Northern Laos: Vientiane, Vang Vieng, Luang Prabang

Wat Xiengthong in Luang Prabang. The Bhudda and the Tree of Life (left).

Sunset over the mountains and development of Vang Vieng.

Monks playing in the blue lagoon near the sacred cave.

Nam Song and the mountains of Vang Vieng. Did I mention it's very smoggy all over the region due to Slash and Burn agriculture and the dry season?

That Luang in Vientiane, the most sacred place in Laos.

Greetings from Luang Prabang, ancient capital of Laos. It's a temple-studded town on the banks of the Mekong River. It's the second largest town in Laos after Vientiane, the capital. The entire population of this land-locked country is about six million. About a week ago, I crossed the Mekong via the Thai-Australian Friendship Bridge to Vientiane. (No, that's not a typo - the Australians probably helped fund the project.) I was originally going to bypass the capital totally, but I met an American at the border while we were waiting for our visas on arrival (35 USD). We got to talking and he lives in Vientiane, working for a non-profit that provides small amounts of capital to fund Laotian businesses (like textiles, traditional medicine, etc.). His descriptions of the city inspired me to change my plans and spend a couple of days checking out the capital.

I'm glad I did, because it really is a very laid-back city with great Lao-French architecture and temples. I even went to the Lao National Museum, which used to house just communist propaganda. Many of the rooms are still just that, but there are several updated wings on archeology and lao culture that I found interesting. In terms of archeology, much of Laos is largely unsurveyed because of unexploded bombs or UXOs that litter the countryside from American military action in the Cold War era. Visitors to the Plain of Jars, perhaps the country's best known archeological site, is warned to stay strictly on worn trails because the region is covered with UXO. Straying off path could mean your life. I'm still debating on whether I want to make a visit there or not. The Plain of Jars is comprised of many different sites where huge jars carved out of solid stone are arranged in some symbolic fashion. Some people say these jars were used to store human remains, but this is an unproven hypothesis.

I ended up playing a little badminton with Alex, the American, in Vientiane in a small outdoor court tucked away in a residential neighborhood. Turns out he went to Los Altos High School and played a couple of years of badminton there. He laughed when I told him I used to take the sport pretty seriously and indeed started running cross-country to stay in shape in the off season, he said he and his buddies used to drink and then go to badminton practice. Well, there's something to be said for diversity of experience, I guess. :)

From Vientiane, I took a local bus to Vang Vieng. I met an English-Australian couple on the bus and all was well until the guy started talking about the incentives the Australian government were giving people to promote the birth rate. Apparently if you have a baby in Australia, you get three thousand dollars courtesy of the government. This meshes with the impression I got when I was in the country - the belief that a stronger economy could be obtained by increasing the population. This is why immigration policies in Australia have been relaxed in the past few decades. But this Australian dude on the bus started ranting about how the uneducated (i.e. immigrant) people on welfare were the ones having babies and getting this "birth bonus", and they'll just keep propagating the uneducated masses, etc, etc. I started to jump in, but he had no interest in listening. Australian cities are incredibly diverse and all seems to be well, at least at a glance. But much publicised while I was there was several racially motivated attacks on Indians. I think just under the shimmer is a chaotic boil about to erupt - as tends to happen when things change "too fast" - when more and more different looking people try to mix into society.

Vang Vieng is one of the most beautiful places I have seen. Huge limestone mountains rise up dramatically across the Nam Song (river) and provide the backdrop for the town. I was happier yet to discover that a modest room at my guesthouse sets me back only 40,000 kips/night, that's less than five dollars! There's a nice little balconey overlooking the town and the mountains too. One day I rented a mountain bike for 20,000 kips for the day and biked across the river to the mountains where there are sacred caves. I visited the most famous one, which is comprised of several HUGE caverns; the biggest one at the front houses the reclining Bhudda. I wondered if the Mammoth Caves in our own country could compare to this level of "mammoth-ness". I passed several Hmong villages on my bike ride, and the farther out I rode, the nicer the kids became, until soon they were yelling "sabaidee!" (hello) enthusiastically when I rode by. The bike ride was definitely a highlight, as was having a Beerlao while watching the sun set over the Mekong that evening. Speaking of the Beerlao, this lager is a source of national pride for a country that doesn't really have any industry to speak of, and a large bottle will set you back 10,000 kips, just a little over a dollar.

