Howling at the Moon Day 2

We woke up the next morning in considerably better moods than we'd gone to bed with and were pleasantly surprised by our surroundings. The darkness of the hour we'd arrived had hidden the delights of the place we'd chosen to stay, and our bungalow even had a nice beach view. After a breakfast of eggs and peanut butter on toast (a luxury in Thailand, for all their peanut sauces and peanut toppings, Thais haven't gotten on the Peanut Butter bandwagon) we wandered along the length of the beach, which was a cove of sorts. There was a small reef just off the beach in shallow water that was perfect for snorkeling. We had gotten spoiled diving in the Similan Islands but there were still plenty of fish to keep our interest. There was a slight panic on my part when I wasn't paying attention and let my mask and snorkel float off, but Greg somehow managed to hunt it down by following the currents under water (or so he claims, it may have just been luck).

We basically just bummed around on the beach all day, making friends with the resident dogs, reading, and working on our tans. Three of our friends from the Muay Thai camp were due to meet us that evening and we inaccurately assumed that they would be as tired as we had been the night before. We realized our mistake when we received a text message that they were making a stop at seven-eleven on their way over to get beer. They arrived twenty minutes or so later with Mikey half pissed and Steve and Marko shaking their heads. After a short discussion, we decided that evening should be a reconnaissance mission in preparation for full moon the next night. With that we set out as two Canadians, an Aussie, a Kiwi, and an Estonian.

The general attempt was to take it a bit easy and make sure we would be in good form for the next night, easier said than done. We got dropped off in Hat Rin and chose a random bar to grab snacks and a beer. We quickly discovered that unlike most guys, when Mikey is drunk he prefers to chat up men (not in a sexual way, more of a bromance type of deal) and we eventually had to drag him away from a table of guys he was bonding with. Just outside the bar we ran into two more Aussie guys from Tiger (they had started as five, two of them got wasted the night before in Patong and never made it on the bus and a third they'd lost in Hat Rin ten minutes into the night) and they convinced us to come along to some pool party they'd heard about.

As soon as we arrived at the party, Mikey had the brilliant idea to smack a random girl on the ass, had a moment of clarity, went back to apologize and got slapped in the face. Just to clarify, Mikey is a twenty year old Uni student from New Zealand lacking both a good tolerance of alcohol and perspective, not justifying anything, just providing background. The pool party, it turned out, was just an excuse for a bunch of half naked twenty year olds to check each other out and make out in a pool next to a whole bunch of other people making out. Occasionally you'd see one lonely person off on their own but it usually wasn't long before they found themselves a companion. We bopped around to the music for a while, wandered down the beach and had a couple drinks. There was one older guy gyrating in the smallest bathing suit possible and Marko convinced a girl he'd met to smack him on the ass. After that he seemed to come to his senses and replaced his shorts fairly quickly.

At around 1am the boys started feeling the effects of their long travel day and we decided to head back to our part of the island. We herded Mikey towards the tuk tuks and managed to hire ourselves a ride home in the back of a pick up truck. With Mikey blockaded in the middle, and an entire Thai family in the cab, we rode the way home dropping off random people along the way and making a stop at someone's house to get gas (?) and water for Mikey. Eventually we arrived with everyone, surprisingly, in one piece.

Howling at the moon Day 1

One of the quintessential South East Asian travel experiences is the monthly full moon party on Koh Pha Ngan in Thailand. Several groups lay claim to the first full moon party but the origin is unclear. One thing is for sure though, the popularity has grown exponentially.

Day 1: I had just finished a five-day live-aboard scuba diving trip in Khao Lak, a touristy beach town an hour North of Phuket, when I decided to head to the full moon party with a friend of mine from the Muay Thai camp. I've had my fair share of long travel days, but this was one of the most tedious. It started with a four hour long ride on a local bus which we had to catch Thai style. Khao Lak doesn't have a proper bus station, so instead you simply wait alongside the main road in town with all your belongings in tow and flag down the bus you want as it passes, which is roughly once an hour with no precise time-line. We had a lucky start to the day and had to wait a mere two minutes before the bus we needed came bustling along. We hopped on for a generally uneventful bus ride, the exception being the slightly overzealous ladyboy who kept “accidentally” brushing against Greg as she walked past.

