Hi folks,
Been a bit lax with posting while i've been in Laos, cos internet is slow & expensive. I spent a few more days in Vang Vieng, but somehow managed to escape - better than some of the people I met who'd planned to be there for a day or 4, and ended up staying for months...
Went from there, with a days canoeing, down to Vientiane (the capital of laos), where I spent the night before crossing over to Nong Khia, on the Thai side of the Mekong, and took the night train back to bangkok. Had a dramatic storm as I was tucked up in my little berth, which rocked - first rain I've seen since arriving, and it cleared the air a bit, which has been getting hotter over the last week or two.
Got a day to waste in bangkok, but I just bumped into someone I was travelling with in Laos, and she has a friend staying with business at a posh hotel, so a bit of living-it-up in the sauna may be in order.
Tomorrow morning I head south down to a small town called Chaiya, and spend the night there before heading to a templed called Wat Suanmokkh for 10 days of silence and meditation!
All that means I'm unlikely to post again until I get back to bangkok on the 12th of March.
Hope everyone's well,
Will.
Bangkok, Thailand.
Monday, 26 February 2007
Tuesday, 20 February 2007
Vang Vieng. A town in serious need of adult supervision.
I'm in an inner tube on the river Nam Song, just up river from a town called Vang Vieng, about 3/4 of the way from Louang Prabang to Vientiene, floating very slowly downstream.
I'm facing backwards to watch the sun set behind the cliffs, towering hundreds of meters above me, with trees clinging precariously to tiny outcroppings in its face. The general consensus amongst the others floating beside me is that this is the best scenery we've come across in our combined travellings in laos, which is no small praise - between us we've cast a fairly wide net. The road between Louang Prabang and here comes a close second.
There's a shout from just behind me, "Beer Laos! Beer Laos". I spin around to see a local, perched on a small rock in the middle of the river, who magically has a bin full of ice and - tasty beer! Unfortunately for him, the previous entrepreneur had no change for 20,000 kip (a quid), so I was forced to take two and had lots left.
If you take the tube straight downstream, it'd take a couple of hours to get back into town, but to do so isn't really the point. This isn't so much an outdoor activity as a water born pub crawl.
There are bars on each shore. The staff fish for punters with bamboo poles, pulling you towards them with promises of cheap beer, good food, beach volley ball and huge swings suspended over the water. There's a collective wince as a girl fails to take a good purchase on the bar of one such swing, and belly flops into the river from the ledge, 30 feet up. A tense second or so passes before she breaks the surface, to a loud cheer from the shore.
So the day went. All of it. You get a vague feeling at the back of your mind that anytime now a parent, teacher or other authority figure is going to break the whole place up and tell us to stop acting up. But you look about and all you see is 20-somethings. Grinning.
Will.
Vang Vieng, Laos.
P.S. The elephant festival was *ace*, but I wouldn't really do justice to it until I put up some pictures, so you're going to have to wait till I'm somewhere less back-of-beyond, that has cheaper internet. However, I was hanging out with a lass called Lindsey there, who has a blog (with pictures!), at http://www.travelblog.org/bloggers/lp
I'm facing backwards to watch the sun set behind the cliffs, towering hundreds of meters above me, with trees clinging precariously to tiny outcroppings in its face. The general consensus amongst the others floating beside me is that this is the best scenery we've come across in our combined travellings in laos, which is no small praise - between us we've cast a fairly wide net. The road between Louang Prabang and here comes a close second.
There's a shout from just behind me, "Beer Laos! Beer Laos". I spin around to see a local, perched on a small rock in the middle of the river, who magically has a bin full of ice and - tasty beer! Unfortunately for him, the previous entrepreneur had no change for 20,000 kip (a quid), so I was forced to take two and had lots left.
If you take the tube straight downstream, it'd take a couple of hours to get back into town, but to do so isn't really the point. This isn't so much an outdoor activity as a water born pub crawl.
There are bars on each shore. The staff fish for punters with bamboo poles, pulling you towards them with promises of cheap beer, good food, beach volley ball and huge swings suspended over the water. There's a collective wince as a girl fails to take a good purchase on the bar of one such swing, and belly flops into the river from the ledge, 30 feet up. A tense second or so passes before she breaks the surface, to a loud cheer from the shore.
So the day went. All of it. You get a vague feeling at the back of your mind that anytime now a parent, teacher or other authority figure is going to break the whole place up and tell us to stop acting up. But you look about and all you see is 20-somethings. Grinning.
Will.
Vang Vieng, Laos.
