The mysterious country of Laos

Hello dear friends!

While the others are getting ready for dinner, I found some time to share our experiences from the past days of our trip. As you already knew, we are discovering the mysterious country of Laos.

Yesterday was quite a rough day. We were a bit exhausted from our tour through Thailand and we needed to hit the road again that day. More

over, my dear friend Ruben wasn't feeling really well yesterday. The Thai food didn't really please him but he's not a complainer so we could continue our journey. A few hours later, we crossed the border of Laos.

Luang Prabang

My uncle knows a lot about travelling and when I told him I was visiting Laos, he didn't hesitate to tell me where to go. He told me that we should definitely visit Luang Prabang. Luang Prabang is a city in the North-East of Laos that is known for it's well-preserved landscape and the numerous wooden Buddhist te

mples. The city is also considered to be the cultural and religious capital of Laos.

My uncle recommended us to see Luang Prabang by boat and so we did. Our guide navigated the boat down the Mekong river. During the guided tour, I was really astonished by the beauty of this country. We passed beautiful mountain landscapes and shiny wooden temples. But the most impressive were the limestone cliffs. O my gosh, that was so amazing! I'm sure I will never forget this boat trip. No wonder Unesco declared Luang Prabang heritage of the world.

Thanks to the beautiful boat trip we made that day, we forgot how exhausted we were that morning. Still, it was time to get some sleep.

Vientiane, the capital of Laos

Sunday rest day? I don't think so! Today we visited the real capital of Laos, Vientiane. This city is more like the economic center of the country because it has known economic growth. However, there's still a lot of poverty in the country. Again, religion is dominating the city view. There are temples and religious buildings everywhere. People around here try to live the quiet Buddhist life. So therefore we decided to visit The Buddha Park, where you can see a collection of Buddhist and Hindu sculptures, scattered amongst gardens and trees.

The last stop today was the memorial monument 'Patuxai'. This monument was constructed to honor those who fought for the independence from France. They made an Arc de Triomphe look-a-like on purpose but with a typical Laos influence. It was really interesting to see the sarcastic reference to France.

While we were in the capital, we decided to spoil ourselves and we looked for a nice hotel near the city center. And so here I am, writing my blog in the hotel room. I should go check on the others now, I guess it's time to have dinner. Thanks for following everybody and you'll hear from us soon.

Thailand: A never-ending story

Good morning awesome followers!

We hope you guys are still present regularly at our blog spot because we can just feel that a lot of adventures are yet to come. As you could already have concluded from the little title, we are still travelling through Thailand having a very good time! At the moment where we decided to visit Thailand, our picture of the country could be described roughly in three words: beaches, prostitutes and spicy food. Well, as we have already been travelling through Thailand for about a week now, our opinion changed completely. We didn't know that Thailand was such a nice country with that much of abundance on a lot of different aspects.

Our day trip to Chiang Mai

After our instructive passage in Bangkok, we decided to move towards the north. When we were waiting for some Taxi in Bangkok, we got to talk with an old women and she advised us to visit the northern part of the country too because over there, life is very different compared to the southern part of the country. We believed her because we knew that Thailand is a very big country so that's why we decided to follow her advice. The day before yesterday, early in the morning, we left our hotel in Bangkok to move on to our next destination, once again by plane. Our flight to Chiang Mai went by clean as a whistle as we have already become experience flyers right now. A little before the noon we arrived at the renewed airport of Chiang Mai. We took a bus as fast as possible to our little hotel to have enough time left to visit this potentially beautiful city. Thanks to the fast and dangerous driving style of the bus driver we did not have to wait long to travel around in the city. We all agreed promptly that we were not going to visit a temple once again because we had seen enough of them (unless they were very beautiful). Other options were parks, old city walls and shopping and we decided to combine all of them. If we would have to describe the city of Chiang Mai in one word, it would definitely be evolution. It was so clear that the city was undergoing huge changes. There were building projects everywhere and there was a large contrast between old buildings surrounded by cranes and brand new, shiny buildings. It was clear to us that Chiang Mai will probably be a second Bangkok in the near future. After our relaxing, enriching day in the city we had some energy left to spend the night in the city too instead of in our hotel room. People told us that there was a special Night Bazar in the city so we decided to spend the evening over there. What we saw over there was a surprisingly busy and cozy night-market where people were able to buy all kinds of products. We felt really comfortable over there so we felt it was like the ideal moment to collect some souvenirs to surprise our family at home. After the shopping moment, we settled at a nearby café to have a beer while recapitulating the beautiful day.

