Goodbye to Daniel and Martin!

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I said bye to Daniel and Martin this morning. They left at 7am to get a bus to Vang Vieng. Afterwards they are travelling down to Ko Chang (the island I wanted to visit but Susan felt it was a bit isolated.) Afterwards they are flying back to Austria at the end of this month. I'm so excited to hear about their journeys, I really can't wait to hear about Ko Chang. As chang means elephant the only thing I can imagine about this island is that there are hundreds of elephants. This is one of the great things about travelling - everybody has another adventure planned and you log into each others blogs and share experiences. If you don't have the energy to go to a place, another traveller will go and will inform you about their experience. For example, I'm happily sitting here thinking about what to eat for tea and not planning on leaving my comfort zone, whilst imagining right now that they are SIP LINING, kayaking and diving. I hope they are not just drinking beer and falling asleep! I hope they are having a real adventure and come back with amazing stories and enormous muscles.

This morning I wanted to leave a present (an English fiction book) for my tour guide who took me through the jungle on New Years day. I waited from 8am to 9am near Tiger Trails meeting point where all the tour guides meet but I think he wasn't working today. I thought it could be nice as he studies English and is quite interested in the culture.

Tiredness, culture shock and emotional exhaustion really hit me hard today so I just took the day to absorb all my experiences and make decisions about how to get back to Thailand. I was tired from dealing with the currency (8,000 kip to 1 dollar) and having to carry around so many notes and having to do calculations (between kip and dollars.) If I paid in American dollars, I'd get kip in change AMD then have to calculate roughly how much change. Every shop owner has a calculator and knows how to change almost any money to Lao kip. They usually accept Thai baht or American dollars. I was tired of trying to explain to yuk tuk drivers where I needed to go as they couldn't read or speak English, French and most people in Laos are illiterate even in their own language so communication was really difficult. Hospitals were very basic. In general Laos don't believe in germs, they follow a spirit theory that if you get ill it is because you have lost a spirit (an animal.) If you are ill, perhaps you have lost the chicken spirit so you then need to go to a witchdoctor or shaman who will help you sacrifice and kill a chicken and offer it up to the spirit gods. In Vientiane the capital, and Lang Prabng the former capital there are basic hospitals but outside there are only shamans. In the guide book it said visit a Lao hospital if you want to go out of your comfort zone, but I didn't want to tempt fate. I have been lucky so far.

Also it is an expensive country to live in, about the same as Turkey or some European countries yet the minimum wage is 300 American dollars a year for a farmer and on average for citizens it is 1,000 American dollars a year so perhaps around 800 euros annually. Visitors can sit in nice bars and restaurants and eat well but to Laos people that would be a dream as it is too expensive. Knowing that I can afford what nationals can't afford feels wrong and I feel ashamed of bargaining as the difference between the kip and the pound are incomparable. The government doesn't give its citizens passports so it is hard to leave the country and in any case there are only two places you can go - Thailand via Mekong River or China in the other direction. Most Laos including tour guides only ever venture to the border. It is geographically isolated and can only import and export via China and Thailand, as everything is shipped via the Mekong.

Here there is no such thing as owning anything as the government controls everything. In Lang prab there is a curfew mainly for locals, everybody must be in their house and off the street by 11.30pm, and tourists must be signed into their hotel rooms at this time (apart from New Years Eve when I spent all night partying.) There is no word for 'your' in Lao language, only 'our.' Despite this they are very happy people, share everything with everybody (tourists and locals) and live day by day, enjoying their spirit theories and always having a smile on their faces.

I spent a lot of time deciding about how to get back to Chiang Mai. There seemed to be an endless amount of undesirable options for travelling back - 7 hours on a speedboat which could hit debris at any moment in the Mekong River, two days on a slow boat up the Mekong packed full of packages, as many people that can possibly fit, or take a 14 hour overnight bus ride through the night where the drivers rely on amphetamines to stay awake or take a 1 hourplane with Lao airlines. I finally decided to do this on the basis that each hour equals a risk of a problem. The 24 hour boat trip risks 24 problems, the 14 hour bus trip risks 14 problems whereas a one hour plane journey risks only one problem.

So I booked my plane, took the day easy, tried to contact my family in Leeds and successfully skyped dad.

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