wbouldingblog-blog

[wbouldingblog-blog]

Hello, dear readers. This is strange. We’re not on the move. We’ve been in the same place for 6 days, so there’s not been a natural break in proceedings to update you AND we’ve got another 2 days before we finally make it to New Zealand. Most importantly, we’ve crossed the equator and are now having to do handstands all the time here in the southern hemisphere and wear special harnesses to stop us falling off this side of the flat earth. Here’s how we made it.

After an uneventful night in a windowless hotel room in Ho Chi Minh (apart from a second cheesy foodgasm experience in Pizza 4Ps – we couldn’t get enough of it), we were checking out and, of course, it was at this moment, 2 hours before our flight to Singapore left, that the credit card machine stopped working. Luckily, as is often the case in HCMC, there was a guy with a scooter available to take Henny to another branch of the same hotel to pay there, where the machine was actually working. Henny was returned on the same scooter, and we hopped in a fresh-faced (couldn’t have been more than 22) Uber driver’s car and wove through the traffic to the international terminal of the airport.

Once inside, we played a game of ‘Where’s The Check-in Desk?’, followed by a lightning round of ‘Which Queue Is The Fastest?’, where the plot twist was that they were all glacially slow. Once at the desk, we were offered emergency seats (fistbump – legroom!) and made our way to immigration, where the authorities made sure to line everyone up to have their passports checked by smartly-dressed sloths. We eventually made it through and got through security (where more attention was paid to the football on the TV than to the x-ray machine) and found a little café, where we grabbed a baguette (I wanted more pho but there wasn’t enough time ☹), and sat down at our gate just as they started boarding. Once we’d finished our food and climbed on board (the extra legroom was aaaaaaaaamazing), we settled into our travelling routine of dozing, reading and listening to music. Before we knew it, we were at the gloriously modern arrivals terminal of Singapore Changi airport.

The difference was immediate and superb. The information desk spoke an English better than most of south London. The airport was spacious, with great big relaxation gardens featuring Koi carp-filled ponds and chirruping cicadas, an entire entertainment deck (as if we were on a cruise ship) with consoles, ‘jam room’, and cinema, and more shops in one place than I’ve seen in a terminal building. The catch? The price. Our first set of coffees outside of cheap Asia was in the 15 euros range (I did, admittedly, have a sausage roll too, but that was the cheapest of the three items). We’d gone from being able to live like royalty (if we’d wanted to) to being able to just sit quietly and sip at our coffees, trying to maximise the enjoyment.

We were going to be here for 12 hours. We wandered around looking at things we will never be able to afford, booked ourselves on the free city tour for the evening and even crossed into a different terminal to see if there were any major differences (none apart from the air conditioning being three degrees lower). We wandered some more, marvelled at the gardens, went to the loo (still not able to beat my shopping centre experience) then looked at phones, as mine was about to give up. I found a good few models, but they’re all still a bit too expensive at the moment, particularly as I’m not sure what my job situation will be in the next few weeks. We went and attempted to play on some games on the entertainment deck, but the computer was slower than I’d thought. After some button-mashing on street fighter II (Henny must have been cheating – I lost convincingly both times) and Henny being devoured by the ghosts on Mrs Pacman, we headed over for our tour, which took us to two major sites in Singapore. First was the Merlion, a new fountain which represents the wealth of the city pouring out of the lion’s mouth. The word ‘Singa’, we found out, means ‘lion’ and ‘Pura’ means ‘city’ (a prince saw a lion on a hunting trip here, so the tale goes), so the lion symbol represents the city itself, the fishy tail its marine economy. Second stop were the Gardens by the Bay. These newly-created, eco-aware gardens are fantastic for getting lost in (as a French couple displayed by being 15 minutes late to the pick-up point) and for getting good sunset pictures of the Marina Bay Sands hotel. After two hours of walking and seeing new sights, we headed hungrily back to the airport, skipped through security and went to a food hall, where I had some Thai green curry and Henny had some Korean barbecue.

  Once we were gastronomically satisfied, we headed to the cinema, where we caught the action-packed finale of Fast and Furious 8, and I got an email about another translation, which was to be submitted in 2 days (or whatever it was after taking into account the time difference – this has really messed up my perception of time). I went to charge the laptops and begin work on it while Henny watched the beginning of Boss Baby (the only film in the cinema’s repertoire that I’d wanted to see, but hey ho). The hour before we needed to get to our gate disappeared into a flurry of typing and it was soon time to say goodbye to Changi and hop on a plane which would take me over the equator for the first time.

Our seats were, sadly, not in the emergency escape aisle this time, and we were surrounded by people who seemed to want to cough up their insides every five minutes, or sniff at 20-second intervals without using a tissue. This continued through most of the flight and is what I blame for my currently-annoying throaty cough. We slept through most of the flight though (it only lasted 7 hours) and were suddenly on our way down to land in Melbourne. We got off the plane, ran to the immigration barriers and, after a brief moment of panic when the automatic gate didn’t recognise me, I engaged in some sport-based banter with the immigration official and was let through unmolested. We had to wait for a bit for our bags, but eventually got them, Henny purchased her new-country sim card and we hopped on the express bus to take us to the city.

We trundled along the freeway (the Aussies seem to have taken the American word for this one) and, at some point along the journey, we turned a bend to see the towering heights of the Melbourne skyline spread out ahead of us. It was fantastic – a moment for a Hans Zimmer score, maybe from the Gladiator soundtrack.

We hopped off the larger bus at southern cross station and onto a smaller bus (more like the local ones we get in England – Surrey peeps, think the 465 to Kingston) to take us the United Backpackers hostel, where we’d be spending the next couple of nights. Through the small yellow entrance which you’d just walk past if you weren’t looking for it, the hostel was clean and bright and everything you could wish for from a place that wasn’t a hotel. Henny claimed a top bunk and I took a bottom bunk (on the other side of the room; most beds were already taken in our dorm) then, after a refreshing let’s-not-smell-like-plane-any-more shower, we headed out for Henny to show me briefly what there was to see in our little corner of Melbourne, including a glimpse of federation square and Coles, the supermarket chain. I initially baulked at the prices, but soon did the maths for the exchange rate and worked out that it was just like inner-city London prices; high, but manageable as long as you were careful.

Henny had been liaising with her former au-pair mum and the girls, and so arranged to go and meet them at their hotel (they live in Canberra but had come to stay in Melbourne for the weekend) while I finished off a particularly urgent translation and made some friends at the hostel at the same time. After I’d finished my translation, I headed off to meet the ladies at their hotel. The girls are diabetic and have a beautifully cute and patient dog called Molly who is also a registered assistance dog; she can smell when their blood sugar levels are dangerous and will alert Adrienne (mum) or their carer at school so that they can take action. After lots of stroking the dog and hearing about their adventures so far, we headed out for dinner, little Molly Polly trotting along alertly beside us.

Everyone wanted sushi, so we walked the 15-or-so minutes it took to get to a particularly well-rated one in a shopping centre near the central shopping area of the city. We’d finally found somewhere to get to the sushi conveyor belt which would sit all 5 of us (Molly could stay on the floor), when a man, who looked as if he’d taken inspiration from Ken (of Barbie fame) for his plastic-moulded hairdo, flatly, yet with an apology or two, refused us service, citing the fact that our dog couldn’t be in the restaurant. Despite Adrienne’s best efforts, showing him the assistance dog card and explaining the need for him, the man (like his hairdo) was not for moving.

Flinging a threat of legal action in the court of human rights over our shoulders along with some Paddington-esque Hard Stares, we left the centre and headed to the David Jones (think an Australian John Lewis) food court for some reduced-price (it was the end of their trading hours) sushi and fried chicken, which was lovely. The girls had a minor spat over a sip of milkshake (apparently the other’s spit would still be in the straw and original owner needed a replacement), which escalated and gave Adrienne a chance to highlight the differences between antipodean and middle-class British parenting approaches – there was no messing around with her. Direct and to the point, with a hint of frustration in her tone and vocabulary, she told the girls that there would be no replacement and that was that. Our sushi eaten and milkshake-wars in a state of ceasefire, we headed out to the street and parted ways, arranging pickup times for the morning after next when we were to head to the zoo for the day!

Before heading to the Zoo though, we had much to see of the Melbourne CBD, so the next morning, we went on a walking tour, learning about the history of Melbourne, the meaning of various sites and their importance in the development of the city, as well as some of the more notable citizens, including a particularly nefarious Robin Hood-inspired Irishman by the name of Ned Kelly. He and his gang were bank robbers and did the common people a service by combining their raids with the destruction of personal loan documents, which, unsurprisingly, made them rather popular. We saw the laneways where countless street artists had applied their skilled hands to jazz up the between-streets, and ended up with a beer in the pub. Here, Henny took her leave to go and see an old friend from her previous time in Melbourne, and I went on a lovely long walk around some other parts of Melbourne with some of the guys from the walking tour. When we’d had enough (the sun was baking), we headed back to our hostel and had a game of pool over a beer, which I lost (the pool that is, not the beer).

    Once I’d got over the loss, I chilled in the aptly-named ‘chilling room’ until my evening’s entertainment arrived. Steph got to the hostel around 7 and we had a drink at the bar, whilst realising that it had been 7 years since we had last seen each other – she had been a supervisor at the farm a long time ago. She now works for Victoria Zoos and had managed to wrangle us free tickets for Melbourne Zoo for the next day. The free stuff didn’t stop there; she’d also won a competition at a Chinese dumpling place and had free dumplings for a year! The dumplings were excellent and I added some crisp pork belly to the order too, which was fabulous – melt-in-your-mouth tender and crunchy where you wanted it to crunch. Afterwards, we headed to what has become one of my favourite places in the world. A bar called Bartronica – a heady mix of retro-gaming awesomeness, pinball and beer. We played and lost heavily at Mario Kart (I was so good back in the day!), then I started kicking some serious gaming butt at smash bros., where Link sword-spun his way to secure me victory countless times. I had a go at Family Guy pinball, the Who song running through my head the whole time (… a pinball wizard’s got such a supple wriiiist… but not from holding a pint of beer), but couldn’t quite engage my inner Tommy to dominate the leaderboard.

We returned briefly but unsuccessfully to the Super Smash Bros., but I couldn’t emulate my previous success against much stronger competition (sorry Steph!) and so we headed our separate ways, promising to meet up again before Henny and I jetted off to Kiwiland.

The next day was full of excitement – we packed up our things, moved out of the hostel and headed downstairs to be picked up by Adrienne again and taken to the zoo. It was a baking hot day, so I wore my England rugby cap (carefully chosen to do maximum damage to local sensitivities after last year’s tour) and a pint of sun cream to keep out the ozone-free rays.

The girls (and Molly) raced around the zoo, the girls flitting like freed butterflies from one exhibit to the next, Molly following suit, a little perplexed by the richness and variety of scents coming her way. Molly was only allowed in certain areas, marked in pink on the map, so Adrienne took care of her at those times. We saw lions, tigers, sea snakes, African wild dogs, pelicans, monkeys (but no gorillas – they were hiding from us, we decided), iguanas, macaws, meerkats and penguins. We also saw a lot of Australian wildlife, which the girls weren’t as interested in as I was, having seen it all before; kangaroos, wombats, emus, kookaburras and a platypus were all fascinating to me but old hat to them.

