Random Projects

I have to say I was a little surprised to see the “Dog Meat Market” marked on the map but I’ve never been that much of a dog lover. The thing that I’ll never forget unfortunately is seeing a metal bowl of water over one of the coal burners that are everywhere here, the surface thrashing around. Looking more closely and seeing a turtle, it’s body bigger than a big hand doing what might have been a funny dance if it clearly wasn’t a horrendous reaction to being boiled alive. A lot of the food is live here and the market in the old town part of Hanoi seems to be the place to see it. I can handle it all except the turtle I think! That was just too far! Where fridges are pretty uncommon I guess it’s a good thing. I survived a raw squid salad a few days ago!

There comes a time when every pant* must be retired. A trip like this can be particularly harsh on the pant. Therefore, of course I was attracted to the Calvin Klein shop in Hanoi. Possibly the only shop for miles around selling a genuine anything. As the door was opened for us I guessed we may not be going to get the bargain I was hoping for. We’ve finally found a cheap country after South America bled us dry and the weak pound took it’s toll everywhere else. It’s almost hard to spend money here, dinner will cost £1-£1.50, smoothy about 50p and coffee 28p. The posh veggie meal with beer we just had at a fancy restaurant cost £5.50 between us. Dinner at a street noodle seller costs a tiny amount. I was somewhat taken a back when I saw the 1,000,000VND price tag on a pair of CK boxers. That’s a whole £42! Probably enough to eat from street stalls, breakfast, lunch, and dinner for two months.

*The meaning of “pant” should be taken as the UK meaning ie. “under crackers”

We couldn’t believe some people we met weren’t going to bother to go and see this Vietnamese institution! The best is supposed to be here in Hanoi near the lake (marked on all the maps and in LP). I didn’t know quite what to expect. It was great to see, not quite the amazing spectacle I’d assumed mostly because the puppets are actually quite small but great none the less. Trying to buy a ticket in the morning for an eve show probably won’t work. Defo need to book in advance. We splashed out (get it!) on the expensive seats and ended up on the front row which gets you pretty intimate with the musicians who also double up as some of the voices. It’s all in a theater with a pool at the font instead of a stage and the performance is traditional with set characters and set scenes, like our pantomime. It’s over in what seems like a flash but I guess it’s more like an hour in reality. My favorite was the Golden Turtle. He does something with a sword along the lines of the “watery bint or tart”, as I believe Monty Python calls her in The Holy Grail.

How genuine they are I’m not sure but it looks like you can buy “used” water puppets from a few shops which would be pretty darn cool to have. I’d certainly get one for my “curio cabinet” if I didn’t have to carry it another gazillion miles. Of course you can buy model ones hot of the production line but a few places seemed to have ones that had definitely seen a good few years of water and rot. Whether that was out the back in a bath of rain water or entertaining the masses who knows. If I went back I’d definitely check them out a bit more carefully.

Been doing pretty well not shedding too many possessions along the way except, for some reason anything to do with our ipod speakers. So far I’ve managed to leave a power supply, and two socket converters behind in scattered places. So, taking a leaf from the local electrical “how to wire just about anything to anything else and survive” handbook I headed off to the market and, just between the fish heads and unidentified miscellaneous meat isles in Hoi An market managed to find some electrical parts. I cobbled together this rather amazing contraption, plus accessories (not pictured). Silent nights no more!

This place is nuts! I love this place and I’ve finally found a new LX3 camera to replace the one dropped and smashed in the jungles of Ecuador, which seems like years ago now! Due to the crappy pound it was actually more than I paid for it in the UK but who cares. Here are the first pics!

This is the “Symphony of Light”. Every night at 8pm sharp the buildings of the legendary Hong Kong skyline come alive. Over 40 of them are kitted out with all manner of lights, all over them, on top of them, lasers and search lights all linked to a 15 minute music track. This is the view from Kowloon over to Hong Kong Island but buildings behind also do their thing so it’s probably worth seeing it from the island too. Or on a cruise!

The famous Chinese Junk.

Neon everywhere of course. Not quite blade runner but the sights, smells, noise and lights made this one thing I’m not going to forget.

There seems to be a market for everything here and if not you really can buy anything. There’s a Flea, Night, Jade, Ladies, Bird, Goldfish, Mobile Phone, Second Hand electronics and countless electronics and computers markets. I had to restrain myself. The Golden Computer Arcade is a gadget lovers dream and Nathan road is chock full of camera shops. Not all as honest as they could be for sure! If if sounds too good to be true then it defo is! etc etc blah blah.

Wallet did well though, out of 7 gadgets I eyed up I only bought 2!

This is in the Goldfish market. It’s more of a street where all the shops just happen to sell the same thing but quite a sight. With your fish you can also buy puppies, rabbits and gerbils, turtles, frogs, seahorses and pet shrimps by the looks of it. Quite hard to deal with some things here if you think start thinking about animal welfare.

Told you! This little fellow is about £13.

The Peak, get a tram up to the top of the peak on Hong Kong Island and you find a big smiley face. Of it’s actually full of shops like everything else here. Lovely views though.

