Filed under: Laos
Posted by Sara
1. Getting there
Bus and train rides have provided some of the most interesting moments on this trip. On the 4-hour bus ride from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng we drove through a village with long rows of market stalls on either side of the road. So far so normal, except that every single stall was selling one and the same product: pineapples. Yep—stall after stall after stall of pineapples. Because we weren’t on a VIP bus we were not surprised when we stopped and the driver squashed as many pineapples as he could into the gaps between the suitcases in the luggage carrier. I think his second job might have been pineapple salesman to the restaurants of Vang Vieng.
I also knew I wasn’t on the VIP bus when the bus pulled over on the green hills in misty rain and the driver said, “Break!” and everyone piled out and just peed on the side of the road, all in a row. People were very matter of fact about it, and might I say that young men of every nationality seemed completely un-phased.
2. Spring Break Vang Vieng
Vang Vieng is a popular stop to break up the long bus ride from Luang Prabang to Vientiane. Lonely Planet says it’s a place travellers either love or loathe and for the most part I think I’m in the “love it” camp, if only because of the place we stayed. The geography of the landscape is certainly spectacular: towering limestone peaks, green fields, and lots of rivers.
Our guest house—run by a rather spacey British hippie—was across the river from the centre of town in an area more for locals than tourists. Its bamboo bungalows sit beside the river in a butterfly garden, with a view of watercress fields and limestone cliffs. Just down the road at the mouth of the river was a popular place for locals to swim and wash clothes. It was a very peaceful if somewhat bug-heavy spot, filled with what there is to love about Vang Vieng.
Staying here we discovered the nasty truth about roosters. For years country folk have been feeding their city cousins propaganda. Roosters don’t go “Cock-a-doodle-doo.” They make an awful guttural screech like fingernails on a blackboard. They don’t do this at dawn to let you know the sun has come up; they do it any time from about 3 in the morning. And they certainly don’t do it just once. They do it over and over and over just to make sure everyone knows they’re alive.
The main drawcard in Vang Vieng is river tubing. Unlike me, most people in town aren’t tubing for the stunning scenery, the fun of the tube ride, or the cooling swim. Most people are tubing for the pub-crawl. What could be better when coasting down a fast and unpredictable current on a light and difficult-to-control loop of inflated rubber than a lot of cheap beer? All along the tubing route bars pump 90s dance music. As you bob past in your tube the owners shout with delight, throw you a rope, and pull you in. Being at these bars felt a bit like being at Spring Break 10 years too late. We decided not to stay and watch drunk 19-year-old guys drawing breasts on their chests with felt tip pens but moved on to quieter waters and a more civilised bar further on.
The town area contains more of what some hate about Vang Vieng as it also seems to be catering primarily to the tourist party crowd. Post-tubing drunk people stagger about in bikinis and togs in defiance of signs asking them to respect the locals and dress modestly. The streets are lined with TV bars, where you can dine slouched on raised mattresses watching endless re-runs of Friends. Why Friends? Why not The Simpsons or perhaps something more recent and relevant? Who knows. A couple of brave bars try for a different vibe. We showed our support by going to one playing Family Guy.
3. Concrete
Four more hours on a bus took us to Vientiane, the busy capital of Laos. Vientiane gets some bad press in comparison with Luang Prabang, but while it is certainly not as pretty it does have some fun sights. Behold, Patuxai:
In 1969 the Americans donated concrete to Laos to build an airport. Instead, Laos used it to make its very own Arc de Triomphe. Hence its nickname–the vertical runway. Laos hasn’t quite got the hang of the positive spin. A plaque at the base of the arch says: “From a closer distance Patuxai looks even less impressive, like a monster of concrete.”
Views from the top gave more of a sense of the city:
And I practised my sniper technique on some monks:
In Vientiane Jeff had the chance to be a little more experimental with his menu choices and enjoyed a big plate of fried crickets, which he recommends heartily to you all.
He also tried to order ant-egg soup but was disappointed to be told it was the wrong season.
Another highlight of the city was Xieng Khuan Buddha Park, built in 1958 by a yogi-priest-shaman. It is park chock full of a bizarre mix of Hindu, Buddhist, and random animal statues. There is also a giant concrete pumpkin that you can walk inside, through the scary gaping mouth and up different levels representing hell, earth, and heaven:
We had a great time at the park:
We’ve gotten a bit behind with the blog and have already had almost 2 weeks in Vietnam. Keep an eye out for Jeff’s next post on Hanoi, appearing soon.
Love Sara and Jeff
Filed under: Laos
Posted by Jeff
I. The Mekong
The Mekong is the chocolate brown river of Augustus Gloop’s fantasies. It begins in the Himalayas and wends down though China, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia to the South China Sea.