Vang Vieng has another side though, when you take a little closer look. It's known for its tubing down the river and getting drunk on bars riverside. I biked down to the Organic Farm a few km outside of town to check it out, and the whole time I sat there enjoying my mulberry shake, loud music was blaring and the vibration got to be too much. I walked to the river and found that about 200 ft away was one of these riverside bars, with people partying. Back in town, many restaurants have "happy" menus where the drug of your choice (mostly marijuana and opium) can be added to fruitshakes or anything of your fancy, and you can lounge around watching endless re-runs of Friends or The Simpsons. The locals just sit back and watch all this craziness. While some of them are getting ridiculously wealthy off of the farangs, many more are living right next to them in shacks.

I find a similar disparity of wealth and poverty here in Luang Prabang today walking along the Mekong. Some people have found a way to market themselves and are doing really well, while others (notably the Hmong) are very poor. At the morning market today, which is one of the best I've seen in southeast Asia, there was an old woman telling three things on her little mat, two of which were a little dead squirrel, and a dead coiled snake. Another woman was selling several groupings of beetles.

Northern Thailand: Mae Sot and Umphang

Tee Lor Su waterfalls near Umphang.

A little swimming and relaxing in one of the waterfall pools.

A morning raft trip on the Umphang River.

Beautiful scenery on the raft trip out of Umphang.

We took a bus out of Chiang Mai and headed to Mae Sot, a border town with Burma (Myanmar) and the end of the bus line, spending a night there before a grueling songthaew ride to Umphang the next day. Mae Sot was laid back without the hordes of tourists, so it was nice. When we got to Mae Sot bus terminal, we were trying to figure out how to go the 2 kilometers into town to our guesthouse. Mamie's bag wasn't suited to be worn for long, so we wanted a ride. But it was going to be something ridiculous like 80 baht (2.5 USD) into town, so we thought, what the heck, we'll just start walking (I know you're thinking, what? 2 dollars? But it could be two-three meals!). It is a ripoff and I hate being ripped off. (although sometimes there's no getting around it...) About a hundred meters out of the station, a white girl (american?) we had greeted at the station comes running after us saying we could ride with her and the kids! Turns out she's some kind of teacher working in Mae Sot and Chiang Mai, and there's a "school bus"/songtheaw filled with students who greeted us enthusiastically with "swadee caa!" when we jumped into the back of the songtheaw. One of those times when I thought, how cool is this right now!

We walked around Mae Sot in the evening and ran into the evening market, filled with huge frogs and swimming buckets of eels alongside butchered meat, fruit, and the smells. Down a side street on the way back, we saw a stage with a whole band and singing and music, but no audience save for a few kids nearby. It was the strangest thing - a complete stage on the side of the road, band, music, no audience, with cars driving by. It was another one of those times when I thought, how cool is this right now!

The songthaew ride to Umphang took six hours to cover 160 km, mostly because the driver made umpteenth stops running errands, picking up things like roses, a basket full of wide noodles, bags of cucumbers and tomatoes, etc etc, which were going to be delivered along the way like his passengers. Oh, and fueling up his songthaew. I was thinking, couldn't you have done all this before you picked up all these people who have to wait for you to do this? It's about lack of respect. Mamie and I were among the first in the songthaew. He picked up more and more people along the way, until at the zenith, there were about 24 people in and on the vehicle. About 16 in the back of the converted pickup, three standing and hanging on to the back of the truck, two up front, and three or four sitting on the roof with the luggage. Apparently there are over 1200 curves between Mae Sot and Umphang. We felt them all, tightly gripping on with nothing else holding our bodies in place. It was exhausting. We were stopped by the police several times for ID checks. Finally we arrived in Umphang where we spent a couple of delightful nights at Tukasu Cottages. We originally planned to do some overnight trekking in Umphang (a little village of 3 thousand), but it wasn't going to work out timewise, with Mamie needing to be back in Bangkok for her flight by Saturday, so we ended up doing a fantastic day trip, floating down the Umphang River with its limestone cliffs in the morning, and swimming/lounging by TeeLorSu waterfall in the afternoon. Really fantastic day, and great to be in the wild.

