Old Goa and the Goa of Old

There comes a point in every travelers life that he must get off his arse and type up a blog post to keep the people who read it informed about his whereabouts. That time, for me, has come. I've been putting off typing up another blog post for the reason that there won't be many blog posts left to write after this one. The truth is that there's precious little time left for me in this marvelous country and if I catch up with my writing there'll be almost nothing left to write about.

But I must catch up.

If you're wondering where I am at the moment, I will tell you. I am in the diminutive town of Chapora - the Goa of Old. A quaint, one-street town which is a favourite Goa's hippy scene. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before I write about the Goa of Old I must first write about how I got here. And getting here was preceded by a trip to Old Goa. If this doesn't make sense yet, bear with me - it soon will.

Old Goa was the capital of Goa during the era of Goa's Portuguese occupation. It is now pretty much a ghost town. What was once a thriving city at the height of the Portuguese rule is now just a husk of a town. The only buildings which remain are the churches and cathedrals which serve as a testament to the Catholic influence which differentiates Goa from other Indian states. Old Goa is also a convenient 15 minute bus ride away from Panaji, making it a perfect day trip for the travel enthusiast. Well, almost perfect.

Se Cathedral

Old Goa was definitely worth the visit and the churches and cathedrals were large and numerous, but it failed to excite me. I suppose that was partially due to the crowds of other tourists who got bussed straight in, and partly because Old Goa gave off an air of discomfort. It's quite difficult to explain, but Old Goa felt as if it didn't belong in India, in Goa even. Everywhere you looked you were confronted by another massive, out-of-place church. The churches dominated the area and I couldn't help but feel that it was all intended as a display of dominance by the Portuguese. The imposing structures seemed to be built to be formidable. It all felt like a religious prick-waving contest that got seriously out of hand.

Churches aren't my thing, but I do love a good beach. And so, with the beach beckoning I left Panaji and headed north to Anjuna. Anjuna is another stalwart of the old hippy scene and used to have a reputation as the place to go to experience a Goan trance party. I imagine things have calmed down since then because I only caught wind of one party happening and the next day everyone said it got closed down at 11 PM.

The sunset over Anjuna

Anjuna may not be the place to go for a party anymore, but it is a great spot to go for a swim. For once the waves were of a moderate size and could be bodysurfed, unlike anywhere else in Goa. That said, waiting for the waves of a moderate size that could be bodysurfed seemed to take up most of the time that I spent in the water. At this point you can probably deduce where this blog post is going to go. Yep, nowhere. When you're spending most of the day on a beach there's not much to write home about.

I did visit the Mapusa Friday market for a couple of hours, but it turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. What was on sale was mostly just tourist crap and fish. I did scour the market for anything interesting or different, but all of the places were selling the same slew of tourist trash - trinkets and T-shirts mostly.

Funnily enough I decided that Anjuna wasn't the best place to be staying. I'm not sure why I came to that conclusion, but it made sense in my mind at the time. I decided to move on after only a few days of lazing on the beach. I even moved away from the beach - to Chapora.

Chapora is a forgotten town. Forgotten by
tourists, at least

The Lonely Planet likens Chapora to the Mos Eisley Canteen in Star Wars and when I arrived here I understood why. It's not much bigger than a canteen, for a start, and its residents (local and hippy alike) have a very relaxed and slow pace of life. That might have something to do with the charas those hippies are smoking, but I can't be certain. It is the Goa of Old and that's what makes it an attractive place to stay. Chapora has not grown up with the rest of Goa. Everywhere else in Goa is full of tourists, Chapora has only a light sprinkling - and most of them are long-stayers. Chapora is still decidedly cheap, whereas the rest of Goa has hiked its prices up to milk the package tourists. I like Chapora. It's just what I was looking for, an almost untainted Goa, a lack of other tourists.

There's nothing to do in Chapora, nothing pressing at least. And I can't help but like that about it. I can spend a full day sipping chai and reading a book and not have to worry that I'm being slack because there's nothing else to do. I think I might just get stuck here for a while...

A short walk from Chapora - Vagator beach

The Rest of Cambodia

I had intentions to write about the rest of my time in Cambodia at the end of my last blog, but I thought given the nature of my previous blog it would be best to write another blog post about the rest of Cambodia instead. Wow, what a sentence that turned out to be!

