I ended up staying in Pai for another week after the last posting. The laidback lifestyle and carefree attitude of the locals made it very hard to move on. I made some good friends there, a combination of travellers and Thais, and just didn't want to leave. It's a small enough town that throughout the day different members of our little group would bump into eachother and gradually we'd all be together for a meal (often home cooked – a welcome change) and some drinks in the evening. You'll see a bamboo bridge in the pictures I took in Pai which leads across the river to where the majority of the bamboo bungalow guesthouses are. There were 5 similar bridges along the river. I'm glad I took it when I did, because that night there was a big rain storm and 4 of the bridges, including the one pictured, ended up getting washed away in the river. About a week into my time there I was walking by a guesthouse and did a double-take into the lobby. There was a guy who looked just like my friend Gabby who had just left for home and given me his phone, but it couldn't have been him. I looked one more time and thought I was going crazy, but I called out his name anyways. Turns out it was him. He had changed his mind at the last minute and decided to stay an extra week. We were both shocked but happy to see eachother. He was there with another friend, Kareem, who also turned out to be really fun. The next day we all rented mopeds and went to explore some waterfalls and the surrounding scenery. The moped was a little tricky to get the hang of at first, which made me nervous on the highways, but once I got into it I ended up loving it. It was great to drive through the mountains with the wind rushing, beautiful scenery all around, lizards darting out of the way. Hell it was great to be driving period since it's been quite a long time. We stopped at one waterfall and enjoyed the view, then drove on for a while before getting a little lost and turning back. The next morning, Kareem and I decided to head out again and see some caves and hotsprings. We got to a tiny village when we were looking for the cave and by the confused look on the locals' face, it was pretty clear we weren't really on the right path. So we made our way to the hotsprings. We knew we were definitely at the hotsprings because there was a sign telling us so at the turnoff at the highway. We had to pay a toll to use the road to get there. I'm not sure what the toll money went to, but it sure as shit wasn't road maintenance. We took our scooters on this road for a solid fifteen minutes, combating mud, steep hills (our scooters were barely powerful enough to get up a couple of them...I needed a charging head start) and sharp turns – sometimes all three at once. We even had to cross a rickety looking bamboo bridge. At three different points one of us would stop and ask the other... should we turn around? We pressed on, but at one particularly muddy and steep hill, we stopped for the 4th time and decided to turn back since we were low on gas and clearly under-machined for this particular path. So we turned back and made way our back to town, plastered in mud. We didn't actually see any sites as planned, but it was still a great morning out on the road.
Unfortunately some drama was brewing with my other set of friends in Pai over some borrowed money that luckily I was not originally involved with. However I did become implicated when the borrower asked me for money in an effort to shift debts. I wisely declined and, sensing that things were only going to go downhill, decided that it was time to get out of dodge. So I left with Gabby and Kareem back for Chang Mai where we hung out for a couple days until Gabby actually did go home for good. Funnily enough I discovered that my Dutch friend Carin who I'd met way back in Cambodia and kept bumping into in Vietnam was in Chang Mai and it happened to be her birthday. I met up with her in the afternoon and we had some birthday cake. She said she was going to the Chang Mai cultural centre for dinner where they put on a dance exhibition from the different hill tribes surrounding the city. I agreed to join her and we had a great night. The food was good and plentiful. They brought out about 8 different dishes on a tray and as soon as any of them were even close to empty, a waiter would swoop in and refill it. We were both stuffed by the time the dancing started. I have to admit it was a little underwhelming. Most of the dancing here is in the hand movements, so it wasn't exactly a recreation of You Got Served up there. Nevertheless it was a great night with good food, and I'm glad I got to be there for her birthday since she was there for mine in Dalat. We had a nightcap and then said our final goodbyes (although we've thought we'd said a final goodbye to eachother about 4 other times) and I headed back to get a good night's sleep because I was leaving for Laos the next day.
So I left for Laos the next day. This was a long and winding 3 day journey consisting of one day on the bus and two on a boat. The first day was an 8-hour bus ride up to Chang Khong, a Thai town on the border with Laos. There I met a couple British guys over dinner and discovered we'd been in 4 or 5 of the same places at the same time, but never met eachother before then which was funny. Being a small border town, there wasn't much else to do besides go out for a couple beverages so that's just what we did. There we met Oh (“I'm Oh, ok?”), an extremely intoxicated local who apparently had just gotten back from spending a week with his wife which seemed like a good enough excuse to be on a 3 day bender on , if he was to believed, pretty much every drug known to man. And in his state, I believed him. Finally his sister came around and kind of corralled him away from us. She ended up sitting down with us and turned out to be very nice, although she inexplicably kept feeding her brother liquor at the other table. We turned it in early enough since we had to get up early the next morning, and we were also terrified to have to walk down the same road Oh would later be driving his motorcycle down.
