backpackingrealness

[backpackingrealness]

Dusting the blog off

10 years ago, something-realness seemed fresh. Probably not to the queers who had been using for years before the explosion of RuPaul’s Drag Race, but one of the delights of culture is the false sense of hope that you were the first to discover the hot new turn of phrase – and the humbling moment of realising nothing is new, and everything has been done before.

This blog has gathered Internet dust for nearly a decade, and I’m choosing to blow some of that off entirely for my own gratification. I last wrote a misty-eyed travel diary when I was 24, and I just turned 33. That’s not to say I haven’t holidayed in the meantime, but I certainly hadn’t been back to the heady smells, sights, and sounds of South East Asia.

There’s also something deeply satisfying to someone who has lived over half their existence online to find that I can access an account untouched for 10 years, and pick it up where I left it. Where did those years go? On Tumblr, nothing has changed. Well some things have changed.

On my original big backpacking moment, the story I tell myself now is that there was a choice between 3 weeks in Vietnam, or a week in Japan. We simply did not have the money to do both, and no regrets, for Japan revealed itself to be my favourite country in the world to visit to this very day, and indeed I shall return in the not-too-distant future for more sushi trains, whiskey highballs, and Tokyo DisneySea.

That decision created a mysterious and magical ‘the one that got away’ allure to Vietnam. Living in Australia for the decade since, I am blessed to be exposed to top-shelf, five-star Vietnamese cuisine and coffee whenever I so desire, but how would a bowl of steaming phở taste in the country it hailed whence from, on a rainy Hanoi morning, ideally on the street (but under shelter)?

I first booked a holiday to Vietnam in December 2019, for the following April 2020. I had found some reasonable flights with Cathay Pacific, and my boyfriend’s family were in the middle of three enormous bushfire fronts blazing through the Snowy Mountains. I had a feeling that the coming months would be quite challenging, and a holiday in April would be well-timed. I think I was also eager to plan an escape route.

That trip didn’t go ahead for reasons clear to anyone with a sense of consciousness, and the following years passed.

Cheap flights presented themselves in June 2023. There was some debate on whether we could afford to go after a fabulous summer in the UK, but in the spirit of ‘life is for living’, flights were purchased. The spreadsheet from 2019 was (also) dusted off, and it was a delight to find that a few extra cities could be squeezed in with the extra time we had.

In September, Tom had a stroke. Standing over his bedside next to his sister in the days following, I hissed at his sister how I had been thwarted yet again. Dark humour to hold back the sobbing, but there also truth in jest! In an absolutely thrilling turn of events, and partially due to his youth, Tom’s recovery was lightspeed. Within two weeks, we were home recuperating, with the advice from doctors ringing in our ears – within three months of the accident, the chances of being able to travel overseas would be very positive.

Honestly, say less!

Fast forward to late November, and an apprehensive but giddy self and stroke-victim-spouse are in an Uber to Sydney Airport, with a driver asking if we are heading to Vietnam for all the beautiful ladies.

Next up, Ho Chi Minh City.

[backpackingrealness]

Jodphur

3 nights, Yogi’s Guesthouse

The trip from Jaisalmer onwards was our first bus trip in India. I had reservations, mostly related to the craziest traffic I had thus far witnessed in my time there, but the trains just weren’t going to work out with the time we had so it was our only choice. It wasn’t even that bad. 

The bus would regularly stop off in dusty towns to load up on passengers, so by the time we had been out of Jaisalmer for an hour, the previously half empty bus was full to the rafters inside, and crawling with additional riders on the sides and roof. I was becoming more and more accustomed to just accepting things for what they were. It made life easier. Naomi & Alex were becoming very talented Would You Rather dealers, and before we knew it the bus was entering Jodhpur.

The atmosphere in the city was electric, and it was impossible to ignore Diwali was imminent. Ghee clay candles lined every window ledge and door way, markets were still bustling in the early evening and lights flashed everywhere. Our rickshaw took us directly to our hostel’s front door, through the winding blue alleyways I’d seen all over the internet. Apparently they were painted blue only for Brahmins, the highest members of the Indian caste system, but in 2015 any one can quite rightly paint their house blue, and Yogi’s was no exception. I was getting severe Tales of the City vibes from the several-stories-tall building centred around an inner courtyard, manned by a mysterious (and fairly fierce) housekeeper called Mrs Yogi. We were given a room each, I think Coop ended up with an Agrabah-esqe boudoir, and met Naomi & Alex on our rooftop for yet another exquisite Rajasthani feast. They were were making their way onwards to Mumbai before resting up in Goa for a month, and we’d set aside a week toward the end of our trip for exploring that part of the country, so we arranged to see each other again in a month’s time. The city showed no sign of sleeping the night before Diwali, and I fell asleep in my room listening to the bangs and squeals of the fireworks outside.

Like Jaisalmer, Jodhpur is home to an old fort. Unlike Jaisalmer, Jodhpur’s fort is no longer in use however remained the home of Jodhpur’s Raj (king) well up until the 1970s. A tuk tuk drove us up the mountain behind our guesthouse, we paid our rupees - which included an excellent audio tour - and set about exploring. Unlike the Red Fort in Delhi, I got the impression that a lot of care (and money) had gone into preserving this magnificent palace. The place was swarming with tourists but everything seemed to be professionally executed, from the signage down to exorbitantly priced colonial cafe. While Jaisalmer’s fort was and is more like a town, Jodphur’s remained a palace pretty much just for the king and whoever he saw fit to join him. I don’t remember exactly which one, but the king who had all forty of his wives burn themselves alive upon his own death sounded like a top guy. The architecture was stunning, from the mesh-like windows allowing concubines to observe the comings and goings without being spotted themselves to the metal spikes coating the fort’s main wooden doors to repel any invading elephants. A couple of hours later we’d made our rounds and needed cooling off, so we strolled a few hundred metres down the hill to the ornate white marble temple sitting on an outlook over the city. Surrounded by a lake and mountains, the monument to a former Maharajah was spectacular to behold and the gardens a welcome respite from the heat.

It was the day of Diwali and there was no way we were spending a quiet night in on India’s grandest festival. Even mid-afternoon, tiny ceramic candles lined windowsills, doorways and streetfronts, ready to be filled with ghee and lit once the sun had sank. We returned to our guesthouse (me and Mel split a sachet of bright blue hair toner, being in the Blue City etc), freshened up and headed out to a restaurant we’d found online after dusk fell. The streets were manic, exploding with sound and light. Firework smoke clouded our vision but we made it through the usual Indian road hazards (cows and cow shit) combined with Diwali exclusiveå road hazards (firecrackers zooming past our faces, lobbed by giggling nine year olds) to a magnificent rooftop restaurant tucked away inside an old city mansion converted into a luxury hotel. The rooftop was small and intimate, with 360 degree views of Jodhpur: the grand city fort behind us, the rambling alleyways and markets in front. We ordered cocktails and took in the firework-filled skyline around us. Absolutely magical. We ordered a table full of delicious things, my highlight behind malai kofta (paneer and potato dumplings cooked in a creamy sultana and coconut gravy) and eventually headed back to our guesthouse’s own rooftop for cheap Indian whiskey and Uno. The fireworks never really stopped.

The day after the night before was a totally different Jodhpur. Windows and doors were shuttered, the streets deserted save for rambling backpackers like ourselves and the odd street vendor. It was eerily like New Year’s Day at home, a very quiet atmosphere everywhere. Well, quiet for India. We decided to take a rickshaw to the stunning Umaid Bhawan Palace sitting on a hill looking over the city, apparently built to employ thousands of peasants during a time of famine and now privately owned by a descendent of the maharajah who first lived in it and a luxury hotel chain. Half of the palace was open to explore and walk around, a jam droppingly gorgeous mix of 1920s European Art Deco and traditional Indian opulence. It was the equivalent of exploring aristocratic homes in England, but with dramatic stories of the deaths involved in construction and such. Kulfi ice cream flavoured with cardamom (amazing) and rosewater (gross) was the cooling technique of the afternoon, before heading back into the slowly waking city. We had a bus booked onward to Udaipur the following morning, so we found dinner at a neighbouring guesthouse’s rooftop (so many rooftops, so many palaces) which I remember being amazing but also featuring a bizarrely delicious banana curry which took a while getting used to but left a pleasant impression…

Mrs Yogi had booked our bus for us, so we had a leisurely breakfast on, yet again, the rooftop, and headed off. I had loved the guesthouse, it oozed with character and although slightly morbid at times (the family weren’t celebrating Diwali due to their husband/father passing away a few months ago) we were made very welcome, especially by Jodhpur’s own Mrs Madrigal. I’d take a guesthouse which feels like someone’s home over a sterile hotel any time. The winding alleyways and markets were a much more accessible India to me than the insanity of Delhi, and watching the sun fall across the breathtaking Blue City over three nights is a visual memory etched inside my head.

Next stop, Udaipur.

[backpackingrealness]

Jaisalmer

3 nights, Mystical Jaisalmer Guesthouse

A 17-hour train journey was never going to be atop any list of ‘things to do in India’ but it was a hurdle we were going to have to face eventually. We were about to enter festival season so it was with sheer luck that we even had bums onboard (see previous post for ticket-related drama) and anyway, I’d been hearing about the magical Indian railway experience for so long, my more masochistic side was kind of... excited.

The sun was setting as we left Delhi, illuminating some of the more unsavoury aspects of Indian railways for the first time; gangs of young children picking through mounds of burning rubbish, people hanging their washing on lines right next to the tracks, girls no older than seven or eight themselves carrying babies around on their bony hips. We were very much ready to leave the capital and move on to something totally new, and these last images only seemed to reinforce that desire.

As expected, there were multiple classes on each train service and pre-boarding I wasn’t entirely sure how they were divided & what the differences would be. Due to our very, very narrow options, we were landed with 3AC class tickets, below first class (private cabins) and 2AC, which had the same amenities as 3AC with a third less passengers. Below us was third class (seats & beds without AC) and finally ‘sleeper’ class: an interesting name choice for a carriage I can’t imagine getting much sleep in. 3AC turned out to be absolutely fine, dare I say comfortable. It was relatively clean, we were given crisp new bed linen & our dinner order was taken as soon as we boarded at Old Delhi station. Sophie’s Harry Potter UNO made it’s debut, and our first of many games introduced us to our cabin mates, including but not limited to a sweet & unsettlingly obsessed Manchester United fan (his eyes genuinely watered upon finding out Mel merely went to school with someone who happens to be a player’s girlfriend).

At first I was affronted that our cabinmates didn’t take us up on our offer of cookies but we later discovered there’s an enormous fear in India of taking poisoned food from strangers on trains. Our dinners arrived - pre-packed thalis with a few veg curries, rice, hot chapatis wrapped in foil, tart lime pickle & a sweet gulab juman ball - and around 10pm I crawled onto my bunk, wrapped myself in the starchy sheets & thanks in part to my Qatar Airways earplugs (questionable quality) & $2 Japanese velvet eye mask, I remained in slumber for a good nine hours. I woke to find sunshine streaming through the window & golden sand lining the tracks. The girls had woken earlier & bought hot chai, so I walked to the carriage doors (obviously wide open) to pop my head out into the hot wind of the desert. I was in the desert! On a train!

We pulled into Jaisalmer around 12 noon, the terminus of the route. A swarm of hollering rickshaw & taxi drivers awaited us, an aspect of Indian city life I’d thoroughly enjoyed a 17-hour respite from, but in the middle of the clamour was a friendly face holding a sign with our names on. The city felt tiny compared to the overwhelming choke of Delhi. Ten minutes later, we were lead up a driveway under an intricately carved archway bearing the name Mystic Jaisalmer, up a flight of stairs & into a bedroom - actually, a bed-chamber - directly from Jasmine’s palace in Aladdin. Brightly coloured silk drapes covered the walls & surrounded the double bed, while the wide windowsill had been converted into a single bed perfect for a princess. We relished the powerful, hot showers & climbed up to the rooftop where the owner greeted us with hot spicy chai & advised us to do nothing but relax on the rooftop in the midday heat before exploring further later on. We didn’t say no. The view of the city was dominated by the old walled city palace, an sand-coloured fort over eight hundred years old but still fully inhabited & used, a sight direct from a  movie set. This was the India I’d flown for.

After a sunset stroll to a nearby lake, we wandered over to the restaurant outside the guesthouse, Jaisalmer’s number one according to TripAdvisor. Accompanied by a new friend from Newcastle we settled down at a table in front of the dining entertainment, a display of local folk music & dance lead by three older men with a dancing lady - who spent the evening throwing us her finest death stare when we didn’t join her on stage - and a boy no older than ten with a shiver-inducing belter of a voice. The all-veg food was delicious, the beer was ice cold, eating under the stars in a fairy light-adorned courtyard was all very magical, but the next three days enduring our first shared case of ‘bathroom blasting’ was a legacy we’d happily have avoided.

Moving swiftly on, the next morning we headed into the walled city. Sophie & Mel were instantly threatened with bad luck curses if they didn’t buy some silver anklets (I think Mel still wears hers) & we spent the afternoon weaving in and out of claustrophobic, cow shit covered alleyways avoiding hawkers & bovines alike, but mesmerised by our surroundings. Again, it all felt like an elaborate film set. A ancient little man sat by a rice bag-lined wall playing a violin-type instrument, masala & puri stalls lined the streets & we couldn’t move for sari sellers. It didn’t take long to be broken by the heat, so we found a rooftop with cold Cokes & a jaw-dropping 360 degree view of the surrounding desert. We couldn’t have been further from Delhi. Clothing purchases were haggled for, complimentary chai (so delicious I remain convinced it was crack-laced) was drank, £2.80 bottles of gin & whiskey were purchased and we headed back to our guesthouse for the night.

