Laos, Vang Vieng

Vang Vieng…This place is, for many people, a big part of the reason why they come to Laos in the first place. We had heard mixed reports from people we had met, some who described it as a beautiful spot, others who thought that it was just one long backpacker grovel where people go to get messed up and hooked up. The truth, in my opinion, lies somewhere in between. As always it’s better to just go see a place for yourself rather than listen to other people opinions so off we went. My my. The first thing I found myself uttering to Kate once we got off the bus and began our usual ‘walk of shame’ to find somewhere to stay was ‘Damn, when did we get so old?’. The average age of the punters seemed to be about 18-21 and for the girls fake Ray-Bans, bikinis and big hair certainly seemed to be the in look for tubing this season. For blokes it was, of course, just boardies. As you walk along the main streets of this small, otherwise unassuming town, the restaurants all play endless re-runs of Friends (puke!) and Family Guy (well, at least that’s better).

We quickly found a dirt-cheap room in a pretty ordinary guesthouse and had a bit of a look around. The town really is in a beautiful spot. The river flows alongside the main town with giant Karst cliffs and mountains looming on the other side of the river. The flipside is the endless bars selling cheap ‘buckets’ of bootleg vodka and whisky. The buckets go hand in hand with the tubing to be had on the river which starts about three km’s from the centre of town. The idea is that you get dropped off at the start point upstream and then trawl your way through the numerous bars on the riverbank before departing completely legless at the end of the day for the one hour float on your tube back into town. But more about the tubing later.

On our first full day in Vang Vieng we decided to hire a motorbike and go check out some of the caves and swimming spots amongst the Karst hills on the other side of the river. This was pretty cool and we found our way to the beginning of a cave where we had to park up the bike and follow a stream up into the hills. A local kid sits there waiting for tourists to roll up, charges them 20 000 kip a head (about $3AUD) to park the bike and then guide you up to the cave. ‘What do we need a guide for?’ I asked myself. I mean how hard can it be to find a cave and then have a bit of a look inside. As it turned out the cave was not just like a bit of an overhang on the side of a hill but a full on pitch black, easy to lose your way in about five seconds type cave. Once inside the boys gave us a torch each and thank God! Even with a torch it was pretty difficult going as everything was completely black, there was water leaking in all over the place and lots of tight squeezes and even a few abyss-like drop offs to negotiate. And once inside what should be there lurking in the darkness?? Why a statue of Buddha of course! What else are you going to build in the depths of a pitch black cave? The local’s dedication to building Buddha’s is truly remarkable and it seems the more dangerous, difficult and far-flung the place to build his statue’s are, the better. At one stage we were led into an inner chamber which, wait for it, was extremely dark! Amazing stuff. After fumbling around in the bowels of this cavern, groveling in the mud and looking at the walls of dark rooms we emerged into the light only to be hit up again for more money by our trusty guide. Oh well, if it wasn’t for him I’d still probably be staggering around in the darkest nether-regions of this cave imploring Buddha, or anyone else, to help me find a way out. So the lucky blighter earned himself another $2, seems reasonable to me.

After having a quick dip in the river on our way back to the bike to scrub off the mud we had accumulated, it was off to ‘the Blue Lagoon’. No, not that almost indecent movie from the 80’s that introduced us all to the ‘talents’ of Brook Shields, but rather the Vang Vieng swimming hole of the same name. As there had been some serious monsoon season rain the night before all the rivers were running pretty high to say the least. This is partly why we had opted to delay tubing on the main river for another day and the river at the Blue Lagoon, albeit just a tributary to the main river, was still running plenty fast. The Blue Lagoon turned out to be the ‘Greeny-Brown Lagoon’ and not a lagoon at all but just a bend in the river with a small rope swing attached to an over-hanging tree. Oh well, it was another typically stinking hot day in Laos so in I went.

The swimming spot was fun, although the rope-swing was pitifully small, but the highlight turned out to be a couple we met there. They weren’t a ‘couple’ in the traditional sense as he was a twenty five year old Laos travel agent and she was a fiftyish South African lady who now resides in India. He was really nice, and actually so was she. However she was a Buddhist or Hindu or something in between and she proceeded to begin chanting and incanting at a furious pace in the direction of the sun and the lovely hillside vista in front of the swimming hole. No biggie, but when you’re trying to chillax and some old lady takes her top off, starts speaking in tongues and babbling at the sun it’s not quite what you were expecting when you showed up for a bit of a dip. You do meet all sorts. Like I said, babbling aside, they were really nice and we even met up with the bloke later on to watch the football World Cup final later that night.

