The final scorecard

Sean: 
Sus'dai, Selamat Malam, G'day, I'm not sure which country I'm in... actually I'm sitting in a cafe at the Kuala Lumpur airport waiting for the Air Asia night flight to Perth, having just caught the afternoon flight from Phnom Penh.

After our last post we spent 5 days at Otres beach on the coast, a long quiet beach with just a few sets of small bungalows, waves lapping, very peaceful, the perfect place to relax at the end of our journey. After that we came and spent just 1 night in Phnom Penh.  We could easily have spent longer there, as it's such a nice city, with a beautiful water front spanning 2 rivers that join together and a very laid back and relaxed feel, more like the other river towns we've visited and nothing like other Asian capital cities we've been to. We also treated ourselves to a nice hotel with a pool, sauna and jacuzzi.


Otres beach from our bungalows.



Sunset at Otres beach.

Finally finishing off that book.
(my feet got nicely tanned.)


And now for a few statistics:  In total we have cycled 3220km and walked 512km, during which time we had zero punctures, 2 minor bike repairs and four sore legs/feet.  We have had over 1400 hits on the blog and visited 13 countries, including 2 very poor ones, Nepal and Cambodia. 

In Cambodia in particular we've noticed the presence of a number of international aid agencies  that seem to be doing some great community development work. The country really seems to be going forward in a good way after such a horrendous period of recent history.  Nepal, despite all of its tourism and natural beauty, is in a worse position, but like Cambodia has emerged from years of civil war to a period of peace so hopefully things will improve. 

Anyway, although we didn't set out to do anything on this trip for the purpose of fundraising, we would like to encourage you to support some of the organisations working in Cambodia and Nepal, such as Oxfam, Care international and Save the Children.  Below are some links to the Oxfam Australia web site where you can either donate or buy gifts that will help fund their projects. If you are not in Australia or the UK you can Google their link for your country.


Deep fried tarantulas at a roadside stall.
There is a recipe for these in the Oxfam cookbook.



Oxfam program in Cambodia:



http://www.oxfam.org.au/about-us/countries-where-we-work/cambodia



If you don't like spiders, try the cockroaches



Buy gifts in Australia:

http://www.oxfamunwrapped.com.au/

In the UK:
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/shop/oxfam-unwrapped
That's all for now.  We will still try to remember to put up some posts from time to time now that our trip is over.

best wishes
Sean and Sama

PS The laptop ran out of power before this could be posted, so now back in Perth.

Days 12-16 of Cambodia cycle

Sama:  Sus'dai

It's been a fabulous experience cycling along the Mekong, the villages are picturesque and everyone  is friendly with lots of smiles and waves.  After a few hours of all this waving I feel I need an automatic waving hand like you see on the rear windows of cars. The early morning starts at 5:30 each day have worked out well, the Cambodians are very early risers, normally up by 5am to get out into the fields by sunrise. Even in the towns large groups are up early doing aerobics in the dark in public squares, to a fast thudding beat, like a rave party.

We spent the last days of the cycle travelling to the Cambodia-Laos border, where we stayed at Ou Svay commune and visited Preah Rumkel commune by river boat.  They are both very isolated and up until a few years ago neither village was accessible by road, but now Ou Svay has a dirt road leading to the new Chinese funded super smooth highway and bridge.  Despite this, it is still very peaceful and simple. At the homestay there was electricity for just 3 hours per day. We fell asleep and awoke to the sound of the family chanting buddhist prayers.

Ferry across the Mekong

Mekong running high after the wet season.

View across the dolphin bay into Laos.

The two villages have only recently opened up to tourism, so it's early days with hardly anyone speaking even a little English, and as we had only a few Khmer words and phrases a lot of the communication happened by sign language and drawing pictures. A number of NGOs - including Australian ones - have done a good job in setting up  signs and an information website for any interested travellers. It is such a beautiful place with a huge potential for ecotourism.

Most of our rides have been on simple dirt tracks along the banks of the Mekong, so every morning our breakfast stops were incredible. One day, however, on the super smooth Chinese highway, which is an easy, if uninspiring, leg of the journey, we were in a very sparsely populated area and as there was hardly any traffic and we hadn't seen so much as a wooden shack for ages we decided to stop for breakfast at the side of the road. After 2 hours of cycling anywhere will do. After just a few minutes of tucking into our bowls of fruit and muesli, a large group of school children appeared out of nowhere and came running down the road towards us with smiles and shrieks of laughter and hellos.  Being a little concerned for their safety on the edge of a major (if hardly used) international highway we decided to round them up and go and find their school, which turned out to be an incomplete structure with no walls resembling the part underneath the house where you might keep the buffaloes. 


