Sorry about 3 posts today. Trying to wast time to keep me busy while I wait to go to the Airport to meet Mel for our new life adventure.

]]> http://tygertown.us/2012/04/pictures/feed/ 0 http://tygertown.us/2012/04/sapa-vietnam/ http://tygertown.us/2012/04/sapa-vietnam/#comments Sun, 29 Apr 2012 11:21:39 +0000 tyghe http://tygertown.us/?p=867 #leftcontainerBox { float:left; position: fixed; top: 60%; left: 70px; } #leftcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; clear:both; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; padding-bottom:2px; } #bottomcontainerBox { height: 30px; width:50%; padding-top:1px; } #bottomcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; height: 30px; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; } After our trip in Luang Prabang we were slated to head to Sapa. Mel and I have never been to Hanoi so were not sure if the plan I had made to hop off the airplane and get a taxi directly to the train station to catch our train would work or not. The plane was [...]]]> #leftcontainerBox { float:left; position: fixed; top: 60%; left: 70px; } #leftcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; clear:both; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; padding-bottom:2px; } #bottomcontainerBox { height: 30px; width:50%; padding-top:1px; } #bottomcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; height: 30px; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; }

After our trip in Luang Prabang we were slated to head to Sapa. Mel and I have never been to Hanoi so were not sure if the plan I had made to hop off the airplane and get a taxi directly to the train station to catch our train would work or not. The plane was supposed to arrive around 6:10pm and the train was to leave at 9pm ish. I suspected that to be plenty of time.

We hopped off the plane and headed to immigration. We had our Visa On Arrival forms filled out already, although, Mel didn’t have a picture to put on her application. I had read that it really didn’t matter and you would pay a 2-3 dollar “fee” aka bribe to fix that. So We waddled through the line to hand in our application and passports.

Immigration Officer: “You no have picture?!?”

Us: “Ohh geeze ya I didn’t know”

Hands back the application form and points to pickup window area

“You go over there!!”

We were a bit bewildered as she didn’t indicate if she was going to still allow Mel’s application or was pointing to the area where Mel would now spend the next 5 days sitting and waiting for our flight out of Hanoi.

A bit later the lady brings over our passports, both with VISA’s in them and  tells mel, “I fix for you. Take picture for $2.” She comes out of the booth with a point and shoot camera snaps a picture and goes back into the office and tosses the camera off to the side where it will not be touched again until this happens again. We give her the VISA fees and the extra $2 which I watch her put into the “I’m taking this home with me tonight because bribes are awesome” pile. She hands us both our passports and off we go. That one made us a bit nervous, but hey it worked. Gotta love SE Asia Bribes.

Through immigration and off to pull out millions and millions of dong. The current exchange rate is about 20,800 to the dollar. Nothing like a 10″ thick wallet since the bills go from 500,000 all the way down to 1000…anywho…taxi to the train station.

This nice vietnamese gentlemen comes up and asks if we need a Taxi. In pretty good English. FLAG! ERROR! ADVISE CAUTION AHEAD!

While yes we do. Let me just call my friend over….How much?

600,000 dong. Excuse me while I catch my breath from laughing.

Negative, Ghost rider. We are looking for around 250,000.

Ohh no, meter taxi will cost at least 800,000. Well I guess we will find out. See ya!

Fast Forward 30 minutes or 45. Arrive at the Train station in our Meter taxi. Ohh how about that. The meter reads either 290,000 or 390,000. I can’t remember. Either way much better than 600,000.

Now, to find that train…We hunt around and ask about 5 different people until we find the desk and get our tickets and head onto the train.

YES! Finally pictures and less words for my beloved readers

Haha, suckers only 3 pictures now more rambling.

So off the train heads. We are in a cabin of 4 beds. 2 bunks. Mel and I have the left side and a very nice lady from Canada on the other side. She is a talkative one and Mel and her have a great convo. I decide to peace out and try some Zzzzs. The cabin has A/C and I cover up. That is until about 2am. Apparently the A/C has been shut off and now our room is quite literally a sauna.

FYI, our carriage was part Fansipan or Fanxipan. I recommend trying another one of the many companies in the summer to avoid this wonderful sweat lodge.

