Off the Couch and On the Road

I have always been a bit of a planner. A listmaker. I grew up in the southern suburbs of Sydney, Australia, with dreams of becoming a music teacher and teaching ballet to five-year-olds on Saturday mornings. By the time I was studying Communications at University, there was a 10-year business plan and dreams of power suits, corporate lunches and a house full of designer furniture.

After graduating in 2001, I moved into PR and Events Management and life began – car repayments, credit cards, gym memberships and all the plastic cards that seem to tie people to a particular place in life. Friends seemed to couple off two-by-two like the animals on Noah’s Ark and I became claustophobic from my office cubicle with too many walls and no sunlight. Not even my amazing ‘champagne and celebrity’ events job could keep me from being bored.

I had never had a huge urge to travel – I just needed a holiday. But looking at brochures in travel agents was addictive. I read everything I could to try and create a shortlist of ideal destinations. My only roommate and younger sister could barely navigate her way to the kitchen for all the travel paraphernalia that had taken up residence in our small two bedroom flat.

It definitely wasn’t a small world after all -  there was too much to do and I decided I wanted to do it all. To my friends this was insane, and no amount of cajoling would convince them otherwise.

“But it’s like living your whole life in the bathroom without ever seeing the rest of the house,” I said. “Wouldn’t you want to see the rest of the house?”

“No,” the friend said, shaking her head vehemently. “I like my bathroom. It’s such a nice bathroom – can’t you just leave the door open and peek out every now and then?”

“Uh, no because there’s a hallway in the way and you can’t really see…um, oh whatever.”

So another list began – temples in Laos, Everest base camp in Nepal, wildlife in Africa, pyramids in Egypt, Christmas in New York. I worked in the sister’s coffee shop on weekends and stopped buying shoes. The travel agent realised I was actually going to spend money instead of stealing free brochures and took my name off the security watchlist.

And now to what I do best – planning. The list has grown somewhat, and it’s the plastic cards and not necessarily the emotional strings attaching me to Sydney that are taking the longest to cut. I am not sure how long I will be on the road for and I have no idea what to expect when I return, but if nothing else, I can start every dinner party conversation with, ‘well, I know when I was feeding infant lions in Kenya…’.

Ok, well maybe not. But hey, if there are any hot guys around you can bet those lions are going to make an appearance.

-Sarah

“I’m going everywhere,” I’d tell people that asked – and it wasn’t too far from the truth. To resolve my problem of deciding which continents to visit, I decided to take the plunge and visit them all. After all, who knows when I will have another chance to become a jobless, friendless, poor, globe-trotting wanderer? I know, enticing.

So, keeping in mind that things may change (depending on how soon I run out of money), here is the basic, original plan:

March: Indochina – Thailanad, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia
April: Everest Base Camp and hopefully volunteering for a week or two at the recently established Dhaulagiri orphanage (see www.nextgenerationnepal.org or http://blogs.bootsnall.com/conor)
May: Europe – hopefully just laying on a beach somewhere for a while. Then after I get a tan, maybe UK, France, Italy, Croatia, Greece and Turkey
August: Africa (Nairobi to Victoria Falls) as well as Egypt
October: Up to Canada to maybe get some work, and utilise the 90 USA visa where I can (Christmas in New York?) – hopefully the sister can join me at this point
February: South America (Rio to Lima) including Machu Piccu trek
March: Back up to Canada and either work and travel for another few months, or come home
 
Eight weeks to go!

-Sarah

It’s funny how so many people have amazing travel stories that you never hear about until you mention you are going travelling. I resigned from work last week and suddenly everyone was recounting anecdotes from their yesterdays – volcanic thermal pools in Turkey, a stint as a factory worker in London, rooftop bars in Croatia, nannying in the USA – I’m kind of sick of talking about my trip by now, but hearing about everyone else’s adventures is wonderful.

In a way it confirms my belief that everyone should ‘sail away from the safe harbour’ at one point during their life, even if it’s only to gather some great stories. As Victoria from Europe on an Alphabet said:

“Life is too short and the world is too big to sit still for too long. After all, I may be hit by a number 57 bus tomorrow, and it’d suck if my tombstone read something like: “Did nothing, travelled nowhere, let her continue to rest in peace.”

There are still a few things I need to do – I have my pack, a fleece, trekking shoes, a new camera and enough asthma medication to bribe a Columbian drug lord, but still need to get some more clothes and other bits and pieces. My arms are constantly sore from all my immunisations and I am just finalising visas and looking at my car despondently wondering if there is a soul naive enough to actually buy it. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

-Sarah

The last few weeks in Sydney seemed a blur of shopping, packing, goodbyes and trying to watch as many Grey’s Anatomy episodes as possible (I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone, but ohmygod Meredith??!!). In the midst of all that I somehow managed to get myself organised and on the plane, arriving in Bangkok late last night, to the delight of the taxi touts at the airport, just hanging out for a naieve, tired Aussie girl to come stumbling bleary-eyed across their path.

