Man. 27 years old. Who'd have thought that by this stage in life I'd have no job, no girlfriend and no home. What a loser. At least I have a large assortment of bikes with which to measure my life's success.
The 21st of May marked a few kilometre-stones for me: I had after all reached the formidable age of three cubed, not quite as triangular as 3^3^3 but as good as I could rustle up on short notice.
It also marked the first time on my trip I'd left the Eurasian Plate, getting myself over the scraped up subduction zone of the Indian Plate (and managing to be neither scraped up nor subducted in the process!).
Another interesting kilometre-stone was that this was the time I finally had less money than when I started this trip back in October last year. What's this? Have I been selling my body in Bangkok to horny Thai girls? Nooooo... As it happens I started my trip with five weeks of paid leave and that, along with the odd squirt of bank interest (praise be to rising rates!), has lasted me these seven months traveling in Asia. The moral of the story: don't travel in Europe.
But all these kilometre-stones would have to be appreciated over time, for now I had just walked into the Kathmandu Guest House with Helio, my companion from the Tibet tour. I was just wondering how I would get in contact with Dad and Rob who were supposedly already here when I saw them walking to greet me. It was my first meeting with Dad for seven month and with Rob for over a year.
The next two days were fairly frantic – packing for the upcoming Annapurna trek, buying gear and meeting up with my excellent and dedicated friends Tim and Rhonda (who, like Rob and I, formed a small exodus from the Engineering Music Society’s cello section for the following night’s concert – good choice guys!). Reacquiring my bike from the Postal Universe – one whose physical laws seem to permit a high density of black holes (I lost my brake pads and beer magazine sent on from Hanoi to one of those black holes) – was another major priority. This was particularly nerve-racking: after disappointment at the reception of KGH where I’d sent it I was beginning to lose hope – until Helio spotted a notice for me on an obscure board. I had to visit eleven desks in five rooms at the sprawling General Post Office to get my hands on it, having pieces of paper stamped, money paid and documents signed in triplicate (Nepal’s bureaucracy is legendary – you can even read epic novels dramatising adventures within it). After stuffing the awkward bike box into a taxi and negotiating the tight twisting streets of Thamal I had to lug it the last couple of hundred metres on my head, following the natives’ lead. I would wait until my return from the trek to explore the extent of its intactness (excitement to come!).
However, I had other concerns now, for it was my birthday.
The evening began as advertised months in advance at the Jatra Bar in Thamal where I bought everyone a round of longnecks for making the effort to turn up – that should be sufficient incentive to travel thousands of kilometres to meet me on my birthday. There were six of us there to congratulate me on my great age, dispense presents and well-wishings and laugh at my jokes (as all good birthday party guests should). No large contingent of clandestine Melbournian or backpacking invitees presented themselves having booked flights on a whim without telling me, and they needn’t have with the excellent company I already enjoyed.
The rest of the night accelerated into a blur of two-for-one cocktails, a frenzied funky Israeli restaurant and Nepalipop dancing at a nightclub into the small hours – my drunken dancing skills would become the butt of jokes for many days to come.
Getting up the next morning for the trek was painful and difficult – I wondered why I’d bothered to go to bed. Saying goodbye to Helio who was staying behind to await his flight home we embarked on a halting and abortive journey to meet our bus to Bhulbule. After getting lost, trying again and then being taxied by the bus company to the actual depot, then lost again, we were finally on the bus and our way – all eight hours of it. Not good for hangovers.
The bus ride’s presentation of the epic Marsyangdi Valley did its best to bring me back to health, as did the haphazard traffic rules and a thorough update on the missed goss’ from home. Finally, we had landed at Besisahar and sat for geological ages on a sweltering and drastically cramped oversized “jeep” awaiting the one extra passenger who would make the driver’s trip to Bhulbule worthwhile. When the crowded jeep finally did depart we all wished it hadn’t as it jangled our concertinaed legs towards total uselessness. But the views and hospitality of the lodge at Bhulbule, overlooking the Marsyangdi River and underlooking the eight kilometre high Manaslu Range, dissolved the painful memories of the journey there.
And the next morning we were off! The participants:
The stoical unstoppable Rhonda;
The avuncular Tim with his knowledge historical;
Rob - doyen of bushwalking Southwest Tasmania;
Sandy, faithful father, fit beneath his years; and
I, Felix, who came up the idea in the first place.
This marked the beginning of for some of us three weeks of almost continual trekking. On that day I dealt the group a bad portent when I misstepped while appreciating the disappearing cloud cover and thus fine views of mountain-hemmed villages and fell several metres off a cliff. Miraculously I landed onto an adjoining path upright and completely unharmed, pumping with adrenaline, despite having to support and balance an eighteen kilo pack. I used to criticise Tim’s sure-footedness: he’s so tall the electrical impulses take too long to get from his brain to his feet, lacking the advantage of a second brain in his hips like a brachiosaurus. But this trek has proved my critique outdated (has his lower spinal ganglion inflated?).
Over the next few days we learnt that we had chosen an excellent time of year to go trekking – perfect weather as the monsoon had yet to hit but, not willing to risk it, no crowds. From the few trekkers we did encounter we found ourselves to be in an extreme minority for opting out of both guide and porter. One French trekker we discovered later had employed both, like the motorcade of a presidential outing. Unfortunately, we were all versed in independent Australian bushwalking rather than teahouse trekking and lacked the ability of some European trekkers to keep their packs in the five kilo range. I managed to bring about five kilos of books alone (okay maybe two), not to mention a one litre glass bottle of port and 750 grams of salt (for oft-threatened but non-eventuating leeches).
The end of the first day was marked by lunch at our lodge of sleep – the only day this was to be the case – under the auspices of a spectacularly tall waterfall and an equally spectacular thunderstorm (two of my favourite water phenomena, excluding comets and tsunamis of course). Here we laughed ourselves to sleep at the hilariously inept PhotoShopping on a poster of a Bangladeshi bridge in our rough yet cosy bedrooms. We would later look back on that day as an age of innocence before we knew of the destructive effects of road building upriver.
Luckily, the next day’s annoyance at the horrible scar on the landscape wrought by picks and jackhammers, belying the remark in the guidebook, after promising ancient wooden galleries to negotiate some steep rock faces, that “They’ll never get a road through here” (a wry phrase we used sardonically throughout the trek), became great excitement as we were stopped by the army so they could blast the opposing cliffs with dynamite. The awesome spectacle was enhanced by the long delay between sight and sound, entirely unlike Hollywood special effects. As it happened, after the third day’s forced clambering around both working jackhammers and undetonated dynamite while perched precariously over a sheer cliff (one trekker was nearly wiped out by a falling boulder – if my work’s health and safety officer saw this he’d explode), the road construction ceased interfering with us. This road building stuff is a real tragedy – the teahouses upriver lobbied for it so they could sell cheaper beer to trekkers (so far it’s hauled in using frequently encountered mule trains) but I don’t think they realise what a disaster it will be for business, as others have discovered all too late.
A few days into the trek the real stuff began. Climbing higher into the Himalayas we passed through beautiful rhododendron forests (I’m told the flowers are a vivid red), around a curved, sloping and smooth glacial wall the size of a dangerously angled city, through sleepy villages of the Tibetan culture (prayer flags, sutra wheels, chortans and gompas vying for our irreverent attention) and beneath the ever-present gaze of the Annapurna Range’s ice capped behemoths, scraped up from the Tethys Sea to just below the maximum height our planet can sustain – if you want more go to Mars. Yes, the group being entirely comprised of engineers resulted in a constant stream of Nerd Talk. Quantum physics, genetics and a group-effort calculation of the gravitational acceleration on the Earth due to the sun dominated the conversation – I’d been missing nerds.
And on the seventh day we rested (the seventh from Kathmandu that is) for purposes of altitude acclimatisation. Or we called it resting. In actual fact the non-Rhondonians got up early in the regional centre of Manang for a day walk to Milarepa’s Cave. This involved a lot of scrambling uphill and arguing over directions, but for our troubles we received a cultural experience in a Tibetan Buddhist gompa and, our curiosity getting the better of us, a further climb to 4400m altitude to watch from close-range a gigantic glacier groaning and grumbling, tumbling and tinkling under its own weight.
It was during the surprisingly exciting audiovisual experience of the glacier (its face was in view but the rest was buried in cloud) that we heard a distant, deep rumble. Over the seconds it enloadened into a violent roar like thunder or a low-flying 747. We all looked at each other nervously: an avalanche.
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” someone shouted, possibly inside my head. Dad and I legged it uphill obeying the old principal that where the interests of good photography and life preservation coincide you should always follow your instincts, but Rob and Tim were too cool to do anything except adjust the focus on their cameras, as though for them Death by Avalanche was a typical Friday afternoon. When the rumble died away without consequence I was so relieved and disappointed I laughed until my brain ran out of oxygen.
That evening we celebrated our survival by socialising with some fellow trekkers over a few momos and seabuckthorn juices. One Dutch girl called Veronique who we’d been bumping into sporadically over the last few days enlivened us with tales of her bizarre trekking companion, an old American man, Douglas by name, whose physical capabilities seemed to lie well below the threshold required by this trek and was slowly going insane from nicotine withdrawal. They each had separate guides so they could split up meiotically, as they were doing then. Another pair, an English duo, were running out of money so badly they were forced to share meals – our group had been visionary enough to extrude wallet-warping wads of cash from the digital ether before our departure. All these companions were a sort of ephemeral community, crystallising and dissolving from the trekker-pool.
Day 9. The Ascent over the Thorung-La Pass. Rob is feeling poorly due sipping untreated tap-water (I need not describe the symptoms). The group is nervous but excited, somewhat short tempered. It has been snowing the previous night. The target elevation is 5416m with Rhonda fronting the assault. Tim has made the ultimate sacrifice. He is taking up the rear to ensure that any injuries are treated with a humane rock-to-the-back-of-the-head.
As it happened the actual ascent was not that tough. But it was spectacular – we were ascending to almost rival the surrounding peaks: teetering cornices towering above fluted snow faces, snaking moraines evolving from the rock/ice landscape with the Himalayan Griffin nonchalantly peering down at our puny party. At 5000m we heard a distant rumble and turned to this time actually witness a vast avalanche falling about a kilometre, reshaping an opposing mountain-face before of our eyes at the deceptive speed best known to astronomers.
At the pass we celebrated the highest altitude ever reached by any of us (from sea-level, not from the Earth’s core) by passing around the port for Port on the Pass (traditionally known as Port on the Hill, but one must be flexible). This communal offering deeply excited a pair of Spanish girls as the brand I’d lugged up here was a local favourite of theirs at home, luckily they got to it before the Nepalese porters got a chance – the porters’ gluttony of the drink is surely an etymological clue.
Strangely, having managed to largely avoid altitude sickness so far (apart from the odd headache), the descent from Thorung-La sent some of us into waves of nausea. I myself was inured thanks to my Tibetan escapades, but I happily took part in the group-snooze half-way down on a neat patch of grass at some ancient ruins. From here we could see a whole new set of mountains, towering above a bleak valley.
The next few days saw growing realisation on the part of Tim and Rhonda that their expedition was soon to end. We stayed in a passive/aggressive hotel called Bob Marley – a truly strange experience not easily described, toured the temple complex of Muktinath where Dad stripped to his jocks to purify his soul beneath 108 water-spouting gargoyle bulls (here we also rediscovered Ross, an English buddy of ours who’d been abandoned by his otherwise charming ‘friend’ Luke on the wrong side of the pass after exhibiting signs of altitude sickness), and made our way towards the oasis town of Kagbeni. This journey was harrowing in every sense of the word: deep bull dust, violent winds, then a combination of the two resulting in an onslaught of airborne missiles. I got one in my eye, ruining my views of 3000 year-old Buddhist caves and monasteries nestled amongst the eroded badlands.
A rest day in Kagbeni, our first real chance at recuperation, saw us eating, sleeping, reading and exploring the local ‘Yakdonalds’ prior to a day ambling our way to Jomsom – racking off point for Tim and Rhonda. Unfortunately, the subsequent day the monsoon finally struck, grounding their plane and forcing them into an epic series of bus rides, an enormous taxi ride and a fuel fail as they limped and struggled towards the airport at Pokhara. Rob, Sandy and I were ignorant of this adventure at the time as we negotiated the Kali Gandaki river valley for our circuitous route to the Annapurna Base Camp.