Off to the countryside...

When we woke up the next morning, we had not decided yet what to do. Because we found ourselves now in the more rural, nature-based part of Thailand, it seemed like an ideal occasion to have another adventurous day, far away from all the city trips. We went a little eastwards to visit some authentic tribes which are very popular in the eyes of tourists. We went to that counryside by boat on one of the hundreds of rivers in the region. On our way to the activity, we got once again confronted with the frightening poverty that still exists in this world. There were some villages near the river that were in a miserable state. Because we did not want to ruin the atmosphere, we didn't stand still with it and we navigated further. After more than an hour of navigating, we finally arrived at a village in the middle of the woods. To our surprise, we were welcomed by the head of a local tribe himself. After some negotiating about the price, we agreed that the man would guide us through the local environs. As we were walking through the woods between the mighty mountains, the guide started with telling stories about the history of Thailand. Those stories were not really stunning but that was also due to the guide's typically asian voice, a type of voice that can sound very annoying sometimes. It seemed to us that Thailand did not have a really rich history. Some interesting aspect that we caught up is that in Thailand, there is also a parliamentary monarchy, similar to our Belgian system. After crossing some woods, we arrived at an enormous open space where there were a lot of plantations. We saw some children working there under the burning sun so we got the impression that the agriculture was quite important for the local tribes. Our guide (who had an almost unpronounceable name) explained to us that the cultivating of products like sugar-cane, cotton, soybeans and some others where the most important source of receivings for the local population next to the touristic incomes. Near the end of our 'guided tour' our guide brought us to a spot where there were a lot of huts all together. The huts were situated next to the enormous mountain Doi Inthanon, the highest mountain of the country. We got into a bit of a chat with some habitants and we understood that we were at a holy place for them because the mountain means a lot for those people in religious terms. We took some cosy dinner over there with overall nice people, but the food was hardly eatable for us. We thanked the people over there and especially our guide and we went back to our boat that would bring us back to our hotel. Once arrived at the hotel, we were of course very exhausted and after some quiet words, we all fell asleep very quickly.

Today, we have decided that we saw enough of this quite fascinating country and that the time came to move on. We can already give away the name of our next destination as it will be the mysterious country of Laos. Make sure you keep refreshing this blog not to miss our next post about our adventures in Laos. Greetings!

Thailand - Continued !

Hi dear followers,

After enjoying a couple of joyful relaxing days biking around Bangkok, we have now arrived in the Center of Bangkok.

The 50 Keth's

The green zones, several parks and the districts.

As said earlier, Bangkok is very polluted and chaotic but they really want to keep “the green” in the city. Thailand is also knows for his numerous parks and green zones in the center of the city. to sum up some parks in Bangkok : Lumphini Park, Queen Sirikit Park, Chatuchak Park Saranrom Park, etc... Lumphini Park is the most known park , it's Bangkok's "Central Park".

Bangkok is a city that is divided into 50 districts or locally known as khet, and then these districts are again divided into sub-districts or khwaeng.

All these districts are under the authority of the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration.
Although Bangkok is divided in districts throughout the years, the western influence maid the city expand without taking notice of the districts. As the city expanded on the outskirts, the inner city just had no other option than to grow up, quite a funny sight to see the difference between the inner city and the outskirts!

Especially the business districts ( Silom, Bangrak, Pinklao, and the new central business district Chatuchak ) grow enormously because the western influence.

Just a little side-note, Bangkok's skyline counts 1,000 skyscrapers and is ranked as the 17th tallest city in the world.

A real must see district is definitely the Phra Nakhon district , a well-known touristic place.

Some touristic attractions we visited in this district were The Grand Palace and Siam Square.

Siam Square is central Bangkok's shopping district whom combines large malls and side shops with both national and international brands.
Here below are some pictures, to show you what we are talking about :

This is the official full name of Bangkok

Lumphini Park

Tourism and culture

Bangkok is known to be the cultural centre of Thailand, there are festivals throughout the whole year, numerous spas for meditation and much more...

So what cultural attraction did we get to experience ?

Well we couldn't be luckier, while we were staying in Bangkok there was an actual festival !

The Bangkok Songkran Festival, This festival celebrates the traditional Thai New Year.

