Author Archives: intothevoid

February 13, 2012

Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers

We landed at the Bangalore airport only to be received in the welcoming arms of our metalhead friend, Sandesh. We had been in contact with him for several months, when he asked us to play the Trend Slaughter Festival – opening for ABIGAIL and DYING EMBRACE. He came to greet us at the airport, and then dropped us at Ganesh’s flat, another friend – who would be our session bass player for the gig. Ganesh thoughtfully invited us to stay at his place and made us feel at home for a week. We spend many good nights with him, drinking beer and listening to doom metal. (Yes, there is a small, but good doom metal scene in India!!!)

Bangalore (formely known as Bangalore), located in the South East of India, was the kind of place you went for a nice, peaceful retirement. In fact, it used to be called the City of Gardens… until the computer/IT industry boomed. The city now attracts young Indians from all over the country to work there, and has thus grown as fast as a shark and reaching a population of almost 8 million. I haven’t traveled long enough in India to say for sure, but apparently this is the most “western” of all Indian cities. Perhaps it’s a good thing for us to land here, in order to have a nice slow transition into the real India! What I liked about Bangalore is that everybody spoke to each other in English… it made everything so much easier!

One of the most famous commercial streets in the city

Bangalore is also known for having the country’s best extreme metal scene, with a rich spectrum of killer Black Metal, Doom and Death metal bands. I even spotted a metal car in the middle of a traffic jam, one evening!

Metal car

I really couldn’t wait to try Indian food, so my friends brought us to Guzzlers’, a rock/metal pub that played really good classic stuff like RAINBOW, DIO, BLACK SABBATH, BLUE ÖYSTER CULT, URIAH HEEP, JUDAS PRIEST, SAXON and IRON MAIDEN. A fun place, with some killer finger food!

Ganesh, François, myself, Sandesh and Vik (Dying Embrace vocalist)

We tried tons of food, but my favourites were these:

Some kind of vegetables fried with chilli flavoured batter. They call ‘em bhajis.

Reshmi Kabab, tender bbq’ed pieces of chicken, wrapped in a thin layer of omelette. You dip them in a mint chutney sauce... to die for!!!!

At the beginning of the week, we hung out at Ganesh’s apartment, waiting for him and everyone to finish work. I was trying to clumsily cook some Indian food, when Ganesh’s maid came along, and showed me how to do True Indian Cooking. I totally messed up the first dish, adding yogurt at the beginning (it started curdling to my great horror!!!)

Myself with Fatima and my horrible vegetable yogurt masala

Some yummy dal (lentils), the veg masala, fried beans and a real yogurt curry

Killer chicken curry

Chicken curry, spinach daal and roasted eggplants with mustard seeds!

I bought tons of spices and a nice spice dish so I can make some at home, when I come back.

A few days later, on the day before the gig, the ABIGAIL guys landed (they had previously played Dhaka in Bangladesh!!!) and we were all welcomed in the true Indian way:

Youhei (ABIGAIL drummer), Jero (ABIGAIL live session guitarist), Vik (DYING EMBRACE), Sandesh and François.

They brought us to this huge rock star suite, which had a sofa and a fridge (for beer and leftovers). I swear, it’s the biggest hotel room I’ve ever slept in! It just screamed metal party!

No sleep ‘till Trend Slaughter

Idly (kind of breakfast couscous with cashews) and coconut pancakes for breakfast

Working on the CAUCHEMAR setlist

In late morning, we headed to Kyra, the venue, to do the sound check. The venue was very professional, and had great sound guys. The show will kick some serious ass!

Gig poster at the entrance. You know what, I think we are the first Canadian metal band ever to play in India! And we sing in French hahahaha!

Ganesh, Vik and François at ABIGAIL’s sound check. Yasuyuki would scream “FUCKKKK YOU!!!!!!!! FUCK YOUUUUUU!!! Instead of the usual “check, check” hahaha

Before the gig, the club offered us some quality Indian food, in the form of a buffet. There was something like 10 different types of curries, 5 different types of rice and a huge dessert table. Apparently, the food was more in the style of North India… and I loved every bit of it!

Heavy metal buffet with ABIGAIL guys

My plate. Looks like a mess, but it was so good! I had some fresh nan bread to scoop out all the yummy sauces

Yasuyuki was so full that he had to undo his belt hahaha

The doors opened around 3:30, and more than a hundred Indian headbangers poured in the venue. Some rushed in at the merch table (records are very hard to get in India!) and we actually sold out of our records before we played!!!

The merch table with local bangers

The first band that played is called DJINN & MISKATONIC. I had listened to some of their songs beforehand, and was very curious about seeing them live… They play an original doomy style of metal, with highly distortioned bass and Lovecraftian lyrics. The bassist’s style would kind of remind me of CIRITH UNGOL, but played much heavier! The vocalist had this haunted voice that fit tremendously well with what they played, and sometimes his vocals leaned more towards a death metal style. The last song of their set, “Weird Tales” was the highlight for me. Anyway, this new band is a true gem, and I certainly hope to watch them grow! I will be buying whatever they release, that’s for sure.

Djinn and Miskatonic

Next band playing were Dhwesha, who had just released their first demo for the occasion. This band was a total surprise for me. I was talking to a few people near the merch table, and when they started, I had to cut the conversation short and run to the front to watch them… They played very dark doomy black metal with melodies, reminding me of the MORBID ANGEL/ARMOURED ANGEL style with lyrics in Kannada (the local dialect). Very solid stuff, and the guys were young as hell! I loved how the vocalist sang with absolute hatred.

Dhwesha

Dhwesha vocalist with his killer eyes! Reminds me of the 80’s Brazilian scene...

Afterwards was a local two-piece gore-grind band called GORIFIED. In fact, they have a drummer but he’s in France, so they just use a drum machine instead. I am FAR from being a gore-grind band, so I can’t honestly criticize their set, but I can say what they did, they did it well. They had the usual pig squeels and blast beats, you know. A strange addition to the line-up, but it gave me a well deserved beer break. You need those bands sometimes!

Gorified

My band, CAUCHEMAR, played next. We were backed up by two great local guys, Ganesh on bass (from the kickass doom metal band BEVAR SEA) as well as Deepak on drums (also from BEVAR SEA and DYING EMBRACE)! We played the five songs from our EP, as well as a cover… I don’t recall too much from our set, except that I remember feeling fucking possessed while singing! I did hear people sing along to our cover and headbang like hell for “Le Voile d’Isis”. It was incredibly special for us to play in India, and I really hope to come back with the rest of the band! Here are some photos, kindly sent from the kickass photographer Uday Shanker:

Deepak, François, Ganesh and myself! Photo by Uday Shanker.

Myself! Photo by Uday Shanker.

Ganesh, our session bass player! Photo by Uday Shanker.

After us was DYING EMBRACE, the first extreme metal band from India – who luckily had just reformed last year. Seriously, although I really loved most bands of the night – and been wanting to see ABIGAIL for a long time, I think DYING EMBRACE are the ones that left the most lasting impression on me… probably because I didn’t know them before. They played an amazing, deep style of black doom, mixing elements of weird early 90’s Black Metal, BATHORY and CANDLEMASS together. They had no bassist, but even then – it sounded absolutely great. They previously released a few 7″’s before disbanding in 2001, and like I mentioned, reformed in 2011. Vik (vocalist) seemed absolutely taken by Jimmy (guitarist)’s melodies, and kind of reminded me of an Indian Bobby Liebling! Jimmy played guitar like it was the extension of his body – flowing through solos as organically as humanely possible. And Deepak had some really original drum beats, which I think is really essential in this type of metal. They played songs raging from 1991 to 2001, a brand new title, as well as a cover of AUTOPSY’s “Twisted Mass of Burnt Decay”. Fuck yes! A true discovery! Sadly, their EP’s are long sold out, but Shaxul (Legion of Death records, France) will be re-releasing all of them on a compilation. Support!

Vik and Jimmy

Vik

Indian fans, who seemed as stoked as I was!

After all that crushing metal finally came ABIGAIL, whom I’ve been following for more than 10 years (time goes fast huh!) and never even saw live yet!! As you read before, I was really impressed by the live performance of DYING EMBRACE but for ABIGAIL, I think I totally went fucking mad. You know, when you totally, intensely get drunk ONLY by the sheer power of the music? I lost all control during ABIGAIL’s set; it was just that good. They played my absolute favourites from their first album, “Intercourse and Lust”; Attack with Spell and Hail Yakuza (with the ultra long part and all! Arghhh!!) as well as some more stuff from later albums, like Violence, Kill and Destruction, Bitch! We Gonna Kill You, Satanik Metal Fucking Hell!, Prophecy of the Evening Star, Hells Necromancer and the most recent classic, Metal Evil Metal! I was also very impressed by Jero’s guitar playing. It was so fucking cool to hear total heavy metal solos and riffs (he also plays in MELUCIFER/GORGON) in all that evil metal punk hell! And Youhei didn’t stop beating the shit out of the drums from beginning to end… he literally broke my neck, trying to follow his beats, that bastard! And Yasuyuki was insane, going right up to the front of the stage, playing amidst a totally chaotic mass of rabid Indian headbangers… his vocals were as powerful as usual, and, really, the whole band totally blew away the whole of the crowd!!!

Youhei and Yasuyuki

Jero

Yasuyuki

They finished with a cover of SODOM’s Outbreak of Evil and then… Yasuyuki called me to play bass and Vik to sing the chorus of Rocking Metal Motherfucker (BARBATOS –I had played session bass for them in Montreal 4 years ago.) It was really fucking cool and a total honour to play with the ABIGAIL guys – especially after such a crushing set!!!!!!

Vik, Yasuyuki and myself during “Rocking Metal Motherfucker”!!!

Myself on bass! (Photo by François)

A better photo of everyone on stage for "Rocking Metal Motherfuckers"!!!

ABIGAIL played a full hour, and after that, I was completely done and satisfied with the evening… until Sandesh and Vik announced us that there was a whole table of kickass Indian food set up for us. ARGHHHHH!!!!! Best way to end a show ever!!! (OK a whole table of poutine would have given me the same effect hahaha).

François, myself, Ganesh and Deepak... a little bit too happy after ABIGAIL hahahaha

François, Jero (BLACKOUT!!!!!!!) and Yasuyuki

It’s weird, I thought we were totally somewhere else until we got our plates of Indian food, and my Indian buddies started eating with their fingers around me. It’s so funny how metal unites us, but food is what takes us back to our own cultures…

Speaking of food (like usual with me haha), we got invited the next day to eat breakfast by Vik, who’s not only a kickass organizer and vocalist, but also a RESTAURANT owner!! Him and his father owns Ullas Refreshments – which is one of the landmarks of Bangalore. It is so well known and good, that it is even featured in my very own guide book of India!! Apparently, it’s known in the metal scene as the metal restaurant because that’s where the headbangers meet to organize gigs and exchange metal information. In fact, that’s where our very own Vik discovered IRON MAIDEN when he was a kid; a long time ago, one of the clients of the restaurant had forgotten a tape with Maiden recorded on it, which young Vik picked up… and which totally blew him away!

The legendary Ullas restaurant in downtown Bangalore

What totally ruled is that François and myself got invited to visit the kitchen. I love Indian food so much, but yet, have never seen behind the scenes, you know, stuff like tandorii ovens and spices in huge quantity. I was really excited, it felt like I was a kid!!! The kitchen was really clean and the main cook looked old haha, a sign of experience and good food!

Taking balls of dough and making roti (kind of the little brother of nan bread)

Using some kind of rock to smash the roti’s inside the tandorii oven

Rotis in the tandorii

A pile of hot, tender in the inside but crunchy on the outside rotis!!! Ahh I want some of those babies right now!

The dish of spices (masalas). I actually ended up buying myself a similar dish – makes it much easier to make Indian food!

Electric-powered grinders, for making the base of curries and gravies. Vik explained that this way is very old school, and that it gives a much better taste to the food.

So, the first thing we tried are puris, which are huge puffy balls of bread, which you dip in different thing – curried potatoes, spicy tomato sauce, coconut chutney and garlic chutney (this was my favourite!):

Puris with their sauces

Some local guys call them “boobies” because they are so big. Jero had to demonstrate:

Boobie puris

We also had a dosa, which is some kind of crispy crêpe that you dip in the same kind of sauces. Yasuyuki put out his finger in order to show how big the crêpe was compared to his hand!

Dosarghhhh!!!!

And I wanted to try his naans so I had one of them with three different kinds of curries. Ahh, what a treat!!!

Sweet sweet tandorii naans with curries

We finished with some fresh fruit salads, but Yasuyuki had ice cream on top of it. “I love sweets”, he said!

Ice cream fruitsalarghhhhh

We also came back to Vik’s restaurant a few weeks later to have a lunch thali, which is a very typical South Indian dish. It was really good, especially the sprouted moog bean curry. So healthy, arghh!

Ullas thali! Miam!

We had one last goodbye drinking party in the evening, at the clubhouse where we stayed. They had Kingfisher (Indian beer) on tap, but for a club member price… 100 rupees (2$) for a pitcher! Can you imagine that? We drank about 12 for the whole of us, closed the place down, and had more in our hotel room…

The incredibly cheap pitcher of beer. I think this set a new record here!

And we finished the night by Youhei and Jero teaching me the basics of karate. I now know how to punch and kick in a drunken way! Drunken master 666!

Learning from the drunken master

Youhei blocking my super kick

So, we said good bye to a hungover ABIGAIL, and a day later, we were off with Vik to Goa, an old Portuguese colony beach place located about 12 hours of bus from Bangalore…

So here is a little surprise for all of you guys… a mini-metal compilation featuring only Indian metal – all bands from Bangalore! You can download it here: Indian Metal mini-Compilation

Goa
02/02/2012

The province of Goa is quite different from the rest of India. For years, it was nearly inaccessible due to being surrounded by mountains and the sea. In the 1500’s, the place got invaded by the Portuguese who were attracted by the local industry of spices, and eventually, they Christianized the area by doing an Inquisition! It was either conversion or death!!! So, many Hindus fled the place… among them were Vik’s ancestors, who went to establish themselves at the border. Nowadays, Vik has a small but beautiful flat in the village of Calangute, which is in North Goa.

Remnants of a Portuguese past – the local St-Jean Baptiste church

An abandoned church. The locals built a Hindu temple on the left of it! The times, they are a-changin’!

Vik lives on the second floor of this nice apartment building! Paradise, no?

Holy cows marching in the streets. Cows are sacred in India. You cannot move them – you leave them be. Killing one is an major offence!

Apparently, the village changed a lot back in the last 30 years… in the beginning, there used to be naked hippies rolling around on the beach, and then tons of drugs, and then raves, and then the government banned loud music from 10:30PM to 9AM. The word still spread around that Goa was THE place to go for partying, but now it seems that mostly retired people go there to get away from the cold European winters. The beach was full of over-tanned 50-something British and Russian women in tiny bikinis, and men with guts that were hanging out like skirts… but of course they also had hot Swedish chicks, which made everything even! A part of the beach was really popular with Indian locals (some who came to see the hot chicks) and it was especially crowded on Saturday afternoon. In fact, I’ve never seen such a crowded beach before! But the other side of the beach was nice and relaxing. I spent every day just listening to metal and relaxing in the sun…

The “Indian locals” part of the beach. SO CROWDED, ARGHH! The Europeans hang out at the other side of the beach.

A lot of Indian families came here, and went in the water completely dressed!

An Englishwoman in a tiny bikini that should have been thrown away ages ago...

Vik showed us the way of the Goa party. First of all, he popped these babies out… the ayurvedic way of partying:

Party smart capsules. Removes hangovers! For real!

And then he introduced us to the best Indian beer we’ve had so far, King’s! A real pilsner, European style. Very good beer, and you can only find it in Goa, unfortunately…

King’s beer

Like I mentioned, during the day, we hung out on a beach shack, and at night, we’d go back to Vik’s apartment for metal listening. It was really fun!

Vik pouring himself two Tuborgs in the beach shack

Beach-shack Chinese-style squid

Another beach-shack delight... tikka bbqed shark!

Malai Kofta, some kind of cheese-vegetable dumpling covered in a thick, creamy, mind boggling cashew-nut sauce!!!

We even had the chance to taste some very potent home-made cider, at this English pub! I haven’t had cider in the longest time, and it was absolutely mind-blowing. Argh! Thank you “party smart”!!!! And thank you Vik for this awesome 4 days in Goa!

Hampi
06-02-2012

We arrived in Hampi after a crappy bus ride with broken air conditioning (it was so cold, I was dreaming that I was sleeping in snow!) But the absolutely mystical scenery stunned us, and made us forget all negative thoughts:

The golden dawn of Hampi (around 7AM)

Hampi is a small village located within the ruins of Vijayanagara empire’s capital, which dates from 1335 to 1565 (although there have been human settlements here since 1 CE.) In the last years of the empire, the town was destroyed by a six-month Muslim siege. It has always been a sacred site (you can feel the magic in the air), and meat and alcohol are forbidden in the main city.

Walking on the main bazaar street in the early hours of the morning. This is the Virupraksha temple, dedicated to Shiva. It predates the Vijayanagara empire.

The site is located near a river, which we had to cross on a tiny boat in order to reach our guest house. This area gave me shivers… it felt like I was in ancient times or something! People were purifying themselves in the river at the dawn of the day, washing their hair and clothes in the holy river water. It was one hell of a sight…

The river at sunrise

The sun getting higher on the holy city

People washing themselves in the river

People cleaned everything in the river, including their clothes – which they laid out on rocks for them to dry:

A bunch of sarees drying in the sun

Finally, we reached our guesthouse, which was chosen for us by our friend Ganesh. We had no idea what to expect, really, but we were surprised when we arrived. A cute little bungalow with an outdoor hanging bed was waiting for us:

One of these was our bungalow. We spent many evenings there listening to music and reading. Ahh, paradise!

This side of the river is really calm, and we had some really nice sleep. People told us how India was fucking LOUD and how it never slept. I guess they haven’t had the pleasure of discovering Hampi!

The main road leading to our guesthouse. On the left – some kind of plantation, on the right, restaurants and hotels.

Some farmer spreading seeds in the field

We mostly went to touristy restaurants, which usually implies they have better hygiene. The food served here is a mix of north Indian cuisine (I wonder why?), Israeli (falafels and humus), Indian, Chinese, Tibetan and continental. We mostly tried to eat as Indian as possible… and 100% vegetarian in order to be as safe as possible. It’s so good anyway!

This is a potato stuffed with cottage cheese and cashew nuts, covered in a rich Indian sauce and sprinkled with fruits and cashew nuts. Killer stuff!

A thali, a set lunch consisting of fried rice, papadums (crispy bread), chapattis (soft, pita-like bread), lentil curry, cauliflower curry, vegetable salad, spicy pickles and yogurt to finish it off.

Our favourite meal at a restaurant called the “Laughing Buddha”. Pineapple curry, creamy potato curry and cheese + pea curry with an amazing sunset on the side of the river...

This is what the sunset looked like! So magical, arghhh!!

During one of our meals, the cooks started becoming all agitated and were trying to kill something. I thought they had found a rat or something… but no! They were killing this gigantic 3-inch scorpion!!!!

One hell of a dangerous scorpion... squished to death!

What is really weird here is that people visiting from all over the world are dressed up as pseudo-hippies. They wear some kind of colourful puffy elephant pants and 50% of them have dreads. Restaurants seem to cater to them, and most of them have hippy/spacey decorations and paintings. François snapped this shot of myself, which kind of looks like it would come from a HAWKWIND live gig!

Annick, the new Stacia? Haha

Anyway, enough of all of that… let’s get to business and visit the ruins – which is the real reason why we came here (besides relaxing).

Spread over 26 square kilometres, the ruins of Vijanagar are mostly concentrated in two groups which we have visited; the ruins of temples around the Hampi Bazaar (the main street, full of squatted ruins turned into homes, restaurants and souvenir shops), and the second group is the royal enclosure – consisting of palaces (or what remains of them), elephant stables, guard houses and a few temples.

