For those of you who don’t remember, great news! We wrote a book about the grueling adventure that was motorcycling from Canada to the southernmost city in the world, Ushuaia!
The book is now available at Amazon.com, just click here and you can choose from paperback or eBook formats! And don’t forget to give it a rating, we’d love to know what you thought of it!
Jessica: Just when you thought you had heard the last from the Jesses, here I am with one last post. We’ve had hundreds of letters from fans around the world asking us what the Jesses are up to now. What happened after Nepal? What was that horrific traveling experience you had that surpassed all other horrific traveling experiences? And most importantly, where are you now? Admittedly, those thousands of fans are mainly our families, and even though they know where we are, we felt we should wrap up the blog properly, as that last entry ended on a bit of a cliff hanger.
To sum up the horrible experience, after our flight was delayed by over seven hours, we were told we would be given a hotel and dinner in Istanbul, since we had missed our onward flight to Berlin. But due to very poor organizational skills and management on Turkish Airline’s part, we ended up getting dropped off at a hotel that was already full, then redirected to another hotel that didn’t have any of the paperwork necessary to check us in. As a result we got no dinner and ended up sleeping a total of an hour and a half before we were woken up to take the shuttle back to the airport… for a flight that was delayed anyway.
Had this not been a wrap-up post you would have been showered with colourful superlatives from yours truly on the woes and grievances suffered that night, but you’re sadly out of luck.
Instead, let’s fast forward to present day. We moved to Berlin, Germany, for an awesome career opportunity for Jess and an awesome schnitzel opportunity for me!
Jesse began work at Blackbridge, on April 1st. He has already made a notable impact on the company where he has introduced Cream Club (where all the men in his department moisturize their hands at the same time—the women have opted out), fixed the office AC with a cardboard box and duct tape, tested the office water with pH strips and, oh yes, operates a constellation of satellites.
Jessica set out to get an engineering job shortly after they arrived in Berlin, but soon found out she was pregnant and abandoned all hope of getting hired. She now splits her time between free-lance writing for almost no money, experimenting with Spanish desserts she has never made before and having morning sickness… almost equally.
But in all seriousness, living here in Berlin has been great so far, although it does come with its own set of challenges. Maybe not as life-threatening as getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom in the middle of the Serengeti, or as seemingly insurmountable as hiking 240 km in just under 12 days with a gimpy leg, but we still consider them an adventure.
And now we’re about to embark upon yet another adventure.
Soon we’ll be welcoming a new member to our little family, and although the changes might seem scary at times, we’re both very excited to see what the future holds for the Jesses.
Jessica: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Oh, who am I kidding, it was never the best of times. Our little jaunt into the Himalayas proved to be the most trying experience in my life. And that includes surviving a 100 km/h windstorm in Patagonia on a motorcycle. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
As Jess mentioned in his previous post, we’d had a parting dinner with Norm and Nan, and at the time they had seemed surprised that I was so nonchalant about heading into snow-covered mountains to hike nearly 3000 meters.
“There’s nothing physically wrong with my ankle,” I told them confidently. “The first few days will probably be tough, but by the end of it I’ll be walking fine.”
At the time, I was still sporting a residual limp from the motorcycle crash in France, and I blamed that primarily on the fact that I hadn’t been able to do any physiotherapy during the trip. The 180 km trek up the Manaslu circuit, which would take us from Arughat, an 8 hour drive North-West of Kathmandu, over the Manaslu pass, was supposed to beat my ankle into submission and leave me in better shape than I had first set out. If only.
And this is the sad point at which my narration descends into a diatribe against Jet Airways, the single worst airline I have had the sorry “pleasure” of experiencing. When we arrived at the counter we were told that there was a Turkish Airlines plane had “crash landed” in the middle of the only runway at Kathmandu airport and the Nepalese had no way to remove it. This effectively shut down the airport and nobody was really sure when it would reopen.
The crashed Turkish Airlines plane. Turkish Airlines, as we would eventually discover, are utterly inept (although they serve great food!)
As a result, and because we didn’t have Indian Visas (which are a nightmare to obtain, unless you’ve got the cash) we weren’t allowed on our flight, which would be making a connection in Mumbai. Instead we were given a number for Jet Airways (in India) and told to call them in order to rebook our flight. We asked if they could call for us.
“I’m sorry, our phone doesn’t dial outside of the airport.”
Right.
So we headed back to the same hotel—and even the same room—where we had spent our original layover in Thailand en route from India to Vietnam (and where, ironically, we had suffered the worst food poisoning of our life curtesy of—you guessed it: Jet Airways!). There we attempted to call the number we were given. Jess had one hell of a time understanding the man on the other end, but that soon wasn’t a problem when he declared “I can’t help you” and hung up the phone. Thankfully we had contact information for Airtreks, the excellent company that had booked our tickets, and when we called them they were incredibly helpful. Because they didn’t have any information on the status of the airport in Kathmandu, they told us to head to the airport as soon as we found out it opened and gently, but firmly, demand that they put us on the next flight. We were getting updates from Chhatra, the Nepalese owner of our trekking company, about the state of the plane, so for now we just needed to sit tight.
But fate had decided to be unkind to us. About 10:30 that night (Friday) Jesse came down with a fever, followed by severe head and neck aches, muscle pain, skin sensitivity, sore throat and diarrhea. He was a bit of a mess and had a miserable night. The next morning, I had it too. Checking on-line we saw that we had all but one of the possible symptoms of malaria. We had stopped taking our Malarone in Thailand since we’d been taking it for about 5 months straight and Thailand was supposed to be a low-risk area—but we’d been devoured by mosquitoes in Koh Lanta, so who knows? Then again, it could also be Dengue fever…or just the flu. We spent the day in bed, taking turns running to the toilet and huddling under our blankets, wracked with fever. The fact that we’d already suffered so greatly in that hotel room once before seemed more than a cruel coincidence. Late that night (Saturday), Chhatra informed us that the Kathmandu runway had been cleared. We popped some fever meds before bed to allow us to sleep and then headed to the airport first thing in the morning, dragging all the way.
Armed with Airtrek’s advice on being polite but insistent with the airline staff, we returned to the Jet Airways counter. I won’t bore you with the inane details of our experience with the Jet Airways staff. Just imagine us slamming our heads repeatedly into a brick wall while 60s elevator music plays in the background to get the idea. The earliest flight they could get us on into Kathmandu was 4 days from now, meaning we’d miss our trek. At last the entire counter abandoned us, problem unsolved and we were forced to call back to Jet Airways in India. Fortunately, they decided to put us on standby and we’d know within a few hours if we could fly that night.
Our fevers returned with a vengeance, so we called our insurance company and then headed to a nearby hospital to get diagnosed. Our blood tests showed that we had Type A Influenza, no doubt acquired from sitting in front of a very sick Canadian dude on our bus ride away from Koh Lanta. We thought he had been hung over, but with the flu everyone looks hung over. We were prescribed all sorts of lovely meds, and within an hour we were feeling a bit perkier.
Waiting in the Bangkok hospital to find out what nefarious disease we had…
Magically, our standby seats came through, and we had confirmed flights all the way to Kathmandu. Back at the airport our bags were tagged with a green Priority label (which I thought actually meant something) and we were off to the races. A six hour layover in Mumbai and a dozen or so mosquito bites later (Mumbai airport was filled with bloodthirsty, uber-aggressive mosquitos. Everywhere.) we were boarding our flight to Kathmandu. Save for the cockroach incident, which Jess dissipated by squashing the damned thing with his in-flight magazine (which he replaced back into the seat pocket in front of him) the flight was quite pleasant and we managed to avoid any E.coli, salmonella and general food-poisoning (mostly by not touching the food).
“That wasn’t so bad,” I told Jess as we touched down on the tarmac. When will I ever learn not to tempt fate?
The arrival terminal looked like a scene from one of those disaster thrillers. There were piles of luggage scattered everywhere and throngs of people squeezing past each other, wading through the mess of suitcases and backpacks and waiting along the conveyor belt to collect their luggage. Immediately Jess and I got separated, and I ended up waiting in a pocket of space beside a mountain of suitcases and discarded plastic wrap. We later found out that part of the chaos was caused by the fact that the Indian actor Shahrukh Khan was landing right behind us to do a whirlwind promotional speech for a paint company (?) and then leaving the same day. Consequently they were cramming in people now before they shut down the airport for him.
I was still searching for our bags when I suddenly I saw a familiar, blond head bobbing through the crowd.
“Vicki!” I called out. The first of our trekking team had arrived. My friends from back home, Vicki and Imran, had decided to join us on our Himalayan adventure.
We spent close to an hour, waiting for our luggage and searching through the piles, but it soon became apparent my backpack hadn’t made it to Kathmandu. So much for Priority. We were told that the cargo for our flight had been split in order to accommodate the weight of so many people and that it would probably arrive later that day. Thankfully I had packed my toiletries in my carry on so the next day Imran (who had arrived the day before us after being stuck in Turkey for two days) and I headed back to the airport to look for our backpacks (his had also been “misplaced”) while Jess convalesced in bed. We weren’t looking forward to trekking with the flu, but the trek was non-refundable and we figured we’d feel better after the first few days. The following day the four of us, joined by Anni, a German solo hiker who was added to our trek last minute, piled into a Land Cruiser and headed off to Arughat, the jumping off point for the Manaslu Trek, one of the best up-and-coming trekking routes in Nepal, or so we’d been told. We were accompanied by Jiba, our guide, and three helpers who would be carrying our backpacks. Jess and I squeezed in the front with the driver, Imran, Vicki and Anne took the middle row and Jiba and the four helpers squashed into the back. It felt a little like riding in a clown car. Despite only being 180 km from Kathmandu, it takes nearly 8 hours to get to Arughat. This is because the road is incredibly twisty and, in most places, only one lane in each direction. As one of the main roads from Kathmandu, traffic along that route is extremely congested, with heavy, slow trucks making up 30%-40% of all vehicles. In South America we were able to quickly nip by those “mojo killers” but in our sluggish 4X4 we had to patiently wait for a clear opportunity to pass legally. Those didn’t come by often.
The other issue was the state of the road. For the first two thirds of the way it was fully paved and in perfect condition, save for a couple of potholes here and there. But once we turned off the pavement the road became a dirt track that gradually degenerated into a rubble pile very reminiscent of the Murderous Mountains we faced in Guatemala.
“How can a bus come through here?” marveled Anni.
Had we not splurged and spent an extra $50 each to hire the Land Cruiser we would have been bouncing down that road, unbuckled, on a bus.
“We’ve motorcycled on stuff like this,” Jess announced over his shoulder gleefully as we were being tossed about. “It almost killed us.”
Since the drive had taken longer than expected we decided to forego the afternoon hike from Arughat to our first tea house and drive the rest of the way instead. Unfortunately the local mafia had other plans.
A man, who was sitting at what appeared to be a local watering hole by the side of the road, suddenly stood up as we drove carefully by and called out to us, flailing his arms and running to catch up. Our driver stopped. I heard Jiba in the back muttering that it had not been a smart move. The man came to our driver’s window and spoke to him shortly in Nepalese. The driver answered back, just as curtly, and eventually the man was joined by another two who were a little more pressing than the first.
“What’s going on, Jiba?” Imran asked quietly, a little ill-at-ease. “They want a bribe or something?”
That last bit had been a joke, but Jiba grimly confirmed it with a quick nod. Eventually he told us all to get out.
“We walk the rest of the way,” he announced, and we all shouldered out day packs, a little wary of starting a trek so late in the day.
On seeing us all out of the Land Cruiser, the man who had flagged us down called someone, the head honcho it would seem, and he was told to let us pass without paying.
“Everyone back inside,” Jiba called out, and we all climbed back in the 4X4, thoroughly confused. As it turned out, it was a two-bit operation run by the local mafia. If people were willing to pay, they were more than happy to collect. Since we had shown them that we were willing to walk and they wouldn’t end up getting paid anyway, they decided to let us drive. On the way, we passed a couple of guys, who we’d end up meeting up with at various points during the trek, and we wondered if they had been conned out of a ride.
An hour later we arrived, and got our first look at a Himalayan tea house. The name evokes all sorts of cozy, heart-warming images of cute, log cabins, with smoking chimneys and piping hot mugs of tea. I guess one out of three aint’ bad. Our first tea house was a three storey, cement building, with an eating area on the first floor and a series of rooms in the two floors above. Our room had its own private bathroom with a Western-style (read: sitting down) toilet and at the time we failed to appreciate what a luxury this would soon become.
The next morning we woke up at 8 AM (another luxury we would rarely indulge in) and set off merrily down the dirt road. At first we all kept a fairly similar pace. We chatted, took pictures and joked about the many yaks we would soon see ambling along our trail. But slowly that changed. I guess our German friend, Anni, was in much better shape than any of us and found our pace somewhat boring. Soon, she had left us in the dust and the others rushed to try to keep up. Jess and I, with our flu still lingering, decreasing our lung capacity and energy to about half, weren’t able to, so we were simply left straggling behind, trying not to think of the burning sensation in our lungs. My ankle, which still hurt mildly when I walked, started to warm up to the idea of hiking, however so, aside from feeling exhausted by the time we hit our lunch stop, I was feeling pretty good about our decision to go on the trek despite my condition.
That, however, would soon change.
A mule train crossing one of the many suspension bridges on our trek
Jesse with his “mountain man” beard
As the days passed, our flu symptoms faded away. We fell into a familiar pattern of waking up at the crack of dawn, packing up our large packs so the helpers could carry them, and shouldering our day-packs. We would then set out, not quite at a run, but a very energetic speed walk, to cover the nearly 30 km we would walk in a day. The trail was not a good one. Sometimes we were lucky and found ourselves on a gently sloping dirt path. Most of the time, however, the trail was a jumble of rubble that rose steeply, resembling an ancient, rocky staircase, with loose slabs and 2 foot rises in some places. The path was made all the more tortuous by the massive number of mule trains that overtook us or crossed our path each day. The problem with the mules was two-fold. First, the mule driver stays at the very back of the 10 or 12 mule train, which means many times he can’t see what is on the trail in front of him. Sometimes the mules break into a run when he’s driving them and they can either squash you against the rock face or push you out into the void of a precipice. Also, the mule drivers sometimes drive the mules by throwing stones at them and, at times, they don’t watch where they’re throwing. I almost got whipped in the face by a stone meant for the mule that was passing next to me. Secondly, mules are stinky, stinky animals. They relieve themselves anywhere and everywhere, mainly right in the middle of where you were going to take your next step. At lower altitudes flies lay their eggs all over the excrement, which then fills with nasty, wriggling maggots. Once those maggots hatch, the flylings swarm around the poo, feeding off of it and brushing past our legs as we walked over it. But as nasty as a mule’s excrement on a Himalayan trekking trail can be, nothing beats out their urine. They seem to all suddenly agree to do it in the same spot, as they walk by, and consequently they create a large, acrid puddle about the size of a small pond. The stench fills the air for a hundred meters in either direction and, even holding your breath, it makes your eyes water.
Jessica, unimpressed with the state of the trail
We were silently wishing for the higher altitudes, when we would lose the mules and their stench, but the higher elevations brought with them other complications. Because it had been unseasonably cold this year in Nepal, there was still a lot more snow than anyone had expected in the area. The few warm days that had appeared to herald spring had only succeeded in causing a number of avalanches that swept away our trail and left us hiking over mounds of frozen-over snow. To most, it was not a problem. For me it meant the beginning of the breaking down of my body. There was a bit of a crust on the snow, so stepping on it could mean either walking on, undisturbed, or breaking through with a sudden thud. When this happened, I would naturally sink in heel first, but since my ankle didn’t have the mobility to allow my foot to rotate upwards as I broke through the snow, my knee would take up the moment, hyperextending painfully every time. Pretty soon I felt like I was seriously damaging my joints, instead of gently stressing them, and I began to worry that I might do some permanent damage to my still recovering leg.
Crossing one of the many avalanches that blocked our path. Jesse actually slipped over the edge here and fell a good 15 feet down the avalanche, but was luckily unhurt.
Anni on an avalanche
But it wasn’t all bad. Our first four days had us hiking up a deep valley, paralleling a wild river. The landscape was beautiful, yielding some of the best photographs of our entire trip. We passed waterfalls, cute, cobblestone villages, deep green forests, groves of bamboo, soaring cliffs and stone stupas covered in engraved stone slabs and/or prayer wheels. As we rose higher, epic mountains began to peak out from over the valley walls and eventually we were surrounded by the giant, snow-covered peaks that we had expected from a trek in the Himalayas. We would greet locals with various versions of “Namaste” (Namastaaaaay = hey dude; na-MA-stay! = Good morning!, NA-MA-STAY! = hello and get the hell out of my way!) The tea houses became much better and actually fit the bill as the cutesy stone-and-wood constructions where we’d enjoy cup after cup of hot ginger lemon honey tea and a variety of delicious Nepalese dishes (momos = Nepalese dumplings, dal bhat = lentil soup over rice, chowmein, pizzas, Swiss rosti = savory potato pancakes, fried potatoes, etc.) All the menus were virtually identical, and although we eventually got tired of the same choices, the quality of the food was usually great (with exactly one exception!) In the evenings we’d usually play cards or just crash due to exhaustion. It was a good routine, and if I wasn’t feeling so physically battered I think I would have enjoyed it much more.
After 5 days of walking, we at last arrived at Lho where we had planned our first rest day and altitude acclimatization break. In the distance, we caught our first view of the mighty Mount Manaslu, the 8th tallest mountain in the world. In front of it, on a little bump of a hill, was a picturesque monastery. We were staying in a series of tiny, beautiful cabins, set side by side, and in the warm glow of the evening sun they looked cozy. In reality they were little freezers, built hurriedly in order to meet the rapidly increasing demand for accommodations on the newly discovered Manaslu trail. There were gaps in the wooden boards as wide as my fingers and the wind whistled cruelly through them as we lay huddled in our sleeping bags, shivering.
The monastery at Lho with Mount Manaslu in the background
That night, despite the long, arduous journey to get there, I had almost no appetite. I ate a small soup and then promptly went to the outhouse to vomit it all up. We suspected the lunch we’d had that day and so, the next day, while the others went out to explore a monastery that was close by (a mere 40 minute walk!) I laid in bed and bemoaned my plight. Well, mostly I slept, but there was some pitiful moaning involved as well.
It was at this tea house when we first started discussing the possibility that we wouldn’t make it over the Larke Pass, the highest point on our trek at 5200 m. We had been told by Chattra, the organizer of the trek, that because there had been so much snow the pass hadn’t been opened yet and all the trekkers were having to turn back. We discussed with Jiba, who seemed to think we’d be alright to make it over the pass, and decided to go ahead anyway. We had seen many trekkers coming back up to that point, but we hadn’t seen very many that day, so we were hopeful. There were two more tea houses before the base camp for the pass, but the second tea house hadn’t been opened for the season yet, a bad sign that the pass would be closed. But we decided to press on to the next tea house, and maybe by then, if it didn’t snow, the second one would be open. That night we had a blizzard. The snow swept in suddenly around 8 or 9 PM and it stayed with us for most of the night. Our contingency plan was to spend another day there and then head back down if there was too much snow, but the following morning dawned bright and sunny and so we shouldered our packs, once again.
At that point I had started applying anti-inflammatory cream, with a pain killer additive, to my knee, which had begun to swell up. It was becoming harder and harder for me to walk, and I found myself always straggling behind. I would love to say that I put on a brave face, whistled a bright tune and soldiered on hardily, but that would be far from the truth. I was angry that we had decided to do the trek, I was angry that everyone else just seemed to breeze along on their two, healthy legs while I struggled at a snail’s pace, but mostly I was angry that my body wasn’t working and that it hurt me so much. Jess had offered to take my daypack for me and when he grew tired of carrying both his and my pack, one of the helpers took it for him. I was stopping every 10-15 minutes, convinced that my legs, both of them exhausted and painful now, were going to collapse under me. In my head I counted steps, I repeated song lyrics over and over, I swore at Jess and sometimes fell to chanting “I can’t, I can’t” to the rhythm of my foot falls. A group of three trekkers passed us going in the opposite direction, defeated by the snowy conditions, and then one of them turned back and passed us again, an hour later, because he had forgotten his glasses at the teahouse we were trying to get to.
“Only 15 or 20 minutes now!,” he called jovially to us over his shoulder as he ran up the trail.
I hated him.
Finally, the interminable climb ended and ahead of us a flat, white valley stretched out as far as we could see. We were surrounded by majestic peaks, glaringly white in the sun, and there was not a single building in sight. It had been 20 minutes since The Runner had passed us. It took us another 40 minutes to trudge through the flat expanse of snow, breaking through the crust of ice that had formed on the four-foot layer of snow that covered everything. Finally, exhausted, covered in yak poop (I had a bit of a slip in the wrong place) and near tears, we arrived at the last tea house we would be staying at on our hike, trudging through deep puddles of slick mud that had been left behind by the melting snow.
We confirmed that the next tea house up was, in fact, closed, and that we would have to retrace our steps back to the point where we had been dropped off to start our trek. Back when we were bright eyed and optimistic about our possibilities of making the pass. That meant another 120 km hike back down the mountain in little over five days.
“What do you think it would take to get a helicopter lift out of here?” I asked Jess that night as we huddled together in our conjoined sleeping bags.
“You’d have to be really hurt, as in you can’t make it down the mountain.”
“I can’t make it down the mountain,” I countered.
The following day, a rest day for me, everyone went to visit another monastery that was also relatively close by. I chose to stay behind and try to rest my legs as much as possible. The day was gloriously sunny, and as I sat on the cement rooftop of the tea house we were staying in, I got so warm I took my jacket off and sunbathed in my t-shirt. I didn’t want to have to get up insanely early and walk 30 km the following day. And the next day, and the day after that. I just wanted to wake up and appear in Kathmandu. I inquired about the possibility of getting a mule to take me down instead of the $5000 helicopter. As it turned out, the mule was also out of our financial reach. At $100/day we’d be looking at $500 that we just didn’t have.
“Fine,” I said, defeated. “I’ll walk.”
As it turned out, the jaunt out to the monastery hadn’t been all fun and games, and for once I wasn’t sad I’d missed out. The way there hadn’t been too bad, a mere 20 minute walk. Jess and the others had conversed with the monks and had tea with them while discussing the meaning of life. But on the way back our guide, Jiba, had decided an alternate route was in order and had taken them on a disastrous road ankle-deep in mud and incredibly slippery. Everyone returned to the tea house exhausted and a little grumpy.
A monk in one of the monasteries Jesse and the others visited
Jiba holding one of the elaborate Tibetan keys used to unlock the monastery
We encountered a young monk who threw snowballs at us
Morning in Sama Gao, our final village on the trek
The snow in Sama Gao was ridiculously deep. It felt like we were trekking in Switzerland during the winter
There was no heating in any building anywhere in Nepal…we would huddle around the cooking fire in the kitchens of the tea houses.
The whole team, ready to start our walk back to the beginning of the trek. Note the snow is up to the second story balcony.
The following morning we woke up just as the sun was rising. We had heard all sorts of strange rumbling noises all around us during the night, and Jess and I were convinced there had been at least another half-dozen avalanches. Sure enough, there were at least three that we could see from the teahouse roof where we were having our breakfast. Well aware that the snow that had been piling up for three straight nights in the mountains around us might very well come crashing down on our heads, we set out, a little warily, for our long trek back to the beginning of our route, some 120 km distant…
Heading back
What followed were the hardest, most painful days I have ever experienced. Both of my knees were steadily abused by the incessant climbing and descending of rubble-stacked mounds. Whenever a loose stone shifted under my weight, or my ankle inexplicably collapsed, it would send a shooting pain from my knee, as though my body was trying to knock some sense into me. What are you doing?? Are you nuts?? It seemed to be screaming at me. And still I pushed forward. There was no other choice. But my mind kept up the chant of “I can’t, I can’t” over and over and I couldn’t shut it off. Finally, after eight hours I’d had enough. Jess was being terse with me and when I asked him why he said he was disappointed with my negative attitude. I lost it.
I’d been dealing with my gimpy leg with, what I thought, was grace, for the past 6 months, since my crash in France. I had gone out in my wheelchair and hobbled around castles. I had flown down to Africa with a hole in my knee the size of an Oreo cookie and had spent two months camping in a tent. I had spent eight hours clambering over boulders and into caves in Petra, and limping my way across India. I had overcome the still fresh fear of riding again and had spent three days on a bike in Vietnam. And here I was, in the middle of the Himalayas, with four full days of walking left, and I suddenly felt entitled to a little negative attitude.
I don’t know what came over me, I really don’t, but suddenly I needed to make a point, I needed to start moving as fast as was physically possible. I started throwing my weight forward and dragging my leg up behind me, looking a little like a zombie. Jess called for me to stop but I was on a roll. My breathing was ragged, coming in weird hitching gasps and my eyes were focused straight ahead. I was going to beat Jess to the tea house, and for some inexplicable reason that seemed like the most important thing, getting there first, getting there faster. Finally Jess stopped me and sat me down on a rock. I cried. A lot. We were just outside the village where we would be spending the night and some of the village folks came out to see the snotty, wailing foreigner that was bawling her eyes out on the rock. Jess told them to leave, but of course, who can tear themselves away from such a train wreck. When I had finally calmed down, and explained to Jess why I had been so upset, he apologized and helped me the rest of the way to the tea house.