All this brings me to the next day and the main event-the tubing. I had thought if I had had a late night the night before staying up watching soccer, then I would be able to cruise a bit more during the next day’s tubing and boozing. Wrong! This place is completely insane and the drinking begins almost as soon as you enter the water on your tube. We had met up with the three ladies from Guernsey we had met on the boat trip a few days earlier and headed out to the tubing spot three km’s upstream from town. I had hoped to take things easy as I had heard that on average about one tourist dies each year due to accidents whilst tubing. These mishaps tended to involve mixing copious amounts of drinking with the myriad of drugs that the locals try to sell you and a fast-flowing river. Throw in the fact that each bar along the river bank has huge rope-swings that shoot you out over the river and then drop you from about 8-9 metres into the swirling current below and it’s surprising that more people aren’t killed or injured each year.

There must be more than a dozen bars along the first stretch of the river all offering free-shots and high wire antics such as zip-lines, rope-swings and my personal favourite, the trapeze. Some bars even offer the more adventurous (or just plain crazy) marijuana shakes, mushroom shakes and for the truly unhinged (or Chinese!) opium shakes. Whoa. I think I’ll stick to the beers and the free shots thanks. At one bar the guy working there was a foreigner with a look on his face that screamed ‘Man I’ve been here waaay too long!’ but he was friendly enough and he promptly offered us all free shots of Bee whiskey. The bottle actually had Bees in it and I must say it wasn’t bad; it tasted a lot like honey funnily enough.

We got to the river relatively early seeing and as the World Cup final had been the night before things initially took a while to get going but once they did…Yassis, we all had an absolute ball. All the negative things I’d heard about Vang Vieng being just a place for English kids on their ‘gap-year’ to get laid quickly melted away and between the rope swings, the fantastic scenery, the beautiful weather and a few cans of ‘Beerlao’ things could not really have been better. The only drawback perhaps could’ve been that I expected the rope swings to be a little higher but they were still more than scary enough I guess but I had heard they were enormous so I was expecting a little more. The day passed by in a blur of rope swinging, beer-pong, attempting to cross and re-cross the river in order to reach other bars and it was all a total blast. I feel I have to add at this point that a lot of the backpacker blokes weren’t particularly brave as quite a few were sitting there drinking away but were nonetheless very reluctant to climb up into the trees to the launching platform in order to have a crack. Weak I reckon, especially as there were quite few girls getting up there and giving it a bloody good go. I don’t think my trying to describe this chaotic scene will really do much more to illustrate to you what this place was like but I’m sure the photos will. Just take my word for it; it was a lot of fun. If you get the chance, go, you won’t regret it.

The boozing and rope-swinging aside I have to say the best part of the whole experience is the tube ride back into the town. The tube journey takes about an hour and you can imagine what it looks like when a bunch of messy individuals all try to clamber into their tubes, only to realise that someone else has pinched theirs. Hilarious. Luckily Kate and I had kept an eagle eye on our tubes so when it came time to stagger into the swift currents of the river we were more than ready. The river is nice and wide and you float down like you’re travelling on some frictionless aqua highway through tropical jungle on each bank. As it was right on dusk as we set off I reckon we couldn’t have picked a better time to set out. Other people would float by periodically in all sorts of conditions, some with tubes, some without, but all more than happy to be doing nothing more than floating down this beautiful river half-cut.

At one point a bloke who must’ve had a kiddies inflatable tube around his waist below the waterline seemed to float by as if levitating, quickly earning him the nickname ‘Jesus’. ‘Save me Jesus!’ Everyone was so happy and friendly it was really at odds with what I had been expecting Vang Vieng to be all about. The float back to town will stay with me for a long while as being probably one of the most enjoyable experiences of our trip so far. Kate and I ‘rafted up’ whereby we draped our legs over the edge of each other’s tubes and glided effortlessly through the lush scenery on this amazing river back towards town. Wow, I actually feel like I’m gushing now as I write this so I better end it there before you all reading this think that I have finally flipped my lid and become some kind of river-loving hippy who plans to stay in Laos forever. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad actually. Nah, just jokes, but it was really a helluva lot of fun! After tubing I literally went straight back to our guest house, fell into bed and went to sleep. Maybe I am getting old after all!

