Hey, mister!

I’ve now been in East Timor for one week, and am enjoying it immensely (of course). What am I doing here, you ask? I’m doing some ‘engineering’ work for a group called Friends of Ermera, which is a community group in the Casey Shire that is friends of the Ermera district in East Timor. Timor is the poorest country in Asia, and you can tell. There is hardly any food security, even things like chicken and eggs are imported from Indonesia. The roads are in shocking condition, and while driving between Dili and Gleno (the capital of the Ermera district where I am staying) we hardly ever get above third gear. They do have a very large coffee industry; at the moment it is harvesting time, and there are sheets covered in coffee beans spread out everywhere to dry in the sunshine.

So far I have been to see three schools/kindergartens who have either put in or are planning to submit proposals to Friends of Ermera for extensions, or fences. My job is to talk to the district administrators about what they want, where things can be built, and come up with a (basic) design. It’s really great, because I get to meet people in their local environment.

One of the schools visited in Madede village

Everyone greets everyone in Timor, here are some of the phrases thrown at me constantly:

Bondia (good morning)

Boatardi (good afternoon)

Bondia Senhora

Good morning, sister!

Good morning, teacher!

Hey, Mister! (an address for foreigners)

Where are you going? (an appropriate response to this is either going home, or going to the market)

Some of my new friends, Sandra, Effie and Adina - they love having their photo taken

Some of the braver children will try to strike up a conversation, and with the help of a phrasebook we have managed to share some things. I also met a young man the other day who had been to Canberra, and expressed to me that Canberra is like ‘heaven on earth!’

Welcome to Timor-Leste!

Vietnam

A few thoughts on Vietnam

Firstly, it took us quite a while to get there. Good old frequent flyer points meant Melbourne, Adelaide, Darwin, Ho Chi Minh.... and bad weather plus inexplicable delays meant Melbourne, lots of hours sitting in Adelaide, quick run through the back alleys of Darwin airport, 5 hours in a hotel in Singapore and arrival 9AM the next day to Ho Chi Minh! In the end Mum and Dad, who flew in from Ireland beat us there, but at least we all arrived safely, with our luggage. Oh, except Mum. haha.

Our hotel was the grand old Hotel Continental, and it was easy to imagine Thomas Fowler sitting back sipping his coffee or g+t, although no bombs, while we were there anyway.

The first thing that I imagine everyone notices about Vietnam is the traffic. It is mental. There are millions of motorbikes, which seem to abide by their own unwritten road rules. Crossing the roads was an exercise in faith, although I did discover that the key to crossing was to pretend you weren't watching the oncoming traffic and just walk (while utilising your peripheral vision just in case). If the bikes knew you saw them they would expect you to stop for them, otherwise they would have to go around you. It's quite an art form. After awhile I realised that they weren't actually driving that fast (compared to the country anyway) it was just a never ending stream of bikes on every single road you contemplated crossing.

Meekong delta:

Steamy, fruity, coconut candy, snake wine, actual snakes, boats, hats, good fooooood, friendly people.

This poor kid: he tried to put the snake on us, and we're all backing away going, "no... thank you anyway!" It's not personal, we're Australian. Don't like snakes.

Hanoi

We flew to Hanoi, seeing as how it's 30 hours by train or something silly like that, and had our first attempted scam pulled on us. Upon getting a taxi from the airport, the driver agrees to take us to Hotel Serenity, which we had booked, pulls up somewhere random and a man comes to the door of the taxi, big smile in place: "Welcome to Hotel Serenity! Actually hotel serenity is closed/out of electricity/ fully booked but come to the -insert hotel of choice- instead" At which point you're supposed to get out and say, oh what a nice man, lets go to his hotel and see what methods he's got to part us with our money. But luckily we had read about this scam in the lonely planet and just forcefully told the driver to take us to hotel serenity. now. Which turned out to be quite lovely in the end. Again, very nice people who went out of their way to help us enjoy our stay.