P.S. The elephant festival was *ace*, but I wouldn't really do justice to it until I put up some pictures, so you're going to have to wait till I'm somewhere less back-of-beyond, that has cheaper internet. However, I was hanging out with a lass called Lindsey there, who has a blog (with pictures!), at http://www.travelblog.org/bloggers/lp
Thursday, 15 February 2007
One for Benny
I saw bears today! At a sanctuary! Is nice!
Unless something goes wrong (this is laos, after all), I should be heading to a little village back up the river for an elephant festival tomorrow, and be back in Louang Prabang on monday. I expect I'll spend some of the 7 hours on the boat back writing something about it, that i'll post up here early next week.
Oh, and I spent the day swimming in waterfalls, which pretty much beats working for a living. Do I have to come back?
Will.
Louang Prabang, Laos
Unless something goes wrong (this is laos, after all), I should be heading to a little village back up the river for an elephant festival tomorrow, and be back in Louang Prabang on monday. I expect I'll spend some of the 7 hours on the boat back writing something about it, that i'll post up here early next week.
Oh, and I spent the day swimming in waterfalls, which pretty much beats working for a living. Do I have to come back?
Will.
Louang Prabang, Laos
Tuesday, 13 February 2007
The Slow Boat to Louang Prabang
The boat's almost full, at around 10.30 on Sunday morning, the scheduled departure time down the Mekong river on a 200km, two-day trip from Huay Xai, on the border with Thailand, to Louang Prabang - a lovely former french colonial town in the middle of northern Laos. Our craft is maybe 100 feet long, 12 feet wide, wooden, with two rows of two-person wooden benches, a thin walkway down the middle, an engine at the back that runs very loud and very hot and, mercifully, a wooden roof to block the bright sun. It's quite cool this far north but when the early afternoon sun gets on you, you warm up quick.
I realise I've left my only bottle of water at the guest-house breakfast table, a 10 minute tuk-tuk ride away. Since I'm going to be on the boat all day, I decide to risk going back up the sand-bank shore to buy another before we leave. I check with one of the drivers that it'll be ok, and he nods and half-laughs. I get the feeling that he knows something I don't.
Getting back on board, I'm behind a queue of what I take to be the last of the passengers, and am glad I already have a seat saved, as they take up the final spare seats. There's still no sign of movement from the crew.
There's no hurry. We wait for a while and another group of people turn up. Some plastic chair appear from nowhere, and get lined up single-file down the walkway for the late-comers, leaving no room to move. More people, more chairs, more waiting. The whole walkway crammed with chairs, a final dozen or so people arrive and have to content themselves with a square of floor at the very front, just behind where the two pilots share a central wooden wheel.
I'm beginning to be glad of the bag of clothes I separated from my main bag - stowed unobtainable in the aft - that I'm using as a cushion on the hard, thin bench. Having said that, I'm starting to wander whether the real cushion my bench-mate spent around a dollar on before we got aboard might have been a good investment.
In other places, the crowd might be getting restless by now, but this is Laos. Although most of us only entered the (still theoretically communist) republic last night from Thailand, as soon as you climb up onto this side of the river there's a tangible sense of calm and laissez-faire. The most impatience anyone shows are quips about how many times friends have recommended to take this boat, and how they might not be such good friends after all.
There are eventually signs of movement, and we push off to a jovial cheer from the tightly packed crowd, a mere hour or so late. Packed like sardines we might be, but still in a great mood.
5 hours later. The seats are hard, there's no space, and there's another two hours left to go, yet as I childishly hum Doors records and stare out across the slow, almost glass Mekong river at the scarred rock and sand banks, the water buffalo and the deep, rain forested valley we're cutting a route through, and I'm not sure I'm going to want to get off.
Except, of course, we're only halfway there, so perhaps I should stretch my legs this evening before we get back on board tomorrow morning, and do the whole thing all over again.
Will.
Having made it to Louang Prabang, The Laos People's Democratic Republic.
p.s. It turns out an hour late is pretty good. It was over 3 on the second day.
I realise I've left my only bottle of water at the guest-house breakfast table, a 10 minute tuk-tuk ride away. Since I'm going to be on the boat all day, I decide to risk going back up the sand-bank shore to buy another before we leave. I check with one of the drivers that it'll be ok, and he nods and half-laughs. I get the feeling that he knows something I don't.
Getting back on board, I'm behind a queue of what I take to be the last of the passengers, and am glad I already have a seat saved, as they take up the final spare seats. There's still no sign of movement from the crew.