So ended our time in Vang Vieng and it was with some sadness that we were forced to leave in order to begin our trip up north to the remote frontier where we will slip over the border in to the far south of China. As I sit here we are due to cross over into China the day after tomorrow which we are both eagerly looking forward to. China is a bit of an internet black hole as apparently our BlogSpot website will not be able to be accessed from there and neither will Facebook. Shock horror! No Facebook, oh well. We have been plagued by slow internet speeds, technical difficulties on the part of the BlogSpot website we’re using and a few hardware issues of our own whilst in Laos all of which has delayed our posting of our adventures up until now. Rest assured, for those of you who are still actually reading this, we will toil unceasingly to ensure that we can keep you as up to date as possible with all of our adventures and misadventures in China. See how we get on with it all next time.

Buddha inside a cave.

Our walk up to the cave was beautiful.

The buddha

The same buddha in the light.

Me and our young guide.

After the hot walk we had a dip in the river.

Tubing

He won't be as sober as this after a few hours!

Floating down to our first bar.

Tim jumping off the first rope swing.

The girls - our first drink of the day.

Jules jumping off the first (biggest) rope swing.

Rach having a go!

Tim

Ellen having a go!

Two cute girls who wanted their photos taken.

Trying on my sunglasses.

View of two bars across the river.

Tim and I.

Us again.

Rach on a rope swing.

The day is progessing....

Us again.

Another bar, another drink.

Rach and Jules had a go at the mud volley ball and after gave Tim a loving hug! I can see that he is loving it!

Jules having a go at the slide.

Floating home. What a fun day!

Blue Lagoon

The 'blue' lagoon - it was actually brown!

The small rope swig into the lagoon

Beside the lagoon was some rice fields and these huge karst/sandstone cliffs.

Laos, Boat Cruise, Pak Beng and Luang Prabang

Laos… Well, yes now, Laos indeed. After a few boring days in Chang Mai hanging around it was time for Laos, the modern day backpacker paradise or hell-hole, depending on your perspective. We crossed over from Chang Khlong in Thailand via a short boat trip across the Mekong River to Houe Xai on the Laos side. Our plan was to secure a ticket on the two-day slow boat down river to the picturesque French colonially-inspired Luang Prabang. After a little fluffing about getting the best price on a ticket we were ready to disembark in the morning from this dusty uninspiring border town in search of good times to be had on our placid journey down the Mekong. What a journey it turned out to be.

The boat was a little cramped passenger wise and after an hour waiting around at the pier we were finally off. This was to be our first introduction to ‘Lao-time’ but certainly not our last. In Lao it seems that no matter what is happening there is absolutely no reason to rush here. Really. Most people spend their work-day asleep and you almost feel bad waking them up to pay for your meal or to ask them to please start the bus or the boat so we can actually get moving. Once away from the pier and actually rolling it was pretty damn nice. The people on the boat quickly differentiated themselves along the lines of ‘those who are keen to drink and those who ain’t’. No surprises as to which category we found ourselves in.

The crew on the boat was pretty solid and we soon found some drinking partners that we were destined to meet up with again during this early part of our Laos journey. The first were five young gentlemen from Denmark who would come to be known as ‘The Great Danes’. This lot was a lot of laughs, especially as they had a penchant for singing boy band songs at the top of their lungs, much to the amusement or chagrin of our fellow passengers. Their most polished number was ‘You say it best, when you say nothing at all’ by Ronan Keating which had allegedly grabbed their attention when this particular number had been given an unexpected hearing during intermission at a Bangkok ping-pong show they had been in attendance at a couple of nights before. The first day of our two day float down river also introduced us to three girls from Guernsey who insisted they weren’t English but sounded just like Poms. The lovely three were Julia, Rachel and Ellen and we proceeded to get nicely inebriated from the comfort of our river side seats to the ‘boy band show’. The scenery was pretty cool and the beers nice and cold as we bobbed our way downstream. The rest of the day passed in somewhat of a blur as we made sure we were plenty ‘hydrated’ in order to combat any chance of encountering the debilitating effects of dehydration in the tropics. You can never be too careful. Bob on.