If I had thought Saigon was busy, the old quarter of Hanoi was something else entirely. Very narrow streets, people communally eating on the footpath, shops bursting at the seams with stuff, markets, cyclos, motorbikes, torrential rain... not easy to capture with a camera.

The next couple of days were spent at Halong Bay, one of the natural wonders of the world up there with the Great Barrier Reef. I have to say, I was more impressed with the mountains of Sapa in terms of natural beauty, but Halong had it's own charms. The most amazing thing was the floating villages... and the thought that there are children out there who have never stepped on dry land.

Also very impressive was the food that our hosts managed to produce on a junk (boat). This masterpiece involves prawns, carrots and potato.

Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum in Hanoi deserves a mention, if only to marvel at the thousands of people who come every day to file past an embalmed corpse in a glass sarcophagus who has been there since 1975. Uncle Ho is credited with saving Vietnam from Colonialism, and many Vietnamese have an almost god-like respect for him. Apparently he said this: "All my life, I have served the Homeland, the revolution and the people with all my heart and strength. If I should now depart from this world, I would have nothing to regret, except not being able to serve longer and more. When I am gone, a grand funeral should be avoided in order not to waste the people's time and money." (http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hochi.htm) Now I don't know what his funeral was like, but the mausoleum erected in his honour would surely make him turn in his grave. Or sarcophagus.

The three days two night spent in the mountain town of Sapa were probably my favourite of the whole trip. It is hard to do justice to the views in photos, but I took plenty anyway :) There were many cool things about Sapa... The minority group the black H'mong who use indigo to dye their traditional clothes, dogs that looked like dingos, rice paddies, VERY steep mountains and Buffalo (one that tried to eat Dad's pants, and one that left a massive hole full of poo for Jemma to stand in - funniest thing I'd seen in a awhile).
An unfortunate result of the Vietnamese penchant to eat anything that moves: The train to and from Sapa was an overnight trip, and remarkably way more exciting on the way than the way home. But that was nothing compared to the buses, as I will explain shortly.

Buses. After our last day in Hanoi, we split, with Mum and Dad flying to Hoi An, and Jemma and I getting the overnight bus to Hue. Firstly, the guy who was supposed to pick us up in a minibus to take us to the real deal was about 2 hours late, which meant we were the last people on. The buses have two aisles, and bunks the length of the bus, on a slight angle so that the person behind can fit their legs under your head. They were not wide. They had a very small rounded handle at about hip height to stop you falling out. The roof was about 60cm from our heads... in Jemma's case the air conditioning unit was about 60 cm from her face. There were local people sleeping on the floor. There was a very loud soundtrack to some Vietnamese movie involving dolphins and martial arts blaring loudly, and whenever the driver hit his horn, the poor girl next to me nearly levitated. And lets not mention the toilet. 12 or something hours later we arrived in Hue! It was an experience, and the second overnight bus we did was waaaaay better. I think we actually slept then.
Hue

Really hot. No beach.... lots of ancient history though, with the forbidden city and such. Quite a popular destination for Vietnamese tourists. First Vietnamese hostel experience... run by an Australian, surprise surprise. But it was good, we met some interesting people from various parts of the world.

Hoi An is famous for tailor made clothes, so we just had to do the done thing and get some too! It is quite a beautiful little city on a river, feels very French... what with all the bicycles around and no cars along the riverside.

This little old lady was selling whistles, she just sat quietly on the side of the road and blew her whistles surreptitiously whenever a tourist walked past. I was happy to buy a pig whistle from her, and she was happy to let me take her photo. All of the elderly people in Vietnam are industrious. Sometimes you feel like they shouldn't be doing the hard labour, but some of them don't seem to mind peddling their wares; they get to sit around and watch the world go by from their little spot on the road.