The most famous of all Hampi temples is the Virupaksha temple, which we have seen earlier. It dominates the village by its size, and attracts tons of pilgrims every day. Inside is a cute female elephant who let me pet her trunk.

Virupaksha temple

Some pretty explicit stuff going on on that temple...

Inside the temple

A pilgrim sleeping among ruins

The temple elephant, Lakshmi!

East of the chaotic Bazaar is the Boulder Hill, which becomes Matanga Hill. We happily climbed its beautiful boulder-filled path in order to discover more ruined hidden gems…

Some parts of the Bazaar ruins has been taken over by villagers and turned into homes. Monkeys and dogs are plentiful in the area...

Here is one unhappy she-monkey that found an empty pile of bananas

The east side of the Bazaar with the Boulder Hill, which we had to climb

A simple temple on the top of Boulder Hill. Doesn’t it look like it comes from a fairy tale or something? Haha

On top of Matanga Hill

West of Matanga Hill is the Achyutaraya temple complex which dates from the early to mid 1500’s and is dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu. It also boasts some quite interesting erotica stone carvings! They are a bit erased by now, but you can still figure out what’s going on with enough imagination.

The Achyutaraya temple from Matanga Hill. The scenery here was quite spectacular with the mountains and everything!

A lizard was hanging out amongst the ruins

Erotica carving #1 – I hope that’s not a monkey on the left!

Erotica carving #2

A little walking later and we arrived at the famous Vitthala temple, which is protected under Unesco as a monument of high importance to the heritage of the world. The temple, which was also built for Vishnu, possessed small musical pillars which resonates to a note of the scale when struck! Everything has been built from huge granite boulders, and it looks really, really cool:

The entrance to Vitthala temple. The entry cost for tourist was 5$, and for locals, 20 cents haha

The main temple with its musical pillars

Inside of the temple. We couldn’t visit it unfortunately because they don’t want tourists to keep on hitting those pillars...

Local women which kindly accepted me taking a photo of them! The middle one was laughing because her saree wasn’t positioned correctly.

Another temple inside the Vittala complex

In front of the temple is a representation of a wooden processional chariot. The wheels are now cemented but they used to revolve apparently!

Temples with the chariot in the background

The chariot

When coming back to the Bazaar, we have to go through a riverside path which is absolutely beautiful! There were some funny signs along the way, as well as the Agni temple on the other side of the river… you could reach it by jumping on a small hand-made round boat thing.

Agni temple. Apparently these stone pillars are actually lingas, the holy form of phalluses

Interesting signs along the river

The other set of ruins was further away, so we had to take a rickshaw to get to ‘em. We found one that would take us for 1$, but a poor non-English speaking French couple we met were cheated in paying 10$ for the same thing! I guess they didn’t try ripping us off with the way we look hehe. Anyway, we first visited the Lotus Mahal, which is where the queen and the women of the court could relax. I think you call that a harem or something!

The Lotus Mahal, which features Islamic influences

Details of the Lotus Mahal

Myself in a total Islamic style doorway

A bit further away are the royal elephant stables, which reflected the high status accorded to elephants, both ceremonial and in battle. There was also a bunch of kids sitting on an elephant that were really excited that I take a photo of them!!!

Cute Indian kids sitting on a stone elephant

The beautiful elephant stables. By the way, all that grass is hand cut, using little sceptres or something. Looks like a pain in the ass.

Walking towards the royal palace is the private palace shrine, which features nice detailed friezes. Unfortunately, it seems all the women on it were decapitated!

The Hazara Rama temple

Finally, we reached the disappointingly ruined royal palace, or what remains of it. It had remains of a really cool aqueduct system anyway!

The royal palace ruins! The siege really went at it!!!

The remaining aqueduct system

So, that’s all of what we visited of Hampi! We’re going to take a night bus back to Bangalore, and then fly to Delhi to keep exploring this intriguing country that is India!

One last day in Bangalore
13-02-2012

On our last day to Bangalore before we headed to Delhi, I went to get some henna tattoo done by Vik’s wife, who is super talented! I always wanted to get one of those, and it turned out awesome:

Vik's wife working on my "indian style" hand henna (they call it mendhi around here)

My hennam finished!

And then we had this amazing St-Valentines dinner which I cooked to thank Ganesh and his wife for their hospitality (and friendship)! Goat Steaks with Chocolate Red Wine Sauce, Roasted Caramelized Vegetables!

The result!

Our dessert, pouding chomeur. Nothing as sweet as this exists!

Ganesh and Aranyani!

OK, too much wine. Time for bed. See you in Delhi!

8 Comments | posted in India

January 26, 2012

Bursting Out

By intothevoid

A couple of months ago, we had planned to fly from Bangkok (Thailand) to Bangalore (India) – but the prices were way too expensive… so we checked for flights to Bangalore from Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia – home of cheapass airlines Air Asia), and they were something like a quarter of the price… so we took the decision to travel all the way down south to Malaysia instead. We were going to spend only 10 days there, and all I knew about this country was that it had great metal bands, killer fanzines, and that the official religion was Islam! That’s pretty much it!!

Research taught us that the country has in fact a population of 28 million people, including 54% Malay, 25% Chinese, 7.5% Indian and the rest being indigenous people and westerners, with the religions of Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Sikhism and Shamanism. We read that the resulting mix makes a big melting pot of cultures and interesting food fusions – which we couldn’t wait to explore…

Georgetown
Our 8-hour train ride from Southern Thailand took us all the way to Butterworth, which is a city located in the Penang state of Malaysia. I had read that Penang holds the best street food of Malaysia, and that its capital, Georgetown, had a reputation of having the best stalls. We just had to take a ferry from Butterworth to reach Georgetown – and we were there, in food paradise!

Approaching Georgetown, which is actually located on an island!

Georgetown is very well known for its great culinary culture, but also for its calmness and the beauty of its streets and buildings. The historical centre has to be one of the nicest we have visited in South-East Asia – reminding us a bit of the city of Sucre, in Bolivia for its white colonial buildings (remains of the colonised by the British in 1786). In fact, the city has been classified Unesco world heritage since 2008. Everyone greeted us in English, giving us the hugest smiles we’ve seen (including street cleaners and city workers!!!) We were instantly taken in by its charm. Too bad we are only staying here for one full day!!

Colonial building – I think this must be some kind of church?

The town hall

The Queen Victoria Clock Tower

Chinatown, with Chinese New Year decorations

Some gigantic incense sticks burning in front of a Chinese Buddhist temple

What we also enjoyed was how so many different cultures lived side by side in (what seems like) harmony. Here, you can walk in front of a mosque, a hindu temple and a Buddhist temple in 10 minutes. It’s just unreal! And the diversity of the food sold on the street was absolutely amazing. We had a food checklist and tried as many local dishes as we could.

Prawn Nasi Lemak (fat rice), a breakfast dish. The rice is cooked in coconut milk, and served with a spicy seafood paste. It can also come with a boiled egg, peanuts and other stuff.

Duck and fishball Kway Teow soup

Penang Laksa – a sweet and spicy soup featuring fish, tamarind paste, onion, basil, pineapple and cucumber in slices. This is considered a Nyonya dish – a mix of Malay and Chinese food

Fried oysters! François told me the fatness of it was the equivalent of eating a Poutine (French-Canadian fast food)

Lok lok, a selection of food on sticks that you warm up by plunging in boiling water

I’m bursting… I’m bursting out!

Some people say that the only thing to do in Georgetown is walk and eat… but we found something much better. A old, rotting resting ground!!!! This 250-year-old protestant/catholic cemetery was absolutely creepy and we had fun exploring its 500+ tombs – some of which were broken and totally used up by the local vegetation…

Georgetown cemetery

Chinese graves

Resting in peace (eating too much always makes me sleepy hehe)

More amazing rotting graves

A very doomy photo of François. Notice the scary cemetery trees in the background!

A freemason tomb

The next day, we hopped on a 5-hour bus journey to reach the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.

Kuala Lumpur

“Have you eaten yet”?

I don’t know if it’s because of Hellbent for Cooking or what, but all of my metalhead friends in Kuala Lumpur kept on asking me that question. I guess it says alot about the local culture; people here live to eat. Minutes are counted between meals… it’s that important!

So, when we arrived to Kuala Lumpur, and I called my friend Iskandar (from the band ENVENOM), the first thing he asked me if we had eaten. We had, of course, but we were curious to know what he had in mind. It was Saturday night, and he took me on the Saturday night market called Lorong Tuanka Abdul Rahman. It’s a traditional Malay market that sells clothes, jewellery, fresh fruits and veggies and most importantly, hawker (street) food. I liked this market so much that I returned, a week later! The variety of food here was overwhelming, and I would have wanted to try everything!

The crowded street

Some Kueh (sweets). I especially liked the white and green ones, called “Kueh Salat”. They have a layer of coconut sticky rice and coconut egg custard. One of my favourite Malaysian foods!

Popiah Basah – “wet popiah”, some sort of spring roll made with a crepe, stuffed with turnip, bean sprouts, french beans, grated carrots, chopped peanuts, and shredded omelette. It is then covered with sweet sauce. Very yummy!

Murtabak, a folded crepe stuffed with chicken, eggs, onions and garlic. You dip it in curry sauce.

I’m bursting… I’m bursting out!

And if that’s not enough, he then brought us record shopping (we also came back there with some friends, a week later hehe). Right next to the market is the Campbell Complex, a shopping center which has about 5 metal record shops on the 2^nd floor. The stores were really cool and had some local CD’s, of totally obscure Malaysian rock and metal. Unfortunately, they also had quite a few bootlegs, and their vinyls were very expensive, but most stock was good!

“Auntie”’s metal shop – a place owned by a lady/music encyclopaedia and her husband. Good place to score local stuff as well as Malaysian made tapes

Niebula, an old record shop/label that had a good LP section, some good black metal and a shitload of tapes!

Another view of Niebula

An unopened “Strength of Steel” ANVIL LP priced at 30$!!

“Uncle”’s metal shop, which was quite similar to Auntie’s, but with a different selection

François, myself and Rudy from Karunguni metal shop

Abhorer 7"! Not for sale... only for tease!

The Karunguni vinyl section

My record scores!

Of course, after all this record shopping, we went eating again… haha! We ended up in an Mamak restaurant (Malaysian Indian), and had some Dal curry Roti Telur (pancake with egg, covered in lentil curry and served with chilli paste. Again, one of my favourite Malaysian meals! I ate this one quite a few times during the week.

It looks gross, but it’s really awesome. Kind of reminds me of a big plate of nachos!

The next day, we met up with Sen (ex-ANTACID vocalist, now in LOBOTOMY) and went out for some food (how surprising haha) and exploring. They took us to Restoran Sate Kajang, which is the most famous place to eat bbq’ed Satay skewers in Kuala Lumpur! They were absolutely wonderful, and you could dip them in a sweet and spicy peanut sauce. I stuffed my face with those babies. They were so good!

The Satay skewers. On this you have rabbit (my favourite!), mutton, chicken and beef intestines

We then visited a mosque – (an Islamic place of worship). As a woman, they gave me a robe to hide my mini skirt, arms and hair. It was my first time in a mosque, and I found it very peaceful – although I found the architecture a bit too basic for my tastes. Perhaps it’s because it’s quite a recent one?

Mosque from the outside. The towers on each side are for “prayer calls”. These calls are actually quite doomy and melodic... makes us feel like we are in the desert or something

Inside the mosque. Look how clean everything is!

Myself and Iskandar (with his Impiety shirt!)

Prayer mats inside of the Mosque

After visiting the mosque, we met up with even more friends – Ratna and Fizan. Ratna is half Indonesian, and she brought us to a fabulous Indonesian restaurant close to her workplace. I was expecting something quite small since we had already eaten meat skewers, but they actually filled the whole table up with dishes! I couldn’t believe my eyes!

Epic Indonesian dishes

The food was very nice – just enough spicy and very exotic tasting… but my favourite thing of them all was an avocado juice! They mix avocado with condensed milk and add some chocolate syrup. I never had avocado as something sweet, but it was to die for, seriously! I couldn’t say a word, it was just so, so sososososososo good! You guys have to try it out!

The amazing avocado juice!

Now, I’m seriously bursting out!!!!!

The next day, we went to an Islamic art museum, which is located right in the centre of town. I was always interested in Islamic art – especially calligraphy, and it was really cool to see some in real life! Although they had Islamic art from all over the world, they mostly focused on Asian Islamic stuff. Really fascinating. I totally recommend this museum, it was really well done! Here are some glimpses of it:

A Chinese-muslim calligraphic scroll

More calligraphy!

We also saw some cool weapons, including a magical kris dagger, which is used both as a talisman and a weapon. It had some cool engravings on it!

A Malaysian kris dagger

Some maces

So, again, we had some yummy food after the museum. This time we had a thing called “claypot”… which is a burning hot pot filled with rice, meat and veggies!

François couldn’t wait to eat before I took the photo haha

And for dessert, one of my favourite Malay foods… CENDOL! Cendol is a weird dessert consisting of shaved ice, which you cover with coconut milk, palm sugar syrup, mung bean noodles, red beans, and other stuff like sweet corn, lychee, and even mango! It’s really really good. I had like 5 in a week!

Cendol!

In the evening, we met up with even more friends – guys from LOBOTOMY, and we went to their rehearsal. They play some kickass speed/nwobhm, and did the songs from their demo as well as a few covers (Metalucifer, Heavy Load, etc…) These guys are really great, and they are actually playing in Japan next month, at the “True Thrash Fest”, along with RAZOR, JURASSIC JADE and ABIGAIL. Support!!!

Sen, LOBOTOMY vocalist and bassist. He sounds alot like Hugo of WITCHTRAP!

Aloy, the drummer

Iwan, guitar master!

We went for a few “drinks” (usually, this implies eating and drinking juice hehe). Iwan ordered a weird thing called “syrup”, which actually looks like really cheap shampoo and tastes like bepto bismol! Not bad! It’s pink syrup mixed with condensed milk.

Iwan drinking shampoo!

Aloy! He’s wearing that shirt because in Malaysia, the price of beer is absolutely out of range. In fact, it’s more expensive than in Canada – due to the government putting the taxes up. Same thing with tobacco. Sucks for Malay people who want to have a bit of fun!

A few days later, we went to visit one of the only tourist attractions near Kuala Lumpur, the 400-million year-old Batu Caves, one of the most popular Hindu shrine outside of India. It is dedicated to Lord Murugan, and features a statue of him right at the entrance. You need to climb 272 steps in order to reach the shrine… which was actually not very hard.

The entrance of Batu Caves with the Murugan statue (the highest in the world, apparently)

Ratna, Fizan, myself and Sen on the bottom of the staircase

The caves have a small colony of monkeys, who hang out around people. They get territorial when you approach them too close, but they were actually quite entertaining!

Mama monkey and her son sucking on her monkey tittie

The inside shrine

Hanging out with hindu gods

A sexy winged cow (details of the shrine)

Coming down, we saw a killer sunset and a beautiful view of Kuala Lumpur in the very distance. The caves were really cool, and I think it was quite a good introduction to our next destination (India!)

View from Batu Caves staircase

The day before we left Malaysia, we got invited to Fizan’s brother’s wedding… and of course, we accepted! They lent us some traditional Malay clothes – which were quite comfortable (mine was made out of silk!)

The traditional Malay wedding consists usually of two ceremonies – the first one is the exchange of rings and vows, and the second one is basically the wedding party and feast. The married couple becomes “king and queen” for the day. They wear crowns, are seated on royal seats and are offered royal food… it was really cool to see!

The wedding of Terima and Kasih!

Ladies throwing some fragrant herbs

The “royal” couple at their table. The decorations at the bottom of the photo are boiled eggs, which were later offered to the guests as a symbol of fertility.

Fizan and his daughter doing the horns!!

Fizan, Ratna, myself, François and Sen

We then took part of the wedding feast… we were assigned a special table, and we had some sort of never-ending buffet in the middle. The food was very good, especially the beef rendang! We again, ate until we burst hahaha

Beef rendang – beef with tons of spices that is cooked for a very long time until it becomes caramelized. Usually served in special occasions like weddings and after fasting for Ramadan.

Royal crab

We were brought in the family house, and shown the wedding bed. Apparently, it happens that sneaky aunts listen during the night… hahaha

Wedding bed

We were then invited to have some tea, sweets and hang out with the bride and groom’s mothers! Everyone took photos of us, we really felt like we were guests of honor or something!

Inside the family house. Notice the “Burning Abyss” zine hehe

After that, we returned to Kuala Lumpur and as it was Chinese New Year eve, we went in the China town and had a few beers with some friends. It was really fun, although it’s really too bad that our stay in Malaysia was so brief…

Chinese guys blowing up illegal fire crackers in the street. These things were really, really loud!!!

Malay metalheads! We’re missing my friend Ahmad, who left us right before, to find some nice girls at a bar hehe

The next day, everyone drove us to the airport and gave us a warm goodbye before our flight departed for India. Malaysia was truly a kickass experience, and we would definitely love to come back and explore other cities (and metal scenes!!!)

Sen with Ratna/Fizan’s daughter’s “princess in progress” bag in the airport parking lot... hahaha

François getting on our Air Asia flight to Bangalore!

We are currently in Bangalore, at a friend’s place, and getting ready to play a gig with Cauchemar (backed-up by an Indian line-up of Bevar Sea/Dying Embrace members!!!) and we will open for none other than Japanese black metal ABIGAIL!!!! It will be one hell of a good time, we can’t wait!

This post is dedicated to late RIOT guitarist Mark Reale, who passed away from cancer on January 25th 2012.

10 Comments | posted in Malaysia

January 12, 2012

Only Death is Real

By intothevoid

Chiang Mai
As the second largest city in Thailand, Chiang Mai was actually quiet… compared to Bangkok, at least! It is apparently home to Thailand’s best cuisine, and a favourite place for foreigners to live as expats. It is where we chose to spend xmas and soak in as much food and beer as possible before our next destination, hehehe… (you will see why when you read on!)

A couple of weeks ago, my parents and grandma transferred us some xmas money (thank you!) which was spent wisely on a few things, including… a cooking class! So, on December 24^th, all I did was cook from morning to mid-afternoon. I learned how to make coconut soup with chicken, pad thai, papaya salad, green curry paste, coconut green curry with chicken and coconut sticky rice pudding with mango, all of them from scratch. We started the day by going to the market, and choosing ingredients for our meals. Our teacher explained the use and names of many veggies and spices. It was absolutely fascinating!

Three different types of eggplants

Thai coriander and kaffir leaves! Everything was so fragrant!

Long beans or snake beans

Shallots

Rambutans (a fruit that kind of tastes like lychee)

Pig blood and pig feet (ok, we didn’t use those particular ingredients hehe)

We then came back to the class, and started cooking! You all have no idea how much I am CRAVING to cook these days, I haven’t touched a kitchen or anything for months. It was absolutely blissful to start chopping up veggies and cooking ‘em up!

Myself with my big-ass knife. Not as metal as the Hellbent for Cooking cover, I know...

Making pad thai

The finished pad thai!

Green curry paste ingredients

Crushing the enemies

Adding ingredients and coconut milk

The result! Green curry! And I think it was the best I’ve had so far haha, it was so fresh tasting!

Myself with the two other Danish students

Cooking sticky rice

Coconut sticky rice pudding with mango, one of the best thai sweets around

And at the end of the class, we each got a certificate as well as a recipe book. Kickass! I can’t wait to try these recipes at home, in Canada!

Recipe book and Thai cooking certificate

The next day (December 25^th), François offered me an afternoon at the spa, including some time in a herbal steam sauna and an aromatherapy oil massage. The place itself was very beautiful, and the treatments relaxing, but the massage was not THAT good compared to others I’ve tried. It was nice anyway.

