Pacific Rim Trip

Last of Hawaii...or not

2009-06-24T17:09:00.000-07:00

Well there's not too much more to write. We spent the rest of our time in Hawaii lazing around in our various beach house rentals, surfing, and snorkeling. I got marginally better at surfing, or at least got used to standing up, falling over, and hitting everyone with my board. And, as everyone noticed, I got lots more tan. We got to know all our local turtles; our favorite was an old dude with a big growth on his eye who we called the Cyborg. We were pretty mad when a white tipped reef shark came and took over the Cyborg's napping spot, but white tipped reef sharks are tame little guys and we didn't have the heart to chase it away with the spear!

Some friends visited and helped keep us entertained. Sam finally did manage to catch some squid which is what they call octupus in Hawaii, since they don't have squids and "squid" is shorter. Then Sam had to defend his catch from the reef shark and ended up climbing up on the reef to get back to the beach. Sam's cousin speared a few Nemos and we cooked those up too. Ok, not really Nemos, I promise! But we decided to go back to the mainland since we'd depleted our little fishing pool sized favorite reef. That and we missed all our little nieces and nephews who were getting bigger and bigger while we were gone!

So pretty soon we were off home to California. But we are planning on going back to Hawaii ASAP! So everybody come visit us!

The Life

2009-04-29T19:44:00.001-07:00

We had a pleasant flight from New Zealand and before we knew it we were back in the USA! Surprisingly they let us back in, even with so many random stamps on our passports and five months out of the country. They didn't even search our bags. We stepped out into the pleasant Hawaii springtime - such a change from the ice cold New Zealand fall!

Sam's uncle picked us up from the airport and we stayed the first few nights with his uncle's family up in Kahuku by the North Shore. They live in a farm similar to the one Sam grew up in and loves to tell stories about, though they have an actual house (plywood) not a schoolbus. Sam's uncle has three little girls (from his second marriage) living with him. The six year old is crazy and talks nonstop! The older girls are more shy. The farm wasn't as shanty as Sam made it out to be, though they are off the grid in terms of electricity and water. But they turned on the generator for us so we had electricity to get our bearings! In the morning we got up and checked out the farm - right now they are growing cucumbers and tomatoes. Then it was off to Walmart to pick up essentials: fins, snorkels, masks, spear! Next priority: plate lunch at the Hukilau Cafe, where we got roast pork and the true Hawaiian specialties of macaroni salad and french fries with gravy. No mutton hangi here! Third item on the agenda, of course find a place to stay long term. Sam's uncle had some new workers coming to the farm and also I was allergic to their cat so we needed a place. Luckily a friend of a friend who manages some rentals hooked us up with a new rental she was working on! This lady was super nice and gave us a good price since she was still setting up. The best part was listening to Sam switch on his pidgin when talking to her since she and her husband were locals. If you've never heard pidgin, it's like this crazy Hawaiian brogue but more comprehensible than a Kiwi accent for sure!

That day we also toured the North Shore which was actually breaking. It was small for the North Shore (a little over double overhead) so everyone and their mom who ever wanted to surf Pipe was out, and all the more serious surfers were elsewhere. I took one look and vowed not to get in the water in Hawaii, but Sam promised me he'd take me to easier spots where the worst crowds were too many turtles. Like Pounders beach where Sam was almost paralyzed bodysurfing as a kid! No just kidding, like Castle's and a few other mellow spots.

That night we went to a Laotian New Year's Party on a neighbor's farm. I thought there'd be at least a few non-Laotians but I was the only one! I felt a little out of place but entertained myself eating all the tasty Laotian food I hadn't had in a while: cabbage wraps dipped in spicy sauce, sticky rice, mmm. The dancing was awesome: Sam calls it "Amy style" in which you barely move and just kind of wave your arms a bit. They were really good at karaoke, which came with both Laotian writing and phonetic spelling on the videos - though I still didn't join in because I was too busy eating all the food.

The next day we moved into our beach studio. It had a nice little private yard with sand dunes leading onto the beach. It was heaven! Especially after living in a campervan for two months straight.

We stocked up the kitchen with essentials like King's Hawaiian Sweet Rolls, Mauna Pua, Chocolate Covered Macadamia Nuts, Hawaiian Suns, and of course the meats! We went a little crazy - we still haven't cooked all the dishes we've been wanting! So far we've made: burgers (real ones not fake Kiwi ones), hot dogs, shoyu chicken, kahlua pig, terriyaki beef on King's Hawaiian sweet rolls, chili and rice, squash soup, lemongrass chicken, terriyaki and lemongrass shortribs, mmmm....After so long on soup and grilled cheese sandwiches we are really enjoying our bbq and oven. Not to mention the coffeemaker: I'd never thought I would miss filtered coffee, but I did! (They only have espresso in New Zealand and Australia, which they refer to just as coffee. I believe their term for American filtered coffee is not printable in this blog.)

After we grocery shopped, we grabbed our surfboards and ran out. We were too lazy to paddle out to the real surf breaks which are out by the reef at Genegator's and Goat Island, straight out from our place. We tried to catch the little waves on the inside only to discover the water sucked up to about 3 inches deep over the reef. All in all we escaped lightly with only minor scratches. We tried again later at high tide too, same deal, oh well. Snorkeling for the first few days was a bit stormy but we did really enjoy our high end gear. It was so nice to have good fins and a snorkel that doesn't let in every little splash. Later we drove to Castle's, a good beginners surfing spot, where I actually managed to ride a wave or two.

We had the cousins over a few times when we needed people to eat up all our food. The six year old eats more than everybody else combined, including Sam! They had fun, though it was a little weird to be trying to teach locals how to swim - I guess the poor girls don't get off the farm and out to the beach too much. They are good kids and didn't even complain too much when we made them clean the house afterwards.

To get fresh veggies, we visited the farm and got cilantro, limes and lime leaves, coconuts, cucumbers, and tomatoes. We also entertained ourselves driving the golf cart they use for transporting small loads of veggies and Sam wreaked havoc taking the tractor 4 wheeling.

Since then I forgot where the days went! The snorkeling has been especially nice with a few turtles and lots of pretty fishes that we don't know the names of. Altogether it's a blur of swimming, snorkeling, surfing, going for runs on the beach, sketching, napping, reading, repeat....We kind of needed a vacation from our vacation and this is it! Sam keeps repeating "Aah, the life" with a satisfied sigh. It's so nice to have our own little place that we didn't even care too much when it rained for five days straight - since the ocean is still warm who cares? Dad mailed us our laptops so we're keeping busy going through photos. Some of our friends came to visit so we're not too lonely here, though not as many friends as were supposed to come, ahem! That's it for now, we'll post again when something significant happens like Sam finally manages to spear Nemo.

Easter Egg Hunting in Northland

2009-04-25T21:31:00.000-07:00

We'd just left Wellington yet again and had a long drive north yet again. Our route took us back through Tongariro, but we didn't stop, since it was snowing there. Sledding Mt. Doom sounded entertaining, but they recommend against doing the Alpine Crossing in poor visibility for some reason (maybe extreme danger) oh well. We also drove through a huge pine forest planted during NZ's Great Depression that went on for miles and miles. Ok well it was more impressive than it sounds, sorry. We made it close to Auckland, but traffic grew heavy in the evening because of the start of the Easter weekend. Easter is a pretty big holiday in NZ, sort of like Thanksgiving at home, except schools get a couple weeks off, though workers get four days. And if you keep your store open, you have to charge a 15% tax. I guess Kiwis take their crucifixions, resurrections, etc pretty seriously! We found a random car park in a random town and parked for the night. We didn't see any other campervans so we were a little nervous, especially when some sedans pulled up and parked next to us. Uh oh, we thought, are we invading someone's drug dealing spot or something? In the morning we realized it was just Kiwis travelling for the long weekend and needing a place to sleep just like us. They were all very friendly though somewhat incomprehensible. They did warn us about the coup, or anti-coup, or whatever it was, in Fiji. More on that later....

The next morning we kept heading north towards the Bay of Islands. Traffic grew heavy, though luckily we'd been warned to avoid Highway 1 north of Auckland, where a new toll system was causing queues 8 km long. Along the way we saw a sign advertising hangi, the NZ equivalent of a luau, which we had read about but had not tried or even been able to find anywhere. Hangi involves roasting a variety of meats and tubers wrapped in leaves in a pit with hot stones, similar to kahlua pig. A few yards past the hangi sign we noticed some kind of wreck or commotion on the roadside, but we were too focused on finding our hangi stand. Later we learned a motorcyclist had gone off the embankment and died. Wow, did we ever feel like assholes for obliviously buying hangi. Anyway we got our hangi and it was horrible - some sweet potatoes which were ok, and a lot of tough chewy mutton, and a little tough steak. Ugh. Not worth dying over, for sure!

That afternoon we made it to Whangarei, where we checked out a kauri forest walk. Kauris are like redwoods in California, as in old-growth stands barely exist anymore. I would say they are a bit more rare than redwoods though, since they are slower to grow and most of the land has been converted to pasture. After admiring the trees, we tried to check out a self-guided cave (we refused to pay for more glowworm "boat rides.") Unfortunately the stream inside the cave was pretty high and Sam got scared of the Shrieking Eels. After getting soaked up to our wastes, we turned back. We saw more nice waterfalls, just for the heck of it, then went to a caravan park outside of town near the coast. There was no surf but there was the Southern Hemisphere's Longest Footbridge, yay!

The next day we drove through the Bay of Islands, but lacking a yacht, didn't stay. Mom & Dad's advice was to just go make friends with somebody who owned a boat, but we were feeling a little shy and also overwhelmed by the Easter crowds. So we continued up to Cape Reinga, the long peninsula that forms the tip of the north island. We camped at a busy campground - and we'd thought we could hide from the Easter crowds! It was up at the end of the cape, where we were devoured by both mosquitoes and sandflies. Oh my gosh I haven't mentioned sandflies yet have I! If you think mosquitoes are bad, you've got to try sandflies, which are little gnats that come out in droves all over NZ, at all hours of the day, and have a horribly unbearably itchy bite. The cold of autumn had mostly kept them at bay, but it was noticeably warmer up at the cape. The next morning, we drove to the lighthouse, not one of our safer drives due to the unsealed road and the fact that we were constantly reaching down to slap sandflies and scratch sandfly bites on our ankles. We checked out the lighthouse at the end of the cape, apparently a Maori spiritual site where you should not eat or drink. But bombing down the lighthouse path on a mountain bike in a tour group was somehow ok.

Along the west side of the cape stretches 90 Mile Beach, actually about 60 miles long (oh those Kiwis and their moderate exaggeration! In America we would call it 200 mile beach, at least!) There are huge sandunes, and the beach itself is so flat and the sand so well packed that the beach is actually part of the NZ highway system. Unfortunately rental vehicles are prohibited from driving on the beach (the sand isn't that well packed.) So we headed to the south end of the beach, to the famous surf spot Shipwrecks. As per usual, there was no swell at this supposedly famous spot, so we hung out and ate fish and chips. We also watched locals drive all kinds of vehicles at high speed along the beach, from motorcycles, to pickup trucks, to little 4 wheel quad bikes, and even bicycles. Our favorite was the tractors used to tow boats though.

The next morning we managed to catch a few waves, but they were mostly closing out. I got tired of going end over end (my fin is long and scary) so I caught whitewater until I cut my foot on a shell or something. Sam took one look at the cut and then promptly gave away my wetsuit and took the fins off my board, declaring no more surfing for our last week in NZ. Oh well. That night we stayed at the same caravan park - wow - this was the first time we'd stayed in one place for two nights since Raglan! But the next morning there was no swell, so we decided to head back south. We were originally planning on going back to Piha, but decided in the end just to stay in Auckland. We were getting a bit nervous about the Fiji situation and wanted to get online and make a plan.

We learned that in Fiji, the judges that had declared the military dictatorship illegal had been fired, and the constitution had been flushed down the toilet, which had backed up, creating a high plumbing bill, so the banks had been taken over by the military, and to reduce embarrassment, all foreign journalists had been expelled and the local press had been shut down. I guess this happens once every few months or so in Fiji and is a good opportunity to visit for cheap, but we were a little nervous since we'd never been there before. Mainly we didn't want to get stuck there and have to stay at a nicer hotel with a security guard and all that, since the actual resorts in Fiji cost hundreds of dollars per night. Long story short: we couldn't change our tickets, so we bought new tickets directly to Hawaii and left the next day. But not before enjoying some final meat pies at the airport! Mmmm...meat pies. We had tickets with United/Air New Zealand and it was a very pleasant flight with a TV for each passenger. We entertained ourselves watching Flight of the Conchords for 8 hours and before we knew it, we were across the dateline in Hawaii, and it was yesterday!

In Which Wooly Cattle Drive the Sheep to Despair

2009-04-25T12:45:00.000-07:00

Sam had been very gracious about all the hikes I'd been dragging him on, so I figured it was time to look for some surf again. Everyone we'd met raved about Taranaki, a big volcano on the west coast of the North Island which formed a big peninsula with a million surf spots. We decided to skip Wellington again (we would live to regret this for a number of reasons) and started driving towards Taranaki. Unfortunately we'd forgotten that it was now Friday night so we inched out of town in heavy traffic and eventually stopped at Hatamangi beach caravan park. Usually we have a policy of driving through all caravan parks before we pay, but this place looked nice enough so I just paid up front. D'oh! Sure it was a nice park but there was not one but three high school girls' volleyball teams staying there! No showers for me! Eventually I just showered in the mens while Sam kept a lookout. Later we got to talking with the chaperones and they were all quite nice, though all suffering from the cold. We were glad we weren't the only ones who thought it was freezing! I guess we were too late to catch warm weather even on the North Island. The chaperones explained to us that they call high school "college" here, clearing up some confusion. This is just one of many strange kiwisms! Others include: appetizers are called "entrees" and "lucked out" means "out of luck." ("Lucked in" means "lucked out.")

Anyway, the next morning we fled towards Taranaki to continue our oddysey of horrible surf. There was no swell whatsoever. After some driving around we finally found some waves at a crowded beach in New Plymouth, which is Taranaki's big town. Sam went out to fight the crowds while I went for a run. Then we drove around looking for a beach shower. After Australia, we couldn't believe that such a popular beach in a big town didn't have a beach shower! Or even a bathroom! Not so much as a port o' potty! I think all the locals must have had at least one friend with a house within walking distance from the beach or something. Anyway we finally found a beach with a shower, and then we headed out to a smaller town to sleep at the marine park. All the locals were out there fishing all night. We felt a little out of place in our campervan but at least it was clearly ok to stay the night.

The next morning the swell was the same, so poor Sam got to do another hike: the Whitecliffs Walkway on the north end of the peninsula. This was an awesome walk along the beach with 100m cliffs looming overhead. I was a little uneasy since the beach was impassable at high tide and I did not enjoy the thought of trying to climb the cliffs with surf crashing around me. Partway along the walk we came upon a poor dead lamb who had clearly taken the short way down the cliffs - not a pretty sight! But we hit low tide perfectly and had plenty of time to spare when we made it to the escape route, an old tunnel for driving stock down to the beach.

Then we started on the inland part of the loop hike, listed as "moderate" in the guide book. Ah those kiwi hikers! "Moderate" turned out to mean a series of stairways, usually about 10 to 20 flights each, going up and down steep hills all the way back - and the stairways were the easy part! The hard part was super-steep slippery grass. Sam wanted to go back to the beach but I was nervous about the tide so we kept going, and eventually made it out to a series of farms, where we admired some strange shaggy cattle. I guess they love their sheep so much in NZ they even breed their cattle for wool! No wonder the lamb gave up on life! It couldn't stand the competition!

In our usual tradition of wearing poor Sam out with long hikes followed by long drives, we headed for the east coast. We stopped at a town known for its natural hot springs. We debated whether to pay for the spa there, but eventually decided just to go straight to the caravan park, which turned out to be a good idea since even the caravan park had a hot pool. Sweet! The next morning we made it to Whangamata, another famous surf spot. Here there was a swell, but the conditions were stormy. Instead we spent the day figuring out how to call home since it was Mom's birthday. We eventually found that they sell SIM cards in appliance shops and got an international calling card which we put too much money on, so we ended up with thousands of minutes. We decided to spend some of the money calling Laos to get the phone number of Sam's cousin in New Zealand. Sam was sure the cousin lived in Auckland, so we figured we could visit on our way back north. But guess what - the cousin lived in Wellington! Augh there is just no avoiding that town!

But first, we had to check out the famous Hotwater Beach, where you could surf, then dig a pit in the sand at low tide and it would fill with hot water welling from a natural spring below the sand. We had to wait for low tide the next morning though. When we arrived the tide was nice and low and there was a big crowd of tourists diligently digging with rented shovels. We decided to watch for a bit before renting our own shovel, and got lots of entertainment out of watching because the swell was still high so every 2 minutes or so a wave would come in and wash out all the pits. We alternated between watching this, and watching surfers get pummeled by whitewater, for the next hour or so. You have to admit both the surfers and the diggers were persistent! But eventually we started to look like total jerks laughing at everybody, so we headed back to Wellington. We made it in quite late, in the pouring rain, and since we were going to get soaked regardless, we eventually parked by the railroad tracks and went straight to bed.

The next day we called up Sam's cousin and went to visit him at his house, which turned out to be nearby. I showered while Sam and his cousin talked in Laotian - I suddenly realized how much Laotian I had forgotten! Sam's cousin had stayed in the Thai refugee camps for 15 years longer than Sam, and had only come to New Zealand 10 years ago. We got to learn the downside of New Zealand: low salaries, a slow economy, and not very many jobs. Sam's cousin took us to check out the Wellington museum, Te Papa, and cooked us a tasty Laotian dinner of bamboo shoot soup, sticky rice, and poua (pronounced "powah") which is basically kiwi abalone. It was quite delicious and apparently you can obtain the bigger ones from illegal poua rings. That's right - we'd finally found the Ring of Poua! Ok, ok, really bad pun, sorry. The next day the weather stayed wet, so we hung out with the family for a bit, then headed back north out of Wellington - yeah, again.

South Island, Speed Sightseeing

2009-04-12T00:16:00.000-07:00

After the Bali ferry, we were just a bit reluctant to get on any sort of boat - at all. We were tempted to just stick to the North Island, but everybody told us the South Island was beautiful this time of year, so we booked a ferry ride with our Jucy van rental (more on this debacle later) and off we went. We decided we'd catch Wellington and tour the real LOTR (i.e. Weta Digital Inc. 1:4 scale models) on the way back. They told us to get to the ferry about an hour earlier than we needed to, but eventually we were loaded onto the "train" level with a bunch of other campervans. (I guess we counted as a tourist train.) When we got out of the van, we were surprised to run straight into some fellow Americans we'd met in Raglan and passed by again in Waitomo. They'd had fun (though frozen) doing blackwater rafting in Waitomo and one of them (a dentist) already had a job offer in Raglan. This definitely made me wish I'd gone into a career in teeth! Stupid computer jobs are only in cities! Anyway Sam passed the time boring them with tales of our travels while I waited in an endless line for coffee.

When we got to the South Island we were surprised that it wasn't as cold as we feared. First on the ferry, first off, so we split for Abel Tasman National Park on the north coast. Due to yet more windy roads, this drive turned out to be longer than we'd expected, so we got in pretty late. We decided to be honest and actually put money in the campground honesty box for once. Then we found a nice secluded campsite in which we could privately do bad things like kill about a zillion mosquitoes. Kiwi mosquitoes are slow and easy to kill but tend to come in droves! Anyway I amused myself in this fashion, trying to clear out the van, while Sam snored. The next morning we got up and went for a beautiful beach hike along the Abel Tasman coast. Secluded coves, crystal blue waters, deserted beaches, warm sun, green forest...then back to a campsite for a swim and a quick lunch. Man, this is the life! Unfortunately, so much to see, so little time! So we took off and headed south down the west coast of the South Island.

The weather quickly got colder as we climbed into the mountains and headed further south. We stopped for the night at a deserted caravan park near a freezing cold river and an empty tavern. Then it was out to the West Coast, where there was a huge swell on but absolutely no surfers out. It was too big for me and too dangerous for Sam to go out by himself - plus we weren't entirely sure why nobody was out! Was it sharks, due to all the seals? Rip currents? Freezing cold water? Or was it just that any local who had ever attempted to learn on this crazy coast had been removed from the gene pool before they got could good enough to catch the giant waves? Anyway, we went for a hike instead. You can imagine how pleased Sam was. We walked up yet another crystal blue river with nice limestone rock formations and thick moss covered forest. Then we checked out the blowhole near Pancake rocks - yep more old rocks. These highly striated rocks formed sharp pinnacles out at sea and were apparently a mystery to science, yay!