The girls did, however, manage to spend some time (and a decent amount of their poor mum’s cash) in the gift shop, much like I’d done at the tender age of 10. Adrienne then drove us to our new home with Chris and Leesh, at their flat in the trendy suburb of Collingwood near Fitzroy, Melbourne’s answer to Neukölln or Shoreditch. They are renting a comfortable, modern 2-bed + open-plan kitchen/diner/living room flat in the former Yorkshire brewery, which has been redeveloped into a large housing complex complete with rooftop garden (with a BBQ, naturally) and gym. We said hello, dumped our stuff in our lovely little room, and headed back outside to meet Adrienne, who took us to Lygon street, a famous foodie street. It is a street, it is full of food, but 90% of it is Italian ristorantes, whose borderline aggressive front-of-house teams all seem to emulate Vietnamese street sellers (“You come eat here, I have very happy customers, I give you good deal, best price best price”). Not quite in the mood for pizza, we opted for a very tasty fish and chip place and tried all the deep-fried delicacies they had to offer. Things almost kicked off with Molly again, but the waitress was nice and understanding and Molly could remain under the table.

By the time we’d polished off the last of the nice thick chips, it was time for the girls to hit the hay and for us to go and meet Chris and Leesha at one of their friend’s gigs, where he would be playing funk/soul/r’n’b beats from 11. The bar was called Boney and the décor took us the 16,000ish kilometres back to Berlin. Arty things hung from walls, lighting was minimal and red and the patrons were suitably (under)dressed or just in the black-jeans-and-beard hipster garb necessary in this sort of place. We grabbed a drink with our hosts, headed upstairs to see his friend play to a room packed to the rafters with smoke from a smoke machine and not much else – we were the only four who had come to see him so far. Gradually though, other acquaintances dribbled in and the music got louder with each new audience member, so much so that we couldn’t really get acquainted with the newcomers, and decided to dive back downstairs. C&L joined us later, then left for their next gig. We called it a night (‘This is a night!’) then went back to our new room (possibly stopping for a McD’s 10-piece chicket nugget box) and slept until it was socially acceptable to wake up.

The next day dawned, but in our quiet, dark, cool cave of a room we didn’t notice until it was almost too late. We were supposed to meet the girls at 10.30 at the Victoria Markets (yay more shopping), which would take nearly half an hour to get to. Luckily, the girls and Adrienne had already headed to a different set of markets before, so we made our leisurely way down to the markets and had a breakfast of bacon and egg bap for me (plenty of ketchup, thanks) and a beetroot and feta salad for Henny. Just as we were polishing off the last morsels, we felt a familiar fluffy presence next to us and found that the girls had found us. Off we went on a zig-zag path past all the stalls with their various trinkets and tourist tat. I found a new adapter for my chargers as well as 2 decks of cards for 5 dollars (bargain). The girls found a few things that they liked, including a fake diamond-encrusted name tag for Molly and a set of earmuffs for themselves, in preparation for the harsh winter ahead.

We had to do some shopping for our promised (my fabled) roast dinner, so we almost tearfully parted ways with the girls for the time being and made our way around to find some decent veg and wine. We then toddled back to C&C’s and, after a while chilling out on the roof (Henny had to finish off her Hoi An post) and a couple of visits from a territorial pug, we prepared for the night’s entertainment: an outdoor cinema extravaganza with a picnic and Get Out. We took a nice ride in a taxify (similar to Uber but better for the drivers and customers apparently), and got to the botanical gardens, where we walked down a dusky path to a great big blow-up screen, in front of which a crowd of people were lying on the grass. We set up camp, tucked into our picnic and opened bottle after bottle then a box of wine, while the events of Get Out (a very, very good Black Mirror-like film) played out in front of us. But that wasn’t the only thing I was watching. As the sun had set, hundreds of crow-sized fruit bats had started winging their way to their twilight dinner above us. I sat, captivated by the slow, graceful movements of the huge bats. Luckily, I managed to pay enough attention to both and, once my wine-addled, bat-distracted, Get Out-head-blown state was brought to a close, we got in another taxify and roared home, where someone (Chris? Was it you?) decided to watch Whiplash (a film about a drummer – awesome) on their projector, just to keep the cinema feel going. It was fantastic – so much was relatable in the film, though maybe I had yet to experience the stresses of being a professional drummer like that. Tapping my legs in time to the music still bouncing around my head, we went to sleep and ended our second night in Collingwood.

This is also where I’ll leave you guys for the time being; there’s plenty more to come! For now though, I’ll just try and keep my eyes open – I’ve just taken some cough medicine and it’s one of those ones with ‘do not operate heavy machinery after use’ or something like that. Do laptops count as heavy machinery?

Yours drowsily,

Boulders

Superb Singapore + marvellous Melbourne (part the first) Hello, dear readers. This is strange. We’re not on the move. We’ve been in the same place for 6 days, so there’s not been a natural break in proceedings to update you AND we’ve got another 2 days before we finally make it to New Zealand.

[wbouldingblog-blog]

There isn’t really enough space to get comfortable in my bunk on this double-bunk sleeper bus. Each of the 35 travellers has their own bed, with two rows on the sides next to the windows and a central row, which is where I’m sitting. I’m on the second of two buses from Hoi An to Ho Chi Minh City, and have had about 4 hours’ sleep in total. Of the 22 hours of bus travel we started with, we’ve got about 10 left. I’m folded in half with my big blue bag under my legs as it won’t fit anywhere else and Henny, surprisingly enough, is sleeping to my left, oblivious to the views of the white sandy beaches and interesting-looking islands now visible in the early morning sunlight from her side of the bus. This, dear readers, gives me a break in adventuring long enough to fill you in a little on our time in Hoi An, as long as I can keep my eyes open (which is proving hard).

We arrived at Danang airport and were met by a chap from the hotel, who had our name on a board (I think I mentioned this previously) and two Spanish travellers who had been abandoned by their hotel after arranging a pickup a few hours’ previously. We took them with us from the airport on the 45-minuteish bus to Hoi An, during which time they cunningly enquired as to how much the taxi was going to cost them by writing a message on the phone. I was handed the phone and read the message: ‘What cost the taxi with you? $ total’. Assuming (and making a total ass out of u and me) that this message was for the driver, I helpfully made a few changes to the question so that it was in slightly more perfect English and started to hear sniggering behind me. Embarrassedly, the Spaniard who’d written it said, “No, answer please”. Mortified that I’d just shown up his English rather than helping him, I confirmed the price with Henny and sat in silence for the rest of the trip, not wanting to give in to my British need to apologise, as that would probably only make it worse (he probably thought nothing of it) but also wanting to apologise profusely for insulting his English ability. Torn, I decided to play it cool and just stared out at the Vegas-style neon hotels as we passed through Danang along the coastal road.

Once we arrived at our hotel, tired and vaguely hungry, it was 11 o’clock in the evening and Hoi An was as lively as an old people’s home. We checked in, got our welcome drinks and some coconut biscuits, which had to suffice. Our room was nice and big again with a view over the pool. We put another couple of episodes of the Inbetweeners on, polished off some cashew nuts from the minibar and went to sleep.

The next day we had another big breakfast, including what they called a ‘full English’, which was ok, but the beans were cold. We then decided to go and have a dip in the pool, where some Asian children were laughing and splashing. We happily did a couple of lengths (the slightly longer pool meant that I could only just get end-to-end underwater) then, following a mucosal outburst of coughing from one of the splashing kids, we went up to finish our blog posts about HCMC and I did a very quick German to English translation for Georgina at Living English. We suddenly realised that the only free bus ride to the town (about 10 minutes on an electric bus) was about to leave in 5 minutes, so we hastily got dressed and scrambled out of the room, camera in hand, to head to Hoi An old town.

Beautiful small yellow-washed houses with little black roofs make up the small UNESCO world heritage site of Hoi An. Unfortunately, they are surrounded by tourists from all over the world and locals on bikes and scooters who all come to haggle, shout and get in the way of each other at every possible moment while classical music blares from speakers tactically placed to try and alleviate some of the stress. After the initial annoyance at having to fight through the throng to get to a coffee shop (via a few of the shops selling souvenirs, including film-inspired drinks coasters), we sat down and ordered some of the local coffee specialities, a Vietnamese filter coffee (with condensed milk) for Henny and an egg coffee for me (made with fluffed egg yolks and condensed milk), both of which were rich, dark and, in my case, like a cappuccino made with the creamiest froth ever. Whilst enjoying these exotic delicacies, Henny booked us an appointment at another cat café, which operated more like a cat rescue centre, which we headed to after some expert map reading on my part.

We missed the house at first. It was an unassuming high metal gate with a small A4 paper sign saying ‘Jack’s cat café’ in faded and rain-stained ink. We rang the wrong doorbell at first, then the right one, and a young Italian woman (who also spoke German, we found out later) let us in and asked us to take our shoes off before showing us to a table. I ordered a beer (Don’t judge me – I’m on holiday!) and Henny a coconut shake, and we read about the beginnings of Jack’s café. It had all started with a street cat, called Jack, who turned out to be pregnant and was taken in by the owners of the café. After giving birth to her litter and a few months of happy meowing, Jack went missing, presumed stolen by someone wanting to make some money on the black market for cat and dog meat. The owners, heartbroken, decided to change the lives of many more cats and opened their sanctuary, where they now live with volunteers and two rather rotund dogs called Boomer and Ruby. Armed with this knowledge and the want to do good, we went to stroke some cats.

Entertaining the locals

Playing with the young’uns

A doze of cats

‘Superior brain size’

Inside a little covered patio, some kittens were playing with other guests, so we joined in. After a while (and a few needle-like paw scratches), I started making friends with Ruby. She reminded me of a chubbier version of Mr G’s Celine from the Australian series Summer Heights High. She loved being stroked and, on the rare occasion that I stopped, she would place a pleading paw on my arm, begging for the love to continue, as it did for the majority of the 90-minute visiting time we had. It was just like me to go to a sanctuary for former street cats and end up making friends with a tubby dog.

Eventually, we had to say goodbye and I had to tear myself away from Ruby. We took a slightly different route back to the bus pickup point, along a quieter back street, then onto the bus to dive back, beeping and whirring, to the hotel. Once there, I finished my translation and sent it off, while Henny continued struggling through her writer’s block for her blog post and booked us a place on a cooking course for the next day. Once this was done, I finally showered, and we headed back to the city for the evening at 8pm. Just as well we did, as everything began to shut down rather quickly. We headed through the lantern-lit streets, over the bridge and into a shiny restaurant where ate some local specialties – Cau Lao (lye-dipped noodles with beef, veg and crispy rice cakes) and chicken with spicy rice for me.

By this time, it was getting a bit late (about 10 o’clock) and things around us, even on the touristy street, started closing, so we decided to get an Uber home. Or we wanted to, having placed the order for the Uber on the app, and waiting for them to find a driver to take us. And again we waited. We had a sneaky peak of where the nearest driver was and found that they were halfway between Hoi An and Danang, driving slowly in circles, helping nobody. Deciding to use our beautiful pins, we walked through the back streets of Hoi An, past some woofy dogs, some men gathered around a board on the ground and jabbering excitedly (I couldn’t tell what it was, just that it was probably something that they shouldn’t have been doing), and a homestay called Hoi An field. I could only imagine it was a B ‘n’ B for permed, moustachioed Liverpool fans á la Harry Enfield.