Bla bla bla, complaining. Arrive in Lao Cai station. Now we need to get a bus to Sapa. Can’t even get off the train without touts getting in our faces about taxis and busses for ridiculous prices. I’m thinking about yelling “Mai Ow!” but of course they would not understand that. We keep walking as they hover around us like hungry mosquitos. We exit the station to amazingly see Mel’s name on a sign somebody is holding up. BINGO! Did not even know that was going to happen. Apparently our guest house has arranged this for us. +1 for them.

The bus ride is stunning as we ascend to Sapa and can see all the terraced rice patties in the mountains. Arriving in Sapa we are greeted by some local tribe women who follow us everywhere. We check in and do some thinking. Only today and tomorrow we will be here. Yep, a trekking tour it is. Now!

So out the door we go. Tribe women still hanging about and following us. Ohh, they are going with us on the tour…ok. Here take this bracelet as they put it on. You buy something later from us. Umm, ok. +2 bracelets for me and Mel.

I’m just going to post pictures now.

Haha, ohh this was awesome. Late into our trek we are walking along and come across this flock? of ducks waddling down the hill. So funny, they were just so content and walked right down the path onto our path and up the hill. Turned the corner and right into their pen. Apparently it was just bath time and now they went home for nap time.

So the trek ended up being about 12km or so long. Mel ended up with some pretty terrible blisters from her shoes that she powered through near the end of the trip. I could tell she was hurting. It was almost carry her time.

That night we ate down on the local “pub” like street and headed back to the motel. The next day we didn’t do too much. Just ate lunch and had some coffee. Played some cards until it was time to catch the bus back to Lao Cai for the Train to Hanoi.

The train ride back was a repeat of the train trip up. Sauna + little sleep.

All-in-all, we probably should have spent 2 or 3 days in Sapa as it was the place we really were hoping Luang Prabang would be. Cool temperature. Cafe’s everywhere. Relaxed atmosphere. Hindsight is 20/20.

With our final days in South East Asia ahead, Mel and I decided to go on a final trip to see some places we had been meaning to see. Luang Prabang was our first stop.

So many people had told us that this was a great place to go if you were headed to Laos. The experience we had was a bit so so because of the intense heat.

We still had some work to do so what we were looking for a was a relaxed air conditioned cafe to sit at and do some things for our work. Turns out, there was only one A/C cafe place that we could find and it really wasn’t the type of place you sit down and occupy a table for hours. Maybe there was a place somewhere else that we didn’t look, so we settled on our room back at the hostel.

We had about 3.5 days in Luang Prabang to do things. Most people go out and visit the water fall or maybe an elephant trek. Neither of those really interested us so we spent most of the time as I said in our motel room given the heat.

We did manage to wake up a bit early on one morning and trek up the hill in the middle of the town and take some pictures.

Panoramic!!!!! Click me for larger size

The day that we were flying out we went out to the Living Land Experience.

There we learned all the steps from plowing a rice patty all the way to cooking steamed sticky rice.

There were 14 steps. Let’s see if I can remember them

1. Plowing the Patty

2. Planting

3. Harvesting

4. Drying

5. Smashing on the ground to get the rice off the stalk

6. Separating the kernel from the bad kernel

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

7. Milling

8. Separating the husk from the kernel

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

9. Soaking

Just soak the rice kernels in water overnight

10. Steaming

Yep, you steam the soaked rice

11. Rolling

Just need to roll the rice while it is steaming

12. Eating

Nope, I failed the test. Not sure which steps I missed.

Our next stop was a Sapa, Vietnam(via Hanoi airport + train station)

Finally am getting around to writing this a week after we arrived back in Bangkok from our trip. Only scammed one time on the way to Siem Reap. Feel alright about that, but really was shooting for not getting scammed at all. Many pictures were taken. It was hot. It is hard to climb up all the temples when it is hot.

Instead of blasting all of the pictures we took onto my blog I’ll just pick out a few of them and then put the link to the Picasa album’s so you can view the rest if you wish.

Pictures from Mel’s Camera

Pictures from Tyghe’s Camera

Getting to Siem Reap seemed like quite the daunting task after reading about it online.