Umphang is a very small town and hardly anybody speaks english, included the woman who greeted us at the guesthouse (which is supposed to be the best in town). Most foreigners come because of the trekking. Finding food was a bit of a challenge in the town, although we ended up having a delightful fried rice, which was one of the few english words the cook knew.

We met a German couple on their honeymoon at the guesthouse. They had just gotten married in southern Thailand. We ended up hooking on to their daytrip and so enjoyed the river and waterfall together. Really nice folks. We felt bad for them because they had booked this one week trip for their honeymoon, with a driver and itinerary, for a humongous amount of money (like maybe a thai family could survive on it for a couple of years), and it wasn't turning out the way they wanted. Their driver is lazy and doesn't really want to take them anywhere or do things with them, so they've been driving town to town, getting in around noon or early afternoon, with nothing to do for the remainder of the day. Decent hotels (the best you could find in this region) but didn't meet their expectations for posh places befitting their honeymoon.
We ended up riding with them back to Mae Sot instead of having another long songthaew adventure. Nice minivan with AC and leather seats - bliss!

From Mae Sot, we wanted to take the bus to Bangkok, but the next one wasn't due for like 5 hrs, so we took a "minibus" to Tak, the regional hub, and caught a Bangkok bus there. Got into the city around midnight after 9 hrs, exhausted, then haggled with a taxi driver to take us to "Phra Athit Rd", a backpacker district near the river where we've stayed before, walked around looking for a room and found one on the fourth or fifth try. It was a windowless room, a box really, with two twin beds and shared bathrooms. Good enough for one night. "windowless" means hard to break into, so that's one plus. 290 baht, or nine dollars split between the two of us. All I need is clean, the rest is just nice to have. weeelll, I take that back, clean with no mosquitos.

Mamie left at 3 this morning and now I'm waiting for my sleeper train to Nong Khai, a twelve hr journey up north to the Thailand/Laos border. Laos is my next destination. I've heard really good things about northern Laos from other travellers and I am excited to check out this sleepy country. I read a travel book called Lollipop Fury recently, about an expat cycling in southeast Asia. Really good book. He shares a saying (from I don't know where) describing the economic situation of SE Asia, or the interrelationships between the four country, as thus:

"Vietnam grows the rice, Cambodia watches it grow, Laos listens to it grow, and Thailand sells it."

Northern Thailand: Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai turned out to be a really laid back city, as I'd heard from other travellers. It's an ancient city, known as Thailand's "Number two city", with a moat surrounding a wall which contains the original town. We could walk around easily, and for the more out of the way places, red songthaews are plentiful and pretty cheap. The guesthouses and hotels are all clustered together near Tha Pae Gate, once of the entrances through the wall into old town. The city is replete with backpacker delights such as banana rotis, fruit shakes, toast and jam and butter, and fruit and yogurt with muesli. Traditional thai breakfasts are savory, headed in popularity by the Khao tom, or rice soup. I happen to love this delicious rice soup, but it's a stretch having it every morning for breakfast, so I have recently taken to having the "farang" breakfasts as well. Once in a while you want to have something familiar.

A highlight of Chiang Mai was meeting up with Ject, a friend of my friend/mentor/former professor, Jim Carter. Ject did part of his doctorate work at the USGS in Menlo Park in Jim's lab. Ject took us to his favorite restaurant near Chiang Mai University where we had amazing thai food I would never have known about much less order on my own. Delicacies like young coconut shoots and sayote salad were delicious! We also spend a lovely evening at the Sunday Walking Market and it was so good to have a local explain what all the foods were, and answer our questions. We had an excellent time with Ject. He does research on giant fireflies!

