Just for an update, me and Soph are back together after oe lonely day apart, so no need to worry!

Our elephant photos are now up if you want to have a look, (again no need for a Facebook account, just click the link below)

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2022141&id=220700053&l=e159c3b23e

Apologies for the lack of blogging but not a lot seems to have happened since our last adventure, mainly due to having to ‘take it easy’ as advised by the doctor. We spent a few days making our way from Chiang Mai in northern Thailand to the southern part of central Laos. After a border crossing involving a bus, a stamp, another bus and a tuk tuk we came to the very French looking capital of Vientiane.

In Vientiane we spent a few days sampling the excellent bagels and pizzas and having our first carafe of (nice!) wine in over two months. Sophie recently acquired a new SLR so we many a Wat (temple in the city); “What Wat is this?” So you should be able to see may of the spoils of our photography. Our main aim of our trip to Laos was to visit the tourist destination for Vang Vieng which is well known for its tubing down the river there.

Vang Vieng in one word is… tour! (A few of you will know what I mean!) Tubing is the activity of floating down the river in a large floating doughnut. Along the 4km stretch of river there are a superfluous of bars, rope swings, slides, trapezes and other such delights (and no me and Sophie did not do any other them!) There was body painting, acrobatics and general drunken antics. The river itself is set in beautiful surroundings and at low season (when we were there) it was very slow flowing with few rapids. In high season it takes only 2 hours to do the 4km stretch and with a mixture of alcohol fatalities are unfortunately heard about often. There are people who have arrived to Vang Vieng planning to stay one day and have stayed (the longest record) 3 years!

Our time there was really good fun, (Sophie is still getting the St George’s flag which was spray painted on her back off!) We met a really nice group of Americans who currently teach in Bangkok in our guest house who we stayed with us to our next location of Luang Prabang.
The journey to Luang Prabang was eventful; the journey time was 8 hours so we decided to make this journey overnight, though it wasn’t the sleeper bus with beds like in Vietnam. We were travelling on the ‘newest road’ in Laos but this still included every turn being a hairpin bend so it was the most comfortable of journeys. The entire journey was 180km and took 8 hours so you can guess at the condition of the road.

In Luang Prabang we had the first task of trying to figure out how we were going to make our way back to Chiang Mai for our elephant project which had been delayed by 10 days due to our injuries. Our orginal plan was to go by bus or boat (trains do not exsist in Laos) but the journey by bus was over 20 hours so we wouldn’t get there in time or the boat option was basically a canoe with a large propeller attached which did the journey in 6 hours along the Mekong River! Unhappy at the prospect that we would miss our elephants we paid a substantial amount to fly with Laos airways, (who according to Lonely Planet haven’t released their safety records publicly because of a bad safety record). Our way back to Chiang Mai wasn’t going to be without incident or so we thought! It turned out that Lonely Planet was behind the times and the plane we took was very new and clean and we had a excellent free meal – something very annoying about Airasia!

After a day detoxing in the very scenic Luang Prabang (see picture of Sophie) we said good bye to our American friends and headed to the elephants!

The Thai Conservation Park houses over 60 elephants; some are rescued from circus or donated after being neglected because machines have replaced them in the logging industry, some are orphans or injured, some have been born and raised in the centre. The baby elephant in the picture is the newest newborn the centre has, she’s only 6 months old and very mischievous. The important factor to remember about Asia elephants are that they would have become extinct if they weren’t trained to be used in the forestry business. Unlike their African relations there aren’t large parts of Asia where they could migrate to or even populate. Although we were part of a ‘show’ twice a day it was used to educate the Thai and tourist audience in the past uses of the elephants and how their natural skills and strengths could be put to use. This did not include balancing on one leg on a podium, spinning around, playing football with a monkey etc etc as I saw in Vietnam in the circus.

On our first day we were designated a elephant and a mahout (the elephant trainer, who works with the elephant usually from birth). I was given Pritheeda a 16 year old male, who was bloody massive and a very friendly, very giggly Mahout called John. Sophie’s elephant was a smaller female called Wan NAAAA (emphasis on the Na is very important apparently) and a Mahout called Mao, though Sophie tended to say Meow much to his delight…!

