All, Destinations
We admit it. We’ve been in hiding. A whole month and a half without a word, even a simple little ‘boo!’ failed to emerge from the Casa del Rat & Dragon. (Unless you have us on twitter/instagram of course). Our mothers have been worried, our younger siblings moving into our metaphorical bedrooms and our friends, well… probably just thinking ‘bet they got stuck in some jungle waterfall or super-secret hilltop rave pad in Borneo. Bloody typical’.
Fear not, dear (otherwise avid) readers. For we are back. Back from the jungle of our own minds, from a journey that took us from dodging crocs in northern Queensland to working the fields of central New South Wales to careering around the hinterlands of Cambodia with a bus full of off-the-hook nut-jobs to conquering the mystical backpacker Eden of Myanmar.
As we emerge from the little hideout we shared with Tanaka-Tigerbaby, blinking into the bright daylight of what some refer to as ‘the civilized world’, we find ourselves in one piece but also split to opposite ends of the globe. In the next few weeks, our Dragon will be reporting from the front line of the centre of the universe (also called ‘London’) and our Rat is on standby during her rural work and can be spotted climbing the coconut trees to get reception in the middle of nowhere (also called ‘a farm and hour’s drive from Spot X’). Bring binoculars and avoid early mornings.
You have been patient. You have grown your Karma points beyond belief. But in the next few weeks, hold your horses. For you’re about to be rewarded by having a humongous amount of awesomeness pour straight into your retinas.
All, Learn
Queensland. Some call it the Texas of Australia. Some call it ‘the place so humid, no one actually lives there’. Some call it the Sunshine State, and our Dragon, well, he calls it home. With a plethora of backpacker-catnip along the East Coast, you’d be forgiven for bypassing unassuming and confusingly named Townsville. Yep, it’s the place you get the bus to, to get the ferry to Magnetic Island, where you really wanna be going. It’s the place where the Powerpuff girls live. It’s also the place that has three major events on the annual calendar (if you go by what the locals say): the first is any Cowboys Rugby League game, the second is the V8 Supercars convention, and the third is the opening of Barramundi season.
As a city girl, it’s never even occurred to me (Rat) to go fishing. As a Townsville guy, it’s never even occurred to our Dragon to not go fishing. So after a month solid of 10 hour editing days powerhousing two series of 7 films each and another 2 projects from scratch, we were waiting for feedback and took an afternoon to explore the local delight that is the hunt for barra.
3pm, we’re at a friend’s loading up his boat with rods, fishing line, hand reels, cooking utensils, sausages and beer. In Queensland, I am told, you can have a beer without fishing, but don’t go fishing without a beer. We head off past idyllic beach fronts, through lush green jungle canopies, past a Mac Donalds and along a dual carriage way. A sharp turn brings the ute (pickup truck and pride & joy of any self-respecting Townsvillleite) careering down a steep gravel path to a small car park and the well-camouflaged boat ramp. We crack the soft drinks. Beer is only allowed after catching the first fish, but seeing as JD & Coke in a can counts as a soft drink, reversing the boat down the ramp and into the river goes like a well oiled dream. A dream involving a 15 part turn.
Our captain Jimbo opens the throttle and we speed down the river with the wind in our hair and the smell of wet dog in out nostrils. We zoom past more lush greenery towards what appears to be a huge concrete H blighting the otherwise idyllic scenery. We come to a standstill right underneath a motorway bridge and strap our boat to one of the pylons. Really? Is my first thought. All this beautiful fauna around and we’re heading straight for the eyesore? “This is the best fishing spot in Queensland”, pipes up Jimbo, and with that launches into a 7 hour on off conversation about how he’s caught the biggest fish and the best fish out of everyone he knows, right here at this secret spot. Not that he seemed to have been many other places, but why fix something that’s not broken?
Dear reader, now comes the squeamish part. If you are vegetarian on moral grounds, or a member of PETA, or watch Sea Shepherd, or believe that anyone who doesn’t leave animals be in their ‘natural’ habitat is evil, please stop reading now and skip one of our other blog posts. Here’s a good one on fun you can have with road kill. Maybe not that one. Please also stop buying suede belts from Topshop, check your new yoga trainers for white-brushed leather, stop using plastic and chuck out all your cosmetics containing palm oil.