“I honestly don’t know how I’m going to do this Jess,” I told him, seriously worried.
My bad knee was not well: it was swollen to half again its size and I could barely bend it. Luckily, both Anni and Imran stepped in to help. Anni gave me her miracle sport injury gel, which reduces swelling, delivers some kick-ass pain relief and has some other damage repair qualities that were described in German. Imran, who had recently had knee surgery but had been kicking our butt every day and getting to the tea houses a couple of steps behind Anni, gave me his knee brace, which turned out to be the only reason I was able to get down from those mountains.
Back out of the snow and into the green, warm valley again
Some of the loads carried by the local porters were just enormous
The next morning, knee braced up and thoroughly numb from the gel, I left the tea house before anyone else, and refused to let my brain start in with the “I can’t” chant. Rather than keeping silent and concentrating on each and every step, I talked with Jess about anything that came to mind, and things got a little easier. I can’t say that the hours flew by and I began to enjoy our romp through the mountains, that wold be a lie. It was painful, and it was difficult, but every step I took meant one less step that I had to take, and that, at least, made it bearable. At this point, however, using the squat toilets the way they were meant to was completely out of the question. My knees wouldn’t hold my weight and my right knee wouldn’t bend enough to even get me in the vicinity of where I needed to be. I am not ashamed to say, I began to use the water bucket in a whole new way.
Another little mental game I played with myself was the “Life or Death” game. In movies you always see characters overcoming terrible odds, crawling through the dirt and blood to some safe haven just as the bad guys are closing in. Case and point, Frodo getting to Rivendell on the back of Arwen’s horse just as the ring wraiths are closing in on them. When it’s a matter of life and death, you push yourself beyond your physical capacity and use every last ounce of strength clearing that final hurdle. So I created a life and death situation for myself. Imran and Anni were, as per usual, ahead of me, and Jesse, Jiba and Vicki had stopped to go to the bathroom, or drink some water. Knowing how slow I was I kept walking, but after walking alone for 20 minutes without sign of Jesse I seized my chance. I imagined that Anni and Imran were Orcs, blundering along ahead of me, and I needed to catch them. Jesse, Jiba and Vicki were another set of Orcs, but they were chasing me, and I needed to get to Rivendell (a.k.a. our lunch stop) before they reached me. I would play this over and over in my mind, throwing glances over my shoulder to make sure I wasn’t being followed, my heart beating urgently as I loped down the rocky path. Jess had given me a pretty good pointer the day before, pointing out that, if I leaned forward and ran/staggered ahead my knee joints would feel less of an impact and I would be able to cover more ground with less pain. I had taken his advice and was making terrific time. An hour went by, and no sign of the Orcs. Another half hour, and still I was safe, having thrown myself into the river that flowed next to the trail to throw the Orcs off my scent. But suddenly, just as I thought I was home free, the Orc they call Jesse appeared behind me, some 300 meters or so. I started, and my heart leaped into my throat. I picked up my pace, willing my legs to carry me faster, trying to avoid the inevitable moment when all hope would be lost.
“Hey Jess,” he called.
I had been caught.
Just an epic photo
The poorest school we’ve ever encountered: a blackboard, a couple of broken stools, and that’s it.
But I had made terrific progress in the meantime and lunch was a mere half hour away. Also, both of my knees were feeling better and I was in high spirits. The unfortunate thing I discovered at lunch, however, was that I had developed a blister on the side of my left foot. Bugger. Thankfully Anni had this weird, silicone sticker that helped to cushion it. After a few hours I could barely feel it. I had told Jess about my harrowing hobbit escape, so when we set out again we kept each other going by continuing my little Lord of the Rings mental game. But as the hours ticked by and the trail became especially difficult, we eventually had all the imagination beat out of us. Jesse was in much better shape, but he was hiking without his orthodics and he was starting to complain that his flat feet felt like they’d been run over by a truck. Moreover, he was feeling pretty defeated by the fact that we hadn’t made the pass. But since sitting down wasn’t an option, we kept moving. Funny the things you can do when you have no other choice. By the end of the trek we had walked 240 km over a 3300 m gradient in just under 11 days. When Jiba suggested taking a bus to Arughat, where a 4X4 would be picking us up to take us back to Kathmandu, we jumped at the chance.
Now, let me tell you a little bit about this bus. Not that we weren’t extremely grateful for it, but if we were to describe to our travel insurance company what the bus ride entailed, they would be refusing coverage. Firstly, it was driven by a fifteen year-old. No exaggeration. But in all fairness, he did get out of the driver’s seat and let the older guy drive when the road became so narrow there was about one inch of dirt on either side of the wheels. Secondly, it was packed. To the brim. As long as there was physical volume that could be occupied by human bodies, people got on. I ended up with a 10 year-old girl sitting on my arm for half the ride. Lastly, there was the road. Yes, it was bumpy. After all, we had ridden on the 4X4 along it and Jess had compared it to the rubble heap that was the Murderous Mountain. But if in a 4X4 with some of its suspension still functioning. The bus, with its complete lack of suspension, threw us around like popcorn in an air-popper. We had to brace ourselves against the seats, the frame of the bus and anything else we could find to avoid smashing our heads on the low ceiling or bashing our knees into the seat in front of us. The bus had been designed for this sort of abuse, however, and the entire interior was hard, riveted aluminum sheets. It even had a functioning DVD player and TV which bombarded us with a stream of Nepalese music videos. Another marvelous feature of the road was the way it would suddenly just fall away on our side of the bus, leaving a clearance that was hardly visible from our vantage point on the bus. As the bus careened and jostled its way down the road it was hard not to imagine it suddenly plunging sideways down the sheer cliff to our left. But it didn’t and two hours later, our bodies thrumming from the vibrations, we stepped off, gratefully and climbed the stairs up to our room.
We had been cut off from civilization for two weeks, without cell phone coverage, internet or even a newspaper, and even though we tried to hold off for as long as we could, our curiosity got the best of us. I wish it hadn’t. In those first few hours we were flooded with bad news. My best friend’s mother had passed away, despite getting better briefly from a very serious illness. Anni was a co-pilot for GermanWings, and there had just been a terrible GermanWings crash and she thought it likely that she must know those involved. Dinner that night was a grim one, and even though we were happy to be finished, the weight of the bad news hung over us like a dark cloud. The following day we piled back into the same small Land Cruiser that had dropped us off, what seemed like a lifetime ago, and drove in silence back to Kathmandu.
Because we hadn’t made the Larke Pass, Chhatra graciously invited us out to a high-class restaurant as a consolation prize. It was an amazing rooftop Italian restaurant that made us feel like we were in Rome instead of Kathmandu. Everyone made an effort to be cheerful and it ended up being a lovely evening. That night we said goodbye to Anni. She had managed to get on standby on an early flight back to Germany. The following day we decided to take a tour of the city, but after visiting the Living Goddess (a 10-year old girl who lives secluded in a building complex and comes out only 13 times a year for various holy days) a number of temples and the Royal Palace, my leg decided I had seen enough. I passed on visiting the Monkey Temple, which is a big stupa with prayer wheels on it, a bunch of shops and a handful of cheeky monkeys trying to steal anything that doesn’t look tied down, and sat in the SUV we had hired for the day instead. We had been planning on going to the crematorium after lunch but a heavy downpour put a damper on that particularly cheerful outing and we headed back to the hotel to rest.
Scenes from Kathmandu streets
Crazy Kathmandu streets
The Boudhnath Stupa–the largest in Nepal
One of the many colorful and freaking looking statues of Hindu/Buddhist gods in Kathmandu
The following day we said goodbye to Vicki, and Jess and Imran went off together to get haircuts. The three of us had the same flight out of Kathmandu the next morning and we were somewhat looking forward to going home. Well, really only Imran was going home. Jess had landed himself a job in beautiful Berlin, while we were in the middle of the African jungle, no less, and we were going directly to Berlin from Nepal, with a quick little stopover in Turkey, of course. Or so we thought. What ensued was one of the worst traveling experiences I had ever had. EVER.
But that’s a story for another time.
Leaving Nepal, our epic trip finally over…
Jesse: Booking transportation within Cambodia is a little like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: you never know what you’re gonna to get. Our trip from Siem Reap to Bangkok started off well enough on a spacious, air conditioned bus, a stop for lunch with our last taste of extremely cheap, delicious Cambodian food, and then a straight shot to the border. This particular border crossing seemed to be smack in the middle of a city. Indeed, as we made the long, hot walk from the Cambodian side to the Thai customs office, we passed numerous hotels and casinos sitting in the no-man’s land between the two countries. Gambling is illegal in Thailand, so we suspected these casinos catered Thais who didn’t want to go all the way into Cambodia for their gaming fix. On the Thai side of the border, we waited with our little group by the side of the road for our “VIP bus” to take us all the way into Bangkok. While we waited, I made the mistake of buying a SIM card for my phone. We were planning on meeting up with plenty of friends and family in Thailand, and the sooner I could start emailing/texting them, the better. The SIM card, bought from a dodgy guy on the street corner, set me back 200 baht (about $7 US) and then promptly ran out of funds after just 4 text messages. Moral of the story is don’t buy anything off of dodgy guys on street corners…? You’d think I should know that by now…
Our “VIP bus” arrived an hour later. It was a tiny, cramped mini bus without air conditioning and we packed ourselves in like sardines, our backpacks piled in the narrow aisle to the ceiling. Jess and I were wedged into the back corner of the bus, sitting on top of the natural gas tank which radiated intense heat onto our legs. It was a long 4 hour ride into Bangkok.
I had originally visited Bangkok 10 years earlier on a backpacking expedition from Scandinavia, through Russia along the Trans-Siberian Railway, and then down through China and Hong Kong to Thailand. Back then, Thailand had clearly been “discovered” by backpackers as a tropical haven, but it was still dirt cheap with a bit of a counter-culture vibe. I recall racing around the city in tuk-tuks and being able to bargain nearly everything down to about 50-75% of the original asking price without breaking a sweat. When our bus dropped us off on a random street corner, we hailed a tuk-tuk and were shocked at the price: 200 baht for about 4 km (for reference, that’s about three times as expensive as India and nearly 10 times as expensive as Cambodia). Bargaining helped only a little. We later found out that tuk-tuks in Bangkok are only for tourists these days—everyone else takes metered taxis. Since I had last been there, Bangkok seemed to have become a modern city with modern prices. Nevertheless, we were able to find perhaps the cheapest accommodation in the city: $10 per night at the Blue Finn Guesthouse, located down a narrow residential alley in a very un-touristy part of the city. It was literally 4 wooden walls and two wooden beds with, apparently, wooden mattresses—perhaps the most basic accommodation we’d seen on our trip so far. Still, it was clean and the owners were friendly. Plus, despite the inconvenient location in the city, there was a vibrant food market on the main street a short walk away where the food was ridiculously good and still ridiculously cheap.
The next day we met up with Norm and Nan Dove, neighbors of my parents in BC who owned a fabulous guest ranch there called Echo Valley. I had worked for Norm as a teenager and had become fast friends with him in the years since. Nan was Thai and so they always spent 2-3 months of the year in Bangkok, which happened to line up perfectly with our visit. We met them in the lobby of the Surat Thani, an absolutely glorious 5-star hotel that made our current digs look like a cardboard box. Near the toilets they had a Wall of Fame, with photos of dozens of actors, musicians and politicians who had stayed there. I didn’t recognize anyone from the Blue Fin wall of fame, which included signatures and hand-drawn flags from people like Brent from the U.S.A., and Francois and Cecil from France. Oh well. Norm and Nan picked us up in a car, and after a round of hugs and greetings, we were off heading south from Bangkok. During our ride, Norm and Nan regaled Jessica with tales of my numerous misadventures working at Echo Valley (death marches, throwing up in Norm’s plane—repeatedly, encounters with bears, capsizing rafts, etc.) and I realized that I had worked there twenty years ago! We all suddenly felt very old.
Our first stop was a seafood restaurant perched on stilts and extending far out over the beach. The tide was out, and in the mud flats below us thousands upon thousands of tiny crabs and mud guppies were emerging from the mud and skittering about. We watched, fascinated.
“It’s almost as entertaining as watching animals in the Serengeti,” I remarked as two thumb-sized crabs below us locked claws in a death struggle. But not quite as photogenic: my attempts at picture of the drama look like photographs of mud.
We dined on an amazing variety of seafood, and then headed to a local market built along the train tracks running through the center of a town. Tents overhung the tracks, providing a colorful tunnel to walk along and admire the various bizarre foods for sale on either side. When a train would arrive, the vendors would quickly pull the tents and tables—which all had runners—back from the tracks. Wares on the ground were short enough that the train would pass directly over them. Alas, we didn’t see a train go past, but Nan had recorded a video of the event with her phone and it looked incredible.
Lunch with Norm and Nan
The covered train market
Back in Bangkok, Norm and Nan treated us to a 2 hour Thai massage at their favorite spa. I didn’t catch my masseuse’s name, so I shall call her Helga. She looked like she could break skinny white guys like me in half, and that is precisely what she proceeded to do to me over the next two hours. Other people rave about Thai massages, so perhaps the pain we experienced is simply due to all the muscle knots we’ve accumulated while traveling the world, but—and I kid you not—there was a good 10-15 minutes where Helga was literally kneeling on my back so that I couldn’t breathe, pulling my legs up around her head and crushing my neck into the floor. I could only emit muffled noises that sounded like “Ghank”. When she finally released me, I sat up and gasped “You’re beating me up!” She just laughed and proceeded to put me in a full Nelson, swing me bodily around and try to crack my spine. When my spike didn’t crack, she tried harder.
“Are you doing ok, Jesse?” Norm called from his room. I guess I was emitting more “Ghank!” sounds again.
“I think I broke something!” I cried as Helga finally released me in a pile on the floor.
“I fell asleep during mine,” Nan said drowsily.
I have to conclude that either A) I am a serious massage wuss, B) Helga was a member of the Thai special forces practicing her grappling holds on me, or C) everyone gets beat up when then have a Thai massage but they all declare that it’s “relaxing” and “therapeutic” because they’re scared their masseuses will track them down and put them in a headlock.
From the spa, we headed into Chinatown which, having been to China several times, is more Chinese than the Chinese. The sidewalks are full of street food vendors, crowds of people selling trinkets for Chinese New Year and, sadly, every restaurant seems to sell shark fin soup. We met up with a friend of Norm’s, a Mr. Chang, and proceeded to a popular restaurant where we promptly kicked a couple off of a big round table near the front door. Mr. Chang proceeded to order an incredible variety of food, from goat cooked in red wine gravy, to deep-fried duck bills, to fish stomach soup. Some of the food was divine (the goat!), some of it was blah (deep fried duck taste like deep fried crunchy anything), but it was a great experience and we left stuffed to our eyeballs. As soon as we left, Nan promptly sat down at a stall and ordered us all a Chinese dessert: a fruit medley in syrup. Full beyond belief, we finished up with Nan buying us a box of roasted chestnuts “for the road”.
On our second day in Bangkok we met up with Nan’s daughter-in-law, Yalaporn, who showed us around the temples and various touristy site of the city. Yalaporn, who had worked at Echo Valley with me all those years ago is one of those ageless Thais who, at 42, looks twenty years younger. We met her at the Temple of Dawn which has the customary Thai architecture: a 4-sided pyramid curving upwards into a narrow pinnacle, covered in carvings and colorful sculptures. From there we headed across the river to what must be one of the world’s largest reclining Buddhas: over 45 meters long and 15 meters high and covered head to toe with gold leaf. We finished off our tour with a visit to the Royal Palace, an astounding complex of temples, epic murals and an ancient 3-foot tall emerald Buddha. However, the place was a magnet for tourists and we sweltered under the intense Bangkok sun—it must have been pushing 40 C in the direct sunlight. That night Yalaporn guided us to dinner with Norm, Nan and a number of their friends at Red Sky, an open-air restaurant on the 55th floor of a skyscraper in downtown Bangkok. The view over the nighttime cityscape was just tremendous, and the high altitude air cool and breezy. But they had a dress code, and by wearing leather sandals I was violating it. (It should be noted that Norm was also violating the dress code with his sandals, but because made the fashion faux pas of wearing black socks as well, the maitre’d didn’t notice). They eventually let us in but I was told to keep my feet under the table and not visit the toilet! Despite this rather pompous introduction to the place, the food was tremendous, the view exquisite and the company great.
The following day saw us on a train headed north to Chiang Mai. As we entered the train station, I blundered my way into a crowd—basically the entire station—standing at attention while the Thai national anthem played over a loud speaker. I was calling out to Jess as I walked and was the only person talking in a group of about 200 people. Yikes.
Years ago I had taken the same rail journey on an old open-air metal and wood train car, where I’d spent half the time hanging off the side dodging leafy plants as we rattled through the jungle. Today we were in a rather comfortable air conditioned train car, packed with other tourists, cruising through…farmland. The jungle had been virtually hacked away in the last 10 years, and only now and then did we enter a leafy green corridor and lose sight of the fields and pastures. Everywhere, the price of progress seems to be the destruction of the natural world.
We were in Chiang Mai to meet up with Jessica’s sister, Melissa, and her family, vacationing in Thailand from Beijing during Chinese New Year. They were staying at a mid-range resort outside of town, so our first course of action was to find transportation out of town. Since the last time I’d visited Chiang Mai, it seemed like the cabbies and tuk-tuk drivers had organized themselves into a bit of a transportation racket. Virtually every taxi refused to use their meter and instead, like all the tuk-tuks, they charged exorbitant flat fares to take you anywhere. The one time we managed to get a taxi to put on his meter, the fare was about 1/4th of the fare he’d originally requested. As soon as you’d try to bargain with the cabbies, they’d shrug and roar away. Times were definitely a changin’ in good old Thailand.
Meli and Bamdad, her husband, had organized a car for all of us the next day, so at 10 AM we all piled into a minivan taxi and headed up into the hills above Chiang Mai. We visited the summer palace of the Thai royal family which had magnificent flower gardens to stroll through. Next we headed to a village of a local hill tribe which turned out to be merely a giant tourist market. Nevertheless we found a lovely little Muslim restaurant there and sampled the local version of perhaps the best food in all of Thailand: Massaman curry! Alas, while good, it was not the best we’d ever had, so we set out to find the best Massaman curry in the country… After lunch, we visited Wat Phra That, a Buddhist temple with a stunning view over Chiang Mai. We were now on a trip down memory lane, as had pictures of myself in front of the Wat from 10 years ago. We finished off the day by visiting the famed Chiang Mai night market where, in the midst of huge crowds of wandering people and countless amazing food stalls, we miraculously found a free table and ordered ourselves some delicious street food. Then we wrapped up the day with a long wander to find a reasonably priced taxi to take us back to the resort…
The next morning we headed out to an elephant sanctuary for some up-close and personal time with a herd of Asian elephants. Like me, Bamdad absolutely loves elephants, so we were nearly as excited as the kids. As soon as I popped out of our shuttle bus, a man handed me a rope leash loosely tied around the neck of little male elephant, and told me to walk him uphill to an open-air shelter. I happily set off with my elephant friend in tow, his trunk dextrously nosing around me and the ground, hunting for a quick snack. Like many of the elephants there, he’d had his tusks trimmed down to short stubs to prevent them from splintering (Asian elephants have thin, long tusks prone to cracking) and to deter ivory poachers. Once we had all gathered at the shelter, I dropped off my elephant and we changed into simple black shirts and baggy pants, as our day-clothes would get a little dirty with all of our elephant snuggling. Each elephant had a “mahout” (a handler) and on their command each elephant stuck out a leg for us to use as a step to climb onto its back. Jess and I rode a 14 year old female elephant named Café, while Bamdad and Ariana rode a second and Melissa and Dante rode a third. We ponderously set off to the river, far down in the bottom of the valley, and as we rode the mahouts instructed us on vocal commands for steering our elephants: Bai-bai was to move forward, and then a host of others that I can’t remember. The elephants, it seemed, only spoke Thai. The jungle is a smorgasbord to elephants, and they were constantly snuffling about for leaves and branches to munch as we descended towards the water. They also play well with each other, which often involves them throwing a lot of dirt around, so twice a day they have to be washed. We slipped off the side of our elephants at the water’s edge, and then headed out into the shallows with them. At the mahouts’ commands, the elephants flopped down on their sides in the river and we began scrubbing their sides with fine gravel from the riverbed. Soon, however, our task inevitably degenerated into a water fight: the mahouts would dip the elephants’ trunks into the water, then holding them out like a fire hose, they would blast water at their unsuspecting targets. Soon we were back on our great gray beasts and heading for the swimming hole. One after another the elephants plunged in, the water surging over their heads in places until just the tips of their trunks—and us, trying not to get washed away—poked above the muddy surface. After a lunch of Thai food, we visited a gigantic mother and her newborn calf. The calf was about 3 feet tall and busied himself by racing around her feet, getting in her way and in general looking adorable. All too soon it was time to go. If we had had more time, we could have signed up for a 3 day mahout training program where you get to work with the elephants intensely. I read a blog about a girl who had done that and, apparently, the elephants at that sanctuary had some crazy recreational activities, including playing instruments in an all-elephant jazz band and painting self-portraits (all on their own accord, the mahouts assisting the elephants rather than training them).
That evening we decided to catch a traditional Thai dance performance at La Grand Lanta, a restaurant at the top-ranked hotel in Chiang Mai. The hotel was designed as a traditional Thai wat and was ridiculously fancy (it’s a $500 US per night kinda place), but the in-house restaurant was pretty reasonable. I had fried rice dish filled with chicken, nuts, berries and curry, served inside a hollowed out pineapple—it was, without a doubt, the best meal I had on the entire trip. The traditional dance followed dinner. It involved a lot of twanging traditional instruments, elaborate costumes and slow hand gestures. It wasn’t thrilling, but it was nice. After dessert, we had our now routine walkabout in search of a reasonably priced taxi to take us home, but being outside the city, our 45 minute walk through darkened suburbia yielded no results and we were forced to grin and bear a 400 baht ride back to the resort in the back of a red pickup truck taxi.
Our two days in Chiang Mai had been so busy that we hadn’t had the chance to buy our onward train tickets back to Bangkok. On our 3rd day—the day of our departure—we figured we should probably buckle down and figure out what we were going to do. The only kink in our plan was that our resort was actually a long way out of Chiang Mai and we were loath to give any more money to the Chiang Mai Transportation Cartel. So we borrowed bicycles from the resort and headed out to the nearest travel agency—as identified by Google Maps. Five kilometers and 25 minutes later, we arrived…only to discover it was long-since shut down. As was the next one. The next cluster of travel agencies were clustered on the other side of a river, and to get there we needed to bicycle down a 6-lane highway with no curb up and across a bridge. Since that looked a little suicidal, we instead opted to pick up our bikes and cross the river on a narrow catwalk servicing some industrial pipework. On the far side of the river, we soon discovered that none of the travel agencies identified by Google maps even existed. What to do? We had less than an hour until we needed to check out of the resort and we were still a long way from downtown. Grinning (rather, grimacing) and bearing it once more, we leaped on our bikes and blasted our way through town to the train station, some 8 km distant. Luckily there were still berths available on the night train to Bangkok. Back we pedalled to the resort where we through our bags together and checked out only 3 minutes late. Nothing like a 30 km bike ride in the morning! We said a temporary goodbye to Meli, Bambdad and the kids—they were catching a flight to Bangkok and we’d see them the next day—and then made our way back to the train station.
Our train ride was comfortable and air conditioned and we awoke early and refreshed as pulled into Bangkok. This time we stayed on the (in)famous Khaosan Road, a veritable backpacker haven if ever there was one. The sidewalks were jam packed full of t-shirt stands, tattoo parlors, cheap restaurants, travel agencies, hostels, bars, and even a couple of stands willing to forge for you virtually any ID card in existence. The area attracted plenty of party-goers, grungy “perma-travelers” and backpackers who have been thoroughly “Thai-ified”, but also lots of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed backpackers out for their first time abroad and even some young families looking for a cheap place to stay. Khaosan Road is one of those travel meccas that every backpacker should visit at some point, but you wouldn’t want to linger there.
We met up with Melissa, Bamdad, Dante and Ariana again and spent two fun days touring the city with them. We visited a 3 meter tall, 5.5 tonne solid gold Buddha at Wat Traimit, wandered through the markets in Chinatown, joined the throngs of tourists visiting the Jim Thompson House (5 beautiful sold-teak houses of an American silk magnate who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in the highlands of Malaysia in 1967), ate some great food, and hired a boat for a tour of the Bangkok canals.
