of a Graham Greene novel I know it's not a joke. It's a bit like that previously mentioned sci-fi genre with the suspiciously quiet daytime and excitingly lethal night - but with the night instead also being suspiciously quiet. I sat on the Mekong's riverfront for a few hours trying to understand some inexplicable construction activity and consumed the occasional baguette (Oh ho ho! Baguette!). I soon made up my mind to move on.

And what a move! The eleven hour bus trip was one of the best yet: I realised here that I have the stomach to read on buses after all and was entertained by the enthusiasm of Richard Dawkins to the ambiance of an epic Mekong thunderstorm. I paused for a night in Savannakhet where I discovered the joys of being evil as I wielded an electric tennis racket in my hotel room and committed a mosquito holocaust that must never be forgotten.

A far less satisfying bus ride to Pakse introduced me through shared misery to another cool English couple and two Canadian blokes called Matt and Troy (who would definitely hit back if referred to as a couple) with whom I searched for a hostel and had some riverside beverages. The next day I hired a motorbike and rode 170 kilometres to explore the Bolaven Plateau.

This was the first time I'd ever (legally) ridden or driven on the right side of the road and it did take some getting used to. I kept thinking, "Hey, this feels kind of natural. Maybe that sinister Napoleon was right to have invented dexterous driving after all" and then realising that I was actually back on the left with a truck bearing down on me.

But the destination made it all worth-while. At Tadlo I was given directions to three spectacular waterfalls by an American backpacker named Amber which involved a lot of rock scrambling to get to an extremely tall fall, and information on how to avoid the annoying pleas for money from the local village children for two huge wide falls.

Another failed attempt to travel down the Mekong by boat rather than bus brought me to Don Det, one of the famed Four Thousand Islands. This island is an amazing gravity well of cool (and may I say extremely handsome) young backpackers such as myself. Here I rediscovered, bit by bit, my old friends Teresa the German beautician I'd met in Pai, Matt, Troy and the English couple from the Pakse bus and Morgan and Shane, my Irish buddies from Vang Vieng and the boat trip. We instantly became a cohesive group and a large subsection chartered a boat for the next day.

This trip was a spectacular tour of many of the eponymous four thousand islands such as beach islands, water buffalo islands and an over-excited school children island. This was all capped off by the usual Felix-generated beach bonfire (the best kind) on Don Det in which the utilisation of bamboo as fuel ensured an explosive experience. However, my satisfaction of these evenings was somewhat tempered by late-night calls for my Australian de-vermination skills (I knew that show 'Crocodile Hunter' was a bad idea). I was even contracted out to deal with a scorpion found in the bed of some French backpackers.

One of the many things I'm seeking on this epic trip of mine is a certain level of craziness. For things to go a bit out of hand. A pub night becomes a beach party becomes a tribal jungle festival and all of a sudden I'm leading a small colonising expedition to a long period comet (that's why '2001: A Space Odyssey' is so awesome - it starts off like a normal movie with apes and stuff and then goes psycho towards the end). The final day of Don Det was nothing like that, but it reminded me of it.

I and the group that had congealed around me (yes, I have that effect on people) all hired bikes to ride around the serenely rural Don Det and neighbouring Don Kong (Connected by an old rail bridge) to see a waterfall and have a swim in the Mekong. Afterwards we visited a hot-sand beach that required a zen-like trance to avoid feet burns by using levitation and decided to charter another small boat to see the endangered Mekong dolphins on the Cambodian border.

Having consumed a few bevos on the journey we stopped right on the aquatic border and spotted the snub noses of a fair few fresh water dolphins as they flaunted international boundaries. Miraculously, half an hour of broken Lao coaxing and eventually beer bribes convinced our pilot to land the three of us in my boat on the Cambodian shore. Here we watched the sun set over the Cambodian hills from a Cambodian beach shack drinking Cambodian beer and learning our first Cambodian words from the Cambodian family living there. The daring boat ride back up through the rapids (the somewhat tipsy pilot was showing off) only enhanced our excitement at having committed our first illegal crossing. Luckily, on the pitch-black bicycle ride home over dodgy dirt paddy tracks we weirdly bumped into Amber from Tadlo who escorted us home with her presciently acquired bike light.

