will's post from kampot

Kampot, Cambodia 24th January 2011

We went swimming in the river . It was really nice and warm ,I can swim without a life jacket and I jumped in off the pier. I spoke to Nana on Skype while I was jumping in. She could see me.

This morning before went swimming we we went to the barbers. Dad got his haircut then I decide to have my haircut too. After the haircut I feeled the back of my hair and its really spiky now.

Right now I can hear two birds talking to each other, it is really loud and squeaky. The bird is white and brown and beige.

We are staying at les Manguiers which means the mango trees in French. We are in a wooden hut, it is far off the ground. The doors are brown wood. It is really relaxing because lots of people swim in the river . We swam off the pier.

We went to a special school what looks after kids and other people and parents so to help them if they are disabled on a part of their body. It is called the Epic Arts Centre, it means every person counts.

 It teaches them how to dance with any part of their body, some parts are hurt badly.

I met someone called Chock he had an infected eye, he has downs syndrome .He is a really good artist and dancer.
Here is a picture of him wemet in the epic arts café.

 I really like Camboida

Luang Prabang, Laos, Tuesday 11th January

Edie:


30 kilometres outside Luang Prabang, we went to Kwang See National Park and first of all the bear sanctuary for Moon bears. They are there because the Chinese capture them
and take their bile which is the stuff that makes your saliva. Apparently, the Chinese drink it!


After that, we ran around the forest and came across this blue lagoon. We ran up, stopped still and our jaws dropped, Wwe’d never seen a beautiful, turquoise blue lagoon like it.  We went swimming  in one and ran on further and kept on seeing more and more blue lagoons with tumbling waterfalls. Eventually we got to the top and saw an absolutely huge waterfall with water spraying everywhere - about 40 metres high.  


On the way to the waterfalls, we stopped at a Hmong village. The Hmong are an ethnic group that doesn’t believe in Communism. Their religion is Animism.  We walked into the village and suddenly felt very depressed because there were people living in tattered, old houses in the middle of the mountains.  They were setting up little stalls for people to buy stuff.  There were loads of children who kept on saying “You can buy 5000”, over and over again which meant you can buy a friendship bracelet for 5000 kip (about 40p). We bought a few bracelets and other things to help the people out.


As soon as we got back in the car our stomachs began to unravel.  We kept on talking about it all the way to Kwang See.  Whenever I think about that I feel a bit depressed and guilty for some reason.  It taught me to feel lucky and to know that I should not expect too much.




12th January Luang Prabang


On our last day in Laos, in the evening, we walked over a rickety bamboo bridge over the Nam Khan river to where it meets the Mekong, a famous South East Asian river.


We walked over to a little sunset bar and ran down to the river bed with its white, dry, sprinkling sand. It is the dry season here so the Mekong is quite low.


For the first 20 minutes, Mum sat down and wrote postcards. For the last 20 minutes we ran around on the sand and took photos, feeling very happy as the sun set behind the mountains. When the sun disappeared it started to get cold.


As we walked back over the old bridge, we passed by a friendly Lao man, smiling and greeting us.  We told him it was our last day in Laos.  “Safe journey”, he said “and please come again.!”  He lives and sleeps in a tiny shack beside the ancient bamboo bridge and collects money from the people who use it.  Dad said he would never forget his smile.

Luang Prabang, Laos, Tuesday 11th January

Ollie:

“Rubbish!”  a 7 year old Lao boy shouts as the shuttlecock hits the floor. We are playing badminton with Don and Ben, my cousin Ivan’s two boys, in the fading light, when the mossies bite, on a court behind their school.

Ivan has lived in Luang Prabang for nearly 10 years and runs two gorgeous hotels here. It’s the place we have stayed in the longest, nearly 9 days so far. It’s mysterious and beautiful and there is so much to discover.

It is the old French colonial capital of Laos. They moved out in the 1950’s and the mixture of Asian and French culture really is quite something. Masses of crumbling old villas, countless glittering wats and a royal palace. A small town built on a peninsula with huge mountains surrounding it and the Mekong river running alongside.

