And now...

The Best and Worst of People who Posted Comments on the Blog!

Best Scotch guzzlin, RV drivin, "Life is good" sayin, corporate business consultin, human jukebox:
Stuart Shepley, founder, CEO and Employee of the Month at the Shepley Group. "A SucceSSful buSineSS needs alot of S's. Stuart Shepley has at least 2..."
Best Cousin who's like a little sister: Melissa
Best Little Sister Jij never had: Emily Holbrock
Worst Little Sister Jij did have: Gregory Holbrock
Worst Older Brother: Matt Price (I'm older than him. AND, we're not even related. Doesn't get much worse than that.)
Best ARTech student not in the Blue Advisory: Alliya Lovestrand
Best adventure seekin, child mendin, Lasagna bakin mama: Mary Jo De Grandi
Best late postin, smack talkin, closet Bengals fan: David Shepley
Best human being: "Happy" Grant Buntje
Best spiritual being: "Funny" Jacky McFahdtime

Thanks so much for posting on the blog. We love hearing from you all!
We're in Laos now, and as Stuart Shepley of the Shepley Group would say, Life is Good!

Take Care...

PHO

What is Pho (pronounced somewhere between "foe" and "fur")?

Pho is Vietnamese rice noodle soup and THE reason why I wanted to visit Vietnam. It starts with the broth, beefy, fragrant and, dare I say, voluptuous. Submerged in this savory stock are a host of players:
The Noodles- Rice vermicelli. White. Like all good noodles, their simplicity is a vehicle for the more complex components that surround.
The Beef- Thinly sliced, rare beef. The longer it sits in the simmering soup, the more done it becomes. Proper beef management is key to eating pho. Don't eat all your beef too early.
The Tendon- My favorite part. Chewy, almost like a swedish fish, but more slippery. Extra tendon can be had for a nominal fee.
The Meatballs- I love meatballs. It's meat, that's been shaped into a ball! Fantastic. Don't need no flowery language to say that.
(You can get Vegetarian Pho, but why bother.)

If the above play the leads, these ingredients form a strong supporting cast:
Fresh Bean Sprouts, Fresh Basil and Mint, Limes, Chilis

Heaven. Absolute Heaven. No pearly gates. Just a huge bowl and some chopsitcks. All for about $1 USD. I could eat Pho til they run out of tendon.

I may not speak Vietnamese, but those folks sure do talk my language...

Since we last wrote, we have travelled the coast of Vietnam and have now landed ourselves in Laos. The internet in these parts of the world is painfully slow...hence the non-blogging but I'll catch you all up on Vietnam and will add photos and Lao updates later. None-the-less, we are very much enjoying our travels and loved the responses to the last blog (people will do anything to see their name plastered over cyber space :). Don't worry, your moment of fame is coming soon.
We enjoyed a pleasant and restful train ride from Saigon to the small town of Hoi An where we spent our time doddling around the quaint town, drinking fresh beer (bia hoi) for 15 cents per glass and getting new wardrobes specially tailored for us! I had my wedding dress made, so it's official, there will be a wedding in the future.
A few days later we flew up to busy Hanoi..a beautiful city, really, with many parks and lakes so long as you can handle the chaotic traffic! We enjoyed a cultural evening where we stumbled upon a traditional dance contest...many groups of dancers in a variety of different outfits, with props such a large fans, flowers, umbrellas, jugs, etc, all telling a story with their routines. We then watched the famed water puppets, a nice little performance set in a small theater, the stage a pool of water with a pagoda-esque backdrop where the puppeteers would hide.
A three day excursion to Halong Bay was our next destination, aboard a junk boat. A junk boat is a large wooden boat with red or orange sails (somewhat pirate-esque), the top deck with recliners for sunbathing and sightseeing, the next level down for dining and the lower level housed about 10 rooms for sleeping. Off we went with the hundreds of other junk boats in to the bay of limestone soldiers. I felt like part of a herd of cattle as we went from one "attraction" to the next...the first and only organized tour we have and will do. At no point did I know what the plan for the day, or even the hour was...so I put on my "mai pen rai (no worries)" face and let it all unfold. And it unfolded quite nicely. We went on a little "trek", I would describe it as a small jaunt through the jungle, went through a cave, did some swimming, kayaking, and just hung out on the boat with our fellow boat mates (all of whom were quite pleasant).
We then returned to Hanoi for a few nights before we flew off to Laos. Here we are in Laos, in Luang Prabang after having spent a few days in a little backpacker town called Vang Vieng and a luxurious night in a 4 star hotel (Novotel) in Vientianne. More on Laos later.