But perhaps the highlight of the visit (at least for me and Bamdad, at any rate!) was attending a Muay Thai boxing show at the famous Lumpinee Stadium. While Jessica, Melissa and the kids went for a swim and a nice dinner, Bambad and I set out in a cab to the far distant Lumpinee. We arrived after the show had started, and, to my dismay, we discovered that foreigners were forced to pay 2000 baht per person and had to sit ringside. Local Thais, who pay around 400 baht, apparently engage in illegal gambling in the cheap seats, and the stadium doesn’t want westerners to get involved. When I balked at the price (about the amount of money Jessica and I would live off for 3 days in Thailand or a week in Cambodia), Bamdad generously gave me an “early birthday present” and paid my way. With no cheap restaurants nearby, we popped into one of the ubiquitous Seven-Elevens that are on every street corner of Thailand, and grabbed a dinner of chips and gag-inducing pre-packaged burgers. Ringside, we were treated to 7 individual fights, each consisting of 4 rounds. The first and last round don’t count for points, so they tend to be pretty boring (unless the underdog fighter is trying for a knockout!) with things getting very intense in the middle rounds. The early fights tended to be younger kids—it was hard to tell, but they looked as young as 12 years old—but that doesn’t mean those fights were any less intense or violent. During the first fight, the kid favored to win (always wearing the red shorts) took a punch to his face and began bleeding profusely. It seemed to goad him into a bit of a frenzy, however, and he ended up elbowing his opponent in the head, knocking him out so badly he left the stadium in a wheelchair. And these are just kids! Following that match, a huge fight broke out in the upper sections of the stadium, with flailing knots of people surging back and forth across the bleachers. It suddenly became quite clear why they didn’t want foreigners up there… Red, the betting favorite, won every match until the “main event” where two seasoned Muay Thai fighters (they were maybe 18) battled for the evening’s prize of 1000 baht. As per usual, they bounced around each other for the first round, but seconds into round 2, blue delivered a massive roundhouse kick to red’s head, knocking him out before the fight even really began. While the foreigners cheered, the gamblers above us were nearly silent.
When it came time for us to leave Bangkok, Meli, Bamdad and the kids came to send us off on Khaosan Rd. To our surprise, they all loved the ambiance and had fun shopping along the cheap stalls lining the road. We had a great time with them and were sad to say goodbye, but the south of Thailand was calling us…
Our trip to the island of Koh Tau in the Gulf of Thailand reminded me again of why I’m getting too old for backpacking. We waited an hour for our double decker bus in Bangkok, finally setting off around 8 PM. They blasted movies at us until we stopped for dinner along the road at midnight. At 2 AM we switched buses, and then at 3:30 AM we were dropped off at the docks in Chumphon. Our ferry wasn’t until 7 AM, so we all just lay on wooden benches, got devoured by mosquitos, and tried in vain to sleep the time away. Before we knew it, the ferry was there and we were groggily boarding into the frigid, AC interior of the boat. Most travellers opted to burn away their sleepiness in the sun, so we got a whole row of seats to ourselves to stretch out on. With the AC cranked up way too high, I ended up wrapping myself in lifejackets to keep warm while Jessica fled to the crowded upper decks to get some sun.
Koh Tau is a major scuba diving training center. There are more than 50 dive schools crowded onto its populated west coast and after Cairns in Australia, Koh Tau issues more diving certifications per year than anywhere else in the world. The competition keeps the prices low and it is consequently the cheapest place to get certified in the world: a PADI Open Water certification will set you back about $330 Canadian. Jessica, who had never dived before, was here to get her PADI Open Water certification and I was planning to get my PADI Advanced certification. We had signed up with Simple Life Divers, one of the smaller, British-run dive schools which offered good instructor-to-student ratios. We quickly realized two things: first, there are absolutely no Thai divers (culturally, they believe spirits inhabit the water, so they rarely go swimming let alone diving), so our instructors were British, Dutch and Australian. Second, although there are dozens of dive sites within a 15 minute boat ride from the harbour, the diving around Koh Tau isn’t particularly good. The water is quite murky with a visibility that varied between 1-12 meters. Also, many of the sites were crowded: boats would all pull up in a tight cluster and dozens upon dozens of divers would all descend to the same—or immediate adjacent—dive sites, and occasionally we’d lose track of which diver ahead of us was our instructor.
Still, despite its shortcomings, Koh Tau was a gorgeous island and we had a huge amount of fun getting certified. My instructor was a Brit named Sam who, like every other instructor on the island, sported a smattering of Thai tattoos. He was friendly, calm and safety conscious; just the right combination for a dive master. My fellow students consisted of Grace, an American, and Jeremy and Vivian, two Canadians from B.C. (Shockingly, they were only the 7th and 8th Canadians we’d met on our entire trip! Likewise, they had been traveling for months and had seen virtually no Canadians. Southeast Asia is veritably crawling in Germans, Russians and Spanish, with just a handful of other English-speaking natives and no Canucks. During previous world trips, we’d met dozens of Canadians, but for some strange reason our fellow countrymen were no longer backpacking, and we wondered why…) My three classmates had all just completed their Open Water Certification and had 5 dives apiece—I, on the other hand, had about 15 dives under my belt, but spread over the last 15 years! I was rusty, to say the least. The Advanced course consisted of 3 mandatory dives (an advanced buoyancy control dive through an underwater amusement park, a navigation dive, and a deep dive to 30 meters) and 2 adventure dives (a wreck dive and a night dive). The navigation dive was fun: in the murk we had to navigate a large square with our compass while our buddy swam beside us counting out kicks (an estimate of how far we travelled). The visibility was so bad that we nearly swam passed our instructor who was floating just a couple meters away from us. Jeremy and Vivian were just a little further off on their navigation and got completely lost underwater. The wreck dive was also amazing. Several years ago they had sunk an old WW2 patrol boat off Koh Tau, fore and aft guns included, and it was now an artificial reef, filled with fish, barnacles and murkiness… I dropped to 31 meters at the stern of the boat, and for a few seconds I got a wave of nitrogen narcosis, which felt a little like being drunk. As soon as I rose a few meters the feeling vanished.
Jessica took to diving like, well, a fish to water. She found it all very easy and, in fact, used less oxygen than even the instructors. We would all enter the water with about 190 PSI pressure in our tanks. I would usually surface around 70 PSI, the instructors around 100 PSI and Jessica at 120-130 PSI! The instructors were flabbergasted and joked that she actually produced oxygen. After we both received our certification, we signed up for two fun dives so that we could finally dive together. Jessica was an excellent underwater buddy and we had a lot of fun cruising the coral reefs together.
From Koh Tau in the Gulf of Thailand, we headed back to the mainland on an overnight boat (basically a cargo ship with bunk beds for backpackers) and then off to the Railay Beach area. When I had first visited Railay 10 years ago, there were a smattering of resorts along the peninsula, but the true star of the show, the spectacular Pranang Beach with its enormous karst formations and islands just offshore, was virtually untouched with just a couple dozen beach bums visiting it at any one time. It still felt like a backpacker’s secret known to just a few savvy travelers. Since then, however, the world had discovered Railay and the place was packed. Day trippers from neighboring towns flooded Pranang Beach with hundreds of people per day, and when the intense Thai sun beat down around mid-day, everyone would pack into the tiny patches of shade offered by palm trees along the beach. With no vacancies within our price range, we had to find a bungalow on the neighboring Ton Sai beach. It was cheaper and quieter than Railay, but required a stiff 30 min trek through the jungle to reach the good beaches. We spent a couple of days there, doing a daily commute to Railay where we swam, enjoyed cheap Thai food cooked in longtail boats pulled up to the beach, explored the Diamond Cave (smelled like bat guano), and then climbed one of the enormous karst mountains neighboring the beach, before making the long, difficult decent to the salt water lagoon at its center. Railay is also a mecca for rock climbers, and at one point we lay on our backs and watched a team of climbers scale a tremendous 1000 foot cliff that towered above us. Another time, unwilling to make the tough jungle trek back to our beach in the evening, we stuffed all our belongings in a dry bag and swam around the base of the cliffs back to Ton Sai. It was about 400 meters of swimming, about the furthest I had ever swam, but it wasn’t that deep and at one point, when I felt exhaustion about to hit, I realized I could just stand up in the hip-deep water. Oh well.
While Railay is perhaps one of the most beautiful beaches in the world with plenty to see and do, our daily commute to the good beaches and the staggering size of the crowds quickly wore us out, so we hopped on a ferry and deeper further into Thailand’s southern reaches. Our destination was Koh Lanta, one of the larger but lesser known islands on Thailand’s Andaman Coast. There is virtually no party scene there, so it tends to attract people looking for a relaxed, low-key time, which was perfect for us. We stayed at Bee Bee’s Bungalows, a wonderland of bamboo cottages built like tree forts anywhere from 5 to 15 feet off the ground. The owners were funny and friendly, and the on-site restaurant the best on the entire beach. Unique-looking resorts and restaurants were strung along the entire beach, and the vibe was very relaxed and pleasant. The only downside was the tide: at low tide, the ocean sank a good 2-3 meters, exposing a huge field of slimy rocks and murky tidal pools…but at high tide, the beach was totally swimmable. We spent a lazy day on the beach, drinking coconut milkshakes and eating the divine food served by Bee Bees, and then spent another two days exploring the islands by scooter. Koh Lanta actually consists of two islands: the touristy and developed Koh Lanta Yai in the south and the totally untouched island of Lanta Noi in the north. On our first day we raced around Lanta Yai, trying out different restaurants and exploring different beaches and checking out the old Sea Gypsy village of Old Lanta. On our second day we took a little longtail ferry across the strait separating the two islands and explored Lanta Noi. During the entire day we saw less than 10 tourists, and had a marvelous time on the curvy roads through the jungles, chatting with locals and having local cuisine in totally untouristed restaurants. At the end of the day, we stopped by an enormous 5 km-long white sand beach…there was only one other person visible over a kilometer away, so we had the beach entirely to ourselves. It was incredible—I didn’t think such places still existed in modern Thailand.
Koh Lanta Noi beach, and we have it all to ourselves!
The next day we began our return to Bangkok: first a minibus packed with tourists to the mainland (Koh Lanta can be accessed by a series of car ferries), then an overnight train from Trang to Bangkok. We arrived around mid-day, stashed our bags at the station, and immediately took a train up to the old Thai capital of Ayutthaya. It had flourished after the fall of Angkor Wat, and had many of the same features as that Cambodian city (the 5-headed snake Naga, the shape of the temples, etc.). Ayutthaya had eventually been sacked by the Burmese, however, and the Thais had rebuilt their capital near the modern-day location of Bangkok. Despite its battle scars, however, Ayutthaya still had a smattering of spectacular temples, which we visited on our favorite mode of transportation: a motorcycle. Nevertheless, the weather was a punishing 37 C with high humidity, so being a tourist was hard work and we flirted with sun stroke. That evening we headed back into Bangkok to a hotel on Khaosan Road, and the following day we met up with Norm and Nan again. After a long drive out of the city to a restaurant we couldn’t find, we turned around and headed back downtown to have a Thai version of hotpot for lunch. It was simply delicious. Headed to Nepal next, we knew we were going to miss the incredible food of Southeast Asia! Our flight to Nepal left at 9:00 PM that night, so Norm and Nan dropped us off at the skytrain station and we headed off once more…
On our train ride back to Bangkok, Jessica swiped the conductor’s hat for a quick picture…
But due to an airplane crash, getting hospitalized with Type A Influenza and an encounter with the Indian actor Sha Ruk Kahn, our trip to Nepal was far more than we bargained for…
Jessica: Getting back on the horse, so to speak, had been a bit of a harrowing experience. Along with the gravel strewn road (reminiscent of the gravel that made me dump Carole’s bike all those ages ago), the crazy (at times) traffic and the sudden stops or u-turns to which our guide was accustomed, I had to contend with the ghost of my crash. My heart would race every time I heard the familiar scrape of dirt on pavement, I would take hairpin turns at a snail’s pace and avoided the brakes at all costs. It didn’t help that my rear brakes were almost non-existent. But I emerged from our ride unscathed and triumphant, with the admiration of our guide and with a little less fear of the two-wheeled beast. To celebrate we headed for an incredible dinner of Vietnamese clay pot stews at Trong Dong, which would become our favourite restaurant. Da Lat didn’t have too much going for it, according to the Lonely Planet, so other than a couple of days of relaxation we weren’t expecting much.
The Crazy House!
We borrowed bicycles from the hotel and pedaled up and down hills, visiting the sights Da Lat has to offer. By far the best of them was the Crazy House which, far from being a hospital for the mentally unstable, is an incredibly unique, artistic and inventive hotel, with everything from giant giraffes you can sleep in, to a huge Viking longhouse, to a giant tree stump with twisted, green and brown vines along which run cement stairs. It was actually a boutique hotel but tourists were free to explore the Alice In Wonderland style buildings. Jess was in heaven as we wound up corkscrew staircases, peeping into eclectically decorated rooms and finally sat in a forest of giant toadstools to sip coconut water and a Vietnamese concoction simply called Yogurt Coffee.
We also stopped in to check out the Summer Palace, where the last king of Vietnam had his holiday house. It was interesting to see the way royalty lived back in the 50’s. It sure was a lot less extravagant then some rich people nowadays. We had to cover our shoes in plastic baggies, to avoid ruining the rich, red carpet that covered all the floors. Jess wasn’t too impressed with the palace and was making his opinion known when we stumbled upon The Emperors Chamber. It was a pink room, with a golden throne bracketed by identical red columns around which were wound golden snakes. There was, in fact, an emperor sitting on the throne, with a couple of courtiers in traditional Vietnamese dresses and a whole family posing around them. Obviously, the room was set up solely as a photo op and had nothing to do with the previous king.
“You want to get our pictures taken?” Jess asked grinning, and I hesitated, not sure whether I was willing to pay to get my picture taken with an obviously fake emperor.
But then the emperor rose from his throne, walked off to another part of the room and took off his robes. As it turned out, the emperor and his courtiers were all related to the family taking the picture.
“You mean we get to dress up” I asked excitedly, and took out my wallet.
I hate to say it, but Jess and I were a hit. We walked up to the throne, Jesse handing his camera to a girl so she could take a couple of pictures of us, and suddenly the room around us exploded. There were cameras everywhere, people were getting in the pictures to pose with us. At one point I was pulled out of the shot and another Vietnamese lady, also clad in royal garb, took my place, laying a hand on the throne armrest as though Jesse were her husband. The uncomfortable look on Jesse’s face was priceless. After another round of photos, with both the woman and I (lucky Jesse got two queens!) we relinquished the throne (quite literally) and took off our costumes, returning to our lowly peasant life.
The King and I
The following day we decided to go for a ride on the train. Although nowadays it’s nothing more than a tourist attraction, back in the day the train connected to the Vietnam rail network and carried passengers all over the country. We were just expecting a relaxing, slow ride along the countryside, but we ended up getting so much more out of it. Firstly, we were accosted by a Dutch girl we had seen at the same restaurant as us a couple of hours earlier, who introduced herself by asking “Is it normal to have blood in your diarrhea?” and then proceeded to describe her symptoms to us for clarification purposes. I guess traveling for a long time gives you an instant feeing of comfort with the people around you… at least for some people. The train ride itself was nothing to write home (or on a blog) about, just a little putter along the thickly leafed jungle forests in the surroundings, but when the train stopped at a small village to turn around, the conductor approached me.
“We stop here for 30 minutes,” he said. “Walk up the road and take the second left.”
And with those words he walked away.
I had been standing at the very back of the train, leaning on the caboose railing while Jess took pictures out the side, one car ahead. Armed with the information from the conductor I went off to find Jess. As we were walking up the indicated street we noticed no one else from the train was following.
“So where are we going?” Jess wanted to know.
“Up this street,” I said vaguely, concentrating on walking so my foot pointed forward instead of off to the side. “Second street in.”
As we turned onto the second street we saw a huge, cement archway with a sculpture of a Buddha on the very top. 100 meters down from the archway was the most interesting and colourful set of pagodas we had ever seen—and we’ve seen a lot of them. One of them had a giant dragon winding around its side and plunging down into the ground beside it, re-emerging in the garden and displaying a cross-legged Buddha in its open jaws. The other was filled with two hundred golden Buddha statues surrounding a giant four-storey Buddha at the back of the temple. The whole place was intricately decorated beyond belief and we explored the place in awe. Before we knew it 20 minutes were up and we had to rush back to the train before it left without us.
“How did you know that was there?” Jess asked in amazement as we hurried back down the street and towards the platform, where the train was loading up with passengers.
“The conductor told me,” I said. “Didn’t he tell you?”
As it turned out, the conductor had chosen not to share that particular piece of information with anyone else on the train, and as a result we were the only ones, aside from a Russian couple, that got to see the amazing pagodas. I felt a little bad for the Dutch girl, but was secretly glad we hadn’t had to contend with a trainload of tourists.
Our next stop in Vietnam was the capital city of Ho Chi Minh (the city previously known as Saigon), which was named after the chairman of the communist party during the Vietnamese war. From the stories we had been told by other travelers, we expected to find a seedy, dodgy city filled with pushers and brothels. Instead we found a well laid-out, modern city, clean and efficient with friendly people and (mostly) courteous motorists (except for the ones that used the sidewalk as their own personal roadway… Don’t get me started…). Crossing the street is always an adventure in Saigon. Since there’s never a break in the traffic, you just slowly walk out into the rush of scooters and taxis, and an like a rock in river, the motorists just flow around you. Terrifying the first couple of times! After a failed attempt at getting some paperwork done at the Canadian Consulate we headed to the Notre Dame cathedral (which bears little resemblance to its namesake church in France) and the Reconciliation Palace. The Palace was the residence of the South Vietnam prime minister up until the North won the war. At that point it was seized and repurposed as a museum, to tell the victor’s tale of what caused the Vietnam War, who carried out what atrocities and how Vietnam was finally “liberated” from the clutches of the West.
Since there wasn’t much else to see we decided to take a two-day tour of the Mekong Delta, which is the south-western region of Vietnam where the Mekong river ends up after running through Tibet, China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia. Understandably, it is an incredibly important river for Southeast Asia. Locally it’s known as the Rice Bowl of Vietnam because it produces nearly half of all of the rice produced in the country. We were picked up from our hotel by a van and introduced to Son, our guide. He asked us all where we were from then resolved to call us Mr. or Mrs. and our country of origin (we were Mr. and Mrs. Canada). At the docks, nearly two hours away, we climbed into a wobbly, flat-bottomed boat and told not to change seats or else the boat would capsize. Son wasn’t kidding, as the movement of just one person from one side of the boat to the other would cause it to tilt precariously to one side until someone had moved to the other side to counterbalance the tilt. The first day we motored along the river, stopping at rice factories, coconut candy artisan shops and a small wooden house where women were making rice paper. At most of our stops we were offered free tastes of whatever the people were making. At the coconut candy shop we were given coconut candy to try, along with ginger candy and a noxious-looking jar of yellow fluid (which was mostly just rice wine) containing a snake and scorpion that Jesse was willing to sample.
Jessica, cuddling with a python in the Mekong Delta
At the honey shop we were given honey straight from a live hive, with the bees buzzing dangerously and tickling our fingers as we poked them into the bee-packed honeycomb. At a little café we were given various tropical fruits to try, including dragon fruit, papaya (yeach!), jack fruit and something that appeared to be a cross between a pear and a peach but tasted like honey. We were also treated to some traditional Vietnamese singing, which bore closer resemblance to the Chinese high-pitched falsetto singing than the crooning 20’s sound we had originally associated with Vietnamese music. We had been offered a homestay as part of our tour, so as the rest of our fellow travelers headed up to their hotel rooms in the heart of Can Tho City, Jesse and I climbed on the backs of two scooters (Jesse’s piloted by a scrawny old man that looked like he would blow over if the wind picked up) and headed off into the jungle. We were excited at the prospect of spending the evening with a Vietnamese family in their home, sharing a meal and maybe having some mimed conversation. But when we got to our home stay we found it was just a bunch of shacks beside a house, with a table outside for the “guests” to eat at. Regrettably, we had zero interaction with the family, and rejoined our group later that day thinking it may have been better to stay with them in the city.
The following day we visited the floating market, made up of fruit- and vegetable-laden boats that congregate in the middle of the river to form a chaotic and unique shopping experience.
One of the floating markets in the Mekong Delta
Small canoes propelled by tiny little motors on long poles and laden with beverages, snacks and even a pot full of stir-fry, would come up to our boat and the pilot would hang on to our boat while his wife offered us all sorts of treats and goodies. Then they would speed away to the next boatload of tourists, the little motor in the back emitting an ear-piercing whine. Before leaving the area we stopped at the regular market, under a bridge, that sells everything from socks and pillows to frogs, pig eyes, skinned rats and various other tasty treats. We had the unfortunate luck of trying one such delicacy. Our guide was leading us around the many narrow streets of the market when he stopped in front of a man selling eggs. But there were no ordinary eggs. There were eggs covered in something black, which he explained is rice husk ash, and others covered in brown shavings, which were the rice husks themselves. He asked for one of the rice husk covered eggs, and peeled it, revealing a completely blackened egg. He then broke off a piece, revealing a greenish brown yolk, and proceeded to eat it.
The nefarious black egg of doom
“Who wants to try?” he asked, as everyone in the group edged away somewhat nauseously.
“I’ll try it,” spoke up one of the guys, putting on what appeared to be an attempt at a brave face.
“I’ll try it too,” Jess called out, and popped a piece of the egg in his mouth.
“What does it taste like?” I asked.
“Just like a regular egg,” Jess assured me, so I gave it a try.
For the first three seconds it tasted almost exactly like a hard-boiled egg, but suddenly this musty, almost bitter taste started spreading through my mouth and I began to feel myself gag. I spat out what remained in my mouth into a napkin, but bits of sticky, greenish brown yolk clung to my teeth and tongue. That’s when our guide chose to explain how they go about making these special eggs.
“They cover the egg in rice husks, and then pack it away for three to six months,” he said. “Then it’s done.”
I had assumed that the egg was cooked because it was hard. The truth was, the husks absorb the moisture from the whites and congeal it, and somehow slows down the rotting process. Bottom line, those eggs were completely raw and well past their freshness date. I wanted to throw up. But I didn’t. Instead Jess and I bought a couple of cans of Winter Melon Tea, the best drink we have found so far in southeast Asia, and proceeded to chug the contents in an attempt to get rid of that horrendous taste that clung to our taste buds. For the rest of the day we felt queasy and vowed never to eat another black egg again.
After our tour of the Mekong Delta we were ready for some R and R and we had been tipped off about Phu Quoc, a veritable island paradise in the south of Vietnam. We had our hotel in Ho Chi Minh book a flight for us for the following day and set out for one more night on the town. It turned out to be the single most expensive “experience” we’ve had on the trip so far. It all began when Jess got into his head that we had to try snake meat. Apparently he had been told by someone that snake was the most delicious meat ever, and he just had to try it at least once in his life. While in the Mekong Delta our tour guide had told us that we could order snake at some of the local restaurants, and Jess’ ears had perked up. So when we got back to Ho Chi Minh he asked our hotel to track us down a restaurant where we could order snake. Meanwhile I looked online and found some fairly harrowing descriptions of what some people had experienced ordering snake in Vietnam. But Jess would not be dissuaded and so, following the hotel’s directions, we set off into the night in search of snake. We found the restaurant easily enough, but the process was very confusing. We first paid for the set menu, then once we were seated we were told snake was not on the set menu, so we were given our money back and taken out through the back and into another dining room with menus on the table. We sat down, perused one of the menus and couldn’t seem to find the snake, so Jess asked one of the only waiters that spoke some English.
“Oh, yes, you can order snake,” the waiter said. “Not on menu, follow me.”
And so we did, towards the back of the restaurant and into the kitchen. The waiter announced something to the staff that were working at the large, wooden bench beside which we had stopped, and soon the entire kitchen staff was crowded around us, looking at us curiously and talking amongst themselves. We had been told by the hotel staff that snake would set us back 1.3 million Vietnamese Dong (approximately 60 USD) per kilo. Despite seeming expensive we figured we’d just have 200 or 300 grams and call it a day. Oh, the naivety. One of the things that had stuck from the online reports I read was that cobra was the good meat, although more expensive. Any other snake, python for example, would be gross to eat. So Jess asked our waiter what kind of snake it was. The waiter smiled and nodded and said “Yes, we bring snake.” And Jess repeated his question with much the same result. Seeing that we were getting nowhere I grabbed a pen and paper from the table and drew the elephant inside the boa constrictor from The Little Prince, and beside it a somewhat hasty, but otherwise photorealistic (Jesse: *snort!*), depiction of a cobra. I pointed at the boa and said “Python?” (Yes, I know I hadn’t drawn a python, but let’s not get picky) and then pointed at the cobra and said “Or Cobra?” The waiter’s face lit up and he nodded enthusiastically.
“Cobra, cobra,” he assured us, and then proceeded to pass the paper around to the rest of the kitchen staff, who studied it, murmuring under their breaths, then looked at me and laughed. It was obvious they were impressed with my artistic prowess. Suddenly a man appeared from even further back into the restaurant, holding a green mesh bag with a snake inside it. The snakes are farmed for the purpose of eating, so we figured the death of this particular animal would weigh as heavy on our conscious as that of a chicken or goose, perhaps. Again, so, so wrong. First the handler weighed it, and we noticed the scale read about 1.5 kg at which point Jess piped in,
“So we’ll take about 200 grams.”