We arrived in Surat Thani, the port town gateway to the islands and, once again Thai style, got dropped off at a tourist agency instead of a proper bus station. We were ushered into a cramped office with an ample pile of backpacks and their accompanying backpackers, when out of pure laziness, we were already tired and hungry, we purchased package bus/boat tickets for the rest of the journey to the island. We wandered off to grab a quick bite and hurried back only to wait around for another half hour unsure of what exactly we were waiting for. Eventually, the bus meant to take us to the port arrived. It was something akin to a converted school bus with extra seats put in to maximize capacity, all of which were filled, in addition to the greatly reduced aisle. A forty-five minute bus ride ensued with our knees jammed into the seats in front of us and a soundtrack of Aussie backpacker slang playing in the background.

We were dropped off at the pier and instantly confronted with an irritated Thai man exclaiming “you're late, we've been waiting for you!” Perplexed as to how the tardiness was our fault, a collective disorganized disembarkation unfolded with people attempting to reunite themselves with the proper backpack. We then boarded the small ferry and once again deposited our bags into an even larger disorganized pile than the one we had just retrieved them from. Sighing, we hunkered down in belly of the ferry to wait out the 2.5 hour ride.

Upon arriving at the pier on Koh Pha Ngan we realized our second stroke of luck of the day; because we were some of the last to board, our bags were at the top of the gargantuan pile. Thankful to be able to avoid the unfolding chaos, we hurried off the boat, only to be accosted by a wall of yelling Thai people trying to entice us to their hotel, guest house or tuk tuk. We had already decided that we wanted to avoid Hat Rin (described by lonely planet as full moon party ground zero), so we hopped in a tuk tuk and headed to Ao Mae Hat which was described as one of the nicest beaches on the island. Our driver was apparently in a rush and set a blistering pace for the twenty minute white knuckled ride (For those who don't know a tuk tuk is a converted pick-up truck with benches in the bed, a canvas roof, and several metal poles holding it all together). We were more than relieved to be standing on solid ground again after being deposited in front of a guest house on the beach. At that point, too tired to be scrupulous consumers, we conceded to stay there after a mere glance, scarfed down dinner, and passed out.

From Russia With Love Part 2

I know I ended rather abruptly last time, but to be honest it’s kind of anticlimactic. The third guy in our group, you may notice the pasty redhead in a lot of my Russia photos, is Patrick, a firefighter from Cork, Ireland, who is in fact perfectly normal and sometimes even kind of funny. There were some small disagreements but I don’t think you can spend 24hours a day with someone and agree on everything. This seemed to be Sam and my luck throughout our trip though as we met a couple other vodkatrain groups later on and they were all bigger, the same thing happened with our scuba course. But I am getting ahead of myself.
So, we met up with Olga and Patrick and went out for our first group dinner. Olga regaled us with stories of her two trans-Siberian journeys and of some guy with dread-locks who got a tick from riding a horse in Mongolia. I’m not sure why the dread-lock part is relevant but it seemed an integral element of her version so I felt I should leave it in. She also revealed her extremely irritating habit of fake crying when telling stories for emphasis. The first time it was funny because it came totally out of left field, but when she started crying because her beer is almost finished or Patrick was talking to some girl, it got annoying rather quickly. In all fairness though, she was definitely the most knowledgeable of all our honchos and her English was flawless, we later learned that English skills are apparently not a requirement to be a honcho. After dinner we went out for a couple drinks and discovered that Olga had developed a little crush on Patrick and would hang on everyword. She also as I mentioned earlier would get jealous when he talked to other girls and on one occasion scathingly said "she's not that pretty" while he was talking to an American girl we'd met. It was altogether a good night, maybe too good even as Sam managed to lose her camera.

