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August 7th 2007

Published: August 7th 2007

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ElisabethV

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The first local bus ride..

Hello all,

In the past few weeks the great forces have conspired for a total lack of updates on my part as:
1. I was Up North where in some places there was no internet
2. I did a trek into remote villages, where there was no water or electricity (so let alone the net..)
3. This website had a few technical probs and deleted some of the stuff I tried to post (but fortunately only a small part which was boring anyway!).

So now here is a FULL UPDATE on the last few days. With hopefully PHOTOS. And a FREE COCKTAIL prize if you manage to read it all (yeah ok for that you have to come and get it here in Vientiane before 9.30 pm tonight).

Watch this space as more photos will be added tomorrow.

July 30th: Vang Vieng
There are three things that I think summarise the town of Vang Vieng:
- people "tubing" down the river (floating in plastic tyre things) stopping at river bars blaring loud music
- restaurants playing non stop episodes of Friends
- amazing scenery.

I decided to skip option 1 (was so not in a

Bus

Obviously not a VIP one..

mood to start drinking beer at 11am) and focus on option 3, so went kayaking for the day. There was a bunch of us on the group, it was quite fun. Especially as we visited a cave where you had to swim in cold muddy water to get in. Then to get out we had to squeeze through a tiny whole which was very acrobatic, and there were some big Irish guys in the group whom I thought we would leave behind stuck in the hole.

In the evening I did go for option 2 though, but did not chose a restaurant playing "Friends" but went for a place showing the cartoon "Family guy", I am a discerning tourist you see.

All in all an enjoyable day but not the sort of place I would like to stay for more than a day, as Vang Vieng really feels like an adventure parc just built for tourists.

July 31st: Luang Prabang
That day I woke up to a downpour of torrential rain. And I thought to myself "Is it really reasonable to embark on a crappy local bus on a 10 hour trip on long windy mountain roads

Scenery

Scenery on way to Vang Vieng

when it is raining so bad, when the bus probably did not change its tires since 1987?". So I admit I chickened out of my initial plan of roughing it on a locaj bus to the North of Laos (Ponsavanh) and instead jumped on a VIP (!) bus heading to Lunag Prabang, the second biggest city of Laos and a place so chilled and beautiful it is on the UNESCO world heritage list.

You know the joke:
- How do you fit four elephants in a Mini car?
- Two at the front, two at the back?
Well we had a similar case, except the question was, how do you deal with the fact the bus company sold too many tickets on this bus and three people had no seats? Well no problem, the laosian solution to the problem is: just stick three wooden chairs in the alley!! And three lucky tourists had indeed to sit in these special (VIP indeed) seats in the aisle.. (I must say I did feel a little bit guilty as everyone seemed to have purchased their tickets in advance whereas I had only decided to get a seat on that bus like 30

Vang Vieng

More Vang Vieng Greenery

mins before it left, ie I was probably the last one who bought a ticket, but still got to sit in a comfy seat 😊

Luang Prabang is on the River Mekong and exudes a lot of charm, beauty, positive energy, in summary I fell in love with the place. It has some amazing temples, a lot of treking into nature, and is the cuisine capital of Laos, so what to ask more? I was quite exhausted after the long bus trip) 6 hours but the Inner Organiser in me still managed to get myself booked on a cooking class and a 2 day trek into the mountains in the following days.

August 1st: What's cooking?
So today had two themes: cooking and sweating.
Cooking because I began the day with a cooking class. We first went to the market to have a look at what is on offer for Lao cuisine. Saw some weird stuff like caterpillars, jellied blood, Hello Kitty bath towels.
Then the fun began back at the cooking school, where we made 5 dishes:
- Ginger Fish (hmmmmm)
- Spring rolls (yumm)
- Coconut chicken curry (ahhhh)
- Lao chicken salad (miaaaam)

Vang Vieng - The Mekong

The magestic river in all its glory

- Sticky rice in coconut with mango (wuuuhhh)
The base of Lao cooking is :
Spices and Herbs: Lemongrass, garlic, ginger, galangal (a root like ginger), lime
Sauces: Fish sauce, Oyster sauce, Soy sauce, Soy bean sauce
Rice: Sticky rice (a special type of rice that is really only eaten in Laos and Nothern Thailand).

Needless to say: 1. it was sumptuous 2. I have become a super expert and am looking forward to demonstrate my new found cooking skills (even though I did more a lot of sturring that hand-on cooking 😊 3. I was stuffed.

After the feast (as we ate all that we cooked) I decided to do some exericise. And you know normal people, when they decide to do exericise when it's super hot outside and after a big meal, usually opt for something like a gentle stroll on a river bank in the shade of the trees? Well not I. I decided to rent a bike (the kind with NO GEARS), and bike to some waterfalls located about 30 km away. In the MOUNTAINS. So a lot of HILLS to climb.
Well I never made it, given the quality of the bike (not

Cave

I tried to go into the cave using my flash as a light..

my fitness levels, no no), i turned around after about 11 km of very intense uphill/downhill fun. All the tuktuks who were passing me were trying to persuade me to give up and let them take me to the waterfall. And all the tourists at the back of the tuktuks were cheering me on like "GO GO GO you crazy person on the gearless-bike on the mountain road".