The next day, we were halfway through breakfast (I’d had some Cau Lao and was munching my way through the first of two slices of peanut butter-spread toast) and the bus arrived to take us to the Thuan Tinh cooking course. Luckily, toast is portable (unlike Cau Lao) and nobody had a peanut allergy, so I brought it with me. We picked up a few more culinary-skill-seeking souls from various hotels and were brought to a café somewhere, where we met our guide and chef for the day, Trang, who can’t have been out of her mid-20s for long but had a very respectable grip of the English language, her one major flaw being her mispronunciation of ‘sour’ as ‘shower’. I dread to think of what she would have made of my Vietnamese, so we stuck to English. In our group of eight were Henny and me, four French-Swiss (or is that Swiss-French? In my sleep-deprived state, ‘Swiss’ doesn’t look like a word either – maybe it’s time for a nap), and a lovely older couple of Aussies called Mike and Jane, who’d retired 17 years ago from their Great Barrier Reef tourism business and had been travelling the world ever since.

Trang took us around the market, explaining what each of the herbs and ingredients we were buying would be used for. In my basket, I carried a pineapple (green at the top and yellow at the bottom, meaning it wasn’t too sweet but not unripe – just in that Goldilocks zone) and the all-important red and green chilis. Henny, on the other hand, got a bundle of Vietnamese coriander (flat-leafed, rather than scalloped like normal coriander), some Asian basil (lovely and citrus-y) and some very small, very tart (‘shower’) kumquats. We walked past stalls of live fish and prawns, tuna halves (and heads) and a fly-infested meat hall. Old ladies packed bags of Romana lettuce while smoking ash-dripping cigarettes without a thought for the end user (it’d hopefully be washed anyway) and tourists were trapped into taking photos with the market sellers for a couple of 10,000 dong notes.

After a quick demonstration of a multi-purpose slicing tool, which we were to receive as a present later, we were ushered onto a boat and taken on a leisurely, If a little loud, ride along the river. After a shot minibus journey to a causeway where they were harvesting and drying the reeds, we got on another (smaller) rowing boat and were taken along a reed-lined river to our kitchen underneath a great big thatched roof.

Here, we watched in wonder as Trang prepared some tasty treats, then tried (a little cack-handedly) to follow her instructions dish-by-dish to make our own. We made Goi Cuon, otherwise known as summer rolls or fresh spring rolls (the paper kept sticking to my hand and my peanut sauce was a little watery); Banh Xeo, a rice pancake with pork and prawns, eaten rolled up with a chili and fish-sauce sauce (I managed to flip mine first time – all those years of Shrove Tuesday practice finally paid off); Bun Bo Nam Bo, a flambéed beef and noodle salad (was very happy with my first flambé attempt, hoping to practice again soon); and phinally our Pho (pronounced like you’re trying to get a hair out of your mouth – ‘fuh’). Suddenly, we’d eaten everything and it was time to go home.

Bun bo nam bo with a cucumber crocodile at the top

Boulders’ Summer roll

The Vietnamese pancake

Henny’s mad kitchen skillz

We were dropped off at our hotel and I went to the gym while Henny had a skype date with Mara, one of her bessie mates from home. Yes, dear readers, I went to the gym. Cross-trainer, free weights and spinning bike, if you must know. I sweated a great deal. Yum. Having lost an Olympic swimming pool’s worth of water weight, I returned to the room, showered, and got dressed and donned my England rugby shirt once more for the Scotland game. After a couple of hours of chilling at the pool and finding out that all the overnight trains to Ho Chi Minh were booked out, meaning we’d have to take a 22 hour bus journey (the very same that we’re now on, dear readers), we went out, had a very pleasing dinner of Bun Chá (pork meatballs with broth, veg and rice) and Won Ton and headed over to the Three Dragons pub for the Ireland/Wales game and then the Scotland/England game. The less I say about the outcome of the match, the better, I think. I just hope we can give the Irish a run for their money on the last weekend, if they haven’t already won it by then.

Whilst I was somewhat tipsily congratulating some Scottish fans on their well-earned win, Henny had paid the bill and we headed outside, where, somehow, we ended up on the back of some random guy’s scooter and flying back to our hotel. After a brief scrabble for change, we stumbled through the lobby and into bed.

The next day began hot and hungover. We pretty much scrabbled to get to the remnants of breakfast and, after negotiating another night at the hotel, spent some time getting rid of our headaches by sleeping and/or swimming at the pool again. After having achieved nothing all day, we decided to go for a walk (Henny) or a cycle (Will) to see what we could see. I found myself just cycling along the same road for a long time, until I came to a little touristy harbour, where I flatly ignored the locals’ imploring that I should rent a small round boat (where would I put the bike?!) and go on a coconut forest exploration trip or buy a mango or coconut. Having practiced different ways to say ‘no’ graciously, and taken some lovely photos, I rang my bike bell back through the throng of tourists and turned right at a junction, which took me up to the other side of Hoi An, near the beach. Here, they seemed to be building another town – they’d flattened whole swathes of marshland to make way for hotels. Progress eh? I then followed the same road round and, feeling a tad peckish, picked up a Banh Mi to munch on the western extreme of Hoi An. After a quick glance at the time, which told me I was going to be late to meet Henny at the hotel, I wove my way through the foot-traffic at the river’s edge and used a local café’s wifi to tell her to meet me at the bus drop-off point. We found a nice riverside restaurant to eat at and leave my bike at while we went to check out the night market, where Henny finally found some gifts for her au pair girls and we tried some of the market food – the highlight of which was Henny’s choice of a coconut and chocolate grilled cake. I cycled back and Henny managed to get the last electric bus back.

The next day, after our last breakfast, Henny did another shave of my head (the man bun is coming on quite nicely) and, after a shower, we cycled out to the town to get some more pressies for the Aussies, where my excellent navigational skills allowed us to find the shop we wanted without any hassle. After venturing out to get some snacks and water for our long coach journey (I found some Ritz biscuits – heavenly but SO bad for you), we tried to get back to our bikes, only to be stopped by a woman wearing a badge saying ‘ticket inspector’. Not realising we needed tickets to return to our bikes, and running low on dong, we made our excuses and went a different way into the town, where nobody wearing a ‘ticket inspector’ badge could harass us and got our bikes. We went back to the hotel, collected our bags and got the electric bus back to the town, where we got an Uber from the drop-off point to the bus office, where we made friends with a nice Dutch girl who seemed a little overawed at the situation.

After getting on our bus, we made our way overnight to Nha Trang, where we waited for our bus to Saigon (that’s what it says on the ticket) and where I am now, passing along a seaside road, where the white waves are breaking pleasingly on the shore to my left and a large orange desert seems to be off to my right-hand side. Henny is snoozing gently and my legs are going numb from balancing Big Blue (the bag) on them. I’m going to leave you here while I adjust my position. Until next time, my faithful few, when we’re off to Melbourne via Singapore. I’m very excited.

Yours pins-and-needlesly,

Boulders

Oi oi! Hoi An! There isn’t really enough space to get comfortable in my bunk on this double-bunk sleeper bus. Each of the 35 travellers has their own bed, with two rows on the sides next to the windows and a central row, which is where I’m sitting.

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I’m wet and cold, but not unhappy. Wet, not because it’s raining dear readers, but because I’ve just been for a  swim in our lovely (so far) hotel pool in Hoi An, and have only been driven upstairs because a) a child, who seems to have whooping cough but decided swimming would be his activity of choice today, hawked the brownish contents of his alveoli into the water where I would have been swimming and b) the temperature has dropped to a ‘frigid’ 24 degrees.

I left you on my Goalie Post as we were on the bus to Ho Chi Minh City (or HCMC as it’s known by those who want to spare syllables, as I do). After the most beautiful noodle soup in the most beautiful service station, we got to Phnom Penh without further drama and were driven to the Mekong Express depot, where we got on larger coach which would take us to HCMC. As we pulled away, the chap who seemed like he was in charge came down to inspect passports and visas. We’d been clever clogs and sorted ours online beforehand, having read that visa-free access was only an option. This turned out to be fake news. The chap explained (repeatedly) that ‘these passports, no problem. You don’t need visa!’ and disposed of our rather expensive printouts.

We got into our usual bus routine of napping, listening to classical music (me – the refined one, as you’d expect) and checking social media (Henny – the modern one, as you’d expect) (but me too when Henny let me leechingly tether to her cleverly-bought sim card). As we passed along the litter-strewn streets, weaving and honking our way past dangerously driven motorcycles, we followed our progress on Google maps – the border was approaching. Once again, the man in charge explained what we had to do and herded us all off at the Cambodian border to confirm to the authorities that we’d actually left their country. Then, once again as a group, we made our way on the bus through the no-man’s land between countries and entered the smart building of the Vietnamese immigration control. Immediately we were impressed by the organisation and cleanliness of the building – there were even bins! Once again, we waited en masse to have our passports processed and shuffled our way past the guards, put our bags through a (seemingly useless) x-ray machine and that was it – far less painful to get through than the Cambodian border.

Back on the bus, we sped past several grandiose buildings flying red flags with more stars, hammers and sickles than you could shake a marching baton at. We were definitely in a communist country now. Every shop flew the red flag with the yellow star in the middle – I was unsure whether this was a law or just some incredible nationalist sentiment from the shops next to the border. Then something struck me. In the 15 or 20 minutes it had been since we crossed the border, we hadn’t seen a single pile of rubbish next to the road, not one mouldy pile of litter had been spotted. On first impressions, Vietnam was taking a great step ahead.

It was only another hour or so to HCMC, where we were dropped next to a Burger King (great omen on the food front) and elected to get a taxi to our hotel – the Alagon Saigon hotel and spa. We had tried to get a vague idea of the price to the hotel (only a kilometre away as the crow flies), but only got the ‘taxi meter, taxi meter’ response, so took the taxi anyway. Bad idea. It ended up costing us 10 dollars for a 10-minute trip as there was a building site preventing us from going the short way. ‘New year’ was the excuse, but we had been robbed blind.

After we’d checked in and inspected our lovely large room (we’d even got an upgrade thanks to Henny’s elite status on Booking.com), we went for a quick explore, found the backpacker street and got some street food (Banh Mi for me – a delicious baguette filled with salad and barbecue pork, and a disappointing Pho for Henny – we knew we’d get better). We then sniffed out a bar on a street corner, ordered a beer each, saw a woman agree to accompany a creepy old man for the night, paid up and went home to sleep like freshly-chopped lumber.

The next day, we decided to have a relaxed day of exploration and walked over to the big Ban Thanh market, where I was talked into buying not one, but two pairs of shorts (I needed t-shirts really) for a princely sum. Perspirating madly and despairing at my awful decision (and bargaining skills), we headed to a local shopping centre which had been recommended by one of Henny’s colleagues (thanks, Alex!).

It was here that I had one of the most interesting toilet experiences of my life. Henny and I had both been suffering a little from the unpredictability of a gippy tummy, so our first stop was to the loos. No urinals, just stalls in the men’s – strange, but true. First thing to hit me was a small panel on the right-hand side of the bowl as you sat down. The second thing to hit me (as I sat down) was the heated loo seat. Normally when you sit on a warm loo seat, there’s that feeling of disgust (some fat, hairy bloke has just been voiding himself here, hasn’t he?), but here it was too warm and (dare I say it) comfortable for that. This was deliberate bottom warming – and not unpleasant. Then there were various buttons to control the minutiae of the enigma that was this loo. Position, style (rear, soft

A little blurry due to fits of childish laughter

rear or front), pressure, dryer and, most importantly, the stop button as well as the heat controls for the seat and water were all present here. There was more processing power here than there was in the rockets for the moon missions, that’s for sure. I found the heat control and turned it down on the seat, as I felt a little bit like I was being turned into human bacon. I didn’t actually produce (ahem) on the loo, but couldn’t pass up this ripe opportunity I’d been presented with. Opting for ‘soft rear’, just to try it out, I heard a whirr and suddenly (taking me a little by surprise) a jet of warm water spurted with quite some force and perfect aim at (and into – not quite as comfortable) my nether regions. Startled by this inanimate object’s sudden, damp invasion, I scrabbled through the controls, initially trying to find the pressure control to turn it down (I had opted for ‘soft’, hadn’t I?!), then mashing the ‘stop’ button like a younger sibling on a playstation 2. Having managed to put an end to my reverse shower, I tentatively pressed the dryer button which, in stark comparison to the aggression of the water, gently wafted me ineffectively. After a couple of minutes of gentle waft, I reckoned I was dry enough to get back out into the real world, where I met Henny with a schoolgirl giggle. She hadn’t been as brave as I (the loo pioneer) had, and probed me tactically on velocity and surprise value.