Our waiter nodded distractedly and it wasn’t altogether clear if the message had gone through. At this point the entire wait and cooking staff were congregated in the back room and some of them were darting out at us from different doorways making snake hissing sounds. The fact that we were such a novelty to them should have tipped us that this was not going to be like someone ordering the chicken, but it didn’t. It actually felt like we were in the midst of a Mafia deal in the back of the restaurant. Very weird. The handler took the snake out of the bag and, to our horror, proceeded to plunge his thumb into the snake’s underside, ripping it open and pulling out its still-beating heart. The blood was quickly drained, the head was cut off and we were asked if we wanted the skin. I was so disturbed I didn’t even noticed when the waiter led Jess away to our table and ended up standing by myself in the back until one of the laughing staff members gave me a small push, laughing. I quickly fled to the front of the restaurant where I found Jesse sitting at our table, with something that looked like a small metal teapot, a shot glass and a cup with the beating heart in it. And he was alone.
“What are you supposed to do now?” I asked, looking at the heart in disgust.
“Eat the heart, but I don’t really know how,” he replied, looking queasy himself.
As soon as the excitement of killing the snake was over, the staff had decided we were just boring tourists and were nowhere to be found. Eventually we flagged someone down and he showed Jess what to do. He put the heart in a shot glass, added some rice wine and snake blood, which was in the metal teapot, and told Jess to shoot it back.
Gah!
“It makes you strong,” he said, making the international gesture of male virility.
Despite the previous experience with the black, congealed egg, Jess tilted his head back and let the heart slide down his throat. The he grimaced.
What followed next was the most inedible, unappetizing meal I have ever partaken of (the egg from earlier that day did not constitute a meal, just to clarify). When they had asked Jess if he wanted the skin, Jess had told them yes, assuming it meant he could take it home. What it actually meant was that they left the skin on when they cooked the meat. The meat itself was a rubbery, tough leather that we had to scrape off the hundreds of bones with our teeth, but the skin was like chewing on a scaly tire. In all fairness, they did prepare the meat in three different ways, hoping one of them would suit our fancy, but all three ways were equally unpalatable. What was worse, as soon as they brought us the second dish it became apparent that the 200 gram request had either not been understood or had been readily ignored.
“Do you think they’re giving us the whole snake?” Jess asked worried.
They did. And when they brought us the bill we nearly fell out of our seat.
“Should we dine and dash?” I asked Jess, only half joking.
The grand total, just for the snake mind you, because we didn’t order anything else, came out to 2.5 million Dong, which translates to a painful $125 USD. Easily, the most expensive meal we have ever had on this trip and sadly also the worst. Karma was pooping all over us for having caused such a wretched death for that poor snake. The next day, on the way to the airport, Jess got sick (double Karma for coming up with the idea!). Thankfully it was a short flight and soon we were smelling the salty breeze and hearing the soft roaring of the waves as they crashed on the sand. Our resort was right on the beach, and our room looked straight out onto the ocean, a mere 4 meters from our glass doors. The resort, Bamboo Cottages, is 100% dependent on solar for its electricity, which is incredibly cool, and they were looking to expand their eco-friendly philosophy to a five star hotel they were planning on building nearby.
We swam, ate our meals at a table on the beach, kayaked to a deserted island and fell asleep to the sound of crashing waves, and soon we were ready to continue on our way. Our last morning there we woke up at the unearthly hour of 5:30 am and were taken to catch a boat that would drop us off back on the mainland. We then took a bus to the Cambodian border and an hour later, visas in hand, we were on our way to Phnom Penh.
Classic Cambodia
Cambodia looked exactly as I imagined it. Dry, yellowing grass fields with a smattering of tall, swaying palm trees. Cambodia is one of the top five poorest countries in Southeast Asia, and site of one of the most senseless genocides in the history of mankind. In 1970, due to the government’s apparent inaction in dealing with the Viet Cong who were using Cambodia as their base of operations, the US backed General Lon Nol led a coup which effectively gave all the power to the general. This turned out to be an incredibly unpopular move, with many citizens pouring out onto the streets to demonstrate against the coup. During the next five years dissatisfaction grew, until a large rebel group, called the Khmer Rouge and headed by a man named Pol Pot, overthrew the government and proceeded to implement Pol Pot’s insane vision of a “fundamentalist communism”. With this new regime, all property and belongings were abolished. The city dwellers were evacuated from their homes and forced to go out into the country, with nothing but the clothes they were wearing, to work at one of the many labour camps that cropped up across the country. Even though Pol Pot’s philosophy held the country dwellers and farmers at much higher esteem than the city dwellers, who were said to be lazy parasites that fed off the labours of the farmers, everyone suffered tremendously under the regime. For some reason Pol Pot decided the Cambodian economy would rely solely on rice production, and so he demanded unreasonable increases in production. To try to achieve these ridiculous levels everyone, men, women and children, were forced to work in the rice fields from early morning until late at night, with often a single bowl of weak soup to eat. Many people died of starvation, or from being worked to death. Others were killed outright. Pol Pot was an incredibly paranoid man, so anyone who was perceived to pose a threat, or to someday pose a threat, was exterminated. This included anyone who was an intellectual (teachers, doctors, artists, writers) or looked like an intellectual (for example if they wore glasses, or if their hands were soft, meaning they didn’t perform manual labour). And of course, you couldn’t leave anyone behind who would want to avenge that person’s death, so entire families, mothers, children, grandparents, even babies, were brutally massacred.
The stupa in the killing fields, housing thousands of skulls of the victims of the Khmer Rouge
On our first day in Phnom Penh Jess and I visited The Killing Field, an area of three to four hectares where the mass graves of more than 17 000 individuals were uncovered. Prisoners from nearby detention centres were taken there, in the dead of night, blindfolded and cuffed together. They would be unloaded from the truck, placed in a small, wooden holding shed and then the communist music would begin to blare. Then, one by one, they would be led to a pit and either be clubbed in the head or have their throats slashed with a razor-sharp sugar palm leaf, and then shoved into the pit. They would then be covered in DDT to mask the smell and to finish the job if they hadn’t already died. The music was meant to cover up the screams of the dying, so no one would know what was going on and, in fact, until the regime was finally toppled by the Vietnamese army in 1979 and people returning to Phnom Penh stumbled upon the site, no one knew what the compound was for. Towards the end of the regime, about 300 people were being killed nightly, including Khmer Rouge soldiers who Pol Pot suspected of working against him. The new government decided to transform the horrible site into a memorial, and built a stupa, a Buddhist temple for the dead, in memory of the many souls who lost their lives there. The bones of about 7 000 individuals are on display as a reminder to all the visitors of the horrors perpetrated in that site. The most heartbreaking of them all were the skulls of infants who had been bashed to death on a nearby tree.
The Killing Tree, where Khmer Rouge executioners would bash baby’s heads in. Horrifying.
By the end of the bloody regime between 1.7 and 2.5 million people had been killed, had starved or wasted away; nearly a third of the country’s entire population. Such a devastating loss brought the country’s economy to an abrupt stand-still, with no industry, professionals or even commodities to trade, other than rice. The recovery has been slow, which is part of the reason why Cambodia has become so attractive to tourists. A meal will set you back $1-3 USD. Alcoholic beverages range from 50 cents to one dollar and a decent room with A/C can be as cheap as $10 USD/night (we saw one place for $3 per night!). Despite this traumatic past, both economic and emotional, Cambodia is set on moving forward, and has come a long way from being a nation of oppressed, terrified farmers. Phnom Penh wasn’t the depressing, dodgy city we had been told to expect, but a colourful, vibrant one. The people are incredibly friendly, more so than even in Vietnam, and children will often come running out of their homes, jumping up and down, waving and screaming “Hello, how are you?” as we go by. Everyone seems to speak a little English and many locals we met were quite fluent.
After Phnom Penh we headed off to Battambang, a small town along the Sangker River that is the starting point of the river boat ride to Siem Reap. Battambang itself doesn’t have much to offer, just incredibly cheap food and a very popular circus, but close by there is something called the Bamboo Train. More than a train, it’s a series of individual cars, made up of two train boogies (one that sports a belt), a bamboo platform with some cushions on it and a small gas motor that started up much the same way a lawnmower is. Jess and I hired a tuk tuk for the day to take us to the train and a couple of other tourist sites around the area and soon we were standing dubiously in front of the train. Well, I was standing dubiously. Jesse had read up on the train and knew not to expect a train made out of bamboo with a coal engine out front.
The Bamboo Train!
We sat nervously on our cushions, our “conductor” wrapped a cord around the motor drive and gave a quick yank and we were off. At first we moved at a comfortably slow pace, but soon we picked up speed, hurtling along the tracks no more than a foot off the ground, feeling every jolt and jog where the tracks connected. Our hearts thudding, the wind in our hair, we flew along, past cows, farmers and a couple of oncoming bamboo trains that had been taken off the track so we could go by. The purpose of the construction of the train is to make it incredibly easy to lift off the track, remove the axles and then reassemble it once the oncoming train has gone by. It was brilliant.
After the train we visited Banan Temple, at the very top of an incredibly steep, and long set of stairs. I had to take a couple of breaks going up and coming down. The temple at the top looked like a miniature version of the Angkor Wat temples and housed several shrines.
It seemed like pain was the name of the game, because after the Banan Temple we visited the Killing Cave, where people were thrown through a natural skylight to die, and the temple of Phnom Sampeau. We set off a steep incline and walked steadily up for about 40 minutes, pouring sweat and gasping for breath. Good training for the Nepal trek in March. The Killing Cave was eerily beautiful, with shafts of sunlight filtering in through the incense smoke and the thick green moss covering the walls. Here, as in the Phnom Penh Killing Fields there were bones on display in a little shrine, and a reclining Buddha watched over them to ensure they could someday find peace.
After the Killing Cave we continued up the side of the mountain, to the temple. It was breezy, with white, pink and blue tiles everywhere and the smell of incense wafting out at us. A man inside was chanting and the drone of the insects joined in to create a somewhat dissonant thrum. As we were heading back down we noticed a set of stairs, plunging off to the left of the path and we decided to explore just a little more, despite my ankle screaming bloody murder at me. It turned out to be a deep grotto with cave-like walls rising high above us to an open sky. There were three figures of a sitting Buddha in a row, and a surprisingly leafy forest growing behind them. It seemed so out of place and random, and we took a couple of minutes to look around and explore. Our curiosity sated we headed back down the mountain to where our tuk tuk driver was waiting.
The following morning we rose bright and early to catch the boat to Siem Reap. We wound our way in an overcrowded motorboat, along a dismally low-leveled creek. Every few turns we would get stuck on a river bank and the guy with the long metal pole had to shove us out again while the driver revved the engine mercilessly. Eventually that shallow river joined another, larger river which flowed into the absolutely massive lake (Tonle Sap) which dominates the middle of Cambodia. The shores vanished on other side of us and we seemed to be crossing an inland ocean. Eventually we headed up another river filled with heavy boat traffic. It was an interesting, albeit rather long ride, and we were treated to the sights of floating villages, typical Cambodian houses on stilts and flashy, golden pagodas as we wound our way to Siem Reap. But once we became accustomed to the sights we turned to Jesse’s book (The One Hundred Year-Old Man Who Climbed out Of a Window and Disappeared) for entertainment. After a 9 hour ride, we were eventually docked. Tired and with a bit of a sore bum, we climbed the sandy banks, expecting to see a city, only to find out we were still 15km away from Siem Reap. After a failed attempt at finding public transportation we settled for getting a tuk tuk and finally accepted the offer of the driver who had been following us for the past 10 minutes.
The hotel we stayed at had $1.50 bikes for rent and our first day of exploring Angkor Wat Park was spent pedaling around the many paved roads that snake through the park. Angkor, the ancient city of the Khmer empire, was a veritable religious and political hub, boasting a population of about one million around the time London was still a village. Sadly, all the functional buildings were made of wood, and have since rotted away completely. What’s left are the temples for the gods, since theirs was the only right to live in stone buildings. Unfortunately that means the sites are not necessarily next to each other, as we had imagined, and we spent more time biking from one location to the other than actually exploring the ruins, but we’d had a couple of days of complete inactivity so we barely noticed our bums growing gradually more and more painful until we were biking home and it became almost impossible to sit.
Despite the heat, we had spent the day clambering up steep, stone stairs, stepping through crumbling doorways and gawking at the spectacularly tall trees that sometimes seemed to be growing directly on top of a temple, crushing it under the weight of its thick trunk. It was exhilarating to think of the hundreds of thousands of people that walked up those same steps, through those same doorways and along those same corridors, hundreds of years before us.
That night we made an amazing discovery. The night market. At around 6pm two intersecting roads line with vendor stalls with T-shirts, jewelry, massage chairs and even fish tanks where little fishes will eat the dead skin off your feet. For a fee. But the true beauty of the night market was Steve’s Place. It was a sea of tourists and locals, crowded around little metal folding tables and being served the most amazing $2 plates of food imaginable. Usually we steer clear of street meat, after our unsettling experience in Peru, but the crowd convinced us to give it one more try. Who can say no to 75 cent chicken skewers and $1 jackfruit smoothies?? It was one of the best meals we’ve had under $8 (for both of us!). So much so that we ate there four nights in a row, and became old regulars with a “usual” (the chicken skewers, of course).
The following day, our butts sore and a little swollen from 30 km of riding the day before, we decided to give the pedalled bikes a break and opted for renting a scooter. We headed out to the Roluos ruins which are not within the park itself, but some 13km away, thinking they would be less crowded than the ones closer to town. They weren’t, and eventually the incessant waves of people got to us and we hopped on our scooter once more, heading further away. Eventually we came to a sign for a temple pointing down a narrow dirt road, far too narrow for a tour bus traverse.
“Let’s check it out,” I suggested, and we bumped along the somewhat sandy road.
But after ten minutes of driving we hadn’t seen a single sign.
“I don’t think there’s anything here,” Jess declared. “Should we turn around?”
“Maybe just go around the bend and see if there’s anything there,” I said, peering over his shoulder.
Eventually we found a sign, at the entrance of a small dirt laneway.
“I don’t think anyone’s been here in a while,” I noted after walking along it for a few minutes and finding a large branch blocking the lane.
We skirted around the branch and eventually came to a very run-down set of three temples.
“There’s no one here!” I cried out happily.
“Except for him,” Jess replied, nodding to a guy, asleep on a hammock beside his scooter.
He didn’t seem to notice us so we sat in the middle of the ruins, drinking water and listening to the Cambodian soca music blaring at us from somewhere in the jungle. It all felt very surreal.
All the temples in Angkor Park have their own unique charm, from the impressive Angkor Wat to Preah Neak Poan, a little altar at the end of a wooden pier, where four-leaf clovers are actually the norm.
Despite already having had a ridiculously long and tiring day, two days in a row, we felt compelled to stop the bike each time we saw a new ruin off in the jungle on either side, and clamber around taking hundreds of pictures. Our last day had been reserved for Angkor Wat itself, and we got up at five in the morning to bike out to the temple and see the sunrise.
Sunrise over Angkor Wat itself
Despite the early hour there were still close to a thousand people congregated on the lawn in front of the temple, hoping to catch a hint of the residual magic that ancient ruins always seem to exude at the break of morning and when the sun dips down to the horizon in the evening.
An empty pool inside Angkor Wat
Unfortunately, I had not done my homework and was wearing shorts, which are not allowed in the topmost temple in Angkor Wat, and since wrapping a scarf around my legs a la sarong was also not allowed, I had to sit at the bottom while Jess climbed up the steep wooden stairs that had been installed to protect the stone ones underneath. He assured me it was nothing to write home about, although I’m not sure if he just said that to make me feel better.
Bayon Temple in a rare moment when it’s not crawling with tourists
Some of the many faces of Bayon Temple
The incredible carved wall along the base of the “Platform of the Leper King”
When the crowds started getting a little too crazy we headed to Bayon, the famous “faces” temple, with 216 faces carved out of stone, and found it completely overrun by tourists. Luckily the thing to take pictures of are the many sculpted faces that crown the tops of the archways, so getting good shots wasn’t too difficult. Even so, we soon grew extremely tired of being jostled by overexcited tour guides and losing each other in wave after wave of tour groups, so we hopped back on the bikes and made our way back to our hotel.
Unfortunately the AC had stopped working at that point, so with the fan on full blast we packed our backpacks and fell, exhausted, into bed. We would be heading for the Thai border the next day, but for the time being all we could think about was sleep.
Jesse: Our arrival in Vietnam coincided with both of us getting nailed with a bad case of travel fatigue: on our taxi ride from the airport to our undeniably lovely hotel in Hanoi’s old city, with the sights and sounds of a brand new country streamed past, we couldn’t work up the effort to care. It certainly didn’t help that we were both still gripped by food poisoning or that we hadn’t yet recovered from severe colds. The first symptom of travel fatigue is that you’d rather stay in a hotel bed and watch endless episodes of Friends on your laptop rather than venturing outside to explore, so for 3 days that’s exactly what we did. From our balcony on the 4th floor, we could hear the sounds of the city below, and every few minutes a cyclist selling something—tea, coffee, snacks—would ride past, with a little sing-song recording played into a megaphone on the bike. In the discomfort of cold/food poisoning, those repetitive little half-tunes became “ear worms” that haunted us…until we made up silly English lyrics sing every time we heard them! A couple of times, when one of us was feeling better than the other, we made short excursions into the old city for pho (Vietnamese noodle soup) or bahn mi (delicious sandwiches made with small baguettes) and what we saw, we really liked: street vendors selling mysterious steaming food on sidewalks, vibrant architecture that was a mix of Asian and colonial French influences (think really tall, narrow and colorful buildings with sharply pointed roofs), clean streets and vibrant markets. The music playing from open shops was in Vietnamese but in a style reminiscent of romantic 1930’s French music—a leftover from the days of French colonialism. Hanoi seemed pretty cool and we wished we were feeling well enough to enjoy it all. But by the 4th day of our food poisoning, when Jessica was wracked by another round of vomiting and diarrhea, we said enough is enough and put her on a course of antibiotics. The next day she was back on her feet and we decided to move on to Cat Ba Island in the famed Ha Long Bay.
Travel in Vietnam is just amazing. Virtually every hotel is happy to make onward travel arrangements for you and, more often than not, they don’t give you any kind of ticket or receipt. At your time of departure, a random car or minibus pulls up and you pile in with a bunch of other bemused tourists. The driver might drop you at a bus station, a gas station or just at the side of the road, but eventually a more official bus will arrive, and you’ll pile in. On our way to Cat Ba, our original driver gave us a bunch of business cards reading “The Pineapple Hotel” before we got on our bus. When the bus dropped us off on a random street in the city of Hai Phong (Vietnam’s 3rd largest city), a man was there waving the Pineapple business card at us and led us down along another street (he was zipping ahead on a motorcycle while we struggled to keep up on foot) to a second waiting bus. Again, we piled in and sped off through the city—and into an industrial park along the waterfront. We bounced along a muddy road, passing huge dump trucks laden with coal and more than once we exchanged a look that said “Where on Earth are they taking us?” But eventually arrived at a rickety wooden dock where a long motorboat sat bobbing in the gray water. We climbed on board, huddling on plastic stools on a deck crowded with scooters and motorcycles, and then off we roared across the bay, freezing salt spray quickly soaking us to the skin. There was yet another bus waiting for us on Cat Ba Island to take us into Cat Ba Town. In the end it took 6 hours and we rode on 5 different vehicles—all without once showing anyone a ticket or proof of payment.
Cat Ba was a pretty little island filled with sharp green karst mountains. Its proximity to Ha Long Bay makes it a prime location to visit the amazing bay, but the fact that it’s a bit harder to access than other more convenient bases (such as the scummy Ha Long City) means the crowds are still pretty thin. Add to that bad weather and the fact that it was off season, and we basically had the whole town to ourselves. Our hotel was on the water front with a superb view of the bay, but for our entire first day it poured rain and we had to resign ourselves to another day of relaxing in the hotel, eating pho and preparing ourselves to be tourists again. Walking the waterfront in search of food in the evening was like wandering through a ghost town—we spotted a total of 5 other tourists, despite the fact that every restaurant and hotel on the strip were open for business but completely empty.
The next day the weather cleared and we joined a boat tour of the famed Ha Long Bay and its less renowned but equally lovely neighbor Lan Ha Bay. As we chugged away from the dock, we passed a floating fisherman’s village, complete with a floating town hall, supermarket and gas station. Our first stop was a place called Monkey Island (which, for those of you who played PC adventure games back in the early 90’s, holds a special significance!) where we clambered up to the top of a jagged, rocky spire for an astounding 360 degree view of the very Caribbean-eque island below us. Jessica, still limping from her leg injury, somehow managed to rock climb up a near vertical wall with no assistance. While we were crouched there at the top, wondering vaguely how we were going to make it down from the pinnacle alive, one of the island’s residents, a cheeky monkey no doubt on the prowl for a handout, sidled into our midst and took a seat not 2 feet away from us. While two German girls tried to get a “monkey selfie”, I captured a shot of the fellow at close range and nearly had my hand bit off for my efforts. But check out the picture below—totally worth a monkey bite.
The floating fisherman village
Jessica climbing the pinnacle on Monkey Island. Note that I’m looking almost straight down…
A split second before he tried to bite me.
Back on the boat, we headed to Ha Long Bay, designated a UNESCO world heritage site for its spectacular collection of limestone karst islands, jutting up from the sea like so many green dragon’s teeth. The scenery was otherworldly and surreal, and it only got better once we docked at a floating boat rental company and set off to explore the islands in tandem kayaks. Our guide led us through a sea cave, a water-filled tunnel boring directly into the side of sheer karst mountain, and 100 meters further along we emerged into a huge tropical lagoon, completely enclosed from the outside world by high green walls. Hidden in a back corner of the lagoon was a second, much narrower sea cave—which led to another hidden lagoon: a lagoon inside a lagoon! With the clean aqua-marine water and verdant cliffs surrounding us, we could easily have been somewhere deep in the Caribbean. A troupe of critically endangered Cat Ba Langur monkeys, pitch black except for blonde, rockstar hairdos, cavorted above us in the bamboo trees clinging to the cliff face.
“I have never seen Cat Ba Langurs here,” our guide said, shaking his head. “You are extremely lucky.” The Cat Ba Langur is the most critically endangered primate in the world, with only about 60 animals remaining in the wild, so for us to see 5 or 6 in one place is pretty extraordinary indeed.
After our kayaking adventure, we were settling down to an on-board on our boat lunch when one of the other passengers, a Russian lady traveling with a hard-looking man dressed in full camouflage (as a style choice?), suddenly announced:
“Someone stole my money! I had all my money in my backpack, and now I’m missing 1.4 million Dong!” (which is about $70 US).
While she proceeded to accuse the two ship hands of theft, I realized that this was the perfect setting for a mystery: an exotic setting in Ha Long Bay; a crime committed in the midst of a lunch party of international strangers… The Case of the Missing Dong! What we needed now was a Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot to appear and begin interviewing the suspects. In the end, neither ship hand admitted guilt and a police inspector eventually had to board our boat to investigate the crime. Alas, we never knew how it was resolved, but in the end several other people admitted to missing money from their backpacks, although nothing so large as 1.4 million Dong, so it was likely there was indeed a thief in our midst…
On our third day on Cat Ba, we rented a couple of scooters ($4 for a full day, baby!) and headed out to explore the island. It was Jessica’s first time back on two wheels since her accident, but she was pretty relaxed about it. The fact that we kept the bikes around 40 km/h (they actually couldn’t go much faster) probably helped. We visited the Hospital Cave, a limestone cavern that had been turned into a huge bunker during the American-Vietnamese war, and then made our way out to some of the remote beaches on the west side of the island. It was the second sunny day in a row (the forecast for northern Vietnam was for unbroken rain for 2 straight weeks) so we soaked up whatever rays we could get.
Hospital Cave on Cat Ba Island
That night we headed for central Vietnam and the famed Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park. It was also our first experience with night buses here, and let me tell you, India could learn a thing or two from the Vietnamese night bus concept: instead of seats, these night buses have bunk beds. They aren’t particularly wide, but they’re long enough to accommodate me quite comfortably. Entering the bus, they make you remove and bag your shoes (the floor is a thick carpet) and provide you with a warm blanket, a bottle of water. All in all, it’s a bit like stepping into a compact hostel dorm room.
Phong Nha-Ke Bang is a remarkable park and home to the oldest karst mountains in Asia. The limestone peaks are literally riddled with caves, including the world’s largest, Son Doong, which was only just discovered in 2009. You can only visit Son Doong on an 8 day trek for the low low price of $3000 US per person (Before you ask who on Earth would pay that kind of money, just know there’s a year-long waiting list for the tour…). On our first day, we rented a single scooter and rode 2-up around the park. En route we stopped at Paradise Cave—easily the most touristic cave of them all. But despite that, it was absolutely breathtaking. The approach to the entrance was down a long road through the jungle, and the up a long, switch-backing ramp. For some reason, the park pumped a bizarre combination of traditional Vietnamese music and a wailing solo electric guitar at us through speakers placed along the ramp. The entrance is a narrow crack beneath a boulder…and then suddenly you’re inside, descending into soaring, cathedral-like space on a wooden walkway. The cave system extends about 39 km, but the boardwalk only covers the first kilometer. Still, the huge passage was filled with multicolored stalactites and stalagmites, arches and pillars and bizarre rock formations that looked like huge piles of melted candle wax. We half expected a merry band of 7 dwarves to march around a corner of the passage at any moment.
