Bike Hippies

Nong Khai

2011-01-28T07:18:00.000Z

We were super excited about being back in Thailand and being able to visit that most traditional of cultural establishments, 7-11, which is filled with all our favourite tasty stuff like purple taro bread, 5 baht bags of coffee sweets and weird little pots of mysterious coconutty desserts. However, it still took us about three days to realise that there was one just around the corner from our hotel in Nong Khai.

Nong Khai is just over the border, about 20km from Vientiane and a bit further along the river. You can wave at Laos on the other side of the river and watch boats carrying boxes of stuff (Beerlao, we hoped) between the two. It shares Vientiane's lovely red sunsets, although they're not over the river.

It's not a very touristy town and is a little weird, having been relatively recently formed from a number of villages so there's no real town centre. The riverside is developed into an attractive promenade lined with cafes and restaurants, and dotted with pleasant shelters where you can sit peacefully and read a book all afternoon.

Further in from the river there are excellent food markets and cheap restaurants - lots of barbecues (including an excellent chicken roasting machine using lots of cogs and bike chains to rotate the chickens). We found ourselves a new pancake lady and learned the Thai word for "four" (we had previously only got as far as three) by ordering two small round sugared pancakes each. She also taught us the word for that kind of pancake so we didn't have to make rounded shapes with our hands any more. Another stall served us the most excellent pad thai.

Sadly, Nong Khai is rife with elephant begging - every evening, mahouts drive their elephants into the city and walk them through busy areas, selling sugar cane and bananas so you can have a chance to feed them. One of the things we learned at Elephant Nature Park was that elephants' feet are very sensitive to vibrations in the ground, which they use to communicate and detect danger. Once you understand this, and have learned about the cruel processes use to "break" an elephant to make it obedient, it can be quite upsetting to see these creatures in the city, often babies without their mothers, constantly overstimulated by vibrations from traffic, whimpering and completely subservient.

If you're visiting Thailand or anywhere that has elephants, please don't support this practice. Elephants need to eat hundreds of kilograms of food every day and you are not helping it by feeding it a couple of bananas - you are most likely doing it a disservice by making it financially worthwhile to bring it into the city. There are plenty of places where you can hang out with happy elephants, and by supporting those places instead you increase their capacity to help more of the sad ones.

We spent several days lounging around in Nong Khai. On our last evening there we took a tuk-tuk out to Sala Keoku, a statue park on the outskirts of the city. Some small, some gigantic, many of the statues can only rightly be described as bizarre or a bit trippy. My personal favourite was a man with an elephant face sitting on a giant rat with hands.

Finally we got the sleeper back to Bangkok for a few more days of this crazy city. Yesterday I took the canal boat into town, wandered around getting lost for a bit and then visited two of the major temples, Wat Po (featuring what is possibly the world's largest reclining Buddha) and Wat Arun, (I climbed up the outside but it really toes the line between "seriously steep staircase" and "actually just a scary ladder with handrails")

In the evening we met up with our friend Matt, who we met in Phnom Penh, and took the lift up to the 64th floor (it's odd seeing numbers that high on a lift counter) of State Tower, the second highest building in Bangkok - there's a bar at the top where they charge 6 quid for a Coke and it doesn't even come in a gold-plated can, but does include spectacular views. Dgym had some vertigo moments but did very well.

Vientiane

2011-01-28T06:16:00.002Z

Sorry, we've been very bad about blogging for the last couple of weeks.

We flew down to Vientiane, capital of Laos, in a tiny little turbo-prop plane which was quite cool. It's only a couple of hundred kilometres but would have been a ten hour bus journey - we were sick of buses, even split into two five hour journeys it seemed too much. We made enquiries about a four day cycle tour that covers the journey, but it turned out to be insanely expensive. It was a shame to miss the pretty mountain scenery south of Luang Prabang, it looked nice from the air.

Vientiane started out with a long hot trek around town at midday, my backpack now a bit heavier thanks to all the market shopping. We found and rejected lots of expensive rooms, and lots of cheap ones that smelled bad before finding one that was moderately priced and not smelly.

Vientiane is very chilled for a capital city. It's next to the Mekong river but not quite on it. At first it appeared to be a very long way from the river, then we realised that it's the dry season and the huge flat sandy bit is probably a huge rivery wet bit for much of the year. On top of that, there's an extra couple of hundred metres of land which is currently being landscaped into a park, and a levee behind that to protect the city against flooding.

It also has some of the most consistently fantastic sunsets I've seen anywhere - the sun dims and changes colour as it drops over the river, until it becomes a large red disc and sinks into the haze a few degrees above the horizon. I walked out across the sandy riverbed one evening, ending up with several spoonfuls of fine dusty sand in my trainers, and was rewarded with a lovely peaceful spot in which to watch the sunset.

We headed away from the river in the evenings and bought our dinner from the night market, coming away with delicious curries, sticky rice, barbequed meats, steamed leafy green veg and larger savoury versions of the little rice treats we'd found in LP. (We have since found out that these are called Khanom Krok and are also available throughout Thailand).

There was also what looked like a dessert stall selling various interesting looking cake-like things. I pointed and asked "All sweet?" The vendor nodded, which turned out to be approximately half right. Among our selection of goodies, one contained a sliver of alarmingly pink sausage. Another, to our delight, was an exact miniature version of a Cornish pasty. The shape, taste and smell were spot on!

Hotel breakfast was typically grim but we went a couple of doors down to an excellent French bakery and coffee shop - what with spending so little on our market dinners, we felt justified in splurging a little bit on fancy pastries and coffee first thing.

We walked out to visit the giant gold stupa one day, it's the national symbol of Laos and is pictured on the bank notes. It turned out not to be made of solid gold or even gold plated, just painted with gold paint and also quite dirty - but it was a fun trip and we also passed Vientiane's concrete equivalent of the Arc de Triomphe.

After a couple of days we caught the bus across the river over the Friendship Bridge, back into Thailand, we were unloaded once for exiting Laos and once again for entering Thailand at the other end of the bridge, passing lots of scary signs about all the horrible things they will do to you if they find bad stuff in your bags. We were excited about coming back into Thailand again but it also felt like we were beginning our journey home. I do hope to see more of Laos at some point - there's plenty more to see but we also wanted to spend some more time in Thailand.

Luang Prabang

2011-01-21T09:44:00.000Z

We flew out of the tiny airport at Siem Reap (it had a temple-style tiled roof and peaceful little garden inside) and landed at the tiny airport in Luang Prabang. We've been flying a lot more than envisaged on this trip, having evaluated the alternative as being two days of overland travel including a sleeper train plus 15-20 hours of bus time, not something we were willing to consider at this point.

Having heard many good things about Luang Prabang, we were excited about arriving and it did not disappoint with its fantastic mountain scenery, beautiful temples, wooden houses and gorgeous night market.

It didn't start out brilliantly for us - we found a cheap guesthouse which seemed good until we switched the fan off and realised it smelled a bit of wee, then we were kept up into the small hours by noisy Aussies (in those wooden houses you hear everything) and woken early by construction work. Dgym was feeling ill the next morning and we had to find somewhere with a nicer bathroom in which he could comfortably hurl. We found a similarly priced much nicer place tucked away in a quiet sidestreet and not made of wood, and we slept better after that. Dgym recovered quickly, but still lost a day of valuable eating time.

In the meantime I was exploring the town. On the first day I had a Thai/Lao body massage which aims to encourage flexibility - certainly not the relaxing kind, I spent an hour being pummelled and contorted around as the masseur attempted to push my limbs into various poses and also to pull all my fingers and toes off. Unfortunately I have ticklish knees and couldn't keep in the giggles as she worked on my legs.

At Luang Prabang, the wide Nam Khan tributary flows into the enormous Mekong river. A rickety bamboo footbridge spans the Nam Khan for half the year - it is rebuilt every year after the rainy season. On the other side is a small river beach from which you can wade out to a sandy island in the middle. I crossed very carefully one afternoon, unplanned and with a bagful of camera and other vital non-waterproof stuff on my back, hoping the current wouldn't knock me over backwards and dunk the lot. I sat on the island and watched local boys dart back and forth across the same stretch of water, then took some pictures to justify risking my stuff like that.

My favourite thing about Luang Prabang was the night market. It sets up on the main street at dusk - walk through at the right time and you will hear the monks drumming as the sun drops in the sky and the vendors set up their tents, hanging paper lanterns, laying out rows of silk scarves and bags onto mats on the ground as well as more dubious items such as animal teeth and bottles of snake whiskey (that's whiskey with a snake in it).

This was where I had my best ever Christmas shop. No icy cold wind, no crowds of stressed out shoppers and best of all no cheesy christmas music. The seller sits on the ground behind their goods, and hands you a low stool to sit opposite from which to view scarf after scarf, examining different colours, textures and fabrics - no rush.