There's no hurry. We wait for a while and another group of people turn up. Some plastic chair appear from nowhere, and get lined up single-file down the walkway for the late-comers, leaving no room to move. More people, more chairs, more waiting. The whole walkway crammed with chairs, a final dozen or so people arrive and have to content themselves with a square of floor at the very front, just behind where the two pilots share a central wooden wheel.
I'm beginning to be glad of the bag of clothes I separated from my main bag - stowed unobtainable in the aft - that I'm using as a cushion on the hard, thin bench. Having said that, I'm starting to wander whether the real cushion my bench-mate spent around a dollar on before we got aboard might have been a good investment.
In other places, the crowd might be getting restless by now, but this is Laos. Although most of us only entered the (still theoretically communist) republic last night from Thailand, as soon as you climb up onto this side of the river there's a tangible sense of calm and laissez-faire. The most impatience anyone shows are quips about how many times friends have recommended to take this boat, and how they might not be such good friends after all.
There are eventually signs of movement, and we push off to a jovial cheer from the tightly packed crowd, a mere hour or so late. Packed like sardines we might be, but still in a great mood.
5 hours later. The seats are hard, there's no space, and there's another two hours left to go, yet as I childishly hum Doors records and stare out across the slow, almost glass Mekong river at the scarred rock and sand banks, the water buffalo and the deep, rain forested valley we're cutting a route through, and I'm not sure I'm going to want to get off.
Except, of course, we're only halfway there, so perhaps I should stretch my legs this evening before we get back on board tomorrow morning, and do the whole thing all over again.
Will.
Having made it to Louang Prabang, The Laos People's Democratic Republic.
p.s. It turns out an hour late is pretty good. It was over 3 on the second day.
Tuesday, 6 February 2007
I'm the only farang in this village
Hey all,
I was in a slightly down mood earlier this evening. I left bangkok yesterday morning, and haven't really met *anyone* since. From people to hang out with coming out of my ears to a ghost-town was a bit of a shock.
I'm in a middling-sized place in central thailand between bangkok and chang mai called phitsanulok. Nothing special, at all, in itself, it turns out. I stopped off there because it made the journey north easier, and meant I got to spend today visiting sukhothai which is this *awesome* 14th-16th century ruined Khmer city. So that was great, but got a bit down later on when I came back here, and the 'bustling' youth hostel has no one but me in it. Again. And the most happening strip in town... appears empty of bars.
So! I decided to get outa here. While sat in a restaurant on the way back to the hostel, I resolved to book myself on a night train that leaves in about an hour from now (half midnight) to chang mai, which I *know* to be ace, where i'm gonna hang out for a day or two before heading to the laos border, which is pretty close to there.
Having made this decision I left the restaurant and headed back to the hostel with a spring in my step. Only to be blinded by a police officer flashing his flash light from the opposite pavement. Unpeturbed, I crossed over, and he signaled for me to stand on the pavement and wait. Looking up and down I saw a *lot* of policemen about. I guessed there was a motorcade coming because the street was empty and a sole police car blarred down the middle of the street with its lights on. I asked a street vendor that spoke a few words of english, and discovered it was the Queen of Thailand going past.
Now she's a pretty damnedly important person round these parts, so i've decided it's a sign. Off to Chang Mai I go!
Speaking of which, I have a night-train to catch.
Laters all,
Will.
Leaving the back-of-beyond, Thailand.
I was in a slightly down mood earlier this evening. I left bangkok yesterday morning, and haven't really met *anyone* since. From people to hang out with coming out of my ears to a ghost-town was a bit of a shock.
I'm in a middling-sized place in central thailand between bangkok and chang mai called phitsanulok. Nothing special, at all, in itself, it turns out. I stopped off there because it made the journey north easier, and meant I got to spend today visiting sukhothai which is this *awesome* 14th-16th century ruined Khmer city. So that was great, but got a bit down later on when I came back here, and the 'bustling' youth hostel has no one but me in it. Again. And the most happening strip in town... appears empty of bars.
So! I decided to get outa here. While sat in a restaurant on the way back to the hostel, I resolved to book myself on a night train that leaves in about an hour from now (half midnight) to chang mai, which I *know* to be ace, where i'm gonna hang out for a day or two before heading to the laos border, which is pretty close to there.
Having made this decision I left the restaurant and headed back to the hostel with a spring in my step. Only to be blinded by a police officer flashing his flash light from the opposite pavement. Unpeturbed, I crossed over, and he signaled for me to stand on the pavement and wait. Looking up and down I saw a *lot* of policemen about. I guessed there was a motorcade coming because the street was empty and a sole police car blarred down the middle of the street with its lights on. I asked a street vendor that spoke a few words of english, and discovered it was the Queen of Thailand going past.
