Kanchanaburi, Thailand

Monday to Wednesday, 13 to 14 November 2006

Kanchanaburi is a 2 hour bus-ride to the west of Bangkok. It was made famous by the World War II film "The Bridge on the River Kwai". Eager to satisfy the increasing number of tourists visting the town after the film was released, locals started saying that a bridge at the town was the one from the film. We learned that this was mostly codswallop. As we were visiting the bridge, a historian was giving an interview to a camera crew there. He explained to them that this bridge was in no way as strategically important as the film made out. We got talking to him afterwards and he said that there were a number of other bridges on the river linking up the Burma-Thailand "Death Railway" (over 100,000 POWs died building it) and these continued functioning up until 1945. So, the myth was shattered. Next thing they'll be saying is that hobbits don't exist...

We stayed at the Jolly Frog hostel, which was an oasis of calm, set nicely beside the River Kwai. An oasis of calm, that is, except for the man in the room next door. An elderly fellow, clad from head to toe in what looked like Daz white pyjamas, he spent the day mumbling to himself and pacing the balcony outside his room. After seeing him howl like a hyena at one of the staff, we just thought he was a bit unhinged. Then, at 4.30 am the next morning, we were woken through the paper-thin walls to him chanting and opening and closing doors in his room. Not sure what was going to happen next, we didn't sleep for the rest of the morning. We were told later that the man was some kind of buddhist monk who had to get up at sunrise to say prayers. It seems that being a holyman can excuse all sorts of bad behaviour though: later that day, he roared through bathroom wall that "everyone must worship the universe"! If only they would do it quietly!

Kanchanaburi was a great place to visit. We trekked through lush forest to the Erawan Falls, regarded by some as the most beautiful waterfalls in Thailand. They lived up to the billing: the waterfalls are on 7 tiers and, at the highest one, you can go for a dip in a pool just below the waterfall. We also visited a "Tiger Temple": a sanctuary for tigers who can't survive in the wild, and did an elephant ride. The former seems to be a genuine attempt to provide a home for tigers. Not so sure about the elephants though as their minders seemed to be pretty brutal with them at times.

After one tour, our Thai guide invites us, and Itje and Annelies, two Dutch girls we have become friends with, on a night out in Kanchanaburi. We are chaffeured by the guide's friends on scooters at lightening speed to one of the town's live music venues. We are the only foreigners there and get to see some impressive Thai hip-hop and some less impressive Johnny Logan imitators. We pass on the scooter rides back to the hostel but then find out that there are no taxis in the town - only taxi scooters. After another hair-raising journey home, we are tired enough to sleep through the monk's morning prayers.

Unfortunately, we have left alot of the photographs from Kanchanaburi on a computer in a Thai internet cafe. These include the ones of the waterfalls - Dara a.k.a Ursula Andress in swimming togs - so they may appear on the internet in any event. For the ones we managed to salvage, click here.

Bangkok, Thailand

Friday to Sunday, 10 - 12 November 2006

Our taxi from Suvarnabhumi Airport to Bangkok is stopped at a police roadblock. While the recent coup may have passed off without a bullet being shot, it's a bit unnerving. Our fears are put to rest when the taxi driver explains in reverential tones that King Bhumibol's calvalcade has passed by and the motorway must be cleared for him. The royal family are held in universally high esteem in Thailand and you are advised not to say a bad word about them. We give an understanding "ah!" and sit back, wondering whether waiting for a king is better than waiting for the Dublin Port Tunnel to be finished.

The hub for backpackers in Bangkok is Khao San road but, on good advice, we stay on Ram Bhuttri road, at the Ram Bhuttri Village Inn. The rooms are adequate and (a big plus for Leahanne) it has a swimming pool. On the downside, the hotel is under siege. A strip of tailors' shops lead up to the entrance and a dozen young men, dressed in the finest Flash Harry threads, try to seduce you with their bon homie and subtle sales pitches like "Hey Irish!", "Here is my card, I give you good suit!" and (for the early day passers-by) "What's the story, morning glory?". It's amusing the first time you hear it and politely refuse. By the twentieth time, when you tell them no, you don't want to be dressed like a blaxploitation pimp, you feel like wringing their necks.