The cocktails were flowing, the UNO was back out & we were rescued from a potentially arduous night with an unfortunate American who insisted on pronouncing Hermione as horrendously as possible, by a gorgeous couple from Manchester, Naomi & Alex, who had been out of England for nearly a year and were spending the last month of their mammoth trip in India. Two things were on my list of things I had to do in Jaisalmer: the first was to watch India’s premiere drag queen, Queen Harish (huge in Japan apparently), perform in her hometown, however we couldn’t rustle together enough rupees for a private performance. The second was a highly recommended overnight camel trek into the Thar Desert. It didn’t take long to convince Alex & Naomi, so we booked on to leave the following day before we would travel on to Jodhpur together.

We packed our bags, jumped into an open-window jeep and headed off into the desert around 2pm. The van was stuffy & cramped, but we were headed on an adventure - our campsite would only be 40km from the border with Pakistan. A half hour out of the city we pulled into an eerie little ghost town - deserted centuries ago, the settlement was left more or less untouched for fear of ghostly retribution. Slightly unsettled, we continued on until we made it to the outpost, where we met our companions for the next two hours: a herd of smelly, beautifully eyelashed camels. After our turbans were tied (more for protection from the afternoon sun than Laurence of Arabia realness) & our rear ends hoisted into position, we settled on our name choices: Mel sat astride ‘Camelissa”, Sophie had ‘David Hasselhoof’, Naomi ‘Sahara Palin’, Alex ‘Lewis Camelton’ while I would be sharing the moment with ‘Camella Parker-Bowles’. She was fierce.

The journey was much more serene than I had expected. Two hours slowly plodding along on a saddle was plenty of time to take in the vast surroundings: dramatic sand dunes for days, endless blue skies for months. I tried to make chitchat with a fascinating American teacher working in Bangalore but the distance from camel to camel was just that bit too far for a sustained Q&A so I pulled out my phone & plugged into Kate Bush. The overwhelming quietness of the desert was replaced by the Hounds of Love, and we arrived at the camp just as the album came to a close. Our adorable guides set up a camp fire, passing around freshly brewed masala chai (tea), while for Naomi, who had to be different, a delicious masala coffee. Hot milk brewed with ginger, cardamom, cinnamon & everything in between is glorious, whether made with tea or coffee, and especially when someone passes you a bottle of Indian whiskey to top it up with. The ocean blue sky had been replaced with a canvas of pink, purple & orange, and we watched the sun set over the dunes.

Dinner was then served, the now common but forever delicious mix of lentil dal, veg curry, rice, pickle & chapatti. We cracked open our beers (kept cold in chillers, carried by another poor camel) & all of a sudden our guides burst into a chorus of voices & instruments. We watched performance after performance of the local folk dance & music while constantly expressing disbelief at how fantastic life was right there & then. Everything was on point. After it all wound down, we were handed huge pillows & blankets to wander off with & dump on a spot under the stars. The guides literally came & tucked us in. Me, Mel & Soph listened to the Cocteau Twins as we drifted off underneath a sky crystal clear & bejewelled with stars. I managed to see my first every shooting star, something I could only achieve by looking in one place for ages, yet the best moment was when all three of us saw the same star shoot across our eyeline at the same time.

Nothing could really spoil this scene of perfection, nothing. Well maybe a pack of wild, rabid dogs barking & howling for what feels like hours, viciously keeping us from slumber… or Mel being woken by a violent attack of bathroom/sand dune blasting & having to evacuate her bowels in the desert for the first time… or maybe me waking up long before sunrise due to every single mosquito in the desert deciding they wanted my blood & my blood only (it’s not even the itching, it’s the buzzing near your ear that sends me loopy). Maybe all of the above. But nothing could really spoil the magic of the night before. Not even the fly-ridden eggs served at breakfast. Nothing.

After another two hour plod back, we back in the van to Jaisalmer. The guesthouse owner graciously let us into a brand new room to wash up in, we said our goodbyes & the five of us hopped on a local bus to Jodhpur, the ‘Blue City’, and our first city back east after travelling so far west from Delhi. Jaisalmer was entrancing from start to finish, and all these months after, remains in my top three places in all of India. It was nowhere like anywhere I’d been before, or since.

[backpackingrealness]

Delhi

3 nights

I left India four months ago. It’s difficult to articulate a piece of writing which will do justice to half the things I saw, did, smelled, tasted, stepped in, slept on. A ‘dear diary… today I rode a rickshaw to a fort & had my photo taken with thirty two people’ thing just won’t cut it.

When people ask me ‘did you enjoy India?’ it take a moment to formulate a response. Of course I enjoyed India, but you don’t board your flight home with a blissful sense of calm & serenity. The country is a challenging one to travel through and a holiday to India possibly requires a holiday afterwards. Despite all of this, it’s a country that has to be experienced if you have any desire to see the world. There is nowhere on this planet like India. Nothing I can write hasn’t been written before, so forgive me for what might sound like a regurgitation of cliches you’ve read before, but the one pervasive word you find yourself thinking during your time there is contrast, contrast, contrast. You will never, ever witness an Indian touching their lips to the plastic rim of a water bottle for fear of cross-contamination, yet the pollution of Indian cities is so intense that I began to use make up remover on my face nightly, black cotton wool pads in my hands. The country just sent it’s first spaceship into orbit with a team of mostly female scientists, yet women are generally still seen as objects to possess. The country’s railway network is the largest single employer in the world, yet you won’t find a station without a nine year old child somewhere rooting for around on a train track for something to eat or wear.

Growing up in the UK, Indian culture has always been around to some degree, but I never took the idea of travelling there seriously until I met two wonderful Finnish girls (to whom much space on here has already been devoted to) in Thailand. They had met me following a six week Indian adventure, an idea that at first seemed terrifying, but the more I heard, the more fascinating & accessible it seemed. Now it sounds awfully patronising, but my thinking was “if two nineteen year old girls can do it, surely so can I?” Well, I did do it, but it was probably the most intense & challenging travel experience I’ve been through. And I’d absolutely do it all again.

I arrived in Australia following my Asian jaunt a few days before New Years Eve 2013, living & working in Melbourne for about eight months. My return flight to the UK was booked for September & by that time my sister would have given me my first niece or nephew, so I wasn’t going to let that flight go. Mel & Sophie were both looking to start their Asian trip around autumn 2014, so our dates were aligning. I found a ridiculously priced return from London to Delhi for £400 on Qatar Airways, so by this stage it would’ve been rude not to go. Six weeks felt like plenty of time. Of course, it only took a few days in the country to realise we would need double that to cover it properly, but it’s still a substantial amount. Once our time was up, I would go back to England for Christmas while the girls would carry on into south east Asia.

Life got very busy very quickly (backpacking Australia & New Zealand mostly, but that’s for another time) so much of the planning I left up to Sophie. She put together a route for us on a gorgeous Indian map which we looked over at my house in September, beginning obviously in Delhi & going out far west to the desert, then making our way back in east through the old kingdoms of Rajasthan, through to Agra for the Taj Mahal, on to the Hindu holy city of Varanasi, up to the border with Nepal for the tea plantations of Darjeeling, then taking a swift flight south west down to Mumbai. A few days later we would travel directly south through to Goa for a week on the beach, finishing at the tip in tropical Kerala. I have to say it all pretty much went to plan.

I landed at Indira Gandhi International Airport after a 15-hour flight a few hours before the girls, so I fell asleep next to the baggage carousel before we reunited, jumped into a taxi & headed into the jaw-dropping, heart-stopping Delhi traffic - Bangkok tuk tuks, Cambodian buses & Balinese motorcycles have nothing on Indian drivers. I reached a certain level of panic before the jet lag haze forced me to switch off, have faith & assume we’d arrive at the hotel safe. Which we did. We were staying in Paharganj, a haphazard district of ramshackled bazaars & guesthouses, in a fairly nice place with a rooftop restaurant & soft beds which sucked us in for a two hour nap.

We decided to take our first stroll out into the streets of Delhi. Holy cows (literally) roamed between fruit stalls, lassi sellers & bicycles along a dusty street lined with fabric merchants, internet cafes & barber shops promised to make their customers look like Vin Diesel. Stumbling around looking for somewhere to eat dinner, we were visibly exhausted & not with it at all: the only way we could’ve made ourselves more of a target would perhaps be with ‘WE HAVE HUGE BANK ACCOUNTS, COME AND TAKE OUR MONEY’ written on our chests. We were aiming for Connaught Place, Delhi’s hub of western brand names & restaurants, just to ease ourselves in on our first night. Google told me it was only a 25min walk from our hotel, but Google doesn’t account for the labyrinth of alleys, bazaars & chicken slaughter stalls in one of the world’s oldest cities. After dodging several smiling con-artists, we took shelter on our hotel’s rooftop, scoffing our first curry feast with cold beer, made a list of the things we wanted to see & do over the next few days then collapsed into bed.

First day in India, fresh start.

The Red Fort was the first stop on our list. Also known as the Lal Qila (also a restaurant on Manchester’s Curry Mile), it was built around five hundred years ago & served as the home of Delhi’s rulers until the British rode in. The Indian flag was raised for the first time above the fort’s Lahore Gate on the country’s first day in 1947, so it’s a fairly important place to the nation. Sadly, my main impression was, in the heat of a hot October day: a dusty, dilapidated palace littered with dried up fountains & crumbling mosques. I’m sure it was once paradise, an oasis in the heart of the city, but no one seemed to care too much for it anymore. Much more importantly however, we experienced our first taste of Indian fame… we were just beginning to get used to the unusual levels of staring by the time a sweet young man asked if he could have a photo with us. Within seconds, his friends had swarmed around us, desperate to shake our hands & take our photos on their phones. We realised that they must be a group of students on a trip as their teacher made their way through the crowd, shaking each of our hands & introducing himself with perfect English. It was overwhelming but all we could do was laugh & smile. We had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for.

From the fort we walked directly into Chandni Chowk, the city’s ancient market street lined with thousands of sari & silk boutiques, shoe shops, jewellery stores, suit emporiums and… a McDonalds. Crossing the street from the fort was an accomplishment in itself, and we saw fit to reward ourselves with our first Indian cafe experience. Cafe might be a stretch, but it was fabulous: a run down, shabby hole in the wall with a few cramped tables & chairs & no menus. From a plastic sign on the wall we decided to just point at a few random items & hope for the best. What came was a deliciously light masala dosa (a rice flour pancake stuffed with spiced veg & paneer cheese), samosas & chutney, yogurt (known as ‘curd’) & some hot, fresh breads. We all grabbed an ice cold, sugary Coke, had some more photos taken by two funny Sikh men & were swiftly ushered out to make room for the new customers. Having no idea how much it would cost, we handed over a note to the cashier who seemed to give us much more change than we needed. After realising that actually, that was the correct change & this was just one for the cheapest meals I’ll have in my life, we decided not to question it any further & to just leave.

The Lotus Temple was next. We flagged an auto-rickshaw, & having no real idea how far the temple would be we pretty much agreed straight away on his price. It turns out the temple was miles away, through various Delhi suburbs, over what felt like a freeway, but finally we reached the spectacular worship space for the Baha’i faith, a religion which from what I remember seems to believe in all of the world’s major religions & simply seeks to promote harmony and the basic moral values which each religion share. Common sense. The line to enter the temple stretched out of the gate but was moving fast, so we made our way through the immaculate gardens & queued up outside the stunning structure designed literally to look like a lotus flower. Inside, the temple had the overwhelming, dwarfing feel of a cathedral but was more welcoming than imposing. Our stomachs were rumbling again, so we negotiated enough tuk-tuk to take us directly to Connaught Place.

I had my heart set on taking the girls to a restaurant the Finnish girls had sworn by: Rajdhani, a Maharajahesque banquet hall with golden cutlery & and a never ending supply of stunning curries from across the country. I can’t remember another time in my life that I’ve spent so much time & energy, already exhausted from our packed day, looking for a restaurant: Connaught Place is a vast complex of various quarters & zones, and we had no clue. Tuk tuk drivers, fast food employees, shop workers, even two lovely female students Googled the address for us on our phones but to no avail. After what felt like an hour of searching, we settled for a much more expensive but exquisite old-fashioned colonial dining room, where we collapsed into decadent upholstery & ordered several dishes none of us had ever heard of. I can’t remember what the bill came to - at the time it seemed outrageous compared to our peasants lunch that day - but it was obviously still cheaper than most curry houses in the UK, and the food was divine.

The next day we realised time was quickly running out to book our train tickets to Jaisalmer. We were less than a week before Diwali, the country’s biggest festival for workers in big cities to return to their home towns & villages, so trains were already massively booked out. The sneaky travel agent in our hotel didn’t seem to be able to help, so he sent us over to the tourist office at New Delhi Railway Station (there’s only one official train tourist office in the city, no matter what anyone says) where we joined the line in a crowded, stuffy ticket office full of anxious-looking backpackers just like us. Our queue position was dismal, with a few hours before we were to see someone, however for some bizarre reason India’s answer to Computer-Says-No Lady from Little Britain called me over with a fierce beckoning finger & asked exactly what we wanted to do. At first she actually laughed at our request to travel to Jaisalmer the following day, my heart sinking, but after a few more pleas she explained that we could have the last two beds on a train. Being a group of three, we obviously said no, but she said our only option would be to take these beds and for two of us to share a berth, something not allowed usually but apparently nothing that would bother the ticket inspector (the implication being that we were white tourists, & therefore special). We took the tickets, thanked the fabulously miserable diva of New Delhi Railway Station (I even got a tiny smile out of her) & got on our way to the Gandhi Museum.

