The Story So Far ...

We said farewell to our work friends at the RSPCA and BBC on 14 September, farewell to our families on 3 October, and set off for Africa to save cheetahs, decorate school buildings, and look around a bit. After a trip home for Christmas, we headed for South East Asia on 6 January -- where we were stunned by Qatar and Cambodia, taught novice monks in Laos, and acted as security guards at an Elephant Festival. It was back home for four weeks to look after John's dad, before we tangoed our way through five South American countries in fifteen days. We then snooped our way through New Zealand, dipped our toes into Fiji, drove-thru California and were home from home with family in Vancouver.

Now, we are home itself. Fulfilled, happy, and ready to earn the respect of our friends and family by knuckling down and earning some money once again ...

Wednesday, 30 March 2011

In pictures... Cambodia


The riverfront in the capital Phnom Penh may look peaceful...

.... but it's a buzzing city where everyone is always on the go...

... sometimes at a gentle pace...

... and sometimes a bit more quickly.

Easily the best time of day to be up and about is at sunrise...

... when the city's residents take the chance to do all sorts of exercises...

... and sometimes even a falang (foreigner) is brave enough
to join in the spontaneous dancing.

And yes, if you look closely, that is indeed an elephant in
 the background, "on it's way to work". But at least when he gets there...

... health and safety still comes first. 



Of course the recent history of Cambodia is heart-rending - the horrors of the
 Khmer Rouge, as well as the American and Vietnamese 'interventions ,cannot
 easily be described. But most of the memorials don't need words.


So after emotional visits to the Killing Fields,
we decided it may help to have a go at meditation class.
(John seemed to really enjoy it,
but I think it just made my knees ache.) 

After travelling upcountry by bus to a town called
 Battambang, we took a bicycle tour into the
countryside to meet farmworkers and see their skills.
This was us trying to make a rice pancake...

... and here's some we (ahem) made earlier.

Often we had a fascinated audience...

... but the real show was the amazing skills
of all the local people.

While in Battambang, and as John lay ill in bed recovering from a dodgy
rice pancake, new friend Joanna and I took a ride on the 'Bamboo Train'.
It's a hilarious motor-driven contraption on the local railway line.... 

... that hurtles you through the countryside at breakneck speed.

On journey onwards then required an all-day boat ride down the river delta....
... which meant we got to see life on the river at sunrise...
... including the morning laundry.

Our boat provided an interesting ride...
... although the 'on-board facilities' weren't up to much.
(Just don't ask what lurks behind that door.)

We were equally a source of fascination to the local villagers,
as they were to us. Some lived on the riverbank...

... while others lived on the river itself.

And when you live on the river, you learn from a young age.


Our final destination was Siem Riep, the base to explore the
 astonishing complex of temples at Angkor.

Some, like Ta Prohm, have long ago surrendered
to the jungle and are wonderfully atmospheric...

... and many are just vast - and very, very steep.

The stoneworkers' skill and ambition was breathtaking...

...and they even found time to add a few gargoyles.


Cambodia - truly a spiritual place.



Wednesday, 23 March 2011

In pictures... Qatar


Well, since there's a pause as we gather our thoughts between trips, I thought I'd put a few photos up of our recent travels in Qatar, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.  This will be more of a 'photo essay', so there won't be too many words, but I hope you enjoy the pics...

Henry



Our journey began in Doha, capital of the Gulf state of Qatar, where we stayed
 with Becky & Niall and their young son Jake, kind friends and perfect hosts.

The city is a bit like Las Vegas, created amid a desert with truckloads of cash...

.... and it really lights up at night..

Of course, Becky and I took our time on Billionaires Row to select
which mega-yacht was the right one for us.

Becky & Niall's home is high up in Somerset House...
... which is one of the 'baby' buildings in Doha.

Some locals out on a late afternoon stroll, not that you can really walk much in Doha
 because of the size of the place, let alone the heat. Most men wear full-length
 white thobes,or 'dish dashas, whereas women have the black abbayas...

.... but there's always time for a good gossip over Sunday lunch.

Jake and Becky

And when we stumbled across a sort of
 kite festival, I couldn't resist this photo.
Any suggested captions welcome...