Take a bus or train to somewhere. Take a tuk tuk to the border. He will try to take you to a fake Cambodian Consulate. Tell him you already have a VISA. Then tell the next fake person he takes you to the same thing. Then he will take you to the border. Go through Thai immigrations. Then do your entry VISA on the Cambodia side. Don’t pay the express fee as it is a scam. Take the mini free bus to somewhere. Then take a taxi or other bus to Siem Reap. If the taxi tries to tell you he cannot enter the city he is lying. Just tell him he can and then he will take you to your guesthouse.

That is just about the gist of it. Well we for the most part did everything except when our taxi took us to some random place and said that a tuk tuk would take us to our guesthouse from here for free, we didn’t argue with him. I tried but he said the tuk tuk was free so whatever…except the tuk tuk is not free. He lied. Liar. Big ol’liar-face.

After dealing with that we finally made our way to our Guest House. http://www.siemreaprooms.com/. Let me just take a moment to say how awesome this place is. The owners are fantastic. They know the area so well and will set you up with drivers that you can trust and that are very very nice. We used the same driver 2 days because he was so nice. They will make reservations for you at places…anything. Good breakfast sandwiches as well! Trip Advisor Page.

The first night we met up with a friend for dinner and a walk through the market. It was her last night in Siem Reap and the last time we would see her in SE Asia. Had a fun time at the market and tried a new drink called the Tomb Raider Cocktail which is basically a gin and tonic with a more citrus taste. Good stuff.

Temple Day

I won’t name any of the places where we went because I don’t know where we went. Just the stories I have of our adventure.

Steps I climbed to take pictures for your enjoyment.

This picture took about 15 minutes to take because I had to keep going back and adjusting the zoom/focus and not running fast enough. I have quite a few pictures of my butt as I was walking down the hallway to get next to Mel.

Lookie what was hiding and waiting for me.

Too tired to go to this temple.

Pretty!!

All the people waiting for sunset. YAWN! Sunset never happened. Instead a rainstorm moved in.

Tomb Raider Temple

Ya, I don’t remember the actual name.

Floating Village

Not in this picture, but you can see that this river floods quite a bit and so they adjusted their housing style to compensate.

But, Tyghe, I see only 2 days worth of touring and you were there for 3 days?

That is right. So we played lazy on the last day and did some tootling around Siem Reap itself. We are boring!!

FYI, Mel is in 7 of the above pictures. Can you find all 7?

So far Mel and I have only told some people about our move for fear of changed plans and having to un-tell people. Things are pretty much solidified now so I’ll just blast it out there on the internet for everybody.

Mel and I are moving to Washington, D.C. at the end of April.

Mel was offered a great position at WRAIR. As this is a great opportunity for Mel she decided to take it although it will cut our time in Thailand about a year shorter than we had expected. Soon after I was also offered a position at the same place as they need a computer programmer to help do different things in the Bioinformatics and other computer related things. Since I already assist Mel here and there with these things it should be an easy transition into assisting a bunch of people. This stuff is very interesting for me as it involves writing scripts and figuring out new things and ways to help other people do what they need to do easier.

Anyways, here are the rough details of the move for the interested few out there:

• Where will we live?
• Most likely the Bethesda, MD area
• When will we leave Bangkok?
• I fly out the 26th of April in the early morning
• Mel has not booked her flight yet, but most likely the 28th
• Why are we flying 2 days apart?
• We have to buy my ticket and it was cheapest on Thursday. Mel has to be at work Thursday and Friday so cannot fly until Saturday.
• Does this change the Wedding plans?
• No.
• Is planning the Wedding and the move and other things super stressful at times?
• Yes.
• Have we made a lot of awesome friends in Thailand and it is super hard to leave?
• Most certainly

Just joking about the title of the post. Mel and I headed to Phenom Penh, Cambodia this past weekend for the Big Phat Phnom Penh Hat tournament(Ultimate Frisbee). We decided to stay a few extra days as well after the tournament so were set to fly back on Wednesday. This turned out to be super nice since Monday was a rest day for sure after the tournament.

We embarked on tournament day 1 with about a 30 minute bus ride to the fields. I forgot to take pictures with my camera. I did get a video on my phone though of Mel and our friend Kristie in the Women huck contest.

In order to win you need to throw it the furthest and have somebody catch the disc.

