Laos - Simply beautiful

Out of sheer laziness, I'm titling this blog post using the line from the Lao Tourism Board, I've been seeing it used on quite a few posters. I also agree with the statement / copy line, so after all why not?

I've been in Laos for close to a month now, including two weeks in Vientiane with my brother Morgan. I had planned to update the blog with a post ideas I've jotted down along the way while I have an internet access in Vientiane but have been too busy playing with my baby niece, cycling around and reading for that (plus the connection is pretty slow).

I've been having an amazing time out here so far, the country is gorgeous, it has been hot, mostly very sunny and people are generally pretty nice. It's the time of year when the Lao have a lot of parties and weddings prior to Pimai, the Lao New Year so I've also been invited to a few random parties in villages and on Don Det, one of the 4,000 Islands where I stayed for a week.

From Savannakhet I headed over to Pakse and Champasak, a lovely small town on the Mekong. It's quite touristy in a low key fashion and the main thing to go visit are the pre-Angkorian ruins of Vat Phou, which I went cycling to with some Spanish people who arrived at the same time as I did.

Tomorrow we are heading North of Laos, to Luang Prabang and then hopefully by boat to Niong Khiaw and Muang Ngoi.

The Mekong viewed from the guesthouse terrace in Champasak

The ruins of Vat Phou

I was invited for my first shot of Lao Lao (the local rice alcohol) by this fine gentleman. Language barriers made for limited conversation, we coped by drinking shots, sharing cigarettes, smiling, laughing and basic sign language

Beautiful views of the 4,000 Islands from my hammock

My little niece Anahi eating some yogurt - and using it as a hair conditioner at the same time ;)

Slow down, it's Laos

I'm very glad of my choice to move on to Laos, I arrived in Savannakhet on Sunday evening after a fairly long bus ride from Hue in Vietnam. As soon as we passed the Vietnamese border, the sky started clearing, the temperature rising, and the roads cleared as well - there are just much fewer people in Laos.

I loved it straight away. I got to a nice guesthouse recommended in the guide, joined by Tatsuro, a cool Japanese guy at the beginning of a 2 year round the world trip. The guesthouse is pretty close to the Mekong so we just had time to drop our bags and go enjoy the sunset with a BeerLao with the locals at one the food & drink stalls set up there in the evenings. Funny to think I had just crossed the whole width of both Vietnam and Laos in a day to find myself right across the river from Thailand.

I like Savannakhet, there isn't really much to do but I guess that's just what I wanted after being on the move all the time since I left Kunming. Yesterday was full sun and over 35 degrees - perfect to just walk around in the sun and have a nap in the afternoon, followed by beer & sunset time.

I rented a motorbike today to go out for a wander in the countryside, saw the closeby Budddhist stupa of That Ing Hang which apparently is an important pilgrimage site in February when thousands of people visit. I also went to a few villages out on dirt tracks, as well as a couple of lakes, there to irrigate the rice paddies in the dry season such as now. Lovely weather, a few clouds showed up so it was hot buy I didn't get burned in the sun.

Considering I can't drive (don't have my license) and hadn't been on a scooter in about 15 years this was pretty adventurous for me and glad I did it. That said, going on a loop biking for several days on dirt tracks feels slightly out of reach just now - I'll probably need some more practice. Next time I think I might just go back to normal cycling, it's easier to enjoy the scenery like that as well.

I rounded the day off with a traditional Lao massage. Lots of stretching and pressure points - good stuff. I'm now back at the iLounge Cafe for a drink and dinner. Good company, cold drinks, good Thai & Lao food and free wifi!

Tomorrow I'll be moving South to Pakse, then on to Champasak to see the Pre-Angkorian ruins of Wat Phou. After that I'll be heading to Si Phan Don, or 4,000 Islands, where the Mekong stretches out to a width of about 14km before Cambodia.

Not sure I'll get a lot of Internet access down there, most places don't have electricity apparently. A few days on a hammock watching the Mekong flow by sounds great though!

Good bye Vietnam

I have spent just about 10 days in Vietnam, travelled from the very far North where I arrived in Lao Cai to where I am now in Hue, about half way through the country. I've certainly had good times but unfortunately no sun, since I arrived I've been in or under a huge grey mass of clouds and haze, which I find makes the whole experience less enjoyable. Altogether I'm not enjoying the country that much, I have been changing my plans almost every day since I got here, chasing sunnier / warmer climes as well as trying to escape from very busy and ultra touristy areas, with all the fairly aggressive touts and scammers that come with them.