Our own experience of this sudden weatherosity involved a nearby footbridge being washed away, another bridge on the main road almost suffering the same fate (Rob heroically helped some workers escape with their gear from the flash flood) and a landslide that threatened our planned bus departure from the town of Tukuche. Luckily this did not eventuate and so the next day we executed Project Wuss-Out and skipped two days of walking along the Kali Gandaki road. Our wussing out, however, was only partially successful as we decided to walk some of the way to Tatopani through an explosion of fertility and, allegedly, the world’s deepest gorge.
Here an evening of male bonding greeted us over a few beers while we marinated our tired bodies in the eponymous hot springs during a thunderstorm. We needed all the relaxation we could get for on the morrow we were to embark upon an arduous 1800m climb to Ghorepani. The valley on the way up was almost insultingly green. But what a view from the top! A four o’clock rise the next morning got us up to the summit of Poon Hill which, being 3200m high, would be called a mountain anywhere but Nepal. The sunrise over Daulagiri and the Annapurna Range was an awesome terrestrial syzygy (try using that word in Scrabble) – fingers of eclipsed light torn from the jagged peaks – and a superb backdrop for Port on the Hill (or Poon on the Poon!).
The Annapurna Sanctuary trek, beginning here, was everything the Annapurna Circuit trek was not: rather than rock-strewn landscapes scraped bare by glaciers we encountered damp jungles of plant-life fighting for every cubic millimeter (while competing with steep paddy terraces and frequent landslides). Instead of glaciers and ice lakes we had waterfalls and hot springs (complete with water nymphs!). Losing Tibetan Buddhism we found Nepali Hinduism. Rather than European trekkers we met those from the British Commonwealth (don’t ask me to explain the reasons for that). Although, as exceptions, we did encounter the Spanish girls and Veronique again – the latter had last seen a severely weakened Douglas crossing Thorung-La on horseback.
The four days’ ‘ascent’ to the Annapurna Base Camp at 4130m felt like a cruel joke – constantly climbing hundreds of metres only to descend again. Our total verticality for the trip worked out to nearly 25 kilometres (in 236 horizontal kilometres) and most of that knee-bending was achieved here (what a way to celebrate Rob’s 31st birthday!). But the views were seriously excellent and no more so than at the base camp itself: here we witnessed another mountastic sunrise while completely surrounded by the fishtailed Macchapuchhare and three Annapurnas (keeping clear of a vast flowing glacier beneath us). Unfortunately, I’d dropped my camera some days ago so could not record the scene (continuing the sprawling Camera Saga), but I recommend Rob’s brilliant photography. At evening-time I consumed three serves of Dhal Bhat, our staple food, which shocked even the local porters (but I sure got my money’s worth!). Heading back to civilisation we sprinted at twice the advised speed, stopping only for a deeply appreciated semi-rest day at the spur-perched Jhinu Dhanda, before finding ourselves standing in the sun, bleary eyed and awaiting the bus to take us to Pokhara. What a trip!
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
7 Days in Tibet
As I recall, I left my gentle readers poised precariously on the cliff-hanger ending of whether or not I would make it all the way back through China to Hong Kong so I could collect my pack and then find some way of getting back through China and into Nepal in time for my 27th birthday party meet-up. In order to relieve the otherwise unbearable tension during this blog I will now reveal that yes, I did make it.
The journey back from 'Shangri-La' east was much faster than coming the other way. Paivi and I took a bus to Jiangxi and then, after an afternoon heeding Chinglish warnings against 'irrational shopping', appropriated part of a sleeper bus back to Kunming. The beds on this bus were just about long enough for the decapitated body of a white male of average height and contained no more carry-on luggage capacity than might be secreted in swallowed condoms. However, I slept far better than the only other sleeper bus ride I've taken - India, 2001, in which I'd spent the whole night throwing up over the Western Ghats while avoiding having my height adjusted by oncoming trucks.
Arriving back in Kunming I immediately booked the next train (departing that afternoon) for Guangzhou near Hong Kong. Paivi was also desperate to get out of the city as she was in serious danger of missing her flight back to Finland from Beijing. Like most Chinese cities Kunming guilted me into feeling like I should get a life, find a job and be productive for the Progress of The Nation, thus the day went by like a picnic held during an air raid - you want to join in the frenzy but you've just uncorked a bottle of wine.
The train ride to Guangzhou was one of my best yet - 28 hours in a largely empty train, reading 'Shantaram', a huge foundation stone of a novel written by a Melbournian ex-crim, who's sort of like an evil Kim Stanley Robinson, and engorged as a right-of-passage by almost every backpacker I meet.
On the train I met a friendly young Guangzhou local named Kyo in possession of excellent English skills and a charitable desire to establish me in a hotel. This ended in a quest far more involved than for which I was prepared as we traipsed across the entire city in the dead of night employing the extensive metro system, multiple taxi rides and kilometres of foot-work, bypassing acceptable cheap digs is search of a hotel that satisfied both Kyo's requirement for a place worthy of my imagined social status and my requirement for absolutely anything costing me less than $50. This was not helped by a massive conference on African development that weekend filling the city's hotels with stylish black businessmen.
But the next day I was out of the city and on my way to Shenzhen, taking one of the 200 km per hour bullet trains in which China is now being enmeshed - the fastest I've ever traveled on land (with respect to that land - I'm not getting into a discussion on galactic divergence).
Eager to know if my pack had left Postal Space and now existed in the familiar dimensions of our own universe, and also because the bullet train dropped me off right on the border, I delayed the tour of Shenzhen until my way back out and once again went through the interminable procedures of leaving one country and entering another - an experience somewhat more irritating than usual because Hong Kong is now a part of China and so I wasn't technically crossing any national borders at all. Since this terminated my Chinese visa I had to stay in Hong Kong long enough to get a new one - three days since it was a Friday afternoon. Impeccable timing as usual. Nicely, Hong Kong's metro joins right into Shenzhen's, a system designed specifically for failed cycle tourists lugging heavy inward-leaning panniers.
I'd been hearing all sorts of things about Hong Kong on my trip, some positive and most negative. Somebody told me it's like Blade Runner - all the rich people living in high-rises trying to escape from the poor people at street level. Whatever the truth of it it's a cool image and certainly had some resonance with my experience living in the Chungking Mansions - a vast cubic firetrap crammed with tiny cell-like rooms with windows overlooking ventilation ducts like Bespin's Cloud City from Star Wars, every conceivable ethnicity in roughly equal proportions inhabiting the rooms, queuing for lifts and haggling over samosas. I got a real buzz out of this crazy place despite paying $15 for a room that could charitably be described as a coffin a few sizes too big for me.
Other than that, the horror stories I'd heard about the prices in Hong Kong seemed to be a phurphy. Things are the same price here as the same things in China, there's just more overt availability of very expensive things. On the first night I went to a classy Vietnamese restaurant perched near the top of a glass ovoid-shaped building and paid just $7 for a full meal. On the other hand I was forced to clench my face in an attempt to lock out emotional displays, my left eyelid flickering with the strain, as the bill came in for the round of beers I had shouted the Hanoi Backpacker's Hostel's barman's friend and his girlfriend for allowing me to send my pack to them (and for it's reunification with me) - they'd recommended an expensive rooftop bar above the main pier so we could watch the sun set through the haze, it's path punctuated by the crowded skyline.
Considering the amount of time available I managed to do a pretty thorough job on Hong Kong. I wandered through the city streets on both sides of the channel, familiarised myself with all forms of public transport (including dirt-cheap ferries, metro, buses and even trams), spent long hours watching the afternoon fade into evening with the accompanying laser show erupting from the tops of dozens of buildings while sitting on the end of a Prohibited Entry pier (AND not getting arrested!), had nights on the town with both British descent and Chinese descent locals - acquaintances of different backpacking buddies, and visited the major peaks of Hong Kong's two biggest islands. The first one being 'The Peak' on 'Hong Kong Island' - a wealthy green utopia in the clouds, like the way books from the 70's depict the perfectly landscaped habitable surfaces of orbital ring colonies - and the second being Lantau Island with its giant Buddha statue near the summit. When the gondola cost and queue proved too much for me to withstand I got up there the old fashioned way - every hour I asked someone how far a walk it was to go and each time they gave me an answer twice as long as the previous person, like an inverse Xeno's Paradox. The girl I met just twenty minutes before reaching the top reckoned I'd never make it.
On Monday morning, visa in hand, I took the metro and left the country, touring Shenzhen (a poor cousin to Hong Kong I must say - China likes to spread its cities out a lot, buildings edging away from each other in mistrust) meeting Kyo in Guangzhou again for a night of beer and pool, and then embarking on a long and spectacular train ride to Chengdu - launching pad for Tibet. An Annoying Incident boarding this train occurred as I was listening to an Atheist podcast on my ipod (I'd been really getting into podcasts). I had to put my panniers and newly acquired pack down on the metal detection conveyor belt but accidentally got my headphones hooked in my pack straps. I tried to free myself but my major luggage item, already in the grip of the conveyor belt, began to pull me into the jaws of the metal detector - no doubt to a terrible fate of radiation poisoning, acquisition of super powers and an eventual stand-off with an evil mastermind planning the enslavement of humanity. Since my hands were occupied holding my panniers I had to clumsily roll myself off the conveyor belt - snapping my headphones cable in the process and cutting off the podcast mid-sentence, trapping it inside my ipod. Clearly it was a message from the Atheist God telling me He does not exist (but due to my lack of faith I refused to believe Him).
This is where the real work began: I was pretty set on checking out that new train line to Lhasa, had been interested in Tibet since my Tintin days and wanted to keep up my aversion to flying (it being a fairly cop-out way to travel the world) - but for some reason the Chinese government doesn't trust us nice tourists to be in Tibet on our own, as though we'll tell the world what nasty bastards they are up there (or worse: tell the Tibetans). So I needed to be on a package tour - something I'd managed to avoid so far. Unfortunately, a package tour to get from the train station at Lhasa down to the Nepali border costs about $1500, so I needed at least one person with whom to share the exorbitant cost. Chengdu's Mix Hostel was exactly the place to find such a person so I spent a week there, slowly running out of time, finding possible companions and being abandoned by them, finishing 'Shantaram' and visiting a panda zoo. My lamentations of failure were eventually overheard by a British dude called Helio who was a) keen on seeing Tibet, b) didn't mind handing over the vast wad of cash required for a visit to said autonomous zone and, crucially, c) was happy to go with my somewhat condensed absolutely-must-be-in-Kathmandu-on-the-21st time-frame.
But, since time was already short, plus with the Tibet permits taking three days to acquire, as well as the train taking a week for the booking, this was no guarantee of success - the hostel informed us that there were no tickets left that would suit us but that they'd check later if someone canceled. I despaired at our chances and took a sad walk through the streets of Chengdu, but upon my return I was informed that yes! Miraculously, two people had in fact canceled! We were going to Tibet! I had had no idea before then exactly how much I was emotionally dependent on that outcome: instantly my spirits elevated right into the stratosphere and I had a mega-enjoyable afternoon (but by the next day my body had used up all its available endorphin reserves and I came crashing back down again until it could manufacture some more).
The next few days we spent waiting for our permits and train, seeing the town and the construction of its new metro system, wrestling with banks to get enough money out for the tour and in the evenings hitting the town. The most noteworthy night was when thirteen of us (we'd conglomerated with Mix's backpacker community by then) stormed a nightclub with a suspiciously high girl/guy ratio. It was after the tenth Lady Ga Ga song came on that the guy component of the backpacker group began to nod knowingly at itself - this was not a normal bar. Of course, it took until the girl component was the victim of successive waves of female instigated arse-grab attacks for it to realise that this was, in fact, a local lesbian bar and so stormed out, disappointment from all parties left trailing in its wake.
I could devote a whole blog to Chengdu and its crazy night life but we had a train to catch so I must move on.