I'll leave you with the Best and Worst of Vietnam...

Best mode of transport: tie between junk boat and sleeper train
Worst mode of transport: tie between the cyclo in Saigon that tried to rip us off and walking anywhere amid the traffic

Best sales pitch: you from....., go back to ......, want to buy a book?
Worst sales pitch: want to buy a belt? this one 120,000. we shake our heads and begin to walk away. ok, 20,000. still we shake our heads. vendor responds with a loud disgruntled shout.

Best dressed: claire and jij after many hours with a tailor in Hoi An.
Worst dressed: tie between large westerners wearing fisherman pants and pointy hats and the canadian on our boat in speedos.

Best deal: 30 beers for $3
Worst deal: sausages snuck onto your plate

Least fingers: 8 finger McGee from Connecticut who would say "counting to 5 takes 2 hands!"...a close second our boat tour guide Su, who had 9

Best food in Vietnam: masala dosa (Indian!)
Worst food in Vietnam: vietnamese food, especially fish sausages you didn't order snuck onto your plate.

Best entertainment: water puppets
Worst entertainment: crossing the street (now I know how frogger feels)

Best comment to Jij from local: you look like Vietnam
Best reply: so do you!

Special Offer

We are off to Halong Bay off the coast of NE Vietnam for a 3 day boat tour. Since we so love reading all of your comments, we'd like to make a special offer while we're asea:

Anyone who posts a comment in the next three days will have his/her name featured in a future post. That's right. Respond to this one time offer and you will be immortalized on the internet. And don't be shy. You can write anything: Hello. Goodbye. I like Claire more than Jij. Whatever. Just post. (deadline is Oct. 20 at 23:17).

Really we just want to hear from all of you because we miss you so...

See you in a couple of days!

Monday, Oct 10: Saigon

07:00 Wake up

07:04 Shower. Put on all orange clothing.

07:05 Find Bengals game on ESPN Asian affiliate; Claire goes out to fetch Breakfast

07:16 Eat baguette with omelette and laughing cow cheese. 4000 VND ( $ .25. Thanks Claire.)

07:30 Kickoff. Who Dey.

08:15 Bengals down early. Too many penalties.

08:45 Chad Johnson tries to resuscitate ball in end zone, to no avail. Nice drive Carson.

10:40 Carson fumbles. Bengals lose. 4-1.

11:00 Nap Time for Jij. Claire conducts business.

16:00 Claire and Jij book travel from Saigon to Danang, onward to Hanoi, then Vientianne. Business. Nice work Claire for laying the groundwork earlier in the day.

17:30 Eat BBQ pork at food stall in market. Avoid being cheated, kind of.

18:30 Return to room and enjoy A/C and HBO. Letters are good.

20:20 Decide to go out on the town. Have only spent $14 at this point and figure we can afford to spend more.

20:30 Devour gigantic plate of Fish N' Chips. Use 3 gallons of Malt Vinegar.

21:45 Time to go home.

21:55 Smell Pizza and decide we're still hungry.

21:57 Order Bacon Cheese Burger, Fries, Large Pepperoni Pizza. We love Vietnamese Food!

23:00 That's what I call an "elegant sufficiency." Sleepily return to guesthouse. Good night.

23:15 Find Bengals game replay. Maybe they'll win this time?

