Thomas H

Well, I passed the massage course. Turns out that despite the insane amounts of memorization necessary to do the massage properly, they're pretty forgiving on the exam. I'm proud to say I only made one mistake on the exam! A minor one, I lifted the wrong knee or something fairly inconsequential. I think my massage skills have improved too; my hands are stronger, more precise, and now I get told "ooh, sabai, sabai," which means "it feels good." I'm proud of this I guess. I've had girlfriends tell me my massages aren't worth much, so I spose I've really turned that one around. It's my last day. Not just Thailand, or SE Asia, it's the last day of my sixth month voyage. Am I a different person than before I left? I hope not - I ... read more

An email to my parents with further reflections on massage school. I decided just to copy onto here to save time and energy: Yeah, the school was definately the right choice. I don't have plans between the fourth and the fifth, no. A bit of frantic sightseeing, maybe? one last crack at the shopping? I dunno. Oh, the morning of the fourth I'm going to a thai yoga session at the monastery, a little bonus of the course. I think it'll be worthwhile. My hotel room is pretty hilarious. Good thing this massage school is completely exhausting or I'd have to get drunk to fall asleep. The guy in the room next to me keeps bringing prostitutes up, not very condusive to my studies. Shared bathroom, cold water, when you pee in the urinal it all ... read more

So I'm enrolled in massage school. It's a thirty hour program over 5 days. It costed a bit more than I wanted to pay, but it's ok - it's Thailand's premier massage school. It's actually quite surreal. There are only four Falang (foreigners) in my class - an old, sometimes grumpy man named Robert, a hip young Japanese guy named Mitsuhiro, and a Japanese girl (Rumiko) with no English but a background in massage. We are training alongside a bunch of Thai people who are actually taking the course for career - very strange to be training with them, but they are very friendly for the most part. It's quite a surreal place. First thing in the morning you arrive, chant prayers and meditate to clear the mind. Then you strike up a conversation with the ... read more

A charming, sleepy little riverside town. Very old and run down looking. We spent a couple days going around, wandering by the restaurants at the riverside, eating tons of ice cream (Anais is an ice cream fiend). Our best day was definately when we rented to motorbikes. This was my second time on a bike, but with an additional challenge - the town had no automatics - only manuals. I figured it out pretty well, I guess, but it took some getting used to! We drove out of town down the potholed highway, dodging shaggy-eared cows and herds of goats. There were enormous limestone mountains jutting out of nowhere, shooting vertically upwards and completely covered in green - remeniscent of Halong Bay. quite good. We crossed this bridge, where a whole bunch of naked little boys ... read more

Vientiane (pronounced Vian Chan) is the capital city of Laos. It's basically a ghost town. It's hard to fall in love with the place, unless you're an ageing man chasing young prostitutes. Nothing really seems to be going on, everything is expensive, budget accomodation is appalling... Not the kind of place you'd want to spend too much time in. I want to say some good things - it's not like I was activelly unhappy. humm. It's right on the Mekong, so it was really beautiful to eat right at the water's edge. There are cute dogs running about everywhere. There are some really nice bakeries serving french pastries. And yet the palce is a ghost town! On our last night, we did finally find the excitement - we found where the cool hung out, the only ... read more

So we did arrive, eventually. Whenever you encounter another traveler who's just come from Laos, they always go on at length about Vang Vieng. The legacy of Vang Vieng chased me everywhere, even when I was in Australia! And yet somehow, I couldn't figure out what was so great about it. By all accounts it was a place to get drunk, high, and watch Friends or Family Guy. In the daytime you went down the Mekong River in an inflatable tube and were roped in by various "bars," or little shacks on the riverbank selling cheap drink. I mean, getting drunk is great and everything, but I can do that more or less everywhere. Yet, I had heard only positive things from every person, and it did seem to be the adventure capital of Laos, so ... read more

So here's the story of how a twenty hour bus journey turned into something much more. We set off on our twenty hour bus journey, and despite our bags being moved from the compartment to the roof, the unexplained hour-long stops and consistent breakdowns, it was a very successful bus ride. We left Hanoi and 6:30 pm and arrived twelve hours later at the border of Laos. Getting the Visa on arrival ended up taking two hours. You had to fight through a mob of pushy Vietnamese in order to get a form, fill it out, fight through the mob, hand in the form with your passport, wait for the single clerk to get around to it, then receive a receipt, which you take to another desk. Pay the clerk there, receive a slip to say ... read more

So, it was with great sadness that I left Hoi An - what a great place. My favorite city in Vietnam. For time budgeting purposes, we ended up flying into Hanoi. We'd decided that instead of doing Laos, we wanted to travel into the Yunnan province of China. It was supposed to be full of natural wonders, including one of the worlds deepest gorges and rice paddies built way up in the mountains that end up looking like staircases. But when we got to Hanoi, we went to the Chinese embassy, and it all went downhill from there. They seemed a little bit anxious about the upcoming olympics, so visa's were really hard to obtain. Even once you'd sent in your passport with photos, a contact/hotel reservation in China, and prepaid round-trip air tickets in and ... read more

From Dalat we took a bus up to Nha Trang, which was supposed to have a fantastic beach. It didn't - the beach was overcrowded and covered in garbage. You had to pay to use to beach chairs and the sand was stony. So I didn't want to stay, but Kieran signed up to do a scuba diving course. I had meant to do that when I got to South East Asia, but money is getting a bit thin at this point, and I couldn't really afford the three hundred they were asking. So Kieran stayed four days and I went north to the incredible city of Hoi An. Hoi An used to be a very popular port - originally used by the Chinese, Japanese, and a bit by the middle east, and later by the ... read more

So we left Saigon for Dalat, in the Central Highlands. Dalat was usually a pleasant 20 degrees celcius, significantly cooler than the rest of Vietnam because it is in the mountains. Despite it's central location, Dalat was uncontested during the war, and was completely unaffected. That may have contributed to the lighter mood. Dalat was a great time, but we definately slacked off. The final Euro game was on, so we needed some preparation for that. We found ourselves waking up later in the day, taking it easy. No complaints! We decided we needed a good jam, so we went off and found a music store with a drum set. It was our plan to deceive them, to tell them we were thinking of getting an apartment in the area, and stocking up on musical instruments. ... read more