The first day of this 48-hour train ride was quite uneventful, except for admiring the profusion of altitude warning signs and oxygen supply nozzles coating the walls. Helio and I were assigned not only different beds (cramped top beds too) but different carriages, so our interactions mainly revolved around endless rounds of the ubiquitous card game Shithead, all while listening to three tracks inescapably played over the sound system on repeat: Beethoven's 'Fur Elise', Celine Dion's 'My Heart Will Go On' (Geez - Titanic came out in, like, 1997!) and a Propaganda speech describing the Happiness of the Tibetan People. I was foresightful enough to bring along two bottles of red wine and a corkscrew for the journey, but Helio over-ruled me with his sensible consideration of altitude sickness (grrr...).
And altitude was a real worry - that night we left the deserted landscape of north-western China and the Silk Road (we had traveled as far north as the latitude of Beijing) and started climbing solidly up to 5027m above sea level - the highest I'd ever been on land and so it would be again until the trek in Nepal. I slept very soundly despite two annoyances: firstly the Chinese guy next to me snored so loudly and spasmodically I almost launched into giving him an emergency tracheotomy with my unused corkscrew, and secondly someone seemed to have decided to open one of the windows for a smoke during the night, evacuating roughly half of the atmosphere in the previously pressurised train.
But when we awoke - What. A. View. I don't know how those Chinese did it but they put a train line across the vast frozen plateau of Tibet, five kilometres above sea level. I hear they have to pump cooling fluids through the piers of the 167 kms of bridges so they don't sink into the gradually warming permafrost - yet another reason why I had to take this journey now. The only way I can really describe this landscape is to compare it with the cliche of the frozen northern latitudes of Mars. Little grew out here, blasted by constant snow storms even during summer, and the only objects to punctuate our views of the half-frozen lakes, vast desert plains and snow covered peaks were the occasional shelter, community or wandering horseman.
The line terminated in Lhasa where our tour guide failed to meet us at the station as planned (not a comfortable place to be left alone - shotgun toting Chinese military personnel in full riot gear grace every street corner in the capital). This set the tone for our relationship in the following days as he later failed to book us tickets for Lhasa's star attraction of the Potala Palace, in our itinerary for the next day, forcing us to stand outside the ticket office for an hour begging them to let us in, and finally, despite us paying his company over $400 per day, excusing his total ignorance of our tour's surrounding geography with the fact that this was his first time beyond Greater Lhasa. As I never tire of hearing, 'you get what you pay for'... (no, I'm being sarcastic - apart from the straight-forward rip-off, there are too many variables valued too differently by different people for prices to be a real universal measure of subjective worth).
But Helio and I couldn't complain too much, our guide was an alright bloke and could translate the driver's extensive familiarity with our surroundings. Plus he told us such interesting facts as that Tibet is suffering under the effects of a fifteen year drought because "Scientists say the Universe is getting hotter", and that another scourge wreaking havoc on Tibet is that the farmers have all seen the movie '2012' and hence have stopped tending to their fields because they fear, of all things, that they are in immanent tsunami danger. I had just been thinking that it would have been a convenient time for a four kilometre high tsunami to sweep the globe and was on alert for a sudden inner-ear pressure change announcing the wave's approach.
Our guide did, however, have an excellent knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism, taking us to many fascinating and beautiful temples and monasteries in Lhasa and southern Tibet. I must say though, I've always had a bit of a soft-spot for this peaceful and compassionate religion, but now I'm not so sure. The more I learned about it the more I was aware of its pre-enlightenment backwardness. Like, rather than concocting practical solutions to their drought problem they feel their best interests are served by either constant prayer or the invention of machines that can pray for them and so allow them time to install messy-looking prayer flags everywhere. Plus, when we visited the solid gold tombs of the previous Dalai Lhamas, each weighing hundreds of kilos, our guide blithely mentioned that all that gold had been extracted from the peasants. What??!! What WERE those methods of extraction!?
However, the Tibetan landscape was incredible. On our way out of Lhasa in a completely unnecessary Land Rover (all the roads were Prince's Highway standard, grrrr...) we encountered a large lake at 4400m or so with distant peaks poking above it - I know, I'm as surprised as you that Tibet has beaches (after a brief swim I can report that, yes, the water is frikkin' freezing). The towns are all mud brick, weathered and ancient - blending seamlessly into ruins that could be thousands of years old. Towering glaciers greeted us at roadsides, vast rivers negotiated ancient canyons, occasionally isolating decrepit forts clambering above the waterline, while just over half the atmosphere remained to shield us from the glaring sun. Our view would often open up to reveal infinite wind-blasted deserts punctuated by whistling mesas and, sometimes, fertile oases where yaks in immaculate headgear would till the land.
I only experienced mild altitude sickness, staying in the city of Shigatse (supposedly the highest city in the world at 3800m, but I have my doubts), where I got a day-long headache definitely NOT cured by the Chinese Medicine foisted on me by a local pharmacy (I didn't even get the placebo effect!). I was almost tempted to wuss out and buy one of the prolific oxygen canisters sold in every conceivable context (expensive restaurants and hotels, rather than advertising AC, would advertise O2) but settled for a random selection of drugs containing codeine from my first aid kit.
Apart from the obvious satisfaction in seeing Mount Everest on Day 2 of the drive (we didn't go to the base camp because the tour operator told us it was "crap"), the highlight was certainly Day 3, the final day, in which we reached the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Now you'd probably imagine that the edge of the plateau would be something like reaching the end of a tall sharp-edged table: the Himalayas poking up beyond it with views between the mountains into the vast haze of the Indian Subcontinent. And you would be correct - that's exactly what it was like. A brown flat bit of land 4.8 kilometres up suddenly giving way into nothingness and a straight line of eight kilometre high mountains receding into the distance like the perfect formation of an unreasonably large alien invasion force. It blew our minds. I have photos on Flickr, but, like most of this stuff, they don't do it justice.
After that it was only a matter of executing a steep descent between two mountains into Nepal, stopping at the mandatory fifty million military checkpoints per milimetre along the way, celebrating our final night in Tibet with our guide and driver over my last remaining bottle of wine in Zuegma, allowing our bags to be searched by the Chinese border to the extent of having each of the 900 pages of Neal Stephenson's excellent book 'Quicksilver' scrutinised by paranoid customs officials (undoubtedly looking for the secret plans for China's new Death Star, naturally I'd hidden them in my underpants), crossing the Friendship Bridge into Nepal, finding an old shack off the main road dispensing $100 three month visas for Nepal (if we hadn't seen it I would still be at large in this country), catching an awesomely scenic bus into Kathmandu and...
...Meeting up with all my friends and family who had made the trip out here for my birthday!
The journey back from 'Shangri-La' east was much faster than coming the other way. Paivi and I took a bus to Jiangxi and then, after an afternoon heeding Chinglish warnings against 'irrational shopping', appropriated part of a sleeper bus back to Kunming. The beds on this bus were just about long enough for the decapitated body of a white male of average height and contained no more carry-on luggage capacity than might be secreted in swallowed condoms. However, I slept far better than the only other sleeper bus ride I've taken - India, 2001, in which I'd spent the whole night throwing up over the Western Ghats while avoiding having my height adjusted by oncoming trucks.
Arriving back in Kunming I immediately booked the next train (departing that afternoon) for Guangzhou near Hong Kong. Paivi was also desperate to get out of the city as she was in serious danger of missing her flight back to Finland from Beijing. Like most Chinese cities Kunming guilted me into feeling like I should get a life, find a job and be productive for the Progress of The Nation, thus the day went by like a picnic held during an air raid - you want to join in the frenzy but you've just uncorked a bottle of wine.
The train ride to Guangzhou was one of my best yet - 28 hours in a largely empty train, reading 'Shantaram', a huge foundation stone of a novel written by a Melbournian ex-crim, who's sort of like an evil Kim Stanley Robinson, and engorged as a right-of-passage by almost every backpacker I meet.
On the train I met a friendly young Guangzhou local named Kyo in possession of excellent English skills and a charitable desire to establish me in a hotel. This ended in a quest far more involved than for which I was prepared as we traipsed across the entire city in the dead of night employing the extensive metro system, multiple taxi rides and kilometres of foot-work, bypassing acceptable cheap digs is search of a hotel that satisfied both Kyo's requirement for a place worthy of my imagined social status and my requirement for absolutely anything costing me less than $50. This was not helped by a massive conference on African development that weekend filling the city's hotels with stylish black businessmen.
But the next day I was out of the city and on my way to Shenzhen, taking one of the 200 km per hour bullet trains in which China is now being enmeshed - the fastest I've ever traveled on land (with respect to that land - I'm not getting into a discussion on galactic divergence).
Eager to know if my pack had left Postal Space and now existed in the familiar dimensions of our own universe, and also because the bullet train dropped me off right on the border, I delayed the tour of Shenzhen until my way back out and once again went through the interminable procedures of leaving one country and entering another - an experience somewhat more irritating than usual because Hong Kong is now a part of China and so I wasn't technically crossing any national borders at all. Since this terminated my Chinese visa I had to stay in Hong Kong long enough to get a new one - three days since it was a Friday afternoon. Impeccable timing as usual. Nicely, Hong Kong's metro joins right into Shenzhen's, a system designed specifically for failed cycle tourists lugging heavy inward-leaning panniers.
I'd been hearing all sorts of things about Hong Kong on my trip, some positive and most negative. Somebody told me it's like Blade Runner - all the rich people living in high-rises trying to escape from the poor people at street level. Whatever the truth of it it's a cool image and certainly had some resonance with my experience living in the Chungking Mansions - a vast cubic firetrap crammed with tiny cell-like rooms with windows overlooking ventilation ducts like Bespin's Cloud City from Star Wars, every conceivable ethnicity in roughly equal proportions inhabiting the rooms, queuing for lifts and haggling over samosas. I got a real buzz out of this crazy place despite paying $15 for a room that could charitably be described as a coffin a few sizes too big for me.
Other than that, the horror stories I'd heard about the prices in Hong Kong seemed to be a phurphy. Things are the same price here as the same things in China, there's just more overt availability of very expensive things. On the first night I went to a classy Vietnamese restaurant perched near the top of a glass ovoid-shaped building and paid just $7 for a full meal. On the other hand I was forced to clench my face in an attempt to lock out emotional displays, my left eyelid flickering with the strain, as the bill came in for the round of beers I had shouted the Hanoi Backpacker's Hostel's barman's friend and his girlfriend for allowing me to send my pack to them (and for it's reunification with me) - they'd recommended an expensive rooftop bar above the main pier so we could watch the sun set through the haze, it's path punctuated by the crowded skyline.
Considering the amount of time available I managed to do a pretty thorough job on Hong Kong. I wandered through the city streets on both sides of the channel, familiarised myself with all forms of public transport (including dirt-cheap ferries, metro, buses and even trams), spent long hours watching the afternoon fade into evening with the accompanying laser show erupting from the tops of dozens of buildings while sitting on the end of a Prohibited Entry pier (AND not getting arrested!), had nights on the town with both British descent and Chinese descent locals - acquaintances of different backpacking buddies, and visited the major peaks of Hong Kong's two biggest islands. The first one being 'The Peak' on 'Hong Kong Island' - a wealthy green utopia in the clouds, like the way books from the 70's depict the perfectly landscaped habitable surfaces of orbital ring colonies - and the second being Lantau Island with its giant Buddha statue near the summit. When the gondola cost and queue proved too much for me to withstand I got up there the old fashioned way - every hour I asked someone how far a walk it was to go and each time they gave me an answer twice as long as the previous person, like an inverse Xeno's Paradox. The girl I met just twenty minutes before reaching the top reckoned I'd never make it.
On Monday morning, visa in hand, I took the metro and left the country, touring Shenzhen (a poor cousin to Hong Kong I must say - China likes to spread its cities out a lot, buildings edging away from each other in mistrust) meeting Kyo in Guangzhou again for a night of beer and pool, and then embarking on a long and spectacular train ride to Chengdu - launching pad for Tibet. An Annoying Incident boarding this train occurred as I was listening to an Atheist podcast on my ipod (I'd been really getting into podcasts). I had to put my panniers and newly acquired pack down on the metal detection conveyor belt but accidentally got my headphones hooked in my pack straps. I tried to free myself but my major luggage item, already in the grip of the conveyor belt, began to pull me into the jaws of the metal detector - no doubt to a terrible fate of radiation poisoning, acquisition of super powers and an eventual stand-off with an evil mastermind planning the enslavement of humanity. Since my hands were occupied holding my panniers I had to clumsily roll myself off the conveyor belt - snapping my headphones cable in the process and cutting off the podcast mid-sentence, trapping it inside my ipod. Clearly it was a message from the Atheist God telling me He does not exist (but due to my lack of faith I refused to believe Him).