You sometimes feel a hint of an anti-western attitude here and there and I think the lack of English speakers is partly due to that. I’ve also heard theories that Russia’s strict visa policy is due to the fact that Russians are required to get visas to go pretty much anywhere, so everyone else needs a visa to go to Russia, an eye for an eye sort of deal. I’m sure that’s not the main reason but it is possibly a factor. One of the other very strange attitudes I discovered was everyday Russian people’s attitude to commerce. I have never before encountered such a resistance of people to let you buy things. It sounds strange to even say it, but something like buying a bottle of water could turn out to be an ordeal. If you go up and ask to buy a bottle of water you first will get the ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying’ look, which makes sense although sometimes I think they really do understand you, and then the ‘how dare you disturb me by trying to buy something’ look. Once you finally convey to them what you would like to buy they will as slowly as possible get it for you, grumbling all the way, and then be angry if you don’t have exact change for what you would like to buy. You could be over by one ruble (it’s around 30 rubles to the dollar) and you will get protestation over giving you change. Just to be clear here, this usually only applies to small kiosks, larger stores seem to be much better but it is rather astounding. My trouble finding the hostel as well, I don't know of a single North American, or European for that matter, business that doesn't advertise its location. Another funny thing I noticed is that I got more dirty looks walking down the street with Sam speaking English, than I would walking around by myself, I guess I didn’t stand out as obviously when I wasn’t talking. In general though the attitude towards tourists seems to be positive and welcoming, they even have a lot of the kitschy tourist things you find in other countrys. You coud have your picture taken with a monkey in a Velour tracksuit outside of the church of the spillt blood or even with a bear cub in front of a naval ship.

Our final day in St Petersburg, we went museum hopping; we convinced Patrick that despite his reservations he really needed to go to the Hermitage. I’ve been twice now and I’ve only seen a miniscule fraction of what it holds. One of our guides told us that if you look at every piece of art in the collection for one minute it would take you eighteen years to see everything. I think it’s second to only the Louvre in size. Unfortunately a bunch of museums are closed on Tuesdays in St Petersburg so we didn’t get to see everything that we wanted to, but we did go to the museum of cultural ethnography and anthropology which contains the chamber of curiosities. This was Peter the Great’s personal collection of abnormalities that he wanted to show to the Russian people to broaden their perspective. A large part of the collection is preserved deformed fetuses and babies. Cyclops babies, Siamese twins, fetuses with two heads all staring at you from their formaldehyde jars. It also contained some of animals and bugs, some deformed some not. A lot of the collection is from a Dutch scientist who Peter the Great studied under who was one of the first to do preservations of this kind. Completely strange yet interesting and worth seeing.

Our train to Moscow left that night at midnight but we decided to go to the Ballet beforehand. We lucked out that night’s performance was Swan Lake, it was really beautiful. Patrick confessed it was his first Ballet and I think, even though he may not admit it, that he liked it. We did feel a little out of place as everyone was dressed up and we were in our comfy travelling clothes, read lululemons and t-shirts, but there didn’t appear to be an official dress code so we passed. The Moscow overnight train was actually pretty comfortable and went surprisingly quick, quick for nine hours anyway. We were in a four bed carriage and our forth companion was an Argentinian physicist who had been in Europe giving a lecture and decided to make a trip out of it. He told us that the train attendants will knock on our door in the morning 30 minutes before the train arrives in Moscow, which didn’t happen, and resulted in lots of scrambling at the Moscow train station. We eventually got our things together and found our next honcho on the train platform. She appeared frazzled and admitted that she’d been told the wrong time for our arrival and had panicked when we hadn’t shown up at 8am. We later learned that her permanent state of mind is frazzled, and she seemed to be overwhelmed by anything and everything. We navigated our way through the Moscow subway system, or I should say she navigated us while we just looked around confused, and got to Godzillas hostel where we staying.

We were relieved to find both Russian and non-Russian travelers staying there and were in general very impressed with the Hostel. It was run by an American guy who asked me when I first got there what state I was from. I replied ‘Canada’ and got the obligatory ‘ooooh Sorry!’ response that would become the standard international response to that question. We got our first taste of hostel story exchanging, or as one English guy put it hostel one-upmanship, which consists of travelers telling stories about how hardcore backpackers they are. It seems to involve stories of how one guy travelled through four continents without taking a plane or this girl who travelled through a certain country by only hitchhiking, and how this guy got bitten by a particular type of poisonous snake. It simply serves to make you feel like a very lame backpacker and not very hardcore at all. In the same respect though I think I’ll pass on the experience of being bitten by a poisonous snake, I’m happy to live vicariously on that one.

