Although my route had changed about a hundred times from its original form I'm not getting into what I've always thought was going to be the most challenge part of the journey - the road less travelled you might call it.
Their order has been tweaked several times but the zig-zag path through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos was always going to be the part of this trip where I become the most like a traditional backpacker.
Much more developed than they were fifteen or even twenty years ago, I am expecting the next three destinations to be particularly different to the rest due to their culture and status across the world. We known much more about Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand than we once did, but I feel like my experiences will be the polar opposite to what I have been through so far, and what I have coming up from mid-April onwards.
I wouldn't say I am worried about them in any way but I feel much more like I am stepping into the unknown, and this is where being a solo traveller can become a little daunting. I hope I will find myself enjoying a pleasant experience as I spend a week in these three intriguing countries, and more importantly I hope I can live to tell the tale....
*********************************************************************************
My time in Thailand was up this morning, well technically I didn't leave the country until this afternoon, but that's a minor detail. I ended up staying here a week which is two days longer than I originally planned though I feel like it was a worthwhile experience. I think in some ways it was a very unexpected positive experience her in Thailand and overall I couldn't have predicted how well things would have gone.
Starting with Bangkok, the country frequently surprised me, and I feel like my expectations and the reality of the fact were totally different.
Although it is undoubtedly a busy metropolitan city filled with hustle and bustle, I found the Thai capital to be quite a relaxing place, and I think it helped being in a hotel which was just about far enough away from the centre, but made it easy enough to access all of the main sights.
Chaing Mai and Chiang Rai were also pleasantly surprsing with relatively small city centres, and plenty to do if you were willing to venture out into the beautiful landscape which surrounds them both. It sounds very boring but I felt great pleasure in Chiang Mai on the first day just walking around the outskirts of the walled city. The weather was perfect, the scenery was fantastic and I found it quite theraputic to just walk around the 2km squared area which is the boundary to the city.
I didn't spend quite as much time in Chiang Rai, but I felt like it gave me a good taste of the northern province, and in the future I would certainly like to visit the Golden Triangle Area where the three neighbours of Thailand, Myanmar and Laos collide:
One of the biggest surprises to me is that I just spent a week in a country which is known for its phenomenal beaches and I didn't see a single grain of sand or any clear blue water in the duration of my stay. I think that proves that there is much more to Thailand than just its picturesque islands, and I am glad that I discovered this during my second, and very different visit to the country.
Something which Thailand did live up to in terms of its expectations is with its costs. Not that any particular place I have visited so far can be considered expensive, but often it was hard to believe that my dinner was costing me less than £1.50.
It puts things into perspective sometimes when you consider that a bus ride to the White Temple cost me 40p - I'm not even sure you could get a ride to the end of my street on a bus in England for the same price.
Due to the duration of my trip I have been fairly concious about spending too much money, especially when I have so many airfares coming up to pay for, but I think it would be very easy for anybody to stay within budget in Thailand, even if they took part in every tour going, stayed at a five-star hotel and ate a three course meal every night.
With many positives to look back on from my travels, I feel like I certainly have a reason to go back for a third time some day, but for the time being it was appropriate to consider my next destination as I checked out of my hotel and caught a taxi to the airport.
I'd gone back, (hopefully temporarily) to booking early flights to get to Cambidia, but only because from Chiang Rai there are no direct flights to Siem Reap which is where I was headed to next.
I was up at 7am this morning, and even found the time to grab a hotel breakfast before leaving. It cost me 150 Baht (around £3) for the twenty minute journey to the airport and I got there comfortably in time to check-in. My route today took me from Chiang Rai to Bangkok, and then from the Thai Capital on to Siem Reap in Cambodia.
Originally I though I was going to have to collect my bags in Bangkok, and check-in again, but instead the lady who gave me my boarding pass handed me a sticker to be a 'fly through' passenger which thankfully means avoiding that hassle.
I think due to the fact that I was departing on an international flight from Bangkok but would be in transit domestically, I had to go through imigration in Chiang Rai, and then was sitting in an almost empty airport lounge until my flight boarded. I was really confused as there were only four people in there and I figured the plane would definitely be fuller than that. Eventually we were joined up with the rest of the passengers, and touched down in Bangjok about 11.30am.
When I got into arrivals there were two people from Air Asia standing with a board containing the names of several passengers - mine included - who they were escorting through an area of the airport which avoided the need to check in to our next flight.
It took a while, and we were joined by two more groups of passengers on the same route at a locked door which someone from security had to come and open in order for us to get through to the departure gates.
We had our passports checked and stamped before continuing up to where I boarded my flight to Chiang Mai on Monday.
I found my gate which was tucked away in the area at the back of the airport with no shops and no plug sockets. My flight wasn't due to leave until 2.50pm so I had about three hours of time to kill before I could eventually board the second part of my flight.