The teacher hadn't arrived yet and the kids were keen to show us their desks and blackboard and before we knew it we were running an impromptu lesson complete with counting and action songs in English until their bemused (but very friendly) teacher arrived on her motorbike. On reflection being a teacher has opened many doors both in Nepal and Cambodia and has helped me appreciate how important education is to people in both of these countries.


Sadly in Cambodia there are always some reminders of the armed conflict that took place here, still leaving its legacy with thousands of active landmines. Just days after arriving in Cambodia in a nearby village a tractor carrying 16 people ran over an anti tank mine, killing everyone. The land mine deaths are counted each year in hundreds, like the road toll in Australia, and its an everyday site to see a one legged land mine survivor on crutches.  It will take decades for this problem to go away.

A rural classroom gets an Aussie lesson.

Half the women in Cambodia seem to get around
in their pyjamas all day, which  adds to the
laid back feeling of the country.

Sean and impromptu English lesson student do their bro' thing



......meanwhile sama was occupying the rest of the kids.



That's all for now.  Stay tuned for our final post for the trip.

Best wishes
Sama (and Sean)
   

One more amazing Mekong sunset.

Further up the Mekong- day 11 of cambodia cycle

Sean:  Hi Everyone

We have now reached Stung Treng, a town in northern Cambodia at the junction of the Mekong and Sekong rivers.  Since our last post we cycled from Kampong Cham to Chhlong, Kratie, then to here. 

While in Kratie we did a 35km day cycle out to a place where you can view the endangered Irrawaddy dolphins from a boat in the river.  We saw a few different pods. They seem to surface and dive like regular bottlenose dolphins, but have a distinctive snub nose.  Anyway it was a peaceful hour or so out on the river. I can see why so many people are into boats, its so relaxing.

This is an irrawaddy dolphin statue, they are hard to catch on camera.
If you look closely you can see that this project is ssponsored by
Oxfam Australia, which has a big presence in this area.

Sunset on the Mekong at Kratie.

We tried to cycle up to Steng Trung along the riverside 'road less travelled'. What we didn't know was that after about 35 km the road turned to gravel, then to dirt, later it narrowed to the width of one person walking and finally got so overgrown that you needed a guy with a machete walking in front to clear the path (which we didn't have) and also someone who knew the way, as by this time the river was well out of sight and we hadn't seen any people houses for quite a while.

Anyway, we managed to back track to the last village and managed to scrounge up a lift in a ute back to the main highway and onward. So it was a bit of a relief making it to Stung Treng, where we have a nice guest house right on the river front. Today we did a 4 hour circuit cycle without our bags to the other side of the Sekong River and around some small villages on narrow bush tracks. It was the best cycle we've done so far, beautiful views, friendly village folks and very shady.

The track got a bit overgrown in places.

Local kids are very friendly, always calling out 'hello'.

This has been a sad week in Cambodia, with a major disaster in Phnom Penh in which hundreds of people were trampled to death at a crowded festival when a wobbling bridge led to a stampede. People here have been very moved by the whole event and there are flags lining the roads of every village and town flying at half mast.

Local villagers returning from the water festival carrying their boat.

Sean buys some coconut sticky rice cooked in bamboo.

Lying around in hammocks is something of a national pastime
in Cambodia.  They have them in petrol stations, in the backs
of trucks, everywhere, even hammock restaurants with no tables
and chairs.

From here we will head a little further north for the last days of our cycle tour.

Thanks to those of you who have added comments or sent emails. We'll reply individually soon. That's all for now.
Sean :)

Cambodia cycle tour - day 6 of 16

Sama: Hi Everyone. 

We have finally made it to the Mekong River in the laid back town of Kampong Cham. 

We spent our first 3 days in Cambodia touring the temples, villages and waterways of the north-west regions. 

Angkor Wat and its surrounds were a spectacular sight, although riding around the nearby villages we found many other smaller ancient sites that hardly get mentioned in the brochures, that were equally interesting and with far fewer tourists.

Sunrise at Angkor Wat

Sean inside the temple.

Sama cycling through the main gate to Angkor Thom,
the ancient city for which Angkor Wat was the temple. 

One of thousands upon thousands of stone relief carvings.

Sama at the gate to the Bakon temple.

