Alex & Lizzy's (Travel) Blog

Our Boxing Day arrival on Gili Trawangan was a slight shock to the system – mostly in a good way! After cities full of cars, trucks and motorbikes, here the only forms of land transport are bikes and horse & carts! Also after a lifetime of freshwater showers, here the only ones available (in our budget) are salt-water!

Seeing dolphins en route here was a treat, although we have very little photo evidence of this encounter as they don’t stay still at all and move incredibly fast. We’ve seen lots of other wildlife here – although mainly under the water doing our advanced SCUBA diving course. We have seen lots of turtles (including one massive one – about 1.5m long), some white-tip reef sharks (well, Alex did, Lizzy managed to miss them!), octopuses, cuttlefish, clown fish (aka Nemo) and loads of other fish & coral. Despite diving at “Manta Point”, we haven’t yet seen manta rays, just their younger cousins sting rays. Visibility is amazing – mostly 20-30m and the water is 28-30 degrees – WOW! We’ve done 4 dives so far and have another 2 planned, including a deep Nitrox dive, on which Lizzy hopes to see the sharks this time.

We’re staying another 4 nights here, until after New Year… although it is tempting to live out here for a few years and work as dive instructors (After doing our rescue & dive master qualificatioons – about 8 weeks’ training and about $750 – not bad for all the dives you can handle and learning a new profession in the mean time!). So if we’re not heard of again, this is probably the best place to look. Internet (and electricity) isn’t great here though, so can’t upload photos… will endeavour to do that somewhere in Java.

After a Christmas morning lie-in and some carols sung in bed (!) to get us in the Christmas spirit, we went out to explore around Ubud. We hired a motorbike (sorry parentals – we know we promised we wouldn’t do that again, but it’s very cheap and the roads aren’t too crazy here!) and buzzed off to see the nearby sights. The countryside here is much more lush than anywhere else we’ve been so far, mainly because it’s Bali’s wet season, so everything is growing – including rice paddy after rice paddy! Rice paddies and terraces do make for beautiful scenery, especially when filled with beautiful bright green rice shoots.

Then it was time for lunch! The day before, we had spotted a restaurant offering Christmas dinner, so we sought this out and gave it a go. We had the traditional turkey, gravy, stuffing, potatoes, cranberry sauce, but all with a unique twist and accompanied by some new bits like sharon fruit and purple potatoes (we think!). For dessert, we just couldn’t choose, so we had one of everything on the menu – each! 5 puddings later (green tea ice crean, apple & cinamon crumble, chocolate cake, chocolate mousse and black sticky rice pudding *) and we were ready to roll back to our hotel for a nap.

We managed to speak to both our families and watch them open a few presents that we’d managed to send them from Vietnam and Amazon – it was really lovely to be able to share a bit of their Christmas

In the evening, we decided we would pamper ourselves with a Royal Javanese Massage – a wonderufl 2-hour indulgence! We had a long oil massage, followed by a salt body scrub which was left to dry out on our skin. Once this had been brushed off, we had another new experience – being covered head to toe in yoghurt! (We assume this was to rehydrate our skin after the salt). Finally we showered off and stepped into a warm bath with a complete layer of fresh flowers floating on the top. We came out feeling very lovely indeed.

What a lovely way to experience Christmas – not as good as being with family, but a strong second

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* -OK, so the 5 desserts were a selection platter and they were all really tiny

Well, despite my best efforts to try and convince Alex that I could still speak Indonesian, 22years after I last spoke it, it soon became apparent that this was wishful thinking and my secret dream that I would be instantly fluent again was dashed (maybe I really am the most forgetful person in the world….it’s pretty impressive forgetting how to speak an entire language isn’t it?!)

Anyway, back to Bali! Beautiful, lush, green, hot, humid, tropical Bali. I love it! We arrived at midday and went straight off to explore Ubud and the monkey sanctuary.