Eventually my gate started to fill up a bit a boarding time got closer.
We took off at about the right time and were ten minutes early landing in Siem Reap.
For the first time since my visit to Indonesia I actually needed to get a visa (as did pretty much everybody on the flight) and it was a good job I had all that time to spend in the airport as it meant I could fill in the two complex forms which we were given. When we landed we had to fill out another health questionnaire form before being able to queue up and get a visa on arrival.
A 30-day Cambodian tourist visa costs $30 - and yes I do mean, US dollars because that's the dominant currency here. I had to pay $2 more because I didn't have any passport photos, so the extra fee was for the border control officers to scan my passport and use that instead. It's a very odd thing to need photos considering the sticker they put inside my passport has no photo anywhere!
Once I had sorted that little task out I collected my bag and met up with my lift who had come from the hotel to collect me as part of my booking.
I can't say I've ever had an airport pick up service before (from a hotel at least) but in Cambodia they are quite common, and I was grateful of being able to avoid having to pay for a taxi. My lift turned up on what I can only describe as a Cambodian tuk-tuk as it was essentially a motorbike with a trailer attached. By now I'm very used to this mode of transport being common place, so I jumped aboard and prepared myself for a bumpy ride:
The reason that I am in Siem Reap is essentially to see the fabulous sights of Angkor Wat which is about 6km from the city itself. I wasn't planning to go tonight, but tomorrow I hope to pick up a pass which will allow me to access the temples for the remainder of my stay here. It is definitely in the top five of things I have been looking forward to seeing in terms of Asian sights so I will save my thoughts for the next couple of blogs.
The journey back to the hotel / villa I'm staying in was an eye-opening one. Compared with my journey through Thailand, Cambodia seems much more rural and I guess 'raw'.
Mopeds (if that's what my mode of transportation counted as - it was essentially a moped with a trailer on the back which I was sitting in) have their own lane on major roads, and we zipped allong passing cyclists and avoiding cars who were making tight turns across our little road.
Once again I was fascinated by my surroundings, and it was hard to take it all in as we came to the centre of the town, and eventually pulled up at our destination.
Tucked away down a little backstreet I am staying on the third floor of the Damnak Hotel which seems nice like a nice enough destination.
There is a pool and a restaurant out the back, and the in-room facilities are nice as I have a large room and even a balcony at my disposal. It's not very well covered however so I don't know how much use I will get out of that.
Once I got settled in I decided to go for a walk and attempt to navigate my way back into the main town centre we had driven through earlier. It looked as though there were shops and restaurants there and all the travelling had definitely made me work up an appetite.
I had a bit of a map but I didn't really need it as I soon found myself being led towards and area of lights which I correctly assumed was the centre point of Siem Reap.
I feel like I say this a lot, but even after thirty seconds of being there I was immediately having sensory overload - I genuinely didn't know where to look:
There were people milling about everywhere; mopeds and cyclists zig-zagged in and out of each other as pedestrians wondered pretty much wherever they like making life difficult for the vehicles (nope - no paths here). I walked across a bridge which led to two areas separated by the river - one to the left, the other to the right. I decided to head left first, and crossed over a lit up bridge which I soon discovered led to the night market:
Like the market from Chiang Rai this place was intimidatingly packed full of shops; everything was really close together and it was hard to know where one stall ended and the next one began. It was like what I imagine life in the Middle East is like with rows and rows of shops selling pretty much everything you need out in the open air. It was a throwback to the Petaling Street market in KL which I was so intrigued by. I walked around the stalls, not looking for anything in articular, and was amazed by the sheer range of goods on offer. Naturally nothing had a price on so the idea is for you to haggle your way to what you think it is worth:
When I came to the end of the market I crossed the road into the 'Old Market' which had the same range of fantastic shops but also had a number of restaurants down a main road which was called 'Pub Street' - no need to ask which country helped influence the name... It reminded me of somewhere you might find in Spain or another touristy type spot in Europe and was essentially the main strip which was filled with people eating, drinking and generally enjoying themselves. The bustle of packed restaurants and bars was in complete contrast to what I expected to see whilst I was here.
All of the restaurants looked quite similar from their menus; each appeared to offer a range of western and local foods, so I picked a busy one (the more people, the better I figured it would be) and had a meal which I think was called Bai Cha (I'm so useless at remembering what I order!) It was basically fried rice with Khmer sausage wrapped in a couple of fried eggs and garnished with salad. I got quite a big portion and was pretty full after polishing it all off. It sounds like a bit of a strange combination of things mixed together, but it was actually really delicious.
I walked down the street until the end of the market and them hoped to be able to navigate my way back to the hotel in the dark - apparently all of the street lights in this place are located on Pub Street.
