the technicolor sleep

A little summary from our travels (so far)

..through India, Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.
So far, I(‘ve) 

- Eaten crocodile meat (Mekong Delta, Vietnam)
- Eaten duck feet / chicken feet (Bangkok, Thailand)
- Paraglided over Pokhara, Nepal
- Seen the sunrise over the Himalayas (Pokhara, Nepal)
- Chill’d up at 4700 meters with a panda hat on my head (Langtang, Nepal) 
- Had an amazing dinner at the top of Bangkok’s tallest building (Thailand, obvi)
- Been covered in colours at the holi festival in Lumbini, Nepal
- (Almost) waving goodbye to life from the back of a motorbike driving god knowns how fast in Chau Doc, Vietnam
- Drunk some home-brewed, slightly illegal whiskey with a 20-something year old shopkeeper in Orchha, India
- Walked in a river with my 5DmkII, sometimes having barely my head (and the camera, of course) over water (Sihanoukville, Cambodia)
- Been on elephant safari and gotten bored to death (Chitwan, Nepal)
- Seen dead bodies burn to ash (Varanasi, India)
- Put a candle on the Ganges river (and made a wish - Varanasi, India)
- Had (a little) too much home-brewed rice wine with a local woman around the fireplace in her house up in a tiny village in Nepal
- Seen pirated Bollywood movies on a tiny TV up at 2000 MASL (Nepal)
- Learned the basics in Bollywood dancing at a rooftop in Pokhara (Nepal)
- Had Dal Bhat, the local Nepali dish with an Indian celebrity dancer (Pokhara, Nepal) 
- Went shopping with a taxi driver (Nha Trang, Vietnam)
- Seen the Taj Mahal in sunset (Agra, India)
- Gotten all of my valuables stolen, including passport (Kampot, Cambodia)
- Seen the Angkor Wat in sunrise (Siem Reap, Cambodia)
- Gotten ‘lost’ within the ruins of the Jungle Temple (Siem Reap, Cambodia)
- …Also literally lost my friend in some other ruins in Angkor Wat and ended up contacting the tourist police, to find out she was waiting for me at the most obvi spot ever just 5 minutes later (Siem Reap, Cambodia)
- didn’t sleep for 32 hours, party life b killin (Siem Reap/Phnom Penh, Cambodia)
- Bought a brand new 5DmkII (Phnom Penh, Cambodia)
- Danced with a prostitute (realized this the day after - Sihanoukville, Cambodia)
- Seen the very rare Ganges dolphin (Varanasi, India)
- Gotten 93 insect bites on my right arm (Phnom Penh, Cambodia)
- ..Gotten over 20 mosquito bites in my face, including on my eyelid (Varanasi, India)
- Celebrated year 2256 by getting splashed with water for four days in a row (Koh Chang, Thailand) 
- Lost all my pictures from Cambodia (Kampot, Cambodia)
- Gotten hit on by an azn hipster LOL (Bangkok, Thailand)
- Been at a local karaoke bar (Mekong Delta somewhere, Nepal)
- Homestay! (Mekong Delta, Vietnam) 
- Eaten the most delicious sashimi ever (Saigon) and in general had some of the best food I’ve ever had
- Taught a businessman from South Korea how to smoke the water pipe (Phnom Penh, Cambodia)
- Taken the sleeping train to Varanasi w lots of Indians (..India, obvi)
- bought an ukulele even though I have no idea how to play it (Saigon, Vietnam)

This was posted 1 year ago.

So, here’s the whole story.

It was in Kampot, Cambodia everything shattered into pieces.

The last time I blogged we were in Bangkok, with our heads full of plans and alcohol, longing for the ocean and a few lush days at the backpacker beach on the island Ko Chang. We spent three days there in total with island hiking and snorkeling in the clear waters, before we caught a bus over the border to Cambodia to see the ancient wonders of Angkor Wat in the outskirts of Siem Reap. Next, we headed for the capital city of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, visiting the S-21 prison and the horrific Killing Fields, before we went down to Sihanoukville to spend three beautiful days with clear, turquoise water and coral reefs to die for - and, of course, a lot of amazing people. 

We were originally heading for Chau Doc after this to cruise down the Mekong Delta region in Vietnam to get a little taste of the beautiful floating villages, but ended up spending a night in Kampot instead, an old colonial (ghost) town close to the Vietnamese border. We decided to rent some bikes to do some sightseeing in this weird, but somehow charming town, and I managed to get a lot of sweet pictures of old facades, abandoned buildings and portraits of kids playing around in the ruins.

