Can Do Sandhu

Just a really quick one this time as it’s nearly 6.30pm in Vietnam and we have some partying to do. Well, its more like have a couple of beers sitting on our balcony in Nha Trang and then have dinner in one of the hundreds of restaurants which are just a stone’s throw from our guest house. Whether we stay up for the strike of 12 remains to be decided.

Anyway, what a year. During our lounging on the beach today, I had time to reflect on the past 12 months (while Sat was busy with chapter 18 of his book) and when I think back to what we were doing this time last year, I have to pinch myself as we’re actually travelling around the world, just as we planned! Suppose I wouldn’t be much of a life coach otherwise – you have to focus on what you want and do everything you can to make it happen.

Not that you need a reminder but here’s a quick zip through 2009 month by month:

January – Sat’s on gardening leave (aka playing on the x-box as much as possible). We spend a week in India with Sat’s parents to determine whether we can spend a few months with them once we start our travels. The weather’s pretty rubbish and we miss our flight back to London! The next time we come to India it’ll be for 4 months – gulp.

February – Sat’s still on the x-box and he starts to make progress on the book he’s spent 15 years planning! I spend most of my time at work career coaching colleagues.

March – An enjoyable weekend in the Lake District for Liz’s 40th birthday. It’s Sat’s birthday the same weekend and Liverpool gift him a 4-1 win over Man Utd! Plans for our great escape are in the final stages and I finish work at KSF.

April – We rent out the house, pack our bags and leave on the first of our 3 stints travelling just after the Easter weekend. We treat the first couple of weeks as a holiday and then it’s in at the deep-end for both me and Sat: me teaching English at the local village school, Sat living with his parents for the first time in 20-odd years!

May – teaching comes to an abrupt halt due to the riots in the Punjab. The weather’s getting hotter and the carpenters making the kitchen cupboards are taking an eternity.

June – a welcome visit from Jag goes by all too quickly so we jet off to Goa for a week. Just in time for the monsoon! At the end of the month Sat and I leave for the very northern region of India called Ladakh. A relief to the incessant heat of the Punjab at 54 degrees!

July – spend the month enjoying Leh and the surrounding areas. Our 4 months in India come to an end and we fly back to the UK on the 31st.

August – the month is spent enjoying time with friends and family plus consuming all the food and drink we’ve missed while we were away, this is particularly evident at the Molyneaux family BBQ and at Satpal & Parm’s 25th wedding anniversary party. The month goes all too quickly and soon we’re packing our bags yet again.

September – a short fortnight with mum back at the farm in the Punjab before going back to Delhi to catch our flight to Kathmandu. We’d been looking forward to trekking in Nepal for ages. Even investing in camping gear (tent, stove, waterproof matches, the lot!) – pity we didn’t use any of it! The decision to trek in from Jiri seemed a good idea at the time – we didn’t think that way 8 days later when we were knackered and desperate for some tasty food!

October – our trek in Nepal continues for the first 2 weeks of the month. We finally get to see Everest and we make some more good friends along the way. Fly back to the UK for the second time on the 21st – countdown to Gill & Andy’s wedding! The 10 days prior to the wedding fly by and the day itself is one that will stay in our memories for a long, long time. Everything was perfect. Then we had to figure out our plans for stage 3 of our travelling – the big round the world trip.

November – This was an odd month for us. Felt a bit in limbo because we hadn’t got anything planned at this point and we were relying on the generosity of family to stay with since our place was still rented out. So we bit the bullet and decided to leave at the end of the month and with flights booked our first stop would be Bangkok on 1st December.

December – a quick skip through Thailand and a week in Cambodia brought us to Vietnam. We’ve been away one month exactly and it’s been a time full of adventures and experiences.

It’s New Year’s Eve and when we look back on the last 12 months, we can certainly be satisfied with our achievements. Sat wanted to write a book (it’s virtually complete), I wanted to spread the good word on life coaching (I do at every opportunity!) and we both wanted to travel around the world (we’re in Vietnam today with many more countries still to visit).

So all in all, a pretty good year in a time where many might not have seen the opportunities that we did. We’re having a great time and enjoying life. We wish you a happy, healthy and successful 2010, and look forward to sharing more of our adventures with you in the months to come.

Love & hugs

Jo & Sat

OK, so the title of this one gives our location away. We are in Ho Chi Minh City in the south of Vietnam. We’ve been travelling for just over 2 weeks and I think we’re in the swing of things now.

We arrived in Bangkok, Thailand, on 1st December to beautiful sunshine just as the weather turned bitterly cold in the UK – great timing! A few days in the Thai capital just wandering around and looking at the odd temple (wat in Thai) was all the culture we wanted at that point. We’d seen a lot of the sights there on our honeymoon 8 years ago. The main event was Sat getting his hair cut in a Thai barbers shop for the princely sum of £1! (and this included a head and shoulder massage at the end too!)

This is also an opportunity to introduce Larry. Larry is a llama and he’s from Argentina. Gill and Andy brought him back for us from their honeymoon and thought he’d be a good companion on our travels. Here’s Larry enjoying a beer in Bangkok.

