Deano’s Travels

Well after having a great time in the party cities of Hong Kong and Bangkok I arrived in the capital city of Lao PDR, Vientiane. What a shock this was to the system, the streets were quiet, the pubs shut down early and the tuk tuk drivers wanted about three days average wages to drive you a mile down the street.

Yeah, Lao is a very quiet place compared to the rest of SE Asia, and most people seem to love the place because of that. It didn’t really do much for me though; maybe I’ll take another look there when I’m older and want to relax.

I only spent time in Vientiane and apparently there are a few backpacker party towns in Laos. Thing is I’m not really into the backpacker scene; yeah I know that I travel with my backpack, but I’m not really into hanging out with 18 year gap year kids (friendly as they may be, and good luck to them on their travels). I tend to do my own thing and quite often stay in less visited places that seem to have a nice feel for them.

Anyway I’m getting off topic here, Vientiane is a pretty enough place, it has a large French colonial influence with lots of pretty buildings and good food; like in Vietnam Baguettes are very popular here. Vientiane even has its own arc d’triumph! When I was there they were re-developing the Mekong river front, making it difficult to get near; my guess is that when there are cafes and a promenade  by the river the place will have a very nice feel to it. Though they do need to keep those pubs open longer!

Here are a few pictures.

Deano

I travelled from Bangkok to Vientiane in Laos in order to get a tourist visa. I went overland through the Isaan region of Thailand and visited a few of the major cities.

The Isaan region of Thailand is quite different from the Chiang mai region where I spent the last 5 months or so. The people look different (they are of Khmer and Laos ancestry), they have a lot of food specialties, the area is more agricultural, is much poorer, and there are not as many tourists to be seen; this usually means that as a westerner that I got greeted by massive smiles everywhere I went.

Here are a few pictures from the Isaan region of Thailand. Note, for some reason the pictures are not being displayed correctly, hover your mouse over the picture to read the captions and to see where the pictures were taken in Isaan, Thailand.

1. Khorat (Nahkon Ratchasima)

2. Khon Kaen

Many old VW vans are to be sen in this region, probably travelled overland down the old hippy trail, and still going strong.

3. Nong Khai

4. Phimai.

The Khmer temple at Phimai, close to Khorat, predates the ones at Angkor (post to come) by a hundred years.

Thailands largest banyan tree (Sai Ngan) is also located  in Phimai.

Deano

Greetings from Vietnam I thought it was about time to catch up with some of the places that I have been to in the last few months, and as a picture is worth a 1000 words, and I have 4 pictures, then this post is worth 4000 words, how cool is that? I hardly need to write a thing!

Macau, a former Portuguese colony is now part of China, but like Hong Kong remains an autonomous region for another 50 years or so. It takes about an hour to get to Macau by ferry from Hong Kong.

Some of the major attractions of Macau are the colonial buildings and the Portuguese influenced food. But the major attraction for most visitors to Macau is Gambling. Macau has 27 casinos, including the world’s largest, the Venetian. This is three times larger than the casino of the same name in Vegas. I wandered around some of the casinos at around noon, it was amazing how many people were dressed up to the nines at this time, and the amount of money being gambled. The minimum bet at most places was about £10 (compare this to one dollar in Vegas), I watched a girl lose about £10,000 in 10 minutes at Baccarat, she didn’t seem overly concerned. Judging by some of the shops at the Casinos, and the amount of money being gambled, it seems that there is a lot of money floating around in Macau.

After a few hours wandering around the casinos, I went to the old part of town to do some sightseeing.

If you are in the Hong Kong area, and have a day to spare then I recommend going to Macau on a daytrip. If you like to shop and gamble, and have serious money to play with then you will probably enjoy more than a few days in Macau.

It is not often that I give praise to a drug company, but I will today. Glaxo Welcome Smith Kline (lot’s of merging in the drugs industry) has announced that it is making their database of 13,500 chemicals that have been shown to act against the plasmodium parasite (which causes malaria) publicly available. It is also making $8 million  (and research facilities) available to research scientists who have an interest in working with these compounds, with the aim of finding a cure for Malaria.

As many of you know Malaria is a hugely overlooked disease given the scale of it’s destruction. It is estimated that every year that there are up to 500 million reported cases of malaria. Of even greater concern, Malaria is thought to cause between two and three million deaths every year; these are mainly young children in Africa.

Although a lot of research has been carried out into combating malaria through mosquito control, stopping the plasmodium parasite, and through education, I feel that much more money should be spent on the fight against malaria given the deadly consequences of the disease.

For more information on Glaxo’s release of the 13,500 chemicals to the public domain, I recommend that you read this report in the guardian.