The first night was spent in a little mud riddled town that I’m sure only exists because the two day slow boat stops here. Pakbeng was pretty much a dive, but it was a necessary stop on our way to Luang Prabang. The guest house was fine but the restaurant in which we had dinner definitely ran on ‘Lao time’. We waited over an hour for our dinner and we watched as the tables around us, who had arrived much later than us, all had their mains before us. In Laos they will bring you your rice then wait half an hour before bringing you your main and never at the same time as the food for the other person you are with. No biggie, but goddamn, sometimes Laos time leaves your patience a little stretched especially when you’re a bit pissed and hungry!

The second day found most of the hardy crew from the previous day a little more subdued, at least initially. The scenery was really spectacular this day and it was not uncommon to look out and see locals casting fishing nets out into the shallows in the hopes of snaring some brunch. At one stage we saw two elephants just cruising by the riverbank having a bit of a shower. Pretty cool. As we spent another day yarning and admiring the countryside the drinks just seemed to flow effortlessly and before we knew it, it was time to jump off at the quaintly beautiful town of Luang Prabang. This place was really something completely out of the ordinary, as after two days floating through what seems like the middle of nowhere, Luang Prabang emerged like a colonial mirage out of the Laos wilderness.

The town is really quite pretty and proved to be a good place to chill for a few days, watch the semi-finals of the football World Cup and catch up with a few of the usual suspects from the boat trip. The town itself is situated in a spot where another smaller river meets the mighty Mekong. The result is a small peninsular-like finger of land which is home to the ‘old town’. Seriously nice place. Watching the locals fish and come and go on their various river jaunts is a really relaxing way to spend a hot, windless afternoon.

I think the main attraction around Luang Prabang has to be the Kuang Si waterfall. Holy s**t this place is rad! We had arranged to meet the Great Danes and travel via tuk-tuk out to the waterfall but I really didn’t know what to expect. Once we got there and I saw the car park full of empty tuk-tuks awaiting the return of their foreign fares I realised just how popular this place must be, and with good reason. The first stop on the walk up to the waterfall was the ‘Bear Cage’. This place had the coolest bears I have ever encountered. I’m sure they were there for reasons of infirmary or other Bearish hard luck stories but I bet they don’t regret it as they appeared to be in the Bear version of a five star resort. These bears had a spa-pool and hammocks and seemed to be living the life of Reilly. One bear lounged in the Bear spa and had the look of ‘you wish you were me right now’ written all over his face. I was actually pretty damn envious of these bears as I watched them cavorting in the spa, climbing the bear-poles and chillaxing in the bear-hammocks. Damn bears. I was actually jealous until we reached the lower pool of the waterfall and realised that we were at a spot where the bears, for all their luxury living could not reach.

Hell. This place was nice. Water cascaded down perfectly formed terraces to pool itself in the kind of swimming hole you can only normally dream about. It even had a log that you could muck about with and practice your log-running on just for shits and giggles. From here we hiked up the near vertical right hand side of the water fall to the very top which required so much exertion that even the Great Danes were struggling to raise a song.

The view from the top however made it all worth it and as we peered over the edge of the falls we spied the ‘Infinity pool’ which looked like just about the best swimming hole ever complete with rock jumps and even a few orange-robe clad monks. Man this place was awesome! We trekked back down the other side of this incredibly tall waterfall to the infinity pool and had to actually climb up through the water over the rocks in order to reach the pool. Once there I quickly sussed the rock jumps of about five metres or so and proceeded to have a ball bombing and diving until I had enough. When you leaned over the edge of the pool you had about a fifty metre view straight down the falls to yet another pool below. This place was simply impressive.

The kicker came when I discovered that a tree that grows over the pool could be climbed and looked pretty damn jump worthy. At about eight or nine metres or so above the pool this looked like being a hell jump but as the tree had notches carved into the side of the trunk it was obvious that it had been done before. As I walked along the skinny branch overhanging the pool the only thing that concerned me was the depth of the pool below. As I had brushed the bottom of the pool with my feet jumping from five metres I had a few misgivings about jumping from this new height. The thought of walking out of this place with a broken leg was not something I wanted to contemplate so I gave into discretion and walked back along the bough to the main trunk still in one piece. The problem was I had unwittingly inspired a few other adventurous souls to give the tree climb a bit of a go.

