Where to go next?

Okay, having said goodbye to all my travelbuddies from 2007 it is now time to decide where to go next. Weather used to look good for up north in Chiang Mai, but it turned from "really sunny" to "partly cloudy with rain/thunderstorms" in the past few days. I also checked down south, and most of it seems to be rain all the way - only Krabi/Phi Phi has a really great forecast going for it.... Or should I skip Thailand and simply go to Vietnam, which I missed out on during the last trip? Tough decision! But as always, the old Denis Leary line i like to quote for backpacking is true yet again: "Don't make any fucking plans!"

Back from the South

Okay, I'm back in good old @home Guesthouse in Bangkok after my trip down south. Couldn't make it to Kho Pha Ngan after saying goodbye to the Swedes in Patong and got stuck for a day in Surat Thani (port town for the ferry to Pha Ngan). The rain was so intense I had to come back up north when I had the chance - Not so lucky were the thousands of people stranded on one of the islands down south (Kho Pha Ngan, Samui, Phi Phi etc), because 2-3m waves mean that no ferry will go. Even on the mainland the trains were not going, and quite a few buses were cancelled, too, they also shut down the Airports on Kho Samui and in Phuket, at least for some time, due to the heavy rain. Even 3 crocodiles escaped from the zoo in the floodings that occurred because of the heavy rain, it's really true, even though it sounds like an urban myth! Next up will be a few pictures, I just have to download them from the camera... What sucks is that I broke my eeePC's screen with some really pointy bit on my seat's footrest (laptop was in the bag down there) on the really nice and comfy 24-seat recliner-seat bus that I traveled up here with, so the top left quarter is blind, I'll go to Panthip Plaza today, need to go there anyway and I'll see if I can find someone that can repair it...

Time to move on..

After a few nights of partying, it is time to move on and fly down south to Phuket and Kho Pha Ngan to meet a few people from my 2007 trip who are both leaving soonish: Ted of the swedish posse and Nadine from Germany. Weather is supposed to be super rainy down there, so fingers crossed it changes when I get there!... Weather in Bangkok is really nice, humid, but not too hot and no rain, so let's hope that old Crowded House song actually carries some truth ("Everwhere you go, always take the weather with you..").

On the road again...

Okay, another four weeks backpacking have just started. I just arrived in Bangkok, took the bus to Khaosan Rd and checked in to my favourite okayish place slightly off the Burgerking end, with average rooms & prices, but good food and free WiFi! ;-)

It seems hardly anything changed. I'm already sweating my ass off. You're still not allowed to throw toiletpaper into the toilet, so the plumbing still sucks. ;-) The supercheap 30-Bath vegetarian Pad Thai food stall on Khaosan is even at the same place still, Khaosan is what it always was, the Tribe ladies are still flounting their wooden frogs, only the gimmicks they sell are different - the latest seem to be propeller-like things with LEDs that you shoot into the sky with a slingshot and that come down slowly. Gotta get myself one of these...

Ready to go home...?

After a few more days in Phnom Penh where we met some nice expats from Germany, USA and England I flew back to Bangkok for some final shopping (I treated myself to a battered used Sony PSP and a Nintendo Gameboy Micro VERY cheaply already in Phnom Penh - it's really great that the US-Dollar is so weak and the Euro is so strong! ;-)
Last night I met Sue again, one of Sarah's friends i had first encountered in may. We had an awesome chat and I probably learned more things about the asian/thai mindset than in the 6 months before! Thank you, Sue! ;-)

I did send a 6kg-parcel containing mainly my Terry Pratchett trophy book-collection home just an hour ago, so I have enough space to fill up now with souvenirs! ;-) Khaosan and Panthip Plaza, here I come!
I'm not sure if I look forward to go back, I guess it will be quite hard to adapt to a normal life again after such a long time travelling... I certainly look forward to a few things, especially people, but the weather is supposed to be rather cold and bad, which will be quite a shock for me I guess...

Shianoukville & Kempot

We did go for a few days down to the coast to check out Shianoukville and Kempot on the way back to Phnom Penh. There's not much to do and see in Shianoukville during off-season, and it sure rains a lot there. But judging from the bars and hotels this place should be quite lively during the main season.
Kempot is even smaller, there's a total of two pool tables in town (one of which is used as an office desk while they do some work on the place). You can go up a mountain and see an old catholic church and a casino that the French built when they were there. Because of frequent rain we decided not to go there and went to some nearby caves instead.
It was a really interesting trip, we had a total of seven guides, none older than 12 years (for a total of $4). They really did a good job in showing us all the interesting rock formations and "encouraging" us to climb down the more scary slippery ledges in the cave by making chicken sounds! ;-)

There are some dripstones that look alot like elephants, and there is a small very old temple inside the cave that is overgrown by dripstone.


We especially liked the trip to the caves, which went right through rural Cambodia, so we took alot of pictures..

Killing Fields: Horrors of the Khmer Rouge

There are some tourist attractions in the world that are not really enjoyable to see, but people go there nonetheless. Maybe it is for the shock value, maybe it is just to get a better understanding of a country's history and a glimpse into what horrible deeds humans are actually capable of once they've been brainwashed enough. What the Khmer Rouge did to Cambodia certainly qualifies for one of the most horrific regimes ever on the planet, what they did to their own people was even worse than Hitler or Stalin...
First we went to the Killing Fields just outside Phnom Penh. They have built a big tower there with 9000 skulls of all the people that they have dug out so far from the mass graves (there's alot of unopened mass-graves left). There was even a mass grave for women and children, and there's a tree they smashed babies against to kill them... When you walk through the graves that have been opened you see pieces of clothing sticking out of the ground, it is quite creepy.

The ironic thing is that the whole place is really nice and idyllic with nice trees and a lake nearby. One could say that like this it is pretty much like a graveyard, but then again this isn't anything like a final resting place, because all these thousands of people weren't just buried, but also killed there.


Just thinking that the Khmer Rouge people who worked there probably had a normal life, going drinking with friends, going home to their wives after having killed 300 people every day is quite impossible to imagine...


Afterwards we went to the S-21 prison where people were "questionned" and detained before being brought to the Killing Fields for execution. They have thousands of pictures there that the Khmer Rouge took of the detainees, it is really eerie, just imagining that all the skulls we had seen before actually are all that remains of the people you see on these pictures. Some of them even smile, and there's very many children, too...


They have tiny 2 squaremeter cells where they kept the "better" detainees, the normal ones were just chained to a big bar in one of the bigger rooms. There's no beds in the whole place so everybody had to sleep on the floor and also piss and shit there.
The numbers vary a bit, but there was anything from 14.000 to 20.000 people in S-21, and only 6-14 of them made it out alive. And this is S-21, so there were at least 20 other facilities like this all throughout Cambodia...