Really fun tournament. Our team was really fun to play on and we had a solid set of players which worked out great in the end as we went undefeated the whole tournament. 7-0. YAY!! My first Frisbee championship win! Yay for me!

The next two days we spent touring around. Because of the way the Picasa plugin works for this site and I’m too lazy to move the pictures I’ll show you our tuk tuk driver for our trip to the airport on our last day first

Haha, this guy was pretty cool. Very nice and not pushy. Even charged us a good price to go to the airport. We found him in the morning and had him drop us off at a side street and told him to come back at 2:15pm to take us to the airport. He showed up even early.

Here are one of the advertisements in his tuk tuk. Haha.

Now for the pictures starting in order. This weekend I basically just took pictures of random things trying to fill up the memory card which still didn’t happen.

Day 1 Pictures

I don’t know what most of this stuff is. Just took pictures or Mel did on her walk while I took a nap.

This was a very interesting place. Mexican bar/restaurant where we met the owner a bit. He was a very strange fella. We talked to him for a bit after dinner(Pretty good food) and he told us about his life as a journalist around the SE Asia before opening the Cantina.

Battle scars from the tournament. Twisted ankle from Semi-finals game. Cleat mark from Finals game and a tooth mark from finals game. Woohoo!

Mel and I dinking off in the motel room. You can see in the right picture they didn’t expect anybody that tall when they put that door in.

Day 2 Pictures

Making our way to the killing fields

The killing fields

If you are unsure what this is all about check this out. Humans do some terrible stuff.

S-21 Museum

Day 3 Pictures

Found this little gem of a place on the morning of the day we were leaving. Get the pun? Haha…ok

Just bring in a thumbdrive, ipod, kindle…whatever and pay very little for movies, ebooks or music. They will put it right on your device.

Local bus system

Large blizzard in Cambodia(Thailand is the same). Same size as a small in the U.S.

Overwhelmed with planning currently I decided to take a break and think about some stuff. Maybe it is the excessive amounts of dark chocolate I just ate, but I’m feeling pretty motivated with no direction at all to my thoughts so expect one of those random timeline posts.

Let’s start with jumping back in time about 3 weeks. Just recently returning from Krabi/Railay Beach we were immediately slammed with Ultimate Frisbee. The Thursday after coming back we had League night which was pretty low key for the Soidawgz as there were so many people in town for the Bangkok Hat that came to League night to play(Open invite). Meeting some new people, everybody went to go eat together after the games which didn’t end until about 10:45-11pm so it was late already then. After eating it was about 12:30am and by the time we get home about 1:15am. Ohh, and of course you are exhausted from frisbee, but body is still trying to wind down from exercise. Maybe fall asleep around 2:30-3.

That was day 1 — 2/9/2012

I only work Monday and Friday this semester, but that is unfortunate for me as after being up so late and from Frisbee you are exhausted when you wake up on Friday. I can hear Mel in the back of my mind, “I wake up every day and you only have to do it once.” I feel pretty bad about that, but it is still darn hard to wake up on Friday. Good thing about Friday though is it is Friday.

This Friday though is the registration party for the BKK Hat 2012. 6pm – late downtown. Another late night, but we sneak out early around 10:30…or do we. RONNY’s PIZZA booyaa. Ben, Tien and I go for some noms in maybe the best ‘Merica Pizza place in BKK.

I don’t remember what time it was that we left, but probably around midnight-ish. This is where one of the freakiest things I’ve ever seen happens. As Ben went to get his car from the parking lot Tien and I were waiting outside the Pizza joint when we noticed a crowd of people across the street looking aghast back towards our side of the street. Then some people walking by the building next to us jumped out of the ordinary in terror. We still don’t know what is going on until this Thai women steps out onto the sidewalk in a white nightgown and turns towards us. I still remember her expression as it was almost identical to what you could expect in a movie scene. Expressionless movements with a dead face and a blood soaked front just aimlessly walking.