On the edge of Phong-Nha-Ke Bang national park
The tiny entrance to Paradise Cave
Just inside Paradise Cave
The next day we headed out on an official spelunking expedition to the Tu Lan cave system with Oxalis, an extremely professional guiding company with exclusive rights to guide the more remote cave systems in Phong Nha. Our troupe (consisting of 5 tourists, a guide, an assistant guide and 3 porters) began our trek across flat, muddy farm fields with huge karst formations rising around us on all sides. We wore helmets and lifejackets, as a good portion of our excursion would be in the water. We’d left our hiking boots behind in favor of Cambodian military boots: simple rubberized canvas with a thin rubber sole. They made us pity the Cambodian army. But once we tiptoed across our first deep mud patch, we were glad our boots didn’t have to weather this kind of abuse.
One of the farmers, bringing in feed for his cattle and buffalo
As we crossed the field, our guide pointed out a series of dirt mounds scattered among the crops.
“Those are graves,” he explained. “When a person dies in North Vietnam, the relatives bury them in a field. After about 5 years, when only a skeleton remains, they move the remains to a proper graveyard and hold the funeral.” We later learned that in the south, they wouldn’t move the body from the unmarked grave, but after about 2 years they throw a huge multi-day wake for the deceased to say goodbye, after which the relatives can move on.
A couple hours into the trek, we left the fields behind and forded our first river, linking arms so that we wouldn’t get pulled away by the rushing current of the waist-deep water. We climbed a ridge, crossed a perfectly circular, flat-bottomed valley straight out of a ‘Nam war movie, and then came to our first cave at last. The first thing we noticed when we stepped inside the huge entrance of Hung Ton Cave was just how dark it was: after the bright lighting of Paradise Cave the day before, our headlamps naturally only illuminated one thing at a time (and in white florescent light) while the rest of the cave was pitch black. Having multiple headlamps helped, certainly, but it was a reality check that we were going where few tourists ventured.
Making our way along the rocky floor, we quickly came to our first obstacle: a 13 meter cliff. Oxalis had installed a gigantic aluminum ladder and our guide attached each of us to a safety rope and lowered us one at a time down to the floor of the cave below.
The ladder used to descend the cliff.
The lower chamber was enormous—perhaps 60 to 70 feet high and nearly as wide—and filled with stalactites, stalagmites and “cave pearls”. We made our way further along the tunnel for perhaps half a kilometer until we came to our second obstacle: an underground lake. In the light of our headlamps, it looked almost exactly like Golum’s lake from the Hobbit; not the sort of deep, creepy body of water you really wanted to jump into. Still, this was the main reason we wore lifejackets: we had to swim across it to our exit. I stripped down to just my shorts and put the rest of my clothes in a drybag, but almost everyone else, particularly the girls, entered the water fully clothed. It was utterly, shockingly, terribly freezing—so cold we had trouble breathing. I felt a mad urge to swim as hard as I could in an attempt to keep warm, so from the back of the group I struck out as fast as I could, quickly overtaking James, the tall Brit thrashing in the water ahead of me. And then suddenly the cold sapped all the strength from my limbs and I had trouble just doggy paddling forward. At that point the current caught us and began pulling us towards the 10 foot waterfall that spilled from the exit mouth of the cave. Fighting numbness, we paddled to the right side of the narrowing lake—now more of a river—and clutched at the sharp rock wall. One of the other tourists, Marco, a Spaniard, lost his grip and began float towards the waterfall. I extended my hand, and with a “Thanks, amigo,” he grabbed it forcefully and pulled himself back to the wall—and pulling me off the wall in the process! Fortunately James was there to lend me a hand and pull me back.
Dripping and frozen, we staggered out of the water in another beautiful, circular valley. The river dumped out of the cave into a milky blue pool and then surged away under the next mountain in its way. A couple of the porters had gone ahead and had a lunch of barbequed pork spring rolls prepared for us on the banks of the pool and had a cozy little fire blazing. We were famished and the spring rolls were amazing. After lunch, we hiked back up over the mountain—essentially climbing back over top of Hung Ton Cave. The going was tough with muddy paths and lots of rock climbing and it didn’t take us long to appreciate the fact that a tunnel beneath a mountain had some serious time-saving advantages over a mountain pass. If our outrageously tough Gorilla Trek (GT) in Uganda was unit of measuring jungle trekking difficulty, this was a 0.7 GT. We descended the mountain right beside the entrance to Hung Ton Cave and set off retracing our steps.
Our next destination was the Rat Cave which we had passed on our way to Hung Ton. After our absolutely disgusting experience in the Rat Temple in India, Jessica was a little leery about this one.
“Why do they call it the ‘Rat Cave’?” she asked about a dozen times, a little shrill quaver in her voice.
“You’ll see!” our guide would always reply with a smile.
Accessing the entrance was difficult: it was on a very steep, muddy bank above the original river we had forded, so the path was treacherous and we all became utterly filthy from our efforts. The mouth of the cave was enormous, and enough light entered the entrance that a forest of ferns had grown there on the floor of the cave. While there wasn’t a major body of water to cross in this cave, it was still very wet. Water dripped all around us from stalactites and deep, cold pools lay beside the path, ready to give you a soaker if you slipped off the slimy rocks. The cave was just over a kilometer in length, and when we arrive at the exit, we could see why it was called “Rat Cave”: the narrow exit rose up towards the light in a narrow tunnel, reminiscent of a rodent’s burrow. Suffice it to say, Jess was relieved.
The entrance to Rat Cave
The high tunnel of Rat Cave
We retraced our way through the cave and then forded the river one last time. As we re-crossed the farm fields, I chatted with our guide about his passion: cameras. He knew cameras inside out; he knew all the features of my Sony a6000 along with all the competitor cameras. But alas, much to his disgust, he could only afford a cheap point and shoot. Deep purple twilight was upon us as we hiked back across the fields, oblivious now to the mud patches in our way. The dark silhouettes of karst mountains rose around us like towering sentinels and we remarked about the stunning beauty of the landscape and whether, in 10 or 20 years, this would all be transformed into another tourist hotspot. We hoped not.
Later that evening we took a night bus to our next destination: the historical village of Hoi An. Our hostel had prepared us “pizzas to go” but given how slow they were in the kitchens, the pizzas ended up being half-cooked balls of dough stuffed into Styrofoam containers. All the toppings had sloughed off and collected on the bottom of the box. They were gross—easily the worst food we ate in Vietnam—and they gave us another round of mild food poisoning. Wheee.
After another bunk bed night bus ride, we made our way sleepily to our hotel, the lovely Golden Bell Homestay. It was an extraordinary place: a boutique hotel with gorgeous rooms, an interior courtyard, an enormous free buffet breakfast, free bicycles to use around the town, and a very kind, caring staff—all for about $18 USD per night. It was perhaps the best value hotel we’ve ever stayed at. One of the items for breakfast was an absolutely scrumptious Vietnamese banana cake, which was sweet, moist and reminiscent of bread pudding. After much gentle pestering, the owner of the hotel gave me the recipe which I intend to make at the first possible opportunity!
Hoi An is a wonderful town. The entire historical center has been designated for pedestrians and cyclists only, so the modern day hustle and bustle of scooters, taxis and buses quickly fades away and you feel like you’ve taken a step back into Vietnam in the 1920s. The buildings are wooden and painted in pastel oranges and yellows, and brightly colored paper lanterns hang from the entrance of every second shop. The old houses and saloons have been converted into cafes and boutique shops selling clothing, leatherworks and art. The food is a fusion of local Vietnamese cuisine with a lot of French influences and is absolutely delicious (baked squid stuffed with barbequed pork, anyone?). We took it easy, trying to shake off the effects of the latest round of food poisoning, and just wandered the old town for a few days. There were several ancient pagodas scattered around the town, an equally ancient covered bridge built by the Japanese and the 12th century AD, and a lot of shops and restaurants boldly advertising that they were recommended on Tripadvisor.com or the Lonely Planet. The place was exceedingly touristy, but it didn’t feel crowded or over run. Apparently 20 years ago Hoi An hadn’t been discovered by tourists and I can only imagine how amazing it would have been back then…
Paper lanterns in Hoi An
Barbecued pork spring rolls!
Some of the classy buildings in Hoi An by night. I half expected to see Humphrey Bogart emerge from one of the saloons in a Panama hat…
We took a day trip out to visit My Son, the ruins of an ancient city from the Hindu Cham empire which was eventually defeated by the Vietnamese. The ruins were set in the shadow of the Cat Tooth Mountain and consisted of several clusters of short tower-like temples. Sadly, several of the sites had been bombed heavily by B-52s, demolishing most of the temples and leaving the ground pockmarked with gigantic craters. The one section of the ruins that was relatively well-preserved was absolutely crawling with tourists—mostly from our own tour bus—so Jess and I scooted ahead to see the rest of the site quickly, before returning to the well-preserved site at the end. Virtually no one was there at that point, and the ruins were significantly more atmospheric. Back in Hoi An and with a bit of time to kill, we visited a hair salon where Jessica paid the stylist a few dong for the use of her scissors so that she could cut her own hair. I bought a North Face fleece/hoody ($35! North Face equipment is manufactured in Vietnam, so the prices here are ridiculous) and Jessica had a fancy shirt tailor made ($25! Seriously, the next time I’m in Vietnam I’m going to get my entire wardrobe tailor made!) We had a fantastic, low-key time in Hoi An and were reluctant to move on…
The Cham ruins at My Son
But adventure was calling us. Vietnam had been the perfect cure to our travel fatigue and we were ready to up the ante on our trip once again. We took a night bus down to Nha Trang, the loud and commercial beech capital of Vietnam. The place was filled with high rises and veritably crawling with Russian tourists. But our purpose was not to relax on the sand, however: we were there to embark on a 3 day motorcycle tour from Nha Trang to Da Lat in the Vietnamese highlands! For the last 10 years, a company called Dalat Easy Riders has been running motorcycle tours throughout Vietnam, mostly by letting the tourists ride pillion behind a guide, but sometimes with the tourists riding bikes of their own. The company became so successful that they spawned a host of copycat companies (“Easy Riders”, “The Real Easy Riders”, “The Original Dalat Easy Riders”, etc.) so it has become hard for tourists to figure out if they’re actually booking with the legit company. We were pretty confident we had the real deal, but the fact was that Phan Van Bang (or just “Bang”), our humorous, soft-spoken guide was so knowledgeable and so professional that in the end it didn’t really matter if we were traveling with the first Easy Riders or not.
Bang met us at our hotel in Nha Trang the day before our departure to discuss the trip, and then several hours later our bikes were delivered by truck from Da Lat (most people ride the De Lat to Nha Trang route, but we were headed in the opposite direction and Easy Riders were happy to accommodate). Jessica chose a rather sporty Honda 125 cc that was a bit rough around the edges, while I was (happily) left with a gorgeous, brand new Suzuki 150 cc cruiser styled after Suzuki’s larger engine Boulevard bikes. Jess was initially a little hesitant: memories of her accident were still fresh and riding proper motorcycles is definitely a step up in difficulty from the scooters we’d rented up until now. But we kept the bikes below 50 km/h most of the time—full throttle was only about 70 km/h on these tiny engines—and she gradually regained her confidence and riding mojo.
The Jesses ride again!
We rode out of Nha Trang at 8:00 AM on a gloriously sunny morning with palm trees waving in the warm ocean breeze. It was hot when we stopped but deliciously cool as soon as we got underway again. We hugged the beach and then headed up into the green hills to the north of town on a brand new 4-lane highway virtually devoid of other traffic: motorcycling nirvana! All too quickly our route merged with the main north-south highway running through Vietnam and the road was swamped with large, foul-smelling trucks. Elsewhere in the world, bikes zip around these slow, ungainly vehicles, but here with our tiny motors and low speeds, we were forced to ride on the curb as the trucks rumbled past us. Soon we turned off onto a country lane and headed towards sharp green mountains and some spectacularly twisty riding. We saw many other motorcycle tourists on the road, either riding pillion behind their guides or on their own bikes, but none of them wore the blue and black jackets of the Dalat Easy Riders like us, so we just figured they were all posers.
It soon became apparent that Bang took his guiding duties seriously and that we were going to get more out of this tour than just someone leading us from point A to point B. At every opportunity, we pulled over to the side of the road so that he could show us or tell us something of cultural or historical significance. We visited a pagoda and learned that a “temple” was intended to worship a god or ancestors which a “pagoda” was intended to worship Buddha. We also learned that the majority of Vietnamese have an interesting mix of religious and spiritual views by believing in God, practicing elements from Buddhism and worshiping ancestors. Many of them use Ouija boards to communicate with the dead and leave offerings at grave sites and to the “hungry ghosts” of people who died in rivers and lakes whose bodies were not recovered. We saw tracks of forest still destroyed from the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. We heard how the Viet Cong used the Ho Chi Minh Trail to carry by hand and by cart the pieces to assemble a brigade of tanks over the course of 10 years. When the time was right, they attacked the Southern city of Buon Ma Thuot from deep behind enemy lines. We saw a cock fight where locals we raucously betting on two scraggly looking roosters intent on pecking each other. We visited several indigenous hill tribe villages and learned that there were 52 minority groups in Vietnam, each with different customs and languages (the majority is the Kinh group which makes up over 80% of the Vietnamese population). Bang would always have a ready supply of candy for the native kids and music videos for the adults. At various points in our ride we stopped to sample jack fruit, raw sugarcane, and different types of sugarcane juice (one was brown and tasted like brown sugar and the other was foamy white and tasted like fresh cut grass). We stopped to examine the harvesting of tapioca and at another point the fields where farmers were drying the sliced root (They only use the gelatinous fat in foods…apparently eating the raw tapioca root gives you severe headaches and makes you go a little crazy; one of the reasons why the Viet Cong were so fearsome in battle). We examined a rubber plantation and saw how the white, latex-like sap was congealing in little collection bowls attached to each trunk. We visited an ancient Kung-Fu master—who absolutely looked the part—and saw how his granddaughter made traditional rice paper on a stove which burned rice husks for fuel. We saw several spectacular waterfalls, one of which was right beside a coffee plantation which offered—according to Jessica—the second best coffee we’ve ever had (the winner still goes to Jesus Martin in Columbia). We visited a workshop where stone masons carved enormous statues out of pure granite for the Vietnamese upper class. We saw a silk work farm and learned how the worms wrap themselves in a tight cocoon made from a single length of silk string and held together with a biological glue. We later saw the factory where the cocoons are dropped into boiling water to dissolve the glue (killing the worm in the process) and the ends off the silk strings looped into machines which rapidly unwind the cocoons into spools of proper silk thread. And last but not least, we stopped at a coffee plantation where weasels were fed the fruit of coffee plants and then poop out globs of undigested coffee beans. These beans are then washed, roasted and sold for exorbitant prices as “Weasel Coffee”. Never ones to shy away from the bizarre, we had cups of weasel poop coffee, brewed in the Vietnamese style, while we watched the sun set over the mountains of the Central Highlands. It was idyllic…except for the whole “drinking poop” part. No, seriously, the coffee was really excellent (perhaps the 3rd best cup we’ve ever had? The jury’s still out…)
Silk worms,wrapping themselves in their single-string cocoons
Guess which one is weasel poop coffee?
Our ancient Kung-Fu master…
Culture and history aside, the riding was really excellent. Much of the time we were on good pavement that soared up and down lush mountainsides or through valleys filled with rice paddies. At other times we bombed down red-dust roads, and dealt with huge pot holes or gravel strewn dangerously across the pavement. But through it all we made the journey safely with only one low speed fall. Our first night we stopped in Buon Ma Thuot at a hotel full of bikers. On the second night we stayed out in the countryside at a hotel which had an absolutely mammoth python as a pet in a cage. It was at least 10-12 inches in girth and 10-15 feet in length. It continually pushed itself up against its cage, hunting for an escape, but inadvertently giving us a chance to pet it. Its scales felt smooth and dry. The following morning, a troupe of gigantic Asian elephants appeared with their handlers, and Jessica and I got a ride out into the middle of a nearby lake on the back of a huge bull. Halfway through the trainer felt like texting on his cell phone, so he motioned for me to take his place on the elephant’s neck while he lounged back in the seat with Jess. I had watched him guide the elephant up until that point, so I gave handling our elephant a good old college try, gently prodding him with my heels and giving low grunting noises to speed him up. It sort of worked.
Jessica is totally a member of House Slytherin
Our elephant in munching on a banana tree log…he’s ripping the bark off while rolling the log around in his trunk.
On the evening of the third day, we finally rode into the high mountain city of De Lat. It had been a spectacular trip and we both a little sad to lose our motorcycles. Our plan is to chill out in these alpine hills for a few days before heading to the heat and craziness of Saigon…
Jessica: They say distance makes the heart grow fonder. Let’s hope this also applies to memories. Where we last left off, Jesse and I, along with a couple of Hungarians and a Frenchman, were boarding the train to Agra. My previous experience with an Indian train, on our way to Varanasi, had been comfortable, cozy, albeit a little less private than I would have liked. I expected a similar experience on the train to Agra, just maybe a little shorter. Boy was I in for a surprise. There is a world of difference between 3AC (3rd) class and 3S (sleeper) class. 3AC provided blankets, a pillow and soft mattresses. 3S did not. 3AC had sealed windows. 3S did not. In short, we crawled along the tracks, enveloped by a murky fog that slowed our progress to a crawl, while the damp, cold night seeped in through the cracked windows and sapped the warmth from our bodies. And it lasted for over 17 hours. I’m happy to report that I slept through most of it. Sadly, Jesse did not.
We finally arrived in Agra, over ten hours late and completely wiped out. Originally, the plan had been to visit the Taj Mahal that day, since we were supposed to be arriving around 5 a.m. Instead, we headed straight to our hotel (not heated, of course) and went to bed. The following day we met up with the tuk tuk driver that took us to our hotel from the train station, and went on a serious tour of the city. First we hit up the Agra fort, a red sandstone fort that took eight years to build and was completed in 1573. As we crossed the street towards the entrance, we looked up at the enormous red walls looming over us and awed at its sheer size.
We had told our driver we would be back in an hour but it took us over two and a half to make our way through, and even then we had to skip out on some things because we were just so tired of walking. The fort was home to the Mughal emperor Abu’l-Fath Jalal ud-din Muhammad Akbar (we’ll just call him Akbar moving forward), his three wives, his harem of 200 women (which we would soon learn was a pittance of a harem), their eunuchs and servants, and some of the most important ministers of his court.
We walked through mirror covered rooms, airy white marble verandas and open audience halls, hearing about the daily lives of the inhabitants, their customs and festivals, on our audio tour headsets. One of the most interesting traditions was the weighing of the emperor. Since the Mughals followed the Islamic calendar, but were also bound by the lunar calendar, the emperor had two birthdays, and he would be weighed on both occasions. They would bring out a massive balance scale, and Akbar would sit in one tray while the other was filled with gold, to the equivalence of his weight. The gold would then be replaced with silver, and again adjusted to the equivalence of the emperor’s weight. A third and final weighing was carried out, this time with precious stones. They would then calculate the monetary value of all three weighing and the amount would be distributed among the poor of the city of Agra.
After the Agra fort we headed to the tomb of I’timad-ud-Daulah, affectively known as the Baby Taj. I was expecting to see a smaller version of the Taj, but in reality the two structures looked nothing alike, other than both being constructed from white marble. The Baby Taj is a single structure, with four sets of circular towers at each corner and a low, square tower in the middle, capped by a rounded, white roof. It bore more resemblance to a medieval castle than the Taj Mahal, but it was still beautiful to see.
We then headed to the view point of the Taj Mahal across the river, a small park with yellowing grass where it appeared geologists were uncovering a fresh set of ruins. And that’s when we saw it. The base of the Taj was teeming with people. They were like a swarm of ants, crowding every possible surface of the marble platform the monument stands on.
“This is going to suck,” Jess muttered. “If we had gone in the early morning it would be nearly empty.”
He was right, but we had bumped into the Hungarian couple at the Agra Fort and when we had asked them how it had been it hadn’t sounded too great. Agra had been socked in with fog from the moment we had woken up until nearly 10 a.m. and when she told us about walking up to it and “seeing it appear through the mist suddenly” we figured we had made the right decision choosing to see it at sunset. Both of us being avid photographers, it would have sucked if we hadn’t been able to get a single shot of it. But it appeared as though we had traded solitude for good visibility.
“I’m sure it won’t be so crowded,” I told Jess soothingly as we headed back to our tuk tuk.
After a short detour to buy Jesse a much-needed sweater, we made our way to the Taj Mahal. The lineup was incredibly long, and we thought we would be waiting for at least an hour but a security guard herded us through and we skipped the line. When we got inside it felt like we were in Disney Land in August. The crowds were absolutely everywhere. It wasn’t until I was on the steps down to the main concourse to the Taj Mahal that I got to actually see the building. Before that there were too many people in front of me, effectively creating a solid wall of bodies through which it was impossible to see. We tried a few times to take pictures with the Taj behind us but the thirty or forty odd people clustered up on the platform with us were all trying to do the same and it was nearly impossible to get a shot without someone’s arm, head or entire body obliterating the building behind us.
We finally gave up and set out for the main monument. It was so much larger than I had ever imagined. Whenever you look up pictures of the Taj Mahal online they are always taken when there is no one there, so you don’t actually get the true scale of how big it is. In person you do, and it really is impressive. As we watched the marble around us turn a golden yellow when the sun dipped down to the horizon we knew we had picked the right time to visit.
The following day we slept in, the fog so thick we could hardly see across the street. While we were having breakfast the proprietor of the guesthouse dropped a bomb on us.
“You check out today?” he said, more a declaration than a question.
“Well, we actually decided to stay one extra day, because our train came in so late,” Jess explained.
We had talked with his sons on the day we had arrived, and asked if it was okay and we had been assured it was alright. Now, it seemed, it was not. Finally he said we could stay at the hotel across the street, which belonged to his brother, and we could still come back across the street for meals and to use the WiFi. A little disgruntled we packed up our bags and moved to the other hotel, noting that it was marginally warmer and a lot quieter than our other room. I would soon swallow my words. We then caught a bus round noon to Fatehpur Sikri, a city built by our good friend Akbar which is designated a UNESCO World Heritage Centre. We had planned to follow the guided tour written up by the Lonely Planet on Jesse’s Kindle, but the bus dropped us off somewhere else entirely and we ended up going through it backwards. After a hike up a sloping road, with tuk tuks and motorcycles careening through at whatever speed they thought suitable, we came upon the impressive Agra Gate, set atop a dizzying number of steep, stone stairs.
At the top we were told to remove our shoes. Thinking we wouldn’t be coming back the same way we tied them to our backpacks and carried them in. Apparently that’s a big no-no, because the problem isn’t dirty shoes touching sacred floor, it’s just shoes in general being in the presence of said floor. We were repeatedly yelled at for having the shoes tied to our backpacks, yet no one seemed to be bothered by people spitting all over the floor, littering everywhere and birds pooing all over it.
Finally we’d had enough of sacred floors and headed back out when we realised the entrance to the rest of the site was actually on the outside. With our shoes back on and our socks considerably filthier, we headed into the main site. Following the tour written in the Lonely Planet, we visited the buildings where Akbar held philosophical debates with his ministers, the apartments for his Hindu wife, his Christian wife and his Muslim wife (Akbar was markedly tolerant of all religions and included architectural styles influenced by all three religions in all his buildings), the area where he kept his 5000 concubines (See? Told you 200 was a pittance!) and the Panch Mahal, a five storey palace that is completely open to the elements.
Just as the sun was setting we setting we headed back down to the buses and back to our hotel. We had to get to bed early that night, because we had a 7 a.m. bus to catch to Jaipur. Our neighbours, however, had a different plan. It started around 8 p.m. They turned on their T.V. and turned the volume up so loudly it sounded like we were watching it in our room. With a partially deaf person who insists on listening to it so loud it distorts the sound. We had earplugs but it did nothing to dim the noise coming through the wall. At first we thought it was the guys at the reception desk, and we cursed our unfortunate luck at having moved us to that hotel, but when the front desk guys finally came to put a stop to the noise (at 4 a.m. no less) I realised it had been our neighbours and I could have gone and raged at them seven hours earlier. Two hours later, grumpy and exhausted, we got up to catch our bus. It had only cost 252 rupees, the equivalent of about $5, so we expected something pretty grim, like our bus from Pune to Jalgaon. Instead we got a partial sleeper bus, filled with an English speaking tour group that vacated the bus three hours later and left it practically empty for the rest of our journey.