The next day we drove further south, passing more beautiful rivers that were all the obligatory crystal blue, and all looked just like the fords in LOTR. By the way, if you are wondering why we didn't make more effort to see the real LOTR sites, it is because there are about a million Fords of Bruinen and a million Shires and a million Rohans and a million Fangorn Forests in NZ! That and most of the real sites were a bit further from major roads or charged $50 a person just to see a few fake hobbit holes that you couldn't even go inside! What? Bag End was a set?! Elijah Wood isn't really 3 feet tall? What disillusionment!

Anyway we soon made it down to the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers. Here we were disappointed to learn that you couldn't walk all the way out to the glacier due to the fact that the glacier might jump out and smack you on the head. This had in fact happened to past tourists who had snuck past the barrier and been injured or killed, and then worse yet labeled "bloody stupid tourists" by the local press. However if you were willing to pay a little extra, you would be given, not a helmet, but a blue jacket (apparently magic protection from the glacier or maybe some kind of ice camouflage so the glacier wouldn't see you.) Then you would be guided out for a hike on the glacier along with a gazillion other blue jacketed tourists. We got stuck behind one of these groups approaching the glacier and thought about joining them but our jackets were the wrong color, oh well. So we booked it out to the next glacier which at least had somewhat fewer tourists. All in all the glaciers were pretty boring but one interesting fact was how many miles they had receded since the 18th century. No wonder the glaciers were viciously mad at humans! Anyway, to really appreciate the scenery, we probably should have done the helicopter tour, which looked fun. You could see all the mountains from the LOTR lighting of the beacons, but when we found out the beacons were just CGI, we decided to skip it. Darn it! Foiled by computers again!

In keeping with our philosophy of both seeing all the sights and driving a million kilometers each day, we headed off towards Queenstown. We made it most of the way and stayed in a nice empty caravan park in a town nearby, with super friendly owners and free laundry! Though we quickly realized our mistake - nobody has dryers in NZ or Australia! Luckily our wash didn't turn into complete ice and we finished drying it in the car as we drove into Queenstown. Queenstown is next to a series of huge lakes - crystal blue, naturally. The landscape here was much drier and looked like California at the end of summer. The weather was winter-in-Tahoe cold though, and Queenstown was in fact a lot like Tahoe: basically a ski town, with mountain biking and lake and river activities in the summer. Except in Queenstown they take the adventure tourism a little further! We're not just talking whitewater rafting, we're talking crazy speedboats doing tricks through the rapids. Luckily we'd already witnessed some of the whiplash these jetboats cause in Sydney harbor, so we knew to avoid these! That and it looked really cold, and also we read in the newspaper about the conviction of some of the boat drivers for reckless driving resulting in lots of dead tourists! So we decided to try one of the "safer" activities, like bungy jumping.

On our way into Queenstown we stopped by one of the oldest commercial bungy jumping sites, a bridge over a river gorge. It was 45 meters high which seems higher once you are out there! Here we observed some poor Japanese lady crying and hollering before finally being convinced to hurl herself headlong off the bridge. Looks fun we thought, and before we knew it we were out there too! The bungy dudes were about to take their lunch break so we hurried out there and dove off one by one without too much thinking. There was a second or two of falling, and then the moment hit, where all of a sudden you realize you are falling fast, headfirst, and you didn't really see what they were doing with that thing on your feet, and oh crap! Then the bungy kicks in and you are ok. But we both agreed, that for a split second, bungy jumping is much scarier than skydiving! We were happy that we hadn't started off on the 145 meter jump from a gondola!

Queenstown was a little busy and touristy. We got some delicious Indian food and watched a movie before driving out of town a little bit to camp. It was a very cold night because I accidentally left my window down. So you can imagine Sam was overjoyed to wake up after not sleeping all night and go for another long hike! This time it was the start of the famous Routeburn track, which winds through more mossy forests and crystal blue rivers before climbing up into the mountains. We made it as far as Lake Harris before our blood sugar crashed and we started running back to the car to get our food! The overnight trekkers with big backpacks all watched us fly by in envy, though really we were the envious ones. Having seen how nice the overnight camping hut was, we wished we'd packed food and stayed the night!

That night we stayed in the same caravan park from a few nights ago, for more frozen laundry. One funny thing we noticed in this town: they actually obey an odd NZ traffic rule that is so odd it rates a mention in the Rough Guide. This rule stipulates that when turning right (they drive on the left) and an oncoming car is turning left, the oncoming car yields. This kept happening in this town and it freaked us out! At first we thought it was just tourists with Rough Guides following this rule, but eventually we had to concede that locals actually do it too! Weird. Anyway we decided to head back north because we were getting pretty cold and were pretty sure those evil glaciers would find us any day now. We drove right past Christchurch, and camped for the night on the roadside. Then we made it all the way up to the ferry the next morning, where we attempted to book the ride through Jucy again, and discovered they'd changed the price to be more expensive than booking from the ferry directly! Not only that but they wanted to charge us more for the ferry ride we'd already done! I'm still not sure if it was an honest mistake or some kind of scam. They wanted $508 dollars when the ferry only wanted $220 each way. They explained that no, it was $240 each way. That still doesn't add up! So we booked from the ferry directly on the way back. Jucy renters in NZ - avoid getting the Interislander ferry from Jucy! Just go direct with Bluebridge! Ok sorry for the rant. Anyway other than that, it was a smooth ride back to the North Island. We were sad to leave our whirlwind tour of the beautiful South Island, but also looking forward to slowing down a bit and enjoying the warmer scenery up north - or so we thought....

Riddles in the Dark, Mt. Doom, and the Flight to the Ferry

2009-04-07T23:50:00.000-07:00

Sam was finally frustrated enough with surfing to try, gasp, horror, caving and hiking. Our first stop was Waitomo, home to the most touristy caves in New Zealand. Here, in true Kiwi adventure tourism spirit, you can rappel (they call it abseiling) or climb or blackwater raft in the dark on inner tubes. We decided to start out with just the simple tour and boat ride, which was cheap, could be done in an afternoon, and best of all did not involve getting wet in a freezing cold cave. We got to see the very cool limestone formations, and listen to the group cheer of a Japanese tour group echo throughout the cave complex. Nobody in our group was brave enough to burst into song a la Moulin Rouge to test out the echo. Not even Sam! Unbelievable! Even if he didn't burst into song, he could have at least done a creepy Gollum imitation for us, but no, nothing! Oh well. Then they loaded us in a boat for a 15 minute boatride - actually 15 minutes floating in place in a little cave looking at the glowworms on the cave roof. These were pretty cool but they slimed Sam with their moskie-catching ooze. And that was pretty much it. I actually thought the highlight was the redwoods by the entrance - just like home! Apparently redwoods grow three times faster in NZ than in their native California.

Not wanting to camp with a bunch of disappointed, freezing, and/or battered tourists, we drove out to the coast on another beautiful but windy road and stayed in a caravan park by the beach. The locals looked at us like they saw maybe three tourists a week and still couldn't see why the number of visitors was so high. But it was a nice caravan park next to some frisky horses that I swear hopped the fence and got into our trash later. Unless it was a kangaroo - just kidding - we're not in Australia anymore Toto! Probably a possum, which actually were introduced from Australia, who knows why. There were also some cows that Sam kept taking pictures of; Sam insisted they looked just like his dog Louie.

The next day we decided to save our money for bungy jumping so we skipped more cave adventures and drove towards yet another tourist destination: Mt. Doom. Ok, ok, they have some "real" name for it like Tongariro National Park or something, home of the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, New Zealand's most famous hike. We checked out the visitor center and observed our first kiwi: stuffed, next to a stuffed stoat, the kiwi's nemesis. They couldn't even give the poor bird dignity in death! We picked up the schedule for the shuttle because the Alpine Crossing is a one way hike (unless you do an overnight.) Then we did a short hike to a nice waterfall. Nice waterfalls are a dime a dozen in NZ, most are barely mentioned in the guidebook and don't even have names. In California or Australia there would be a million tourists oohing and aahing but we didn't see any other tourists until, lucky us, an entire busload of school children appeared. So we headed out to the National Park campgrounds.

NZ national park campgrounds are mostly on an "honesty" system where you drop money and your license plate number into a box. Clearly they have unrealistically high expectations of foreign tourists. At Tongariro somebody had even stolen all the envelopes. Anyway we got a nice little spot and sat back to watch the crowds roll in. Eventually we had to share the spot with some nice girls from Israel. As with most Israelis we had met on our travels, they were fresh out of the army and traveling for awhile before going to university. (They have compulsory service for both men and women there.) The girls were super nice and gave us more tips on NZ.

The next morning we woke up early to catch the 9am shuttle bus and joined the tourist train doing the Alpine Crossing. The crossing goes by two big volcanoes, Tongariro and Ruapehu. The latter erupted recently and looks just like Mt. Doom. It was in fact used in the filming of LOTR. You can optionally climb it, but we judged that our hobbit feet were not well-developed enough yet, so we skipped it. Also we forgot the One Ring back at the van so we didn't have anything to toss in the crater. Plus it looked about as fun as climbing a giant sand dune anyway.

At first the tourist train we'd been warned about was not too bad, but as we approached rougher terrain it did get pretty busy. Most of the tourists did not look like they should be on this hike! They were having serious trouble sliding down the rough lava scree. Only the overnight trekkers with hiking poles had any confidence. Later we passed a girl who had unfortunately broken her ankle and was waiting for a helicopter evacuation. We were both envious (free helicopter tour!) and argued about which of us should pretend to have the broken ankle. Ok, ok, it probably sucked, poor girl.

The hike involved lots of interesting volcanic scenery, which was impressive if not exactly beautiful - no shire here! The second half also had pretty emerald green lakes, creatively called the Emerald Lakes. The hike ended up, surprisingly, in a lush beech forest, which we did not stop to admire because by that point we were running our asses off trying to get away from the tourist train and also trying to catch the 3pm shuttle bus. Apparently in NZ when they say it is a six hour hike, they really mean it.

We were pretty much done with Mt. Doom so we beelined it all the way to Wellington. We wanted to do the South Island before it got seriously cold there since we were already freezing our asses off up north! On the way we just had to stop at a Chinese "takeaway." We'd been seeing these things everywhere and found it curious that all the Chinese places sold fish and chips and burgers in addition to Chinese food. So we tried the burgers and guess what - they were just like the burgers in Southeast Asia! Maybe all the burger joints in Asia are really run by kiwi Asians. Basically the burger patty was the size of a silver dollar, and consisted of: 95% bread crumbs, 3% soy, 1% Chinese five spice, and 1% unknown beef product. Next time: bacon and egg burger, hold the burger. But don't worry, later there would be redemption when we learned that the Chinese food at these places is great.

Arriving in Wellington, we asked at a motel outside of town where we could park our van and sleep in the area, and they helpfully told us that there was a great location with lots of campervans just across the railroad tracks. We drove down and looked at it, and then drove back to the motel and re-read the motel sign which advertised spa baths. Then we looked at the coating of volcanic dust all over ourselves. Not much of a decision here. So we indulged in a night in a motel with a spa bath. The next morning we got up early to catch the ferry to the South Island.

Hobbits Don't Surf

2009-04-07T16:17:00.000-07:00

In Australia we'd talked to some people who had toured New Zealand recently, so we knew our first stop already: Piha. A few hours from Auckland, it's where all surfer tourists go first. We drove along a craggy coastline that reminded us a lot of Big Sur in California. It was nice after Australia where the beach is usually hidden behind 12 foot tall bushes or else housing developments. However the quality of the surf was noticeably poorer! We admired all the poor souls fighting the chop and whitewater for a bit, checked out the surfshops, and then found a nice parking spot for the night near the beach. The campervan next door was occupied by a very nice couple from the south of France, who run a food stand during the summer there, and travel every winter. Wow were we ever jealous! They had been travelling for awhile and gave us even more tips on where to go in NZ. Then we got asked to move on by a ranger or cop or something, who said that the people in the nice beach house across the street had complained. Apparently this is an unusual thing to happen in NZ and had only happened once so far to the French couple. We contritely offered to move the paid camping sight, but the ranger immediately clarified that no no, we just needed to move from this particular spot. Just go to the next parking lot up the beach! So we did that, but this lot unfortunately had a gate. When a ranger came to close the gate at 10pm, we thought we were in trouble again, but no, she just wanted to make sure we were ok to stay until she opened the gate again at 8am!

We were happy to sleep in, so that was no trouble! In the morning we headed to the beach, where Sam and the French guy went out to a peak further out, and the French girl and I attempted to stay on the inside. However there was a lot of current and chop and pretty soon the waves were well overhead even on the inside. I caught my first wave with no trouble and felt like a pro, but after that I just got pummeled, so we went inside to surf whitewater. The ocean was fairly cold, but apparently unseasonably warm for NZ, and Sam stayed out for awhile. Then the poor French couple had to head back to Auckland to deal with a traffic ticket, and we were on to the next stop in the surfing tour of NZ, Raglan, surfing capital of the North Island's east coast.

On our way, I think we had our first experience of meat pie in NZ - delicious! Sorry Australia but it was way better and cheaper than any we had there. The landscape and cool temperatures continued to remind us of California, in around December, and this made us a bit homesick. The drive to Raglan was pretty short. We looked at the messy beach surf, and decided it was time to find a place to sleep. Unfortunately Raglan, being NZ's equivalent of Byron, didn't allow sleeping at the beach park, but we talked to a guy in a caravan who said to head out of town a bit on the unsealed road and sleep out there. The unsealed road was rough and narrow, making all previous drives look like freeways, and we wondered how on earth huge caravans got out there. We soon came to a little lookout packed with campervans, and decided to keep driving...and driving. The coast was so beautiful it was hard to stop! But we couldn't believe such a beautiful drive was not packed with tourists. We later learned that it was really pretty standard for NZ, ho hum, crashing ocean, steep rocky coastline, craggy green hills, yawn. Anyway we eventually found a spot next to, you guessed it, a sheep farm, where we camped in the freezing wind. We were starting to miss Australia.

In the morning there was a beautiful sunrise, I would have taken a picture if I could have felt my fingers. Oh well. We drove to one of the surf shops where Sam got to talking with the owner about shaping boards. Typical Kiwis, when we mentioned that we needed to buy wetsuits, they soon offered their old ones to us for dirt cheap. They also offered to let us park on their property to sleep. Then we went to check out the town, where a local told us that the best place for fish and chips was the shack down at the campground. We headed down there and were amazed at the cheap prices! We got a huge order of fries and two orders of fish for only $10 NZ, which is like $6 US. We were so proud that we found this great place. Burgers and shakes were only a few dollars too. Of course later we learned that fish and chips are good and cheap almost everywhere! The only annoyance is that, just like Australia, ketchup and tartar sauce all cost extra. Luckily we cruise around in a campervan and have our own supply.

Happy to have wetsuits, we surfed down at the main beach, since the point at the boat harbor wasn't breaking. I gave up on being pummeled by beach break fast, but had fun catching whitewater for awhile. Thanks to my new suit I wasn't cold, but I was about to puke fish and chips everywhere, so I got out of the water. Sam soon followed and we were both starting to want hot showers, so we decided to just pay to stay at the campground. Caravan parks in NZ (and Australia too) are for the most part super nice, with clean bathrooms, hot showers and laundry that are usually free, TV rooms, kitchens, sometimes even pool tables and hot tubs. They are good value too - usually less than $30 NZ for two people. For comparison, two beds in a shared dorm at a backpackers usually runs at least $50 NZ for two people! Campervan are the way to go!

The next morning we woke up and oh man - a swell! Sam raced down to the boatramp only to find the conditions were great but there were already 30 tourists in the water, of which only about 2 knew how to surf, plus a few locals. There was no way I was going out, so I sat on the beach and watched Sam fight for waves and dodge heads. He had a good time commiserating with the locals about all these dumb tourists paddling and not even catching waves. However by this point his wetsuit only had one arm, no legs, and Sam was freezing! So he came in pretty quick, feeling very frustrated with NZ surf in general. We decided to get out of crazy Raglan. Next stop: Mt. Doom!

Just Like LOTR

2009-04-07T15:32:00.000-07:00

It was sad to say goodbye to Australia. Everyone down to the airline lady who checked us into our NZ flight was super-nice. We didn't even get charged for the surfboards! A short flight later we were arriving in Auckland. Since we got in too late to pick up the next of our series of campervans, we booked a hotel near the airport. We hadn't stayed in a hotel since Bali, and hadn't stayed in a Western hotel since I don't know when, so it was a bit of a weird experience. We immediately noticed that Kiwis are a lot less outgoing than their Australian counterparts, but still very nice once you get talking to them. And yes, their manner and accent really is just like Flight of the Conchords! I kept thinking everyone was Brett or Jemaine and we were on hidden camera.

The next thing we noticed was that beer was affordable again - yay! And even food was not super pricey, though given that we were eating at the hotel restaurant, it wasn't exactly affordable either. We watched TV for a bit and went to bed as early as we could manage given we were still on Sydney time. Then it was morning and time to be picked up - yes what service! - by Jucy campervan rentals. In Auckland Wicked is not actually the cheapest campervan rental, so we got a Jucy van for about the same price. Even though Jucy vans have bright paint jobs too, they all have the same paint job (bright green) so you can at least know what to expect and have a little anonymity. (No, I swear, it wasn't me officer, it was that other Jucy van!) Also the vans are pretty new and most importantly come with a plug in cooler and a DVD player.

Finally we drove in to Auckland itself. Despite its reputation as a big city, the large area of surrounding suburbs still had a small town feel, with small streets and corner dairies. Of course we soon discovered that a "dairy" is basically a 7-11. Downtown Auckland itself wasn't too big either, and was fairly quiet because it was Saturday. We found a used bookstore to buy a NZ Rough Guide, a camping/roadmap/LOTR site map book (yes all in one I swear) and 3rd and most importantly a hiking book. Sam was groaning in dread of the hiking already. Then it was lunch time. We fairly randomly got Taiwanese rice rolls - basically like a burrito where you pick your filling, but with fancy brown rice on the outside, and bbq pork, bamboo shoots, or whatever on the inside. It was delicious. As we walked around Auckland, and then headed out of town, Sam commented that so far, NZ was a lot like Hawaii in terms of ethnic makeup, food, small town feel, and horrible driving. Except colder than Hawaii, of course!

Next we went to the grocery store, Countdown or some such, which we suspected was a Woolie's in disguise since everything was exactly like Australia and even had the same Woolie's brands. Surprisingly prices were about the same as Australia despite the NZ dollar being weaker. We stocked up on our usual wine and baked chicken, and of course Tim Tam biscuits. Yay - we hadn't left those behind just yet! Chocolate coated wafers with chocolate fudge in the middle, mmm.

Stocked up and ready to go, we headed out of Auckland on a narrow windy road (which by now would probably seem like a highway to us) through country that looked a lot like the Shire, except for the occasional tree fern. Later we would learn that "shire" is pretty much the North Island's default mode. It's other modes are: coast, volcanic high desert, and shire. Oh wait I said that one already. Anyway the posters in Flight of the Conchords are pretty much spot on. I think there's one that says "New Zealand: It's nicer than you might think." And another one that says "New Zealand: It's just like Lord of the Rings." This is correct except there are more sheep and cattle than in the shire. According to the guidebook, there are nine sheep for every one human in New Zealand. The reason NZ looks so pastoral is because it is! Everywhere that could possibly be used for grazing has sheep, cattle, goats, or even deer. The rest is mostly used for pine tree plantations. Even people without lots of land keep a cow or two in the front yard! And it truly is not very populated. Apparently the population is only 4.3 million, with 1.3 million in Auckland and another 400,000 in Wellington and 300,000 in Christchurch. We tended to meet more tourists than locals - NZ gets 2 million visitors a year! But more on that later.

Admiring Koalas and Surf Camp Sucks Really Sucks

2009-03-30T20:44:00.001-07:00

According to the trusty guidebook, koalas spend 20% of their metabolism just fighting off the toxins in their all-eucalyptus diet. Humans spend 20% of their metabolism on their brains, but koalas can't afford that luxury and therefore sleep 20 hours a day. This is why they are pretty hard to spot and some Australians look for 20 years or more before seeing one in the wild. So we gave up on the idea of seeing a koala in the wild and decided just to imitate their lifestyle. Seal Rocks was the perfect spot!

We got in late to our old campsite on a Saturday night and were amazed to find the place was packed with about 100 people! Australians really do use their own parks! Luckily we found a spot and got up early to get out of there. Unfortunately for Sam but luckily for me the swell was very small. The point at Seal Rocks was not breaking, but the beach was perfect for pushing me into tiny waves. I had a great time actually getting some waves without getting pummeled or exhausted and finally even stood up for a few seconds. Yes, I have to shamefacedly admit that up until this point I hadn't even managed that particular feat.