After the choice is made, the haggling begins. I've had mixed feelings about haggling on this trip - generally we haven't done it much, reasoning that the discount probably makes a lot more difference to the seller than it does to us (plus we're uptight and British and quite simply not used to it). However, prices are often given with the expectation that you'll try to negotiate it down and I sometimes can't help feeling like I'm depriving the seller of their favourite sport. I very much got into it that evening, sometimes placing an initial offer at about 75% of theirs, sometimes aiming for a particular figure so pitching a fair bit below that. Sometimes they'd meet my final offer, sometimes I'd meet theirs. Nobody pays more or accepts less than they're comfortable with, everybody has a little fun and it adds a little extra human interaction and challenge to the sale.

Hungry after a good shopping session, I met up with Dgym and we headed to the tiny sidestreet filled with lots of tasty food stalls and also some not so tasty-looking ones that sold pretty much every part of a chicken you can imagine and some you probably can't. The tastier ones involved a vegetarian buffet and barbecued meat and fish on sticks, accompanied by a lovely Beerlao, which has been the nicest of all the beers I've had out here.

Dessert on the market consisted of tiny pancake-like coconut cakes. I don't know what they're called but they're cooked over a fire in a specially shaped pan which acts as a mould. Batter is poured into the pan and cooked to make tiny delicious hemispheres which are put together to make a little cake about the size and shape of a flattened golf ball. The texture is soft and slightly wibbly and apparently they're made with rice and coconut. We were too busy eating them to take any pictures.

American Stinky

2011-01-11T12:54:00.002Z

We bounced away from Kep on the bouncy bus, which conveniently stopped after about ten minutes to let us all out while the driver got nice and oily tinkering around in the engine. We sat on the grass in the sunshine while word spread among vendors back in the town that a bus had broken down, and a few minutes later our every street food desire was being fulfilled by carts selling meat on sticks, bread, water and unripe mangoes with weird little bags of salt (I bought one and wasn't sure whether that was how you eat them in Cambodia, or maybe as a naive foreigner I'd gone and chosen the wrong mango)

We watched the bus driver smile cheerfully as he chatted on the mobile, which gave no clue as to how screwed our bus was - it didn't seem like the kind of thing that was going to break his day. As it turned out, our bus was pretty much useless - it had been much nicer and shinier than the one we came in on, clearly the shiny buses do not work so well and are not to be trusted. A less shiny rescue bus came along shortly and we continued to Phnom Penh in suitable amounts of squalor.

This was just a quick stopover - we were thinking about getting the boat to Siem Reap but decided that it left too early (7am) and cost too much ($35) - the buses went all morning and cost a fraction of that. Phnom Penh seemed crazy, noisy and filthy after Kep. Probably because it is all those things. Unfortunately we were a few days too late to witness the wedding of two snakes in a nearby village.

We set off on the bus to Siem Reap the next day. The predicted 4-6 hour journey time was in fact seven hours, it was quite a rough journey. We stopped at a cafe for lunch, and Dgym and I shared a steamed dumpling which turned out to be pretty much the Cambodian equivalent of a Cornish Pasty, only breadier. We stopped again in the middle of nowhere about 20km short of Siem Reap to allow the bus radiator to cool down, the driver to have a smoke, and several dozen mosquitoes to join us for the final leg. By this time we'd run out of water and long since had enough of the journey and decided that five hours was about our limit for bus travel.

So we were infinitely thankful when we arrived at Siem Reap and were greeted by the grinning tuktuk driver from our hotel. We've never been so pleased to see a tuktuk driver, and sitting down and drinking water never felt so good!

We took the next day off to take it easy, then the following day we rented bikes from the hotel and rode up to the Angkor temple complex, a vast park full of crumbling stone temples, the ruins of the ancient Khmer empire. This includes the enormous Angkor Wat, the world's largest religious building. We had a lovely but very hot, thirsty and sweaty day riding around seeing some of the highlights. The scenery between the temples is beautiful too - mostly shady forest on the loop we did, but sometimes opening out a bit more and sprinkled with palm trees and cows. A particular highlight (and my favourite) was Ta Prohm - over time, trees and temple have become one, and it's sometimes hard to tell them apart.

There are plenty of places to stop for a little light refreshment during a day at the temples. Everywhere we stopped off we were offered water, fruit, hats, little bracelets, "Something to eat, lady?" (we are still arguing over which one of us was being called lady). When we finally decided to stop for lunch, we made the mistake of being separated for a second and were both pounced on by separate restaurant owners and managed to cause a bit of a fuss because they'd both seen us first and therefore each was indignantly staking her claim on us. We felt so objectified, but at least it meant we were hastily offered discounts in each place. They proceeded to squabble and moan like five year olds and left us just wanting to have a quiet sit down under a tree - but they'd seen us now and kept following us. We decided to go with the less annoying one, and as soon as we'd made our decision the fighting stopped.

However, the main highlight was trying to buy water after we emerged from Angkor Wat, hot and sweaty and ready to call it a day. We were approached by a young girl who had clearly found her target market and attempted to sell us a large water for $2. We pointed out that we could get it for about 50 cents in the cafes and shops. Not at Angkor Wat, she pointed out. Only pond water costs 50 cents at Angkor Wat. The price dropped quickly to $1 and then to 0.75. We didn't have far to go before we'd find a shop so we turned away and got on our bikes. She called us "American Stinky" and flounced off in a sulk.

We spent the next day recovering from visiting the temples - we lounged around town, ate food, drank fruit shakes, shopped a bit. There's some pretty cheap food to be found here - you can eat for a couple of dollars in the cafes by the old market. We've been staying a 20 minute walk from the town centre, close to some very cheap local restaurants, the point-at-your-food kind with jugs of free iced tea We've also discovered little street restaurants dedicated to desserts - beans, sticky rice, tapioca, coconut, taro, all served from metal bowls, plus some interesting pastries. Dinner + dessert for two has cost under $4 for the past couple of nights. Tasty and cheap.

Did I mention the cheese on toast? We found a western-run bar serving various fried breakfasts, Jacket potatoes and other stuff we haven't been seeing much of. I'd been having a difficult few days with food, not really feeling like eating local stuff. I walked in, up to the bar and asked for cheese on toast. "Well, you certainly know what you want", the Aussie owner remarked, and soon two delicious slices were placed before us. With a sprinkling of Lea & Perrins. that put me back on track and fulfilled my feeble Western body's cravings for wheat and dairy produce, a warm cheesy oasis in a desert of rice and noodles.

Tomorrow we're flying to Laos!

Mangosteen

2011-01-08T01:08:00.004Z

Reasons why we love mangosteens:

They're purple
They look awesome
They taste awesome
They're hygenic (important in countries of dubious water quality - the edible bit is protected by thick rind)
They're new and exciting. Neither of us had even heard of them until now
They're good for you
They're easy to get into - squeeze and the rind pops open.
The inner bits look like cloves of garlic.
They're well padded so don't get damaged too easily.
They rhyme with langoustine. What else does that? If you have any recipes for mangosteen with langoustine, or any poems making use of this, we'd love to hear about it.

Kep

2011-01-05T02:26:00.000Z

The bus to Kep was advertised as air conditioned, which was fair. It was also quite shabby, a bit grimy and the curtains were hung upside down. We were aware that the road wouldn't be fully paved but it was only a few short stretches and for most of it the bus belted along at a crazy 70mph that we wouldn't have thought it capable of. We bounced in our seats on every pothole, which was kind of fun.

Sometimes the road was dusty, the dust came into the air conditioning and we along with everybody else spent the next fifteen minutes with the nearest item of clothing clutched to our faces. We passed roadside shacks, pepsi bottle petrol stations, skinny cows with alarmingly visible rib cages, ponds with pretty water lily flowers, and horrendous amounts of litter.

After about four hours we reached Kep, passing the famous (or not) Giant Crab statue, and were dropped off in the town center, or as near as you're going to get in a small and scattered place like this. We were instantly assailed by tuk tuk drivers offering trips to Rabbit Island, trips to the pepper fields, trips to a cheap guest house they happen to know, pretty much everything except a nice non-bouncy sit down on the sea wall which was what we were after.

After a sit down and a sweaty walk around town we found ourselves a guest house for the next few days and began our stay in Kep. We've been having a great time here. It's very quiet for a seaside town - in the days of French rule it was Cambodia's most popular seaside town but after they left, the Khmer Rouge came along and tried to destroy the fancy coastal villas in an attempt to eradicate all trace of former days. However, they did a pretty poor job of it and today Kep is filled with the decaying shells of these buildings. Some are being restored as Kep slowly regains its tourism status, and those that are not often still have immaculately kept gardens.