This is where the real work began: I was pretty set on checking out that new train line to Lhasa, had been interested in Tibet since my Tintin days and wanted to keep up my aversion to flying (it being a fairly cop-out way to travel the world) - but for some reason the Chinese government doesn't trust us nice tourists to be in Tibet on our own, as though we'll tell the world what nasty bastards they are up there (or worse: tell the Tibetans). So I needed to be on a package tour - something I'd managed to avoid so far. Unfortunately, a package tour to get from the train station at Lhasa down to the Nepali border costs about $1500, so I needed at least one person with whom to share the exorbitant cost. Chengdu's Mix Hostel was exactly the place to find such a person so I spent a week there, slowly running out of time, finding possible companions and being abandoned by them, finishing 'Shantaram' and visiting a panda zoo. My lamentations of failure were eventually overheard by a British dude called Helio who was a) keen on seeing Tibet, b) didn't mind handing over the vast wad of cash required for a visit to said autonomous zone and, crucially, c) was happy to go with my somewhat condensed absolutely-must-be-in-Kathmandu-on-the-21st time-frame.
But, since time was already short, plus with the Tibet permits taking three days to acquire, as well as the train taking a week for the booking, this was no guarantee of success - the hostel informed us that there were no tickets left that would suit us but that they'd check later if someone canceled. I despaired at our chances and took a sad walk through the streets of Chengdu, but upon my return I was informed that yes! Miraculously, two people had in fact canceled! We were going to Tibet! I had had no idea before then exactly how much I was emotionally dependent on that outcome: instantly my spirits elevated right into the stratosphere and I had a mega-enjoyable afternoon (but by the next day my body had used up all its available endorphin reserves and I came crashing back down again until it could manufacture some more).
The next few days we spent waiting for our permits and train, seeing the town and the construction of its new metro system, wrestling with banks to get enough money out for the tour and in the evenings hitting the town. The most noteworthy night was when thirteen of us (we'd conglomerated with Mix's backpacker community by then) stormed a nightclub with a suspiciously high girl/guy ratio. It was after the tenth Lady Ga Ga song came on that the guy component of the backpacker group began to nod knowingly at itself - this was not a normal bar. Of course, it took until the girl component was the victim of successive waves of female instigated arse-grab attacks for it to realise that this was, in fact, a local lesbian bar and so stormed out, disappointment from all parties left trailing in its wake.
I could devote a whole blog to Chengdu and its crazy night life but we had a train to catch so I must move on.
The first day of this 48-hour train ride was quite uneventful, except for admiring the profusion of altitude warning signs and oxygen supply nozzles coating the walls. Helio and I were assigned not only different beds (cramped top beds too) but different carriages, so our interactions mainly revolved around endless rounds of the ubiquitous card game Shithead, all while listening to three tracks inescapably played over the sound system on repeat: Beethoven's 'Fur Elise', Celine Dion's 'My Heart Will Go On' (Geez - Titanic came out in, like, 1997!) and a Propaganda speech describing the Happiness of the Tibetan People. I was foresightful enough to bring along two bottles of red wine and a corkscrew for the journey, but Helio over-ruled me with his sensible consideration of altitude sickness (grrr...).
And altitude was a real worry - that night we left the deserted landscape of north-western China and the Silk Road (we had traveled as far north as the latitude of Beijing) and started climbing solidly up to 5027m above sea level - the highest I'd ever been on land and so it would be again until the trek in Nepal. I slept very soundly despite two annoyances: firstly the Chinese guy next to me snored so loudly and spasmodically I almost launched into giving him an emergency tracheotomy with my unused corkscrew, and secondly someone seemed to have decided to open one of the windows for a smoke during the night, evacuating roughly half of the atmosphere in the previously pressurised train.
But when we awoke - What. A. View. I don't know how those Chinese did it but they put a train line across the vast frozen plateau of Tibet, five kilometres above sea level. I hear they have to pump cooling fluids through the piers of the 167 kms of bridges so they don't sink into the gradually warming permafrost - yet another reason why I had to take this journey now. The only way I can really describe this landscape is to compare it with the cliche of the frozen northern latitudes of Mars. Little grew out here, blasted by constant snow storms even during summer, and the only objects to punctuate our views of the half-frozen lakes, vast desert plains and snow covered peaks were the occasional shelter, community or wandering horseman.
The line terminated in Lhasa where our tour guide failed to meet us at the station as planned (not a comfortable place to be left alone - shotgun toting Chinese military personnel in full riot gear grace every street corner in the capital). This set the tone for our relationship in the following days as he later failed to book us tickets for Lhasa's star attraction of the Potala Palace, in our itinerary for the next day, forcing us to stand outside the ticket office for an hour begging them to let us in, and finally, despite us paying his company over $400 per day, excusing his total ignorance of our tour's surrounding geography with the fact that this was his first time beyond Greater Lhasa. As I never tire of hearing, 'you get what you pay for'... (no, I'm being sarcastic - apart from the straight-forward rip-off, there are too many variables valued too differently by different people for prices to be a real universal measure of subjective worth).
But Helio and I couldn't complain too much, our guide was an alright bloke and could translate the driver's extensive familiarity with our surroundings. Plus he told us such interesting facts as that Tibet is suffering under the effects of a fifteen year drought because "Scientists say the Universe is getting hotter", and that another scourge wreaking havoc on Tibet is that the farmers have all seen the movie '2012' and hence have stopped tending to their fields because they fear, of all things, that they are in immanent tsunami danger. I had just been thinking that it would have been a convenient time for a four kilometre high tsunami to sweep the globe and was on alert for a sudden inner-ear pressure change announcing the wave's approach.
Our guide did, however, have an excellent knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism, taking us to many fascinating and beautiful temples and monasteries in Lhasa and southern Tibet. I must say though, I've always had a bit of a soft-spot for this peaceful and compassionate religion, but now I'm not so sure. The more I learned about it the more I was aware of its pre-enlightenment backwardness. Like, rather than concocting practical solutions to their drought problem they feel their best interests are served by either constant prayer or the invention of machines that can pray for them and so allow them time to install messy-looking prayer flags everywhere. Plus, when we visited the solid gold tombs of the previous Dalai Lhamas, each weighing hundreds of kilos, our guide blithely mentioned that all that gold had been extracted from the peasants. What??!! What WERE those methods of extraction!?
However, the Tibetan landscape was incredible. On our way out of Lhasa in a completely unnecessary Land Rover (all the roads were Prince's Highway standard, grrrr...) we encountered a large lake at 4400m or so with distant peaks poking above it - I know, I'm as surprised as you that Tibet has beaches (after a brief swim I can report that, yes, the water is frikkin' freezing). The towns are all mud brick, weathered and ancient - blending seamlessly into ruins that could be thousands of years old. Towering glaciers greeted us at roadsides, vast rivers negotiated ancient canyons, occasionally isolating decrepit forts clambering above the waterline, while just over half the atmosphere remained to shield us from the glaring sun. Our view would often open up to reveal infinite wind-blasted deserts punctuated by whistling mesas and, sometimes, fertile oases where yaks in immaculate headgear would till the land.
I only experienced mild altitude sickness, staying in the city of Shigatse (supposedly the highest city in the world at 3800m, but I have my doubts), where I got a day-long headache definitely NOT cured by the Chinese Medicine foisted on me by a local pharmacy (I didn't even get the placebo effect!). I was almost tempted to wuss out and buy one of the prolific oxygen canisters sold in every conceivable context (expensive restaurants and hotels, rather than advertising AC, would advertise O2) but settled for a random selection of drugs containing codeine from my first aid kit.
Apart from the obvious satisfaction in seeing Mount Everest on Day 2 of the drive (we didn't go to the base camp because the tour operator told us it was "crap"), the highlight was certainly Day 3, the final day, in which we reached the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Now you'd probably imagine that the edge of the plateau would be something like reaching the end of a tall sharp-edged table: the Himalayas poking up beyond it with views between the mountains into the vast haze of the Indian Subcontinent. And you would be correct - that's exactly what it was like. A brown flat bit of land 4.8 kilometres up suddenly giving way into nothingness and a straight line of eight kilometre high mountains receding into the distance like the perfect formation of an unreasonably large alien invasion force. It blew our minds. I have photos on Flickr, but, like most of this stuff, they don't do it justice.
After that it was only a matter of executing a steep descent between two mountains into Nepal, stopping at the mandatory fifty million military checkpoints per milimetre along the way, celebrating our final night in Tibet with our guide and driver over my last remaining bottle of wine in Zuegma, allowing our bags to be searched by the Chinese border to the extent of having each of the 900 pages of Neal Stephenson's excellent book 'Quicksilver' scrutinised by paranoid customs officials (undoubtedly looking for the secret plans for China's new Death Star, naturally I'd hidden them in my underpants), crossing the Friendship Bridge into Nepal, finding an old shack off the main road dispensing $100 three month visas for Nepal (if we hadn't seen it I would still be at large in this country), catching an awesomely scenic bus into Kathmandu and...
...Meeting up with all my friends and family who had made the trip out here for my birthday!
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Megaland
To summarise, my bike was in Nepal, my brake pads in Vietnam, my tent in Singapore, my pack in Hong Kong and I was in China. How did I manage to spread myself so thin?
And what's worse - when walking to the Chinese border, seemingly located in the centre of the town of Mon Cai, I realised just how hard it is to carry panniers in your hands: you have to lift them up as the thin handles dig into your fingers, then hold your arms outstretched so the inward-leaning bottoms don't get entangled with your legs. And don't get me started on asymmetrical weightings! I was also forced to wear my cleated footwear everywhere which crunches and scrapes over all paved surfaces.
But despite these encumbrances I ambulated my way into the Great Nation of China.
And what a nation! It felt like I was in the only 'real' country I've ever visited - all the others seem like a couple of towns separated by bits of country-side in comparison (okay, maybe not India - but that's more like Europe than a single country, or what Europe would be if it had lost the crusades). China is immense. It's a truism to say there are a lot of people in China, but what's hard to realise is that these people are not just represented by sacks of flesh, but by the human infrastructure congealed around them.
And what's worse - when walking to the Chinese border, seemingly located in the centre of the town of Mon Cai, I realised just how hard it is to carry panniers in your hands: you have to lift them up as the thin handles dig into your fingers, then hold your arms outstretched so the inward-leaning bottoms don't get entangled with your legs. And don't get me started on asymmetrical weightings! I was also forced to wear my cleated footwear everywhere which crunches and scrapes over all paved surfaces.
But despite these encumbrances I ambulated my way into the Great Nation of China.
And what a nation! It felt like I was in the only 'real' country I've ever visited - all the others seem like a couple of towns separated by bits of country-side in comparison (okay, maybe not India - but that's more like Europe than a single country, or what Europe would be if it had lost the crusades). China is immense. It's a truism to say there are a lot of people in China, but what's hard to realise is that these people are not just represented by sacks of flesh, but by the human infrastructure congealed around them.
One justification for spending the last few months bumming around the world not achieving much is to figure out what I want to be when I grow up - should I stick with the construction industry, lash out into a cushy engineering design job or do something totally different like inventing a machine that manufactures tailored universes for the rich and then get myself into the speculative real estate market? But one thing that's tipping the scale for the status quo is that what I find most exciting about new places is checking out the mega-construction projects going on. Stuff temples, palaces and musea - I want to see freeway projects, half-constructed metro systems and spindly skyscraper scaffolding sacrilegiously puncturing the heavens. And, largely thanks to China's trillion dollar stimulus package, there is a lot of that - my bus ride to Nanning transported me into the future so thoroughly I was tempted to ask directions to the sky-tube terminal for a nearby floating city.
I spent the day in Nanning blundering around in amazement at the massive metropolis I'd never heard of whose CBD is the size of Greater Cranbourne. I was also still shocked that my hotel room came with its own computer terminal. Compared to South East Asia the wealth here is mind-blowing.
