Skip to content

Monthly Archives: May 2011

Ziplining for the Brave Coward

Monday, May 23, 2011

http://bfnionizers.com/product/282cps-charge-plate-converter-for-static-field-meter/?add-to-cart=2512 get ready to drop, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

After a few days in Bangkok watching bad movies, knocking back happy hour drinks and swimming in a hotel pool mostly used by sunbathing Russian prostitutes, we decided our injuries were healed enough to take a train north to the pleasantly touristed city of Chiang Mai.

One thing you need to know about Chiang Mai: the town itself is very pleasant, but there’s not a huge amount to see or do except look at wats (temples) and eat. After eating my own weight in Laotian baguettes avec fromage, I’m on a diet. And we’re all done looking at wats.

So all the signs advertising the ziplining park an hour out of town start to catch your eye. Tiny wooden platforms high in the treetops. Emerald-green foliage. Shrieking tourists in harnesses and banana yellow helmets frozen photogenically in the air. The posters are all over the leafy lanes and narrow side streets of the old city. Beckoning from every guest house and travel agency. How can you resist a come-on like that? You can’t.

And so, we found ourselves with a group of assorted Europeans in little yellow helmets of our own, crowded onto a tiny treetop platform. We wait our turn to be clamped onto the line, peer 20m down to the forest floor, grab onto the harness strap with white-knuckle dedication… and…

1… 2… 3… JUMP!

A falling sensation, then acceleration forward along the line, sailing through a tunnel of leafy branches, and you’re on the next platform. After the first couple of ziplines the fear pretty much evaporated and I enjoyed the experience quite a bit.

Janelle did not. On one of the early ziplines, she was convinced that she heard something rip inside the harness. At that point, it became a lot more… well, I’ll just let Janelle report in her own words:

When Eric says ‘convinced’, it sounds like it didn’t really happen—that I imagined it. I can assure you, fans, it HAPPENED. Definite sound of stitches ripping in the 2cm-wide piece of webbed fabric that was the only thing holding my not insubstantial frame from plummeting to earth. It was the good-natured ‘bouncing’ of the line by the guides that did it. Thinking they were giving us a bigger thrill and all that. Well, on the downbeat, I hear ‘the sound’ and it resulted in me screaming and grabbing for the line (Rule 2 of ziplining: “don’t grab the line”).

So for all of Eric’s ‘sailing through the trees’ bullshit—can I just add that I found the experience terrifying from that point on? I spent the rest of the day with my hands tight on my harness praying for a happy outcome.

Ahem. That’s what she said.

I should also say, our two guides and I all took a good look at the harness and whatever the sound was, everything was intact. But it’s still the kind of thing that captures your imagination in a bad, bad way. Like me, with amusement park accidents. Sure, the odds are in your favour, but really, should you be rolling those dice? Apparently, yes.

The rest of the expedition involved a few variations of ziplining, including a couple of vertical drops and one terrifying combination of bungee/zipline which more than one of my zipliners-in-arms had to be ‘coaxed’ into starting. Not me, though. I just thought to myself, “well, if I am to die here, so be it” and launched myself, arms and legs spread like a chubby little starfish.

I don’t know if the experiences we’ve had in our Asian travels have made me braver, or just more jaded about my own mortality, but things like this seem to phase me a lot less. Maybe next time I go to the Gold Coast I’ll be able to ride The Giant Drop at Dreamworld.

Or maybe not. That thing is freaking horrifying. I’ve had nightmares.

Filed in adventures in asia | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

mêlée du Laos

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Robbery!

After a few pleasant days among the low-key backpacker debauchery of Vang Vieng, we took a stunning bus ride to Luang Prabang on Thursday afternoon. We easily found a nice guesthouse and went out for an early dinner at a French-Laos restaurant. After dinner, we were walking down a side street and stopped to read a flyer when two guys on a motorcycle pulled up and grabbed the backpack Janelle had slung over her shoulder. Before we knew what was going on they took off, trying to snatch the bag, but what they didn’t know is that Janelle is the kind of person who is both constantly aware of the possibility of bag snatching and who will be damned if some piece of shit is going to rob her. This was the moment she had been mentally preparing for since we left Australia, and she held on tight. Unfortunately, that meant she was pulled behind the motorcycle for a short distance, maybe 10 meters. After that, the bike fell over and Jan grabbed the bag away and bolted. It was only at this point I realized what had happened to my wife. I’m not a violent person by nature, or one especially inclined to act out of emotion, but this was an affront. I very clearly remember thinking “Janelle is safe, these guys are little, they just fell off a bike and I really, really want to fuck them up.” I (very stupidly) ran at them and got a few ineffectual punches in, but they managed to knock me down, right the bike and speed off. 