We didn't really take to Bangkok. It may have been to do with the sticky heat and traffic. It might also have to do with us feeling that, while in Russia and China we might have been a bit off the beaten track, Bangkok is a mecca for foreign travellers. It shows in the mass of western bars, restaurants and shops around the place. This takes away a bit from the mystique of the city. The streets around Khao San are filled with over-tatooed and under-washed Westerners, doing their best impressions of Sixties flower children. We also see dozens of men, mostly middle-aged, with their young Thai "girlfriends". Are these sex tourists or is it true love?

All in all, the scene is not a pretty one and we are glad to move on.

For more pictures, click here.

Hong Kong

Wednesday and Thursday, 8 and 9 November 2006

We spend two days in Hong Kong. "Spend" is the operative word: we go through more money in these two days than we did in the previous two weeks in China. Hostels are pretty bad value here, costing upwards of US$20. Alot of them are in the ambitiously-named Chungking Mansions. The "Mansions" are in a nasty-looking tenement building which looks as if it needs to be exorcised by a few hundred energetic cardinals armed with a fire engine of holy water. We stay instead in the comfortable Park Lane Hotel, which makes a bit of a dent in the pocket.

Despite the expense, Hong Kong was a great city to experience. You can still see the British influence: the car registration plates, street signs and double deckers buses are the same as the ones you'd see in London. What makes the city though is the spectacular skyline of Hong Kong Island. We take a tram up to the top of Victoria peak for a view. During the day it's a bit hazy so we can't see much. At night though it's better and we take a Star Ferry from Tsim Sha Tsui on the mainland across to the Island. From the boat we get a great panorama of the lit-up skyscrapers.

After one hectic day of sightseeing, we "take" afternoon tea at the Peninsula Hotel. It's all very Hyacinth Bucket: the cucumber sandwiches, cut into neat triangles, are tiny and the waiters have never heard of jumbo breakfast rolls!

For more photos, click here.

Lijiang and Tiger Leaping Gorge, China

Wednesday to Tuesday, 1 to 7 November 2006

Lijiang is in southwest China. Fairly recently named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the local tourism industry likes to call it the "Venice of the East". Its Old Town consists of hundreds of old wooden houses built around a network of narrow cobblestone streets, bridges and streams. From a hill overlooking the Old Town, the roof-tops look like a set from "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". At night it has a bit of a wonderland look to it as the place is lit up by hundreds of red lanterns and floating candles bobble along the streams. Outdoor bars look out on the waterways and the atmosphere is pretty rowdy (for China). Groups of Chinese tourists in opposing bars try to out-sing each other, issuing a challenge that sounds like "Yeah so! Yeah so! Yeah yeah so!". We help an American tour group from Alabama to rise to the challenge, with patchy renditions of "The Fields of Athenry" and "The Irish Rover" (to our shame, the only Irish songs we know complete verses of, apart from the national anthem!).

We stay at Mama Naxi's Guesthouse. "Mama" herself is a canny businesswoman but, as the name suggests, has a maternal side. She insists that we all have breakfast and dinner at her place. Woe betide anyone who misses out on dinner as Mama will welcome you back to the guesthouse with the stern interrogation "What, no Mama dinner?!?". In fairness, the banana pancakes we get for breakfast are tasty and the spread put on for dinner would feed a small army.

For photos of Lijiang, click here.

We spend 3 days trekking the nearby Tiger Leaping Gorge. The gorge is ranked according to some definitions as the deepest river canyon in the world. It is spectacular. Vertigo-sufferers wouldn't fancy the sheer drop of a few hundred feet into the frothy gorge below. We join up with Rob and Michelle, from Adelaide, for the trek: they give us a bit of a crash course on Australian culture (e.g. toilets, comparing the merits of Australian "drop dunnies" with the Chinese "squatters") and it's good to be able to chat to take the mind off the pain of climbing some of the hills. The "28 bends", a long snaking path up to the top of the gorge, is the toughest bit: at every bend you have to stop and catch your breath. Meanwhile the locals stroll up. At bend 27, one guy tries to take advantage of our knackered state and scam money out of us for photographs of the gorge. We later learn that he is a bit of a thief and has managed to extort money out of tourists as a finder's fee for cameras that have "gone missing". We stay at the Halfway Guesthouse, the toilets of which are pretty smelly but have a great view over the gorge. On the final day, we walk through farmland to the short ferry crossing over to Daju village. From there we take a bone-shaker of a minibus back to Lijiang.

For photos of Tiger Leaping Gorge, click here.