With my afternoon having been made by the loo experience, I forgave Henny the next hour or so of shopping centre ritual (walking aimlessly around the shops, mostly western, tugging at interesting tops and saying ‘ooh that’s nice’), when we got to a toy shop full of Lego. I’m not sure if it was my giggling childishness from the loo, but I certainly felt 5 years old again as I wondered at all the new (and expensive) Lego kits that were out there. We were supposed to be searching for something nice for the two Australian girls that Henny au paired (and who I’ll be meeting in Melbourne – looking forward to it!) on her last visit down under 4 years ago, but sadly found nothing at this particular spot (except great excitement for me at the prospect of playing with Lego again at some point in the future).

After a brief visit to the top of the high tower, we found that pool afternoon was in order. We headed home, got in our swimmers, in the lift and up to the 11th floor for our rooftop pool and 3 for 2 offer on beer, which powered us through our blog posts. The wifi was good, so we were able to post and schedule a few blog posts at that point, a refreshing change from the on-and-off relationship with the wifi on Koh Rong.

Beers finished, pool splashed in and blog posted, we made our (slightly wobbly) way down to the restaurant for high tea, a small collection of cakes and fruit and a cup of Earl Grey. I was once on holiday in Devon during the blazing heat of an English summer (probably about 25 degrees) as a child and couldn’t understand how my parents and grandparents were able to drink hot tea with their cream teas. I was told, “You’ll understand one day, William. Now finish your squash.” This was the day that I understood. Glorious it was.

Once we’d finished high tea, we headed upstairs again for a bit, I watched some football (it seems to be on fox sports 24/7) and walked to the street food market, where I ordered more Pho and some fresh summer rolls, while Henny took the night off food in an attempt to curb gippy tummy. We then rolled to a travel agent, booked a visit to the Cu Chi tunnels for the two days’ time and headed back home.

The next day, after another lovely buffet breakfast, we set off in search of sights: the independence palace, war remnants museum and (most excitingly of all) the post office. We got 2 out of 3.  After taking the long way around the walls and being accosted by a coconut seller who stole 150k dong from us for 2 coconuts (that’s 5+ euros for 2 coconuts which usually cost about 75 cents each) and holding his weighty wooden staff for a bit, we found that the independence palace was shut until one. We then decided to go to the war remnants museum and return when it was open again.

Me ‘pretending’ that the stick is heavy

Henny struggling with the weight

The war remnants museum is, unsurprisingly, about the Vietnamese wars of the mid-20th century, including both the war of independence with France, then the proxy and direct wars with the United States, which they call the American war. History is written by the victors, they say, and so it was here; everything written from a refreshingly Vietnamese point of view, painting them in a brave and patriotically heroic light rather than the ‘Apocalypse Now’ cloaked-and-daggered Viet Cong, Ride-of-the-Valkyries-blaring-from-a-helicopter history we’re familiar with in the west. Along with the standard war machinery in the courtyard, there was a wealth of photojournalistic content documenting the horrors from both sides (though the torture used by the Americans seemed to be more present) and the lasting effects of the tonnes of Agent Orange used to flush out the Viet Cong. We read stories of how 2nd and 3rd generations of families were dealing with the consequences, how the social programmes were helping those affected, as well as art which had been created by children affected by dioxin. It’s amazing how brutal we can be to each other sometimes and beautiful how people cope with and get on with their lives however they can.

After the museum, we headed back to the palace, but weren’t prepared to pay entry for another museum and walk around the gardens as well, so we got a bottle of water instead and headed to the post office via the cathedral. Unlike most British post offices, this wasn’t a Postman-Pat/Mrs-Goggins-run place with chocolate bars and lottery tickets, this was more of a post palace. The only thing I’ve seen which is comparable was in Russia, where they have a vast room and hundreds of Gogginses bureaucratically stamping and franking envelopes. At one end was a huge picture of Ho Chi Minh (the president whose name the city now carries) and around 3 sides were barred-off counters with various functions; pensions, unemployment benefit, parcel collection and sending, and stamp sales. After buying enough stamps to send our postcards from Koh Rong (hope you got it, Grandma!) and taking a blurry posting-picture, we went home, had some more high tea watched some football (or at least I did) and then treated ourselves to dinner at a sushi place where we sat next to some Germans who had found out the Vietnamese for cheers and wouldn’t shut up about it. Nevertheless, the sushi was good and my chicken teriyaki delicious. We then headed to the local mini mart, grabbed some beers and headed upstairs for a Netflix and chilling thriller session with the Ritual – a great British thriller set in Sweden.

The next day, after another very large breakfast (with more Pho!), we were picked up by a bus and taken to the Cu Chi tunnels, via an art factory where people affected by Agent Orange were making some fabulous pictures on blocks of wood using eggshell and bits of clamshell. Beautiful, but useless for us travellers, so we took the short tour of the workshop then chilled in the shade before getting back on the bus. 45 minutes later, we were unloaded and had stickers pressed onto us before getting into the museum’s densely wooded area. Here, we were shown how the Viet Cong had hidden in a network of tunnels which was a miniature underground town, with kitchens, underground toilets, air holes, tailors (for the high-end Viet Cong fashion overalls), and weapons factory. We also had a demonstration of various grisly traps, initially designed for animals but used by the Viet Cong for maiming humans. We were shown the remains of a tank and were even offered the chance to shoot some guns, which felt insensitive and a little awkward to do where so many people died, so we politely declined whilst flinching every time somebody had their go. Then, we finally got to crawl through a 100-metre stretch of the tunnel and I immediately regretted bringing my large blue rucksack – it was a squeeze even for those without hefty luggage. Dusty, dirty and with aching joints from scrambling around in the dark (it was like doing mega-squats), we headed to the kitchen where we were served the staple of the Viet Cong (tapioca with a sugar and peanut mixture) and some jasmine tea. Afterwards, we headed back to the bus and chatted with some of our fellow travellers, who gave us some excellent tips for Hoi An, our next stop.

We were dropped off at our hotel and, as another treat, headed out to the tallest building in HCMC for some cocktails and sunset view (we made it with 15 minutes to spare) then went to Pizza 4P’s (For Peace – another Alex recommendation) and had the best pizzas we’d had in a long time, perhaps ever (the toppings, sauce, dough – everything perfect). A very impressive cheese board with garlic pizza bread had kicked us off and the pizzas blew us away – Henny had a half-margarita with creamy burrata and a camembert and ham and I had a seafood pizza which I added tabasco to and it was perfect. We’re still waxing lyrical about it a week later. Dreaming of that pizza. Weighing up whether to return there, even though we only have 1 night in HCMC on the way to Australia.

Almost crying with happiness, we headed home and I introduced Henny to a staple of British culture, which is on Vietnamese Netflix and I’m pleased to say it was a success. Henny absolutely loves the Inbetweeners. Happy and full of lovely food and British schoolboy humour, we slept again until it was time to wake up for more food – this time a lighter breakfast – and then we checked out, left our bags downstairs and headed up to the pool to read, relax and swim. I managed to make friends with a Scottish dad who lives in Shanghai (shoutout to John) and chatted for ages about everything. We spent another couple of hours drying off, then headed out for some Banh Mi and a beer. We headed back to the hotel, collected our bags and headed to the airport in an Uber. The airport was better than Schönefeld (not a very high bar) and we relaxed and watched a couple of episodes of the Inbetweeners after going through the rather lax security.

Once on the half-filled plane with a loud American complaining and breaking several records, including ‘Most Disruptive Passenger Ever’, ‘Most Words Uttered On An Hour-Long Flight’ and ‘Most Opinionated Female 2017’, Henny took her usual travelling nap and I plugged myself into my ipod for some Blink 182 goodness. At the other end, we were met by a chap with a board, and helped out a couple who’d been let down by their lift from the airport. I’ll leave you there, wondering what happened next, and fill you in on Hoi An at a later date.

Yours cliffhangingly,

Boulders

  Ho Chi Minh… *sigh* Gone. I’m wet and cold, but not unhappy. Wet, not because it’s raining dear readers, but because I’ve just been for a  swim in our lovely (so far) hotel pool in Hoi An, and have only been driven upstairs because a) a child, who seems to have whooping cough but decided swimming would be his activity of choice today, hawked the brownish contents of his alveoli into the water where I would have been swimming and b) the temperature has dropped to a ‘frigid’ 24 degrees.

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A between-posts-post

Just sitting in the middle of the front three passenger seats of a very nicely air-conditioned van on the road to Phnom Penh again, where we’re going to change to get to Ho Chi Minh. We’ve had quite an eventful morning, dear readers, so I thought I’d explain all while on this epic 12-hour daytime bus journey past stalls of fruit and vegetables in the Cambodian countryside. Last night was rubbish.…

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I left you last time, dear readers, as we’d just boarded the cramped little bus to Sihanoukville, a one-night-stopover on the way to Koh Rong, a relative newcomer to the tourism scene, having opened its first hotel(s) around 2010, when I was still able to drink a lot and the 80s had yet to come back into fashion.

We arrived in Sihanoukville sweaty and exhausted – the Hilux hadn’t left us much room to relax in. We shared a tuk-tuk to our hostel (the first hostel rather than hotel on the whole trip – what a life!) with a lovely Dutch couple, then went to check in and dump our bags.

There isn’t much to do in Sihanoukville. This we discovered after talking to some of our fellow residents at the hostel, who’d been here for 2 nights already (they’d missed a ferry to Koh Rong that day) and had done everything that you could, namely drink and eat and go to the beach. That wasn’t much different to what we’d got planned for Koh Rong, but after a quick trip to the beach, where we saw a family discussing in quite urgent tones where to put the family street-food truck, we found they were right. The beach was disgusting, the prices were absurd and the people not the most welcoming (probably having dealt with far too many western tourists to be interested any more).

I feel I should qualify my ‘disgusting beach’ statement. Rubbish in Cambodia isn’t like rubbish at home. People just throw it on the street for the magic rubbish fairies to pick up. This means that it collects in all the drains, at the side of the road, any nook and/or cranny it can stick to. I felt a sudden pang of sadness when we got to the beach and a sewer was emptying into it at one side and the tideline, instead of being marked by seaweed or other, natural markers, was demarcated with plastic bottles, plastic bags and straws. I can’t bear to think about the impact on the wildlife. We saw many hotel signs claiming to have a spot on the most beautiful bay in the world, but I would beg to disagree with them. The trend shows no sign of stopping either; a young girl of a bout 14 or 15, who was old enough to know better, simply threw her Cornetto wrapper (yes, they have Cornettos here – I tried an Oreo one for the first time and it was delish) onto the beach WHERE SHE WAS SITTING. I couldn’t believe my eyes – there was a bin about 5 metres away from her! Rare enough that there was actually a bin but then not to use it! Horrified doesn’t cover it.

