don´t worry, we are still alive!

hello!

it appears its been a while since we updated this thing.... sorry guys. but don´t worry we are here now!

since our last post we have done and seen sooo much! after Vietnam we flew to Bali where we stayed for two weeks, and had the chance to meet up with Bridget and Karina which was amazing, and soo much fun!!! before they arrived we went to a city called Ubud which was awesome...its got an artsy vibe to it and all the buildings and streets were so pretty. we loved all the hindu architecture! all the buildings look like little temples it was so cool. we went to a monkey forest there which was quite the experience... both Kaylen and I had monkeys crawling up and down us!! we were really scared at first and apprehensive to enter the forest but we finally came around to them. they are soo devious and cheeky though. you have to hang on to all your stuff or they will steal it! at a temple in south Bali one jumped onto my face and stole my sun glasses! we are very pleased that there are no monkeys in europe...

anyways, when B and K came to visit we met them in Kuta beach then we took a boat to Gili Trawangan (a very small island a couple hrs from bali) and it was sooo beautiful! the water was so warm and the colour was unreal. we will try and post some pics soon! we all went scuba diving there and it was wayyyy better than thailand! i´ve never seen so many turtles and cool fish in my life, it was great! (sadly we saw no sharks like we were hoping... guess i´ll have to go back!)

we left bali the 2nd of May and flew Qatar airways to Madrid! spain has been amazinggg. everything is so beautiful here. we stayed in madrid for 5 days with Kaylens sister who is studying there, did some sightseeing etc. had some great tapas (free!) and saw a bull fight! (don´t need to see another one of those...)

oh wait have to run!! just remembered we need to go meet someone in five minutes.

to be continued...

Saigon and Mui Ne, Vietnam

hello everyone! we are currently soaking up some much needed sun in Mui Ne, which is about 4 hours from Saigon/Ho Chi Minh city. It's gorgeous here.. we are sad to be leaving tomorrow :( we are staying at a hostel called Vietnam-Austria House and its amazing.. the manager is super nice and helps us out a lot and the place is really great.. nice clean rooms, pool out front, and its right on the water! we met Amber and Hannah and have been hanging with them for a few days which has been so much fun. i think it was the 4th time we were able to meet up which was cool. before Mui Ne we took the bus from Phnom Penh to Saigon and stayed there for 3 nihgts. we LOVED the city... so much going on and tons of energy. we visited the war remnants musem (which was like 4 floors and lots of reading!); it went through all the details of the war with the states and had tons of pictures, artifacts, etc. it was really good ,very intense though and sad. we also went to the Cu Chi tunnels which are about 2 hours from the city.. they are an underground tunnel system that took 20 years to build starting during the war with the french, but were only used during the war with the states. they were pretty cool to see. they let us crawl through a few of them too, they were sooo small! they also showed us all the traps they used to use during the war... classic traps like putting grass/leaves over a hole in the ground while the enemy falls through onto spikes.. meanwhile the americans were using tanks and bombs and guns to fight. we also did some non-war things like buying cameras (i bought a normal one and kaylen got a great deal on a video camera which has been so fun to use!) anyways, gotta run for dinner! xoxo nomads

Sihanoukville

Just a quick update to go with the pictures!
We were in Sihanoukville for a week, and after a day there we met some people who worked at this bar called JJs and they told us we could work there. It was awesome, they set us up with accomodation (a dorm room above the bar), free food, and free alcohol. Basically our job was to hand out flyers a couple times a day, then we would bartend from about 930pm to 5am. we werent required to make any of the intricate drinks, most people just order simple mixers or beers (cause theyre so cheap) so they dont really need to train you or anything. It wasnt serious either, if we werent bartending we would just go dance around/chat to people/etc. It was super fun though, were glad we did it. SUch an easy way to save money but also meet so many people.
We are back in Phnom Penh now, going to go to Vietnam shortly.
About the Angkor Wat picture, sorry its pretty crappy. Since Maddy's pictures were all lost and my screen is cracked, my pictures from that day didnt turn out very well and because I cant use any settings on mine the sunrise shots didnt work out very well. SOrrrrrryyyy!!
Have to go book our bus!
xox