From Hoi An we took a day trip to My Son (pronounced me sun) ruins. They are of a similar vintage to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, but discovered a lot earlier, and therefore not as well preserved. But interesting non the less. It is a bit hard to get your head around the age involved...well, for me anyway. Occupied from the 4th to the 13th century. ie 400BC to 1300AD (History is not my strong point. I hope I've got that right)
After picking up our clothes and hanging out at the beach a bit, off we headed to our real rest stop, Nha Trang. The party/beach capital. Very popular with locals and internationals alike, Nha Trang is kind of like the Gold Coast... without the theme parks. Highlights: a mud bath with locals who thought we were hilarious (sorry, no photos), getting a pedicure, watching Jemma having her hair cut and changing my mind, having a local rave about Top Gear Vietnam and insisting on forwarding through the episode to show me where he appeared in the background, a snorkeling trip with a floating bar and very cheap cocktails on the beach! Our final day in Saigon involved last minute shopping and getting utterly utterly drenched as a result of a typhoon halfway up Vietnam. I have never seen so much rain in all my life. The locals knew better than us, they all just packed up shop and watched it come down.

And there ends a thoroughly relaxing, eye opening and beautiful three weeks in Vietnam! (Aside from the not-so-cute customs dogs at the airport... but that's another story)

It's been awhile....

Edirisa Smiles! It's been over a year since Jemma and I were in Uganda... and in the interest of maintaining interest in the very worthy chairitable cause of Edirisa Smiles, I am writing one more blog. (See Zemanta's "blogging for a cause" link below)

Can I just say, the wonderful invention of the internet allows me to read the Smiles blog every now and then, and see other volunteers' photos from the lake, but it's such a bittersweet privilege, as it feels so familiar yet sooooo different... the babies are getting bigger, and things are changing.

http://www.edirisa.org/smiles

Smiles does so much good work... educating children, working among the community and one of my personal favourites, teaching children to swim. If the loss of even one child can be prevented by the skills we were able to share, my time at the lake was not wasted!

This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” (link: http://www.zemanta.com/bloggingforacause/ ) campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

Europe

OK, so now we’ve arrived in Ireland and basically finished the full-on backpacking part of our journey, but I’ll fill you in on what we have been up to in Europe (briefly).

Pre Uganda

Amsterdam We have now been in and out of Amsterdam a few times, by bus and plane, and we spent about 5 days there at different times. I didn’t really like it in winter because it was freezing and got dark at four o’clock…. But I can see how it would be lovely in summer or spring. The highlight was definitely Ann Frank’s house, no questions asked. It was strange to see the place that so much has been written about.

BerlinWe got an overnight bus to Berlin which at the time felt gruelling, but Ugandan buses were in a different league altogether (the benefit of hindsight I suppose). We stayed in a really nice hostel and met a few people, plus did a mammoth amount of walking and looking at museums. We also did a walking tour that was very interesting.
Probably the ‘best’ thing we did was go to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp half an hour outside Berlin. It was certainly the thing that will stick in my mind the most. It was especially good because it was the middle of winter and there were not many tourists, and although the air was cold it was a brilliantly sunny day. It was actually quite a beautiful place despite the appalling history.

Post Uganda

Hamburg

The biggest highlight for me was the smell of our clean clothes after the Laundromat… wonderful! The dock area was quite nice and various old buildings, churches etc.

Dusseldorf

Our first sight of the Rhine – it was a lot bigger and faster flowing than I was expecting, definitely puts the snowy to shame. There were lots of parties going on along the river banks, the German equivalent of beach parties I suppose.

Cologne Cologne is dominated by Germanys largest cathedral smack bang in the middle of the city. It was very impressive. Mostly just spent our time wandering around looking at various sites. (Sorry to be so vague about the last few places…. It feels like a very long time ago now)

Bonn I went on a pilgrimage to Beethoven’s birthplace on my own because Jemma was sick. It was really cool – but I did feel like the biggest fool taking photos of myself outside it (we have this ingenious gadget for taking photos of ourselves – it’s just a long stick that attaches to the camera like a tripod does)

Bruges We ended up here quite by accident, as Brussels was too expensive. Neither of us had heard of it or knew how to pronounce it, but it turned out to be the most beautiful city in my opinion (even beating Prague). Having said this, it was at it’s best on the Thursday night we first got there, before all the hoards of tourists arrived. Apparently there had just been a movie released (In Bruges, with Colin Farrel) which we knew nothing about having lived under a rock called Africa for the previous 2 months J Actually, I found this movie hilariously funny. I’m not sure if it was a combination of the Irish humour and the fact that we’d just been to Bruges, or if we were starved of movies. I’ll be interested to hear some Australian opinions. Lets just say, it was NOT what I was expecting.

