Beach Party Animals

Indian beaches are working beaches.

You'll find fisherfolk landing catches, cows grazing or just wandering and the local dogs marking out their territory. On the more tourist developed beaches you'll find hawker selling bedsheets, bangles and clothes.  Almost everywhere you'll find food and drinks on offer.

it's less likely that you'll find horses, but my beach of choice for Diwali has seven of them that happily mingle with the tourists and make the effort to appear at sunset for photo opportunities.

One Day

The views from two of the flat windows at different times of day.

Morning



Evening

I say "the view", for the morning shot what I mean by that is the view if I lean out over the child safety barriers and trust in luck to snap the sun. The sunset is from the spare bedroom and requires careful framing to avoid the big black buildings on either side of it. Still, it's nice how the light filters through the smog.

Phu Quoc

Phu Quoc. It's a Vietnamese island in the Gulf of Thailand just a few miles off the coast of Cambodia. It has clean beaches, warm waters, lovely scenery and incredible sunsets and you'd beter get yourself there now before the international airport the cruise ship docking facilities and the mega casino do.













A fifty minute flight from HCMC.

Laos

We had an amazing trip to Loas flying into Vientiane from Saigon via Cambodia. We liked it so much that we left a lot unseen as it's fairly obvious we're going to go back.



The architecture and statues are stunning, I filled two memory cards on the camera. If you want to see them all (and frankly I can't think of a better way of spending four hours than looking at someone elses holiday pictures) click on any of the pictures to go to Flickr.

Food is fresh and tasty, there are a lot of higher end restaurants in Vientiane and Luang Prabang but we honestly didn't have one bad meal no matter where we ate. Well, there was the weird sweet curry in Vientiane but that was par for the course because it was Stephens birthday and he always gets a dodgy curry on that day.


There were men in santa hats.


Around every corner was a classic image.


Honest Tourist Attraction notices



and we even found a bar dimly lit enough to feel seedy





The lasting memory though has to be spending two days with elephants. More on that in a later post. Meanwhile here's my elephant having a snack.