Author: Paul Handover

The Vista Verde Help Fund for strays.

A return to such an important story.

Last week, under the post title of Group Goodness, I put out a plea for anyone who felt so minded to make a donation to this fund. That donate page for this fund being here.

Now it’s very fair to say that there wasn’t a rush of donations. It would be more accurate to say that there were no donations for several days. In fact it is only in the last twenty-four hours that the amount donated has gone from 216 to 244 Australian dollars. (The fund will be transferring those Aussie dollars across to assist John Zande and his lovely wife soon. The currency being used is because it is the sister of John’s wife who is raising the money and she lives in Australia.)

Now it would be very wrong of me to seek the reasons why not a single follower or reader of this place chose not to make a donation. But I will offer this perspective. In that Jean and I wanted to make a second donation and it has taken several days to figure out why our gift wasn’t being processed; the reason being a rather cautious (our) bank attitude to debit card payments being made overseas. So if anyone else has tried to make a donation and the system has got in the way then please do find a solution.

Here’s why!

Because John and his wife, Dionete, are totally immersed in doing their best to help the homeless and abandoned dogs in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Here are copies of recent emails that John  and Dionete have sent me over the last few days.

20th. April

Morning Paul, I took a camera this morning just to show you the new boy I’m helping. Gorgeous fellow, and young. It never stops. They never stop showing up… which is something I’m sure Jean understands all too well from her work in Mexico.

Again, thank you for your help and posting the campaign.
I queried if this new boy had a name?

No name yet. Can you think of one? I found him on the corner of a street where I feed two (sometimes 3) cats every morning. G’s mum and dad used to live in that street and her dad would feed them. He loved cats, and after he died (and G’s mum moved closer to us) I’ve kept going back. It’s been over a year now that I go there every day, and despite every effort to capture them, I’ve failed. They’re quite feral, but I can’t bring myself to letting them to fend for themselves.

And these are those photos.

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John then continued that same day:

Anyway, the boy showed up about 9 days ago, so on my daily run I feed and water him. G put his pictures on Facebook this morning and a girl (Luiza) responded saying she knows of another lady who’s also feeding him. I saw food there once, on day 2 I think, but none since, so I’m not sure what that’s all about. The girl who actually responded is a part of this loose Vista Verde group. I’ve never met her, but I know of her. We’re helping her as she took in a dog a few months ago that had been hit by a car and is paralysed, but, to her credit, she’s refused to give in and has him in physio (including water treadmills), which is actually showing some positive signs. That’s sort of how it all works. Here’s some pictures and video of that case. Gorgeous dog.

Go here to view those pictures & videos.

The boy is relatively safe where he is. He has shelter, and doesn’t appear to be in any mood to move on, which is good. If he stays put we can help. Finding a home for him is not easy, but after we can find some place as a temporary shelter we’ll get him into the vet, neutered, treated for whatever, then settled. The huge problem is, there simply aren’t any shelters we can just take him to, so we can’t get him off the street and into the vet immediately. Every shelter is over-full, and that makes rescues just that much harder. It’s not the case of simply finding a dog (or cat) and getting them to safety… which is heartbreaking. You just have to hope they stay put. A few times I’ve put a dog in the car and taken them from danger (like near a main road) and brought them up to our area where there are parks and plenty of shelter and people to help. It’s a safe place, and if they stay put we often have successes… But that takes time. But, as I said, he doesn’t seem to want to move on, and he’s starting to put on weight. He was desperately thin, but 500g of mince and a big bowl of dry food every day seems to be doing the trick.

Here’s hoping to a good ending for him.

In speaking with Jeannie about this poor dog she very quickly suggested the name of Socks. John happily went with Jean’s suggestion.

21st April

Hi Paul, just a quick update on socks. Luiza (the girl I mentioned yesterday) has found temporary shelter for Socks for one month. It’s not long, but will give us the chance to neuter him and do all necessary blood work. Finding him a home is the next hill, but I spent time with him this morning, just sitting with him, and he’s really a lovely, gentle fellow, so here’s hoping.

24th April

Socks update: His shelter home is ready today, we’ve been told. That, however, might now not be needed. Sunday I saw he now has a huge dog house on the footpath, with blankets, food and water. He wasn’t interested in the mince I brought him, so I just left some chewing treats. Same thing this morning (I’ve just gotten back). So, we’ll go back later today just to speak (again) to the people in the street (we don’t know who exactly put the dog house there), and it might be the case that he just goes straight to the vet for neutering, maybe a few days in the shelter for recovery, then back to his house while (if still needed) we look for a permanent home/family.