Traveling is a tough business on the streets of Saigon. Luckily, traveling IS our business; afterall, we do, in fact, "live on vacation."
Our first day of touring around the capital city of Vietnam was marred by two consecutive experiences of people trying to rip us off.
The first was our seemingly friendly Cyclo driver. A cyclo is a gigantic bicycle with a big, almost comfortable seat perched before the handlebars. A very Saigon experience, slowly meandering through the madness of street traffic. (Traffic = throngs of bicycles, motorcycles, cars, buses, vans, trucks, horsemen, unicycles, hovercrafts, swarming intersections like fratboys to the keg or filipinos to the buffet...a sight to be seen.) He greeted us with a very elaborate handshake, quoted us a reasonable price of $2/hour, assured our comfort and delivered us to some very nice tourist attractions (most notably, The War Remnants Museum, which ably depicted the gruesome inhumanity of the Vietnam Conflict through horrifying photos, unbelievable quotes, embalmed mutated human fetuses, and, of course, war remnants: bombs, gas cans, guns, etc.). When it was all said and done, time to pay up, suddenly it was $2/hour EACH! We handed over the money we had originally agreed on, but he refused to accept it. "Only half," he claimed. After some serious posturing, he finally accepted his due, and not a dong more. Off he pedaled, and good riddance.
The next episode came at the Ben Tranh Market, the city's largest open air market. We'd decided to get a bite to eat at one of the many food stalls within. We sat at a counter and ordered some fresh spring rolls, seasoned ground pork and fresh greens wrapped in rice paper. Ang sarap. As we started to eat them, our hostess slyly slid sausages on our plate, sausages we clearly had not ordered. I must admit that I was still steaming from the first ill encounter, and comsumed the sausages ready for a faceoff. "She's gonna charge us for these, but I'm not paying 'cause I didn't order them," I told myself. "I'm from America, gol dernit." When the bill came, of course it included the unordered mystery meats. When I only payed for the spring rolls, she indicated the sausage. "But I didn't order these, you just put them on my plate. They must be free. You were just being nice, right?" My "must be free" ploy didn't work in the end, and we ended up paying for everything... but not without telling off the entire staff of the place with broken english, the only kind of english understood in thses parts (Claire tried doing it in French, I think). "You bad. You cheat. No like you." And not without causing quite a commotion in that particular corner of the market.
How's that for drama? Best kind. Human drama.
(For the stat trackers, our argument was over 10,000 dong, the equivalent of $ .65. Cheap drama.)

Sin Jao (Hello in Vietnamese)!

One last post from me as I enjoy the fastest and most modern computers I have encountered so far!

The bus ride from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh was stunning. Lush, green rice fields tended to by farmers in their pointy hats, palm roofed huts of wood on stilts, cows, pigs, water buffalo, goats, patches of water lillies more notable perhaps than those that inspired the works of Monet (I actually realize now those water lillies were actually lotus). All so interesting and fun to see a day in the life of people in small town Cambodia. I would take a video clip and shortly thereafter think, "ooh, this is pretty" or "wow, look at that" and the videoing resumed. And so it went for a good portion of our 6 hour ride, all from the window of a bus moving much too quickly to allow video of any quality other than dizzying! It's a good thing I was on a bus, confined, otherwise it would have been the old stop and go show to snap some quality photos. And while I would have returned home with some stellar pics, patience may have worn thin and I may have been travelling solo for the remainder of the trip!!

My favorite attractions along the way, other than the various wooden contraptions pulled or pushed or toted by horse, cow or person (there are pigs in those baskets in the photo), were the gas stations. Get some old coke or beer bottles, fill 'em with oil and gasoline, a few funnels on hand and bob's your uncle, you've got a gas station.

We arrived mid afternoon for our short stint in Phnom Penh. Phnom Phenh, the land of happy and funny pizzas...use your imagination and you can guess the special ingredients. Luckily I need no help being happy or funny so I can pass these by ;) We experienced our most primitive stay so far in Phnom Penh, staying in a room with thin wooden slatted floors and walls...teetering above an arm of a lake that is seemingly more of a wasteland than a lake. The structure had no windows, just shutters of slatted wood. Still dirty water and no windows=mosquito mania. So we enjoyed a night within the confines of a mosquito net (though with a good imagination one could equate it to a fancy canopy bed), trying to ignore each and every footstep, bass beat and voice blaring through the paper thin walls.

Another long bus ride (8 hours) the following day landed us in Ho Chi Minh City, otherwise known as Saigon, Vietnam. It was obvious the difference as we crossed into Vietnam with gas stations, toilets (no need for signs explaining how to use the throne like we saw in Cambodia), paved roads, brick buildings, road signs, the works. After 2-3 days exploring Saigon we will be zooming up the coast towards Hanoi with a stop or two along the way. We are debating whether to brave the bus (20 hours to the first stop and another 20 + hours from there) or take the more expensive, but more comfortable train. I think Jij is going to write about our time spent here in Saigon so I'll leave that to him. So that's it from me until we find our way up the coast!!

Leaving you with a picture of Jij and I, clad in orange watching the Bengals!

Bon Tid Teek Juab K'Neer (Kmer or Cambodian for See You Later)

Haven't you always wanted a monkey?

Interesting sights along the way...








































Haven't you always wanted a MONK-eee :)

Our three days of temple exploration were, in the words of our French friend Mustafa, "romantical". Each day we toured a different section of temples. Each set of temples so distinct. Each and every moment smiling uncontrollably at the mere idea of riding bicycles around these ancient Cambodian temples.