So the next morning we had to get up early to take the 2 minute boat ride across the river to Laos and pay for our Visas. After paying a terrible exchange rate and waiting for an hour and a half for the group to get through, we finally got to hurry up and wait and two different spots where the tour company tried to sell us different crap at terrible rates. We finally got on the slow boat at noon and made our way up the river. The first day on the boat was a 7 hour ride. The boat held over 100 people, and while it was a little cramped, it was still a pretty good time, depending on what you made of it. I made some friends on the boat and enjoyed the beautiful scenery until it started raining and the tarps on the side of the boat had to come down. We finally got off in the late afternoon in the pouring rain in a tiny town that pretty much only exists because it is the stop between the border and Luang Prabang. Wanting a quiet night and a comfortable boat ride the next morning, I decided to refrain from the partying there.
The second day on the boat just seemed a lot longer. Everybody had grown pretty tired of the seats, which were basically old van seats, and you could just tell everybody was anxious to get there. I tried to enjoy the view as much as possible. Laos is riddled with mountains, so basically both days were spent floating down the river with lush green mountains surrounding us on all sides. Like most things here though, even this beauty had its ugly side. I saw three different dead human bodies floating in the river during my two days on the boat. A couple were tangled up in the rocks where the current had taken them and one just floated right on by us downstream as we went upstream. I found this pretty disturbing and asked some locals about it. The two most likely explanations were that it was either a fisherman who drowned or simply a villager whose family couldn't afford to bury him. The locals seemed amused at my concern. I also inadvertently provided my friends on the boat with a catchphrase that has stuck even a week later. People had been talking about seeing the bodies, some had seen them and some hadn't. I happened to be standing up talking to a few friends about something unrelated when the one body floated by in the background, so in shock I said “that's a dead body right there”. They took my shock for calmness and thought that was pretty funny. So now when anything out of the ordinary happens, somebody always says “that's a [insert what's happening] right there” in a calm, southern drawl. Most of them are British and for some reason they think I have a southern drawl.
Anyways, we finally got off the boat Friday evening in Luang Prabang and made our way to some guesthouses. I had a pretty quiet night, since I had once again lost my bank card a few days previous in Chang Mai. For those keeping count at home, that's two lost on this trip so far. The problem here is that the ATMs give you your cash back and then make you hit cancel in order to get your card back, as opposed to giving you your card, then cash. I was in a hurry to meet some people, so once I had my cash, I took off without thinking and without my card. Luckily I still have my Visa for cash advances, but unfortunately it can't be used at a machine, only in a bank. So I kept it quiet on Friday, waiting to take my money out the next morning. This is when I discovered the banks are closed in Laos on the weekends and I was up shits creek without a debit card. Luang Prabang has a huge number of money exchange places, and they all give embarrassingly bad rates, but I had no choice and exchanged the last of my Thai Bhat into the Laos Kip. This gave me the equivalent of roughly 7 dollars to live on for the weekend, so I knew it wasn't going to be a lively one. There are stands all over town that sell sandwiches for a dollar, so I'd wait until noon or 1 and buy one for lunch, then wait as long as my hunger would allow and go back and get another one in the evening. These and a bottle of water were pretty much all I could afford so I didn't go out much and explore in order to conserve my energy/hunger/thirst. I basically stayed in and watched movies on my computer and read. As you can imagine, these weren't exactly the most fun couple of days travelling. Finally Monday morning rolled around and I managed to get the money out of the bank. I bought myself a nice big breakfast to celebrate, and my spirits slowly returned. I rented a bike and explored the city a bit to see what I'd been missing. Luang Prabang is a valley that is, like everything else in Laos, surrounded by mountains. There is a temple at the top of a steep hill in the middle of the city that gives you a great view of the area. Yes, I forgot to bring my camera. It's a very quiet and pretty town, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There are also a couple of beautiful caves and waterfalls nearby that every tuk tuk driver you pass will kindly offer to take you to.
That night I also met up with my friends from the boat for a few drinks. There is a curfew in Luang Prabang that dictates that all the bars must close by 11:00 pm. There is only one place that is exempt from this, so as everybody leaves the bars after last call they are bombarded by tuk tuk drivers yelling “bowling!”. That's right, the afterparty spot in Luang Prabang is a 10-pin bowling alley. So you cram as many people into a tuk tuk as possible and take off to this 15-lane alley. I've only ever been 10-pin bowling once before, so I was pleased with myself when I came in second last.