From Russia With Love

For the record I do know that this is the cheesiest, most obvious title possible, but I don’t care and I’m going to use it anyway. Where to begin? First of all I just have to say that Russia was nothing like I imagined. Maybe I watch too many movies, but I thought that it would be much harsher and rough, dangerous even. It is true that Russian people don’t really smile but once you get talking to them, they are actually quite friendly. A large majority doesn’t speak English, which was a slight shock after Western Europe, but they will try and talk to you anyway. By far the most common question was to inquire our impressions of their country, and general curiosity as to why we were there.
I flew to St Petersburg from Rome on Russian airlines and was the only non-Russian on the plane. It was the first plane ride I’ve ever been on where nothing was translated into English; usually English is the default second language, no such luck here. Luckily the customs card was though; my Cyrillic isn’t exactly up to par. Customs was actually surprisingly easy, given how challenging it was to get a visa, the only irritating thing was that they kept closing custom lines randomly and then re-opening them again so you’d have to hop between lines and hope for the best.

After hearing many stories about people taking a taxi from the airport and getting taken out to the middle of nowhere and then robbed, I was a little nervous, but that too went perfectly smoothly. At least until I got to the hostel. I got an e-mail just over a week before I landed in Russia saying that I had been moved to another hostel as they had just opened a second location. What they didn’t mention, was that, as it was brand new, there was absolutely no sign or any other indication to where the hostel actually was. So, I got dropped off outside of this huge apartment block of buildings, that was 12 Italian street. It was also partly under construction and I really had no idea where I was supposed to go. I went through the gate that was the least under construction and found a Russian girl on a motorbike who spoke no English but seemed to know where I needed to go and pointed me back out the gate and to the right. I followed where she had pointed to another gate, walking over wooden planks to get there and ended up in an alley-way. After about a minute I decided that there was no way that this was the right place and wandered back over to where the girl had been. She gave me a look like I was slightly retarded and a friend of hers who was there looked at the address and again pointed me back towards to same gate that I had just been through. I made my way back through the gate and into the alley-way and began to meander down it when I came upon an older woman coming out of what I presumed to be an apartment building. She also didn’t speak a word of English, but I guess I looked like a sad enough case at that point as she became determined to help me. She also had no idea where the hostel was but she walked me further down the alleyway and around to the back of the building, where there was one large wooden door that was propped open. A moment later some university aged people came out and we both came to the conclusion that this was where I needed to go. With no sign in sight I began to trudge up the stairs and eventually found a miniscule sign for ‘Apple Hostel’ printed on computer paper with an arrow pointing to a buzzer, crisis averted.

By that point it was almost 10pm and as I got settled in to my room I quickly abandoned any notion of going out that night. It soon became apparent that 90% of the people staying at the hostel were Russian, most of whom also, so surprisingly, could speak little to no English. 10pm also seemed to be around the time when Russians start getting ready to go out, which if you’ve ever been to Russia will know that it’s quite a lengthy and complicated process. Russian women will rarely go out of their homes without full make-up dressed to the nines, and of course wearing heels. To give you an idea, our honcho in St Petersburg, Olga, told us that she’d previously done the trans-siberian route and when she’d been in Beijing she walked up the great wall in 4 inch stilettos, not my idea of fun.

The next day Sam arrived from Coppenhagen and we discovered that that night was the red sails party, which is basically a nation-wide graduation party. They close off Nevsky Prospekt which is one of the main streets in St Petersburg and its just a huge street party. One of the girls who worked at the hostel, Sascha, kindly took us under her wing and offered to show us where some local bars were and we ended up hanging out with her and several of her friends for the night. It was pretty rowdy, broken bottles litered the streets and liquor stores there stay open all night, the only rule is you can't buy anything over 40 proof past 11pm. The only black mark of the night was while we were waiting in line at a liquor store some guys behind us heard us speaking english and responded "oh Americans, Obama sucks!" we calmly explained that we weren't actually American but they didn't seem to care. At that point one of Saschas guy friends turned around and asked them what the problem was. They asked him if we were with them, to which he responded yes and an argument in Russian ensued. After a bit they seemed to lose interest, Sascha felt bad and apologized, saying that they were just drunk and stupid.