Our time with the elephants consisted of collecting the elephants at 6am from the forest, very early very cold starts but the elephants were always glad to see us especially with a banana or a sugar cane in hand. The centre has massive of forests of their own where the elephants are put every night. Unfortunately they are chained up, but this is for their own benefit to stop over breeding and so they are forced to graze and not walk off. Elephants in the wild eat all day and because these elephants work between 7 and 4 they need to eat the rest of the time. The elephants did have about 20m of chain so they could still wander around (and still leave a wake of destruction!) The picture shows Sophie’s elephant where we left her at the end of the second day.

We rode the elephants back to main area and we would go off and have breakfast and be back in time for the 10am show. These public shows demonstrated all the skills as I mentioned before and we got to take the elephants for a bath in the large lake. This was the favourite part of everyone’s day including the elephants where they splashed and played and sprayed each other and us without encouragement. My elephant was undisputedly the best at water cannoning, as the picture shows; many a mahout cowered in our wake…MWAHAHAHA!

In the show we have to show off our talents as Mahouts by showing how we got on and off the elephants, throwing objects for the elephants to pick up, generally have a bit of fun. The picture is of Sophie demonstrating getting on/off her elephant; you can see Wannalee Leanne’s elephant she had earlier this year in the photo.

This whole process was repeated again after lunch and then we rode the elephants back to the forest. We had great fun over the three days and learnt a lot of non-transferrable skills (it might be a while before we meet Thai speaking Asia elephant that we need to get our flip flops down from a tree!) It was amazing how much they listened to their Mahouts (their real ones not us!) My elephant was a giant beast who could strip a corn on the cob from its leaves faster than I could using only the dexterity of its trunk. The picture is of Wanna lifting up her Mahout.

I am currently sat on an overnight train (with beds, thank goodness,) down to Bangkok to pick up our other rucksack we left there as our original plan was to fly to Sydney from there. Now we are flying from Colombo (Sri Lanka) to Auckland (New Zealand) instead (via Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Brisbane) so I’m heading down by myself (yes me and Sophie have separated ways for the first time since we left!) I will be meeting Sophie in Koh Samui in a few days to start our Christmas festivities.

Hope that these are getting long enough for you Nick Magoo, and you now agree with the colour changes Mr Acarnley! We can’t wait to see the Acarnley’s in just 3 weeks and the Magoolagan clan in just over 5! Please look out for our article in the Craven Herald, they’ve only just contact me after asking them three months ago!

So the past week has involved a few tears; first it started when we came back (home) to Saigon and our favourite Thai restaurant had run out of our favourite curry. The week ended when we made it to Bangkok in one piece and had our first Macdonald’s in 3 months, yes that is worth tears of joy!

We went with a friend to Phu Quoc island for the weekend. This is the island situated 2km south of Cambodia, though officially still Vietnam. The first day we arrived it was beautiful and sunny with crystal clear waters. The next few days were a little overcast so our original plan of sitting on the beach sunbathing with a few gin and tonics altered slightly.
On the third day our friend Caoimhe suggested we hire some motorbikes to explore the island. A great idea, the whole way down the country we had hired them as they are the best way to see the real unaltered Vietnam.

On our way to the most northern point of the island 30km from our hotel on a deserted country road we hit a large pot hole, resulting in us falling off and arriving a few meters down the road on the opposite side of the road. Luckily we did have Caoimhe and we were wearing helmets so there was no real damage. Although Cara realised she had a rather large hole in her knee (about a penny wide and cm deep – all the way down to the gooey fatty centre!) Luckily for us a fish truck came down the road, scooped us off and took us to the nearest local “hospital,’ and towed our bike for us, very charitable (or so we thought!)

At the ‘hospital’ we were greeted by a doctor who was ‘very busy doing paperwork and would be with us when he had finished’ so we waited 15 mins (with a big hole) whilst drawing a crowd of about 20 villagers who thought it was great entertainment.

