Last week I temporarily vacated Bangkok for the town of Kanchanaburi - a standard looking town three hours north west of Bangkok via a 25 bhat train journey. This journey was marred somewhat by a very drunken local attempting to teach me Thai boxing number one in the world in Thai for the majority of the journey. It was later made more interesting as I had to verbally maneuver around some pleasant but persistent touts attempting to make their commission by convincing me to stay at particular guesthouses. I beat them all by taking myself to Apple's Guesthouse - a place that doesn't need to sell itself is usually preferable I find.

Kanchanaburi is made special due to its geographical location - near Bangkok and beside the Burmese border; also overlooking the Kwai River - this town was the perfect place for a bridge providing passage for trains passing through Burma and into India from the east. And so it came to be: during WWII the Japanese rounded up their Allied POWs and set them to work on a railway which would serve such a purpose and their srategic interests. Prominence for Kanchanaburi was sealed by the David Lean film Bridge Over The River Kwai which is an inaccurate tale but yet supplies Alec Guinness with the opportunity to produce a stirling performance.



Visitors of all ages flock to see the (fairly unremarkable looking) bridge, a well maintained Allied war cemetery, and to partake in the town's other activities. And luckily there are many. Tours take in a series of stunning nearby waterfalls, elephant bathing, more examples of POW efforts on the railway, rafting, a monkey school (which I missed!) and even a tiger sanctuary ran by a Buddhist monastery where I was one of a number of tourists to stroke the fur of a couple of fully grown adult tigers. Such is the beauty and immensity of these animals - one cannot help but be awed into a silenced reverie.

I did this last excursion as a half day trip. I couldn't help but notice on my receipt the very carefully and deliberately written words No Insurance. I avoided wearing red, but it was okay; the tigers ignored me - they were hand-raised from birth, contentedly fat, and probably drugged to the eye balls. Which is morally acceptable if monks are doing it surely...



Typically for a tourist town Kanchanaburi serves up a string of bars and restaurants offering western and Thai fare. And as is usual in this part of the world they saturate the market to the extent that a single traveler finds it difficult to find a bar with the busy hustle of people meeting each other over a drink. Instead customers are spread out such that the average number in a place is between none and three. Classic south east Asia annoyance.

I rarely offer many recommendations on these pages, and it is about time I started. I shall immediately address this oversight with a plug for Apple's guesthouse restaurant - possibly serving the best Thai food I have eaten and deserving of their excellent reputation. Apple's also do a cooking school and their one day tour was superb. The rooms are okay although at a meager 150 bhat per night I have nothing to complain about - but bring your earplugs if you want to avoid being forced to listen to the chat of the residents in the adjacent room to yours.

And I will further compensate for my past ineptitude by recommending a superb guesthouse in downtown Bangkok: Suk 11 is air conditioned throughout, is extra clean, enormously friendly and I don't stay anywhere else in the city I have returned to for the next few days.

Ah, air conditioning... the second greatest invention in human history...



Meanwhile, Stav has put up some picures from her stay at Cool Bananas guesthouse in Agnes Waters, Australia. Don't expect to see me featured too much, but they do illustrate the sort of thing I had to put up with whilst I was there.

So it turns out I probably don't have X-Men-like hex vision powers. For surely they would have kicked in the moment a team of Thai surgeons attempted to use a laser to burn parts of the top of my eyes off. Naturally this is not all bad for I electively underwent surgery to perfect the vision in my eyes. Yes, on Wednesday I had laser eye surgery or LASIK eye surgery to be more exact at Bangkok's Bumrungrad Hospital - supposedly Asia's leading private hospital. And quite a place it is too. I shouldn't have been surprised when I walked through the doors to find yet another indoor shopping centre. I strode past McDonald's, Starbucks and a very posh Japanese restaurant to my appointment with Dr. Narurmol Luckanakul (she insisted upon hearing I was to write an account of my surgery that I get her name spelled correctly). A friendly doctor who spoke good English and who liked to draw pictures of eyes in response to any questions.