Inside the spa

For xmas dinner, we went to a French-Thai restaurant. We had a charcuterie plate as an appetizer, and for main meals, I had steak tartare and François, cheese fondue. It was quite decent, but the service was weird – the entree arrived with the fries and salad that were supposed to come with the steak tartare, and everything arrived so fast we were finished everything 30 minutes after entering the restaurant. Let’s just say I wasn’t too impressed. We decided to finish the evening in a really cool rock bar, which blasted AC/DC and Black Sabbath. There were a few bikers, which kindly invited us to their table, and bought our beer for the rest of the evening!!! The leader was a tattoo-ed up British who was vegetarian, involved in Buddhism and meditation. He showed me some amulets that protected him from the police and others from falling off his bike. I wish I had my camera, it was just too surreal of an evening!

A few days later, we decided to go to another restaurant called Huen Phen, which was much better than the French-Thai one. They specialize in northern cuisine and are one of the most popular (and affordable) restaurants in Chiang Mai. We had a Khantoke set menu for two, which is usually reserved for weddings and other special events. It was a great introduction to the local cuisine, and everything was tasty as hell. I mean, the food was so yummy that it kind of made our tastebuds explode, haha!

From left to right: bananas in coconut milk, pork curry (Burmese style), chicken curry with veggies, laap (minced pork salad), pork sausage, minced pork with tomatoes, fried crispy pork (this was exactly the same as "oreilles de christ", a French-Canadian speciality!) and sticky rice (everything for 12$!)

Inside Huen Phen. When we left, there was a 3-hour line-up going all the way outside in the street...

We also went to another quite famous restaurant called Aroon Rai, which apparently has some of the best curries of Thailand. I am not a huge expert in Thai curries, but I have to admit the ones they had were to die for! (Although my very own green curry was superior hahaha)

The curries of Aroon Rai

Since we were there for the weekend, we went to the Saturday market. It was really really busy and completely packed with people! Vendors and merchants were selling everything from slippers to sushi, sweets, bbq’ed skewers, etc…

The Saturday market, in the evening

Home-made noodles

A guy holding his dog as a purse!

A cute lady-street musician

Beautiful rolls of sushi (16 cents each!)

The problem with these markets is that they are a few kilometres long, packed and equipped with very few toilets. Luckily, I found some but they were quite something!

Rural-style Thai toilet with a manual flush. You’re supposed to put your feet where the marks are. I was shaking up there, I was so scared to slip off the thing haha... if you look closer, the brand of the toilet is “American Standard”... yeah right!

Oh yeah, there was bunch of hot Thai chicks dressed in Santa costumes, since it was Christmas day. I took this photo especially for the guys!

Hot Thai chicks dressed in Santa costumes

While walking, we saw quite a few random, interesting and funny things, which I wanted to share…

“Mr. Beer” car rental! Free 6-pack when you rent a car! Haha

Baked bacon cheese with seaweed Lays chips. We’re pretty sure a stoner invented this one.

A weirdly shaped temple. Actually, quite a few temples in the north were shaped like this.

On a more serious note... sex slavery is a huge problem in Thailand!

Anyway, we didn’t do too many touristic things in Chiang Mai, but it was a really nice week to relax before we spend a week up north in the town of Fang, more precisely at Wat Sri Boen-Ruang, a Buddhist monastery. We also spent about six hours rehearsing and writing in a local studio (3.50$ an hour, including instruments!). I snapped a photo of François, which I thought looked totally 70’s haha

François with his xmas present shirt that he got from me!

Fang
From the Chiang Mai bus station, we took a local bus to Fang, which is located 3-4 hours away, and is only 20km or so from the Burmese border. Hill tribes live in the area, as well as the famous Giraffe ladies (the women with a million rings around their necks that fascinated all of us as kids). We didn’t visit any of these unfortunately, but perhaps we will next time! Anyway, when we got on the bus to Fang, we were a bit surprised; the seats that would normally be for two were for three! I thought it was made like this if there were families with small children, but no, people actually crammed themselves three per seat. But I guess people were shy around us and they take the third place on our seat, haha!

Inside the bus to Fang

We showed the name of the monastery we were going at to the bus driver and so he dropped us in front of it. When we entered the gates, our initial reaction was that it looked very calm and kind of ghostly – there was hardly anybody on the grounds! Only two guys were sweeping, and luckily one of them spoke English and brought me to the hut of one of our monk/teachers, Phra Greg.

We came to stay in Wat Sri Boen-Ruang especially to learn about Theravada Buddhism (the “purest” branch of Buddhism – practiced mostly in Burma, Lao and Thailand) and to learn how to meditate.

Basically what we’ve learned is that Buddhism is the philosophy of following the Dhamma (the teachings of professor Buddha). Phra Fred taught us that Buddha was actually a prince who lived around 2600 years ago, and who was born in what is now known as Nepal. He intensely meditated and attained Nirvana (enlightment) under a tree, then lived the rest of his life teaching his findings (the Dhamma). What is enlightment? Essentially, it is total, pure, blissful joy by doing good (and getting the results of it), as well as stopping all internal suffering. It is a state that can only be attained by yourself.

In the monastery, we learned from Phra Greg about the Dhamma and how to meditate with mindfulness (visspassana meditation). By concentrating on ONLY one thing at the time during meditation (breathing, for example), you get to control much more what you are thinking, and therefore are able to stop any thoughts or actions that are getting in our way.

And how to stop all internal suffering? What I understand of it is being able to keeping a balance; not to be to be extremely sad/negative or be extremely happy/positive. It’s what is called “the middle path”. Talking about happiness; I actually get stressed when I talk about some dish that I like so much. I get huge skin rashes!! And a similar thing happens when I get really, really angry. By staying focused and not feeling about anything too strongly, I’d stay on the middle path. I’d suffer enormously if a fire wiped out my entire LP and CD collection… but if I wouldn’t get attached to my records too strongly, I’d say “Whatever! I can live without ‘em!” But obviously, I know that this would not happen as music is my very own religion hehe

In order to stay in this particularly monastery, we have to go through eight rules, or eight precepts:

No killing or harming living beings
No stealing
No sexual or romantic activity (not even if I’m married, snif! Can’t even sleep in the same room!)
No improper speech
No drugs or alcohol
No eating from noon to 6AM (very very hard for me!!)
No entertainment, singing and beautification (cosmetics) – and wearing white clothing only… this one is extremely difficult as I’m not allowed to listen to ANY music for a week! I will make it up afterwards, arghhh
No luxurious beds (it makes you want to sleep too much)

We thus went through the precept ceremony (atasilani). Conducted by Phra Greg, we took the temporary oath of keeping the eight precepts by reading them out loud in Pali, the ancient language spoken by Buddha himself. We also had to an offering of flowers, incense and candles.

Our offering!

Phra Greg! He’s originally from New Zealand.

François and myself taking the oath in front of Phra Greg

After taking the oath

And, here is our modest bed hehe:

It’s actually quite comfortable! Better than something too soft with too many springs! We also had our own private bathroom. How luxurious!

We lived on the second floor of this building

And we bought dark chocolate (it doesn’t count as a food, according to our teacher, Phra Greg, as it melts in the mouth like a liquid) so we could survive. It actually helped alot!

Chocolate removes the suffering

Every morning (except for Buddha days), monks and novice monks leave the monastery at 6:15AM to collect food offerings from the locals. (Monks cannot buy, or prepare their own food to be able to fully concentrate on their practice. The community relies on the normal people for material needs, and in return, the monks provide spiritual guidance and moral support.) We, of course, had to follow them on their rounds. Sometimes the mornings were chilly and misty, and it was super awesome!

Around 6:30 in the morning... misty morning, clouds in the sky!

Waiting for people to come for their offerings

Placing sticky rice in one of the alms bowls

When the offering is done, the monks do chanting

People during the chanting. Notice the snazzy dinosaur hat!

Phra Fred and Phra Greg (our two foreign monk teachers) coming back to the monastery

And here is a video of it. Sorry for the dog barking, it’s the only decent video my camera could take… you get the point though!

When we arrive, we can finally feast! I can say that we are totally starving at this point. And we are able to eat an extremely vast variety of northern Thai food!!!

A table full of food from the alms rounds – we have to wait until after the monks and the novices eat to be able to eat. There are tons of stuff; curries, coconut desserts, rice, noodle dishes, spicy pastes, steamed peanuts, vegetables, fish, etc... Some stuff is extremely spicy!

Examples of offered food

Sticky rice cooked in bamboo (SO GOOD!!!!!!)

A super healthy lunch (the sticky rice in bamboo is the white thing in the bottom) I totally fell in love with those little packages wrapped in banana leaves. They include all sorts of things, but my favourite were coconut sticky rice covered with a coconut egg pudding. So good, I really want to make my own now!

Closed package

Opened package, with sticky rice, coconut milk and pudding.

The monastery is also home to about twenty dogs. People drop them there and others adopt some… they are absolutely adorable and each has a personality of their own:

My favourite dog, Chickenkiller! Beside her name (which was given to her as she used to kill chickens obviously), she is such a nice little girl. She waggled her tail everytime we’d come back to the monastery, and she’d wait for us outside of each building

The resident fattie. This one used to be the head dog, and always ate first... which led to her total overweight. Phra Greg has tried making her run, but she’d give up after a few steps, the poor thing

Falling and trying to get back up. When you poked her, the flesh would wobble for a while. Poor doggie. Haha

One of two puppies and an older dog. The puppy always get chewed on!

Don’t know this one too well, but he’s cute anyway

The Abbot of the monastery and a puppy

Sometimes, in the evenings around 6PM, there would be chantings in pali. The whole monastery would group up and sing the teachings of Buddha. It’s hard because you have to sit on the floor the whole time, but when you get a good position, it gets very soothing and frankly, it sounds really cool!

The wihan, where the chanting takes place

Naga eating a Naga (details of the epic staircase)

So, we spent New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day in the monastery… for New Year’s Eve, the abbot of the temple decided to organize evening chants and Dhamma talks that would lead the local devotees into the new year by doing good. It started around 7PM and lasted to probably around 1AM. There were also fireworks and firecrackers going off in the air!

New Year’s Eve chanting

For New Year’s Day, it happened to be a Buddha day (one of the 4 phases of the moon). Instead of the monks going on their alms round, the locals come to the temple and do offerings there directly. They lay out food on the table, and offer chunks of sticky rice to the novices, which they place directly in their bowl. A bit like in Luang Prabang.

Locals putting some food offerings on a table

Putting sticky rice balls into bowls

We also experienced more events during our short stay – such as…

…an ordination into monkhood:

Ordination of a novice to a monk. This man has 227 precepts to follow from now on!

The monk with his family, doing offerings to the monastery

…and a funeral! Funerals here are seen as an important day, like births and weddings. It’s part of the cycle of rebirth. People must talk good about the deceased in order for him to reach a higher realm. Or something… thus, funerals here are not all about crying and mourning… although I did see a couple of people cry!

A “bus” picking up monks and novices from the monastery

Inside the monk bus

The casket and funeral

The ceremony with monks chanting

Once the ceremony is done, monks symbolically carry the funeral casket to the crematorium. It results in some sort of really cool funeral march. The first guy in front flies a ghost to scare away bad spirits, and the monks (and family of the deceased) pull on a rope.

Thai ghost

Photo of the deceased

Pulling on the rope at the funeral march

Novices pulling on the rope! Notice the novice with the sun glasses!!

A little further away in the march, the family of the deceased

The men carrying the casket to the crematorium

The crematorium! About 30 minutes after, it smelled like the burnt body of the deceased everywhere around!

I took yet another video so you guys can listen to the music and soak in the atmosphere. The music is supposed to be loud and “annoying” to, again, scare the bad spirits away, but I actually quite enjoyed it!

After all of this, we went through another ceremony to downgrade ourselves to the basic five precepts (or whatever we want to follow). We had to do another offering:

Offering to professor Buddha and the monastery

And that’s pretty much it for our temple stay! Our experience was absolute gold and we really enjoyed our time there. We discovered not only what Buddhism is about, but we learned about Thai culture, how to meditate and how to include it in our daily lives. We totally recommend and urge people to come and stay this monastery! You can learn more about the program HERE.

Anyway, the last evening, I celebrated by undergoing a traditional Thai massage, which was offered in the home of a small family near the temple. It cost US$ 4,50 for two hours and it was the best massage I’ve even gotten!!! I was the last client of the day, so the owner also massaged me for quite a while, which made it a four hand massage! It was absolutely mind-blowing. I came out of there feeling totally high and had trouble walking!

The wonderful massage therapist, Fon

The owner and her little princess daughter

The next day, we got very lucky and a generous Thai man gave us a ride all the way to Chiang Mai, where we are taking the train to reach the south of Thailand. It was a tiny bit awkward because he knew maybe 10 English words, and us about 5 words of Thai, but we kept on laughing at our mediocrity the whole way hahaha!

Now we are on the train, riding for two days, going to the hot and tropical beaches of Thailand…

Koh Phi Phi
One car, two trains, 3 buses and two boat rides later… we arrived on Koh Phi Phi Island! Known as having some of the world’s best beaches, Koh Phi Phi was hugely stuck by the tsunami in 2004, killing something like 1000 people… but of course everything has been rebuilt since, and they did one hell of a good job!

Arriving on Koh Phi Phi island. This part of the island is considered the “town”, and no way in hell would we stay there as they blast super loud dance music until the small hours of the morning!

We booked 5 nights in a bungalow on Long Beach, located about 45 minutes walk from the town. Since we were tired as hell from our traveling, and we had all our bags with us, we decided to take a taxi boat to reach our destination on the island. The color of the water really blew me away, it looked so clear and had beautiful emerald colors!

Our bungalows viewed from the taxi boat

The taxi boat stop

The beach itself was surprisingly quiet and really well organized. There were no sellers trying to sell you sunglasses, bracelets or fruits… and they had fresh fruit shakes for 1.25$! I bought a small bottle of rum, and made my own frozen margaritas hehe! (The real ones were going for 4.50$ a glass, screw that!)

Drinking huge lime shakes spiked with extremely cheap rum

Relaxing on the side of the beach while reading INFERNAL DEMON zine and listening to VULCAIN/SCORPIONS/V8... paradise!

Check out the colors of the sea!!!

You can relax on a hammock while the sun sets in...

François enjoying Singha beer at one of the beach’s restaurants

What surprised me the most was when you enter the water, there are tons of multicoloured fishes that come and meet you! At one point, I think I had around 50 around me, it was kind of intimidating haha! Some were tickling my feet. It really felt like we were in an aquarium or something…

Fishes in the water!! There were also some weird 80’s looking fish that looked like they played in MOTLEY CRUE or something

Myself surrounded by 80’s glam fishes

The highlight of Long Beach though, were three Maltese dog puppies that were owned by some lady working at our hotel. They are so cute, oh man, I couldn’t resist hugging them haha… I wish I could have held all three at the same time, but only two fit in my arms.

Maltese dog barrkmageddon

And so that is it for our trip to Thailand. I think I’m seriously going to miss this country and its people… but we must move on. Tomorrow we are entering our first Islamic country; MALAYSIA! See you soon!

Hole in the skyyyyyy.... take me to Malaysiaaaa

7 Comments | posted in Thailand

January 10, 2012

Rock You All Around the World – One Year of Travelling Into the Void!

By intothevoid

Annick and François

It’s been exactly a year since we’ve been gone from Canada. That’s 4% (Annick) and 3% (François) of our lifetimes so far spent on this trip! We have had an absolutely priceless experience so far, having visited 96 cities and villages in 13 countries; taking planes, buses, boats, trains and hitching rides to our destinations. We learned a new language (Español), tasted hundreds of beers and thousands of dishes, seen different metal scenes and met some amazing people – with whom we have connected intensely. We have seen incredible poverty and extreme riches. We have already been transformed, and we keep on learning every day. Thanks to everyone who we’ve met on the road, that helped us and with whom we shared drinks and meals, and thanks to those who have been following us on this blog! But mostly, a million thanks to our families and friends who we miss greatly, and who have had the patience to wait for our return.

Our next plans will be to go to Malaysia, India (where we will play a gig!), Nepal and then Europe, where we will do a long CAUCHEMAR tour, playing in many different countries and at four festivals. More info on that when the time comes. We are projecting to come back to Canada, moving to our hometown of Ottawa in late summer, early fall 2012!

So, for now, we have written a list of our best and worst experiences so far, on our travels. Enjoy!

TOURISTY STUFF
Most expensive hotel room: Tokyo, Japan – 60$ for two in a 4-bed dorm… and that was the cheapest in Tokyo!
Cheapest hotel room: Kampot, Cambodia – 4$ for two in a private room with showers and mosquitos
Best hostel(s): 1. Khaosan Kabuki Smile, Tokyo, Japan – well organized, beautiful and comfortable. 2. Luna Sonorisa, Valparaiso, Chile – quiet, and unlimited fresh goat cheese for breakfast! 3. Adventure Brew Hostel, Cuzco, Peru – free pisco sour classes, free pancakes for breakfast, and very comfortable bed.
Worst hostel: Mochilero’s Inn, Miraflores, Lima, Peru – Moldy room, dirty showers, and rip off staff!
Highest altitude: 5000 meters – in the Uyuni, Bolivia, national park. It felt like being a 90-year old
Hottest weather: 35 celcius, in Siem Reap, Cambodia
Coldest weather: -15 celcius in the Uyuni national park, Bolivia
Longest public transportation ride: 42 hours on a train – From Shanghai to Kunming, China
Best bus ride: Valparaiso to Valdivia, Chile. 12 hours on the second floor of a comfortable bus, with a dinner and a breakfast and a host that tucked us in for the night!
Worst bus ride: Cuzco to Lima – 24 hours with a dramatic Korean tv series dubbed in Spanish, playing on FULL BLAST!!!! …and Puno to Cuzco – 14 hours of vomiting for François while travelling in the Andes mountains
Best toilet: Kyoto, Japan – you get a full ass shower, including drying and a hot seat
Worst toilet: Kunming, China – A river of shit and low walls, forcing you to look at other people when you are taking a dump
Safest place visited: All of Japan! You could leave your bags in the streets and come back 5 hours and they will still be there.
Most dangerous place visited: Backstreets of Medellin at 3AM
Most mystical place visited: Inca trail and Macchu Picchu, Peru
Most chaotic city visited: Hanoi, Vietnam – motorcycles, honking, no street lights, annoying street sellers..

Macchu Picchu!

MUSIC
Best live bands seen: Voltax (Mexico), Witchtrap (Colombia), Condenados (Chile), Metal Grave (Chile), Axe Battler (Chile), Reino Ermitaño (Peru), Cobra (Peru), Accept (Ger – seen in Bolivia), Sigh (Japan – seen in China) and Darge (Japan – seen in Korea)
Worst live bands: A bunch of shit cover bands seen in Mexico city. They played the same songs (Smoke on the Water, Led Zeppelin songs, etc…) and one of the bands’ vocalist was reading the lyrics. It sounded like a failed high school party.
Best metal scenes: Medellin (Colombia), Santiago (Chile), Lima (Peru) and Bangkok (Thailand)
Country with the best metal shops: Japan, by far! Never seen so many metal records in one shop. Took hours to go through them!
Country with the worst metal shops: Bolivia. Most stores were 5% real CD’s and 95% bootlegs. You couldn’t find anything. Also, Lao, Vietnam and Cambodia… as there are no metal scenes there at all, haha!
Best metal bar: Crypto, Lima, Peru – Spent many nights drinking their cheap beer, and headbanging to Judas Priest!
Worst metal bar: Immortal bar, Chiang Mai, Thailand – The bar took the name from Norwegians IMMORTAL but had only some basic “classic rock” and nu metal. No Motörhead, no Priest… therefore, no fun! They were playing Bob Dylan when we were there.
Best traditional music: Peru (from the Andes)
Worst music: Bolivian pop or Cambodian wedding music… both have terrible singers!