We rented bikes for a day and rode them up onto Kep Mountain (which is only a little mountain, a couple of hundred metres high) to follow the 8km jungle trail. We didn't see any monkeys up there but lots of butterflies, all of which did a grand job of evading my camera, much to my annoyance. No tigers either. About half way round there was a sign directing us off the path to a cafe with refreshments. Dgym had been complaining about dehydration so we headed down the ladder and onto a steep path, assuming it was quite close. After a minute or two I spotted the cafe in the distance, a good km or two away at the bottom of the mountain! At that point we decided to turn back onto the path. Doesn't seem right to attempt to divert somebody down off a mountain for a quick drink - they'll probably need another one by the time they've got back up to the path.

Yesterday we caught a boat out to Rabbit Island which didn't have any rabbits but is shaped like one apparently. It did have some pigs, dogs and beach chickens though. The pier featured an artist's rendering of what the pier should look like. Bizarrely, this included business men in suits with briefcases waiting for smart looking hovercraft to ferry them across. It was clearly done by an artist who had never visited the location, or possibly even Cambodia, or been told anything about the location because I really can't imagine what you'd want a suit or a briefcase for on Rabbit Island, which is mostly full of palm trees, wooden shacks and people in bikinis.

We had a lovely day chilling out and reading on the beach and had some lovely coconut and pineapple juices with our lunch at one of the cafes.

The seafood is spectacular here - I've been eating a lot of crab (particularly good with local green peppercorns) and even Dgym couldn't resist the lure of a barbequed squid-lolly from the market. One particularly interesting market treat was a mysterious grilled banana leaf parcel. We speculated that it might be amok but weren't sure and bought one anyway - unwrapping revealed that it was a little sausage of rice, and biting revealed a tasty little Cambodian banana inside.

In general, the food in Cambodia hasn't been as good as Thailand and is usually a bit more expensive. It's harder to find a good fruit shake and there are no 7/11s selling weird purple bread and unidentifiable coconutty goop, instead there are pricier convenience stores selling mostly imported American stuff. However, there's plenty that makes up for that. People are very friendly here and always happy to say hello, including the kids who are adorable - tiny toddlers barely old enough to speak grinning and waving at you, and one little girl of about six walked up to me in the street, said hello, shook my hand and walked on again!

I should also mention the coffee. Mmm, the coffee. You don't see much Cambodian coffee outside of Cambodia which is a shame because I will miss it when we leave. It often has quite a distinctly chocolatey taste. If you ask for milk, you often get sweetened (condensed) milk which was surprising at first but it grew on me very quickly and I now opt for it over regular milk, not least because in combination with the chocolatey flavour, a cup of coffee becomes virtually indistinguishable from a dense, bitter cup of Italian hot chocolate.

Phnom Penh

2011-01-04T11:41:00.001Z

We've been getting a bit behind with the posts lately - what can we say, we've been too busy lounging in the sunshine eating tasty food.

We've been in Cambodia for just over a week now and things are good. We arrived in the capital Phnom Penh last Monday evening and spent Tuesday recovering before moving on again. Well, Dgym spent the day recovering, I spent it trekking across town to visit both the genocide museum and the chocolate shop before we moved on again.

Phnom Penh itself didn't exactly captivate us but nor did it live up to the horrible description on Wikitravel. (I'm starting to realise that because Wikitravel is the compounding of the experiences of everybody who's visited that place and bothered to write about it, and since people generally talk more about negative experiences than positive or neutral ones, it sometimes turns into a "list of bad stuff that could happen to you here but really most probably won't").

Sure, it's probably a bit dirtier than Bangkok and the traffic, while a bit lighter, is also a bit more insane and there's a bit more tuk tuk pestering but it didn't come across as rough or horrible, nor did anybody try to throw bricks at us. The rich poor divide is quite evident in the many huge shiny SUVs on the roads and big modern shopping malls while one-legged beggars get their children to follow you for entire blocks pleading for money. The riverside area is a very pleasant space and a nice place to sit, and there are some beautiful buildings and monuments. We stayed in an Irish pub along the river front which was OK but we couldn't eat one of those Irish breakfasts every morning.

The genocide museum was - well, I don't know how you describe a genocide museum really. It's a former school which was converted into a prison camp by the Khmer Rouge regime in the Seventies. The four three-storey buildings are pretty much as they were when they were found by the Vietnamese after the fall of the regime - rusty iron bed frames remain in some of the interrogation rooms, other rooms are filled with the photographs that were taken of each inmate, and many rooms are divided into tiny cells by brick and wooden partitions. Barbed wire mesh remains across the front of one of the buildings - this prevented desperate inmates from committing suicide. It's worth reading about the Khmer Rouge rule and the Tuol Sleng Prison - very disturbing stuff but a piece of relatively recent history that has clearly had a huge impact on the country.

The chocolate shop was considerably more pleasant, I met up with Dgym and we had a brownie and tried some of the pepper chocolate (pepper being one of those things Cambodia does well) and some chocolate coated coffee beans. Coffee is also one of those things Cambodia does well, and we're not complaining about the chocolate either.

We thought maybe we'd end up getting the early morning boat to Siem Reap the day after that but I found a little booklet with some info about the quiet seaside resort of Kep which sounded lovely so we hopped on a bus and made our way down to the coast.

About those bugs

2011-01-02T03:06:00.002Z

After spending Christmas in Phuket we left on Boxing Day morning, travelling to Phuket town on a local open-sided bus which we weren't sure would ever arrive but eventually did and was quite fun, if a little scary on the downhills. A short walk across Phuket later, we stopped outside the bus station for some very tasty noodles and iced tea before setting off on a long coach journey to Surat Thani, the nearest railway station.

The lady at the bus station said 4 hours for the journey, the internet said 4-6 and we're learning to add a good couple of hours to scheduled journey times around here but had over 8 hours before the train so weren't too worried when the bus crawled along at about 20mph for the first hour of the journey, so long as it didn't do that for the full 200km. We stopped by the side of the road for about half an hour while various mechanical and spannery things happened beneath the window and when we started up it seemed the bus had found some more gears and sped up considerably. We were kept "entertained" on the journey by a very flickery tv screen and the movies "The Experiment" (american remake of German "Das Experiment" which was of course much better) and "Step Up 3" (in Thai with no subtitles, for which we were thankful)

We reached Surat Thani (actually Phun Phin, a suburb) with three hours to kill and stumbled across the loveliest market we've seen yet. As Dgym has already mentioned, I ate bugs. I would like to point out that people eat wiggly seafood all over the world, French people eat frogs and snails, Tequila is made from worms and for goodness sake, some people even eat haggis. Eating bugs is not inherently any more gross than eating animals with slightly fewer legs, and is considered perfectly normal in many parts of the world.

The mealworms actually looked tasty and I definitely wanted them. Grasshoppers sounded fiddly but kind of prawn-like in composition so I was interested to try some of those. I thought the grubs looked a bit fat and squishy for my tastes but I saw a Thai girl order a big bagful of them and she looked so excited I felt they deserved my attention too.

The verdict - mealworms were good, they were crispy and took on the spicy peppery flavouring very nicely. I finished them and would happily eat more. Grasshoppers were OK but too fiddly and not enough edible stuff to be worth the effort. I bit into a grub and spat it out straight away - as I had suspected, too squishy and full of yucky bug stuff. Definitely an acquired taste.

We also had some delicious freshly cooked Thai doughnuts (served with the traditional green Thai custard), grilled chicken and sushi from the market, all of which were yummy. I think I could happily stay in Phun Phin for a week and eat my way through the market.

After that we took the sleeper train to Bangkok, we had first class tickets this time - the cabin was a bit cramped but it was infinitely better than the non-reclining seats. We could have flown but I was glad we travelled overland this time - it took some time but it was worth it for the market and for the gorgeous sunrise which Dgym missed - pink sky and light mist over farmland dotted with tall lollipop-like palm trees.

Bangkok seems more familiar than it should do for somewhere we've stayed in for 4 days and passed through a couple of times. There's an odd kind of charm about it that I can't put my finger on, in spite of the heat and the fumes and the traffic. It was nice to come back and kill a few hours in cafes before our flight out of Thailand into Cambodia.

Merry Christmas

2011-01-02T01:25:00.003Z

Our last day in Phuket was a good one. I have been enjoying the summer holiday aspect, and especially the sea which was lovely and warm. We had lunch at a very posh restaurant, complete with Christmas pudding (although we had a tasty chocolate pudding too), and then spent the afternoon lounging around the pool at the hotel.

Once you get past all the offers for tuk tuks this is a decent place to spend your summer holidays. Great for people who don't always co-ordinate their seasons very well :D

Unspeakable, unthinkable, and reasonably inedible.

2010-12-27T13:59:00.004Z

I have a little to catch up on over the last few days. After a very pleasant Christmas day we started traveling again, and we are still behind on sleep. However, certain events are foremost on my mind and would be better aired, although I'm sure few will thank me for the sharing. Even now Hel is reading this as I type with a satisfied look upon her face - the guilty smirk of someone who has outdone themselves.

