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Published: November 6th 2006
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Bangkok
View of the Chao Phraya River from our hotel room. We started this tour of Thailand and Indochina about 2 weeks ago. It has been a very strenuous tour and we have had very little time to ourselves -- no "days at leisure" like we had in NZ and Australia. We started the tour in Bangkok where we stayed at the Shangri-la Hotel which is a very nice hotel on the Chao Phraya River, the "River of Kings," which runs from Northern Thailand down to the Gulf of Thailand. Thailand is very close to the equator and so its days and nights are pretty equal -- 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of nighttime, every day of the year. We noticed right away how early it got dark here.
What to say about Bangkok? A city of 12 million people -- it is an amazing mixture of sights, smells and sounds. Our tour director first took us to the market in Old Bangkok. There we saw stall upon stall upon stall of flowers, vegetable, fruits and things to eat -- more than we could ever imagine there were enough people to consume!! The market is open 24 hours a day, every day -- like one big 7-11! Speaking of
Grand Palace
This is a very sacred complex and temple in Bangkok. There are many Thai kings resting here. 7-11s, and of course with Ted being "in the business," we have seen more 7-11's on this trip than we thought possible, especially in Australia, but in Bangkok as well. Anyway, we'll post a picture or two of the market, but they are unlikely to fully portray the magnitude of what we saw!
In Bangkok we visited the Grand Palace which is home to the Temple of the Emerald Buddha -- a shrine for Thai Buddhists comparable in religious importance to Mecca or St. Peter's. The Grand Palace contains so many beautiful chapels and buildings within its walls. We will send a few pictures of them here, but there aren't really words to describe their splendor. We also visited Ayutthaya which is the ancient capital of Thailand. Bangkok and Ayutthaya began what we have come to know as the "temple tour" as temples and pagodas are the sacred places of worship for the religions of this area -- Buddhism, Taoism, Confucsionism and Hinduism.
We spent almost a week in Vietnam and it was an experience we will never forget. We had wonderful local tour guides, all three of whom were affected by the Vietnam War in a personal
Grand Palace
Another shot of the beautiful architecture within the Grand Palace grounds. way. Nam (age 30), our first guide in Hanoi -- his father was in the war and fought for the North Vietnamese. In Danang, we had a tour guide named Hai (age 58) who himself fought for the South Vietnamese and whose brother fought for the Viet Cong in South Vietnam. The father of our tour guide in Saigon, Cuong (age 35), died in 1974 while fighting for the South Vietnamese. Each of our tour guides had a different viewpoint of the war and of the relationship between Vietnam and the United States now. But because they are all in the tourist industry, they all agreed that since Bill Clinton came to Vietnam in 1994 and the U.S. lifted the trade embargo, the lives of the Vietnamese has improved. The Vietnamese love the U.S. dollar! From a capitalistic standpoint and in the bigger cities, perhaps. But there is still a lot of poverty, especially in the Vietnamese countryside with the farmers and the laborers. Anyway, all the Vietnamese people we met were so friendly and open to us -- even when we stopped in the countryside to take pictures of the workers in the rice paddies.
We saw so
Market in Old Bangkok
The market in Old Bangkok is huge and open all the time. This is a picture in the flower stalls (lotus blossoms). many things in Vietnam, it would take hours to write it all down here. Some of the highlights were: Hoa Lo Prison ("Hanoi Hilton"), Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum and Presidential Palace, the limestone islands and caves of Ha Long Bay, the colorful and overwhelming markets of Hanoi and Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), the War Museum in Saigon and a number of Buddhist temples. One place we did want to mention was the Cu Chi Tunnels about 70 km from Saigon. These tunnels, built by the Cu Chi people and Viet Cong soldiers in South Vietnam, comprised a giant cobweb of 200 km. The VC used these tunnels and the various hidden bunkers around them to fight the US soldiers to try and take the city of Saigon. The size of the tunnels was astounding -- you could only crawl through them which Ted and Griffin both did. There would be nearly 2,000 VC in the tunnels at a time!
We hated to leave Vietnam but that day came and now we are in Cambodia. We visited Angkor Wat today, the largest religious monument in the world. The Cambodian people are again very friendly to the Americans -- we
Market in Old Bangkok
The market had all kinds of food available to eat (including fried cockroaches and dog!). Here is a photo of one girl getting ready to serve different meats in her stall. are the "VIP" wherever we go. Don't believe we really deserve that title, but that is the reality here -- at least for now! Everyone told us how much things have changed in both Vietnam and Cambodia in the last 20 years -- and how much more it will change in the next 10 years. We are already looking forward to finding that out for ourselves!
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NANCY PUGH (KIRBY)
non-member comment
OH MY GOD!
You look like you are having the time of your life! The places you've been already look amazing, you must feel like your in a "Story book". I didn't realize there is some place out of Northglenn, just kidding. Just have a great time and enjoy every moment. Nancy