Oh, Indonesia: How to Bribe a Cop and Island Hopping

Yes, we have a bit of catching up to do... we have said our sad goodbyes to Indonesia, but there were definitely a few surprises waiting for us in our last few weeks in that crazy country.

And yes, as the title implies, we had to bribe our first cop.

We thought we'd take in a bit of the Balinese countryside and rented a motorbike from our guesthouse in Ubud. And since whizzing past the rice paddies and up and down volcanoes on the eastern side of Bali was so much fun, we opted for a second day on our motorbike.

There was no real plan, just a general direction (this is the more interesting way to travel), so that day, our direction was 'North'. We were riding for a little while when suddenly the air got really cold - this was an omen! Because not five minutes afterward we came upon a 'checkpoint' where 3 cops stopped us.

Out came the registration, and it was all going good and they were quite friendly until he asked for our international drivers license.

"Oh, this is problem," was the cop's observation when we couldn't produce one, but we knew what was coming - so why not have some fun with it?

"Oh well, I guess you'll have to write a report." Adrian said.

"No, no, you know-- I want to help you."

"Great, so you're giving us a warning - thanks!" Then we start to mount the bike.

"Wait, no!"

"You're not helping us now, why?" We asked.

"Um, you have big problem, big fine, 200,000 rupiahs (20 dollars)."

"Okay, I guess you have to write a report."

Adrian managed to continue this circular dialogue until it became quite painful to watch and continue with the conversation. Dayle on the other hand was not amused and would put veiled stabs in where ever she could.

All in all we had bartered him down to 50,000RP (5 bucks), and went on our merry way. After some fuss from the corrupt cops, we even managed to get change for our bribe, as we only had a 100,000 Rp note-- something we thought had to do with our bargaining skills.

"What about when we come back, more problems?" Dayle asked.

"Don't worry, I remember you!" Was the officers surly reply.

At first we thought it was cool, but then later we felt dirty, and soon after that we were just ticked off. Returning the bike to the shop, we related the story to the owner, who chuckled a bit.

"50,000 rupiah? This is normal price." At least we got away without paying the "tourist price"... or did we?

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From Ubud it took us an entire day of bus-ferry-minibus-refugee boat rides to cross to the next island of Lombok, where we made way to some smaller islands called the Gili(s), just off the northwest coast. As soon as we arrived-- at dusk-- on Gili Air, we encountered our oh-so-familiar problem of no accommodation. This time we somehow lucked out, and met a local girl, Susie, who worked at one of the bars and graciously offered us (and some friends from the bus) rooms with breakfast at her mom's house. We heard many people end up sleeping on the beach for a night or two! Instead, we woke up to chickens running around the house, and a lovely banana-pancake brekkie cooked by Susie's mom. We weren't huge fans of the squat toilet though.... and eventually moved out to a beachside bungalow entirely made of the squeakiest bamboo. The porch had a hammock and the ocean was right in front of us, as was the main road-- barely one lane made completely of sand. It was incredibly peaceful, with the wave noises interrupted only by clucking chickens, electronic Christmas tunes (the ice cream man's songs), and the jingling of horse carriages that served as the "Gili Taxis"-- there were no vehicles on the island at all.

We'd chosen Gili Air for its reputation as the quiet yet civilized one of the three islands (Gili Trawangan was party central; Gili Meno was all but totally asleep) and did some fantastic snorkeling just off the beach. There were fish of every colour and shape a quick swim from shore; snorkels cost about $2.50 to rent for the full day and there was no end to the underwater discoveries: silly-looking mantis shrimp, clownfish, squid, angelfish, technicolor coral, and a sheer drop where the shallow reef became deep ocean (a bit scary to swim alongside!). Not to mention the beach was lovely and lined with just enough restaurants with laid-back bamboo huts to dine and drink in. At nighttime, green fluorescent dots appeared in the waves: some sort of glowing algae. You look up and there's about a billion stars to see. And the few days we woke up early enough in the morning-- visible on the mainland was a massive volcanic peak, Rinjani, which sat in front of the sunrise and towered over Lombok. The island was stunning. The food was some of the best we'd had in the country, and the island was so small we were soon greeting everyone by name along the main sand street. Unfortunately for our relaxation plans, we met some fabulous companions-- both travellers and locals-- and found the nightlife laid-back yet quite excellent on Gili Air.

