Another Slow Boat

I took the scenic waterways route as I exited Vietnam for Cambodia taking in a floating fishing village, a floating fruit and veg market, and a Cham village along the watery way. I headed for Can Tho to see the floating fruit and veg market and had a rather creepy bus journey from Saigon to Can Tho. The bus driver of the minivan only knew "I love you" in English so I humored it for a while. The driver and bus ticket man offered to take me directly to my guesthouse which came across as a bit creepy so I hopped on the back of a moto to my guesthouse. I was just settling in when the driver turned up and motioned to me, him, and my room! Jeez! I'd only said bye to Tom a few hours before and already I was being propositioned! Of course I said a firm "no" and hid in my room for a little while.

At the floating fruit and veg market Can Tho, Vietnam

The next morning I got up bright and early and headed for the dock and got on a small boat powered by a little local woman who took me to the busy floating market and then back through the quiet backwaters (it reminded me very much of Alleppey, India). Whilst she was steering the small motorised boat she crafted me a bracelet and staff made of river reeds. Super impressive crafty skills!

Good craft!

I then headed to Chau Doc and took the slowboat, first to the floating fishing village and Cham Muslim village, and then towards Cambodia. The view was very scenic and we passed lots of kids having a great time splashing about in the river water and the usual rice paddies and wooden stilt houses. It was a very chilled introduction to Cambodia.

Floating fishing village, Chau Doc, Vietnam

On Tour

A view of life on the road

We had a very brief stop in Dalat, sank a strawberry shake (possibly even eclipsing my love of mango shakes) and visited a mountaintop pagoda, and then scooted out of there on the back of a motorbike for a three day tour of the surrounds. It was so much fun!! I am pretty much anti-motorbikes but when traveling old ideals sometimes slip out of the window. We hired motorbikes and drivers through Freelance Cycles, strapped our backpacks onto the back of the motorbikes and away we went! It was exhilarating!! I can see why people get hooked on it: the wind in your face, being exposed to the elements, the freedom, and really being part of the landscape as you zoom through the mountains and alongside villages and rice paddies. It was incredible! An absolute Vietnamese highlight! Plus we rarely saw another traveller and so got off the tourist trail for a few days at least which was refreshing. It was chilled and fun and educational and a million other things too!! Brilliant!

We swung by this lovely blue water for a refreshing dip, after a slippy clamber down, plus a shoulder massage underneath the super powerful waterfalls.

Our first stop was Crazy House in Dalat in the style of Gaudi but executed with a little less panache. It was still an interesting spot with different animal themes running throughout, my faves being a huge ant where I drank a Vietnamese drip coffee, a big cheetah with scary red eyes, and a huge toucan with splayed wings. Crazy House is an ongoing process with new wings being continuously added to, we even had a clamber over the building site with bits of concrete and poles jutting out haphazard. Oh Health & Safety!

Crazy House under continuous construction

After exploring for an hour we hit the road with Khian and Khio our hilarious double-act drivers who entertained us with folk tales of cleverness and trickery, as well as logic puzzles using chopsticks and bamboo toothpicks that we very rarely managed to crack, and if we did it was with a fair few hints! Lots of fun!

On our first day we visited a flower farm. In Vietnam three pink roses shows love, yellow flowers for respect and red for luck. I received a lovely bouquet of pink and red flowers from my driver, none from Tom mind! We stopped off at a coffee plantation/rice wine factory combo. The rice wine is a super strong spirit made of rice (of course!) and locals make it for local consumption. It is pretty lethal stuff! Later we learnt that you can add animal bits and bobs with different effects: scorpions for the back, goats' penis as Viagra. Charming! At this little roadside place I had the best coffee of my life! Weasel coffee! To start you harvest the coffee beans, get little weasels to eat the coffee beans, wait for them to poop it out, collect the coffee beans (which are still intact!), and grind them up in the regular fashion...and this is weasel coffee!! We drank it in the usual Vietnamese drip coffee style and, oh my, it had the densest, smoothest, richest taste verging on alcoholic it was just so strong!

Waiting for our Vietnamese drip coffee sweetened with condensed milk. I'm a BIG fan!