Now she's a pretty damnedly important person round these parts, so i've decided it's a sign. Off to Chang Mai I go!
Speaking of which, I have a night-train to catch.
Laters all,
Will.
Leaving the back-of-beyond, Thailand.
Sunday, 4 February 2007
Dealing with Jetlag
Hey folks,
Friday night was pretty long through jetlag. Woke up about 4am, and didn't sleep. Still, it wasn't so bad - it's not actually as hot as I was expecting, and there was running water outside my window & chimes, so I just chilled. Given how close it is to KSR (khao san road) it's pretty quiet.
However! I think I have it beat now. I ended up not getting back to sleep after that, but kept myself awake until pretty late last night then got up this morning with a bit of a hangover but feeling distinctly more normal. I've met a bunch of people at the first guesthouse that I went to Chatuchak market, which is pretty huge - about 15000 stalls. I bartered hard to get a thin strip of leather to hang my evil eye pendant off (thanks Jossie!)
Totally failed to get a Laos visa. I was trying, because you only get a 15 day visa if you get it at the border, but it's 30 days if you get it at the embassy. Anyhow, I went on a trek for hours across the city in the hottest part of the day yesterday, got lost, gave up, found a taxi, got to the embassy, and found it's shut on weekends. I want to leave Bangkok first thing tomorrow, so I'm not going to bother going back - you can get a 15 day visa on the border and just extend it, and I hear rumours that they've started issuing 30 day visas at the crossing point in the far north near Chang Mai which is where I was heading anyway.
Right - off to sit in a park and watch some tai chi before meeting up with someone for lunch. It's a hard life :)
Will.
Banglampo, Bangkok, Thailand.
Friday night was pretty long through jetlag. Woke up about 4am, and didn't sleep. Still, it wasn't so bad - it's not actually as hot as I was expecting, and there was running water outside my window & chimes, so I just chilled. Given how close it is to KSR (khao san road) it's pretty quiet.
However! I think I have it beat now. I ended up not getting back to sleep after that, but kept myself awake until pretty late last night then got up this morning with a bit of a hangover but feeling distinctly more normal. I've met a bunch of people at the first guesthouse that I went to Chatuchak market, which is pretty huge - about 15000 stalls. I bartered hard to get a thin strip of leather to hang my evil eye pendant off (thanks Jossie!)
Totally failed to get a Laos visa. I was trying, because you only get a 15 day visa if you get it at the border, but it's 30 days if you get it at the embassy. Anyhow, I went on a trek for hours across the city in the hottest part of the day yesterday, got lost, gave up, found a taxi, got to the embassy, and found it's shut on weekends. I want to leave Bangkok first thing tomorrow, so I'm not going to bother going back - you can get a 15 day visa on the border and just extend it, and I hear rumours that they've started issuing 30 day visas at the crossing point in the far north near Chang Mai which is where I was heading anyway.
Right - off to sit in a park and watch some tai chi before meeting up with someone for lunch. It's a hard life :)
Will.
Banglampo, Bangkok, Thailand.
Friday, 2 February 2007
It's too late. I'm already here
Howdy, all.
Arrived in bangkok earlier today. Took a number of days to get through security - my hopes of the flight being empty were unfounded - it was packed to the rafters.
Anyhow, no worries. Managed to get to get some sleep, and got an invite to stay in melbourne from some dude I met on the plane, so it's not all bad.
I've had my first beer Chang, and my first plate of stir fried basil & chilli chicken, so I can sefely say I've arrived. Off to the biggest market in the world tomorrow (15000 stalls!), and might find time to sort my Laos visa, but I might be too busy having lots of fun.
Bangkok's as crazy & smelly as ever. All is well.
Will.
Just off the Khao San road, Bangkok, Thailand.
Arrived in bangkok earlier today. Took a number of days to get through security - my hopes of the flight being empty were unfounded - it was packed to the rafters.
Anyhow, no worries. Managed to get to get some sleep, and got an invite to stay in melbourne from some dude I met on the plane, so it's not all bad.
I've had my first beer Chang, and my first plate of stir fried basil & chilli chicken, so I can sefely say I've arrived. Off to the biggest market in the world tomorrow (15000 stalls!), and might find time to sort my Laos visa, but I might be too busy having lots of fun.
Bangkok's as crazy & smelly as ever. All is well.
Will.
Just off the Khao San road, Bangkok, Thailand.
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