Having exhausted our options on the seafront, we headed back to the hostel to chill and read a bit more before having dinner. It was Valentine’s day (groan) so we made it romantic, made the effort, and went to the restaurant next door called ‘Nice Food’. There, we ordered our food (pizza baguette as a starter, various rice dishes as mains) and waited. And waited. Eventually, my food arrived, then Henny’s, then about 30 minutes later, the starter. We paid up and left as soon as we could, so that we could take advantage of the happy hour at the hostel, where draft beers were 50 cents again. We got talking to some friendly Canadians (is there any other type?!) and, it being Valentine’s day, Henny went to bed early, still feeling the effects of the long trip there, and I went drinking with the Canadians. Romantic eh?

There was a good hostel just down the road, where happy hour lasted forever, so we grabbed more 2-4-1 cocktails and chatted for a while. Then it gets blurry – the cocktails seemed to be strong. I remember saying goodbye to the Canadians after having spotted and engaged the Dutch couple from earlier in conversation, then spotting an English couple from our dorm and began playing table football with them. I think I beat them. What happens next and in what order remains a mystery. I woke up with a fresh bottle of water next to me and $50 extra in my wallet (I had been running low). Thanking drunk me for being so sensible, we got up and made our way down to the pier, where the blazing sun wasn’t doing my hangover any favours, much to Henny’s delight.

We checked in to the speedboat company and got some lanyards with our tickets inside them, then joined a throng of other people in the shade (thankfully), who were waiting for our boat to arrive and take us to our island paradise. Once on the boat, we skimmed across the waves, just a couple of people succumbing to the minimal bumps (the landlubbers). Once we reached the main pier on Koh Rong, we realised that we weren’t quite home and safe yet. We got a lift in a taxi boat from some chicken-bone cracking and sucking brothers who couldn’t have been older than 16, who we gave two dollars for each of the five minutes it took to take us to the other pier and plunge us and our belongings into the surf on the beach rather than use the pier provided. One to put down to experience.

Once we got to our hotel, the customer service experience jumped up a notch as we were greeted by the hotel owner with perfect English, handed an ice-cold lime juice and talked through everything. Once inside our wooden thatch hut, we discovered a wet room with a sloped sink (not by design) and two double home-made four-poster beds. After a nice long exploratory walk down the 4k beach (so named as it’s actually quite long, just not 4 kilometres) and a bit of sun burn, we had some lunch and found out the prices at our hotel were high (surprise surprise) and went to scout out the way to the main pier. This took us back up the beach and through a wonderful bit of forest – dark and humid, it was as if somebody had just put on a few recordings of rainforest sounds. Crickets, laughing frogs and squeaking birds all provided our soundtrack as we ventured through the gloom to the beach on the other side. It was noticeably cheaper over here, and we decided that we’d have our dinner the next day at a beachside restaurant with a lovely view over the bay.

We found a place which did a decent cocktail, and which was staffed and populated by beings which seemed to be hardened gap-year veterans. Long hair, interesting facial hair and even more interesting clothing couplings (picture a fur vest with harem pants and a wide-brimmed sunhat) and it felt like we were back in Berlin-Neukölln. We managed to tear ourselves away from our familiar surroundings and headed back along a starry-skied beach to our hotel to sleep very well, even without the luxury of air conditioning.

The next day, we got up, had a free breakfast with some unevenly-sliced baguette, scrambled egg (Henny had hard-boiled poached eggs) and bacon. We made the most of it however, then made our way around to the other end of 4k beach, next to the Nest bar and restaurant. I went snorkelling around the spiny sea-urchin covered rocks with similar fish to Thailand and a beautiful array of corals, but nothing to match Koh Tao for variety and colour. Vaguely disappointed, I headed back to Henny, who was doing what Henny does best – sunbathing and snoozing. A very chilled morning of reading and people watching (which I did from the shade of a nearby tree – direct sun isn’t good for Bouldings).

We decided to head to Nest for lunch, as it was just there behind us, serving food and stuff. I ordered a big water for us both, a Greek salad for me, and for Henny some hummus with olives and pita bread, fully embracing the Mediterranean off the coast of Cambodia. My salad arrived first and was promptly dealt with, Henny nibbling the odd olive and bit of grilled feta. Then the real waiting began. Half an hour after we had ordered, I went to the bar to check what the hummus status was and was assured that the kitchen was just a bit busy at the mo and it’d be out in a sec. Others who’d arrived after us began getting their food (mostly burgers and things) that would have taken a lot longer to prepare than a few crudités, a slap of hummus in a bowl and to heat some pita. My patience beginning to crumble like my feta had, I caught the eye of another waiter who also assured us that the hummus would be on its way in just a few minutes and that he was ever so sorry and would we like a cold drink while we waited? Glumly, we stared at and sipped the coke until it was finished. Gradually our water suffered the same fate. When we had about 3 centimetres until the bottom, a third waiter approached us and asked if we’d like something to eat (my salad bowl had been cleared by this point). Once again we explained the situation and, once again, were apologetically offered sugary refreshments to keep us going until the hummus (supposedly) imminently arrived. We turned them down, our nerves already sufficiently on-edge.

After a little while longer, it arrived and Henny wolfed it down and even gave me a couple of pieces of lovely home-made, herby pita with the grainy and delicious hummus. It was almost worth waiting the full hour for. We got a free refill of our water bottle, paid up and went back to the hut to finish off our blog posts. That done, we chilled and read on some sun loungers at the front of our hotel while a flock of Asian tourists paddled and clucked on the beach, their day-boat waiting ever so patiently at the pier. An hour after they arrived, the ferry honked them back onboard and only had to chase two or three families who thought they were above the rest of the visitors and delayed them by a further 10 minutes or so, simply refusing to leave until they’d finished their splashing in the sea. Once they’d left, we enjoyed the peace and quiet for a couple of hours until the sun went down. We showered and went to the BBQ place we’d spied the previous night.

Lip-smackingly gorgeous doesn’t really do it justice. Henny had a lovely limey grilled red snapper and I had a barracuda fillet, both of which were cooked to perfection and as flavoursome as anything. They came with a crisp, yoghurt-dressed salad, a baked potato and garlic bread (carbo-loading for the physical activity of the next day) and we were in flavour heaven. We ventured back through the laughing-frog forest, using my LED torch as a guide (excellent Christmas present, thanks Dad!) and decided to go and hunt briefly for the plankton that we’d heard about, just off the beach at a particularly dark point.

The stars were amazing and so numerous you couldn’t count them if you tried. We waded out into the sea (we had to go quite a way – the beach was shallow a long way from shore) then turned off the torch. We dipped our hands in the water and swished them around a bit, like we were testing the temperature of the water. Tiny specks of neon-blue followed our movements, a trippy vision which I’d only imagined in top-quality 90s music videos. It was as if we were mediocre magicians, able to conjure up some pretty blue sparkles from our fingertips, but not really do anything with them. The greater our swishes, the more blue specks followed them. Not wanting to get too wet, we decided to go swimming with my snorkel the next night and headed back around the beach to our hut to get to sleep again.

The next day we spent busily relaxing, with our Kindles bearing the brunt of our efforts. After another OKish breakfast, we claimed two sun loungers (mine in the shade, natch), left our towels and kindles there and went to have a quick paddle in the water. We returned refreshed and ready to lie down for a long time and do nothing. I was reading The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell, the second in his Warlord series about the dark-age Arthur, and Henny was finishing off the Tinderella book by her buddy Rosy, who we’d met in Siem Reap. We interspersed our frantic electronic page-turning with bouts of napping and swimming and generally chilled the heck out. Eventually, the sun set on our last day of island life for the time being and we headed in for showers and to get changed out of our swimming stuff for dinner. I’m writing this as Henny’s showering, so I’ll be sure to fill you in on dinner later on or tomorrow – we’ve got a long and potentially hazardous journey tomorrow to Ho Chi Minh, with an eye-wateringly early start.

Yours hungrily,

Boulders

It’s all gone Koh Rong I left you last time, dear readers, as we’d just boarded the cramped little bus to Sihanoukville, a one-night-stopover on the way to Koh Rong, a relative newcomer to the tourism scene, having opened its first hotel(s) around 2010, when I was still able to drink a lot and the 80s had yet to come back into fashion.

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OK so it wasn’t phenomenal, however fond of the word I am, I just liked the convenience of the word-play. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice, but it didn’t enthral me as much as some of the other places we’ve been to on our journeys so far.

We had arrived an hour ahead of schedule in our bunk-bedded bus. Bleary-eyed, we searched for an Uber (we’d been tipped off that they’d actually got Uber here) and, after watching him crawl down the road to us, we finally dumped our bags in the boot and hopped in the arctically air-conditioned taxi and explained the route to him three times. Once at the hotel, Henny managed to sleep, as only she can, but I was awake and using the wifi to try and contact Arthur, who needed to be awake for his early flight to Phuket. Leaving our bags at the hotel, we followed the map to his last shared location and found his room after looking through the guestbook.

Knocking on his door at 7 in the morning shouting things like ‘Room Service’, ‘Thai Massage’ and imitating Conchita from Family Guy (‘Nooooo, Misser superman no home’), he finally relented and opened the door. Turns out we were actually doing him and the boys a favour, as they wouldn’t have heard their alarms and would have overslept. Arthur and Will had bought Cambodian football shirts at the central market the day before and had been given one of them in the wrong size – medium. Cambodian shirt sizes are a little less generous than ours, so when They had tried on the medium-sized one, it looked like the fat kid from school wearing a shirt at the pool. We dived off through the rubbish-strewn streets and arrived at the recently renovated French-designed Central Market. An impressive Art-deco design, it was full of stalls selling everything from live fish being slaughtered at the request of a sadistic customer to fake Bluetooth speakers, which Arthur had also purchased yesterday. They found the stall they were looking for and after a brief to-and-fro, exchanged the shirts then had to run back. Henny and I hadn’t eaten, so we stayed behind and with a rushed ‘See you in New Zealand’, went off to find some food.

I was looking to be culinarily adventurous, so engaged the services of a lady who was making a chicken noodle soup for a throng of slurping customers. We sat down and watched as she combined the necessary ingredients in a bowl and poured some broth over it, sprinkling a handful of coriander over the top for good measure. We also added some deep-fried bread sticks about as long as my hand which were the Cambodian crouton replacements. The broth was warm and delicious, the fried bread fatty and hearty and the chicken almost inedible. The lady had seemingly sought out the bits of chicken which one normally has difficulty navigating when carving a roast and plonked them all in our bowl. We survived by sucking the meat off the bones though, but I did have the lion’s share, Henny deciding to take it easy for this particular dish (I don’t think the boiled whole chicken staring out at us from behind the display glass was helping her appetite).

After paying 2 dollars for the experience, I promised Henny that we could find a nice western coffee shop for our hobbit-like second breakfast. We headed back in the direction of our hotel and found a hip little place for an iced coffee and a cheese and ham toastie. Henny’s appetite finally satisfied, we decided to pay a visit to our rooftop pool and had a lazy late morning/early afternoon session of sunbathing and reading with a glorious view and a pool that I could swim two lengths of underwater, as I love to do in hotel pools.

