Friday 31 December 2010

Vang Vieng, Laos

Vang Vieng, Laos, Wednesday 29th December

Edie’s blog

I’ve been floating down the slipstream in the Nam Song river, I just saw a beautiful red dragonfly. The mountains are huge and beautiful, it’s boiling hot here.
This morning, I had a lovely mulberry shake at breakfast in a farm outside Vang Vieng.
Yesterday, I went cycling to a lagoon, 4 miles through little villages. There are little kids working for their Mums and Dads because it’s a very poor country.
I’m sad because there are lots of people that don’t have a lot of money.

I want to go and see what Will’s doing, he’s playing with the kids in the field behind us.
…“Oh my god, have you seen the herd of children that Will’s playing with.??!!”

Will’s blog
There are big mountains where I am now in Laos. I am having breakfast in a restaurant with a nice garden. There was a huge butterfly, we have seen loads of them all over the place. And there are lots of huge motorbikes around, they are gigantic. We are staying by the river called the Nam Song in Vang Vieng.  There are also lots of air balloons that wake me up in the morning.  They have big flames to keep the them up in the air.




Ollie’s blog


Sitting on the balcony of our hut overlooking the Nam Song river, huge limestone cliffs surround us, the water bubbling by. The boom from the sound system across the river can just be made out over the natural sounds which is a bit of a pain and can be a lot worse at night. Luckily they are only allowed to play music until 10pm…but one night it was Lao karaoke! Louis got a very powerful, green laser torch in Bangkok which can shine an amazing distance and we half-heartedly tormented the karaoke singers with it late at night !

Vang Vieng is a very strange place, nestled in an incredibly dramatic valley. Someone described it as Apocalypse Now meets Club Med which is not far off. A vast, golden hot air balloon has just drifted through the trees in front of me!…
This is where the westerners come to hang out and get beered up, drugged up and generally wasted!! You can tube (rubber ring ) down the fast flowing river or canoe or longboat or go caving. For very little money, they are thrown beers by the locals or honey drinks laced with magic mushrooms in buckets as they speed by. It is seriously strange, pretty sick…and seemingly out of control.

Meanwhile, the real Laos just about exists side by side, people fish by hand with large weighted nets and women stoop over the rushing river for hours to gather cockles.

Yesterday, we cycled out to “the blue lagoon” (more like a small pond) with a rope swing but among fiercely steep limestone cliffs that take your breath away…the roads are stony mud tracks and lethal. Life is very hot and hard in the fields. Amazingly, there seems on the surface very little resentment of these crazy foreigners, in fact we are greeted my wide smiles wherever we go…great to see the kids here, in uniform, sometimes 3 on one bike, all Will’s age, on their way to school.

For all its obvious faults and strange mixture of gob-smacking beauty and jaw-dropping
Western crassness , we have decided to stay here for a few days. The moment we arrived , after a hair-raising minibus ride thought the mountains from Vientiane, we picked up our bags and made our way over this gorgeous little wooden bridge ( I’ve never fallen in love with a bridge before!) to a  lovely ‘quiet’ home stay. All forms of life pass over that bridge, tractors loaded down with workers, 4X4 jeeps with Thai tourists, men in straw hats with pots and pans that could fill half a shop. It’s great to just sit and watch. This small holding has begun in some strange way to remind me of Hillside, you can get away from it all  here. There are trees all around and tropical ‘lawns’ for the kids to run around on and ducks, cows and calves, water buffalo and 10 small puppies suckled by their Mum in a deep sandy hole in the river bank. It is very calm and we have two huts side by side, 30 feet from the water’s edge.

This afternoon, our 4th day? (I’m losing count) Edie and Louis have been finding the deeper gulleys in the river to be swept down, Will and I were paddling in the shallower sections. It’s not heaven but it feels like a good place to stop and take our breath …We’ve been away nearly 4 weeks.


