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Published: January 29th 2007
Ah, Thailand: like Reading in the Premiership, it's definitely been the surprise package of our trip so far. Before coming here we had been fearing the worst. We'd heard that there were too many tourists (including grubby buggers who don't go there for the temples), too much development and, on the eve of our arrival, a best-not-tell-the-parents bombing campaign in Bangkok. Nevertheless, we were quickly seduced by the place. The climate is great, the scenery gorgeous and the food even better, but the best thing about Thailand is the Thais: a nation of people so cheerful, accommodating and just plain nice that they make the Aussies seem like the French. Even in jam-packed, helter-skelter Bangkok you're greeted with a smile wherever you go, and not in a 'quick, they're tourists, let's get their strides down' sort of a way, unlike some places we've been to.
The warmth of the welcome made it impossible for us to execute Plan A, which was to travel post-haste to neighbouring Laos, and we ended up staying about 10 days longer than anticipated. From Bangkok we headed north to the ancient city of Sukhothai, the birthplace of modern Thailand, which nowadays is the site of
Wat Pho, Bangkok
"Anyway, so I says to the missus..."a series of spectacular ruined temples and giant buddhas. We hired bikes and pedalled around lazily, and the perfect end to an excellent day was the amazing guesthouse we stumbled on nearby: blissfully quiet (in spite of a three-day wake going full-tilt next door), immaculately turned out and run by possibly the nicest woman in the world. It would have been easy to park up and do nothing for several days, but we resisted the temptation and instead took a five-hour bus ride to Chiang Mai, the country's adventure capital. Doing so gave us the chance to reacquaint ourselves with a sorely missed friend from our South American travels - the long-distance public bus. Having been shielded from such vehicles in Australia, thanks to the air-conditioned splendour of our borrowed Volvo (ta again, Mr Rawlings) and China, where we mainly caught overnight trains, being back on another 40-year-old death-trap loaded to the gunwales and smelling of armpit was a worryingly comforting sensation. Just as well, seeing as this is our primary mode of transport for the next few months.
Against the odds, and the opinions of just about everybody we've met, we didn't get on with Chiang Mai. It
Royal Palace, Bangkok
Even monks need a holiday seemed like just another sprawling Asian city, albeit one in which westerners outnumbered the locals. The number of fat old gits pretending that the pretty young Thai girl on their arm was their, ahem, girlfriend didn't help, either. Then again, it could have simply been that we were knackered: it had been a long time since we'd stopped anywhere for more than a night or two. Maybe we needed (don't laugh) a holiday? We decided to play it safe and take one, anyway, heading into the nearby hills (more bus hell) a town called Pai, a former hippy haunt set in glorious countryside that offered - and I'm hating what I'm about to write as much as you'll cringe to read it - an 'extremely mellow vibe'.
Pai, as it turned out, was just what the doctor ordered. It's a curious place - essentially four streets in the middle of nowhere, each packed with so many bars that your liver would end up looking like Oliver Reed's if you attempted a pub crawl - but wonderfully relaxing despite the number of people like us in town. Once again, we lucked into a fantastic place to stay amid a collection
Royal Palace, Bangkok
And we thought Louis XIV was bling of bamboo huts by the river on the edge of town, with an ambience equal to most of the places we went to at car companies' expense in our former lives and all for under a fiver a night.
As a result, we settled down to do absolutely bugger-all for a bit. No, tell a lie: we hired our first-ever proper motorbike, with a road-burning 125cc at its disposal, and used it to ride 300 metres to the local swimming pool and back. And we also spent a brilliant afternoon fulfilling one of Adele's lifetime ambitions by going trekking - on an elephant.