I didn’t know an awful lot about the man himself, just the basics: the guy who basically got rid of the British, mostly through being very nice, peaceful & intelligent (versus good old violence), a man who made a case for independence so strong that the British had no choice but to leave. The museum in Delhi sits on the site of his old home, and is filled with photos & artefacts from his entire life, from the time he spent in South Africa, England & right up to the day of his assassination - the clothing he wore when he was shot, complete with a huge blood stain, was chilling. As we left, the sun was setting so we wandered over to the garden to have a rest. A gentleman approached & informed us that an inter-faith prayer meeting was about to begin, and would we like to join? Of course we would. With very little warning, we were suddenly sitting in a circle with a Jewish rabbi, two Sikhs, two Muslim imams, a Catholic priest, a Buddhist monk & two Jain women, who all took turns to read a scripture or prayer. It was absolutely beautiful, and an awesome case of simply being in the right place at the right time - of course we had no idea this was about to happen, and apparently it only happened on the third Friday of every month or something. One of the Sikhs’ phones kept ringing & ringing during the Buddhist monk’s prayer, which was painful as the longer it rang for, the louder the monk recited, until the Sikh simply answered the phone & started talking, receiving a fiery death stare from the other Sikh, while the monk just got louder…

We were much more prepared for Rajdhani that night. We had the address, we gave it to a taxi driver who still wasn’t totally sure but by sheer luck we caught the shop front hidden behind palm trees from the road & jumped out. It was everything we expected & more - an enormous golden thali plate filled with several little bowls which were constantly refilled. Curries I couldn’t name, pickles, vegetables, two types of rice, three types of bread & a fried sweet dessert at the end. Heaven. Everything happens as it’s supposed to, etc.

Our final day in Delhi arrived, one I personally felt satisfied with as I was ready to explore new environments. I didn’t want to spend this post being doom & gloom so I’ve refrained from the negatives, but Delhi is a shock to the system for a first-time visitor to India. I’ve been told & read that Delhi is enjoyed much better once you’ve spent some time in India & acclimatised to the way things are done there, whereas it might be too much of a shock to the system at first. I understand & believe this, so I’d be happy to give it another try but I didn’t have much desire to stay for a fourth day at the time. The desert was calling us, so we grabbed coffee & pastries in a German bakery, I bought a beautiful pair of camel leather slippers which would serve me excellently through the rest of the journey & we made our way to Old Delhi station for our 17.45 train to Jaisalmer. So far, so good.

[backpackingrealness]

Tasmania, 4 nights

I’d been in Australia four months when a good friend from university in Manchester, Yasmin, told me she would be in Melbourne on a weekend break from Sydney life. We met up - you can’t explain that feeling of seeing a big, friendly grin from home when you feel so far away - and naturally had a fabulous time together, discussing everything that had happened in the previous twelve months (she flew out to Australia around the time I began my year in the States) and eagerly planning what potential adventures we could begin together. She told me she was heading to Tasmania in May with two Irish girls she’d met through her rural work, and suspiciously the dates were precisely the weekend before I was due to leave Melbourne for my own rural work. Sometimes things just happen for a reason. All I knew of Tasmania at that point was what I’d been told by customers in my restaurant, much of which was very appealing; how wonderful the food & drink was, how much the green rolling hills & windy country lanes would remind me of home… how unusual the locals & their lack of dental hygiene were. Oh, and apparently it was tiny.

Fast forward to mid-May and I’m boarding an early morning flight from Melbourne to Hobart, the Tasmanian state capital and the second oldest city in all of Australia after Sydney. I’d been working 55-60 hour weeks for a while at that point, and by the time departure day came I hadn’t had a single day off in four weeks. I was ready for some fun. Because of said work schedule, I hadn’t managed to do any research of my own: as I’d booked the flights, Yasmin reminded me that we needed to fly into Hobart in the south, and out of Launceston in the north. When I asked why wouldn’t we just fly in and out of the same place, she told me the size of Tasmania was more or less the same as… Ireland. Not quite the small tropical paradise I was imagining. An hour later I’d crossed the Bass Strait, had met up with Yasmin, Paula & Fiona and was behind the wheel for the first time in nearly nine months. Thankfully Australia decided to follow the mother country when it came to driving rules yet it took me a few hours to stop switching the window wipers when all I wanted to do was indicate. 

The general plan of the four days was a night in a different city or town up the east coast, as it would be impossible to tackle both sides in our limited time. We hadn’t booked anywhere apart from our first night in Hobart, as we’d been told it wouldn’t be in an issue in the slow time of year we were travelling during. We’d also been told that the number one must-do attraction in all of Tasmania was the Museum of Old & New Art, or MONA - a bonkers private art gallery owned by a Jay Gatsby-type with mild autism & an obscene talent for gambling, to the extent that he’s been barred from casinos in Las Vegas & Macau. So that was where we headed, straight from the airport. Immediately noticeable was how different the landscape was to what I had seen in Melbourne and its surroundings. People were right, it did remind me a lot of home, or an idealised version of home - green rolling eyes for as far as you could see, roadsides clinging to the sound of steep mountains and crossing bridges over vast, gorgeous bodies of water. There were vast open spaces everywhere, and it was a struggle to find something ugly… or even uninteresting.

We pulled up to MONA, walked past the owner’s reserved parking spaces (his is titled GOD, his girlfriend’s GOD’S MISTRESS) and followed the winding underground stairs to the cavernous exhibition halls, filled with simply whatever the incredibly rich owner wants to fill them with. Apparently he was going for a ‘subversive Disneyland’, and what he’s made isn’t far off. I remember walking up to this bizarre, slightly stinky contraption which looked like something from Dexter’s Laboratory, only to find it was making artificial human faeces. We stumbled into a soundproof room with an entire wall filled by stacked television sets playing recordings of Madonna super-fans singing her greatest hits collection from start to finish, with only the fans’ voices coming from the audio. It was surreal, and bizarre, and uncomfortable, and I loved absolutely everything. Genuinely one of the best museums/art galleries I’ve ever experienced, and that’s possibly because it’s just one person in charge, with a solid vision & intention, and not a committee in sight.

We drove into central Hobart to check into our hostel & grab some lunch, which turned out to be the biggest parma I’ve seen in my life (loaded with sour cream, salsa & nachos… probably not necessary). The town itself wasn’t what I’d imagined at all: the second oldest settlement in all of Australia appeared to have been built entirely in the 1960s, with drab concrete blocks standing where I had expected to find gorgeous, old colonial buildings. A walk through the town centre was bizarrely reminiscent of a trip to a small, English suburban high street, complete with depressing charity/op shops & 80s haircuts, but we powered through and decided to take the car up to Mount Wellington, the grand hill towering above the city. The view was absolutely breathtaking: a sky of purples and pinks, an expanse of water bordered by tiny houses & boardwalks. We didn’t last for long in the cold but the photos remain some of the most beautiful I captured in all of Australia. That evening, we headed to the thankfully gorgeous waterfront for snakebites & tankards of cheap beer with inappropriately young students, before waking up painfully early the next day. 

I was determined to find some history & culture in Hobart and dragged the girls on an almost two hour journey further south to a place called Port Arthur, one of the most infamous convict prisons on the continent which has since been converted into a wonderfully calm & beautiful area today. The complex sits in what felt like a valley leading down to the ocean, and the guide pointed out what parts of the settlement would’ve sat on the now immaculately kept grounds. There was a computer where you could check if you had any ancestors pass through the complex, and obviously the Irish girls had tonnes of people from their hometowns, they would. We had a bit of a tough drive onto where we’d be spending that night so we left a couple of hours before sunset and hit the road to a small fishing village mid-way up the east coast, Bicheno.

By the time we’d made it back up to Hobart mid-way the sky was already black, so most of the apparently spectacular drive up to Bicheno was clouded in darkness but Yasmin got us all there in time for dinner. I continually felt mortified at how small I expected Tasmania to be, especially after finishing that 3-4 hour drive just from one destination to the next. After checking in to the only backpackers in town, we wandered down to the deserted beachfront to find a warm Italian where we all had delicious pizza (I remember someone having a disappointing lasagne, but obviously all lasagnes in restaurants are going to disappoint. It was probably one of the Irish girls) and I sampled my first Tasmanian oysters. I also remember Yasmin getting away with paying under $10 for her entire meal due to a stray hair, leaving me paying at least $40 for my albeit hairless dinner. I don’t mind a hair.

The next morning we found Bicheno was pretty low on things to do during winter so we grabbed coffee, tea, sausage rolls & headed off north again. The coast was admittedly stunning, and occasionally the road would divert inland to dramatically different scenery - the ocean to mountains and back. I’d been told that Tasmania was the closest Australia had to New Zealand, on a smaller scale obviously, and often that’s where I felt I was. We stopped off at a local brewery and ordered beer flights, most of which tasted like absolute piss, but the view - the entire side of the bar looking out to the ocean was floor to ceiling glass - was so magnificent we kind of had to hang around. We had a fair bit of time until sunset, so we drove onwards to a town called St Helens, which if not for the wonderful coastal setting turned out to be nearly as grim as it’s English counterpart - our hostel was promised as ‘the best reviewed guesthouse in Tasmania’ despite being operated by the most miserable Englishman I’ve met outside of Slough who was more interested in fixing his bicycle than checking us in, and dinner was frozen fish & chips in a charming eatery whereupon telling the owner I was from near Birmingham, was told how it’s now ‘full of black people’. Lovely. 

Luckily St Helens was massively saved by it’s proximity to the Bay of Fires, a section of coast lined by rocks covered in bizarrely bright red moss, giving the impression that they’re all ablaze. We grabbed our box of goon, strolled along one of the most picturesque, guidebook perfect beaches I’ve laid eyes upon, and watched the sunset talking about old people having affairs. It was wonderful. It was wonderful to temporarily go back to holiday mode after four solid months of work work work, and it was wonderful to spend so much time with both brand new people & familiar faces. Similarly to Bicheno, St Helens wasn’t exactly going off so we grabbed ciders & settled down for a movie in the hostel with a group of Japanese girls who were spending their working holiday visas working in a fish factory in the town. Yep.

The last full day of our Tasmanian Adventure had arrived and we were on our way to Launceston! Stomachs grumbling, we stopped off at a dairy within a gorgeous valley surrounded by yet more breathtaking mountains in a hamlet called  Pyengana, which turned out to be where the cheddar at my Melbourne workplace was from. We were given a kind of guided tour around the dairy, where millions (alright, about thirty) of cows were milked by apparently very comfortable machines which worked on the cow’s terms, so if the cow wanted to be milked they would stroll toward the machine and go for it, and if they didn’t, well… they didn’t. Independent women. Then we walked back into the cafe and had cheese on toast, with cheese made from that very milk, along with a free milkshake and coffee made with… you guessed it. It was all delicious and there was a novelty about eating yummy things made with the stuff from the cows you could see having a fabulous time outside. We arrived in Launceston around 4pm, which I immediately found more visually impressive than Hobart - even more water, bridges and plenty of gorgeous old Victorian architecture. We had a few hours of sunlight left so we headed to the Launceston Gorge, an absolutely gorgeous gorge (I didn’t even mean to do that) with a cute chairlift traversing a lake, valleys & immaculately kept old gardens, which of course we hopped on. There were cute old bandstands, beautiful flowers & fierce peacocks everywhere, which felt all the more jarring when the picturesque English scene would be broken with a very un-English wallaby hopping across the lawn. It was probably the most fun I’d had since MONA on the very first morning.

The last supper was a recommendation from the Pyengana dairy owner, where we indulged in gourmet pizzas (I think I had Moroccan lamb, mint & pea) and Paula tried Malaysian soft shell crab. The hostel was by far the best of the trip, a stunning old Victorian guesthouse with huge ceilings & very friendly staff. Mr St Helens could learn a trick or two. Launceston was a delight, and the next morning I didn’t really want to fly back to Melbourne.

Overall, I was really impressed with Tasmania. As me and Yas said when we were planning it, it’s unlikely I’ll ever return as it’s just one of those places which are great but they’re not exactly a ‘destination’. But I dunno, on reflection we had a brilliant time and it’s a world away from Melbourne which sits just an hour over the sea. Since visiting I’ve also spent three weeks in New Zealand, and I can indeed confirm Tasmania is a little slice of Kiwi paradise on Aussie soil. Obviously it has nothing on NZ, but it’s so different to anywhere else in Australia that they should treasure it. I’d definitely go back to Tasmania. As for that grim flight back to Melbourne, I had to pack up the cute little apartment on Collins Street I shared with a beautiful Thai girl I’d been living with for two months, as on the Monday I was off to a town called Romsey in the Victorian (the state, not the time period) countryside to begin my rural work for three months. I didn’t want to leave one bit, but I think I was also ready for a brand new adventure. 

[backpackingrealness]

Osaka

1 night, Hotel Toyo

I arrived in Osaka around 5pm on a 45 minute train from Kyoto - the short distance between two very different cities reminded me of Manchester & Liverpool - and my first impression was being plunged back into the neck-achingly tall skyscrapers and flashing neon on every available surface. Like Kyoto, the transport system was much easier to unscramble than Tokyo’s  and within half an hour I was at my hostel for the night. I had an entire full day following but my flight was usefully at 11.30pm, meaning I could leave my bags at the hostel all day after checking out and get a full day of exploring. First on the cards, as always, was dinner. 