The first bloke climbed up the trunk and showed that you could jump from where the trunk met the main bough and walk away unscathed. Good to know. The second bloke however, was extremely sketchy and edged his way along the highest bough where I had been in several nerve-inducing hops. I thought if this bloke falls from here then I’m actually going to feel guilty as he might not be up there if I hadn’t of shown him how to get up to this point. After several anxious moments he finally saw sense and decided it wasn’t worth the almost certain beating he would have suffered as he fell like a rag-doll into the shallow pool below. As we were about to bail I had to get back up the tree and jump from the spot just at the intersection of the main trunk and bough where I had seen the other bloke go from earlier. I still brushed my feet on the bottom but it was worth it and I walked away unscathed. Sucked in comeuppance, I still haven’t got mine and hopefully never will!

NB Author’s note; there might have been pictures of the aforementioned jump but the ‘chief photographer’ for our journey was too busy yelling at your dear author something along the lines of ‘Tim, get out of the tree you dick! Don’t f**ken’ jump you idiot! I swear if that drop doesn’t kill you I will’!! And so on, hence no photos, but thank you Kate for your advice-your concern for my wellbeing is truly touching.

Alright alright. So that’s the end of our first few days in Laos. So far so good. I must say that Laos must be one of the most laid back countries on earth and even my usual impatient, raging self was beginning to slow down. Our next destination was to be the backpacker holy grail of this part of the world, Vang Vieng. ‘In the tubing’ is what every second person’s singlet in this region sports on the back and we had heard that this place could be described as either Heaven or Hell depending on which way you looked at it. The reality, as usual, lived up to the hype in the most unexpected ways. This is the town where you can tube down a river, swing from giant trapeze’s into the river and drink like there’s no-one paying the bill. It turned out to be all this and more. But more about that next time.

Two day river cruise from Houei Xay to Luang Prabrang

We saw many small villages along the river and this is just one of them.

The banks of the river were sandy - sometimes it looked like we were at the beach. Here are some fishing boats.

The elephants we saw on the banks of the river.

The scenery and a slow boat.

The great Danes singing their favourite Ronan Keating song to the girls.

Do I need say anything here??

Pak Beng

Pak Beng's only main street.

View of the Mekong from Pak Beng.

The slow boats.

Luang Prabang

Waterfall

A bear chilling in his hammock

Michael and his long pipe - the pipe can be extended.

One of the many swimming pools.

Above Tim is the tree he jumped off.

Me.

Luang Prabang - World Heriage Town

Street opposite the Mekong river with many french-styled houses/guesthouses.

The main street in Luang Prabang. I tried to capture the cute, french buildings but I don't think I have succeeded!

A tuk-tuk.

Cambodia, Siem Reap

Siem Riep…So after the sobering experiences of the killing fields and the shambles that is Phnom Penh it was once again onto the bus for the trip up to Siem Riep. Siem Riep is most probably the richest town in Cambodia as it has the good fortune of being located a few kilometers away from the giant temple structures that make up Angkor Wat. The town itself has a mixture of classy resort type accommodation and all the usual stock standard budget guest-houses. Guess which kind we stayed in?? Well at least where we stayed had nice clean rooms, a garden bar/restaurant type area and a lovely French couple that ran the place.

In spite of its proximity to the temples poverty is still very much the reality for many of the town’s inhabitants and this led to some interesting encounters. One boy who was trying to sell books on the town’s main tourist drag of ‘Pub Street’ got really annoyed with us when we refused to buy a book from him. As we were having a quiet bit of lunch he came along, tried to sell us a book then demanded to know why we wouldn’t buy one. No amount of us trying to placate him seemed to work and he got angrier and angrier. After a while he stormed off only to come by periodically and stand behind us saying things like ‘stupid man, stupid woman, f**k you…’ and on and on. In the end I told him straight to just piss off or he’d get a boot up the arse but it’s hard to stay mad when you think about the mental image of some rich foreign tourist abusing a child street hawker! No doubt I probably wouldn’t have been very popular but jeez, give us a break, I was just trying to have snack in peace.