Angkor Wat (crappy picture)/The crew at JJ's/skulls at the Killing Fields/The workplace

Cambodia

ALLO!
we are in Sihanoukville right now (south cambodia, on the Gulf of Thailand). We came here from Phnom Penh yesterday. Unfortunately the weather is still a bit crummy, its been pretty cloudy most of the time we have been in Cambodia (almost a week now) but still hot and still nice.
I guess from the last post we were in Southern Laos...we visited a couple of the islands there which were nice. The first was remote (i think i wrote about it) and very authentic...the second was called Don Det and was definitely a tiny little tourist hub. we only stayed there for one night though because it turned out that there was no ATM or banks anywhere on the islands because of their remoteness, so we had to use our cash to get to Siem Reap while we still had some.
Siem Reap was sweet, we stayed a couple nights there and visited Angkor Wat for sunset (hardly a sunset cause it was cloudy) but then the next morning we woke up at 5am (mad and i slept through our alarm, which we always do, but luckily our friends found us and woke us up). we made it just in time for sunrise, which was pretty amazing, even though we were absolutely exhausted. We hired a tuktuk for the day to drive us to all the different temples at Angkor Wat (they are all very spread out and in different areas). They were unreal though, it would take about 30-45 minutes to go through each one. We would upload some pictures of it but unforutnately our cameras are out of commission (ill elaborate on that in a second). Cambodia gives a very different vibe than Laos considering how close they are to eachtoher, i think the poverty level is around the same, but the people here are much different, and the begging is much more intensee than what we found in laos. Laos was much more laid back. Oh and the prostitution here is pretty wild, soooo many very old men walking around with very young cambodian girls, its really sickening. You see it everywhere, its hard to get over....Anwayys, After visiting Angkor Wat and puttering around Siem Reap for a couple days we left for Phnom Penh.
Phnom Penh even gave a different vibe than Siem Reap...probably to do with all of its history, but again there is a ton of begging and it is a very bustling city. we were forwarned about being cautious with bags and scams etc as it is very common there. In PP we met up with Mad's dad's friend's fiance (haha long explanation there)...but she is Cambodian and she invited us for dinner at her house one night. She picked us up on her motorbike and then drove us to her house which was about 30 minutes from our guesthouse. Her whole familywas there for dinner (3 sisters, 3 kids, her borther, and her inlaws), where we ate a Khmer meal on the floor of their wooden house built on stilts over the river. WE really enjoyed it, she was so sweet and her family was so welcoming, and it was awesome to have a very Cambodian experience. we visited Tuol Sleng Museum (which is S-21 prison) where they kept and tortured thousands of people during PolPots Regime (Khmer Rouge). It was incredibly creepy and heartbreaking. THe next day on our way to the Killing Fields (where they killed all the people that were kept in Tuol Sleng), we were riding in a tuktuk and a guy on a motorbike drove up beside us and literally snatched Mad's purse off of her body. It was a shoulder bag and wrapped around her body and under her shoulder, and somehow this guy managed to get it over her head within a second and then drive off on his bike. We tried to follow him but the tuk tuks go sooo slow and there is always sooo much traffic. SOooo unfortunately Mad lost her camera (all her memory cards), her ipod touch (which is what we have been using for skype), and some cash. Luckily our passports were int he process of getting the vietnam Visas back at the guesthouse but its still a huge bummer considering that my camera half- broke when we were in laos so I havent been using it that much.
Now we are in Sihanoukville which is nice, lots of tourists (cause the beaches bring everyone here) but the weather isnt that great which kind of sucks. Today was decent weather. The people tyring to sell you stuf here is a bit aggressive on the beaches...its all young girls and boys (around 15 years old or so) trying to sell fruit/bracelets/sunglasses etc). One girl got really hostile with Mad today cause she claimed that Mad made a promise with her to buy some fruit from her even though she didnt...but the girl wasnt happy, she was cursing at us and stuff.
okkkiiiii time to go! will try and get some photos up soon if we can find some relatively decent ones on my broken camera (the lens broke so i cant see what i am taking pictures of and i cant use any of the settings so the pics dont turn out that well). Porbably gonna both be buying new ones whenw e get to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam within a week.
xoxo