We found a small, very noisy guest house in the old silversmith area. A warren of tiny, narrow streets that only the tuk tuks and motorbikes can comfortably fit down.

Apart from having a great time with my cousin and his boys, we have been very busy tourists. ….

A couple of days ago we went to the UXO (Unexploded ordinance) visitors centre.
We were all shocked to find that Laos is the most bombed nation on earth. Over 260 million munitions were dropped by the Americans between 1963 and 1973, every 8 minutes. More bombs were dropped here than during the whole of the second world war, so called carpet bombing….the Americans were fighting a secret war against the communists. They failed and when they withdrew in 1973, the communists soon took over.
At UXO, they have only managed to clear a minuscule percentage of the unexploded  bombs and we were told on average, one person still dies every day when they go off…



We also visited the myriad of wats with ornate rooves that seem to sweep low to the ground .They house giant golden Buddhas in the big ones and in the smaller, lotus-shaped ones there are dark, cave-like, candlelit interiors full of Buddha figures in every pose, in every size in bone, glass, bronze, wood …All the kids enjoyed lighting candles and incense and meditating but Will in particular was completely absorbed by it all, sitting unprompted  in the classic lotus position with his fingers joined, meditating for several minutes . He was in his element .Will even asked us for a piece of paper so he could copy the intricate glass mosaic figures that are stuck on the outside walls, of elephants, warriors, bears and holy men.



Ivan took us to the Nam Ou river 30 minutes outside the town where we visited another holy site, the Tam Ting cave. Approximately 2500 Buddha’s are crammed in here.  I have  never understood the significance of the Buddha poses but there I found an explanation of some of the important stages in his life .

 ‘Calling for rain’ is when Buddha stand, arms pointing downwards...

‘Calling the earth to witness’ when he is seated and one hand extended downwards…

‘Stop arguing’ (a pose, I think I’m going to be adopting a lot in the future!) where the figure is standing and his palms are extended outwards.

After the cave, we all went for lunch and a swim in the river.

It is going to be very hard to leave Laos but we are off to Cambodia in two days time.

Luang Prabang, January 10th 2011

Edie


We got up late because we had been out late, having fun with Don and Ben and their puppy, Mufassa who we all call the carpet dog because of his furry back.  


Today, we went to the Palace for the second time. It is now called the national museum since the communist revolution in 1975. We took an audio tour. It told us there is a rumour that the ghost of King Sissavangvong walks around at night and shifts all the furniture, which is why no one ever goes there after dark. That scares me.


We saw their old cars, some had been given by the Americans and we saw in the palace the gifts they’d been given from Denmark and other countries around the world. 


It was very interesting.

Will


We had to take our shoes off in the palace but not in the garage.


 I really liked the cars, my favourite was the middle one. The speedboat was made of wood

Luang Prabang, Laos, Wednesday 6th January

Open , Welcome all travellers! Drink alcohol snake cobra wine, try it at least once.
Wine good for strength, want shot 5000 kip, thanks a lot. The older being younghood.
You cannot come Laos and not try this snake and cobra wine….

Edie:


I woke up this morning and went down to the Mekong River and saw an Italian couple that were drinking Cobra juice from a stall. There were pickled snakes and lizards all crammed into large jars…dead of course!!!

Will:
Every day in Luang Prabang we play Badminton with my second cousins, Ben and Don and yesterday we met their puppy which is Mufassa, “woof, woof”. 


Lots of the trees are hairy here and their money  isn’t pounds, it is KIP. They don’t have any coins only paper.


They are loads of flies here, when I went to the meat market, I said “it must be Christmas for the flies.”


We walked in the hot, sizzling sunshine to Dad’s cousins girlfriend’s hotel. It had five or six pools(actually two) , a Jacuzzi, a sauna and we had lunch in the restaurant. 


I bought a ring in the market and I’ve got it on my finger. It is yellow, brown and white and made from  a shell.

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.

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….