As we approached the village where we were going to spend the first night a thunderstorm hit with dense rain so out came our matching green waterproofs which were a great lol. It was pretty scary and exciting driving through the rain and the storm with lightening cracking in all directions. We made it to our basic accommo of a huge wooden longhouse on stilts with mattress on the floor and mosquito net with no bathroom (the nearest was the restaurant down the road) and power cuts throughout the night just to add to the drama of the storm. We had a great feast with dishes galore. Khian had phoned ahead earlier in the day to make sure I had some veggie eats, and I sure did: tofu, battered mushrooms, wintermelon salad, greens, spring rolls, rice and more. Delish! We slept in our basic but huge wooden home with the loudest gecko shouting out "gecko gecko" right by our ears all night long.

In our matching waterproofs!

We also took in a brick factory, tea plantation, mushroom farm, silk worm factory, a poor attempt on my part at crossing a rickity bamboo bridge, paddled across a lake in a wooden canoe to see some surprising fishing tactics, cocoa plantation, rubber plantation, cashew nut farm, and saw a waterfall or two. Busy busy!

At the silk factory. You can see cacooned silk worms in the big baskets waiting to be cleaned. Don't fret, the dead silk worms are not wasted, they are fed to farm animals!

We had such a brilliant time and it was worth splurging the travelly budget. Khian and Khio defo made the trip memorable with their never-ending enthusiasm, puzzles, and skillful driving skills. Absolute highlight! I hugely recommend! Never try, never know!

Navigating our way through a herd of cows strolling along the road.

Pretty Much 4,000 Islands

I missioned it to the south of Laos via a double bed sleeper bus which I shared with a stranger: a clarinet playing British girl. I stayed on Don Det, one of these 4,000 Islands, and had a super chilled time, even bumping into a couple of Team Laos members on this tiny island. I hired a bicycle a couple of times and looped both Don Det and Don Khong in a morning casually cycling along the bumpy pathways through the island jungles and villages and along the delta of the islands. I even saw a heron casually hanging out on the back of a water buffalo (which would have been a great photo pic had I not been crashing around trying to find my camera!). I even managed to cycle past this cow-like creature without getting too phobic about the situ. The islands and deltas were very beautiful indeed. 

A nice little scenic spot on my cycle about two of the 4,000 islands

Cruising around the islands towards sunset



And who knew watermelons grew like this?? On a tiny little sandy mound (erm, island)

Crabs Escape on Train!

So to my weekend jaunt to the delightful Sunderbans. A perfectly chilled group of us took a 2 day boat tour of the Sunderbans in search of the elusive man-eating Bengali tiger through the largest mangrove delta in the world (not mangoes as one of our troupe thought!). We started off super hungover after a Hope Foundation flat-warming party (the results of which saw the Hopers get evicted due to the apparently rowdy party. Eeps!). We then, of course, took a plethora of transportation modes: firstly, the taxi to Sealdah train station, onto the locals train, onto a sort of rickshaw front end with a flat wooden cart stuck on the back for us to sit on (possibly the most uncomfortable 45 minutes of my life with every bump in the road felt as heads and legs were thrown against bars and boards), and finally onto our modest little boat.

Rickshaw/cart fusion. Beautiful scenery en route made this journey bearable: mud huts, rice paddies, tropical trees...

It was simply extremely chilled with guitars and singing, nice peeps and beautiful surrounds. On the first night we went to one of the villages and sat amongst a courtyard of mud huts for many hours with more guitar and singing and a cheeky little toddler to keep us entertained. The villagers then cooked us the most amazingly delish foods as served up for festivals (and of course there was a festival, this time for Saraswati): mushed up and spicy lentil and rice dish, grilled aubergine, and matchstick fried plantain. All eaten by hand and served up on a metal tray. We then popped off to the main event which turned out to be a village dance-off and as the guests we were invited up on stage. Urgh! I avoided this humiliation but the boys had a great time even giving a thank you speech. Afterwards we returned to the boat for some sleeps but alas!!, the boat was stranded on the mud bank! With some bloke muscle power they managed to haul the vessel back towards the dock. Disaster averted!