When we got out of the water, I saw a van with blue markings all over it that said RBT on the back. That's funny, I thought, another RBT van - wait a minute! That's our van! And somebody taped over the titties! Sure enough, it was. The person who had rented it after us had been embarrassed enough to tape over all the boobs with blue masking tape. Surprisingly, it was a single guy, Jen, from Maui. He had actually rented a different van which had broken down 10 km from the Wicked lot (gotta love Wicked vans) so they gave him the booby van. He was in Australia for 2 months so you couldn't really blame him for taping over the titties. Anyway Jen was super nice and we hung out with him for the rest of our stay at Seal Rocks. It turned out we weren't the only ones who recognized the van; there were some crazy dudes from Byron Bay there who gave poor Jen a lot of crap for taping over the boobs.

We spent the next few days just hanging out on the beach, occasionally driving into town to get ice or shop, surfing, cooking, surfing again...it was very relaxing. By Sunday noon the place had emptied out completely, and we had the campsite virtually to ourselves again, with only a few other campers arriving late on Sunday night. There was a really spectacular lightning storm that night, with pretty much continuous lightning and thunder. On Monday we made steaks with Jen and this time I successfully defended them from both kookaberras and monitor lizards. There were a lot of monitor lizards at the campground and since they made Sam scream like a little girl, it was up to me to protect the steaks.

Over the next few days I got lots of surf practice, and we hung out with some crazy older ladies surfing in kayaks (again, those Australians!) The only trouble was twice a day one of two different surf camp buses would appear. These were packed full of tourists with huge foam boards learning to surf and would completely take over a spot on the beach. They were nice though and mainly kept to themselves, not taking up too much of the waves, except on one day when there were really no waves to be had. We quickly learned to all get out of the water at 10am and 2pm so that they would think there were no waves and keep moving. Really they weren't too bad, though clearly they had irritated the locals in the past, because painted on a telephone pole on the road into town, in huge letters, was "Surf Camp Sucks" and on the other side "Really Sucks."

We would have liked to stay in Seal Rocks forever, but we really didn't get a lot of sympathy that we had to leave, since our next stop was New Zealand. So we headed back into Sydney where we stayed for one day and went to the zoo to finally see some koalas. The koalas were every bit as cute as people make them out to be, and sleep just as much too. We also got to see more kangaroos - in Australian zoos they don't even fence them off; they just stick them in a revolving door-bird-like enclosure with some of the other natives! Fortunately all the native highly poisonous snakes were in separate cages.

We had one last nice dinner with Roy, Kimberley, and Jenny. Then Sam dropped me off at the airport with all the surfboards and luggage. He returned the Wicked Van and caught the train back in no time, and we were off to New Zealand!

Mission: Kangaroo

2009-03-30T20:42:00.001-07:00

So admittedly this wasn't the most well-planned tour of Australia. Thankfully we'd gotten lots of good advice on the way. Our main purpose in heading south was to finally see some kangaroos! There is a famous beach where kangaroos supposedly just hang out. Envisioning roos in boxing gloves on surfboards, off we went.

Against Kimberley's advice, we took the Grand Pacific Drive and Prince's coast highway, because our guidebook made it out to be spectacular. We imagined something like Big Sur, with kangaroos. Again, we were failing to take into account Australia's idea of scenery! There was one impressive bit driving right along a huge cliff, where they'd got so sick of rock slides they just built a bridge out over the water. After that, it was mainly driving slowly through beach towns with an occasional glimpse of water over the horizon. Finally we made it to Jervis Bay, a nice beach front state park. It wasn't famous for its surf so we weren't to disappointed to find no swell. We admired the beaches and camped at a nice spot, hooked up by the lady at the visitor's center. (For once, you actually had to pay to camp in advance, so we finally made our contribution to Australia's park system.)

In the morning I got up to go for a run, and actually spotted two little wallabies running away through the bushes. Sam got to see one too at the campsite. I was so busy admiring the forest and looking for koalas that I missed my turn back, and had a bit of a scary time wondering when I should turn back and whether I would end up as foxbait. Fortunately I found my turn the second time!

Wallabies are nice, but we wanted kangaroos, so we drove down to Murramarang National Park and the famed Pebbly Beach of the roos. There were no kangaroos on the beach! Noooo! So we decided to camp at Depot Beach instead. Shoot, we had to pay again, so we headed to the campground office, and there, lo and behold, lazing on the lawn right outside the office: a few dozen kangaroos! Success! We took pictures and hoped they didn't come out looking like we were at a zoo. Stupid kangaroos couldn't even be bothered to walk down to the nice scenic beach background! Oh well. At least we got our fill of kangaroos. After a nice beach walk, it was time to camp and cook some kangaroo steaks, no just kidding, we had regular steaks. Though apparently kangaroo steaks are more environmentally friendly there because there are so many kangaroos that they are somewhat of a pest, and they can live off native flora efficiently, unlike cattle. Still we stuck with beef - the roos were too cute!

As we cooked our steaks, we admired a particularly photogenic kookaberra happily posing for us. Or so we thought, until we turned our backs for 2 seconds and the beastly bird flew off with one of our steaks. Sam laughed but I was mad! That was my steak! Luckily the steaks were small and we had four more of them.

Now what? Mission accomplished, we felt so empty and purposeless. During our beach walk we had learned that the ocean down south really was cold - not California cold, but not bearable in just boardshorts either. Also there was no surf unless we drove quite a bit further south. Originally we were planning on doing some 4WDing in our fancy new van in the parks down south, but we quickly realized that Australians are absolutely not kidding when they say 4WD. Heck they'll take an ancient Honda Prelude towing a boat on American "4WD" roads! And drive 80 kph to boot! When they say 4WD, they mean, Land Rover commercial complete with deep river crossings! Given that our tires were bald, our van was useless, so we studied the guide book, and decided screw it, what we really wanted was to go back to Seal Rocks and just stay in one place for awhile to end our trip. So we drove all the way back up to Seal Rocks in one very long day. This time we went through Kangaroo Valley as per Kimberley's advice. There was some nice, actually fairly really mountainous country (really I swear) and pretty waterfalls on the way. The guidebook warned that there were no kangaroos there, but now we didn't care so much. Now if only we could see a koala....

Searching for the Blue Mountains

2009-03-30T20:41:00.000-07:00

With no swell anywhere, it was time to drag Sam kicking and screaming on some actual hikes in some actual mountains. So we headed off to the Blue Mountains, only to discover that Australia's idea of actual mountains is rather generous. See, according to the Lonely Planet, Australia is a very old continent with little volcanic or glacial action to renew mountains or topsoil. Which finally explains why candy is so expensive there! No corn for corn syrup! Though this did not deter me from trying every kind of Cadbury candy bar they have! And there's a lot!

Anyway we headed up to the so-called mountains and to the most famous view point, where we stared intently into the complete whiteout but failed to discern anything at all. We were going to take a picture to prove the complete lack of a view but figured we could just take a photo of a blank sheet of paper later and the time would be better spent fleeing in terror from the hordes of tour buses full of pissed off tourists. The guidebook said that Blackheath was a little mellower so we went there to find a caravan park for the night. Here we met our first unfriendly Australians (though maybe they were immigrants, not sure) who accused us of trespassing when we decided to drive through the caravan park to see it before paying, even though we'd checked in at the office first. We explained that we just wanted to check for any loud campers who had somehow wandered out of Byron Bay and this mollified them somewhat. Anyway it turned out to be a great caravan park, very clean and well-run, and we thoroughly enjoyed the hot showers, as well as the amusing commentary on the owners written by other campers on the shower doors.

The next day we drove back to the view point where we managed to see a little bit, and hung out in town waiting to see what the weather would do. Fortunately it cleared a bit, so we returned to Blackheath to do the "Grand Canyon" hike. We were a little afraid of what Australia's idea of a grand canyon would turn out to be, but it turned out to be totally awesome. We hiked through dense forests and winding canyons with verdant foliage, clear streams, and elaborate rock formations - caves, overhangs, cliffs, buttresses, and so forth. Despite being one of the best and most famous hikes in the area, the hordes of tourists were not in evidence - we only saw five other hikers the whole time. The hike was so nice Sam even enjoyed it and that is saying a lot. The bit where some older ladies kicked our butts on the way up was great too. Those Australians! Luckily we had hot showers to ease our aching muscles back at the caravan park. The park proprietors were getting friendlier by the minute as they realized that despite our scruffy appearances (well, Sam's scruffy appearance) we were not going to try to sneak in 10 friends without paying.

The day after that: whiteout again. So we drove back to Sydney, where it was raining also, and caught a movie at the pimp theater with huge sofa sized seats and side tables. Then it was back to the Wicked lot to finally, gratefully, ditch the titty van and get a nice 4WD van with relative mild artwork - some aborginal looking stick figures hunting, playing with kids, etc. We headed south at an amazing 110 kmh! Finally we could drive at the speed limit! Yay!

Seal Rocks ROCK!

2009-03-30T19:57:00.000-07:00

The drive to Seal Rocks from Crescent was only a few hours on the main HWY 1 so we arrived by mid afternoon. The entire drive I couldn't get Byron out of my mind with its' nice beaches and uncrowded surf. I really didn't want to go to Seal Rocks where there is no surf due to sharks wanting to eat the seals. What are we going to do for a few days at this place since we heard it's a tiny little place without even a grocery store and no one really knows about it (other travelers). I guess I can drink beers all day and fantasize about surfing. It will be a good time to finally pull out my guitar and learn some songs. Oh well, life goes on.

When we pulled up to this little bay I noticed a few things:

The water was crystal clear
There was absolutely no seals
There was a head with a barrier reef around it
The waves were waist to chest high and peeling around the head
There was 3 people out

It was on! I pulled into the parking lot and slamed the van into park. Jumped out, grabbed my board, and ran into the water. I forgot if I turned off the engine or not, oh well, Amy will take care of it.

Seal Rocks is pretty much a smaller version of every popular "head" in Eastern OZ. You can walk all the way to the head and jump off the rocks right at the main peak. No paddling required. When I jumped in the other 3 guys were all smiles and really friendly. I guess safety in numbers against great whitey. We all talked, cheered each other on, and took turns catching the set waves that came every 10 minutes or so. It was super mellow and fun. The water was only about 5 feet deep due to the reef protecting the break. No sharks in site and if one was brave enough to come near, we could see it 100 yards away due to water clarity. We surfed and talked until the sun went over the hill and the wind picked up. It was time to get out and look for a place to park for the night before doing it all over again the next day.

None of the surfers I talked to was a local there since the only thing around was a caravan park with some cabins. There were a few homes scattered here and there but most of them were empty vacation homes. Over the hill from Seal rocks was another bay that was just as nice minus the waves. There were a few homes here and half of them were occupied year round by people who fished for a living out of the area. The other half belonged to very wealthy Sydneysiders who built vacation homes here since it was within driving distance for weekend trip. I later found out from one of the few locals that there was bad blood brewing between them and the Sydneysiders. The locals want to keep the place pristine and undeveloped (explaining why the only road into town was a gravel road until you get into town) while the Sydneysiders wanted to build up more shops and turn the place into a resort town. I have to take the locals side on this one and we all planned on getting together later for some beers before burning down the vacation homes! Just kidding, I do wish the people find a balance and keep the place undeveloped for our next visit.

We found a nice campsite with free bbq's and only two other group of campers. It was nice and quiet so we set up shop. More of the same: cook, wine, talk stories, then sleep. I love this lifestyle. Oh, the reason we slept early (around 9 PM usually) wasn't just due to having nothing to do at night, it was because we wanted to get up early to split the camping area before the rangers came in to collect fees. Sly little bastards we were.

The next day wasn't as nice since the wind picked up and the swell went completely flat. Water skiing would be more appropriate than surfing. We hung out and made breakfast to see what the weather and waves would do. Nothing changed for a few hours so it was time to get out of town and head into the mountains since Amy was dying for some hiking. I'm not a big fan of walking around for no reason but convinced myself that the skin on my stomach and chest could use a break from the sun and rubbing on my board to the point of feeling like leather. Time to head to the Blue Mountains for some hiking, yay!

Byron and Crescent Part Deux

2009-03-30T19:24:00.000-07:00

Well, we loved Byron so much that we had to return and get more surfing in. The fact that we had a house to stay at was a bonus also (thanks so much to our new adopted Australian family).

Here's our daily routine in Byron:

-Wake up at 7 or 8 at the house and use the facilities (bathroom, espresso machine, etc)
-Head to Watego and surf for a few hours
-Cook lunch right on the beach using the free propane bbq grills
-Climb in the sin bin (boobie van) and sleep for an hour
-Surf for a few more hours until your arms felt like noodles
-Head to Woolworths (it's a grocery store here) and pick up some groceries
-Drive to Clarks beach and make dinner
-Head back to the house to shower and sleep
-Do all over again the next day

After a few days of this it was time to head south to Crescent Head to see if the swell hit. Guess what? It did and the waves were pumping about head and a half high to double plus at the longest right hander in OZ (about 200 yard ride if your wave connects). The only drawback was that the main peak had about 100 guys sitting at it while the inside was scattered with another hundred. Of course I had to test the biscuit out on the main peak. Got a nice head high ride almost right away but it didn't connect so the ride was only about 50 yards. Paddled back out and sat with the rest of the fools for over an hour trying to pick off a wave. The problem was that the longboarders would sit about 20 yards further out and take all the waves. I mean ALL the waves while only a few brave short boarders would drop in on them on the inside and hope they dont make the section. There was no shortage of screaming and threats in the water. After an hour and a half I finally got cold and dropped in on a longboarder who I knew couldn't make the section. Fortunate for me he couldnt get around the whitewater and the wave was all mine. All mine and all the way into the river mouth, thats almost 200 yards of dodging people and yelling at the ones trying to drop in on you. I had enough and headed back in after only 2 waves in an hour and a half. I'll get up early and surf in the AM when it's less crowded. I really miss the small, clean, empty waves up at Byron Bay!

We headed out to our camp site and realized that it was a weekend (we lost all sense of days by now) and the place was packed. Campsites were pretty much piled on top of each other but for some strange reason our spot was open. It must be the fact that it was under a tree that would barely fit a mini van and could only host 2-3 persons around the fire pit. Nice! Time to park, make a fire, cook, have some wine, and set up the muskie net. Early to bed equals early rise to beat out the crowds in the water.

We woke up nice and not so early at 8 and headed to the beach. Holy crap, there was only about 10 guys out at the main peak. The swell did drop a bit and waves were only head high but clean looking. I washed up real quick at the beach bathroom and was getting the jitters about surfing Crescent with only 10 others at the peak. Inside section had about 100 people but who cares. As I pulled my board out of the van I heard something that really sounded like a air horn. As I turned to look at the waves again I realized that it was a hooter that I heard and the surfers in the water had on jerseys. WTF! There was a contest going on and I'm the last to find out. No wonder the lineup was so damn empty while the inside section was packed. F-this, we are out of here. We load up the van and headed south to Seal Rocks. I'm really going to surf at a spot only a few hours north of Sydney called "SEAL ROCKS" after all the shark attacks in the past 2 weeks. Hell no, we only want to camp there and look at the pretty landscape since everyone who has been there highly recommended it.

Byron Bay and the Sunshine and High Rise Coasts

2009-03-30T18:44:00.000-07:00

Byron Bay was the only spot in Australia that everyone actually warned us about - saying it was too touristy and, gasp, they did not let you sleep in your car there. It also turned out to be a long drive so we got there quite late, in the dark, in the middle of a downpour. No couple could manage this without a fight and I thought we had quite a nice one while driving around for hours trying to figure out where to sleep. There were a ton of other Wicked Campers there but we started to see why they don't allow people to sleep in their vans in Byron - all the tourists we saw we're drunk and very very high, leaving trash everywhere, and genuinely incapable of intelligible speech. When we asked them where we could park overnight we just provoked fits of the giggles. Finally we heard about a spot from a few folks who hadn't yet visited the smoke shop, and we did eventually find it - rows of campervans lined up on a side street in the dark. But first we had to cook dinner, which we did in a carpark in the pitch dark, because we kept switching off the light in fear of getting fined every time we heard a car.

The next morning the sun came out and things were looking up. The main beach was packed so we drove up to the lighthouse, which is at the easternmost point in Australia, and boasted views down the coast on both sides of the point. It was amazing to see how much windier the Tallows beach side of the point was compared to the Byron side. Looking straight down the cliffs, Sam spotted some excellent waves so we burned rubber out of there down to the beach, which turned out to be Watego's. There Sam caught some good waves while I stayed on the inside, not catching anything because I was too afraid of hitting a small child, boogie boarder, miscellaneous tourist, or swimmer (those crazy Australians sit there and do the crawl stroke through the beach break!) Then we headed into town to do laundry and call up some friends we met in Cambodia who were from Byron Bay. They were two typically Australian sisters, generous and outgoing and fun-loving, called Lorien and Malaika. They were swimming on the beach and immediately came to meet us and brought us home to their parents' house where they offered us parking in the driveway, use of the bathroom, and even a spare bedroom! Their parents were just as nice - mom immediately offered us a choice of desserts and then dad took us on a guided beachwalk on Tallows. Their dad had travelled and lived in Asia and spent all his time in a sarong at home, it was interesting to hear about China from him and we definitely want to go there on our next trip.

In the afternoon Sam surfed Watego's again while I did the lighthouse loop walk, which was very scenic. We made dinner there on the free gas barbecues, then headed back to Lorien and Malaika's for more dessert and a peaceful sleep parked in Byron! Priceless! The next morning we attempted to surf at The Pass, a nice long point break with long rides and a million gazillion people in the water. It would have been a great spot for me, since you can just stand on the inside and push yourself into little knee high waves, but once again I was petrified of killing some poor child with the huge fin on my wombat board. Deciding the weekend crowds were just too much at Byron, we headed north to check out the opening day of the Quicksilver Pro up at Snappers on the Gold Coast. The contest was quite a scene, and they were surfing even though the conditions were horrible, because it was the first day. We got to see our stalker Joel Parkinson, also Chris Ward and some other surfers that Sam knows all about but weren't in my surfing video game so I don't know them or their abilities.

The sun was super hot on the beach so we continued driving nonstop through the Gold Coast. Nonstop because the place was a zoo, like Waikiki but going on forever and ever. We reached the Sunshine Coast which was supposed to be better but still looked horribly built up after New South Wales, so we just kept driving all the way to the north end of the Sunshine Coast at Noosa. By this point it was late and time for another fight. Luckily our guidebook served us well for once and pointed us to the mellowest spot in Noosa, Sunshine Beach. When we asked a local if we could park and sleep there, they looked at us like we were crazy for even asking - why not?! It was a great spot - the bathrooms were clean, the girls even had an indoor shower, and there was a nice coffee shop and a mini grocery store just up the road.

The next day we stayed there to surf. Even though it was an open beach, the beach break was actually quite good. Though there was a surf lifeguard camp right there, it never got too crowded because there were many peaks. Paddling out through the beachbreak and then fighting the current to stay in place was good paddling exercise for me, though I could usually only catch three or four waves before getting too exhausted. Sam was a good sport and helped push me into waves and even gave me the occasional tow when I got tired of paddling. When I went in, Sam had a lot of fun on his biscuit. We stayed there the whole day, though we did drive into Noosa Heads to see the town and buy me a rashguard so I could stop caking layers of sunscreen on my back. The next day - more of same!

After some debate we decided not to head further north. The Great Barrier Reef sounded awesome but expensive to reach and that time of year you need to wear a full-body jellyfish suit. We decided we'd rather spend more time in Byron and some of the places we'd missed in New South Wales. So we headed back south to Brisbane, to visit guess who? Lorien and Malaika were back at university so we went to stay with them in their apartment! The thing with Australians is they are so nice you don't even feel bad mooching off them! It was nice to hang out with them and spend a whole day using up their bandwidth uploading all our pictures and catching up on the blog - so everybody thank them for the pictures dating up to Brisbane! However on a big screen we could now see that most of our pictures, taken on Sam's ancient Canon Elph, had not come out, so we went shopping at the mall and bought a new camera on sale there. We also checked out the city a bit, and best of all went out to steaks with the girls. Mmm, steaks!

We didn't want to leave Brisbane but unfortunately we had to return our booby van. Ok maybe fortunately. When we booked the van the Wicked staff said that they weren't busy at all and it would be easy to extend our booking, so we decided to book just two and a half weeks in case we didn't like the campervan life. When we called them, we learned that everything is always cool and ok with the Wicked staff and no, they were completely booked, but they could upgrade us to a 4 wheel drive van for the rest of the trip. We were so happy to be free of the boobies we agreed! But first, we had a little time before needing to be back in Sydney, so it was back to Byron. Again, we pretty much skipped the Gold Coast, stopping only to sell Sam's Bali board for a measly $150 Australian - probably all it was worth!

Haustralia: Myall Lakes->Coffs Harbour->Crescent Head

2009-03-22T22:17:00.000-07:00

So, we hop into the boobie van and off we go. Myall lakes national park was desti one and only a few hours north of Syd. Man the boobie van gets a lot of attention. Some drive by giving the thumbs up while others hoot and laugh. Then there are those that gives that dirty stare as if we had a wooden penis bottle opener from Bali glued to our foreheads. All good times though.