Another memorable experience in Chiang Mai was the Thai cooking class Mamie and I did, in which we learned about the traditional ingredients and cooked five dishes from scratch, down to pounding the curry paste. I made green curry, tom yum soup, wide rice noodles, pumpkin in coconut milk, and something else, which I forget just now. It is actually quite easy and everything turned out delicious. The hard part will be getting the ingredients back in the States.

We also visited the Thailand Elephant Conservation Centre near Lampang. When we arrived, the elephants were just getting into the lake for a bath before the show. It was so fun to see them playing in water, obviously having a great time, and watching the interaction between each elephant and its trainer. The show was nice, and I liked watching the demonstration of how the elephants used to work with logs, pulling and piling them up, back when that was their primary job during the timber age. One of the main reasons why there are so many elephants and rescue and conservation centers for them is because they were let go when they weren't used for logging anymore. It takes a LOT of food to feed an elephant - about 260 kilograms, or about 500 pounds, on average a day. After the show, Mamie and I walked over to the nursery and saw two very young elephants, one with its mother. The other was about a year and a half old, and it is a rescued wild elephant. Watching him was heartbreaking because his mother didn't have enough calcium when he was feeding, and consequently, he developed bowed legs. It is hard for him to balance, and every step is a struggle. Now they are adding calcium to his rice diet; I hope that does something...Elephants really are amazing creatures, and true gentle giants. They are so big and lumbering, but they have such grace despite their might. They're also really smart. As an example, after the show, the audience could feed bananas and sugar cane to the elephants. I watched one elephant as he accepted one piece of sugar cane after another, and handed each piece up to his trainer (who's riding on him) for storage. When the glut of food stopped coming, he reached up to the trainer and enjoyed the sugarcane one by one!

Getting to the Elephant Centre and back was interesting. They dropped us off on the side of a highway and we made our way down the road to the Visitor Center. When we left, we had to cross this highway to hail down a bus back to Chiang Mai. We waited just a little while before this old junker of a bus stopped, with the attendant jumping off the bus, shouting "Chiang Mai, Chiang Mai". So we got on, and the fare was a heck of a good deal, but I had to scoot down the bus, which was completely packed with locals, and sit on the floor, which just happened to be over the bus engine. After a little while, the floor got unbearably hot. I pulled out my Thailand guide book, which had plenty of girth, and sat on it for most of the trip. Mamie ended up front between the bus driver and the attendant, sitting on a wood stool.

travel weariness

We met an American couple on a songthaew tonight. A songthaew is a hop on-hop off "taxi" - a converted pickup truck with two (in thai = song) benches and a cover. It's the cheapest way to move around town besides the ol' feet. Anyway. Americans. The man used to live in the Roaring Fork Valley. That made me think of Colorado and, not for the first time on this trip, of how much I miss it. I see a photo of red canyons and my heart thumps. I realize I haven't eaten a toasted chewy bagel in months. I wonder what's going on with Obama and the healthcare initiative. I need calcium and miss my favorite source of it: yogurt. I am getting a little travel weary, I must admit, and I am homesick. I don't even know where "home" is anymore; I just know it's in America. and my ache is for American mountains and rivers and canyons and desert, Colorado and Utah, the Rockies and the Colorado Plateau, and Alaska, Alaska, Alaska. Montana and Wyoming. Lake Tahoe, Yosemite and the granite of the Sierra Nevadas. My family, my friends. Quiet mornings and evenings. Cooking and eating exactly what I want. My bed. Eight months is a long time to be on the move. The moments of feeling totally alive and exhilerated are there, but they are interspersed by periods of almost a dullness or tired reception to everything around. My brain is reaching saturation (is this possible?), and my body needs some tuning for sure. I desperately need my running shoes. I've killed my contact lens from the previous months of backpacking and trying to keep them clean in the backcountry. It's almost time to go home. I have a month and a half to go yet though.