We were helped out by a local student, Bang, who’s English was pretty good, luckily for us again, who negotiated an ambulance to ship us back to the hotel with instructions to go to another hospital the next day. This ambulance was really a white van with a red cross painted on it which needed a push to start it. The one good thing that came out of the experience was that we gave a ride to a very sick woman who was in the hospital when we arrived and would’ve been stuck there as she couldn’t afford the ride to the main hospital on the island. Everyone involved in the ‘excitement’ was given a payout, from the fish truck driver, to Bang’s uncle who towed the bike.
The next day back in Ho Chi Minh we visited an international hospital and were checked out thoroughly. It took over 40 mins and over 2 litres of saline to remove the original bandages from our grazed skin. Our favorite nurse was a Phillipino lady called Therase and she couldn’t believe what the local doctor had done to patch us up. Three days later Cara had a couple of stitches in her knee as it wasn’t clean enough to stitch before, they weren’t cheap at $20/stitch! Sophie is icing herself as we speak to relieve her blood clots caused by the impact of falling off the bike (and from Cara falling on top of her!)

We are fine now 5 days on, with grazes that require redressing everyday. We will definitely never get on a bike ever again and have been advising every traveler we’ve met not to either. The doctor (and Sophie’s mum) advised us not to get in dirty water and Cara can’t bend her knee so the elephant trip has been pushed back to the 10th of December where everything should hopefully be healed up.

We are now in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand so are planning to travel around the area and onto Northern Laos before coming back to the elephant conservation centre.
This afternoon we took it easy and went and watched 2012 in the cinema, at the beginning of the showing the audience leapt to its feet when the national anthem and patriotic images of their King were shown on the screen. We pondered whether Queen Elizabeth II would get the same reception in an English cinema!

Sophie finally got her new SLR camera so expect some snazzy shots to come soon, Cara got a free disposable waterproof camera so don’t expect anything snazzy from her! (The pictures of babies from the centre our friend Sarah took with hers) Tonight we are going to see some Thai Boxing maybe people will think we are tough boxers with all our bandages!

Both the Vietnamese and Thai don’t seem to empathise with our war wounds and either laugh when they find out it was a motorcycle accident or assure us that they (on their bike/tuktuk) won’t crash if we took a ride with them!

Sophie spent two days at the centre before we flew to Bangkok, Cara unfortunately could only do an afternoon. But all the kids are still great and all a lot bigger with the exception of little Mai in the first photo (above left) who isn't too well at the moment. We are waiting on Gokky's (Ngoc) sponsorship to get that moving.

Hope everyone is still good back home (and still in one piece). Congratulations on new auntie Sarah and happy birthday to Holly Acarnley today.

S & C xx

Lost Phone

Hi everyone, we've lost our english phone so now have a Vietnamese number 00841212307431...Bear in mind our number will change frequently as we travel across SE Asia! Watch this space. Longer blog to come soon, Soof xx

And then... and then... and then....

So we are now pros at surfing (our new Russian friend told us so!) Both of us moved onto smaller, fibre glass boards, (so we are now no longer using oversized plastic pens; i.e Bic - sorry surfer joke!) The surf was veryreally good and for about 3 days we hit the surf around 7am for a couple of hours.

We are now in Phu Quoc a small island off the coast of Cambodia, though still belongs to Vietnam, its one of our last destinations in Vietnam before we head back to the big city then on to Thailand. Its one of the least populated parts of the countryside with a large national park and untouched beaches. The water are so clear it’s the only place left where you can scuba dive, all the other locations in Vietnam have bad visibility due to it being the monsoon season. Open Water qualifications start at $250 so Sophie was going to see about doing hers.

We spend 3 days having another ‘holiday away from our holiday’ in Phu Quoc before going back to Saigon where we are going to work for 3 days at the centre. We had some great news on our arrival back, one of the younger girls; Hien has been adopted by a French couple so in about 3 weeks she makes her journey to her new life in France!