So here goes. After visiting S-21 and the Killing Fields I spent another day in Phnom Penh, just walking around. I visited a few markets and walked along the Tonle Sap River for a while, just taking in the ambiance of the place. My second day in Phnom Penh was really chilled out. I went back to my guesthouse in the evening and booked my bus ticket to Kompong Trach.

The next morning, bright and early I headed to the bus station to catch my bus. Kompong Trach is not a tourist destination, there is only a single paragraph on it in the lonely planet and the only reason that paragraph is there is because of it's proximity to the Vietnamese border. But in that paragraph there was a little jewel of information. 2km from Kompong Trach is Wat Kiri Sela, a buddhist temple built into the side of a limestone karst mountain. I was instantly intrigued by this mysterious wat and simply had to go there. The lonely planet described the wat as having hundreds of caves and caverns under the mountain and a 'hidden valley'at the exit to one such cave. They described the walk through the cave as a 'stumble back in time to the Jurassic period'. The deal was sealed so off I went.

The one-road, one-tourist town of Kompong Trach

Kompong Trach was a one-tourist town and that tourist was me. The locals seemed shocked that a tourist was in their town and I was stared at constantly. It's a strange feeling, being stared at, and it's somewhat disconcerting. But their stares weren't malicious, just curious and they were some of the friendliest people I've met. Nobody spoke English in Kompong Trach so I had to get by with my limited Khmer. Basically all I could do was say hello and thank you. I did a lot of miming in Kompong Trach.

The beauty of getting away from other tourists is that you get charged the local price for everything. There's no farang mark-up off the tourist trail. Because of this, Kompong Trach became the cheapest place I have ever been to. The first meal I had there cost me only 25c (American) and I left feeling completely full and satisfied. When one gets off the tourist trail one doesn't expect to have the same quality of food as they are used to - I thought I might have to become accustomed to tarantulas for dinner. It was to my great delight that I was proven wrong. In fact, I had one of the best meals of my journey in Kompong Trach and for only 75c. I'll dream forever more of that fantastic pork and ginger dish with steamed rice.

It looks like I'm rambling again. What you really want to hear about is Wat Kiri Sela, I'm sure. The day after I arrived in Kompong Trach I borrowed a bicycle from the guest house and headed off to Wat Kiri Sela. Nobody could really point me in the correct direction, but thankfully the lonely planet gave clear directions. Hoping I was going in the right direction, I headed down a gravel road in the direction of a karst mountain. On the way I met a boy who was heading to the wat. He spoke good English and was going to the wat to guide tourists through to the hidden valley. Score. I said he could guide me. The wat wasn't far from the main road and before I knew it I was at the base of the karst mountain in the centre of the wat. My young guide pointed at the cave entrance and said I should follow him through to the valley.

Caves are generally very dark places and this cave was no exception. The only light that penetrated it was from it's two openings - the one we had entered through and the one to which we were headed. In the distance I could see the light coming from the exit, but the valley was impossible to make out. We walked through the cave and my young guide pointed out limestone formations that looked like animals and common objects. All of a sudden we were at the exit and what confronted me was one of the most beautiful natural phenomena I have seen. The cave opened up into the centre of the mountain. The valley was not so much a valley as it was a depression in the centre of the mountain, but it was fantastic nonetheless. Sheer limestone cliffs towered around us and vines and lush vegetation hung down from the mountaintop. We spent the next hour wandering through the little caves and caverns that are peppered around the hidden valley. It was an amazing place to be and I was lucky to be the only tourist there to experience it.

Walking out of a cave... 

Into a 'valley' that looked like this

Thoroughly please with myself, I headed back to Kompong Trach and inquired about a bus to Kep, a beach town 30km from Kompong Trach. I was able to gather that a bus comes past every day at 10AM and 4:30PM. I was also able to gather that nobody sold tickets for the bus. I would need to wait until the bus came past and then flag it down. If you've ever flagged down a bus in Southeast Asia you know that it can be very hit-or-miss. I was a little apprehensive about missing the bus. Kompong Trach was great, but I needed to be able to leave.