Tomorrow I plan to head out early so I am intending to have a relatively early night so that I am able to wake up in time to Visit Angkor Wat at dawn - hopefully it's a plan I will be able to stick to.
Incredible
Shapeshifters (2006)
Their order has been tweaked several times but the zig-zag path through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos was always going to be the part of this trip where I become the most like a traditional backpacker.
Much more developed than they were fifteen or even twenty years ago, I am expecting the next three destinations to be particularly different to the rest due to their culture and status across the world. We known much more about Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand than we once did, but I feel like my experiences will be the polar opposite to what I have been through so far, and what I have coming up from mid-April onwards.
I wouldn't say I am worried about them in any way but I feel much more like I am stepping into the unknown, and this is where being a solo traveller can become a little daunting. I hope I will find myself enjoying a pleasant experience as I spend a week in these three intriguing countries, and more importantly I hope I can live to tell the tale....
*********************************************************************************
My time in Thailand was up this morning, well technically I didn't leave the country until this afternoon, but that's a minor detail. I ended up staying here a week which is two days longer than I originally planned though I feel like it was a worthwhile experience. I think in some ways it was a very unexpected positive experience her in Thailand and overall I couldn't have predicted how well things would have gone.
Starting with Bangkok, the country frequently surprised me, and I feel like my expectations and the reality of the fact were totally different.
Although it is undoubtedly a busy metropolitan city filled with hustle and bustle, I found the Thai capital to be quite a relaxing place, and I think it helped being in a hotel which was just about far enough away from the centre, but made it easy enough to access all of the main sights.
Chaing Mai and Chiang Rai were also pleasantly surprsing with relatively small city centres, and plenty to do if you were willing to venture out into the beautiful landscape which surrounds them both. It sounds very boring but I felt great pleasure in Chiang Mai on the first day just walking around the outskirts of the walled city. The weather was perfect, the scenery was fantastic and I found it quite theraputic to just walk around the 2km squared area which is the boundary to the city.
I didn't spend quite as much time in Chiang Rai, but I felt like it gave me a good taste of the northern province, and in the future I would certainly like to visit the Golden Triangle Area where the three neighbours of Thailand, Myanmar and Laos collide:
One of the biggest surprises to me is that I just spent a week in a country which is known for its phenomenal beaches and I didn't see a single grain of sand or any clear blue water in the duration of my stay. I think that proves that there is much more to Thailand than just its picturesque islands, and I am glad that I discovered this during my second, and very different visit to the country.
Something which Thailand did live up to in terms of its expectations is with its costs. Not that any particular place I have visited so far can be considered expensive, but often it was hard to believe that my dinner was costing me less than £1.50.
It puts things into perspective sometimes when you consider that a bus ride to the White Temple cost me 40p - I'm not even sure you could get a ride to the end of my street on a bus in England for the same price.
Due to the duration of my trip I have been fairly concious about spending too much money, especially when I have so many airfares coming up to pay for, but I think it would be very easy for anybody to stay within budget in Thailand, even if they took part in every tour going, stayed at a five-star hotel and ate a three course meal every night.
With many positives to look back on from my travels, I feel like I certainly have a reason to go back for a third time some day, but for the time being it was appropriate to consider my next destination as I checked out of my hotel and caught a taxi to the airport.
I'd gone back, (hopefully temporarily) to booking early flights to get to Cambidia, but only because from Chiang Rai there are no direct flights to Siem Reap which is where I was headed to next.
I was up at 7am this morning, and even found the time to grab a hotel breakfast before leaving. It cost me 150 Baht (around £3) for the twenty minute journey to the airport and I got there comfortably in time to check-in. My route today took me from Chiang Rai to Bangkok, and then from the Thai Capital on to Siem Reap in Cambodia.
Originally I though I was going to have to collect my bags in Bangkok, and check-in again, but instead the lady who gave me my boarding pass handed me a sticker to be a 'fly through' passenger which thankfully means avoiding that hassle.
I think due to the fact that I was departing on an international flight from Bangkok but would be in transit domestically, I had to go through imigration in Chiang Rai, and then was sitting in an almost empty airport lounge until my flight boarded. I was really confused as there were only four people in there and I figured the plane would definitely be fuller than that. Eventually we were joined up with the rest of the passengers, and touched down in Bangjok about 11.30am.
When I got into arrivals there were two people from Air Asia standing with a board containing the names of several passengers - mine included - who they were escorting through an area of the airport which avoided the need to check in to our next flight.
It took a while, and we were joined by two more groups of passengers on the same route at a locked door which someone from security had to come and open in order for us to get through to the departure gates.
We had our passports checked and stamped before continuing up to where I boarded my flight to Chiang Mai on Monday.