We are booking into a elephant conservation place in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand on the 29th November and after that we will make our way through Laos and Cambodia before descending into Southern Thailand for Xmas. Our new flights are booked to arrive in Sydney on the morning of the 31st December.

Hope everyone is well, please send us any news. Vietnam being the communist country that it is, has now, along with China, banned Facebook so we feel devoid of the outside world! Hopefully this will be turned over though its not long until we leave. Ciao for now x x

From North to South Vietnam

To start our journey from North to South Vietnam we took a 12 hour night bus to Hue, (A night bus here is around 30 semi flat seats, we’d been told to avoid the back as it was the bumpiest and hottest as over the engine and to not go on the second row of beds as you’re likely to fall out – hopefully you can see by the picture what I mean) What was supposed to be 12 hours ended up being 17 as the bus only went 40 km/hour. But on the plus side we managed to get quite a lot of sleep as the back row had 5 beds in a row so no falling out.

Hue is the cultural capital and we spent a day there seeing the sights, tombs, palaces, temples and pagodas. It was destined for ruin until in 1993 it was given world heritage site status and the restoration and preservation work is still going on today, so now it’s a cultural Mecca for tourists and nationals. We took a Cyclo (a human powered tuk tuk) around the city which was one of our main highlights.

We moved onto Hoi An the next day. Hoi An is traditionally the highlight of any Vietnamese trip due to it being rich with history having escaped the destruction of the wars going on around it. It’s built on the river and has much more class and Mediterranean feel whilst still being cheap and warmingly Vietnamese. Hoi An has its own special food delicacies which we sampled on many occasions. Hoi An is very well known for its tailoring industry, shortly after arriving we were invited into a shop where we perused the latest Next catalogue/ Vogue to chose any design made with any material you could imagine. We’d discussed getting dresses made for Amy’s wedding and I found a nice design in a magazine, picked a colour, material was measured and the dress was finished 24 hours later after 3 fittings. Hopefully it will still fit after 3 months in America!

After we had spent all our money on shopping we moved onto Nha Trang, one of the main seaside resorts in Vietnam. Although we had a great time there on the beach, getting alcoholically persuaded on an intentionally innocent boat trip the town was full of “holidayers” and so its Vietnamese charm was neglected.

We travelled the 6 hours to Delat to get a bit of reprieve from the hot beach weather. Delat is situated in the mountains, we knew only about its famous wine which is for sale all over the country. Its only 40,000 Dong and at just over 1 pound as you can guess it’s not the best! As Delat is considerably cooler and has more mountainous terrain they offer all different outdoor persuits. We decided to take up canyoning and trade in our bus ticket onto Mui Ne for a 70km cycle down to the coast.

Canyoning is the way by which you travel through a canyon by any means. Mainly for us this was abseiling down waterfalls. There were rock slides, cliff jumps and all other scary activities, but on the whole the day was very fun.

Very early the next morning, still sore from our previous day activities we headed off to Mui Ne. There was only us two, Thao; our guide and our driver in the support vehicle. Our bikes were imported Giant mountain bikes from Singapore, though had very hard small saddles which were fairly unbearable towards the end of the trip. We started cycling around 9:30 and finished about 2:30 and covered 57 km in total. The best part on the bike was covering a 14km downhill section in about 20 mins – very good fun! We stopped for lunch in a minority village which was very interesting.

The day was tiring but very enjoyable, every single child we passed would run out into the road to wave at the crazy white girls pedaling manically on bikes and shout a happy ‘Xin Chao’ (hello) to us.

Thao our guide was a really nice guy and we found out was only paid about $8 for the day and our driver would’ve been even less. We did tip him; it wasn’t very much for us but for him would cover half his rent. He had moved from Nha Trang to go to Delat university and now he works in a adventure company with all his mates, sounds like a good job to me but maybe not paid enough!