We crossed the border into Laos at Huay Xai for our first experience of a communist country (Hong Kong really doesn’t count). So far the politburo seem to have impeccable taste- visas cost considerably more for Canadians than anyone else ($42 vs. $30 for the rest). Otherwise Huay Xai looks a bit like a frontier town- yellow concrete paving makes the whole town seem in need of a sweep and no street lights means most shops were decorated like Christmas with fairy lights. Even just across the river Laos is very different to Thailand. As a great man (well okay, Nick Preval) once said “the food is Laos-y, the people are Laos-y and the weather is Laos-y.”
To avoid getting stuck on the floating sheep truck of the slow ferry we decided to splash out a bit and booked two tickets on the luxurious Luang Say cruise. The Luang Say plies the same route as the cattle cruiser but provides meals, accommodation (in Pak Beng), guides, life jackets and room to stretch your legs.
Quite a lot of room as it turned out. Instead of the normal 40 passengers there were eight: your humble narrators, four Aussies who had retired to sail the world and two not-so-quiet Americans. The Australians had been sailing around the region for about four years and had been deep-fried by the sun until their skin was the colour and consistency of spring rolls.
The Americans were on a vacation where they packed in three countries in two weeks. They had the pristine pink baby skin of people who spend nearly all of their time under artificial lights and at a constant temperature of 23 degrees.
The voyage downriver was quite extraordinary. Instead of battering you with adjectives, here are a couple of photos:
Our accommodation at Pak Beng was the most luxurious we’ve stayed in. We had our own beautiful teak chalet. With a certain irony, given the dodgy joints we’ve been staying in, the Luang Say Lounge was an ‘eco-lodge’ which is Laotian for “open to the elements but pricey anyway.” You know you’re in the jungle when a grasshopper the size of a toblerone lands on your mosquito net next to your face.
After another day of making our pampered way downstream we docked in Luang Prabang.
II. Luang Prabang
Luang Prabang is the old capital of Laos and the former seat of the Laotian kings. In 1995 UNESCO declared it a world heritage site and mandated its protection. It is a surprisingly compact charmer of about 100,000 people. The narrow lanes and sidewalk cafes feel very French but with a laid-back Laotian pace.
One of the highlights of Luang Prabang is the National Museum.
It is in the former Palace vacated by the royal family in 1975 when the Communist Panthet Lao forced them into exile. Although the Government hasn’t admitted it yet, the King of Laos and several of his siblings later died of starvation in a re-education camp. The museum preserves much of the palace as they left it including exhibitions of their clothing, personal effects and the table set as if for dinner. Most Lao believe that the palace is haunted by the ghosts of the royals and will not venture near it after dark. Certainly it is a most eerie place: whatever you thinks of regicide it echoes loudly.
The sign for the ex-royal Theatre in the palace grounds with ‘Royal” painted over
Otherwise we’ve mainly been mooching around eating great food and sweating in the heat. It’s been sheer torture and we’ve longed for the New Zealand winter. Sara’s done a weaving course which she loved but I’ll leave the gory details of that to her.
III. Farangs
The terms for foreigners (farang in Thai, falang in Laotian) actually mean ‘French’ as the French were the first Europeans to regularly show up on the doorsteps of these countries. Perhaps, however, this is more than a linguistic artifact. I had initially put my declining personal hygiene and insistence on speaking my mother tongue down to backpacking and poor linguistic skills but now the horrifying truth dawns. I suspect that I am, in fact, becoming French. The next time you see me I may have a little dog under my arm and a man purse.
Two types of farangs are strangely omnipresent:
1. Dodgy old men. Inevitably accompanied by a young, pretty Thai woman. Nearly all bear an uncanny resemblance to Josef Fritzl. The dodgy old men are a disturbing manifestation of the free market gone wild.
Another sound decision on the part of the politburo in Laos was to ban all relationships between Laotians and foreigners unless Government sanctioned. While this seems a bit draconian in theory, in reality it more or less quashes the exploitative sex trade. We haven’t seen any Josefs here and Laos is the better for it.
Now if they would only ban commercial relationships between tuk tuk drivers and Westerners we’d really be talking.
2. Really tall women. It seems like every second farang women is a six foot plus gargantua. I’m not sure what lures these amazons to South-East Asia but it can’t be anonymity: on crowded streets they hove into view above the mass of dark Asian hair like clipper ships.
We’ve seen more massively tall ladies in Thailand than elsewhere. I suspect medical tourism of some sort. However I have no idea whether the tall women are having vertebrae removed to become average-sized or whether regular women are having extra bones added to their legs in order to become giantesses.
A bientôt,
Jeff and Sara
Filed under: Uncategorized
Posted by Sara
Ah, Chiang Mai—the first of our destinations we could idly imagine ourselves living in someday. It is more charming and of a more manageable size than Bangkok. The old city is surrounded by a moat, with cute, narrow, leafy streets winding off the main roads. Our guest house was on one such lane, along with many others. I imagine that in the high season the old city is full of tourists, but when we were there it was quiet and relaxed. A market at the end of our street supplied for our addiction to Thai mangoes, and we rented bicycles for getting around town easily, though these were better at night than in the death rays of the sun (only in these temperatures has the sun become for me something to be avoided!).