Too many Bintangs later, somehow 7 days slid by and we topped off our stay with the best dive ever experienced. As soon as we descended to the ocean floor, a huge Manta Ray flapped its way past us; 4 Reef Sharks (one of which was 'asleep') circled us as we prayed we wouldn't be lunch; giant round Green Turtles cruised by us; and a Banded Sea Snake completely freaked us out as it wiggled out of some coral and started heading towards our dive group (which Adrian hated - he doesn't like snakes... and this one was actually a poisonous one!). We could've gone out for the afternoon dive, but chose to go for a quick snorkel instead -- because there's no way we can top that one last (fabulous) dive.

Leaving Gili Air was torture: as Lombok is well on its way to having an international airport, we fear the next time we're back the island will have utterly lost its rustic beauty and laid-back attitude. It was back to Bali for a little souvenir shopping and to catch our onward flight to Kuala Lumpur for 4 days of sights and sounds--it was a crazy yet somewhat unrewarding city to explore after all the great places we'd encountered over our six months-- and a killer 14 hour flight to England. No pain, no gain!

3 Nations, 2 Travelers, 1 Lawyer.

Since arriving in Chiang Rai 4 days ago, it’s been non-stop. We had the good fortune of coming when the Saturday market was happening, and the night bazaar too.

Thirsting for adventure we jumped the first bus to Chiang Saen (yes, there are about 5 Chiang ‘somethings’ in the area), which was an hour and a half away. Chiang Saen is a moderate small town but smattered with old ruins from ages ago. It’s pretty wild to see a 7-11 with an 1000 year old chedi for a neighbour!
We rented a bike at Gin’s guesthouse and with a full tank we set off for the Golden Triangle, the place where the 3 nations of Burma, Laos, and Thailand meet at the Mae Kong River. It used to be a big hotspot for the opium trade, but Thailand has since stopped its production (mostly). The Golden Triangle is pretty hard to miss, a giant golden Buddha surrounded by elephants is the first hint you’re there. Yeah, it was a trap but we like our corny pictures, and Adrian got to pose with a semi-nude mermaid.

Next stop was North in Mae Sai; the Northern most tip of Thailand – also the border crossing for Burma. We had a great look across the border and now our travel interest in Burma is totally buzzing. Naturally there were all the border town characteristics: begging children, soldiers, crap souvenirs, and a bit of uneasiness in the air - but it was our first glimpse of Burmese men’s fashion – the sarong. Maybe there’s an office furniture shortage in Burma, but there were these women who’d prop the heaviest looking metal tables on their heads and cart them back across the border on foot.

Along the way back to Chiang Saen we had a whole 4 lane highway to ourselves, and eerie feeling. So what a great place for Dayle to learn a new skill: motorbike driver. She was excellent (we’ll post video soon), Dayle not only mastered the ‘leaning’ basics, she took us 25 km before we drove by a huge scrub burn off and she got some crap in her eye. Well done, Hell’s Angels look out!

Since we’d missed the last bus we were fortunate to catch a ride back with the actual Gin of Gin’s guesthouse. He’s also a Provincial lawyer, and we had a great and colourful conversation with him and his wife Julie. He even invited us to his house in Chiang Rai and played us a song on his piano, see lawyers aren’t all bad (mostly).

Kitsch in the Mountains: Dalat

After a few weeks of sweating out the muggy days and nights in Saigon, a visit to the charming mountain town of Dalat was a refreshing change (in temperature and in pace).

As soon as we stepped off the bus ($11 AUD/$6 USD for the six-hour ride!), we felt like we'd reached another country. Surrounded by tall mountains, the "small town" of about 185,000 people is built in tiers, so looking around there are layers and layers of colourful homes everywhere. It's got a bit of a European Alps feel to it, with stone steps and old-looking buildings. Without much of a search, we found a decent guesthouse on one of the main streets for $8 USD a night with a big balcony overlooking the street-- an excellent vantage point for watching a torrential downpour the next afternoon we learned!

Dalat is a bit of a honeymoon spot and weekend getaway for Saigon residents, evident in the many dimly-lit, French-style restaurants around town. It's also a place that loves its kitsch, and in embracing the cooler climate, we even saw a few Swiss-chalet looking hotels (one complete with plastic snow and icicles hanging from the roof). We wandered around the street market in the centre of the town and found everyone milling about in thick sweaters, scarves and mittens (OK, it was cold, but not that cold!) One of the nicest parts about Dalat for us as well was that despite being a tourist town, many of the visitors were Vietnamese, and we felt like we could blend into the background more than other places without being bombarded by sales pitches from everyone we met.