It was around 8PM when we decided to hit the local restaurant on the river bank to taste their famous pepper khmer dishes, when a motorbike with two people suddenly pulls up behind me. I hear my friend shout my name before I suddenly see that the motorbike drives up in front of me, blocking my path, and a hand reaches out for my backpack which I had so safely (at least so I thought, it was a big backpack nonetheless) placed in the basket in front of me. The hand struggles a bit, but finally manages to pull my relatively heavy backpack out of the basket, and there was no chance I could avoid it. From then, I don’t remember much. My friend said she heard me scream and at first thought they had stabbed me, which they of course hadn’t. I try to run after them but can’t, and the next thing I know I just sit on the street in the middle of the road tearing my hair out (almost literally) while crying, and locals gather up around me, looking just as confused as I am. And still, the very last thing I remember is the sleazy, horrible smile of the thief as they drive away into the night, holding my backpack up with triumph. Of course, I don’t remember his face, neither the colour of the bike or their clothes. It’s all erased.

Normally I guess I’m not much of the ‘materialistic’ person, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have reacted in such away if it wasn’t for that not only my 5D mark II, Sigma 23-70mm f/2.8 and my 50mm f/1.4 was in the backpack, but rather, all my photos from Cambodia both on my eight different memory cards and a 320 GB harddrive. As if that wasn’t enough, my passport, travel documents, credit card (and cash), iPhone, headset, sketchbook and travel diaries was also in my beloved Fjallraven backpack, which is now in the hands of some filthy criminals whom I’d rather want to see dead than anything else. All my sketches and drawings, which I’ve spent countless of hours on creating, as well as texts and travel diaries, old tickets, postcards glued into my red travel book and notes from fellow travelers - all gone.

In the middle of the chaos, I’m in the end glad that I had my friend there to help me out. I guess I looked like a pale ghost all the way to the police station (a very kind boy whom saw it all happen and tried to follow the thieves drove us to the station on his moto), but as we got there we soon realized that the policemen didn’t know a word English. The local boy that had helped us went to pick up his father, and together they helped us translating everything Khmer to English (and back), and early the next day we were already sitting in a taxi on the way to Phnom Penh to fix an emergency passport at the Swedish embassy, as there was no Norwegian embassy there. In a few days I will receive my new passport, so until then I guess we just have to try to look at the bright side and keep each other with company. I’ve checked with the travel insurance company and I think that it will cover everything, and since we still have a month left of traveling in Vietnam and Laos, I figured I’d just buy a new 5D as soon as possible, hopefully with a worldwide covering warranty.

Normally, of course, I would never ever put my backpack with such valuable things in the basket of a bicycle when riding in a big city, but the town was so small and so empty of people that I found it nearly impossible to think it would happen - and so did the hotel manager, whom had been living in Kampot for quite a while.

Anyways, I refuse to have the rest of our vacation ruined by that, excuse my language, motherfucking piece of shit, and as soon as I have my new passport and Cambodian visa in hand (and a new camera, of course), we’ll get on the first bus to Ho Chi Minh city, with or without air-condition or not - I don’t really care. I just want to get the hell out of this country, the karma definitely hasn’t been with me on these travels (yesterday a tuk-tuk drove over my foot. I mean. Yeah.)

I’m physically okay, but I’ve grown quite a fright for people on motorbikes. Every time I go out in the streets I’m literally terrified for someone to steal my stuff or pull up behind me, even though I don’t have any more valuable things on me. Call it paranoid, but believe me, that incident I had in Kampot was probably the scariest thing I’ve experienced in quite a while. Period.

This was posted 1 year ago.

Stories from our travels

Barely a week ago we returned from a nine-day long trekking in the Langtang area up in Northern Nepal, and now we’ve finally reached the modern and stressful Bangkok after twenty lush days with sunsets over the Himalayas on a daily basis and less tourists in the streets. In total, we’ve traveled through India’s New Delhi, Agra, Orchha and Varanasi, while Nepal offered us with Lumbini, Chitwan National park and my own favorite, Pokhara, where we spent a few lush days by the beautiful lake eating chicken momos and the local thukpa, or to the little more extreme, paragliding over the rice fields and valleys over Sarankgot, where we also watched the sunrise over the Himalayas.