Other times women would thrust their babies into your face and ask for money, or blokes who had obviously lost one or more limbs to landmines would hit us up, pretty grim stuff. You can’t help feel sad for some of the locals as they really have got it tough but it’s simply not possible to give them all money as much as you might like to. We had basically decided that after Siem Riep we would be moving on from Cambodia as it was a bit of a depressing place. It wasn’t all bad though and the average non-beggar locals were pretty cool. Take our tuk-tuk driver that drove us around Angkor Wat for example. ‘Muong’ was a top bloke and gave us a fantastic tour of the temples and the surrounding countryside but I’ll come back to him later.

First I have to discuss the temples which are what everyone comes to Siem Riep for in the first place. If you’re like me then you might have a small idea as to what to expect but the reality is much greater than I ever would have expected. We opted to do the sunrise tour which means we had to be up at 4:30am to meet our tuk-tuk driver who drove us out there in our own personal ride. As the world cup has been on recently I have been having quite a few late nights watching the games (especially the All Whites, well done again boys) so I was pretty bloody tired before we even got in the tuk-tuk to head out to the temples. As the whole temple complex covers a leg-shattering twenty six square miles I knew I was in trouble. Coupled with that is the fact that after about 9am it is so stiflingly hot that even the flies take siestas.

Having said that we made it out to the main Angkor Wat temple that you might have seen on the telly or something like that. This is the main draw card and there were a lot of other tourists out there all standing around waiting with baited breath and camera in hand for the sun to come up. The beauty of this part of the world is that if there’s money to be made from any situation then there will be an eager local on-hand to exploit it. So within minutes of arrival at the sunrise spot a lady approached me with the offer of a nice comfy chair and a hot cup of coffee for the grand sum of one dollar! ‘Bollocks to the temple’ I thought as my weary backside edged its way toward my chair and the kind lady promptly tottered off to set about making me my coffee. Stoked! This temple spotting carry on might be alright after all.

The sunrise did look pretty cool over the main temple itself from the comfort of my chair but all too soon it was time to begin the trudge around the exterior and interior of this giant stone structure. The temples were mainly built around the 11th and 12th century and I must say they certainly knew what they were doing back then. The stone has all been carved into different pictures and images that tell stories and look very beautiful but it is the sheer size of the place that got me. Every stone, and there must be literally hundreds of thousands of them across all the temples are intricately carved and assembled to make these amazing structures. The coolest ones I thought were probably the gates to the other main temple site of ‘Angkor Thom’. These were like four giant faces made out of stone, each one facing either North, South, East or West. The faces were huge and just seemed to ‘loom’ out of the stone as they towered above you. Very cool. Angkor Thom has about twenty temples to walk in and around and the best one is called, actually I can’t remember what it’s called but it was pretty amazing with loads of intricately carved towers and faces poking out everywhere. Hopefully the photos do this place justice. There were temples for the kings and even one for a bloke they called ‘the Leper King’. There were also temples where the jungle had grown over the actual structures and now formed part of the temples themselves. Not just like a few weeds either but actual enormous trees that were easily twenty metres tall or more. The kind of tree that would give the average Kauri a run for its money.

We tarried wearily from one temple to the next but I must say I was struggling a bit. The tuk-tuk driver just laughed when he saw me traipsing back towards the tuk-tuk before informing me that we were off to another one. At one stage we drove 40km’s out to another temple which looked a lot like all the other ones but I must say it was pretty impressive. The sun was beginning to melt both of us but there was still more temples to see and the driver was even talking about sticking around for the ‘sunset viewing’ experience. Sunrise to sunset?? You’ve got to be kidding me, I don’t care if these things are ten million years old, I just wasn’t going to make it. It’s hard when you’re at a place for only one day so you want to see as much as possible but at the same time its 38 degrees and you’re buggered from walking around and lack of sleep. By about 4pm and after 11 hours of temple viewing I was completely knackered so I thought stuff this lets go home! All in all it was a great day but you’d have to be some kind of evil masochistic temple lover to want to go back again the next day. So yeah, amazing place but the sheer scale of it is what gets you in the end, there’s just too much to see.