I’ve always noticed that the Vietnamese always put salt and pepper on their fruit, I thought it was a matter of taste, but from talking to Thao he said that it was because the Vietnamese know that a lot of sugar is bad for their teeth and fruit has a lot of sugar in it they counteract this by putting salt on it…crazy!

Another adventure we had was our trip to the hospital one night in Delat. Sophie hurt her ear (suspected burst ear drum) from jumping off the boat in Nha Trang. We were directed to a new hospital where we hoped someone would speak English. Unfortunately no one did and also there were no doctors around. After conveying what was wrong with Sophie through the medium of Charades/Pictionary (I’ve still got the note – very funny) the nurse looked down her ear with a torch and we gathered we should come back in the morning when a doctor might be around. In the end, her ear seemed fine so we didn’t go back.

We are now in Mui Ne until 19th,, which is the surfing capital of Vietnam. We’ve managed to catch a few waves this morning whilst trying to avoid the kite surfers. I’ve been told to look on You Tube for ‘kite surfers and Mui Ne’ because in high season you can’t move for them!

We’ve now changed our plans to spend Xmas on Kho Phangan Island in Southern Thailand as our time to travel the rest of Asia seems too short. Also we have a few more days at the centre next week which will be really nice to go back and see the kids.

Finishing at the centre and onto Central Vietnam

Well now we have finished work at the centre, a month has flown by but our connections there are by no means over…

The last couple of days in the centre have probably been the most rewarding. I was working closely with Swin the Physio; there are two kids with M.E down one side of their body and their main need is to be able to walk unaided. This means independence and ultimately a higher chance of a job after leaving the centre. These two characters are (little) Hoang and Chi (both their pictures are left from when they were hand painting), both around 3 years old and very cute. Chi can walk around holding someone’s hand and just really lacked the confidence to do it by herself. But with a little bit of guidance and a few distraction techniques we got her to walk by her self on Thursday and after that she was going it alone, a very proud moment!

Unfortunately this achievement was marred by the news that Swin gave us; all government paid workers are made to retire at 55 whether they are able to work or not. The centre has half its staff paid for by the government (healthcare, carers, kitchen staff) and the other half are paid for by voluntary donations (administration, sponsorship team, directors etc). So Swin very soon will be told to leave her job, she makes around $80/month – yes a fully qualified Physio who has been working there for over 20 years only on around 11 pounds/month! Though there are other problems, she unofficially adopted a girl, now a teenager from the centre who lives with her and she believes that she will be taken away from her as she will have no stable income. At the moment us volunteers are trying to find a solution for this, as to whether her income can be paid for by CNCF or by fundraising and paid to her directly so she can carry on her work as a volunteer. As you can see by the achievements she makes daily like those with Hoang and Chi, she is a vital part of the organisation.

We had a few creative days with the kids, we made a big a footprint mural, which took me back to my Ottley Street Nursery days. Pick up child, put paint on foot, stamp foot, run to sink to wash and repeat… Very good fun if a little messy, me and Sophie made a display with the footprints and photos from the day to go up in the centre so they can never escape our ugly mugs!

Another creative day we had was to make masks for Halloween; honestly I’ve never seen so much glitter thrown around and I’ve been to Nottinghill Carnival! It was in hair, ingested and left stuck all over the floor which means the lino now has that expensive glittery marble look! But again it was all good fun, the masks were for our final day Halloween party, which unfortunately got rained off. (The picture left is of Vy, she's aged around 5 and has Cerebral palsy.)

Halloween night itself didn’t go without a few shenanigans; the expat community here (mainly Americans) went crazy over the day with us Blue Petering it up with a white sheet to make a ghost and a mummy outfit. A few lashings white facepaint, a heavy bout of food poisoning for me, a 630am stumble home for Sophie meant it was a memorable night had by all! (the picture left is of all the other volunteers from the centre, me, Sophie, Jamie, Caoimhe and Sarah)