We arrived at Myall lakes and discovered it has flooded over from the storms. Well, what can you do but to make dinner, have some wine, and try to pass out. Oh, one problem mate, you got no muskie net (Haustralian for mosquitos). No worries, we got tons of REI bug juice and started lathering it on. Deet is good for the skin, makes you age 20 years over night. That went well and we slept for about 20 minutes until the muskies started biting through jeans and sweaters. Up all night putting on Deet every 30 minutes, slapping muskies, and bitching about how bad Myall lakes suck. Out of here at first light for sure. Amy actually got up and went running in the AM despite the 2 large dingos running around the camp site. They are wussie house trained Dingos, even Louie (my attack dog) would kick their dingo butts.

Amy showed up nice and sweaty from her run while I did my morning exercise which consisted of rolling a drum, making coffee, and bitching and moaning about how many muskie bites I have. I hate you Haustralia! We heading into town (Hawks Nest) to use the public facilities which are quite nice. Pulling up into the beach parking lot made me feel a lot better and the thought nice waves took my mind off the itching. WOW! Crystal clear waters, tons of dolphins surfing the little waves. This was beautiful and Amy whipped out the Vid camera and took some nice footage. We watched for a while as the dolphines cruised up and down the beach only about 10 feet offshore. I really felt at peace except having to relieve my bladder of the morning coffee. I took my nice stroll to the beach bathroom and HOLY CRAP, there is a 6 feet Python right outside of it! I'm not f-ing peeing in that bathroom or going anywhere near it. I yelled at Amy to bring the vidi so we can document our first wild encouter. The locals came over and laughed, "thats just a baby one, we have bigger ones in our attics". Well guess what, I'm not moving here and if I do my house will not have an attic. Lets get out of this town was the first thing on my mind. Off to the beach to pee where I can see if anything will approach to bite me. We hopped in the boobie van and headed north as quickly as possible with the sole mission of finding a camping store that sells muskie nets.

Coffs Harbour:

A few hours north of Myall Lakes is a pretty little town called Coffs Harbour. The downtown harbour area itself is quite touristy so we decided to head to the beach north of it. Nice small beach break with chest high waves. There was only 4 guys out in the water so we decided to join and get our first Haustralian surf session and test out on our new boards. Soooooooo much fun. I love my expensive Channel Island Biscut since the exchange rate made it affordable. That thing surfs as if I'm a monkey on acid strapped to and elephant on crack running away from micies. Now we are starting to enjoy this country the way it should be. An hour in the water was enough since we were both starving. Oh, it's Haustralia and they have free gas barbies at every darn park and street side. Grill up some chooks (what they call there chickens) and make some nice chook and cheese sandwiches. MMMMMMMMM. We hopped in the boobie van with full bellies, tan faces, and head a few hours north to Crescent Head.

Crescent Head:

This is a tiny little town with the longest right hander in Haustralia. I'm talking about 150-200 yard ride from the main peak to the inside if your wave connects. The beauty of it was that you could catch the wave all the way in, get out of the water and walk to the point, hop in from the rocks and do it all over again. The only time you need to paddle is to get the wave. One problem though, when the swell pumps, so do the crowds. One main peak + 100 surfers trying to take off in a 20 feet area = no waves for you. The waves were small and it was windy that day so we decided to head into the campgrounds and set up shop. Oh such a lovely campground, free firewood, showers, clean bathroom, etc. We make dinner, enjoy some wine, and test out our new Muskie net. Ahhh, real sleep with no bites. Nice. The next morning we head into town to check out the waves and found..........ankle high wind slop. Well, time to hop in the "BOOBIE VAN" and head north to Byron. Off we go.

Sydney and the Titty Van

2009-03-19T00:34:00.000-07:00

Australia! Talk about culture shock! Luckily we had not come straight from Laos or it would have been worse. Our flight was not too bad; it was another ValuAir (cheapo) flight. Luckily we were now forewarned from the last flight that blankets, pillows, and sandwiches were $10 each! The only issue was a problem with the airline in Bali that left us in the check in line for hours - plenty of time for the Arak to wear off and leave us wondering if they would really delay the flight for economy passengers. Luckily they did.

We arrived in Sydney in the morning, bleary eyed and droopy tailed. It would ultimately take us some time to get used to Western prices again. At first it was extra shocking because even though the exchange rate gives our dollar 50% more buying power, everything is 50% more expensive, so if you don't do the exchange rate mentally in your head, you have a heart attack, at least after Bali prices. I can't imagine traveling in Australia when the exchange rate was 1-1! Anyway long story short: we were super cheap for the first week! So we took the train from the airport. It was extremely easy and when we asked one passenger when we were to get off, all of the other passengers started offering directions, help, and advice. This was our first experience of Australian insane super-niceness. We got off at Circular Quay to catch the ferry, and got to admire the opera house and the didgeridoo players accompanied by techno beats (we bought the CD so you can all savor the music with us later.) The opera house looked a lot smaller in real life, especially from the side, and was dwarfed by a huge cruise ship in the harbor. I was sure it was just a tourist cafe with a fake opera house roof at first until we moved around and saw the front!

We then easily transferred to the ferry and were off to Neutral Bay, where some friends of my parents had kindly offered us their spare bedroom. Downtown Sydney had been just another city - cleaner than Bangkok, and everyone speaks English (sort of) but not too shocking. Neutral Bay, a nice suburb just a short ferry ride from downtown, was major culture shock! We wandered about for a bit before selecting the most likely candidate for the correct house and letting ourselves in. Luckily we had guessed right! It was so strange to stay in a nice old Victorian in a quiet suburban area - hard to explain really! It was just little things, like hot water coming out of the sink as well as the shower, and tap water you can drink, and a microwave, quiet tree-lined sidewalks outside, drivers that stop for pedestrians in crosswalks, and red lights too! After a nap we walked up to the supermarket which was also a big change from Asia, leaving us in awe of all the food. Luckily we couldn't carry too much or we would have bought everything, especially cheese and steaks! And don't even get me started on all the Cadbury candy bars! And then there's the wines! Mmmm....

We learned that in Australia grocery stores are not allowed to sell alcohol so there is usually a liquor store basically inside the grocery store. If you buy six bottles of wine you get 30% off. And the wines are already only $8 Australian or so for a decent wine like Yellowtail. Also it is cheaper to actually go to the butcher shops to buy steaks where you can get three big tee-bones for only $15 Australian. Conveniently there is a grocery store, butcher, and greengrocer in every shopping mall, not just clothes like in America. There is also a town library in almost every shopping mall! This is just one of many examples of how (to us anyway) Australia just seemed to make sense. Some other examples:

Toilets have two flush buttons, half flush for #1, full flush for #2! (There is a major drought there just like at home in California.)
ATMs will not give you your cash until you take your card back.
Voting is mandatory.
There are frequent nice rest areas on all highways and major roads.
Small cars and car trucks! There are not so many gas guzzlers in Australia. The national car seems to be a white Holden Commodore station wagon, sometimes seen with a hitch towing same. And I've never seen so many small cars with the backseats replaced by a utility bed. Even regular Toyota pickups sometimes have the stock bed replaced with a utility bed!
Cell phones are mostly pre-paid.
Free gas bbqs at most beach and town parks. Ok, maybe this wouldn't make sense in California.
Speed cameras on the road. I've never seen speed limits so carefully obeyed before!
And, though it takes some getting used to, instead of 4-way stop signs that cause tons of traffic and where the right of way is always contested, you just sail through a roundabout, often without even stopping, and the right of way is always clear! (If you get hit from the right then it's your fault, and that's that.) The only problem will be if we ever go to France, we'll probably drive through the roundabouts in the wrong direction (clockwise) and die.

Anyway, after grocery shopping, we had another nap, and woke up to find our host Kimberley had made us and the downstairs tenant Jenny a delicious chicken dinner, with peaches and ice cream for dessert. Example #2 of Australian super-niceness! This quickly convinced us to stay with them for a few days and catch up on little things we'd pretty much given up on, like laundry, personal grooming, and our blog. On the first day, we caught the ferry into downtown Sydney, and went to King's Cross, the backpacker area, which made us even more grateful for our nice place to stay. King's Cross is a lot like the Tenderloin in San Francisco, full of shanty boarding houses, drunks, pimps, and whores. And I think we saw the nice half of it! We went there looking for a used travel guide but all we could find was an Adult Book Exchange - which we did try (I mean "Lonely Planet" and "Rough Guide" - maybe they would have one by mistake!) But no luck, until we eventually found a bookstore down the street.

We spent the next few days hanging out in Sydney, where we visited all the free museums and saw a movie in a real movie theater - the first movie theater since leaving home! We also went to the celebrity cricket match, where we found out that non-cricketing celebrities were also players! For example, Joel Parkinson (pro Australian surfer we saw in Bali) was apparently still following us around, and couldn't bowl for anything. This was probably the wrong introduction to cricket since the already confusing opaque rules were made more confusing by the general madness of the celebrity match, in which the announcer attempted to catch fly balls and some kid kept coming out to bowl. It was apparent even to us ignorant Americans that the kid was better than poor Parko though.

We also went out to Manly beach one day. We did not get in the water, partly because of the serial killer sharks around Sydney (four attacks just while we were in Australia) and partly because it would have been like paddling in Hong Kong crowds. However we did find great surfboards for a good price! In Australia boards are cheaper than in California even before you do the currency conversion. Sam picked up his dream board - a Channel Islands Biscuit - for $680 Australian. It was a beautiful board, custom ordered with a nice resin swirl but never picked up, and on sale since the down payment had already been made. It was similar to his Bali board, but with three finds so Sam wouldn't die in bigger waves. I got a barely used imitation Wombat - basically a longboard chopped in half. Perfect for a learner while still convenient for travelling around.

Even though we could have happily stayed in Neutral Bay for longer, soon it was time to pick up our campervan we had reserved from Wicked Campers. Campervans are a popular way to travel in Australia since they can be rented or bought cheaply there ($40 a day rental), and campgrounds and beachparks are nice while the hotels are fairly expensive (even a shared communal dorm room is $25 a person.) Wicked was one of the original iconic brands and still retains its hippie heritage, with laid-back staff, lots of freebies left by previous travellers, and brightly painted vans. When we arrived, the worst paintjob in the lot by far was a van covered in rows of, well, naked titties, in all colors, with huge nipples, and on the back: RBT Random Breast Testing. (A play on Random Breath Testing, a common way to combat drunk driving in Australia.) We laughed and prayed that it wasn't our van. But guess what? It was our van, due to being the only automatic and my dumb ass not being able to drive a stick, especially not left-handed.

The van came equipped with everything you might need - sleeping mats, a little gas stove, a sink and water container, a cooler or "Eskie," pot, pan, silverware, plates, mugs, pillows, sheets, and even two folding chairs. So there wasn't too much we needed to do to get on the road. Except start the van, hmm. After some efforts to get the poor old titty van started, we slowly drove off the lot. Because the van didn't go any faster! It had over 400,000 kilometers on it, but at least it helped us avoid speeding tickets by shaking like crazy above 85 kph, and top speed on all hills was 40 kph. This was a little scary in 110 kph zones! Anyway we drove the van rather shamefacedly to Neutral Bay where we parked it in front of the fancy apartments there and tried not to meet anyone's eye. Though we soon realized that the best bet was simply to make eye contact, laugh sheepishly, and explain that the van was a rental! We did get some glares, but most people got a kick out of the van - some stared and honked while narrowly avoiding wrecking their cars, and one group of girls wanted their picture taken in front of it! But all that later. For now, we packed up the van, and then headed off on the Pacific Highway, well equipped with towels and travel advice from our hosts.

Last of Bali

2009-03-02T17:59:00.000-08:00

Once we got off the ferry from hell, we headed strait to a little tourist town called Ubud. This is the artsy-fartsy town that most tourists end up moving to. Tons of art galleries, restaurants, and just about every building was a "home stay" or guest house. Rice paddies in this town are strictly planted for asthetics so tourists could feel like they are staying in the "wild".

The shuttle van dropped us off at the edge of town in front of a Circle K and the first thing I did was grabbed a $2US Bintang (Best Bali Beer). A local driver/guide approached us and offered to show us his buddies guest house. Being so hungry and exhausted (the rain didn't help either), we agreed and went along since it was 2 blocks away. Nice little place for the price of $15US so we took it. Our tummies made us ran to the nearest restaurant for a quick meal before a cold shower and bed. Damn we were so tired from that ferry ride through hell.

The next day we walked around and found a really nice guest house with a swimming pool that we fell in love with. The sun was out and super hot so the pool sold itself. I think we spent more time in that pool then in our room or anywhere else in town. The next few days consisted of swimming, walking around town, swimming, eating, swimming, sleeping, swimming and more swimming. I think we were both water logged by the time we left Ubud.

We did manage to go to a "traditional dance show". There is a different dance every night but we got lucky and got the most popular dance the night we went. What was amazing was that there were about 1000 people all dressed in white marching down the main street. This parade was the intro to the dance show that we were attending. We thought "WOW, there must be a lottery system where half the town needs to do this parade as a civil duty such as jury duty for us back at home". "Billy and his family has been doing it for the past 20 years but Mike's family hasn't participated in over 5 years". I guess everyone in town hates Mike and doesn't buy shrimp chips from his warung even though it's fresh. The actual dance show itself was very interesting also.

Monkeys at the monkey sanctuary weren't as feisty as their reputation puts them. They are well behaved and will only take banana's that you hand them. None of them threw poop at anyone, and the baby monkeys weren't crying. Those little suckers are so cute and we have wayyyyyyy too many pictures of them. Oh, we took one back to the guest house with us as a pet but he ended up not knowing how to "wipe his own ass" so I kicked him out. Damn monkeys!

It would be a sin not to visit the volcanic Mount Batur and Kintamani lake so we hired a driver for the day to take us there. The drive up was very interesting and we stopped at a few different temples. The problem with temples in Bali is that you can buy the exact replica stones at the corner store and build your own. Most homes and shops are built to look identical to the "real" temples. Since you see it all around you (the architectural design of the temples), when you actually visit a temple you aren't as impressed. Did I mention you can buy wooden penis bottle openers at all the temples?

Mount Batur itself was spectacular, the views were amazing, and boy was it windy and cold. We managed to get about 20 minutes worth of beautiful views until the clouds blew in and visibility became zero. You had a hard time seeing 5 feet in front of you so it was quite scary when we were driving back down to town, the driver listens for an oncoming vehicle rather than watching for one. We managed to survive the descend and stopped off at the most picturesque rice paddies on a hillside. The vendors and street hawkers were really pushy but everything was only one dollar. Motorcycle toy=one dollar, penis bottle opener=one dollar, silk sarong=one dollar. What we found out later was that nothing was one dollar, it was there way of getting you to touch the item so you'll have to buy it for $20US. Once you touch the item and it's in your hands, they will not take it back and demand the higher price. Lucky for us we refused to even look at anything and our driver informed us of the "bait and switch" one dollar scam. Who wants a very large wooden penis bottle opener anyways?

After four days of sitting on our butts and swimming way too much, we decided that it was time to get out of town. We booked a driver to Medewi, a small surfing village on the south eastern part of the island. This was perfect since it's really close to Balian River where our large bags were being stored at "Mike from Canada" guest house. Did I mention that I have been traveling though Bali with a small backpack with only 2 shorts, 2 shirts, 1 underwear, an ipod, and my surfboard? Yeah, it's really nice to travel lite except when both shorts are wet, I had to wear the towel as a sarong to the restaurant. I fit right in.

We surfed, ate, and basically sat on our asses for a few days in Medewi. The waves were soft head high waves that was a lot of fun. Windy as hell in the late afternoon so you need to get it early. There were about 15 tourist in the entire town when we were there so everyone kind of hung out and talked at the only restaurant on the beach. Nice and convenient since it was cheap, good food, and right in front of the waves. I surfed, ate, drank more Bintangs, and slept most the time. It was a really rocky beach so Amy didn't surf, she spent here days reading, drawing, eating, and drinking fruit shakes by the gallons. Life was good!

The wind picked up too much for the surf break on the third day so we packed up and headed to Balian River. We caught the local bemo (bus) to Balian which was only 30 minutes away and it cost us $1.50 for the both of us. Amy did punk out the driver who wanted more money by saying "We only paid $1 on the way here last time" and jumped out of the bemo and walked away. The actual "local cost" was $.50 each but they usually charge tourists double to triple the price. Good job Amy!

Balian was nice, we ordered food and I hit the water since the waves were head high and super clean. I figured the food will be ready in 45 min and I'll get out of the water then. I caught a few nice waves that were head high to a few feet overhead. Man I was loving it, my single fin was loose and fun. All of a sudden, the swell everyone was talking about was coming in. It was within 20 minutes that the waves went from fun head high waves to triple overhead bombs. I spent the next 30 minutes sprint paddling over the set waves and tried desperately to get over to the channel. No luck since the current was pulling you right to the peak so I took off on a smaller (double over head) set wave and slid down the face sideways on my board. "Stupid single fin board, all looks and no go" I bitched to myself as I splat on the water. The lip of the wave that drove me down and ragged dolled me for 20 feet was no fun for me, Amy seem to be having a kick watching from the restaurant. She laughed in between bites of her damn burrito every time I had to swim under to avoid wave after wave on the head. I finally manage to get a little ripple wave on the inside and took it all the way in to the beach. I'm buying a real board once we get to Australia!

We didn't stay the night in Balian since the room we wanted was booked for a few days. The people at the restaurant was super nice and like us a lot (we tipped them $10US on our first stay) and arranged for a driver to take us to Sanur. Off we go and as usual, it rained like crazy the whole way there and we had to look for a place to stay in the rain.

Our driver was very nice and drove us from guest house to guest house to find a place we liked and could afford. The rain was really coming down hard and it was already dark, I thought for sure that we would end up having to settle for an overpriced shitty place again. Not this time, the fourth place we looked at was amazing for only $18US a night. It had a nice pool in the garden and our room had huge french doors that led to a big balcony overlooking the pool/garden. We'll take it!

We spent the next few days swimming, eating, and getting Arak drinks (local rice wiskey) at the "Honeymoon Bar" across the street from our hotel. The bartenders were really nice and we seemed to be the only patrons there most the time. We tipped well, got free drinks, heard interesting stories from the bartenders, choose the music we wanted to hear and had a great time. Of all the towns in Bali, Sanur would be one of the most laid back places. The expat call Sanure "Sa-nore" as in snoring since it's boring. We loved it, quiet and peaceful. We walked the beaches and decided "lets get massages just to say we did". This was the first massage I have ever had and lucky for me it was by a husky woman with very strong hands. I was hooked instantly! I had no idea one could fall asleep on a nice bed on the beach, in the shade, while someone is beating the crap out of your muscles. It felt so good that we looked over to each other and decided we'll have to just come back again tomorrow for our $6US hour long massages.

Time to go! What? We finally fell in love with Bali and learned how to relax. It was sad packing up and heading to the airport. In fact, we were so sad that we made our driver wait at the hotel while we walked across the street for a couple of "goodbye" drinks at Honeymoon. A few Arak later we stumbled into our van and headed to the airport. Boy are we gonna miss Bali, the cheap food and accommodations, nice people, surf, and just about everything you ever wanted including very large wooden penis bottle openers! next time we stay for 2 months. Off to Oz.

Pictures

2009-03-02T17:38:00.000-08:00

Pictures from Southeast Asia are finally up: http://www.tripntale.com/me/amy

We'll put them in the blog itself soon!

Island Islands and the Ferry Ride from Hell

2009-03-02T14:55:00.000-08:00

From Kuta Lombok, we were off to the Gilis for some R&R. The Gilis are three very small islands off the coast of Lombok and are a famous spot for super-chilling, diving, and snorkelling. Gili is Indonesian for, you guessed it, island. So when we refer to the Gili Islands we are really saying Island Islands and the Indonesians are probably laughing at us. No motorized vehicles are allowed on the islands, only bicycles and horse carts. This may not sound like a big deal if you haven't been to Indonesia, but not having to constantly dodge cars and worse motorbikes coming from all directions, driving on either side of the road, with usually no sidewalk, was a huge relief. There are also no police, I guess because there is no income from giving tourists traffic tickets.