Treatment at Bumrungrad is with the VISX-Star S4 laser system - the latest laser available and treatment for both eyes cost 48,000 bhat - about 650 pounds Sterling. I chose it because of its high reputation. Even foreign doctors from countries with renowned health care systems would fly into Bangkok to have their eyes treated here. Equivalent surgery at such a high class hospital would cost at least double in the West. Bumrungrad kept costs low due to the cheap overheads of building costs and labour that come naturally here plus the pure numbers of patients who undergo this procedure there. Tests were ran through: my pupils were dilated; lights were shone into my eyes; my head was placed in the headrests of countless instruments; I read off wall-charts; I had my blood pressure taken; my pulse was tallied; and my weight measured; nurses came round waiting rooms offering drinks. I spoke to the doctor, asked all the questions I could think of and agreed to go ahead.

On the days before the surgery I did all the usual things (I avoided wearing contact lenses and abstained from alcohol, caffeine and anything else that might be construed as a narcotic), but in my mind I was telling myself "this is the last time you will shave wearing glasses", this is the last TV you will see in glasses", "this is the last shower you will take when the world's a blur" and so on. I arrived at the hospital a good two hours before surgery. I was immediately given hospital pyjamas - decorated with elephants and the Bumrungrad Hospital logo - to wear and put in a bed. More tests were taken - my blood pressure and pulse were measured for about the tenth time in a week. Pills were distributed to my mouth and I popped my glasses - wretched things - into a sealable plastic bag, the sort drug dealers distribute their weed in... I think it was a new one though.

I was wheeled towards the operating theatre, head laid back against my pillow. Lights on the ceiling, blurred to my eyes, passed overhead. It felt like a much overused shot from a film - it was a much overused shot in films. I wondered whether it was used so much because it was such a striking image or if it was such a striking image because it had been used so much by directors. Doors swung open automatically as my bed neared them before I was finally turned into a modern-looking operating theatre. From the top of my vision, and upside down to my eyes, a middle-aged Thai woman dressed for surgery looked at me, smiled, and said "No pain." She was wearing glasses.

Why was she wearing glasses? Did she not trust the procedure. I put it out of my mind. She gave me a dose of anesthetic eye drops. I lay there for ten minutes before Dr. Narurmol came in. "The traffic was terrible" she said.

"That's Bangkok for you" I countered, already beginning to sweat.

For some reason I had a thick blanket over me underneath the green surgical cloth that covered all but my eyes. I maneuvered it downwards. "No pain", the woman with glasses repeated.

More pleasantries were exchanged. If they weren't competent at least they were incredibly friendly. Smiles and laughter were present probably in part to put everybody at ease. In the event they all seemed very competent, and I wouldn't have been there if I thought any differently. I have previously criticised the quality of Thai nursing in chemists on Ko Pangan, however this was a plush hospital and all were highly trained.

I was put under the laser. It would vapourize the middle part of my cornea by tiny amounts at a time until the relevant part of my eye effectively presented a perfect sphere allowing light to focus perfectly onto the back of my eye. At least that was the theory. To do this, the top part of my cornea would have to be lifted up - it cut almost all the way round in a circle and lifted up like a flap. Dr. Narurmol turned on the laser so I could hear what it would sound like. A circular metal instrument was pushed over my eye ball both forcing my skin back so as not to obstruct the eye and keeping my eye still. My eyes were numb but I was fully conscious and able to see.

Looking up at where the laser would be emitted I could see a distinct red dot. The instrument that was to cut my cornea was placed over my right eye. I could only see the bottom of it but I imagined it to be shaped something like a jeweller's eye piece. It was a machine that made the necessary incision. I didn't feel it, but I knew exactly what was happening. My body's sweat glands would have opened at this point I imagine. It took a few seconds to cut and my cornea was lifted. This was indicated to me as the vision in my right eye swung quickly in the same direction before the cornea cleared my line of sight and the red dot became very blurred almost filling my entire field of view. A minute or so passed presumably as the surgeons checked all was fine before the laser was started. I cannot remember if I was given any warning - I was too busy sweating, worrying, and attempting not to move my eye at all.