Flanders Part of our visit to Bruges included a day trip to Flanders fields. I probably don’t need to say that this was an amazing experience. I know pretty much nothing about the First World War, and so the snippets of info we were given were very sobering. I did not know that farmers still fin tons and tons (literally) of metal in their fields each year from unexploded shells and every year at least one or two farmers actually die when they plough over unexploded shells. Unbelievable.
Blegium is also not compensated for help in removing all the debris and they have many years work of work lined up in dismantling bombs stockpiled in a nearby forest.

Nice We spent about 40 stressful minutes in Paris sprinting through train stations To catch our overnight train to Nice (which we made by less than a minute), and then about 4 days relaxing! The beach was weird, as in rocky (!) but the water was soooo blue. It was also strange to be sitting on a beach with zillions of people sunbathing but practically no one swimming. Like the good Australians we are we got in. Yes, the water was freezing, but not that bad!
While in Nice we went on a day trip to Monaco, Canne and other surrounding parts of the French Riviera. The wealth of Monaco was fairly disgusting, as was the tourists’ fascination with it (I suppose we can’t talk, we were on a bus tour of all these areas too…). For anyone who is a petrol head, we drove around the Monte-Carlo Grand Prix circuit. I got a very strange feeling as we went through the tunnel and realised that I had been on this road before…. Thanks to our cousins’ playstation!
I’m sure there is a name for the phenomenon that happens when you go to the cinema and watch a movie simply because it is the next one on, not because you particularly want to see it…. This happened to us with the Rolling Stones movie. It was on and it was in English, so we saw it, and I enjoyed it immensely. It might have been because we hadn’t seen a movie in months, but it really was enjoyable!

Basel This lovely little City is in Switzerland very close to the border of France and Germany. We had been sampling a fair bit of chocolate in various places and I have to report that the best stuff is Swiss. We also caught our first bit of Australian news for a while – Australia culling 200 kangaroos made it to the front page and pensioners stripping off in fed square made it to page 3.

Basel also had the best set of church stairs we have seen. As you can imagine, we have seen quite a few... but these were the most cramped, steepest by far. Fantastic.

Heidelberg Heidelberg is a really cool old city, the highlight certainly being the castle on the hill. It was mostly a ruin, but very very old. I love the (generally old) people who look after castles and run the tours – they are so enthusiastic about their jobs…. So entertaining.

Spardorf

The village of Spardorf is where Jemma lived for 10 weeks on exchange with Coti and her family. I really like her family and we had a fantastic week with them. The last night of the Erlangen beer festival was on our first night there – it’s the biggest festival after Oktoberfest in Munich, and accordingly was mad. We also went for a day trip to Nuremberg, walked in procession through the streets for Corpus Christi, cooked dinner for the family one night and went to Coti’s 4-way joint 18th party on our last night. It was great to stay in one place and with a family for a week, and everyone was so nice and welcoming.

Prague

Our last full-on backpacking city was Prague. We caught up with Louie from Uganda and his mate John, which was great…. Checked out the castle, went to an opera, lots of walking, got lost a couple of times… The streets in Prague are not straight, and they all converge on themselves and go around in circles. Plus they all have funny names. So it was quite difficult to navigate. That’s my excuse anyway. I quite enjoyed the changing of the guard at the castle; I don't know how they could be so serious.

I must say that both of us had almost had enough of sight seeing by the end of Prague, and were ready to see some familiar people in Ireland. So far everything has been wonderful, and it’s great to see all our family again! Thanks all for wading through the tirade of information!