Cycling has been very enjoyable in Cambodia. So far the roads have been smooth and flat, and we have hardly even needed to change gears, except to negotiate the odd bridge (many of which have large kangaroo logos).  Our only difficulty has been the sun, which by 10:30 on most days has been quite oppressive.  We've started to leave each morning at 5:30. It's still dark at that time, but it allows us to cycle 4 to 5 hours and reach our destination before the heat drives us (and everyone else in Cambodia) in search of a shady place. 

A modern day Cambodian temple. 
Although many were destroyed during the civil war,
there has been a large rebuilding program.

Everywhere we go we are welcomed with broad smiles and a chorus of friendly 'hello's from both children and adults. Even people passing us on motorbikes often slow down for a chat.  Many Cambodians seem quite surprised to see us cycling, which we are told is something they would only do if they couldn't afford to travel any other way.

Thats's all for now.  More news soon

Sama


Cambodian public transport is often very crowded,
and this guy was still touting for more customers



Thailand & Cambodia

Sean:  Hi Everyone

From Nepal we flew to Bangkok and headed out to Ta Muang to see Bob, Dao, Maria and Chrisy [i.e. my brother, sister in law and 2 nieces]. They were all in excellent form. Maria seems to really like school and Chrisy likes playing badminton, playing with her friends and singing Thai pop songs. Their house is in a great spot on a quiet street, and just around the corner from grandma.  Bob and Dao plied us with bad jokes and delicious food (respectively) before we headed off on the train back to Bangkok then on to Aranya Pratet on the Cambodian border.



Maria, Dao, Bob and Chrisy testing out the strength of the hammock.

We're now at Siem Reap in Cambodia.  Cambodia so far seems a lot like Thailand, the people are very laid back, you can get things done without much hassle, the roads are dead flat and they do great tofu, rice and vegetables. We have spent the last 2 days cycling around local villages in the area and are still trying to acclimatise to the Southeast Asian heat and humidity after the coolness of the Himalayas.   Yesterday we cycled to the floating village, where they even had a floating school with a floating playground and football pitch (not full size, but impressive).

This is the primary school building of the floating school, with playground on top deck.
The secondary building was further out in the lake. I'm not sure how they got out there, but I assume there was some sort of ferry.

This is a nice change from the Khmer Rouge days, when there was, in the words of a guy working at the hotel who lived through the whole Pol Pot era as a child:  "no school, no hospitals, not much food and no love." Unfortunately his father had been killed by the Khmer Rouge for being a teacher and 2 of his siblings had died from no access to medical facilities. Very sad.

That's all for now. We'll try to keep you posted during our last 3 weeks.

Lia Hai

Nepal Trek days 8 to 17



Langtang Himal range viewed from Laurebina Yak.

Sama: Hi Everyone. Our treck ended on Saturday in Syabrubesi, a small regional town near the Tibetan border.
We returned to Kathmandu that evening to find a city in full party mode. We hadn't realised that this weekend was Deepavali, the Nepali New Year, so the last few days have been full of loud music, bright lights and fire crackers and I can't help but wish I was in the mountains again.

We have had an amazing and challenging adventure over 17 days, walking through the Himalayas has been a wonderful way to experience the incredible variety of cultures that make up Nepal, as well as being an education for me to the level of poverty that Nepalis encounter daily.



Sean tests out the new 'high tech' bridge (made of metal) across the Langtang River.

 The trek itself was incredibly diverse, and led us through very changing environments, including steep terraced farmlands, small isolated villages, forested river valleys and high alpine meadows rimmed by snow covered peaks. My favourite place was Kenjin Gompa, a small settlement high in the Langtang Himal where we stayed with a friendly Tibetan family for 3 days. From there we were able to trek further up the Langtang valley in search of glaciers and more spectacular snow covered peaks along the Tibetan border. We also ascended Tsergo Ri, a 4989 m mountain and got caught in a snow blizzard just before we reached the top and had to make a rapid descent to our lodge for hot chocolate and warm yak cheese on Tibetan bread.

Sama at the highest point of the trek, just below 5000m and snowing.

Monastery Guest House, Kenjin Gompa, with glacier in background.

Our final few days were spent on the Tamang trail, a much less travelled track with many isolated villages and people living a very traditional lifestyle. We have both been very inspired by our time in Nepal and are hoping to return for a longer visit.

These gompas are all along the path on the Tamang trail. The stones are actually engraved in detailed Tibetan script. Many of the engraved stones were actually carried all the way from Tibet after the Chinese invasion.