The French bartender at the popular Ikon bar across the street took us in, helped us clean up and took us to the police station, which was literally on the nearest corner, maybe 30m from where this all went down. She told us we were actually the fourth bag snatching on that same side street in just the past few weeks. Presumably the same guys, but who knows. I doubt the police will be able to do much to catch these dudes, but maybe they can keep a better eye on what goes on outside their door at 7 PM. I’d like to think clocking one a few times in the face would give them pause, but realistically I suspect that if you’re in the bag-snatching business, the times you’re successful more than compensate for taking the occasional nerd-punch.

Anyway, aside from being shaken up, we are fine. Janelle has some scrapes and truly impressive bruises where the bag strap pulled her behind the bike, but that’s it. She lost her glasses in the struggle, but she has a spare pair and we didn’t lose the backpack, which happened to have all our cash and passports, as we had set out to get our Chinese visas that afternoon. 

We do both recognize the “right” thing would have been to just let the bag go, but instinct tends to kick in, and we’re kind of glad we didn’t lose our stuff. And while attacking two criminals in a foreign country is clearly idiotic and incredibly dangerous and could have ended badly, I’m not particularly ashamed of it. On a primal level, it felt more right than the “right” thing. I’d just never, ever do it again, is all.

It’s disappointing this happened in Laos, because we really love the country and it felt very safe. However, even aside from the attempted robbery, it’s clear Luang Prabang has lost quite a bit of its charm since our last visit. There were more tourists on the street right now, in May, the slowest month, than there were in 2007, when we were there in January, the busiest month for SE Asia travel, and it’s clearly bringing out the undesirable elements. We had our passports because the travel agent we went to earlier had suddenly shifted the Chinese visa wait time from two days to six after we did all the paperwork, so we grabbed the passports and walked out. Even more obnoxiously, after the mugging, the tuk-tuk driver who drove us to our guesthouse took advantage of our clearly upset and battered condition to rip us off a small amount. It’s really too bad, but the Luang Prabang we fell in love with four years ago now seems like it’s on its way to becoming a Phnom Penh with Disneyland French colonial  architecture.

This has far from spoiled travel for us, but we did decide there wasn’t much point in sticking around LP. Our planned next step had been to hop through the villages and parks of Northern Laos en route to China, but to be honest, while our injuries are minor, strapping 15-kilo backpacks to our bruises and oozing scrapes or sitting though eight-hour sweaty bus rides on bumpy roads with painfully sore backs and shoulders is probably a bit beyond poseur honeymoon flashpackers like us. So we’ve made our way back to Bangkok to rest up and recuperate for a few days in a nice little Sukhumvit hotel at off-season rates. We’ll watch a few bad movies, use the free wifi, and figure out where we’re going next.

Filed in adventures in asia | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

Peoples Democratic Republic of Laos-Pronouned-Lao

Friday, May 6, 2011

Lao: Land of Beer And Coffee, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Burma was definitely an experience, and, as experiences tend to do, it wore us out a bit. The language and cultural barriers, the lack of communication and the terrible, terrible food, both Burmese and Western: it gets to you. After Burma, we spent a few days in Bangkok, just long enough to buy much-needed new shoes and earphones, check the Internet, mail some unnecessary baggage back home, eat a decent meal or five, and crash another expat cocktail party. Then, onto an overnight train to Laos.

We hadn’t initially planned to go to Laos this trip, but after a couple of weeks in Burma our minds started to drift to nostalgic thoughts of fresh baguettes, strong Lao coffee, and cool mountain climate, so we decided to come back to relax for a bit.

Our last trip was in January of 2007, where it was a real highlight of our first SE Asia expedition. Back then, tourism in Laos was just taking off in a big way, but it was still a place where you avoided traveling the crumbling roads, power outages were commonplace, and when people said they were going to the ATM, they meant they were going to take a riverboat to Vientiane to use the country’s single machine. While nowhere near as isolated or poor as Burma, there were, shall we say, definite infrastructure development issues.

While we’ve yet to travel beyond Vientiane this trip, things already feel different. Just getting in was different: our train from Bangkok dropped us off at the Thai-Lao border from where we travelled across the Mekong to Vientiane on Laos’ first train since the French ran the place. Wifi isn’t quite as ubiquitous as Cambodia, but still common, reasonably fast, and uncensored. The trunk roads have improved so much that boating on the Mekong is now considered slow, uncomfortable and expensive compared to buses. It’ll be interesting to see how Luang Prabang has changed when we get there.