In my research I read more than once that the rest of Japan viewed Osaka as the country’s kitchen, with a very proud culinary heritage. The takoyaki (fried balls of minced octopus & vegetables) I tasted first in Tokyo are Osaka’s most iconic creation and one-man-stalls lined every street, a familiar reminder of the street food across south east Asia. The receptionist on the hostel gave me an extremely useful map of the city divided by neighbourhood, and I was well in walking distance of the city’s main shopping & business district, thriving well into the late hours. In the snatches of shopping time I grabbed in Tokyo and Kyoto, I was on a mission to hunt down a poster-size map of the world in Japanese. I love maps, most of all world maps, and I desperately wanted one with all place names written in kanji, but in both previous cities I’d failed miserably. Nothing affects my mood quite like not being able to find the precise thing I’ve got my heart set on, and upon asking the hostel receptionist for advice, she actually wrote me a paragraph of text in Japanese that I could hand to a shop assistant who would hopefully find exactly what I need. And thanks to that awesome receptionist, I now own a beautiful big Japanese map of the world. This was just the appetite builder I needed, and I found a little cafe with stools at a bar wrapping around a grill, manned by chefs frying up magnificent noodle pancakes with any topping you wanted. A big jug of Asahi beer to wash it down, another hour spent strolling around the dizzyingly lit arcades and I was wiped after a long day starting with a visit to the Golden Temple back in Kyoto.

The next morning my feet had thankfully stopped aching pretty much after my self-inflicted ankle injury at Tokyo DisneySea, which was good as I had an entire day of power walking ahead. Osaka was very walkable, like Kyoto, and my immediate impressions from the night before and in the morning light were of a more colourful, almost garish (never an insult for me) condensed Tokyo. Gone were the traditional two-storey houses of Kyoto, but the city never felt as vast or consuming as Tokyo, and there was so much more colour everywhere. Billboards, posters, buildings in every kind of colour, flashing from dusk to dawn. Every major Western fashion & food chain was there, and I finally found an enormous record store to explore - my two favourite shops in any new country are supermarkets (I can’t explain it) and record stores, of which the latter are becoming increasingly rare - in which I found enormous chalkboards handwritten written in Japanese promoting One Direction everywhere. I also picked up at a listening post a band called Perfume, who are pretty much the Japanese Girls Aloud, with seven or eight albums in their catalogue being written and produced exclusively by the same pop factory and annual enormous tours of Japan & South Korea. I didn’t know anything about J-pop beyond Utada (the Japanese Madonna) but since leaving I’ve been slowly chipping away at the Perfume catalogue. Literally the Girls Aloud of Japan. 

I visited the Osaka Castle, kind of a must-see, even though it’s shamelessly a tourist trap. The castle is actually a replica of a much older castle that was destroyed in World War 2, but is undoubtedly stunning to behold, and the surrounding park has been dedicated to now promoting world peace & tolerance. You could pay to visit the top, but it was much more beautiful to look at from the outside. An elderly Japanese man caught me for a conversation (this was becoming regular, and I loved it) and told me he’d never visited the UK but had regularly hosted British & Australian workers for much of his adult life and had learnt English purely from them & BBC television. It was so nice to be approached by these people, and went against much of what I’d heard about the Japanese being ‘overly’ respectful and keeping themselves to themselves. I have to say, across Japan, whenever I gave the impression of being lost or requiring assistance, someone always came to my rescue and helped me in pretty good English, another contradiction to what I’d been told (English use has blown up recently in Japan after so many years of ignoring it unlike the rest of the world, mostly because Japan didn’t need English for anything like tourism or business, they were and are much more self-sufficient than most of Asia). 

I happened upon a long avenue of shops & boutiques dedicated to gaming & anime, which while not really my thing was such a Japanese ‘thing’ I had to check them out. Much to my delight I found an entire shop dedicated to Power Rangers, probably my first ever ‘obsession’, and would absolutely have bought one of the collectable figurines if not for a total lack of Yellow Rangers (always female & ethnic, immediately iconic). I found a lunch-sized box of super fresh sushi for my last taste in Japan, and spent the rest of the afternoon aimlessly wandering the well organised, friendly city, exploring the gazillion shopping arcades filled with shops devoted to every kind of kitchen gadget you would ever need (another passion) and a Charlie Brown-themed bakery. The sun was setting, I felt like I’d seen as much of Osaka as I could in one day and by foot, and headed back to the hostel to get my shit together & grab a cheap dinner (a bento box from lunchtime, usually selling for about £6, reduced to £1 - this stuff gives me so much excitement). A very well organised (of course) train would whisk me away from the hostel straight to Osaka-Kansai Airport for my late-night flight, and my whistle-stop, absolutely magical sensory overload of a week in Japan would be over. My budget was only ever going to allow for one week, but I just wanted a sample, a taste of the one country I’d wanted to get to more than anywhere else in the entire world. I’ve always wanted to just get myself over there and teach English for a year, so I know I’ll be back one day for a much longer time in which I can explore every nook & cranny of Tokyo, but that week was like having my finger in a plug socket from start to finish. What better feeling is there than having extremely, possibly unrealistically, high hopes for an experience & to find the real thing actually supersedes those expectations? I’ve raved about the country since I left and will continue to do so. Japan was awesome.

[backpackingrealness]

Kyoto

2 nights, Khaosan Guesthouse

Over a week in Japan, I'd given three nights to Tokyo then two to both Kyoto & Osaka, which despite being totally different in every way imaginable, are separated by just fifty minutes on a train. Obviously getting a bullet-train was on my list of must-do things but I only would've needed it to get from Tokyo to Kyoto, and the price didn't make sense for one journey (if you're using it multiple times over a few weeks, it definitely does make sense). So the day after trekking around Tokyo DisneySea, I checked out & hobbled my way to the coach checkpoint for Willer Express - I basically used the first company which had turned up on Google for 'tokyo to kyoto bus'. It was reasonably priced, about the same cost as a bus would be in the UK for an eight hour journey, however I bet no bus in the UK comes with fold-out enormous pink hoods on each seat which act as enormous eye-masks, TV screens with not just classic 90s movies (I watched The Mask) but Nintendo games like Super Mario & Donkey Kong, or stops at service stations with wall-to-wall fridges holding bento boxes of every kind of fried Japanese goody imaginable or electronic screens of the future showing traffic updates on a road grid of the country? ...I try and find excitement in everything I do ok?

The hostel was relatively easy to find, being just a little down a street off the main shopping avenue Shijo Street. It was around half the price of the Tokyo hostel, but possibly even better? It catered to every possible need a backpacker would be craving - a huge fully functional kitchen connected to an open plan traditional Japanese lounge littered with free to use computers, bean bags & an enormous TV, and we were given a free upgrade to a private bedroom as they were out of dorm beds. Seriously, things like this make all the difference to your mood, Japan's got the backpacker gig sorted. It was pitch black already but not yet 7pm, and I was hungry so we ventured out into the bitter, bitter cold (so much colder than Tokyo) for grub, finding it at a gorgeous two-storey traditional house with sake bottle-lined walls & mats instead of chairs. A waitress thankfully found one English language menu, but recommended I try a Kyoto speciality, home-made tofu. Alright, why not? Ten minutes later a bowl bigger than my face arrives, filled with admittedly delicious but way too much tofu, which was just about finished off with liberally applied rice wine vinegar & crunchy pink salt. The restaurant and much of Kyoto so far was on a totally different scale to Tokyo - barely any skyscrapers as opposed to only skyscrapers, and a much more cosier city feel. 

We only had one full day, and I'd made a list way in advance of things I had to do. First up was the Fushimi Inari-taisha, a shrine at the base of a mountain just outside the city, which I'd first seen at the end of Memoirs of a Geisha. Four kilometres of mini-shrines purchased by families line a path up the mountain, which took me two hours to walk but provided absolutely breath taking views of the city. Statues of elegant foxes guarded the shrine, & running through the breath-takingly red tunnel of shrines didn't really get old. Rows of street food hawkers lined the exit, and I was trying not to eat but watched red bean-stuffed fortune cookies being made & consumed by the dozen. Next up, a metro train (slightly more efficient than Tokyo in that I think 'only' two companies had control of the whole system) back in the direction of my hostel to Gion, the geisha district.

There is a geisha district in Tokyo but Kyoto is much more associated with the culture, a centuries-long tradition of young women being trained & groomed in a whole series of arts & skills ranging from musical instrument playing to conversation who accompany gentlemen on night-long engagements, often at a geisha house. Absolutely no sexual activity is part of the bargain, and just being in a geisha's presence can cost thousands of pounds for an evening. The culture practically became extinct in after the second world war, but began to grow again in the seventies, just in time for a whole generation of girls to be trained up by ageing geisha. A trainee is called a maiko, and we had been advised to attend a special showcase of maiko and other traditional Japanese performances held every evening specifically for educating & entertaining tourists. An actual evening with a geisha would be practically impossible, as even if I had thousands to spare, you actually have to be invited to a geisha house.

But the show was a few hours away, and just exploring Gion was fascinating. Every now and then an actual geisha would exit a house, fully dressed from head to tow in stunning kimono, make up & hair, and my jaw would drop only for me to quickly check myself after noticing withering eye-rolls from locals. The district is lined with gorgeous little arts & craft stores, Japanese bakeries & bars, most of which wouldn't open well into that evening. Instead, I decided to hobble (those shoes) my way over to the original Imperial Palace, built long before Tokyo became the new capital. Unfortunately not as grand as Tokyo's, the palace is surrounded however by a magnificent park, and delicious little cafes filled with huge varieties of different meats, vegetables & soy bean curd products prepared in different ways & sauces, from which you just pick what you want and pay by weight. While eating this mini-feast I was approached by an ancient-looking Japanese lady who must have been well into her eighties, who started talking in near perfect English & explained for most of her adult life that she lived in London, New York & then Switzerland as a working classical musician. She spoke so highly of the UK that I started to get a bit homesick, but I was so chuffed that I'd been approached by this lady who just wanted to give her English a dust-off & welcome us to her city. As I left, she stuffed some delicious mints wrapped in a tissue into my hand as a gift, showing that it's not just my nan back in Coventry keeping mints in her bag.

The Nijō Castle was next up, a UNESCO World Heritage protected castle used by shoguns until the early twentieth century. An absolutely stunning Japanese traditional palace, I took a self-guided audio tour through the main buildings which were lined with paper walls decorated with magnificent tigers & dragons, hundreds of years old and prohibited from photographing in case of light overexposure. The palace was built with 'nightingale floors', floors which were spring-based so they would make loud squeaks when walked on, preventing eaves-dropping or spying. Dusk was settling in so the entire gardens were bathed in orange & pink light, and despite being in winter was absolutely full of colour.

By this point my feet were in a crazy amount of pain (I'm cringing remembering how much it hurt to use my left foot on that specific day), so we took a bus back to Gion where we bought tickets (I think about £10) and watched a show comprising of different traditional Japanese ceremonies, like tea-pouring, a form of pantomime which came from Korea about five hundred years ago, and finally a maiko who performed to live music. It was lovely, a little quaint but I can say that I've hung out with a geisha - well, a baby geisha - and watched her perform in Kyoto which basically makes me Hatsumomo, yes? Dinner that evening was in a cute little curry house just a street over, which can be found all over Japan but basically just serve katsu curry (the stuff from Wagamama) with any kind of meat or vegetables you want. I just stuck for the classic breaded chicken & loaded up on fresh chillis, and it was perfect for the biting temperatures. This was the coldest environment I'd been in since visiting Washington DC nearly a year earlier, but at least I had better shoes than fabric Converse. 

The next day I aimed to get a train over to Osaka in the late afternoon, as I still had Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Temple, to explore. I somehow got a very easy bus route from outside the hostel & ended on the outskirts of the city half an hour later, after having another lovely conversation with an elderly Japanese lady using the English she'd learned living in Oxford in the seventies. Unfortunately I'd been slacking in the battery charging department and had to use my phone to capture surely one of the most spectacular sites I'd come across in Asia, but you can see for yourself how mesmerising it is. Built in 1397, the Buddhist temple is gilded in gold leaf which just glitters before you, but the one you visit today is actually a replica after a crazy monk went nuts and set the whole thing on fire in 1950. Fabulously ornate, easily one of the most stunning things I'd seen in Japan and beyond. 

I'd barely touched the enormous shopping district on the doorstep of my hostel, so spent lunchtime wondering the thriving avenues, arcades & shopping centres clustered together on Shijō Street. It was a Sunday so it was packed, and food stalls were everywhere but you know, when you've got a craving for a bowl of $5 ramen from 7/11 you've gotta do something about it, so I snagged one with a delicious bottle of peach-flavoured iced green tea & dozed off for half an hour on the bean bags in my hostel. Kyoto had been everything Tokyo wasn't, and a totally, totally different side to Japan. I felt like I was seeing more of a complete picture. Anyway, it was 4pm, and time to get a train north to my final stop in Japan, Osaka!

[backpackingrealness]

Tokyo DisneySea

1 day

When I told people I would be spending a day out of my one week in Japan at a Disney park, I received one of two responses. Most normal people said “why”… and most people I’d just spent a year working with in Walt Disney World said “YES”. Or something along those lines. On paper, I know it’s insane to be wasting precious time in a brand new country in a place similar to the one I’d just lived & worked in for a year, but Tokyo Disney is just… different. If you’re unusually interested in theme parks, read the paragraph below. If you’re a normal person, skip.

Basically, the deal in Japan is that the two Disney parks aren’t actually owned by Disney. They’re owned by a Japanese leisure company, who pay Disney a licensing fee but otherwise own & operate everything by themselves. Contractually they’re obliged to basically do whatever Disney wants them to in the parks, including but not limited to building the best versions of every standard cloned attraction, the most detailed & immersive-to-the-hilt environments, and producing ludicrously expensive live shows, day and night. I’d read so much moaning & complaining online in the past about the Japanese parks being lightyears ahead of its American & French counterparts, purely because Disney can build whatever they want there to the highest standards but without paying a penny. Someone else foots the bill. I’m currently in a living situation where my supermarket trips are totally paid for by someone else, and I can order whatever I want. So I understand the feeling. But I still only had one day. Even I couldn’t justify two out of seven days in a theme park, so I had to pick one of the two. Disneyland is made up mostly of clones from Disneyland in California, and the Magic Kingdom in Florida. Done, done, done to death. DisneySea however is totally unique to Japan, and cost around $4 billion to build, making it by far the most expensive theme park in the world. In comparison, California Adventure, the second park in CA next to the original Disneyland, cost just $600 million. That’s 7.5% of DisneySea’s price tag… and it shows. And one more thing, an entrance ticket to California Adventure costs the equivalent of 54 pounds. DisneySea? 34 pounds. Japan does everything better. 