Gatlang village, on the Tamang heritage trail, has the friendliest kids in Nepal, as Sama found out.

Gatlang village, Tamang heritage trail.

The boiling hot springs at Tato Pani were a nice relief after a long day's walk on day 14. It wasn't easy to get out. Tato Pani means hot water in Nepali.



Tibetan buddhist gompa at Laurebina Pass.





View up the Langtang valley, beyond Kenjin Gompa.



Nepal - Day 7 of 17 day Trek

Sean: 
Hi Everyone. Sama and I are in a small village called Thulo Syabhu, which is in the northern part of Nepal, close to Tibet. As I write this I'm in front of a window with a beautiful view of mountains that are actually in Tibet.  Being only a couple of hours walk from the nearest road, its the first place we've come to that has internet. It's near the base of the Langtang river valley with fantastic views and is a nice change from the cold of the high altitudes. The people in this village are Tamangs, of mainly Tibetan descent. We have just spent 6 days walking here from Sundarijal, just outside of Kathmandu.  We left most of our gear (and our bikes, obviously) behind and have just been carrying the bare essentials.  We decided to do it without a guide or porter, and have met quite a few others doing the same thing (mainly Europeans) and formed some nice relationships with those going in the same direction, exchanging tales in the evenings. We've also met plenty of Nepalis of course, who are for the most part very friendly and open. Often its for the purpose of confirming we're heading in the right direction. There are lots of forks in the path and none of those nicely painted signs or painted rocks you get in Germany, just yesterday's footprints if it hasn't rained and a few biscuit and chocolate bar wrappers.

The path we have been on has been a very up and down one, taking us to gradually higher and higher levels, and finally over a 4660metre pass before descending to Gosaikunda Lake, which is a sacred pilgrimage place for Hindus. It was also sub freezing, and by far our coldest night so far. It also got a bit difficult to acclimatise to the lower oxygen levels going up, with plenty of stops to catch breath during the last thousand metres or so. The views on the way down were magnificent, lots of snow capped peaks, deep valleys, waterfalls, etc, and nicely spaced tea houses. The great thing about trekking here is you hardly need to carry anything as there are lots of lodges with warm beds (and with surprisingly comprehensive menus) although some groups seem to have lots of gear and incredibly overloaded porters. Also, although there are quite a lot of young people trekking, just as many or possibly more would be between 45 and 60, but sometimes older, which surprised me, maybe I'm a bit ageist.  But its great to see that we still have lots of trekking time ahead of us. Sama calls them CUBBWETES, which stands for cashed up baby boomers with expensive trekking equipment. Okay, that's all for now, we have some great photos, but uploading them would take a week on this internet speed. I pinched the yak photo above from an internet site, just to put you in the mooood. 

Sean :) 

Back in Kathmandu

Sama:  Hi Everyone 
We're back in Kathmandu for a few days only, which has been quite an assault on the senses, but also it's nice to be amongst modern comforts again, like hot showers and the internet.  Our 3 weeks in the village was a rewarding and at times quite challenging experience. The children we taught were a delight and as is often the case I think we gained more from our time with them than they did from us.

Living in the village was like stepping back in time and made me appreciate how simply these people really do live and how much more simply I could live.  One interesting example was the constant stream, every morning and evening, of bicycles with people carrying milk cans of all shapes and sizes making their way slowly to the local dairy, achieving  their milk delivery without throw away cartons, plastic bags or vehicle emissions  (Bikes are still the main form of local transport, with just a few motorbikes, and hardly any private cars). Moreover, the milk was fresh from cows and buffaloes grazing in fields within a 1-2 km radius of their homes.

One of the most challenging aspects of living in the village was that your business becomes everyone else's.  Indira took great delight in keeping everyone informed about the things we got up to, for example Sean and I not eating meat, and especially when Sean did something very unmanly, like washing clothes at the outside hand pump.  The women of the village were fascinated by my non-arranged marriage (in Nepal over 95 per cent of marriages are still arranged by the parents).  They referred to our marriage, with lots of giggles and sideways glances, as a 'love marriage' and gave us the titles 'buda' and 'budi' (lovers) and within days small children started calling these names out to us as we cycled by.