Another truism about China is its authoritarianism and bureaucracy. It seems to thread its way through all levels of society - even the hotels lock you out of your room electronically if it's one minute past the check-out time (once I'd just had a shower and had to borrow money for the next night while clutching a towel). And the railways! Each station is the size and grandeur of an international airport - Nanning's had a huge LCD screen with a looped Communist Party video instructing young nerds how to pick up chicks, or so it seemed without understanding the dialogue. The bureaucratic infrastructure for the railway network is immense, with a reported average of 10 million Chinese traveling by train at any one time. And they feel they have to check your ticket SIX TIMES. Once upon entering the station at the metal detector for the waiting rooms (which are each the size of concert halls), another when boarding commences, a fourth time at the entrance to each carriage, twice on the train when the conductor swaps your ticket for a magnetic tag so you don't wander off before your designated stop, and finally upon leaving your destination station - just to be safe. On one trip an armed police officer even went through the carriages and scanned everyone's National ID Card. Luckily I was exempt or they would have discovered my Counter-Government Activities.
But they sure are nice about it. In Nanning, when for the first time in my life I actually missed a train I had a ticket for (never trust 'Windows time'), a staff member with excellent English saw my distress and exchanged my ticket for the next train - apparently it's common practice to get a full refund even after the train has departed.
My destination in this case was the karst-city of Guilin and marked the beginning of my totally inept 'drunkard's stumble' across southern China, panniers in tow. Here I discovered China's love of underground cavities and unnecessarily large dogs. A PVC-pipe raft floated me down the spectacularly scenic Li River to the even more karsty town of Yangshuo while I suffered under the effects of a rice wine frenzy forced upon me by some Chinese tourists the previous night. My companions for this journey and beyond were three Scandinavians: a Helsinki girl called Paivi who came with bonus Chinese skills and two Swedish guys called Henrik and Matthias.
We spent over a week in Yangshuo and in that time managed to achieve almost nothing. We went on a couple of bike rides, watched DVDs by the terabyte, and launched ourselves on a night-out from which the recovery required the next two days. Individually I also went on a walk to the top of Moon Hill which is a karst mountain with a gibbous hole in it, I got to another geohash that involved hours of getting lost and crawling through damp undergrowth and was sent on an epic quest by my dad to find a cafe he went to in 1994 called Mickey Mao's (I discovered it had been renamed Minnie Mao's).
Our excuse for such laziness was that it was raining pretty much the whole time. We were planning to take a hot air balloon ride over the town when the weather cleared up but we were informed that they'd stopped running it because five tourists had recently been killed in a freak accident. They still hadn't taken down any of the advertising for the "Scenic and safe float over Yangshuo". During all this lethargy I think we annoyed the hell out of our hostel staff - at about 3am one night after a bottle of wine and a few DVDs I tried to steal my own bag from behind the reception desk so we could draw a penis on the face of a sleeping Henrik with a permanent marker (apologies to any older relatives who'd assumed I'd grown into a mature person by now). It was only then that I realised the staff actually sleep behind the reception desk.
In Kunming I celebrated the six month anniversary of my slow crawl across a small fraction of southern Asia and used the occasion for a reflection of what I'm really doing here. Figuring out who I am and where I'm going all while enjoying the spoils of my previous life in a new setting is certainly a big part of it, but so is trying to read all the major science fiction novels written between 1958 and 1972. So far I've learnt that I'm neither completely introverted nor completely extroverted. I suppose I'm an extrovert on the outside with a gooey core of introversion. In some places I've noticed a bad tendency for me to see the exterior world as merely a distraction from all the interesting stuff going on in my head or a book, but with my recent foray into the hostel circuit I feel myself getting energised by meeting people and forming groups and inciting parties like a social Prometheus (with similar consequences for my liver). All in all though, like life itself, my trip really has no purpose. When once I got stressed out if I didn't see everything there is to see in a place I've now lost all qualms about just doing nothing for a day.
Kunming is like many other cities in China, where the technological future has crashed landed into a traditional community like an alien spacecraft brought down by an RPG, remnants of old buildings and cultures crawling pathetically out from under the wreckage. Despite this the streets are clean, with normal and recycling bins spaced every 50m, the signs and announcements often bilingual although charmingly Chinglish, and immaculately well thought out urban planning creates elegant public squares and integrated public transport. They still haven't dealt with the rampant spitting though. I've also noticed, much to my annoyance, that the swarm of motorbikes in Vietnam was transformed into a sedate river of cars as I crossed the border into China, but this is offset by the profusion of top-brand mountain bikes replete with hydraulic disc brakes (a thorough brake pad search proved that none would have suited my bike, much to my relief).
The following evening I, Paivi and a Canadian girl called Lauren took the sleeper train to the touristy hillside town of Dali, the main attraction of which was a tall glass of hot brandy chocolate, a ferry ride that proved to be frice as expensive as we'd been willing to pay and so didn't, and a chance to get up to Hadrian in my History of Rome podcast. However, an unsung charm of Dali was the curiously Melbourne-like weather (or at least pre-1995 Melbourne weather). Occasional gusts of warm wind interspersed with fronts of cold drizzle presaging an afternoon of sunniness and thunderstorms.
The next day we headed up hill to the northern Yunnan town of 'Shangri-La' at the beginning of the Himalayas, both a flagrant abuse of a fictional utopia and an epic place to be for people who like looking at mountains. I nearly fell out of my seat and then out of the bus as the first of the towering snow capped mountains reared into view. This was exacerbated by a small child trying to throw up on me from the seat behind (on my trip I've been shat on, pissed on and thrown up on several times by small local travellers - usually on buses so crowded the kids have to be distributed evenly to all available knees).
'Shangri-La' (from now on I'll call it Zongdian - its pre-money-spinner name) is really cold. It sits at 3200m above sea level and on one morning snowed heavily. None of the hostels provide heating so everyone had to sleep with all their clothes on. After a day of sipping hot plum wine and tentatively getting a view from a small local hill Paivi and I booked a day hike up a proper mountain near the town. Unfortunately, I was determined to try some yak meat for dinner the night before and felt like throwing up the whole of the next day. In the morning we stopped off at our guide's Tibetan family home for some... yak milk tea. It was so disgusting I almost explosively redecorated the interior of their spartan living room.
The hike itself was a beautiful and eerie icy wonderland, snowing the whole time. Our trip was supposed to take us to the top of a 4200m altitude mountain but we stopped 200m short because our guide was 'cold' and made a fire instead. Failed again to exceed my top land altitude at Gunung Kerinci in Sumatra.
Our descent marked the beginning of my ridiculous double back track across southern China to get my pack previously sent to Hong Kong and return to within hours of Zongdian to cross into Nepal for some real altitude. Stay tuned for the next episode: Felix in Tibet.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Mud
The worst thing about cycle touring is that there's so much that can go wrong. When backpacking or bushwalking the worst that can happen is you miss your bus, or your legs get tired or you contract syphilis. When cycle touring you've got to watch out for your tires being pumped, the gears to be aligned, the drive chain not worn, the seat position to be correct, your brakes to stop you (but not all the time), your knees to work properly, your physical condition to be not exhausted, your spokes tuned, your bike not to be on fire and for you to be heading in the right direction. And you have to be aware of all of these all of the time.
That's what the first few days of my time in Ha Noi was all about. I got my pannier rack welded back together, gave my drive train a general service and allowed my left knee some rest before the next stage of the ride. But before I could head off I had to wait for my Chinese visa to be granted and my spare brake pads to arrive from Australia.
Some of this time was spent in the hill town of Sapa. I took the long and scenic day train and mini bus to arrive at a viewtastic hotel room. Walking around town the next day I encountered an official demanding to see a ticket. "What for?" I asked. "Tourist Mountain" was the response. 'Tourist Mountain'. Who goes to a place with a name like that?
I was tempted to climb Mount Fansipan - a REAL mountain, and the highest in Vietnam - but my twin excuses of a sore knee and terrible visibility forced me to wuss out. Plus my friend Tom has climbed it so I knew it couldn't be much of a challenge. Instead I went on a two day guided trek along a rice-paddied valley. Nice as it was, my group soon discovered that our tour guide was actually rushing through interesting river beds, rice paddies and local villages in order to get to our home-stay so she could watch a Korean soap opera on TV.
Despite this annoyance I had an excellent time. My small trekking group met up with a bunch of other groups and proceeded to ensconce ourselves in a Big Night involving copious beerings and the ever popular game of 'I Never' which quickly got out of hand, as it's supposed to. One other advantage of the trek was being given a first-class sleeper train ticket back to Ha Noi by a generous American who had decided to go to Laos instead. It was luxury. I felt so American.
Back in Ha Noi I discovered that the backackers' I was staying at had morphed into a construction site while I was away and the constant drone of jackhammers chipped away at my sanity. Still waiting for my Chinese visa and spare brake pads I occupied my time by searching for the internet cafe where I'd left my camera, agonising over whether or not it was worth getting up early to see the embalmed body of Ho Chi Minh and trying desperately to get to what eventually turned out to be the world's worst river-front.
On the plus side, being surrounded by tourists I honed my new-found skill of being able to pick from their accents which V-Line district Australian tourists grew up in (it's safe to assume that any Australian tourist here is Victorian). Oh, and also showing off my Vietnamese language skills: if you bargain with a local by hurling out numbers the tourists around you think you're speaking fluently.
I also bumped into my old friend Mel from Laos. The last I'd heard of her she'd got some sort of flesh wound on her leg and a local witch-doctor had treated her by blowing dust on the affected area, the healing of which she had boasted about endlessly. The post script of this story turned out to be that her leg got infected and she had to see a real doctor.
Finally, after several days of being told it would be ready tomorrow, my Chinese visa arrived. I decided to abandon my spare brake pads and beer magazine being sent to me by my old housemate Tim. This would not end well. A brief stop off at the post office to send the bulk of my luggage on to Hong Kong and my hotel key back to Sapa (whoops!), and I was away. Following the coast towards China.
The first day of the ride was like most first days cycle touring: pretty uninteresting. I very gradually extracted myself from the extenuated suburbs of Ha Noi and clung desperately to the feebly offered hand of the wilderness - a hand that would later grab me and refuse to let go. An eerie sight presented itself in this awkward interface: a modern township that had been completely abandoned with the roads ripped up and given to pastures. Couldn't get my head around it. Ironically, I saw there was a storm coming and so found a hotel early in the afternoon to avoid it. This storm was to last for the rest of my trip.
The next morning saw me riding off into the maelstrom towards Halong Bay, which started as gentle rain and soon became a torrential downpour. It was lucky that the hotel staff at my last stop had generously built a mudguard for my bike (they're like that, the Vietnamese) or I would've had to ride the whole way with my eyes shut.
Halong, the town at Halong Bay, was a pretty dead town - in both senses of the term. Half-constructed dripping skyscrapers and empty streets soaked with rain. My hotel was quite nice, with a viewy balcony, but it suffered from having a terrible mouse problem: after a few half-sleeping hours of battling it over control of my left-over food it eventually took the offensive and attacked my hair (presumed to be the enemy's high command). When I tried to complain about this to the young receptionist in the morning she thought I wanted to exchange email addresses ('a mouse', 'emails' - same same). I eventually gave up and went along with it to prevent embarrassment. Bad move.
Halong Bay was amazing. Very rainy and foggy, but very awesome. It was like global warming had flooded Pandora (yes, this country reminds me of Avatar a lot). Thousands and thousands of densely vegetated karsts jutting vertically from the ocean. Initially I was annoyed that I could only get a four hour boat tour, but it soon became apparent that a pair of rich Koreans had bribed the tour operator to give us all eight hours. To keep my schedule I ended up having to ride to the next town into the night to the point where finding a hotel became a desperation. I eventually found one in the guise of a decaying block of Soviet-style flats.
The next few days got worse and worse. I initially rode 20 kms along an island that, contrary to my map, turned out not to be connected to the mainland at both ends, forcing a long and dispiriting backtrack. To make matters worse, the mainland road I had to take, the highway, became mud within a few kilometres. Although there's humour in every situation. Every now and then a crazy dog would rush out onto the road and bark at me. It got so muddy here that one dog couldn't stop itself and slid straight into my rear spokes, nearly toppling my whole bike. I laughed for kilometers.