I've been thinking about "identity" a lot lately. Mamie and I are often taken for Thais by Thai people, and when we tell them we're American, we get very puzzled looks. We're not "farangs", or blond and blue eyed foreigners. People talk Thai to us all the time. It's a little exhausting when people are constantly questioning what you are. It's not as dramatic as all that, but something like it. Does who you are have to be legitimized by people around you? What if you don't fit into this group or that group? Do you create a wall to protect yourself, or will it be a bridge? And what will this bridge be made of, what language, collective thoughts, histories? a song? And certainly there have been millions before me who have had similar experiences in straddling different worlds; how have they or do they deal with it? I have a feeling it may be as simple as, "one day at a time..."

Northward bound

"Well, if no one wants to play, I'll just lay here on the table and keep the eggs company." Happy cat in Chiang Mai. We're happy too to be in laid-back Chiang Mai, which seems like it's a sleepy outpost compared to Bangkok.

Me...

...and Mamie on the overnight "express" train, second-class sleeper, from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. Mamie had lots of admirers on the train. :) Okay, so one of them was a semi-crazy stewardess... :D

Grand Palace and Emerald Buddha temple.

The Chao Praya River runs through Bangkok. My favorite way of getting around the city is by ferry, one trip for 13 baht (40 cents). Sunset around 6:30pm.

front seat, next to el capitan, on the Chao Praya.

First night in Bangkok we splurged for a really "flash" place next to the river, New Siam Riverside. Mamie's having breakfast. A beautiful start to the day!

(look at the pictures from bottom up to get the chronological order)

We spent two full days in Bangkok. Our bus from Kuraburi rolled into the big city at 4:15 in the morning, pitch black, but the southern bus terminal was hopping, with some vendors and shops already open, and people getting off buses in pulses. Our bus was "VIP", which meant everybody got a packaged bun for a snack and a blanket. I didn't find it a very comfortable ride because my feet couldn't touch the floor. Because I couldn't let my feet hang there all night, the way I deal with it is I take my Chaco sandals off and stack them on top of one another. Then when I rest my feet on the two-tiered sandals, it's almost right. Exciting, ey? Two more exciting things happened on the bus ride: 1. I watched "Waterworld" in Thai, and 2. I got to see Thai soldiers up close and in action as our bus got stopped repeatedly for soldiers and drug dogs to check us and our things out. We saw a bus just like ours next to the road with all its passengers ejected...they must have found something. What a way for those folks to spend the night!

Bangkok was the big shadowy city when we arrived. After a long while, we eventually figured out that we had to take th 511 bus. The funny thing is that Information Desks in Thailand (that I've encountered so far) are not staffed by people who know English. But eventually some piece of vital information gets passed, or at least they physically point to you the right direction to get started. Thailand is proving difficult to get around without knowing any Thai. I am glad I started my travels in English-speaking countries! Travel here is difficult even compared to Malaysia, where many people speak English, because their language is written in Roman alphabet. The Thai script is impossible for me to understand. We have taken to carrying little scraps of paper with the destination written on by a nice Thai so that we may present it to other nice Thais to help us.

Perhaps my favorite part of Bangkok is the river that runs through it: the Chao Praya. The silently flowing river is a calm ribbon of blue to rest the eyes when the exhaust fumes and noises of the city get to be too much. Many places we wanted to go to were along or close to the river anyway (Chinatown, Grand Palace, Wat Pho, connection to Skytrain...), and there's no bottleneck traffic on the river, although the ferries get very crowded during rush hour. Still orders of magnitude better than the buses. And, it's beautiful.

I also enjoyed walking the streets of Bangkok when school lets out, when all the uniformed kids wander about, buying snacks from the street vendors, getting picked up by parents...I even saw a group of girls negotiating with a taxi driver for a ride home at a reasonable fare! Taxi drivers don't like to use the meter, so they can rip you off. We used the taxi one time, when we needed to get to the train station after waiting and waiting for the bus to show. Another backpacker shared the taxi with us, so split three ways, it's not bad, but if I had been by myself, it would have been an expensive ride. Mamie and I also used a tuk-tuk in Bangkok, one of the three-legged "vehicles" that are basically a motorcycle with a covered bench in the back. Our driver was crazy and we were both happy to have survived. He would sing in a way to suggest he wasn't totally there...and his pinky fingernail was long and painted pink. Maybe it's the fashion for Thai men, who knows?