We hired a driver from the Kuta Lombok mafia to take us out there. It was a stormy day, so we thought it was perfect for travel since we wouldn't want to surf anyway. Obviously all the tropical air had messed with our brains since if you wouldn't want to surf, would you really want to hop in a boat? The drive went fine and we got to see some beautiful scenery and also lots of monkeys. When we arrived at the ferry landing, we were mobbed by a huge crowd of locals trying to sell us all kind of confusing moto rides and expensive boat rides. Luckily we had been prepared by the guidebook - which said that the ferry landing was so unpleasant there were frequent fist fights, and just to ignore everyone and buy a ticket from the ticket office. So we walked right by them all to the ticket office. Except it was boarded up and there was nobody in sight. Panicked, we ran back to our driver and demanded to be taken to the real ferry landing, but some tourists coming from the island informed us this was it, and the ferry was not running. The guidebook failed to mention that the ferry only runs once a day, if at all, during the rainy season! And of course the local mafia there knows that! So we had to get the moto ride to the local harbor, poor Sam struggling with the surfboard, and then pay $30 to get out to the nearest island, Gili Air. This doesn't sound like much but when the ferry is running the cost to charter a boat for the whole day and go wherever you want around all the islands is only $15! However all the locals have a no-compete agreement and wouldn't take us for less. If you try to bargain with a different guy, the first guy follows you and tells the other guy in Indonesian something along the lines of "The price I quoted is $30, so I'll break your kneecaps if you offer less than $35."

Once we agreed to go, a bunch of locals who had clearly been waiting all day hopped into the little fishing boat with us - at least this made us feel that the ride might be surviveable. Why they were using the only boat without outriggers was not clear to us, maybe it was too stormy for outriggers? Anyway we did in fact survive the short ride to the island, though the boat got swamped by every third wave. When we got to the island, we finally caught one of the pony carts, our first and only horsecart ride. Most horsecarts in Indonesia just have to haul supplies, but the poor Gili ponies have to lug fat tourists!

We stayed at Coconut, which has a very pleasant secluded garden, though it costs a little more than some of the places closer to the beach. We got delicious empanadas at the Thai cafe (I know, it makes no sense.) Sam tried to surf the little ankle-to-knee-high waves breaking off the island along with all the locals under 14 years/100 pounds, with only a little luck. Unfortunately it was too stormy for snorkeling but we did take a walk around the island. The crystal blue waters we'd heard of were all a storm tossed uniform gray, but it was kind of fun because the whole place was pretty deserted, especially the stormier north and west shores, and we could pretend we were shipwrecked adventurers on sabbatical.

The next day our friends from B.C. showed up, having gone through exactly the same ferry hell, and Sam and Kyle commiserated over their sore assholes. Except their horsecart driver had hit a tree and nearly broken their surfboards! Anyway we stayed and relaxed for a bit, but the weather did not improve, so we decided to take off for Ubud ahead of our friends as soon as the weather improved enough for the Bali slow ferry to run. Usually the fast ferry is the way to go, but it doesn't seem to run during the rainy season. You can still buy tickets for it though! You just end up taking the slow ferry for double the price - we ran into a bunch of people in this situation. In retrospect we should have flown again. First we had to take a ferry to Lombok, then drive on a bus for hours to the main harbor south of Mataram, then get on the big ferry which was completely overloaded with the huge transport trucks. The trucks were backed up along the road for 3 miles in an impromptu truck driver village, because the ferry had not been running the last few days.

All those stories about Indonesian ferries capsizing? True and believable - we had a calm day but the ferry still rolled like crazy when a swell came up. Luckily it died back down when the rain hit, and the swell actually helped us arrive on Bali in only four hours instead of the usual five. Unfortunately we then had to float around for hours while we awaited our turn at the ferry landing, which was similarly crazy to the Lombok side with a line of trucks. We'd booked all the way to Ubud, so we got in a minivan with a family of tourists with tired young kids, and finally made it to Ubud!

Indo Fantasyland

2009-02-18T02:29:00.000-08:00

After Kuta, we had no idea what to expect of Bali, but Sam was eager to try some surfing in water, not plastic bags. On the advice of some fellow surfers we ran into in Kuta, Kyle and Cassandra, we headed to a spot on the southwest coast of Bali. January and February is the rainy season in Indonesia and somewhat of an off season for surfing, so we were glad for the advice. When we arrived, we found that the artsy restaurant and bungalows nearest the beach had rooms available (apparently a rarity) so we got ourselves by far the artsiest bungalow we've stayed in, with paintings, modern decorations, big tile counters, very clean and nice, for $20 a night. As a bonus it also had the most unique toilet paper holder we've found in Bali, it was your typical monkey god statue with a very large, uh, male member, cheerfully horizontal but modestly hidden by the TP.

We stepped blinking onto our balcony and took a look around. The steps to the beach were just a few yards away. The surf break was directly in front of us, beautiful waves, double overhead on the sets - too big for me! A pleasant and reasonably priced restaurant was right there on our left, with delicious frapuccino-like iced coffee, good pizza, Indonesian food, and even edible Mexican food! (That's a first on this trip.) The owner was a Canadian expat and author of the Lost Guide to Bali/Lombok which was full of good advice, though some of it a bit late (like the watch out for Kuta bit.) The beach was blacksand and completely deserted. A river ran out to the beach on the left, and there was a palm-tree lined headland topped with a temple to either side. The area only had about ten guesthouses, most of the rest of them empty this time of year, and a small town at the top of the hill with a few houses and shops. In other words, a complete Bali-surf-fantasy, the kind of thing we did not think existed anymore. We spent two nights there, Sam got to slide all over the place on his single fin, and I got to read, go for runs and make tracks on the unmarked beach, and do some drawing. Oh yeah, and we both got to eat a lot! Our B.C. friends were there so we also got the scoop on Bali and life in Canada as well. (Summary: both are great, but not in February.)

Unfortunately our room was booked after two nights, but our friends had rented a car and were heading to the airport near Kuta to fly to Lombok, so we figured we might as well tag along. The flight had seats available (only $30) so feeling a little tick-like, we decided to follow our friends a bit more - they had done lots of research and seemed to know what they were doing and where they were going! The flight was, um, well Indonesian airlines are probably blacklisted for a reason, but it wasn't too bad and only took 30 minutes. The worst part was when the captain said something in Indonesian that sounded remarkably like "crash position, please" in English and then immediately put the plane into a nosedive, straight into, oh, the Mataram airport landing strip. Normal descent? Lucky crash landing? Anyway we seemed unscathed so we grabbed our boards and shared a taxi with our friends to, oh no, Kuta. Yeah, there's a Kuta on Lombok too!

Like Kuta Bali, Kuta Lombok is a surftown. That's about where the similarity ends. The town is small and pretty empty of tourists this time of year. There are many beautiful deserted beaches and a long craggy barely populated coastline. There are a few dozen unimpressive guesthouses both on and away from the beach, and a dozen or so restaurants. After some walking around, we found a pretty good deal ($18 for a huge room with a private outdoor bathroom, A/C, and hot water) at a haunted looking hotel with huge parklike grounds. We later found out that it was government-owned; it had probably been previously abandoned for awhile by the past owners when the first version of the Lombok international airport deal fell through. (The new deal is supposed to go through resulting in an international airport next year. Or maybe that's what the real estate mafia tells us, not sure.) Anyway the hotel pool was in good condition and the rooms were clean, which was all that mattered to us.

Now it was time to face the local mafia - i.e. moto and boat rental guys that lurk outside the hotel security gate all day, waiting for us, practically the only tourists in town. Luckily we'd already been warned of the most common scam there: they rent you a moto, but keep the spare key. When you park it on a beach or something to go surfing, they take the extra key and steal the moto and make you pay $1200 for it (the thing is probably only $700 new!) But you have no choice since of course the police are in on it, as well as a dozen or so large locals. FYI: the police in Indonesia are pretty much never on your side and should be avoided at all costs. Even the guidebook recommends running away if they try to pull you over while driving! Apparently running away is not a crime so you are not going to pay any extra and as a bonus you might actually get away. But we talked to a girl who ran away so much that they eventually set up a roadblock and threw the girl and her friends in jail because she couldn't pay the few hundred dollars worth of tickets she had racked up. So she spent the night in jail, bought the guard a few drinks, and he let her go in the morning! Crazy! Anyway the moto-scam. We told our guys that we wanted a guarantee that they would not steal our bikes, and they said ok for at least the immediate area. Outside of this area there are stories of machete attacks, etc, so we figured that was reasonable. We didn't have any problems, but two other people did get charged $1000 each for this scam while we were there, so be careful if you go! Lombok is great but you have to be on your toes while you are there.

The next day we chartered a boat from the same group and headed out to Garupuk, the main surf break there and the only place that was breaking, out on a reef in a nearby bay. This bay featured the typical emerald green and turquoise blue waters, picturesque brightly painted fishing boats, green crags at the entrance to the bay, virgin yellow sands inland on the beaches...yup, pretty standard. The surf was great for a few hours, which was plenty long for us! I mainly got paddling exercise, being a little afraid of the 1 1/2 overhead waves and reef. The sun was intense and even Sam got sunburned to the point of peeling later. This is saying a lot since by this point Sam was already super dark from Laos. I of course did an imititation of a Thai tourist and turned lobster red. But after awhile the wind and rain picked up, and 20 people in helmets with longboards showed up on a boat marked "Sengigi Surf Camp" or some such, so we happily retreated to our hotel pool. Later we got delicious food at the Family Cafe (really the only good place in Kuta Lombok that time of year) - get the chicken sandwiches and Brasilians (cinnamon, coffee, and chocolate smoothees) if you go!

Next day: repeat. In the afternoon we took the bikes and checked out some of the other beaches - no surf but Cassandra and I went for a jog and admired more scenery. The surf break was getting a little crowded though as more and more people figured out that this was the only spot breaking on the whole island, and the wind started picking up. So Sam and I decided to go to the Gili islands, to avoid the Rip Curl Search coming to Kuta Lombok in two days.

Cooties in Kuta

2009-02-18T01:41:00.000-08:00

Bali - time for some beaches! Time for some R&R after some interesting but not very vacation-like travels in Southeast Asia. We had changed our tickets up a bit in order to get out of Thailand, and we decided to skip Singapore - sorry, we're just not city people, and Thailand kind of killed our budget already. We still ended up with Singapore in our passports though because Cathay Air couldn't check our bags through. I guess Cathay did not trust Valuair not to lose our bags (frankly neither did I, with a name like that.)

Our Valuair flight was very, uh, value - ancient seats that don't recline, $5 for a sandwich, etc. Almost like flights at home! It got in late to Bali got in late because of thunderstorms. We'd heard that you are often mobbed in Indonesia by taxi drivers, bracelet and sarong salespeople, etc, but we had to go looking to find even one taxi driver in the downpour. We bartered him down to $10 to get to Kuta, the nearest resort town. This apparently was too much bartering because the taxi dumped us off a block from the wrong end of the wrong street. I hung out with the pimps and hos for a bit while Sam ran around looking for a place to stay. We eventually found one and crashed out at about midnight - for about 10 minutes. Then we heard a huge commotion outside followed by a woman with a Hindi accent shouting for the next 4 hours straight "When you gonna change? You say you gonna change, so when you gonna change? You say you not gonna change? When you gonna change?" (and repeat) I guess she caught her man with one of the hos from my waiting spot. I wanted to shout "shut up and get a divorce" but instead we just had the management knock on their door three times. At dawn she eventually stopped only to start up again at 11am. So Sam heroically ran out and after looking at a zillion places, found us an even nicer hotel for half the price ($15 a night) just down the road - Hotel New Arena is super nice and is very clean and has a really nice pool if you decide to stay in Kuta due to kidnapping, insanity, or some other ailment.

By this point Sam had seen a fair bit of Kuta and was contemplating heading straight back to the airport and getting out of Bali. Only our nice room and hotel pool convinced him to stay. Kuta, Legian, and Seminiyak are three beachfront towns on the south coast of Bali. Kuta has basically assimilated the others, borg-style, and the whole strip is now one massive smelly dirty tourist trap. When one thinks of a "beach" one usually thinks something like rocks or sand (you know like they make glass from) next to water. However Kuta has its own definition: a solid layer of trash and plastic bags, next to a thick layer of trash and plastic bags floating on sewage. Maybe I exaggerate, maybe not, do not find out for yourself! We didn't attempt to swim or surf but the surfers we talked to said the plastic bags do really drag you down.

Inland from the "beach" Kuta consists of a bunch of super-busy roads and a bunch of narrow alleys thickly lined with tee shirt, sunglasses, and trinket shops, as well as the ubiquitous Circle K (I guess Circle K and not 7-11 has the monopoly in Indonesia.) However nobody could possibly shop because walking is a huge strain due to the need to constantly flatten yourself against the nearest wall or awning or other fat tourist (or whatever) to dodge high-speed motorbikes zooming down the shoulder-wide alleys, then run a few steps, and repeat. If I was a shopowner I'd put a bunch of roofing nails down 100 meters up the street every day so that the tourists could actually get enough peace to look at my goods!

Anyway once we got used to it Kuta wasn't so bad - our hotel swimming pool was quite enjoyable - so we spent a few days hanging out and shopping for a surfboard for Sam. We'd also found the cheapest place to eat near our first hotel - $1 nasi goreng, $0.70 gado gado, mmm. Indonesian food, or rather the tourist version of Indonesian food, is quite tasty. Nasi goreng is good old fried rice, usually with a fried egg on top, made delicious with Sam's favorite - "Sambal" sweet chili sauce, like a sweet Siracha sauce. Mie goreng is chow mein. Gado gado is steamed veggies and tofu with peanut sauce. Satay is meat on a stick with peanut sauce. There's also various curries and of course cap cay, which I never really did figure out but seems to be veggies or meat with what appears to be ketchup on them - but maybe I didn't find a very good place to order it. For the adventurous, you can also try babi guleng, roast pork served with a side of fried pork skin (often with the hair still on it), roast pork skin, blood sausage, and some stuff we couldn't identify, plus chili sauce. The roast pork is delicious hot but usually this stuff is cooked sometime last week and served cold - or rather luke warm, depending on ambient temperature.

Shortly before Sam finally found the most impractical board possibly for Bali's surf, a sweet little single fin, we ran into Kyle and Kassandra from B.C. Canada, some fellow surfers who gave us advice on where to go next, a semi-secret surf spot on the southwest coast. Glad for the advice, we hightailed it out of Kuta straightaway!

Double Big Mac, Super Sized

2009-02-10T00:04:00.000-08:00

With Bangkok International Airport now open, there were plenty of sleeper seats on the midnight ghost from Laos into Thailand. We first went up to the restaurant car and partied in style, where we kept our seats until closing by giving one of the staff shots of our whiskey all night. Then we crashed out in our comfy bunks and arrived in Khaosan road bright eyed and bushy tailed, ok only a little bleery, and just in time for Chinese New Year. Oops, as in, everything is booked! It took some walking around but we did eventually find a place. Our first priority taken care of, we went straight to, you guessed it, those sweet, sweet golden arches. I got a double cheeseburger which went down smooth, but Sam foolishly got himself a double big mac (do they even have that at home?) with four burger patties, which he regretted soon enough. Ah, the joys of being back in the land of tourists after so much time at the village in Laos. I have to say, I haven't been sick since that meal. Either it was the ultimate cure, or the ultimate poison compared to everything we've eaten since.

We didn't have a lot of time before our flight to Bali, so we booked a trip to Koh Chang, one of the nearer Thai islands, famous as a backpacker destination, where Sam had stayed in a shanty beach bungalow just over two years ago for $3 a night. When we arrived fairly late in the day, we were surprised by the change since the tsunami - the whole strip had been coated in a tidal wave of fancy resorts! Even the shanty beach bungalows were now fancy, upscale looking beach bungalows, beachfront for $120/night, shanty bungalow a few meters from the landfill for $40/night, book well in advance!

BIG WARNING TO EVERYONE WHO READS THIS: THAILAND'S ISLANDS ARE NO LONGER BACKPACKER DESTINATIONS!

The ironic thing was we went to Koh Chang because everyone told us it was the best island left, and to avoid Koh Phi Phi, Phuket, and Koh Samui at all costs because they were so built up! Oh well on the plus side we now had a 7-11 every 50 meters on Koh Chang, so we would never get too thirsty! Sure, you can probably try some of the lesser known islands, and if you're willing to commute to the beach by moto you can still stay for very cheap. But for Americans, I think Hawaii or Mexico are now a better bet, with cheaper airfare, similar priced accomodation and food, and better beaches too. If you want to see southeast Asia, and don't mind riverfront instead of oceanfront, Laos and Cambodia are quite nice! Northern Thailand (Chang Rai, Chang Mai) is also super cool. Bali is still a good bet and pretty cheap, with clean beaches, at least outside of the biggest resorts, but more on that soon.

Anyway sorry for the negative spin, just thought we'd warn you. Sam talked to the local workers in Koh Chang and here's what happened: after the tsunami, big international companies came in and bought all the beachfront property. They then built a bunch of big hotels, which were completed and opened only six months ago. Some hotels are still going up. Surprisingly, rooms were still mostly full despite the higher prices and the airport situation a few months ago. But everyone we talked with who had been frequent visitors to Thailand in the past vowed never to return.

We hung out at Koh Chang for a few days. By staying across the street from the beach we managed to find the fanciest room we've stayed in for the whole trip, in a brand new hotel, for not too much money (though Sam had to use his good looks and boyish charm to extract the price from the receptionist girl, while I stayed discretely away.) The beach was ok, though not super clean. I guess they built big hotels but didn't think too much about sewage treatment, or maybe it was the landfill they were digging up polluting the ocean, or both. I highly recommend renting a moto and cruising all around the island at top speed, as in, pushing it up the steepest hills and cursing all the way, then nursing the burning brakes on the way down in first gear. Oh well, safety first! We also checked out one of the waterfalls there, it was pretty small but the water was refreshing. All in all I guess the highlight of Koh Chang was this delicious place where you could get a whole baked chicken for $5, we ate that every night with 7-11 bread - delicious! Everywhere else was $10 a plate for a few prawns. FYI: there's nothing like a trip to Laos to turn you into a super cheapskate! Or to make you appreciate a chicken with actual meat on its bones!

Another highlight of Koh Chang was the snorkeling trip we took. Ok, it was kind of a small boat, packed with tourists, and the snorkeling spots were small. And though they explicitly promised that fins were included they wanted to charge extra for them! But it was all made worthwhile when a boat 10 times more crowded appeared, absolutely packed with Thai tourists in identical swimsuits and lifejackets. They totally entertained us with their beach antics!

Then it was back to Khaosan, for more McDonalds, naturally, and also stocking up on the world's best tee shirts for travel, as in, hand washing and wringing. (You know, all those 7 Up and Elmo shirts Sam wears everyday like a uniform.) Decked out in style, we then spent one day checking out the huge mall, MBK, once the world's third largest, though probably not anymore. It is actually worth seeing! There's an entire floor of cell phone shops, hundreds and hundreds of them! The tricky part is finding the shop you liked again once you leave it, particularly if you already paid for something and are trying to pick it up! Also the Chinese New Year dragon dancers in the mall were pretty cool, though for some reason they did not have elephants with them like the ones back at Khaosan.

Another fun activity in Bangkok was catching the river taxi down to Chinatown. Actually, it was more like a river local bus - packed to the roof, and leaves regardless of the lady with the stroller trying to get on, with one leg on the boat and one on the dock....In Chinatown everything was closed for Chinese New Year, oops again, but Sam managed to pick up a cheap guitar to occupy spare time on those Balinese beaches.

Soon enough our time was up! At BKK we had to have BK, of course, and also for a change from Mickey D's. Then it was off to Bali!

The Last of Laos

2009-01-19T23:11:00.000-08:00

In Phnom Penh, we debated the following choice:
1) Wait in our shanty bungalow on the lake for three days for Lao visas. This wouldn't be too bad except for the Coldplay at a gazillion decibels until 3am and also the whole complex shakes whenever the other residents (outnumbered 3 to 1 by the pimps and hookers) walk by. Then take three 12 hour bus rides up to Vientiane and hope that only one of the buses breaks down.
2) $400 and 60 minutes later be in Vientiane, courtesy Vietnam Air.

1) would probably have cost us nearly as much due to hotel costs, bus ticket costs, and the necessity of procuring some of the local offerrings to get through it, and I don't mean the girls or ladyboys. Not being broke yet, we chose 2). Phnom Penh airport was very nice and Vietnam Air treated us like VIPs, even feeding us lunch despite the flight being only 60 minutes! I only wished the flight could last longer. Naturally we ate the lunch, despite the two Dairy Queen blizzards, lasagna, and chili cheese dog we'd already consumed at the airport. Mmm, DQ.

This left us with a pleasant week's R&R at Grandma's to hang out with the family and, also very important, do laundry. They did a ceremony for us similar to the one at Nambok and we bought a pig to BBQ. This seemed like a great idea (save money, feed everyone) until Sam's cousin showed up with the live screaming pig in his arms! I plugged in my headphones and ran upstairs but that pig was loud!

It was sad to say goodbye to all the family but we tore ourselves away so we could have a little time in Thailand. But not without many fond memories of Laos. Here are some of the things that I think will stick in our minds:

1. Sticky rice, naturally. Which is not only stuck in our minds but also stuck elsewhere...final goodbyes to the sticky rice may not be for months!

2. The cute little thatched houses on stilts, dwarfed by a giant old fashioned TV satellite dish attached to the side. Due to road dust and rust, the color coordination between the two is astonishing.