For you bloodthirsty adventurers, this is where is gets interesting, and there are different types of fishing. You can throw big cast net into the water using a spiralling action to maximise the surface area, and you pull in anything that gets caught. You can spear your fish with a bamboo spear from a rock outside the water, you can wade and spear or get yourself a spear gun and snorkel/dive and pretend to be James Bond.
The most commonly known way to get dinner is probably with a rod and a hooked worm, and again this is only one way to do it. Fly-fishing is an art form within itself and involves complex feathered and knotted fake insects and special techniques to coax the fish to the hook at the end of your line. Lure-fishing allows you to try out an enormous array of different multi coloured plastic or metal fish that simulate a swimming dinner for a bigger fish, right up to attracting Marlin in deep sea areas. Apparently it’s not how tasty the lures look, but how pretty they seem to the fish, which encourages our aquatic friends to give them a bite. For the real Bear Grills types, there is bait fishing. You can use little hand reels, i.e. a plastic circle with fishing line wound round it and dead bait attached to the hook at the end – chopped up liver works a treat, so do grubs, pieces of fish, squid and prawns you can buy deep frozen from a fishing shop. And this is how you catch live bait, which is exactly what we were up to under out motorway bridge.
Sitting there with music blaring, all four of us chatted away about fishing exploits and nothing else. I didn’t have much to say, this being the second time in my life I was at the other end of a hooked line (the first time I was 6 in a trout farm in Austria, and I think I got quite a bit of help). As the afternoon progresses the narrative fish get bigger and more ferocious. The circumstances harder, the bravery peaks in a story of catching a mythically large barramundi in what sounds like a cyclone. Graham sharply pulls at his little blue circle of fishing line and yanks a little stripy fish about the size of my palm out of the water. First bait is caught, deposited in a special compartment at the rear of the boat that lets in fresh river water to keep the little ‘Barra Mars Bars’ alive and the first beer is cranked. The second yank is mine, another little unsuspecting nibble turns out to be a hell of a journey for a spiky little black and yellow striped bait fish. I have to carefully smooth down his dorsal spikes so I don’t get jabbed as I pull the hook out of his lip and get him to the wet box as quickly as possible, before he wriggles around enough to scare me into letting him go. K-SHHHHHHHH I’ve earned my beer.
As it gets darker, we catch more, 15 in total, and Graham who is by far the best hooks a turtle. Don’t confuse them with uber cool dude Crush from Finding Nemo, these river turtles are ugly and they stink to high heaven. We unhook him and are glad when he disappears off to where he came from. During the spectacular sunset we move the boat out from under the bridge for the ultimate showdown of the day – using our live bait to catch what will hopefully turn out to be a monster barramundi. Quick reminder that this is my first proper time fishing. I have no childhood memories or familiar fondness to connect to what we’re doing. To me, the fishing shops we visited earlier during the day may just as well have been huge warehouses filled with millions of different coloured key rings and a wetsuit or two. But as the sky turns blood red and purple, and we set up for the hunt, I find myself feeling quite excited.
First, we need some decent tunes. Rage against the machine takes over from N’Sync. The little camping stove is fired up for dinner. We’re hardly in the open roaring ocean but after 5 hours under the bridge seeing the sky makes me feel a little bit like we’re in open water. We take it in turns to scoop a bait fish out of the wet box, hold it so it can’t squirm out of our hands or spike us, and hook it onto our bigger barra hooks. This is probably the ickiest part, but at the same time the hook is best placed where it harms the fish the least, so it can happily swim around the longest to attract a barra munch. Different people do different things, some hook through the back above the spine, some through the lip, we hook ours into the mouth and out through the forehead. This has several advantages, first it misses all vital organs and blood supply keeping the fish alive and wriggling temptingly. Secondly, when you drag the fish back in when it’s wondered too far, you are dragging it in the direction it would usually swim, not against the grain, as a back hooking would.
We let our little fishies swim for it. Put our rods that were unknown to our bait and target still firmly attached in the rod holders around the side of the boat and watched the line as it wandered around the boat following the fish exploring. Chatting away about – you guessed it – fishing, we sat, sipped our beers and watched the sausages sizzle. A couple of times, when the lines looked like they would tangle due to our fishies wondering, we reeled them in again, and let them run in a different direction. I felt a little bit like I was taking 4 small fish on leads for a walk around the park.