After a week of eating dahlbaat at every meal, I decided to share some of my favourite recipes with Indira.  She was shocked by the amount of vegies I served up and the next day invited a group of her disbelieving friends to come over and watch me cook.  I felt like a contestant on Masterchef, while Indira gave a running commentary that evoked lots of ooohs and aaaahs from the audience, especially when I declined all spices offered and opted for only a light salt seasoning.  The lightly seasoned vegies and poached eggs were a resounding failure and everyone went home convinced that Australia would be the last place on Earth they would want to go and have a meal.

pics missing here but will complete upload later.

For the next two and a half weeks we will be trekking in the Langtang National Park.  It is very unlikely there will be any internet access, so we will reply to any emails after that and update the blog.

Nepal

Hi Everyone

I'm sitting in an internet booth in the village of Pokadi, the next village up from Ganganagar, where we are staying. Internet here only works sometimes and uploading a photo takes absolutely ages, so we will be posting some photos soon. 

We have been in Ganganagar for nearly 3 weeks now, staying with a very nice local family, Ramzi and Indira, and their son Sanjit.  As their 2 daughters are now married they have a spare room available. Each day they cook us daalbaat, which is mainly rice with a little bit of lentils and vegetables. People here mainly eat just 2 meals per day (big ones), one at around 9am and another around 7pm, with a small snack mid afternoon if hungry.

The village is very beautiful, with lots of rice fields, buffaloes, bicycles and virtually no cars, just the occasional motorbike. Even the school bus has stopped running for the Dashain holidays.  Yesterday we saw a wild rhino (huge one) in the wetlands, just 40 metres from the village houses, near to the resource centre. The resource centre is a room with a few tables and a fan where we go to teach the children English each morning. Most of the children are from a marginalised cluster of houses on the edge of the village, set up for displaced people from other parts of Nepal, due to flooding or other problems. They appear to be mainly lower caste landless labourers, but some seem to have small vegetable plots. Anyway they are living pretty close to the breadline most of the time.

We have about 15 children in each of our 2 classes (one for 5-9 year olds and one for 10-12 year olds) and run a structured session that includes oral work, action songs, games, story reading and some written work and colouring in. It's been really enjoyable teaching the kids and a pity that we are not staying for much longer.

The other project in Ganganagar is "Happy Home", which is sort of an orphanage or more accurately a sort of foster care boarding hostel for kids from families that can't look after them. The children have now gone away for the Dashain festival, but up until 2 days ago we were going there each afternoon for a few hours and working with the kids there.

That's all for now. There's so much to tell, but more interesting when embellished with a few photos.

Sean  :)

Farewell Europe

Sama: Hi Everyone

We are in Istanbul for a short stopover on our way to Nepal. With our bikes securely packaged for the onward flight, we hired bikes for 2 days and soon came to realise how well engineered our Australian bikes are for comfort. The combination of the stiff framed Turkish bikes and the cobble stones had our bones rattling, nevertheless we persevered and soon found a beautiful cycle track that took us all along the Bosphorous, a narrow channel that divides the Black Sea from the Sea of Marmara, and Europe from Asia.


Sean: Istanbul is an interesting city with lots of beautiful mosques with big domes and tall minarets. We are staying in the old part of the city in a small hotel.  Today we visited the Aya Sofya, which started off as the major christian basilica of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, was later converted into a mosque in the 15th century, and is now a museum. The city's main mosque, the blue mosque, is right nearby and is almost as big as the Aya Sofya  and absolutely beautiful inside.

The Blue Mosque, Istanbul

Aya Sofya, main dome.

Lots of fishing in this town.

You can buy anything at the bazaar.

There are literally hundreds of ships in the straight. You can hardly see the horizon.

Sama: Our last 5 days in Germany were spent in the Bavarian Alps and walking some of the best mountain tracks that I've ever experienced. We arrived in the area by train, then cycled, and once again it was a wonderful experience to get to our destination under our own steam.  I'm now convinced that this is the best way to see any country, besides helping to reduce our carbon footprint it has kept us out of the larger urban centres and given us the opportunity to spend more time in small villages and rural areas.  I found the Germans to be absolute bike enthusiasts who have set up situations and infrastructure that make cycling an enjoyable experience, they also give lots of positive encouragement to anyone cycling in their country, although they didn't seem to understand why we had left Munich just as the Oktoberfest was about to start and became even more bewildered when I tried to explain that, even though we were from Australia, we had come to Germany for the mountains and not for the beer.

Sean: Next we got to Kathmandu via Sharjah. We are going to be working on a volunteer project in rural Nepal for about a month with an organisation called INFO Nepal. We may not have regular internet access during this time, but will update the blog if we get a chance.