A swing through Southeast Asia
by Debbie Shorey and David Briggs
Debbie and Dave spent the winter of 2004 in SE Asia and here are some of the highlights of their trip in Debbie’s own words.
Passenger Boat, Cambodia
Vietnam was a great place to visit, very well organized and geared up for tourists. We went from Saigon to Hanoi in 5 weeks and loved every day. We took a 4 day boat tour on the Mekong Delta and stopped along the river at different villages seeing locals making furniture, incense and one place that made all sorts of candy out of rice (since there’s so much of it!). We got to try snake wine, saw a floating fish farm and took a ride in a little row boat that the women paddle with their feet. Then we headed north to Nha Trang where we snorkled and relaxed with $2 pedicures! Went to Danang with all its war memories. Then to Hoi An, a lovely little town on the water, very touristy but with great shopping and lots of good cheap restaurants. We moved on to Hue where we took a dragon boat tour – very colorful and lots of fun, stopping at pagodas, temples and local villages. We saw Ho Chi Minh’s house and a Buddhist university where they were all in their saffron robes singing and chanting. Did a tour of the demilitarized zone. Then we caught a train to Hanoi, a CRAZY city with a million restaurants and hotels. Saw the Hanoi Hilton – a prison during the French occupation – and the mausoleum where Uncle Ho lies... really neat. A real “to do” with all the formally dressed guards and the man himself in the casket was really, really an experience! And he did NOT want this, he wanted to be cremated! Later we took in a water puppet show. Then we headed north to Sapa where some people known as the “minority people” live who are darker and whose dress and customs are totally different. Good trip! Finally in Halong Bay we did a 2 night live-aboard on a boat just like the old pirate boats. JUST FANTASTIC! Beautiful scenery cruising among the islands and stopping at caves.
Cambodia was much less organized though easy to go through. They get very little tourism except in Siem Reap the hub of the155 square mile Angkor district where the most famous of the 44 temples built between the 9th and 14th century lie. The breathtakingly stunning Angkor Wat is adorned with giant carved heads and elegant bas-reliefs. It is the world’s largest religious structure and is surrounded by a moat filled with lilies and topped by pineapple-shaped sandstone towers with walls covered in carved figures representing Hindu myths. Angkor was a metropolis of a million or so people, the capital of Khmer kingdom, which flourished for 500 years, peaking in the 12th century. This visit was one of the highlights of our trip.
Debbie at the Budda Park, Laos
We spent 4 nights in Phnom Penh which is a big city, very dirty and very busy but with very friendly people. Here we saw the French embassy and the Silver Palace after which we did an overnight excursion by speed boat to see fresh water dolphins in Kratie. Next day we went to Compong Cham, the third largest city in Cambodia but which is only about as big as Plymouth. Here’s where the locals sell giant spiders fried! Then we moved on to Battambang, the second largest city still nothing more than a big town. We had a wonderful time in both places touring local villages on the back of motorbikes. REALLY NEAT. Saw the REAL people, rice paddies, so many animals, lush greenery and rivers, hard to explain how beautiful it was. So far removed from the rest of the world – no TV or radio or Madonna, just living, banging laundry on rocks, kids riding buffalos in the fields, people in the rice fields, all of them happy and comfortable just living. Amazing!
Luan Prabang
Laos was just beautiful and had hardly any tourists at all except in the town of Luang Prabang, a UNESCO World Heritage site, that has lots of temples. There are also rivers to raft and trekking amid hill tribes. We found the people there so gentle and soft spoken. They never stared at us or asked us for anything, a contrast with Vietnam that has lots of street vendors and beggars. Further on, in Tad Lo, we stayed in a resort right on a waterfall and took a fab elephant ride through streams and villages. It was fantastic and very cheap!
Long Necked Women, Thailand
In Thailand we spent time in Bangkok where there is plenty to see though there is lots of pollution and many tourists everywhere. In Chiang Mai we went to see the hill tribes famous for their long necked women. The longer a woman’s neck, the more beautiful she is considered to be. The neck gets elongated by the addition of brass rings around the neck. After 3 months of traveling on buses and trains with chickens and sacks of rice, we decided to spend our last 2 weeks in southern Thailand, in Phuket, a big resort island in an area made famous by such movies as James Bond's "Man with the Golden Gun" and the Leonardo di Caprio movie "The Beach". From here we took a 4 day "live-aboard" scuba diving trip in the Andaman Sea where we had the most awesome experience of swimming with 15 ft. manta rays. The rest of the time we enjoyed the sun and surf, seafood and sunsets, relaxing and reading before returning to the cold New England weather.