After cycling consistently for a few weeks you tend to extend your nervous system beyond your biological body and into the machine you rely on for transport (nerds: yes, just like in Neon Genesis Evangelion - but without having to fight alien monsters). Every clicking sound, grinding feel, oily smell, loose sight and greasy... taste... is part of your sense of self and problems with these are equivalent to pain. Getting off this beautiful and well-roaded island I suddenly sensed what I'd been dreading: the metallic scraping sound of naked disc brake. My rear brake had worn through and I'd have to remove it.
Still, I had my front brake - two is just for redundancy right? Well, riding along this muddy, rocky, wet, winding, undulating highway I needed all the braking power I could get my hands on. Typical of Vietnamese road-building, they first tear up the old road, then wait five years for the paperwork to come through, then slowly start work on the new road. And the traffic! Huge Chinese freight trucks passing back and forth, sometimes getting bogged in the up to 300mm deep mud ruts and occasionally backing up for hundreds of metres at a bottleneck. If I could stay on the road when they went past they would spray a thick waterfall of mud at me. Although I knew it was futile I would still have my bike cleaned in every town, just to give my gritty chain a few metres' rest. I was a mess. But in the midst of all this, one Chinese truck driver gave me an enthusiastic thumbs up, as if to say "Hey - that's cool!" - it was a welcome revelation that however bad things got here, nothing could detract from that.
However, the next day really sunk the boot it. My front brake wore through. This was the one that had had plenty of wear left in Ha Noi - the abrasive mud scourers all. I was forced to hobble the next 80 kilometres with no braking ability whatsoever, suffering the shame of walking my bike down the hills (for those not used to dealing with hydraulic disc brakes - the pads are practically unique). My aim: Mon Cai on the Chinese border - the only real population centre for the 200 kilometres of this jungle-encroached 'road'.
Thankfully, the knowledge that there was no way I could continue riding to Hong Kong released me from all my worries about my bike, the constant driving rain and the road conditions: I became happier than I'd been in days and was suddenly able to enjoy my surroundings - and they were amazing! I eventually rolled into Mon Cai to the tuneful screeching of my front brakes (they seem to clamp shut when worn through) where I found a hotel that allowed me to take my bike onto the balcony. I cleaned and repaired it one day and posted it the next. The destination: Nepal. The only place I knew I would be in the next few months. The postage cost $370.
On the other hand, I was now a backpacker again and welcome to rejoin polite society. Although, as I walked across the border into China, I realised that I was more accurately a 'pannier-er', and those things are pretty damn hard to carry around.
Oh yes, and those spare brake pads? They'd arrived in Ha Noi two days after I'd left.
That's what the first few days of my time in Ha Noi was all about. I got my pannier rack welded back together, gave my drive train a general service and allowed my left knee some rest before the next stage of the ride. But before I could head off I had to wait for my Chinese visa to be granted and my spare brake pads to arrive from Australia.
Some of this time was spent in the hill town of Sapa. I took the long and scenic day train and mini bus to arrive at a viewtastic hotel room. Walking around town the next day I encountered an official demanding to see a ticket. "What for?" I asked. "Tourist Mountain" was the response. 'Tourist Mountain'. Who goes to a place with a name like that?
I was tempted to climb Mount Fansipan - a REAL mountain, and the highest in Vietnam - but my twin excuses of a sore knee and terrible visibility forced me to wuss out. Plus my friend Tom has climbed it so I knew it couldn't be much of a challenge. Instead I went on a two day guided trek along a rice-paddied valley. Nice as it was, my group soon discovered that our tour guide was actually rushing through interesting river beds, rice paddies and local villages in order to get to our home-stay so she could watch a Korean soap opera on TV.
Despite this annoyance I had an excellent time. My small trekking group met up with a bunch of other groups and proceeded to ensconce ourselves in a Big Night involving copious beerings and the ever popular game of 'I Never' which quickly got out of hand, as it's supposed to. One other advantage of the trek was being given a first-class sleeper train ticket back to Ha Noi by a generous American who had decided to go to Laos instead. It was luxury. I felt so American.
Back in Ha Noi I discovered that the backackers' I was staying at had morphed into a construction site while I was away and the constant drone of jackhammers chipped away at my sanity. Still waiting for my Chinese visa and spare brake pads I occupied my time by searching for the internet cafe where I'd left my camera, agonising over whether or not it was worth getting up early to see the embalmed body of Ho Chi Minh and trying desperately to get to what eventually turned out to be the world's worst river-front.
On the plus side, being surrounded by tourists I honed my new-found skill of being able to pick from their accents which V-Line district Australian tourists grew up in (it's safe to assume that any Australian tourist here is Victorian). Oh, and also showing off my Vietnamese language skills: if you bargain with a local by hurling out numbers the tourists around you think you're speaking fluently.
I also bumped into my old friend Mel from Laos. The last I'd heard of her she'd got some sort of flesh wound on her leg and a local witch-doctor had treated her by blowing dust on the affected area, the healing of which she had boasted about endlessly. The post script of this story turned out to be that her leg got infected and she had to see a real doctor.
Finally, after several days of being told it would be ready tomorrow, my Chinese visa arrived. I decided to abandon my spare brake pads and beer magazine being sent to me by my old housemate Tim. This would not end well. A brief stop off at the post office to send the bulk of my luggage on to Hong Kong and my hotel key back to Sapa (whoops!), and I was away. Following the coast towards China.
The first day of the ride was like most first days cycle touring: pretty uninteresting. I very gradually extracted myself from the extenuated suburbs of Ha Noi and clung desperately to the feebly offered hand of the wilderness - a hand that would later grab me and refuse to let go. An eerie sight presented itself in this awkward interface: a modern township that had been completely abandoned with the roads ripped up and given to pastures. Couldn't get my head around it. Ironically, I saw there was a storm coming and so found a hotel early in the afternoon to avoid it. This storm was to last for the rest of my trip.
The next morning saw me riding off into the maelstrom towards Halong Bay, which started as gentle rain and soon became a torrential downpour. It was lucky that the hotel staff at my last stop had generously built a mudguard for my bike (they're like that, the Vietnamese) or I would've had to ride the whole way with my eyes shut.
Halong, the town at Halong Bay, was a pretty dead town - in both senses of the term. Half-constructed dripping skyscrapers and empty streets soaked with rain. My hotel was quite nice, with a viewy balcony, but it suffered from having a terrible mouse problem: after a few half-sleeping hours of battling it over control of my left-over food it eventually took the offensive and attacked my hair (presumed to be the enemy's high command). When I tried to complain about this to the young receptionist in the morning she thought I wanted to exchange email addresses ('a mouse', 'emails' - same same). I eventually gave up and went along with it to prevent embarrassment. Bad move.
Halong Bay was amazing. Very rainy and foggy, but very awesome. It was like global warming had flooded Pandora (yes, this country reminds me of Avatar a lot). Thousands and thousands of densely vegetated karsts jutting vertically from the ocean. Initially I was annoyed that I could only get a four hour boat tour, but it soon became apparent that a pair of rich Koreans had bribed the tour operator to give us all eight hours. To keep my schedule I ended up having to ride to the next town into the night to the point where finding a hotel became a desperation. I eventually found one in the guise of a decaying block of Soviet-style flats.
The next few days got worse and worse. I initially rode 20 kms along an island that, contrary to my map, turned out not to be connected to the mainland at both ends, forcing a long and dispiriting backtrack. To make matters worse, the mainland road I had to take, the highway, became mud within a few kilometres. Although there's humour in every situation. Every now and then a crazy dog would rush out onto the road and bark at me. It got so muddy here that one dog couldn't stop itself and slid straight into my rear spokes, nearly toppling my whole bike. I laughed for kilometers.
After cycling consistently for a few weeks you tend to extend your nervous system beyond your biological body and into the machine you rely on for transport (nerds: yes, just like in Neon Genesis Evangelion - but without having to fight alien monsters). Every clicking sound, grinding feel, oily smell, loose sight and greasy... taste... is part of your sense of self and problems with these are equivalent to pain. Getting off this beautiful and well-roaded island I suddenly sensed what I'd been dreading: the metallic scraping sound of naked disc brake. My rear brake had worn through and I'd have to remove it.
Still, I had my front brake - two is just for redundancy right? Well, riding along this muddy, rocky, wet, winding, undulating highway I needed all the braking power I could get my hands on. Typical of Vietnamese road-building, they first tear up the old road, then wait five years for the paperwork to come through, then slowly start work on the new road. And the traffic! Huge Chinese freight trucks passing back and forth, sometimes getting bogged in the up to 300mm deep mud ruts and occasionally backing up for hundreds of metres at a bottleneck. If I could stay on the road when they went past they would spray a thick waterfall of mud at me. Although I knew it was futile I would still have my bike cleaned in every town, just to give my gritty chain a few metres' rest. I was a mess. But in the midst of all this, one Chinese truck driver gave me an enthusiastic thumbs up, as if to say "Hey - that's cool!" - it was a welcome revelation that however bad things got here, nothing could detract from that.
However, the next day really sunk the boot it. My front brake wore through. This was the one that had had plenty of wear left in Ha Noi - the abrasive mud scourers all. I was forced to hobble the next 80 kilometres with no braking ability whatsoever, suffering the shame of walking my bike down the hills (for those not used to dealing with hydraulic disc brakes - the pads are practically unique). My aim: Mon Cai on the Chinese border - the only real population centre for the 200 kilometres of this jungle-encroached 'road'.
Thankfully, the knowledge that there was no way I could continue riding to Hong Kong released me from all my worries about my bike, the constant driving rain and the road conditions: I became happier than I'd been in days and was suddenly able to enjoy my surroundings - and they were amazing! I eventually rolled into Mon Cai to the tuneful screeching of my front brakes (they seem to clamp shut when worn through) where I found a hotel that allowed me to take my bike onto the balcony. I cleaned and repaired it one day and posted it the next. The destination: Nepal. The only place I knew I would be in the next few months. The postage cost $370.
On the other hand, I was now a backpacker again and welcome to rejoin polite society. Although, as I walked across the border into China, I realised that I was more accurately a 'pannier-er', and those things are pretty damn hard to carry around.
Oh yes, and those spare brake pads? They'd arrived in Ha Noi two days after I'd left.
Friday, April 9, 2010
The Solo Tour
I spread out the tear over my cheek so it would dry faster. I'd just seen the backs of my four cycling comrades anonymising amongst the railway crowds. From now on, I was alone.
Getting back to my hotel the first thing I did was consume an evening meal consisting entirely of a can of stout, a litre of milk and a kilo of chocolate ice-cream while I watched a chick-flick marathon on HBO (that's the sort of stuff I wouldn't be getting away with in a pack of guys... well maybe the stout).
There was one thing keeping me in Hue: my camera. I think now is as good a time as any to indulge myself in the tale of my camera's quest to stay alive. For the first month of its existence in my possession the memory card refused to fully recognise its union with the hardware until I gave up and bought a new card. Clearly in retribution for all this stuffing up I began to treat it badly. Firstly, I crashed my bike with it on the road to Dam Rong, filling it with dirt and breaking the battery cover. Then in Da Nang I dropped it onto concrete, bending the extended zoom to comically resemble the leaning tower of Pisa.
As it happens, my camera was still not quite destroyed: it could be rebuilt - we had the technology. I Found a guy near the station to repair it and he finally showed me the result after two days, several attempts and $15 (the distended but still operating camera channeled Robocop 2) during which time I had been cycling around to the sights of Hue (the best way to see a city is to get lost and then try to get home again). When I finally got it back I was too nervous to use it for a few days - and sure enough, the auto-focus cog had disengaged. Magically, it clawed back to life after a bit of tinkering and so far continues in that state. As an addendum, in Ha Noi a couple of weeks later I left it at an internet cafe for two days. After searching for hours for the establishment's location I discovered they'd kept it for me all that time. The battered camera limps on to this day.
The first couple of days of my solo tour have been blanked out of my memory - the most fascinating thing about them was that they were so boring, riding along the shoulder of Highway One for hundreds of kilometres with nothing much to look at. But when you're riding solo you do get into an interesting state of mind - you lose yourself in your thoughts, and your emotions are free to spin off unchecked by people or activities. Alone with the Universe. And 90 million Vietnamese.