The big symbol in this festival is Water, this is not just for fun but has a real meaning to the Thai people. They believe the water will wash off all the misfortunes in the past year and welcoming the new year with a fresh new start. Originally it was a sort of ritual with family and friends but because of the tourists influence it now is a real festivity, and what a great experience it was to have witnessed these festivities !!

As last we would like to talk about the native food and how it works over there.

A very funny fact in Bangkok a way of saying hello is just saying "Kin khao rue yang?" ( Have you eaten yet?). Bangkok is filled with all kinds of food carts, picturesque restaurants and even superb international restaurants.

This is everything we have encountered up to now, we are all having the time of our life !!

Greets and catch you all up later !!!

Thailand!

Hi dear followers!

a week ago, we left Cambodia. I had already enjoyed our trip up to then, but things keep getting better because now we are staying in Thailand.

We took a plane from Battambang (Cambodia) and arrived at Ubon Ratchathani (The royal town of the lotus flower), which is situated in the South-East of Thailand. Ubon Ratchathani is known as 'The Entrance of The Emerald Triangle' because the city is situated close to the borders of Laos and Cambodia. They call it 'The Emerald Triangle' because it's surrounded by tropical monsoon forests and beautiful nature.

Exploring Ubon

The first day, we decided to explore the city and recover a bit because the next day we were about to travel around the parks.

First, we visited the River Mun Market. We heard there was a nice market at the shore of the Mun river. Luckily, a guest from the hotel warned us we should go early because the place gets very crowded. You get overwhelmed with all kinds of scents, but the market is very cozy.

We also visited the national museum , were we learned a lot about the natives of the area and also discovered this area was well known for it's opium trafficking.

in the afternoon, we started our search for some of the many temples left in the region. We visited the 'Wat Suparranaram' temple and the 'Wat Panachat' temple, where we met fascinating Western monks who try to maintain the culture of the Thai people. The temple is situated in the middle of the forest and is really worth a visit.

National park

The region is well known for the parks. So the second day, we got up early to pay a visit to the 'Pay Thaem National Park'. The park exposes the Mekong river beautifully. We were lucky to visit the park in the dry season because the rest of the year can be really rainy or cold. The beautiful cliffs, waterfalls, nature and wall paintings are really unforgettable. Exhausted, we went back to the hotel because the next day we were leaving the region of Ubon.

Korat

After two days, we decided to leave Ubon and go more to the center of Thailand. We were about to travel to the capital, Bangkok, but we weren't in a rush to get there. So we decided to do as much as possible by bike and by train and bus. If we'd follow the Emerald triangle, we should end in Bangkok anyway.

The following days were very nice, we really enjoyed the environment and the weather was perfect. When we arrived in Korat (Nakhon Ratchasima), we visited the historic center. It was really romantic with the evening market and the nice restaurants. That night, we took the train and headed to Bangkok, where we are staying for the moment. We just arrived here, but the city looks very chaotic. Traffic in the city is a mess! there are cars and Tooktook's everywhere. The Tooktook is the typical vehicle of Bangkok, it looks like a tricycle with an engine. Because of all the traffic, there's a lot of smog in the city center. The air is very polluted. We still have to discover the beauty of the capital, but i'm sure we will in the following days. We'll keep you informed!

Miss you guys and hope to hear from you soon.

Second stop: Cambodia

Second stop: Cambodia

Hello everybody! It’s time for a new post.

Phnom Pehn

After a first stop in Borneo, we took the plane from Banjarmasin to Phnom Pehn (difficult to write) the capital of Cambodia. Our first impression we had when we arrived was the crowd. There are a lot of people here! We took a taxi and first of all we decided to find a hotel. It was not very difficult, our taxi driver was able to understand our English and took us to a very nice hotel called the Phnom Pehn hotel. We put our luggage in our rooms and decided to walk a bit in the city.

Quickly, we saw that the capital of Cambodia is an important point. Rivers such as the Mekong and the Tonlé Sap are coming together in that city. There are also a lot of beautiful places and buildings to see! But that was for the next day because we were tired of the flight and decided to go back to the hotel.

The next morning, everybody was ready to walk in Phnom Pehn. We visited the silver Pagoda commonly referred to as Wat Preah Keo. Other buildings we’ve visited are temples such as Wat Phnom ,Wat Ounalom ,Wat Lang Ka and Wat Koh. We asked to a habitant what the meaning was of ‘Wat’ and it just means temple. Between two temples we also visited the National Museum. Very interesting, the guide in the museum said the roof of the museum was the house of one of the biggest group of bats in the world and believe us, when he said that, we were not very confident anymore..