One thing that hadn’t changed is the food. While traditional Laos food probably isn’t as tasty as Thai food, and Bangkok technically has better food in that you can get pretty much anything there if you look hard enough, the kind of on-every-corner food in Lao is fantastic. Fresh-baked baguettes stuffed with meat, fish or cheese (good cheese! in Asia!), Western and Thai-style salads with fresh vegetables, pho noodle soups, and tropical fruit shakes. And that’s not even talking about Beer Lao, the best of SE Asia’s cheap national lagers, or Lao coffee with sweet milk, probably the best coffee I’ve ever had, available everywhere for about 60 cents a cup.

As Janelle likes to say, if the food is good, everything is good. I think we’ll stay in Laos a while.

Filed in adventures in asia | | Comments Off on Peoples Democratic Republic of Laos-Pronouned-Lao

Adventures in Burma, Part III: The Leg-Rowers and Jumping Cats of Inle Lake

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

the road to town, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Flashlights in hand, we walked through black hallways and common areas of our sprawling, four-story guesthouse.

“Sorry, the generator is a little broken,” said one of the half-dozen staff gathered out front. It wasn’t too hard to see why fixing the generator might not be a priority: as far as we could determine, we were the only guests they had, and seemed to be two of what I’d generously estimate were around a dozen and a half Westerners in Nyaungshue.

The tourist trail in Burma is clearly-marked but populated by a slow trickle of foreigners, which means you tend to spot the same people repeatedly. On the downside, an off-the-beaten-path place like Burma attracts the dregs of the backpacker circuit, sour-faced budget-travellers like The Nazi and The Troll, two backpackers with a penchant for Hitler-themed shirts and dubious hairstyles, or Le Squad Francaise, a group of we-are-the-hardest trust-fund hipsters who haggled over pennies and glared hatefully at every other foreigner.

On the plus side, though, it threw us together with Uri and Chen, two incredibly nice, funny, well-traveled young Israeli professionals. We encountered them first at Yangon airport and ran into them again in Bagan, where we took shelter from a sudden windstorm at their table in one of the Burma’s many “I have no idea what the hell Westerners actually eat but I know they like cheap beer”-themed restaurants. We had a surreal reunion in Nyaungshue when we both cut down the same unlit side-street from opposite directions. In the dark, they look like any other couple, and we almost passed them by, but we have the distinction of being a pudgy 5’4″ dude holding hands with his 5’9″ wife. Even without streetlights, we’re easy to spot. We chatted for a bit and decided to hire a boat to see the sites of Inle Lake together the next day.

Which was spectacular: a real highlight of our travels so far. Seriously, it’s straight-up National Geographic out there.

Inle is a smallish, shallow lake, though it would be hard to determine the exact size, as all around the edges, it transitions into huge expanses of reedy marshland—not dissimilar to many of the lakes in southern Saskatchewan, actually. Unlike Saskatchewan, though, the marsh is dotted with villages built out onto the lake. Entire towns are built up on stilts: houses, workshops, even bars all loom overhead as you go through on boats. The local people spend much of the day on little skiffs, which they paddle to get from place to place, and use as floating platforms for work. Going to the store? Paddle your skiff on over for some soap and a coke. Hanging the laundry? Take the skiff two meters and hang it over the water. A drink with your buddies? Tie up your skiff to the little rattan stilt-house with all the liquor ads taped to the walls (just don’t ask if they’re licensed). Not surprisingly, we saw everyone from toddlers to uniformed schoolgirls to fishermen to elderly women gracefully guiding their little boats along the regular gaps between rows of stilt houses that serve as roads. 

Intha fishermen, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

The Intha people of Inle Lake have also mastered an unusual leg-rowing technique, where they keep their hands free by tucking an oar under the arm and wrapping a leg around the oat to row. I can’t imagine mastering it, but we saw six-year-olds for whom it was as natural as walking.

Of course, folks aren’t there just to be scenic—they’re making a living out there. The lake echoes with thundering slaps from the local fishermen, who catch fish by striking the water with huge poles and scooping the stunned fish up in nets. Even more unusual are the floating vegetable gardens: blocks of earth and seaweed suspended on the surface of the lake by long bamboo poles driven into the lake bed, planted with tomatoes and gourds. I found it kind of fascinating, actually. I’ve never heard of this style of agriculture, and I wonder if it’s unique to the region. So many questions! Does being on the lake protect from pests? Does the sun and water increase yields? Is lake seaweed a good fertilizer? Do the poles keep the gardens from sinking, or just from drifting in the currents? Where’s an aquaagronomist when you need one?

