What We Did on the Way to Borneo

What We Did on the Way to Borneo? It’s a bit like what I did on my school holidays... except with better weather. Well the last Blog entry told you all about the New Year epic trek and Danny's food fear. This blog is all the bits that have happened since then that got us to Borneo now.

Well after we left Laos for the last time we both went back to Thailand to meet up with our respective friends who came out from the UK to get in on the travellers lifestyle... which was basically being hot, dirty and skint :)

Danny met up with Sarah and Anne and went off to Krabi climbing, I followed on a few days later and met Shane in Bangkok. He had jet lag, no sleep and the airline had lost his bags so the solution was to start drinking as soon as possible. They do something called a tower of beer in Thailand and it holds 4 litres of beer... we had 2, then nearly died when we had to get up at 7am the next day for an outing to the Bridge over the river Kwai and some really cool elephant trekking. Lucky for us the elephant trekking fun was the day after the world’s worst hangover.

So we leave the flumps and head down Thailand to the coast on the night train, this also happened to include a lot of beer... we arrived having not slept to find that Danny who we were supposed to meet had headed off back up the coast to Ko Tow. Nevermind we had a nice hotel and of course cheap cocktails.

So we did sun sea and snorkelling in the amazingly nice islands of southern Thailand. We even spent a couple of hours on the beach where they shot the film The Beach. Shane managed to damage his foot on some coral and ended up a few days later having the rotting flesh cut away from his toes in the local clinic... I’ve never heard a man laugh so much... he must of really enjoyed the experiance.
Danny rejoined us for the trip back to Bangkok where we said our goodbyes to Shane and took the bus to the Cambodian border.


The Ruins of Angkor

We did a tour of Cambodia which lasted 7 days. We arrived in Siem Reap to visit Angkor Wat. I've wanted to see this place since saw it for the first time on TV when i was a kid. I was fascinated by the trees that had enveloped the old temples.

They resemble some kind of alien tentacled creatures who spend their slow lived days devouring the last pieces of a human civilisation. The temples of Angkor are a feet of human engineering and civilisation. At its height Angkor Thom city housed a million people and that was about 1000 years ago.

The city, it's thought was abandoned when its success killed it... too many people and not enough water or food. There are two, 2 mile long lakes on either side of the city complex but one is now completely silted up but the other still holds some water. The area Angkor covers is immense. We spent 3 days exploring by local tuk tuk and our own peddle power.

One of the most arresting temples beside Angkor Wat is the Bayon which is inside the old city walls. This summer palace complex had been adored by several dozen carved stone faces who have the most serine and enigmatic smiles.

It felt very peaceful being at Angkor which was such a contrast to the modern day horrors of Pol Pots Killing Fields.

 Khmer Rouge and the Killing fields

We travelled to Phnom Penh capital of Cambodia and stayed in a hotel that was directly opposite the Genocide Museum; Tuol Sleng. This was a former school building that was taken over as a ‘security office’ called S.21. What we didn’t know at the time was that this museum/former school was the centre of torture and murder of at least 10500 men, women and children. We saw it in a different light after that.


The people sent to S.21 were disposed of in the countryside in what has become know as the killing fields. We took a moto ride out to the site that was used as a killing ground for the S.21 prison. The area now houses a memorial tower of human remains found in the mass graves. There are still graves there that haven’t been excavated and it’s very strange now walking around both the killing fields and the prison as it’s very quiet and almost peaceful. Out of the 10500 people to go into the prison only 7 came out alive.

The museum now hosts many of the photographs of the inmates and shows the way in which they lived and died between 1975 and 1979 in the then ‘Kampuchea Democratic’. In all Pol Pot murdered 3 million of his own people in a twisted ‘social experiment’ lasting 4 years. It is good to see that the Cambodian people have not been twisted by the slaughter and still remain kind and caring although deeply scarred.

 From one former war zone to the next – Vietnam
 

We thought it would be nice to travel into Vietnam via the Mekong river from Cambodia. It takes about 5 hours and is a nice relaxing way to get into the country. The problems only started when we got into Vietnam. We arrived at a place called Chou Doc, a run down little boarder town with a very limited charm and a million mosquitoes. We foolishly decided that a nice way to get up to Saigon (now Ho Chi Min City) would be to book onto a 3 day Mekong delta trip. What a nightmare, it was so badly run and none of the guides/idiots took any responsibility for the passengers. At the end of day 2 the bus pulled up in the middle of nowhere and told us to get off and take a taxi to our hotel. This is the point where both me and Danny went metal. We refused to get off the bus until a tour guide with proper information came and took us to our hotel. The bus guy and Danny were toe to toe and I was sure it was gonna come to blows. I was very proud of Danny he was 'battle squirrel' ready for the kill.

We eventually got to Saigon after another awful days touring only to find that in 2 weeks it was Tet New Year (the lunar new year) and all and I mean all the transport up to Hanoi where our flight was due to leave from was fully booked. There were no trains; or they wouldn’t sell westerner the tickets, no busses and only really expensive flights. So here we were trapped in Saigon, with the whole country about to shut down on us.

This might not have been so bad if it weren’t for the fact that the Vietnamese people really really hate the westerners, I think after what the US did over there they have no respect, no time and no thought for tourist except to part them from there money as fast as humanly possible. I can’t blame them for this attitude after visiting the war museum and seeing the photos of what the US dropped on the people over there it’s horrifying. Just the Agent Orange and the Napalm alone was enough never mind the hundreds of tons of bombs. It will take Vietnam longer than it’s already had to recover from the devastation the US caused and having seen its fallout first hand, it makes me afraid for the consequences of what will come to us from Iraq.
 So, as we couldn’t get to Hanoi for the flight out we booked new flight out to Borneo, I’ve never been so relieved to get out of a country as I was from Vietnam.