Japanese metal shop!

FOOD
Best seafood: Lima, Peru – best place for ceviche and …sushi!
Best meat: Seoul, South Korea. The BBQ’ed steak we had gave me a mouth orgasm!
Best street food: Bolivia (Salteñas, pasteles de queso + api, humintas) and Mexico (everything!!!)
Worst meal: François: Liver Soup, Suzhou, China; Annick: raw piure (some kind of sea water dwelling crustacean creature) in Temuco, Chile
Cheapest meal: 1$ for two for beef satay skewers with cabbage salad and dessert, Kampot, Cambodia
Most expensive meal: 40$ for 4 pieces of fatty tuna Nigiri sushi, Tokyo, Japan
Best beer: Kunstmann beer, Valdivia, Chile
Worst beer: No particular brands, but the beers in Colombia were pretty tasteless
Cheapest beer: 50 cents in Cambodian bars for an ice cold, draft beer
Most expensive beer: 9$ in a Tokyo metal bar for 250 ml draft
Worst hangover: Seoul, Korea – after eating BBQ and drinking for 6 hours. My liver is still shaken up by this one.

Drinking and eating non stop for 6 hours...

MISC
Best trend: Poutine in Thailand, we found it in three different places!
Worst trend: Nerd glasses with no lenses, Japan and Korea
Best massage: Fang, Thailand – It was like getting high on yourself!
Cheapest massage: Fang, Thailand – 4.50$ for two hours!!
Most epic moment: Myself getting a haircut from the master, Gezol from SABBAT!
Worst post/mail system: Medellin, Colombia – 30$ for sending a small pot of spreadable caramel to Canada (for my dad’s birthday). On top of it, the Colombian inspection office opened the package (including the protective foil) and removed completely the birthday card. So my dad received an opened pot of caramel spread hahaha!

Gezol cutting my hair at his salon

And here is a photo of our backpacks, you can compare them with how beautiful they were HERE!

Our bags in January 2012

So now, we are currently on the Island of Koh Phi Phi, in the South of Thailand. You haven’t heard from us for a while because we haven’t had regular Internet access since almost half a month! Expect a huge update (and replies to e-mails) when we arrive in Malaysia, on the 12^th.

Cheers!

7 Comments | posted in Uncategorized

December 23, 2011

Metal Inquisition

By intothevoid

I had no idea what to expect of the city of Bangkok except the facts that it is HUGE (population of 11 million), that is has a killer metal scene and… that its “real” name is unusually long (Krung thep mahanakhon amorn ratanakosin mahintharayutthaya mahadilok popnoparat ratchathani burirom udomratchanivetmahasathan amornpiman avatarnsathit sakkathattiyavisnukarmprasit) meaning “The city of angels, the great city, the residence of the Emerald Buddha, the impregnable city of Ayutthaya of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarn”!!!

So… anyway, the first thing we did arriving here was to travel to the embassy of India to get our visas – but we found out we were far away from any metro/sky train station (we were located near the Grand Palace and Khao San road)… therefore, we had to take a bus. So, the first thing I experienced in Bangkok was its massive rush hour traffic jam, and we had to take a bus in it… arghh! I admit it was a very chaotic and stressful experience, but starting with the worst only meant one thing: everything was going to be better!

Some royal elephant statues near the Grand Palace

Beside the visa run, we started with our favourite thing ever; record shopping!! We discovered two killer record shops; Triple Six records, and Record Hunter. Triple Six is quite varied, and has an amazing selection of underground CD’s/LP’s/tapes/patches and ‘zines from all over the world. I was surprised to find IRON DOGS’ demo there (Ottawa heavy metal) as well as our very own CD! Their prices were around $7-$15 per CD, $25-$35 per LP and $3 per tape. Pretty good! I bought the new IMPIETY, the TORMENTRESS (Singapore all-female thrash!) CD and the most recent Burning Churches fanzine.

Myself with Boy (Zyogoatsis/Surrender of Divinity) and Triple Six owner

CD’s, LP’s and tapes

Boy at work

Right beside Triple Six is a shop called “Record Hunter”, which specializes in second hand importation LP’s of all genres. Little did I know that the owner was a huge metal LP collector! He had a kickass selection with records that you’d normally see in European metal markets. I was tempted by a few LP’s but ended up buying the Darkside Records (Greece) “Beyond the Grave” compilation, which features obscure tracks from early 90’s death and black metal.

Record Hunter - definitely a must visit on your metal trip to Bangkok!

My Bangkok score!!! Yeah!!

On Saturday night, I was taken for a visit of the city by Bangkok’s Thai metal inquisition. Actually, it was my friend Jerasak and his metal friends who took me around – and it was one hell of a ride!

Coming out of the sky train with the metal inquisition

We met together at a coffee shop, and there, a monk started staring at my friend Jerasak’s jacket. We all thought he was going to come and criticize us or something but from his monk bag he took out a metal magazine!!! He showed us that he was a big “Dimmu Borgir” fan! Then he kept on staring at us!!! My friends found that very unusual (it’s the first time they ever see this) and that he is perhaps breaking one of the Thai Buddhism rules by enjoying metal (which is entertainment). Anyway, it was quite a weird experience! I took a photo with the monk:

Myself with the monk from the Black Temple! Notice his magazine on the bottom right.

Jerasak at a coffee shop

Myself with Witchfinder and Metalsavage! Notice what we are drinking – iced coffee and tea. Thai people love their caffeinated drinks cooled with ice!

We then headed for the JJ market – a huge market that has everything from animals, to souvenirs, bags, food and vintage clothing. It was funny to shop with a big bunch of metal guys, but we had alot of fun! I bought a vintage 70’s Zeppelin shirt for François as well as some bootleg metal patches.

JJ market

Some pretty crazy crocodile purses haha

The city’s only punk shop. They had an INEPSY patch, but selling it for 7$!

After the market, we went to a food court to have lunch. In Thai food courts, you have to put money into a card, and then use it to buy food. I had my first real green curry, as well as some pork ball skewers.

A lunch money card

Green curry. It was pretty good, but had big chunks of blood sausage inside. Not really my thing!

Pork ball skewers. These were delicious! The sauce was sweet and spicy at the same time...

But the best was something Jerasak gave me… holy shit, I seriously had tears in my eyes when I ate it. They were crispy pancakes covered with thick meringue and a sweet grated coconut (?) topping. I need to find these again, they are so good!!

The hellishly good pancakes

We hung out a little bit, and then headed for KTK – a “secret” metal meeting spot located in a local night market. Basically, it’s two friends that for 5 years have been setting up a table for selling records… but really, it’s just an excuse to meet up, drink beer, exchange metal information and swap albums. That night, tons of people came out and we had one hell of a party! I think we were around 20 in a small, black alley street of that night market. We seriously looked like a gang or something haha

Töng in front of the KTK table

Myself with Anusorn, Sonyaluxx, Jerasak, Wiran, Tong and Metalsavage!

Keng (the local Thai crust punk!) and myself beside the record table

SIAM METAL ATTACK!

One of the two guys selling records, Metalsavage, is the Thai equivalent to Neal Tanaka (a famous Japanese metal collector). He has thousands of LP’s, a gigantic VENOM collection and about 50 jackets with all original and hard to find patches that he has been collecting for the past 30 years! I was absolutely blown away to find an original 80’s VULCAIN patch on his jacket that night. WOW!

A VULCAIN patch!!! They should make these again, it looks great!

When the night market closed, 15 of us moved and invaded the local backpacker street Khaosan Road, where we consumed beer intensely until the wee hours of the morning. It must have been weird and unusual for tourists to see us!

Invading Khaosan Road

Whathanakorn (Surrender of Divinity!!) and Metalsavage. Drinking beer and eating chicken satay’s!

On the street were many lady boys (some kind of third gender here in Thailand…) and one of them was dressed up horribly as “mother Christmas”. Ayayay! I absolutely HAD to take my picture with “it”!! Haha

Myself and a mother Christmas lady boy. Notice how the photo is blurry. My brain was blurry as well at that time!

As you could probably tell, the next day was a brutal hangover… But I slept it off and was fine after a while haha!

Now, about my other favourite thing ever… FOOD! Thai food is well known and popular everywhere, and for a reason! There are only two other countries that I have visited with such an amazing variety of food, and that is Mexico and Peru. Over here in Thailand, people have kickass food, and are PROUD of it. On top of that, you can eat amazing freshly cooked meals in the streets for REALLY cheap ($1 – $1.5, depending on how fancy you are).

For one of my first breakfasts, I had a very typical Thai breakfast – Congee with chicken. It’s actually a kind of thick rice porridge where they add chicken pieces, green onions and sesame oil… but it’s really good and starts well a day!

A bowl of congee from the streets

I also HAD to try the famous Pad Thai – which are fried rice noodles with sauce, veggies, egg, peanuts and lime juice. I ate plenty of ‘em in Montreal and Ottawa, but this one in particular was even better!

Pad Thai on Khao San road

Mmmm, I am salivating right now!

Like in Laos and Cambodia, Thailand have their own version of Green Papaya salad. I really hope to find green papayas when I come back to Canada because I am seriously becoming addicted to these things:

Thai Green Papaya Salad

And finally… we had something that was absolutely unthinkable in Bangkok. …POUTINE! Yes! After finding poutine in Chile, we found some in Thailand! It is actually owned by the girlfriend of a famous Quebec author/comic/traveler called Bruno Blanchet. The poutine itself tasted exactly like in Canada, except for the cheese that was not squeaky and kind of melted into the sauce. It actually made me think of the poutine my high school used to serve:

The Poutine stand

The Poutine!!!!! I know we are in Thailand, but you have no idea how much we crave this dish! We have eaten it twice. Gotta stock up!

Oh yeah, we also had a minor culinary escapade in Bangkok’s Chinatown with some friendly people we met. The street where they sold food was all illuminated and it looked really cool!

Chinese lanterns and food stalls

Outdoor restaurant

Fried red snapper fish with huge chunks of garlic!

We did quite a lot of sightseeing as well. It would have been super awesome to stay in Bangkok longer than a week before there was so much to see, but we did manage to visit some amazing places like the Grand Palace, the Wat Phra Kaew, Wat Pho, Temple of Dawn and the Ayutthaya ancient city. We spent an entire morning at the Grand Palace grounds… it really held its name, as all the buildings there were absolutely huge and heavily decorated.

The beautiful Grand Palace

A parade doing nationalistic songs

Heavily decorated mini temple near the Grand Palace

Beside the Grand Palace is the Wat Phra Kaew, a really big temple which houses the most sacred Buddha statue in all of Thailand: the emerald Buddha! This Buddha statue is actually made of jade, but is very old and quite a long history… it came from Chiang Mai (north of Thailand) and was in the hands of Laotian kings for more than 200 years, but has been taken back by the Thailand kings a few hundred years ago. Anyway, the temple itself was pompously decorated with glittering pieces of mirrors, and is a masterpiece just by itself:

Wat Phra Kaew

A decoration thing (I’m sure it has a religious significance)

A surrounding temple with two big guardians

A massive golden Stupa

“Garudas” protecting the temple

Mother of pearl decorations on the outside doors. Look at the designs... they are in fact “Naga” snakes!!!

The inside of Wat Phra Kaew, with the emerald Buddha. Photographing this is forbidden, but I thought it was too impressive to let it go! The Buddha is covered by a scarf at this time of the year! (It’s winter in Thailand)

Around the temple is a large enclosure that features extremely detailed paintings telling some ancient Thai legends and folklore (I think!) They were really impressive:

Fighting with magical bows and arrows!

Demons getting loaded and eating pig head

Some strange dead animal with a bird eating its entrails (what the hell does it have to do there? Haha)

The material of the artists

There was also a garden with a super cute frog… haha I couldn’t resist taking this picture:

Thai frog! I wonder if the street stalls come get their meat here?

We then went to visit Wat Pho – which is just an excuse to see the gigantic reclining Buddha – a statue measuring 53 meters long! It’s so big, I couldn’t get a picture of it. Only it’s head… sorry!

The reclining Buddha’s head. It was so big and impressive! You can’t help yourself but exclaim “WOW!!!” when you see it!!!

Outside the Central Palace group of buildings is a really cool amulet market. They sell rare Buddha figurines, phallus shaped amulets, bracelets made out of teeth, yant cloth, but the weirdest thing are these replicas of famous monks… they looked so real, it was the creepiest thing ever!

Thai replicas of famous monks! They imitate everything; beauty marks, veins on the forehead, etc... so so strange.

What is cool about Bangkok is its canals and rivers. If there is a traffic jam at rush hour, everything stops and it makes traveling around a pain in the ass if you’re not using the metro or the sky train. Luckily, there is an awesome “bus-boat” system that takes you to many places by water! It’s much more fun and only costs a little bit more than taking the bus. Our local “boat station” still had debris and remains of the floods that happened only a few weeks ago.

The water is still high in this part, but there is no problem at all

Remains of sand bags and garbage

But yeah, Bangkok itself was absolutely dry and that is the only thing we saw that was left over from the floods. Anyway, back to the canals and rivers… we tried their bus-boat system, and it proved to be really cool! We used it to visit the Temple of the Dawn (Wat Arun), located on the other side of the main river.

Getting on the bus-boat

Temple of the Dawn and its distinctively high Stupa

A picture-perfect entrance to a temple

The inside of one of the many temples

We could climb on the top of the Stupa and see the city from it. The climb was ok – a bit steep, but not that much… but the resulting view was outstanding!

François climbing the Stupa

The view of the river from the top of the Stupa

Us leaving our mark on the bright pink ribbon on top of it

View of the temples

A demon holding the Stupa with all of its strength!!!

Ayutthaya, another site that we visited, is actually the ancient capital of Thailand. It was influenced by Sri Lankian, Indian and Cambodian architecture, but has been violently destroyed by the Burmese in the 1700’s (hence relocating to Bangkok). We took a tour for this one, as it included transportation, English guide, entrance to the sites and an all-you-can-eat buffet lunch (for 15$ each!)

The tour started weirdly though, as it stopped on the way to Ayutthaya to drop us off at a strange monastery under the name of Wat Niwetthammaprawat. What makes this monastery so strange? It was built under the orders of the eccentric King Rama V (we are now at Rama IX if it gives you an idea) to look like European buildings! It was unreal, we really didn’t feel like we were in Thailand.

Some buildings in the monastery

But the weirdest was a church, which served as a Temple with buddhas and everything! So it was build exactly like a basilica but it served for Buddhism and had none of the “normal” Jesus statues and stuff.

The church-temple

Inside the “church”! So weird!

Anyway, after this we went to Ayutthaya, for real. The first site we visited was called Wat Mahathat, and was in total ruins. The buildings were made with bricks and some of them are leaning dangerously towards the ground – as if they were falling (just like mini towers of Babel!)

A falling tower... they certainly didn’t have the expertise of ancient Cambodia

Buildings falling apart

More badly damaged buildings... the one on the right kind of looks like a south American pyramid, doesn’t it?

The Burmese destroyed all the Buddha statues and stole their heads and arms:

Headless statues. The big one at the back is recent!

But I think some heads were too big or too heavy, so they just left them laying around… one of them was left beside a tree, which has slowly taking it over with its roots! It looks really really cool – check it out:

Head taken over by nature!

This area of Ayutthaya was cruelly flooded for 5 months… (usually the floods lasts a week or two?) and you could see the trace that the water left on the ruins:

See the white mark on the left wall – that is up to where the water went!

The next site we went to visit was Wat Phukhao Thong (Golden Temple), which was built in 1387. You can also climb the Stupa of this one, and see a nice view of Ayutthaya:

The long Stupa!

The view from the top! These fields should actually not be flooded, but a little water remains

A cow on the temple premises

After this, we went to another ancient site, whos particularities featured many bell-shaped Stupas. They apparently contained some relics like the king’s ashes and the ashes of his many, many wives. There was also a palace I think, but the Burmese once again destroyed it!

Stupa and ruins

Ruins of the palace

Three of the many Stupas

Some crab apple (I think?) fruits taken from the trees on the site. The red ones are sweeter and quite good!

Right next to this site is a temple called Thanon Si Sanphet, which houses a very famous and revered bronze Buddha. It survived all the Burmese attacks!

The destroyed Temple with the Buddha remaining inside

The renovated temple

A huge, huge huge Bronze Buddha!

And finally, we visited YET another ancient ruined temple (Wat Lokayasutha) which had almost nothing left except for this other big reclining Buddha. Apparently, it represents the moment at which a giant was unwilling to pay respect to the Buddha because he was proud of his huge body. The Buddha desired the giant to be less arrogant, so he turned himself as much larger than the giant!

François and the reclining Buddha!

It’s now midnight and I’m on a shaky night bus to Chiang Mai. It’s Thailand’s biggest city and apparently home to its best food… I’m very excited to try some of it, it’s going to be KILLER!

OH! It will be Christmas in a few days. Hope you guys your food and gifts and party time! Cheers and have a drink for me!!!!!

4 Comments | posted in Thailand

December 12, 2011

Troops of Doom

By intothevoid

Before we start with this post, we just wanted to say that we have decided to go to Hellfest 2012, in France – which we will do a full report. The line-up is beyond awesome this year, with Black Sabbath, Death Angel, Exodus, Girlschool, Saint Vitus, Pentagram, The Devil’s Blood, Necros Christos, Napalm Death, Blue Oyster Cult…. and 60 other bands which are to be confirmed. Sounds like one hell of a party to me! We will be joined by my best friend Alice… BLACK fuckin’ SABBATH!!! ARGHHH!!!!!!!!

So, here goes for the rest of our Cambodian trip, which was quite horrifying, but mostly beer fueled (and relaxing)!

Phnom Penh
Cambodia might have a glorious past (see previous post!), but as most of you know, they have a really, really horrific one as well… it is all over the international news these days too (the remaining leaders are finally being judged in court). The Khmer Rouge were in power only a few years in the mid 70’s, but they left one hell of a bloody streak on the country, killing what is thought to be one QUARTER of its population. It happened not that long ago, and you still see traces of it everywhere.

The Khmer Rouge was led by a madman politician under the name of Pol Pot. Basically, he forced people living in the city to relocate to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labour projects.

They wanted to form a communist, classless society, abolishing money, schools, private property, law courts, markets… they forbade religion, family ties, and stupid stuff like colourful clothing! Everyone in the country worked for “Angkar” (the Khmer Rouge Empire), which meant “The Organization”. But instead of doing it gradually, they tried to do it overnight by announcing over loudspeakers that the US was going to bomb Phnom Penh, commanding and forcing all citizens to leave their homes and take “refuge” in the countryside, in their home villages. This journey alone lasted many weeks, and many Cambodias died of exhaustion and starvation along the way… but it was only the beginning! The combined effects of forced labour, malnutrition, poor medical care and executions resulted in the deaths of 2,000,000 to 5,000,000 people (Cambodians, as well as a large population of Vietnamese and Chinese, and Thai, Laos, and a few foreigners) over a period of almost 4 years. They murdered doctors, teachers, government leaders and even Buddhist monks.

With François’ parents, we went to visit the notorious Security Prison 21 (S-21), which is a former high school used by the Khmer Rouge to interrogate people whom they suspected of being “enemies of the regime”. They were repeatedly tortured and coerced into naming family members and close associates, who were in turn arrested, tortured and killed. Out of 20 000 people that were sent there, only 7 survived. It was a truly horrific experience. Read this text if you are not faint of heart!

The entrance to the prison

The main part of the prison, where they held prisoners. There is barbwire everywhere to prevent suicide and escape.

The first floor cells, made out of bricks.

Another view of the prison in its preserved state

A torture room. They used all sorts of torture methods including beatings, electric shocks, hot metal burning, hanging, knife cuts until heavy bleeding, suffocating with plastic bags, pulling out fingernails and then pouring alcohol on the wounds, holding prisoner's heads underwater... arghhh, it was crazy! Notice the dark spot under the bed, it is a gigantic blood stain!!!

