bonnie & clyde

We finally left Vientiane, Anke has her visa for Thailand, and we're going to vang Vieng, but we can't really stay to do the tubing. We left the next day already for Luang Prabang. Everybody says it's cool, it's charming, it's relaxed, it's beautiful and the reality is it is all that, but way too touristy. So we did not stay the 5 days we intended, onl ended up staying a small 3 days, which was enough. We met our French friend Vivien again, who we've been touring with the last couple of weeks. We had christmas together over an italian dinner, as we exchanged some gifts. It was fun. After LP we went up north to a little charming town called Nong Khiaew, perched in between the mountains overlooking the Mekong. A very cool place but the weather sucked big time. it was cold and rainy. Luckily there was a small cinema place in town, where you could rent a room with a wide screen TV and rent a DVD. We watched two movies and saw the day passing by. We wanted to stay one more day but we decided to move on. Better to be inside a car while it rains then when the sun comes out. When we looked on the internet it said there would be rain tomorrow. So we move quickly... again! Next stop... Luang Nam Tha: the road there took ages. the bus broke down several times, due to an oil leak, we waited on the side of the road for over an hour and when we did finally arrive we took a tuc-tuc for 15 minutes to arrive in a twon wih no electricity whatsoever. We looked for a place in the dark but everything was packed. Finally we did find a place, where we had no electricity and no water, but we did luckily have a bed that we enjoyed a lot! Our main stop we had planned was to be Muang Sing, where we were to spend a couple of days. The ride to the town was quicke, easy and beautiful and a italian guy we just met kept yapping away. he would not stop! the town is sleepy and not a whole lot to do here. First day we did a walk, went to tapao cultural village just about 5 km outside of town. We felt we were not used to walking anymore, our legs hurt! The second day we walked more, about 25 km, first to Kai mai, where they had a newyear festival for the Hmong people. It was great. And then a walk to see the waterfalls of Huangsay, but we did not make it all the way out there, just to a stupa on a hill and back. After MS to Huay Xai. We will have our new year's eve here. The town itself is kind of a tourist hangout with a street full of bars and guesthouses with Thailand is lurking on the other side of the river. We met a couple of australian girls and another australian couple. We had a few beers together on our rooftop terrace and then wet on to go to a party one ba was organizing in town.That seemd to be nothing so we had a pizza instead and afterwards went over to the bar across the street, which turned out to be quite cool. We got drunk, watched a couple of drunken Laotians sing karaoke and dance and celebrated newyear.
Tomorrow we'll start with the Gibbons Experience!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So we made it to the capital of Laos, after a little-to-no-sleep-nightride from savannakhet. when they promise you a bed you get a slightly inclinable seat, and no sleep at all. so we arrive tired and find ourself hastily looking for a place to sleep, which... is extremely hard if not impossible for a price under 100000 kip (10 euro). every single hoste or guesthouse is full, or we should wait until 12 for checkout, which, in this case, is hardly advisable since we need sleep right now! finally we found a double for 90, we had to wait an hour till it was ready. in the meantime, we had other stuff to attend to as well, like getting the visa's for china and thailand. anke and i decided to each go our own way for a couple of weeks, not because things are going bad (not at all) but because i would love to go to china and anke prefers getting her advanced diploma diving in thailand. we will meet up anyway in malaysia. getting the visa for china was easy, i just have to pick it up when i'm in luang prabang, a few days later. luckily the tourist agent i arranged it with has an office there. anke has no such luck, apparently they changed the rules to her game: no more free pass to thailand for 30 days when entering overland, but only 15 days now, and that's a bit too little, so she has to pay for a visa. the stupid thing is we did not arrange this on thursday morning, beacuse then we would have had it the next day and could be on our way to vang vieng, but she arranged it only on friday and since the good people at the thai embassy do not work on weekends, we have to wait until monday to pick it up, which means we're kind of stuck here. but it doesn't matter though, because anke doesn't feel so good, she has stumach-aches, so it's probably best we stay anyway. we have a bus booked to vang vieng on monday at 1.30. anke gets her visa at 1, so it will be a very close call. we hope we manage to make it because we do really not want to be stuck here another night. by the way, vientiane is a nice enough place, but it's really small and we have already seen every street, every bar and every internetshop about 10 times although i'm not sure i'm not exagerating...
soon we will be in luang prabang and we are looking forward to this!!!