When I’d had enough of relaxing (it didn’t take too long, I can tell you), I went down and wrote the previous blog post and then looked up some jobs in New Zealand and polished off a whole bag of potato sticks in the process (I’m so sorry, diet – I swear I’ll get back to you soon!!!). Browsing through various websites full of a variety of things (vineyard technician, sales assistant, trainee shepherd – bring your own sheepdog), my excitement and anticipation grew and grew until I had to remind myself that I still had a month to explore and enjoy the delights of Asia in. There are so many things to look forward to, I can’t focus on anything at the moment (insufferable I know, I’m just a bit excited ok?).

We’d also booked ourselves onto a sunset cruise which our hotel organised for its guests., so at 5 o’clock, after a very polite courtesy call to our hotel room to remind us, we trotted off to the bus and drove at a snail’s pace down to the harbour where we jumped on the ‘OKAY’ branded boat, which looked a little junk-esque (the boat style, not that it was at all bad quality) and found a lovely seat in the bow. After a couple of games of musical chairs as we tried to guess which way forwards was (Henny doesn’t like going against the direction of travel), we were sipping cocktails and watching a huge fireball sink below the horizon. It was spectacular, and the lighting was very good for taking photos of Henny too, which she wasn’t really sure she liked. I’ll probably include them here anyway though, just to annoy her a bit.

We had a bite to eat on the boat (a chicken yellow noodle stir-fry between two) but were still hungry when we landed 2 hours later. I still felt the need to be adventurous and had been curous about many street food stalls selling baguettes, usually accompanied by a bbq. I decided that I must try this local delicacy and approached a man who was selling the baguettes and asked him what was worth trying. Eventually we came to the understanding that these small, red sausages were the bees’ knees and so I ordered a whole baguette with them. He toasted the baguette, smeared it with some yellow paste (it was sweet, may have been condensed milk or honey) and placed the sliced sausage inside. I was wondering what noise the meat had made before it had become a sausage but didn’t feel like bringing the full spectrum of my farmyard animal impressions to this street in Phnom Penh, and instead kept quiet. The flavour was deep and rich, like venison or black pudding, but I had a feeling that some of the gristle had been left in as there were still some chewy bits which I had to power through. This, combined with my growing fear that the sausage may have been more ‘woof’ than ‘moo’ or ‘oink’, made me finish as quickly as I could. It had been really interesting flavour-wise, but I don’t think I’d repeat the experience before finding out what had actually gone into it.

After grabbing a 50-cent beer to steady my nerves (and stomach) and a papaya salad for Henny in a local restaurant where a middle-aged man flirted far too much with a teenage Cambodian waitress (though she didn’t seem to mind and laughed like a hyena whenever he said anything), we headed back to the hotel and flopped exhaustedly into our bed. A very long couple of days it had been and we slept like the heaviest of logs.

The next day we woke up early, as has become our habit, and got excited; our first buffet-style breakfast was waiting just a few floors away, just another half-floor above the rooftop pool. We went for it, mixing western and eastern food to mixed reviews, but decided that the green curry with rice was excellent and the ham and cheese omelette was also pretty damn fine. We stuffed ourselves to avoid having to buy lunch and made sure to monitor the interesting eating habits our fellow diners from various Asian countries. It was fascinating to see these well-dressed and obviously intelligent people slurping noodles into their mouths, which they neglected to close as they chewed camel-like, a dangle of saliva never far away from their chins. I wonder if they say the same about us (“He didn’t even have his mouth open – you couldn’t tell what ratio of rice to curry he’d put in there!” or “His chopstick-work was so far below par, I thought I’d spit out my rice wine”) or if they’re just nice, unjudgemental beings like the rest of you.

After waddling back to the lift, grabbing our stuff from the room and heading down to the lobby, we began negotiations on a tuk-tuk to take us to the days’ main events – the sombrely-named Killing Fields and S21, a former Khmer Rouge prison. I like to keep these blog posts relatively jolly and high-spirited, and have thought about writing my thoughts on the two memorial sites in a separate post, to give them, and me, the space required to describe and analyse them effectively. In brief: the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed an estimated 3 million people between 1976 and 1979, before they were forced out of power by a joint Cambodian and Vietnamese government. Pol Pot remained the leader recognised by the west until the early 1990s and lived to his mid-70s and denied responsibility for the killings. He’s definitely up there on my list of people who deserve absolutely no thought or respect whatsoever. S21 was where thousands were tortured and died; the killing fields were where they were sent and murdered when S21 had run out of room to store the corpses. It was a chilling day to say the least, and both Henny and I were glad when we had finally put it behind us and could escape our thoughts. Henny escaped to the rooftop pool and I went on a long walk along the harbourside, where the locals were preparing for the imminent lunar new year and its influx of tourists and money.

One of the revellers taking a crazy ride

I saw a number of street food sellers trying to sell small shellfish which they had on their carts by the thousand, A lady was also collecting some flowers or something from the central reservation of the road, leaving her bike in the nearest lane as she did. A group of tourists were feeding the pigeons (in direct contradiction of my Trafalgar Square-based sensitivities) and a cat was, rather unsuccessfully, trying to hunt one of the fat ex-dinosaurs for its dinner. Elsewhere, a large, colourful screen was flashing images of what promised to be an excellent celebration for the lunar new year, but some bright soul had left the video control panel open so that it blocked the top left-hand corner of the screen. I walked along the vast Mekong river where swallows flitted by. Some boys were playing street football (I got a couple of good action shots) and some men were playing a version of badminton with what looked like a plastic bottle and instead of racquets they used their feet to bat the shuttlecock back and forth.

Then, a little further on, I saw a man working, completely on his own, trying to move a rock from the side of a path which was being redeveloped to improve the riverside further. Again and again he tried to shift this boulder, but it was only moving an inch at a time. Cracking, I thought, a perfect opportunity for a photograph. Then it came: a ferry with one of the most capitalist slogans emblazoned on its side drifted past and this man, who had been working so hard to improve this one small part of his country all alone, moving away from its natural, wild self and towards a uniform, westernised, Coca-cola Cambodia, had a glimpse of its future as he took a break. It will be hard work, but the unforgivable actions of the Khmer Rouge can be countered by the continued efforts of the Cambodians themselves and continue to bring sustainable economic and social development to this fascinating, beautiful and varied country. I hope this doesn’t mean that it’ll lose its wild charm, but if it can improve the day-to-day lives of the everyday Cambodians, it will be for the best. I know I said I’d keep it light but have got a little preachy. I’ll stop now.

I returned to the hotel room via the red light district (by accident, I assure you dear readers; I experienced enough of those sorts of sights during my stay in Hamburg) and found Henny writing her blog post. After sharing accounts of our afternoons, we had a quick dinner and headed to a cool rooftop bar for a 2-4-1 cocktail, then back to our room and to bed for our early start the next day – we had a bus to Sihanoukville booked for 8am, which meant very little time at the breakfast buffet. A short tuk-tuk ride and we climbed into a Toyota Hilux-type van and were surrounded by other people’s bags. With a lack of both leg space and sleep, we left Phnom Penh for the last leg of our time in Cambodia. That is a tale for another post my dear readers, so until then I’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing before you read this all the way through.

Yours apologetically,

Boulders.

Phnom(enal) Penh OK so it wasn’t phenomenal, however fond of the word I am, I just liked the convenience of the word-play.

[wbouldingblog-blog]

Once again, dear readers, I find myself at a lull in our adventures just long enough to entertain you with some of my ramblings about our experiences in the far east. This time, it’s from a nicer environment than the grim Bangkok bus station at 4 in the morning. I’m sitting on our balcony on the eighth floor of our hotel in Phnom Penh at the ticklingly self-deprecatingly named ‘Okay Boutique’, which is actually a bit of a stunner. Spacious rooms, rooftop pool and a bathtub big enough to fit a baby dolphin in, if you were so inclined.

I left you with the sneezing competition last time (the buddhist monk won a TKO), and after waiting for an hour or so more, we headed downstairs to our bus, which was waiting at stand 106 (of about 300 – and they all seemed to be in use). It wasn’t as large or as blingy as our previous buses, but nice enough and only about 2/3 full, so we had a decent amount of space to spread out in. Once en route, we were brought a carton with a cupcake and one of those mini refreshing towels you get at KFC. Then, 5 minutes later, we were brought some apple juice and a bottle of water followed 5 minutes after that. We certainly weren’t lacking refreshment, or were they lulling us into a false sense of security before the major hurdle the Cambodian border was bound to present? Only time would tell.

About half an hour before we arrived at the border, the crew member who had seen to our refreshment needs stood and announced the visa process at the border; $40 in cash (no idea why they wouldn’t accept card at the border – the Cambodian border police have a reputation for being upstanding moral citizens for a dollar or two) and 2 passport pictures for visa on arrival unless you had an e-visa (which we had cleverly done for $35 a couple of days before). A Spanish girl with unruly hair and dirty fingernails in the seat in front of us seemed surprised and asked whether there was a cash machine and if you could have pictures taken at the border. I had to wonder about the way she was able to cope with life; going from one country to another and not checking a) whether a visa was necessary or b) what you had to do to get into that country – her laissez-faire attitude was refreshing but seemed a little too reckless for the border of the ‘Wild West of the Far East’. I would have been climbing up the walls and over the sunroof of the bus if I’d been suddenly confronted with the fact that I didn’t have cash, 2 pictures or been prepared for the rigours of getting into a foreign country.

Naturally though, she got past security before me, despite my preparedness. Henny and I zoomed past the Thai exit, passports stamped, and continued the next 100 metres to the Cambodian immigration control building. We needn’t have had a visa – the population of the town were freely moving around the street, continuing to sell food, beg, and move trailerloads (the trailers were made of planks of wood hammered or gaffa-taped together) of Armini, Tommy Hilfinger and Pollo Ralph Laren-branded items from one side of the border to another without any visible controls. Nonetheless, we filled out an immigration form and took our passports to the window.

Henny went first, waited for about 5 minutes and then was given the all-clear, so I approached the window and handed my passport through the slot. With the speed and agility of a wounded sloth at death’s door, the border guard looked through and read the majority of my passport, including the message from her Majesty and the two Russian visas in there, which I’m sure he enjoyed greatly. Storytime over, he asked me where my visa was, having (in)conveniently passed over the copy attached to one of the pages in his rush to get to the main plot. I showed him in my passport and handed him the second copy I had printed out as instructed on the website. His eyes flicked sleepily from one to the other, checking that it was, in fact, me on both. Satisfied, he called a secondary member of the Cambodian Unit for National Thoroughness and Security (a group title I have here made up but imagine the bureaucrats involved would find fitting, especially its acronym), probably with the job title ‘Chief Assistant Scanning Officer’, as that’s all he did – press my second copy to the scanning machine before sitting himself exhaustedly back in his chair, his taxing duty complete for another 5 minutes or so.

Having given me the time to read War and Peace a couple of times through, he decided I was ok and waved me through the exit. I feel he could have been given a new lease of life for a dollar or two, but I was damned if I was going to give him the satisfaction. I’d rather wait an aeon than spend a couple of dollars to get someone to complete a process they do thousands of times per day and could finish in a heartbeat.

We found the rest of the group, jumped on the bus and headed off, now on the right-hand side of the road. Immediately, we felt a little less safe on the road. The bus (possibly with a new driver) kept making unnerving swerves to the other side of the road and honking his horn regularly to warn others of his presence. At one point, he even performed a failed emergency stop and hit a motorcyclist who evidently had failed to check the road before entering it and who was now leaking engine oil onto the dusty-red road. Eventually though, we made it to Siem Reap, which was only slightly more populated than the small villages we had been passing through on the ‘highway’ (more like a B-road). Once there, we were offered free transfer to our accommodation with the condition, we found out once we were on our way, of course, that we then use the tuk-tuk drivers to take us on a tour of Angkor Wat and the temples the following day.