Ok, I know you’re supposed to find the metered taxis, and I’m absoloutly sure I was ripped off. But it was at least 3am Sydney-time and equivalent to the cost of an airport taxi in Sydney, so I thought of it as kind of an advance payment on my Karma for this trip, and Buddha and I called it even.

-Sarah

After trying to sleep through a 4 hour animated discussion between my hostel roomates about what I like to call “The British Backpackers Guide to Bangkok’s Ping-Pong Girls”, I gave up and resigned not to do very much on my first day in Bangkok. I found an street stall selling iced coffee and decided things were looking up if I could find coffee in Indochina (the recipe - a large cup full of ice, mix the espresso with sweetened condensed milk, sugar and a white powdery substance and pour over ice. I obviously need to find an appreciation for tea).

In the afternoon, I caught a metered taxi (lesson learned) to the hotel where I would meet my tour group, and slept for the remainder of the afternoon in air-conditioned bliss. My tour turned out to be a pretty cool group of 7 mostly-British gap year students, with a few Aussies and a Swiss added in for good measure. Our group leader Sakai was a cool Aussie guy who moved to Cambodia to become a monk and spent 8 months in a vow of silence, amongst other awesome travel adventures.

We all ate dinner at a local semi-street restaurant where the food was good and cheap, skipped the touristy bars with overpriced drinks and karaoke, and headed for a 7-11 for cheap beer, joining thousands of others sitting on Khao San’s roadside people-watching until we could barely manage to keep our eyes open and returned to our hotel for a good night’s sleep.

-Sarah

Bangkok is full of contradictions. It’s street stalls next to skyscraper malls, traffic with no obvious rules yet an undercurrent of order that allows you to walk out in front of it and have traffic swerve neatly around you. Very neatly. So neatly in fact that I often waited for a Thai local to cross first and kind of hurried off beside them. And it was fascinating and scary all at once.

We left first thing and walked down to the Nae Nam Chao Phraya (river) to catch a boat down the back canals (Khlongs) of Bangkok, seeing the parts of the old city unaffected by modern life. Except for Coke and Pepsi, naturally.

Kids swimming in the brown water would wave madly and everyone always had a smile as we sailed past, their back doors not much higher than the waterline. We pulled up at the pier just outsideWat Pho, hosting the largest and most holy Buddha in Thailand.The Golden Buddha is so big they actually built the temple around him, but there are hundreds of other Buddhas and statues built to honour various royals right throughout the site.

Our tour guide was great, I didn’t remember any of it, but the entire temple was magnificent. And you have to give credit to Buddism. Our guide showd us Chinese and Hindu statues, telling us that “Buddism is very flexible, we welcome everybody”. In fact, it is not a religion but a philosophy, has no unique creed, no single authority and no single sacred book, which is pretty awesome, especially when they’re so damn happy all the time. They even call the toilet “the happy room”, due to the state one is usually in when they exit

We had some free time in the afternoon to go to the mall and find the bits and pieces we needed before we left the city, including a good bottle of Thai whisky to help us get through the 15-hour train trip to Chiang Mai.

-Sarah

Trains are ok. They really are. But when they try to be something they’re not (ie. a bed) they ultimately suck. They really do. Sleeping on that carriage was like laying in half a single bed with a bunch of kids on Ritalin jumping up and down on either side. So I spent at least 10 hours laying awake trying not to throw up. The Thai whisky and beer probably didn’t help either.

We were actually right next to what was the ‘disco carriage’ on the train, which played Venga Boys and YMCA while serving beer in 1.6 litre bottles. So we were kept entertained until about 10pm when we all tried to fall asleep, failing miserably.

We arrived at Chiang Mai in northern Thailand at about 8am and felt much better after a big breakfast. Technically we could do whatever we wanted today, but it was a unanimous decision led by a whole-hearted whisky toast the night before, that we would ride elephants before we left Thailand.

Sakai arranged the transport and a guide, and we were so excited we could barely contain ourselved the whole way there. And they were gorgeous. It was two people per elephant, so Kate and Ihopped onto the back of one armed with a bunch of bananas for bribery purposes and set off on the track.

Except this elephant didn’t want to follow it’s handler on the track, did it. So we hung precariously to the seat with a small chain holding us in while it ignored the handler and kind of plodded along some unknown path into the bush. Which was kind of funny, and out Thai handler giggled and kept shaking his head. Trust me to choose the rogue elephant.