April 25th.

Hello Paul – I can see you’ve been playing “email tennis” with the gofundme staff  –  good to read they (finally) managed to sort it out.

We saw Socks today. Apparently a bunch of neighbours got together to feed and take care of him, albeit on the street (he was given a 2nd-hand doghouse & doona (oops, duvet)). One of the guys has been thinking of taking him to his country house; an acquaintance of mine knows of somebody who might adopt him. Yes, everything’s still in the air, but he has it much much better than other dogs we’ve found and helped.
Now we can book his neutering/vaccine.

As for me, I don’t have enough words to thank you & Jean. Truth to be told it feels a bit weird to be the beneficiary of a campaign. We’ve always helped others and suddenly seeing ourselves in this position is a tad uncomfortable, actually – which doesn’t mean this money is not welcome, considering all the cases we’ve had so far this year.

Fingers crossed it all works out for Socks. We’ll keep you posted.

So, good people, this is why I beseech you to please support what John, Dionete and his close group are doing on behalf of those dogs down in Brazil. Please make a donation!

Growing babies.

Just thought I would share the latest pictures of our family of Canadian Geese.

First up, let me again show you a picture or two from the day when the goslings were born on the 11th April (and there were six born):

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Mum and Dad and what looks like 5 goslings.

So now to how they are getting along just two weeks on from when they hatched out from their eggs.

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Next thing the youngsters will be all grown up and wondering, like yours truly, where all the years went!

Five years in the blink of an eye!

“Events, dear boy, events!”

That quote was one uttered by Harold Macmillan, the British Conservative politician and publisher, who served six years as Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963. It was in response to a question regarding what sort of thing was most likely to blow a government off course.

Why did that quotation come to my mind? Simply because all my grand plans for writing a post for you good people were stymied by our internet connection being down for much of the weekend.

So rather than get cut off half-way through a new post, I decided to re-post what I published on this blog five years ago to the day: on April 24th. 2012. Here it is.

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How lady luck brought joy for a ‘down-and-out’ Londoner and a cat called Bob!

I was chatting with my son yesterday and he happened to mention that perhaps I should write about a cat for a change! Alex mentioned a book recently published in the UK called A Street Cat Named Bob: How One Man and His Cat Found Hope on the Streets.

This is how the book is described on Amazon (UK site),

When James Bowen found an injured, ginger street cat curled up in the hallway of his sheltered accommodation, he had no idea just how much his life was about to change. James was living hand to mouth on the streets of London and the last thing he needed was a pet. Yet James couldn’t resist helping the strikingly intelligent tom cat, whom he quickly christened Bob. He slowly nursed Bob back to health and then sent the cat on his way, imagining he would never see him again. But Bob had other ideas. Soon the two were inseparable and their diverse, comic and occasionally dangerous adventures would transform both their lives, slowly healing the scars of each other’s troubled pasts. A Street Cat Named Bob is a moving and uplifting story that will touch the heart of anyone who reads it.

A quick web search found volumes of material.

As in the local London newspaper the Islington Tribune wrote this back in 2010,

Two cool cats… the Big Issue seller and a stray called Bob

Inseparable: musician James Bowen with Bob

Down-on-his-luck musician teams up with ‘wonderful loyal friend’ he rescued from streets

Published: 24 September, 2010
by PETER GRUNER

NOT since the legendary Dick Whittington has a man and his cat become such unlikely celebrities on the streets of Islington.

Big Issue seller James Bowen and his docile ginger cat Bob, who go everywhere together, have been attracting comments since they first appeared outside Angel Tube station.

The story of how they met – widely reported in blogs on the internet – is one of such extraordinary pathos that it seems only a matter of time before we get a Hollywood film.

James, 31, who lives off Seven Sisters Road, Holloway, is a musician who has fallen on hard times.

He ekes out a basic living selling the homeless people’s magazine Big Issue at Angel and Covent Garden.

Bob was a stray discovered by James outside his accommodation one day.

The cat was limping after apparently being attacked by another animal, possibly a fox.

After failing to discover the cat’s owner, James took him to the RSPCA hospital at Finsbury Park, which prescribed a course of antibiotics.

