Bunces in indo-china - Jan-Feb 2012

Great drive with just a driver, the two of us and air con and Muang Khoua turns out unsurprisingly to be a sleepy dusty place at the end of nowhere in north eastern Laos.   Roughish hotel  but still one of the best in town for about $7 a night with internet but no breakfast.   While looking round Muang Khoua for an evening  meal, frankly a waste of time because every menu is the same even as far as the Lao Beer cover we did spot the delicious sounding  ‘One plate of non-glutinous Rice’ for 5000kip (about 60 cents or 50p).   Noodles and vegetables again !  The tourist office has one hand drawn map on the wall as its total information.  This is a place to get out of which we do in the morning.  This time we have a private boat for two days down the river Nam Ou to Luang Prabang.    On the pebble beach we have trauma No.3.  Heather falls but is unhurt apart from a nasty graze on her foot.  The computer fa...

Indo-China 6 Further to the glowing report on the Hanoi hotel.  When we logged onto emails in Laos, there was an email from them thanking us for our stay and hoping we’d had a good flight to Luang Prabang.   So they even remembered that - Amazing . Two rivers meet here at Luang Prabang, the mighty Mekong which is quite wide upstream and the  Nam Ou which flows through a narrower channel with Karst Limestone alongside.  Apparently spectacular and that’s the one we join two days upriver in a few days time.  Long, long minibus north, 10 of us for about 7 hours.   Us, another Brit, 2 Koreans, 1 Dutch guy plus sundry others.    The destination bus station at Luang Namtha  is 11 kilometres out of town and we’re told that this is to make sure that there’s employment for tuk-tuk drivers.   If the buses drop in town people just walk to their hotel.   It’s a very small place and our pre-booked hotel with ...

I have to say that a one hour flight beats a 950km bus ride.    We shared a taxi with two Argentinian Lawyers with the topic of conversation being football as usual.   So only an hour and a half from Saigon to our hotel in Hoi An, centre of the Vietnam made to measure clothes industry.  It seemed like every other shop was at it and to start with most looked as if they were from the 1960’s/70’s with lots of frumpy clothes on offer.    This really is a tourist town but is none the less very attractive. I know I wrote about traffic in Cambodia and it is very similar here in Vietnam.  Traffic is king, more motorbikes than cars, parking usually on the pavement and crossing the street is still ‘just get walking and let it flow around you’.   If our traffic is classical music in a controlled fashion, here it’s just like jazz, a bit of improvisation here and there, rules but only known to the cognoscenti and just like modern jazz ...

After a fruitless search for veggie, Heather has to settle for something with prawns in which she has to pick out of her dinner.   Overnight I have what we all call a ‘tummy upset’ and a temperature so I lay under the air-conditioning fan all night soaking my head every hour or so with cold water.   It gets the temperature down quite well.   At 6.30 we wait for our hotel pick up which comes in the guise of two motorbikes which whip us along to the bus station where the bus is less luxury that we thought and looks suspiciously ‘local’, although we are assured that it is the right bus.  I am feeling a little jaded at this point and we enjoy an 8, not a 5 hour trip, stopping regularly and for most of the time being the only westerners aboard.   It fills, and continues to fill, smoking is allowed.   When the bloke sitting in the aisle next to me lights up I bring all the experience gained listening to those Marcel Marceau LP’s into p...

After the trip we enjoyed to Sihanoukville (on the Cambodian coast) I can really see the benefit of having a car and driver or a teleportation system.   Picked up at 6.30 from our hotel, we changed vehicles twice before we even got to the main bus station, took 7 hours to Phnom Penh, had to wait until 3.10 for the connection and arrived in Sihanoukville at 8.50.  Apart from some fruit, we’d not eaten since breakfast.   The bus was only $10 each and a lot less for the locals.  Still, it can’t get worse than that can it?   Well yes it can, as you’ll see in my next email (nb no accidents).  Booked for 3 days in a hotel on the beach, we checked out in the morning and walked 50 yards to another which had thatched beach bungalows, our own terrace, view of the sea, clean fresh room – exactly what we wanted.   Called Above Us Only Sky, I can imagine where they got the name from. Two colourful Russians in the next one, about 30, good look...

An update on the traffic in Phnom Penh.   Although functionally redundant, there are pedestrian crossings with lights on.   Now, we once saw an exhibition of the different types of figure used on these pedestrian crossings for a wide range of world-wide cities.  Bet you didn’t know they were all different.  Well they are and the ones here are different from any we’ve seen elsewhere because the little green man runs.   Musing on world-wide cities made me realise that even with the relatively small group who are blessed/cursed with getting this email there are people in or soon to be in various places.  This is being received (I didn’t say read) in Laos, Australia, Sri Lanka, Egypt, the Maldives, England and Scotland at least. Exotic fruit, now that’s what I like.  Mangoes, best eaten in the bath, have only been touched sliced at breakfast.   Ripened bananas in different varieties taste nothing like the ones we get at home....

This is a capital city without a public transport system, matched with a fairly anarchic private transport system, mainly of tuk-tuks and motorbikes.   For those who don't know, a tuk tuk is a motorcycle rickshaw.  Here they have a 100cc engine which makes for an almost stationary fight against any sort of headwind.   Motorbikes, mopeds really, are pressed into service to deliver anything and everything although our current spotting record is only four people on one.  Six is my target.    I would say this place is notable for the traffic.  Horns are not used and everyone seems very unaggressive when driving.  While Indian driving can be characterised as a whole bunch of suicides just trying to find a location, here in Cambodia, or at least in Phnom Penh it really does just flow, and I choose the word carefully.  For instance, if you are in a tuk-tuk wanting to turn across the traffic on a wide road, the right-angle does not exist. About 30 o...