Yesterday we went to Elswout which is within (long) walking distance from where we are staying, in Holland. Back in the day this used to be a summer property for the rich. Now it is parkland which mystical pathways that lead you around into what appears to be Middle Earth. Moss and bridges and trees. So beautiful. 
A nice walk yesterday through a big, wooded park and a coffee break!
We went to Leiden today. Another beautiful city, only fifteen minutes away by train…
Fields awash with colour as seen from the train…tulip field in full bloom…
Leiden is a beautiful city that used to be walled and many windmills still stand in their original places at the edges of the old city…
Also home to Rembrandt, you might accidentally stumble on his childhood home…
Tutus and old lanes…
It’s really difficult to take a bad photo here…
Many buildings are decorated with poetry…
More tulip fields in the sunset on the way home…
Today we went a few train stations away to visit the old neighbourhood that we lived in the first time we came to Tokyo. We walked to our old guesthouse, which, while old and dark, is in a beautiful park like setting with bamboo and purple flowers in bloom. There is the final type of sakura blooming now, which happens to be my favourite because it’s layered and ruffled. Most of the cherry blossoms are now done and the other flowers, such as tulips and lilacs are starting. I am going to a Wisteria Festival next weekend and hope to have lots of beautiful photos.
(journal excerpt: February 24, 2012-Dalat, Vietnam)
We have been really enjoying our time in Dalat and I’ve been especially enjoying taking photos! I swear, every time I take out my camera, I breathe a sigh of relief.
Dalat, being the top rated location for Vietnamese honeymooners, is full of tourist kitsch and tackiness and we had to take part by taking a paddle boat swan onto the lake in the middle of the city. I haven’t had a chance to upload more recent photos of all the things we have seen here but I will be sure to include some in my next post. The paddle boat was fun but the lake is quite green with quite a few fish floating belly up. Apparently the lake is drained and dredged every decade or so having just been drained last year but you can’t tell by looking at it! The fish don’t seem to tolerate it much either. Surprisingly, this doesn’t stop people from sitting around it all day, trying to catch the diseased fish. It made me glad I’ve been off seafood the past few months. But mostly the paddle boat just showed me how out of shape I’ve become.
We then wandered around this creepy abandoned children’s amusement park, taking photos of all the weirdness (again, photos to come soon). No idea why it is not in operation anymore but there was still a woman working there, presumably renting bicycles. It’s funny how there is absolutely no such thing as copyright infringement here. The park has weird representations of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Mickey Mouse images are pretty much used everywhere in this country, including on the front of elementary schools, on T-shirts in the market, no problem! Same with the whole bootleg DVD thing. Apparently not an issue.
We went to a free flower garden next to the golf course which was nice but not very well maintained and a little run down. Perhaps because they are not collecting admissions like the other main flower garden here (update: we went to the paid flower garden yesterday, equally mismanaged and dirty). We were particularly surprised to see all the produce growing, just rotting on the vine-pumpkins, tomatoes and chili peppers, seemingly going to no use at all.
We went to the market which is huge and covers two large indoor spaces, spilling out onto the streets surrounding it. Pretty much everything is for sale here, but it’s geared more for locals with not a lot of tourist tat which is great because HCMC is full of that. In fact, I read somewhere that Vietnamese tourists make up about 80% of the tourism here, with the rest being from other countries so it is kind of nice. You feel like you are getting more of an authentic experience wandering around the country roads here. Anyway, back the market. The bottom floor is full of food, local produce and dried local fruits, sugared to the point of candying. I got suckered into buying a bag of mixed dried fruit, most of which were okay but some where just awful and far too sweet for my liking. Like most sweets in SE Asia, they are just TOO sweet for me.