We settled on a price of $25 ($5 more than the usual rate, but we were frazzled from the long day and were getting a trip to the lake as well) for the temple tour and were dropped off at our lovely hotel, Solitaire Damnak. From the beaming smile of the receptionist to the opal-blue swimming pool to our luggage being heaved up the spiral staircase to our modern and stylish room by a teenage lad, the experience was superb. Settled, showered and fresh again, we decided to go for food and a little explore of Siem Reap’s centre.

By this time, the sun was just setting and the lights were beginning to come on and, like the flies buzzing around the halogen lamps adorning the bridges, we were drawn to the flashing bright lights of Pub Street. Yes, there is really a street called pub street and yes, it is everything you’d imagine it to be. Tourist-heaving bars, pubs, restaurants with inflated prices and mediocre food. We, luckily, chose the one gem to go to – the Red Piano – and stuffed ourselves with Beef Loc Lac, Fish Amok and Pork and Ginger and washed it all down with 50 cent glasses of beer. The portions, however, were much larger than in Thailand and we both felt very overfull by the end of it (yes, dear readers, the great Human Dustbin was overfull).

As previously mentioned, my suitcase was cracked by some lovely groundstaff on the way from Berlin, so on the way back we passed through the night market and I negotiated (again, poorly) a lovely new blue suitcase. Home, I repacked my bag into the new one, tried it out and was so relieved, exhausted and full and so, needing to get up at 4am the next day, retired to bed, where even the excited whoops of travellers playing beer pong in the bar down the road and all the local dogs joining in a Howl at 2am couldn’t keep me awake.

In the groggy early-morning darkness, we rose and made ourselves ready for the mammoth day ahead – today was the day we were going to see Angkor Wat and the temples of the Khmer empire. Our breakfasts packed by the hotel staff, we jumped into the tuk-tuk and set off into the streetlit morning. After picking up our tickets at the desk, we sped off as fast as the little 50cc scooter could carry us and arranged to meet our driver under the big tree, next to the other big trees (so glad we cleared that one up). The main bridge was cordoned off for construction work, so we and another 100 visitors all stamped across a temporary floating plastic bridge to the sound of sloshing water underfoot. Ahead, we could just make out the outline of a building and a portal to pass through, so we followed the others and squeezed our way through the statue-filled passage. Again, following the crowd, we made our way to a large field with a lake at the end, not able to see anything past the yellow neon lights of the pathway in the pitch black behind.

Creeping through the early-morning mist, the silhouettes of the three famous turrets came into view. An eerie stillness came over the crowd, interrupted only by the local children asking if we wanted a coffee in their slightly shrill tones and other tourists of Asian origin (not naming any particular countries here) directing their two-fingered sun-hatted photography en masse. The sun continued to rise behind the building, bringing ever more clarity to my pictures and beauty to the surroundings. Our index fingers sore from button-mashing and me half blind from squinting through my viewfinder, we decided to go and explore the inner temple. Climbing up some steep steps, we found a young monk offering blessings for a donation, many sashed statues and masses of incredibly intricate carvings, naturally all documented on our over-stretched memory cards.

The time came to head back to the big tree next to the other big trees, so we said our goodbyes and sploshed back over the plastic bridge. Back on the tuk-tuk, we sped off to Angkor Thom, the ancient capital of the Khmer empire. We hopped out at the entrance gate and were greeted by a group of old men holding up the railing leading to it and by a monkey making his way back to his troop. We were then taken to the Bayon, the main temple full of carved stone faces and an interestingly-named ‘Leper King’s terrace’, where we also got very close to another troop of monkeys having their breakfast/morning grooming session. After that, we went past the Baphuon, the former palace, and on, briefly through Preah Khan, to Ta Prohm, a beautifully ruined and root-ridden temple, which was also, according to our guide, used in Tomb Raider (which was pronounced ‘rider’ by the locals – an entirely different film altogether, methinks).

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After having wandered for so long and wondered at the beauty of it all, we sank into our tuk-tuk and dozed as much as we could behind our sunglasses on the bumpy road to the river. Naturally, Henny was able to fall sound asleep on my shoulder, but I couldn’t sleep with the aggressive bumpiness of the road and took in some very interesting local sights (and smells) of the villages we passed through, where many of the houses were built on stilts to keep them at the same level as the road and above the damp of the rice-paddies below.

Having reached the river to take us to the lake and deciding the $30-per-person was a bit steep for a boat ride to the lake, we turned around and headed back. Not wanting to waste the trip, we stopped at an interesting group of huts and asked our driver what they were used for – apparently people just buy some street food, take some drinks and go and chill there for a while. Sounded ideal and just what we could have done with, were we not completely exhausted by this point. We pressed on and were asked if we’d like to go to a crocodile farm. Picturing a large, green, zoo-type affair, I pushed for the yes-campaign and we went in.

The sudden smell of crocodile dung and the presence of a crocodile bag and shoe shop should have tipped us off for what was to come next. An industrial-type crocodile where the poor beasts were stacked 2 or 3 on top of each other with so little space to move. Some of them were 3 or 4 metres in length and were quite fearsome to look at. I did my best to imagine these prehistoric lizards in their wild habitat and had to dig in to the depths of my imagination. When they moved it was just like hearing someone scraping an item of luggage across a concrete floor – it sounded rough and hollow, even when they were alive. Henny was slowly turning green at the thought and sight of the plight of the crocs, so we beat a hasty retreat and returned to our hotel.

Once there, we crashed into a deep sleep for a few hours, before rising and preparing for the next event – the Big Night Out for the rugby. On with the England 2015 RWC playing shirt and off we went to find a nice place for a drink before we headed to the bar for the first game – we found a lovely and brightly-coloured rooftop bar, ordered two cocktails, got some lovely fried corn, ordered two more beers and a bottle of water and speculated about the various groups of gradually-drunken revellers that were gathering there. The bill came and it turned out to be happy hour – $5 for the lot. Giddy and delighted at such a steal, we headed to Score sports bar and, after a quick enquiry as to the later location of the rugby, were given seats at the bar which we promptly swapped for some rather comfier ones on a sofa near the large, projected screen.

Another young couple (yes, we’re all still young) came and sat beside us and we got talking. Turns out it was Rosy Edwards, author of Confessions of a Tinderella, and her boyfriend, Phil. Phil and I were probably making too much of the football chat and so we decided to sit next to each other and force the ladies to chat together. Much lad-bants (totes) later, they decided to head off for a bite to eat while I stayed to watch the Ireland-Italy match and the start of the England-Wales match and enjoy our own shared meal of a club sandwich and chicken wings (we treated ourselves with western food for being so adventurous to that point). A number of solid $1.50 beers (relatively pricey for the area) later and I was having a great time, with the fact that England were winning, but the game was in anyone’s hands. Henny didn’t seem too bothered about the scoreline, just the viciousness of the tackles going in. I do wonder sometimes…

I awoke the next morning a little bleary and worse-for-wear. We had paid for breakfast already, so we stumbled to the hotel restaurant, where I ordered Goodgee (I think that was how it was spelt), which is a rice and starch-based broth and was very tasty. We had to check out by 12 and spent much of the morning lazing around and repacking our bags, then reading and chilling by the pool until we felt the need to go and eat something and have a little walk around the surrounding area, which was actually quite interesting; along the main road there were 3 or 4 schools, as well as a university, which would be very convenient for any family living nearby who could afford both.

Our pleasant experience with Solitaire Damnak continued with a free transfer to our bus station, or rather where our bus station should have been. We subsequently found out it was at a place 500 metres away through tourist-packed streets with no pavement and Cambodian motorcyclists threatening to run you and your luggage over. Surviving the frogger-like roads, we made it to the bus station and waited a few minutes before being led to our bus. From the outside, a normal, unassuming bus, but when we got nearer, I poked Henny in the ribs (taking her somewhat by surprise) and said, “There are bunk beds in there!”

Luggage below, shoes off and we were into our bunkbeds, which weren’t quite long enough to lie down in once you’d put your bag down. There was a pillow and a blanket though, however the ‘leather’ we were sleeping on stuck to our skin like a piece of sellotape sticks to your thumb when you’re trying to wrap a Christmas present really carefully but it just ALWAYS curls and sticks to everything and is really annoying. Again, we fell into a deep, but brief, sleep and arrived in Phnom Penh bleary-eyed and disoriented at 5 in the morning.

That’s where I’ll leave you this time – it’s getting late in the afternoon and we’ve got a sunset river cruise to get on, which has been laid on by our hotel. Hopefully there won’t be a stop at another crocodile farm on this journey – once was quite enough.

Reptilianly yours,

Boulders

  Siem Reap & Angkor Who? Once again, dear readers, I find myself at a lull in our adventures just long enough to entertain you with some of my ramblings about our experiences in the far east.

[wbouldingblog-blog]

Koh Tao - ThaIsland Paradise

Koh Tao – ThaIsland Paradise

So here we are again. 4.30 in the morning in an airy and neon-bright Bangkok bus station, waiting for a bus to take us to Siem Reap in Cambodia at 8am. The intervening three and a half hours gives me a tiny window of opportunity to give you an analysis of the last few days, which is what you’ve come for, I suppose. If you’ve come for something else, a satirical view of the Trump administration or…

[wbouldingblog-blog]

It’s pouring outside here in Koh Tao. Henny and I are lying exhausted on a delightful double bed with a view of the infinity pool and the beautiful bay, unable to escape our hut for fear of dissolving in the deluge outside (and the fact that Henny is, yet again, asleep). Lucky for you, dear readers, it gives me a moment of respite to catch you all up on the eventful last few days. This is a long one, so put the kettle on and grab a whole tin of biscuits. Treat yourself.

Done? Here we go…

We scavenged a lift from a Polish friend to the airport (shout out to Martyna – hope you enjoy the vodka!) and tried checking in. First hurdle and we trip a little bit – Norwegian needs you to prove that you’re leaving the country before you board the aeroplane, so we had to do some hurried booking of a bus from Bangkok to Siem Reap in Cambodia, our next destination after Thailand. Little did we know that the much simpler solution would be to book a flight from near Koh Tao but instead we opted for a 24+ hour ferry and bus journey from the south of Thailand to Cambodia, including (apparently) a hellish immigration wait at the Cambodian border. Yay.

The ticked booked and shown to the lady at the counter, we set about putting our luggage on the scales. Naturally, Henny had managed to exceed the limit by a couple of kilograms and I, like the hero I am, bravely undid my bag and took some of her shoes, rezipped my bag and lifted it to put on the scales and it fell open. Bugger. Hastily repacking my gaudy Christmas-present pants (thanks mum!), I did the zip up and triple checked its security before putting it on the belt, where it was whizzed away.

The flight to Norway was quick enough and when we landed in Oslo, everything was white – Bing Crosby’s best Christmas song whistled through my head and back out again as it was 11 months too early. When you think of Scandinavian countries, you don’t think ‘Ooh I bet I can get a real bargain here’, do you? Well you can’t. Especially not in a Scandinavian airport. I paid around €16 for a warm brie and bacon (and cranberry sauce) baguette and a small bottle of fanta. Delicious but dangerous for the bank account.

Then we got to the gate and this beauty below was waiting for us. The Boeing Dreamliner 787-9. In the photo below, you can also get an idea of how snowy it was (not just a dirty lens). Teams of bulldozer-type snowploughs were zooming all over the place, reminding me of emergency landing procedures from Thunderbirds, trying to clear the runway and taxiways.