Thursday, 10 March 2011

What Another Taxi Driver Told Us

Off to the airport

Taxi drivers, we have learnt, can end up revealing far more about the country you’re visiting than the country itself.

The taxi driver who took us into Phnom Penh from the airport on the first day of our Asian adventure revealed truths more shocking than we could comprehend during small talk (see “What the Taxi Driver Told Us”, 16 January.)  The driver who yesterday delivered us safely from the insanity of Saigon’s streets to its airport on our final day taught us something less frightening - but curious, nonetheless.

As in January, he was in his forties, laughing as he pointed out the prettiest girls and told us about his Catholic faith.  He was a Catholic, he said, because his father had been French, and served alongside the Americans defending South Vietnam.  So his father had been on the losing side, and he well remembered the day the winning side, the Communists, stormed his home city and stayed put.  

That was thirty-five years ago, and I’d seen very little that remotely resembled Communism in this neon country during these past two weeks.  But he assured me that no, most of these furiously paced people with things to sell and places to go just wanted to get out -- and he was one of them.  

It was something else for us to think about as he dropped us off at the concourse marked Departures, beaming gratefully at our $2 tip.


John

Tuesday, 8 March 2011

Notes from Abroad 1: Zero Credibility

Nice smile, shame about the noughts

I'd always assumed that the more zeros on a country's banknotes, the more of a muddle its economy was in.  Perhaps this was based on a childhood trip to a rather chaotic Italy, where as a ten-year-old I wrestled with the 3,000 or so lira they gave me for each of my pocket-money pound notes.

Africa appeared to confirm this theory on our travels last winter.  South Africa (pretty solid economy): 11 rand to the pound.  Kenya (on the up): 125 shilling to the pound.  Uganda (still bordering on basket case): 3,650 shilling to the pound.

But Vietnam has mucked that theory up, with how-much-is-this-coffee calculations that make your head ache more than the turbo-powered coffee itself.   (Answer:  17,000 dong -- seventeen thousand --  and it still only works out at less than 50p.)  Meanwhile, the country's economy moves faster than the herd of motorbikes that powers past you on every neon lit street corner.  Everyone's got something so sell.  Nobody seems to want something for nothing.  Maybe it's because in Vietnam, everyone can aspire to be a millionaire.

John

Notes from Abroad 2: Farewell Factory Floor

I'd always assumed that the moment a hardline socialist government realised that hardline socialism wasn't terribly fashionable any more, it redesigned its banknotes.  Recent observations appear to have confirmed this theory.

I seem to remember that on a trip to (sort of socialist) Uganda a few years back, the battleship grey banknotes were adorned with pictures of electricity pylons.  They now show some lovely animals, and a big map in a range of exciting colours.  Laos, bless, hasn't quite caught up with this approach, and one of its biggest notes still appears to boast a collective farm.  Vietnam, meanwhile, is so far ahead that for its latest series, it's gone for the trendy Australian plastic banknote style, ditching what appears to have been three ladies in a sweat-shop (2000 dong) and a hydro electric dam (5000 dong)  in favour of a selection of charming temples.

Sweat-shop & Hydroelectric Dam
Charming temples

But at least most of them do have one thing in common: the size and colour of the banknote helps you sort them in your wallet.  Big red note = different value from smaller blue note.  That's just common sense, surely? 

Not judging by the one banknote so many countries seem to actually want, the US $.  So do us all a favour, Uncle Sam.  Drop those dreary presidential portraits, get the design team in, and try to catch up with Vietnam's Uncle Ho.

John

Saturday, 5 March 2011

Some Observations on Vietnamese Water Puppetry

Scene One of Twelve

It's wonderfully quick, Vietnamese Water Puppetry.  Done and dusted in forty minutes flat.  The perfect pre-dinner entertainment.

Henry and I discovered this the other evening.  Water puppetry is to Vietnam what Opera is to Italy, and although we've always had our doubts about opera, we thought we ought to take a look.  But our hearts sank when we saw the programme.  There would be twelve scenes, all of them involving those shiny marionettes.  Puppets of children playing in the water, puppets of dragons fighting in the fields, puppets of women growing rice, puppets of a turtle and a phoenix dancing like lovers.  Oh boy, we thought.  We've got to sit through all this puppetry before we can head off to our Emperor's Banquet at a restaurant down the road (six courses for £6.20.)