“I kept him for two weeks until he was well enough to go on his way,” said James. “But when I opened the front door to let him out Bob wouldn’t move. He seemed to me to be saying: ‘I want to stay with you.’

“Now we go everywhere together. I even have a cat harness when we go out and Bob gets really excited when I show it to him.”

Read the rest of the article here and if you want more information, a web search on Bob the Cat will finds loads more.

It’s a fabulous story with a great message of hope for not just for James and Bob but for all of us that find ourselves ‘up a creek without a paddle’ at points in our lives.

Here’s how the newspaper The Daily Mail wrote about it on their website,

[last half of the story]

But then Bob started following him and it became increasingly difficult to shoo him away, especially as there were dangerous roads to be crossed. One day there was nothing for it but to put Bob on a makeshift lead and take him along. Bob travelled sitting on James’s shoulders.

The trouble was, so many cat-mad passers-by stopped him to stroke the animal that James arrived late at his pitch, secretly cursing Bob for thereby costing him some of his usual £25-a-day takings. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Within minutes, people who would normally have walked by without giving James a second glance were lingering to make a fuss of the cat sitting sedately in his guitar case, and most made a donation. By the end of the day, he’d racked up more than £60.

It was the beginning of a phenomenon as tourists and commuters befriended Bob and James, many bringing titbits for the cat. People were amazed at how placidly Bob would sit all day, quite happily watching the world go by while James earned a living. Not that it was always without a hitch; on a couple of occasions Bob bolted when startled, leading to a frantic chase through the crowded streets.

Bob’s popularity continued when James switched from busking to selling the Big Issue, the magazine produced and sold by homeless people. This change in direction was part of James’s growing sense of a need to get his life in order, which he puts down to the responsibility of looking after Bob, and the example the cat offered of the possibility of a second chance.

It enabled James to make the final push to end his drug dependency, going through the necessary cold turkey to get off heroin substitutes, and to mend broken contacts with his family. The final result of Bob’s influence came when a literary agent who passed the duo every day and had seen them on YouTube suggested James tell their story in a book. The result is this heart-warming tale with a message of hope that will appeal especially to the many cat obsessives out there.

Read the full story here.

Let me close with another video, this one from a recent UK This Morning TV show with James Bowen and his cat being interviewed by Eamonn and Ruth.

Thank you, Alex; great story!

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Hope you enjoyed that ‘blast from the past’.

Picture Parade One Hundred and Ninety-Two

The third and final set of Janet Goodbrod’s images.

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Weren’t they wonderful. If only there were more!

Well, there are! 🙂 And from the same lovely lady.

So here’s a taster for more over the next few weeks.

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And wasn’t that last one simply stunning!

Be happy good people!

Dogs are saving our lives!

Literally, not just emotionally!

Over on my website, under My Writings, I mention my recently published booklet, The Amazing World of Dogs.

Here’s an extract from pages 17-18 of that booklet.

Finally, Dr. Morten Kringelbach of the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford University1 explains that the need to nurture is very deep in us humans and that dogs produce an instinctive parental response in us that is very similar to our nurturing instinct for our children.

If the magic of having dogs in our lives for such a long time ended there it would still be breathtakingly wonderful. But dogs could now be offering us humans the capacity to understand many human diseases. Literally, our dogs could be saving our lives!

The challenge in understanding human diseases is that within our ‘breed’ there is a great variability of genes. Not surprising when one considers the incredible diversity and variation within us humans.

But when we turn to dogs then we have a bonus. For despite there being, as mentioned earlier, 400 or more different breeds of dog, within each breed dogs are very similar to each other. In other words, that narrow gene pool within a specific dog breed makes if far easier to pinpoint genetic mutations than it is in humans.

Elinor Karlsson is the director of the Vertebrate Genomics Group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.2 As a geneticist, Dr. Karlsson has identified, “hundreds of diseases common to dogs and humans”. In 2005, the dog’s genome was fully mapped; all 2.4 billion letters of the dog’s genome

Among those common diseases between us humans and our wonderful dogs are diabetes, cardiac diseases, epilepsy, many cancers especially bone cancers, and breast cancer and even brain tumours.

So it was an obvious thing to do to republish the following article that appeared on the Care2 site a few days ago.

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 Could a Dog Vaccine Help Save Kids With Brain Cancer?