Anyway, to relax from the effort, I went to the steam bath run by the Red Cross, there were many locals there which made the experience fun. For 4 USD, I got a steambath and a 1 hour massage, pure bliss.

August 2 + 3rd: Among the Hmongs

These two days were spent on a cycling - kayaking trek. So a group of 5 tourists (2 Canadians, 1 American, 1 French and Melting Pot me) and two guides jumped in a van to drive up to a remote mountain area where we would cycle to a typical village where we would spend the night, + kayak back down to town the next day. I think my backside was not pleased by having to end up roughing it

Kayak Girl

Who said I was not credible as a sportswoman?

on a bicycle for the second day running 😊 but this one had gears so a little less crazy.
It was actually nice to spend the day actively after so much bus-travelling and eating, and the experience of staying overnight in a typical village was fun. We slept like the real rural Lao, in a little wooden house on stilts (down below was a weaving workshop + some chickens). There was no running water of electricity, so when we arrived up to the village we dived into the river to refresh and wash there like the real villagers.
As we got there quite early, we had a whole evening to find some activities to do. So we played cards. And did some Stretching. And played the Chicken Head Game.
You never heard of the Chicken Head Game? 😊 Well it's simple, you get the head of chicken, stick it into a bowl with a lid. Then sit around the bowl in a circle, shake it, and when you open it, whoever the chicken's head is pointing at has to drink some Lao Lao (rice wine).
The worst is, we played with the head of the chicken we had for dinner.

VV - Bridge

This was one scary wobbly bridge..

The chicken really had no chance the moment we walked into this village 😊
(I know I know it's wrong on so many levels, but you know like they say, when in Rome, do as the Romans do...).
The funny thing is the Lao lao drinking opened up our guides to some olympic level joke telling and here are a couple of golden samples:

- When is a door not a door?
- When it's a-jar

- What has a heart but can not love?
(no ladies, the answer is not your exboyfriend)
- The forest.

Anywayyyyyyy.

The next morning, headed back into town with the kayaks (thank god I was in the kayak with one of the guides, and we never turned upside down in the water, contrary to all the others some of whom got shaken up!).

August 5 + 6th: The mysterious Plain of Jars

After an extra day spent doing absolutely nothing in Luang Prabang I managed to peel myself off this town and headed up, finally, to Ponsavanh to see the mysterious Plain of Jars. The name comes from the fact the area is full of sites with

Tubing

A couple of people tubing down the river in Vang Vieng

big stone jars, a bit like Stonehenge, as no one knows what they were really for, and how they got there (given they date back to about 3000 years ago and the areas where the stone comes from was really far away so it's amazing they got them in this place).
The northern province where these are is also one where some heavy bombings took place in the Vietnam, and here is where the history bit comes in.
During the Vietnam was Laos was caught in the middle, litterally, of the violence. The Vietnamese had set up a network of people and information between the south and the north of Vietnam running through Laos, which was supposedly a neural ground where no military presence should have taken place. But there were still many bombings, for example the US would temporarily convert military pilots into "civil airline pilots" so that they could go in and do the deed. The US were trying to get to this Vietnamese network running through Laos. Also when the US planes flew to Vietnam and for some reason did not drop all their bombs there, (maybe because of visibility reasons etc) they would not want to

Market

A Lao delicacy..

take the risk if landing back in their airbase with planes full of explosive stuff so they would just offload it all over Laos.
It's terribly sad to see this violence of the war. The worst is, not only Laos suffered a lot at the time injustly, but on top of it there are still dramatic consequences nowadays as the country is littered with unexploded bomsbs (UXOS ie unexploded ordnances) that are just lying there waiting for a kid to find it, or a farmour's metallic tool to hit it, to explode. There are many casualties as these keep exploding. Fortunately a charity called MAG (Mines Advisory Group) is working hard with the villages to remove bit by bit all the UXOS, they reckon it will take 100 years.. (as Laos is the country that has been most bombed, ever, by any measure really).

Anyway I am glad I went to see this area of the world which still lives in the present with the horrors of the past. The amazing thing is people do not seem really bitter, on the contrary they seem more fatalistic about it all.

After the visit, I jumped into a night bus

Market 3

Fancy a bit of blood, anyone?

back to Vientiane which was hard work!! First of all we broke down about 30 mins into the journey. By some miracle, after pouring a sea of water into the engine (or whatever) they managed to make it start, though it did smoke quite a bit throughout which made me nervous.
They had about 9 people too many on the many and did the usual trick of sitting people on chairs in the aisle (these were plastic chairs with no backs, I was shocked people accepted to travel like this, especially as there was one elderly couple there).
Then they showed movies and played Lao Pop music ALL night, VERY LOUD which made sleeping impossible (and this was a 10 hour night trip). Fortunately some of the videos were entertaining, in one of them there was this naked guy running all over the place in a village 😊
One thing I learned: wearing white is not a smart idea when travelling...

Arrived this morning in vientiane totally zonked, and am getting ready for ANOTHER night bus tomorrow night (will I ever learn?) which will take me to the south (Pakse) for a totally different experience (mainly going to an

Market 2

Fancy a bit of eel a la foam anyone?

area called Four Thousand Islands, hope to see some dolphins). But this bus is supposed to be really VIP really we promise.

Anyway to be continued!

Take care y'all.

Elisabeth

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