The following day, Sam had arranged a city-tour for us through a connection at work. We met up with our pint-sized tourguide, Svetlana at around nine and did a very full day of sightseeing all through the city, we went to the Hermitage, the church of the spilt blood, all around the river and into some russian orthodox churches. At the end of the day we were excited to head back to the hostel to meet our tour-group for the next three weeks. As we reached the hostel we were met by Olga who told us that we were postponing the meeting until later in the evening because someones flight wasn't getting in until 8. We then asked her if the rest of our group was already here so we could meet them. She looked slightly confused and then, to our horror, replied that he was the rest of our group. We were both really worried that we would get stuck with some horrible socially awkward guy, or a real asshole and then we'd have to deal with them for three weeks, which is a long time on an enclosed train compartment.

To be continued...

Roma

For the sake of my own sanity, considering how far behind I am already, I am going to skip Rome, Sorry Steve! Don't misunderstand me I had a really nice time there, I don't know that anyone really dislikes Rome, I just don't have that much to write about other than that I ate a ridiculous amount of amazing food and had an awesome time. I imagine what people really want to read about anyway is Russia, which is next on the itinerary. I did post pictures though!

Rome

Brussels and Everything Around It

After the cruise, Adrienne and I had a fun adventure attempting to get back to London as we quickly discovered that it was a bank holiday so the train we were planning on taking wasn't running. Apparently replacement buses were being run, but no one on the dock seemed to know exactly what was going on. Coupled with the complete lack of sleep from the night before, huge waves all night long and a fire alarm at 3am, we new it was going to be a great day. The parking lot was complete chaos as they were unloading 2000 passengers onto various shuttles and airport transfers, and another ferry had arrived only minutes after us.  Eventually, a representatve of the bus line showed up and we were all herded to another parking area where they loaded us onto buses and in the melee we didn't even have to by tickets so at least thats one bonus. Once we reached London, Adrienne and I said our goodbyes, I headed back to Anns house for one more night, and she headed to go meet up with her dad.

The Next day was an early one as I had the first of my many train rides, a 7:30 Euro star to Brussels.  After a comfortable and surprisingly brief ride, I arrived in Brussels to find my uncle Wayne waiting for me at the station. On the way back to his apartment all my memories of my previous stint in Brussels came flooding back to me and everything seemed veru familiar. It was a very action packed 10 days in Brussels, Wayne was entirely prepared to play tour guide for me and had all sorts of ideas. The first couple of days we spent around the city visiting the various sites and museums some of which I remember from my previous stay. When Friday hit, Pascal had taking the day off of work, and we headed to Wayne at Pascals country house near the border with France. It was nice to be out of cities for a change and I definitely hadn't seen farm animals in a while. Their house is only partly finished but beautiful nonetheless, they've done a wonderful job at maintaining its authenticity and charm. The town itself is really, what you would imagine the french countryside to be like, Wayne and Pascal seem to be already updated on the town gossip as well and apparently one of the women who works at the butchers has a little crush on Wayne.

While we were there we also went to visit some of the neighbouring towns, including Chimay where Chimay beer is made. We went to the abbey but we weren't actually allowed into where the beer was made so we walked around instead. I also got to see where they got married (the ceremony) which was nice as I hadn't been able to go to the wedding. We had lunch in the restuarant and walked around the town for a while and even went to do a small hike to where there were some old Roman baths.  The day we returned to Brussels we had lunch/dinner with a couple of friends of theirs, Martin and Viola. I'd met them on my previous trip as well as their daughter Helena who  had been a couple weeks old when I first met her and now is a cheeky 6 year old. She proceeded to boss me around in French for the entire evening and was appalled by my lack of french speaking skills.

We watched In Bruges in preparation for our trip to Bruges, it was a really good movie. Although it meant that our whole day there I was looking at everything in relation to the movie. When we went on a canal tour our guide pointed out the window Colin Farrel jumps out of into the river, and I deffinitely noticed that the stairs to the tower were indeed very steep and very narrow.