LaoLao

Sorry for the delay! Laos has been the worst with internet, everywhere we go is either so slow and not worth the money. So the update from since Luang Prabang...wow we are pretty far from there now. From Luang Prabang we bussed down to VangVieng with our canadian buds where we met Amber and Hannah. Randomly we ended up getting a room directly beside theirs (we knew what hotel they were though). VangVieng was hilarious basically all u do there is go tubing and then lounge at these "Friends Bars" where all the restaurants play episodes of either Freinds or Family Guy literally all day long. Its a trap for all the hungover people who go tubing the day before. The day after we arrived we went tubing, there was 6 of us (all canadians) so we bought red and white heart shaped sunglasses and then each person bought 'sanpans'(those asian rice hats). we made quite the impression. Tubing basically involves renting a tube and then geting a tuktuk to the top of the river where u start at the first bar (the river is lined with bars) and then you tube to the next. It was incredibly fun! Amber and Hannah left the day after the tubing and we stayed, we planned on doing one more day of tubing before heading to Vientiane but we woke up to the weather being really crappy and pouring rain so we decided to leave vangvieng. In Vientiane we only stayed one night, the 4 of us went to a french restaurant for dinner which was sooooo good and we had amazing steaks (we went all out and got wine and salads etc and our total bill was still only 50$ between 4. it was awesome. Vientiane wasnt that exciting though, the weather was still crappy (probably about 15 degrees and pouring rain). After our dinner we went bowling and without knowing it we ran into amber and hannah again! Bowled with them for a while then parted ways. They left for Hanoi the next day. From Vientiane we decided to reroute and instead of heading to Vietnam we decided to see Southern laos and what they call the 4000 islands. its a long route so we broke it up and stopped at a cave called Kong Lo and it is 7.5 km long, it was wild. we took little boats through it. We stayed one night at a guesthouse, saw the cave, then left that night for Pakse(after a 12 hr bus ride that was supposed to be 6 hrs). UGH and it was freeeeeezing while we did this. This cold front hit that area of laos i guess and we literally had to wear pants and layers and layers of tops because it was probably 5 degrees (not joking) and sooooo windy. During the night maddy and I shared one of our single beds and put 2 comforters on it. Lasted about 2 days. anyways, We arrived in Pakse after at 4am and had to find a guesthouse, which was annoying but not too bad, just super tired. The next day we took a bus to Don Khong (the biggest of the 4000 islands) which is where we are now. Its really nice and were really glad we came this route because now we arent far from Cambodia, and its super relaxing so we are just gonna chill here for a few days before crossing the border. THe islands are super quiet and its funny cause they are called the 4000 islands but we think that they count these 5 foot chunks of land emerging from the water, in that 4000, so its not like all these massive islands everywhere....just a lot of little guys! today we rented bikes and we just biked around trying to find beaches but they dont really have them on this island, its the most "authentic lao" of them all. We have hardly seen any tourists. TOmorrow we are going to DonDet which is one of the smaller islands and apparently a bit more touristy (supposed to have a beach or 2), but well see...we thought this one had beaches but it definitely doesnt!
we are having an amazing time though, Laos has been sooo awesome, hence our extending our stay here a bit and traveling more of it. were excited to hit cambodia too though!
hope all is well back home!!
xoxo
Nomads

scared mid-zip,and our view from the Treehouse