We started with Angkor Wat...angkor what? Almost 1000 years old, Angkor Wat is the main and most well preserved of the temples. The layout of the wat overseen by its towers represent the Angkor concept of the universe. In the middle of that universe is a mountain, signified by the central tower. We discovered this representation to be very accurate as we climbed the thin, steep, sand covered steps to the top. The corridors surrounding the towers host the most intricately carved scenes and images of myths and legends, some Hindu, some Buddhist. As the reign changed, so did the temples, as the rulers would destroy icons of the other religion. Hence the many headless Buddhas we saw.

Baguettes in our bike baskets accompanied us on our second day to Bayon Temple in the middle of Angkor Thom, an ancient city. As we rode through the rice fields, we could imagine the wooden homes of the Angkorians who were responsible for building the temples. The towers of Bayon feature giant Buddha faces, each facing one of the four cardinal directions. We couldn't escape the glance of buddha in this temple, so we were sure to be on our best behavior. On our ride back homeward, we were stopped on the way by a pack of monkeys, posing for pictures. We ended our day watching the sunset from one of the few hilltop temples. We shared this amusement park-esque (elephant rides to the top and all) experience with all the other photo snapping, fannie pack toting tourists.

The third and final day took us to Ta Phrom, a temple seemingly consumed by the surrounding jungle. Jij felt like he was back on the set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It was also our longest bike ride, a whopping 20 km. Our day was made most memorable by several side stops we incurred in search of souvenirs. Kids in these parts are top notch salespeople, some with great material. A little boy we met would shout in his funny, raspy voice, "Oh my god" each time we told him his price was too high. We later returned to give him some pocket money and he offered Jij a piece of string for 3000 riel (75cents) which, using his fine tuned haggling skills Jij got down to 1000 riel. With huge smiles on both of their faces, the boy was proud to have sold a piece of string for 1000 riel, and Jij proud at getting such a steal!

We very much enjoyed our stay in Siem Reap and our visit to the Angkor Temples. They were as lovely as Jij's mom said they would be! If any of you are ever in the area we know a nice couple at Dara Guesthouse who would be thrilled to share their home with you...their bicycles have nice bells.

(I can't take full credit for this post as Jij and I tag-teamed it. I can take full credit for the layout, I finally figured out how to rotate pictures!)

I've been informed that certain people are getting bored with the blog content. Bored because as of yet, it has included no drama. Now, the quality of people's entertainment in reading the blog is very important to me, please hear that. I must admit though, I'm not feeling too upset about the lack of "drama" up to date! For those thrill seekers, I would most willingly try my hand at creative writing...you know, come up with an epic, if you'd like but for now, I would prefer not to live it first hand :)

That being said, despite the horror stories, the much dreaded bus trip to Siem Reap was smooth sailing. Free of hang-ups is a more accurate way to explain it!! We experienced no hassles with visas, no bus scams, the tales of being bombarded by people as soon as you cross the border didn't prove true as it was a religious holiday the day we arrived and quite quiet, all the bridges were in working order (which is often not the case), and there had been no rain to flood the roads. Smooth sailing isn't an appropriate descriptor, really, seeing that the 150 km (93 mile) trip from the Cambodia border to Siem Reap took a mere 8 hours due to the condition of the roads! As we boarded the bus the drivers helper was full of wise cracks..."free massage for you for the next 8 hours," "we'll be lucky if all of the bridges are working," "be careful if you are sitting in the back, a guy last week hit his head on the ceiling and was bleeding everywhere," "maybe we should have a disco ball and some music," "drink beers to forget the bumps!", and on and on. It was a joyful ride. I couldn't wipe the grin (or maybe it was a smirk) off of my face for most of the ride. How I got a kick out of what may have seemed like torture to some is beyond me. It's not often, though, that I get to experience a road so dreadful and a bus ride so bumpy...so I best enjoy it. Our fellow travelling companions were good company, filled with good humor. Jij and I were thrilled to have arrived safely at 10:30pm after leaving Bangkok at 7am.

Today proved to be my favorite day of the trip so far. We woke early, found ourselves a lovely little guesthouse to spend the next few days in, rented bikes and headed for the temples. That grin I couldn't wipe off my face during the bus ride re-emerged as I was peddling away on my little bike, ringing my bell! We only managed to navigate around one temple today. The largest of them all, Angkor Wat itself. The stone carvings so intricate, so old, and so abundant. Buddhas and monks and lotus oh my. We bought a book and gave ourselves a self-guided tour. It was interesting to pair the stories/events with the carvings on the wall. Somewhat of a history lesson, you might say. Tomorrow, we will ride our bikes up for sunrise over one of the temples and spend another day exploring, taking far too many photos and really just enjoying whatever comes our way!