I woke up on my third morning in Tokyo, my legs still jelly from two solid days of walking, at around 7am. Sick of my trusty white Converse, I decided it would be a great idea to break in my new purple suede Nike hi tops… in a theme park. More on that later. Luckily my hostel was only two train changes away from Maihama station, the metro stop inside the resort (I think it’s impossible to get to Disney World from downtown Orlando using public transport), and five minutes later I’d changed to the resort monorail which went through the stops for Ikspiari (like Downtown Disney, shops, restaurants, etc.), Tokyo Disneyland and finally Tokyo DisneySea. At 8.30am the entrance plaza was already heaving, and the ticket booth lines were monstrous, so I made a bee-line for a girl holding a Little Mermaid popcorn bucket & smugly clutched the tickets I’d bought in advance at the Shibuya Disney Store.

The park, as the name suggests, is built around the theme of water, which flows (high pun score) from the enormous globe held up by fountains through each area of the park: Mediterranean Harbour, a pristine recreation of Venice complete with gondalas, classy pizzerias & boutiques adorned with Italian art masterpieces inhabited by hidden Disney characters; American Waterfront, a turn-of-the-century New York docking district anchored by a gothic Tower of Terror & full-size steamliner; Cape Cod, a picture perfect New England bay town;Port Discovery, a steam-punk aqua take on Tomorrowland; Lost River Delta, a South American/Mayan jungle equivalent of Adventureland; Arabian Coast, a gaudy recreation of Agrabah complete with an Aladdin Broadway-style show; Mermaid Lagoon, a full-blown under-the-sea world devoted to Ariel… obviously my favourite area, and finally Mysterious Island anchors the park in the middle with an enormous volcano blowing fire into the sky on the hour, every hour. Still with me?

The day’s schedule was so convoluted & confusing it would be pointless to list things in the order I did them, so I’ll just go through the highlights. The Mediterranean Harbour was like the Italian pavilion at Epcot on Berocca, with labrynths of lanes & alleyways to explore, intertwined with canals. I had a cappuccino and orange & almond biscotti there mid-morning at Mamma Biscott’s Bakery (a theme park quick service restaurant with real silver ware & plates), and ate evening dinner at the waterside Ristorante de Caneletto, where I had a Christmas pizza with duck & hazelnuts. There wasn’t an attraction in the area, but the park’s main shops & boutiques were all here and I spent a small fortune on postcards, pins & other useless shite which gives me so much happiness. Will forever kick myself for not getting those Donald & Daisy Duck chopsticks though - the best advice I can give to any traveller is if you’re in a shop and you want something, don’t spend an hour wondering if you really need it or not. And they’re eighty bloody dollars on eBay!

The American Waterfront was spectacular, even more so with it’s Christmas decorations which were even more comforting after being away from home for so long. My home isn’t New York, but you know what I mean. The main street is lined with bagel shops, a Scrooge McDuck department store and brass band performers, leading to the magnificent Tower of Terror at the end. The only tower in the world without a Twilight Zone theme, the tower is still a hotel but suggests the owner, who toured the world collecting artifacts (more hints to the story are left in the Lost River Delta area, the ‘jungle’ where he found them), stole a haunted idol. The entire building is spectacular, and even the standard souvenir shop is themed to be the hotel’s luxury spa baths. As if this wasn’t extravagant enough, an enormous steamliner, the S.S. Columbia, sits next door, an entire ship more-or-less open to explore. A fine dining restaurant & bar sit inside, but otherwise the decks are exactly as it would be on a 1920s luxury cruise ship. From the port side, the ship looks out over the real Tokyo Bay, giving an almost perfect illusion that the ship is really at sea and has docked in New York. This is theme park geek gold. There’s also a mini-land in the Waterfront based on a Coney Island beachfront amusement park, housing a vintage-themed Toy Story Mania, a ride with four hour waits the entire day. No chance.

Port Discovery was a bit of a comedown after the previous land, with a simulator I didn’t bother with, although I did get followed by another group of school girls in matching red jumpsuits onto a boat ride had their camera out ready to snap me every time our boats faced each other. I swear I’m not making this up! The Lost River Delta was way cooler, with crash-landed planes lining the river outside an enormous Mayan temple housing Indiana Jones & the Temple of the Crystal Skull. I bumped into a pseudo Indy lookalike, who looked… absolutely nothing like Indy. There were really cool South American merchandise shops & a Mexican food hall with ice cold Corona. Next up was the Arabian Coast, and we’d left it too late to win a ticket in the lottery for the Aladdin show (the park is so busy that all the entertainment shows are housed inside purpose built theatres and require ticket lotteries to cut down on mad crowds queueing up outside the shows all day), plus the area’s main attraction, something to do with Sinbad, was closed for refurbs so I sat down with a snack I’d read about online called a Chandu tail: a pastry the shape and colour of a tiger tail, filled with the exact same filling as a Greggs chicken bake. I swear. There were windy Agrabah alleyways to get lost in, and I had to be convinced not to buy an adorable teapot the shape & colour of the Genie’s lamp.

Mermaid Lagoon was always going to be a highlight. The Little Mermaid is my be-all & end-all, so nothing was stopping me going wild, not even all signs clearly pointing to this being pretty much the only kiddie area in a mostly adult theme park. You enter through a façade designed as Triton’s underwater palace, and although you’re obviously in a decorated warehouse the entire room is filled with effects making you feel underwater. The ceiling is covered in large projections of animated waves, and bubbles pop up from all sorts of orifices. The rides are all for four year olds, so instead I made a beeline for the one show not requiring a ticket lottery – a Cirque du Soleil-style re-telling of Ariel’s story. Holler! The actress was probably the only other white person I’d seen in the park and used a multitude of ropes & pulleys to swim & sing her way around the theatre. It was like being at a P!nk concert, aimed more at gays than lesbians. I may or may not have also made my finest t-shirt purchase ever, a standardly Japanese over-the-top collage definitely intended for nine year old girls. Has that ever stopped me before?

But by far, the Mysterious Island was the highlight. Aside from the fire-breathing man-made volcano, the land also held a full blown medieval fortress posing as a childrens’ playground next to the park’s premiere fine dining restaurant, which I didn’t get to enter but the photos look jaw-dropping. I haven’t even got to the park’s two best attractions: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in which you ‘go underwater’ (a genius plate of bubbles in your window makes you genuinely believe you’ve submerged) and see all kinds of trippy shit, and Journey to the Centre of the Earth, a ride so good I had to do it twelve hours after my first ride despite my ankles screaming in pain (remember me deciding to break in brand new shoes in a theme park?). You’re strapped into a machine digging to the centre of the earth, encounter some nasties on the way then shoot back to Earth through the mouth of the volcano, catching brief glimpses of the park around you & Tokyo beyond. Insane. Every inch of this land was designed with a total disregard for money or budget, and is dripping in details. My mouth was permanently hanging open. And the red jumpsuit-clad schoolgirls managed to track me down again…

I had to make sure I caught the park’s two entertainment shows on the lagoon in front of the volcano, bordered by the Mediterranean Harbour. In the day, theLegend of Mythica was an unusual blend of ancient mythological animals with Disney characters but featured spectacular pyro, waterworks & aerialists. It was so off-center, it would never end up in an American Disney park. Really strange, bizarre but beautiful, and the crowds were going wild for it. At night, a Japanese production of Fantasmic from California & Florida had just opened, but was the one Japanese clone I though was a bit rubbish and not as good as the American originals. Maybe the show was swamped in the enormous lagoon (it’s in much smaller environments in the US), or not understanding a word of what was going on was more of a hindrance than I thought it would be. There wasn’t a parade but I greatly appreciated the effort put into the Christmas decorations across the park, considering Christmas really doesn’t have much history in Japan (most Japanese believe Westerners eat KFC on Christmas Day, and as a result KFCs are packed across the country in December): in each land there was a different themed Christmas tree, with the American Waterfront’s being the most traditional & gorgeous. Definitely wanted to steal Ariel’s.

I headed back to the hostel around 10pm, nearly fourteen hours after entering. This was major for the Disney geek I am, and I would go back without a doubt when I return to Japan. You don’t even need to like Disney to appreciate it, as a theme park it’s by far the best I’ve been to in the entire world. My feet were in absolute agony, but thankfully I’d be spending seven hours on a bus from Tokyo to Kyoto which would hopefully help. Sayonara Tokyo, arigato Kyoto!

[backpackingrealness]

Tokyo

3 nights, Anne Asakusabashi

Do you really want to know all about my Japan obsession? Cos like, I have a lot to write about and this could take up valuable writing energy/reading motivation. And who isn’t obsessed with Japan? It’s the country constantly out-cooling every other country on the planet, a country which effortlessly melds ultra-modernity with century old traditions. Sushi, Power Rangers,Memoirs of a Geisha, POKEMON… the list of incredible Japanese inventions appropriated by Western cultures is endless. I mean, obviously Memoirs of a Geisha was written by an American, but that book taught my fifteen year old self an awful lot about a treasured & protected part of Japanese culture, which most just pass off as prostitution. And how to apply flawless face paint, obviously. Japan is awesome.

Back in England, I had no intention of incorporating Japan into my original travels. Geographically the islands are a fair distance away from south east Asia, around seven hours by plane. When I booked my trip the travel agent advised me to use Kuala Lumpur as my ‘base’ as the city is home to AirAsia, the equivalent of EasyJet or Ryanair, but even cheaper and probably more efficient. I just happened to be browsing the website (skiving at work) and noticed that two flights: Kuala Lumpur to Tokyo, and Osaka back to Kuala Lumpur a week later, would cost me a total of two hundred pounds. For a fourteen hour round trip, that’s ludicrous money, and an hour later my seats were booked. When on earth would I ever be in a position to visit Japan for so cheap & on such a whim again? As a result, my plans for Vietnam were pretty much shelved for money & time reasons, but Vietnam is a beast apparently better tackled on its own over a month, so one day I’ll return.

The flight from KL wasn’t the best of timing, arriving in Tokyo too late at night to catch a train into the city, as they stopped at 11pm. My choices were paying an extortionate taxi fare or kipping down until they started running again at 6am, which I ended up doing. The hostel was in the Asakusabashi district, a mainly business area attached to the tourist zone of Asakusa, home to kimono boutiques and artisans painstakingly putting together those bowls of plastic food, which do actually sit outside every restaurant worth its salt… pardon the pun. I reached the hostel around 8am after grabbing breakfast (a 100 yen – around one pound – sushi roll, which was kind of just a triangle of rice with a chunk of tuna hidden inside) in an awesome 7/11 (all 7/11s in Japan, and Thailand for that matter, are awesome - seriously), and it was far too early to check in but I didn’t want to waste valuable time hanging around just to dump my bag. I got to grips with a legendary electronic toilet (warm seat, super hygienic) and a pretty standard hot shower, changed my clothes and got stuck into Tokyo.

I’d been told to head to Ueno Park for a really cool museum on historical Tokyo, which is apparently valuable due to everything in Tokyo being regularly knocked down and re-built (unlike Kyoto, six hours down the motorway). Navigating the metro system was probably the one pain in the neck I found in the city. English wasn’t a problem, translations were everywhere, but most lines on the metro are owned by different companies who require a new/different ticket with each interchange. That’s like the Northern & Victoria lines being owned by different companies in London. To add to the confusion, it was really difficult to distinguish between underground metro lines, overground train lines and some vague in-between lines. But yeah, obviously I got everywhere eventually. It just made me appreciate how well organised systems are in London.

After the museum, which was actually really cool, I wanted to check out the Tokyo National Museum, a ten minute walk away. Unlike the glorious British Museum, which consists of artefacts pillaged from civilisations across the globe after we’d finished raping them, the Tokyo Museum protects national Japanese treasures alone… and was tragically closed for renovation. No worry, the area was stunning despite being in the throes of winter (a painful shock coming from warm Cambodia), and I treated myself to a very necessary Uniqlo red feather down jacket (thanks mum). It was around this point when I found myself wandering down residential lanes (houses look exactly like they do in Pokemon) and was accosted by a large group of schoolgirls asking for a photo. This. Was. My. Moment. Trying to remain as not-arsed as possible, I agreed to posing for around ten different camera phones on the condition I got one myself. Amazing.

The Imperial Palace was next, the equivalent of Buckingham Palace, and had spectacular Japanese gardens to wander around with a vaguely interesting history involving lots of plots to blow up the emperor by planting bombs in his food cellars. Lunch was again acquired from 7/11, which continued to re-define ‘convenience store’, with an enormous fridge of actual meals you could buy for around four pounds and heat up in a wall of microwaves. These aren’t your standard ready meals either, I snagged a Wagamama-quality chicken katsu curry with a Minnie Mouse strawberry iced green tea.

After this it gets a little blurry… I know I checked out the main shopping districts: Shibuya, home to the legendary but actually not that big of a deal pedestrian crossing; Harajuku, everything you think it will be and more, kind of a Japanese Brick Lane dotted with Barbie boutiques & amazing trainer shops (snagged some gorgeous violet Nike hi tops) and Roppongi, home to the department stores, designer shops & in a slightly more salubrious area, really cheap big steaming bowls of ramen (noodle soup) & gyoza (fried/steamed pork dumplings). I passed the Disney Store, a five-storey boutique shaped like a giant castle turret, and acted on some good advice I’d been told about getting Tokyo Disneyland tickets (that’s for a whole other blog), to buy them from the store instead of at the crowded park gates.