On our journeys we found ourselves in Surat Thani with a few hours to spare before the night train. This is probably the least tourist oriented town we have had the pleasure of visiting, and we were excited to note the presence of an excellent street market. We were soon cursing our lack of appetite, for we had unfortunately eaten recently, but were still content to wander up and down looking for a potential late dinner.

One stall in particular drew Hel's attention, as they were offering a small (but not nearly small enough) selection of delicacies. There were several varieties of beetle, a plate full of mealworms, another of grubs, and a bucket of grasshoppers, all delicately fried to some twisted idea of perfection.

Hel is adventurous when it comes to food, and was very enthusiastic to find something that she had not eaten before. Despite the many superb reasons that these items had yet to be sampled by either of us, the fact that someone was misguided enough to sell them was obviously good enough reason to go along with the ill conceived notion by actually buying and eating some.

I did not share in this enthusiasm, nor did I choose to look as Hel filled a small plastic bag with the critters. Neither did I look as she munched her way through them with mixed reactions. The "crisp-erpillars" (the mealworms look like caterpillars, and were evidently crispy when fried) were received very well - apparently.

I would rather not dwell on the subject any longer. Suffice it to say that Hel eats bugs. Charming.

Nice lunch

2010-12-25T03:40:00.001Z

We found nice lunch yesterday, after I took a walk on Patak road, the main highway and realised that although it was busy as hell and took several minutes to cross, you can walk along there without being offered a tuk tuk, a suit or a massage, and then I started to notice that there were several little shacks with Thai writing on the outside and Thai people eating on the inside.

The one we chose for lunch had no English menu or pictures, but a canteen style counter where you could point at your food. We couldn't see rice so asked for "khao" and the lady looked very surprised that we had asked for it in Thai and she had understood us! We each pointed at some tasty looking dishes to be piled on top of our steamed white rice. Dgym's included some kind of spicy minced pork that was hot enough to leave him wanting copious amounts of cold dairy produce afterwards, and mine included some weird little chewy dried fish. Very tasty, with nice cold jugs of water at the table, and cost us 70 baht in total. We felt suitably pleased at having fed the two of us for less than the cost of a fruit shake down the road, and finding a little piece of genuine Thailand again.

In the evening we decided to fully embrace the touristiness and go for a round of dinosaur-themed mini golf, after all it's not every day you see that, and what holiday is complete without mini golf? Quite expensive - 240 baht per adult, i.e. double the cost of a round of mini golf on Brighton seafront, but it turned out to be a lot of fun putting our way through glowing caves, past waterfalls, dinosaur statues and dinosaur poo statues, and we did get a full 18 holes for our money.

We were in danger of being cut short at just seventeen holes when Dgym knocked his ball into a murky pool which was deeper than his arms are long and his chopstick-style attempts to retrieve it with two clubs were fruitless. I finished hole 17 and lent him my ball, which he also knocked into the water. We eventually managed to fish one of them out and finish the game. I won, by the way. After all that, I think I would have won even if my score had been higher.

After dino-golf we walked up the road a bit to Karon Noi beach. It was dark by then but we had a little walk around on the squeaky sand. If you close your eyes you can imagine you're walking on snow.

From north to south

2010-12-24T03:48:00.005Z

We stayed in Chiang Mai for a little over a week - mostly lounging around but we spent a lovely day with elephants, I took a cooking course and we popped into town every so often to the excellent Mexican restaurant we found, which was conveniently next door to a delicious burger bar.

Staying on the edge of town had its drawbacks - it cost 100 baht each way when we wanted to go into town. We did try to walk once, but only once, having to cross the Superhighway and then the busy moat road and several other busy roads - pedestrian crossings there seem to consist mostly of a faded zebra stripe that everybody ignores, and you can wait a good 10 minutes before it's safe to cross.

However, we were glad to stay where we did - our hotel was situated in quite a green and leafy neighbourhood, no touristy pretences, just real people going about their real lives, and restaurants full of Thai people in which very little concession was made to the western world. One restaurant made our curries so hot we could barely eat them - and we are people who order especially hot sauce off the internet and can't usually convince restaurants in England to actually make something hot enough. We found a lovely street restaurant with an extensive menu in Thai and a few pictures with English pronunciations. The food was delicious and fried but also full of tasty crunchy vegetables, and we could both eat there, with drinks, for about 80 baht (£1.60).

We also ate in a non-Thai restaurant which was pretty pricey compared to others nearby but we had a good meal there - I had crab pasta and Dgym had a duck curry, followed by some lovely cakes. However, not such a good experience when we returned to try some of their cheaper Thai dishes. My pork fried rice had a funny smell and taste which I soon identified as somewhat dogfoody - Dgym concurred, and suggested that they might have used bone marrow. I didn't finish that meal.

There were also some small convenience stores along the road, selling a selection of weird little cakes, snacks and drinks. I became quite addicted to black sesame flavoured soy milk. Dgym drank too much of the chocolate flavour milk and got tummy ache. I spotted blueberry and hazelnut flavoured Pringles in the shop one time but they had disappeared again by the time I had made up my mind to try them, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

We were headed to Phuket next for some beach action, from the top of the country to the bottom - and decided to fly down to save ourselves two consecutive nights on sleeper trains. Much as I prefer overland travel to flying, I will concede that it saved us a hell of a lot of hassle this time.

We took the minibus from Phuket to Kata beach where our hotel was waiting for us. They turfed us out of the bus half way and into a travel agent where we saw our first fake-looking smiles since we got here as the travel agent lady enquired about our plans with the aim of selling us a hotel. We dutifully answered the questions, expressing our disinterest in being sold anything, and got back on the minibus where it continued its journey. The minibus costs half the price of a taxi and drops you right outside the hotel so we're not complaining too much if that helps to keep it cheap.

On arrival at Kata we were super hungry so dumped our stuff and went out to eat, instantly finding that everything was super expensive compared to Chiang Mai and even Bangkok. Being desperate to eat, we picked a restaurant and ordered some relatively cheap Thai dishes (A simple fried rice or Pad Thai seems to go for about 120 baht here). They were absolutely horrible, the worst food we've had in Thailand so far, and were served with "juice" that was not juice but sugared stuff from a carton. My noodles were overflavoured and so rubbery they pinged me in the eye, and Dgym's rice had no flavour at all. Then it started bucketing down with rain. We popped into a mini mart afterwards and I was slightly cheered up by finding some weird banana flavoured crisps.

It's our third day in Kata now and we've found some actual decent food (including pizza, which made Dgym happy) and real fruit juice but it's still bleeding expensive compared to anywhere else we've been here and we feel ever so slightly caught in a tourist trap.

It's very very different here. People are constantly trying to sell you stuff, be it ladies in street bars trying to sell themselves or the crazy bloke at the Indian restaurant whose arms never seem to tire from trying to wave people in from the other side of the street. Or the tailors who step in front of you and try to shake your hand as you walk past their shop. Walk up to a menu outside a restaurant and the waiter will come out and hover over you until you either walk away or decide to go in. Maybe they have had problems with people stealing menus from outside restaurants.

It all comes across as a bit pushy and we're not quite sure how to take it. It feels as if people are trying to aggressively sell you stuff all the time, but maybe we're wrong and it's just the nature of people in this region to greet everybody that way. Either way, we're still trying to find where the Thais eat, those restaurants that aren't filled with tourists and where perhaps we have to point at a picture to order.

Needless to say we have been spending some time at the beach - the northern and slightly sewagey smelling end is quite empty but the rest is jam packed with loungers and umbrellas as far as the eye can see - they go for 200 baht a day which the sellers don't seem to want to negotiate on, but we're quite happy sitting on a towel under a tree next to dozens of empty seats which are doubtless costing them money - just a little willingness on their part to haggle would see them making a bit more of it back, but never mind. I'm surprised the numerous beach sellers still bother to approach us given that we're clearly too cheap to even fork out for a seat. The sand's lovely and soft and the sea's lovely and warm and a little bit wavey at times and it's good to go for a swim in mid December.

It's not all bad. Despite the cheap and cheerful side of Thailand being slightly absent here, there are some things that shine through all the touristy crap - the huge and brightly coloured butterflies, the chorus of noisy frogs outside our window at night, the mummy gecko and its tiny baby that we found on one of the hotel walls... and the lovely pancake lady who sets up her cart at the end of the road. Thai pancakes (roti) are a bit different from the European kind - they begin life as a solid ball of dough made from flour, egg and coconut butter, which is kneaded and beaten into a flat pancake shape before being fried and folded over any filling you may care to order in a neat little pancakey parcel. Definitely tastes different too, a bit more like a flatbread than a pancake, but delicious.

Elephants!

