Tuesday, December 30, 2008

for anyone who's interested

here is a rundown (stolen off the IVHQ website) of what i'll be up to while volunteering over the next 2 weeks (starting jan 1)

ORPHANAGE WORK/CARING FOR DISABLED CHILDREN

Although Vietnam has now been at peace for many years, effects from war continue to haunt not only the adult population of this beautiful country but also its' children. Volunteers have the opportunity to work in institutions caring for children and young people affected by Agent Orange or in schools and community clinics looking after mentally disabled children. Work is somewhat varied dependent on the institution where the volunteer is placed, however typical examples of jobs and tasks can include; assisting local staff in providing rehabilitation exercises and therapist treatments for children, playing with children and entertaining/educating them with games, music, arts and other exercises, helping to develop fundraising initiatives to ensure ongoing funding for these institutions and teaching English to local staff.

IVHQ Placement: Peace Village - A combination of a school, medical clinic and rehabilitation centre, this institution provides for over 120 children and is located in Hanoi. 

Phu My Orphanage - Located in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh), this orphanage looks after 600 children (400 in the orphanage and 200 in day care for street families). Many of the children at this orphanage are disabled. (Please Note - These are just one of many institutions on our program and not necessarily the one you will be working at).

ACCOMMODATION AND MEALS

In Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh, volunteers have the option on staying in the volunteer dorms with other volunteers or in a homestay with a local Vietnamese family. We give that family money from your fee for support, food and board. It is exciting to stay with a family; that way you will learn the Vietnamese way of life, meet local people, eat local food and engage in local customs and traditions. However, the volunteer dorms are also very popular and a very sociable option as you get to live and socialise with other volunteers and Vietnamese staff. Living conditions in Vietnam are not luxurious and will vary depending on where you are placed although all home stays do have electricity and running water. Host families are educated, well respected in society and experienced in hosting in international volunteers. While bedding is provided, it is recommended that volunteers bring their own sleeping bag and mosquito net if they wish to travel away.
Vietnam is renowned for its tasty and diverse food. Although you cannot expect to eat like a king throughout your home stay, rest assured your accommodation hosts will provide you with a variety of Vietnamese treats during your volunteer period. Your host family would also be excited to taste some of your national dishes during your stay as well! Breakfast is taken in the morning, lunch is served at approximately 1pm (you can take a packed lunch if you wish to eat at your project) and then dinner/supper is served at 7 or 8 in the evening. If you have special eating needs, please let us know ahead of time so that we can make arrangements for you. However, we need to stress the point that you should not expect to eat as you normally do at home. We will do our best to see that you are well taken care of, but also as a volunteer, there is a need to be flexible. There are numerous amazing restaurants throughout Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh which you will be directed to by program staff if you wish to eat out occasionally.All meals are provided at the accommodation regardless of which type of accommodation you are in. Living conditions are basic but comfortable and three meals are provided on a daily basis. Meals consist of traditional Vietnamese fare, which volunteers generally find to be very generous and tasty.
ORIENTATION

Orientation will begin on the morning of the 1st or 15th of the month (dependent on your booking) and you will be picked up from your accommodation and taken to the orientation. Orientation will be conducted by the team in Ho Chi Minh or Hanoi (dependent on your placement) and cover everything you need to know for your volunteering placement in Vietnam – Introduction to Vietnam, Vietnamese Customs, Rules and Expectations, Safety, Travel Opportunities in Vietnam, Survival Vietnamese language lesson, Introduction to your project and placement. The orientation will also give you a chance to meet other volunteers and swap contact details for weekend travel and socializing. Once orientation is complete, volunteers will be taken back to their home stay and introduced to all relevant parties – home stay family members and program placement staff.
VOLUNTEER WEEK

First Day: On the first day of the volunteering placement, the volunteers will be escorted to the project by either a member of the local staff and introduced to the staff at the project you will be working with.

Weekdays: While our programs are flexible and can be fitted to your requirements, a typical day is as follows.

* 7.30AM Breakfast with the host family
* 8.00AM Volunteer leaves home and is dropped (or walks) to the project;
The volunteer joins with the local staff. You will be given a duty roster and a plan for your work. There is usually a tea break and a lunch break. Work and hours is dependent on the project and location that the volunteer is participating in.
* 2.00PM-5.00PM Work at the project usually ends. The volunteer at this point is free to visit and see places or do shopping. Usually we will have a guide to take you around. You may also want to hang out with the kids up to around 6.00PM.
* 8.30PM Dinner with the host family.