3. The myriad forms of animal transportation. In particular, the water buffalo in the tiny mini pickup trucks, and the goat all alone on the open roof of a full size bus.

4. Baby animals! Everywhere! Puppies, baby goats as cute as puppies, kittens, chicks, calves, baby water buffalo. I'm not entirely sure how we managed to drag ourselves away without at least one of each stuffed in our backpacks (well maybe not the buffalo.)

5. Local buses. Our final bus trip was a fitting goodbye i.e. packed like parasites in the belly of a bat out of hell. By this point I didn't even care and fought the lady next to me valiantly for my 3 inches of seat. However due to the 2 ladies already next to her on the 2.5 foot wide seat, I didn't have a lot of success.

6. Village life. The slow lazy pace, strolling next door for shampoos, shopping, etc. We'll never forget the time everyone was sitting around outside the house and, as happens many times a day, a cow walked by along the road. All of a sudden Sam's cousin jumps up: "That's my cow!
and takes off running.

7. Village food. 70 cents pho, 20 cents coffee, and all the great meals with the family, all sitting around sharing sticky rice with sticky rice, also tasty veggies, soups, bbq baby animals, ok just kidding, usually we bbq the grown-ups.

8. Our bicycles. Renting the local bikes is not the same! We'll miss our Gary Fishers but left them locked up at Grandma's to ride around there in future trips.

9. The crazy caffienated roosters crowing at all times of the night and day. The worst is when one starts, all the others start, then the dogs start barking. Or vice versa. Our attempt to find and eat the ringleader rooster unfortunately failed and he is still out there. Somewhere....

10. Family. Aunties, uncles, cousins, grandma, in-laws, 2nd cousins twice removed, next door neighbors that are fourth cousins 3 times removed somehow....We'll miss everyone a lot!

Off we go to Thailand on the Midnight Ghost (Cold as hell AC sleeper train from Nongkhai to Bangkok). See you all on the beaches of southern Thailand!

Siem Reap and more old rocks

2009-01-19T22:55:00.000-08:00

The only thing we wanted to do in Cambodia was to visit these old rock piles from a long time ago. We really couldn't figure out how old the rocks were but had a nice rough estimate on when it was piled together by these old people. They did a wonderful job considering the rocks were old and mostly square so it must have been tough to roll them. My favorite pile was this one that had a lot of square rocks on top of each other and trees and stuff growing from and around it. It is so interesting that these old people from a long time ago actually went rock hunting and found these square rocks. How and where did they find so many old rocks that were almost the same size and shape will always remain a mystery to me.

Ankor is one of the most fascinating places I have ever been. I wasn't too excited about seeing the ruins but went along to keep Amy company. Once we arrived at the "Ticket Booth" on our rented bikes I moaned about the $80US for our 3 day pass. Who wants to spend 3 days looking at old rocks that were once piled together? When we arrived at Ankor Wat itself I was overwhelmed by how spectacular it was. WOW! The details on almost every stone and how magnificient the buildings were. Everything was so elaborate it gave me chills to think about how life there must have been back then. We walked around and looked at every building stone by stone. The stories that each wall told was carved with so much detail that we figured out which story was which without having a guide or book to follow. I'll let our pictures do all the explaining since I cant begin to write about all the splendors. I did really enjoy the hammock outside of the 5 star bathrooms they had at Ankor Wat. We tried to rent out a stall for the night since it was much nicer and cleaner than any guesthouse we have been to in all of SE Asia. The police officer showing off his new stun gun made me think twice at first but after he listened to som Bob Marley on my iPod, we became good buddies. I was offered a free hour nap on the Hammock.

We spent the second day in bed since we both felt sick. The entire time we couldnt stop thinking about all the other cities and ruins at Ankor that we could be running around at. Well, at least our pass is good for another day. Time to rest.

We both felt fairly sick on the third day but it was our final day to see the ruins. Bike rental it is again since a tuk tuk will cost us $12US for the entire day compared to $4US. The ride wasnt as pleasant today since it felt hotter and we were still sick. We made it to Ta Prom, the city that wasnt rebuilt and it's ruins being taken over by giant trees. It was an amazing place but I kept getting this feeling that I was at Disneyland waiting in line for a rollercoaster ride. Maybe the thousands of tourists that just got off the 50 buses parked outside, pushing their way past us ruined the mood. We both had enough for the day and headed back into town with the promise of returing during the rainy season when no one else wants to visit.

Siem Reap itself was a nice town despite being very touristy. The trick was to just give a polite apologetic "No, thank you" to all the tuk tuk drivers, tour guides, trinket salesman, etc that constantly surround you. We learned that this was more effective than a rude "No!" Cambodia took some getting used to but was not so different from Laos, or, as they say all over Southeast Asia, "Same same, but different."

Same same: the agressive tuk tuk drivers. Different: Instead of being 3 wheelers, the tuk tuks were actually regular motorcycles pulling a kind of two wheeled chariot. It makes you feel very royal!

Same same: women wearing sarongs. Different: women wearing full-on pajama suits. I have no idea what this fashion is about, if you know, please tell me.

Same same: plenty of Western food and tourist services. Different: everyone speaks very good English! The average beggar kid on the street speaks better English than the most expensive Lao tour guide! We weren't sure if this was due to the more outgoing Cambodian personality, or the fact that all the TV is American TV in English, rather than American TV dubbed in Thai. Particularly endearing to me is their habit of saying "like" every third word.

Same same: poverty. Different: More poverty, and lots and lots of amputee landmine victims. It is a terrible problem. One organization sponsors landmine bands where the victims learn a musical instrument and make money from donations and CD sales.

Same same: tonal language. Different: Instead of the rising tones, high tones, mid tones, etc of Lao, in Cambodia the tones appear to be !, !!, !!!, and !!!! We could never tell when couples were arguing and when they were exchanging tender love poems.

Same same: inflated currency - 4000 riel to the dollar. Different: For anything over 4000 riel, they use US dollars. ATMs only give US dollars.

Anyway, the next day we headed to Pnom Penh by bus. Not too bad of a ride, only 6 hours. We planned on staying one night in the city before hopping on another bus for 3 days back to Laos. Guess what, no Visa on arrival in southern Laos. Luckily we looked into this at Pnom Penh instead of heading up to the border to be denied access. Our options are to stay in Pnom Penh at the rat infested lakeside guesthouse for 3 days to get Visa's done or.....fly to Laos. We both decided that we were over 3 day bus rides and coughed up the $400US of our plane tickets. Off we went for a little shopping at the Russian market (no Russians in evidence but lots of cheap black market Western brands) and then the airport!

Southern Laos - Take Two

2009-01-10T04:40:00.000-08:00

After some time recovering and resting at Grandma's from our little bicycle odyssey, I was able to keep down food most of the time, and getting restless staying at the house. Plus I'd thrown up all 7 of the 7 total Lao dishes already and so nothing really appealed to me to eat there - I was ready for some tourist-town pizza and Indian food. So we caught a ride with Ehp who was heading south at 2am to Thakek. We assumed this would be better than the bus, but in fact found that there are worse things than the bus - such as freezing in the back of a pickup for 7 hours. At least we got to look at the stars, and Sam's rendition of "Somewhere Out There" (or whatever the American Tale song is called) was excellently done in an authentic Feivel voice.

When we got to Thakek we found that there wasn't much to do or see there, so we went to the bus station to catch the 11:30am bus to Paxse, and waited, and waited. The only entertainment was a poor goat tied to the roof of an actual full size bus! The poor goat, stuck in the hot sun. At least someone climbed up to give it water, which it refused to drink. Anyway our bus did eventually did leave at about 3pm. It was a local bus so it stopped every 5 minutes to offload people, livestock, cement, etc, and didn't get to Paxse until late, causing all the poor locals to miss their connections and have to beg for a place to stay. We'd been up for 36 hours and were just happy to crash out at a town with a tourist area, meaning internet and pizza (which I devoured and promptly threw up.)

We rested for a day in Paxse. Swearing off local buses, we went to a tour agency and booked a minibus to Champasok, near Wat Phou, the only Khmer ruin in Laos. We stayed a day there and rode rented bicycles (sad after our nice mountain bikes) up to the temple, which we toured in great detail, because really it is not very big at all, though fun all the same. It was hot so we didn't stage any kung fu fights on the crazy temple steps. Next time. If you are going, my advice is to rent a scooter and do this as a daytrip from Paxse, because Champasok is a very small, sleepy town. By sleepy, I mean every shopowner and restaurant owner is asleep and has to be dragged grumpily out of their bed or hammock to help you. Well, most of them. There is a restaurant at every house but we discovered once you order that the owners of the restaurants all run over to the same kitchen nearby and order you food, then bring it back a few hours later at a premium price. Luckily we met only the second American couple we'd ever seen in Laos and had a fun time comparing notes with them while we waited.

Next we booked another VIP minibus to the 4000 Islands, an area in southern Laos where the Mekong divides and creates an area with about 20 islands, 2000 rocks, and 1080 trees sticking up from the river. We ended up having to throw our bags on a big bus and take a minibus, since the other minibus had broken down. Arriving at the ferry crossing to Dondet island, we waited for the bags. And waited, and waited, and thought about all the things that we really really needed and couldn't possibly replace in those bags. Eventually we found out that the bus had broken down as well and our bags showed up in another bus. So we finally got to catch the ferry to the island. The ferry was actually a rickety longboat powered by, I swear to you, a weedwhacker.

Dondet island was super cool, a lazy laid back place on the river lined with bungalows and riverfront restaurants where we immediately parked ourselves and ordered ourselves some french fries and fruit shakes. Later we got beers at the Monkey Bar where a crazy drunk wouldn't leave us alone - eventually we discovered he was the bar owner, but not until his children forcibly carried him away.

The next day we did the kayak tour with some friends from the broken down bus. The tour was great, but we forgot our cardinal rule - always inspect the equipment before paying! It turned out one of the kayaks was actually an inflatable - very difficult to steer and paddle. We soon found out why the tour was expensive and why they don't let you tour by yourself - locals have to carry the kayaks past the first falls, actually a section where the river splits into a series of small falls. It has not been whitewater rafted yet, at least not successfully, and we were not going to try it in our inflatable! After the falls we got to try the rapids (probably barely class 2) after which we cleverly got our friends to trade for the "fun" kayak. We had lunch on the Cambodian side of the river at the Irrawaddy river dolphin-watching spot. After the gibbons, we didn't expect much because we'd heard people often did not see any dolphins. But the dolphins were feeling organized and were in their assigned positions that day - we got to paddle out and watch them for about an hour quite close up. However they totally failed to do any backflips, oh well. We paddled back over to Laos where a truck drove us to the second waterfall, apparently the largest falls in Laos by volume, where a huge section of the Mekong dumps off a big shelf. We'd heard it was pretty lame but in the dry season it was pretty spectacular - probably about a 40 foot drop and a huge amount of water, glowing in the setting sun. Yeah yeah, pics soon, when we get fast internet i.e. leave Southeast Asia.

The next day we booked another VIP bus to Siem Reap in Cambodia - a 2 day journey. The border crossing exit point was a total cliche - just a tiny shack with a little tollgate style pole on a string. Then a short walk and repeat for immigration, and change buses. After about an hour, take a wild guess what happened next - the bus broke down. Apparently even VIP buses in southern Laos and Cambodia only have about a 33% chance of arrival. Luckily the operators have cell phones and the buses break down so much that they send another bus pretty fast. We did an overnight in Kampong Cham, where surprisingly the bus operator got us all a good hotel without cheating us much ($5 a night for a good clean room.) The next day we had to change buses a few times again but made it with no further trouble to Siem Reap.

2 Days on 2 Wheels

2009-01-10T04:02:00.000-08:00

All over Laos we kept meeting people touring the country by bicycle, most of them over age 50, so being sick of the buses we thought we'd give it a try. After all, if they could do it, couldn't we? Oh famous last words...anyway we figured if the roads sucked we'd get Sam's cousin Ehp who does deliveries in southern Laos to pick up the bikes. So we set out early from Grandma's house shortly after Christmas, with the entirely family laughing at us and shaking their heads in amazement at the stupid things falang do.

It started out well; we decided to ride the back way from Ponhong to avoid Vientiane. The air was cool, the farm roads were shady and had little traffic. A convenient nam rice roll shop awaited us for breakfast an hour away. A nice little ferry waited at the river crossing, and they didn't even overload it with motorbikes. After a few hours riding, we came to the road that would be the main stretch for the day (60 kilometers) and discovered that the thinner red line on the map did not actually mean road but instead was marked "unpaved track, condition unkown." Yeah, always read the map legend before you go. Actually it wasn't too bad of a dirt road, a little rough, but it was pretty dusty and the dirt was very loose and it was getting hotter by the minute.

Around noon we came to an intersection that wasn't on the map. Asking the way to the next town on the map from a roadside stand, the helpful lady told us to take the new road and it was close by - a perfect lunch stop, we thought. It was dirt also, but well packed, so we were happy to take the new road. 10k or so later, hmm, the road construction crew. Wow, it really was a new road. We asked them which way to the next town, and they sounded a bit confused, as did the next few people we passed. Eventually we were sent down a small trail that ended up in a confusing maze of single track cow paths through thick woods by the river. Thrilling as this would have been on our brand new Gary Fishers, we had our heavy bags and the hummingbird size mosquitoes were eating like they hadn't seen fresh meat in days, which they probably hadn't. After getting scary lost for awhile, we ended up backtracking - all the way to the original helpful lady, where we discovered that a) the "next town" on the map wasn't actually on the way to our destination and b) it wasn't actually a town but some kind of ethnotourist village or tweaker resort or vampire enclave or who knows what. The map legend didn't explain what "star" meant, maybe it meant "avoid this spot at all costs" or "beware, mosquitoes."

Well, that's the way it goes when you go the back way. Nine hours after leaving we made it to highway 13 and found the usual brand new guesthouse where half the rooms were still being built. We half expected the staff to run away screaming the Laotian equivalent of "aaah, bigfoot!" but fortunately they recognized us as some kind of crazy falangs under the thick layer of dust and dirt caking us, and even let us use the brand new hotel room with brand new sheets and towels (we showered for an hour each first.) Despite being apparently in the middle of nowhere there was a hotpot restaurant next door which revitalized us a lot.

The next day started off easy - paved roads, cool air. The traffic was not too heavy though it was scary whenever a bus would pass a big truck coming at us and force us off the road. The road was a steady uphill grade but manageable until afternoon when as the road started to turn towards the Mekhong, a strong headwind came up. And it got hot. And I got sick - as in throwing up everything including water. We'd already made it about 60 k and all we could think of was making it the last 20 k to the next town, Paxsan, because all the 2-ways that passed were bizarrely packed with furniture on the roof (must have been National Moving Day or something.) Poor Sam eventually had to take my bag and helpfully push me up the steeper sections. Less helpfully he sang "Eye of the Tiger" for me until I was ready to kill him. I frequently stopped to puke my guts out so it took hours but we did make it before dark.

At the guest house in Paxsan we discovered that the uphill continued for the next 250 k but the wind got stronger as the road turned south. Also that touring that section of road was probably about as appealing as touring I-5 in Central California in terms of tourist attractions to see. Also that tomorrow was New Year's Eve and we should absolutely under no condition attempt to bicycle on the road for the next two days because of drunken drivers. We struggled with the idea of Grandma laughing her ass off at us when we returned the next day, but eventually gave in since I still couldn't keep down water.

So we headed back to Grandma's for New Years where they did in fact laugh their asses off at us. But at least we survived the drunken drivers.

Happy Holidays from Napho

2009-01-04T04:19:00.000-08:00

We spent Christmas with the Sam's Grandma and the family in Napho. Being Buddhist, they don't actually celebrate Christmas, but we celebrated by inviting everyone over, buying tons of the fresh spring rolls (about 10 cents apiece), river clams, and buying me a shampoo and shoulder massage for about 50 cents. The lady used to be a professional hairdresser in the city but moved back to the country when she inherited her parents' house and farm, and just does hair now and then for fun. I guess she must like the bit where she gets to smack people on the forehead with hammers. But really it felt good, I swear.

We also took the bikes out to hang out at the farm and get some peace and quiet, and ride around the greater Ponhong area, which we discovered offers more than we thought - a driving range *and* a discoteque! Who knew?

A bit about the village of Napho: it is pretty small, maybe a few thousand people. It is on a road that runs between the main road and a network of roads near the reservoir. The most desired real estate is directly on the road because then the women of the house can open a business in the front of the house. Secluded, quiet houses out near the farms are considered highly undesirable and are only for the very rich or the poor. The business opened out of the house is usually a soup shop, (as in, what shall we eat, oh joy, another soup shop), cafe, barbershop, gas station, or a mini-mart. The mini-marts sell a few clothes, packaged foods, toiletries and other necessities. Grandma's house has a gas station. Basically uncle drives out to the main road gas station and buys a few gallons at a time, which they sell to motorbikes and tok toks for a little more than the prices on the main road. It's a cush job that mostly involves napping in front of the house, but hey, somebody's gotta stay and watch Grandma! If you can't afford a house on the main road, then if you are enterprising and willing to work your ass off, you can go into the steamed fertilized egg or mauna pua bun business, which involves walking (if you are unlucky) or riding a motorbike all around the entire area all day with big heavy steamers on poles, selling eggs or buns.

The homes vary from the woven thatch homes on stilts at the poorer end, to stucco with red tile roofs on the rich end. Grandma's house is somewhat in the middle and is a common variety - a brick bottom floor, with the brick faced with stucco and painted. Rebar enforced concrete pillars support a wooden top floor made out of some of the excellent and strong Lao hardwoods. The roof is metal. The front room downstairs is large and tiled (a sign of prosperity) and there is a kitchen in back. The toilet and shower/dish area are in stalls in the kitchen area. They don't have gas or powerful electricity so they cook using a kind of charcoal briquette made from wood. The bedrooms are upstairs, but we are working on extending the house closer to the street so that we can add two bedrooms downstairs so that Grandma doesn't have to climb the stairs every day and the uncle and aunt who live there can have a bedroom near Grandma. It's funny - no permits or nothing, we just started sledgehammering down the front wall and went from there!

On gender: Women, as far as I can tell, have basically the same rights as men, but cannot become monks because in the Lao version of buddhism, women have to be reborn as men before reaching Nirvana. At least that's the guidebook explanation. Naturally I think this is dumb. There is a less common type of female nun though that wears white instead of orange, following a different branch of buddhism. As in "fine, I'll get my own religion" which is what I would do!

There is some division of labor. Women tend to run the shops and businesses and keep house while the men farm, unless the family cannot afford a house in town, in which case everyone farms. I imagine everyone chips in during busier harvesting or planting seasons too. It was kind of funny, when buying a bicycle, the men were the salespeople and bicycle mechanics, but the women set the price and did the numbers, and we had to wait for the wife to return to actually negotiate the price and buy the bikes. At night, the women cook, and the men helpfully consume the alcohol and food.

Women also take whatever extra food they have to sell at the town outdoor market in the evening. Here (well in winter) you can get veggies such as green onions, green leaf lettuce, cabbage, cilantro, mint, basil, and bok-choy like things. You can buy pork, and sometimes beef, tendon, or water buffalo. The fruits in winter are papaya, coconuts, mandarins, tangerines, papayas, and mangos. They prefer the green mango and papaya eaten with chili sauce and are amazed when we actually show desire to eat the ripe ones. You can also get imported apples and pears.

As far as food goes, only two words are really needed: "sticky rice." Every family grows its own, as well as the regular boiled rice, and eats it all year. Last year the crop failed somewhat due to the rains, so Laos has its own real estate crash right now due to families who got out loans against their homes and land to buy nice new Toyota Hilux trucks, and now can't pay the bills.At least there are lots of Hilux trucks now!

When eating at home, everyone sits on the floor around a woven platter holding the various dishes - everyone shares, eating out of the same dish. Sticky rice is eaten with the hands and is used to dip or pick up the food in the dishes, a skill I have entirely failed to acquire so they always bring me a fork and spoon!

The pho rice noodle soup is usually eaten for breakfast (when it's cool enough outside to eat it) and comes in many varieties: chewy thick noodle, regular noodle, glass noodle, with beef and patay or meatballs or fishballs or dried octopus, or with a kind of pork chili. It comes with cilantro, lime, basil, and sprouts, and often lettuce and green beans. You actually are supposed to eat the lettuce cooked in the soup, which made us gag at first but you get used to it. Most people just eat leftovers with sticy rice for breakfast though.

For the other meals, more sticky rice with sticky rice, also all kinds of delicious chili, garlic, peanut, scallion, sugar, and/or fish sauce dippy sauces. To go with the sticky rice there is usually steamed vegetables or green papaya salad with insane spicy chili sauce that makes even Sam drip sweat. Sam calls the green mangoes and green papaya salad McDooDoo's. They are delicious though! Meat is a luxury and also the main source of fat since they don't have dairy or cook with much oil, so the fatty meat is prized. Definitely a formula for weight loss for me!