I have probably covered 1,000 km in Vietnam so far and the only grace weather-wise was a clearing of clouds for some sun and blue skies a couple of hours this morning. Anyways, I decided to give up on Vietnam and move on to Laos tomorrow morning. I am taking a bus early in the morning for Savannakhet.

I have some nice photos, met some cool people to chat with as well as spend a day or evening with, so it was all good but I also won't be missing Vietnam very much, nor am I in a massive hurry to come back. I guess it's a spoiled traveler's issue, but I much prefer China - I'd recommend going to Szechuan or Yunnan over Vietnam any day.

I certainly don't want to just sound sour, so here are a few highlights of my time here, with a few photos.

Now you see what I mean when I said Sa Pa was in the clouds and had bad visibility.

I wasn't sure I liked Hanoi much at first though As I met a few people who lived there on the 2nd day, I started to warm up to the busy atmosphere. I think it would be a great city to live in, and it was certainly nice to walk around for a couple of days. I'd say the city has a lot of charm, though not necessarily many beautiful sights for a tourist. I didn't find the food amazing either, good but not great. Maybe I didn't go to the right places, but you may know I can also be a condescending snob about that (well that and probably some other things come to think of it ;).

I decided to give Halong Bay a miss. They closed the site to most tourists the day before for fog reasons and most of the people I talked to who had just come back from it said it was not worth it given the bad weather. It was also a considerable expense for my budget, I decided to keep that money for some other attraction another day.

Busy traffic in the Old Quarter of Hanoi

The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum

I played around with reflections in the photos

I met some cool people to have dinner  and drinks with, including Ralph, World Traveller - his business card says so.

I went to Ninh Binh instead, with Tam Coc close by and many karstic rock formations considered to be an inland Halong Bay (actually these sort of rocks cover most of the country a I saw during my train ride later on). I spent a nice day cycling around with a Danish chef who showed up - which was good because I think I might've gotten bored by myself and he is a cool guy. I was going to go to Cuc Phuong National Park but the weather still wasn't great so I headed south on the train the following day.

Nice views of the rock formations, though limited by weather.

The long train ride was one of the highlights of Vietnam for me, I enjoyed just watching rice paddies, banana trees, rock formations and occasional trees go by while listening to music and reading for 8 hours.

It doesn't look amazing but it was a bit difficult to take good photos on the train. And it didn't actually look that great either. I enjoyed the train ride nonetheless and had an awesome book to read. 

After a short and random stop in Dong Hoi for a night, I decided on a whim to stop earlier than planned on the train, in Hue rather than Danang and Hoi An as I originally planned. I might have wasted about $5 changing train tickets and destinations, so not a huge deal.

Still cloudy weather yesterday in Hue, I spent a nice afternoon with some English people walking around the Perfume river and the remains of the old imperial palace. Had nice food for lunch, local sort of roll'em yourself spring rolls with a good peanut sauce.

In the old Imperial palace of Hue.

I'm catching up on some writing today, here and i wrote two letters, so that's four letters in Vietnam - still enjoying writing them very much. I think that'll be it for now, folks!

10 days on the road

As I wrote it in a letter to someone yesterday (I'm enjoying this letter writing by the way, 6 sent so far ;), I've only really been on the road for 10 days (not counting Hong Kong) and it already feels like a month at least. I'm not even necessarily doing that much; it's a lot of new experiences, thoughts and conversations in a short amount of time - presumably as the environment is so different I'm looking at everything differently as well. In any case, whatever you want to call it, it's certainly one of things I enjoy most about traveling. If you haven't done that in a while, I recommend you book a ticket for some strange and new destination, try it out. I"m always surprised at how much changing the context / environment can open my mind to new thoughts, ideas and observations. It's not providing any particular answers to the meaning of life - as far as I can gather it's still 42 - but it's a pleasure nonetheless.

I'm having a really good time and extremely happy with the choices I've made for this year to come and explore the region around here. Given I can't easily access Facebook to upload photos, I'll sum up the trip so far with a few choice pics here.

