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Published: November 12th 2006
Me in mid-zip above the trees!
"Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!"I've covered a lot of distance since I arrived in Bangkok two weeks ago - I've managed to squeeze in 10 days in Laos, and have had the most wonderful time. Here's a message to everyone who reads this blog - COME TO LAOS! The scenery is fantastic, there's loads to see and do, and the people are among the friendliest I've met since I left the UK.
First things first though - I stayed in Bangkok for two nights, having a bit of a recce and seeing a few sights. My hotel was pretty cool, 10 dollars a night with hot water, tv and air con (a must in Bangkok) and a swimming pool on the roof. It was quite close to Koh San Road - where ALL the backpackers hang out. Loads of bars, lots of neon, lots of shops selling old tut, lots of tuk tuk drivers wanting to take you to the sleazier side of town, oh - and lots of quite ugly european and american men with young thai princesses. From what I've seen and from who I've spoken to, there are a lot of male egos been massaged out here, for the relatively cheap
price of paying for your new "girlfriend's" food, drink and accomodation! How does that Sheryl Crow song go? "If it makes you happy...."
Bangkok has some amazing Buddhist temples though, including one with a 46 metre long golden reclining Buddha! I'll have more of an explore when I go back with Terry and Jill next week - there's certainly lots to see.
I got an overnight airconditioned bus to Chiang Mai next. No double bed like my bus to Mumbai last month, but it was quite comfy. The only bad thing was the air conditioning. I was warned to pack a fleece in my day pack, and it was good advice as the coach started resembling the temperature of a meat cooler as the journey went on. They came round with blankets late in the evening much to the relief of the Israeli girl next to me whose teeth had been chattering for half an hour!
Chiang Mai was a good place - a bit more like the real Thailand I think, but again I couldn't stay long there as I wanted to get to Laos. The whole of the old town is surrounded by a kind
of moat - some nice temples though, and the market was good fun. Think I may try and go back there if I have enough time - there are lots of treks etc you can do using Chiang Mai as a base, and there is a good cookery school I wanted to try!!
I took a 5 hour minibus trip to the border town of Chiang Kong the following day. We got there at 6pm - an hour after the border crossing closed so I had to spend the night there. My fellow minibus travellers, including a nice bunch of Canadians, went to a little restaurant for a spicy thai curry, a few beers, and watched The Dukes of Hazzard on DVD. What was Jessica Simpson's husband thinking of when he asked for a divorce?!
I've never crossed a river into another country before - ten of us piled into a little motorised long boat at 8 in the morning and whizzed across the Mekong into the Laos town of Huay Xai. I met up with some lads - Pete, Chris and Cal, at the border who had just arrived form Myanmar (an Aussie, a South African and
a Brit) who were also on The Gibbon Experience.
I booked The Gibbon Experience after hearing so much about it from other travellers. Everyone told me I had to do it. It's basically a conservation project set up to protect the Bokeo forest from poaching, logging and slash and burn farming. There is around 100 or so golden gibbons inhabiting the forest - a variety thought to be extinct up to recently. A tiny part of this vast forest has been opened up to tourists, and 4 tree houses have been built for people to stay in. No more than 16 people can go in at a time. In order to preserve the forest they have come up with the novel idea of using zip wires to travel across the forest canopy! The local villagers are the guides and are lovely people.
Ten of us crammed into an open top jeep-type contraption that drove us for three hours into the jungle on one of the bumpiest roads I ever been on. Actually it wasn't even a road - they were still building it! We drove in and out of craters and had loose rocks pinging around all over
The coolest monk in Luang Prabang!
"Who's in the mother-f***in' temple?!" the place on this dusty road. My sunglasses had a nice layer of orange grime on them by the time we reached our destination!
When we finally got to the village where our trek started, we got off to a really good start as our jeep ran over a stray dog. Not a pretty sight - what was particularly weird was while all the tourists were gasping in horror two little boys came up, tied a rope around the creatures legs and just dragged it away. I suppose I guessed they were used to seeing that kind of thing!