If you're looking for variety, you can also get eggs, buns, vegetarian spring rolls, fried spring rolls with pork, and rice noodle "nam" which is basically the thick rice noodle sheets wrapped around a little ground mushroom and pork. Also the mint and minced meat salad (say it 3 times fast) which they call "laab." In some places you can get bread and the Vietnamese style sandwiches with chicken curry or bbq pork or pork patay. Or you can get sticky rice for a change. Did I mention there's lots of sticky rice?

Families in Laos tend to be pretty big, with many children and strong family ties. The health care is better than it was in the past when the majority of the children would not make it to age 5, but still very basic. Many of the children typically start businesses or, if the family can afford it, go to the city for college and jobs. Typically it is the younger kids (boys or girls) that get sent to college, because the family has more time to save for it. One or two kids stay to be farmers. Most families boast a primary/high school-teacher or two also - grandma's family has three. And just like in the states, they make horrible pay, about the same as a day laborer.

Homosexuality and transgenderism, that is, ladyboys and toms, are pretty well-tolerated, and hate crimes would be unheard of, though there is teasing. Parents aren't usually too disappointed because there will never be a shortage of grandchildren! Plus there is a stereotype (not unlike at home) that ladyboys will be successful hairdressers, businesspeople, etc. However you can't make assumptions here: it is quite normal for friends (two girls or two guys) to hold hands, hug, or touch as a sign of frienship, where as it is frowned upon for a couple to touch physically in public. It is also frowned upon to wear clothes that show your thighs or shoulders except on the farm or around the family, though less so as the younger generation grows up. The women still like to wear the traditional wrap skirt ("sin") a lot though. I guess given the lack of bathrooms and rest stops on the road, it makes practical sense! Everyone just files out of the bus, lines up along the road, turns their back, and goes! Then when the bus has to wait for me as I claw my way out of the brambles, and they see why the bus was waiting, they all groan "oh, falang." (Falang is like gringo or haoli.)

The roads: The roads vary from rough dirt roads to highways. The highways are basically two lane roads that are actually wide enough for two cars. Due to the floods last year, they may frequently turn to rough dirt roads. The highways may have a line painted in the middle, or not. The line is meaningless anyway as passing is always allowed, though if you can't see far enough to pass safely, you should always honk your horn to warn oncoming traffic before going ahead and passing anyway. It is ok to pass another vehicle while it is passing a 3rd or 4th vehicle if there's room, though you should honk in this case as well. The horn is probably the most important part of the vehicle, used to signal "hey I'm coming!" If the headlights go out oh well, if it's burning oil whatever, but if your horn goes out you are screwed!

So anyway I don't think there are any actual traffic laws and certainly no driver's license is required for a car or motorbike. There's no speed limit either, though the potholes in the road work pretty well as speed bumps. When it comes to right of way, the rules are simple: the bigger thing wins. A passing car, truck, or bus has the right of way over an oncoming motorbike or bicycle which should get off the road in this case - fast. A pedestrian never, ever has the right of way - not in a marked crosswalk, not in an intersection with a green light, not when walking on the main road and a car is pulling out of a driveway or parking spot, never. When a side road joins the main road, vehicles turning left should yield, but when turning right, the person pulling onto the road has the right of way, and other vehicles should move left to make room for them. When a bicycle or motorbike or jumbo turns left, they typically cross the road when safe, drive slowly on the wrong side around the corner, and then cross over again when safe.

As far as drunk driving goes, not a lot is done to prevent it, and the roads are dangerous at night, not only because of drunk drivers but because of vehicles without lights and cars parked on the road for bathroom breaks, throwing up alcohol, or whatever. During New Year's, the drinking starts at about noon on New Year's Eve and goes until January 2nd, all while driving from party to party. Also everyone comes in from the city to visit family in the country. According to the news, over 100 died in Ponhong and over 400 in Vientiane on New Year's eve alone. So, not a very happy New Year's for 2009!

For our New Years, we stayed at Grandma's the whole time for New Years and hung out with the family, except for a few brave souls who went to pick up Sam's mom and uncle from the Vientiane on the evening of the New Year's Day. They made it safely. Grandma had been complaining about the crummy sausages we kept buying so we challenged them to a cookoff and celebrated New Year's with delicious lemon-grass and chili pork sausages. Then we caught a ride with Sam's cousin Ehp (right, pronounced "Ape") down south, more on that soon! However between Christmas and New Year's we first attempted to head south by bike, we'll tell you all about that next.

Back to Nambok by Bicycle

2009-01-04T04:15:00.001-08:00

From Luang Prabang, visiting Sam's uncle again in Nambok was a perfect test ride for our new bicycles because a) the road was crummy enough to justify the nice bikes we had bought and b) the bus ride was so dang unpleasant a bicycle trip could hardly be worse. (For those who haven't memorized every posting, it was by a 2-way, which is the covered back of a pickup truck with bench seats, and was packed with people and freezing cold.) Plus, we knew we couldn't make the whole trip in a day so we didn't have to push ourselves: we could just throw our bikes on the 2-way when we got tired. The only drawback (and becoming the theme of our trip) was I was once again sick and had to run into the bushes after every uphill push! Oh well at least we got to stop a lot and look at the scenery.

The scenery up there is quite beautiful - steep sided limestone karsts and mountains, trees, rice fields, and small rivers with wooden boats being poled through the calm waters. The roadside also provided some entertainment, including more of the tok tok (tractor motor) cars travelling at 5 mph, 2-ways containing goats, 2-ways containing water buffalo - well one buffalo per 2-way, and that was enough to cause the tires to nearly rub the frame! Also live and dead wildlife for sale, including ocelot-like wildcats and some kind of chinchilla-like groundhog. We saw an unhappy goat being tied up and weighed on a grocery-store size scale...all very pastoral!

We rode for about 4 hours and 50 k (there was a lot of up and down hill, and the, umm, stops) and then eventually hailed a 2-way to Nambok. We arrived at uncle's icicles as usual, but they were kind enough to start a fire and heat us water. They were very happy to see us again and fed us plenty of sticky rice. FYI: you don't need immodium in Laos, sticky rice works better. In fact it works too well!

We spent the next day around Nambok and rode the bikes down to Sam's cousin's house who runs a mechanic shop at the rode split a few kilometers away. They were having a ceremony for a family member who was also getting over stomache trouble (they're not immune either!) It was funny how after drinking all night and eating a big meal, they quite competently got out their welding gear and went right outside to work on a huge bus that arrived late at night with a broken wheel.

We had our own ceremony the next day in Nambok. The ceremony they do is a standard celebration for many occasions - weddings, leaving on travels, getting over sickness, etc. They create a banana leaf origami centerpiece and tie white strings to it and arrange small money and food around it (usually a freshly killed and cooked chicken, sticky rice, and various packaged treats.) Everyone holds a string and someone leads a prayer, then there is another prayer while the recipient(s) of the ceremony hold some food and drink some rice whisky. The whisky and food grease is also rubbed on the head, for hair gel I guess because my hair was a mess, also the head is a sacred part of the body so maybe there is some ceremonial purpose. Maybe not though. Then everyone takes a string and ties it around the wrist of the recipient(s) of the ceremony while speaking well-wishes to them. All people are supposed to be composed of many spirits which may wander, and the idea is to gather the spirits back to the person using the string. Finally, everyone eats the food and the recipients keep the lucky money.

From the road split, we went to visit another of Sam's cousins down the road and saw pictures of part of the family which lives in New Zealand (sweet, hopefully we can stay with them later!) Then the trip took a very bizarre turn, i.e. we had good luck with a bus! In trying to hail a 2-way, we instead caught a guy with a minivan and no bus permit poaching passengers. We got him to drive us all the way back to our hotel, pick up our big bags, and take us to the Luang Prabang southern bus station where we caught the overnight "express" to Vientiane. We were impressed that it even had assigned seats and everything, but a few kilometers outside of town, out came the stools in the aisles, and in came all the unofficial passengers and stops. We still arrived by Grandma's road pretty fast (4am) and so had to ride the bikes in the dark the 7k or so to Grandma's. Here I discovered that the dogs have a vampire thing where they turn into rabid beasts by night, though they leave you alone during the day. Luckily going that way it was downhill and they couldn't keep up with us, or else the moon came out of the clouds, or something. Anyway we survived and made it to Grandma's for Christmas.

Floating to the Bang then Luang Prabang

2009-01-04T03:15:00.000-08:00

The slow boat to Luang Prabang: 2 days of pleasure cruising on a luxury yacht

Arriving from Thailand to Huayxai was an interesting ordeal. There were about a hundred falangs at the immigration check in and we only had 30 minutes to make it to the boat dock to catch our slow boat. I used my Laotion charm to get the immigration officers to do our paper work ahead of the large group only to get hassled by the same cops that asked for some "Falang Babes". It was all in good fun and they processed us quickly so we could get to the boat. Once at the boat dock, we ended up sitting around for 2 hours waiting for the same large group that was ahead of us at immigration. Good times I tell you.

All aboard! There was about a hundred people on this long boat shaped like a butter saucer with hard wooden benches running down each side. Damn it once again, we didn't see that there was a shop selling sitting pillows that everyone else had purchased. Oh well, we are training for the buns of steel competition and 2 days on this boat will mean we will be claiming first and second prize. At least we each got our own bench since a bunch of people had to double up on these 3 foot wide benches. I think the fat and stinky American thing about us is finally paying off.

The crowd was a pleasant mixture of people. Old, young, locals, falangs, drunks, prudes, and everything in between. This was going to be an interesting trip for sure. It was less than an hour into the trip when 2 English lads decided to bring out the Lao Lao (Lao also means whiskey but pronounced with a different tone). They sang and played the guitar as the whiskey flowed and half the boat joined in while the other half either laughed along or got really irritated. I decided that my duty was to entertain Amy and keep her from throwing up since she still felt sick from the California Rolls in Chaing Rai. We talk, we sat, we listend to our iPoods, and did more of this for the next 7 hours. It was a good time for us to enjoy the scenery and think about our lives. I think Amy spent most of her time thinking about all the different candies she has eaten in her life and I thought about all the different ways you could cook an egg. Yeah, time sucks when you're stuck in a tiny boat with a sick girlfriend that cant eat anything. I decided that fair is fair so I didnt eat anything either the entire day since I felt so bad that she couldnt eat.

The boat arrived at a little village called Pak Bang where we were literally mobbed by a crowd of locals grabbing everyone's bag. We had to scale a 45 degree sand bank for 50 yards to make it up to the main road. Luckily two schmucks grabbed our bikes for us and carried that up the hill since Amy was weak and tired from being sick. I tipped them $.20 each only to get angry looks directed at me but my bad mood shown through and scared them. They mumbled and returned to the boat to get bags for falangs who would tip a decent $1 or more. Hehe!

There was guest houses all along this town and after looking at a few, we decided they were worst than a homeless shelter. There was one nice large hotel in the village that charged $35 per night. That is way too much for us but the manager decided to give us a break. For $20 a night, we get the room and a free breakfast but no "paper work". In other words, the owner doesn't know that a room was rented and the staff splits the $20. That was exactly what we needed, a nice bathroom for Amy to practice her super model skills in (throwing up anything she eats). Poor girl.

Once we woke up, we got our free continental breakfast and headed to the boat. Bikes are nice and secure on the roof, we got our own benches again, and there was an actual stand on the boat that sold sandwiches and beers (we changed boats for the second day). After a few hours on the boat I decided to join the "festive" crowd since Amy was feeling a little better and wanted to sleep. I moved the benches and made a nice bed on the floor for her then joined the singing troupe. It turns out that 4 beers made the next 5 hours go by in a breeze. We sang, we didn't dance, and everyone was merry. By the time we got to Luang Prabang everyone was asking how Amy was feeling. I guess my story telling captivated most of the boat and they all expressed concern for Amy and was fascinated with our journey. Well, most people wanted to follow us everywhere once they found out I spoke the local language and have been to Laos every year for the past 5. They figure I'd be a nice tour guide that will show them around and prevent them from over paying for anything. Amy and I made a quick getaway on our bikes once we got off the boat while everyone else was getting on tuk tuks for a 100 yard ride.

Ahhh, finally made if to Luang Prabang. It was a fun boat ride but being sick would make it difficult so I was glad we made it to land. We were able to check into the guest house I stay at every year since the crazy Thai tourist are out of town. There was a Thai holiday the first time we were in Luang Prabang a few weeks ago. This means that about 10 double decker buses carrying thousands of Thai tourist took over the town and every guest house is packed. A few nights here for Amy to get better and we'll be off by bicycles to Nambak to see my uncle.

In Search For Gary Fisher

2009-01-04T02:18:00.000-08:00

Chaing Rai Thailand:

We decided that Houyxai was a waste of time and space so we made a quick getaway to Thailand once we got back from the Gibbons trek. Amy is deathly allergic to that town and refused to stay any longer. Checking out of Laos was a breeze this time, the cops were super friendly once they knew I was Laotion and requested that I bring them back some Falang babes from Thailand. I promised them a boat load and knew there would be plenty of Falangs on their way to Luang Prabang daily.

We hopped on a tiny long tail boats with our bags and off we were across the Mekong to Thailand. It was a quick 3 min ride that dwarfed the long swim from stories I heard growing up from my parents of how they had to swim across the river to escape the communist regime. They claimed I got swept out of my moms arms and floated down the river and thats where they should have left me. Too bad for them I knew how to swim at the age of 6 months and made my own damn way to Thailand.

The bus ride from Chiangkong (Boarder Village in Thailand) to Chiang Rai was uneventful except for the motorcycle crash our bus caused. The bus made it's usual sudden stop to pick up passengers when 3 motorcycles were behind and swerved into each other. Two of the riders skidded right pass our window while the other biker crashed into a big ditch. This really scared the crap out of us but luckily everyone got up with just road rash and broken motorbikes. The bus driver casually pulls away as if nothing happens and I quickly ditched the idea of buying a motorbike to ride across Laos and most of SE Asia.

6 hours and a dead battery (on my iPood) later we got into Chaingrai. We didn't have a guide book so the first falang I saw at the bus station was interrogated for the best guest house. He recommended Banbua so off we were to find it. After 30 minutes of searching in the dark and being too damn tired we came across a gal from Germany who happened to be looking for the same guest house. We searched together and finally found it after miles of circles around the place, it was just a block away from the bus station. The place had a nice garden area and super clean, large, and cheap rooms. The gods seems to have finally smiled on us. Two beers and a shitty hamburger (would be better considered a meat loaf made of cardboard and some beef seasoning) was enough to send us to bed. Oh, the stories from this German gal named Tina was unbelievable literally. She made me feel like a Catholic schoolboy compared to where she has been and what she's done. Amy and I just sat there listening with our mouths wide open. More on that later.......

Chaigrai has a great night market with a food court that made us both giddy. Deep fried food heaven! Fries, tempura, fried fruits, fried bread, fried insects, fried soda, fried fried, FRIED! Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm FRIED! We feasted like royalty on just about every fried items available and each serving was about $.30. There were free entertainment consisting of local bands, traditional dance groups, and random acts on a center stage that all the seats and tables faced. I really enjoyed watching the light show but found out it was just the electricity going on and off at the random food stands when the musical instruments drew too much power. Amy once again managed to get brave and try some California Rolls at one of the stands. She paid for it with 3 days worth of the runs and throwing up from food poisoning. The poor girl is starting to look like Kate Moss and could probably get a modeling gig if this keeps up.

We spent the next few days resting and searching for nice mountain bikes to ride across Laos. There was two shops that sold real bikes that we ride in the western world unlike the typical local bikes. The local bikes are fine if you are under 5' tall and weigh less than 70 lbs. No gears, parts fall off during rides and it has the geometry of a unicycle. The steering tube is straight up and down so and sudden turns of more than 2 degrees means biting the pavement but luckily dental work is cheap in these parts. You can go to any motorbike repair shop and they'll pull your broken teeth out with pliers for $.05. We met Gary Fisher at the second bike shop and decided we liked him right away. $1000 for 2 Gary's with racks, saddle bags, tools, and spare parts. Now we can explore Laos in style!

The jumbo driver that took us to the bike shop had been super helpful while we assembled the bikes, and the poor guy was so scared driving back with $1000 bikes strapped to his jumbo that he waited like 5 minutes to make a right turn (they drive on the left.) No jumbo wheelies on the way back!

Next we took our bikes out for a spin to Chiang Rai beach (a river beach) which was very pleasant. We hung out at a cafe by the river and got spicy papaya salad with river crabs...possibly another source of a lot of later stomach trouble, but oh well.

The next morning we packed up and rode to the bus station to take us back to Chiangkong to return to Laos. Bikes were thrown in the back of the bus for no extra charge since it was early and the bus was completely empty. When we got to the bus station in Chaingkong, we rode like the wind to make the crossing in time to catch the slow boat back to the Bang. As usual, we rushed and stressed the entire time only to find out we made it with a few hours to spare.

Hot Monkey Love

2008-12-14T20:54:00.000-08:00

The Gibbons Experience: We had high expectations before going on this trip for good reasons, anyone and everyone who has done it really praised it. The thought of being dissapointed ran through our heads for the entire 2 hour truck ride into the national forest where our journey was to begin. There was five of us in our group, a couple from Chicago (husband was an Aussie, wife is an American of Latin decent), and a single Singaporean woman in her late 20's.

Once we got to the village/national forest, we had 30 seconds to get out of the truck and start hiking. Amy almost got left behind since she was trying to close her $5 backpack we purchased for the trek from a "Chinese Market" since we couldn't bring along our big bags. The zipper was about to break and the buckles were falling apart (the biggest piece of shit bag in the world, a plastic Wal-Mart bag would hold up better). The guide spoke some eng-ish and once again thought I was from another planet let alone the same country he's from. He hurried us across a little stream and up into the forest. They definitely don't mess around when it comes to trekking, especially since they do it in flip flops 2 sizes too small. Their pace made us look silly and I was beginning to wonder where the fire was. We stopped about 30 min into the hike to eat lunch consisting of premade samich's from headquaters. Curry chicken samich, MMMMMM. I spoke laotion to the guides and it shocked the hell out of them. How did this laotion guy get so big they thought. Finally they got up the courage to ask how many siblings I had and if I ate my family members to get so fat. Assholes!

The rest of the hike was pretty hard, straight up hill for about an hour and my legs were burning. The other couple was kicking our asses pretty bad since they just arrived from a few months of trekking in Nepal and Tibet. Man did I feel out of shape, luckily the singaporean was slower than us ;-)

Once we reached our first zipline, our guide gave us a quick safety check and instructions on how not to die. Off he went, zzzzzsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss across and out of site. "OKAY" was shouted across the canyon and it was my turn. Shit! I dont want to die but it looked so fun. Will the harness hold up my fat ass or should I kiss Amy and tell her how much I love her and to take good care of Louie, say "Hi and Bye" to all my friends and family for me etc. What the hell, WOOOHOOOOooooooooooo and off I went. WHAT A RUSH! I cant describe it any better than the fact that our skydiving excursion a few months ago seems like kindergarten play compared to this rush. Now Amy will tell you her version about pooping and peeing herself on the first zip.

Whatever, I wasn't that scared. The harness and roller looked fairly trustworthy, and the brake made of a bicycle tire...well ok I was a little scared. But the ride was awesome, and so were the next few. It was like the most amazing video game ever, zipping way above the jungle, the shortests zips were like the longest zipline ride you could find in the states. Just the first day was worth the 160 euros each!

After a little more hiking, we took a long zip ride into a huge tree way out on its own in the middle of the jungle. It had a two story treehouse on it about 100 m up, with gravity fed sink and shower (I guess piped all the way from a spring way up in the jungle.) And, most importantly, the best squat toilet in the entire world. I mean, you might actually linger on this squat toilet, yes linger on a squat toilet, to admire the view! Fruits and dinner arrived shortly by zipline (veggies, rice, and some of the pork from the cute little piggies back at the village.) The guides came to hang out (no pun intended) with Sam. They'd never had a tourist that spoke fluent Laotian before and though they spoke enough English to communicate safety instructions ("ored - return - no go!"), they couldn't really converse with the tourists. They were eager to learn about America and all kinds of other things - like the earth going around the sun, not the sun going around the earth. I hate to think what else they learned from Sam's scientific instruction, but at least they got the basics!

The next day one of the guides woke us up early to trek out and surprise some gibbons in their sleeping tree before they woke up. Unfortunately the gibbons seem to be on to them by now and were already gone, doubtless muttering "damn those tourists they get up so early we have to get up at 5 to avoid them!" in gibbonese. We had more rice and veggies for lunch and every meal thereafter, then headed out to the waterfall. Dropping right out of that treehouse in the morning was pretty scary all over again, but zipping through the fog was pretty fun (though wet.)