The next day we went to Crazy House, a place we had heard about from Departures years ago. The photos we took (to be posted next time), do not really do the place justice but it is indeed crazy! The mastermind of a Vietnamese, female architect, Crazy house was built, I think, starting in 1990 and it is still under construction. Heavily influenced by Gaudi, as far as I can tell, Crazy House is a mass of artificial hills and terrifying bridges with no guard rails. This fellow travellers Youtube video gives a great idea of what it looks like, actually. It felt like I fell down the rabbit hole, wandering through all the weird themed rooms and we just missed the tourist buses so we mostly had it to ourselves. I don’t know about staying here though. Besides the parades of tourists walking through all day that you would have to put up with as a house guest, the place wasn’t the cleanest looking and the beds all looked rumpled and slept in, not to mention it was more expensive than any other place we had been staying in thus far. Very cool though and very worthy of the 35,000 D admission charge.
Hard to say what we will do on the rest of our days here but we’ve been enjoying wandering around, checking out all the beautiful old French architecture and drinking the cheap local wine. We’re not much for the tourist hot spots, choosing instead to walk back roads and avoid tours and major tourist sites but there is a pagoda that sounds interesting to me that you can also access by cable car. I don’t know about a cable car in the third world, but we’ll have to see!
View outside our room…
(journal excerpt): January 14th or 15th? Kanchanaburi, Thailand
Our last few days in BKK were good. We met a woman from France working with an organization assisting Burmese refugees and we talked about the situation there and ethical travel. She invited us to some kind of BUddhist ceremony to honour the teachers of her organization, including her, which will be tomorrow but we already left to come to Kanchanaburi yesterday. The ride here was better than the last time we were here which was completely miserable and despite the fact I was totally going out on a limb and guessing the name of the place we stayed last time, we drove into the familiar parking lot in the early afternoon. The place has changed a lot in the past four years and for the first time on our trip, it’s been a change for the better. Our little room by the river still exists but now has air con and the place is also now outfitted with a swimming pool and wifi. All for 70B more than we were paying in BKK for, well…a bed. We were initially disturbed by the presence of mattresses in the sun as we drove in (good indication of bed bugs) and the unfortunate wooden bed frame in our room (also more susceptible to bed bugs) but we passed that initial first nervous night bite free. Our sitting area outside our room is just as perfect as I remember it, although a lot more overgrown. Our guesthouse sits on a narrow, shallow canal off the main river (that’s the River Kwai by the way) and we are fortunately separated from the main river by a wide jungle covered sandbar. I say fortunately because there are only two annoyances to the tranquility here: one, the vacationing Thais and their hideous karaoke barges that float up and down the river and two the rampant and obvious prostitution everywhere. However, apparently there has been a big crackdown in the karaoke boats recently (can’t say the same about the prostitution, which limits the hours they can cruise up and down the river and to be honest, we rarely hear them. The prostitution, thankfully, is mainly unobtrusive. European men with women at least remotely in the same age bracket and no children or anything like that. They shack up with them here and play house presumably until they’ve had enough of one another and then go on their respective separate ways or in the case of the couple in the room by the pool today, have a massive blow out fight and scream at each other until one checks out. However, luckily our room is not by the pool, it’s by the canal and so apart from the occasional boat, it’s perfectly serene.
View of canal and jungle-y sandbar
We have a coconut and papaya tree on the banks, shallow water with koi and other fish and a million chattering frogs at night. It is a bird lovers paradise with an innumerable amount of strange jungle birds, some that sound like cats and another which sounds like a metronome…
…if we don’t want to sit by our room we can go upstairs by the pool where it is so beautiful. The whole area is basically a garden with orchids of nearly every colour, frangipani, coconut and jasmine trees. In the jasmine above the lounge chair at the pool, a little dove has a nest and every once in a while she adjusts herself and jasmine fall down from the tree. Yes, it’s that sickeningly perfect…
More view of canal outside our room…
January 16, 2012-Slightly hazy morning here in Kanchanaburi and it poured rain yesterday for about an hour. The mornings right now seem to start off cloudy and burn of throughout the day. I don’t know if it was the weather or all the junk food I’ve been eating but I felt pretty shitty yesterday evening, mentally speaking. I think it is also because I have another Skype interview with a Japanese company today and it’s made me feel weird. Not at all nervous or anything like that, but just weird because it feels strange to try to prepare for a future that I don’t even know if it exists. I guess that’s what we are always doing though, isn’t it? I am trying to get comfortable with uncertainty as Pema says. This should be a good lesson for me…
Orchids!