I took a train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou on Thursday 24th Feb, hoping to catch another one directly to Kunming. I hwaited a few hours there. When people told me the station at Guangzhou is very busy they weren't kidding.

After a 26h train ride (on a hard seat, they only had those tickets left) I arrived in Kunming and spent a lovely few days there. I just walked around town, and also visited Qiongzhu Si, the Bamboo Temple.

I met some great people in Kunming and had some excellent food. Here, we are in a Dai restaurant, they are a minority people from Xishuangbanna, in Southern Yunnan - delicious spicy food. Next to me on the pic is Mike, a cool Canadian dude who has been cycling from home all the way to China across Europe and central Asia.

After a few days, it was time to head over  to Vietnam as I only managed to get a 10 day visa for China this time, I stopped first in Tonghai and visited the lovely mountain park of Xiu Shan, so many gorgeous flowering bonsai, all blooming.

I don't know why, but I can't seem to add any more photos to this blog post. Anyways, after Tonghai, I stopped in Jianshui the following day which has a large part of the old town left and I visited the Zhu Clan['s house and gardens, a nice place to while away the afternoon and write a letter. Then I took another bus to Vietnam and ended in Sa Pa on Thursday evening. I've been in a cloud pretty much since then. It's supposed to be amazing views of the valley all sculpted in rice paddy terraces, but unfortunately there is nothing to see right now. I met some nice people anyways and walked around a village in the mist yesterday. I'm cutting my stay here slightly short and heading down to Hanoi this evening given it's just cold and damp all the time. Maybe some other time.

I'm splitting the way I share my travels in a few different ways and enjoying it, of course on this blog, then you may have heard some of my audio snippets via Facebook or Twitter thanks to Audioboo, and as I said above, I've started writing letters as well.

Wandering planner

As I said in my previous post, I had a lot on my mind once I got back from Tanzania in December last year. You may know this already, I've made some pretty radical choices for this year and I'm very happy about it.

I decided to resign from my job at iris in London and go travel for a while, which is something I've wanted to do for a very long time. As my friend Adam told me, traveling is one of the few topics I get visibly very excited about when it comes in conversations. I really hesitated as it certainly wasn't the reasonable thing to do but those who know me also know I enjoy being unreasonable and I usually do things putting 100% in or not do them at all. I'd given up my previous flat in London and was going to look for another one while staying at my brother's place for a few months, I have a little bit of money on the side, I'm single and my wanderlust only grew stronger after the trip to Africa. Anyways, all of it put together it's a great time to take a plunge and go ahead with travel plans.

I only had a short few weeks in January to sort out everything in London and flew to Hong Kong on the 2nd February where I'm writing this from. One of other best friends, James, lives here and I hadn't seen him for several years. I have been organising a loose itinerary traveling in Southeast Asia and taking care of my visas for China, Vietnam and Laos. My little brother Morgan recently moved to Laos so the first leg of the journey is to make my way from here to Vientiane overland, via China and Vietnam. In a few months, probably during the summer depending on how the budget goes, I'll be looking for a new job somewhere in the region.

I've also decided to write letters and post cards while on the way so send over your address if ever you wish to receive one (I'll prioritise people I know, but happy to send something even if I don't know you). I received a letter from my sister who recently moved back to France in December and I'd forgotten how cool it is to receive and read a letter. I also like the idea of writing something for one person rather than broadcasting online on places such as this blog. I tend to be completely oblivious to the magic of email and online stuff; I'm looking forward to be a bit disconnected while traveling (at least not have 24/7 access as I'm used to).

I had a break from the Internet and computers while in Africa and it was very refreshing. I also forget that emails or even SMS are asynchronous methods of communication. There is a lot of talk about real time these days and my usual expectation if I send an email or an SMS is that I should get a reply very soon if not immediately - when you think about it, it's pretty silly given the other person isn't there waiting for you even though that's how I and others I've seen behave. Anyways, the surprise of someone I write to getting a letter in the mail while they're waiting for people to reply to important emails and text messages makes me smile. So there.

