We opted for the one night two day adventure. We started out on an elephant trek. This consisted of hopping on an elephant and having it go down a trail to the river to cool off. Then up through a little valley and through a briefly wooded area and then back to the camp.
Thursday, 28 April 2011
Jungle Trekking in Chiang Mai (Thailand)
We opted for the one night two day adventure. We started out on an elephant trek. This consisted of hopping on an elephant and having it go down a trail to the river to cool off. Then up through a little valley and through a briefly wooded area and then back to the camp.
Thursday, 21 April 2011
Laos
The first place we visited was the capitol Vientiene. This city was laid back and we just relaxed a few days to recover from the bus ride. There isn't too much to say about the city, we didn't really do anything touristy and there's not much to do there anyway. We caught the three hour bus to Vang Vieng, which is spring break on crack. The city is small and the only thing to do there is drink beer, which you do in an inter tube floating down the river or one of the bartenders will throw a bottle attached to a rope and pull you in. The best part of this place is all the rope swings, zip lines, and water slides. These are not the kind you see in America as they are pretty dangerous. The swings go up 35-45 feet, the zip lines give people horrible whiplash, and three weeks before we were there a person died on one of the slides (it is now known as the slide of death).
Monday, 11 April 2011
Part 2: Nam
The only other thing we did around Saigon was go on a tour of the Mekong Delta. Which was very touristy. We rode in little paddle boats, wore stupid hats, held a boa, went to a coconut candy shop, and went for a donkey ride in the jungle. This was actually pretty cool and fun trip, and the best part was the entire day trip cost 7$. Vietnam was the cheapest country I've ever been to, but you really had to barter over every little thing, and it got really bad in the North as the people just tried to rip off every non-North Vietnamese (we even ran into a SV couple who got ripped real bad on the Ha Long Bay tour just b/c their accent was different). Everyone I spoke to didn't like the NV as a people.
We flew into Hanoi and it was a very pretty city with old French architecture and a pretty lake in the middle of it. The best part of the city was the Pho, which was extremely cheap and delicious. Another cool this was they had homemade beer and they would put out little chairs on the sidewalk for people to come and drink, but other than that there wasn't much to do there.
The best part of Hanoi was going to Ha Long Bay. It was a little scary because we went six days after one of the boats went down and 11 people drowned on it. Alex was nervous, and woke me up in the middle of the night when the engine turned on to reposition the boat. But I felt that was probably the safest time ever to go because Vietnam would lose a lot of money if another boat went down (I also think this would be a good time to fly Southwest). The highlights of the cruise was kayaking around the islands, watching how the people lived on the water and sold food to tourists, and going through the two big caves.
Thursday, 7 April 2011
The start of the trip: Cambodia
I didn't take many pictures there because it was kind of erie, but that building is full of skeletons and there lots of open graves dug up. They estimated that 1.2 million people were killed at this site. I touched on the corruption from the 70's there and our friends told us that it is still prevelent. It's so bad that you pretty much just pay for your job. I think they said that if you want to be a cop it cost 2000$, an engineer 5000$, or a doctor like 8000$ (they use the US Dollar there). And the cops just pull people over at random and give them tickets (I think I saw this in every country we visited, so its not just the Cambodians, but most of Asia is very corrupt).
This is another picture I have gotten a lot of questions about:
YES, take the sign literally. You can purchase an old Rocket Launcher and shoot a cow, or you can get an AK-47 and shoot up a chicken. I've even heard rumors that if you paid enough you could shoot a person. I don't know what kind of person would want to do that, but I hope its not true.
Those are some of the more interesting antedotes and adventures we had there. It's a beautiful country and nice city with some amazing shopping in the Russian Market. After getting our tourist visas for Vietnam we took an 6 hour bus sans AC, which would be reoccuring nightmare throughout our trip.