2010-12-16T14:03:00.003Z

Last Sunday we decided to take the train to Chiang Mai, which is in the north of Thailand. This was done in two stages - back to Bangkok in the afternoon and then a sleeper leaving in the evening. Unfortunately the first class option is very popular, and needs to be booked a few days in advance, so we went with reclining seats instead. The seats did technically recline I suppose, but not more than a token gesture. The result was an uncomfortable trip, but we got to Chiang Mai and only a few hours late.

We are now staying a few miles out of town following a recommendation on tripadvisor. A9 Place is a comfortable hotel and in a quiet neighborhood, with everything we need on the door step but no noisy club music to keep us awake.

Yesterday we went to an elephant sanctuary. It was quite an abrupt start as we had made the booking on line and had not received the confirmation we were told to expect, so didn't think it was happening. When the bus came to pick us up at half eight we were still asleep. Oh well, 5 minutes later and we were off. The sanctuary is only an hour away in a beautiful valley, and is home to over 30 elephants. Most of them used to be working elephants, but were abandoned when logging was banned about 20 years ago. A couple were born in the jungle and have been rescued after their parents died. They are considerably more mischievous, and can be easily identified as they have two handlers (Quan) each while the others only have one.

We started off by helping with the feeding. This consisted of holding out large pieces of fruit so the elephants could take it with their trunks. This lasted until they had eaten a large basket filled with bananas and various melons each, so about 10 minutes.

Then we went to a large enclosure where one herd was eating. Being rescued elephants they are not actually related (apart from some of the youngsters) but have formed herds anyway, for friendship and to protect the young. This was the first glimpse we got of their playful nature, as one decided to clamber over a fence just for a challenge, despite the gate being open right next to it. Apparently they break a fence at least once a fortnight, not that they actually run away - they stay where the food is, but it is good to see them living on their own terms.

In the afternoon we went elephant washing in the river. Enough people with buckets can get an elephant clean in about 5 minutes, and after a good soaking they go looking for some nice dry mud to cover their backs with. The mud protects them from sunburn, and gives next day's tourists something to wash off. The elephants certainly seem to enjoy a splash around, perhaps it also helps them build up a good appetite for their evening meal.

With each elephant eating up to 200 kilos of fruit a day the sanctuary has an impressive food bill. The elephants do not work and do not perform tricks, this really is a sanctuary, and it is supported through eco-tourism. If you ever get the chance to go and support the work they do here I would thoroughly recommend it. It was a very informative day, and a wonderful opportunity to spend time with these noble creatures while contributing towards their care.

http://elephantnaturepark.org/

Kanchanaburi

2010-12-12T00:32:00.002Z

The first few days in Bangkok had been a bit cloudy but the sky was clear and blue the morning we left.

We were taking the train from Thonburi station - the taxi driver mistakenly took us to another station which was on a road whose name sounds exactly like Thonburi, but we made it eventually. We got there early so took a wander through the markets with our backpacks, passing the usual fruit sellers, barbeque stalls selling various bits of meat and fish on sticks, boys sorting through big piles of red chillies. We found a nice cafe on the other side of the market and managed to order by means of pointing at pictures. Dgym recognised the word for chicken on the menu and I was very proud of him.

The food was lovely, as were the drinks, including a very cold mango ice drink which kept giving me brainfreeze. I commented on this and one of the waitresses seemed to have both heard me and understood the word "brainfreeze" as she offered to take the drink away and make it a little more temperate.

We travelled third class, that being the only option - the train was a little shabby but comfortable and reasonably cool once it got going. There was an unexpected half hour stop - we don't have very good maps on us so we didn't really know where we were. It turned out we were waiting for an oncoming train to free up the line. In England a delay like that would result in at least a lot of tutting, if not a full-on passenger revolt, but nobody seemed too bothered by the wait, and neither were we.

We arrived in Kanchanaburi at dusk, the sun a big orange over the end of the main street down which we walked, dodging tuk tuks and street stalls in search of accommodation. We knew where we wanted to stay - Dgym's sister had stayed on a river rafthouse called Sam's several years ago, and had recommended it to us. There was a lot of sweaty walking and asking of directions before we found it down a dark little lane, thankfully away from the hectic main street.

Kanchanaburi is mostly famous for the Bridge over the River Kwai, built in WWII by prisoners of war and now surrounded by souvenir shops, markets and hordes of visitors. The town itself is very touristy and considerably Anglicised. The main street is lined with places offering fish and chips, steak and kidney pie, cocktails, "Typical Thai Food (Red and Green Curry)" and one bar offers the opportunity to "Get shit-faced on a shoestring". Erm, no thanks. Considerably more usefully, it has English language bookshops and plenty of guest houses and restaurants which are slightly more Thai.

Staying on the river is mostly pleasant. We have air conditioning, electricity, comfy seats and the wifi isn't too far away. The place rocks ever so slightly when a boat passes. Small pale lizards run around on the walls. The outside becomes thick with mosquitoes and other insects after dark so we have to slip through the door very quickly. Friday night was quite noisy, probably because it was Constitution day, another big holiday in the Thai calendar. Music carried on until the small hours and we were woken up at some point by our drunken neighbours arriving back, squealing and laughing and pushing each other around, rocking the whole raft. I do hope they felt the effects the next morning.

We took the bus to Erawan national park, which featured a long rocky walk uphill past several beautiful waterfalls and a few slightly grumpy-looking monkeys stealing any food they could get hold of. We saw a huge lizard at one of the waterfalls - it was a couple of feet long and scampered off into the trees as I approached. I also noticed quite a big spider in a web a few feet above Dgym's head. We saw several funnel-shaped webs close to the ground, leading into deeper burrows but I'm not sure what kind of spiders were in there.

On our way back down the waterfall trail we stopped for a swim. Well, I did anyway while Dgym had a sit and a read. I started to lower myself into one of the pools and was so concerned about the fact that the edge was slippery and steep that I completely forgot what I'd been told about the nibbly fish which took me by surprise. It was a funny sensation but not at all painful and I had a proper swim after getting used to it.

I finished my book, part one of Al Humphreys' account of cycling around the world, which was excellent, very interesting and one of the most honest accounts I've read of what cycle touring's like. Unfortunately it left me wanting part two, not ideal - you don't generally get books on demand when travelling, you take what you find. Volume two would have to wait and instead I paid a visit to one of the second hand book shops. It was probably the most disorganised bookshop I'd ever seen - some were grouped by author, but generally there appeared to be no logic in the arrangement, something that became quite clear when I discovered a novel by Katie Price aka Jordan, nestled beside a fat volume by Dickens. I'm pretty sure there are laws against that in the UK.

Bangkok

2010-12-11T03:31:00.001Z

I wanted to bring the bicycles but there was no persuading Dgym to get his fancy trike out of the shed, even with the prospect of cheap tasty noodles to fuel us and plentiful massages at the end of the day. So we've swapped panniers for backpacks and are wearing down our feet instead of our tyres this time.

The flight to Thailand was pleasant, we had a lovely dinner and plenty of legroom. The dinner menu kept us amused for a while - unusually, we were less interested in the food and more concerned with deciphering Thai lettering and deducing what the word 'chicken' looked like. We had a decent sized list of food words by the time we ate.

Although it was night and they made us keep the shutters down, I was excited (and strangely nervous about flying to somewhere so far from home) and kept peeking out. On the way to the airport we'd done some calculations and figured out what time sunrise would be, deciding on 2am. I looked out to see a red glow on the horizon at around three, possibly somewhere over Russia. A couple of hours later we passed the Himalayas, a distant white outline jutting up over misty foothills. We both got some sleep but not enough and were glad it was almost the end of the day again by the time we got to Bangkok.

My first impression of Thailand was how smiley and welcoming the people were. A few smiles went a long way to keeping our moods up after the long flight and we soon found ourselves stamped into the country, exiting the airport into a wall of heat and humidity and then swiftly into an air conditioned meter taxi whose driver seemed to have made it his mission to exclaim "Happy birthday King!" approximately every five minutes that day. The King's birthday is a big deal in Thailand - unfortunately we arrived too late and too tired to really appreciate it, but it had clearly created a cheery atmosphere.

He had also made it his mission to pin an example of a bank note from every country in the world onto the ceiling of his taxi, and was delighted when we helped him out with a Slovakian note that had been in Dgym's wallet for the past five years. Passing and greeting another taxi at a set of traffic lights, I noticed a similar collection on the other driver's ceiling - maybe it's a competition.

After checking into the hotel, we found ourselves a cheap street cafe and sat down for a pad thai and chicken with cashew nuts. The sleep we got wasn't the sleep we were craving - I slept restlessly for three hours, woke up for three more and then slept heavily and peacefully for another three, which weren't enough, and Dgym didn't fare much better.