We are now in Chiang Mai, having arrived by a sleeper train this morning after a fifteen hour journey north. It's really nice to be able to sleep most of the night through on a real (albeit very narrow) bed. Mamie and I got seats that faced each other. The seats fold out to make the bottom bunk, and the top bunk folds down from the top. Really nifty. The Thai staff kept laughing and giggling about something around us, and we figured eventually that two of them were teasing one of them about Mamie because he couldn't take his eyes off her whenever he walked by. :D Then there was the crazy woman stewardess who was drinking Chang beer on the job and acting a little drunk.

Southern Thailand: water and sun

View upstream from Krabi town, where I spent my first few days in Thailand. This is still one of my favorite paces in Thailand. It's a place of real Thais, cheap food, friendly people, and just a short ways from the spectacular beaches and limestone cliffs of Railey seen in the photos below.

Kayakers dwarfed by the limestone cliffs around Ao Nang.

Longtail boats for hire.

climbing down into the Lagoon, a blue paradise ringed by palms and sheer limestone cliffs that open up to the sun in a circle. A bit of magic down there...

el lagoon...

...el lagoon cont....

...sad to leave this special place...and a little daunted by the climb back up, which involves three vertical sections assisted by rope. This is beyond the hiking and scrambling I normally do (but I couldn't have been happier!).


.

West (left) and East Railay Beaches.

Phra Nang beach and cave.

Phra Nang beach. It may get the gold medal for "best sand" and "most scenic beach" of my life so far...

okay, just one more shot of Phra Nang beach...beautiful!

Sunset walk along the river in Krabi town.

I guess I lied - another shot of the Railey beaches area sneaked in here. :) Maybe you can tell I was loathed to leave this place behind.

thai dessert/snack: bananas, pumpkin, black rice...cooked in a sugar syrup and swimming in coconut milk, which is actually kind of salty. the pumpkin was my favorite - yum!

The moon over Krabi River. I watched it rising while I was having dinner under the night sky at the food stalls next to the river.

Two women I met the food stalls, Silvia, a retired nurse from Germany, and Marian (right), an environmental health inspector from Sweden who's getting paid to spend two months in Krabi "studying" energy and sustainability! Lots of wisdom all around me. Much to learn!

After Krabi town and beaches, I went to Phuket to meet my little sister Mamie, who was flying in from Hong Kong. We're travelling in Thailand together for 2 and a half weeks. It was great to see her big smile after months! :) Phuket beaches were a bit too overrun for my tastes and can't hold a candle to Krabi for scenic value. Not our kind of thing, so we got out of there and went up north a few hours to Kuraburi, the gateway village to Ko Surin, 60km offshore fringed by shallow reefs - great for snorkelling! The whole thing's protected as a national park, which is awesome, and they've got bungalows and tents for rent if you want to stay on a bit of tropical paradise for a while, so we rented a tent, and hired a guiding service by longtail boats to take us out to the snorkelling spots.

Mamie snorkelling in Ko Surin. Over two days, we went to eight or nine snorkelling spots around the islands,which are 60km offshore of Thailand, and much closer to Burma actually.

Mamie at the Mokken Village in Ko Surin.

The Mokkens are ethnic thais who are sea gypsies. Their village here was completely wiped out by the 2004 tsunami and all this is rebuilt.

Mokken pups trying to stay cool as they slept. It was burning hot!

Mamie snorkelling. We saw such spectacular coral and fish in the clear clear waters of Ko Surin.

From our tent.

Snorkelling guides turned out to be pyros at night. Mamie and I were just laying on our blanket at the beach watching the stars when an impromptu fire show took place.

Having lunch at the only restaurant on Ko Surin...the previous night the power went out in the middle of dinner. No one screamed or yelled. It was very peaceful, actually. Then all of a sudden someone turned on their flashlight, and then soon every table around us had a flashlight going - except us. The people in the table over offered us one of their lights! I thought it was so neat that people just took the power outtage in stride. Thais seem to be a very calm people, not easily panicked or loud (based on my measly two weeks of observations).