The next day I went to Cambodia the proper way.

Crazy Laos

Pai for breakfast. It's a small backpacker village in the highlands of Thailand, north of Chiang Mai. The drive up was pretty spectacular with a lot of the mountainous terrain covered in jungle, despite there not being any national parks around - non-use of land is something I have trouble comprehending. It was here that I finished listening to all the songs on my four gigabyte iPod in alphabetical order. I started on the buses in Malaysia - the buses in Indonesia are too interesting for one to be incommunicado.

My first activity in this town was discovering an amazing and cheap bungalow right on the river. And then one of those great things happened that all backpackers secretly yearn for: I randomly bumped into my old friends Tom and Lisa with whom I'd shared many lazy days watching movies months ago in the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. And this English couple is a great one to bump into twice so we instantly hit Pai's bar scene (a scene barred from a mere individual like me due to awkwardness, as in my Surabaya experience).

As a couple, Tom and Lisa tell me they find it hard to meet people while traveling as everyone around them doesn't want to impose on their symbiotic mind-meld of true coupledom (like pan-dimensional beings of pure energy). I tell them it's just as hard as an individual but I guess everyone just needs to be more socially engaging.

The rest of my time in Pai was spent drinking beer on the river watching the fire lanterns rise to their altitudes of equilibrium, riding a mountain bike to a waterfall and then on into the hills - waaay too far, as a thunderstorm caught me on the way back, and celebrating Australia Day with the only other Australian in town. I woke up covered in Australian flag stickers.

The next day was a work of timing genius. I got to the bus station at a random time in the morning, just making it for the trip back to Chiang Mai, where I walked straight into the dentist's for my second appointment without putting down my pack, then driven by the plush Dentistmobile back to the Chiang Mai bus terminal in time for the last bus to Chiang Rai. The Dentistmobile was so classy they needed two dental workers in the car - one to drive and one to open the door for me at my destination.

Now, my timing hasn't always been the best in Thailand - I arrived days after the full moon - the only one for about 280 years with a decade turnover in it - and left days before the next one, nicely bypassing the notorious Full Moon Parties. But there is one department in which my timing has been impeccable: milk. The very month in which I was inhabiting Thailand was the very month in which 830ml milk bottles were on special at 7/11 and I can tell you I spent a fair whack of my budget on them.

As an asside, I've learnt that tolerance to lactose is one of the most recent evolutionary changes in humans, or at least those with an ancestry of pastoralism. but there is an even more recent change: colour vision. After the dinosaurs died out our newly diurnal ancestors regained colour vision by making use of a parasitic strand of DNA that accidentally duplicated the code for our eyes' cone cells. But in the last few thousand years, due to the lack of selection pressure in the wild, colour blindness is increasing dramatically as this parasite is being removed. The upshot of all of which is this: as a colour-blind milk lover, I am the pinacle of human evolution.

I'll just wait for all the biologists to stop throwing up at this appalling evolutionary logic.

Okay. Chiang Rai is similar to Chiang Mai in name only. The town itself seems devoid of life in the metaphorical sense but is surrounded by beautiful hilly country all the way up into Burma. I didn't get that far but was close after having hired a motorbike to see waterfalls, hilly villages, lots of cool snakes, hot springs, tea plantations and French tourists on 4WD tours.

Now I had this big plan of getting to the border town of Chiang Kong and settling in for the night at an internet cafe to video in to the awesome party at my old share house, but I got swept along with this general movement to cross the Mekong into Laos, then onto a two day slow boat to Luang Prabang.