Our tuk-tuk driver had told us about a great $3 all you can eat BBQ place and as he’d been such a great driver and tour guide we thought we’d shout him a feed. He brought his little brother with him as he had done the driving during the day while Muong gave us the info on all the places we visited. The place turned out to be an awesome restaurant and we had a great time feasting on BBQ chicken, pork, beef and seafood. For three bucks this has to be the best value place I’ve ever eaten! The funny part was our driver Muong who looked like a skinny little bloke who would barely weigh 50kg’s soaking wet, proceeded to pack away enough food to make a long haul truck driver blush. He easily outdid me and both Kate and I sat back as this bloke polished off plate after plate of BBQ meat. We were pissing ourselves by this stage but he just kept going!! A truly great effort and how that restaurant still managed to make money after giving away that much food I’ll never know. As probably not too many of the customers take the driver out for a feed Muong was very grateful and I think we have made a friend for life there now. Muong was a great driver so it was more than worth it to take him and his brother out as although $3 may mean nothing to us it’s probably still more than most of the locals can afford to throw away on a meal.

Before I finish up with Siem Riep I have to mention a place called the X-bar. This is a roof top bar in the main town that has, of all things, a skateboard half-pipe ramp on the roof! The bar is three stories up and then from there you go up another flight of stairs to the very top and there’s the ramp! An Aussie guy named Carlo runs this place and for whatever reason had the idea of building this thing and I must say he’s done an excellent job. The view from the top of the ramp is pretty awesome and you can see right across the whole town. You wouldn’t want to lose your board over the edge though but luckily they have nets in place to avoid that sort of thing. A friend of ours we had met in Vietnam also made it to Siem Riep and as he’s a fellow skater we had a jam there a couple times. You could buy beers at the bar for a buck and then skate the roof up top, perfect! Of all the places we have been to this would have been just about the last place I expected to have something to skate. It just goes to show how you should never be caught anywhere without your board as you just never know. Come to think of it I have had some pretty random skates in some very unexpected places across Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and now Cambodia. Wherever you go though, as any skater knows, if you show the locals some respect and you’re not a dick then skaters will always hook you up. We had some fun at this place and another place down the road that sold two cocktails for two dollars. The girls sure do lap those ones up! But with two for one drinks on every beer as well the boys were more than happy too.

We had decided to head from Siem Riep to Bangkok direct by bus due to time and visa constraints so it was with the promise of loads of ‘genuine fake’ shopping to do that we loaded up and left Cambodia behind. I never thought I’d arrive in Thailand and go ‘wow, this place is really clean and the locals seem so wealthy’. But after two weeks in Cambodia, Bangkok looked like just about the most high-tech and advanced city I had ever seen in my life! We have already written about Bangkok in the past so I don’t see it as necessary to devote another blog entry to the city again. Suffice to say we shopped hard, got a whole heap of sweet clothes and shoes etc which have all been safely bundled up and sent on to await our arrival in the UK. From Bangkok we have now travelled up to Chang Mai were I sit surrounded by young drunken Irish backpackers getting on the piss in the hostel pool. Fantastic stuff. From here we are travelling up to the Thai-Laos border where we intend to take a two day boat trip into Laos on the Mekong River. I will pick the blog up again after this time. By now, after five months in South East Asia we are both looking forward to getting out of this region and over into China for the long trip up to North East Asia, South Korea and Japan. Hard to believe we still have ‘only’ three months left to go. Bring it on! Will Laos be just another backpacker grovel-dive or will the slow-boat along the Mekong be just what we need to recharge before we cross into the vastness and ancient culture of China? Find out next time. ‘Til Then.

Photos of the Wats surrounding Angkor Wat.

We saw around 30 wats and temples so here is just a few pictures I have selected.

 

Freaky giant face above the gate!

Some of the temples had been abandoned for years so trees have grown over the top of the buildings.

The heads have been cut off either by the Khmer Rouge or have been stolen.

The doors were like picture frames.

This building had very intricate details carved into the bricks.

The only 5-headed horse in all of the wats.

Jungle temple. Trees have grown on the monuments because the temple was abandoned.

Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat.

Carvings in the Angkor Wat temple.

One of two gates at Angkor Wat.

Angkor Wat at sunrise.

Dinner with our Tuk Tuk driver

Muong and Tim

The crew eating our $3 BBQ buffet!

Me and Muong's brother.

Skate ramp in Siem Reap at Bar X

Tim and Josh.