Here we are looking forward to our last night in ‘Jogja’.
I hadn’t realised how long it has been since I wrote an entry here, Our last was a rushed entry as we were leaving Sa Pa and we’ve come a long way since then. Unlike the previous two months, this last month has been organised on the go. We’ve even re-done most of our arrangements for China. Then there has been the gallery, all of the images there need to be heavily processed so that they load fast for the internet, but there’s also all the work on the hi-rez images too.
Hanoi, for all we didn’t stay there nearly long enough, was probably the highlight of Vietnam. We’d set aside most of our time for Hue. When a taxi driver enquired, as they always do, how long we had in Hue, he then asked: ‘What are you going to do in Hue for five days’? We found enough to fill our days without feeling we were chasing our own tales. We had intended to go to some of the places along the coast in Central Vietnam, but some of the reports made it sound a bit like Ibiza. I’m sure, like Goa, there’ll be plenty havens in among the havoc. Anyway we had a problem with Cambodia.
We decided we just hadn’t allowed enough time, so we set about grabbing some time back here and there. We were probably a bit brutal on the things we cut, since we even found an extra five days that we certainly didn’t want to spend in Singapore, which meant we could reinstate our plans for Borobodour and here we are. We rather decadently went to Bali for just one day and also have an extra day in Singapore where we’ll celebrate my birthday with a singapore sling in Raffles Hotel. On the back of that we’ll probably have to slum it for the other three days. Although, there are apparently wonderful places with streetfood hawkers where the ‘tax and the rents are so cheap, they can serve high-class traditional food for a couple of dollars’. Now that doesn’t sound too much like slumming it.
We had two days in Saigon and decided to miss Phnom Phen, which gave us three full days in Siem Reap for Angkor and Angkor Wat. We could have easily used five days, but we hired a really good Tuk-Tuk driver. He wasn’t one of those people who would tell us what we should do, indeed he started each day by asking us our plans for that day, but he didn’t just leave it at that. He knew the places in between that we’d missed and wasn’t shy about suggesting side trips to interesting temples. Our three days with Vanna were great and we certainly saw a lot more than we would have by just following our plans. Many thanks Vanna!!
Borobodour, was a very different place from the Borobodour I visited about twenty-five years ago. Most of the conservation work they have done sensitively and I do think the greater control over numbers is, in principal, a good thing, but one hour to explore this wonder of the ancient world just isn’t enough. Still, we wouldn’t have missed it. I think we may need to come back to Bali and Java to do them both justice.
We’re not sure what to expect from China. My conversation with the Chinese man on the train in Laos has made me wonder if the difficulties with language in China will be of a different order than those so far, let’s hope not. We’ve had plenty of situations with no one speaking English before now.
What harm can happen in three weeks?