The only 7 survivors

The leaders. Obviously people hate them with a passion!

Some prisoners after being interrogated. Notice the wounds... and the poor little kid at the top right

Prisoners were forced to smile on the camera, so they tried to tickle them until they would smile (see hand on left side of the guy)

Thousands of women were killed

My friend Piotr Dubiel, a fellow record hunter whom I know from many years, had told me about his own experience at this prison. I remember he was very much scarred by the “menacing” and “undefeated” looks of the prisoners on photos. This one in particular shared the shit out of me:

You might kill me, but you will never kill my spirit!

At first, they buried the dead corpses around the prison, but after running out of space they had to bring the people alive to a field, which was once a Chinese cemetery, to kill and torture them there…

Skulls dug out from around the prison

Photo of skulls and bones in a warehouse in the Killing Fields, before putting in a communal Stupa

So we actually went to visit the Killing Fields themselves, which were located about 30 minutes drive outside of Phnom Penh. It was transformed into a beautiful garden with a lake, trees and some flowers. We had a really well done audio guide that told us what happened in parts of the fields. It was a creepy experience for sure. There were dozens of mass graves with up to two hundred people buried in each… People there dug their own graves, and were killed not by being shot as ammunition was in short supply, so they were beaten to death with pick axes or other instruments, or their skulls would shattered on tree trunks, etc.

The killing fields! This tree was used to smash kids and babies' heads before burying them in a pit beside the tree. It was cheaper than using ammunition. Pieces of skull, teeth and brain as well as blood was found on the tree trunk. Why kids? So they don't seek revenge for the deaths of their relatives.

A mass grave pit. This one was used for women

A close-up of a sugar palm tree. Instead of using knives, they used this palm thing to slice people's throats so they'd stop screaming.

Fragments of bones and teeth found surfacing from the mass graves after the rainy season

Clothing of the corpses

In the middle of the fields was a large stupa monument, which was built to house the victims’ skulls. You could enter it, and see the skulls from closer…

The skull stupa in the Killing Fields

Some skulls. I got the "death chills" here... last time was in that weird cemetary in the unknown Peruvian ruins! By the way, the broken skulls were smashed before the bodies were buried.

Blahhh, it was quite a downer to visit all these places – but at least we had something to cheer us up… A real, ass-kicking metal bar!! Owned by Mr. Jun, an immigrant metalhead from Taiwan, ZEPPELIN CAFÉ in Phnom Penh was the bar with the best music we’ve heard since we’ve been traveling. It felt just so good to drink beer and listen to REAL metal with no compromises, no poseur songs, no nu-metal, no irritating glam rock… Jun, who is also the DJ, put some incredible set-lists with songs from Trouble, Saint Vitus, Hawkwind, Motörhead, Venom, Judas Priest, Danzig, Blue Cheer, Uriah Heep, Anvil… it was a killer night! In fact, we liked it so much that we found a hotel right next to it hahaha! On top of it, it mixed food and metal, so it made me very happy… they served some excellent home-made Taiwanese fried dumplings. Hell yes!

Inside Zeppelin Cafe

Metal dumplings

Jun is a die hard VENOM fan

Showing off some of his vinyl collection

Phnom Penh was of course not just about metal and prisons and killing fields; it is actually a pretty nice city with a lush green park and some cool buildings. We visited the Royal Palace, some temples (who were partially destroyed by the Khmer Rouge regime) and had some nice dishes.

Phnom Penh Royal Palace main bulding

The national museum. We couldn’t take photos inside, but it was basically only sculptures taken from Angkor and a few other things

The worshipping of Lady Penh. (Legend says that in 1372, an old nun named Lady Penh went to fetch water in the Mekong and found a dead tree floating down the stream. Inside a hole of the tree were four bronze and one stone Buddha statues.)

A lotus flower offering

A weird statue on the back of a temple... I guess it represents some guy starving

Mini temple cat

A huge tree full of... BATS! Yes! Bats in daylight, it was loud and it was the weirdest thing ever!

Fish amok (some kind of fish cake with coconut milk) and rice

We had a taste of a weird local fruit, the "mangosteen". The inside was like a creamy mandarin mix with a lychee texture and after taste!

Poor François has started a bronchitis and is now on 15 days of pills! I tease him that he's now like a grandfather with his dose of pills hahaha

Alas, after spending a month together, we unfortunately had to part with François’ parents, which we are going to miss! Merci beaucoup pour tout vous deux, on vous revoit dans quelques mois!!!

Our goodbye meal – green papaya salad with grilled chicken

The family!

Sihanoukville
Sihanoukville is a seaside town, and has some totally underrated beaches. The town itself is ugly and has no character, but we spend 9 days on the beautiful and quiet Otres Beach – which was 4km away from the town. Most of the time we were sleeping in a bungalow of Don’t Tell Mama, a nice group of bungalows and rooms run by a very hospitable German couple. It was total luxury… white sand, comfortable beds, mosquito nets, hot water… we totally relaxed and pretty much did nothing for the whole stay. We did walk alot though, and went on a boat trip to some islands.

Our bungalow at Don’t Tell Mama

At siesta time, there was always a bird who hung out on the roof, and made the funniest and weirdest sounds. Sometimes he would do psychedelic moog type sounds, monkey cries, chirps… anyway, it was quite entertaining. Check it out:

Basically, our days consisted of waking up, working on the Cauchemar European tour, having lunch, reading, taking a nap, having some 50 cent beers, eating, then heading home and relaxing before sleeping again. Haha! It was so perfect!

Some beautiful emerald colored water

Ruins of a failed hotel that we found walking on a deserted beach

Some killer vegetable “amok”. We had that meal everyday, it was so tasty! Kind of like a really thick coconut curry.

Some woman coming to sell coconuts at 8AM on Otres

A beach breakfast – oven roasted baguette with a potato/mozzarella omelette. Not very Cambodian!

The coast of Bamboo island, which we reached by boat

An evil looking sea urchin, that was picked up by our boat driver. These guys are venomous and will drive its spikes into your skin if they are scared, leaving black spots in your flesh. Its long spikes can grow up to 30 cm! The hole you see at the top of it... is his anus.

A quiet little fishing boat on the seashore

We ate a yummy BBQ on the side of Otres Beach

Otres beach-side camp fire and sunset

A fire dancer, entertaining us during our beach BBQ!

Kampot
After spending time on the beach, we decided to go to Kampot, an even quieter place, located about two hours from Sihanoukville. Known for its pepper cultivation (apparently the best in the world), we spent 5 days of tötal relaxatiön. It is also there where we had the cheapest hotel room so far; 4$ USD a night, including a shower! The food was also very cheap, we could have meals for 1.50$ for two – including skewers, cabbage or green papaya salad, and even dessert. People were also really friendly, as it is less touristic than other places and I guess sometimes they are still not very used to seeing foreigners. The town was once colonized by the French, who built a resort on a nearby mountain.

Our hotel dog was very cute and it slept in the shoe rack, like a cat would do… haha. I had to snap this picture:

Shoe rack dog

What remains of the French colonial architecture

The best thing to do here is to drink beer while watching the sun set on the river... and then go to have some street side beef skewers. Miam!

We took a boat ride on the river. The scenery was very lush and green!

One of the first things we did was to visit the market in search of strange and different food. It was not quite as chaotic as other markets we’ve visited, but it was as colorful (and smelly) haha

The market of Kampot

The speciality here is also the cultivation of "dorian" fruits - which smell like nasty 100-year old used socks

We discovered some yummy bbq’ed bananas covered in crunchy coconut rice. I only saw these once and wish I could find more – they were absolutely delicious!!!

Bbq'ed bananas in banana leaves

Unwrapping 'em... arghhh, they were so good!! They cost 25 cents each.

I also had some beef with the famous local green peppercorn. The freshest and tastiest pepper you can have! It was a real treat – I’ve been putting loads of pepper in my food since hahaha – got me totally addicted!

Beef and green peppercorn stir fry

And at another place, we tried some Beef Lok Lak, which was really good as well:

Beef Lok Lak with egg

Like I mentioned, the only touristy thing we did here was to visit the Bokor Mountain, with the ruined resort on top. We read that we could visit the totally destroyed casino, which is often shrouded in mist, and has a creepy ghastly appearance inside…. but the locals were actually RENOVATING the ruins (apparently to make a museum or something)! They were removing the Khmer Rouge bullet holes that were creating ghostly sounds with the wind! So basically, we arrived up there and saw this:

The ruined casino that is being renovated... what's the point?

A bullet stuck in a nearby rock

Close to this casino was a church, which was still standing – but was turned into a squat (Cambodian people are living in it now, but it was also squatted by the Khmer Rouge during their regime):

The abandoned French catholic church

The squatter's clothing

There was also a monastery, which was half in ruins. I think people were still sleeping in it as well, but I am not sure…

A room in the monastery

The view from the mountain was pretty cool, but we couldn’t see much from all the clouds and mist hiding the scenery haha. There was a huge jungle down there, with apparently tigers and elephants, but we obviously didn’t see any. Upon returning to our van, a tiny monkey (a gibon, I think?) jumped into the van searching for food, and wouldn’t get out! He got on my head and scratched François haha, he was a pain in the ass… I got to take a photo of him:

The annoying van monkey

Oh yeah, I forgot to write how Cambodia was weird for its Lexus and deluxe big car craze. It kind of makes me think of the “bling bling” culture of North America – you live in the hood (in shit wooden houses in this case) but you show that you have money by having a nice big car and a tv. It’s pretty obvious that it’s only about the brand – as they put the logos in really big on the side of the car. It’s absolutely surreal – you can see Lexus cars everywhere! Some restaurant owner told me that Cambodia was the country with the most Lexus cars per capita. It’s all about saving the “face” around here. In Siem Reap, we passed in front of a streetside “house” out of metal scraps (it looks like something you’d build in your basement as kids) and we heard TV playing!

Lexus parked beside the bus station in Kampot

So, in two days we will depart to Bangkok metal city, in Thailand! We will be spending a full month in Thailand – a week in Bangkok, week and a half in the North (including xmas and new year’s), then going south on the beautiful Koh Phi Phi Island before reaching Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.

4 Comments | posted in Cambodia

November 25, 2011

The Temple in the Underworld

By intothevoid

We landed in Siem Reap in mid day, and right away we were swept by the intense heat of the Cambodian sun. The first day we arrived, I got skin allergic reactions from all the heat (I come from Canada, we rarely experience such high temperatures!) but I guess I got used to it, because it got better in a few days. We of course cooled off as much as possible with the local beer, “Angkor” (also the brand name of cigarettes):

Angkor beer! Kind of tastes watery, but ohhh is it ever refreshing at such high temperatures!

Of course, we were in Siem Reap for one goal: to marvel and explore the millennium-old ruins of Angkor. I have been introduced to this magical place by one of my ex-coworkers, Christophe, at the (then) small Montreal graphic design firm Bivouac Studio. The pictures were branded in my mind; intricately carved stone temples destroyed by the Cambodian jungle… it blew me away. Now, five years later, I was standing on those very grounds.

The reign of Angkor (meaning, “city”) has started in AD 802 and lasted until 1431, when the area was sacked and its population migrated to Phnom Penh. During those years (and especially between 900-1200), the Khmer (residents of Cambodia) built some of the world’s most incredible architectural masterpieces. Over one thousand religious buildings were produced; some very minor of course, and some absolutely mind-blowing like Angkor Wat (on which 30 000 people worked for 50 years!). The area covers 1,000 square kilometres, and speculators suggest it contained a population of up to a million people. Angkor was eventually abandoned, and was rapidly cloaked by the jungle… until it got “re-discovered” by a French archaeologist – which cleared the forest and helped renovate and re-assemble the ruins.

The temples were influenced by quite a few religious movements; indigenous cults (worhip of ancestors), royal cult (god-kings), hinduism (shavaism/vaishavism) as well as buddhism. Sometimes temples were defaced and re-engraved with figures of different religions!

We went to visit the ruins of the temples by “tuk tuk” (a moto with a trailer), which brought us anywhere we wanted. It kind of felt like luxury to have your own driver haha!

Downtown Siem Reap, and a bunch of tuk tuks lined on the street

Andrée and Yvon on the tuk tuk. We used that to go everywhere!!!

A typical countryside scenery we would pass by with our tuk tuk

So, here are the ruins we visited… I put them in chronological order so you can see how they evolved over the years:

Preah Ko – Built: 879 AD – Religion: Hindu (Shiva)
Preah Ko, meaning “sacred bull” is one of the first major temples of the empire, located in the early Khmer capital of Hariharalaya. Its six towers have been built on a platform, and you could still see carvings dating from that time:

Preah Ko. Notice the grass growing on the ruins! Shiva’s sacred bulls are right in front of the temple.

Some really cool ancient Hindu sanscrit written on the door frames

All that remains of a building on the grounds

Bakong – Built: 881 – Religion: Hindu
Standing 15 meters tall, and as big as 650m x 850, Bakong is based on a temple-mountain architectural formula… The middle tower is higher because it represents the Mount Maru – which in Hindu mythology, is something like 30 times the height of the earth, haha! For years to come, the next temples will be influenced by this style.

Bakong temple-mountain

Another view of Bakong

François and myself, in front of Mount Maru

Some cool ruins surrounding the temple (don’t you think it would fit on the cover of a Pagan Altar record?

These made me think of some kind ankhorian stonehenge

Banteay Srey – Built: 967 – Religion: Hindu (Shiva)
Banteay Srey, meaning “citadel of the women”, has to be the most beautifully decorated temple I’ve seen. It’s more than a thousand years old, but it has incredible carvings and engravings in pink sandstone that have been miraculously preserved! Every carving is symbolic, and some tell some Hindu stories…

Banteay Srey, viewed from the surrounding pool

Inside view of Banteay Srey

Intricate carving of vegetation, which is supposed to purify you when you pass beside it... or something like that haha

A demon who protects the temple, and scares evil spirits away

Some kind of hindu mythology scene

Monkeys fighting! Notice the bullet holes - these were done in the 70's, during the Khmer Rouge regime...

Not part of the original construction, but a gigantic ant hill built beside the temple haha... scary!

Angkor Thom – Built: Late 12^th century – Religion: Buddhism
Angkor Thom is actually a 3km² walled royal city that includes many structures, including the famous Baphuon and Bayon temples. It has 5 heavily decorated gates, one for each of the cardinal points – as well as a victory gate.

The South gate leading to the royal city

Baphuon – Built: Around 1050 – Religion: Hindu
Baphuon was first built, and then integrated into Angkor Thom. It is a huge temple-mountain, which is dedicated to the Hinduism linga cult (phallic symbol of fertility). It is mostly in ruins, which makes it even cooler looking!

Baphuon temple

Its unfinished gigantic reclining Buddha. You don’t really see it, but trust me, it’s there!!

A nearby temple that looks strangely like some ancient mayan ruins...

Bayon – Built: Around 1180 – Religion: Buddhist
Bayon is one of the biggest and most important temples in the area. It was in fact a state-temple, and is easily recognizable by its 54 towers sporting 217 carved faces. It is also well known for its bas-relief carvings, which has everything from dancing nymphs to cockfights!

You can take an elephant ride to visit the Bayon temple!

Bayon temple Southern entrance

Dancing apsaras

A devada, heavenly nymph

The towers with the strange faces

A close-up of one of the faces

Andrée, Yvon and François exploring the temple (they are too tall to enter the next room haha)

More dancing apsaras

Bayon temple from the East

Angkor Wat – Built: Early 12^th century – Religion: Hinduism
Angkor Wat is visually, architecturally, and artistically a masterpiece. It is also the best preserved temple in Angkor, and one of the largest religious structures in the world! Its three towers, which are made to look like lotus flowers, rise up to 65 meters from the ground! It is again a temple-mountain, dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu. It has also served as a state temple, but some speculate it was a funerary temple/tomb due to it facing westward…

François and Yvon at the entrance gate

After crossing the gate, on the way to Angkor Wat. Notice the epically spectacular blue cow-pattern outfit the Chinese woman on the left is wearing!!

Some of the beautiful carvings inside Angkor Wat. This one describes a battle.

Top pillar representing Mt Manu

Spectacular view of the entrance of Angkor Wat from the top

Devadas

Inside Angkor Wat walls at the sunset

Angkor Wat reflecting on one of its pools, by sunset!!

Banteay Samre – Built: Mid 12^th century – Religion: Hindu (Vishnu)
Banteay Samre was built around the same time as Angkor Wat, using the same architectural style… but of course, it is nowhere as big. The carvings are still in good condition, but the temple has been looted quite alot in the last few decades.

Benteay Samre building

An amusing worshipping of (what remains of) Buddha’s feet

Inside one of the wings

Ta Prohm – Built: 1186 – Religion: Buddhist
Although all the other temples are really cool, this is by far my favourite one. Surrounded by the jungle, which has merged itself into the temple – leaving it as decaying ruins, Ta Prohm makes you feel like you are almost the first one discovering it. It is a really other-worldly experience to walk in there. It surprisingly still had some killer carvings as well! My expectations were largely surpassed.

The Entrance of Ta Prohm

A friendly Buddhist monk that was hanging out on the premises! He let me take his photo, and gave me such a friendly smile!!

Using all my strength to keep the temple walls up!!

The entrance to one of the corridors

A tree taking over a wall

A tower

The “crocodile” tree in Ta Prohm. Don’t ask me why they call it that!!

Total ruins with devada nymphs

The coolest mix of nature overtaking human work... this right here is a silk-cotton tree on top of another tree, and covering picturesquely an obscure doorway...

More killer ruins!

DEATHCRUSHED!

Exiting Ta Prohm

Preah Khan – Built: 1191 – Religion: Buddhist
Quite similar to Ta Prohm in both architectural and nature crushing ways, Preah Khan (meaning Sacred Sword) was once dedicated to 515 (!) divinities. It has many tiny corridors and dark secret passages…

A tree taking over the East wall of the temple

A spider that was hanging out in the temple (doesn’t it look strange?

An outside “library” or mini-temple on the promises

Inside Preah Khan, looking out

Sexy Apsara dancers

More killer trees, arghhhh!!

What I like about the whole Ankhor complex of temples is that, contrary to Macchu Picchu where only the rich can visit it, every Cambodgian citizen is allowed to enter for free. Unfortunately, at the same time, it attacts many annoying sellers to the sites… often, the sellers are even four years old! It makes it very hard to access and leave a site, as they surround you and try to sell you ugly souvenirs with a really high-pitched tone… and most of the time I just ran away haha! Of course, we are on their territory so we have to deal with it.

We also had some superb Khmer meals so far, my favourite being the neverending coconut curries. You can never go wrong with them! They are so good!!

Pumpkin curry. Yum!

“Tropical” stirfried chicken with rice

Beside the temples, we also visited something totally unusual; Kompong Phluk – a century-old Khmer village located in a flooded forest. In fact, the houses are built on 6-meter high support piers, on top of the Tonle Sap Lake – who’s water level changes every season. For most of the year, the lake is fairly small (one meter deep/2,700 square km wide). During the rainy season, however, water is pushed up into the lake, increasing its area to nine meters deep/16,000 square km wide, flooding nearby fields and forests. Right now, the water level was still very high, so you barely saw the mangrove forest, and there was less than a meter left before the water reached the houses! It looked really cool, almost like the entire village was floating! And you ask, why go through so much trouble building a village that gets flooded every year? The Tonle Sap lake is the largest freshwater lake in South East Asia, and provides 75% of Cambodia’s annual inland fish/seafood catch. Building your village right in the middle of it makes fishing much easier! But soon, the waters will go back to normal. Kompong Phluk will see the ground and its residents will have to climb ladders six meters high to enter their homes (!!)… for now, everyone is enjoying the water; especially children (who are butt naked half the time!!)…

The boat we rode on the lake to get to the village. It had to sail around 30 minutes before reaching Kompong Phluk!