Ugandan pick-up lines

Before I launch into this, I must say, Ugandan men are quite rediculously attracted to white women. It's because of the status and money that we have in their community, but still! We couldn't walk down the street without getting at least one marriage proposal (well, maybe that's a slight exggeration). There were some lines that were quite memorable:


Location: Match and Mix bar

Ugandan (to Jemma): How much do you weigh?
Jemma: What?
Ugandan: How much do you weigh? I want to pick you up...


Location: Outside Edirisa

Streetkid 1: Give me a kiss
Me: no
Streetkid 1: Why not?
Me: You're far too young (he was about 12)
Streetkid 2: I want our two souls to become one...


Location: Kampala secondhand clothes market

Ugandan (to Jemma): hello wife!
Ugandan (to me, having had no luck with Jemma): hello wife!


Location: Internet cafe

Ugandan: How old are you?
Us: 18 and 20
Ugandan: Oh! So young to be finished school! Are you married?
Us: No, we're too young
Ugandan: 18's not too young to be married... I really want a white wife (hint hint)


Bride price is still a fairly common practice in the rural villages of Uganda. One man offered to buy Jemma from the local guys she was with for 2 million shillings (about 1000 US dollars, a LOT of money in Uganda!)


This last one requires additional information. For those of you who don't know, Jemma and I do not look alike. Most backpackers are extremely surprised to learn we are sisters, except this one guy...

Location: Edirisa bar

Ugandan: I thought you two were twins. She's the tall one and you're the fat one.

Yes, that was an attempted pick up line. Fat is good in Kabale. (To read another article about this issue see a colleague's articles... http://www.edirisa.org/studio/?p=89 )

Rwanda - really a long time ago now!

The weekend after Easter, Jemma, myself and two fellow volunteers from the UK, Louie and Adam went to Rwanda. Where we were staying was very close to the border, so it was not as big a deal as it sounds, and Rwanda is very safe.... they even tend to drive on the side of the road they are supposed to! We got up at a ridiculously early hour to get there and it paid off, as it took only about half an hour to get across the border (sometimes you can stand in queues for hours). So eventually we arrived to find everything closed at 9 o'clock on a Saturday morning, as once a month all of Rwanda (or at least Kigali, the capital where we were) shuts down for the morning. So we just sort of wandered around and got a feel for the place.... traffic lights! shopping centres! lots of sealed roads! People speaking French!
By the time it got to lunchtime we were quite desperate for some food, and we ended up eating in a local cafe. This could have been a disaster (some local food is disgusting, like matooke - more later), but it was actually excellent. And so we discovered that the average Rwandan eats much nicer food than the average Ugandan. I think a huge plate of chips, rice, goat, greens and other stuff cost less than $1.
After our exotic lunch we headed to the main tourist destination in Kigali, the genocide memorial museum. This was, as you can imagine, both very interesting and very harrowing. The thing I found hard to deal with was the reactions of other Africans also seeing the museum.... there was a lot of grief and horror being openly expressed. And what can you think in a situation like that except please, never again.
The following day we headed out to a church site from the genocide that had been left as is.... only the bodies were removed and it was full of thousands of clothes. It is unbelievable to think that this only occurred just over 10 years ago. Which brings me to my next point. People have asked what Rwanda was like, if there is any evidence of the genocide.....
Kigali felt a bit too nice, like they have tried to cover up what happened with development and infrastructure. I suppose the money for that came from guilty-feeling countries who didn't do anything to help Rwanda at the time. I get the feeling that the genocide is never mentioned by local people, and everything is done to prevent differences between tribes of people being mentioned. For example, no one is ever referred to as a Hutu or Tutsi (even if they are.... and in Uganda people are identified by their tribe all the time). Another international that I met at one stage was telling me that it is easy to even inadvertently upset people about various things. For example, she offered a local that she know a biscuit, and he said 'no, those biscuits remind me of the genocide'. It turns out he hid in the back of a shop and had only this particular brand of biscuits to eat for a week. For course, I'm sure he was not offended by the question, but it seems that recent history is well and truly within memory for a lot of people.