glen's leaving party

SAyonara...SAyonara...

(ros, deccy, jon, kat, miho, kazuya, johanna, james, caroline, gareth, tomomi, pamela, kristen, glen, me)

could she be any cuter?

i thinkt he number one thing i can't wait to get home to is my little niece natalie...who's growing up SO fast.

the mother of all posts...my SE asia trip

Well I feel as though I’ve neglected The Blog long enough. I have started an affair with facebook and it has taken up much of my time. As a result, my poor irasshai is suffering. But I will remedy that. If only to have a forever-account of my holiday for myself which I can go back to. And also for mum who can’t see the photos otherwise.
So…back to the beginning.

Bangkok!

I arrived in Bangkok in the evening and went straight to khao san road and to the guesthouse where I knew tom and Rachel were staying. They were happy, tanned, and exhausted from two weeks on a beach followed by a night-bus back to Bangkok. We immediately booked night-train tickets for the following day up to chiang mai, as all of us had spent enough time in bkk.

sleeper train to chiang mai

For anyone who's ever taken a night bus...the night train/sleeper car was absolute bliss. Except for the INCREDIBLY LOUD alarm that tore me out of my sleep at 4:30am, it was great. We arrived in chiang mai early in the morning and easily found accommodation. It wasn’t necessarily the most luxurious (broken beds, ant-infested, stained walls) but at $1.50 a night who’s complaining.

Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai was much slower-paced than Bkk. There’s a nice river that goes through the city and one of the nights I was able to meet up with a friend of mine (who lived in Japan first year) for some dinner. She’s living in CM now, doing an internship at the international university there. Iina.

tom and the ladyboys. rach and me in the market

relaxing at the pool

trekking in chiang mai

We booked a trekking trip that was leaving CM the next morning. The first day was about 5 hours of hiking through the jungle of the national park, arriving at dinnertime in a Karen hill-tribe (long-neck) for the evening. The jungle was beautiful though the northern part of the country now is overrun with forest fires from all of the slash-and-burning they do there. The air was dense with smoke which when inhaled, was equated to smoking 45 packs of cigarettes a day or something equally horrible. After about a week and a half in northern Thailand and laos (where it was the same), you could definitely feel it in your lungs and in your eyes.

The second day of the trek we got up early and had a short hike to a river where we rode elephants for an hour or so. It was included in the trekking price but I would have been much happier walking on my own as I question the treatment of those poor animals and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Afterwards we set off of some bamboo rafts floating down the jungle-ridden river for about 3 hours.

chiang kohng

The next morning we caught a bus to the thai/laos boarder town of chiang khong. It was a tiny, sleepy dusty place along the Mekong river – the only thing separating Thailand and laos. We stayed the night and the following morning caught a little boat across to the other side.

slow boat to luang prabang

From the laos boarder town we caught a slow-boat which took 2 days down the Mekong river to a pretty French-colonial town called luang prabang. The slow-boat was one of only two methods of transportation to LP. The speedboat was the other one, though it’s incredibly dangerous to take it during the dry season and you’re always provided with crash-helmets, which usually isn’t enough to protect you from almost certain death by Mekong.
The slow boat had hard benches and was crammed with backpackers. The smoke was dense as often either side of the river was blazing. It was about 8 hours each day but we survived it somehow. We met a Canadian guy named Ray who was great company for the next few days. After the first day we stopped at a riverside town called pak beng where we stayed in a guesthouse, got some dinner and breakfast, and set off again in the morning. Finally around dinnertime of the second day we made it to Luang Prabang, and it was well-worth the journey.

fires along the mekong
view from pak beng, where we stayed the first night

Luang Prabang

It’s a pretty town with dozens of temples, monks, French architecture, delicious food, and cheap guesthouses. Our’s was nice and promised on the sign “quiet rooms” which was ironic as immediately next door they were building a new house, so we awoke to hammering and sawing every morning. Ray, rach, tom and I spent our days eating yummy food, walking around the town, visiting the night-market, and, after ray left, visiting the caves.

Ray

the caves

The caves were an hour-long tuk-tuk drive away, and after you take a boat to cross the river, you walk up a steep staircase in the caves in the side of a mountain, which are filled with Buddhist statues. It was definitely a highlight of LP.

At the top of the mountain old women sell baskets filled with birds which you can release to bring you good luck. I thought that was absolutely horrible. I think these poor things are so weak that the women just catch them again and resell them. There was an Israeli guy with us, ‘tomer’ who bought two to release on the other side of the river – far away from those mean old ladies. Tomer was a really sweet guy who, incidentally, plays the role of “Phantom” in Tel Aviv’s production of The Phantom of the Opera. So I know a famous person now.

never a dull moment

From Luang Prabang we took a night bus down to Vientiane. Leaving the bus station was a frightening experience, as when we were about to go three very large and aggressive and scary men came on. They were in a big argument about money or something, and really shocked all of the quiet, peaceful (and very small! Laotians on the bus – and me who was sitting the back, near them!) A guard (carrying gun) came onboard to try to get them off the bus but he just had to power over them. At one point one got off the bus and the other followed him, tearing down the isle of the bus and pushing everyone really forcefully out of the way. He even knocked this old, frail, tiny Laotian woman almost to the floor! When they got outside they started beating the crap out of each other, as all of us on the bus watched in horror. I thought we should have just pulled away then, but one of them was still left on the bus. After a while the two got back on and the bus pulled away. For the next hour they were still arguing loudly about money and the one guy kept saying, from what we could make out, “if I die on this trip you’ll never get your money”. I can only wonder about what the three of them were doing there. Hmmm… when we arrived at 5 am the next morning they were met by several guards. I don’t know what happened to them after that.
That was probably the worst night bus experience of my life. For about the first 6 hours, the bus turned the sharp corners of the mountains round and round, throwing everyone from side to side constantly until the wee hours of the morning. Tom had taken 2 sleeping pills that I had bought in Bkk and he was absolutely out for the next 18 hours. Remind me not to take 2 of those.

more bus rides...

After arriving in Vientiane early the next morning we were tired and unsure of what to do next. We wanted to get down to the south and there was a tuk-tuk driver telling us to board a certain bus which was leaving immediately so we did. It was a local bus which took about another 8 hours down to the south. But it was quite an experience as we were the only foreigners on a bus which foreigners don’t usually take. The pee breaks were literally a stop at the side of the road, and a squat next to the bus. These became quite usual, especially in Cambodia, where almost every other page of the guidebook warns never to stray off the path due to land mines. The bus also stopped for about 30 minutes while they loaded up about 30 barrels of tobacco onto the roof.

Southern Laos

We finally arrived in the southern town of Savannakhet in the evening. We wandered around, had some dinner, and talked with the locals, who didn’t seem as though they’d met too many foreigners. Their smiles were powerful and they were some of the warmest and friendliest people I’ve ever met. Except for the kids who tried to beat Rachel up. But they probably just had a bad mother.
Savannakhet looked a bit like cuba wich decaying colonial buildings, the paint peeling off and the shutters falling off their hinges. But it had it’s charm as we walked through the dusty streets. We even had a nice chat with a monk who was at a temple we passed by and wanted to practice his English.