On the ride I started to categorise the Vietnamese responses to my presence, it being so much more overt than when riding in a group. There's the stunned staring; the polite "Hello?"s (you have to reply in exactly the same tone or they won't understand you); the uncontrolled laughter - probably by people who think Westerners only come in packs of tourist bus; the stop-what-you're-doing-and-look-confused look (a personal favourite); school boys clapping each others' backs and laughing haughtily when they get a response, coupled with school girls collapsing in embarrassed giggles; the dreaded "Hey!" which strongly resembles the 'Hey' as in "Hey! You're pannier's fallen off!/You're bike's snapped in half!/You're heading towards a tsunami!" but instead intended to mean "Hey! You're white!"; and finally, the worst of all (other than not getting a response in the game 'Hey Cow'), the delayed 'Hello' - you can see it on their faces: they're stunned for a minute, then they chase after you shouting... but you're too far ahead to respond easily and have to choose between being rude and straining your neck. Always the former. They had their chance.
As the days went on I got so into the rhythm of cycling I lost interest in stopping during the day, pretty much at all. When I was with the others we'd find any excuse to rest for an hour, drink coffees and talk crap. But on my own there's only the prospect of language wrestling with curious onlookers, asking the same questions they always do, to entice me to put on the brakes.
Also, the true extent of my stinginess came out, not in money, but in conservation of momentum: with heavy panniers it takes some time slowly accelerating up to full speed and I didn't want to waste that. I'd ride for up to 70 kilometres in three hours or so without even slowing down. Combine this with 6am starts and you go a long way, on many days up to 150 kilometres.
Finally, I reached the seaside resort of Dong Hoi and parked myself in a hotel with a balcony overlooking the beach. It being a hot day I went for a swim, losing my one good (Caucasian-skin-coloured and hence sand-coloured) knee brace in the process. This would have later consequences. Afterwards I went for a meal, that, like most meals cycle touring, didn't quite satisfy, so I went elsewhere for another.
Do you ever get that fear in restaurants that don't have prices on their menus that when the waiter produces the bill it's for 3 trillion dollars? "But that's more than Brazil's GDP!" You protest. "I'm sorry sir," he replies, "But we are an exclusive restaurant, I do hope you enjoyed your meal. We have a no refund through regurgitation policy of course, but most customers prefer to pay it off as a loan." So there you are having to quickly build a drug and arms empire from the ground up to raise the $7 billion a month interest repayments until you get enough capital to finance the extrusion of a space elevator and mine the asteroids (actually that sounds kind of fun).
Well that's (sort of) similar to what happened at this place. The first restaurant charged 15,000 dong (reasonable), the second 180,000 (unreasonable) with barely anything to distinguish them and served on plastic chairs outside a garage on the street. It was like paying $200 for a pub parma. It's the only time I've considered doing a runner, but my bike was in the guy's garage (conveniently). This put me in a bad mood for most of the next day.
This mood was finally broken when I intruded inland and almost instantly found myself surrounded by the most epic karst mountains I've ever seen - here I stopped every two minutes to photograph them (see them on Flickr!). They emerged majestically from a sea of mist, like when you watch Avatar standing on your head. Tragically, most were in the process of being dismantled for their limestone, so I'd check them out before they're all leveled (challenge: can humanity flatten the earth faster than it's uplifted?).
A few days of clemently overcast weather allowed me to cover even greater distances by removing the need to seek shade during the heat of the day. I still had to have lunch though, and one thing about lunch in central Vietnam is that it invariably involves a lot of rice-wine. For nearly a week I had shots forcefully offered to me by groups of drunk men, while their women-folk looked on shaking their heads in shame. Does the male half of Vietnam contribute anything to its economy? And rice-wine is such an inefficient drink - you get drunk without the pleasure of drinking.
When the weather cleared for a day I made an error of judgement. The previous night I'd been up at all hours finishing off Jane Austen's 'Emma' (which I think is the best Austen novel, and I've read most of them now - it really gets the reader into Emma's head), and so the next morning I foolishly drank a Thai Red Bull to compensate (far more potent than the western rip-off). This had the effect of making me deliriously happy, like most energy drinks, and I spent the day listening to Fat Boy Slim on my ipod as I rode through iron-age villages and around buffalo-ploughed rice paddies - safely, the only other traffic on the road was other cyclists.
When school finished at lunchtime (the rotters), all the kids were out on their bikes and, as usual, wanted to race me up the hills. This time, high on Red Bull and House Music, I took up the challenge and left them and their un-panniered bikes in the dust... but wrecked my newly unbraced left knee in the process, forcing me to hobble up to Ha Noi very carefully for the next three days and ruining my dreams of cycling to the hill town of Sapa. It is STILL recovering.
At last I reached Ha Noi and was congratulated by the Australian owners of my backpackers with a free beer. I'd ridden 1,980 kilometres in 28 days. Suddenly I was thrust back into touristland, meeting an Australian buddy I met in Laos, and Kye and Emma from the Mekong Delta Tour. Waiting around for my knee to repair, for my spare brake pads to arrive from Australia and for the Chinese bureaucracy to grant me a visa, I began to realise that I have an inner need for progress, and without the tangible experience of knocking off kilometres on a map I feel like I'm wasting my life. I had to get back on my bike...
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Bikes in 'Nam
Ah Vietnam. The longest, spindliest country of all (after a few more earthquakes in Chile that is). It looks like an interplanetary spacecraft, divided into two halves and spun on a linking thread to provide artificial gravity. Alternatively, it resembles someone spooning Laos and Cambodia, which also conveniently resembles its cultural relationship with those two countries.
After finding my Melbournian buddies Dave, Nathan and Morley coming from the Ho Chi Minh City Airport with their bags and bikes we heading off on a Mekong Delta tour to Can Tho. Here we learned that the three letter acronym of our tour company which I forgot a moment before I heard it is supposedly easy to remember and that the reason Vietnamese families are so large is because couples struggle to invent activities under the mosquito net whose outcomes don't involve the manufacture of more Vietnamese.
Here we met a charming Australian couple named Kye and Emma who were to reapperate to me later on like cockroaches swatted with an inadequately wordy paperback novel, as do so many of my other traveling acquaintances (hi guys!).
It was in Can Tho that I finally lost my beloved sun hat to the pleading whimpers of a small drunken mob. But that was not to deter me from enjoying the lengthy explanations of which construction companies had been responsible for the numerous cable-stayed bridges of the region and how whilst coconut sweets are "Very good for ladies", banana wine (read: undrinkable rice-wine with a slight banana taste) is very good for men. That took some experimentation but proved false.
Once we were safely back in Ho Chi Minh City we were met by Phil, fresh from his move from Saigon to Singapore, who was keen to introduce us to the cultural wonders of southern Vietnam, such as his former workmates, wild nights on the town, supposedly non-dodgy massage parlours and the delights of eating turtle.
Once these important cultural introductions had taken place it was time to get into the serious business of acquiring and reconstructing our various bikes from airport luggage, a Saigon bike hire business and cold storage respectively. Possibly unwisely, Phil and I had decided to head to Phil's friend's house which had been harbouring my precious mode of transport (after Phil had graciously taken my bike to Vietnam from Australia months ago in preparation for this ride) having consumed several beers over our long reptilian lunch. The first result was a sever cross-threading of the crank where one of the pedals was attached, and the second was my pedal actually falling off into busy highway traffic on our ride back into town, forcing me to use my remaining usable cleat with abandon to one-leggedly power my bike home.
After a brief flurry of excitement in which Dave and I went to the post office to post our unnecessary luggage for our respective year-long trips to our future-selves in Hanoi (it's quite hard to translate that concept into Vietnamese), we were off to the only serious bike shop in Vietnam to collect Dave's bike and fix mine - as it turned out the proprietor was a practicing Melbournian construction engineer looking for recruits. But the next day we were on our way.
The first stage of our epic cycle sojourn across Vietnam involved the necessary four hours of faffing around revisiting the post-office and having an emergency bike shop stop but...
...Suddenly the five of us found ourselves hurtling irrevocably north towards the ambitious (too ambitious as it turned out) destination of Hanoi. The first few days went fairly well with no major incidents so I'll skip through them quickly: the first day was mainly about traffic getting out of Ho Chi Minh City; the second day was a lot nicer - following the shoulder of Highway One to the coastal town of Phan Thiet where we were embroiled in the trip's only real argument (concerning wake-up times - the party representing the least flexible sleeping schedule inevitably prevailed over that of the most); the third day was much more scenic with views of giant wind-turbines, rice paddies and coastal mountain ranges; and on the fourth day we rested.
The most exciting activity of that day, which chiefly involved sleeping, eating, train spotting and mucking around in the ocean behind our faded 60's beach motel, was spectating for a giant crab which had escaped from a restaurant and was making a desperate bid for freedom by crossing the highway to the sea: we were all half hoping it would make it and half excited by the prospects of it getting squished by a truck. It got squished.
The next day we pelted along the scenic coastal road to Phan Rhang, where we immediately set to work faffing it up to 90's classic tunes from the west, which the Vietnamese seem to always play whenever we turn up somewhere, and surfing the web for a few hours. We then headed inland for the beginning of our epic ride up to Da Lat, which was tempered only by us being rejected by the town right at the bottom of the climb, forcing us to backtrack 10 kms to a town with a guest house.
The 1500m climb up to the French-Alps inspired Da Lat was grueling but satisfying, apart from the 30 kms of dusty road works Phil reckons has been on the go for over three years. The town itself was very picturesque, but we spent most of the rest day sleeping off the ride up, visiting the market for snacks and, in my case, enduring the irritation of Phil's new discovery that my Vietnamese after two weeks in the country is of a slightly lower standard than his after two years (grr...).
However, the next day is when the real action began. It began with me throwing up in the basin after a combination of ill-timed malaria tablet consumption and a beery previous night. This was to be a foretaste of the future.
The ride down from Da Lat was a beautifully scenic sojourn around dams and through pine forests on a quiet newly sealed five star highway. This was to end abruptly at the bottom of the climb to 1812m where it became a rocky unsealed dirt track, during which the only surcease to our struggle was a spot of tea with the park rangers (all their other activities seemed to involve large amounts of whiskey). We celebrated our success at the maximum elevation with 'Rum on the Hill', but no cannon-fire.
The ride down though. That was something. We all hurtled along the dusty, rocky and occasionally muddy track towards our destination: a town aptly named Dam Rong. The views were spectacular: we were mostly riding through thick tropical rain-forest often broken by views of the surrounding mountains and mountain villages. Here I made a foolish mistake: I was using my camera to video the others on their descent by riding one-handed and overtaking them. After the easy success of the first video I upped the ante with a faster one. This inevitably led to me skidding into a turn and seriously grazing my elbow, snapping a tube on my pannier rack and breaking open my camera filling it with dirt.
Luckily Nathan did such a good job of patching me up that my wounds didn't get infected, and I managed to turn my camera on and off enough times that it started working again.
The rest of the day just got wilder. After clearly missing the 'correct' road we found ourselves being directed down a steep single-track (often meeting the criteria for a creek) through the forest that had us all silently contemplating a scenario of spending an untented night in the bush.
After many hours we suddenly found ourselves on a sealed road at Dam Rong, just as the sun set. Little realising that our troubles were only just beginning.
After three hours of hot discussion between our guest house and the police, which in Vietnam must okay all requests for anyone to sleep anywhere at all, we were politely informed that not only were we not welcome in the town, but we had to leave the entire ward those cops patrolled. Immediately. No reason was given (although they might as well have just said 'Communism').
This proved to be a difficult directive to follow because the only road out of town was blocked by a river crossing for which the ferry does not run during the night. Luckily my clearly visible Christian piety must have shone through like a beacon to the assembled masses who'd come to gawk at the white guys vs cops battle of wills as we were offered clandestine lodging at the local church. This turned out to be a real coup with the place being extremely comfortable and the priests all too generous.
Thinking that my troubles were over I and the others continued on our way the next day, but I was getting a head-ache (initially thought to be due to my massive stack) that got worse all day, and the sun was unrelenting throughout the undulating 70 km journey. When we got to a hotel in Lien Son I'd attained a new height of weakness and soon began throwing up. I'm going to skip the detail of how I vomited in the basin, which, like all Vietnamese plumbing, feeds directly onto the floor, causing my spew to clog the drain unnoticed while I had a shower - flooding the entire hotel room with spew water. That would sicken my gentle readers.