There is not much else to report from Lijiang, although Dara does eat a creature's lung, mistaking it for a mushroom. Should have stuck to Mama's home-cooking.

Shanghai, China

Friday to Wednesday, 27 October to 1 November 2006

Shanghai is a good break after a few weeks of roughing it. We are staying with Caitriona, one of Dara's friends from college, who works in the Irish consulate. Her official title is Vice Consul but "Substitute Mammy" should be added to this, as she takes great care of us. Ham and cheese sandwiches and rashers, sausages and Barrys Tea breakfasts never tasted so good.

On Friday we go to the Blarney Pub's monthly Irish night. Irish expat pubs often have the tacky "Seamus O'Shenanigan's" look about them. The Blarney is authentic though and the scene there is typical of alot of Irish pubs on a Friday night: plenty of flushed-faced Irish shouting at each other about the decline of their parish's underage hurling. (Shanghai hosted the Asian Gaelic Games a few weeks ago and Michael O'Muirceartaigh did a bit of commentary for the games, waxing lyrical about Cáit's libero role in the Shanghai Ladies' defence.)

Cáit gives us a quick walking tour of Shanghai. It's great to have a local showing us around and a big improvement on our usual routine of standing at street corners holding street maps at weird angles. The tour takes in Dongtai Lu antiques market, the Bird & Insect Market (seeing the bizarre accessories Chinese keep for their pet crickets), the old streets which are to be levelled in advance of the 2010 Expo, and the Bund. We notice that, like other places we have seen in China, alot of Shanghai toddlers wear what we like to call "split-arse pants". Toilet training here skips the whole nappies and "Junior Huggies" stages. Instead parents prefer their toddlers to "go commando" and have a discreet slit on the backside of their trousers. No matter the place, should Nature come calling, their kids are able to answer immediately.

We also do a bit of shopping. DVDs are very cheap: 1 Euro per DVD. You get what you pay for though: the quality varies and DVD covers are thrown together - for some, it looks as if a non-English speaker downloaded reviews from the internet and did a cut-and-paste job. For "Wedding Crashers" the glowing review is: "This is a one-gag movie which runs out of steam after the first 20 minutes". For clothes, No. 580 Nanjing Xi Lu is one of the last counterfeit shopping markets on Shanghai's main shopping strip (the city is keen to improve its image and has tried to shut down alot of these). We try to improve our haggling skills but the shop-owners here are big on emotional blackmail and try their best to make you feel as if you are ruining their livelihood if you don't pay the sky-high tourist prices. The trick of bargaining as far as you can and then threatening to walk away to the next shop works sometimes. (The price for a Mizuno driver plummeted from 60 to 20 euro when we started to head for the exit of one golf shop.)

We had a great few days in Shanghai so a big thanks to Cáit who was the perfect host. It'll be difficult to get back to roughing it...

For more photos click here.

Lhasa, Tibet

Sunday to Friday, 22 - 27 October 2006

We fly to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. The new Beijing-Lhasa Express is booked out for months in advance. Taking the train would have made it easier to adjust gradually to the altitude. Instead, for the first two days in Lhasa (at 3650 metres) we are slowed down a bit. Physically, we feel as if we're constantly walking uphill. Headaches and light-headedness come and go. It takes a while to complete challenging mental exercises (like figuring out which way is up on the street map or Pepsi versus Coca Cola). We don't do much and have to be content with watching CCTV9, China's English-language "news" channel, and the sports channel which seems to show nothing but a continuous loop of badminton.

Our hotel is in the western half of the city where the Han Chinese live (as opposed to the native Tibetans). While not quite ethnic cleansing, there are signs everywhere of China aggressively settling Han Chinese in the city. There is an obvious military presence here. It is clear that China is concerned about the stability of the "Tibet Autonomous Region" and this is nowhere more evident than at the Potala Palace. This is the traditional seat of the Tibetan government and former residence of the Dalai Lama. Nervous that this could be the centre of a revolution, just as it was in 1959 after which the Dalai Lama had to flee the country, soldiers and surveillance cameras abound within the palace, keeping an eye on the caretaker monks.