I got up early the next morning and packed my bags. The previous day I had waited until 4:30PM to see if the bus came past and sure enough it did,  10 minutes early. Armed with this information I guessed that the locals must have got the times right when telling me when the bus would come past. At 9:30 I went outside and waited. A moto driver was sitting beside me and said that the bus would only come at 11. I was now really uncertain as to when the bus would come past. So I waited. 10 o'clock came and went. I thought the moto driver had got it right, so I resigned myself to leaving at 11. An hour longer is really not that much. At 20 past 10 I was getting thirsty so I went to get myself some water from the shop next door. I can back and spied a chair which looked very inviting after having been standing for an hour. I picked up the chair and was taking it outside when the bus cruised past. "Shit!" I thought. I dropped the chair and waved at the bus driver.

He noticed. The bus stopped and I climbed aboard. I was on my way to Kep.

Kep is a beach resort town. And it isn't cheap. It was the polar opposite of Kompong Trach, yet it was charming in it's own right. I found a guest house that had cheap rooms and settled in. Kep has a very narrow strip of sand called Kep beach it's claim to being a beachside town is a little exaggerated. I've seen more sand in sand pits at playgrounds. But Kep's fame comes from it's seafood, pitched as the best in Cambodia.

Kep lives off this reputation and takes great pleasure in punching tourists' wallets in their kidneys. My own wallet spent the second day in Kep in the bathroom, pissing blood. I felt very sorry for inflicting that damage upon it, but bloody satisfied with what had inflicted the damage. But more on that in a moment.

Kep Beach

On my first day in Kep I went through my orientation and acclimatisation routine of walking around for a while and taking in as much as I can. This was a little trickier in Kep as it is a lot more spread out than most towns and to find a cheap room I had to get right out of the town centre. My orientation ended up being a walk down to Kep beach and then a walk back to my guesthouse to get out of the sun. My first experience of kep prices was dinner that evening. $2.50 for fried rice is unheard of in the rest of Southeast Asia, but not in Kep. It was the cheapest thing on the menu, besides cooldrinks and my poor wallet started whimpering at the thought of what lay ahead.

The next day I headed down to Kep beach again, this time on a bicycle. I lay on the rough sand for the entire morning and listened to the wavelets trickle up the beach. At midday I decided to get out of the heat and headed to my guesthouse to sit in the shade of a palm tree.You may find this back-and-forth strange, but I had a reason for it. I was deliberately doing it to build up an appetite for lunch. "Oliver you are a strange guy," you might be thinking. But there is method to my madness (I think). I was building up an appetite for seafood.

Munching on crab at the Crab Market

At about 2 o'clock my stomach started growling. I knew I was ready. I jumped on my bicycle and pedaled furiously down to the crab market. At the crab market there is no such thing as a cheap meal. Every dish costs in excess of $5. (Yes, that's not much by our standards back home, but in SE Asia that is at least 3 times the cost of a meal). The freshest seafood you can imagine is on the menu, some of it caught just offshore the previous hour. But if you go to the crab market, you'd be a fool to order anything but crab. And so I ordered grilled crab. 45 minutes later a plate with 5 massive crabs on it appeared in front of me. Who can complain about paying R9 per grilled crab, really?

By now I was famished and I tucked in with gusto. Eating crab at Kep will definitely go down as one of the top 5 culinary experiences of my travels. It was fantastic! The crab was incredibly fresh and the meat was fantastically tasty. It had been cooked to perfection and by the end of the meal I was too full to move. My wallet started simpering when I payed for the meal and pleaded with me to spare it from any more torture. I was happy to oblige, I didn't need dinner; I was too full.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Actually nothing was happening back at the ranch (except, this sunset pictured below) I just really wanted to say that line. I went back to my guest house and booked my ticket to back Phnom Penh. The nest morning (yesterday morning, as I write this) I jumped on the bus and headed back to the capital. Upon arrival I booked my bus ticket to HCMC. This morning I headed to the bus station with a huge sense of excitement. I was going back to my favourite city in the world and Chris was going to be joining me the next day. I could barely contain myself.

And here I am, back in Ho Chi Minh City! Sitting, typing to all of you (my avid fans) and eagerly anticipating the arrival of Chris. He's currently on a flight to Kuala Lumpur where he will change planes and fly to HCMC. i'll be meeting him at the airport tomorrow and a whole new leg of my journey will begin. Vietnam with my brother. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch....

There I go again!

Oliver

Suit Up!

The first thing you hear about Hoi An is that it is Vietnam's premiere destination for suit shopping. It certainly lives up to it's reputation. But before I go into any detail about my time in Hoi An so far let me tell you how I got here...