Back to centre life…. I requested a leaving interview with Helena to discuss our thoughts and feelings on the centre. The main point of the volunteers is not only to aid the carers but to also bring a fresh perspective on the centre with a few western ideas thrown in to the mix. One of my concerns was a need for a dentist, we had the joy of cleaning everyone’s teeth everyday, some like experience and use it as an excuse to eat as much strawberry flavoured toothpaste as possible, others absolutely despise it. I named a few of the kids who had awful teeth and we asked whether they saw a dentist. Helene’s response was that it wasn’t a priority and the kids that we had mentioned were ones from out in the provinces where there is no education about teeth care, so they probably hadn’t brushed their teeth until they arrived at CNCF. She mentioned that at the moment the government has campaigns on to advertise this necessity out in these areas. Sophie’s idea was to have a dentist come in twice a year to blitz everyone’s teeth, so if anyone knows a dentist with some spare time, a travel kit and a big heart send them to Vietnam!

We decided to fly north and work our way back south over a couple of weeks and then spend a few days back at the centre delivery the items we promised. One is a bike for Hoang (pronounced Wang, I think I’ve spoken about him before and his new white trainers). There are no larger bikes for the older kids at the centre and there isn’t one without stabilisers so we are going to get one of them for him and hopefully teach him to ride it before we disappear again.

There was some good news just as we left, the ban on going out of the centre has been lifted, very annoying just as we leave! The government have now placed the responsibility on establishments to control swine flu and CNCF has decided it is unnecessary to keep the kids quarantined in (and no face masks!) The kids are being taken to a water park on Friday and hopefully when we are back we can take a few swimming as that was our main wish when we started.

We spoke to Helena about Nhi’s wheelchair, one will have to be imported in from a more developed country so it will be higher quality as in Vietnam they are a bit dodgy. I’ve begun researching this, we can get a specialised children’s chair for a couple of 100 pounds but there’s quite a bit of red tape to get through, it all has to be approved by the head doctor of the facility, but my plan is to get it shipped in before mid December so we can pop back and see it in action before we head to Australia.

Also more news on Sophie’s little) friend (/Izzy replacement); Ngoc, from that meeting we found out she is one of 10 siblings and her mother couldn’t cope which is why she is in the centre. We are hopefully going to get her family signed up to the sponsorship program where they get an amount every month towards schooling and we should hopefully be able to help her. All this little girl wants to do is to go home and be with her family and hopefully we can help her achieve this. It’s around $15/month to support her and Sophie already has plans to send her to uni, she’s only 2! (She has already researched it’s around $1000/year in HCM, so Dr Gokky here we come!)

As I said before we have now flown to northern Vietnam, to see a bit more of the countryside and hopefully some spectacular landscapes. There is a big north/south divide, mainly due to one half originally being republican and the other communist. The southerners we met in Ho Chi Minh said that northerners were stingy with money, it was always cold and rainy and they all work in mines (I made that last bit up but it does seem to resemble home a bit!) If Sophie decides the South is better and I like the North it will be like we have never left!

Well hope everyone is well and thanks again for all the contributions we’ve received. We saw a lot of the medical supplies taken to the hospital the other day, most of our stationary and pretty hair clips etc were bundled up in preparation to be taken to the boys and girls shelters, so they’ve all found good homes, thanks again for that.

We started our adventure with 68kg between us, now unloaded with our CNCF donations we’ve had a bit of a blitz for our journey north and only checked in 10kg between us on our Vietnam Airlines flight. Dads are always right; you only need a t-shirt, pair of shorts and your swimmers and you’re away!

(I wrote the above a few days ago from Hanoi, since then we have been to the beautiful hills of Sapa and the coast of Halong Bay - pictures below)

We are now in Hue, after a monstorous 17 hour bus journey from Hanoi, it was only supposed to be 12 hours but its always good to add an extra 5 hours due to traffic in Vietnam. It was a sleeping bus so had beds so we did actually get quite a lot of sleep (picture right). But no rest for the wicked we have gin and tonic buckets calling and a 7:30am 6 hour bus ride to Hoi An.

Hope that’s long enough for you Dad! Up the Clarets (10th in the table get in!)

xx