After a terrible fitful night sleep during which I continued to instantly regurgitate every mil of water or gram of food I took it became apparent that I'd be on the bus the next day. Thinking it was all over in the regional capital of Buon Ma Thuot I found that I still could not keep liquids (or solids) down and so the only recourse was to visit the local hospital. Here a lack of English skills was no impediment to getting on a saline drip for a few hours (extreme thanks going to Phil for his bedside patience and, *cough*, Vietnamese skills during this time) which seemed to completely cure me (not bad for $10!). This leads me to believe that I was suffering from dehydration.
The following day we kept the ride up, ending at a hostel watching 'Fool's Gold' on HBO with the rest of the rum. But the day after that we came to the conclusion that (partly due to my hospital day) we were one day behind schedule and needed to take the bus a few ks north to Kon Tum (but I'll gloss over that part in the hope no-one was paying attention). This riverside town proved a hit with the beering-it-up part of our brains, although the movie 'Marley and Me' was complete flop with the movie-appreciation part of our brains.
The next few days got steadily more scenic as we rode along ridge-lines, flood plains and river valleys on the Laos side of Vietnam. This culminated in the awesomest terrain ever during the day Phil retired to Danang to have a 'pussy infection', *snigger*, the size of a golf ball doctored up, clearly resulting from some impious remark to the Gods he must have made (or maybe they're just mean).
This day involved three climbs, each more awesome than the last, poking us well up into the clouds to soak in the rain we'd been missing for the last two weeks. Waterfalls, jungle, slippery roads - we had it all. We were so pumped from the ride - pretty much 10% grade all day - that at lunch, where we'd planned to spend the night, we made a go for the next town 50 kms down the road: a tangle of dam building construction activity and tiny village streets, crossing major rivers and negotiating small farms. Universally acclaimed as the best day of the trip (Phil abstaining).
After that it was an easy matter of spending the next two days hitting the tourist town of Hoi An where Phil rejoined us, destroying my camera at Da Nang whilst trying to photograph a ship beached along an uncanny Beaconsfield Parade imitation and negotiating tunnel tollers for safe passage for our bicycles before arriving at our updated destination of Hue. We'd cycled 1100 kms as a group in 18 days.
A morning of cyclo-sight-seeing presaged our somber separation, where my fellow cyclists took the train to Hanoi. From there Nathan and Morley headed home (they avoided the Tulla's outrageous airport shuttle fare by, brilliantly, riding their bikes), Phil flew back to Singapore to start his new life there and Dave, well, the last I've heard of him he'd crossed the border into China by the thinnest of visa margins (and has been popping on and off Google Chat's online list since then).
As for myself, I was to continue in my epic quest to get to Hanoi by one of the slowest methods possible (barring lip-crawling). But that's another story...
After finding my Melbournian buddies Dave, Nathan and Morley coming from the Ho Chi Minh City Airport with their bags and bikes we heading off on a Mekong Delta tour to Can Tho. Here we learned that the three letter acronym of our tour company which I forgot a moment before I heard it is supposedly easy to remember and that the reason Vietnamese families are so large is because couples struggle to invent activities under the mosquito net whose outcomes don't involve the manufacture of more Vietnamese.
Here we met a charming Australian couple named Kye and Emma who were to reapperate to me later on like cockroaches swatted with an inadequately wordy paperback novel, as do so many of my other traveling acquaintances (hi guys!).
It was in Can Tho that I finally lost my beloved sun hat to the pleading whimpers of a small drunken mob. But that was not to deter me from enjoying the lengthy explanations of which construction companies had been responsible for the numerous cable-stayed bridges of the region and how whilst coconut sweets are "Very good for ladies", banana wine (read: undrinkable rice-wine with a slight banana taste) is very good for men. That took some experimentation but proved false.
Once we were safely back in Ho Chi Minh City we were met by Phil, fresh from his move from Saigon to Singapore, who was keen to introduce us to the cultural wonders of southern Vietnam, such as his former workmates, wild nights on the town, supposedly non-dodgy massage parlours and the delights of eating turtle.
Once these important cultural introductions had taken place it was time to get into the serious business of acquiring and reconstructing our various bikes from airport luggage, a Saigon bike hire business and cold storage respectively. Possibly unwisely, Phil and I had decided to head to Phil's friend's house which had been harbouring my precious mode of transport (after Phil had graciously taken my bike to Vietnam from Australia months ago in preparation for this ride) having consumed several beers over our long reptilian lunch. The first result was a sever cross-threading of the crank where one of the pedals was attached, and the second was my pedal actually falling off into busy highway traffic on our ride back into town, forcing me to use my remaining usable cleat with abandon to one-leggedly power my bike home.
After a brief flurry of excitement in which Dave and I went to the post office to post our unnecessary luggage for our respective year-long trips to our future-selves in Hanoi (it's quite hard to translate that concept into Vietnamese), we were off to the only serious bike shop in Vietnam to collect Dave's bike and fix mine - as it turned out the proprietor was a practicing Melbournian construction engineer looking for recruits. But the next day we were on our way.
The first stage of our epic cycle sojourn across Vietnam involved the necessary four hours of faffing around revisiting the post-office and having an emergency bike shop stop but...
...Suddenly the five of us found ourselves hurtling irrevocably north towards the ambitious (too ambitious as it turned out) destination of Hanoi. The first few days went fairly well with no major incidents so I'll skip through them quickly: the first day was mainly about traffic getting out of Ho Chi Minh City; the second day was a lot nicer - following the shoulder of Highway One to the coastal town of Phan Thiet where we were embroiled in the trip's only real argument (concerning wake-up times - the party representing the least flexible sleeping schedule inevitably prevailed over that of the most); the third day was much more scenic with views of giant wind-turbines, rice paddies and coastal mountain ranges; and on the fourth day we rested.
The most exciting activity of that day, which chiefly involved sleeping, eating, train spotting and mucking around in the ocean behind our faded 60's beach motel, was spectating for a giant crab which had escaped from a restaurant and was making a desperate bid for freedom by crossing the highway to the sea: we were all half hoping it would make it and half excited by the prospects of it getting squished by a truck. It got squished.
The next day we pelted along the scenic coastal road to Phan Rhang, where we immediately set to work faffing it up to 90's classic tunes from the west, which the Vietnamese seem to always play whenever we turn up somewhere, and surfing the web for a few hours. We then headed inland for the beginning of our epic ride up to Da Lat, which was tempered only by us being rejected by the town right at the bottom of the climb, forcing us to backtrack 10 kms to a town with a guest house.
The 1500m climb up to the French-Alps inspired Da Lat was grueling but satisfying, apart from the 30 kms of dusty road works Phil reckons has been on the go for over three years. The town itself was very picturesque, but we spent most of the rest day sleeping off the ride up, visiting the market for snacks and, in my case, enduring the irritation of Phil's new discovery that my Vietnamese after two weeks in the country is of a slightly lower standard than his after two years (grr...).
However, the next day is when the real action began. It began with me throwing up in the basin after a combination of ill-timed malaria tablet consumption and a beery previous night. This was to be a foretaste of the future.
The ride down from Da Lat was a beautifully scenic sojourn around dams and through pine forests on a quiet newly sealed five star highway. This was to end abruptly at the bottom of the climb to 1812m where it became a rocky unsealed dirt track, during which the only surcease to our struggle was a spot of tea with the park rangers (all their other activities seemed to involve large amounts of whiskey). We celebrated our success at the maximum elevation with 'Rum on the Hill', but no cannon-fire.
The ride down though. That was something. We all hurtled along the dusty, rocky and occasionally muddy track towards our destination: a town aptly named Dam Rong. The views were spectacular: we were mostly riding through thick tropical rain-forest often broken by views of the surrounding mountains and mountain villages. Here I made a foolish mistake: I was using my camera to video the others on their descent by riding one-handed and overtaking them. After the easy success of the first video I upped the ante with a faster one. This inevitably led to me skidding into a turn and seriously grazing my elbow, snapping a tube on my pannier rack and breaking open my camera filling it with dirt.
Luckily Nathan did such a good job of patching me up that my wounds didn't get infected, and I managed to turn my camera on and off enough times that it started working again.
The rest of the day just got wilder. After clearly missing the 'correct' road we found ourselves being directed down a steep single-track (often meeting the criteria for a creek) through the forest that had us all silently contemplating a scenario of spending an untented night in the bush.
After many hours we suddenly found ourselves on a sealed road at Dam Rong, just as the sun set. Little realising that our troubles were only just beginning.
After three hours of hot discussion between our guest house and the police, which in Vietnam must okay all requests for anyone to sleep anywhere at all, we were politely informed that not only were we not welcome in the town, but we had to leave the entire ward those cops patrolled. Immediately. No reason was given (although they might as well have just said 'Communism').
This proved to be a difficult directive to follow because the only road out of town was blocked by a river crossing for which the ferry does not run during the night. Luckily my clearly visible Christian piety must have shone through like a beacon to the assembled masses who'd come to gawk at the white guys vs cops battle of wills as we were offered clandestine lodging at the local church. This turned out to be a real coup with the place being extremely comfortable and the priests all too generous.
Thinking that my troubles were over I and the others continued on our way the next day, but I was getting a head-ache (initially thought to be due to my massive stack) that got worse all day, and the sun was unrelenting throughout the undulating 70 km journey. When we got to a hotel in Lien Son I'd attained a new height of weakness and soon began throwing up. I'm going to skip the detail of how I vomited in the basin, which, like all Vietnamese plumbing, feeds directly onto the floor, causing my spew to clog the drain unnoticed while I had a shower - flooding the entire hotel room with spew water. That would sicken my gentle readers.
After a terrible fitful night sleep during which I continued to instantly regurgitate every mil of water or gram of food I took it became apparent that I'd be on the bus the next day. Thinking it was all over in the regional capital of Buon Ma Thuot I found that I still could not keep liquids (or solids) down and so the only recourse was to visit the local hospital. Here a lack of English skills was no impediment to getting on a saline drip for a few hours (extreme thanks going to Phil for his bedside patience and, *cough*, Vietnamese skills during this time) which seemed to completely cure me (not bad for $10!). This leads me to believe that I was suffering from dehydration.
The following day we kept the ride up, ending at a hostel watching 'Fool's Gold' on HBO with the rest of the rum. But the day after that we came to the conclusion that (partly due to my hospital day) we were one day behind schedule and needed to take the bus a few ks north to Kon Tum (but I'll gloss over that part in the hope no-one was paying attention). This riverside town proved a hit with the beering-it-up part of our brains, although the movie 'Marley and Me' was complete flop with the movie-appreciation part of our brains.
The next few days got steadily more scenic as we rode along ridge-lines, flood plains and river valleys on the Laos side of Vietnam. This culminated in the awesomest terrain ever during the day Phil retired to Danang to have a 'pussy infection', *snigger*, the size of a golf ball doctored up, clearly resulting from some impious remark to the Gods he must have made (or maybe they're just mean).
This day involved three climbs, each more awesome than the last, poking us well up into the clouds to soak in the rain we'd been missing for the last two weeks. Waterfalls, jungle, slippery roads - we had it all. We were so pumped from the ride - pretty much 10% grade all day - that at lunch, where we'd planned to spend the night, we made a go for the next town 50 kms down the road: a tangle of dam building construction activity and tiny village streets, crossing major rivers and negotiating small farms. Universally acclaimed as the best day of the trip (Phil abstaining).
After that it was an easy matter of spending the next two days hitting the tourist town of Hoi An where Phil rejoined us, destroying my camera at Da Nang whilst trying to photograph a ship beached along an uncanny Beaconsfield Parade imitation and negotiating tunnel tollers for safe passage for our bicycles before arriving at our updated destination of Hue. We'd cycled 1100 kms as a group in 18 days.
A morning of cyclo-sight-seeing presaged our somber separation, where my fellow cyclists took the train to Hanoi. From there Nathan and Morley headed home (they avoided the Tulla's outrageous airport shuttle fare by, brilliantly, riding their bikes), Phil flew back to Singapore to start his new life there and Dave, well, the last I've heard of him he'd crossed the border into China by the thinnest of visa margins (and has been popping on and off Google Chat's online list since then).
As for myself, I was to continue in my epic quest to get to Hanoi by one of the slowest methods possible (barring lip-crawling). But that's another story...
Saturday, March 13, 2010
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.
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.
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