Our steed, a 48-year-old female called Phanom, was incredible, happily uprooting trees with her trunk yet astonishingly gentle around people. But first we had to get on her back, an awkward and potentially humiliating manoeuvre. You grab an ear and walk yourself up her side - which is all very well, except that Phanom was so big that it was like trying to get onto the top deck of a bus without using the staircase. The
mahout who looked after her made it look like a breeze, whereas I split my boxer shorts clean in
Wat Pho
Buddha - the first of many half when I tried it. The only consolation was that they wouldn't have helped much during our three hours on elephant-back, which were among the most painful of our lives. Forget a Passage to India - this was more like a Passage to Casualty - there were no silken padded saddles here. If the discomfort of having Phanom's vertebrae wiggling underneath our backsides wasn't bad enough, trying to stay on as the thick-skinned goon walked us through just about every bush and tree going really took the biscuit. And if she didn't like the look of said tree she simply felled with one rather scary stamp of her foot, all the the time with us clinging for dear life to her leather hide. By way of apology she would stop occasionally, swing her trunk around and shower us with its sticky contents. But the best bit was when she took us into a river for an impromptu bath: first we got jet-washed with the trunk, then unceremoniously (and deliberately) flung off. This seemed to amuse Phanom enormously, although not quite as much as it did the
mahout.
Had our guesthouse actually had a pool attached, there would have been
Welcome to Thailand
Five-star bed for less than a fiver a danger that you would have never seen us again. As it was, you can only do so little for so long, so after five days we reluctantly dusted down Plan A and headed for the border with Laos, a land-locked, often overlooked country that has the dubious distinction of being the most bombed nation on earth. Getting there involved a three-day, two-night odyssey in a succession of minibuses, pick-ups and bum-crunchingly uncomfortable boats, the last of which took us down the mighty Mekong River at snail's pace. The good thing about this was that it allowed us plenty of time to drink in the scenery and watch people going about the business of working on and living off the river in the same way they have for generations. The bad news was being forced to break our journey in a grim little village called Pak Beng, where we spent a sleep-free night in a rat-infested sh*thole - and that may be talking the place up.
Eventually we arrived at Luang Prabang, a jewel of a town on the banks of the Mekong that's full of lovely French colonial architecture. There we continued our assimilation into the local culture
Cycling round Sukothai
You can smell Rob's sandals from here by going straight down the pub, ordering a big plate of a plate of pie and mash and watching Liverpool tonk Chelsea. Pretty soon, though, we'd hired bicycles - a pink lady's bike with matching mudguards, in my case - and set out to explore. Laos is more laid-back than Thailand, a legacy of the fact that it has only recently opened up to tourists, but also that it is desperately poor. Why the US spent millions bombing the place during the Cold War is a mystery, even with hindsight: there's nothing more sinister here than a small population trying to eke a living from the land, which is heart-breakingly difficult considering the number of unexploded bombs in the fields.
We loved Luang Prabang, although staying here for a few days made us aware of another phenomenon we'd noticed throughout Asia. The main route through northern Thailand and Laos is so well-worn that you constantly meet the same people and do the same things as them. This is not unpleasant in itself, because we've met some nice people, but it does make you feel that you are on a giant conveyor belt for western travellers. Adele calls this the
Sukothai
A needed breather after Bangkok 'Banana Pancake Trail', on account of the same-same 'alternative' food you find on the menu just about everywhere you go, and we began to resent it. This, I know, is a bit rich bearing in mind that we're no different from everybody else here, but we began to crave some of the solitude and isolation that we'd experienced during our time in South America.
This drove us to ignore our planned route to the capital, Vientiane, and took us instead in the direction of yet another uncomfy bus and an even more uncomfortable boat, which took us to a small village called Muang Ngoi four hours up the road from Luang Prabang. The town provided the isolation we craved: it's only accessible by river, and the river in question is so shallow that we had to get out of the boat and walk for half an hour. But the real attraction here is being able to trek into the surrounding hills where, as well as stunning landscape, there are a number of isolated village communities populated by local ethnic groups such as the Khamu and Hmong.