Not that it mattered - the metal clamp thingy would have prevented that and the laser supposedly performs several checks of the position of the eye before committing itself to a burst of zapping light. And I had read somewhere that the laser captures 99.8% of all the eyes movement and corrects the position of the laser accordingly. The 'putt putt' sound continued for what seemed like about fifteen seconds - although could have been anything up to thirty or forty seconds. I was hardly in a calm second-counting mood. The cornea was replaced and my eyes was cleaned with the first hand tool I had encountered - a small swab.

Once my left eye was completed (it seemed the laser took longer than for my right eye), the surgeons seemed to take an eternity to bring me out from under the now redundant laser. Probably they were checking the condition of my eyes very closely. Next two plastic gauzes were placed over my eyes with only small holes with which to see through. I was helped out of the operating chair - my Bumrungrad pyjamas were soaked through with my cold sweat. I asked and was told that, yes, I had sweated more than any other previous patient. I suspected they were humouring me with news of such an honour. Outside of the operating theatre then and I attempted to glance through the holes in my eye shields. I knew my vision certainly would still be blurry, but I could perceive... Yes! A definite improvement. I could see things clearly in the distance!

Four days have passed now. The irritation in my eyes was much less than I expected, and every day my vision has stabilised a little bit more. My eyesight is at least as good as with my glasses on, although glare off lights will remain for a few weeks yet. I am being careful with what I do, and I'm not venturing out into the Bangkok fumes, but I am functional and vision is good. Eye drops and antibiotics in my pockets I stalk through the world without a form of crafted lens between my eyes and the world. And it should be bloody marvelous as I venture further afield.

Despite the lack of hex vision...

Now use your eyes to espy some pictures of my group on Fraser Island, Australia via Tibo's website.

One of the benefits of coming to South East Asia are it's cheapness and its copyright laws. Either there is no enforceable copyright law in Vietnam regarding the selling of DVD's and CD's or no one cares enough to enforce them. In shops up and down Pham Ngu Lao - the travelers main hang-out in Saigon - and in the surrounding area, one can wander into stores and select from countless copies of the latest albums and films. In some cases, DVD copies of films are available before the film is itself being shown in local theatres. And here's the kicker: music CD's cost 30p per disc; DVD's 60p. In the last week I have seen DVD copies of Spiderman 2, The Bourne Supremacy, Elephant, Fahrenheit 911, and a number of others. DVD players can be rented for 24 hours and for less than two pounds. Quality is mixed of course; whether it was the player or the discs, some movies would stick, others were filmed by a camera at the back of a cinema (complete with occasional bobbing head off to the toilet), and some copied straight from an original DVD it seems.

The discs and their packaging are very well made although the English language explanations are often laughable in their naivete. A glance at the back of The Godfather packaging will show a carefully designed copy of the official DVD, but read it and the explanation of the film is actually taken from the Disney film Monsters Inc - printed in the Godfather's familiar typeface.

This freest of markets in the biggest city in a socialist country is not exclusively a digital medium thing. Salespeople (often children) carry around heavy stacks of photocopied books. All bound and packaged expertly but certainly not by the official publishers. I have a book called Sideshow - an excellent report on how Nixon and Kissenger's criminal indifference led to the near destruction of Cambodia and its people after the Vietnam War. One section of the book is upside down, in another part the black print become blue ink! Most copies are better though; I've just finished the superb The Life Of Pi, with few problems. Bought for 2 pounds from a lady who sold it to me whilst I was eating breakfast in Gon Cafe.

Across the road from said cafe is a shop specializing in selling reproductions of famous paintings. Not so dodgy or morally questionable perhaps, but a good opportunity to hang a copy of The Last Supper in one's bathroom. These reproductions are of excellent quality and go for between US$30 and $100. I'm not sure of the legality of buying copied books, DVD's or CD's, but westerners buy these goods in their droves.

Of more original interest are the communist propaganda posters that have decorated (or plagued depending on your viewpoint) the streets for many years. Nowadays the posters usually warn against HIV and AIDS or show the image of revered figure Ho Chi Minh. It is quite interesting to note that their is a shop in Saigon entitled "Old Propaganda Posters" - an attempt to pretend the posters are anything else would I suppose by folly. And these posters are really quite cool. Most date back from the Vietnamese struggle against the American's and encourage fighters to be brave or citizens to back up the country by working hard.