see you

we have managed to leave the temples behind us, and now are heading for laos, but that will take us a few days because we almost need to go back to Phnom Penh and work our way up. the infrastructure in cambodia will certainly enjoy improvements over the following years i'm sure. the first night we stayed in kompomg cham, which is nothing more than a dusty sleepy albeit quite charming riverside town. the next day we took the bus and stranded in stung treng, which has the same qualities as the last town but is sleepier and smaller still. We arranged our ticket to get over the border with laos, which was actually really easy, since the riverside hotel where we stayed (the only backpacker place in town) arranged the lot for us. just some quick formalities at the border and laos we enter! our trip takes us to nagasang, just across the border where we hopped on a boat to Don Det, i.e. the 4000 islands. It could well be 4000 islands by the looks of it. The place is a true heaven on earth. beautiful island, lovely people, relaxed atmosphere and very cheap prices for very good accomodation and extremely good food. what need we more? we stayed 3 days, rented a sissy-bike and drove to the beach, the waterfall and up onto a boat to spot the rare irawaddy dolphin, which we saw from afar. this is the kind of place you could easily end up staying for a couple of days more. but we have some travelling to do, so, together with Vivien the Frenchman and Eric the strong and always relaxed dutchman, with whom we are travelling since kompong cham, we headed north to pakse, and on to Tadlo, a very relaxed hilltown, in the Bolaven plateau. We looked up mam Pap, since we heard she was a really cool old lady renting rooms, but she was full, so we stayed in the place next door, Samly, which was also good value. We did end up eating at Mam's place all the time. Although she just hands out weed for free and looks likes she's smoking all the time, she's not. it's just the way she is. We spent a nice relaxing day at the waterfall, and we rented a motorbike the next day to tour the region. we must have driven over 150 km with a small scooter: result was one flat tyre and a running out of gas. but that's adventure and in the end we loved the ride. we said goodbye of eric and vivien, and we took an early bus to savannakhet which is where we are now. At first sight there is nothing to see, at second sight neither, but it still remains very enchanting little town.

see hyou when we're in vientiane

yoyoyo wazzup homies!!!

we were in phnom penh for a couple of days, more than we wanted to, but we had to take care of our lao visa, and that took us a few days. so we hooked up with eva and kristof, a nice belgian couple we accidently ran into, and eva knows a good friend of anke's from school, so i guess yes the world is rather small! we had dinner the first night, poker the second and a really difficult quiz night the third, and in between we just went shopping at the markets. as for the city, it's ok, but it's nothing special. loud, crowded and hot... means very asian! that said, we did enjoy our time here! visa fixed, we were on our way to Siem Reap, home of the ever-impressive Angkor Wat. The small town itself could easliy have been on the spanish coast, right in between Benidorm and Salou. It is by far the most touristy place we've been to, but oddly enough it has kept its cool and gentleness. there are classy bars, clubs and diners everywhere, but there is enough of that old-fashioned cheap market-feel as well, so it's nicely enduring. We bought ourselves a 3-day pass to go and see the temples. One day is just not enough we guessed, and we were right. This place is huger than huge. It's an archeological temple-park, they are just scattered all around the place! we rented a bike, drove for miles on end, and the temples kept on going, and it must be said, they are astonishingly beautiful, so much you just have to see them all. of course that wasn't quite possible, so we skipped a few. The second day we tuc-tucced the whole way to Banteay Srei, about 40 km out of town, not a big one, but probably the best preserved, especially in carvings. People here say they had to be done by women's hands, so elaborate and refined no man could ever have achieved such delicacy! true... the driver parked us right outside Ta Prohm, after which we decided to head further on foot. It was a long enough way back to Angkor Wat, but we made it and the reward was smiling gently on us... a sunsoaked Angkor Wat to tinkle the senses! Now, you have temples and you have temples, well this is just the mother of all temples. It is H-U-G-E and it is beautiful, and we were in awe. But i guess we were having clear indications of temple-overload by the end of the day, and given the fact that our attention was pointing towards a nice extra outside the temple, we were kind of rushing through it. That nice extra came in the form of a free MTV-awareness concert, informing locals on the perils of human traficking. The stage was set in fornt of Angkor Wat and anyone could attend for free, only if you had a ticket though. We didn't but we stayed on and finally could slip in, like a few hundred other people. The line up was a very impressive Click Five, Duncan Sheik, Kate Miller-Heidke and none other than Placebo! We stayed till the end, and had to say we were very glad to have done so, because the concert was - oh my god!- absolutely amazing. we loved it! we got back pretty late in town though but still managed to grab a bite. Next day we were off by bus to head for Kratie, which we didn't make. We're kind of stuck in Kompong Cham, a sleepy river-town but nice enough. Tomorrow we go all the way to Stung Trang, hopefully go into Cambodia's wild, which is Ratanakiri.