Tuesday 21 December 2010

The boat

Khao Sok National Park, Thailand, Monday 20th December

I have to write about the boat journey….unforgettable, a turning point for us all , maybe it was when the trip really began…. I shot a little film but the photo doesn't do it justice.

We'd had an exhausting last day in the sea off Ko Tao (Turtle Island), full of the usual cocktail of bliss, bickering and sibling rivalry, mal-functioning snorkels and a bright red kayak….
We had said our goodbyes to Mr Talek, the fantastic chef and shy, guesthouse owner and his very handsome but surly brother and took our last longboat into the port.

Dumped our bags at the travel agent, chatted to a lovely Malaysian woman who together with her husband, had left Paris to set up a patisserie on the main street in town. She was very jealous of our long trip together and raised her eyebrows when we mentioned India….she had had an unforgettable time there many years ago….we will be there soon…..

We ate a meal, bought our supplies at the Seven-Eleven and boarded the boat at around 9pm…..

It was old  and wooden, colonial in  style with very low ceilings, stiflingly hot with two storeys and open windows straight out onto the sea. There were fifty beds on each floor!! Each bed was about 2 foot wide and 5 ft long …Weirdly, I was excited, the atmosphere was intense...Louis definitely wasn‘t and Rach and Edie were very nervous after their last ,sickening 2 hour boat ride to the island…As we left the twinkly lights of the port some of us (apart from Louis) felt like explorers going down the Okavango delta rather than just another boat load of (mostly) pleasure-seeking tourists on their way to their next treat.

Two minutes out of the tiny, rickety port it was lights out, bed-time…yeah, right!

Will who was sharing my miniature patch of bed was the first to go, Edie the last about 3 hours later…We were a huge, cramped mass of arms, legs and backpacks. It was mad . “Like a refugee boat “the Danish man with his two kids said next to me, he had my feet under his nose for the next 6 hours. Rach (chief-packer and mother extraordinaire) gave me some earplugs and I was the next to go…

I remember spending the night fending off Will’s flailing legs and awoke to see him practically lying on top of Louis. At the time, somewhat romantically I thought it made me think how as families we can never really get away from each other.

The next day we were all shattered , landing at the port of Surat Thani at 4.30 in the morning but we all realised that if we could survive that journey, we were now ready for anything.

Edie says she loved it, me too, Will who is just permanently buzzing and making friends left, right and centre, took it all in his stride... we are all secretly proud to have got through it.

Four days later, I am now sitting in the National park  in Khao Sok, a 66 million year old rainforest full of incredible lime stone cliffs and stunning 100 ft bamboos,  bright coloured plants and creatures of all kinds.

We made friends with a Danish family and hung out them here for three days…rode elephants, swam in streams, went on night safari to see scorpions, monkeys, chameleons ..amazing.

Yesterday, we went tubing, riding the river on rubber tractor rings and swinging on rope swings into the deepest parts of the river…we slept in a the honeymoon tree house, 40 feet above the jungle (built for two obviously) but packed with us five and three different mosquito nets, very heath Robinson as Dad would have said.... but we were all pretty much unfazed….seasoned travellers we are after two weeks in Thailand!


Tonight, we take the night train to Bangkok and then on to Laos. We might even dare take another boat, up the Mekong river to Luang Prabang, who knows….














Tuesday 14 December 2010

will's post

I miss you Blisland school I hope you have a good time while I'm away.
I've been having a really good time and I'm eating my breakfast.
The fish come all the way to the shore, you can see them really easily. I have been
snorkelling so I can see the fish really close. I've seen orange fish and white fish. The
coral is really sharp and so are the rocks which I cut myself on.

In Bangkok there are pictures of the King everywhere. It was his birthday last week.

It is boiling hot where we are now on the island Ko Tao, luckily there are fans everywhere
to keep us cool.

Tomorrow we are taking the night boat to the jungle. I hope to see monkeys and ride on
elephants.