My feet were crying for a rest, I’d been on the go for a good eighteen hours but was living every second. I felt like I’d stuck my fingers in a plug socket, and kept bursting out laughing when I reminded myself where I was. Tokyo. Tokyo! What the hell. And every time I’d found myself looking puzzled at the metro lines or ordering in a restaurant (ok I’d only eaten in one restaurant so far) people had thrown themselves in my path to help. And so far, it was nowhere near as expensive as I’d been warned. Everything I’d expected to find wandering the streets was there, but it was actually less crowded than I expected. I walked a few blocks down Tokyo’s equivalent of Oxford Street and the roads were practically deserted. Odd. But by 11pm I really was on the verge of collapse so it was back to the hostel where an enormous thick winter duvet covered me up and struggled to let me escape from the next morning.

The next morning I walked fifteen minutes to the adjacent Asakusa district, home to the most magnificent Japanese Buddhist temple, and while not being anything like any Buddhist temple I’d previously seen, seemed to feature every Japanese stereotype imaginable… feeding off the hoards of tourists flocking there. Ladies dressed in traditional kimonos – cherry pink & blueberry – weaved through ornamental gardens filled with shishi-odosh (bamboo water features) & fearsome warrior statues. An street of stalls & kiosks selling every kind of novelty chop stick alongside delicious sweet rice treats stretched way further than my eyes could see, and breakfast was a delicious red bean & rice dumpling dipped in powdered sugar, made before my eyes. I picked up some postcards & chop sticks pertaining to my Chinese zodiac (what of it?), before walking through the Sumida district which ended up at the Tokyo Skytree, the world’s tallest free-standing tower.

I’d had my fill of going up towers (it would be tough to top the Willis Tower in Chicago… there goes another first world problem) but I hadn’t had my fill of super fresh sushi! An enormous food court underneath the Skytree housed all manner of fabulous food options – bagels, salads, burgers – but why would I get anything else than sushi made with fish caught that very morning, from a fishmongers stretching an entire wall’s length of the food court. Loading up on wasabi & pink ginger, I briefly pondered the amount of sushi I’d eaten before while hoping I would one day eat it in Japan… then stuffed my face. Sensational. Salmon sashimi, eel, tuna, cod, shrimp… my mouth is watering. I was full but my nose was flirting with the smells wafting over from the takoyaki stall (fried dumplings made from minced octopus then covered in cottage cheese – way better than they sound). “I’m only in Japan for a week” was an excuse I would start to justify most actions from that point onward. It turns out that takoyaki is actually the street food Osaka is most famous for, and I would go on to taste even better dumplings there a few days later.

I really wanted to visit the Meiji Shrine back in Shinjuku, near Harajuku, but I was cutting it fine with time. I jumped on a train, not finding this ludicrous mess of lines & companies any easier, but somehow ended outside the shrine gates an hour later – ten minutes too late, in fact. Kind of irritating, but you always need a reason to come back and visit again. So I gave Harajuku another walk through, completely in awe at the hustle & bustle marauding through Soho-style shops filled with slogan bearing sweaters, street desserts of the moment (I kept seeing crepes pumped full of ice cream & strawberries). I desperately wanted some beautiful stationary or postcards, an idea I’d had since regularly visiting the Mitsukoshi department store miniature in the Japanese pavilion at Epcot, so naturally headed straight to the mother store. Disappointingly, it was merely the Japanese equivalent of Debanhams or House of Fraser, and held none of the kitsch Japanese memorabilia/crap I had hoped to get my hands on. No fear – is that my stomach rumbling again? Dinner was an enormous steaming bowl of ramen in ‘pork bone broth’ – an unappetizing name but basically a thick, syrupy soup base filled with chunky mushrooms, chicken & pork belly.

My two back-to-back solid days in Tokyo were done, and I really felt like I’d made the most of the time I had. I didn’t make it to a Pokemon Center (that would have sealed every childhood ambition ever), and there’s the Meiji Shrine & Tokyo National Museum to come back & check out, but I really feel like I could make a home in the city, even for just a year. I think London, New York & Tokyo sit in their own category far above any other city, in terms of grandeur, population & buzz. You would never, ever be lost for something to do in Tokyo, and you could probably eat something different every day for a year. It was everything I had hoped it would be, and of course much more.

I did actually have one day left in the city, but it would be spent from dusk to dawn at a place I’d been dying to get to since… well, as long as I knew about its existence. Day three would be at Tokyo DisneySea!

[backpackingrealness]

Cambodia to Japan, via Malaysia

1 night, Matahari Lodge

For just over two months I'd been making my way from city to town to island through mountains, down rivers and over straits & seas. It was (and to this point) the longest I had gone living out of a backpack, and it was marvellous. I flew from Phnom Penh in the early hours of December 7th to Kuala Lumpur, the place I had started my south east Asian journey on September 30th. Landing at the LCCT airport this time (the budget airport for easyJet-type airlines), I hopped straight on a £2 bus into the city and arrived back at the Chinatown guesthouse I had slept in last time. It was bizarre to be back, but comforting, especially knowing there was a clean, hot shower & a comfortable bed waiting for me. I had just under a day in KL before flying to Tokyo the following day, and I had covered everything I wanted to see & do in the city on my first time around. I took the free day's opportunity to book some accommodation for Melbourne on arrival before New Year's Eve, start scouting out jobs & backing up all the photos I'd taken so far on the hostel's computer, before heading out for dinner at the city's best rated Indian restaurant, which was just ten minutes from the hostel. My belly full of the softest, butteriest naan bread & spiciest, creamiest dal, I slept like a baby... despite feeling a similar level of excitement to a ten year old's Christmas Eve. The next day I was going to Japan! JAPAN! No other country in the world enticed me as much, and I was finally going. 

I was thinking about the highlights of my trip so far, and of course there were so many. The island of Penang in Malaysia, turning out to be such a gorgeous, welcoming place after enduring mild trauma to get there, and home to so many different cultures. Thailand of course, thirty days in a magnificent country, seeing, doing, tasting so many different things. I met some of my best friends & learnt to scuba dive with them in Ko Tao; visited a marvellous Bangkok hospital after busting my eardrums doing it; rode a rescued elephant and bathed it in a waterfall... I spent two days making my way down to the grand but sleepy Mekong river to the even sleepier Luang Prabang, one of the most gorgeous towns I've ever stepped in. I spent a month travelling with amazing new friends from Finland, and said goodbye to them after spending two days in the closest place I've found to paradise, Koh Rong. I walked through a thousand years of history in Angkor Wat. 

But I had one last adventure before I spent Christmas in Bali & flew on to Australia, and it involved seven days - morning to night - in the Land of the Rising Sun.

[backpackingrealness]

Phnom Penh

2.5 night, Eighty8 Hostel

We arrived on a blissfully smooth coach from Sihnoukville to the capital around four hours after departure, and actually rode past our booked hostel on the bus which was a pleasant relief from desperately trying to work out directions from some obscure drop-off point. The hostel was the closest to a 'party hostel' I'd stayed in, with an outdoor pool, DJ booth & huge open air lounge, and had a really good atmosphere. I got chatting to some Norwegians who were studying in Singapore and were taking a break, but otherwise it was gone midnight so I got my head down ready for two full days.

Phnom Penh is a very walkable city, and I don't think I hailed a tuk tuk once. Maps are easy to work out, and while being a great deal busier & bigger than Vientiane, felt like a smaller & condensed Bangkok. Everyone seemed to be in a rush, which was exciting after spending the last few weeks in sleepy environment. The air was thick with dust, petrol & crap, but it everything was an adrenaline boost.

Along my travels loads of people had told me to do my homework on Cambodia's recent history as it would inform a lot of the things I'd encounter, and what I found was horrendous. In case you don't already know (I had no idea, despite it happening so recently) in the early eighties a political party called the Khmer Rouge took power in the capital and, to summarise as efficiently as possible, sent every remotely intellectual Cambodian - doctor, teacher, lawyer, anyone with any academic ability - out to the countryside for fear of a revolt. This was covered up with propaganda convincing Cambodians that by building the country from the fields & with peasant work, greatness would come but of course the country took several centuries' steps backwards & hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were murdered in 'killing fields', literally fields were people were worked to death or just shot. Just outside of Phnom Penh were the largest killing fields, which were inevitably a huge tourist attraction now, but much like visiting Krakow & paying your respects in Auschwitz, it kind of has to be done. That trip was on the second day, but on the first I explored the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum which was housed in the city's most notorious former prison, a place where most people ended up just before they were bussed out to the fields. It was much as you'd expect, awful, horrendous to be exposed to but a necessary evil. The reason these places exist is to remind people it can happen in any place at any time, and this wasn't the Nazi Germany of our grandparents' generation - this happened in the 80s. Awful. Every single prisoner was photographed, and now their portraits - shaved heads, terrified eyes - line every room.

I wandered the standard national monuments/'things to see' checklist and snagged a bowl of chicken noodle soup for a dollar. The national museum was spectacular, and consisted mostly of protected statues which had been moved indoors from the elements & tourists of Angkor Wat, where replacements now sit. The Indochinese/south east Asia subcontinent is so rich in history & culture I'd had no previous exposure to, probably because it wasn't ransacked by the British Empire, which made it all more worthwhile. That night there was a pool party in the hostel, and after that things get a bit blurry. 

The next morning we got a tuk tuk out to the killing fields, through miles of dusty roads & small shanty towns. I felt like an idiot tourist but I had to hold my t-shirt over my mouth the whole way, hopefully saving myself some lung cancer in the process. The journey was ominous (earlier that year I'd basically done an unwitting Nazi tour of western Europe, starting in Amsterdam with Anne Frank's house and ending in Krakow with Auschwitz) but actually on arrival the site was bathed in calm & peace. The fields themselves were indeed a gravesite for thousands of innocented unnamed people but in the years since, nature had begun to take over the site of so many atrocities and colourful flowers & huge shady trees bloomed everywhere. The audio tour included in the admission fee contained recordings from not just former prisoners but prison guards, some of whom held their hands up & admitted their atrocities but others who insisted they were pressured etc. It was fascinating, & an absolute must-do in Phnom Penh.

Back to the city, I walked to the Royal Palace a couple of hours before sunset. The colours were beautiful, with the orange sun lighting everywhere against the stark blue sky. The palace was emptying but I grabbed an hour wandering the collection of temples built for the king but now open to the public, featuring mind bogglingly intricate architecture, gold leaf & jade. The cultures of Laos, Cambodia & Thailand are so richly intertwined that sometimes it was difficult to spot differences between countries in architecture & artwork but Cambodia's most treasured holy buildings felt much more elegant. A group of young, brand new monks cornered us to practise their English, telling us about themselves & asking what we were doing in Cambodia... and why? Why did we want to come here? I just told them what a beautiful country I'd heard Cambodia was, and everything I'd been told was true.

Back to the hostel, but not to a bed. My plane was leaving the airport at around 6am the next morning, so instead of paying for a bed we had asked if we could sleep on the sofas in the open air lounge & catch a tuk tuk a couple of hours before the flight. We were more than welcome to, but after half an hour of being mercilessly devoured by mosquitos I was on the verge of just paying for a bed. I fought through, & arrived at Phnom Penh International Airport (only around fifteen minutes outside of the city) at 4am, getting another hour of kip in the airport. Back to where we started in Kuala Lumpur, just an hour away on the plane, for one night... and then off to the country I'd wanted to visit more than anywhere else in the world. 

[backpackingrealness]

Koh Rong

2 nights, Ty Ty Guesthouse

Siem Reap behind me, I wasn't entirely sure what else Cambodia had to offer. A flight was booked back to Kuala Lumpur in six days time, before I would fly onto Japan, from the capital Phnom Penh, so I had a couple of days to kill. Most people suggested the coastal town of Sihnoukville, Cambodian backpacker party central, but someone overhearing this recommendation told me to skip the town & get a ferry straight to the island of Koh Rong - in his words, "the closest you'll find to paradise". By this point, paradise was getting a bit tiresome; I'd seen & been to some pretty spectacular places, and was wary of them being topped. But it made sense with timing, so off we set on - the most fabulous - night bus to Sihnoukville where we arrived around 7am. A tuk tuk whisked us straight off to a local scuba diving school who chartered ferries to the island, and just as luck would have it the one ferry of the day was leaving in fifteen minutes. We had no prior idea of the ferry schedule, and if we had missed this one it would've been pointless going to the island at all. Maybe someone was looking out for us after the Don Det-Siem Reap disaster?

Previous ferries had thoroughly tested my stomach's constitution but this was the closest I'd come to emptying my entire body's contents into the Gulf of Thailand. The boat looked like something out of Steamboat Willie  and was presumably built the same year the cartoon premiered, but as ever, I made it safe and sound at a blissfully early 10am. By 10.30 I was checked in to the cutest guesthouse literally a metre and a half from the surf (the smallest tsunami & no amount of travel insurance would have saved me) with my own private room & double room for $5 (USD) a night. Ridiculous. The following two mornings I would wander out of my room to the fruit stall ran by the hostel owner's wife, who would slice me up half a pineapple for breakfast quicker than you can say "significantly aids digestion" for a dollar. Due to the fabulously early arrival time, I had the entire day ahead of me. 

The tourist area (I bet there were less than 100 tourists on the island) dominated the island's south coast, one long beachfront stretching for about 3km. There were the standard beach BBQs, book stalls, bars & scuba diving schools I'd come to find but the island was palpably more relaxed than even Ko Tao. Of course there were white people everywhere but tourists didn't seem to negatively dominate everywhere compared to the Thai islands. My guesthouse was two buildings down from the island's school, where the children were dressed in the smartest uniforms. I decided to spend the day in a hammock, and that's what I did, after walking past a terrifying bright green snake hanging out in a tree and finding a $1 coconut bigger than my head. I spent a few hours destroying my brick-sized book, eventually wandering back for a long hot shower (what feels nicer than washing a day's worth of sand off your skin?) and a bowl of green curry for dinner.