The Gibbon Experience itself was awesome. The harnesses, the pullies and the safety wires took a bit of getting used to, but after a while you felt quite confident leaping off from platforms 100 feet up in the air and zipping along the cables! I shared with two girls - Noelly from France and Katrina from Australia, and we had a really nice time. The treehouses we stayed in were something special too - right in the middle of dense jungle. The guide would zip in from a nearby kitchen with hot food for us, there were mattresses and
duvets there, mosquito nets and even a bathroom! It was a lovely feeling waking up in the morning to the sound of gibbons singing to each other. I also heard what I thought was a dog, but actually was a barking deer according to our guide Tau!! The second night we stayed by a waterfall and went for a very nice swim the evening we arrived and also at 6.30 the following morning! As we washed our hair there, I kept thinking of that advert for Timotei shampoo! At one of the bases for the guides, we also saw a cute baby gibbon, a cute baby black bear, and two very cheeky monkies (who managed to get a whole packet of malaria pills out of someones bag and scoff the lot!!). All in all a truly memorable experience - and one that is very much unique. If you want to find out more about the place visit www.gibbonx.org
I got back to Huay Xai after another bumpy jeep ride in the afternoon, and booked myself on a two day boat trip the following day down the Mekong River to a place called Luang Prabang (they're great names aren't they?!).
There are two ways of getting to Luang Prabang - the slow boat (2 days) or the speed boat (8 hours). You may be tempted to get the speed boat, but I had heard enough horror stories to think that an extra day on the river is no bad thing. The speed boat is basically a little wooden longboat with a bloody huge V8 engine perched precariously on the back. Apparently it's hideously dangerous, you get soaking wet, none of the safety helmets fit, and you can't hear anything for hours afterwards after sitting so close to a bloody big outboard motor!
So the slow boat it was, and after liasing with around a dozen people at the boat station we managed to get a whole boat for ourselves instead of the usual slow boat crammed full of 70 sweaty falangs (that's Laos for 'toursists'!). It was a tranquil couple of days, watching dense jungle indispersed with the occasional remote village go past serenely.
Luang Prabang was a great place to chill out. It's a very laid back town on the banks of the Mekong River. A few monastries, some very nice temples, and great restaurants and bars.
My first afternoon there I climbed up Mount Phusi (have to watch how you say thay one!) to watch an absolutely amazing sunset over the Mekong River. I also met some really cool buddhist monks who I spent some time with - got to say though they were more interested in my sunglasses and my mobile phone than me. I did help one of the monks out with his English homework though - quite tricky definitions of english words - when would a Laos monk use the word "hocus pocus'' for gods sake?
I also had my first seriously heavy night out on the beer in Luang Prabang. The boys from The Gibbon Experience, Pete, Chris and Cal were there and we hooked up with some lawyers from Liverpool, Anna, Ali and Caroline. Really nice people - especially Anna who had an excellent taste in music. She also had some hilarious stories - including giving a tramp in Manchester 200 quid and taking him to a lap dancing club...I won't say any more! The local brew here is Beer Lao, and amongst travellers is has almost acquired legendary status - EVERYBODY drinks Beer Lao. I must say it is
probably the best beer I've drunk since I left the UK, but it only has Kingfisher, Everest and Chiang beer from India, Nepal and Thailand to compete against! Anyway I had seven Beer Lao during the course of my first night in Luang Prabang. We ended up in a late bar called 'The Temple' until 3 in the morning. Still have no idea how we got home - apparently 10 of us squeezed into a tuk-tuk and I fell asleep!!!
As a hangover cure the following I went to an amazing waterfall called Tat Kuang Si some 32km from Luang Prabang - beautiful spot where you can swim in turquoise coloured pools and relax and watch dozens of butterflies.
After Luang Prabang I got the bus down to a place called Vang Vieng - the place to come in Laos for your real adventure stuff. My first night there I was drawn like a moth to the flame to a bar called Jai Dees with the wonkiest pool table I've ever played on! I managed to win a big game of killer and walked out with a nice tee-shirt! Nice pizza there too!
A weird thing about
Vang Vieng is everywhere is showing either reruns of Friends or The Simpsons. Nearly all the restaurants and guesthouses along the main strip have low tables with lots of cushions and backpackers slouched out comatose watching the tv. It's got so bad here I walked past a bar with a big sign up saying "WE DO NOT SHOW FRIENDS IN THIS BAR". I reckon it's a selling point!