Weekends: During the weekend, volunteers have spare time and usually just relax or take the opportunity to explore other parts of their local town, Hanoi/Ho Chi Minh City and Vietnam. Long weekends can be taken to travel further afield and engage in tourist activities such as trekking, Vietnamese history tours and visits to temples. If volunteers wish to volunteer over the weekends they can join local teams and visit other orphanages (or other children helping organizations) to spend time simply playing with and entertaining the children.

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Hanoi & Halong Bay

So it has to be said.... i'm not really a fan of Hanoi... and i'm a little annoyed that i've got another 2.5 weeks here.... however, cultural experiences aside i'm having a really good time! The hostel i'm staying at is great, it seems to be the place everyone (in backpacker land) goes to, or at least hangs out at. So i'm meeting lots of great people and having fun being around them :) 

Hanoi is funny in the way that people do everything on the street/pavement. I mean not just selling clothes and eating etc but also washing dishes and burning all their rubbish...Last night we saw an entire (plastic) rubbish bin on fire...which i though was taking burning rubbish a bit to far... but who am i to judge this crazy country? hahaha... it was quite warm though if you could get past the burning plastic smell..haha 

For the last few days i have been down at Halong Bay, which is about a 3 hour drive from Hanoi. The first day they took us out on a boat and we went Kyaking all around some of the islands in the bay. It was sooo beautiful...although it would have been a lot prettier (and warmer) had it not been overcast (to the point where you can't see the sun) the entire time we were there....but hey, good excuse to go back (i'm hinting that to you Carly...you will love it!) We then got back on the boat and preceded to get quite quite drunk in the name of Christmas eve...hahaha...(Carly our pirate boat dancing adventures were relived) 

The next day we docked in at Cat Ba island and i spent Christmas day rock climbing ...lots of fun! Really randomly there were 2 others guys there...one of which went to my uni and i recognised from QUT cliffhangers.... Seriously what are the chances? So we ended up hanging out with them for the night at a bar near our hotel, after a very traditional christmas dinner of pizza and mohitos. SO it was not quite the cocktails on the beach in the sun like i had planned, but still a great day none the less! 

I got back into Hanoi last night, and now i'm heading on an overnight train to the mountains with some other people from the hostel. It's actually going to be quite cold, so it's a good thing i hung onto my Nepal warm clothes after all! 

Hope everyone had a joyful Christmas and are not feeling too sorry for themselves! I expect to see many a messy picture from new years!

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Peaceful Pokhara

So the last few days i've been allowing myself to do not too much at all. My time in Pokhara has been largely (and in my opinion - wisely) spent laying around in the sun and reading books, with a little bit of sightseeing when i felt like it. 

Today, one of the guys that runs the hostel i'm in took me motorbike riding though the mountains. It was hillarious because the bike was ancient and kept conking out when it got too steep. We went up to the top of Sarangot and took pics from the lookout as well as visiting Buddhist and Hindu temples and a lake about 9kms out of town (for anyone who has been to pokhara obviously not the lake at lakeside). We saw the lake just before sunset....soooo beautiful. 

On the ride back to the hostel i decided one of the things i really like about Pokhara - aside from the wonderful people and laid back atmosphere (instead of the busy hustle and bustle of Kathmandu). The thing i really like is the mountains in the background. On hazy days you look up to the Annapurnas and all you can really see is the snow line (obviously the rest of the mountain is there - but it's the snow that really sticks out). It makes them look more like clouds and parts of the sky, than parts of the land. Anyone whos been here should know what i mean, they just seem to appear. 

Last night the brothers who run the hostel, Tal (another guest) and I sat around and played guitar/djembe/whatever we could find and drank raksi (nepali home made wine). It was a lot of fun - although we absolutely massacred the likes of pink floyd and eric clapton - luckily there were no hardcore musos about to catch us out....or if there was, they didn't make themselves known.

Tonight i'm joining the family who runs the hostel for Daal Bhat (Nepali national dish...some people have never eaten anything else). The whole time i have nbeen in Nepal i haven't eaten it so it's about time i did!

Hope all is grand at home
xx

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Everest Trek

I'll spare you a day by day account of things that happened. But lets just say it was beautiful, wonderful, amazing, incredibley hard, emotional, exhausting and completely worth it. 