The next day I had been strongly advised to take the hour-long walk through the jungle in the middle of the island to the Long Beach (very creative beach name), "the best beach I would ever see" apparently. Again, another enormous promise that I wasn't in the mood to believe after the glorious sights I still had fresh in my mind... but after climbing up & down, over & under Jurassic Park-style surroundings and doing my best to heed the many BEWARE OF SNAKES signs, I think I found the best beach I ever did see. It was around 10.30am, and for a good 5km (you could genuinely see that much ahead) there were perhaps two other people on the entire beach. Unless they were so far away I couldn't see them. It was overwhelming, and I was so overcome I dropped everything immediately & dived head first into warm water the colour of those bright blue tip tops you'd get on the way home from school (the ones that taste like WKD). 

I had been warned that the one downside to this untouched idyll was the swarms of vicious sandflies, but maybe my factor 30 kept them away or something cos my pristine skin remained unsullied by bites. Slowly, more sunseekers stepped out bleary-eyed from the jungle and had similar reactions to mine, until the beach wasn't so empty, yet it never got busy at all. I grabbed a $1 ice cold Khmer beer for lunch and spent the afternoon performing The Little Mermaid to some South American lesbians, letting the sun dry me naturally as it fell over the horizon & taunted my camera with "photograph me right now" until I got snapping. The sunset was jaw dropping, and the photo above is one of my favourite photos from the entire three month trip. The sun eventually fell, and I hopped in a fisherman's boat to take me back to the other side for the same price I was paying for a night in the guesthouse. Well worth not giving my big toe up for a snake's supper.

Dinner was a fresh fish beach BBQ, with snapper & prawns caught a few hours ago. I spent the rest of the evening reading in a bar next to my guesthouse, with the flickering lights of Sihnoukville in the distance. The bulk of my time in south east Asia was nearly over, and this was a marvellous place to finish up in. A solid tribute to heeding the advice of fellow backpackers, Koh Rong is visited by a tiny percentage of the swarms that head to Thailand's isles, and hopefully (but not likely) will stay that way. The next morning I was up at 8am for the return ferry, which proved even testier & was two hours (the journey should've been an hour) of choppy waves, green gills & a sea spray shower. The photo above demonstrates the only remotely comfortable position I found. We met back up with the beautiful Finnish girls in Sihnoukville, where they had spent the past two days, before they went onwards to Koh Rong & I headed north-east to the capital. One big kiss & smile, and we said goodbye. We'd stayed together since we met in the hell hole of Chiang Khong back on the Thai-Lao border, and we'd seen an awful lot together. I'm sure I'll see them again. 

Next stop, Phnom Penh.

[backpackingrealness]

Angkor Wat

day trip, from Siem Reap

As soon as I put the phone down after booking my ticket to Asia in July 2013, I googled ‘beautiful south east Asia’ (cringe) & proceeded to spend the next hour gawping at Angkor Wat. I’d definitely seen photos before, mostly jaw-dropping silhouettes against sunsets & rises, but I didn’t really know much about it. The most popular tourist attraction in Cambodia, and probably most of SE Asia, it’s the reason the town of Siem Reap exists, and we spent our full second day at the site. We’d been strongly warned to ignore the independent tour touts lining the streets and to hire a guide from the National Tourism Agency, which is just what we did. After paying around ten pounds each (between four) for an entire day of air-conditioned transport to, from & around the huge site, and the cutest young Cambodian tour guide who told us on several occasions the number of strict examinations he had to undergo in order to take the job, we spent the day learning about every tiny detail hidden among enormous murals, statues & architectural masterpieces that have survived for nearly a millenium.

Angkor Wat is basically  a collection of vast religious complexes built in the 12th century by Hindu Khmer rulers, and was converted a few centuries later to Buddhism by a different government. The complex was then abandoned for another few centuries until being discovered by a French explorer, which lead to a huge interest in ancient Khmer culture. The temple sits on the national Cambodian flag and served as a rallying point for national pride & re-building after the Khmer Rouge regime in the 80s. Upon re-discovery, they’d been entirely reclaimed by nature, with many buildings actually destroyed by huge trees springing right through the roofs. All but one were totally cleaned and restored to their previous appearances, with the remainder being a novelty purely because of it’s fascinating overrun appearance (this particular temple was where a few scenes in Tomb Raider were filmed, leading to Queen Angelina Jolie spending a fair bit of time in the country, adopting a kid or two & genuinely spending millions on local schools & hospitals. Ask any Cambodian and they discuss her with reverence & awe usually reserved for deities), with trees & branches intertwining stone archways & towers. 

We visited around four different sites in total, stopping for lunch in the middle in a slightly sanitary tourist-only cafe (not the kind of places we were used to), finishing with another spectacular sunset overlooking the iconic main stupas. Like Ayutthaya in Thailand, when the sites were actually in use they were mainly functioning settlements, with homes & agriculture taking up much of the beautiful vast green spaces that exist today. The reason they didn’t leave a trace behind whereas many of the spectacular temples & libraries remain is because what survives today was made of granite, not wood. Finally visiting the site toward the end of our stay in SE Asia (within a week we would be practically a world away in Japan) felt like a natural culmination of visiting every tiny temple in every place we stopped from Kuala Lumpur onwards. A jaw-dropping site to behold from start to finish, paying a visit always felt like a thing we had to do and we left feeling tired but not at all disappointed. 

The following day we were still pretty wiped, so we leisurely brunched & explored more of Siem Reap. That evening we had another night bus booked onwards to the south west coast, where we would visit Koh Rong, an island we were told would surpass everything we had already seen in Thailand. As thrilled as I was to return to spectacular beaches, the thought of another night bus after the two previous eventful/awful journeys filled me with sheer dread. I’m extremely happy to report the night bus was a wonderful experience, with clean sheets in each plush private cabin and a solid sleep. See… it’s not all bad!

[backpackingrealness]

Maybe I was a tad dramatic at the end of my last post, referring to the next journey as ‘nightmarish’. I don’t know, what would be a travelling nightmare? We begin with an 8am canoe to the mainland, where two hours later eleven of us are stuffed into an eight-seater minivan, luggage strapped to the outside of the van with some anorexic-looking rope, for another two hours to the Laos-Cambodia border checkpoint. So far, so good. After handing my passport again to another Mr Smiley-type character and having an Angelina Jole-style introduction to various Cambodian children, my passport apparently is nowhere to be found. Everyone else has had theirs returned, & the first three immigration officials I ask have no idea where it was (just imagine my heart rate level). It turns up eventually and the precarious minivan journey begins again through the north of Cambodia, now with an additional pair of middle aged Czech women who insist on letting not only the entire van but surrounding countryside villages know what’s going on in their conversation. The promised eight hour journey from Don Det to Siem Reap has already reached the suggested arrival time yet… and we’re not even half way.

Oh, we’re stopping for dinner. The sun is well & truly setting, and we stop for what I’m positive is dog stir fry & two quid cans of Coke (we’re in the middle of nowhere, usually the price would be 10% of that), and no, apparently we have much longer to go. It’s just now that we’re realising our travel agent in Don Det has massively fobbed us off, and the standard journey time from the 4000 Islands to Siem Reap is more 20 hours than 8. Oh well… we’ve all got seats (no matter how tight they are)… we’re fed & watered… the situation could be worse. Looks like the minivan is pulling up next to a much bigger bus… finally! We might even be able to get a couple hours of sleep. It’s now around 11pm, and the 13 of us aboard the bus to find there’s about… five spare seats. A bus full of bewildered Cambodian faces watch us quickly decide who will go for what seat, and it turns out I’m the only one lucky enough in my group of 4 to actually get one. I can’t remember what Eeva & Eveliina ended up doing but I know Vito spent the remaining four hours of the journey, creeping painfully slow through the Cambodian countryside, in the luggage hold below the seats. Absolutely illegal, but what can you do?

The end is in sight, we’re in Siem Reap, we’re here! Thankfully we have a hostel booked, a warm bed waiting for us all. Oh… no we don’t, apparently I accidentally made the booking for December 28th instead of November 28th. Pretty sure I’ll be in Australia by then. So it’s around 3am, we’re in Cambodia, we don’t have a place to stay, everything aches, all I’ve eaten is dog stir fry: yes, that was ‘nightmarish’. Thankfully someone chose to throw us a bone and the owner of the hostel I had mistakenly tried to check in to phoned his friend down the road, who had a lovely clean big room waiting for us. Phew. Writing that all out has been really cathartic, I feel like I’m over it now. I have to say that out of three months in south east Asia that was the single worst travelling experience I had and even then, it could’ve been so much worse (injuries, being mugged, lost passports, etc). The next morning I woke up to a gorgeous sunny Cambodian day in busy, bustling Siem Reap, and it was time to start fresh.

Siem Reap is a relatively new town, only a couple of hundred years old, but one that has continued to blossom as interest in Angkor Wat has grown. People only really come to the town to spend a day in the ancient temples, and luckily we had decided to spend the following day there with clear & alert heads, taking our first day in town just to walk around and get to grips with Cambodia. It was a good deal busier than anywhere we had seen in a long time, probably even the capital of Laos. I even spotted a KFC - a capitalist symbol clearly still banned in communist Laos. We were all ravenous, so found one of the highest rated cafes on TripAdvisor and headed there for a spectacular brunch. Genuinely revived, we got talking to the English mother of the restaurant’s owner who gave us a couple of tips, both focusing on providing employment to the extremely poor locals.

The first was Phare, a circus company run by a non-for-profit group who specifically employed vulnerable, young Cambodians from the countryside, giving them long term (5-10 years) scholarships in learning the circus craft and then showcasing them in nightly productions. We visited the show that evening before dinner, and was worth every penny of the $15 ticket. My immediate concern was possible mistreatment of animals but the show was humans-only, and was mainly spectacular acrobatics and live music. It would be number one on my list of things to do in Siem Reap, after Angkor Wat obviously.

The second recommendation was to visit a sewing school on the other side of the river, where girls aged 14-22 (my age when I visited) were taught the basics of sewing alongside learning English from the ground up, so not just providing them with skills to produce their own goods but being able to sell them as well. We sat in for a half hour English lesson, and most of the girls were too shy to practice with us but we got talking to their teacher, a Japanese-American who was born to wealthy parents in San Francisco. She got a top business degree, flew to Tokyo to work in banking and three years later gave it all up because it just wasn’t what she wanted to do. So now she volunteers her time & money to teach these girls skills to get themselves out of the poverty they were born in to. Apparently Robert Pattinson had visited a year prior, but the girls weren’t phased as they had no idea who he was. One girl asked me what I had spent my previous year doing: when I said I’d worked in Disney World, she looked at me blankly. I said “Mickey Mouse?” Still nothing, just a nervous laugh. Can you imagine being born into a country so poor & isolated, you don’t know who Mickey Mouse is? Strange, really strange, especially considering the KFCs & Pizza Huts lining the tourist-crawling streets. 

Siem Reap is a great town for partying, with a long road called Pub Street being where most backpackers end up, like Bangkok’s Khao San Road. We didn’t really have the time or the motivation, but ended up in a fantastic post-Angkor Wat Mexican with $1 frozen margaritas (one dollar!). It also has a wonderful indoor market, with beautiful crafts, bags, clothes, jewellery, whatever. I hadn’t done much shopping up to this point but I did get a cool shirt & an amazing passport cover - I had been looking for a passport coverforever - made from recycled rice bags by locals. There were plenty of dusty book shops full of old travel & history guides, gorgeous galleries with local Khmer modern & Angkor inspired art and more of the same colonial-style airy French cafes with awesome coffee we’d found in Luang Prabang. You could easily spend a week in the town, lounging around not doing an awful lot. One end of the town was home to grand Hiltons and Radissons, there was clearly a market for older, wealthy Westerners which wasn’t something us backpackers had seen since maybe even Bangkok. They were also drawn here by Angkor Wat, something so big I’ll have to give to the next post. 

Well done if you made it this far. I could murder a $1 frozen margarita.

[backpackingrealness]

4000 Islands

2 nights, random hut

As I’ve mentioned before, we had entered Laos in the north and were making our way down the country’s spine directly south until we met the Cambodian border. My next destination, an area known as the 4000 Islands, would be the final place I stopped in Laos and from what I’d been told & had read, was one of the country’s most beautiful landscapes and totally different from the mountainous north. The girls had gone ahead a day before, and the journey would be our first on a night bus, saving us a night in a hostel and hopefully arriving just in time to wake up. 

My plans to get stuck into a scary Stephen King and snooze my way through dodgy Laotian highways were thwarted by probably the worst fellow traveller I have ever met, a German who we were later told had (and is probably still on) the road for three years solid and was absolutely blind drunk. Not in a fun let me join in blind drunk, but obnoxiously declaring how sorry he was for the war, how it wasn’t his fault and he shouldn’t be apologising but he’s gonna apologise anyway so no one hates him (no one asked him to apologise for the war) and how he loves Jews and gay people, even Jewish gay people (there weren’t any Jewish people, straight or gay). This was mildly entertaining for about five minutes but it got old fast, especially when he started to get violent when people told him to calm down, not stopping even when an Austrian girl screamed at him (in German) something about breaking his nose. Of course, of course he was lying in the bed cabin directly next to us, and eventually he did pass out (I think he was swigging straight vodka) but not until he’d vomited all down his Bayern Munich t-shirt and nearly sprayed my bed with it after I threw toilet roll at him. So that was interesting.