I also just finished reading Chief Culture Officer by Grant McCracken; a really good book and it's giving me interesting ideas for things to look out for while traveling as well as what and how I'd like to share those noticings. That's why (sort of) I can happily announce that if you're a hardcore Gourmet Burger Kitchen fan wandering around Lan Kwai Fong in Hong Kong, you can sample the wares of Gourmet Burger Union (Disclaimer: I didn't eat there so no idea how their burgers are, I just liked the extreme similarity with the GBK logo). This in itself is a whole mine of inspiration for thoughts / a blog post about brand copycats of which there are all around in Hong Kong and China.

I'll add just one last thing matching back with some of the ideas Grant put forward in CCO, if you have a brand and you don't follow what's going on with your customers and in culture generally, you might have copycats take your brand and likely do more inspired things with it than your brand book will ever allow (Again, the thought doesn't necessarily apply to GBK vs. GBU though if someone who tried both wants to comment, they're more welcome).

So if you want to follow some of my travel experiences; check out this blog, my Twitter stream, my Audioboo (which will also post to Twitter / Facebook), Facebook if we're friends there, Flickr, or if I have your address make sure you check your mail box regularly ;)

Back from Africa

February 2011 update: I took about 3 months to finish this draft, a few more things have happened since.

I had an absolutely fantastic trip to Tanzania with The Great Football Giveaway in November 2010, you can follow the events during the trip here. By now I can safely say it has been a life changing experience for me. I gave up on the draft in December partly out of simply being lazy, partly busy at work, partly because it was such a rich experience I didn't know what to write about it exactly. Altogether the photo above illustrates pretty well how overwhelming it was - in a good way.

We were nine people on Neil's team (who has done an awesome job with kick-starting the whole project and leading the team) joined by our three amazing drivers: Sebastian, David and Josef. We got along like a house on fire for the ten days of the Football Giveaway: as much banter and piss-taking as well as more serious conversations and sharing personal stories. They are all people I now hold dear in my heart, with whom I shared this unique experience. You can find everyone's names on our JustGiving page, and you can also still make donations for more balls to be given to children on future trips.

I was lucky enough to have more holiday time, so while the others flew back home I spent two more weeks in Tanzania; a few days on a safari in the Selous and a week on the beach in Zanzibar.

A lot comes to mind in wanting to describe the whole experience, about Africa and Tanzania, the children, infrastructures in the country or lack thereof, charity vs. gifts, education, play, the development of tourism and who benefits from it, large charity organisations / NGOs, animal conservation and hunting, the amazing people I met there, smiles on so many children's faces, and probably a lot more I forget right now.

I can talk about any of these points at length but the best way I can sum it up for now, even though these simple words don't do justice to the experience, is that life is too short not to do things I really enjoy doing. I don't mean that I particularly deprived myself of that before, on the contrary if you now me you know I'm rather bon vivant. It's just that this is what's present when thinking of the trip.  I'm extremely privileged to have a lot of choice in the way I lead my life and I want to make sure I take advantage of that, both for myself and to make a difference for others.

More specifically about my trip, you can check out some photos on my Flickr and we are in the process of editing all the videos we have from the Football Giveaway. If you ever fancy a safari in Tanzania, I highly recommend going to Selous and staying at the Selous River Camp. Owned and managed by Kenny and Kate, I loved their blog and was right to go there; they made me feel very welcome and I had an awesome time at their camp discovering the Selous and generally relaxing relaxing by the river.

To finish off, you can get that a lot was bubbling away in my head in December, I'll write about that in my next post.

London fundraising event

We held an excellent fundraising evening last week in London, on Wednesday 27th October. Everyone had a brilliant time and it was great for several of us going on the trip to Tanzania to meet up as well as meet with Paul and Sarah of The Great Football Giveaway.

We started the evening programme by showing the short and very inspiring Football Giveaway video, then Neil told us about how this project started for him, and Paul talked about how the overall initiative started about 5 years ago.

Hugh came up front after that to tell us about an interesting and fun project to design an application based on one's feelings of guilt and which would allow people to alleviate that guilt by quickly making small donations to different charities based on personal choices and feelings. To top it off in true Radio 1 fashion, Hugh shared his personal Top Ten guilts!

And last but not least, Neil from UsTwo was kind enough to join us and share a really interesting project they have been up with another charity, The Kids Company, who take care of children in inner city areas of the UK. The kids participated in creating designs for a MouthOff iPhone application released today, the proceeds of which will all go directly to the charity (minus the 30% Apple keeps for the transaction).