I’m pleased to say that I won a fight with the monkey that almost immediately tried to grab my water bottle but I will admit, flashbacks from watching Outbreak and 28 Days Later unnerved me slightly and I was a bit more cautious as we approached the hundreds that were running freely through the forest. After surviving the ‘sanctuary’ we wandered through the numerous art and crafts shops before heading back to our pre-booked (read: blown the budget for Christmas) guest house for a swim.

Feels strange thinking it’s Christmas tomorrow but we’re looking forward to treating ourselves to an extra nice meal and a Balinese massage

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After weeks of moving on every few days, we decided a whole 7 nights should be spent on, or near the beach. We chose Koh Chang (translates as “Elephant Island”) in Thailand for this and, after a rather long and tiring journey (including a bus breaking down and missing the last ferry), we arrived at Lonely Beach on the island just before midnight. A couple of nights later, we finally found some accommodation that was clean and cheap enough for us and settle there for the remaining 5 nights. It also came with a pretty nice view of sunset over the sea – for free!

We spent 5 days on the beach, working our way through the books we’re carrying, building our tans and swimming in the sea. The remaining day we went scuba diving and snorkeling. The scuba diving was infinitely better than Phu Quoc where we last dived, both in terms of visibility and interesting things to see (this time the new things we saw were a Lion Fish and a puffer fish – last time it was just nudibranchs which aren’t so amazing). We took the underwater camera snorkelling after our dives…

We have a flight from Bangkok to Bali on Christmas Eve, so we leave Koh Chang on the 23^rd and travel for 10 hours back to Bangkok, ready for our flight the next morning. Koh Chang is a lovely place – here’s some more photos so you can see for yourselves:

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So we’d heard that the view of Angkor Wat (the world’s largest religious building) at sunrise is pretty special so we set our alarms for 4am, and off we went on a tuk tuk in the dark.  The hoards of other tourists who’d also decided to do the same meant that the experience wasn’t the serene and inspiring sight we’d hoped for, but it was still pretty amazing. After the sun was fully up, lots of people returned back to the main town for breakfast and a nap. We decided we’d stick around and take advantage of the quiet and wandered around the temples virtually on our own.

A brief bit of history about the area courtesy of the Lonely Planet The city used to be the capital of Cambodia’s ancient Khmer empire which stretched from Burma/Myanmar to Vietnam and was built between the 9^th and 13^th Century. Attempts to save the temples from the attack of the jungle started in 1908, after a French Naturalist ‘rediscovered’ the area. Although most of the temples have been carefully repaired, some of them (Ta Prohm amongst others) still look like they belong in an Indiana Jones film (the site was used to shoot scenes from Tomb Raider and Two Brothers) and are half overgrown by jungl e.

We LOVED it! You’d never get such free access to a site like this in England- health and safety for starters would probably prevent you from getting within 10 ft of the ruins, let alone allow you to clamber up the worn, steep steps, 100ft in the dark. Brilliant . So after two sunsets, one sunrise, 10 temples and little sleep, we eventually left, still debating which was the best temple (Alex’s favorite was the Bayon, mine Pre Rup)

More photos @ Flickr

It’s difficult to express what I think and feel of Cambodia so far. The countryside is beautiful, the people are warm and friendly, even the capital seems fairly calm and quiet. Yet in the first few hours of arriving, we heard a fellow westerner on our bus from the border being asked whether he wanted to go and shoot some animals with an AK47, go and throw some grenades, or have some happy time with a 13 or 14yr old girl…..‘whatever you want is no problem no problem, you just come find me, it’s no problem’ (we got the impression that nothing’s out of bounds here if you’ve got the money)

Although horrible, when you hear some of the horrific history of the country and see people with missing limbs and disfigured faces it becomes slightly easier to understand why right and wrong can become so blurred. Every face over the age of 30 has lived through the hell that happened here – and the country is still traumatised. So a brief warning- I’m processing my thoughts and I’m going to ramble about what I’ve seen today and most of it was very ugly.