January 17, 2012-Sitting in the restaurant after breakfast-tummy not the greatest yesterday and today. Too much spicy food I think. I’ve had red curry three days in a row and then I topped it off with the spiciest glass noodle salad I’ve ever had. Had a western breakfast of omelette and toast and really turned off eggs and fish lately in general. Maybe I’m reading too many books on Veganism. Had the Skype interview yesterday and got positive response back within an hour. Basically what I got was provisional acceptance for a position in Japan. What that means now is that after I email them back a form agreeing to some points (kind of a preliminary contract), they send my profile out to some suitable schools and then come back to me with an offer from a school board somewhere which I will either then accept or decline. I should be elated about this. An ALT job is exactly the kind of teaching job I was applying for and hoping to get but we aren’t 100% sure if we are going back to JP or not so I am happy but reserved. Not to mention, because it’s a provisional acceptance, I’m not yet sure what the actual offer will end up being and if I’ll like it. SO what I’ve decided to do is send back the paperwork tonight and wait for the job proposal. As even my interviewer said and of course I know, I’m under no obligation to take it if it is not what I am looking for. But as far as a job goes, it looks pretty good on paper at the moment …(removal of boring details)….a bit different than what I was doing there last time, that’s for sure…something to think about…
This pool (at our guesthouse) is shaped like a wiener and b’s…seriously.
January 23, 2012-Monday again and still no reply to my JP email. I’ve actually decided to stop caring or at least to start telling myself I don’t care. If it is meant to be it will happen but at the moment I’m sceptical. Still in K.Chan and although little happens from day-to-day, a lot is happening in terms of our travel planning or at least a lot has to happen very shortly as we only have 13 days left on our Thai visa. We have, not entirely, but mostly, abandoned our plans to go to Laos for now. Perhaps abandoned entirely for this trip. I know it sounds awful but we are just not in the mood for the getting there at the moment. Our options for getting to Luang Prabang from Chiang Mai have not been very attractive to us but we are still looking into it. One option is to fly into LP on Lao Airlines (dubious reputation at best, although apparently not horrible and only 1 hour!) but it’s over $300 on the dates we have been checking. For a one hour flight, this is ridiculous and they pretty much have the monopoly as far as I can tell. Option 2 involves lengthy land based travel and a two-day horrible sounding slow boat with an overnight stop over in a nameless riverside village (okay, it has a name but …) Option 3 is the fast boat-allegedly terrifyingly dangerous (they make you wear a helmet!?) and notoriously overcrowded. So Laos isn’t really selling us so far. We aren’t the type to do the package tour thing, I won’t be getting up at the crack of dawn in LP to line up with the hordes of other tourists to take photos of the monks collecting alms and I have no desire to go tubing in Vang Vieng with all the pissed up gap year twats (sorry, that’s harsh but the truth). Laos has a tonne more to see other than that, but perhaps our time is better spent elsewhere for now. We’ve started calling all our alternative plans and ideas “just riffin'” to amuse ourselves and stop ourselves from going crazy. Don’t ask me why.