He's a big lad

Sunday was my last day in Nha Trang. The trip to Hoi An from Nha Trang takes 12 hours so the best choice is to take a sleeper bus overnight. This also saves on a night's accommodation. Sunday arrived as Sundays do, after Saturday and 24 hours before Monday (Rebecca Black would be pleased at my understanding of the days of the week.) I set off in the morning and booked my bus ticket for that evening along with four other Englishmen I'd met while traveling. The bus was leaving at 19h30 so I had another full day in Nha Trang. I had yet to see the giant, seated Buddha statue and decided it would be best to head straight there.

So to the giant Buddha I went (well, Gad and I went, but typing 'I' is so much simpler.) The Buddha is perched on a hill overlooking Nha Trang and there are some fantastic views from the top. To get to the seated  Buddha you must walk past a pagoda, a sleeping Buddha and a giant bell which weighs one and a half tons. I was told that if you stand at the bell the monks would pray for you so I was quite keen to put their prayers to the test. Unfortunately we arrived during the monks' afternoon nap and not a single prayer was heard. Not particularly fussed, we walked the rest of the steps up to the seated Buddha and milled around on the top of the hill, taking pictures and looking like typical tourists. Craving coffee, we headed back down and found the pagoda was being opened. Wanting to take pictures, we asked if we could go in. A monk explained that we could not take pictures until we had done three 'wais' in front of the Buddha statue in the pagoda. A 'wai' is merely a dip of the head and torso with the palms of your hands pressed together in front of your chest. We did our 'wais', snapped some photos and headed off to the nearest coffee shop, 30 metres away.

After a great day on our feet in Nha Trang it was time to lift them and hit the sleeper bus. All five of our group had been put at the back of the bus with no aisle between sleeping berths. The berths aren't exactly very wide so a lot of spooning went down on the trip to Hoi An. It wasn't uncomfortable, but the road wasn't exactly smooth and every bridge is slightly raised above the road level and acts as an extended speed bump. Everyone on the bus would be asleep and the bus would cross a bridge, everyone would be flung a foot above their berths and be rudely woken by the landing. We probably crossed twenty bridges that night.

This kinda makes up for the spooning

Hoi An is an amazing place. I would cross all those bridges twice to get here and still be pleased. The ancient town's architecture is stunning, the market is alive with activity and the whole place lights up at night like no other place in Vietnam. Everywhere you go the streets are lined with shops for suits, dresses and shoes. It's little wonder why Hoi An has been attracting tourists for years.

Gad had come to Hoi An with a single goal in mind: to get a tailored suit. He'd been preparing since Da Lat and was really eager to get going. So, after checking into a hotel, we set off to scout for a good place to buy a suit. Scouting for a suit shop in Hoi An is simple, close your eyes and point in any direction - you will be pointing at a suit shop when you open your eyes. Being sensible people we didn't just walk into any suit shop, we spent about half the day comparing prices and suit quality and pretending to know more than we actually do about suits and how they should look. At this point I would like to add that I'm not getting a suit, not yet at least. When Chris joins me for a month in June we'll be stopping off in Hoi An to do our suit shopping together.

Gad trying on his tailor-made suit

Gad settled on a place run by the famous Mr Xe, an incredibly flamboyant and openly gay Vietnamese man with a really good reputation for making fine suits. I will never buy a suit anywhere but in Vietnam. The prices are so cheap they make everywhere else's prices cry in shame in a dark corner. Gad is getting a cashmere suit with 2 extra pairs of pants, a waistcoat, 2 pure cotton shirts, a trenchcoat and 6 ties for under $300. And it takes only 2 days for everything to be ready. He's picking it up tomorrow morning, having been measured for it yesterday.

It's impossible to talk about Hoi An and not talk about suits, but I'll try add something extra. Hoi An severely lacks a night life. The entire town shuts down after 11PM, but that actually turns out to be a good thing. Very few people are out on the streets at night which means you're able to enjoy the beauty of the place with no other tourists around. And believe me Hoi An is ten times more amazing at night.

Lights start coming on around 5PM and more and more lights flicker into life as it gets darker. By 8 o'clock the town is lit almost entirely by lanterns and takes on a warm, yellow tone. After going to a night club, the walk back to our hotel was breathtaking. There was nobody out and it felt like the entire town was ours. The streets were quiet and the whole of Vietnam seemed, for once, to be resting. It was magnificent.

The market in Hoi An

This certainly makes up for the spooning!