We hooked up with Dale, an extremely hairy-but-sorted 19-year-old Australian, and found
Buddha of Sukothai
Or Goldfinger as he's known to his mates a guide called Si in town, and set off on a three-day trek that we'll look back on as one of the highlights of our trip. We walked about six hours each day through stunning countryside, and stayed in villages that were accessible only on foot. Most of them were like giant farmyards, with dogs, chickens, pigs, goats and children running amok in the dirt. There were a couple of generators but otherwise no power; only one had running water, while another had seen its first western visitor only one month ago. The people here live - several generations at a time - in sturdy bamboo houses on stilts, and survive hand-to-mouth by subsistence farming. Truly a different world.
We felt like interlopers to begin with, especially as Dale and I were a good foot taller than everybody else, but they seemed (we think) to like having us around: especially on the second night, when we stayed in the house of the village chief. After our evening meal - during which the chief and his mate conducted an antimated discussion about a local cow - a bottle of
lao-lao, the locally made rice whiskey, was produced, and we were
Our mate the public bus
Note the chock - no hillstarts for us then invited to try some. Dale and I gamely joined Si and the chief in a shot or two. And then a couple more. And then a few more after that. Thankfully - for this was proper firewater - that was the bottle emptied. No problem, said the chief, producing another. After we'd lost count of how many shots we'd had, we made our excuses and retire to bed (to some extremely bizarre dreams). But the chief wasn't done yet: over breakfast the following morning he made us finish the second bottle and insisted that we make a substantial dent in a third. Dale and I emerged to discover what it felt like to go trekking on a breakfast of hard liquor - albeit in better condition than Si, who insisted on walking through rivers with his clothes on.
By this point, unfortunately, Adele had made a discovery or two of her own: namely, what it's like to have severe diarrhoea in a place where there are no toilets and no running water on tap. (This came courtesy of our dinner of a local speciality, Mekong 'river weed', we ate on the eve of the trek, although eating the likes
Dumbo
That's him at the back of squirrel en route may not have helped.) Being that ill in the midst of such poverty gave us an insight into (a) how lucky we are and (b) how hard life is for some people. Although she's on the mend now, this has meant a couple of unexpected days of cooling our heels back in Luang Prabang, which is where you find us now.
Next up is an overland journey, staying off the 'Banana Pancake Trail', into Vietnam. We don't know exactly how we're going to get there, but the one thing we're sure of is that by the end of our journey - to paraphrase the Baby-Eating Bishop of Bath and Wells of
Blackadderfame - our bottoms will surely wish they had never been born.
Take care,
Rob and Adele x
Fact of the week
Both Thailand and Laos use variations on the Buddhist calendar, which means that as far as they are concerned, we are living in 2550. The news from the future isn't great, though: we're still both unemployed, homeless and skint, and Liverpool still haven't managed to win the Premiership...
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John Parsons
non-member comment
At last I've been there...
Hi Guys, Nice to know you are still sampling the joys of other worlds and toilets (if any!). We loved the Thai people too and found they had a joy of life that is so rare these days, whatever their circumstances. Too late now, but you should have gone to the River Kwai (on the public train preferably )- it was a humbling experience which taught us that although it is now a bit of a tourist trap it does mean that people (even the Japanese tourists) can reflect on what happened there and not forget the enormity of it. Guess you will find that in Vietnam too ( next on our list as it happens). Will you touch Malaysia? Don't miss it - a great mix of cultures that seemed to have learnt to co-exist. When you get back (are you actually coming back?) do let me know how, technically, you do this excellent blog and pix from the back of nowhere. I may need to know in a couple of years for a rather more modest exploit of my own ( just the one continent, but Africa is a big place!). Tip for the 'trots' - flat Coke is about the best treatment for rehydration and eventual recovery. Most medication just delays expelling the cause... Keep safe and enjoy thinking about the Hesseltine slaves at home... most of whom seemed to have been playing musical chairs over the last few months. Love , John and Pat