India’s beautiful city Varanasi (and our last stop before crossing the border to Nepal) had my love at first sight, located alongside the Ganges river that breathes both life and death in and out of the city, as the Hindu people wash their limbs in the same water as the ash of their dead relatives is spread.

After a memorable boat ride downstream the river both at sunrise and sunset, it was impossible not to fall in love with the purity (if you forget about the relatively dirty water of Ganges) and peacefulness of Varanasi, which has slowly become a paradise for lost backpacker souls from every corner of the world. Unfortunately our time schedule was a bit tight, and the short romance with Varanasi was soon replaced with a bumpy bus ride over the Nepali border to Lumbini, Buddhas birthplace.

Other than experiencing the annual colour festival better known as Holi, Lumbini was not so interesting compared to the wild jungle landscape and countrylife of Chitwan, where the days went by swimming with the local kids in the river, visiting small villages in the outskirts of our nearest town and riding on elephants through the jungle, in hopes of catching a glimpse of a tiger or rhino.

After traveling through the already mentioned Nepali paradise Pokhara, we faced north to Kathmandu, spending hours getting lost in charming alleys and streets around the Darbur square, eating lunch in the afternoon sun leaning our sunburnt backs against one of the many temples spread around the same area, munching on locally made potato dumplings filled with delicious spices and mashed vegetables.

We had already decided to do a week-long trekking in the mountains, but had literally no idea about where to go. I wanted to do the Annapurna Circuit myself, but this trek lasts for nearly 20 days and was therefore too long for our time schedule. Finally (after speaking to no more than seven different trekking agencies) we decided to do a slightly more customized Langtang trekking, which is still considered to be the road less traveled for tourists, a perfect option for myself who wanted to experience more remote villages not so affected by all the tourism.

After riding for eight hours on the local bus through muddy roads, waterfalls (literally) and small villages where people would jump on or off the roof with a goat or two under their arms, we finally reached the tiny mountain village Syabru Bensi - the starting point of our trekking in the Langtang area of Nepal. The chicken wrap me and my three other Norwegian friends had in Kathmandu the day before decided to declare war on our stomachs during the first night, and we started the journey with green faces the next day, going from 1700 to 2420 meters above the sea level. The higher we got, the thicker the surrounding tropical forest grew up the hills, until finally vanishing at around 3000 meters, replacing its scenery with a deep, upgoing valley of rocky landscapes and snow covered peaks in the distance.

It didn’t take me long to realize how polite and helpful Nepali are. Just let me say this: if you confess them with the tiniest problem, they will solve it as it was their own problem. In comparation to the sometimes more aggressive tone we received in India, Nepal is completely the opposite, making our stay here alot more peaceful and calming than in the rural cities of India, naturally enough.

At Kyangin Gumba (3749 m) we spent one freezing night, before climbing up at the Kyangin Ri mountain (4700 m) meters the next morning, getting a stunning panorama view over the surrounding Himalayas. Just the thought of being so far away from safe ground is quite dizzy, but easy to forget about with such a breathtaking landscape of dramatical, snow-covered peaks pointing so peacefully up at the unnaturally blue sky above.

With Kyangin Gumba and the charmingly tiny Langtang village behind us, our journey finally faced what I had been looking the most forward to during this trek; the mountain villages. Following the main path the same way as we had come, by the turquoise Langtang river rushing through the tropical forest paradise, we took a tiny path up the hill and followed this for a couple of hours until we reached the picturesque village Sherpa Gawn, bathing in the glory of the afternoon sun. Spending the overnight here, we finally got a stronger taste of the Nepali culture, eating Dal Baht (rice, potatoes, spinach and lentil soup) by the bonfire in the small cottage, and later in the evening sharing a fantastic Nepali chocolate cake with Ganesh and the boys.

The next day we continued following the path downhill to the astoundingly green village —-, where I had been hoping to do some portraits, but due to the weather the next day (and evening) I had to realize it was a dead case. Instead, we watched piracy Bollywood films on a tiny TV, drinking local wine by the fireplace and eating delicious foods and Nepali snacks.

The following day we walked the remaining three hours down to Syabru Bensi (the starting point of our trek), catching the local bus back to civilization again.

As already mentioned, I’m writing this from an Internet cafe in the heart of the backpacker area in Bangkok, but we’re soon heading down to the beautiful island Ko Chang to chill out with hippie people for a few days (lol) before crossing the border to Cambodia. Can’t wait to see the ocean again!

This was posted 1 year ago. It has 5 notes.