This boat ride was so incredible its ramifications have lasted several weeks into the future (as in 'right now' in Felix time). Almost everyone I met here I've come across again and again everywhere else I go. Laos is one of those long skinny countries taht funnels the backpackers into one main route. I quickly formed a group and we sat on the back of the boat drinking beer and playing guitar (not me, I've lost that ability) and admiring the river villages of the Mekong. When we stopped for the night in a small town it took a while to come to terms with the fact that it had no internet and I would miss my party at home. Unfortunately, I shared a room with an American guy and spent the next week running into him and forgetting to pay him my half of the room cost. For a while after that everyone I met I ask to look out for him.

Laos is a funny ol' place. For one thing they drive on the wrong side of the road, and I was disappointed I didn't get to see the crazy loop-over interchange they'd have to implement in order to link up with us lefties (I made the crossing by boat you see). The border also marked the moment I left the Free World for the last time until... do you count Nepal? On the plus side, it's my first fully landlocked nation I've ever visited (most have actually been sea-locked) - and my last until... Nepal? Hmmm. Cutely, the Lao people don't seem to be aware of their relationship with the sea, as they refer to their borders as 'coasts' and talk about going 'overseas' when they take the bus to Hanoi.

I've always thought of Laos as the bits that all the other South East Asian countries left over after they'd had their pick. It doesn't have any coasts, no famous mountain ranges, nor major rivers (whoops! The Mekong). But there really is something about Laos that's incredible. The place is stunningly beautiful, the people are all awesome and, most importantly of all, it's a massive backpacker hub.

I arrived in Luang Prabang after another day floating down the Mekong hanging out with world backpackers (sinisterly for me, we call ourselves 'Boat People') and instantly found myself in a situation of having to maintain my integration with too many social groups, all of which seemed to have crystallised from the super-saturated solution of the Boat People (I like to think I was the nucleation but I tend to think things like that).

During the day we achieved little - we went to an amazingly beautiful emerald-coloured waterfall, saw a temple and... er... yeah. This took three days. Weirdly, at the waterfall I again randomly bumped into Tom and Lisa for the third time and nation. But the nights out was what it was really about. On one night we found ourselves at a Lao club where even old women danced with leather-clad youngsters to the music of Britney Spears. That night later ascended into immaculately choreographed line dancing in which we ineptly took part.

Other nights focused on the age-old problem of beating the 11pm nation-wide curfew, usually by finding out-of-town clubs and er... bowling alleys?... that must have had Laos People's Party links. On one of these nights I spent over an hour stumbling randomly home lost in the darkness, and others managed to have even more extreme Odysseys that stretched credulity.

Now I don't usually like to whinge into my blog (whinging to fellow-travelers at least alows them to fight back), but I'll make an exception for one annoyance: banks. Every time I get money out I'm charged by [leading Australian bank] to the tune of $5. Then they charge me another few dollars because I'm doing it overseas. Then another 2% or so for an intercurrency conversion, and then, if I've survived all that, a $5 monthly fee. All so I can have to privalege of lending them money. But the worst part is that a lost of the ATMs over here also have a fee of about $5 to take money out, to a maximum of... $80. This means I pay about $15 to use an ATM, or up to %20 of my total expenditure. There must be another way! I mention this here because in Laos I accidentally typed 4 digits of kip instead of 5 and got socked with a double charge that took the fun out of the whole day.

Viang Vienne was next after fleeing Luang Prabang's banking nightmare on an impressive karsty bus ride. The town itself is beautifully set on a river amongst towering mountains, but it's really now only famous for one thing: tubing. I was actually dreading having to float down the 3km river on an inner tube stopping at all the crazy drunken bars on the water all alone, but like most places I've been I met some people I knew from the slow boat: Morgan and Shane from Ireland.

After jumping off the bus, hiring a tube and being dropped off up-river I experienced one of the most outragious and almost grotesque phenomona on the backpacker circuit... but that's anather story.