Angkor

We stayed 3 days in Phnom Pehn to visit the city and then decided to go further. We asked to the hotel receptionist which city was also nice to see in Cambodia. Without hesitation, he answered Angkor. So we took the bus in direction of Angkor. 7 hours later, we arrived in Angkor and directly we realized why the receptionist said it was beautiful here, we saw the Angkor Wat (Temple of Ankor). It was a bit a familiar building for us. We know we saw the Temple earlier but we didn’t know where. We found a hotel to eat and sleep to be in a good shape for the next day. After a good night we found out that the same building as the Angkor Wat was used in The Jungle Book (King Louie and the monkey song) but the temple was also present on the flag of Cambodia. The Temple, built in the Khmer Empire was the most important building in Cambodia. Now it still is the greatest religious building in the world with its 65 meter height, it is built on 1 square kilometer.

We also visited Angkor Thom. It was a village but now it is a ruin. In the village we saw a lot of little temples, the elephant place and the terrace of kings. It is very long to describe but if we could help you, the movie of tomb raider had been filmed in Angkor Thom, just watch the movie then ;)

In 4 days we visited lots of temples such as Ta Prohm, Preah Khan, Ta Som and Banteay Srei. Every temple was different but very beautiful. These four days were very difficult, so in the afternoon of the last day we decided to find a typical restaurant. We experimented a lot of different dishes such as Amok Trey, Ban Hoaw, Ka Tieu, Kralan and Loc Lac; typical from Cambodia.

But now it’s time to leave Cambodia. We have to go to our next destination where we will stay longer than in Borneo and Cambodia. See you there dear bloggers

Our first little adventure: Borneo

Hi dear followers!

Believe it or not but were are very excited to be writing our first blog post during our (still young) journey around the world. Luckily, we can reassure our beloved followers that we have arrived in good circumstances and that everyone is feeling alright.

Taxi trip
Two days ago, we arrived at the airport of Banjarmasin a city in a district named Kalimantan. Something we learned during our flight to Borneo, thanks to a Ukrainian businessman, is that we were actually landing in the biggest city of the whole country. Keeping this in mind, we knew we were at the point to discover a lot of things during our first stop. Using a Taxi seemed the easiest way for us to get from the airport to our little hotel so we took the first one we saw at a bus. Our Taxi could actually be seen as a van, because we all had to fit in it with our fairly heavy luggage. The first thing the driver told to us was that our overnight stay was located at the other side of the city and that it would take us about an hour to get there. At first we were a bit sad to hear that we had to travel another hour before we could finally take some rest but what we didn't know at that point was that it would probably be our most informative taxi ride that we would ever have. Very quickly, we got into an intense chat with the driver (Lucas was his name by the way) and we got to know that Borneo is actually not a country by itself. Hereby, we mean that Borneo is a country that is ruled by three different governments. The Indonesian and Malaysian government are the two main regulators in Borneo but there's also the part Brunei which can pretty much be seen as the real Borneo. At that moment we were in the Indonesian part of Borneo and we would also visit the Malaysian part, which is pretty much known for its phenomenal nature. Brunei only covers about 1 percent of the total surface of the country so it's not our intention to specially visit it. After about half an hour, some of us asked for some air-conditioning because it was quite heat but as expected, the old van didn't have any. The climate in Borneo is typical tropical, with no real seasons. The heat, in combination with the humidity made it very difficult for us to adapt to the local climate. Of course there was also a lot of sight-seeing during the trip and the first impression you get down the streets is... poverty. It definitely was not a surprise for us to encounter a poor country but streets looked dusty and polluted, some houses were very crappy and standing way too close to each other, people were sometimes hardly dressed and so on. It looked like some kind of third world country, but we don't know if it really is one... The amount we had to pay at the end of the taxi trip confirmed our thoughts about the actual poverty in Borneo because we hardly had to pay something. Though we gave Lucas a little fee because he drove us safely and because he was one hell of a nice guy, just like most people we met in Borneo!


Visiting Banjarmasin
In the late afternoon we still had some time left before darkness came and we decided to visit the most attracting spots in the city of Banjarmasin. When scanning the city centre, we were a bit disappointed because we only found a few things that were worth to seeing. We saw some typical eastern palaces but other than that we only saw some typical Asian streets with a lot of chaos. After our disappointing city trip, we decided to go back to the hotel to eat and sleep because the next day could turn out very exhausting for each one of us (the food in the hotel was a bit special and really spicy, but luckily everyone liked it).