The next day we trekked to the "waterfall" (a nice cold pool with about a 2 foot waterfall above it.) Somehow we managed to get collectively only one leech; the other group's leech score was much higher so we lost that contest. The zip network around the waterfall blew away the first day's lines. We went around the loop there 3 times for fun, zipping over the river, through the valley, and around again, as fast as we could go. The longest zip is supposedly 1km long and took about 10 guys almost a month to put up! The treehouse that night was not quite as amazing, but did have quite a bit more wildlife. As in, tons of very, very large noisy rats. We devised a variety of clever rat traps involving buckets of rice precariously set on ledges, but the rats were smarter than us and instead ate the food on the dirty dishes and held kung fu rat fights with each other all night, on the floor, the thatch roof, our beds....

The last day we trekked out a different way, showing a different side of the jungle, i.e. clearcut farmlands. It was very beautiful, sunny, and Hobbiton-like though. Then it was another crazy truck ride and back to Houayxai. We were sad to leave and tempted to sneak back in, but in the end decided to head acroos the Mekhong and take the local bus to Chiang Rai in Thailand.

Northern Laos by Local Bus

2008-12-14T20:13:00.001-08:00

In Laos, there are two kinds of buses: "VIP" buses which make rest stops, have large, comfortable seats and follow a set itinerary, and local buses, which are basically, well, SF MUNI. You can flag one down anywhere, get off anywhere, bring your chickens, etc. However the local bus won't leave the starting point until there are 2-3 people on every tiny seat, and the aisles are full of people sitting on stools. Only then is it time to go start picking more people up. Or 50 kg bags of rice, concrete mix, propane tanks, etc (the top of the bus already being full of bags.) VIP buses are definitely the best way to go, but require reservations and some basic organizational/planning skills which we unfortunately lack.

We did manage to get at least the minibus (like a small VIP bus) up to Luang Prabang, but with our usual luck, we managed to get the one ancient minibus in a fleet of new Honda minivans. When the driver actually got the bus moving at a good clip downhill, he refused to stop for anything - instead using the horn to warn everyone out of his way. Somehow we managed to just barely avoid an entire family of pigs and a two year old human child, and nothing (that we know of) was killed on the trip.

We stayed for a day in Luang Prabang where we mainly relaxed around town and ate at "The Pizza Luang Prabang" over and over. This place is far and away the best pizza in Southeast Asia. The town was absolutely packed with Thai tourists; later we learned that this was due to a national holiday in Thailand. We only got a hotel due to Sam speaking Laotian. The lady at the hotel literally grabbed him and dragged him to the front of the line in front of all the other tourists!

For fun we rented bicycles and rode around town, where we saw some real working elephants being used as pack animals cruising down the street. Then we paid $2 each to climb the hill up to the stupa and see the view. To get our $2 worth, we ran up and down the 250 steps 3 times with Thai tourists egging us on all the while (in retrospect, a mistake, at least in flip flops.) We also couldn't resist buying some of the sparrows in cages from some old ladies and setting the sparrows free at the top, which is supposed to be good luck. Maybe it was bad to support this industry since we usually are all for cage-free sparrows! Oh well. For additional fun we tried to get our cell phone cracked to accept Asian SIM cards, but failed miserably. Sam also tortured the "smoke weed?" guy that popped out of the shadows at night by telling him in Laotian "you're going to get arrested!" I've never seen a guy disappear so fast!

Next we decided to go visit Sam's uncle in Nambok. The problem with visiting family is there is often no VIP bus or even local bus to get there. We caught a 2 way (i.e. the back of a pickup truck with bench seats.) The capacity is supposedly 12 people (or at least 12 Laotians.) Once we had 17 people, a baby, and four 50 kg bags of concrete mix we were finally able to leave the bus station and start the usual rounds of picking up people to hang onto the back. For people who are jealous of our travels, just try to picture this and you will feel better. Also it was about 50 degrees F outside and quite windy in the truck!

Anyway we survived the trip to Nambok. Sam's uncle and aunt and cousin were very happy to see us. It was a bit of a sobering visit, most of the family up there doesn't have much money. Sam helped them build a very barebones concrete house to replace their old thatch house, but there is not much inside - no ceiling or paint to cheer it up, and just a few mats for the floor. It was very cold - similar temperatures to Northern California in the winter, with a very cold fog that often lasted most of the day. It seemed colder because none of the houses or restaurants have any sort of insulation at all and are often half open to the air. Sam's family is so cheerful and grateful for what they have; it really made us think how lucky we are back home. Sam's cousin was in a bad motorbike wreck last year but is able to walk with crutches now and get around on her own. Soon she will be able to return to school. She was very nice and helped me practice my Laotian.

The next day we travelled with uncle and auntie via local bus to Oudomxai, where their son has a successful hot pot restaurant (why is hot pot so expensive everywhere? It's a mystery to me.) At the restaurant we met a very nice doctor from Atlanta, recently from San Francisco, working for the CDC on a program to help the health department there set up immunization programs for children. He was happy to chat with us for awhile and tell us about his recent trip to Mongolia which sounded amazing (living in yurts and all the rest!)

Now we had to say goodbye to the family and take two more bus trips to go before reaching Houayxai where we planned to do the Gibbon Experience. The road between Oudomxai and Luang Namtha was terrible due to the floods and mudslides last year - completely unpaved rather than the usual 50-80% paved. Imagine Tassajara road by bus! After Luang Namtha the roads improved, but were still quite steep. With our usual luck we got a bus with no brakes (or at least the driver did not trust the brakes.) Whenever we got to the top before a steep (10% plus) grade downhill, he would come to a complete stop, shift into first gear, and go slowly downhill using the transmission to brake. Even the big dump trucks were passing us. And you can imagine what the passengers had to say! Anyway we somehow made it to Houayxai in time to rest for a day before heading off to see the gibbons.

In the Tubing in Vang Vieng

2008-12-06T05:31:00.003-08:00

Well we finally tore ourselves away from the comforts of Grandma's house where they wait on us hand and foot unless we yell at them not to and laundry only costs 10 cents/kilo for wash, dry, and fold. We were lucky enough to catch the bus from there rather than having to backtrack to Vientiane. We stopped for one day in Vang Vieng, which is basically a tourist town on the river between Vientiane and Luang Prabang. The highlight of Vang Vieng is inner tubing on the river, or "In the Tubing" as they call it there. Basically it works as follows:

Follow the blond Canadian girl with the knit witch cap and fingerless Michael Jackson gloves and bikini who has covered herself in permanent marker ink numbers and is chanting "LET'S GO TUBING" and has been doing so all night long and well basically for the last week straight (apparently.) We think the tubing companies may actually have hired her for this purpose, but it's hard to know for sure. Anyway you get a number inked on your hand with permanent marker, climb in a tuk tuk and head down to the river.

Before getting in the river, you need to buy alcohol at the "Eco-drinking" bar where all proceeds go to the children of Laos. You then float a few yards down to the next bar where they have a rope swing on about a 20 foot platform which is extremely scary given that up to this point the water has only appeared to be about 1 foot deep. However after watching the acrobatics of the staff and the bellyflops of the other tourists and drinking a few beers or Lao Lao whisky buckets, you take the plunge. Then, repeat for the next dozen bars. Should you accidentally pass a bar, the staff will chant "Come-on come-on beer-lao beer-lao!" at you and throw you a line to pull you in. There are variations at each bar including the "flying foxes" which are zip lines that are even better for producing bellyflops than the swings. The culmination of bellyflops is a huge waterslide at one of the last bars. Unfortunately we failed to wait for the other drunken tourists on this one and so were not able to watch them and avoid bellyflopping ourselves. We're still hurting!

So we decided to beat the crowd for the rest of the float down the river. It is lucky we did because the rest of the float takes about 2 hours and the sun leaves the river quite early, resulting in some freezing tubers later on.

For nightlife in Vang Vieng, you have two choices: Friends or Family Guy. Basically all the bars have all the seasons of a single American TV show and play it endlessly. Unfortunately the Simpsons bar closed down. Luckily there is a 3rd choice for entertainment: the tubing girl, who gets back from tubing around 9pm and is still up chanting at 3am. Piss drunk. On the balcony across from our hotel window. With a big group of friends. But to be fair, she is the quietest of the bunch!

Now we are off to Luang Prabang by minibus!

Hiding in Napho

2008-11-30T21:09:00.000-08:00

We are currently laying low in a small village called Napho where my Grandma lives. It's a little village 1.5 hours north of Vientiane and has about 2000 people. I took the liberty of kicking my cousin out of his bungalow in the middle of the rice field so we can "camp". Since we are "falang" I am having a toilet installed so we dont have to do any digging ourselves. It'll be nice to be out in the middle of nowhere to enjoy the peace and quiet. It is a little cold and very hard to find scotch so I'll just have to get more blankets.

The maids are extremely cheap here, we have one for each duty such as a cook, laundry person, Beer Lao runner, etc. We only pay them about $1US combined for all their hard work each day. I'm working on importing them to the US for sale so let us know if you want any. I think I could fit about 5 in each suitcase.

Pretty much just hanging out and waiting for my mom and uncle to get here one way or another since the airport in Thailand is still closed. As soon as we find out whats going on with that, we'll head up to Bokeo and hang out in the trees with the Gibbons monkeys. Now Amy is going to rant about the roosters that crows at 11PM.

Yeah the roosters are American or something because they like to crow at night especially after 3 in the morning. Everyone is friendly at Grandma's house and I'm starting to catch a few phrases but mostly I just smile and nod and say Co-op Chai, which is Thank You, or Sabai Dee, which is Hi how are you/Bye/Fine, thank you, all in one.

We went into Vientiane (mainly for hot showers) and it has changed a lot. The village looks the same except everyone who used to ride a bike now owns a scooter that goes just as fast as a bike and spews black smoke as a bonus. But in Vientiane there are a lot more Western goods and stores available (for Western or at least Thai prices.) The morning market, which used to be pretty shanty (where we bought the couches if you saw the photos from the last trip) has changed a lot. It now bosts a 4 story concrete parking garage and the indoor mall part is fancier and bigger. Out by the Mekhong, the open strip with a few chairs and cafes is now covered by restaurants built on stilts. There are a lot of Euro tourists too, all looking as pale and sickly as I was - the food is still a bit of a shock to the system here. I'm feeling better though as of today.

The weather is much cooler than Thailand, cold at night actually but warm, dry, and sunny during the day. Definitely this is the best time of year to visit. For Colin Cotterill fans, we've seen almost everything in the books, including the Lao Women's Union, the black stupa, the Ministry of Education, and Mr. Geung (with Down's syndrome) who went on a bender last night and came by all the houses in the village causing an uproar. But apparently he is normally a hard worker on the farm and very popular. There is also an Auntie Dtui. And of course the bicycles with no brakes are a must! We'll try to avoid those.

We also did a nice walk around Sam's cousin farm which looks just like the shire, if hobbits grew rice. It had a cool footbridge made out of bamboo which surprisingly did not collapse when Sam crossed it. It probably waited to collapse for the next poor person to come along!

Well we are heading back for some R&R and then some camping at Grandma's house now. We'll post again when we head north.

Surviving Bangkok

2008-11-26T23:19:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post to let you all know we made it safely out of Bangkok. We took the bus back from Koh Sahmet and decided to catch the train to Vientiane the same night, in case Bangkok hotels were busy with tourists waiting for the airport to open. The train station was not too crazy but it did have quite a few tourists there - Sam says normally there are almost none. The sleeper car train was full so we took the second class "soft seat" train. It was better than flying, I guess, given that flying would have been impossible. Anyway after 2 taxi rides, 2 bus rides, 2 immigration lines, and various chaos we got across the border and are at Grandma's house in Laos now. Mmmmmmmmmm green mangos and fresh fruits. We'll be celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow at lunch while you guys are eating dinner since we don't have time to find and kill a turkey today. Happy Thanksgiving!

Koh Samed and the Say Anything Announcer

2008-11-25T21:04:00.000-08:00

We got to Koh Samed without too much trouble, well at least I did. Sam had 60 kilo of baggage on his lap in the minibus. The ferry was oddly crowded but we survived by hiding in back with the pilot. The tourists up front got soaked. When we arrived we found the prices a little higher - about $40 US for a room with air conditioning, however the AC was worth it as it was very hot and humid.

We headed straight for the beach in front of our hotel and basically stayed there in one spot for 36 hours - at night they just change the beach chairs for tables. We only left to eat the cheaper local fare outside the resort, which was tastier. Sam's brother would have loved the insanely spicy larb salad. The swimming was great with the water pleasantly cool but not at all cold. Now I'll tell you about the "toy boy fie-mun."

And up next is "Buk hum lai" who is only 12 and def 100 percent virgin. If you want to take him for toy boy you can but watch out for dem thai police. And be careful because he too young to know yet if he ladyboy or not yet. Sometime you see on the street you don't know if they boy, girl, ladyboy, transhec, homoshec, or what. Scary. Anyway "Buk hum lai" good kid take year off to pay for school. Not like dem kids take money from parents for school and spend getting piss drunk and mushroom...."

That's basically the announcer for the firedancers who sounded exactly like the race car dude in Say Anything. The firedancers were 6 guys (one had the night off) who juggle torches and do all kinds of crazy acrobatics, even juggling actual fireworks at the end. It would be super illegal in the US especially as the ones at the top of the human pyramid were only between 12 and 15 years old. They were very impressive though the announcer was definitely the highlight.

Finally today we decided to head back to Bangkok to catch the train for Laos, after one final swim in which the mosquitos and jellyfish all came out to bid me a fond farewell. Between that and the sunburn I look like a proper Americal tourist now (i.e. lobster red.) We are hoping the train station isn't too crazy because the airport is completely shut down by protesters. If we can't get a train we'll stay at the Happy House again, don't worry it is far from the airport.

Sam's thoughts on Koh Samed:

The highlight was definitely the annoucer for the fire show. There was a lot of beautiful fat euros wearing speedoos and damn g-strings all over. The guys were wearing g-strings! Other than that, Amy pretty much covered it all minus the parts about only eating $2 US per meal for the both of us and only 2 meals a day.

Thailand: Kao San Road

2008-11-25T20:53:00.001-08:00

Well, Thailand at last. We made it here safely and got a nice room near Kao San Road. There's more dirty hippies per capita than Humboldt county except the ones here are travelers like us. Amy says this is her one chance to let out her "inner hippy" but I think with time on the road and less showers and body maintenance, we'll get there soon without effort. We walked around Kao San and got cheap pad thai from the street vendor for $1US. Mmmmmmmm. When it got dark, we treated ourselves to some ice cold "Chang" beer at a beer garden and treated some local mosquitos to some good "Farlang" blood (Amy's). Woke up early and like a bat out of hell, we headed by bus to Koh Samed.

Now for Amy's thoughts on Kao San:

I don't have too much to add, it was quite nice there and also a relief to fit in for a bit with all the other tourists. We stayed at the Happy House which is more or less what you expect from the name: staffed by "ladyboys." The room was cheap and had a balcony so we were able to do our laundry, thanks to Forrest's handy clothesline. We also got in some shopping - skirts and mens' tee shirts are about $6 US and girls' tees only $3 - finally fair prices! I definitely liked it there apart from having a hard time telling the mosquitoes apart from the bats.

Kung Fu Fighting in Hong Kong

2008-11-23T01:27:00.000-08:00

We made it to Hong Kong and wanted to leave as soon as we landed. That was the craziest city with more inhabitants than an insane asylum on crack. Millions of drones working and living in "skyscraper caverns" that decends on the streets after 5 PM. The scariest thing I have ever experienced in my life. Amy will now tell you about the fun stuff.

Ok so the trains were definitely impressive. I think the longest we waited at any hour was 4 minutes. Our first day we made the rookie mistake of taking the hotel shuttle so we did avoid the chaos of commute hours on the train. We then wandered around trying to locate our guest house which turned out to be somebody's apartment on the 5th floor of one of a zillion identical 40 story buildings in Causeway Bay which is like the HK mission district or something. We thought the room was quite awful until the hotel workers showed our room to some interested tourists who commented on how wonderful it was compared to "the other place." Oh well I guess it was clean and had free internet. The only problem was finding food, the lines were so long it wasn't worth most people's time to deal with "Englibabas"!

On our first full day in HK we decided to see the city, for about 30 seconds, then we hopped on the nearest ferry out of there. It turned out to go to Lantau island which was awesome. We waited the usual 60 seconds for a bus up to the Giant Buddha and Tourist Trap which was fun; we also took a short hike to admire the views. There was also a pretty cool "Wisdom Path" with 30 huge pillars with some kind of Buddhist prayer written on them in beautiful calligraphy which if we'd been able to read Chinese we would now be enlightened! But sorry, no enlightenment for us. Yet.

After waiting 2 more seconds for the next bus we headed out to Tai O, which was a nifty little fishing village with stainless steel shacks on stilts in the mud flats. Clearly the US dollar is worthless because the locals were way more interested in fishing and totally ignored all the tourists wandering around. Last we went over and found the one big town on the island (40 fifty story skyscrapers surrounded by 99% nature preserve with no people around anywhere due to it being work hours.) However in the dark shadows under the buildings we found the fanciest Pizza Hut ever, white cloth and silver and everything. Unfortunately we were too poor to eat there because we are too lazy to have jobs like proper HK residents. We discovered that we could also take the train back from this island due to the fact that the train goes absolutely everywhere, so we returned to the chaos (during commute hours, yeah) and crashed after a meal of pork buns. Mmm, pork buns. OK over to Sam for the next day on HK island.

We woke up at the usual 4AM HK time and wondered the streets when it was fairly empty. Only about 1M persons per square mile. I was able to find a small cafe in an alley that had "Americanaaa" menu. You could choose from 3 set items (egg sandwich, saimin, toast, coffee). The price for a meal was about $3.50 US but it was enough to feed a squirrel (We eat like them now since we are poor and dont want to go broke). Amy says that she doesnt care for any more food on HK island except for one pork bun a day. We then headed to South Island to a town called Shek O. This town has a vendetta against Lee, we found a sigh for his market called "Fuck Lee Market". This was one of the highlights of the trip. We also indulged on our first real meal at a "Thai Restaurant" in that town. $30US later and full tummies, we walked up to the cliff on the side of the beach and sat in the sun for a while. After Amy got her 8 minute of tanning, we headed back to downtown HK. We were both exhausted but decided that it was a great time to go and see "The Peak" which is the highest hill in HK. This is the "Beverly Hills" area of HK where only the extremely dirty and wealthy can live. To get to the top, you can walk your fat american ass or take a trolley that costs $10US to take you to the top. We felt lazy for once in our lives and paid to get sardined in a little trolley with about a thousand other angry tourists. Once we were up top, the view was magnificent! You get the best 360 views of the city from your seat inside Burger King. This definitely tops the Taco Bell in Pacifica for prime real estate owned by a shit hole eatery. We hiked down through some trails/roads and saw lamborghini's, Austin Healeys, and the likes in driveways of homes with "fish tanks" for outer walls. Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta!

Once we made halfway down the hill, we finally found the infamous "Mid Levels Escalators" which is a series of escalators that runs from downtown. These escalators sucks according to Amy but my fat ass sure appreciated them. Except, we were on our way down and not up. They only run upwards in the PM and we think they run downwards in the AM for those damn rich lazy Hongkongneese. We got tired, grumpy, and headed home to our cell block to bed but not after another $1US pork bun each for dinner. Mmmmmm pork buns.

On the last day we decided to really get out of town and took about a zillion trains and one bus out to Tai Po Kau nature preserve. The 2 hour hike was tough but enjoyable (except for the large crowds hiking at 1/2km per hour which we finally pushed down the cliff in order to get around them. Sorry people whoever you were.) The Bridal Pool at the end was distinctly lacking in any of the qualities of its name (most important being water and brides) but the hike was worth it just for the exercise. Still we decided to walk back on the road. We took the train back and thought we were beating the commute but it seems the HK workers get off early on Saturday and the crowds were much thicker than usual, read, mobs that trample you until you are dead if you try to go against them. Sam and I got separated (his fault) and it was a miracle we found each other only 10 minutes later.

The best part of the day came when the crowds died down in the evening and we finally braved the food on a stick. We got yellow fish gummy, mystery meat, and tentacle all dipped in the spiciest most delicious satay. Crying tears of joy and spiciness we turned in early so we could get up today and catch our flight to Bangkok.

Final thoughts on Hong Kong
- trains and roads are excellent despite the steepness of the island (the roads put Devil's Slide in Pacifica to shame both in steepness and in constant maintenance)
- the food is not so good when you are poor and don't speak Cantonese, but it is possible to survive on pork buns and bananas
- people don't form lines for food (biggest hungriest person wins) but do for line up neatly for buses and trains
- kung fu does not exist but there's lots of Tai Chi
- stay in your hotel between 5pm and 5am weekdays, all day weekends to avoid being smushed by the local pedestrian crowds
- don't stay downtown if you go there. In fact don't go there again ever!