The main “road” of the village! Notice the temple at the very back...

Everyone is naked here haha, kids are either sailing or swimming, plunging directly from their porches. They might not have the best living conditions, but I’ve rarely seen such a happy community...

Some "floating" houses

Daily life!

Such a peaceful town...

The flooded mangrove forest

There are some restaurants, a school – and even a monastery in the village!!

The huge monastery!

The school, which seemed to be only for girls?

It was quite a refreshing experience… the people there were so friendly, I couldn’t believe it. I felt a bit voyeur to enter their daily life, but they seemed used to it – and everyone would smile!!!

We then had to leave Siem Reap and reach Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital… we have been there for a few days already, and are going to Sihanookville already, but I will leave these for a later post. In the meantime, here are some street food that was sold in between Siem Reap and Phnom Penh – where the buses would stop for pee breaks!

Some steamed buns, which tasted exactly like Vietnamese Banh Bao’s.

Inside of the buns! You can find pork, onions, ¼ egg, sausage, etc... sooo good!

Myself with some GIGANTIC pomelo’s!

Peeled pomelo. The skin is half an inch thick!

A beautiful cockroach salad... just kidding, don't know what kind of insect this is haha

And to my mother’s disgust (haha, sorry mom!), I tried a local specialty… fried tarantula! These babies, who are the size of a human palm and hairy as hell, are bred in holes or foraged for in nearby forestland, marinated in chili and garlic then fried in oil. It is not clear how this practice started, but some have suggested that the population might have started eating spiders out of desperation during the years of Khmer Rouge rule, when food was in short supply. I was kind of put off at first, but tried eating its legs and found that they were good and crunchy! Kind of like crunchy chicken wings, you know? You don’t eat the body though, as it is either full of eggs or excrement.

The spiders in their spider bowl

Eating a spider!

OK, that’s it for now! Tomorrow we are leaving for a nice week on the beach. We got to relax sometimes hehe!

2 Comments | posted in Cambodia

November 15, 2011

Fire in the Sky

By intothevoid

Leaving Sa Pa, we were on to embark on one hell of a hard ride to Luang Prabang, Laos. The first day was okay; we took a small nauseating van to Diem Phen Phu (last big Vietnamese city before the border). We drove for 6 hours, and stayed there for the night – experiencing our first mosquito nets!

Myself in my mosquito netted bed. Gotta get protected from those evil malaria mosquitos!

The next day turned out to be quite an adventure; we were about 40 people stuffed in a 25 people bus, riding for 8-9 hours. There were people everywhere; in between the seats, standing up… it was crazy! Luckily we had seats so we were quite comfortable. After an hour or so, we arrived at the Laos border station and had to get our visa, which took a good three hours! They were checking our temperature to make sure we weren’t sick, and then they gave us our passports back.

Tons of people stuffed inside the bus

The border station. It’s actually very new – it’s only been opened for about 3 years!

There were about 10 Czechs in the bus, and one of them had a small ukulele guitar. They started singing traditional Czech drinking songs, and took out some alcohol bottles from their bags (first – Vietnamese vodka, and then Lao Lao – 50% Laotian moonshine!) There was a Russian professional singer also, who sang some really creepy traditional Russian songs after drinking some of that vodka. Anyway, it turned out to be quite the party bus!

Czech guy playing his guitar

At one point during the trip, we had to get off the bus so it could cross a small river. On our side, we had to cross on a suspended bridge:

The small suspended bridge. François’ mother was quite scared about that one haha

Finally, we arrived in mid-afternoon in our first Laos village, Muang Ngoi. But first, to get there, we had to get off the bus (again!) and take some kind of tiny wooden embarkation to the other side:

The tiny boat thing we had to go on to cross the river. We had to take out our shoes or we’d get wet!

The village of Muang Ngoi, located on the side of the river and in the middle of palm trees, was really beautiful and peaceful. We were stunned at how nice people were; everyone was saying “sabai deeee!” (hello!) or just giving us huge smiles. It felt good to be so well received! I took a tiny nap, and then we went out for our first real meal in Laos…

Laap, some kind of really killer “meat salad” with lime juice, garlic, onions and coriander. It’s actually quite similar to ceviche, except that it is made with cooked meat.

Typical Lao food is almost always served with a hearty serving of sticky rice, found in a bamboo basket. You traditionally eat it using your hands, making small balls and sticking them in your mouth! I love eating with my hands, so I was happy haha

The lights went off at 9PM, and then we returned to our hotel walking in tiny dark streets, using candlelight. What a killer day!!!!

The following day, we had to take the bus AGAIN, to get to Luang Prabang. In fact, we took two different buses; the first one stopped in Udomxai, and went very fast, so we took a second one to Luang Prabang (which was supposed to take 4 hours) Unfortunately, this second bus broke down and we had to wait for a new one on the side of the street, for two or three hours – until night came, really. We were with another group of Czech people, and they had a bottle of Slivovice! (Very strong home-made prune alcohol from the Czech Republic). So I drank with them and we all enjoyed the “forced” break.

Our broken down bus, and the group of Czech girls! Always ready for partying!

The bus ticket, arghhhh

Some victorious bottles of Beerlao (the national drink, and best beer of SE Asia!), after finally arriving in Luang Prabang

Luang Prabang
November 3^rd

Luang Prabang, the old capital of the country, has a population of approximately 70 000. It is apparently one of the most beautiful in South-East Asia, and I certainly don’t have difficulty believing it! Just imagine a totally green city with almost no cars, exotic golden temples, colourful markets, lazy rivers and most importantly, charming people. I had no idea it was going to be this great!!! Oh yeah, the whole city has been classified UNESCO world heritage since 1995!!

The city has been built beside the Mekong river (an Asian equivalent to India’s Gange or Egypt’s Nile) and is crowned by a tiny mountain called Phu Si. From its 100 meters, you can get a nice view of the whole city – so we climbed it. We couldn’t believe how deserted the streets were! After traveling to so many big cities, it was refreshing to see something like this! We couldn’t even hear a single car honk…

View of Luang Prabang from the Phu Si hill

Top of the mountain temple thing

Buddha’s “foot mark” from the window of a small sanctuary on the top of the mountain

Myself and François on the path leading to the mountain

We visited a monastery, which included a big stone “stupa” (kind of temple) called That Makmo, which was constructed in 1503, as well as a temple and a Buddhist school. I was taking photos of kittens (haha, so metal!) and a curious 18-year old monk started talking to me and François. He was very nice, and asking us tons of questions about our country in close to perfect English… but he got called back into monastery by an elder monk. Hope we didn’t get him into trouble! We didn’t even ask his name…

That Makmo stupa

A tree, under which the monks put mats for meditating (as the monk told us)

A 6-day old kitten eating rice! So cute!

In the evening, we went to visit the famous Night Market – probably the most relaxed market I’ve ever seen. Merchants are either sleeping, or smiling at you! Usually, Asian markets are really stressful!! There was a side street that was dedicated to local cuisine at extremely cheap prices. We found many vegetarian buffets that offered a full plate of food for 1.20$. We ended up eating there four times haha! They also had grilled meats, fish, veggie pastes, sandwiches, fruit shakes and …green papaya salads! That kind of salad was a real discovery for me; it is made with unripe (green) papaya, garlic, cherry tomatoes, olives, raw eggplant, freshly squeezed lime-juice, fermented crab sauce, fish sauce, chillies, salt and peanuts. I had some twice. Apparently, you can find that in Thailand too…!!

A guy making my papaya salad, squeezing all the juices together

Ingredients

Laos green papaya salad!!

Grilled meats at the Luang Prabang night market

Amazingly cheap (1.20$) and tasty vegetarian buffet

One morning, we woke up very early to watch a very typical Laotian ritual; Tak Bat, or food-receiving ceremony. Around 6:30 AM every morning, monks line-up and collect balls of sticky rice or fruits from locals. It is a calm and meditative ceremony, where the monks reaffirm their wishes of poverty, and the Buddhists rise their spiritual merit by giving these respectful donations.

Tak Bat in Luang Prabang

After that, we went to visit the morning market, which is a colourful open-air (mostly) fruit and veg market, where the locals shop:

The morning market

Silk worm seller

Spicy as hell chillies!

And beside the morning market is a really cool monastery, with the coolest staircase I’ve seen so far. It features the “Naga”, a water snake which is supposed to protect the monastery from evil spirits!

The amazing monastery staircase snakes

The monastery itself. So many details!

A flower offering on a golden Buddha statue

Walking around, we saw many cute dogs, as usual. I never get tired of photographing them – I hope you don’t mind my growing obsession hahaha!!!

Main street dogs; Whiteballs, Blacky and Rubber

Puce, a scruffy dog hanging out around our hostel area

Bite, an adorable baby dog that kept on biting my feet, legs and hands

We eventually visited the two biggest attractions, the incredibly rich Royal Palace/Vat Mai monastery as well as the Vat Xien Thong, a monastery dating from the 1500’s.

Photos were forbidden in the Royal Palace, but I can say that the inside was absolutely splendid. The insides were mostly dark red and gold, and some rooms featured beautiful mural paintings. You could also visit more normal rooms, like the living room, dining rooms, kid’s bed room, etc… and see the really killer-looking royal golden snake chariots.

Royal Palace viewed from the Vat Mai monastery

Totally epic golden snake chariots!

But the coolest thing to visit in that area is the sumptuous Vat Mai monastery. Built in 1821, it was actually not destroyed by the Chinese Ho people because they thought it was too beautiful! Its roof has the traditional Luang Prabang 5-level style.

Vat Mai front

Inside Vat Mai... I was totally speechless! The picture is nothing like the original, everything is so detailed and beautiful, it was incredible!

Another view of Vat Mai, from the street. Notice the roof style!

As for Vat Xien Thong, it is a really famous monastery for its classical Laotian architecture. Located near the Mekong river, a good 15 minute walk from the center, it was surprisingly peaceful and of course, as beautiful as always.

687 – The south-facade of Van Xien Thong with the tree of life mosaic
656 – The entrance of the temple
645 – The main golden Buddha. It was so peaceful inside…
676 – Details of the roof! Isn’t it amazing?

There were also many “chapels” and a “garage” temple-thing. One of the chapels contains a rare statue of a reclining Buddha – which dates from the early construction of the site. The “garage” contained many Buddha statues as well as another golden chariot – which is used to carry the funeral urn of the royal family.

The “garage” (doesn’t look like a garage huh??)

Details inside the garage

Details of the royal funeral chariot

Inside the reclining Buddha chapel

To finish our last day in Luang Prabang, we found a nice little terrace with an ancient big furry tree, and downed a few nice relaxing Beerlao’s… we’re going to miss this place and its people!!

Furry tree

Beerlao dark! Kind of tastes like a porter. Very good, but also quite strong!

Vang Vieng
November 8^th

I had read a few years ago about this place, but totally forgot about it. The “cool” thing to do here is rent a tube and float down the river, while getting loaded in river-side bars on plastic buckets filled with booze – or take some “magic/happy shakes”, drinks made with weed, magic mushrooms or even opium! On top of that, these bars often have sketchy slides or tires which you can use to jump in the water… all of those things together make a lethal mix, and turned Vang Vieng into SE Asia’s most dangerous backpacker destination! To be honest, I was only interested in the scenery, so we relaxed and drank beer beside the river and mountains. The rest of the village is a tourist ghetto nightmare… it’s filled with restaurants playing either “Friends” or “Family Guy”, karaoke bars and gift shops, and the city is populated by drunken frat boys and girls… so you understand why I stayed at my beautiful spot:

We slept in one of those bungalows... so amazing

6:30 in the morning mountain scenery

4:30 PM scenery

5:00 PM scenery

Sunset scenery

We still had to feed ourselves though, so I had some soup in a restaurants that didn’t play “Friends”:

Tom Yum soup or something. It was ok, it tasted like citronella with lots of ginger.

The receipt! I love Laos script. Doesn’t it look like a script from outer space?

And now, I am in the bus going to Vientiane, which is a few hours from Vang Vieng. There is apparently the biggest festival going on in Laos at the moment… can’t wait to see it!

Vientiane
November 10^th

Formed in the 1000’s, then almost completely destroyed by the Siamese in 1828, Vientiane is now Laos’ capital and biggest city, with a population of 210,000 in the city itself. It does feel much more modern than any other city we’ve visited in Laos, but it still has very low traffic compared to other cities in the world.

We arrived in mid-afternoon, and learned that our festival was going on at 8PM. Boun That Luang is a Lao Buddhist celebration, and is the largest national holiday in Laos. Government offices and school closes so that everyone can enjoy the fest. Located at the Pha That Luang monastery, it is always held around the three-layered golden stupa called That Luang. Apparently, it contains Buddah’s hair and bosom bone, and it is profoundly revered by all Lao people…

The festival usually lasts three days, starting with a wax castle procession and ending with a procession around the stupa. We only saw the last day celebration – which was quite enough… there were thousands of monks and perhaps 100 000 pilgrams (or more!!) that came from all over the country to celebrate. The people offered banana leaves covered with flowers, bouquets of flowers with candles, incense, etc… and at the end, the monks blew fireworks – symbolizing an offering of flowers of light to Buddha. There was also music, street food sellers, and all sorts of merchants everywhere…

793 – The That Luang golden stupa, Lao’s symbol, with “flowers of light”

Thousands of pilgrims from all over Lao

826 – Offerings

Tons of offerings!

A mini temple with incense all around it

Monks in front of one of the site’s huge temples

We didn’t do that much in Vientiane, beside visiting a few museums, monasteries and of course, trying out some local food. We got to visit Wat Si Saket, the oldest standing temple in Vientiane, which was really cool… the temple itself was surrounded by thousands of Buddha statues… some with chopped heads from wars, others in tiny niches… it had quite an atmosphere:

A strange view of Wat Si Saket – it was kind of hard to photograph!

Some of the buddhas around the temple

Decapitated buddhas!

Another one we did was Haw Pha Kaeo, which was first built in 1595 to hold the magical emerald Buddha (who got taken away by the Siamese in the 1700’s). The temple got destroyed, and got rebuilt by the French with a “Bangkok” style architecture. The inside was actually some sort of “holy art” museum, but it was quite ok… the best was the sculptures as well as the Buddha statues:

Haw Pha Kaeo

François, myself and two young Buddhist monks... notice the totally kickass "Naga" staircase on the right

A very beautiful bronze Buddha with a “calling for rain” pose

An old stone with ancient lao writing

As for Vientiane food, we tried some fried meatballs – which were ok tasting, as well as a killer Laos-style fondue!!! The fondue was killer, and was done directly at our table… at the end, all the veggies and meat made an amazing broth, which you ate, mixed with rice noodles!

Laos fondue

Fried meatballs. Or at least it said that on the menu!

We also visited some kind of arch of triumph, which was built using cement given by the United States. Apparently, the US gave them the cement to build an airport, but they built that instead hahaha

The Vientiane arch of triumph

Around the arch, I saw a monk on a bike, which I found a bit amusing. Notice how everyone wears a helmet but him… perhaps he is under Buddha’s protection!!!

Monk on a bike!

So our trip to Laos is now done… we will miss this country and its people! We seriously loved our stay here. But now, we must depart for Cambodia and see many more amazing things….

Onward to Siem Reap!

1 Comment | posted in Laos

October 31, 2011

Unleashed in the East

By intothevoid

Hanoi
We met François’ parents at the Hanoi airport around midnight on October 24th. They haven’t slept for two days – flying all the way from Montreal… but everything went very well for them. We went straight to our hotel, where we slept like babies.

Phở (Vietnamese soup) for breakfast at our hotel!

Located in the North of Vietnam and with approximately a population 6.5 million heads, Hanoi is the capital city. We stayed in the old town, which is quite famous for having tiny streets with merchants and specializing in a particular trade, such as silk, jewels, lanterns…

The bamboo street!

The flower street

A stall at the local market... which I admit is more than a street haha! I love how chickens are walking around freely.

A backstreet, located in old Hanoi

We have been fans of Vietnamese food for years, and we couldn’t wait to try it in Vietnam. To be honest, what we ate so far in Hanoi was ok, but not as good as the small Vietnamese restaurant that was close to our home in Montreal. Perhaps it’s because the quality of the meat was better in Montreal, or maybe I didn’t eat the right things, but I was expecting total mouth orgasms. Nevertheless, we still ate some good food, which had included tons of veggies!!

Fried spring rolls, which were to be dipped in fish sauce

Fresh spring rolls with beef

Stir-fried chicken with cashews

5-color beef stir fry with rice and veggies. The beef was really hard and chewy! Snif!

Tamarind chicken plate with some imperial rolls. Ok, this was yummy – it was from a culinary school restaurant, but in a tiny portion.

A very good chicken soup

Deep fried glutinous rice balls stuffed with beans. Good stuff.

Ha Noi Bia!

The menu lists were also hilarious, way worst than in China or even Japan!!! I also saw some pretty wild things, like rooster nuts, pigeon, dog (I actually saw one roasted, but I couldn’t take a photo of it…), snake, turtle, etc…

Cock testicles! Who wants steamed cock testicles with eggs? Hahaha! Look up... they even have a mullet section.

This really nasty and dirty menu was the worst I’ve ever ever seen. You can order "pleased me fried melon prices", "restoration workshop with garlic", "discharge eel try peppers", “absinth fried omelette” and some "dandruff beef hot pot"!!

Oh yeah, and “real estate fried pepper discharge” was pretty winner too.

The old part of the city was quite chaotic… I never saw anything that bad, even in South America. There are always an endless stream of Vietnamese motorcyclists and no traffic lights. I was a bit baffled at first, but I quickly learned that the only way to cross the street was to walk slowly and let the motorcycles drive around you. It was insane!

Nighttime traffic.

Daytime traffic with a very chaotic and messy electric line system

Our hotel was located near Hoàn Kiếm, a lake right in the center of the city. In the very morning, tons of people would go around the lake and do exercise… some with funny dance Vietnamese music, others were doing taichi.

A dude doing some exercise on one of the lake’s many trees

The lake’s famous bridge leading to a temple. Photo taken at dusk!

Together with Yvon and Andrée (François’ parents), we visited the Temple of Literature. It houses the Imperial Academy, the oldest university in Vietnam, built in 1076. It had many different courtyards, and was quite different from any other temples we have visited so far in Asia! The temple itself was dedicated to the memory of Confucius, and the sages and philosophers of Confucianism.

The entrance gate with a big bell... perhaps to call the students from their smoke break?

First courtyard. There were many Vietnamese tourists that day.

Myself, François and Andrée (his mom) in front of a bell in one of the courtyards

A strange decoration... mother monster and her baby monsters

The great Confucius!

Myself with a Vietnamese girl dressed traditionally! She actually asked ME to take a picture with her, because she said I looked “cute”? With butch army pants and a big tattoo? Haha

François with his father, Yvon. The tree they were standing in front was really big and cool looking!

There was a traditional band playing folk songs inside the temple itself. They had some fascinating bamboo instruments which made quite interesting sounds. The music vaguely reminded me of traditional Peruvian music. Here is a song featuring a musician “clapping” her hands to make sounds through a bamboo instrument!

After visiting that temple, we walked around Hanoi, and stumbled in front of the Hochi Minh mausoleum… it apparently houses his mummy, which is very popular with Vietnamese people.

Hochi Minh mausoleum

Walking around, we saw a bunch of – I think – graduated students posing in a park. They were all wearing colourful traditional Vietnamese costumes, so I took a photo of them:

Trad viet chicks

We also saw an ancient cathedral, built by the French people when they occupied Vietnam. It looked really cool because it seemed abandoned!