Mangroves...not mangoes!

We spent pretty much all of the next day cruising around the Sunderbans spying a few monkeys, a big lizard, and a croc...but no man-eating Bengali tiger! At one of the docks we bumped into a famous Bengali actor who climbed aboard, blessed the boys with a splodge of river mud on their forehead, and then gave us some river crabs as a gift for us to cook up for our tea. Bizarre!

Bengali actor warmly greeting his fans

On the journey back we piled into a tempo which could comfortably hold our group of eleven plus driver, but as soon as we were about to depart the masses piled in as they wedged their way onto the benches, clung to the sides, and sat on the roof bringing us to 25 aboard! Hilarious!! Then, at a brief stop at another town, another 5 magically squeezed their way on!! Impressive stuff! On the train back to Calcutta I was in charge of looking after our crab dinner. I did a poor job. Unbeknownst to me one escaped and as I caught sight of the second trying to claw its way out of the carrier bag it was too late and it too scuttled off - it's pincers looked pretty fierce and determined! There was mild pandemonium on the train as word got out that the foreigner's crabs had escaped! Pointing and high dramatics ensued. The crabs scuttled a little further down the carriage towards the doorway and were promptly kicked off the train by two in our group who were trying to save the crabs from being stomped to pieces by the locals. So no crab dinner. Funny times.

Confusing Banyan

Captivating Calcutta. I got into Calcutta at 4am and couldn't believe the intriguing energy that came off the streets of the city. The place was alive. Everything happens on the streets here. Laundry, pavement-side water-pump showers, curries being cooked up, chai, fruit and veg and fish and live chicken sellers, kids playing cricket, peeps sleeping and living. This is India.

After a few pre-drinks at my temporary residence, Modern Lodge, we stumbled across this puja held down an alleyway inbetween two spare parts shops which were both still visible with some of the women sat off to one side in amongst the metal junk. We were blessed (red blob on forehead), presented with a red and gold ribbon, and then had a great view of traditional singing and dancing. Fun times!

I headed off to the Botanical Gardens to see the great old banyan tree via local bus (of course) and crossed the Howrah bridge and it was just an incredible and awesome sight. It's hard to describe just how many people there are in India. As we passed by Howrah station the place was just seething with masses and masses of people filling all available space as they journey purposefully and frequently across India.

There is no sense of personal space here and everyone happily piles one on top of the other at all times of day and night and in pretty much all situations. I guess with the sheer numbers there really is no extra space to be had and so this is the way that life is led. It's possibly part economical and also part collective psyche. Observing the streets out here seems comparable: the roads are so chaotic with rickshaws nonchalantly driving up the wrong side of the road, all forms of transport zipping in and around each other at full speed piled high with people and cargo, pedestrians moving between traffic with ease and confidence; and yet there are so few calamities because of this seemingly huge understanding of each other and between each other.

...although you do still see the cycle carts being loaded incredibly high with bulky goods cycling down the busy streets. And then there's the hand-pulled rickshaws lugging lazy passengers through the city.

After musings with fellow travellers, it appears that there is a sort of silent communication that floats above the typical but figures somewhere in this collective psyche. And then somehow, after some months in India, you feel your own self drawn into it, but then everything becomes so disorienting as you battle with the homegrown idea of striking out as an individual against merging and swaying with a collective Indian way of life. You start to loose your mind a little bit as you grapple with this and the first idea to go is any sense of time. So days later as we sit drinking rose lassis I remember that my ill friend wanted a 7Up but it turns out that was a request made days earlier. Hard to explain but it was pretty funny (and maybe slightly worrying!).

Point 3 reminding you not to bring a DEAD BODY on the metro (???!). Jeez!

So yea, the banyan tree was pretty awesome. It looked a lot like little trees all clumped together with some roots starting in the sky and working their way down towards earth. Also it was pretty chill out there what with the little lake, munching (squirrel-like) on cashews, and kids messing about in pedalos and not too many "one photo".

Part of  the great big old banyan tree

Ooty to Varkala Possible

6 state buses, totalling less than 300 Rupees, in minus 24 hours towards NYE on the beach!