We spent a few days in Bangkok, catching up on sleep, getting used to the heat and the squiggly letters and seeing some sights. Bangkok's a huge city and it's relatively hard getting around. It feels as big as London, and indeed has a similar population, but imagine London with only a couple of tube lines, none of which go into the central bits, and a bus system you can't understand. We walked a lot and ended up with quite sore feet. We took taxis and tuk tuks (three wheeled motorbike taxis) which were nice and cheap, despite the tuk tuk driver quoting us 30 baht (60p) at the start of the journey but demanding 70 when we got out.

One day we took the Skytrain as far to the centre it would go, the National Stadium, and walked for about an hour along a busy fumey road to reach the old town centre. We could taste the fumes, and felt quite ill by the time we got there. We visited Khao San Rd which is backpacker central but I had also read you could get barbequed bugs there, unfortunately we didn't find any. We found a weird park which appeared to be themed around some kind of Thai story - giant hearts, bunnies, a boat, and a tree decorated with lights and gold foil hearts beneath which school children lined up to have their photo taken. So did we.

We spent an afternoon visiting the Grand Palace which consists of several buildings, mostly made of sparkly shiny stuff. Dgym commented that it was pretty, but the kind of pretty that an eight year old might glue together with sequins and gold foil. It was super-blingy and very pretty, a good way to spend an afternoon.

We ate some very tasty food, and were pleasantly surprised to find UK Thai restaurants are pretty authentic (well, in taste and content, not pricing). However, Thai puddings are a very pleasant surprise and we feel slightly sad that so many UK Thai restaurants resort to a lame generic ice cream menu rather than serving authentic desserts. Coconut milk soups with water chestnut, taro (which appears to be a kind of squishy red bean based thing), mango with sticky coconut rice... delicious.

We left Bangkok on Thursday and headed out on the train to Kanchanaburi. More on that soon...

Keep at room temperature

2010-12-08T10:40:00.002Z

We haven't done any cycling for a while (well, Hel did but hasn't had time to write about it yet) and don't have any immediate plans so it is important to consider our long term storage. England is far too cold so we have escaped to the Far East for winter. This time we have left the bicycles at home, and are instead sporting some enormous back packs.

Speaking of the back packs, we were quietly confident that after all our trips we knew how to travel light, and that the packs we had borrowed were unnecessarily large. Hel's confidence lasted until 30 minutes before the taxi arrived, and my disillusionment was shattered shortly afterwards. It seems that bikes can carry far more than we can, even with all the extras of toolkits, tents and cooking facilities.

Still, we set off on time for a brisk jaunt to Heathrow. I say brisk because we didn't want to weigh ourselves down with winter wear for our summer holiday. Still, England was having one of its more pleasant days - nothing that couldn't be kept at bay by a hot chocolate.

The flight to Bangkok was as expected - long and dull - but the food was surprisingly good. Thank you Thailand Air, I didn't think it was even possible!

And so, less than 24 hours after setting off, we left the airport and were immediately hit by a wall of warm, humid air. Between that and the overused air conditioning I don't think we have actually managed a proper room temperature yet, but it isn't so bad.

Bangkok is very enjoyable. It is mostly clean and friendly although sometimes the pollution can get a bit much. In fact some of the locals are suspiciously helpful - we were told that the Palace was closed for the morning, but a handy tuk tuk driver would help us see some of the other sites for a very reasonable price. Luckily we decided to confirm this ourselves as the Palace was actually open (for the morning only no less) and this was our last opportunity to see it.

The city is a bit hectic for our tastes (simple country folk can't handle the pace) and we are heading out tomorrow. It will be an early start (might have to wake up before 9, eugh) but we are looking forward to seeing some more of the country.

Grey Mouse is going on an adventure...

2010-12-04T17:36:00.001Z

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Monday September 14th - Zurich

2009-11-29T08:28:00.003Z

It was downhill all the way to Tiengen, and I was glad to have all my gears again.

I bought two fresh pretzels at Kussaberg and ate them right away before joining the Rhein cycle path, a gently undulating off road path with Switzerland just to the right across the river.

The border was manned but no passport was required... and I carried on into Switzerland, the twelfth country my knackered old tyres had seen.

I was soon swept up onto an off road cycle path but quickly lost track of where I was - the signposting was much less informative than in Germany. Several miles later I ended up in a town I managed to identify as Wil and determined that I needed to head south. I figured I might have better luck sticking to the roads but even those were quite badly signposted and I ended up resorting to the compass.

The sky clouded over and turned black, but stopped short of actual rain.

Roadworks at Eglisau meant a diversion, but the bicycle diversion signs appeared to direct me over the railway tracks, which also insisted that I do not cross them. Confused, I waited for another cyclist to come my way and followed the "do what that bloke does" tactic which took me straight down the road and past the works.

I was in a brand new country which used a currency of which I had none, and I also had very little food. In Eglisau I hunted down a cash machine which dispensed a single giant 100CHF note.

The road got busier and, although I was on cycle paths, it got distinctly less pleasant as I neared Zurich. At Kloten I decided to stop and catch the train into the city. A quick wifi stop told me all I needed to know - the bike would need its own ticket and must be loaded through the bike doors.

I found the station and bought tickets. There were no departure screens telling me where to go so I went under the subway to where everybody else was standing and found a huge grid telling me which platform and sector each train would arrive on. The train was very modern inside - display screens showed the projected (and actual) time of arrival at the next few stops.

There was lots to sort out when I got to Zurich, most importantly food. I sat down at a restaurant in the station and ordered Alpen Maccarone which is not breakfast cereal with pasta, but macaroni cheese cooked with small cubes of potato, accompanied by apple sauce. This was quite a revelation - although cheese and apple are widely known to be excellent companions, I'd never had nor even heard of this particular combination. It was delicious.

I headed for the travel agency and was able to book a very early (7:02) TGV + Eurostar journey home for the next morning. Not altogether unpleasantly, it turned out the cheapest Eurostar ticket the system could find was a first class- the only drawback being that I wouldn't be able to change my journey details. Being less than 24 hours in advance I felt I could just about live without that option (and could just about put up with the free drinks and lunch and comfy seat...)

The bike was easily booked onto the TGV but to do the same for Eurostar meant calling a UK (0870) number. I got dgym to call the number later on but all bike space was taken on the train that I'd already booked. I had the option of either sending it separately on a later train or bagging it up and taking it as luggage. Since I had my housse with me, I decided on the latter. And so the journey home was taken care of.

With such an early train to catch, I wanted to stay as close to the station as possible. I had ideas about staying in the City Backpacker hostel just round the corner, which I'd seen on wikitravel. I set out from the station with a map but put it away when I noticed three grubby backpackers heading in the same direction. I followed them all the way to the hostel but it turned out to be full. So I headed back to the tourist office at the station and enquired about city campsites and they directed me to one about fifteen minutes ride away.

On the way to the campsite I was given navigational help by a lovely lady who spoke very good English (as did most people in the city). She informed me that it had been a special holiday in Zurich, Knabenschiessen (Boys Shooting Day) in which traditionally boys (but now also girls) take half a day off work to practise shooting.

I got very little sleep at the campsite - church bells ringing, people talking, streetlights shining, cars passing. I planned to get up at 4am anyway so there wasn't a whole lot of point in trying. It's quite hard to pack up a tent quietly but I tried my best and left the site at 5am.

Distance: 48 miles (618 miles total) • Day 14 Route • Day 14 Photos

Sunday September 13th - Down

2009-11-28T22:10:00.007Z

It was a cold morning and my bladder woke me at precisely 6am as it had got into the habit of doing. After taking care of that, I snuggled back into the warmth of the sleeping bag and took my time over getting up properly. I left at 9, picked up a pretzel and some rolls at the bakery and continued to climb further into the Black Forest.

I stopped to eat the pretzel at a pretty spot overlooking a valley.

Close to the top of the hill I was diverted onto a cycle route leading away from the road and towards Titisee-Neustadt. The route kept me going for most of the way and all the way to Bonndorf - there were some ups, some downs and some gravelly bits.

The section from Neustadt to Bonndorf ran alongside a disused railway line. At Lenskirch it crossed a valley, doubling back on itself. I stopped in the town for lunch at an Italian restaurant - I had some delicious pasta stuffed with artichoke, and a hot chocolate (since it had been a while...)

After Bonndorf the previously excellent cycle route signage was reduced somewhat. Rain had threatened earlier but never happened, but now I kept singing rain songs. "Oh now I wish it would rain down" (and trust me I am not a Phil Collins fan), "Raindrops keep falling on my head" and of course "I'm only happy when it rains" (which is definitely not true). I struggled to think of any sun songs.

The descent started at Bonndorf. Unfortunately my front derailleur wasn't behaving - it refused to shift properly and kept springing back to the smallest chainring. Which was an annoying problem to have on what should have been a fun and fast downhill, but I'd rather that than be stuck on a large chainring on the way up!