I found my gate which was tucked away in the area at the back of the airport with no shops and no plug sockets. My flight wasn't due to leave until 2.50pm so I had about three hours of time to kill before I could eventually board the second part of my flight.
Eventually my gate started to fill up a bit a boarding time got closer.
We took off at about the right time and were ten minutes early landing in Siem Reap.
For the first time since my visit to Indonesia I actually needed to get a visa (as did pretty much everybody on the flight) and it was a good job I had all that time to spend in the airport as it meant I could fill in the two complex forms which we were given. When we landed we had to fill out another health questionnaire form before being able to queue up and get a visa on arrival.
A 30-day Cambodian tourist visa costs $30 - and yes I do mean, US dollars because that's the dominant currency here. I had to pay $2 more because I didn't have any passport photos, so the extra fee was for the border control officers to scan my passport and use that instead. It's a very odd thing to need photos considering the sticker they put inside my passport has no photo anywhere!
Once I had sorted that little task out I collected my bag and met up with my lift who had come from the hotel to collect me as part of my booking.
I can't say I've ever had an airport pick up service before (from a hotel at least) but in Cambodia they are quite common, and I was grateful of being able to avoid having to pay for a taxi. My lift turned up on what I can only describe as a Cambodian tuk-tuk as it was essentially a motorbike with a trailer attached. By now I'm very used to this mode of transport being common place, so I jumped aboard and prepared myself for a bumpy ride:
The reason that I am in Siem Reap is essentially to see the fabulous sights of Angkor Wat which is about 6km from the city itself. I wasn't planning to go tonight, but tomorrow I hope to pick up a pass which will allow me to access the temples for the remainder of my stay here. It is definitely in the top five of things I have been looking forward to seeing in terms of Asian sights so I will save my thoughts for the next couple of blogs.
The journey back to the hotel / villa I'm staying in was an eye-opening one. Compared with my journey through Thailand, Cambodia seems much more rural and I guess 'raw'.
Mopeds (if that's what my mode of transportation counted as - it was essentially a moped with a trailer on the back which I was sitting in) have their own lane on major roads, and we zipped allong passing cyclists and avoiding cars who were making tight turns across our little road.
Once again I was fascinated by my surroundings, and it was hard to take it all in as we came to the centre of the town, and eventually pulled up at our destination.
There is a pool and a restaurant out the back, and the in-room facilities are nice as I have a large room and even a balcony at my disposal. It's not very well covered however so I don't know how much use I will get out of that.
Once I got settled in I decided to go for a walk and attempt to navigate my way back into the main town centre we had driven through earlier. It looked as though there were shops and restaurants there and all the travelling had definitely made me work up an appetite.
I had a bit of a map but I didn't really need it as I soon found myself being led towards and area of lights which I correctly assumed was the centre point of Siem Reap.
I feel like I say this a lot, but even after thirty seconds of being there I was immediately having sensory overload - I genuinely didn't know where to look:
There were people milling about everywhere; mopeds and cyclists zig-zagged in and out of each other as pedestrians wondered pretty much wherever they like making life difficult for the vehicles (nope - no paths here). I walked across a bridge which led to two areas separated by the river - one to the left, the other to the right. I decided to head left first, and crossed over a lit up bridge which I soon discovered led to the night market:
Like the market from Chiang Rai this place was intimidatingly packed full of shops; everything was really close together and it was hard to know where one stall ended and the next one began. It was like what I imagine life in the Middle East is like with rows and rows of shops selling pretty much everything you need out in the open air. It was a throwback to the Petaling Street market in KL which I was so intrigued by. I walked around the stalls, not looking for anything in articular, and was amazed by the sheer range of goods on offer. Naturally nothing had a price on so the idea is for you to haggle your way to what you think it is worth:
When I came to the end of the market I crossed the road into the 'Old Market' which had the same range of fantastic shops but also had a number of restaurants down a main road which was called 'Pub Street' - no need to ask which country helped influence the name... It reminded me of somewhere you might find in Spain or another touristy type spot in Europe and was essentially the main strip which was filled with people eating, drinking and generally enjoying themselves. The bustle of packed restaurants and bars was in complete contrast to what I expected to see whilst I was here.
All of the restaurants looked quite similar from their menus; each appeared to offer a range of western and local foods, so I picked a busy one (the more people, the better I figured it would be) and had a meal which I think was called Bai Cha (I'm so useless at remembering what I order!) It was basically fried rice with Khmer sausage wrapped in a couple of fried eggs and garnished with salad. I got quite a big portion and was pretty full after polishing it all off. It sounds like a bit of a strange combination of things mixed together, but it was actually really delicious.
Tomorrow I plan to head out early so I am intending to have a relatively early night so that I am able to wake up in time to Visit Angkor Wat at dawn - hopefully it's a plan I will be able to stick to.
Incredible
Shapeshifters (2006)
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