I will be the first to admit i didn't actually make it to he "base camp" proper - due to the fact i'd been throwing up on the way to the tea house and i ended up spending the afternoon in bed while the majority of the group walked there and back. But from what i hear it wasn't that much to see anyway - as our leaders Jugs was telling us - it's just a name really. What i did do instead - and was 1 of 4 people out of the 11 people in our group to do - was get up at 445 the next morning and sumit Kalipatah (a 5550m above sea level summit) and watch the sun rise. That was hands down the hardest thing i have ever done in my life, but incredibly worth it!

Everyone in our group got gastro, colds and acute mountain sickness so keeping up morale was tough at times. But the group as a whole was fantastic. Believe me, hiking with gastro in the land of squat and drop toilets (where there are any at all!!).....not fun :S

One of the more random things that happened on our way home was: we were sitting in the common room of a tea house one night when these 2 american guys walked in and made their presence known. They went around introducing themselves and apparently one of them was a rapper called Jay Electronika - who none of us had ever heard of but we googled him later and he was legit - he had been filming a video clip in the mountains and had to come lower due to the weather or something. He also gave one of the guys in our group his US$15000 jacket cos he asked if he could have a photo in it. It was all pretty funny - the guys thought they must have been drinking too much local spirits and it had been messing with their heads - but we have the photos to prove it.

We all went out for a final meal last night and drinks which was fun. Thanks to Jess and Shauns random convos al night i got on my 7am bus to Pokhara on 2 hours sleep, so i'm thinking i'm going to have an early one tonight.

Sometime i'll get around to uploading pics. 

Thats all for now
xx

Friday, November 28, 2008

Colourful Nepal

Today is the end of my 4th day in Nepal. I've just gotten back to Kathmandu after 2 days of white water rafting in the hills. Yes, i AM crazy enough to go white water rafting in Nepal, in WINTER. hahaha. Despite the cold it was a whole lot of fun :D 

Last night we camped right by the river and mingled with the locals. There were only 2 of us camping so it meant we could have a really good chat to the people living in the area. The lady who made us dinner was really excited about having interactions with a western female (i'm presuming) and after a drink or 2 decided that she should dress me in a sari and teach me how to dance, haha. A very random but fun night...lots of photos to follow eventually. It was really good to be able to meet people out of the city!

This morning we hitched a ride back to the starting point (with our guide) with all of our gear - raft, paddles, helmets etc. yes, hitched...on the roof of a truck.... soooo cold! but fun cos you see the locals doing it all the time. I also had my first experience of jumping out of a moving bus once i got back to kathmandu. Directly after which i realised i had no idea where i was (they said something about a connection bus but nothing about which one). Entrusting my life on a random taxi driver i was taken around all the back streets until we were both completely lost and he kept asking for directions....only a little bit of me thought i was going to die...haha

Tomorrow i'm meeting up with the intrepid group and heading up to base camp :D

Also i'm not sure if i've been receiving notes from people (or if you're all just slack) so if you've sent me one and i havn't replied copy and paste it to axeweildingfairy@gmail.com and i'll get back to you in 2 weeks when i'm back in the land of the living.

xxx

Monday, November 24, 2008

last of Thailand... including THE bus ride....

My last day in Chiang Mai was really good. About 6 of us from green tulip did a cooking course at siam rice. The guy took us around the markets first and showed us where to buy each of the ingredients.... He kept handing them around all of us then putting them back on the stall, including the jelly mushroom he put on my face :S not very big on cleanliness at the markets.... 
I made Pad Thai, Spicy soup, noodle salad, curry paste (from scratch), curry, stir fry and banana coconut desert.... we were all sooooo full when we left! We bought some lanterns to release into the sky before Peter and i left but we were told back at the hostel that it's not allowed before 11pm :( instead Celine made us a mini one from a tea bag so we didn't completely miss out - she's sooo sweet.

So last night Peter (a guy from the Green tulip crew) and I took the night bus down from Chiang Mai to Bangkok. When we saw the bus Peter mentioned to me that this bus looked dodgy....a lot dodgier than the one he had caught up to Chiang Mai. But we figured we'd already paid for the bus and maybe it was just a bit old and hopped aboard without much thought.

The first bit was fine, watched part of the Hulk and fell asleep after a few hours - thanks to the use of ear plugs (the ones we got at Infected aaaaaages ago nita). At about 330 i woke up to the sound of a girl arguing with the driver (well one of 4 of them) - telling him to turn the light on. She kept yelling and yelling at him but he would not do it. Having being woken up by this i wasn't entirely amused but after it continued for ages the bus stopped for 2 minutes and then continued to drive still with all the inside lights off.