Dalat is also somewhat of an artist's spot, so on our second day we took a walk to visit a real architectural wonder-- Hang Nga Crazy House. Nope, not a lunatic asylum, but a bizarre creation by a Vietnamese architect who had the cash and inspiration to build a very Alice-in-Wonderland-meets-Gaudi complex which is part hotel, part playground, and part tourist attraction. It's a tribute to the nature Madame Hang Nga loves, with the structures shaped as giant trees, with fishponds, toadstools, and giant concrete giraffes hanging out together. We spent hours exploring the many themed animal-themed hotel rooms and climbing windy bridges between the concrete "branches" of the zany artifical trees. One of the other cool things is when we asked the lady selling admission tickets what the house was made of, she replied, "I made it from concrete..." and we realized it was the architect and mastermind herself, Mrs Hang Nga, humbly hanging out in the ticket booth, answering questions and selling admissions-- amazing!

We noticed some black storm clouds coming in thick and fast and just as we arrived back at our hotel to drop off some things, the rain started. There was so much water coming down the street in front had become a series of lakes and people were madly trying to get shelter and get off their motorbikes. We witnessed a few kamikaze trucks zooming down the road, splashing all the way to the buildings (and anyone unlucky enough to be in between!). It was quite the sight... and of course, in an hour, was all over and sunshine again!

The next morning was all gorgeous blue skies and we seized the opportunity to rent a motorbike ($6 USD for an automatic) to explore the sights in the hills outside of town. There are countless motorbike riders selling personal tours of the surrounds (the Easy Riders, they call themselves) but as we like to do things our own way-- and were sick to death of their pestering-- we opted for our own wheels. It wasn't long before we were off the map and totally lost in the mountains, trying to find our way to the scenic-sounding Tiger Falls. We zoomed past the proper turnoff about four times and the villagers on either end had probably seen enough of us by the time we made it... but it was a beautiful way to take in the countryside-- Adrian as the driver and Dayle as the hand-signaller. :) We did a bit of off-roading-- Vietnam mountain roads are not as smoothly paved as Thai mountain roads, it seems!-- and eventually found our way deep into a valley to the Tiger Falls, named so apparently from a legend that there once was a mean tiger who lived there. All we found was an old man, a few cute humpy dogs, and a big concrete tiger to climb inside of (oh Dalat!), but it was good times. We finished off our cruising at the "Valley of Love", a cheeseball Disneyland-for-couples attraction that's a bit hard to visit seriously-- two-person swings, naked statues, heart-shaped painted wooden frames to take photos inside of, staff dressed up as cowboys-- well, of course we opted for the super-cheese and squeaked our way into the Valley of Love's lake on a rusty, creaking swan-shaped paddleboat...

And just when we had had our fill of cheesiness for the day and were going to make a quick escape from the "Valley"... we found ourselves with a flat front tire! Oh damn, we thought, how much will this cost us? And however will we explain this, in our feeble Vietnamese, to the hotel staff who rented us the bike ? Well, it turns out that there are motorbike mechanics everywhere, and it takes about 15 minutes and costs about $1.50 AUD to fix a flat in Vietnam. Woohoo! Now that's true love!

Spending Like Millionaires.... of Dong

We've just woken up to our second morning in Vietnam a little fuzzy-- maybe from the 4 hour time difference from Melbourne, maybe from the million or so dong we spent on a big day of eating and drinking. EEK! OK, so a million dong (that's the Vietnamese currency) works out to be about $90AUD, and less than that in Canadian, but we've now learned it's still definitely possible to spend lots of money, even in a place with prices as cheap as Vietnam. So today we'll live frugally! Except for our "extravagant" hotel room, that is-- with TV, free internet, A/c, balcony, ornate sculptured ceilings, private bathroom, fridge, and enough room to fit two dressers and a desk-- for $15 USD. Sweet!