I went on a day trip with a nice bunch of people including Villy and Beatrice from Germany, Jean-Claude and Giselle from France, and a really funny girl from Taiwan whose name I won't attempt to spell! The trip included seeing some mad underground caves that go on for miles under the lime stone cliffs that line the Nam Song river. We went in quite deep in one of them, and the guide mentioned that last year two americans went in to explore on their own, went ridiculously too far (like miles), got lost, torches ran out of batteries, and were found dead by rescuers a few days later. That certainly put people off venturing too far on their own! The caves were impressive though with huge stalagnites and stalagtites (hope
Little boy looking forlorn on the banks of the Mekong
"Is ANYONE goona give me a dollar for a photograph?!" I've spelt those right - probably not!). One we had to swim into holding a rope which was quite cool. In the afternoon we did some "tubing'' down the river. Tubing is the thing to do in Vang Vieng, and is the sole reason a lot of people come here. You basically climb into a huge inflatable inner tube and float down the river. There are loads of makeshift bars lining the river for most of the route, and the bar staff are on hand with a long bamboo pole to pull you in if you fancy a cheeky Beer Lao or two. Some bars also have some really cool trapeze like swings over the river too! I went on one that was 30 feet high which was great fun - did a bit of a belly flop when I let go and landed in the river though!
So I'm finally in Vietiane, the capital of Laos, ahead of a flight on Laos Air to Bangkok on Sunday morning. I was right to think you don't need more than half a day in Vietiane - I arrived around 1.00pm, unloaded the rucksack and went straight out to hire a
bike. Unfortunately the only ones they had available women's bikes with a nice basket at the front! Oh well - somewhere to put my Lonely Planet and my bottle of water I guess! I cycled up one of the main streets to Patuxai, Laos' answer to the Arc de Triomphe - a sort of concrete arch you can climb to the top of for views of the capital. Very low-rise here though - the tallest building is the Laos Plaza hotel, which is probably as tall as Nelsons Column at a push! The beautiful golden Pha That Luang was a short cycle away. It's the most important national monument in Laos. I bumped into a nice Buddhist monk (seem to be doing a lot of that recently) who gave me the lowdown on it's history. We swapped email addresses - he was very much into British football - Chelsea fan unfortunately. Favourite player is 'John Telly' apparently!
Just a quick background to Laos - not many people know much about it (well my mum didn't anyway!). One of the poorest countries in the world, it's heavily reliant on foreign donations. The country has had a lot of upheaval since
The Luang Prabang monks seem impressed with my mobile phone
"...and here's a text telling me that the mighty hammers have beaten the gooners" the French buggered off in 1953, with right wing parties backed by the US and communist parties backed by the Russians fighting for power in what was deemed a pivotal position for SE Asian "dominance" during the cold war. It suffered terribly at the hands of the Americans during the Vietnam War. From 1965 to 1973, the US devasted eastern and northeastern Laos with non-stop carpet bombing to counter the presence of North Vietnamese in the country. They flew over 580,000 missions over Laos, dropping two million tons of bombs, costing US$2.2 million a day. Around 30% of these bombs failed to detonate, leaving the country with a large unexploded ordanance (UXO) problem. Even with UN-led bodies trying to clear this UXO, it will take 100 hundred years to make the country safe. Once the Vietnam war ended, the US withdrew from Laos in 1973 and within two years the communists had taken over and the Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR) was born. Since then Laos has slowly changed to play catch up with neighbouring countries - private enterprise and foreign investment is now being encouraged, and of course tourism- but in terms of alleged human rights abuses and suppression
of political opponents (political dissent is still a criminal offence) it still has a long way to go.
Well, I've just finished a nice red chicken curry and sticky rice washed down with a Beer Lao watching the sunset over the Mekong river - very nice! Next stop Bangkok tomorrow - hope I survive my Air Laos flight tomorrow morning - not the best safety record in the world apparently! :o
My flight arrives at 1.50pm - that gives me two hours leeway as Terry and Jill are arriving at 3.50pm from London! I can see two weeks of sordid behaviour with them in Bangkok and on Koh Tau and the other islands...will fill everyone in on that next time!
Bye for now!
Doogs x
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Sawatdee khrap.....
Thanks mate for the nicely written piece on Laos........which I plan to visit sometime early next year......Just one request though if you don't mind.......How much did the 2day slow boat ride cost you.......and any reccomendation for overnight stay at Chiang Sean......and Luang Prabang....