In Chiang Mai, aside from the usual wafting around eating, we took advantage of a couple of the touristy options. First up was a cooking course on an organic farm about 45 minutes out of the city. On our way to the farm we went to a market and learned about different rices and spices and about Thai ways of eating. Having previously wandered through such markets rather aimlessly, it was great to have a local tell us what was what, and to finally solve the mystery of pink eggs (look it up if you don’t know). Also, it turns out that Thais have rice with their soups to alleviate some of the spiciness. Here I’d been thinking that waiters were just offering rice to feeble farangs (foreigners) ordering tom yum.
Rice at the markets:
The farm itself was very pretty and tranquil. Over the day we cooked five dishes, getting to choose between three options for each dish. This included pad thai (hurray) and yellow curry. Any of you who are putting us up in London, prepare for a feast—if we can track down the ingredients. And yes, Robyn, we also made your great favourite, mango with sticky rice! There are mangoes in London, right?
Here’s Jeff cooking up a storm:
And here’s the lunch Jeff and I cooked:
Apropos of Jeff’s musings in his last post about language and communication difficulties, on the back of the truck riding back to town I overheard the following conversation between Jeff and a Dutch girl who was in Thailand to volunteer at an elephant camp:
Jeff: Do they have many elephants at the camp?
Ramona: Mini elephants? No, I don’t think so. Normal size. Asian elephants.
Jeff: 18 elephants? That sounds like a lot to me.
Before leaving Chiang Mai we also did a 1-day trek. There was not much actual trekking involved, but rather a day of action adventure, with elephant riding and waterfall swimming in the mix with visits to hill tribes. The first village we visited felt like it had been manufactured for tourists. It didn’t seem that people were actually living there, and there was hardly anyone around except for a couple of people selling crafts and one toothless woman who thrust her baby at us for a photo and then asked for money. The second village felt more real, with lots of animals, and people in the houses weaving or resting (it was just after lunch, and very hot). But on the whole these hill-tribe visits felt quite exploitative. We want to see how these people live, but I don’t really know how to get an authentic experience of this without being intrusive.
Anyway, here is my 20 baht photo:
On the trek up to the village:
A woman weaving at the more authentic village:
Probably our favourite event of the day was bamboo rafting down a river. We shared our bamboo raft with a nice Kiwi couple and rather prophetically dubbed ourselves Team New Zealand. The Thai men punting the rafts were full of jokes and mischief. Throughout the ride they were cracking the punting sticks (technical term) on the water to splash us, leaning on the rafts to make one side go underwater, and careening under low-hanging branches of trees. This was all very entertaining and fun until a giant spider appeared from inside the bamboo and ran up my leg. I’m not quite willing to point the finger, but it is entirely possible that this spider was planted as another funny joke. Once I had recovered from this excitement, Jeff thought he would join in the fun and leaned over to the raft next to us and yanked at a rope to pull one corner under the water. It turned out that the rope was rather loosely holding the raft together. Fortunately we were close to the shore, so the guys were able to fix it up before we continued. Then Jeff decided to be helpful and do some of the hard punting work at the back of the raft, which went fine until the stick got caught in a rock and he fell in. He went right under, but came up wearing his sunglasses and a big smile, and managed to catch the raft before we floated away. Hilarious.
Here is a picture taken whilst riding an elephant of other people riding an elephant (I realised later we should have swapped cameras). The baby elephant came along for the ride and did some very cute clumsy sliding down mud hills:
Food on this trip continues to be delicious, and we can’t get enough of the local specialty, khao soi, a noodle soup dish. The taste approximates tom yum crossed with satay and is really, really good. Unfortunately we didn’t learn how to make this one at the cooking course, but we plan to seek out a recipe online and give it a go sometime.
Most restaurants that we go to are those recommended in guidebooks or on the Travelfish website (a great site that I highly recommend to anyone travelling to south east Asia). This is partly because we are too wussy to go somewhere where we can’t tell what the food is, where the menu is in Thai, and where nobody speaks English. Does this make us wimpy travellers? We’ve still been experiencing a lot of wonderful, authentic Thai food and trying different things. But you don’t see a lot of locals dining in the places where we go, except for young pretty Thai women with older (sometimes elderly) white Western men. Interestingly, in Laos it is illegal for a foreigner to have a relationship with a Lao person, so I guess we will be seeing less of this in the next country.
Since leaving Chiang Mai we have travelled up to Chiang Khong—part of the trip in an old bus that doubled as a postal service—and had a night in a lovely teak guest house overlooking the Mekong river. Today we ferried over to Huay Xai in Laos, and tomorrow head off on a 2-day luxury cruise down the Mekong to Luang Prabang. Jeff will tell you all about it in the next post.
Last view of Chiang Khong as we sail away from Thailand for awhile:
Love to you all
Sara and Jeff