My boat friends took off for Vang Vieng the next day, but I wanted to spend a couple more days in town to actually see it since I was still two days behind. While I enjoyed the scenery, I must say I didn't like Luang Prabang as much as some other people had said they did. I found people were trying to rip me off one way or another every time I turned around. Tuk tuk drivers would ask for way too much, street vendors would charge more for food than originally advertised, and in one case I bought some water at a corner store with a 50,000 Kip bill and the clerk tried the old trick of only giving me back change for a 20,000 (they look very similar), claiming that's what I gave her. I had to argue with her for a couple minutes to get it back, but I finally did since I know for a fact I looked to make sure. This general greedy attitude combined with my first couple days spent impoverished just didn't leave me with a great impression of the town. Finally ready to leave, I booked my bus ticket for Thursday morning. I paid the extra 5 dollars for the “VIP” bus figuring I'd want the extra comfort of air con and hopefully some extra space. I woke up Thursday morning a little under the weather but decided to trek on anyways, since I had the comforts of the VIP bus anyways. As soon as I got on the bus I knew I'd made a mistake and should have turned around right then but I didn't. The bus was so cramped. They had clearly adjusted the seats in order to put more in. The seat I was assigned was actually on an angle, which meant I had even less leg room than everybody else on the bus. There was literally less than a foot between the seat cushion and the seat in front of me. Murphy's law, the guy sitting next to me was the second tallest person on the bus. Guess who was the first. So basically I spent the entire ride sitting completely sideways with my legs in the aisle, unable to stretch them though because the guy next to me had to spread his knees well onto my side. The air conditioning turned out to be nothing more than a bit of warm air blowing from those little fan things above the seat. But seeing as how there were more seats than originally intended, guess whose seats weren't covered by any? It was probably the worst bus ride I've taken since I've been to SE Asia, and that's not an easy feat. The ride up was windy and bumpy as there are no highways, just a combination of twisting dirt, gravel, and occasional concrete roads through the highways. The scenery once again was beautiful, but I was in no mood to enjoy it.
So I arrived in Vang Vien Wednesday evening and spent the next day and a half recovering from my fever/bus ride. Vang Vien is a very small town that is best known for its tubing and partying. To say both is a bit redundant. I haven't done the tubing yet, but I will in the next couple days. Essentially you rent an old tractor tire here in town and they drive you about 5 km up the river and you float back down towards town. Along the way apparently are a few bars that you can float up to that have ziplines, rope swings, slides, and pretty much anything else you've ever been advised not to combine alcohol with. I think I'm gonna decline to participate in these things since pretty much every second person you see walking has a limp or cuts and scrapes from their adventures. I'll stick to floating and maybe a couple beers thank you very much.
I finally managed to get out yesterday to explore. I quickly learned it was the Rocket Festival. I assumed this was their translation for firework festival, but wasn't really sure. The last festival I'd been to was the water festival in Chiang Mai where everybody shoots as much water at you as possible. So you can understand my apprehension when I turned a corner and saw a dozen Laotian teens carrying oversized bottle rockets. Luckily nobody fired them at me. There were different processions of people carrying these rockets, singing, dancing, drumming, and drinking. One group invited me along and while I had no idea what they were singing or where we were going, I was having fun. It was enjoyable because they were just there having fun as opposed to my negative experiences in Luang Prabang with the locals. I was still curious what the festival was all about though. Finally we got down to the river where there were stages and food stalls set up. There were also 3 different ladder-like structures set up next to the water. One was about 8 feet, one was about 15, and one about 25. I quickly learned that these were the launching platforms for the rockets. These people were actually launching these fucking rockets! Not fireworks, but rockets. The stems on the bigger ones would be about 15 feet and the tube with the fuel would be about as big as your leg. I stayed as far back from the launch spot as possible. I couldn't believe it when they set these things off....they went anywhere between 500 and 2000 metres in the air. And the festival went on all day like this...just setting these things off, watching the tail of smoke disappear into the clouds (it was unfortunately overcast all day). I'll have to ask around what exactly the festival is celebrating, but I have a feeling it has to do with their independence. It's just an odd way to celebrate since more bombs have been dropped on Laos than any country in the world. I of course would have taken pictures of this, but had no clue that this was going on before leaving my guesthouse.
I did take a few pictures in the last few weeks though. Here are some pictures from Pai and here are some pictures from Chang Mai, along with the White temple we stopped at on the way to Chang Khong.
Sorry for the length of this post, I'll try not to wait so long for the next one!