Jaipur was considerably warmer than Agra, with much less fog and, also, cleaner streets. We were dropped off at a bus stop and found a tuk tuk driver named Sunny who agreed to take us to our hotel for 90 rupees. It was around this time that I had begun to “have it in for tuk tuk drivers” as Jess would often put it. But that wasn’t the case, really. The problem was, I knew they were fleecing us. The hotel would tell us it should cost 60 rupees from point A to point B and the tuk tuk drivers would invariably tell us 150 rupees. If you wanted to consult a different tuk tuk driver, the original one would follow you and his presence would prompt the following driver to offer 250 rupees. I had caught on to their ways, and decided a hardline approach was the way to go. Once we were told how much a trip should cost there was no moving me from that number. Also, while in Kochi I had seen something written on the meter of one of the tuk tuk drivers that had dropped us off at our guesthouse: 18 rupees first km, 5 rupees every additional km. At the time I had been told it was an old fare when I had argued that he was fleecing us but I knew better. So I used it to roughly calculate how much we should be paying and for the most part it had worked fairly well. According to Google maps we were a mere 6 km from our hotel, a 45 to 50 rupee trip, yet everyone was insisting we pay 100 rupees. Sunny won Jesse over by offering 90 rupees, but I knew it was still too much. As we wound our way through the city we perused his book of positive comments, which he had fished out of his glove box for us to read, and I was vaguely reminded of the homestay owner in Kochi, watching over Jesse’s shoulder as he wrote the review on Trip Advisor that he had been strongly asked to do. So when he offered us a tour the following day to the Amber Fort (pronounced Amer fort, the b is silent!) and other various sites for 1300 rupees I told Jess maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea. After a delicious dinner of kachori (a lentil and gravy stuffed, deep-fried pocket of goodness) and various assorted sweets, we decided to brave the city on our own.
The following day we grabbed a tuk tuk to the Pink City and walked around the many pashmina, cookery and jewelry shops. Named for the colour of its buildings and fort-like walls, it’s a chaotic, blaring tangle of tuk tuks, motorcycles, cars, cows and people. We found the Hawa Mahal, a towering edifice built so that the emperor’s many concubines could sit and watch the city go by, hidden from view behind the stone latticed windows.
Again, the number of local tourists was staggering but, as most people stayed in the main courtyards and walkways, we found several places to be completely alone. From there we headed to the city palace, where the craziness grew to even greater heights, as the tuk tuk drivers, motorcyclists, cars and cows were joined by bicycle rickshaws who absolutely would not take no for an answer.
“Ma’am, the Water Palace entrance is free today,” one pedlar advised me, “I take you for 500.”
We waded through the throngs and reached the entrance to the palace, where colourfully dressed guards, their turbans hanging freely to their waists, stood with their bayonets at the ready. The entrance fee was a painful 350 rupees each (equivalent to 7 dollars each, but when you’re used to paying just slightly more for a meal for two, it hits you hard) but we shelled it out and headed inside, where we were met by the two largest silver objects in the world (according to the Guinness book, not just a hyperbole). The highlight for Jess was the armoury and we spent most of our time in the complex trying to find it. After touring the many buildings that housed paintings of the various Marajah Singhs that ruled over Jaipur, the clothes they wore (the pyjamas worn by the “cuddly” 250 kg Maharajah were definitely the highlight for all the visitors) and their offices, we finally found the armoury. It was extensive. There was everything from meter long scimitars to a crossbow with two mounted pistols on it. Some of the jewel encrusted swords were obviously ornamental, but no less impressive. By then we were both feeling pretty run down so we called it a day, dropped into a veggie restaurant for a tasty dinner and headed for bed.
The following day we caught a bus out to Amber Fort, which cost us exactly 10 rupees each. Suddenly Sunny’s 1300 rupee deal didn’t seem so tempting. Ten minutes out of town we saw the Water Palace and I had to laugh. The rickshaw driver hadn’t been lying. I wouldn’t have paid an entrance fee yesterday, or today or any other day, for that matter. The Water Palace is an eerie, abandoned building that sits in the middle of a man-made lake. There are no roads that lead to it and the most you can do is pose in front of it for a picture. Sneaky, sneaky.
As we neared Amber Fort we were suddenly hit by its incredible size.
I thought the Agra Fort had been impressive, but it was nothing compared to the magnitude of the Amber Fort. Looming over us from halfway up a hill, even the elephants that took the lazy tourists up the snaking stone pathway to the fort were dwarfed by its immensity.
And the best part was, it was completely open for us to explore. There was no set tour through the fort, so we were free to scramble up twisted staircases, crawl into tiny nooks and explore any and every room to our heart’s content. Unlike Agra Fort, whose walls were mostly bare, save for the emperor’s chambers and audience balcony, Amber Fort is filled with colour, with white washed walls covered in intricate patterns, surprisingly vibrant and intact. As we passed through the entrance doors I briefly caught a glimpse of a sign with the words NO TIPPING written on it, but I didn’t see the rest of the sign. Later, as we were walking though the many, narrow stairways connecting the various floors, we asked one of the guards how to get up to the second fort, the equally enormous Jaigarh Fort, covering the hilltops above the Amber Fort, since we had passes from our visit to the City Palace the previous day. She showed us a path out the window, then said something we didn’t quite understand and motioned for us to follow her as she set off, up staircases and through doorways to the topmost tower. When we arrived, somewhat out of breath, she turned to us and said “My tip?” holding her hand out. Then I understood the sign and told her we weren’t supposed to tip. “Ok” she said, and walked away.
We exited Amber Fort and turned up the hill toward Jaigarh. We scrambled up the incredibly steep, long and winding road up the hill.
I kept telling myself to just keep going, one foot in front of the other, and after nearly forty-five minutes of StairMaster hell we finally staggered up to its doors. It was a neat place, but nowhere as interesting as Amber Fort. The highlight of this building was the cannon at the very top of the hill. It holds the Guinness record for largest movable canon, with a 20 ft long barrel and a range of 22 miles (over 35 km), but was only ever fired once, and that was only a functionality test. And despite the huge number of tourists in Jaigarh Fort, there were entire sections of the place that were completely deserted, and we could feel like we were completely alone there, a feeling that doesn’t happen often in India.
Exhausted, the beginnings of a cold threatening in my throat, we headed back down the snaky road, towards an early dinner and a warm bed. It was New Years Eve, but travel exhaustion was beginning to hit us and we didn’t feel like searching out a party. Besides, we had an early morning ahead and we had let the proprietor know that morning when we settled the bill. Except maybe they didn’t really realise what we were telling them because early the next morning we found the large, wrought-iron gate that barred the entrance to the home-stay was locked with a padlock and chain. Not wanting to wake anyone up we took turns holding the backpacks while we scaled the fence and dropped, silently, on the other side. Our next destination: Bikaner.
Neither Jess nor I had ever heard of Bikaner before but Jesse’s Lonely Planet guide called it a good alternative to Jaisalmar for camel trekking in the desert. Jaisalmar, being so far north, was sure to be colder than Jaipur and my cold was now in full swing. Also, tourists have started flocking to Jaisalmar, crowding it and driving prices higher and higher. Bikaner sounded like a wonderful alternative and in a short 6 hours on our comfortable Deluxe Volvo bus we arrived in the sand-swept city. After booking our bus to Delhi, which the ticket counter guy assured us was comfortable when Jesse asked (ok, in reality his response was a nod and “It’s a Volvo!”), we headed to see the Camel King, or Vijay, as his friends call him. He runs a guesthouse and is apparently the go-to guy in Bikaner for camel trekking tours. We booked one for the following day and then headed out to see the sites of Bikaner. In reality, there are only two: the old city, which we actually didn’t have time to see, and Junagarh Fort. We first needed to hit up an ATM, and as Vijay’s wife had told us there was one a few minutes away from their home-stay, we shook our heads no to the tuk tuk driver that stopped beside us and set off on foot. But after rounding the corner without seeing it, and no other buildings beyond the cross-road, Jess decided to ask a local who had just gotten out of his car. Thus the adventure began.
He told us, in perfectly clear English, that it was about a hundred or two hundred meters down the road.
“I’ll take you in my car,” he offered, and ran up the steps of the building in front of us to drop off his parcel before we could say no.
I was about to say something about not getting into cars with strangers, when he returned and opened the passenger-side door, so we piled into his car and set off. On the way he asked what Jesse and I did and, like most Indians, seemed incredibly pleased to find out we were engineers. He told us his name was Dr. Vk Tinta and proceeded to tell us his wife was a goddess and she had given him two diamond children.
“You must come to my house for tea!” he exclaimed enthusiastically, in between maniacal cackles elicited by Jesse’s response to his comments about his wife and parents.
Before I could say no Jesse was already agreeing to it, so when we got out of the car to go to the ATM (where we were about to take out a not-inconsiderable amount of cash) I hurriedly told Jesse it might not be the best idea, and he conceded. Instead, when we got out, we stood by the car and explained that we actually didn’t have time for tea because we wanted to see the fort. To say this made him upset would be an understatement. At first he insisted urgently, telling us that all we have in life is time, and it is wasted if you don’t spend it with friends, and then, as he saw that this approach was not working for us, he got out of his car and insisted loudly that we were afraid. If we hadn’t been, we sure were then.
“Look, my house is just there,” he pointed to a spot behind the ATM.
How convenient.
But when we wouldn’t give in he finally caved, but in true Indian spirit, offered to drive us to the fort instead. I was wary of getting back in the car, the doors locked automatically (or he locked them) as soon as the car started moving, but Jess agreed and we got back in. For the rest of the drive he proceeded to elaborate on why his children were diamond children, how his parents were the greatest beings on earth and how he worshipped his wife. I scanned the streets as we passed them, trying to figure out if we were going to the right place or not, but suddenly the fort loomed to our right, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Then Jesse offered to have tea with him at a café nearby and, spotting one across the fort grounds, our new friend intimated to the guard that he was a doctor and proceeded to drive his car the fifty meters across the palace grounds to the café. I’m not sure why Jess asked him to have tea with us, I guess it was a thankful gesture for driving us, but I can’t have milk and he can’t have caffeine, both of which are essential ingredients of the Indian chai. It would be the first of many we would be forced to drink just to be polite, and my poor lungs screamed in protest. After many lunatic cackles and somewhat harsh yells that we “should never say thank you, do not use that word with me!” and requests to have us visit next year with our babies (all expenses paid, apparently…) we parted ways with our new “friend” and bought our tickets to tour the fort.
It was, probably, the best fort we had visited. Some had been grander, at least in size, but this one had all the furniture inside it, still intact, along with instruments, clothing, etc. The walls were still richly decorated with stunningly intricate paintings, gold paneling and hundreds of mirrors. It was really like stepping through a door into the past and we could almost imagine what life was like back then.
We had purchased an audio tour and it soon became apparent that the narrator really admired and looked up to the Raja who lived there. He would go into lengthy details about the Raja’s incredible dedication, his many contributions to the city, his kindness and love for his citizens. We were glad we had seen that fort last, all the other would have seemed boring in comparison.
As an interesting historical note, before England united all of India (and Pakistan), Rajasthan had been made up of fabulously wealthy city states, with individual maharajas running Jaipur, Udaipur, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Bikaner, etc. Most of these royal families are still in existence, some living in palaces (Jaipur), others turning their fortresses over to the state and living in stately mansions (Bikaner).
We headed back to our homestay where, we noted, the bedroom was actually colder than the outside temperature, but because of mosquitoes we couldn’t leave the door open to warm it up. Hoping our night out in the desert wouldn’t be too cold, we climbed into bed, pulled the thick duvet over us (Jesse inside my sleeping bag as well) and watched a few episodes of Friends on Jesse’s laptop. We wouldn’t be leaving for our camel trek until 10 a.m. so we relished having a bit of a lie in. The following day we set out, and were surprised to find out we would be the only ones on the trek. It was apparently low season, but they had just had a group of 35 people out on the dunes to celebrate New Year (we had spent it in bed after an early dinner at Yo China!, a Chinese chain restaurant which was surprisingly tasty). Our guides, we were told, didn’t speak English because English speakers are educated and don’t want to work on the dunes, they want to work in the city. We were dropped off, met our respective camels (“Noble beasts, ships of the desert” as Jess likes to call them) and immediately hopped on. The first thing camels do when you get on them is stand up, and that can be a terrifying experience if you’re not ready for it. Camel’s legs are long, and they stand up on their hind legs first, throwing you forward into its neck, before standing on all four. My guide never waited for me to be ready, he would just tell the camel to stand and I had to suddenly grip the saddle with my legs to avoid crashing down onto its head. We strolled through the desert village, shouts of “Ta!” (Bye) from the local children following us. Soon we were out of the village and into the desert, but since it was winter time, with high humidity and plenty of dew in the morning, it was filled with low shrubs and needle-y trees reminiscent of the ones in Africa. I named my camel Alphonso, after the mango variety, and we got along famously. Alphonso was a bit of a glutton, younger than Jesse’s camel, and he would pull entire branches off of the bushes we passed by and chew them slowly, losing some of the twigs along the way while Jesse’s camel harrumphed in disdain. It was mating season, we had been told, which meant that male camels wouldn’t be too happy if you tried petting them close to their heads. We soon learned the word close is a relative term.
We stopped for a five minute break at one of our guides’ house and, as we clambered off our beasts, Jess decided to have a cuddle with his camel. The camel did not feel the same affection for Jesse and swung his head back at him, his large jaw open, his lips flapping and his teeth bared, ready to bite his hand off. Jess was not impressed. After a short tour of his house and an obligatory cup of chai, we were off again. Jesse’s admiration for his noble steed was somewhat lessened, but he still regarded the species as a whole as dignified, noble creatures. Again, when we stopped for lunch and a bit of a nap in the shade of a sparse tree, Jess tried to approach his camel once more, with much the same result.
As we wound our way through the desert we hardly met anyone else doing a trek, only off in the distance and we wondered if we would be the only ones camping that night. Indeed, when we got to the campsite, we found out we were the only ones there and, of course, felt obliged to drink the cups of chai they had prepared for us, since no one else was around to drink them. We decided to explore our little patch of sand and, as we passed by the camels on our way up a dune, Jess decided to give the species one more attempt to redeem itself. Once again his camel drew back his head angrily, baring his teeth and Jess finally decided to give up.
“At least yours is nice,” he told me, “go pose with it!”
So I did, carefully standing a good 8 feet away from its head.
“Closer,” Jess insisted, but I shook my head.
And so Jess decided to show me how it was done. The same flailing lip, teeth baring response ensued and Jess finally admitted defeat. Or so I thought.
We clambered up the sand dune, to catch the sunset, and then came back down the dune to find we had been joined by three Indians from Delhi who had decided on a whim to get in their car and drive off somewhere. They were all engineers, a couple of them working abroad, and had some very interesting insight into Indian culture. It was very interesting to hear them dissect the problems we had seen in every single city we had visited. They said “In India, people want their house to be clean, but they don’t care about the neighbours, so they throw their stuff anywhere”. Essentially what you get is a bunch of people trying to clean their area by tossing everything elsewhere, surrounded by people doing the exact same thing. It is why people think its ok to urinate anywhere and everywhere. After all, they’re not urinating on their own home. After dinner and a musical performance reminiscent of the Kathakali singing we had experienced in Kochi, we climbed into our tents, which were surprisingly warm for how cold it was outside, and tried to sleep. Problem was, I had caffeine surging through my veins from all the chai and my nose was completely stuffed and drippy at the same time. Finally, as the full moon dipped towards the horizon, I managed to get some sleep. The following day we said goodbye to our fellow campers (who were doing a trek that day) and headed back to the village atop a camel-pulled cart.
Since our bus wasn’t until 6:30 p.m. and it was well before noon, Jess suggested we visit Karni Mata, or the rat temple, as it is commonly referred to. Apparently there is a legend that says that there was a woman from the town who wanted to save her son’s life and made a deal with one of the gods. In exchange, however, all of their descendants would be reincarnated into rats, and so she built a temple for them. I had my reservations about going into a temple infested with rats, especially when Jess told me you have to go in barefoot, but he seemed so excited by the prospect that I agreed. We caught a bus there, my cold getting progressively worse as the day went on, and got off an hour later. When we got to the temple I almost didn’t go in, but I thought it would make for a boring blog entry if I didn’t at least have something to say about a temple built specifically for rats. So off came the boots and I stepped inside the courtyard, very much aware of the lumpy rat droppings under my feet. The smell of rat urine and feces was overpowering and the rats skittered back and forth across the floor, gathering in messy piles at the feed bowls and sitting in neat little rows to drink the milk from their dispensers.
In the middle of the courtyard, surrounded by what looked like rat infested warehouses, was a small building. I was nauseated by the smell and nearly jumped when a rat scampered over my foot. They were everywhere. In the middle of the room was a small alcove, from which I could hear chanting and for which people were lining up and I wondered briefly what was in there. One of the faithful devotees, a young boy of about six, was clinging to his mother’s leg and shrieking wildly between sobs whenever a rat ran by him. Rather than removing the child from such a traumatising scene, his mother urged him on. Across the room a couple of three year olds were playing with the rats, stooping down to pet them. Next to them a couple of military men posed with a dozen or so rats who were too busy drinking milk from a massive silver bowl to notice their presence. They had boxes of sweets in their hands and I wondered what they were for… then I approached the alcove in the middle of the room and, to my disgust, found out. There were people still standing in front of it, but most of the crowd had cleared. As I edged closer I saw about six or seven people, sitting on the floor, singing and playing drums while the rats swarmed over them, eager to get at the sweet treats they were holding out for them to eat. I decided I had seen enough and headed for the door.
When Jess mentioned that he was hungry and if we could get something to eat, I pointed out that the only food in the immediate vicinity was being walked all over by flies which were probably the same flies that were walking all over the rat poo. That decided it for him and we hopped on the first bus we saw back to Bikaner. After a quick dinner we picked our backpacks up from the guesthouse and headed for the bus station.
We asked for the overnight bus to Delhi and the man at the ticket counter pointed to a small, rundown bus that looked more like a city bus than an overnight bus. The seats were hard plastic bucket seats that obviously didn’t recline, and the windows were stuck slightly open.
“This can’t be it,” I told Jesse, “They guy said it was a Volvo.”
But apparently it was it, and we spent the worst 11 hour overnight bus ride thus far on our trip. The bus was not, as our ticket claimed, an express bus to Delhi, and instead ambled around pot hole strewn back roads picking and dropping people off every half an hour or so. Every time it hit one of the countless pot holes the entire thing would buck like a rabid bronco, sending us flying out of our seats. Exhausted, a bit sore and still very sick, we arrived in Delhi only to be told that the 4km drive to our hotel would cost us 150 rupees. Remember the formula kids, 18 rupees for the first kilometer, 5 rupees every kilometer after that, roughly 35 to 40 rupees. But the drivers insisted it wasn’t 4km, it was 10, because the 4km road was closed and they had to go the long loop around. After striking out with several drivers, even with the ones that acknowledged that I was right, chuckling to themselves as we argued, we finally caved and agreed to the 150 rupees. The drive took less than five minutes, and we drove along the very road I had just been told was closed.
Our hotel, however, was amazing. We had hot showers, heating, breakfast included and incredibly attentive staff that left little plates of cookies for us while we were out and folded and organized our clothes when they cleaned the room. We had only planned to do two things in Delhi: visit the Lotus Temple, a Baha’i House of Worship that is shaped like a lotus flower, and watch a movie in English. The rest of the time we were going to spend sleeping and trying to get over our colds before catching our flight out to Vietnam. I have to say, sadly, that both experiences turned out a little sourer than I would have liked. The movies because people kept talking and the intermissions were very poorly planned, and the Lotus Temple because of the mass amount of people visiting it. We were hustled through briskly, single file, no stopping. We were given about five minutes inside the temple then asked to leave and once again, were hustled out. The guards were shrilly blowing their whistles with yells of “chelo, chelo, chelo,” (go, go, go) as they waived us down the path towards the exit. It was still a breathtakingly beautiful building, but the reverence and peace I had been looking forward to was just not there.
Finally, at long last, it was time to catch our flight. It wasn’t that we had hated India, there was so much beauty and history in that country that we had admired and awed at, but we were feeling rubbed raw. It was like attending a dinner party with some of your annoying co-workers except there are over a billion of them and the party lasts three weeks. I was feeling frayed, my patience was completely gone and I found myself snapping at rickshaw and tuk tuk drivers who were a little more insistent than I had the tolerance for. We boarded the impeccably clean and modern subway (signs warning of fines for spitting are everywhere) and were quickly whisked away to the equally clean airport. However, all did not go as planned and as we stood, waiting nervously, while the attendant behind the check-out counter looked up our reservation, it became apparent there was something wrong.
“Do you have your visa for Vietnam?” the attendant asked me.
“No, it’s Visa on Arrival, they just sent me this email saying they would send me an approval letter at 8 a.m. which is before we land in Hanoi,” I explained. “We have a 17 hour layover in Bangkok”
But she refused to give us our boarding passes, stating that we had to have the preapproval letter before even getting on the plane to Bangkok. Finally, after 30 precious minutes of arguing back and forth she finally agreed to let us fly to Bangkok and then we would have to figure it out from there. We happily grabbed our boarding passes, ran to security, where they dismantled my backpack completely only to confiscate a two-inch pair of foldable scissors and my half inch can opener (which had already made it through a dozen other security screening around the world), then raced to the plane, boarding only 10 minutes before take-off. But our woes would not end there.
Because of all the milk I had ingested while in India we had chosen the low-lactose food option for me, so Jess and I had different meals. One thing, however, we had in common: a weird thick patty of something that might have been re-processed pork. It was like a meatball made out of meat that has been cooked, put through a blender and then smushed back together to form a patty. I get chills just thinking about it. But our meals were meager so we ate it. Oh, the folly!
We arrived in Thailand four hours later, tired and worried about our lack of a visa approval letter. After running through the airport for about an hour, trying to talk to a ticket agent about potentially changing our flight, I had the brilliant idea of first emailing and then, immediately after, calling the visa application place. My previous experience doing so, the many, many times I tried talking to someone about our Indian visa, had proven fruitless but we had no other recourse. The results were astounding.
“Hi, I have a bit of a problem, we applied for our visas before Christmas and we didn’t realise that the office would be closed until the 5th of January. We are supposed to get the approval letter by 8 a.m. tomorrow but our flight leaves at 7:45 a.m.” I said in one long breath.
“Ok, hang on, let me look,” the woman said on the other end.
“Do you need my application number?” I asked, hopeful.
“Uh, no,” she said. “This is Jessica?”
“Yes!” I cried out surprised. How could she have known?
“I just opened your email,” she explained. “Ok, you’ll have the letter in the next two hours.”
Just like that, no hassle, no arguing. Done. I could’ve kissed her!
But our problems didn’t end there. Not by a long shot.
We had booked a night at a hotel close to the airport, since we were going to be spending a considerable amount of time there. We checked in, had a shower, Skyped with my parents and then headed for dinner.
“I feel weird,” Jess said as we sat down to order. “Like heavy and achy in my joints. It kinda feels like the beginnings of food poisoning.”
I assured him it was probably that he was still getting over being sick but halfway through the meal he stopped eating.
“I seriously think I’m getting food poisoning,” he declared, setting his fork down.
So I shoveled the rest of my dinner down, we paid and made a bee-line for the hotel, Jess worried that he wouldn’t make it there in time. Luckily he did, but just barely. After he had vomited most of the pad thai we had just had he called out weakly from the bathroom,
“Could you get me something to eat? Something plain like crackers or a banana or something.”
So I went out in search of food. The hotel let me use their bicycles for free, so I picked a low riding one with a nice metal basket on the handlebars and away I went, swerving left and right down the road before I got my rhythm back. I bought him some plain sandwich bread and listened glumly as he vomited that up to for the next hour or so. Then it was my turn. We were both violently double-barrel sick (as the saying goes) for the rest of the night, only slowing down a couple of hours before we were supposed to get up to go to the airport.
“How are we going to even do this?” Jess asked weakly beside me.
I didn’t have an answer. Air travel is exhausting in the best of conditions. We had spent an entire night retching out the entire contents of the past 24 hours and hadn’t slept a wink. Add to that the fact that we were both still trying to get over our colds and it seemed like an insurmountable feat. But the possibility of canceling all our future tickets should we try to make a change to one of them so close to boarding time forced us out of bed and into the shuttle the hotel had arranged for us.
“It’s ok, we’ll just go through security and then we can just relax at the boarding gate,” I assured Jess. “It’ll be easy.”
But it wasn’t.
When we arrived at the check in counter the woman behind the desk asked me if I had the approval letter and I showed it to her on my phone.
“You need to print it out,” she said and pointed vaguely to somewhere to her left where there was apparently an internet café that would print it for me.