Thankfully I did manage to get some sleep after stuffing my nose with earplugs, waking up around 6.30am in Kratie, an industrial town where we were switching to a minivan (some people in the night bus were going onwards straight into Cambodia). Naturally the German was coming with us, but had thankfully retreated into a sheepish, embarrassed state. We were heading to the main  island of Don Det, which was (presumably) surrounded by 3,999 other much smaller ones, most of which were uninhabited. It was absolutely stunning, and like nowhere I had been before: tiny wooden huts hugged the coastline, and most had small adjacent farmyards with a pig and a few chickens. One small street catered to backpackers and had the usual Western-catering restaurants (awful) separated by the occasional Lao/Thai cafe, with the obligatory competing travel agencies. I was expecting to head to a hostel reserved for me by the girls but a miscommunication error (one of those) meant I spent about an hour, stinking in the afternoon heat, asking the few guesthouses by the water if they had a spare & reasonably clean bed. Eventually I settled for a cheap private bungalow (read: hut), I was only here for two nights and it probably cost me about £5 in total. I found the girls pretty quickly, and we spent the rest of the day exploring the island. They’d told me there really wasn’t much to do here, but they had heard about some spectacular waterfalls nearby where we could cycle. That was the plan sorted for the next day, so we found some food & spent the evening touring the island’s three bars.

It turns out the waterfalls were spectacular, not the turquoise dive-in-me type of Luang Prabang, more majestic Mekong don’t-come-near-me-or-you’ll-die, but well worth the bike ride. The scenery was unusual because all the waterfront locations I’d previously visited had been by the ocean, yet the islands were freshwater. The pace of life was also incredibly slow & rural - it was possibly the poorest place I had visited yet, but of course the locals were always wearing beaming smiles and were thrilled to hold a conversation in broken English (was that my Eat Pray Love moment? Eurgh, awful). A ride around the neighbouring island lead us to a beautiful cafe for lunch, past a big school just as the bell went, meaning our bikes were swamped by a mass of kids in very smart but not so clean uniforms, and back to the closest bar to my bungalow just in time for a big bottle of ice cold Beerlao and a gorgeous 4000 Islands sunset.

Writing about my two days here felt like talking about a bit of a non-event; nothing of much note really happened, and I’d understand if you were a bit bored after reading through it. However, up until now most places had been go-go-go, activities all the time, never not doing something and on reflection I remember feeling enormously content with spending a couple of days beside a river, cycling through slow island life and not racing around temples with my camera. It was probably just what we all needed. Having said that, we were thrilled to get to our next destination over the border, into the very old town of Siem Reap and home to Angkor Wat. 

I slept soundly on my last evening in Laos, and cheerfully lugged my backpack down to the island’s dock the next day… blissfully unaware of the nightmare about to pan out. 

[backpackingrealness]

Vientiane

3 nights, Sihome Backpackers Hostel

I can’t say I knew an awful lot about Vientiane. Do you? I’d maybe heard or read the name a couple of times before, but neither fellow travellers nor guide book were particularly insisting we visited the Lao capital. However, I thought it would be ridiculous to visit a small country and skip it’s biggest city, especially as it was on our way down to the Cambodian border. The minivan collected the four of us promptly from outside our Vang Vieng guesthouse, and although the journey was only around two and a half hours I never stopped believing it was likely it would be my last - the crazed drivers of Thailand had nothing on this particular vehicle operator, who seemed hellbent on ignoring as many traffic signals/fellow drivers as possible. By the grace of some unknown god we arrived in Vientiane scarred with nothing more than angry stomachs and green gills, and found a surprisingly welcoming & promising city. Certainly a small city at that, but the French colonisation had left it’s legacy in very pretty architecture, boulevards & bakeries, much of which seemed begrudgingly preserved. The hostel was actually a riot; it was a breath of fresh air to share a dorm again. Dinner was possibly the world’s greatest lime & mint smoothie and local dishes like pork & mint salad in Lao Kitchen, rated number one on Trip Advisor and was like searching for a needle in a haystack.

After speaking to an Irish girl in my dorm about not actually knowing what to do in Vientiane, we were pointed in the direction of ‘COPE’, the government rehabilitation unit for Laotians injured by UXOs (unexploded land mines), something myself nor apparently around me had any previous knowledge about. My vague memories of learning about the Vietnam War didn’t recall much of Laos’ involvement, or the devastating effect American bombing campaigns had on genuinely innocent civilians who had no idea what was happening around them. Apart from the millions of deaths & disabling injuries, it’s a huge issue still in Laos today despite the war ending over 40 years ago, with thousands of unexploded bombs littering the countryside. The unit was there for the treatment of Laotians but contained a museum/cinema to educate foreign tourists about this travesty totally glazed over by the Americans. An excellent British/Australian film showed former UK/Aussie military doctors travelling the country educating local villages about what to do when a bomb is discovered, and handling the issue of keeping children looking for scrap metal to sell (so they can just buy food) away from these hunks of explosive scrap metal. It just taught me an awful lot, and I didn’t expect to come away knowing/feeling the way I did.

Sadly Vientiane took a little dip after such an interesting peak. It was a nice place to wander, but it was definitely the smallest capital I’d ever been to and signs of institutional poverty were everywhere: when a government can’t afford to even keep it’s own buildings clean it says a lot about how it keeps it’s own people. We explored a few temples but we were long past Buddha fatigue, and it was a struggle to find something of interest, as awful as that sounds. So we did what we did best, and ate. Now this is even worse: we went for pizza, and not nice Italian or even Italian/Asian fusion pizza, but awful, really awful Pizza Hut covered in butter spray thick doughy style ‘pizza’ in a chain restaurant we had seen in Thailand. The prices of pizza weren’t dissimilar to what they would be in a UK Pizza Hut, which makes it an extremely exclusive joint almost unaccessible to most Laotians. That knowledge didn’t make it taste better, and the temporary revelling in melted plastic cheese and my genius prawn & pineapple topping selection soon turned to gluten-related self loathing. We finished the day by walking to the Pataxuay, an admitted copy of the Arc de Triomphe but with little triumph to celebrate. Even a government-placed plaque on the arch denounced the structure’s ugliness. Fascinating country.

The next day we headed to the other ‘must see’ attraction in Vientiane, Buddha Park. A public bus (beautiful & air-conditioned actually, a gift from the Japanese government) and tuk-tuk away from the city, the park itself is basically a graveyard for all manner of Buddhist & Hindu statues, icons and imagery. Again we tackled this outdoor masterpiece in the peak of the day’s heat, so enjoyment wasn’t running high but it provided for some wonderful photo opportunities and it was nice to temporarily escape the dust of the city. Eeva spotted a guy she’d ‘enjoyed the company of’ back in Vang Vieng so we made a hasty exit and had dinner in a really cool sushi train restaurant where each table came with bowls of broth in which we could cook raw ingredients from the train and make our own soup. Sounds great in theory but in practise my ‘soup’ was more chewy chicken and egg flakes, but still. Still.

The girls were heading onwards to the 4000 Islands a day ahead of, hearing they were more beautiful surrounds to spend time in than the city, of whose charms were slowly dripping away. We said our temporary goodbyes, and I spent my third day in Vientiane tackling the National Museum, drenched in Communist propaganda and little else, as the museum’s annual budget seemed to be around what I paid for my pizza two days ago. I found a private hotel pool, paid £2 to use for the day and watched a film for the first time in months in the hostel’s fabulous ceiling-to-floor padded cinema, having my first ‘holiday’ day since probably the Thai islands. That evening, we were collected by a minivan taking us to our double-decker night bus to the 4000 Islands, and left the Lao capital behind.

[backpackingrealness]

Vang Vieng

3 nights, Nana Guesthouse

It was time to move south through Laos. We had said goodbye to Amit & Ben who were fast-tracking their way to Vietnam and myself, Vito, Eeva & Eveliina had formed a fun unit. The next logical step south - well, the only point of any interest before the capital of Vientiane - was Vang Vieng, best known to westerners as the place where you sit in a recycled tyre inner tube and thrown into the Mekong river, stopping off at various bars for £1 mojitos etc. The bus journey there was pleasant enough, I vaguely remember stopping off in some mountainside village and there conveniently being a chicken & avocado baguette stall waiting for me (I still wasn’t over my rediscovery of the baguette). 

Travelling onwards from the swoon-worthy beauty of Luang Prabang would make most places seem ugly in comparison, but Vang Vieng really didn’t have much going for it. One main street sliced through the town, and we were dropped off at our industrial-looking guesthouse to find a surprisingly pleasant room with charming regulations: one poster informed guests that if flip flops or sandals were stolen, the thief would pay 1,000,000. We never did find out if it would be one million dollars or the native Lao currency. We headed out for our standard exploring evening walk, bumping into a couple of familiar faces from the Chiang Khong horror house and finding dinner in this absolutely wonderful Japanese-run burger bar. I loved finding the most unusual nationalities setting up shop in these countries, presumably pursuing the backpacker pound but probably looking for a totally different life as well. There was the Canadian pizziolo in Luang Prabang, the current Japanese couple in a tiny town in Laos… we would later find a beautiful cafe in the Gili Islands owned by two Italians not much older than us. The standard Irish bar in every single town ever doesn’t count. 

The next day we decided to do the tube thing - there really wasn’t anything else on offer - so we collected our tubes from a little garage after signing several forms promising we wouldn’t sue them if we died etc., hopped in a songthaew and hopped out twenty minutes later up-stream. From here we began our float down, which was admittedly blissful; roaring mountain ranges ride along for the journey while the water was spectacularly calm and peaceful. We got off at the first bar, as you do, helped by ropes thrown our way and started on the Beerlao. Got back in tube, floated past second bar, who were desperately shouting “COME IN, COME IN, THIS LAST BAR” to which we openly scoffed and continued floating. This apparently ludicrous ploy for attention was sadly based in truth  - the scores of bars which had lined this section of the river just a couple of years before had all closed down due to various pressures from the police & government after loads of dead backpackers had appeared in foreign newspapers with the bars named. People get really drunk, jump into the really shallow water, really stupid things happen. So it was sad that the only fun thing we had found in town wasn’t so fun anymore but I guess it’s fun not to die as well.

A ponderous two hours later we threw ourselves, shivering, on shore at the get-out point. We were heading out for dinner later but first I wanted to put the colour on my hair that I had bought in Luang Prabang. It wasn’t that my hair wasn’t still blond, it just looked a bit dull, and I’d found the exact dye I used so I had nothing to lose. I did what I have done for years, apply the dye and leave it on for around 20-30 minutes. Nothing was off or strange. The timer was up, and I washed the dye out. The person who left the shower wasn’t blond anymore - he was brunette. With a pleasant purple tinge. I just gawped at myself in the mirror, horrified. There was absolutely nothing I could do. I was in the middle of south east Asia, not exactly known for Aryan-catering hair salons, I had inflicted this on myself. But how? The dye hadn’t expired, it was in date. We went for dinner, I consoled myself with wine & pizza, everyone else laughed at me. 

The next morning I woke up on my 23rd birthday. I remembered that I was in Laos, in Asia, travelling, what a marvellous way to turn 23. Then I looked in the mirror and remembered I was purple brown. You can imagine my face. Luckily we had a distracting day trip planned to visit the local caves, where Lao people had carved out a near fully functioning village when hiding from American bombs in the 70s. It was a lot of fun, our guide was adorable and we lunched on spicy chicken with a tour group of rich, old Koreans. The morning tour came to an end, we didn’t really want to do tubing again so we asked if we could join the Koreans on their afternoon kayaking trip. The Lao guides found spare boats for us - the Fins shared, I had my own - and off we set. Kayaking down the Mekong on my birthday, almost enough to forget my purple brown hair… fate hadn’t finished with me yet. I’ll try and keep this short.

There were some rapids coming up, but not so big that they couldn’t be traversed with ease. The Koreans all managed it. My group managed it. Myself, suddenly overcome with the spirit of Pocahontas riding the Great Rivers of Virginia, burst into “Just Around the Riverbend”, hit a rock and capsize. Luckily the water was waist-height and I didn’t hurt myself, it was fine. Apart from the fact that my boat was floating off at a rather fast speed ahead of me. And in my boat was a dry-bag containing: my phone, Vito’s phone, my wallet, Vito’s wallet and my incredibly expensive camera. Good. Bye. Entire. Trip. No forms of communicating with home, no forms of payment whatsoever and all recorded visual memories thus far, with no way of taking photos of anything in the future, if we were to continue with the trip. Those five minutes were by far the lowest of all low points of the trip. There was nothing I could do… just watching the current take my boat down the river and presumably at the same speed my dry bag containing my entire life underwater. I could’ve been sick. I noticed one of the Koreans catch the boat, not that I cared. There was no way I would find the bag again. 

Until I noticed something brightly coloured attached to the now up-turned boat, in the distance. The dry bag. One of the Lao guides had attached the bag to the boat, and attached it good. In that moment I went from absolute despair to laughing with sheer joy. I didn’t know what to do, other than to doggy paddle as fast as I could back to the boat and a large group of hysterically laughing Koreans. I had no idea how to say thank you in Korean, so I just screamed it over and over in English but really my biggest thanks should have been in Lao. Everything was fine again. I still had purple brown hair, but at least now I had the money to get me to a country where I could pay for blond hair again. Joking aside, that relief… wow. We celebrated that night with dodgy green curry and birthday gin & tonics in - of course - the only Irish bar in Vang Vieng. A town of absolute ups and downs, but one I had been happy to turn 23 in amongst some wonderful people. We’d pretty much outstayed our welcome over 3 nights, and were moving on the next day to the capital, Vientiane. 

Writing and reliving that highly traumatic experience has exhausted me. I need a glass of wine.