I saw a motorcycle crash on the way down. The guy was coming the other way and skidded on the corner, the bike sliding sideways and lodging under the crash barrier. He got up straight away and dusted himself down, insisting he was OK. His two friends stopped to help and there wasn't much I could do other than gawp and struggle to string a German sentence together, so I went on my way.

I camped near the small town of Untermettingen. Upon examining the dodgy derailleur, the problem turned out to be quite simple - a loose gear lever.

Distance: 42 miles (570 miles so far) • Day 13 Route • Day 13 Photos

Saturday September 12th - Schwarzwald

2009-11-28T00:06:00.006Z

I started out from Obernai the next morning and rode through pretty towns filled with brightly coloured half timbered houses covered in flowers.

I found a well signposted cycle route alongside the Rhone-Rhine canal which led me towards the Rhine river, past a hydro electric power station and into a nature reserve on a narrow island in the middle of the river. There was nobody else on the path, which was closed to motor traffic - just me, the river and the sunshine.

I emerged into Germany and followed signs to the small town of Weisweil. Wooden statues and carvings lined the road - squirrels, rabbits, apples...

I'd been making excellent progress that morning but hadn't found lunch yet and was getting hungry. I tried to find somewhere to eat in Kenzingen but everywhere seemed closed or deserted. Lidl saved the day and I picked up some German camembert, more kiwis, a yoghurt and a bag of crisps. I found a picnic spot just outside Emmendingen and discovered that the crisps tasted exactly like peanut butter.

More canals led me to Denzingen where the town stork was nesting on the church roof.

The Black Forest was close now. The cycle route signage had been excellent all day but I was expecting it to disappear as soon as the serious hills started. It didn't seem like it'd be worth anybody's while to provide dedicated cycle facilities in the mountains. Surely not enough people would want to ride there? It turned out I was quite wrong.

I left Denzingen and continued to follow the signs (or so I thought) along the road and onto some narrow paths. The paths started to twist quite steeply up the hill. I saw no more cycle route signs. Pedestrians and horse riders passed me, but no cyclists. I arrived at a junction, giving me the choice between a sandy stony track going straight on or a more paved route twisting around to the left. I stopped, unable to figure out where I was until I flagged down a car and asked in my best shaky German whether I was going the right way for Glottertal. The driver seemed to say yes so I carried on up the track. It got steeper and I got off to push until I reached a lookout overlooking the fields below. A mountain biker had stopped there for a rest and offered routing advice when he noticed my bike. Apparently the path I was on was about to turn into technical single track. I'd taken a wrong turn, something my instinct had been trying to tell me for the last twenty minutes. He pointed out the road below and once I got back down the hill I picked up the cycle route again easily and reached Glottertal.

Now I started to worry about accommodation - it was Saturday again. There was a campsite further up (in the vertical sense) but I felt happy to stop in Glottertal and get a room. I found a pension with a "zimmer frei" but they only had a triple room - the owner tried calling around some other places but all were full. So I carried on to the campsite, which was 10km away but about 400m up. The cycle route signs warned of a 6% gradient - certainly nothing I can't handle.

And so I found a good rhythm and kept pedaling. The sun was on its way down, casting long light onto the hills. I grinned at cyclists flying past in the opposite direction - envious but wanting to share in their sheer joy.

I reached the campsite before sunset and ate at the campsite restaurant which was fantastic. Noodle soup and salad, followed by a mushroom pancake which was literally just a pile of mushrooms upon a folded pancake but the mushrooms were so well cooked and full of flavour. I could have quite happily ordered a black forest gateau for dessert (in fact I'd been thinking about it all day) but the waitress misunderstood my gesturing and brought me the bill instead of the dessert menu :-(

Distance: 60 miles (528 miles so far) • Day 12 Route • Day 12 Photos

Thursday September 11th - Strasbourg

2009-11-26T10:10:00.005Z

I left my bike locked up in Obernai and caught the bus into Strasbourg at dawn.

I'd asked for two nights at the campsite to give me the opportunity to take a day off cycling and spend some time seeing what I considered to be one of the highlights of the trip. And so, hoping to get some nice early morning light in the city, I left the tent when it was still dark and crept away to the bus stop.

We arrived just after dawn - unfortunately my early light plans didn't work out as it turned into an very cloudy morning.

I bought a pain au chocolat and sat down in Place Kleber, watching a family of cute baby sparrows playing in one of the flower beds.

I was still hungry after that so bought a pretzel. I'd never had a real pretzel before (i.e. bread, not the little snacky cracker things) and this was the beginning of a beautiful new relationship between me and my twisty salt-encrusted doughy little friends.

After a little wandering, I found the best bit - well, one of them anyway, the picturesque Petit France quarter consisting of stunning half timbered buildings overlooking the river.

I bought some oil for the bike and spent an hour at an internet cafe, investigating train routes home and possible paths across the Black Forest.

After that I located the cathedral, an incredibly ornate building.

And beside it, the almost impossibly beautiful Maison Kammerzell.

Strasbourg is a popular cycling city and has plenty of lanes and parking facilities - my feet were sore from walking by the end of the day and I half wished I'd brought my bike into town, but it did make a nice change to have a day out of the saddle.

I picked up some horrendously coloured but very tasty macaroons from one of the many delicious looking patisseries...

... and then headed back to the campsite.

Back at the tent, I started to pay some attention to my bike. It had started squeaking over the last couple of days so clearly needed an oil... but upon examining the rear sprockets I realised how gunked up it really was. I spent a good couple of hours that evening scraping solid rubbery black gunk off the sprockets, chain and derailleurs and really wishing I'd bothered to clean it before leaving. The other thing I noticed was just how knackered the tyres were. The front was full of holes and the tread on the rear was almost non-existent. The last time I'd changed them was over three years ago, in Germany. I calculated that I'd ridden in eleven countries on those tyres, over unknown thousands of miles. I picked small stones out of the holes and planned to replace them when I got home.

Day 11 Photos

Wednesday September 10th - Vosges

2009-11-22T14:03:00.005Z

I started out late from the campsite at Phalsbourg and headed straight for the town to do what I should have done over the last couple of days and buy some decent food from the shops - fruit, cheese, salads and bread. (yeah, more bread. It's hard to get away from in France)

I had been studying the map and come up with a nice wiggly green (i.e. scenic) route along a foresty road through the Vosges mountains, via Dabo.

The road was flat at first then started to gently climb, with signs towards the Plan Incline. This is one of those things I didn't really understand at the time but now that I've got back and done a bit of reading, sounds quite interesting and makes me wish I'd stopped off to take a closer look. The Saint-Louis-Arzviller Inclined Plane is a clever lifting mechanism for getting ships up the mountain canal route as a quicker alternative to multiple locks.

After a long hot climb, I reached the town of Dabo. The sun was high in the sky and it was getting a little hot for comfort so I stopped in the shady town square, placing the solar panel in a patch of sun - despite all the sunshine, it still wasn't gathering enough energy to keep my phone going. A group of Canadian cyclists on lovely lightweight racing bikes stopped to say hello - they were staying nearby and enjoying the sunshine on the last day of their holiday.

Further climbing out of Dabo led me up the Col de Valsberg to La Hoube then over the departement border and onto a lovely long descent down into Alsace. At Romanswiller I picked up a cycle path which ran along a disused railway line and a canal.

I passed several other cyclists and walkers, and the signposting was quite good until I reached Molsheim and it disappeared. Motorways and major roads met just south of Molsheim and I couldn't pick out a good route on the map to get past all that. A local cyclist stopped to offer help and invited me to follow him through a maze of back streets, eventually leading to a bridge over the motorway and back out into the countryside. I thanked him and he left me on tiny lanes among cornfields, the cycle route to Obernai now clearly signposted. I gathered some speed and then, not really looking where I was going, hit a rather steep speed bump at 20mph, jarring my arms quite badly - which hurt, but no real damage.

I lost the cycle route briefly in the pretty town of Rosheim but the tourist office put me back on track.

After that the road surface got very bad at Bischoffsheim but I finally reached Obernai, where the campsite was very well signposted and thankfully selling cold drinks and ice lollies (something that had become more appealing over the last few days than lunchtime hot chocolates). More importantly, a Chinese restaurant was just down the road and I was able to tuck into hot, greasy delicious chicken chow mein for dinner. Yum...

Distance: 45 miles (468 miles so far) • Day 10 Route • Day 10 Photos

Tuesday September 9th - No lemonade

2009-11-14T22:28:00.006Z

The tent was even wetter than usual when I woke up at Burtoncourt. I walked down to the lake to take some photos of the sunrise and then spent a long time trying to dry out the tent and not making a very good job of it.

