All work and no play...

...would make Anna and Phil pretty dull, so we’ve tried not to just stay in Mae Sot all the time, and have managed to see other parts of Thailand and the surrounding region.

First place (which we should have blogged about a while ago now) was Chiang Mai, the capital of the north, and so much nicer than Bangkok (not that hard though). We spent a few days there doing very little, wandering around and doing a little bit of Christmas shopping.



It all looked like such good fun before the tree caught fire!



The next week was Anna’s NGO’s retreat. Phil had spent his retreat with his NGO in a nearby national park with 15 of them sharing 3 rooms. Much merriment was of course had, including letting off paper lanterns J (one of which had to be retrieved from a tree to prevent a forest fire after some initial miscalculations about flight paths), but Phil did come back with lots of bed bug bites(!)

Anna’s retreat was a little more extravagant, with 170 staff from all over the country going to stay at the Hilton in Hua Hin, a seaside town a couple of hours from Bangkok (and 11-13 hours bus journey from Mae Sot, depending on how much stopping for shopping and sightseeing is done). With only 2 mornings spent doing ‘ice breaker’ type team games and the rest of the time for relaxation on the beach or beside the biggest and most extravagant pool I have ever seen, I don’t really see that the $75,000 spent on it was good value for money. Maybe just an example of how large NGOs can waste money, or maybe it’s more a fault of a donor making sure their money is spent regardless of how? It seems pretty outrageous to me, especially when there are currently large influxes of refugees crossing the border every day from Burma and the staff who may otherwise work on this are instead on an all expenses paid to holiday by the beach. Phil enjoyed it though.

  

The rough conditions NGO workers have to endure in Thailand. For
reference the swim-up  bar is on the left just below the waterslide



After a couple of weeks back at work we had to leave the country for our visa – we only get 90 days before having to cross the border. We had thought that it would be easy to do this in Mae Sot since it’s a border town, with the Burmese border a few km away across the river. The Friendship Bridge still isn’t very friendly these days though and the border’s been closed for months. With the current fighting happening in Burma it doesn’t look like it’ll open again anytime soon... So, we decided to join a visa trip with a Christmas holiday and got a flight to Vietnam with the plan to return overland to Thailand. Anna was told that her office would be closed between Christmas and New Year, so she might as well have a longer holiday, so 2 weeks travelling has been possible J

So, we booked on the night bus from Mae Sot to Bangkok, expecting it to arrive fairly early in the morning, but not sure quite when. So when we pulled into the bus station at 4.15am we were a bit surprised, and of course tired. We’d ended up sitting behind an Irish guy we’d met at a party the previous week, so the three of us whiled away an hour having coffee in the bus station before heading to the Skytrain in search of things to do until our afternoon flight. Breakfast can only take so long, so after some wandering around and still being only 8.30am, we decided to get head to the airport and waste our time there instead. Anna at least got to have a few hours sleep on the seats there J



Getting around in the Mekong Delta



Our few days in Ho Chi Minh were good – it’s a nice city which we wandered round the first day, admiring some French colonial architecture and visiting the war museum, which was not exactly uplifting. Strange how the Americans can perform such horrific violations of human rights to the Vietnamese population, yet no one has ever been charged with any crimes.

We then had a couple of day trips. The first was a boat trip along the Mekong which was good, especially the first 2 hours. The 3^rd was spent mainly napping and the rest of the day was short stops to see things. The second day was mostly spent on a terrible bus - 3 hours of journey to see a temple for half an hour was not really worth it, although the Cu Chi tunnels afterwards were interesting – the original tunnels which the Viet Cong used to attack American soldiers.

A bus journey later and we were in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which is quite a nice city with a very impressive palace and temple complex. We decided not to go to the Killing Fields, but did visit the S- 21 prison, which had been a school, but was turned into a torture centre by the Khmer Rouge and had around 20,000 people pass through before being sent to the killing fields (only 7 who passed through it survived). The whole thing is pretty crazy.

Christmas on the beach :)

Next stop was Sihanoukville, Cambodia’s only seaside resort. After one night at a soulless hotel a long way from where we wanted to be, we then spent a good few days on the beach, which included Christmas day and we spent Boxing Day doing a snorkelling trip.

Our final stop has been to Siam Reap to visit Angkor Wat, which we did today, having also entered the park last night to see sunset quite spectacularly over the surrounding landscape. Angkor Wat itself was pretty impressive, although a bit too big for Phil’s attention span. We then visited other temples around, including Bayon where there are lots of huge stone faces, and the temple where Tomb Raider was film (pretty cool with the overgrown trees taking over the stone temple). One day was enough for us, so we’re heading back to Bangkok tomorrow to spend New Year’s Eve there with a couple of other interns.

Tough life.

And Anna’s now handed in her notice so we’ll be flying back to the UK on 31^st January J in time for her to start her new job in the UK! Phil is having to take a more seat of the pants approach to work as it seems he’ll only find out if he gets his old job back once he returns to Cambridge…