Once we had run out of bananas though, our cute little elephant seemed to get quite angry, and snorted at us while whipping our feet with it’s ears. Now, I have health insurance, but I doubted at that frantic moment whether it covered loss and damage due to ‘elephant on a rampage’. It set off into a jog (do elephants jog?) and came up to a tree-house filled with buckets of bananas. The Thai handler was yelling at this stage, hitting the elephant with a kind of pick (and still giggling) while trying to catch us up to everyone else, who’s elephants were quite demure in comparison, riding in a long straight line further down the track.

Our elephant trumpeted in anger, tossed aside a few of the buckets with it’s trunk, stole sevaral large bunches of bananas, and stormed off, leaving our guide 2 storeys up in a tree platform, still giggling, and us screaming with terror and laughing hysterically down the mountain. By ourselves. With no handler and a rogue elephant. God it was fun.

After our elephant adventure, we changed and head off to the Chiang Mai women’s prison. Their rehabilitation program is one of the most respected in Thailand and involved teaching the women(amongst other things) to practise Thai massage so they could earn a living after they are released. And apparently their massages were the best kept secret in Thailand, so we checked it out. And it was the best massage ever. Amazing. The girls giggled, laughed and talked so much that we wondered how any of them could commit a crime, and asked Sakai what they were in for. Apparently for some it’s prostitution, other for saying a bad word against the King (even stepping on a flyaway Baht note is punishable with a jail term, as you are stepping on the King’s head). But we decided they were all lovely and left the jail feeling stretched and relaxed. And kind of glad we weren’t wearing yellow so they didn’t confuse us for prisoners and let us leave.

The early evening was spent at Wat Phrathat on the mountain of Doi Suthep. According to legend, holy relics discovered during the reign of King Kuena (1355-1385) were placed in a howdah on the back of a white elephant, which carried t5hem up the mountain before dropping dead from fatigue. The king built the temple to store the remains and the site has since been expanded to include a monastery where monks and nuns live and work on either side of the temple (at the top of 300-odd stairs which killed our nicely massaged legs). Monks are the highest level of person in Thailand, even higher than the royal family, and every make is encouraged to become a monk at some point in their life. There were small boys there on a school holiday program (getting it over and done with early, I guess) and we were lucky enough to be able to kneel before a monk and have white string tied to our wrists (right for men, left for women) as good luck and a wish for happiness.As he was tying the string, he was smiling and mumbling what sounded to me like “happy-happy-lucky-lucky-best-wishes-to-you-happy-happy-lucky-lucky”. It may have been more serious and complex than that, but I doubt it.

If the string fell off within three days, we had to hang it from a tree or something higher than us, or we could keep it on for as long as we wanted. It wasn’t a touristy area of the temple and in fact very few people ever have that experience. I personally am keeping mine on until everyone asks me where I got the string and what it is for, so I can casually drop in that a Buddist monk in Thailand blessed me with luck and happiness. Very casually. Nothing to it really. Just a good contact, you know how it is.

We watched the chanting of the monks and nuns at 6pm and walked back down the stairs to fresh strawberries and dinner at a local seafood restaurant, whose main selling point on all it’s signage was fried chicken. Of course.

-Sarah

The following morning we left for a 6-hour bus ride to Chiang Khong, where we would spend a night before crossing the border into Laos. The bus trip was broken into a few 2-hour trips and we stopped for lunch at another temple (can’t remember where it was or what it was called, but it was dubbed the ‘tacky temple’ and looked like something the white witch would live in within Narnia).

We arrived in Chiang Khong late afternoon, the town of which was really only one street filled with guesthouses, and spent the afternoon playing cards and going through the differences in Laos culture. We ate a local restaurant, where a Thai man and his 4 year-old daughter sang Eric Clapton with black hats flashing with red and green lights in a voice reminicent of Elvis with a Thai accent. We wanted to get up and start singing too, but that damn 4 year-old was holding onto that mic tighter than a Pamela Anderson t-shirt. Ah well, Karaoke would have to wait.

-Sarah

We officially left Thailand and crossed the river into Laos the next morning to board our boat for the two day journey to Luang Prabang. We stopped off at a village on the way, offered salt to the village chief as a gift, and lost all interest in the village once we discovered had pigs, with little black piglets running around the huts. We were all taking photos of the pigs, and not the village or view across the mountains, which the village people were quite amused at. I suppose it would be like somebody taking photos of our letterbox. But still, piglets!