In less than 24 hours me and fellow Hampi dweller missioned it south from cold and wet Ooty to Varkala beach in search of fresh fish, sea, sand, sunshine and, of course, a pina colada or three. We powered through from government bus to government bus with not even a free moment to grab a chai - testament to the grueling, non-stop, determined bus trip towards beaches and booze. We took six state buses with benches for seats thinly upholstered in the standard blue plastic leather mix, glassless windows, concertina blinds made of this standard blue pleather which are useful for when the sun or the wind gets too aggressive. (I have been known to burn sat on these buses - surprised? Not at all!) Elbowing our way onto these buses whilst carrying awkward backpacks and competing with the short but strong and determined Indian ladies to get a spot on the next available bus. And we succeeded every time, with only a few short hours spent stood up wedged in amongst the other locals dripping in sweat and covered in a grimy dust layer. And all for less than 300 Rupees! Crazy cheap!

We had a small glitch when we turned up at a bus station at 1.30am and the next wasn't until 5am so we settled down and napped on the bus station floor, naturally. And then we set off for the final leg to catch another two buses before breakfast. Such an incredible journey!! I'm converted to state buses and now don't even know how to book a private bus! Lols.

We bumped into Lizzie's chum on arrival in Varkala and abused her lukewarm shower (possibly the best of my life) and then headed for our second breakfast of the day on a clifftop overlooking the sea and just off shore we spotted dolphins! Such a fun mission!

Hampi Christmas

Such a beautiful, serene, tranquil, overwhelmingly striking place. I planned to move on after a few days, even booked a bus to Gokarna, but ended up staying over two weeks...I think it's the same for most who wind up there. Especially those who make it over the river to The Other Side. Hampi is mesmerising. I totally fell for the place. Did a spot of yoga some mornings. Had a go at bouldering amongst the immense and awesome rock formations. Hired a bicycle, "Miss India" no less, and pottered around, although this was slightly harder than anticipated as we had to push our bikes along pathways made of huge, ancient, uneven slabs of granite and then load them onto little boats to cross the rivers at two points. Smiling whilst cycling of course. And mid-trip we stopped for a delish thali served on typical banana leaf plate and eaten with hands. The waitress-come-chef-come-owner-homemaker showed us the Indian trick to this: get your hands messy, cover them in curd and curry and rice, position hands in a small little shovel and then flick it all in your mouth with your thumb.

And then there was my Indian Christmas and my first away from the shire. We celebrated on 24th December as is the German way with good intentions to recreate Christmas on the standard 25th December but after Manju's strong punch the night before we were a little worse for wear. The day started with yoga and bouldering, obvs. Lizzie, resident at Manju's for over a month, took on the role as events organiser and set us the task of decorating the Christmas tree (of sorts) with an array of gaudy Indian Christmas decorations and crafty and creative homemade bits n bobs. We even had presents under the tree with the additions of bows and ribbons getting more and more elaborate as we crafted away. We had a super tasty barbeque with veggie kebabs, pitta, hummus, chips...maybe not typical Christmas dinner nor typical Indian cuisine but it was tasty delicious. Yum. Then after dinner entertainment of jamming around a small bonfire. It possibly didn't resemble too much of a Christmas as I know it but the festive, Manju family spirit was there.

The Darjeeling Ltd

27.11.10 First train journey! Mumbai to Udaipur. Wes Anderson's 'The Darjeeling Ltd' is possibly solely responsible for this Indian adventure. Oh how different is film and my reality! Blue grubby leather benches cramming six berths into an open cabin. Not quite living the dream! But after a few hours I settle in and they have become one of my favourite activities. Watching the landscape change, moving from cityscape to villages to slums to countryside. Catching sight of those who live and work along the train lines is fascinating and insightful and a truer reflection of this country than walking down some touristy strip..."which country suffers without you?" and "one photo, one photo!" This first train journey was slightly marred by an aggressive and grabby beggar woman who put some sort of curse on me when I refused to give her money, as it was all in Hindi I'm oblivious to my plight!