By: Laura Goldman April 17, 2017

About Laura Follow Laura at @lauragoldman

The statistics are grim: About 60 to 70 percent of children who have glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer, do not survive more than two years. This fast-growing cancer is resistant to traditional treatments like radiation and chemotherapy.

For dogs, cancer statistics are also grim. More than 6 million dogs are diagnosed with cancer every year, and one out of four dogs will get cancer during their lifetime. It’s the leading cause of death for dogs after the age of two.

But there could be hope for both dogs and kids. A vaccine being developed that destroys cancer cells in dogs could also be successful in fighting glioblastoma in children.

Researchers at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., have started a partnership with ELIAS Animal Health, a company that’s testing treatments for osteosarcoma (bone cancer) and B cell lymphoma in dogs.

“If we take advantage of the resources we have in this region and get behind those collaborations, this could be a mecca for advanced, exciting, innovative therapies for cancer and lots of other diseases,” Dr. Doug Myers, an oncologist at Children’s Mercy, told the Kansas City Star.

ELIAS Cancer Immunotherapy (ECI) uses the dog’s own immune system to destroy the cancer. “Research has shown that ex vivo activated T cells have the machinery to effectively kill cancer cells, including cancer stem cells,” according to the company’s website. “ELIAS Cancer Immunotherapy utilizes adoptive cell therapy to deliver an army of activated T cells.”

The dog is vaccinated with his own cancer cells to produce an immune response, then the generated white blood cells destroy the cancer cells.

“Personalized T cells are then safely obtained from the patient through apheresis [the removal of blood] and then ‘super charged’ to produce a large population of killer T cells that are reinfused into the patient to kill the cancer,” the company explains.

ELIAS Animal Health is currently conducting clinical trials of ECI at Kansas State University, the University of Missouri-Columbia and a few animal hospitals across the country. The success rates of using ECI along with surgery on dogs with cancer are being compared with those of patients that are treated with surgery alone.

“Early clinical study results already show positive outcomes,” Tammie Wahaus, CEO of ELIAS Animal Health, said in November 2016.

Among the ECI success stories is that of Dakota, a German shorthaired pointer who continues to survive a year after she was diagnosed with osteosarcoma. This is twice as long as her original prognosis. X-rays taken during a follow-up examination showed no signs of the cancer spreading.

Could ECI also successfully treat children with glioblastoma? Dr. Kevin Ginn, a pediatric oncologist at Children’s Mercy, and other researchers are currently developing protocols for trials. They’re planning to apply for a Phase II clinical trial with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, using the results of ECI’s studies on safety and effectiveness as far as dogs are concerned. The Phase II trial would give ECI to a large group of children to see if it’s effective and further evaluate its safety.

Animal health trials are regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They are less expensive and proceed faster than FDA-regulated human trials, the Kansas City Star reports, “but successful human health treatments often bring a larger return on investment.”

In this case, a larger return on investment could be a win-win for children as well as dogs with cancer.

Photo credit: cgordon8527

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My booklet closes thus:

Many would extend that proficiency of dogs to include their sense of loyalty and forgiveness, to and of us humans, but that all pales into insignificance when compared to what our understanding of dogs is giving us.

No less than the capacity to help cure many of our diseases, to deeply understand the workings of the human mind, and above all else, to offer insight into our very existence.

That’s quite a relationship!

Quite a relationship indeed!

Group goodness

The power of sharing.

(And, please, make a note of my final remark at the end of today’s post.)

Those who are regular visitors to this place will know that John Zande, who lives in Brazil, is a good friend, and, for that matter, I try to be a good friend of his place.  (If you didn’t read my recent review of John’s latest book On The Problem of Good then it is here.)

So when a couple of days ago I received the following email from John you can imagine my positive response to his request.

Paul, hi, I have a favour to ask.

My wife’s sister, Dee (who lives in Australia) has started a gofundme campaign to help cover a rash of vet surgery bills we’ve had recently. These past few months (most of summer, really) has been appalling with the number of dumped animals in our area.

Together with a few other people in our loose group we rescued about ten and got them adopted out to good homes. Plus, we have three in temporary shelters as we nurse them back to health. We took one into our house, Nina, thus making eleven here now, who had her tail amputated last Tuesday. We were fortunate in that our vet worked for free (a 3hr operation) and only charged us for the anesthetist.