First we went to S21, the school that was converted by the Khmer Rouge into a prison for torturing and killing. Thousands of photos of the dead line the walls, blood stains still evident on the floor, torture equipment still in place, tale after tale of the horrific, unspeakable pain and suffering that humans inflicted on each other. The brutality of it shocks and angers me. I wanted to direct my anger and disgust at the tourist I saw who was able to smile and laugh while wandering through the building.

We then went to the mass graves at Cheung Ek, (aka the Killing Fields) where most of the prisoners from S21 where finally killed. There are over 19,000 mass graves in Cambodia- we saw about 10 each with the remains of between 100-450 men, women and children (in total somewhere between 700,000 and 3,000,000 people died due to the KR regime – the total is not clear). More stories- the killing ‘games’ that were played, the executions carried out in the night masked by music played over a loudspeaker. Most of these atrocities were carried out by kids who’d been torn from their families and sent to ‘re-education camps’ where they were brainwashed by the KR to hate, to fear and to kill. Some even killed their own parents.

The memorial ‘stupa’ (see below) holds some of the remains of those exhumed from the graves….there’s 17 tiers each filled with bones.

Unbelievably, the UN let the KR represent their victims on the UN council till 1991 and it is only within the last 3 years that courts have been set up to try some of the senior KR leaders responsible for the regime and killings.

How can the Cambodians live, apparently peacefully, alongside the very people that slaughtered their families? Why did Pol Pot ever think that eradicating the educated, the ‘wealthy’, the religious and those of mixed ethnic background was a good idea? Why did he think that families should be broken up and every good thing banned? Was it insecurity, fear, jealousy or too much power that drove him?  …I feel numb- I’m not sure I really want to understand.

Palm fringed sands, clear blue skies and a calm turquoise sea… what else could a person want for? Phu Quoc was a perfect, if a little pricey, retreat after a fairly frantic 11days  travelling through the rest of Vietnam.

The SCUBA diving wasn’t up to much compared to Phuket, Thailand, but in all other ways (apart from the food- Vietnamese is not a patch on Thai food )  it surpassed it and remains (for now) quite unspoilt.

Nope we didn’t order the ‘crap with fried vermicelli’ We did order a chocolate tart though (are you proud Julie?) and this is what we were served on a plate with a knife and fork-quality

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We made a whistle-stop tour of Ho Chi Minh City (a.k.a. HCMC or Saigon) – a one day trip on foot around as many sights as we could squeeze in. We saw a couple of museums, a palace, a few markets and various other significant landmarks – all thanks to the Lonely Planet’s walking tour that we followed.

However, before all that, the night we arrived 2 interesting things happened. Firstly, Vietnam had won a football match that night against Malaysia in the SEA (South East Asia) Games in Vientiane. This meant that pretty much the whole city was on the streets riding their motorbikes and waving Vietnamese flags – mad & noisy! They’re obviously big football fans here! Secondly, I almost got into a fight with our taxi driver, who, after getting lost, wanted extra money. The exchange ended with him throwing some stuff on the ground and storming off. Not a great start.

However the rest of HCMC was actually really nice – less manic than Hanoi and with more friendly people (from what we experienced anyway). The place we spent most time was Reunification Palace, where we took advantage of one of the free tours, which very much helped in having an appreciation of the history of the palace and also the country. The two are rather intertwined – the North Vietnamese army stormed the palace to relieve the American-supported South Vietnamese president from power (“The American puppet regime” as they like to call it). My favourite quote from that day goes something like this: Southern President “I have been waiting to hand over power since morning”, Northern Commander “You can’t hand over, what you don’t have, but we’ll accept your unconditional surrender.” – CRUNCH!

After a few other stops, we headed, along with a hoard of other backpackers (there must have been at least 20 other people doing the same – just on one day) to the bar at the top of the Sheraton hotel, floor 23. The view was lovely as we watched the sun descend over the city, sipping expensive-but-worth-it cocktails, nibbling the free snacks and giving our tired feet a rest.

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