So it was quite a relief that each scene seemed to last about three minutes.  Once we'd grasped the timings, we found ourselves rather enjoying the colourful skill of the puppeteers, manoeuvring their little charges on long poles beneath the water to the sound of the Vietnamese pipes.

If Verdi had taken the same approach,  I'd have taken out Lifetime Membership of Glyndebourne long ago.

Wednesday, 2 March 2011

Tea for Two, Twice

When Henry and I visit stately homes back in England, I always try to make sure we arrive at about 2.45pm.  This gives us enough time to feel we've done the place justice, before settling down at about 4.30pm to the bit we were really interested in the first place, Afternoon Tea in the Refreshment Room.  On a recent bike ride in Vietnam, we discovered a different approach.

It was about 3.15pm that we clambered off our bikes on the outskirts of the Imperial City of Hue.  We'd tracked down the Garden House of a Foreign Minister who served Emperor Tu Duc when our own Queen Victoria was busy running her own empire.  It was a tiny place, which we covered comfortably in ten minutes flat -- pond, temple, mangosteen tree, shrine.  But the little old lady who trotted out to greet us (her only visitors, as far as we could tell) wasn't going to let us get away that quickly.  She ushered us to a teak table on the late mandarin's verandah, shoved a jar of candied ginger before us, and promptly produced from nowhere a pot of steaming jasmine tea.  As we sipped, she beamed. 

You weren't thinking of leaving, were you?
The next stop on our Garden House Trail was the former home of a junior mandarin under Emperor Thanh Thai, built in 1888 and now owned by his 79 year old grandson.  We know his age because he told us, as he escorted us in his pyjamas around his orchard, vegetable garden and fishpond.  Our second pot of tea soon followed, accompanied this time by a bunch of bananas, more smiles, and a box for tips.

Next stop
We didn't mind the hint.  We'd had far more refreshment than a £6.25 National Trust scone and pot of Earl Grey could ever have provided, and we hadn't had to queue at a self-service counter to pay for it.

John

Tuesday, 1 March 2011

February Report (due to popular demand, a new type of blog entry that actually tells you what we've been up to ...)

Rainy Dawn in Hanoi.  We didn't dress like that deliberately

The last time we updated you on what we were up to, we had  been thrown in at the deep end as English teachers in Luang Prabang.  We were, to be honest, feeling slightly overwhelmed by Lesson Plans and Past Participles, needing to be conveyed in a language our audience couldn't speak because they had come to us to learn it.  We are pleased to report that this story has had a happy ending.

Over the days our confidence grew, and by the end of our three weeks I think we had grasped that whilst every student may not have understood every concept, we were if nothing else playing a useful role by enabling them to hear spoken English, and have a shot at writing and speaking it themselves.  On our last days, Henry was to be found leaping up and down, and asking the same of his monk charges, to illustrate the tenses of the verb "to jump".  Meanwhile I was causing something of a stir by dividing my class into two groups of eight and taking each group out, one after the other, to sit with me at a bench beneath a frangapini tree, where I had them read their work to each other, before discussing it.  Both were, we think, real liberations from the rituals and rote of the classroom, and a reminder of why we were here.

After a weekend break in a small village eight hours upstream for kayaking, a massage, and a very good curry (see The Dinner Party) we headed back south to our next main destination: Paklai, and the annual Elephant Festival.  We have Henry's colleagues from the RSPCA to thank for this -- and very thankful we are too.

This episode ticked both the 'Roughing It' and "Did we really do that?" boxes, with the odd spot of heat exhaustion thrown in.  After our 13-hour journey south on small wooden stools in a slow boat (see The Luncheon Party)  we were picked up in a smart air conditioned 4x4 by a Lao businessman: we'd be spending five nights in his home as his paying guests.   We were slightly disappointed when we pulled up at his flash portico'd front porch, as we'd envisaged something a bit more primitive with which to test ourselves.  We need not have worried.  He and his wife ushered us into what can at best be described as a dingy grey room, at worst a prison cell, of unrendered walls and a filthy small window, overlooking a chicken yard which ensured that there was never any danger of us sleeping in beyond cock-crow at 5am.  The bathroom, reached through several dark ante-rooms, managed somehow to combine dust with dampness, rust and a musty smell, with some dodgy electrics dangling perilously close to the rubber shower attachment.  But he and his wife were eager hosts, insisting we joined them for dinner that night (seated on the floor, dipping various meats and vegetables into communal sauce and rice) -- never to be forgotten, and truly Lao in its simplicity and its sincerity.