We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City at about 8pm on Feb 20, and were immediately awestruck by all of the people and the lights-- the neon light signs were visible even from the plane! After spending so much time in the vast empty parts of Oz, riding streets alongside hundreds of buzzing motorbikes was a trip! We checked into out guesthouse and hit the town with our friend Warren, who is teaching English here (Adrian used to work with him at ANZ bank). Good times on the tourist strip-- eating great noodles from a street vendor on child-size tables and plastic stools!-- for less than a $1 USD pp., drinking Tiger beers for next to nothing too, and people-watching... welcome to Asia! Warren's been enjoying the HCMC life for about 8 months now, and isn't at all ready to say goodbye to the city-- something we're starting to understand as we get into its energy, which is sort of laid-back but a little nuts at the same time. Got scared half to death by a giant rat scurrying through our laneway on the way back to our hotel (seriously bigger than the stray kittens hanging out on the street) and we were thankful to be staying on the 4th storey of our building.

Yesterday we woke up with that "Oh my god, where are we?" feeling that happens on the first morning of any trip and ventured out in the humid sunshine (29 degrees). I grabbed a Western breakfast and Adrian went straight for the pho (Vietnamese noodle soup) and we took a walking tour of part of the city, marvelling at the scenery and practicing our street-crossings. First lesson: There are crosswalks painted on the roads, but it doesn't seem to make much of a difference where you cross. Lesson 2: Find a tiny gap in the constant barrage of cars, buses, and motorbikes, and start walking across very slowly... something that goes against all instinct when a speeding bike's coming at you, but if they'll steer around you with ease if they can tell where you're heading and how fast. Cars are another story-- GET OUT OF THE WAY! is about the best advice to follow.

We wandered through some street markets (vendors very grabby in parts) and managed to find the necessities-- a SIM card for our phone ($6 AUD!), a plug converter, and a bath pouffe-- which all took a bit of Charades and Pictionary, as we're finding Vietnamese is a very hard language to pick up quickly! But we've learned a few basics already and we're working on mastering the conversion math [11,000 Vietnamese dong equals $1 Aussie dollar; $1 USD equals 16,000 dong. We'd like to eliminate one currency, but our savings are in AUD and some of the prices here are in USD and some in VND.... and then there's all the bloody zeroes to deal with..... yarrrrrrrr!].

We met up with Warren in the late afternoon at Fanny, a great ice cream shop with delicious flavours and very artistic sundaes (I had a Canard, ice cream in a duck-shaped basket with wafer wings!) and the evening went on from there-- to gorgeously decorated, swanky coffee shops, a Pho restaurant, and a bar or two. But most memorable of the night was when I got entirely lost in the city on the back of a motorbike taxi-- it's scary enough being right in the thick of the traffic, but then my motorbike taxi driver lost Warren and Adrian, who were on Warren's bike and said "Follow us!" and zoomed off to disappear into the crowd. Everything looks mildly familiar in HCMC, but the street names are long and difficult to remember, and I have a terrible sense of direction without a map or the sun to guide me. So I spent about 45 minutes on the back of this old man's (who didn't speak a word of English) motorbike, reading street names aloud and hopelessly trying to communicate with him. Of course, Adrian had our phone, the hotel key, the backpack.... I was lucky we split up our money in the morning and had 500,000 dong in my pocket, as I'd left my wallet in the backpack on Adrian's back too! I also had our new phone number in my pocket but didn't know how to use a payphone, let alone speak the word "telephone" to the driver. Eventually he pulled over and had me speak with some other motorbike drivers, and I managed to write down our hotel's address, as I guess I'm hopeless at pronouncing it properly.... and then my driver couldn't find the street.... it went on and on.... finally in some miracle we came across it, and I had to run around trying to change this big VND bill to pay my 50,000 ($5) fare. Somehow Warren had a feeling to check our hotel, and I was just about to call the guys when he appeared on his bike to save me! We zoomed back to where he left Adrian, and who was Adrian hanging out with but the old motorbike taxi driver who didn't know his way around town! We decided to go to a bar close by, this time split up the mobile phones, and when Warren and I got to the bar, this time it was Adrian who had disappeared.... well, I guess we shouldn't have used that driver's services again, cuz he dropped Adrian right off at our hotel, despite the driver and Warren's agreements to meet on a certain street. At least Adrian's ride was a bit cheaper than mine.... needless to say a lot of beer was necessary after that.... and that's about all I can say about our second day in Vietnam!

PS. If you can figure out how to call/text Vietnam, we'll be reachable for the next month or two at +84 (that's the country code) 1265772662. Good luck & miss you all! xoxoxo Dayle & Adrian