I'd been really bad at eating properly over the last couple of days - there had been fewer cafes so boulangeries had provided both lunch and dinner, and I was getting a little bit fed up with bread. Today was no better. It was a long day - I set my sights on a distant town with a campsite and went for it, choosing to put in the miles rather than divert into a town and seek out some decent lunch.

I cycled across misty farmland and through the towns of Boulay Moselle and Boucheporn. At Longeville I bought a baguette and a small quiche, then got on the N-road to St Avold, for want of a better route.

One of the things they don't tell you about cycle touring (and this probably also applies to backpacking and other such forms of travel) is the crap music that gets stuck in your head. I attribute this to two things - firstly, the terrible music they play in cafes and other public places, and secondly the lack of my own source of music to wipe away the bad stuff. After nine days on the road, my head was mostly full of Lily Allen singing "It's not fair, it's really not ok, it's really not ok" over and over and over and it was very, very annoying. I figured I had to get something decent but catchy into my head so started to hum catchy but enjoyable classics such as 99 Red Balloons and The Final Countdown.

Beyond St Avold stood a handwritten sign pointing to Biding, which was a village I was hoping to pass through. The sign pointed down a slightly stony track, so I set off on another off road jaunt along bumpy ground between fields. I reached Biding after a couple of miles, unconvinced that that had been the road marked on the map but having enjoyed it nonetheless.

Further down the road, signs pointed me to Munster which boasted of both its church and limonaderie. I'm not really fussed for churches but it had turned into a hot day and I was soon daydreaming about cool lemony drinks. I arrived at Munster hot and thirsty and ready to drink a gallon of the stuff. I found the limonaderie but nowhere to buy the lemonade, and left as thirsty as I'd arrived.

I arrived in Phalsbourg late in the day and followed signs through the town to a campsite on the outskirts. I was greeted by friendly English-speaking owners and directed to a mostly empty camping field. Too tired to ride into the town and find proper food, and too lazy even to cook up the emergency spaghetti, I dug into my panniers and had bread and butter for dinner again...

Distance: 62 miles (423 miles so far) • Day 9 Route • Day 9 Photos

Monday September 8th - Loo roll!

2009-11-12T23:27:00.004Z

The church bells rang at 4am in Rosport. In continental Europe you get used to bells ringing at 6am or sunrise, but at 4 it was still very dark and I'm not sure what sane person would need or want to hear church bells at that time.

At a slightly more sane hour I set out into another damp and hazy morning, continuing along the river valley. A few miles down the road, a huge structure loomed out of the mist above me - it was the motorway passing high above the valley, supported by enormouse concrete columns. I've never seen a motorway look so beautiful!

At Wasserbillig, I left the bike path for a while to pick up some goodies in the town. I bought the world's tastiest plum tart and some bread from the bakery, a couple of chicken legs and, triumphantly, some loo roll. I've never been so happy to see toilet paper!

After spending quite a lot of time in the town I decided to put in some real miles before lunch. The road was flat so it was easy to set small targets - for example, getting to 25 miles by 11:30am.

The cycle path disappeared for a while and became a red strip at the side of the road. Vineyards became the dominant scenery, and the sun burned away the mist. The Our river flowed into the Moselle and the valley widened out a little.

I reached the 30 mile mark a few miles short of the French border and stopped for a chicken sandwich and to hang my washing on the back of the bike.

I arrived in Schengen, home to all good shared border agreements, shortly after that. There's probably a good reason for the choice of Schengen for that particular treaty - it stands close to the meeting point of three countries. In the space of a couple of minutes I left Luxembourg, crossed the bridge to Germany and turned the corner into France.

A small model of the Eiffel tower marked my passage into France. The cycle path vanished in the town of Apach and all of a sudden fast lorries and cars were whooshing past my shoulder. Then I remembered the first rule of cycling on N roads in France - don't! I dug out my trusty Michelin atlas pages to plan a nice D-route.

Things got hilly that afternoon. I huffed and puffed my way up a tiny little road, across open farmland and through tiny villages in which stood numerous closed and abandoned cafes. It also happened to get very hot, which was nice but also meant a lot of sweat and a lot of suncream. I reached Bouzonville, a reasonably sized town which didn't appear to have any accommodation but at least had a boulangerie where I was able to buy food and water, and a tabac whose owner directed me to the nearest campsite.

I double checked outside by Googling the place on my phone. I hope that doesn't seem like a rude or mistrustful thing to do. I've been sent on a few wild goose chases before, usually unintentional I'm sure - and whereas locals are normally an excellent source of general information about what's in the area, I don't expect the average person to keep a working and up to date knowledge of campsite opening dates and finer details. However, it looked as if the campsite existed and was open so I headed off in that direction.

An hour later, the sun was getting low in the sky when I reached the campsite, a pretty place beside a lake near the small village of Burtoncourt. It was good to pay single digit prices for camping again!

Distance: 59 miles (361 miles so far) • Day 8 Route • Day 8 Photos

Sunday September 7th - Chairlift

2009-11-03T23:12:00.006Z

The bell on the level crossing at Wilwerwiltz woke me straight away when the trains started nice and early on Sunday morning. The tent felt damp, it was cold and I was cosy in my sleeping bag. I put my hat on for extra warmth and fell asleep again.

Since entering Luxembourg I hadn't been able to get mobile signal, so hadn't been able to contact Dgym the previous night. I knew he'd be worried so I got up at 7 to set off in search of some means of communication.

It was misty again - the sun was already starting to poke through, but despite my best drying efforts (soaking up moisture with awesome microfibre towel and then wringing it out) I left with a damp and heavy tent.

I started out along a quiet road which at first followed the valley of a small stream but then turned away and climbed steadily.

At the top of the hill I stopped for a wee and used up the last of the loo roll. Luxembourg, I had discovered, is one of those countries (like France) where you are expected to bring your own, and I hadn't packed much. I was also running low on food supplies - I had a single biscuit, some liquorice and half a stinky cheese. There had been very few open shops or cafes so far. I got hungry and ate the final biscuit. But at least it was a lovely sunny day at last. Hooray!

I carried on through small villages, aiming for the Our river. At Stolzembourg I descended into the valley on a road signed as 17% gradient. The Michelin map claimed 4-7% and, worshipful as I am of their French maps, I started to wonder about the quality of their Luxembourg data.

Vianden was a pleasant tourist town overlooked by a huge castle set in forest a couple of hundred metres up the side of the valley. A chairlift extended over the town and up through the pine trees. I've only ever been up chairlifts on skis and snowboards (For a while I was even slightly terrified of them after my first ever ski chairlift ride involved a slightly late exit and a bit more jumping than strictly necessary) so thought I'd try a pedestrian experience. I parked up at the bottom - there were bike carriers but it didn't seem like a good idea with so many panniers.

In the cafe at the top I had a plate of chips and admired the panoramic view over the valley, then went for a short walk through the woods and took a curious peek at the alternative route down - a zipwire traversing back and forth through the trees.

Heading out of Vianden, I picked up some more snacky cakes at the service station, and a packet of spaghetti as an emergency dinner option.

A bit further down the road I found long distance cycle route number 3, which would lead me along the Our river and the German border, all the way to France. The route turned out to be excellent. Sometimes on road, but mostly as a separate lane, and sometimes beside the road, but often leading away from it to peaceful riverside tracks passing under shady trees and past flocks of wading geese. The path often passed right through campsites and the distance to the next town was frequently labelled.

A few miles before Echternach I found a usable wifi network measuring about two meters square. Taking care to remain in that tiny area, I IM-chatted with dgym for a while - yes, he had been a bit worried. I was starting to enjoy things but still not feeling like spending a month away - we agreed that I should come back after two weeks away.

In Echternach I searched the town centre for cash and toilet paper. Cash was easy to find. Toilet paper was more evasive. I'm pretty sure it should be easy to find in a nation which is unwilling to provide it in public toilets. I left empty handed, having to improvise with paper napkins from cafes. I did, however, manage to find my old friend the Eiscafe, featuring all the favourites - Spaghetti Eis, Pizza Eis, etc, and had a cone of freezy coffee flavoured deliciousness.

I stopped to camp at Rosport, a small town on the river, just across the bridge from the German town of Ralingen. Not actually wanting buttered spaghetti for dinner (so far that day I'd eaten chips, ice cream and biscuits) I set off in search of nice food.

An Asian restaurant in the town looked good - menu outside, opened at 6... except when I tried to go in there at 6:30, the door wouldn't open. Then I noticed the cobwebs around the door, the yellowed newspapers stuffed in the letterbox around the side and the hole in one of the windows. It didn't look as if anybody had been in there for quite a while. Perhaps I didn't want to eat there after all.... There was nothing else suitable in the town so I crossed to the German side and found an open restaurant serving lovely big schnitzel, chips and salad.

Distance: 42 miles (302 miles so far) • Day 7 Route • Day 7 Photos