10 mins later the bus stopped again and one of the 'drivers' ran across the highway. 3 of the boys on the bus chased after him and eventually caught up with him. It was only then that the people on the back of the bus (like me) found out what was going on. A lot of the people in the front of the bus had had their passports and money stolen as well as other personal items. The closest being about 3 seats away from me. 

After arguing with the driver that ran away the boys managed to drag him back to the bus, however it turned out he had nothing on him. After much more arguing the first girl who had been arguing with the driver said she was calling the police. As soon as the word police was mentioned the remaining drivers ran from the bus. Leaving us there on the side of the highway - somewhere about an hour away from bangkok - in the bus wondering what to do next. 

The baggage compartment was open so we decided to check it out. Upon inspection (using the torch i was given -Thanks mum) we discovered that all of our bags had been gone though - yet still had the locks on them! I was very lucky and had nothing stolen (but i also really didn't leave anything valuable in my bag) though everything inside of it was moved. Other people had cameras, DS's, wallets, money and other items stolen. :S 5 large bags of white, flour like powder was also found by another girl in the drivers cabin.

About 1.5 hours later the police arrived and took some photos and said that they'd drive us to the police station. The first person that tried couldn't seem to get it to work, and they ended up having to call someone else in.... who also seemed to have a lot of trouble - but at least we were moving! 

At the police station we all double checked our bags to make sure nothing had been planted in them and people who had things stolen filed reports with the police. The police said they'd called a mini bus for us - but after an hour we asked again about them, and they said the bus company wasn't open yet but they'd left a message. Hearing this 12 of us decided we'd take taxis to the closest bus station, but after lots of negotiations with taxi drivers they'd figured out a deal that they'd drive us to Bangkok for 400 baht per taxi. 

After that everything went smoothly and we arrived in Bangkok around 10am - instead of 6am like we were supposed to. 

So that was that eventful ride. I got off very lightly indeed, with more of an inconvenience than anything else. But certainly a reminder to keep my wits (and belongings) about me. 

I'm staying in a dingy broom closet tonight (really was spoiled at the tulip) but it's cheap and i leave early in the morning so at least it is a place to sleep. I've had no luck trying to get my visa for vietnam so i'm trying to get it online (and hoping it's not a scam!).

I'm flying to Nepal tomorrow for a whole new adventure. Will be good to escape the heat for a while! 
That's all i can think of for now. Hope all is great back home :D

Thursday, November 20, 2008

The beginnings

So i realise it is still very early in my trip....some may think too early to already be telling people of my grand adventures. But i'm going to be using this as much as an online travel journal, as as a way to keep in touch.

The flight over was relatively uneventful. I slept for the entire thing except for when food came out and the lovely lady beside me woke me up for it. Just before landing we had a huge chat, and it came up in conversation that i hadn't actually changed over any money yet. Just before i got off the plane she gave me 500baht -around $20- (and when i say gave i mean she shoved it in my bag when i kept refusing) so that i wouldn't have to change my money over at the airport (and thus get a better rate somewhere else). And flat out refused that i pay her the Australian equivalent. So that started me out on a very good note about people in general.

I didn't really want to hang about Bangkok so i booked a train ticket to Chiang Mai and took the overnight train there that night. On the train i met this awesome girl called Monique. We're now sharing a room at this fantastic hostel in the centre of the old city. It's so clean and colourful and CHEAP! The staff are amazingly friendly and greet us by name everytime they see us. Unfortunately this means anywhere else i stay from now on is going to fall under harsh comparison!

Yesterday we went on a tour that lasted about 12 hours! We went white water rafting, elephant riding, forest walking, swimming under waterfalls, bamboo boat riding and hill tribe and orchid farm visiting. Sooooooooooo much fun! We were going to watch Thai boxing last night but we were so exhausted from the day we decided to have a quiet one instead.

I was going to make my way down to Kanchanaburi (2 hours south of Bangkok) over the next few days to visit the tiger temple. But after making that plan i found out that the monks there have been drugging the tigers to keep them docile - which i really don't want to support. So instead i'm going to hang round here a bit longer, apparently there is a tiger temple around here somewhere so i might check it out. 

Today i'm going to have a lazy day. Get a massage and work out how to get my visa for Vietnam.

I'll fill you in on more stuff later. Hope the Brisbane weather is clearing up.
xxxx