Let us not pretend that we in the west are free of copying and piracy. If you are reading this, you are online, and you must surely be aware of the ever growing mp3 collections on the hard drives of computer users everywhere.

Not me however. I've just come from Saigon...

The trouble with these weblogs is that everybody can see what a lazy boy I am.

Bah.

It was a funny feeling. I came out of the airport which serves Ho Chi Minh City, negotiated a taxi ride to the travellers area Pham Ngu Lao, and rode through the bustling streets of south Vietnam with relative joy in my heart. Why?

I had come from Sydney, a clean, accesable, English-speaking western city, with countless more services and western pleasures than anywhere in Vietnam. In HCMC I would face heat, humidity, thunderstorms, countless hawkers approaching me in an attempt to flog books, lighters, hammoks, chewing gum, moto rides etc etc etc, language difficulties, various biting insects, dirty streets and so on. Yet I felt good here because unlike Sydney, here I was a big player. In Australia one is a "backpacker", lugging a big bag around in order to live in a dormitory and carefully save money. Here, I am a traveller. I live in hotel rooms and I carry a huge wad of notes around with me and I am relatively wealthy. "Relatively" is the important word here but nevertheless, to the people who live here, I am a rich man.

Which means virtually the entire city is within my financial and cultural grasp - restaraunts, shops and, in fact, transportation anywhere around Vietnam. Here I feel more liberated to do what I want than in Australia where financial constraints, business districts, and a western class system exclude activities from me as long as I have insufficient funds. Let me explain more clearly: in parts of urban Australia I would walk up quiet clean streets which consisted of buildings I could never enter. This is no different from any other western cities, however in this part of the world, as a westerner, all doors are open - even the most exclusive restaraunts and hotels.

Meanwhile I can sup a beer in the afternoon without worrying what effect such an adventure might have on my bank balance...

I've left 1770, and very sad it was too. It is always hard to leave a place where so many friends are made. On my last night the whole town went to a deserted beach for a huge party. Although the party had little to do with me, it was a fantastic opportunity to have a last drinky with some new found friends. The scene consisted of a generator, some decks, an MC from East London who couldn't rap but who tried anyway, more 4x4 vehicles which provided the only means of entry and exit, fire jugglers, and various drunken revelry. Typically, locals would hang on to the roof rack for dear life as our 4x4 made its way back to reality. Heaven knows how none fell off. The following morning the people I made close friends with all got up early to dispose of any remaining narcotics with me and wave goodbye before my 8.30am bus out of there. They all took pictures of us outside Cool Bananas whilst I chastised myself for locking my camera away in my rucksack and missing it all. Stav was one of the picture takers - get those piccies up girl. Hopefully I'll get copies of those photos somehow.

Meanwhile, and quite marvelously, Stefan has come through and posted some piccies from Fraser Island up on his website. I don't feature particularly prominently in them, but you can espy me there, the rest of "Group B" plus the 4x4 I drove around on the huge sand island.

So back in Sydney then. To be frank, I'm not a huge fan. Sydney is very picturesque and the people are generally friendly, but it's a city which holds little interest for me. It's western - so nothing new there, it's quite pretty, but I'm not sure it offers anything exclusive maybe apart from surf, and I'd much rather surf in Noosa or Agnes Water. Which is why I'm only here briefly. Monday is Vietnam day. It will take me nine-and-a-half hours to fly to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC or Saigon), and I won't leave Australian airspace until after seven of them. It's a damn big country. And I haven't seen anywhere near enough of it to be able to truly say that I know Australia; my travels took me nearly 600 miles up the east coast and that is barely half of the distance up to the north east tip - let alone into the outback and the west coast 2,000 miles away. I wanted to visit the central Australian "town" of Boulia (pop. 290) - famous for its regular UFO sightings - to see a camel racing festival. I looked on the map - directly west of me and also in Queensland! Distance: 600 miles! Fuck that then. I'd have to convince someone with a car to take me and it would them quite a while.