The scene at this point is too much to actually comprehend for Tien and I. Then she walked back to the building and started lightly banging her head on the outside wall. At this point Ben pulled up in the car unknowing of what is transpiring. We get in as a few Thai people finally broke out of the social stunned crowd to help her? As we drove by she was just sitting cross-legged on the ground. What was really freaky was I looked into the building which seemed to be under repair and there was a Thai guy in the dark just standing there…End of story as we know it

End of Day 2

Saturday was Day 1 of the Bangkok Hat. We took motorbikes for maybe the 3rd time ever to the fields as we were a bit late..but not really because late to us is never as late as frisbee on-time. I forgot to mention that Tien and Allison were staying with us as they might as well be living in Singapore, they live so far away. Not really, but really…

So the day started and there were 2 other Dawgz(BKK short for Soidawgz) on my team. Tall Piete and Jamie. Some new faces that I didn’t know but things looked pretty good for us.

I’m going to go ahead and throw this right out on to the internet. I feel the reason our team did not play well was because I was a huge spirit killer(go ahead and jump in on this one Piete as I think we may have taken the bad spirit award if there was one). I can’t say for sure, but I lost the tournament for us within the first game as I just gave up right in that first game. Hard to win games when you have players that do that. Sorry Yellow team.

We did almost win 17th place though. Had I just not had my first drop of the weekend in the endzone or just jumped with a little more umpf that last game…Hind sight is 20/20 right?

End of day 3/4

Monday I woke up pretty tired, but had to persevere since I teach from 5-7pm. Just to clarify that though, I start preparing around noon and there is a lot of travelling involved to go to the university and come back so Monday’s are usually a good 9 hour day for me(good thing I have Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday off hahahaha!)

So the thing to take from this day is I was tired when I went to bed. Out of the ordinary Tired..raises eyebrow

End of Day 5

Tuesday I have off so can afford to be lazy all day. So I be’d lazy all day. Tired is what to take from this day.

End of Day 6

HOLY CRAP I’M SICK!!!

Fever 102+. 16 hour headache.

Should we go to the hospital?

Mel stayed home and fixed me though and worked my fever down

End of Week 1 – 2/16/2012

Thursday is League night and I stayed home all day and felt decent. I decided to get out and go to League. No cleats. No jersey. No playing….or so I thought. Our team was missing lots of people so ended up walking around on the field to give others a rest.

Left right after league. Ohh, fever is back! Dumb decision on my part to go.

End of Day 8

Teach lab. Friend says, you need to go home. Looks like you are about to pass out.

End of Day 9

No energy to do anything.

End of Days 10/11/12

Tuesday I go to see the Dr. They do a blood test and my white blood cells and platelets are down by a lot. Highly likely I contracted something via Mosquito from our trip in Krabi. Good thing is that I’m probably recovering since my fever did go away within 2 days so not Dengue. Come back on Thursday to take another blood test to ensure you are getting better.

Make it to Kris and Piete’s for Pancake Day night. Pre Ash Wednesday…

Play some games and have a lot of laughs with friends.

End of Week 2 – 2/23/2012

Go back to hospital and get blood taken again. Counts have about doubled but still lower than norm. Definitely getting better.

League night and I’m showing great signs of getting better. About 90%. Good enough to play. Play decent. Feel great. Go straight home anyways. No noodles tonight.

End of Day 15

Friday is teaching. Friday night is Tawan Dang with the Dawgz. This place is something else. Can’t explain it other than Vegas -ish style entertainment. Crazy.

End of Day 16 – Current day

Feeling 100% and realizing all of the stuff we have to do to get ready for our move to D.C and Wedding

So that is basically the last two weeks. Writing it down it seems pretty boring, but being sick for basically 2 weeks straight plus the Hat before that and Krabi before that has almost erased a month from existence for us. Nothing productive came out of those 3-4 weeks so now trying to catch up on everything I was going to do.

Stay tuned for planning woes and complaints about stressful life situations. I’ll write about it just to ease my mind.

Finally receiving payment from the University, Mel and I decided to head off on an adventure. We looked up airline tickets and decided since we may be able to use the tickets we bought to Krabi for May that we would head there. Many people suggested going to Railay Beach so off we went.

We left on a Saturday around 6pm and arrived at around 7pm in Krabi. We hopped on the bus to Ao Nang and about 45 minutes later arrived for a mere 150 baht. I had looked up 2 places to stay that had great reviews on TripAdvisor. The first one was full. The second one we could not find. Searching we went. Full. Full. Full. Full. Have a room for 900 baht. The room looked great. Sold! I had seen so many bad reviews on TripAdvisor that I was weary of every place, but we got to see the room first and it looked nice.