“Here, let me take your bag,” Jess offered as I set off to find said internet café. But I was already a few feet away, I didn’t feel like backtracking and I was sure it was only a few meters away, somewhere behind the desk, so I turned him down. The internet café ended up being on the other end of the terminal, past all the other check-in counters (we had been at J, just to give you a point of reference). When I got back to the check-in desk to give the lady our newly printed paper, I realised I had left my phone at the printing place, so I raced back, got my phone from an annoyed attendant who said I should take better care of my stuff and raced right back. That’s when Jess explained that we still couldn’t get our boarding pass, we had to pay a fee for having gone through immigration and having left the airport while transiting through. So we rushed off to the payment office, paid and rushed back to the check-in counter to get our boarding passes. I felt like I had been running through the airport for hours, but luckily it had only been about 40 minutes of racing around. We sailed through security, confirmed that our gate was, as expected, on the other end of the terminal, and spent another 30 minutes rushing through duty free and perfume store lined passages, up and down escalators and finally down a ramp to the boarding gate. The flight was only two hours long, but it felt like an eternity, despite the Thai Air staff trying to do their best to make us feel comfortable. They moved us to the bulkhead seats, so we had clear and quick access to the bathrooms, gave us a cup each of electrolytes and ginger ale and a couple of thick blankets that I think were meant for first class passengers. We both continued to vomit our way through the flight.
“Almost there,” I whispered to Jess as we got off the plane.
But there was still one more hurdle to overcome. Our visa-on-arrival.
We entered the arrival area and I left Jess waiting on one of the benches. I saw a bunch of people milling around a counter that had Visa Application posted above it. They had forms in their hands, with a couple of passport pictures and a clutch of money. I was a little confused. I hadn’t read anywhere on the application page that I needed pictures, and I was sure I had already paid with my credit card. I assumed that meant they must be applying for the visa, and moved on to another line. The man at the counter took our passports and the letter I had printed, and confirmed my suspicions by not asking me for any money or for pictures.
But when they called my name and I went up to the counter to collect our passports it was a different story. We needed to pay cash and they wanted two pictures. Crap. Luckily they were really nice about it and one of the guards came out to take our picture with his digital camera and then escorted Jess out, past the immigration counters and to an ATM to get money out. Still, the process was lengthy, Jess had just been sick again in the bathroom when we arrived and we both just wanted to crawl into a bed and sleep the day away. Finally, we were free to enter Vietnam. We gathered our backpacks, headed for the front door and hailed a taxi to take us to our hotel. We’ll be convalescing in Hanoi for the next few days and, hopefully, with good pho (brothy soup) and good sleeps, we can get ourselves back to exploring mode again.
Jesse: Ah, India. No other country I’ve ever visited runs the full spectrum of dirty, poverty-stricken chaos all the way up to world-class sights and experiences. India is full-on, and a few weeks of travel here is the equivalent of months of travel in other parts of the world—both in terms of amazing sights seen and the sheer exhaustion from over-stimulation of the senses. I visited India about 8 years ago during my Ph.D.; for a short musical summary of that experience, check out the video I compiled on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlzE1IY3PVY
We arrived in Kochi, capital of the southern Indian province of Kerala, where we were greeted by balmy weather and relative calm and cleanliness (for India)—a perfect way to ease Jessica into the craziness that dominates the rest of the country. We bused the 50 km into Fort Cochin (40 rupees vs. the 2000 rupee cab ride!), the old Portuguese quarter and the destination for most tourists in the state. It was reminiscent of Havana, Cuba, with ancient, colorful colonial buildings moldering in the tropical heat, people loitering on front steps, and plenty of old, battered cars and motorcycles tearing around the narrow streets. As one of the two predominantly Catholic states (tiny Goa being the other), Kerala fills up with tourists around Christmastime, and thus finding accommodation and transportation is tough. We managed to find a tiny, boiling-hot room in a homestay with a Portuguese-descended family. As all the trains were booked solid out of Kochi for the next month, the owner (who was so friendly he was borderline aggressive), helpfully offered to take care of our onward journey arrangements—for a very fat commission, of course.
Feeling a bit disgruntled about blowing $100 US for our travel to the next city (the sold out trains would have been less than half that), we finally set off to explore Fort Cochin. We visited the north of the island where traditional Chinese fishing nets, giant spider-like apparatuses operated by 4 men from the shore, are still used to pull a gradually diminishing number of fish from the Arabian Sea. We visited the elaborate Jewish synagogue and learned that an ancient Jewish kingdom had actually existed in Kerala long ago until Muslim raiders had decimated it and the Jewish prince had swum to the relative safety of Fort Cochin with his wife on his back and had been given refuge by the Hindi city state existing there at the time. The prince had established the synagogue there, the final remnant of a vanquished Jewish kingdom in India. We also saw the so-called “Dutch Palace” which the Portuguese had built for the local rulers to placate them (and which the subsequent Dutch rulers had taken over once they’d ousted the Portuguese). But in all honesty, none of the sights were very spectacular (we had just seen Petra, after all, so perhaps our expectations were too high). The big draw for Kochi is touring the backwaters of Kerala on a houseboat, however, so we signed up for a tour and headed out of the city to where rivers and canals wind their way through the surrounding countryside. First, our van full of tourists were loaded onto a long canoe and polled through a shady canal. It was relaxing, but we saw nothing but the occasional local bathing in the murky water and a few ducks. We paused for a bit of a spice tour, but it paled in comparison to the spice tour we’d had in Zanzibar. When you’ve travelled extensively, it’s hard not to draw comparisons to other experiences… We were served a spicy lunch in a building reminiscent of a jail, and then placed on a much larger boat for a slow pole up a major river. The only thing we saw of any note was a water snake; Jessica ended up sleeping the whole way and I read my book. We agreed it was the most boring tour we’d ever been on and we couldn’t figure out why so many people—including the Lonely Planet—rave about it. The definite highlight of our stay in Kochi was catching a “Kathakali” performance at a local theater. Kathakali is a stylized form of acting that involves no words but elaborate make-up and costumes and intricate facial expressions. Before the performance, one of the actors ran through about 30 or 40 of the various expressions used in the course of a Kathakali play. Despite our play being summarized in about 3 lines, the whole performance lasted over an hour. Real Kathakali plays (where the actors perform in the living rooms of rich patrons) can last 7-8 hours…
The Chinese fishing nets in Fort Cochin
Applying the elaborate make-up prior to the Kathakali performance
The Kathakali performance
Our friendly/aggressive homestay owner drove us to the bus on our last day and charged us 300 rupees for the lift despite the fact he was driving that way already. We found that most people in Kerala would try to make a buck off you at every opportunity, and it was more than a little tiring. Our “bus station” was in the middle of a busy, dirty, commercial street, with the office above a tire repair shop. While waiting, two worried-looking Polish girls poked their head in and were relieved to see other travellers. Eventually we were kicked out of the office and forced to wait on the side of the busy street as night fell and no bus appeared…Eventually it arrived, 2 hour late, and we piled on for our long trip to Goa. The bus trip was the best we had in India: steeply reclining seats, AC, 2 Bollywood movies shown on a flat screen TV. The only issue is that it was slow and we arrived 5 hours late, for a grand total of 20 hours on the bus. Little did we know it at the time, but slow and late would describe virtually every one of our experience with long distance travel in India…
We based ourselves in the capital of Goa, Panaji, another old Portuguese town with an even richer atmosphere of moldering colonial architecture. We visited Old Goa, filled with cathedrals and hosting a festival to honor their patron saint, St. Francis Xavier, whose rather gruesome remains we saw on display in a glass sarcophagus at cathedral Se de Santa Catarina, the largest cathedral in Asia. The Catholic churches here were certainly “India-ified” with flower garlands on the angels and neon halos around Jesus’ head. We daringly tried some street food at the festival and other than a few twinges later in the evening, felt fine. The next day we met an older Canadian couple at our hostel, Jerry and Lynn, and accepted their invitation to share a taxi with them down to one of the southern beaches—the main highlight of any visit to Goa. The sun was hot, the sand golden and the Arabian Sea clean and deliciously cool. We spent a delightful afternoon alternating between a lovely tandoori restaurant on the beach and floating in the gently undulating water. Back in Panaji, we attempted to watch the Hobbit in a movie theater, but the on-line schedule was completely out of synch with the actual schedule, and we ended up with a hot, 2 hour hike across the city for nothing, dodging piles of trash as we went. Littering is endemic in India, and in Goa and Kerala it piles up in places like they’re a month or two into a garbage collector strike, attracting thousands of crows to the city. No trip to Goa would be complete without sampling some of the spicy cuisine, and so we tracked down a highly acclaimed restaurant and ordered a Vindaloo and something called an Ambotik. Both started off mild enough, and I scoffed. thinking I should have ordered a hot instead of a medium…but by the end of the meal, our faces were melting and I had resorted to rocking back and forth while frantically rubbing my hands on my thighs, my bizarre involuntary reaction to excessively spicy food.
An “India-ified” statue of Mary
The main cathedral in Panaji, Goa
Cute 🙂
Our beach in Goa. We should have stayed longer!
Even old cars molder in the tropical heat of Goa
The next leg of our journey across the Indian sub-continent was on a “half-sleeper, non-AC” bus, which translates to “not terribly comfortable.” It was a 24 hour bus odyssey that began when our rickety bus arrived 2 hours late in Panaji. Goa had been swelteringly hot, so we were dressed in the lightest clothes we had—not, perhaps, the smartest move for a ride on a bus with open windows. By 2 AM we had left the heat behind and absolute frigid air was blasting through windows that refused to shut properly. Jessica and I huddled desperately under her jacket, the rest of our warm clothes tucked away in our backpacks below the bus. With the wind-chill, the temperature must have hovered around 5 C. In an attempt to cover ourselves with something, I pulled some of the dusty, scratchy drapes off the back windows to wrap around our bare legs. They’d probably never been washed since the bus had emerged from its assembly plant 30 years earlier, but we didn’t care. We were eventually let off in the raucous, chaotic city of Pune where we took a tuk-tuk to a different bus station, waited another 3 hours, then boarded a cheap local bus to complete our journey to Jalgaon (the “n” is silent, which caused the poor locals no end of confusion until we caught on). This bus looked like a ramshackle school bus from the 1960s and clearly hadn’t been cleaned since then either. The suspension was adjusted such that each bump in the road felt like a landmine going off beneath us and the ensuing rattle of the metal interior was so loud we had to wear ear plugs the entire time. Nine hours on that bus and we were ready for an appointment with a chiropractor.
Jalgaon was a fairly ugly little city, but tourists flock there to see the incredible Ajanta Caves in the hills 60 km south of town. Generations of Buddhist monks had carved out a series of temples into a horse-shoe shaped cliff face above a little river adorning the walls of the temples with carvings of Buddha and rich paintings of episodes from Buddha’s life. They had eventually abandoned the site in favor of the more-accessible Allora Cave system further south. The Ajanta caves had been rediscovered by John Smith, one of the early leaders of the East India Trading Company, while he’d been out on a tiger hunt and he’d taken the time to scroll his name on one of the priceless paintings before galloping off in search of his prey. The caves are, to a certain extent, the exact opposite of Petra. In Petra you have tremendous temple facades carved into sheer cliffs, but the interiors are tiny and empty. In Ajanta the facades of the 27 caves vary between very basic to quite elaborate, but the interiors or richly carved temples with pillars, alters, giant orbs, giant Buddhas, reclining Buddhas, and fabulous paintings. While it didn’t evoke the whole “lost city” vibe of Petra, Jess and I agreed that architecturally, it was superior. However, one drawback to Ajanta was that it was absolutely packed full of Indian tourists, including troupes of loud school children. Sigh.
The schoolboys visiting Ajanta thought Jesse was a bit of a rockstar
Our very pleasant and helpful hotel proprietor in Jalgoan helped us secure our first train tickets in India, so the following morning we were ensconced in a 3AC-sleeper train car headed north to Varanasi. It was a crowded but otherwise comfortable 22 hour journey.
Our Lonely Planet guide describes Varanasi as “blindingly colorful, unrelentingly chaotic and unapologetically indiscreet. Varanasi takes no prisoners.” A good example of this was our experience at the Blue Lassi, perhaps the most famous lassi shop in all of India. On our way there through the narrow warren of alleyways, we dodged beggars, tourists, chaiwallas (people selling milk tea in huge kettles), military personnel, honking motorcycles, a woman urinating in a corner, a number of slowly meandering holy cows, a sadhu or two with their foreheads colorfully painted (Hindu holy men who give up all material possessions and beg) and at least one corpse wrapped in yellow fabric being carried towards a funeral pyre on the Ganges. The Blue Lassi itself was a tiny, blue-painted room just a couple of steps above the chaos of the street. While we waited for our order, we counted a total of 7 funeral precessions rush past. Varanasi is one of the 7 holy Hindu cities and the Ganges River (or the Ganga as it’s called in India) is especially holy. Getting cremated on the banks of the Ganges and having your ashes cast into its waters is supposedly highly auspicious for your next life, and as a result Hindus come from far and wide in order to live out their last days in Varanasi and queue up for a cremation. Of course, not everyone gets the honor of a Ganges cremation: the corpses of lepers, pregnant women and people who die by cobra bites get tied to a bolder and dropped into the middle of the river.
The lassi guru working his magic at the Blue Lassi
The narrow, smokey alleyways of old Varanasi
After our lassis (served to us with great reverence in clay goblets), we followed a funeral precession towards the burning ghats. Ghats are essentially great sets of steps which lead from temples down into the water of the Ganges. Enormous quantities of firewood are brought to the burning ghats and stored in towering stacks. When a pyre is being prepared, the family chooses the type of wood (sandalwood being the most expensive) and the amount of firewood is carefully weighed on great scales so that its price can be correctly determined. Apparently there’s an art to precisely determining the amount of wood it takes to completely burn a body. At the burning ghats they had about 5 pyres burning simultaneously, and the shore was a tangle of discarded bamboo stretchers and yellow funeral cloth…Immediately downstream, a huge water processing plant sucked river water into a giant pink tower for general use in the city.
The burning ghats
An especially holy-looking sacred cow hanging out by the burning ghats
There are about 84 ghats in total, and starting at the burning ghats we walked southward, taking in the spectacle, craziness and normal life which unfolds along the western bank of the Ganges. We passed boys playing cricket, kids flying kites, holy cows moseying along, a particularly friendly sheep who decided he was my buddy and followed me for a ways, a snake charmer who let me cuddle his defanged cobra, ladies doing laundry, men bathing in the river, people practicing yoga, a man who seized my hand and began massaging it like crazy, and a circle of sadhus getting high with a bunch of “India-fied” tourists (many tourists with hippy inclinations get fully “India-fied” by growing dreadlocks, wearing robes, get a little red bindi painted between their eyebrows, etc.). It was, all in all, an amazing, eye-opening walk. Bizarrely enough, however, despite the hubbub of the city and ghats on the western bank of the Ganges, the eastern bank is entirely empty: a desolate bank of sand lies there, and, behind it, the forest.
A sadhu, or a sadhu knock-off looking for a tourist’s spare change? Who can say…
Snuggling with a snake charmer’s cobra
a spice stall in the narrow alleys of Varanasi
We spent 3 days in Varanasi, and by the end we were more than ready to leave. Outside the ghats, the city is outrageously loud, dirty and chaotic. Strangely enough, it was difficult to find restaurants there as well, so we ended up eating at a decent German bakery just around the corner (in the evenings, sitting on top of the bakery, we could see dozens of kids on rooftops across the old city flying kites—magical). We’d been in India for over a week at that point, and we’d both noticed that our body odours were changing from non-stop Indian food, so some sandwiches and soup were very welcome. The weather was also quite awful… I had heard that December was an ideal time to visit India, but that person must have been referring to the south. In the north, the temperature hovers around 0 C at night and a thick fog moves in, sapping your warmth. None of the buildings are heated either, so we ended up shivering all night in our frozen room. Inevitably, and on Christmas day, I got sick and spent the day huddled in bed with a fever. That night we fought our way through outrageous traffic (the new popular Indian PM, Modi, had been in town that day) to the train station to catch our train out of town. Preserving at least one little Christmas tradition, Jessica and I watched Love Actually on my laptop amid the chaos and anarchy of the Varanasi train station. Boarding the train at last (it was 3 hours late), we joined a merry troupe of international travelers headed to our next destination: Agra and the Taj Mahal.
The Varanasi train station
Christmas Eve party at a local hostel!
Jessica: Welcome to Jordan! This would soon become the most repeated phrase we would hear during our short stay in the country. But before we were afforded the pleasure of meeting Jordan’s friendly citizens, we were forced to spend a 17 hour lay-over in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. I had heard many anecdotal evidence of the oppressive regime that rules over the country, but I had never had the opportunity to experience it first hand. I have to say, it was not a pleasant experience. The first subtle hint of culture class came when in the Nairobi airport: to board the plane we hd to pass through no less than 4 separate security checks, which included having our bags opened and searched twice. Next, as the plane was readying to take off, the stewardeses began walking up and down the aisle spraying a ton of perfume. I wondered why and the only possible explanation I can come up with is that it was due to the many African passengers (who were, by the way, all sitting at the back of the plane), since they never sprayed any perfume on our flight from Saudi Arabia to Jordan or vice versa. Once we arrived at the Jedda airport we boarded a bus and I had to ask Jess to turn around and stare the man behind him off, since he was openly gawking at me. At security, women weren’t allowed through the metal detectors. Instead we had to go to a small room where we were wanded down in private. When I wandered off to look for some painkillers for Jesse’s headache I was glared at as I walked by, presumably because I was lacking the proper head-to-toe covering. I hate to say it, but just the atmosphere at the airport, which is far more liberal than on the streets, was so oppressive that I was almost dreading Jordan.
The two countries have nothing in common, other than the spoken language of Arabic. Although in Jordan there were women wearing burqas, it is not compulsory and there were plenty of young girls and older women who went about their daily activities in western clothing, many without even wearing a head scarf. The men didn’t leer, the women didn’t glare at me as I walked past. It was, altogether, a lighter, freer feeling. There are still societal norms to follow: necks are highly sexual, so wearing a scarf around it is adviseable; going out with wet hair is an announcement that a woman is available for sexual activities, and should be avoided; and any amount of leg showing is too much, be it a knee or a calf.
Armed with that knowledge, Jess and I set out to explore Jordan. Our first real day in the city was spent in Jerash, where we visited the ancient city. The ruins include Hadrians Gate, built to commemmorate Caesar Hadrian’s stay in the city, the temple of Zeus and the temple of Artemis which, although she was the patron of the city, was never completed, as interest shifted to the construction of the temple of Zeus instead. Pfff, men. We walked down the main colonnade, lined with dozens of still-standing columns designed by the Romans to sway (but not fall) in the event of an earthquake. Hollowed out stones connecting the columns at the top would ring, bell-like, to warn the citizens when the columns below were shimmying and shaking.
The main circular plaza in ancient Jerash
Chilling out on the main colonade
We spent four hours walking among the ruins and then headed into the current-day city to find something to eat. By the time we extracted ourselves from downtown it was well past two. We had planned to also visit Adjoun, a ruined castle that was built along with a number of others, to repel the crusaders that were trying to invade the area. Originally our hostel owner had told us that he could arrange a driver for us to take us to both sites for the low, budget price of 200 jordanian dinars (each of which is equivalent to 1.6 Canadian dollars). We balked at this since we had read online that a bus to Jerash cost less than 5 JD and the one to Adjoun was similarly priced. The owner of the hostel had assured us there was no bus, but being the wiser we decided not to heed his words. And for the first five hours of the day we felt pretty smug. The ride out to Jerash came out to 1 JD each and dropped us off a mere 50m from the entrance to the site. But when we tried to catch a bus to Adjoun… Well, things didn’t go so smoothly. We first had to walk to the bus station, a gruelling kilometer and a half (ok, maybe only 700m, but to my barely recovered ankle it felt twice as long), only to be told by a helpful bus driver that there were no local buses, only a big, tourist bus that went to Adjoun. Coming from Africa, the land of “Muzungu” pricing, we knew what large tourist buses would cost us. We tried asking a different bus driver, but were told there were no buses to Adjoun, a definite downgrade from the first bus driver’s information. Suddenly, as a bus was driving by, the driver stuck his head out and cried out “Adjoun?” and then added something in Arabic which, for obvious reasons, didn’t register with either me or Jesse. The bus driver who had told us there were no buses responded, they argued back and forth and finally the newer bus driver won out and waived us onto his bus. The cost of the bus ride, a mere 0.35 JD each, should have been the first clue that perhaps that bus wouldn’t be taking us to Adjoun. The sheer number of accupants should have been a second clue, but Jess and I sat happily, oblivious of the warning signs, feeling like we had beat the system. That was when our driver stopped the bus at a T-junction in the middle of some metal shops and furniture stores and announced
“Adjoun, here.”
“Are you sure?” Jess asked, looking around.
“Yes, you get off here, Adjoun,” he insisted, waving vaguely off to our right.
Not thoroughly convinced, we climbed off the bus, along with two older women and their children, who threw curious looks our way.
“Adjoun this way?” asked Jess to one of them and she nodded and pointed in the same direction the driver had alluded to.
“Maybe there’ls a bus station ahead,” I offered, my ankle starting to really hate me.
It was also the same direction they were walking, and for a while we followed them. But after passing the fourth metal shop with no sign of a bus station Jess stopped to ask a guy selling paint. We were lucky he spoke English.
“Adjoun?” he asked, looking troubled, “No, no bus. Hang on, I help you,” he added, after getting the low down on us, and he walked out to the middle of the road.
“Is he going to thumb a ride for us?” I asked Jess incredulously, and the answer was most likely yes.
Before he could, however, we decided it was too late to make it to Adjoun and so we began the long walk back to the station from whence we came. After a short rest, which was cut short by a taxi driver trying to haggle us into taking his taxi back to Amman, we walked back to the last bus stop before the driver let us off. It was not close. After being ignored by several buses I finally managed to get one to stop and asked “Amman?”. The driver nodded. “Tabarbour station?” I pressed. He nodded again and we happily climbed aboard. This time, however, it was 2 JD each. This should have roused our suspicion, again, but we were too tired to think about it. Twenty minutes later, on the edge of the city, the driver stopped the bus and told us to get out. Confused, we deboarded and he told us to take a different bus to the station. Since we would have to take a taxi anyway once we got to the station, we hailed the first one that drove by and gave him the hostel address. Ten minutes later we were back at our hostel and had to admit defeat to the owner. He rewarded us with directions to an excellent restaurant and an even more excellent sweet shop. He even wrote down the name of the best sweet that shop made and told us we had to order it. Having ignored his council once and come out the worse for it, we decided to do as he said. The result was a delicious, incredibly filling dinner of shwarma and chicken liver sandwiches (Jess wasn’t a fan of the latter… admittedly they are much better hot and on an empty stomach) and an incredible Arabic dessert comprised of goat cheese covered in what we think was fried milk with sugar syrup and cardemon. Heavenly.
The following day Jess had to fly out to Germany for an interview early in the morning, so I slept in, not relishing the idea of heading out on my own, and still partially full from the previous night’s dinner. When I finally did leave my room, I headed down to the common area to do a bit of emailing. That was when the fun began. First, the owner (or the owner’s son, still not sure) came up to me and told me he needed me to help him write an email to an investment firm in the UK and brought his laptop so I could email from the hostel’s account. As he began to tell me what he wanted me to write, he brought me binder upon binder of investment statements, mostly in arabic. He then opened up a program on his computer (saying the passord outloud as he typed it) and showed me, real time, all his investments. Assured that I had enough background information, he left me to write the email. Halfway through he called out to me.
“We invite you to lunch,” he declared and motioned me to a chair next to his sister and the Philippino girl that had checked us in when we arrived.
We had hard boiled eggs with cheese and pitas dipped in olive oil and thyme. As we were eating his cell phone rang and suddenly everyone was talking. Finallym seeing the confused look on my face, he explained that his aunt was in the hospital, her hemoglobin count was dropping and he was trying to get people to donate blood.
“I can donate,” I heard myself saying and, not at all surprised or taken aback by my offer, he nodded.
“Yes,” he said, as though it was a given that I would donate, “we go after we finish the email.”
But once we finished the email there was another one to a girl requesting a work exchange, and then he wanted me to find out where a famous bridge that had been blown up decades earlier was located. Hours later, and sure that he had completely forgotten about the blood donation thing, I was settling down to my emails when a guy I hadn’t seen before walked into the room.
“You go?” he asked, making a gesture that could have been confused with an invitation to shoot up.
“Uh, yes,” I ventured, assuming he meant to ask if I was donating.
He gestured for me to follow him and he led me to a small van, where another guy and the hostel owner (or son of) were sitting. He gestured me in, I climbed aboard and he got in. As we drove away I thought of my father’s words of caution the night before.
“Don’t leave the hotel.” Well, this certainly constituted leaving the hotel. Sitting in the back of a van with three mostly strangers, we rolled along the street when suddenly one of the guys shouted out at the window at a guy walking on the street, who immediately opened the van door and climbed in beside me.
“He’s going with us too,” I was told.
My unease grew but then we pulled in front of a white building surrounded by white and red vehicles. I breathed a sigh thinking, this must be the hospital. But when we climbed out, instead of going to the front doors, the guys went off into an alleyway beside the hospital. I had no choice but to follow. Turns out the original hospital was at the back of the building, and had been connected to it via a walkway, but it was faster to skirt the building. After testing my blood for hemoglobin and declaring it “The best blood for a woman,” the doctors proceeded to spear me with a 3mm needle, rewarding me with some mango juice for my bravery. It wasn’t the only reward of the evening. The aunt’s husband rode back with us in the van and when we arrived, insisted on buying me a 1.5L bottle of the thickest mango juice I have ever had. It was almost a pudding. I was then ushered inside and invited to dinner, where I ate until I was full, and then ate some more because they told me they would be angry with me if I didn’t finish the plate of food in front of me.