We’re lucky to have these wonderful people around, but we’re a tad snowed under right now with the accumulated surgeries and medicines, which is why Dee started this little campaign.

Now there was no question that Jean and I wanted to help. Not only by making a modest donation ourselves but by promoting Dee’s campaign. I emailed a reply to John saying just that.

John then responded with more details, including some photographs:

Dee is married to a very good friend of mine from Uni. She started this campaign to help Dionete, my wife, and I (and if possible a few other Vista Verde folk who’re in our rescue network) here in Brazil. Dee was here just before Christmas and saw the problem first hand. She actually helped us rescue a wonderful little fellow, Terrorista, who now lives a few streets away with a wonderful family.

I didn’t know, but Dionete was chatting to her a week or two ago and it came up just how many vet/surgery/medicine expenses we’d accumulated over the summer. Without either of us knowing, she, Dee, then started this gofundme campaign to lend a hand and help clear the vet bills. We’re not an NGO (we actually help four here in Sao Jose dos Campos, two in Sao Paulo, and Sandra’s Maxmello in another city south of Sao Paulo). Because we’re not an NGO we’ve never thought about doing a campaign ourselves, so was surprised when Dee started this one. It’s quite modest, $1,000 Australian dollars (the goal) converted to Brazilian Reis will make a sizable dent in our backlog of vet surgery bills. Our bills are tiny compared to a guy we know who does have an NGO and owes his network of vets 90,000. He’s a wonderful fellow and I’m actually working with him to try and get a mobile neutering unit started here in Sao Jose dos Campos. But that’s another story. So, to be clear, the campaign is for us here in Vista Verde, which is sadly a dumping ground for animals. Surrounding districts seem to think we’re all wealthy here and therefore they can dump their animals. It’s infuriating, and the animals never stop coming.

I am sure that Jean and I aren’t the only ones that want to help.

So here’s the link to that GoFundMe campaign on behalf of VISTA VERDE HELP FUND for strays.

And John could offer no better reason for seeking some financial support from the wider world. Here’s some of his later email:

My apologies if there was some confusion. I’m actually heading out right now to feed a new fellow I found a few days ago and is sleeping outside a house in another district. When I get back I’ll send some more photos, OK.
Let me close with some more photos of dogs that have been helped by John, Dionete and the rest of the great band of the Vista Verde Fund.
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Finally!
Please offer whatever you can to help. Even the smallest amount makes a real difference.
This is the GoFundMe donate page.
I am going to run this post for two days. I.e. the next post will be out on Friday, 21st April.

Party Animal Dog Food Recall

This came in just a few minutes ago.

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Party Animal Dog Food Recall of April 2017

April 17, 2017 — Party Animal, Inc. has announced it is recalling specific lots of two varieties of its Cocolicious canned dog foods because they have each tested positive for the euthanasia drug, pentobarbital.

What’s Being Recalled?

The following products are affected by the recall:

  • Cocolicious Beef and Turkey
    Size: 12 ounce cans
    Lot Number: 0136E15204 04
    Best By Date: July 2019
  • Cocolicious Chicken and Beef
    Size: 12 ounce cans
    Lot Number: 0134E15 237 13
    Best By Date: August 2019

What Caused the Recall?

According to a statement posted on the company’s website and its Facebook page:

The safety of pets is and always will be our first priority. We sincerely regret the reports of the discomfort experienced by the pet who consumed this food.

As pet parents ourselves, we take this matter seriously.

On April 13, a retailer in Texas notified us that their customer had presented samples of our Cocolicious Beef and Turkey Lot #0136E15204 04 and Cocolicious Chicken and Beef Lot #0134E15 237 13 to a testing lab, and that the results had tested positive for pentobarbital.

We have requested those results.

When we were notified, we immediately tracked the lot numbers of the food in question and determined that the food had been manufactured and distributed in 2015.

We then contacted the two probable retailers that had sold the customer the food and asked them to isolate all remaining cans from these lots.

We also requested that the retailers send all of the cans from those lots to us so that we can forward them on to an accredited independent laboratory for independent testing.

We expect to receive the receive the results in 7 to 10 days.

We first saw the formal report from the lab at Texas A&M regarding the customer’s samples, today, April 17.

Out of an abundance of caution, we are retrieving the remainder of these two lots nationwide.