See you all later

Seems we skipped Phu Quoc after all. We were not sure if the weather would hold up so decided to head to Cambodia instead. After all, they have beaches there too. So no beach right now, but the enjoyable hassles of crossing borders. The ride to tha bordercrossing was easy, the crossing itself was easy, and the ride to Sihanoukville, our first stop along the coast, was easy, albeit pricey because we had to haggle for prices with taxi and motorcycles. But we got there in the end, and it was worthed! Sihanoukville is nice, and if you manage in hitting the right beach at once (which was Otres Beach) it is actually the coolest place on earth! We were rewarded with a beautiful and quiet beachhouse, looking onto an even quieter and almost turquoise beach. The other beach is the complete opposite of ours, mass tourism, gringo hangouts, shady bars and beggars alike line up the shores. Aren't we lucky to be where we are.
We stayed a full 3 days, of which Anke did another dive for a day. She enjoyed the diving a lot, of course, but there wasn't much visibility she said, due to the rainy season and the winds. we spent another day at the beach after that, relaxing and recharging, because Phnom Penh was soon to follow, and so here we are... a medium-sized city, crawling with the usual motorcycles, tuk-tuks and vendors everywhere. It's not a beautiful city, but the area we're staying at, around Boeng kak lake is really nice, though touristy. We're waiting for the visa for Lao to be arranged. We should be getting that tomorrow so we can get the hell out of here, on our way to Angkor Wat. We're actually really looking forward to going to Lao!
Right, enough for now. Write to you later.

We traded the beauty of Hue for the one of Hoi An, in search of better weather, but sadly we couldn't find it either. seems Hoi An is worse off. Nevertheless, its beauty still impresses. It's an old colonial port-town and it feels and looks that way too; small cosy streets lined up with bars, restaurants and the million tailors Hoi An is famous for. This is tailor city and if you can't find your suit here, you won't find it anywhere. You can have pretty much everything made here, the fabric, color, design and fashion you desire... they fix you up in one day. So that's what we've done, i had them make me a suit and anke a couple of trousers, a skirt and a dress. Sending it over to Europe was pretty expensive though, but well worth the trouble. We left for Danang the day after our clothes were made, to take a plane to Saigon. With weather like this we decided to skip Nha Trang and Mui Ne and head straight for the big city. Saigon is not at all like Hanoi, it feels much bigger and much more modern. The taxi from the airport to the center took us an hour, finding a hostel about 5 minutes. The gringo area of Saigon is packed with cheap hostels, and they all seem pretty nice. So Saigon... means War remnants Museum (everybody does), Reunification Palace (everybody does) and the cosy markets (almost everybody does). We spent a couple of hours walking around in another part of town and felt like we were the only ones there, untill we stumbled upon a market and decided we were not. Tourists are just everywhere in Vietnam. When we had had enough of Uncle Ho's City, we went to My Tho, a typical mekong town, did an overpriced tour there with a really cute Vietnamese girl guiding us (she spoke English rather well, but it must be hard for them pronouncing these strange words), and after My Tho we went to Can Tho, another Mekong village, although this one feels much more like the big Casino at the seaside. We found the million tourists again. Of course all of them come for the floating markets, and so did we. The markets itself are pretty disappointing, but maybe we were just too early and not in the weekend. But i guess it's just like this. The area around it, the Mekong river, is absolutely gorgeous though. we spent six hours just wandering about the palm-lined rivershores, sunbathing and meditating. Sometimes you really don't need much to make the most of it.
We are having a bus going to Rach Gia today, and if all goes well we should be on a boat to Phu Quoc island tomorrow. Sadly the weather forecast has some bad news. Clouds are gathering and chances of rain are growing, at least for saturday. Whatever the outcome, we shall swim god damn it!