Lots of love
Will

Sunday 12 December 2010

Ko Tao, Thailand

Koh Tao, Thailand Monday 13th December

8 am on another beautiful sunny day, we have two small huts betweens us one beside the other , 30 foot from the sea edge.The gentle lapping of the sea against the sand is filling my recently slept head. No one else appears to be up but I thought after a week it was time I gathered my thoughts and let you all know how we are getting on…...a little mir cat like Thai squirrel has just decided to join me on the veranda and is staring at me with his tale aquiver….yesterday he stole our bananas , he’s scampered off now…..


This place is very beautiful and so quiet, the island itself is quite developed and has a seven/eleven store and offers diving courses and late night parties and resorts with infinity pools but where we are, there is only an cluster of small huts a 10 minute boat ride from the small village. There is a small restaurant and that’s it…

We have been here 3 nights now and are beginning to be seriously chilled. The coral and sea life is amazing and all the kids have learnt to snorkel. Louis has been filming with his underwater camera, yesterday Edie and I went snorkelling and saw a school of thousands of yellow and gold fish swim by with an enormous parrot fish swimming above them, we floated there just watching aghast, giving each other thrilled double thumbs up signs under the water! It must have taken at least 3 minutes for them all to swim past us…one of the most amazing things I have ever seen…

When you dive down to look at the coral close up it feels as if you are in your own film!!!
From day one Edie said she wanted to live here, Will said he never knew we were going to go to paradise, Louis is also very excited in a wonderful, very Louis way…..All three of them spent the whole day yesterday in the water playing games and snorkelling.

At night, we sit in the small restaurant and play dice or later back at the hut, we play charades…this gets them very over excited and hard to get to sleep but it’s great to have uninterrupted time together and wonderful to see them all so happy…in between bashing their feet on coral or arguing over snorkel masks etc

We took a long journey 6 hours by train (the kids were brilliant)and then 2 ½ hours by boat (Edie was sick and Rach looked miserable) but Louis, Will and I were out on deck in the sunshine, excitedly watching the changing horizon and amazing cloud shapes… But blissful as it undoubtedly is, life on the road is not without its stresses….
 ( Will has just woken up and come bounding up to me with a huge grin in one of Neddy‘s fabulous old Hawaiian shirts looking for the gecko that was stuck to our hut wall but has since run off, now he‘s swinging in the hammock)….

The kids are just as demanding as always or maybe more so, wanting water, food or not liking the food!! It was great with the pool at the hotel in Bangkok because there was a tourist office there and while the kids swam, we could plan our next few weeks ….we are going by night train to Laos on 21st Dec.

My cousin Ivan (who lives and runs a hotel in Laos) was staying in our hotel that first night in Bangkok which was great for us. He knows the city well having lived there for 4 years and took us out for a fab meal at a restaurant on the river. We went by Tuk tuk which we all loved very hair raising round the bends, a bit like being at the fair , not a seatbelt in sight !!
Edie couldn’t stop taking pictures, everyone was out in the street, on an incredibly hot night, whole families eating out in the pavements, all that sweet smelling delicious noodlefood, beautiful dingy half lit, incredibly atmospheric streets, honking horns, shrines and huge yellow ribbons wrapped round the palaces like birthday presents in celebration of the king’s birthday..

I loved Bangkok …so much more than I though I was going to…it was the perfect place to start…very easy to get around, boat, sky train, tuk tuk …no one hassles you, very friendly people, they kept ruffling Wills hair and helping us if we were lost …

The shopping centres are scary, so air-conditioned and huge with every brand name in store…and then at dusk to the old food market, fruit of all shapes and sizes, fish and frogs and eels in buckets, dark, smelly and very mysterious…It feels in as though we have only just skimmed the surface of this amazing country












Wednesday 8 December 2010

Fish Nibbling Bangkok

 It's like being tickled .....but they bite the old skin off you-guess who they liked nibbling the most?

Will had Teddy  bear shaped Rice.

Saturday 4 December 2010

countdown

Twelve hours before take off.....repacking again, all at fever pitch....