We are working with our distributors and retailers to determine if any additional beef-flavored products manufactured during this 2015 production period remain on shelves and, if so, to retrieve them from shelves, immediately, as well.

What to Do?

Consumers with questions may contact the company by phone at 855-727-8926 or by email at info@partyanimalpetfood.com.

U.S. citizens can report complaints about FDA-regulated pet food products by calling the consumer complaint coordinator in your area.

Or go to http://www.fda.gov/petfoodcomplaints.

Canadians can report any health or safety incidents related to the use of this product by filling out the Consumer Product Incident Report Form.

Get Dog Food Recall Alerts by Email

Get free dog food recall alerts sent to you by email. Subscribe to The Dog Food Advisor’s emergency recall notification system.

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As always, please share this as far and wide as you can!

No place for amateurs!

Offering up a tribute to the work of a professional.

Many, many years ago when I was in business on my own account (1978-1986) I had the pleasure of getting to know Frank Tijou. He was running his own very successful business. But more important than that, Frank had this wonderful ability to explain what he had learned over his years of being an entrepreneur. One such learning was stick to what you really know and don’t try and do things that are best left to other professionals. In other words, don’t be an amateur when it comes to important matters.

Thus when some weeks ago I was strongly recommended by some local authors to have an author website, I looked around for a professional. I quickly came to find Christy Kiltz of Design! by Kiltz Internet Solutions.

Talk about finding a true professional.

Forgive me, I’m not coming at this in terms of an ego trip. I just want to promote what a wonderful job Christy did. (And not forgetting Emily’s grand design work.) (And most certainly not forgetting my darling Jeannie who did the image of the man in a flat cap with the dogs!)

Please go across to my new website: Paul Handover – Life Traveller.

The home page banner image from my website.

So in the words of American playwright Garson Kanin:

“Amateurs hope, professionals work.”

Thank you, Christy!

Picture Parade One Hundred and Ninety-One

The second set of pictures sent across by Janet Goodbrod.

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Another set in a week’s time.

You all take care out there meantime!

Further travels with Natalie

Natalie returns with her second travel installment.

Almost a month ago, the 18th March to be exact, I introduced Natalie Derham-Weston:

Those who take a close interest in this place (you poor, lost souls!) will have noticed from time to time me posting items that have been sent to me by Bob Derham. He and I first met when we were both based in Larnaca, Cyprus in the late 80’s/early 90’s and we have remained good and close friends ever since.

Natalie is Bob’s beautiful daughter and recently contacted me to ask if she might offer a guest post on her traveling experiences. Natalie has ambitions to be a travel writer and, as you are about to see, would make an excellent one.

On that day Natalie presented the first installment of her travel blog. It was very well received by you good people. Many of you left great comments.

Thus it is with great pleasure that I present Natalie’s next travel  installment.

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Travel Blog: Installment 2: Laos

After having set the standard so high in Thailand, there was a lot riding on our following section of the journey. However before moving on to Laos, the logical next step and easiest route to take, we had a few metaphorical “bridges” to cross. Looking back, the process seems an enormous chore but at the time we didn’t question the operation. Although tiredness did sometimes set in heavily, Hannah and I had to mentally overcome this and remind ourselves how this beat office day jobs hands down.
Our last evening in Thailand was spent in Chang Mai. After some deliberation and consulting of maps and Google facilities, we booked a slow boat trip down to Mekong to take us into Laos. The evening was then free to be spent at our leisure. Pre-travelling I was naïve, and perhaps still am. Though even I had heard tell of the Thai “lady boys” and we had the greatest pleasure of spending an afternoon in their company after having looked lost and forlorn at a cross roads and took up their offer of a pool side beer. They spoke openly about their choice to change gender and what they had to undergo. This meeting was purely circumstantial but very memorable all the same. After this curious incident we caught up in town with a friend I had been to school with in South Africa. Carmen was in Thailand teaching English and had an evening to spare, which was such a lovely chance to assemble and to chew the fat as some may say.
On our wander back to our hostel we happened to bump into Nadine, a girl we had met previously on an overnight train. This is one of my most favourite parts of travelling, crossing paths with friends, having had no plans and no inkling of the others location.
The following morning consisted of some organising, dollars had to be sourced for the Laos border and check out was an early evacuation, drying our towels on the outside of our bags and heaving them downstairs to be left for the later pickup. In the meantime, we bought up some supplies to support us through the epic bus journey that we had to embark upon that afternoon. Fortunately, these snacks barely amounted to anything, and certainly made a welcome change to our expensive sandwiches and bottles of water back in the UK!
Our bus was a 7 hour journey, taking us through minute villages and stopping at temples along the way. One in particular stood out, which was pure white. The only colour was a singular red nail on a hand protruding from a statue of swarming limbs surrounding the building.
That night was our first sighting of the vast Mekong, a fast flowing murky, brown mass of water with grassy banks and elephants grazing alongside. Children were running down to the shore to bathe and play and generally splash around as much as was possible.
Our accommodation had been part of the ticket and so was basic to say the least. Dinner went untouched due to the extensive family of flies feasting on it. In the morning, the pre stated time of 8:30 got blown out the window and there was a quick panic to depart at 8. After yet more busses, there was a process in place at the border for visa stamps and signing of papers. The long queues were hot and felt much longer than they probably were.