The sausages were cooking away nicely and I was just reeling in my little dude who was chilling under the boat too close to the anchor line when BOOOM – something massive tugged at the line. Within lightning speed, the half cooked sausages and gas stove where stored away and everyone’s lines were brought in. Instructions were given from all sides, but no one touched me or my rod, I had to do this on my own. I had never realised that fish are caught in sport on lines that only hold a certain amount of strain, measured in kilos. The thrill comes from letting a hooked fish run, then slowly reeling it in, then letting it run again if it does, then slowly reeling it in, all without breaking the line. The lower strain the line can take makes the bigger the fish you caught even sweeter. Suddenly the prestige of “I caught a 10kg tilapia on a 5kg line” made total sense. The extreme case of the chase can lead whole boats following a fish on the other end of one guy’s line, to avoid breaking it before the fish tires out. This can take hours and hours, with no guarantee that he will get away last minute. Cue more cyclone/shark infested water/”it was bigger than my auntie” stories from the crew.
And so I carefully reeled, waited, lost line, gained line and brought the fish closer and closer to the boat, without seeing what it was. Suddenly it jumped out of the water 2 meters from the boat, to my delight (it wasn’t an eel!) and the other’s horror (this is when fish are most likely to get unhooked). I got lucky though and reeled him in again, and again until he flopped into a net. In the boat, everyone cheered. It was a big one. The minimum size you can keep is 58cm length, this means that there are enough baby fish to keep the species alive and kicking (or swimming). The mythical size everyone wants to catch is over 1m. The biggest fish the boat had ever caught was 89cm. This one was 75cm long. Despite my previous indifference, some primeval funny bone had been tickled deep inside my Neanderthal brain matter. Seeing the fish I had just single-handedly caught was awesome, and thanks to barra season officially open, it also tasted awesome the following day.
Many sports fishing enthusiasts will unhook the fish, possibly tag it, and then let it go. Cue forehead slaps and confused looks from our Indonesian and Laosian friends. But I wanted the full experience, and you learn something new each day, if you try new things. Whilst I don’t think I’ll be swapping an opportunity for a great discussion on some lofty subject amongst good friends with sitting under a bridge with a line and raw liver all over my hands, I can now say I have an idea how to survive on a desert island. And that’s quite a skill to have acquired.
All, Destinations
11 months in the making, Tag has been our most ambitious project to date. Now spearheading STA Travel’s global Blue Ticket campaign, our project of love throughout our 2014 Epic Journey from London to Sydney has quite a few Easter Eggs hiding in it. Without further ado, find out some interesting facts about the shoot and see what you can spot:
1) Quick fire facts:
Total millage covered in production: 40000km
Total countries covered: 19
Total destinations and activities filmed: 34
Total featured destinations in the final cut: 19 across 10 countries
Total featured activities in the final cut: 8
How many can you name? Travel buffs are required to accept a handicap of -4 points to level the playing field 🙂
2) Cuts:
To make it to two minutes we had to cut Tallinn, Penang, Roppongi, Kyoto, our friend Wu’s Kung Fu demonstration at 798 Art District Beijing (spot him in STA Travel’s Insider Intel film!), temples in Ubud, Bali (check out Ganesh in the Tag lowdown) and Uluru. Talk of killing your darlings…
3) Locations:
Unlike a lot of movie magic, most scenes in Tag were shot in sequence, though there are some fun exceptions. Surfing Bondi was actually shot at Spot X, the epilogue was shot in a public park in the middle of Joetsu, Japan. There’s one scene that’s shot on the other side of the world to where it’s set. Guess which one!
4) Oufits:
Our two outfits (before and after swimming) stay the same throughout production, so we needed to cart them around for 11 months through all sorts of climates. An exception are our shoes. How many pairs do Nic and Sax get through? And what country does Nic change her hairstyle in?
5) Planning
Some things, such as our longtail to scuba shot, were carefully planned and took several takes to get right (see how Nic goes from dry to wet hair?). Some things, on the other hand, were complete coincidence, but we just had to include them. The Chinese dude spitting on Tiananmen Square gave us the same feeling a wildlife photographer gets from capturing the perfect shot of a majestic eagle catching salmon. Can you guess another one that was complete pot luck?