The next day Wayne, his friend Axel, My friend Yoli and I took a trip to the coast. Of course the second that we got to the beach it proceeded to POUR rain and we had to run and take refuge in a nearby hotel. When it finally stopped raining we walked along the beach and I got my introduction to Geocaching. If you've never heard of it, geocaching is a sort of global scavenger hunt using GPS point and various clues in order to locate hidden "caches".  After the first cache on the beach Yoli and I were hooked and we spent the rest of the day hunting down caches. We had so much fun the four of us decided to do it again, this time in Cologne, Germany. I only had two final days in Brussels that I spent running around the city, going window shopping with Yoli, we went to a Hamam which is a Turkish bath house, and completing random errands. We had one final night out barhopping around the city. We went to a super touristy bar that had over 100 kinds of beer on tap, that was full of drunk backpackers and random Belgians trying to pcik them up. We did run into one of Yoli's friends from school though, a really nice guy she described as Belgian aristocracy, but we had a fun night. Finally it was time to leave and Wayne and Pascal thankfully offered to drive me to the airport, I hadn't realized that it was over an hour outside of the city and my flight to Rome was at 8am. Somehow it all worked out and I was off to the next adventure.

Cruisin' Around Part 2

Last time I was writing I got up to Helsinki so I will start where I left off, after Helsinki we went to St Petersburg. I am returning to St Petersburg later and I would rather write about it all together but one thing that I will say is that they don't make it easy to get to Russia. It was a painful experience trying to get a Russian visa and because I only have a single entry visa I couldn't use it when I was on the cruise or I wouldn't have been able to get back in later. Cruise companies have some sort of arrangement that you are allowed to get off the ship in St Petersburg but only as part of a tour and you still have to go through an airport like immigration process where you fill out an immigration card. As soon as your tour is done you have to return right back to the ship and you have very little leway. This was pretty funny compared to a lot of the other stops where you literally walk off the ship and right into town.
After St. Petersburg we went to Tallin which was a really beautiful city. Being honest I really knew virtually nothing about Tallin before I got there and all I know about Estonia I learned from Liisa and Heli and the other Esto girls at Guelph. Which for the record mostly involved drinking, so it seemed fitting that we get beers in one of the main squares in Tallin. Adrienne and I met up with one of the guys from Florida and a couple of the bartenders, two Peruvians and a Brazilian. Aside from drinking, as I said Tallin is a beautifully preserved medieval city there are still some stone forts and amazing old buildings. Entirely unrelated and somewhat random but one of the things I most vividly remember from Tallin is that as we were walking around the city we came across a stroller on the side of the road only to realize that there was a baby inside. Someone had left their baby on the street while they went into the store, we stayed for a couple minutes so it wasn't a quick stop either. Sam later told me that apparently its a rather common practice in that part of the world and she saw it when she was in Copenhagen all the time. Apparently some woman recently got arrested in NYC for child endangerment after doing that. Im all for cultural understanding but that one I definitely don't get.
The final stop on the cruise was Gothenburg Sweden, we again opted to walk around the city instead of taking a tour although our grandparents did a tour of the volvo factory which sounded kind of cool. They had all the different Volvo models you could try and drive around their track, including some of the really sporty ones. Again a very beautiful Scandanvian city, lots of beautiful blonde familys walking around, winding canals and a University campus that definitely put Guelph to shame. One funny thing I remember from Gothenburg though was that we were there during some kind of festival and there was a display set up for the military. It wasn't anything to do with recruitment I think just kind of a public relations sort of thing. There were these various, jovial looking military personel with painted faces of different camoflauge (sp?) colours and some assault rifles and tanks and things that you could actually go play with and try out. There was this kid playing with a machine gun on top of a tank, it was definitely a different attitude towards the military from what we're used to in North America.
So just a couple random notes on the cruise; the food was okay, way better than any all inclusive resort I've been to but still that kind of mass production style. I said this already but the staff really were the best part, they were actually really amazing, my grandparents were astounded when our waiter and assistant waiter at dinner were Serbian and Croatian respectively and seemed to get along perfectly. As much as I complained that everyone was old we did meet some nice people close to our age, three guys from Florida who seemed to spend the entire time gambling and drinking, one of them let slip what they managed to rack up in bar charges and let me say it was impressive! We met a really nice guy who was a firefighter and from NYC, he was probably one of the most genuinely nice people that I have ever met. All in all we had a surprisingly fun time and I think me and Adrienne were both really happy that we went.