The next day our work began (see Too Many T Shirts and Insecurity Guards): four days with several other volunteers setting up a stall in the main fairground area, selling T-shirts in 35c+ heat, and attempting to prevent mayhem from breaking out when the stars of the show, the elephants, were on parade.  Our evenings were spent cooling off with cold beer (80p for a big, big bottle) and rice-based meals in the company of a wide range of fellow volunteers and travellers who made for such varied and engaging international company.  I suspect it is true what they say: if you travel with someone, you will always have company, but if you travel alone, you will always have lots of company, as the same small groups kept forming and reforming around the rice-bowl, and often we would join them.

From here it was a five-hour journey, the least comfortable of our lives, by minivan to the capital of Laos, Vientiane.  My affection for this country was most sorely tested at this point (along with my buttocks), as I questioned how any government could permit such a shambolic road system to exist between its capital city and any of its towns.  Think of a dirt track leading off a country lane in rural Cumbria, double the number of potholes, treble the volume of red dust, quadruple the heat, and you have a sense of it.  We recovered with a gin and tonic (the first of our four months' travels) in the city's finest colonial hotel (before a deliciously cheap French meal and night in our budget, 'does-the-shower-work-today' hotel down the road.)

The following morning I mis-memorised a streetmap, went for a pre-breakfast jog, ended up miles from the Mekong -- but was able to have enjoyed a snapshot of Laotian city dwellers beginning their day.  We then  packed and headed for the airport and our final destination -- Vietnam.

Thanks to Henry spotting that I'd misunderstood the visa regulations (my extensive research had led me to conclude that they could easily be picked up on arrival at the airport in Hanoi; Henry discovered they couldn't; we arranged the visa in Laos and discovered  that if we hadn't we'd have been escorted back there on arrival in Hanoi) we were soon in the damp and slightly chilly streets of the Vietnamese capital.

What a contrast to sleepy little Laos!  Motorbikes, horns, traffic, vendors -- and the bells of a Notre Dame like cathedral from the little square where our hotel was located.  The grey skies and (almost English) February temperatures were  a delightful relief, as was our dawn walk around the city's central lake the following day -- observing badminton and ballroom dancing exercise routines from a polite distance, while I directed Henry's photo-shoot.

Ballroom Dancing by Daybreak

I'll stick to my morning run

After breakfast of two fried eggs, bread and jam, we became tourists for 48 hours.  We wandered the streets, visited 3 museums, and paid our respects to the embalmed corpse of Ho Chi Minh, lying in his open coffin in the Mausoleum more than forty years after his death.  His genial face beams from all the banknotes and many of the billboards. "Uncle Ho" is, I think, the first totalitarian leader I've come across to have pulled it off without a genocide at the time and all round embarrassment several decades later -- but I would be interested to know others' thoughts on this.

Tonight we save a hotel bill (all of $23) and take the overnight Reunification Express train south to the Imperial City of Hue, on the banks of the most delightfully named Perfume River.  I dare say it will smell of sewage, but if the city itself is half as fascinating as Vietnam has been so far, it will be worth it.  We then head further south along the coast to the mayhem of Saigon (nobody calls it Ho Chi Minh City now, apparently, in spite of the banknotes) -- and our flight home.

Thank you for reading this far.  Do let us know if the blog is of any interest -- we've changed the settings so that I don't think you have to sign up or do anything fiddly to leave a comment -- it always gives us a real buzz to know when anything we've written has struck a chord or raised a smile.  And we shall look forward to raising a glass with you soon, on our next return.

With love,

Henry and John

Henry & Donna
(not an Engagement Photo, but one of our very best new friends we met whilst teaching.
And it's one of the few decent ones with poor Henry in it ... all my fault, but it's what happens
when you leave your partner to take all the pictures ...)