We went for a walk around the village, defferred a few marriage proposals (”Umm, no. We are married. All of us. To each other”) and continued our journey down the Mekong. From here on in there would be little or no electricity and hot water and definitely no western toilets, although I am a pro at squat toilets by now, it’s all about foot placement. We stopped at a guesthouse and enjoyed a Laos feast by candlelight - made up of sticky rice shaped into a scoop, using our hands and the sticky rice to pick us the various dishes on the table. Delicious. I don’t know how I am ever going to go back to eating shit food after this trip - which is kind of like saying I don’t know how I am ever going to drink again when you have a hangover, because everyone knows junk food rocks. It’s just whether or not you admit it.

-Sarah

By the time we were well and truly sick of playing cards, we arrived in Luang Prabang early afternoon the following day and travelled in tuk-tuks to the guesthouse. They were individual bungalows amongst beautiful gardens and a pond, and had electricity, hot water, real toilets, private balconies and a bar. Really not much more you could ask for, and it was clear this is a completely underestimated holiday destination.

Incidentally, apparently the Laos government decided to create a campaign called ‘Visit Laos’ a few years ago, but forgot to advertise it outside of Laos. They also couldn’t decide on a start date, so the campaign ran for two years. Bless.

More buffet-style Laos food and many many more Beer Laos later (these are served in 640ml bottles and are US$1, in case you wondered), we crashed and woke early the next morning to our breakfast being served on our balcony (have I mentioned Laos rocks?) before boarding our tuk-tuks for the 45-minute journey to, um, some random village in the middle of nowhere that I don’t know the name of. But it rocked, because it was in Laos, and I’m sure they had some piglets around somewhere.

This was the beginning of our mountain trek that would end in a swim at the waterfalls and it was a great morning - the scenery was amazing and it was good to stretch our legs after two days in a boat. Legally, we were supposed to trek with a Laos tour guide, but they wanted to charge us a small fortune, so the local village girl that saw us off joined us for about an hour beore heading back. Our tour leader had done this trek hundreds of times before and was adamant that the tourist police would not travel a few hours out of their way to arrest a bunch of tourists in the forest, which made sense, so we continued on alone.

We arrived at a sign saying ‘Danger: Do Not Enter’ near the end of our trek, blatently ignored the sign and exercised whatever rock climbing skills we had to climb down to Sakai’s hidden swimming spot. With no tourists around we were able to swim in crystal clear waterfalls, butterflies and exquisite bird calls in such abundance we couldn’t help but reenact a few Herbal Essence ads. It was so perfect I couldn’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else in the world at that time.

After a final swim, we made our way back up the cliff and continued on to the less-than-perfect-full-of-tourists waterfalls, and were almost there when we were stopped and told we had to have our photos taken. By the tourist police.

Obviously the pissed off tour guide had tipped off the police and they wanted to take Sakai down to their offices for questioning. Which he refused to do. They probably would have decided not to bother, until the tour guide, who was waiting at the entrance to the waterfalls with the police, mentioned he didn’t have any of his paperwork about our group on him (obviously on purpose) which meant we really shouldn’t have been there. We all kind of glanced at each other with a mumbled round of ‘fuuuuuuck’ before being led to lunch by Sakai and our tour guide. And the tourist police. By this time the clear blue sky had been replaced with menacing black clouds and the sounds of thunder could be heard drawing closer by the minute. Our rice arrived when it hit - like Buddha had decided to finish off the day with a storm to prove he couldn’t just do perfect waterfalls.

The girls closest to the edge of the hut decided to move to the other end of the table to avoid the rain, about two seconds before the massice straw-covered wooden planks that made the roof collapsed spectacularly with the force of the wind. Right where the firls had just been sitting. After another chorus of ‘fuuuuuuck’ we huddled under what was left of the hut, scoffing down our rice and piss-bolting into our tuk-tuks for the open-air journey back to the guesthouse. In the storm.

It was one of those moments where you laugh histerically, because it was so funny, and yet it was nervous laughter, because it was a very close call, and we didn’t particularly want to see the inside of a Laos hospital. Needless to say, we all arrived at the guesthouse safe to see Sakai being led away by the police.

His passport safely hidden in the boys’ hut, he kind of casually called out that he would be back soon, and that he had alays managed to talk his way out of arrests in under an hour. A look of panic crossed everyone’s faces, until the guesthouse manager confirmed that our dinner and tuk-tuk were already booked. Phew, we would still get dinner then. We settled into a game of cards and a few beers when Sakai wandered back in. After telling the police he didn’t mind spending a night in jail, they realised the whole debacle wasn’t worth their time and Sakai negotiated the fine down to US$30 (and in only 35 minutes, his best time yet).

That night, toasts were made to bravery and sheer luck in the face of falling roofs and communist police, and we settled our shaken nerves with a few more beers until well after midnight.

-Sarah

PS: Photos are coming…probably when I arrive in Bangkok in the next few weeks. Anticipation is everything, you understand.