We took a few side-trips off the water, too, to local markets, workshops and pagoda-studded hillsides. There’s a well-known “jumping cat” monastery where the monks have taught cats to jump through hoops. The afternoon jumping cat show was the only place we saw a significant number of other tourists, as boats from the upscale lakeside tourist resorts paid visits, too. It was… tremendously disappointing. Not even lame enough to function as Buddhist kitsch. But it was worth it for the song Janelle and Chen made up:

Jumping caaaats, jumping caaats,
What are they feeding you?

Inle Lake is a pretty incredible place. More than Bagan, even, it was the real highlight of our Burma trip. And it was great to hang out with Uri and Chen! Jan and I are comfortably introverted people and don’t feel much need to party with 22-year-old backpackers or strike up conversations with middle-aged package tourists. But we hit it off quickly with these far more outgoing travellers, not too dissimilar from us in age or temperament. Like hanging out with Mark in Bangkok and Yangon, it brought us out of our little travel-couple bubble a bit which is probably not a bad thing from time to time.

Filed in adventures in asia | Tagged , | Comments Off on Adventures in Burma, Part III: The Leg-Rowers and Jumping Cats of Inle Lake

Adventures in Burma, Part II: Bagan

Monday, May 2, 2011

Bagan stupa plain, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

A thousand years ago, Bagan emerged as a place for rich and powerful Buddhist royals to build brick religious monuments to accrue enough merit to counter the misdeeds that made them rich and powerful. Today, it is a stunning monument to religious zeal—a huge, dusty plain with literally thousands of paya as far as the eye can see.

Bagan has a few more Western tourists than we saw in Yangon, as would be expected at the country’s biggest tourist attraction. Enough, at least, that you don’t get stared at in the street. But by far the biggest tourist contingent was Burmese taking advantage of the Thingyan holiday to visit the sites and pay respects at the many still-active temples.

We hired a covered horsecart and English-speaking driver for a day to take us around the pagodas. While a romantic way to see the sites, it’s also the most practical way to do it. There are only a few roughly-sealed roads to take the Chinese package tour buses to the main highlights. The rest of Bagan is rutted, dusty trails too rough for anything except horses, and the occasional cyclist willing to brave the 40-degree heat. In fact, horsecarts (and oxcarts) are widely used all over rural Burma for short hauls. While charming, they are also a reminder of how poor the countryside is. People here can only dream of the gleaming Japanese pickups farmers in neighboring Thailand have.

The highlight of Bagan is definitely climbing to the tops of the largest monuments at sunrise and sunset to take in the sheer scale of it all: red brick paya to the horizon in every direction, shrouded in the morning mist, or lit up red and gold in the setting sun. In between, we toured some of the temples, but they are much less elaborate and impressive individually than, say, Angkor. They are all laid out in a square floorplan, with four big Buddha statues, four prayer areas, four collection boxes and four gates. After a while, I found myself making mental notes on the more interesting floor tile variants. It’s really the sheer volume of monuments—over three thousand stupas, pagodas, temples and monasteries—that blows you away.

Like Angkor, there are folks at many sites looking to sell you things or provide services. Unlike Angkor, though, you can’t just push past them and let them go onto the next tourist: there might not be a next tourist for hours, so they have all the time in the world work on you. It’s really not so bad, though, once you give in and go with the flow. They are very sweet and provide actual services. We had one woman insist on applying thanaka sunscreen/makeup to us (“he look like baby!” she laughed after smearing it on my cheeks and nose), we had an old man show us the best camera angles and hidden details of a pagoda, and a young boy with a flashlight guided us through a dark monastery to the roof to see the sunset. We didn’t ask, and a little money was expected, but they were all very nice and polite about it, so we went along with it. Just easier that way. Travel in Asia is sometimes about picking your battles.

The heat was a lot harder to make peace with. An irritant in Yangon, by the time we got to Bagan the thermometer was on the wrong side of 40 degrees and stepping out of the shade was like opening an oven. This was our first real experience with intense Asian heat, and it made us think seriously about our traveling strategy. As willing as the spirit may be, when it gets this hot, everything becomes 30% to 60% less enjoyable: siteseeing, walking, eating, drinking; you name it, it’s impacted, and more than you might expect. We want to go to India, but May is the hottest month in most of the country, so some planning is in order (we decided to go to Laos next, anyway, so we’ll figure out India from there). Even in the short term: we considered going to historic Mandalay, but a check of the weather forecast (39 to 42 degrees for the following week) coupled with our limited interest in looking at yet more old Asian buildings, and we decided to pay a visit to more-temperate Inle Lake instead.

Turned out to be the right decision.

Filed in adventures in asia | Tagged , | Comments Off on Adventures in Burma, Part II: Bagan