Thank you again to everyone who attended and donated, it was a brilliant evening. I only have two more days to go until flying to Tanzania, can't wait!

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Giving away footballs in Tanzania

In the very exciting news category, I'm going away on a fabulous adventure to Tanzania in November this year with The Great Football Giveaway.

If you haven't heard about them before, I wrote about it a while ago, they are a small organisation whose belief is that "no kid should be denied the chance to kick a ball about. It's one of life's most simple pleasures." I don't particularly care that much for football in general, and certainly not for the giant cash industry it has become but I really care about making a difference, helping put a smile on a kid's face and playing games. That and also traveling, as I've never been to Africa.

The principle is very simple: £10 donated = 1 football going to kids in Africa in places they don't have any to play with. It might not change the world, but regardless. Playing with a brand new ball and kicking it about will change the experience of life for a kid, even if only a moment.

Do you remember how excited you were as a kid when playing and kicking a ball around? That or whatever else you enjoyed playing with. We're going to give lots of balls around to kids in Tanzania, as well as meet up with NGOs and charities out there working with kids and who could use a few brand new footballs.

Neil, through whom I also found out The Great Football Giveaway in the first place, wrote a post a couple of weeks ago announcing he was pulling a team together to raise funds. Sounded very exciting. After consideration and checking that such a trip was pretty unreasonable given I a few other things going on, I chucked out the reasons not to go ahead out of the way and committed.

Now we have a team of eight talented and smart people from the advertising and media industry joining up for this amazing adventure. We are starting to organise the whole thing and will be actively raising funds for the trip as well as making contacts both with potential sponsors for balls and organisations operating out in Tanzania we could meet up with.

The plan at this stage is to go from Dar Es Salaam (Departing from London on Thursday 4th Nevember) to the Southeast of Tanzania which apparently is off the tourist trail, has the most undeveloped and poorest parts of the country. We will choose a town as a base somewhere and spider out from there on 4x4s to go and give out footballs.

We have just set up a JustGiving Page so you go ahead and start donating:

http://www.justgiving.com/Tanzania2010

Our target is to raise £13,500 for 1,350 footballs.

We are also looking at organising a fundraising event in London mid October; more news on that very soon. If you have any contacts for potential sponsors or NGOs / Charities / peopl in Tanzania, please keep in touch.

My favourite brands continued - Skittles

I thought I'd pick up on a theme I wrote a few posts for when I started blogging, you probably guessed by now, about my favourite brands and why I like them.

So let's talk about Skittles.

To start with, and that's pretty obvious, I like the product. They're definitely amongst my all time favourite candy. I love the flavour and sorting them out by colour as I pull them out of the pack to choose which I feel like eating first (keeping reds for last, or until I have three to eat at once is a traditional strategy of mine). I love the sour Skittles as well. I had as a small kid in the States but while growing up in France, Skittles were few and far between. They were hard to find so it made more special than say, Haribo. Which by the way, I still don't understand why I can't find Tagada Strawberries in the UK - what's up with that Haribo?

They started out in the UK in 1974 and were subsequently released in the US in 1979, produced and marketed by Wrigley which also is a division of Mars Inc.

I also love pretty much everything they've been doing for marketing and advertising in the past few years. They've become well known for creating completely weird adverts in the past few years which seems to have really taken off in 2006 but I'm not exactly sure.

I found a few older ads; in the 80's Skittles was definitely traditional in the advertising:

The weirdness was creeping in beginning of the 90's with their 'Is that real?'

Then we have the string of silly, to full blown weird, to plain creepy ads, I love most of them:

And the famous 'Skittles touch'

The title of this ad brilliantly allows me to smoothly segue to the reasons why I love them so much. As you can see, this last ad was uploaded on Youtube titled: Worst Skittles Commercial Ever! I like to say the best kind of advertising is polarising, and these definitely are.

Brands can't be everything to everyone, particularly not FMCG brands that can hardly differentiate from their competitors. After all the competitors in the category are basically bits of sugar with flavouring so the brand itself and the way people remember it or not makes all the difference. If your brand or at least your communications are polarising, it gives something for people to talk about (or argue about).