6) Crew
Production consisted of a skeleton crew of 2 people, plus local assistance for knowing the best places to shoot and guarding our kit of Canon DLSR x 2, Hero3 GoPro x 2, Lenses: 50mm 1.8, 18-55mm, 50-300mm, Sennheiser mike, Zoom recorder, Tripod, Slider and compact steady-cam.
7) Stars!
Finally, we could not have produced Tag without our unsung heroes. Kahori and Yumi-delux, two of our best mates from Japan, nailed playing professional patty cake in front of snowy Joetsu’s Takada Park samurai castle. Nicola’s brother J is in the background on Koh Phi Phi doing what he does best: adding tone. Paul, Kate, Honorata and Rob at the Victoria STA Travel store – thanks for your lunch breaks!! And Celina, Saxon’s sister, (who’s a professional actor!) and boyfriend Ryan presented an outstanding emotional performance as the perfect UP couple with a happy ending! For a cheeky side-track, can you spot the ‘porn’ star?
Tag was indeed a monster to create, but we’re stoked that so many people will be seeing this little piece of epicness as part of STA Travel’s Blue Ticket campaign. Whilst we’re mega busy at the moment (watch out for Oz road trip films and TLC adventures coming soon!), we can’t wait to get our hands on our next Epic Project.
All, Inspire
We’re staying in a tiny Lao village among the pigs and chickens and water buffalo on the Eastern bank of the mighty Mekong River. Thailand’s identical-looking jungle is lapped by turbid waters on the opposite bank, a short – but treacherous – swim away. From what I could manage to understand from a local guide, Ped, Laos people here believe there are 32 individual parts to the human spirit. When we experience moments of extreme excitement, fear or trauma, some of those spirit parts can detach from us and stay in those places where we experienced it. An ancient concept of a horcrux if you like. This makes us spiritually incomplete. We’re missing something.
After playing football and games with the kids, night falls over dinner and the generator gives up the ghost. Everyone busily sets up candles around the huts so the village elders can invite us to a Baci ceremony to call back our lost spirits. The moon is missing only a sliver of its own self. It will be complete as a full moon tomorrow night. The rest of the sky is a deep, sapphire blue, chinked with facets of the stars. There are lots of candles. The village shaman is chanting to call the wayward spirits. I’ve had so many extreme and profound moments recently that I find it very easy to imagine that my spirit is missing a few important bits. I think of some of those extreme moments of elation, fear, loss and joy.
The flickering lights illuminate a centrepiece of flowers, bamboo sticks, items of spiritual meaning and cotton threads. The atmosphere lulls us all into a feeling of being looked after by the dozens of faces inside the house and many more peering in through the windows. When the shaman is satisfied that the spirit pieces are all present, the village elders all help to tie the spirits back onto us. All the elders form a circle around our outward facing circle and, taking turns, chant as they tie a cotton string, first to the left wrist, then to the right, until our wrists are wrapped in bundles and bundles of white cotton strands and knots. Each one of us gets each of the elder’s individual well wishes, blessings and smiles.
Ped explains that the idea is to keep the cotton stings until they come off by themselves, and by the time the last strands naturally fall away, the spirit will be fully intact again and healed together. Alternatively, if you do want to remove them, we were told we could take them off and leave them by one of the millions of Buddha statues that you might come across in Laos, or tie them to a tree, or release them into a river, or on a mountain, or some other beautiful natural place. You wouldn’t want parts tying your soul back together to end up somewhere unpleasant.
After all the elders tie all the strings and mumble the chants, we all eat morsels of delicious pre-prepared offerings and drink the village rice whisky with our re-united spirits (never an uneven number of shots of rice whiskey – we are also drinking for our spirits, of course, and it would be rude to have just one shot for yourself). We are so full from dinner, but we must feed our souls nonetheless. It is at this point we realize that both the beautiful centre piece of the ceremony as well as all our individual offerings are all newly hand made. Even the individual banana leaf plates, incense and candle holders and flower chains have been freshly made that day by the village. An incredible amount of work and love has gone into our experience this evening, and we don’t even know how we can start to thank the villagers for their kindness.