So back I go to SE Asia. I've already seen Vietnam but there are a couple of places that I missed due to the dastard time constraints - Na Trang being foremost of them, plus the Chi Chi Tunnels near HCMC where I can have a tiny experience of what fighting for the Vietcong might have been like (bloody difficult is my prior estimation). Plus I get to revisit my friends Jon and Clair, and the new water slide in Damsen Park, "Black Thunder", oh yes. Then back to Thailand to see its north side, then onto the tiny country of Laos - famous only for having more bombs dropped on it by B52s during the Vietnam War than were dropped during the whole campaign of World War II. Should be good folks... back in the tropics.

Occasionally there arrives a moral dilemma for me and this weblog. I'm in a place which is small, untouristy but which is easily the best place I have visited. Do I advertise it and add to the increased talk about this place or do I help to preserve its uniqueness with silence?

Predictably of course I choose to advertise. I realise of course that presenting my argument above only adds to the mystic but I choose to keep the paragraph for reasons of style and presentation. It is the tiny Town Of 1770 and its slightly less tiny neighbour Agnes Water that I find myself writing about here. These streets contain the most sought after real estate on the east coast. Ten years ago there was no tarmaced road here; developers came to build homes and some shops and they undoubtedly now preside over even larger bank account as a result. House prrices are high, although mid-price homes have gone down. Of course compared to London, houe costs are pathetically small, and the area fantastically more pleasant. A sprinkling of travellers are now finding themselves surrounded by a few hundred residents, a variety of beaches - most deserted, fields of kangaroos, a mainificent selection of the best bits of the Great Barrier Reef and staff intent on providing increasingly interesting times. Seven of the top ten reefs, according to Lonely Planet, are based here.
 
The place to stay is called Cool Bananas - you'll make plenty of friends here and you'll always have something to do. Agnes Water/1770 has a number of characters who are friendly and interesting, one is Rod who runs the Street Beat Scooter Co. If you come here, do say hello. Rod also runs the free 4x4 trip from Cool Bananas every morning at 11am where one will be escorted up dirt tracks, to empty beaches and to places of interest. Everyday is a new adventure and their seems to be an extra excitement about spending time in a place that is so young but seems to hold so much promise. "The next Noosa", "the next Byron Bay", are terms I've heard - but for me this is the first "Agnes Water". As it gains popularity I wonder how it will fare; as part of its attraction is it's cosiness. No wonder then that many of the people I have met here have stayed for far longer than they originally intended.

Yesterday I took a boat into the ocean to snorkel around Fitzroy Reef Lagoon....



Our boat was the only one that operated at this huge reef - the second largest of its kind in the world, and licenses to see it are only granted to two boats, one of which operates elsewhere. We saw turtles, dolphins, thousands of fish, dolphins, and the best of all two huge humpback whales. They stopped the boat and they, being huge and incapable of being intimidated came to investigate us. A close pass and they were huge! Even the guides on the boat were amazed and jubilant.

Before all of these malarky I had been at Fraser Island - the biggest sand island in the world, containing fresh-water lakes, rain forests, cliffs, sand dunes, the clearest views of the southern sky I've seen and miles of beach. All in all: marvelous. Placed with a group of ten and given a 4x4 car, tents, food, various other camping equipment and a terse set of instructions we had a great time driving up beaches and up dirt tracks. Well actually two of us did, the others had to sit and say their prayers.



I was a bit concerned about driving what was tantamount to a van around challenging and treacherous conditions and a wall of accident photos in the nearby "Hotel" (or pub to the rest of the English speaking world) didn't help - but actually it was the proverbial piece of piss.

We had what was referred to by others in a different car "the good group." Damn straight.

We had the loudest stereo. But it's the people that always make it. Here are the websites for two of my group.....

Stephan

Tibo

Tibo's is in French, Stephan's in Dutch. Use Babel Fish at the bottom of the left hand bar to translate. Which will be exciting for you.

It was the tip of Fraser Island which Captain Cook sailed past and lost Australia. He had to turn east to rediscover it and he hit 1770 - hence it's odd name.

All in all then, quite a couple of weeks. Australia has gotten better and better.

Well done to it and all that.