We got on, made friends with a little old norwegian lady next to us (shoutout to Emma, wherever you may be) and settled in for the 10-hour flight. After binge film watching (Despicable Me 3 and King Arthur – the Guy Ritchie version if you must know) and a very tasty lunch/dinner of roast beef, I played the onboard quiz a few times. I fared quite well in the final standings – of the 240+ people on board, I came 2nd, 3rd and 5th with my 3 attempts. Not bad eh? I hoped I might have got a prize, but I think the air stewards were too busy congratulating the winner or something. I bet the winner was in Business Class. Some people have all the luck.

I tried to sleep, but could only manage an hour of real shut-eye before breakfast (Cinnamon and oat biscuit and ham sandwich with a plastic cup of apple juice) and then we were pretty much on the runway at Bangkok airport – much larger and more modern than I could ever have hoped. Certainly puts Berlin’s airports into perspective.

We waited for a while in immigration line (Henny amused herself by worrying if she’d filled out too much of the landing card), collected our suitcases from the carousel and collected some Baht from the nearest cash machine and noticed, much to my dismay, a number of thin, but nonetheless worryingly present, cracks in the shell of my suitcase. Damn. Either I’ll have to buy a new one in SE Asia (dangerous if you watch these Aussie or Kiwi border control shows – the vendors often put naughty things in the linings) or wrap it multiple times in cellophane before the next flight. Decisions, decisions…

Off to the taxi rank we trotted, collected a ticket (a very good system of allotting taxis) and found ourselves heading for a garishly pink Toyota Corolla. You’re nothing in Bangkok, apparently, if you don’t drive a Corolla, a Honda Civic or a Nissan Almera. Naturally, it’s got to have a bodykit on it and be painted some ridiculous colours. Of course, by the time we’d got there it was early in the morning and rush hour in Bangkok, so we had a 1-and-a-bit hour taxi ride past a number of floral tributes to their late king, where I dozed and waited to get to our hotel.

Once there, we had another four hours until we could check in, so we went for a quick toddle around the area and found a couple of very local-looking (and smelling) markets and a beautiful big park in the centre of town, where we walked and wondered about what was coming next. Once the four hours were up, we checked in, showered and napped for a couple of hours before heading to a rooftop bar just around the corner. There, we enjoyed some well-made cocktails and Thai sausage and fried pork with fresh ginger, garlic, coriander and chili and looked out over a gorgeous sunset punctuated by the skyscrapers of Bangkok.

 Henny’s done her research and found out that, in 2016 at least, this tower was the tallest in Thailand. I found it fascinating to look at – the deconstructed central sections are an architectural marvel. I’d have loved to have gone inside if I could, but there was so much more to see and do in Bangkok that we didn’t have the time or a reason to go inside any of the offices there, and barging in unannounced would have been just rude.

On the second day, I was very excited. This was the day I got to see my little brother again. I say little, but he’s 22 and actually quite large now. Not large as in fat, but big. Grown up. You know what I mean. He and his mates (shoutouts to Tom and Will) are having a 6-month bonanza all around SE Asia, Australia and New Zealand, before heading to America and then back to the UK. This was the first of hopefully two possible meeting points along that journey, the second being in New Zealand. We met Arthur at his hostel, the Born Free hostel near the Khao San road, which had a hipster-palleted lounge area with excellent wifi facilities. He hadn’t been feeling well the night before (he’d eaten something odd) and opted for some simple steamed rice for breakfast, while we went for some lovely street-foody pad thai, which at 40 Baht (about a euro), was a steal.

The smell is one of the things that’ll stick in my memory about Bangkok; the mix of exhaust fumes and cooking meat which hangs over the whole city, mixed with the occasional and unnerving stench of rank binbags, is unforgettable. Food seems to be a constant occurence in Thai lives; if they’re not cooking it on the street, they’re buying it off someone who’s cooking on the street or carrying it in one of the millions of plastic bags they will pour anything into to take away. Fruits, fried pork balls, orange juice – all in these tiny little environment-hating plastic bags. Given that the packaging is so ubiquitous, there’s a distinct lack of public bins. I often had to carry waste around for hours before I came across a bin or took the Thai approach and chucked it in someone else’s binbags when they weren’t looking.

While Arthur and the boys were recovering from their bus journey to Bangkok, Henny and I took a walk around some of the temples. When I say around, I do mean around, as we couldn’t go in (neither of us met the dress code and were both unwilling to buy some harem pants to change that. They were stunning, carved in such intricate detail and on such a large scale that it was far easier to revere the craftsmen than the deitie(s) represented inside.

We met up with the boys for something to drink and were offered a continuous stream of tat from some of the local street sellers – everything from party paper throwers (best description I can give – they were utterly pointless though) and offensive wristbands (claiming to love everything from various cultures’ male sexual organs to Ladyboys) to cooked scorpions on a stick (about as tempting as it sounds). Nevertheless, we had a great catchup on their progress thus far. Hope they’re keeping a record of it too.

The next day, after a Thai buffet breakfast (Henny ordered chili chicken liver by mistake, but guess who ended up eating it…), we met up with Arthur once again and headed to a cat café, which was, unsurprisingly, Henny’s idea. It was cutesy and kitsch and the cats were very cuddly and funny and the coffee wasn’t too bad either. Then we took a brief walk through Chinatown (nothing really changed except the signage was in Chinese rather than Thai) and said TTFN to Arthur.

Then came the first of what I fear will be many mornings. We had booked a bus from Bangkok to Koh Tao to take us at 6 in the morning and arrive at 3 in the afternoon. All fine thus far – just had to get up at 4.45, which we did, get an Uber across town, which we did, and just arrive at the bus stop in time for the bus, which we didn’t. Of all the mornings the Bangkok government could have chosen to hold the marathon, they chose that one. A marathon needs a lot of streets to run on. Streets which, say, might normally be used by tourists in taxis trying to get to a bus station on the other side of town early in the morning so that they could make the beach paradise which they so craved after the dirt and smell of the city. Streets which were shut off by whistle-happy police. At one point, we just got out and walked (read: ran) the route to the bus stop ourselves, me taking both suitcases and wearing a leather jacket (there wasn’t any room in my suitcase) in a high-humidity environment.

Fate decreed that we weren’t going to get on that bus; my rucksack split open, showering my baseball cap and suncream all over the road. I bent down to pick it up and zip up my bag, dropping Henny’s suitcase in the process. Then, as Henny had gone on ahead to hold the bus, I looked up for her and couldn’t see her. I remembered seeing the Burger King at the end of the Khao San road on the map when we were looking at the route and thought that she must have gone down there. She hadn’t. She’d continued up to the bus station and found the bus. I, in a panic, was running round various (incorrect) streets like a headless, sweating chicken. Eventually, at 6.25 I gave up and tried to find wifi so that I could also find Henny. We managed to meet up, and various curt exchanges and a rebooking process later, found a café in which I could do some translation work and where we could gather ourselves together. That finished, we left our bags with the bus company and headed to a park to try and find the silver lining to this dreadfully black cloud.

What a good call that was. Dappled sunlight and cool shade along with more wildlife than you could shake a stick at (don’t actually – you might frighten it) made this former royal park the ideal place to spend the afternoon. Instead of reading on a beach in paradise, we were reading and snoozing in a park in the middle of Bangkok.

This meant we had to get the dreaded night bus, which we had been hoping to avoid. Nonetheless, at 6pm, after treating ourselves to a cracking foot massage, we headed back up to the bus station and collected our bags. After some initial confusion surrounding which bus was the one to get on and what the proper seating etiquette was, we both popped a couple of travel sickness pills (we were at the back of the bus) and Henny promptly fell asleep. I’d downloaded a couple of Star Trek: TNG episodes on Netflix and managed to watch a couple of those before I too succumbed to the numbing effects of the pills and the sway of the bus.

We were rudely awoken by the lights turning on as we stopped at a Thai service station. They’re much the same as English ones; dirty loos, awful-looking food and prices even Jay-Z would shake his head and tut at. Another 3 hours of patchy sleep later and we were at the pier for the ferry which would take us to the island. After a two-hour wait in a lean-to while the rain hammered down overhead, we got on a very swish looking ferry and zoomed across some rather large waves. People on board made some rather large waves themselves in the sick bags which were handed out pre-zoom. Another hour and 45 minutes later, here we are, in a beautiful hotel room with a view of an infinity pool and the sea. It’s just how it looks on the postcards. I’ll upload some pictures at a later date, but first, I’ve got to go and take them – the sun’s come out now.

Lorra lorra luv,

Will

It all started so well… It's pouring outside here in Koh Tao. Henny and I are lying exhausted on a delightful double bed with a view of the infinity pool and the beautiful bay, unable to escape our hut for fear of dissolving in the deluge outside (and the fact that Henny is, yet again, asleep).

[wbouldingblog-blog]

Preparations are in full swing

So here we are. A grand total of 5 days to go until we don’t see Germany for a year and a bit. A decently-portioned and potent mix of excitement, terror and let's-consume-as-much-stuff-from-Germany-as-we-can-before-we-go has taken hold. Saying goodbye to old (yet still young) friends, old (and middle-aged) students, and our even older (DDR-built) flat.

Henny is hating the mess as we clear out the flat and pack the stuff that’s staying here into boxes to go to her parents and into our basement. I’m loving the chaos. There’s something wild and free about just being able to put something on the floor with the ‚I’ll put it away later‘ excuse and not be told off like a child who hasn’t tidied his room. Unfortunately for the hoarder side of my personality (thanks for that particular gene, dad), it also means having to chuck or sell carefully stored items that might be 'really useful' in the future. Hats, USB cables and books on office yoga are gone, all gone! I’ll come to terms with it though, I hope. Eventually.

I won’t miss the goodbye-drink hangovers though. It seems I’ve either got double the number of friends I thought I had or everyone wants to say goodbye twice, which, as everyone who’s said goodbye to someone then gone in exactly the same direction as them knows, is a bitter-sweet experience. I’ve put back on all the weight I lost before Christmas, but it has been totally worth it. Also, by all accounts, in Asia I’ll end up with some sort of horrible stomach-based illness wanting to expedite the digestion process at either end as much as possible. Yeah, let’s move on, shall we?

Our flight leaves at 9.50 on the 31st. We’re flying with Norwegian airlines to Bangkok first, via that classic stop on the way to Asia, Oslo. The timetable is above, with a couple of holes (Lücken – see, you learned something!) for spontaneity, probably a decent amount of travel around northern Vietnam before we head back south to Ho Chi Minh.

I was speaking to my little brother last night on Facetime, as it was his birthday and I have to use up my German data (we were out having more goodbye drinks – what a life!). He’s also gone to Asia and was in Chiang Mai, and as you’d expect, sampling absolutely none of the local culture – eating chips after a night of drinking and debauchery. He’ll be in Bangkok at the same time as us and has insisted that I join him and his friends at a 'Ping-pong show'. I think I’ll put a ‚TBC‘ next to that particular opportunity.

Come back for more exciting updates and food/drink/whinge-related content soon. For now though, I’ve got some tastefully painted decorative Russian spoons to say my last goodbyes to.

[wbouldingblog-blog]

Welcome!

My aims here are to record the trials and tribulations of the final year of University and beyond! Feel free to check up whenever you like - I'll try and do a new post at least every week, but I'm not promising anything, given the large amount of work I have to do to get this degree done! W

[wbouldingblog-blog]

Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Confucius