see you later
a and b

Halong Bay was just as we were told: Gorgeous! Just like the pictures! No wonder they named this Unesco World Heritage: hundreds of high mountains that rise up from the sea, a beautiful and peaceful scenery. We took a boat for the day to explore the landscape, go to the caves and have a swim on a deserted beach by a rock, magnificent.
After that we had a similar experience in Ninh Binh, same same but different (the typical, and only, phrase the Vietnamese can say This time we go with a tiny little boat for two persons along the river in between the rice fields, you can feel that you are in the countryside, everything is less developed, maybe that's what makes it so special too. Again, it is difficult to desribe its beauty, you can always take a look at the pictures on my facebook.
The trip to get there was a bit more difficult though, trying to take a bus when millions of Vietnamese pull at your shirt to take you on their motorbike or taxi, to drop you off at the wrong bus station, to try to ask when there is a bus to the people at the desk who do not understand a word of English, not even the word 'bus'... sometimes it gets quite frustrating, but when you think about the way people grow up here and there past, you can not blame them... then we took a night bus to Hue, the beds where just big enough for a Vietnamese person, so we were sleeping with the upper part of our body in the hallway, travelling can't always be pleasure...
Hue is very beautiful, we have visited the royal palace today, for which you need a whole afternoon to check out all the different temples and gardens, really beautiful! You can still see the results of the Vietnam war, they are reconstructing the whole thing, but it still is very impressive!

We left thailand... for now, but we'll be back later. It's Vietnam on the menu right now, and the tastings aren't bad. As we arrive, Hanoi seems to be wet. A typhoon just passed here, result: 40 dead! But the gods clearly are with us, and they give us a bluesky sunny Hanoi the next day. We heard many things about this city, and they all seem to be true. there are literally thousands of motorbikes jamming the streets, making you run for your life as you cross the street. there are millions of street and snack vendors paving the roads and there are billions of tourists! or so it seems. it really is a hotspot for tourists, and although it isn't as bad as bangkok, it's getting there. But with reason, Hanoi's a lovely place to be for a couple of days, and there is really more to see than meets the eye! Next stop is Sapa, an old French colonial hilltown up in the mountains in northwest vietnam. Getting there seems best by rail but only possible by nighttrain. The conditions were fairly good but not good enough to give us a good night's sleep, so we were pretty tired when we got out next morning, and what you don't want at that moment is a string of vietnamese dragging your arms into taking their tourbus to Sapa or any place you'd want to got to, for about triple the price you should normally pay. It seems their tactics pay off, because a whole bunch of tourists that hit these parts are elderly, coming in groups or by organized tours, and as everybody seems to know around here, they bare more of that desirable cash, and more importantly, they seem to be more eager to spend it! Not us though, because Bonnie and Clyde are of the budget kind, and we find our own way! We did, we got into Sapa and found ourselves a pretty cheap hostel, with an amazing view, but without a heater. then again, none of the hotels do. It gets pretty freezing at night, but since we're the lucky weather-kids, the climat was mild on us. First day took us to Cat Cat village, just off the road out of Sapa. It's a 3-km walk, the scenery's breathtaking and the hilltribe people that roam about every possible street around this area are very friendly, but pushy when they gets to selling. So the word for today is 'ignore', a word we'll be using lots thereafter. We had our dinner at a small restaurant in the main street, cheap and very tasty. and about every bar in town sells its happy hours to the eager tourists, so we too enjoyed a double cocktail at a local hip bar. Second day we rented a motorbike and hit the valley to Lach Kim, just southeast of Sapa. Beautiful scenery, again, partially cloudy and getting colder by the minute, especially as you catch the winds head-on.
We went to Ta Phin as well, a beautiful little village about 15 km out of Sapa. truth be told, the villages are nice but if you've seen one, you've seen them all. the hilltribes are friendly, but same goes here, and the scenery...well, same as well. So that's why we decide to leave soon and do our trekkings elsewhere, when we cross northern laos and thailand. For now, it's back to hanoi and directly through to Halong Bay. Hope the weathergods agree in following our trail!
We see you soon.