I've read here and there blog posts from people comparing these ads to branded pieces of content such as Glass and Half Full Productions from Cadburys and wondering whether they were relevant, but I think there is a significant difference: where Cadbury's have created content with no relation whatsoever to chocolate, Skittles ads always feature the product. Moreover, the fact they feature the product in these weird settings forces people watching to think, even for the briefest of instants, whether they like the way the candy is being represented because it's not how candy is usually shown in ads. And that's brilliant.

They've also bravely been experimenting in the social media scene. They were slammed and criticised by many people a couple of years ago for their website that was basically a bunch links to live and real time social media sites (kind of a copy of the Modernista! agency site at the time, one of the reasons they were criticised in the industry). It turned into a mob lynching as people quickly realised anything tagged #Skittles was shown live on the website.

Skittles stuck with it. They didn't shut down their website. Everybody argued about whether it was brave or plain stupid. I liked it. There are a lot of other posts about it so I won't linger on that right now - the gist of my thinking is that many people were talking about a PR and social media / community failure when this was a website redesign and the way the brand represented itself to people rather than interacting with them. Essentially they gave the brand over to people to represent them for the time the site was live, and people responded in all their brutal beauty and ugliness combined.

Their Facebook Page is one of the most popular brand pages on the social network, over 8.5 million people subscribed and one of the only ones I appreciate the updates of, for the same reason I like the ads: they're complete nonsense and when I catch one on my news feed, it makes me smile.

The latest project / campaign they ran via Facebook a few months ago was genius: Mob the Rainbow. Raising cash for someone nobody thinks about, in its last iteration to fulfil someone's dream. As opposed to what we can often see on charity sites or generic brand campaigns, the dream here isn't grandiose, doesn't involve giant mansions or white sandy beaches. This guy's dream is to own a bowling alley and he needs a scolarship to help go through bowling management studies. Completely weird but also completely real and engaging for their community on Facebook.

As far as I know, Skittles also never changed their tagline: Taste the Rainbow. The rainbow has always been with them, they've only evolved the expression of the rainbow over time.

Loads of people create content online about Skittles and own the brand, whether it be people creating fake weird ads, flavoured vodka shots, or people arguing about the ads.

So there you go, I love Skittles. I might even buy some on my way home.

Put dot io

I hadn't heard about Put.io yet, so I thought you might not have either. Kai and Kalam told me about it last week and said it the fastest service they've come across. I've tested it this weekend and it's seriously fast. Incredibly fast. And probably a taste of what the future of computing might look like as well.

So what is it?

Imagine the unholy offspring of a cloud storage service like Dropbox, mixed with a media sharing community such as Vuze, and P2P file sharing in a variety of ways (BitTorrent, RapidShare, directly with friends, etc). Add in some radioactive electrically charged weird mix of chemicals to give the creature super-speed and there you have Put dot io.

Apparently they're based in Turkey and they have the fastest possible Internet connection in the country. Basically users register for an account, are given an amount of disk space on their servers and a monthly data streaming allocation, as an example the normal subscription I just got for $9.99 / month includes 50Gb of space and 50Gb of data streaming.

Once your account activated, you can either upload files to the server, or ask the server to download any files from anywhere. I tried it and it did about 1.5Gb worth of downloads in barely a minute. Something like the latest Yes Men documentary released on P2P would probably take less than a minute for the Put.io servers to download.

From there you can either watch it streamed from their servers or download it to your computer, share it directly with friends on the network. You can also use it as cloud based hard drive for any files and it's browser based so accessible from anywhere.

It reminded me again of the excellent Kevin Kelly TED talk about the next 5,000 days of the web, where he describes all our connected devices as different windows into one same entity, the web. As servers increase in speed and capacity, the need for hard drives on computing machines disappears, although it also raises interesting questions about perceived ownership and privacy.

With digital media having brought the costs of copying or even owning anything close to zero some considerations we used to have are no longer relevant, like background thoughts of being careful which photos I shoot with my camera because it's my only roll of film left. Now we have hundreds of photos from various occasions stored on our computers. I'm wondering if there is some feeling of comfort at knowing that even though those photos aren't tangibly present, they are all stored in a physical object, the hard drive in the computer.

Even if I don't understand exactly how it works I can touch and feel the object containing my photos, which may create an illusion of control or comfort. With everything going cloud based, we are going further away from physical, tangible things. We are already doing this with cards and money.

I'm not really sure what it means, but it's definitely interesting.

Try out Put dot io, definitely worth it!