Until then we’d been uncertain which direction we’d take from Bangkok but decided a beach would be a good idea. The usual locations of Phuket and Krabi were too far south for us so we headed east to an island called Koh Chang.

We’d arrived there during the celebrations for the King of Thailand’s birthday on the 5th December. It’s a massive event and a national holiday so everyone was in high spirits and everywhere was busy. To get to the island we took a 30 minute ferry ride and at the other end jumped onto the back of a pickup truck with benches in the back (aka a taxi) for the ride to the other end of the island and the resort of Bang Bao. We’d selected one of the Lonely Planet choices to stay and had phoned ahead to make a reservation for 4 nights. Luckily they didn’t have the reservation (more on that in a minute) but they did have a little straw thatched bungalow we could stay in.

There was a pier with many souvenir shops and restaurants along it but not much else in this resort, and definitely no beach (OK so we didn’t research it well enough beforehand but we’re learning!) so after 2 nights we went back to the north of the island to the resort of White Sands, booked ourselves into a nice room and stayed there for the next 5 days.

Koh Chang isn’t too far from the Cambodian border so that seemed the next logical place to go when we decided it was time to move on. We did our due diligence and checked with several tour companies before we bought our tickets (that’s important to know, bear with me). So at 7.20 am we were picked up in a minibus and headed for the ferry. So far so good. When we landed on the mainland we got going but ended up at another of the ferry terminals picking up more passengers and then waiting for ages at a roadside cafe for more people. So far this has taken the best part of 3 hours and it should only have been one hour! Anyway, it’s given us the opportunity to get to know some of the other people on the bus. We chat for a long time with a Dutch couple, Ivo and Angela. They too are on a world tour. They’d packed in their jobs and were just over a week into a year long journey so we had plenty to talk about.

The bus finally gets going and stops just short of the Thai border. We’re told to disembark and enter a building where forms are handed out and we’re instructed to fill them in. It’s then we realise we’ve been on a scam bus. Basically they expect you to fill in their forms and they’ll get the visa for you but at a much inflated price. If you don’t go ahead with this, you’re stranded at the border. After a bit of a fraught altercation (there are now 8 of us standing our ground and insisting we are not paying the scammers) they burn the forms we’ve filled in (since we refuse to hand them back given they have all our personal details on them) and we get a refund of about $4 each. We all walk over the border together and fill in the same forms for a second time and pay the correct amount. It hasn’t exactly gone to plan but at least there’s a bus waiting to take us to Siem Reap which had been our original destination.

We’d already been aware of these “scam buses” but they operate from Bangkok so we didn’t think we’d be affected. Clearly we were wrong. Of the 8 of us ‘mavericks’ 6 of us decided to stay at the guest house where the bus dropped everyone off. At $8 a night it was a bargain. A little foray into town for dinner ($2 each) and a few beers seemed just reward for a stressful day!

In case you’re wondering about the $ prices, some of the countries in South East Asia operate a dual currency system so you can pay in dollars for virtually anything.

Anyway, Siem Reap has a really nice vibe to it and we spend a few days there. Our time was spent getting to know the city but more importantly, seeing the ruins at the ancient site of Angkor Wat. There are many temples built several centuries ago and are the main reason people visit Siem Reap.

Once we’d visited Angkor Wat we were quite keen to press on as Vietnam was high on our priority list of places we really wanted to visit. Another 6 hour bus journey to Phnom Penh would enable us to get our visa for Vietnam quickly. Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia and although it has a riverside location, it just didn’t grab me like Siem Reap did. However we did visit the Killing Fields and the interrogation centre/prison of S21 where many of the atrocities and murders took place during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. The stories of what happened are truly horrific and it’s hard to understand why the west didn’t intervene when mass genocide was happening. At least some of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge are now being prosecuted but for many it’s too little too late.

A trip to the National Museum sealed our visit to Phnom Penh and with Vietnamese visas in hand, we boarded yet another bus for yet another 6 hour journey to Ho Chi Minh City. And here we are. We arrived yesterday and did the customary arrival ritual of lunch and a beer! $5 total for the 2 of us! The food is excellent, far tastier than the blandness in Cambodia. They know how to use chillies to good effect here!

This morning we went for our first run since leaving the UK. There’s a park just across the road from where we’re staying and it was full of people exercising – many doing martial arts or T’ai Chi and things like that. And most of them were between the ages of 60 and 80.

Lunch today was at a place called Pho 2000 (pho means noodles) and it’s famous because Bill Clinton ate there in 2000. There are pictures of his visit all over the walls. The food was superb, particularly the Vietnamese spring rolls. Think we’ll be going there again while we’re here.

So that’s the story so far. It’s likely we’ll stay here until Christmas as we hope there’ll be a nice atmosphere here. We sat in a cafe this morning by the river drinking coconut juice and listening to traditional Christmas carols sung in Vietnamese! It’s hard to feel Christmassy when it’s so hot. Especially when you know the UK has ground to a halt because it’s snowing.

Vietnam celebrates 65 years of communism on the 22nd and there are festivities and events being organised for that. Should be interesting to be around for that.

If we have any readers left, then we wish you a wonderful Christmas and a very happy and healthy 2010.

Lots of love

Jo & Sat
xxx