The Hanoi cathedral

To finish our visit in Hanoi, we did a quick stop to the One Pillar Pagoda, one of Vietnam’s most iconic temples. Built in 1049, the temple is built of wood on a single stone pillar 1.25 m in diameter, and is designed to resemble a lotus blossom (a Buddhist symbol of purity, since a lotus blossoms in a muddy pond). It was a bit small and underwhelming, but it was still very different from anything else we’ve seen in Asia!

The One Pillar Pagoda

Hanoi was a nice city – but much more chaotic than what we were used to so far in Asia. The people are quite nice, but very business (mostly in the old centre) – but that is to be expected. We mostly enjoyed the quiet places, but it was a really cool place nonetheless!!

Halong Bay
I have seen pictures of Halong bay a long time ago, and have since wanted to visit it… this mystical place, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is located about 3 hours north of Hanoi. The limestone in this bay have undergone 500 million of formation in different conditions and environment changes, and have formed some sort of strange pointy mountains called “karst” which are surrounded by the sea of China. Apparently, people already lived there 10 000 years ago… I don’t blame them, this place is paradise.

We spent 1 night on a boat, and had perfect weather the whole time. The trip included tons of yummy food and sport activities!

Halong Bay - this boat looked quite similar to ours.

Our boat! Our room was located at the bottom right

Our lives were in the feet of the captain!

Food on board the boat - fried rice paper rolls!

Food on board - calmar stir fry

Omelette

A really spiky local fish dish. It was very juicy but perhaps a bit too flavoured with anis

Driving around in the beautiful aqua-colored Halong bay

Never in my life did I think I would be kayaking and swimming in the waters of this beautiful sea… but we did it! The water was warm and very clear. We could sometimes see blue fishes swimming around!

Exploring Halong bay by kayak

Probably the most epic swim of my life

Relaxing after the swim with a nice cold beer

We also visited a cave, formed many thousands of years ago. It was pretty cool, but the view from the entrance of the cave was even better!

The view from the cave entrance

Inside the cave...

A cornerstore on boat

And so, we returned to our boat, had diner and enjoyed the evening sky. The surrounded area was like a dream – we were surrounded by mountains and other boats, and floating on a clear sea…

A nighttime view from our boat

The boats made me think of chinese lanterns floating on water...

Our beds! The room was made of dark polished wood, and was actually nicer than 90% of the hotels we sleep in!

The beautiful morning sky on Halong bay

After this incredible scenery, we returned to Hanoi and then took a night train to Sa Pa, a mountain village located 9 hours away in the North of Vietnam. The ride was very easy, much better than the hard sleepers in China… although François’ father did not rest at all.

The Hanoi train station! Our train looked like the ones you see on the right

François and myself drinking mint tea in the train on the way to Sa Pa

Sa Pa
We arrived to Sa Pa in the small hours of the morning… but the view from our hotel room was totally worth it. I mean, look at this! It was incredible!

The magnificient view of a chain of mountains from our hotel balcony

As you could see on the above photo, Sa Pa is located at the base of the highest peak in the country, Fansipan, which is 3143 meters high. Sa Pa is a quiet mountain town and home to a great diversity of ethnic minority peoples. The total population of 36,000 consists mostly of minority groups (Hmong, Dao, Tay and Giay). The mountainside is also home to rice terraces, which gives the landscapes a very ancient look.

We trekked right away to a nearby Hmong village (Cat Cat village), which had some of the most stunning mountain sceneries I’ve ever seen. It felt like in a dream… and it kind of reminded me of our mystical trails in highland Peru!

On the way to Cat Cat Hmong village

A dream house, sitting in absolutely beautiful mountains

The continuous descending path to Cat Cat village

Rice teraces and mountains... arghhh

We many Hmong people (who make beautiful handicrafts) and kids…

Hmong grandmother washing her kids

Beautiful handmade handicrafts

…and many many animals.

An old looking dog with a beautiful mountain view

The cutest little VIetnamese pig sleeping next to his mama

An adorable mountain baby chicken (look in the middle of the photo! SO CUTE)

Another dog! Unfortunately, I think this is the species Vietnamese people eat...

The next day was very sunny, so we took advantage of it by washing our clothes, and hanging them on our beautiful balcony:

Our clothes drying on our balcony in Sa Pa, Vietnam

We hired a guide, who would take us to three small villages (which I don’t remember the names)… along the way, we saw other breath-taking landscapes, as well as minority people from different groups:

François and his mother, Andrée, walking down a path leading to small villages..

The amazing scenery along the way!! Absolutely mind blowing incredible!

A Red Dao minority woman

Some village houses

Black Hmong women

More Black Hmong people

Crossing a bridge

A very young ethnic minority girl

Some more rice teraces... apparently, this ancestral way of growing rice is very very very difficult! Most people living in this area are actually auto-sufficient, but sometimes the crops don't yield enough food for the peasants...

Such a quiet spot... I wish I lived in one of those houses...

While walking, I saw a strange insect that was about 1.5 inches big. It had kind of toilet cleaning antennas… really weird!

Toilet cleaning VOIVOD insect

So now, I need to go and get rest in order to be in shape. Tomorrow, we’re leaving very early (after a breakfasting on Vietnamese soup) to our long journey in crossing the border to Laos… it will take us about 10 hours to arrive to our next city, but we will be driving only 100 km. Why? The roads are surrounding the mountains… I certainly hope we won’t be taking the one in the center of this picture:

Crazy mountains and roads leading to them...

Our crossing to Laos should take us three days. Wish us luck!!

3 Comments | posted in Vietnam

October 25, 2011

Balls to the (Great) Wall

By intothevoid

We are back! As we couldn’t access our blog from China, we decided to write pretty much only the highlights, dates included. Enjoy!!

BEIJING
September 25^th

To get to Beijing from Seoul, we had to first fly to Shanghai, and then take a transfer to Beijing. I was a bit worried to travel to these airports as all I know in Chinese is “nihao” (hello!) but luckily most of the important staff spoke basic English. We arrived at the Shanghai airport in the late morning, and waited 3 hours there before the second departure. The airport was beautiful, and the waiting area had some sort of “fake sky” look:

François in the Shanghai airport.

The flight took 3 hours, but we had a guy behind us coughing and then clearing his throat of mucus VERY LOUDLY every 5 minutes. It made me shiver every time! But I have to get used to it, because it’s a common thing here. I should have recorded it though, it was quite spectacular. Anyway, about 15 minutes before we arrived in Beijing, we looked outside our window, and saw the city… and its immense cloud of pollution. I have read that Beijing was one of the most polluted city in the world, but I had no idea it was going to be that visible! Wow!

About to land in Beijing city

For the second time in our trip, we had a friend waiting for us at the airport. Wang, a Chinese metal head and record shop/label owner whom we’ve met several times in Canada (his doom metal wife, Kayla, studies at the University of Montreal), offered to be our host in Beijing.

Wang and myself at the Beijing airport.

Wang brought us to his wife’s unused apartment in Beijing, where he told us to be like at home. Wow! A real place of our own? After months and months of traveling, to have a real place to ourselves was a dream come true. Thanks Wang and Kayla!! So yeah, as we were hungry as hell, Wang immediately brought us to our first Chinese feast. We went to a Xinjiang (region of China that had had a lot of Turkish immigrants in the past) restaurant and had some absolutely amazing braised lamb and chicken skewers:

Killer skewers. They were covered in spices, Portuguese chicken style.

We also tasted a strange curiosity, century eggs! They are preserved eggs that went through a chemical process… the egg white becomes hard cola-coloured gelatine, and the yellow becomes greenish-black. They still tasted like eggs though, which is the weird thing! They were served on very soft tofu, and covered in salt. They have a light ammonia smell… (kind of smelled like pee):

Century eggs on tofu. Evil looking but really good stuff.

We later saw what century eggs looked like before cracking the shells:

Un-cracked century eggs

We started our intense sight-seeing the next day, but we had to have a big breakfast before leaving. We thus had some really yummy stuffed steamed dumplings with different flavours; pork, spinach and sea weed – a typical breakfast meal around here:

The steamed dumplings! I totally forgot to take the thing on the left as well – it was an intestine and liver stew in thick brown sauce. Not my thing, especially not for breakfast haha

We then headed for the famous Forbidden City (Ming Dynasty – 1368-1644); the very center of Beijing that was forbidden to anyone except the Emperor, the Emperor’s 70-something wives and the chopped-penis/emasculated workers. Of course, high officials had to enter from time to time to talk to the Emperor about war problems or other city-related subjects, but it was quite rare as the emperor didn’t want to see too many people every day.

François, myself and Wang in front of the Forbidden City gate (and Chairman Mao’s face).

We then entered the gates, and ventured into what was one of the most mysterious parts of Beijing. The Forbidden City includes the palace, the resting places of the Emperor and its wives/concubines, the workers rooms as well as a small garden

Entering the majestic Forbidden City

The palace details were quite similar to what we had seen in Seoul, except that it had more golden dragons.

The royal palace details.

Some beautiful ceramic flower details on the side of a house in the Forbidden City

The architecture was really amazing, and the pollution/fog gave it an absolutely gorgeous mystical look:

The imperial court

In the garden, they had some very strange things like an artificial hill constructed out of eroded rocks (taken from a nearby lake):

A weird hill called something like “the hill of escalated elegance”, where the Emperor would stroll with his wife or concubines.

After this, we went on one of the most famous ancient shopping streets, which has shops that are 100+ years old. There, we experienced a strange sunset with a supernatural sun!

Shopping street in Beijing

September 26^th
Today we visited Yong He Gong, the Lama Temple. Built during the Qing (Manchu) dynasty (1644 – 1911), this temple was the home of the only official recognized Lama (leader of Tibetan Buddhism/Yellow Sect Lamaism) by the Chinese empire. Or something like that. The place was very colourful and there were many people burning fragrant incense to honour Buddha.

A huge bell

Big belly Buddha, with fruit offerings. People in front were kneeling, praying and burning incense.

An esoteric deity. Notice the little leg he’s holding in one of his many right hands!

One of the beautiful halls

Myself and a rolling prayer tablet

People heavily burning incense

In the Wanfu hall, there is a 26 meter high/3 meter diameter statue of the deity Maitreya, which was sculpted from a single piece of sandalwood. It was impressive, I’ve never seen such a big sculpture in my life! It was 3 or 4 stories tall!

Wanfu hall

The crazy tall statue of Maitreya, painted in gold

There were a few museums on site, displaying impressive Qing Dynasty imperial court items and Lamaism ritual statues and objects. One of them had a skull cup, made from an actual human skull…

Skull cup. Sorry for the image, it’s quite blurry... I had to take the picture quickly!

And then we had a dumpling soup for lunch, which was like 75 cents:

Pork dumpling soup! The dumplings tasted very similar to what you could find in won ton soup.

September 27^th
ROADTRIP DAY! Wang drove us to the Great Wall of China (Badaling section), which was used as a military defence system built over 2000 years ago over the majestic mountains of North and Northwest China. At places with broad views, towers have been erected near the wall to send signals – which would be received quickly in case of an invasion. Of course, it has been re-enforced many times, but the original structure remained the same. In total, it is 8000 km long!

Great wall of China around 9AM in the morning (notice how there are barely anyone there yet!)

As you can drink publicly in China, we brought some cold beers to enjoy on one of the most mystical human-made places in the world hehe

Myself and François drinking delicious Chinese beers on top of the wall!

The scenery around us; beautiful Northern Chinese mountains

Myself at one of the tower windows. The soldiers used to be parked here, day and night, winter and summer, and watched the distance to see possible invaders.

Sometimes the stairs were very very steep, or there would be no stairs at all – just slippery bricks. It was quite challenging at parts, and the day after I totally felt my calves had heavily worked out.

One of the steepest parts of the wall

Myself and Wang

Another beautiful scenery. Notice the little François on the bottom right!

And finally, we ended our day with some Kung Pao chicken (sweet and spicy chicken with peanuts and leeks). Yummy!

Kung Pao chicken

September 28^th
Today, we finally went to visit “666 Rock Shop”, owned by Wang. They are the only shop in China selling metal, and I was surprised to see the insane quality of the records you could find there! From extreme metal to doom, death, NWOBHM and thrash metal – everything is there. The selection is breath taking – it’s like going through a really killer online distro, but it’s an actual store! Of course, if you compare them to Japanese record shops, 666 Rock Shop is quite small, but its great selection makes up for it. I found some out of print South American CD’s there for really cheap, but had to pass on many other kickass releases (will buy them later on when we travel to Europe). Here are some pictures of this small but kickass shop:

Outside sign

Inside the store

I have been told that one of the most popular items there was my very own cookbook… they have sold around 20 copies of it! Incredible!

Afterwards, we went to another Xinjiang restaurant along with 10 other headbangers to have a long Chinese food and Chinese beer feast. We ate and drank for 6 hours! I love Asia so far, so many intense culinary adventures!!! We had some kind of Xinjiang lamb pizza, some pork with thin tofu sheets that use to wrap the pork in (making some kind of tofu tacos), century eggs, and many many skewers.

Our feast table!

They would impale and roast everything; mushrooms, bugs, lamb, lamb cartilage, garlic and bread!

Dawn, an Englishwoman working in China eating a Lovecraftian mushroom skewer

Bug skewer

It was really killer… we were blasting metal at the table and nobody seemed to mind!! Welcome to China!!

Our table at the end of the night!!!!!

October 30^th
The Summer Palace is what we visited today. Located a bit outside Beijing, but still easily reachable by subway, it is a huuuuge place with temples, palace rooms, gardens, islands, bridges and a lake. It was really pretty, but at the same time extremely touristic… pretty much every building inside was transformed into a restaurant/snack bar/souvenir shop, and if you had to pay extra if you wanted to visit more interesting things. We still walked around quite a bit though, as the place is absolutely gigantic!

Suzhou “street”, which is actually some kind of river bordered by small houses

The main structures of the Summer Palace, viewed from the lake shore

Around there, we found some street vendors selling questionable food:

More bug skewers; cicada and baby scorpion skewers!!! Arghhh!!!!!

October 1^st
Today is the first day of the Chinese National Holiday week. It is therefore the wrong time to do any sort of sightseeing in the city. The places are filled up with Chinese people, and it is a nightmare walking around! So, we decided to go where the normal tourists wouldn’t go; a metal gig! We went to the first day of the “National Holiday Metal Fest”, which featured about 5 or 6 local bands. It has to be one of the weirdest gigs I’ve been to. The inside of the venue was covered with mirrors and feathers, and they were serving hot beer in paper cups!!!!

The venue

The girl’s bathroom. It looks like a whorehouse or something

Male bathroom! You can literally piss on Geiger’s artwork!

The bands themselves unfortunately ranged from mediocre to vomit-inducing. We pretty much came to see “Raging Mob” which was supposed to feature ASSASSIN’s Robert on vocals (he now lives in Beijing!) but he had quit the band on the same day. The band sounded like modern thrash… it was mediocre, but at least we could listen to it. The other bands of the night were just terrible – there were some melodic metal, some metalcore and some rap metal. Another band featured a keyboardist and a cute female singer… I was expecting some vocals à la Nightwish, but she was actually growling like a man! She added many effects to her voice, and some parts actually made me think of Vincent Crowley (Acheron)’s vocals, but the rest was pure crap. At least it was entertaining! Wang told me NOT to think of this concert as a good representation of Beijing’s metal scene hahaha

Raging Mob

The band with the big balls chick singer

October 2^nd
Our last day in Beijing! We ate all day (literally), and packed our bags as we are taking a night train to Shanghai. A few days ago, I had asked Wang if we could have Dim Sum for breakfast. Dim Sum are some sort of Chinese tapas; tiny meals carried around by people with carts in the restaurants. I had some a long time ago in Ottawa’s Chinatown with a Chinese friend of mine (hello Kevin!), and I wanted to repeat the experience in China. Wang explained me that Dim Sum was typical food from Hong Kong, but we could still find some in Beijing, so we went to a nearby restaurant. We ordered many many things, and it turned out to be quite a feast!

BBQ pork and glutinous rice wrapped in lotus leaf. These reminded me a lot of tamales!

Steamed pork buns with a crunchy sesame base

My favourite of the meal; bbq pork and chives in a rice wrap

Steamed shrimp dumplings, and at the back, sweet chestnut pancakes (some sort of blend between a French toast and a chestnut pudding!)

In the afternoon, myself and Wang walked around in a market and stopped at a fancy cafe:

Ginger and flower tea

Hong Kong style sweet; mango packages! The inside was whipped cream and a real piece of juicy mango. The outside was fondant. Yummy!

And then, to finish our trip to Beijing on a perfect note, we went to a local restaurant to eat the famous Beijing Roast Duck! As an entrée, we ate pork and coriander meatballs, and then came the duck. The whole duck was only 10$… a steal!

Meatballs!

Beijing Roast duck plate. They leave the skin on the duck, so when you bite into it, it melts in your mouth. It’s very greasy, but it’s to die for!!! You have to dip the pieces in oyster sauce (black sauce seen on picture), put them on one of those pancake/tortillas, add a piece of cucumber, a piece of green onion, wrap it up and then pop it in your mouth. The flavours were so amazing! I am craving it RIGHT at this moment hahaha

After this, Wang took us to the Railway Station, and left us at the last gate.

Beijing Railway Station! Located in the center of the city, it is one of the most beautiful train stations I’ve seen – both inside and outside.

François in front of the train! This is one of the new bullet trains, but as we took it in the night, it only rolled at 150 km/h. We saved 3 hours off the normal 14-hour train ride though!

Our first experience in Beijing and China was really great, especially thanks to Wang! He made us feel at home in such a foreign land, and we really appreciated everything he did for us!!! Thank you Wang, we shall never forget our absolutely epic week with you!!!

So now, we are heading to Shanghai… one of the biggest cities of the world!

SHANGHAI
October 4^th
We arrived quite early in the morning on the 3^rd, and pretty much rested the whole day as we didn’t sleep too well on the train (it was just normal seats, and they weren’t very comfortable). On the 4^th, we started doing some sightseeing, starting with one of the most famous Shanghainese neighbourhoods, The Bund (pronounced “the bunned”). First, I felt like I was walking through New York city or even London, and then BANG! You see buildings that totally seem like they come from space or something! It was the weirdest thing ever. Never thought I’d see something like this in China haha

The Bund, Shanghai. This is the “historic side”

The Bund from Space!

They arranged a scenic pedestrian way beside the main river, so you can walk and appreciate the weird architecture. They were tons of people because of the National Holiday week, but it just made it seem crazier:

The Bund’s pedestrian way full of Chinese tourists

But not everything is totally modern and crazy; walking back home, we stumbled upon some weird neighbourhoods that seemed like ghettos or something! But yeah, I think these are just old houses that were there a long time ago. It was weird to see the contrast between those houses and the surrounding high as hell skyscrapers:

Messy Shanghai neighbourhood

A thing that was hard in Shanghai is that we weren’t with anybody to help us with Chinese language anymore. In Beijing we had Wang, but now we have nobody! Learning Chinese Mandarin is a total nightmare – not only do you need to remember some strange (and sometimes very long) names, but you also have to remember a “melody” (or tone) that goes with the word. So, I tried, but even then… nobody understood me, so I just gave up. Haha. I got a guide book and pointed a pictures, and it seems to work out…

October 5^th
Although it is still the National Holiday week, we couldn’t just sit at home (well, at the hostel) and do nothing, so we decided to visit the Old Town. Easily accessible by subway, we walked around a bit and saw some surprisingly cool buildings!! I believe they are restored, but it still gave a good idea of the local ancient architecture. Unfortunately, it started getting extremely busy and crowded – and fake Rolex/Chanel merchants were pissing me off, so we left pretty fast.

A street in the old town. Everything here is either souvenir shops, tea shops or restaurants.

What was the coolest around the Old Town were the markets. They had an interesting antique market (italics because the antiques are all new items, with an old style) but the best was the …insect and bird market!! That’s right, a whole market dedicated to selling creepy insects and chirpy birds!! It was kind of hard to find, but totally worth it to visit… although I did feel kind of scratchy when I left the place:

Chinese fighting crickets! These things were HUGE!!!!! The size of half a hand!