I haven't had the time yet to write about the past few weeks in Thailand, we were too busy relaxing on the beach and having massages
But I will try to repair things and give you a short overview of the 3 weeks with Griet in Thailand: great!
After one day of culture shock in Bangok, beautiful temples, Buddha's and Grand Palace, but still trying to adapt to the humid and hot weather, we took a plane to go and cool off at the beaches in the South. We flew to Phuket, but just stayed one night there in order to go to the islands asap. We went to check out Phang Nga, "James Bond Island", which is a beautiful place, especially the boat ride there is really magnificent. Through jungle on a curly river with our personal driver, we explored the gorgeous scenery, passed by some nice villages built on the water, a great experience!
After that we went to Krabi, which turns out to be 'freak town', where we met a shemale, some drunken Vikings and a toothless lesbian, we didn't feel totally at ease... So the next day we decided to go to Koh Siboya and meet the French guys there we met in Bangkok, Christof and Manu. Ko Siboya is a beautiful Island, we rented a bungalow and felt as we were the only people on the whole Island! We certainly were one of the few tourists, it is a deserted but beautiful place. We relaxed, went swimming, played some cards and drank some beers, not bad
We went with them to the Island next door, Koh Lanta, which was also quite deserted, it felt as if they were still reconstructing everything after the Tsunami, but the scenery was extraordinary. We went diving there, very nice, we saw a giant turtle, finally! The next day we rented two scooters and discovered the Island, with a fantastic multi-coloured sunset to finish the day.
We said goodbye to our friends to continue our trip to the other side of Southern Thailand, Koh Tao. We took a night boat and felt like fugitives trapped in between boxes sleeping on the floor, woke up only one hour after the boat had arrived to discover a relaxed beach with white sand, and a blue and greenish sea of 28 degrees, mmm... We were quite tired after travelling two weeks, so decided to stay some more days on Ko Tao to rest, and go diving off course. We went diving two times, but actually we had expected a bit more of it, we did not see that much fish and the coral was not very colourful, but I guess we got a bit spoiled... The second dive was already a lot nicer, but a pity we did not see the sharks! We met jesse and Ine from Ghent on the beach, what a coincidence! We had a nice BBQ on the beach with them, went to the bars looking at the locals playing with fire, real artists, even a 6 year old! The last evening we went to the Blue Moon Party on the mountain, there weren't a lot of people so it was not the best party ever, but the decoration and music were really nice!
That was the end of our time in the South, we returned to Bangkok where I saw Bart!!! We had some great last days in bangkok, with a lot of shopping and massage for me and Griet, Ping Pong show for Bart and going out In Bangkok!
Bye bye Griet, I will miss you!

The times has come. I quit the job, started packing and am ready for take-off. Tomorrow night, if all goes well, I'll be joining Anke and Griet in Bangkok, somewhere along Khao San. This seems to be the Gringo-street of the world, so what better place to kick off! Guess it won't hurt, matter of adjusting to the pace of life over there.
Really miss my darling, after 2 and a half weeks we can finally be together!!! so honey... HERE I COME!!!!!!!!!!!