We’re staying in Chungking Mansions, a right old melting pot of people and things. Last night we arrived back to find the place full of police. Checking everyone in and out and obviously searching for someone. After getting our hand stamped to say we were innocent we retired to our room. We’re staying in a Guest House (Maple Leaf Guest House) which is lovely, completely spotless and new. Really it’s an apartment split into a few rooms with a little hallway where a man sits sometimes but generally it’s unstaffed. So it was me who opened the door following some rather forceful banging. I was greeted by a mass of police completely filling the outside corridor. I’m sure they’re very good at their job but these guys are certainly not intimidating and it was all a bit of an anticlimax when they left. They didn’t even look under the bed . They should have done!

Hmm, where do we start with this one. Well our Global Explorer ticket from STA had done us well up until this point. We have now found out that we can’t actually travel the route we booked and have to pay for the privilege of changing it.

When we bought the ticket we couldn’t book all of our flights on the dates needed as they were more than 12 months away which is fairly standard. The last few of months of our trip were all booked and confirmed on made up dates to be changed when possible. As time went on and just before we left the UK, STA still couldn’t confirm the last few flights we needed to get home from Nepal and Tibet however and we were a bit concerned. We were told it should be no problem, flights sometimes don’t become available until a few months before the flight etc etc and we were put on wait lists for the flights from Nepal to Bahrain and Bahrain back to London.

I was kind of expecting STA to take care of all the confirmed flights we couldn’t get on the correct dates and move them to the correct dates via email instructions as we went along. We ended up having to contact the airlines direct (or getting parents to call in the UK) to change these, not easy or cheap when you’re not near internet or phones for weeks on end. It’s safe to say we have spent more time actually in airline offices and trying to find airline offices than we might have thought before we left. I can’t even remember the details now but we came close to forfeiting our entire around the world ticket at least twice due to lack of info given to us about the ticket and then internal airline operations.

It would now appear that although we were told we’d have no problem with sorting out the end of our trip, that isn’t the case. After getting nothing back from STA except the fact they were looking for the flights every day we spent quite some time ourselves finding and going to the Gulf Air office in Auckland that would be the carrier for those flights and managed to get 2 spaces on the last leg (Bahrain to London) but nothing on the Nepal to Bahrain.

Gulf Air told us that the number of tickets available for Global Explorer ticket holders on that route was tiny\none. A search found nothing for weeks before or after the date we wanted. Nothing at all in fact. Unusual for sure, but a fact. This meant that we had no way of getting home if we carried on and went to Tibet. Beware of unconfirmed\unconfirmable flights on Global Explorer tickets is what I’d like to say. During that visit we also found out that a previous date change hadn’t been done. Off we trudged to Cahay Paific – it was their flight but not their fault. We like them, they fixed it and didn’t charge us although they could have.

Finding this out was hard and time consuming enough. We spent at least a couple of days doing this, eating into our traveling time and of course we now cannot go to Tibet (or Nepal) which was going to be a highlight for sure (and my birthday!) We have also lost the cost of a connecting flight which we bought outside the Global Explorer (not an insignificant amount!) We’ve also had to reroute the Global Explorer ticket which we had to pay what seems like a lot of money for too. That seems particularly harsh right now as we’ve had to pay for something which wasn’t our fault and has directly stopped us from going to Nepal and Tibet.

Finding out that we couldn’t actually travel the route we booked and would have to pay for the privilege of changing it was just the beginning however. That ends STAs involvement, the next saga was with British Airways who we would need to contact to make the route changes.

This was us in NZ. One months worth of serious bumblebee action. More stuff about some places and things soon hopefully, if I don’t collapse

Bleedin heck! Just remembered.. forgot about whale and dolphin watching in that earlier post. Doh.

OK, latest report on the trip so far (right up to today I might add!!)

Click the image for more info and to zoom about etc.

Cant quite believe it! According to the little GPS thingy here I’m almost at the 100,000 mile mark. 5 months in and considering all the time I’ve forgotten to turn it on or take it out that’s not bad! Looks like everytrail.com might just have reached its limit though. Just tried to upload the latest info and got a big fat black page. Hmmmm

It’s hard to blog from the wilderness you know! That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. So there. And it’s even harder to do it while strung up off a bridge or being flung out of a perfectly good airplane. (Better not talk to loud… so far managed not to be flung from anything, only down things and over things and around things.. oh yeh, and under things). One things for sure, we’ve not been bored in New Zealand. So far we’ve managed to…

• Canoe 90km in 3 days
• Zorb
• Black Water Raft
• Ride a Segway
• See a real Kiwi
• See a cave full of glow worms
• Hike (or “tramp” as they say here) countless mountains
• Spend the day on a yach
• Ride the worlds longest flying fox
• Quad bike around the countryside
• Drive over 4000km!
• …..blah blah blah! Much more I’m sure, can’t even remember!

Now for the second time so far we’re in prison. The Jail House backpackers in Christchurch. Pretty cool really, all the old prison stuff is still here. We look out on the outside world through bars and the key that opens our door is one that used to open the same door for some dangerous rustler or moonshine maniac no doubt.

No pics for a while I know too. Something about having over 50Gb worth and 7,000 to sort through really hasn’t appealed so far! Soon!