It’s now been a couple of days since, and we’ve already released a couple of strings ourselves. Some were left in a Buddha cave, set into a cliff at the confluence of the Mekong and Nam Ou rivers, overlooking the Y-shape of the two vast rivers and beyond to rice fields and hills studded with water buffalo and working elephants. Ped told us how to pray to the Buddha in the cave like the locals do. Even though we’re not really Buddhists, we follow his instructions. We knelt in that cave, brought hands together and bowed our heads, wishing good wishes on a bunch of people very dear to us, and hoped that we could feel whole again.
We’re not sure if it all worked, our souls still seem like they’re floating around in the ether getting distracted by cats on YouTube and salad. But we did feel quite peaceful in that cave in the cliff face above the river. And the fact that everyone had made such an enormous effort for complete strangers was magical. So even if Buddha is not your bag, I think you’d like the spot, if only for the human good will poured over us all by this little village somewhere on the bank of the Mekong.
All, Destinations
Returning wide-eyed and open mouthed from our 3 day mind-warp to the Field of Pots, (sorry, Plane of Jars), the Pot People (i.e. Ricky, Jodie, Matt, Toto, Dragon and Rat) met our new travel companions at the left turn off that gravel road by the tree. 4 hours windy bus ride later we drifted down the Nam Song River at Vang Vieng, in inflated tractor tires, beverages in hand. It was the perfect activity to align our hugely expanded minds with Amy, Evelien, Harriet, Matt number 2, Jay, Lilly and Chao, who did a fabulous job catching up with the help of river-flavoured Beer Lao.
Whilst rope swings and spring break bars have shut down due to health (/death) issues, tubing is still a lovely thing to experience as the surrounding scenery is breathtaking and our fantastic group took the party way through dinner and beyond, turning our riverside restaurant platform into a dance off competition with another table in the bar next door. Cue the re-birth of gangnam style.
The capital lay ahead of us the following day, but as anyone who has been to Vientiane knows, it’s large and industrial with a quaint city centre, but there’s not that much going on. Apart from the very impressive COPE centre (must-see organization dealing with the ongoing effects of UXOs from the Secret War), some temples and the picturesque riverside night market, we were most amused by our guide Chao’s smug giggles at explaining the origins of Laos’ own Arch de Triomphe. American funds and cement intended for a new airport (read: increased US military access) were appropriated somewhat differently by the Royal Laotian government, who had Patuxai Gate constructed in defiance. Locals still repress proud smiles and refer to the Victory Gate as the ‘vertical runway’ to this day.
Far more exciting was our next stop at Kong Lor, where we stayed for two nights amongst impressive karst mountains and rice fields. In true ‘middle of nowhere’ style, the electricity gave up after 5 hours, which lead to a collective loss of inhibitions as we bunched up to hand-wash our dirty clothes in a large bowl ‘borrowed’ from a nearby shed. Local legend has it that a farmer, many years ago, lost his flock of ducks whilst he tended to his far too full bottle of LaoLao one afternoon. Confused yet laissez-fair, he proceeded to explain the concepts of time travel and multiple dimensions to his wife that evening, just to find his ducks being sold at a market on the other side of the mountain a week later. Inter-galactic teleportation aside, the ducks could not have crossed the mountains un-aided, so after frenzied exploration on the farmers part, a huge cave was discovered hiding behind a nearby bush, with a gushing river leading 7 km through the mountain and out the other side. Just goes to show how much attention people sometimes pay to their nearest surroundings.
Pumped up by tales of legendary duck-courage, we split into groups of 3 to board individual longboats, and set off into the vast cave with an incredibly skillful boatsman each, who found his way through the pitch black, around submerged jagged rocks and up underground waterfalls armed only with a flimsy torch. Chao proudly pointed out the electrical cables that lead to a small but impressively lit 5 minute walking trail in the heart of the mountain, where we could see various stalactites and stalagmites before jumping back into the boats. This was indeed the height of technology in these parts. Topped off with a BBQ, swim and Ricky’s own fishing show, we all had a fantastic day.