Insect experts and birds in the background

Insect experts poking insects to see how they react (I have no idea what they intend to do with those!)

Of course, where you find birds, you gotta find things to feed them! They had huge boxes full of those beautiful live maggots things.

We honestly didn’t do too many touristy things in the next week. Shanghai is not a very touristic place, so we ended up with a lot of time on our hands to do other things. We thus mostly worked on organizing European CAUCHEMAR concert dates (we got 6 dates confirmed so far, will announce them in a few weeks!), worked on the tour concept and wrote new material. We found a rehearsal room, which we used for 12 hours! We are very productive and inspired these days, and we got to take advantage of it.

We got to taste some local things – but it was harder this time as our guide, Wang, wasn’t with us! Most of the things we tried ordering in the restaurants were not very good, or just too expensive for the portion size, so we stuck to eating stuffed dumplings, ramen noodles and lunch boxes from the convenient stores (all of these items were also dirt cheap!). We of course did have luck ordering some yummy meals in the restaurants:

BBQ charred catfish (barbotte pour les québecois!), soaked in an extremely delicious sauce of chinese cabbage pickles, caramelized garlic heads and chilis. This was BY FAR the best cooked fish I ever ate. It doesn’t look like anything on this photo, but every bite was like a mouth orgasm! We found this very local restaurant in the French Concession neighbourhood, for 22$. The price was a bit of a surprise, but it was worth it... and it was HUGE!

Chinese snacks and soft drinks are weird, the logos are all translated, and they have very different flavours that what we are used to:

Pepsi and 7-up in a vending machine

Cheese Lobster Lays chips. They actually taste like lobster covered in cheese! We washed those down with a yummy Tsingtao lager.

Another funny Chinese thing, ELLE magazine... for men! Nobody would ever buy this in Canada haha

October 12^th
Today was our out-of-town day. We visited Suzhou, which is only 30 minutes away from Shanghai by bullet train (this time, it went around 300 km/hour). This very old city was once the capital of the kingdom of Wu, from the 12^th to 4^th centuries BC, and its world-renowned gardens have been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997. It is also known as the “Venice of the East”, as 9 east-west canals and 12 north-south canals runs through the city. Suzhou did not stay stuck in its glorious past; they currently have one of the best economies on the globe as the world’s largest single manufacturers of laptop computers. We of course only focused on visiting the historic part haha

We first visited the Humber Administrator’s Garden, which was absolutely huge and really beautiful (but too full of tourists for my taste hehe). We weren’t in season, so the flowers were dead and the plants weren’t that green, but it was still really cool and well arranged. Every angle was absolutely picturesque!

One of the many small bridges crossing water paths

A small area for relaxing or reading classical Chinese poetry (or drinking beer; whatever you’re into)

A door leading to a bamboo garden

A Chinese kitten happily posing for my lens

Myself looking through a weirdly shaped tinted window

Again myself in some sort of weird rock tunnel. The Chinese seem to LOVE those weirdly shaped rocks that they take from the bottom of lakes.

We then walked around in the old town; and found some canals. They are really beautiful, and still in use today! People are using it for boats and other things…

The canal and some boats. On the left of it is a tea house.

We thought it was a great idea to stop for tea near the canal; it was overpriced but the leaves were fresh and the taste amazing!

A local guy boating on the canal. I think I embarrassed him by taking a photo haha

Sadly, the water wasn’t very clean, and in some parts you could see garbage floating or streaks of oil:

Nasty water

Some people didn’t care though, like this woman cleaning her cranberries in the same water!!

I made sure we didn’t eat there hehe

We then went more towards the center, and visited some more things, like the Taoist Temple of Mystery. We thought it had the coolest name ever, and it looked pretty damn cool too (although we didn’t enter):

Suzhou’s Temple of Mystery... shrouded in smoke!

Some Taoist red candles... I think these are meant for asking wishes or something. Some had gold dollar signs painted on them...

We then visited the brick Twin Pagodas, which were built in the Song Dynasty, and are currently standing in the ruins of a temple, surrounded by randomly placed bonsai trees.

Door to the Twin Pagodas

The Twin Pagodas

Beautiful bonsai tree!

Another bonsai tree

One of the CUTEST, most adorable garden decorations I’ve ever seen. Screw garden gnomes, I want one of these in my garden when I’m an old crippled woman!

Walking around the city, we saw many pets, including the following cute little one:

We called this one “Tittie” as she had perky ones. Haha! She was adorable!

Near the end of the afternoon, we went to another very recommended place called The Garden of the Master of the Nets. Originally built in 1140, it is 1/10^th of the size of the one we visited earlier, but it was really well done and much less touristic.

François in the Master of the Nets garden

Another view of the garden. It was very serene!

Walking back to the train station, we passed in front of the North Temple Pagoda, which was 9-stories tall and super impressive!

The North Temple Pagoda and the gate. We didn’t visit it either, only walked in front of it.

So yeah, this day trip was very worth it! We didn’t do too much in Shanghai, but our lone day in Suzhou made up for it!

October 13^th
Today we met up with a friend of mine, Erik, a diehard Swedish headbanger living and working in Shanghai. He explained us many things about Chinese culture, and brought us to one hell of an amazing hot-pot dinner at a restaurant called “Bone King” (How metal is that?) along with his girlfriend and other friends. It was a really cool experience, and we ate for hours until we were completely stuffed!!!!

The started hotpot. You can see here some fried pork balls, tofu, bamboo shots, dried goji berries, chicken and Chinese dates.

These pork bones made the broth, which was absolutely tasty! You could eat the meat from the bones, and suck the yummy bone marrow using a straw.

A side-dish; fried bull frog, lotus roots and French fries! That was absolutely delicious! If you never ate frog – do it at least once... it’s very bony, but it tastes like a mix of chicken and white fish. Very good!

The beautiful plate of desserts. It seems Chinese people eat cherry tomatoes as desserts as well? Anyway, I only had that black, white and pink fruit (don’t remember the name). It was delicious!

October 15^th
Originally, we were only supposed to stay a week and a half here, but a few days ago, Mirai from SIGH wrote me an e-mail telling me they would be playing in Shanghai on the 15^th, as part of an Asian Metal Festival! So of course, we changed our plans and stayed a few days longer. The fest started at two in the afternoon, and I arrived around 2:30… I wasn’t too sure of the exact line-up, but the first few bands were quite terrible unfortunately. I mean, some were good musicians, but they didn’t play my type of metal at all. The first band I saw played some power ballads (with terrible vocals) and a cover of Sid Vicious’s My Way. Second band was a “Black Metal” band with way too many keyboards. People seemed to love them though! I then met up with Mirai, and we went to buy some gas for his pyrotechnics. I also finally met the beautiful Mika (vocals/saxophone), who gave me a killer Gyudon recipe for Hellbent for Cooking! Mirai told me she wanted to try strange Chinese food, so I brought her some delicious chicken feet. She was very happy as she loves cartilage, and had them before in a Chinatown in the states!

Salted chicken feet

Mika said that you are only supposed to eat the “fingers” part

So back to the concert, where we met with Erik and watched some more bands. I am very sorry, but I missed tons of bands and don’t really remember the names of the ones I did see… but the following one was some sort of modern melodic death. The music didn’t really interest me either, but the guitarist’s hair alone was worth watching them! They were some of the longest, and shiniest hair I’ve ever seen – and he was doing crazy windmills the whole time:

Chinese melodic “death” band

We then missed some more bands, due to going outside to drink beer. The beer inside was a outrageously ridiculous 6$ for a small can (even more expensive than in large venues in Canada!) so we happily drank our 75 cents 600 ml beers outside in the street.

A few bands later was Japanese G.S.D., who played some Behemoth-style “Death” metal. The two guitarists and bassists looked like the same person, and really impressed François and me! They were ok.

G.S.D.

After drinking more beer, we came back inside just in time to see the last and headlining band, SIGH! I’ve been a fan for ten years (François, for fifteen!!!), and had regrettably missed them in 2008 when they came to Montreal. When Mirai told me they would come here, we were absolutely stoked!!! On top of it, it’s their first show in China, and a very very rare event in Shanghai. They played for about 40 minutes; a good mix of some old songs and newer ones. I was so excited to hear Hail Horror Hail, followed by The Knell… I just couldn’t believe I was listening to those songs live, yet alone in China!!!! All the guys played exceptionally well, and the home-made pyrotechnics were very cool. It’s rare to see a band with such striking visuals!

Mirai with his fire oni mask

Sinichi, original member and killer guitarist!

A skull, part of their live theatrics

Mika, playing saxophone

Their bassist

Mirai, looking like a total madman

A very bloody Mika!

Mirai with his mystical oni mask

Blowing fire from the devil’s horns!!!

They played the following mind-blowing set:

Prelude to the Oracle
Introitus
Hail Horror Hail
The Knell
The Soul Grave
Death with Dishonor
Shikigami
A Victory of Dakini
Weakness Within
Shingontachikawa
Me-Devil
Inked in Blood
Black Metal

Afterwards, we went to meet the guys in the backstage area, and partied and drank beer together – along with some local Chinese metalheads:

Myself and Erik with the SIGH guys and some Chinese metalheads

We returned “home” at 3AM, totally satisfied and a little bit tipsy hehe. Thanks to Mirai for inviting us at the show and to the SIGH guys for such a killer performance!!! Thanks also to Erik for being such a kickass guy and for telling us about the local culture and metal scene. We’ll miss all of you!

Right at this moment, we are sitting in the sleeper section of a train going from Shanghai to Kunming, in the Yunnan region of China (In the South, in the mountains kind of close to Tibet/Vietnam, home of 24 different ethnic minorities). We are doing the longest travel we have ever done so far; we’ll be traveling 44 hours in total! So far so good, the beds are hard but comfortable (much better than soft beds with springs), and we share a cabin with 4 other Chinese guys. We have access to hot water, so we brought an industrial supply of instant Ramen. Hehe. The countryside is gorgeous with tons of mountains, agricultural terraces (a bit like in old Incan sites!) and old houses built of local material. The train went pretty fast and I couldn’t take too many photos, but I did manage this one:

Beautiful Yunnan mountains

We can’t wait to arrive to Kunming and see a totally different China!

KUNMING
October 17^th

The train ride wasn’t that bad finally, and as we were well prepared, it went by pretty fast! The only bad thing was the 5 different crazy snores of a huge Chinese guy who was sleeping beside me. He eventually had to sleep in a sitting position because he was choking loudly every few minutes! I just put my earplugs and was able to ignore it.

Train food; fried batter on a stick with spicy potatoes, oily veggies, spam, a half cooked egg and rice. It was actually pretty good! This thing cost 3$, which is actually three times the amount it’s supposed to cost in a convenience store.

We arrived in Kunming early in the morning to a surprisingly cold temperature… we were at 2000 meters above sea level! The city itself is way smaller than the other cities we visited, but with the neighbouring suburbs, it still holds 10 000 000 people. Haha! As soon as we arrived, we went to explore the downtown area:

A shopping street with lanterns. Notice how people are dressed! Autumn is coming in Yunnan!

A street with ancient houses that look like they are rotting...

They had a little park with a very green pond and a gazebo thing, full of old people drinking tea and playing cards or Chinese chess.

Kunming park. The roof of this thing was really cool!

Yunnan is the region of China that grows and make Pu Erh tea, my favourite tea in the world. This type of tea is usually packed in sort of round “cakes”, and buried for a number of years until they become fermented. This method was traditionally done for easy transportation to tough regions like Tibet, for example. Some Pu Erh cakes are very valuable, and their value grows year after year – just like wine. We went to some market and had a tasting:

Pu Erh tea tasting! It was absolutely delicious! We bought some Pu Erh afterwards. That stuff is so good and comforting.

In the evening, we treated ourselves to some really comforting braised beef stew with home-made noodles. I don’t know if this is a local dish, but it tasted very North American/Eastern European!

Braised beef noodles

October 18^thWe only had one “full” day in Kunming, so we decided to visit the biggest Bronze temple in China, the Golden Temple, from the Taoist cult. It was located on top of a hill in the north of the city. Before we started our journey, we fuelled up with some comforting rainy-day beef, mushroom and sweet potato noodle soup:

Sweet potato noodles!

We then entered the impressive gates of the Golden Temple, which were HUGE! We then ascended the hill which took perhaps 20 minutes, and reached the Golden Temple.

Golden Temple gates

Golden Temple! These men in front of it were trying to throw coins into the mouth of a stone fish submerged in water. Everyone failed! (I tried too and failed miserably). What seems to be built out of wood is actually pure Bronze! Really impressive!

Details of the staircase. The head is polished because Chinese people rub it for good luck.

Inside of the Temple. The ceiling also had a golden dragon.

The place was surrounded by gardens and parks, and there was also another Taoist temple on the grounds. It seemed to have more worshippers judging by the amount of charms attached and incense burnt:

Orchids growing freely on the temple grounds

Kunming Taoist temple

In the evening, we went to the grocery store, and found some black chicken! I saw that in Beijing, but wanted to try it in a restaurant and haven’t seen it since… apparently the bones are also black! A rare delicacy!

Chinese black chicken. Apparently, the feathers are white and very puffy

October 20^th
Yesterday, we traveled a good 8 hours by train and local buses to a cute little town called Dali. Known for its traditional architecture, ethnic minority people, Cangshang mountains and Erhai lake, Dali was founded in 738 and was the capital of many Kingdoms over the years. Apparently, in 1000, it was the 13^th biggest city in the world! Hard to believe, as for us, it was just a tiny quiet village… at least compared to other Chinese mega cities. We haven’t had so much fresh air since our hike in the Seoul mountain, more than a month ago.

The most famous streets of Dali old town all have little streams flowing in the middle of them. They were really beautiful!

Unfortunately, the most beautiful streets had also the fiercest souvenir sellers… on the street from the photo you see above, there was a little old lady that approached François and me. She tried selling me some ugly wooden bead bracelet, which I didn’t want, and then gave it to François. She didn’t want it back, and insisted he paid, so he just left it on a bench and walked off… and she punched him! HAHA! That was the only negative thing in Dali though, most people there were very nice and smiling all the time.

It seemed we were in a totally different country… everything was different; the street snacks, the color of people’s skin, the local architecture, the dogs… Even the tones of the language seemed different! We tasted some local speciality; grilled goat cheese:

Ladies making foodie goodies

Grilled cheese! It was ok, nothing spectacular... perhaps we had some cheap ones or something haha

Ethnic minorities (Bai, I believe?) in their traditional costume, with a weird Chinese uncle sitting beside them

Myself with a beautiful ethnic minority girl! I have no idea which region she came from, she didn’t speak English, but they were about 15 of these women in a group. Perhaps some tourists from the Yunnan region?

A temple gate

One of the most beautiful dogs I’ve ever seen!! This is either a Tibetan Chow Chow or a Tibetan Mastiff... or perhaps a mix of them both. He was so nice, calm, fluffy, and HUGE. I want one!

We found a cheap vegan Buddhist buffet. For a 75 cent donation, you could eat all you wanted! I believe it is a way for the monks to eat for free or something… but anyway, the food was absolutely delicious, and we ate there three meals in a row (they changed the menu all the time).

Monk food. You see here spicy fermented cabbage, spinach, carrots, some unknown green veggie and some spicy eggplant (the best part of this plate), served on a bed of rice. It felt so good to eat vegan after weeks and weeks of indulging in heavy meat feasts! I’m sure my vegan friends will approve hehe

October 21^st
Today, we rented two bikes to visit the surrounding Erhai lake villages. It was one of our favourite activities in China, as we were able to see the country side and really tiny villages first hand. No pollution! Women labouring the land! Everyone saying hello when we see them! Children running, and old men doing nothing… it was a truly relaxing day.

Myself with my super feminine Chinese bike in the Dali countryside

The shore of lake Erhai, with the mountains in the background. See the architecture? The white houses all have paintings and calligraphy on them!

In the fisherman village of Caicun, we found a little dock where you could relax, and watch the day go by. There, we met a really old Chinese guy and some other tourists, who were also cycling.

Fishermen with their boats

Local fisherman

Old Chinese guy! He showed us a photo of himself when he was young... he had some kind of black turban and was mounted on a horse. He was so proud of it!

We spent perhaps an hour there, talking, eating peanut butter on bread and mandarin oranges… when some kind of weird monk showed up to do his daily prayers. I’m not sure if he was a Tibetan monk; he had the robe, but the hat was totally out there. Perhaps it is how monks dress in the area? I don’t know, but the prayers he was reading were in Tibetan script.

The monk, blowing from a seashell horn!

We then took a local path and went to see other villages. Some peasant woman offered to share her lunch with us on the site of a field, but we politely declined because we were still stuffed by those peanut butter sandwiches. People were so nice and surprised to see us! Little kids were saying “hello” or “hallo” in English and they were so proud of it haha

A scene of village life in the area. Some really old houses were made of bricks. It kind of felt like walking in some old French town. I read that the oldest houses were close to the lake, and I believe it after seeing those villages.

On the way back we then did a small detour to visit the famous three pagodas on the site of a Buddhist complex. They are some of the best preserved Buddhist structures in China, and the middle one is apparently 1200 years old! You could pay 20$ and visit the entire site, but we decided to be cheap bastards and see them from far for free.

The three pagodas with a golden phoenix statue. The sky had holes in it (hoooole in the skiiiieeeee), and created some sort of “holy lighting”...

We honestly could have stayed there three days more, and done something different everyday, but we had to already head back to Kunming, to catch a flight to our next destination…

October 23^rd
Today we had to wake up early in order to take the bus, which took us to the Dali train station. Our hostel (the Jade Emu), with the rise of the sun in a cloudy sky, had a really crazy colourful look:

The Jade Emu hostel in Dali at around 7AM

At the train station, I bought some souvenir food from the Yunnan region, which had a funny name. They called the box “Yunnan eighteen monsters”, which perhaps they meant “Yunnan eighteen wonders”. It was not horrific at all, and actually pretty tasty! It was all sweets made with fruits, vegetables, chocolate, sesame and tea.

Yunnan eighteen monster box set

We took hard seats, the same class we used to go to Dali, but this time we shared the “cabin” with a bunch of old Kunming ladies. They were so nice, and we communicated using my phrase book. One of the ladies wanted me to try a bunch of food, as she saw that I seemed to enjoy eating… among them was spicy pickled ginger, a weird cinnamon tasting cube that was apparently good for the throat and finally, some tamarind – a sort of bean which you crack and eat the insides (it kind of tastes like fresh dates). I knew about tamarind since working on Hellbent for Cooking, my cookbook; Filipino band DEIPHAGO had given me a soup recipe using tamarind paste which I didn’t find, and had used crushed fresh tamarind instead.

Tamarind offered by an old Kunming lady!

The scenery was beautiful, as always, and I was able to take a photo of countryside houses when the train had stopped a few minutes:

Yunnan countryside

And then, we finally arrived to our hostel, after spending a good 8:30 hours of traveling!

Now, we are in the plane on the way to Hanoi, Vietnam, where we are going to meet François’ parents – and travel with them for a month. We are very happy to finally see family members and to discover yet another country… which means a new language, new culture and new cuisine!!

In total, we have traveled around 70 hours in train in China, and we have done our best to discover as much as possible. We had many prejudices and pre-conceived ideas of China – which were pretty much all broken… China is a beautiful and gigantic country, with sweet people and a VERY diverse cuisine. A month wasn’t enough, but we enjoyed all of it!!

3 Comments | posted in China

Into the Void

Author Archives: intothevoid

Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers

Bursting Out

Only Death is Real

Rock You All Around the World – One Year of Travelling Into the Void!

Metal Inquisition

Troops of Doom

The Temple in the Underworld

Fire in the Sky

Unleashed in the East

Balls to the (Great) Wall

Recent Posts

Destinations