Off for food we go. 20 steps down the road we found a Thai restaurant. Mel ordered the Cashew nut chicken and I ordered some coconut curry. Usually the Cashew nut chicken is not spicy, but luckily for Mel, it was this time. <– Sarcasm. Regardless, the Coconut curry was so amazing. I ate it so good.

Day 1

Tasks to complete today:

• Have fun
• Find place to stay on Railay because we are lazy

    

    

We found a decent place to stay near the end of the day. Railay Princess Resort and Spa. Everywhere is more expensive on Railay, but this place was quite a bit less than the others.

Most of the day was spent walking around looking at different things. We had made the decision to bring our laptops and some other stuff along and were going to do some work stuff, but instead we just lugged heavy awkward bags everywhere we went. Walking between Railay and TonSai was really fun with these awkward heavy bags. <– Sarcasm again.

Only partial fun was had this day but we did find a place to stay for the next 2 nights.

Back to Ao Nang for the night. We went to a place that had a wine special and it turned out their food was quite expensive. It was actually pretty good though. After that we found an Indian/Thai/Italian food restaurant that didn’t have too many people and played settlers together.

Day 2

We checked into our room and then ventured out to find kayak rental plus find a tour to go on for day 3. We found a really fun looking snorkeling tour that left later in the day and booked that. The guide was going to be English which would be different.

After we booked a kayak for 3 hours and headed out on the water. Not really knowing where we wanted to go, nor how long it would actually take.

What we found out was that you can really travel quite far on a kayak in a bay area in very little time. After an hour we had almost kayaked everywhere we wanted to go so we stopped on a beach and hung out a bit.

Then we took off and tried to go all the way across the Railay bay and around the bend a bit and then headed back. Well now we were tired from the 2 hours of kayaking already and the wind and current were against us and it felt like it took forever to get back to the beach. Forever meaning 30 minutes, but it was a good workout.

After that we pounded a burger and some fries and then I ate a sandwich. Mel and I grabbed some drinks and some chips and bought a mat and sat on the beach and watched the sunset. By far the most fun thing we have done in a while.

After, we went back to the room and changed and went back out to check out Railay East and had some more to eat.

Day 3

Food Poisioning. Thank you Mama’s Kitchen from the night before. The coconut curry was not as good from this place for obvious reasons.

Day 4

Checkout. Boat. Airplane. Home.

Headed out this weekend to a fishing pond just outside of the city near the airport.

I can’t remember the name right now, but the pictures show all that is needed.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Finally a trip outside of Thailand with Mel that is not back to ‘Merica.

We hopped a fly fly to Vietnam this last weekend to go to another frisbee tournament. This was a larger one with probably 200-300 people(maybe more I don’t know). This was also a Hat tournament, meaning they draw teams at random for the most part. Of course they have to even the teams a bit so it doesn’t end up super lopsided. The tournament was spread over 2 days starting Saturday at about 9am. Busses picked everybody up around 7am near the motels and took us to the fields.

Day one was pretty warm. I would say in the 90′s although later on it was a bit overcast which felt awesome. My team(Team Olive) ended up losing all 4 games the first day. The first game we played Mel’s team(Team Purple) and lost pretty bad. By the 4th game of the day our team was learning how to play together pretty well, but still lost. No problem, first day is all about learning your team.

On the second day we had to play our first game at I think 8am as the teams that were seeded 1-4 had a first round bye and got to sleep in. That is of course if your fiance has to play at 8am. I’d say it is equal payback as the same thing happened to me during the Bangkok Hat last year(Our team went 3-1 Mel’s team 0-4 last year).

So, bang! Pulled off our first victory of the tournament, beating a good team and feeling pretty good about it. Second game we played a team we almost beat the day before and this time we won. Now we are in the Semifinals. Cinderella story time here we come.

Playing Team Purple again. Mel’s team. Ohh, they have added a new player since yesterday. Some supa-star ultimate player. Whatever, let’s see how we can do against them. 3-10 Loss is how we can do against them

Awesome day though and great team to play with.

Watched the final game with some friends. Was fun as Mel’s team ended up winning.

PICTURES!!!