A long drive brought us to Thakhek, where we persuaded our driver to drop everyone off and then take two laps of the small town with our kitted up Dragon perched on the back of a borrowed motorbike, ridden (by our Rat) precariously close to the bus, other vehicles and at one stage the police. The mission for the perfect bus-exterior shot raised a few local eyebrows, as did the amused hollers of the rest of the group, camped out in a nearby restaurant. Mental scaring ensued as four of us (who shall not be named) accidentally paid for a massage in a brothel. At least Chao, who swore he has ‘always told every other group to not go there’ thought it was hilarious. Which in itself was hilarious.
After Thakhek’s somewhat seedy border-town charm, we had a real treat lying ahead of us. After several hours of singing East 17, Hanson and 50 Cent at full pelt we took a right turn off the main road and the driver got his revenge. Our buts got the best massage in weeks, but the potholed dusty paths we hurtled along lead deeper and deeper into amazing countryside so no one paid much attention to the fact we were being turned into Schnitzels. A quick stop at an unassuming pond with a small temple in the centre brought forward 5 huge soft-shelled turtles who were lucky enough to have been born in a lake they were considered sacred (not supper). “Beautiful little buffalo, come to me, aye aye aye” sang the driver and Chao in unison, coaxing the creatures out of the murky water with crackers sold by one of the more entrepreneurial locals just outside the park gates. We decided it wise to not enquire further about the local attraction to little buffalo. While everyone tried to get his or her cameras right into the turtles face and feel its soft leathery shell, Amy made a friend for life in a local, white and brown-patched dog.
Back on the road to Xe Champhone, we drove tantalizingly close to our home stay, but dropped by the local temple first, where a monk happily chatted to us about his life in Michigan until we all hooked up on facebook. The temple was also home to a 200-year-old Buddhist library full of thousands of Sanskrit scriptures and bamboo tablets, all crammed into three small wardrobes in a tiny stilt structure in the middle of a lake. A huge white Buddha statue on the other side of the lake, that had been donated by the Thai government after the old one was bombed in the war, provided a great photo opportunity, as did the monkeys in a nearby forest our group eagerly fed bananas to. Monkey porn ensued.
Our second home stay, whilst less integrated with the locals as the last, was a great communal experience for our now rather large group. We had left the Dutch behind in Vientiane, but four new faces, Tanja, Mary, Claire and Kelly had joined. Tanja and Chao united to become the driving force behind dinner, creating huge amounts of curry, vegetable dishes, bamboo sprout dishes, sticky rice and other tasty treats whilst Ricky and the boys tended to (i.e sporadically and expertly poked) the barbecue. Our Rat was even fortunate enough to try some of the drivers special chilly sauce which, without further ado, made her head explode. Without this core team’s efforts, we surely would have died of starvation. Sitting around the campfire after the fantastic meal we once again reminisced about the joys of travelling, meeting new people and telling the rat race to go eff itself.
Nursing our hangovers over omelet and coffee breakfast, we couldn’t believe there was so little left to go. On the way to Pakse, our group declared a mutiny and, despite what our driver and Chao recommended, jumped straight into the freezing waters of the spectacular Tad Ngeuang waterfall. A hangover cure if there ever was one was followed later by a massage and Indian feast in Pakse’s city centre.
And so, dear readers, we arrive at the final part of this trip through incredible and unsung hero of a country. Scaling the heights of Wat Phou, an ancient temple complex built as the capital of the Khmer empire before Angkor Wat, we marvelled at the amazing views, the intricate carvings of the temples and calm serenity of its hillside setting. It was even better than Bonnie Doon. Little old ladies chanted prayers as they bound cotton bracelets around our wrists and a clear stream of water emerging straight out of a gigantic overhanging rock cooled our sun beaten faces.
A few hours later saw our bus board a river ferry made of a rickety bamboo raft supported by floaters made of old war plane fuel tanks and packing our bags into our final little longboat, we sped through the Mekong’s 4000 islands on the way to Don Det. Cycling through the sunset past numerous bamboo hideouts, some scattered hippies swaying to their private head-raves and a mid-street local cock fight was the perfect round up of this incredible trip with awesome people we can’t wait to see again soon. Laos, you’ve enchanted us, and grown our appetites for adventure in the next stop on our TLC project: Crazy Cambodia.