At another stop we convened with a load of other tourists. At this point it dawned on us that neither Hannah nor I had any local currency, which was apparently an issue. So the solution to this was for me to jump on the back of a bike belonging to a tour guide within the group and find the nearest ATM and hope for the best. I sauntered back with 500,000 kip, the equivalent of about £50, and felt very wealthy! 12 of us were stuffed into an open tuktuk, with our bags precariously perched on top and sent down a steep slope to a load of boats tied up, surrounded by pigs in baskets, goats running lose and a huge swarm of blue butterflies milling around the general vicinity.

Nobody seemed able to direct us to the correct boat so after half an hour of debating and questioning, we finally got some sense out of someone and all started to engross ourselves into a comfortable fashion on a long boat. The seats had previously been in a minibus by the looks of them but made for a relatively pleasant crossing. We exhausted every possible game we could think of, including eye spy and cards and took to gazing out the open windows at the scenery, with our legs dangled over the side, dozing in the sun.
Late afternoon time saw us arriving at our overnight spot, a very small village, running solely on the likes of us, temporary tourists. Our newly made friends were mainly from Europe and we stuck together choosing a hostel on the hillside and later all enjoyed a joint dinner out. I remember this being 79,000 kip = £6.50 and what I thought was fantastic value! The shower back at the hostel was nonexistent so I made do with crouching underneath an outside tap arrangement. As it was Easter Sunday, I took some time to have a phone call back home and caught up on the news of England.
The next day entailed an 8 hour boat journey further down the Mekong into the town of Luang Prabang. Still in our group, we found a local bus into the main high street and found our hostel. We ended up in a mixed dorm with a Japanese man we had shared a bus with a few days prior, who made us endless origami frogs, two Dutch girls we had met in Pai and some others from the boat.
We had a quick nap and were out again that evening to try out the local foods and to witness the night market. I added to my collection of foreign art work with a bright Buddha head painting and some more elephant trousers. These really are the way forward, they are light, don’t crease, are breezy and make long journeys far more pleasurable. The food stalls were a sight to behold, full of black eggs, chicken intestines, heads and feet so I opted for some fresh looking fruit. Later we sat as a huge group at a popular bar called Utopia and as happens when travelling, skipped the polite introductions and befriended each other quickly. This is another part of the whole “travel” life that I appreciate. Nobody judges on mundane things that don’t matter, people just seem to mould more easily and quicker.
In the next couple of days we visited waterfalls and woke up at 5 am to witness the “Giving of Alms”. This is a procession of monks who come to receive gifts of food. We found bookshops and read on recliners overlooking the Mekong. It felt like a world away from parents and friends back home.

Collectively, our group made the decision to bus to Vang Vieng shortly after. The main attraction of this town is “tubing”, an activity for the brave and resilient. An all day drinking marathon down the river in rubber rings. I can’t deny, it was fun. The weather was glorious, and everybody was in good spirits. At each stop down the river, we were pulled in by event staff and were given bracelets (this became an obsession with some of us over our travelling time. Some sort of victorious achievement was to have as many travel bracelets as possible.)
The quick interlude in this popular backpacker location included much watching of ‘Friends’, a tradition even cited in the Lonely Planet books. Although after a couple of days, we craved some more brain stirring activities and more cultural action. So again, we took a bus to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, holding up the piles of bags in the back of the bus and awaited our next mode of transport into our next country…

ooOOoo

Please, all of you, wherever you are, have a wonderful weekend.