In the Tibetan half of the city, the atmosphere is completely different. Lhasa means "place of the gods" and Buddhist pilgrims from all over the country converge here. The Jokhang Temple and the pilgrim circuit around it, the Barkhor, are filled with a moving mass of monks and pilgrims, chanting, swinging their prayer wheels and prostrating themselves on the worn flagstones outside the temple. Inside the darkly-lit temple, incense mixes with the smell of rancid yak butter. Yak butter is a big part of Tibetan life and is used here as a kind of candle wax. The smell of it is pretty bad but there's no escaping it. Some Tibetans smear themselves in it as a form of sunblock. It is also used to make yak butter tea which tastes woeful (think of a mix of sour butter and sweaty sports socks left in the sun for a fortnight: it's WMD in a teapot).

We visit the Sera monastery outside Lhasa. It's the site every afternoon for public debates among about 100 monks from the monastery. The format is as follows: one monk stands, facing one to two monks sitting crossed-legged on the ground. The standing monk makes an assertion/puts a question of Buddhist theology to his counterpart(s). He rolls his prayer beads up his left arm, leans back on one foot, raises his right arm to the sky and marks each point by lurching towards his opponent(s), spearing his right hand at them and clapping it against his left hand. He lets out a yelp as well for added effect. It's a bizarre scene. The monks are of all ages. Some are very young novices who don't seem bothered about the whole thing until the supervisor monk comes around with his clipboard. Others are showmen and like to perform for the crowd of tourists looking on. A bit of footage can be seen here.

We make an overnight trip to Samye monastery, about 100km from Lhasa. Our guide tells us a bit more about the buddhas and icons we see in the temples. He tells us that among the buddhas shown, some are "bad buddhas" and have their faces covered so that people cannot look on them. However they cannot be removed from the temples because some Tibetans believe in them. With bad buddhas knocking about the place it seems that buddhism is not as straightforward as sitting under a tree and waiting for enlightenment...

Our week in Tibet witnessed a big event as well: Leahanne's birthday! It wasn't quite dinner at the Ritz but we had chocolate birthday cake at The Tibet Summit Fine Art Cafe where the staff did a good job of singing "Happy Birthday to You" (drowning out Dara's tone-deaf wailing) and followed this up with yak burgers and fries at the Dunya restaurant. We're also getting the hang of Skype (telephone calls over the internet) so it was great to be able to call Leahanne's Mum, Miriam, in Dungarvan on the day.

For more photos, click here.

Xi'an, China

Friday and Saturday, 20 and 21 October 2006

It's a miracle the pilot managed to land in Xi'an. The airport, like the rest of the city, is cloaked in thick smog and the ground first came into view about 15 seconds before touchdown. On the basis of this performance, the dare-devil pilots of China Eastern Airlines would laugh in the face of the fog at Cork International Airport. The pollution seems to be a real problem though as, even at ground level, it's difficult to see more than 100 yards in front of you.

Xi'an's stand-out tourist attraction is the 2000 year-old tomb of Qin emperor Shi Huang, which is guarded by the Terracotta Warriors. About 8000 life-sized warriors and horses have been unearthed at the site. On our way there we get talking to a friendly local, Lee, who explains that the smog is a year-round phenomenon and is down to peasants burning vast amounts of wood and other fuels. (According to the guidebook, Xi'an is one of the most industrialised cities in China so the peasants might not be the only ones to blame.) Lee also offers to give us a quick lesson in Mandarin. The first phrase we learn and the one he emphasises to be the most important one in the language is not "hello" or "what way is it to the train station?" but "how much does it cost?" ("Duoshoo qien?"). As haggling over the price of things seems to be a national pastime, this might prove to be a useful phrase!

A massive tourist village has grown around the site of the Terracotta Warriors. There are stalls selling the usual souvenirs, including a few billion replica Terracotta Warriors and an odd-looking fruit (we think pomegranate) which we sample as we are trying hard to reach our target of five portions of fruit and veg a month. The site itself was discovered in 1974 and conspiracy theorists say that it is all part of a grand swindle, that the Terracotta Warriors were mass produced, kicked about the place a bit to give them an ancient look and then buried in the ground. Some are so well preserved that this is believable but we prefer to think that they are the real thing. The hundreds of warriors aligned in battle formation around the tomb are eery to look at and must have scared the bejaysus out of a few tomb-raiders down the centuries.

Suffering from Abrakebabra-withdrawal symptoms we search out the Muslim quarter in Xi'an to find kebab. The search is long but we find a place that serves a mean kebab. The chaos of this part of the city is the side of Xi'an we like the most as it feels a bit more authentic than the tourist spots that have been given the Bunratty-makeover.

For more photos of Xi'an click here.