Worn out, and missing a few liters of blood, I headed to my room, and slept in until late the next morning. Thankfully that day was much less eventful, the highlight being getting free sweet at the sweet shop we had visited earlier. When Jess came back from Germany I was rested and ready for some adventuring.
Which is a good thing, because we had booked a whirlwind two-day tour with the hostel to go visit The Dead Sea, Petra and a whole slew of important religious landmarks along the King’s Highway. Our driver, Mr. Ali, was a friendly white-haired gentleman who had 11 children and a staggering 27 grandchildren. He immediately nicknamed us Jameel and Jameela, which is the male and female version of a name meaning beatiful man/woman. As we drove to our first stop, St. George’s church, site of an ancient mosaic map of the arabic world, he told us all about his family, his job and the Jordanian way of life.
“Here in Jordan, very friendly,” he proclaimed, “No one ask you what religion are you. Christians, Muslim, Jews, we all worship the same God, so why bother asking.”
He also had some wisdom to impart about Saudi Arabia.
“My son, he work there, he makes one tenth the amount a Saudi makes. The king, he gives his people everything. Every two years, people have a new car, no problem, the country pays for it. So people don’t do anything, just sit at home and eat.”
As we walked up to the church we saw a film crew walking just ahead of us. Turns out they were filming a documentary for an anniversary celebration, to be shown to the king, and they asked Jess and I to be in it. We were told to look up Mataba on YouTube to see the documentary. After completing our movie roles we headed to Mount Nebo, where God showed Moses the promised land but then told him he couldn’t go in, and saw the mosaics of the oldest church in history, which dated back to 500 A.D. A short ride later we were parking at the Amman beach, to experience the Dead Sea first hand. Looking down into the water I could see slicks of dissolved salt swirling around. With a deep breath I stepped in. It felt incredibly strange on my skin, slightly slimy and abrassive at the same time. It also burned wherever I had a small nick or scrape. Not only were we incredibly bouyant, but it seemed like we were weightless, the wind that blew over the surface pushing us easily along the shoreline. After a half hour, our skin burning all over, we were ready to get out.
Floating in about 1 m of water in the Dead Sea.
Since we didn’t have time to ride camels in the desert, we figured, hey, why not ride the in a parking lot?
Freshly fried falafels. Once you go fresh, you never go back…
We followed the winding road, the King’s Highway, careening over speedbumps well over the limit they were designed for and, after a short stop for some chicken and rice, arrived in Petra shortly after sunset. We were told to drop off our luggage and come down for some tea, the third black tea of the day, and we wondered if we’d be able to sleep at all. But overly dense bodies of water have a way of exhausting you physically, and after an hour of conversing with Mr. Ali about international relations, the king’s reponse to ISIS, and Arabic TV (the Turks have the best soap operas), we stumbled upstairs and fell asleep almost immediately. The next morning our epic day of adventure and exploration began. After a filling breakfast we headed to the main gates, bought out tickets and crossed into the site.
Petra is an ancient Nabatean city built in a deep valley and composed of small homes carved into the many rock faces that sprout up all around. To get to it we had to walk along the bottom of a siq (a deep gorge or canyon created by the moving of tectonic plates, as opposed to the movement of water), which was 80m deep in some places and opened up on the impressive “Treasury” (featured in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. You know, that building where the Nazi bad guy drinks from the wrong cup and his face melts off). It’s unclear why it’s called The Treasury, since it was actually a tomb. Most of the elaborate and ornate facades in Petra are actually tombs, the Nabatean being more concerned with showing rank after an individual’s death than during their life. After two hours of clmabering up ruin steps and poking our heads into shadowy doorways we headed up to the Monastery.
The first glimpse of the Treasury through the Siq
When we arrived in Petra, there was virtually no one there but the Beduins. We felt like Indiana Jones re-discovering a lost city
These are some of the more elaborate houses of Petra–they’re a lot less ornate than the tombs
This is the Palace Tomb. For scale, note the tiny Jesse walking next to the tomb on the lower left side…
The main valley is full of elaborate tomb facades. The actual rooms inside are generally quite small, however.
This is the theater, unique in that it’s carved out of solid rock. When the Romans took over Petra, they added the columns and held plays here. Prior to the Romans, it used to be a gathering place for pilgrims.
“Are you sure you want to do it?” Jess asked, eyeing my limp.
“We’re here, we might as well do it,” I answered, “besides, it’s just over those cliffs.”
I pointed to the rock face a few hundred meters in front of us as I surveyed our map. Our map was not to scale. As we walked along the trail a few bedouin boys offered us a donkey ride up to the monastery (at a price).
“It’s 150 steps,” one of the boys warned us.
“That’s alright,” I called out cheerfully, “I can do 150 steps.”
Turns out, he had miscounted. 800 rock hewn and worn out steps later I staggered to the top, my ankle screaming bloody murder and my knee throbbing dully. It had taken me an hour and a half but, sweating in my socks, my heart pounding, I had done it. Jess, being in perfect physical condition, clambered off to get the bird’s view of the monastery, while I sat at a cafe across from it and gawked. Much less ornate than the Treasury, the Monastery was actually more impressive. Standing close to 80m tall, it was taller, wider and more imposing. I felt tiny compared to it and wondered how the Nabatean had built it.
One of the many Bedouin ladies selling souvenirs in Petra, happy to invite you to tea and then use that to guilt you into buying something…
The incredible rock colors in the ceilings of the tombs
The Bedouin guards in Petra
En route to the Monastery, we passed through an alien desert landscape
Past the Monastery, Jesse caught this very Star Wars-y view out over the desert mountains
The gigantic Monastery itself
When Jess returned we made our very painful, and very slow, way down. I was repeatedly asked if I wanted a camel or donkey to take me back to the front gate.
“Madam looks tired,” one bedouin observed, making the argument that I needed a donkey.
“Madam just climbed up to the Monastery and down again, she can make it to the front gate,” I countered, laughing.
In all fairness it was uderstandable that every two minutes someone was offering us a camel ride, some tea (if we bought from their store) or a place to eat lunch. Since the recent outbreak of violence in Syria, the instability in Israel and Palestine, the military coup in Egypt, and the overbearing threat of ISIS, tourism in the entire area has been incredibly hard hit. The entire day we spent at Petra we saw only about thirty other tourists and all the other attractions and sites we visited were just as empty. Mr. Ali ad some choice words to say about the media and their role in drying up the tourism industry in Jordan.
“They only like to talk about this Muslim killed this one, or blew up that building. But they don’t ever talk about the good things Muslims do,” he contested. “Man who kills, he’s no Muslim. Maybe he say ‘I am Muslim’ but in here,” he jabbed at his chest emphatically, “he is no Muslim.”
But back to the donkeys. A ride on one sure would have made extracting ourselves from Petra easier. An hour later, we finally crossed the gate of the Visitor’s Centre and fell, exhausted and grateful, into the back seat of our taxi.
“Good day?” Mr. Ali asked.
We nodded, then promptly fell asleep.
Our time in Jordan was sadly too short, but incredibly enjoyable. Everyone, from our driver, to the pizza place owner, to the shop keepers, made us feel welcome. Maybe some day we will return and visit the rest of the sights we missed out on. For now we head off to India, where we will test the resilience of our digestive systems.
A panoramic of Petra
Hey, even Stormtroopers feel the urge to visit ancient cities…
Jesse: One of the major optional activities we signed up to do on our African tour was a trek to see the critically endangered mountain gorillas. The last of the gorillas, all 880 of them, are found within two parks: about half of them are in Virungas National Park, which is filled with amazing picture-perfect volcanoes and is shared jointly between Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda. But the park is often plagued with rebel activity from the DRC, and they can’t guarantee the gorillas will be in any one country at a time. The safer, more reliable option is the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda, but boy does it live up to its name (more on that later). Surrounding these two parks is some of the most densely populated rural areas on Earth, with an average of 480 people per square km. Every valley and hillside for hundreds of kilometers in every direction has been converted to farming terraces and it’s this encroachment of their habitat that has driven the gorillas to the brink of extinction. To save the remaining gorillas, the governments of these countries charge exorbitant permit fees to see the gorillas (~250-420 GBP per person) but then use the money to fund community projects and fund other, less visited parks. As a result, the locals are extremely aware of the economic value of the gorillas. All poaching and destruction of habitat has virtually ceased and the gorilla’s numbers have stabilized.
The rolling countryside in southern Uganda
Unfortunately, Jessica’s leg prevented her from participating on the trek. She was crushed, but the other Canadian woman on our trip, Jennifer, was also skipping the trek so they ended up going for a long, slow hike to Lake Mutanda, visiting with plenty of fun-loving local kids along the way. The rest of us were roused at 4:30 AM and embarked on a bumpy 2 hour ride through the hills of southwestern Uganda to the entrance of Bwindi. There we divided into two groups—they limit the number of people in a group to 8 and you’re prevented from going if you have a cold as diseases readily jump from humans to gorillas. I chose the group that promised the more challenging hike, and we set off into the jungle. At the crack of dawn, trackers head out to find the gorillas and then radio their location to the guides to prevent too much needless searching and bushwhacking. For the first 2 hours, our fit little group virtually raced up a well-maintained trail, hardly breaking a sweat, two armed guards accompanying us carrying AK-47s. Suddenly our guide’s radio crackled to life.
“The gorillas are not far,” he said. “Perhaps 1 km. They’re just on the other side of this little valley…We’ll be there in about 30 minutes.” We later realized he was referring to 30 African minutes…
We left the path and started down the side of the little, narrow valley. We suddenly understood why this was the more “challenging” of the two treks that day. The valley slope was perhaps 60-80 degrees and slick with mud and wet vegetation. Vines grabbed our feet with every step, and many of the trees we needed to hold for support were covered in hundreds of spiky thorns. I had bought a pair of bright red leather welder’s gloves to protect my hands, and despite looking ludicrous, they protected me while many of the other hikers’ hands ended up riddled with thorns. And the vegetation was thick: it would have been impossible for us to move had our guide not hacked a rough semblance of a path through the trees, vines and roots, leaving a trail of spikey stumps, ready to impale us in his wake. Walking was very tough, and had it been any more difficult, I think it would have moved from the “Challenging” category to the “Miserable”.
It took us another 2 hours before we came upon the trackers. The gorillas had moved since they had originally radioed us, and we had passed through their “nests” where they had spent the night (and then subsequently used as toilets). We dropped off our backpacks and proceeded with our cameras at the ready. The vegetation was outrageously thick, so we didn’t realize that we were so close to the gorillas already. The trackers hacked out a tiny 5 ft x 5 ft clearing and then basically cleared an open path all the way to where a giant silverback gorilla, the leader of his family, lay dozing on the ground, a smaller female grooming him from behind. For a few minutes he just lay there, watching us with one eye open while we clicked away with our cameras. Swarms of flies buzzed around them and the air was thick with their rank smell. There are 32 gorilla families in Bwindi, 12 of which have been “habituated” to human presence, and ours were the most habituated of the lot. They seemed perfectly happy to have us in their midst and have the trackers virtually deforest their surroundings so that we could get a clear view of them. We saw 5 gorillas in our short 1 hour with them: the gigantic silverback, a young male, a couple of females, and a seriously cute 2 year old who, after cavorting on a log for our amusement, ended up falling off in his efforts to impress. Visits to the gorillas are limited to 1 hour, again to reduce the chance of diseases jumping across species. Reluctantly we extracted ourselves from the dense jungle. Ultimately it was amazing to see them, and a great challenge to get there, but unlike some people I didn’t feel the visit was profound in any way—probably due to the fact we didn’t see them do much besides snoozing and nibbling greenery.
They next day we visited a village of pygmies or the “Batwa” people as they are known locally. The plight of the Batwas is a tragic story, unfortunately. They were the original indigenous people of Uganda, but were kicked out of the parks when they were turned into gorilla sanctuaries in the 80’s on the pretence that they would have violent encounters with the gorillas (there’s no evidence of this). Without land or any form of income, the pygmies were left to squat on local farmers’ land, usually on rocky soil that the farmers couldn’t put to use. Their hunter-gatherer way of life virtually extinguished, they are forced to work as day laborers for local farmers, their payment often half or less of what other day laborers make (the equivalent of $5 US per day, or sometimes just a meal). They are regarded as dimwitted and a nuisance by the local Ugandans and even our guide, as matter-of-fact as he tried to be, spoke of them in a derogatory way.
“These people have no sense of time. This old lady? I asked her how old she is and you know what she said? That she is just two years old.”
The Batwa live in shabby huts, often up to 10 people sleeping in a space no more than a few meters square. Their chief wore a battered old suit jacket and no shoes, but lived in a tiny dark brick house which had been donated by some Canadian tourists. We saw a couple of sick children, but with no money to pay for medical care they would either get better on their own—or die. The area around the desolate village was strewn with their graves. It was truly a pitiful sight and it broke our hearts to be there. Before we left, however, they performed a number of loud, chaotic and vibrant dances, and when they did that, they began to smile and seemed to have a lot of fun. We joined in, splattering around in the mud, emulating their jumps and claps, and it did a lot to cheer us up. They escorted us back to our car, dancing and singing all the way.
That day about half our group, virtually all the people we had picked up two weeks before in Arusha, left for Kigali. They had signed up for a just a quick tour around Lake Victoria and wouldn’t be going all the way to Nairobi with us. All that remained were the original 4 (the Jesses, Laura and Michelle), Emily and Frances (who had been with us since Johannesburg), and Jennifer. Our big yellow truck Pluto felt quite empty as we pulled out of Kisoro and headed deeper into Uganda. We spent a night in Kabale and then continued on to the capital of Kampala. It was sprawling, polluted, noisy and crowded—like most major African cities we’d seen, but taken to the next level. But our campsites were always pristine and calm, little enclaves with first world accommodations in a sea of poverty and chaos. It felt weird and elitist, but given the craziness and dirtiness we passed through, we weren’t really complaining. On the third day we reached Jinja, where the Nile pours from Lake Victoria to start its long journey to the Mediterranean. The campsite was run by South Africans and it was similar to Victoria Falls: it offered big thrills (white water rafting, bungee jumping, horseback riding, etc.) at big prices. Having done most of these activities already, we contented ourselves to smaller pleasures: eating chapattis outside the camp gates, getting a haircut (me) or getting elaborate braids (the girls), having a massage or two (which greatly improved the mobility of Jessica’s leg) and taking a cheap sunset cruise on the Nile. Oh, and getting loads of parasites (but more on that later)…
From Jinja we finally headed into Kenya, our last country of the tour. Like Tanzania and, to a lesser extent, Uganda, Kenyans speak Swahili first and English second—whereas the majority of other African countries we’d visited spoke English as their official language. As a result, we all learned a smattering of useful Swahili words and discovered it’s one of the most fun and silly-sounding languages around. For instance, hello can either be “mambo” or “jambo” (heh heh, mambo jambo); to sleep is “lala”, OK is “sawa sawa”, to go slowly is “poli poli”, thank you is “asante”, and welcome is “karibu”. Then there are all the words used by Lion King: lion is “simba”, warthog is “pumba”, friend is “rafiki”, etc. But my favorite word is ginger: “tangawizi”. As foreigners, we were all called (rather racistly) “muzungu”, which derives from a Swahili word meaning “someone who travels in circles”, since the original inhabitants of East Africa had thought the first white explorers who kept visiting their shores were all the same people returning over and over again. Kenya is a relatively rich country by African standards and, like most other places, its people are extremely friendly. However, due to their actions in routing Somalian warlords out of power, Somali radical Muslims are targeting Kenyans and their news is filled with attacks on shopping malls, buses, or, while we were there, quarry workers being beheaded. But sharing a long boarder with Somalia and housing so many Somalian refugees, the solution is not immediately clear to most Kenyans.
We stopped outside of the little city of Nakuru at a campsite with a hungry black cat that was a shameless in her thievery of our food as she was affectionate. We did a game drive of the next day around Lake Nakuru National Park, which, at ~170 km square, is one of the smallest national parks in Kenya. It basically consists of a fringe of land surrounding Lake Nakuru, with the city of Nakuru built right up to its borders. To make matters worse for the park, the lake, like all others in the Rift Valley, is growing, slowly drowning the surrounding forests and shrinking the land available to the animals (the tectonic plates on either side of the rift valley are likely squeezing an underground body of freshwater up into the lakes). The one advantage of so small a park, however, is that you’re virtually guaranteed to see most of the wildlife within it, which, in this case, included a large-ish population of white rhinos. In fact, we got up close and personal with a herd of 4 white rhinos, very close to a rare Rothschild giraffe, and an enormous eland, the largest member of the gazelle family (and about the size of a cow), and mingled with plenty of cape buffalo who, with mating season approaching, were feeling the need to fight one another.
The encroaching Lake Nakuru has forced the park to abandon some of their infrastructure
From Nakaru, we visited a local orphanage, sponsored by Absolute Africa. There were about 25 kids there, ranging from 2 to 16, and they were just amazing. As soon as we walked in the gate, several them singled each of us out and hurtled themselves at us for hugs. They then led us around the clean and wholesome orphanage, giving us a tour of the place, and introducing us to their dogs, cows, chickens and rabbits. We then spent a happy hour there playing “Duck, Duck, Goose”, “Little Sally Walking” and other group games.
Next we headed to Lake Naivasha where we explored an even smaller national park: Hell’s Gate. At 68 square kms, Hell’s Gate is relatively pea-sized but boasts some of the most spectacular scenery we had yet encountered in Africa: towering red-stone cliffs, deep canyons eroded into bizarre shapes by centuries of floods, and towering, free-standing pinnacles of rock, the cores of ancient volcanoes. In fact, there are so many thermal vents in the park, that Kenya has built a megawatt thermal power generation plant there. Best of all, there are no dangerous cats so you can rent bicycles and pedal your way through the park, past herds of zebra, giraffe and (scarily enough) cape buffalo. With the early morning sun on the cliffs and virtually no one else in the park, our ride in to the ranger’s post was borderline magical. From the ranger’s post, we hired a local Maasai guide named Brian to lead us through the canyon to “Pride Rock”, supposedly the inspiration for the lion’s den in Lion King. The canyon was amazing and very, very narrow, requiring plenty of contortions and careful footwork to make our way through. Many of the streams of water pouring off the canyon walls smelled of sulphur and were at a boiling temperature. Eventually the canyon opened up and, after getting many soakers, we came at last to Pride Rock. As impressive a pinnacle of rock as it was, it looked nothing like the lion den in the movie and we were left with the impression that Kenya had named that spire just to attract movie fans…
We briefly visited a Maasai village and were toured around by the chief’s sons. We were given an oral tour of the Maasai culture, including their cattle-herding way of life (the men will herd the cows abroad for up to 6 months at a time while the women remain in the village), their polygamous relations (the more wealthy the man, the more wives he’ll try to acquire), to their courtship rituals (jumping dance—the women choose their men based on how high they can jump). They gave us a demonstration of their dances (I think I held my own in the jumping—at least I impressed Jessica!), starting a fire by rotating a stick, and a tour of a typical house. I ended up buying a Maasai sword and lion-hunting spear…I couldn’t resist.
Our last major destination of the trip was the famed Maasai Mara, Kenya’s extension of the Serengeti. Although 1/9th the size of the Serengeti, the density of wildlife was higher and the landscape more conducive to spotting game close-up. Every game drive that we’d been on had offered at least one special moment, and Maasai Mara did not disappoint. The first drive we saw a cheetah at our closest range yet (about 60 m). On our second we spotted a small pride of lions in a bush (a mom, her two male cubs, and an aunt), and while we were watching, a herd of male buffalo entered the bush and routed the lions. With a low roar of warning, the mom cleared her pride out and they came racing directly towards us, passing just in front of our truck on their way past. On our third drive, we encountered an ancient black rhino with an absolutely massive horn—larger than any I’ve ever seen, including National Geographic photos. Unfortunately he was wounded on his read leg, and his ribs were showing. We feared he didn’t have much longer to live. On our last drive, on our way out of the park, we spotted a hyena chasing a baby gazelle. Just as he was getting close, a male gazelle appeared in front of the hyena and began a dangerous game of distraction, running tight, teasing circles about the hyena and leading him inevitably away from the herd. We finished up the drive with a mother lion and her 5 baby cubs feasting on a wildebeest in a bush. One of the major highlights of Maasai Mara, however, was the tame eland at our campsite. The Maasai guards of the camp had saved her from lions less than 6 months before, and now, at 9 months old, she was growing prodigiously and would stick her nose into our little kitchen for fruit and veggie scraps. Joe and I made fast friends with her, but she disliked all the girls on the trip and would attempt to head-butt them if they got too close.
At last we left the park and headed towards Nairobi and the end of our tour. But our fun wasn’t quite over yet. You see, Jinja had left us with some unpleasant souvenirs: parasites. I first discovered mine a few days into Kenya. I had awoken for the past 4 nights in a row with a burning pain in the tip of my right big toe, but other than a bit of redness around the area, there was no evidence of anything wrong. The pain would only come at night, and on the 4th night, it was extreme. I finally roused Jessica, and she examined my toe for the umpteenth time. Finally she shone her headlamp through the back of the toe, illuminating it in all its ruddy transparency. And there, very clearly near my toenail, was a large black smudge, about the size of my pinky fingernail. Yep, I had a living creature residing in my toe. It turns out it was called a jigger, and it had likely been deposited in my toe by a flea living in the mud outside the campsite in Jinja. It only moved around at night when I was still and my feet were warm. Later that day a black dot appeared (its reproductive organs extruding from my toe so that it could poop out all the eggs it was engorged with). At our first opportunity we stopped at a hospital to get it removed. Yes, it was a third-world clinic on a dusty street filled with junky cars, cracked cement and weeds, but they were fast and professional and the operating theater spotless. Within 30 minutes they had given me a local anesthetic (horribly painful), sliced open my toe (the jigger bulged out like a sack of transparent jelly), cleaned out the eggs, bandaged me up and sent me out the door with some antibiotics. Total cost, $25 US. The next day Jennifer found a jigger in her toe, and headed back to the clinic to get it removed. Then on the last day, Jessica found a bizarre sack of fluid growing on her bum cheek. We never really found out what it was (the doctor who removed it thought it might have been a thorn), but there was clearly a white egg-like thing in the middle of the sack and our driver, Patrick, thought that it was likely a parasite found in Jinja which lands on wet laundry and then lays its eggs in your body. Lovely. We had it removed as soon as we got to Nairobi and hoped we’d seen the last of African parasites.
We were all a little sad to see our grand African adventure come to an end. After 56 days of riding on our overland truck, we had all become a little institutionalized with the steady routine. Every morning we’d wake up, disassemble our green canvas tent, have our breakfast that Joe would lay out, hop on the truck for 2-12 hours, reading, playing countless games of cards, listening to music or the Harry Potter audio books over the loudspeakers, or just watching the world roll by. We’d then shop for food (we’d take turns cooking, washing dishes, cleaning the truck, etc.), head to the campsite, set up our tents, have a shower (hopefully hot), cook/eat dinner, then head to bed. Life was spiced up with the occasional game drive, cultural exposure, hostel stay, etc., but overall it had a simple, pleasant rhythm and we were all a bit loath to give it up.
On our last night together, we headed out to dinner at a lovely restaurant that wouldn’t have looked out of place in southern France or Italy. It was my birthday, and Joe had smuggled a cake into the restaurant and everyone had signed a lovely card. We all gave little speeches about the trip ending and warmed ourselves by little charcoal braziers (Nairobi is COLD!). In the morning we all had one last breakfast together, then Jessica, Emily and Frances and I said goodbye to the others (everyone else was leaving that day) and headed out to a baby elephant orphanage. It was adorable to watch the tiny (relatively speaking) elephants drinking milk from bottles and cavorting with each other in the mud. One little guy came up to me, wrapped his trunk around my arm and then firmly tried to pull my hand into his mouth. Next we headed to the Giraffe center where endangered Rothschild giraffes are bred. We entered an elevated pavilion and a small herd of giraffes thrust their heads inside for us to feed them tasty pellets of grass and hay. While gentle, their affection could only be bought with food: try to pet them without a pellet, and they’d jerk their heads away. We all tried feeding them pellets between our lips for a soft/slimy giraffe kiss.
Back at the hostel, we found that everyone had left. The place felt empty and lonesome. We kept Frances company until her taxi arrived to take her to the airport, then ate dinner with Emily and watched the Lego Movie on my laptop before bed. In the morning Emily was gone and Jessica and I were literally the only guests left in the hostel. After 2 months of close company with a group of amazing people, to be alone again felt unspeakably lonely. We busied ourselves with packing, and at 9:00 AM we caught a ride to the airport with Smiley, the hostel’s taxi driver who earned his name by laughing uproariously at, well, virtually any comment. He may have been a little off his rocker, but he was incredibly friendly.
With the African chapter of our trip over at last, we’re headed to Jordan. The adventure continues.
Planes, Trains & Motorcycles 