Nature Day
Waking up sweaty, hearing the rain rattling against the window, ... this has got to be Borneo. We planned this day to be our nature day. We did some research before we departed and the main conclusion was that whoever visits Borneo has to take a look in the jungle as Borneo is known to be one of the most beautiful countries in the world when it comes to nature. We packed our bags, because it was our last an only night in this hotel, and we took off to meet our guide who would guide us through the jungle all day. We departed with an old little boat on the river Kapuas together with some other tourists on which we navigated to the pure jungle of Borneo. The first minutes in the jungle were really breathtaking as we saw huge trees everywhere, you could hear at least hundred of animals at the same time and the fauna was also quite impressive. As we kept on walking through the wild jungle everything became even more impressive and one of us spotted a Bornean Oerang Oetan sitting in a tree, it was awesome. We asked some information about the monkey to our guide but he said he would give more information later. About 10 minutes later, all the awesomeness of the jungle changed into a huge shock. There was an area of about 10 football fields that was just... empty. The guide explained to us that the government cuts masses of wood every day and that was a huge disappointment for us. At this point our guide began a long sad story about the deforestation. To make a long story short: Borneo's main export products are palm-oil and especially plywood which means that trees are being cut very rapidly. You can say that the government has no choice because that's the only way to receive some income but the disadvantages of the deforestation are incredibly large. In the first place, a lot of animals lose their habitat due to the deforestation and animals like for example the Oerang Oetan might extinguish in the near future. Another fact is that rain forests are very important for the whole world. Borneo is together with the Amazon and some other jungles one of the main lungs of our planet. This problem could be described for a lot of other countries too and we just hope that somebody does something about this before it is too late. In the late afternoon we arrived back at the place where we departed. We thanked and paid our guide, greeted the other tourists and went to a place where we could take a bus that would bring us to our next destination, the city of Kuching. We were all pretty exhausted and as we were travelling towards Kuching, it felt like we were all thinking about the fact about how crazy our trip actually had been so far. Hereby we mean that we were all pretty surprised about how different this world looks in comparison to our dear western society, even after just two days. We already saw a lot of the misery that Borneo unfortunately has to serve but we've also experienced some moments where we thought, it should be like this in Belgium too. Once arrived at Kuching, at our place where we would spend the night, we didn't feel like doing something serious anymore so we just ate a cosy dinner and afterwards we watched some tv and went to bed.


Kings of Kuching
We actually woke up way too late this morning as a result of our tiring day yesterday and we just felt like it was the right choice to just spend the rest of the morning in the hotel, playing some parlour games, watching some tv and chatting with some other tourists in the little hall. Of course after we ate our delayed breakfast, we went out to see the city centre of Kuching and to our surprise, the weather was quite well as it was not raining for once. Our expectations about the city were rather high as we hoped to compensate the sourish feeling about the previous city we discovered. Of course that sourishness only counts for the architecture and decency. Before we departed we asked our friendly hostess to advise us some of the hot spots in the city centre. She told us that there were a lot of cosy places but the things to watch, in her opinion, were definitely Fort Margherita and the Sarawak museum. We decided to visit the museum first. When we arrived there, the first thing that stroke us was the fact that the museum actually looked a lot like the western style when you look at it from the outside. Once being inside, we got faced with, once again, very weird Asian constructions but we really liked as it's always something completely different as you would see in Europe. Satisfied as we were after our museum visit, we walked our way through the city to our next goal: Fort Margherita. While walking through the city it was remarkable that this city seemed to be much more alive than the previous one because there were markets all over the place and people seemed to be optimistic and happy but probably the weather was also a deciding factor in all this. When we finally arrived at Fort Margherita, we got slightly impressed by the authenticity of the building. Of course there was a guide present who told us a very long story about the Fort and there were actually a lot of boring parts in it but the interesting part was when he explained a lot about the fight between the Indonesian, Malaysian and Bruneian people for the authority in that part of Borneo. After this very entertaining city trip we decided to go all the way back to our hotel and that's where we are at this moment, finalizing our first blog. In about half an hour we will go for dinner but after that, we will go out tonight to throw a big party in the city centre and we are looking forward to that because we really don't know what to expect. We hope that you guys learn a lot from these kind of blogs. Make sure that you stay tuned at our blog because in a few days, we will have probably already posted our next blog. Whether we will still be in Borneo or not by our next blog, that's a question that has yet to be answered! Cheers!