“Just riffin’ but we could go to Chiang Mai by overnight train and then come back to BKK and travel overland into Cambodia…”
“Just riffin’ but we could go to Chiang Mai, come back to BKK and get a visa for Vietnam and go back to HCM and Mui Ne for surfing…”
So far we have no less than 5 “just riffin’s…some of them more likely (go to Vietnam) and some of them just totally out there: “Just riffin’ but uhh..we could fly to Paris for a month, rent a flat and then go to JP from there!” This one is particularly tempting except there goes ALL our money in one month and umm…it’s January and I have tank tops and fisherman pants…just riffin’...sorry, I know this is funny only to us…
Frangipani, wilting in the heat…mmm my favourite smell…
I’m trying to approach this all with graditude. More: “the world is our oyster-we are so lucky!” than: “Oh my god, what the hell are we doing?!?!” We like staying here and could stay here for months probably, but our visa situation means we have to plan somewhat. This one is expiring February 6th and if we go to Vietnam we’ll need a few days to apply, plan and wait and it is also Chinese New Year today which makes the flights go up, things get busier etc. One thing I have learned though is when we try to plan too much, things tend to backfire or change so it’s a good lesson on being flexible and open to possibilities. But wow, lots of internet research to do tonight on flights and whatnot. Stay tuned…
November 12, 2011-(journal excerpt)-Last night I was saying that we havent had rain here in the evening like you often see and about 15 minutes later it started pouring continuing well into the night. Usually after dinner we walk around the beach but we couldn’t do much without getting soaked so we went back to our room and watched a movie (terrible-The Adjustment Bureau) on the computer. Today it is still cloudy which we don’t mind so much as we told ourselves we’d spend one day out of the sun to nurse our burns. We spent a bit of time swimming in the pool instead of the coean where it is a bit more shaded and met an American couple just briefly as they were on their way to lunch.
Tomorrow we will get up earlier and go to Ao Nang and Krabi as a day trip to see about getting a voltage converter as we are worried about charging our new computer and blowing the battery like M just did with his razor for the second time.
A lot has changed here-there seems to be almost a desire to move this place away from the backpacker haven it used to be towards the more upscale family oriented resort island. A new resort has been built on the shabby east side where we stay and gone are the DVD’s for sale and the movies playing in the restaurant at night and even the bookstores are gone here. The place is riddled with Russians, the retired and little kids with their parents. I certainly don’t expect a place to never change-beautiful places inevitably get discovered and I have no more claim to this area than anyone else who is here, but as M says, he feels maybe a small piece of his love for this place dies each time he comes here and we wonder if anyplace is unspoiled anymore. Maybe there are no more secret places and we don’t deserve to know about them anymore than anyone else. We are also here to take, exploit and leave…
Today our place was descended upon by a massive family of monkeys-they ran all along the rooftops, rifling through the garbage cans and tipping them over, pulling out 1/2 full yoghurt containers and first eating with a spoon and then their hands by the dripping handful. Some annoyingly loud newcomers to our bungalow strip started feeding them biscuits only to have the package ripped from his hand as the little fucker ran for the rooftop. From the asshole monkeys, to the bitchy woman in the mini-mart to ourselves-we are all here to take from each other what we can get.
November 10 was Loy Kratong-an important holiday for Thais and apparently the last major one until New Years. Beautiful “Kratong” are constructed from plants and flowers-a base made of a sawed segment of some kind of tree and is covered in orchids, marigolds and banana leaves, intricately folded with candles and sticks of incense in the middle. You can make these yourself or purchase one. The owner adds a piece of fingernail and a hair and a few baht as an offering to the goddess spirits of the water. Then the Kratong is held up to the owners heads while they make a wish or prayer and the Kratong is held up to the owners head and placed on the water to float away (after lighting the candles and incense, of course). The sea was all lit up with Kratongs and people were also shooting off fireworks and lanterns that float through the sky by flame. On Railay, the Kratong celebration seemed relatively small and subdued compared to what I imagine would be taking place in BKK on the Chao Praya where the residents must have a lot to say to the river spirits. But it was still beautiful and we sat on a second story platform open bar with pillows under the full moon and tamarind trees to watch it all take place.
Earlier I watched a woman meticulously constructing her kratong and I wondered about the sense of importance this had for her or if it was just a tradition that one does without spiritual ceremony, like putting up a Xmas tree out of annual habit. Or was the careful placement of each folded leaf imbued with her hopes and wish and maybe this was a really big deal? To construct something so beautiful but transient reminded me of buddhist mandalas made of sand and the next morning when we saw a few orchids and other bits washed ashore I thought of all those hairs, fingernails and coins sinking to the bottom in the dark water while their owners lay dreaming of their dreams full of food and drink…
Jenn Peters 