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Published: February 15th 2007
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Well once again it has been a while since we posted... thinking about what we did a week ago feels like it was actually about a month ago! We left off when we were in Chiang Mai having finished trekking. We had another day in Chiang Mai, where we mostly wandered around finding more Wats, but here we also took a boat trip along the river Ping. We then caught the bus to Chaing Rai where we ended up in a really attractive teak guesthouse, but it was a bit out of town - slight mission. When the owner here realised we were English, we were soon renamed 'mary' and 'jane'! We only had one full day here - we discovered Chiang Rai and its Wats and ate far too many banana pancakes. We also discovered, on a little hill with views over the city, what the guidebook comments is a "phallic stonehenge". We agree, it was very odd, and all the statues were wrapped in bows! I think there are some things we will never fully understand...
From Chaing Rai we went to Chaing Khong, which is where everyone goes to cross the border into Laos... except before we
did this we wanted to go north to the golden traingle, the meeting of thailand, burma and laos and also where a lot of opium used to be grown or transported or something... we only discovered once we were in chaing khong that this was more difficult than we thought... basically we'd gone to the wrong place. sigh. a bit of a mission later and we were where we wanted to be! It became our mission to get there just prove that we could, and it's true that actually it was quite interesting to see 3 countries at once, so in the end, a successful jaunt!
We crossed the border into Laos on the 9th, friday, in a little boat which we thought was fairly exciting but in fact literally took us accross the mekong delta and into laos, where the entry point was fairly entertaining and chilled out, which seems to be a good indicator of laos in general. mainly just a couple of young blokes trying to obtain pictures of foreign girls for their walls! this is also where we meant an american dude called Joe who had just had a facelift in thailand (!) and also 2 english girls, lizzie and susie, who were about to do the same 2 day slow boat, (and they do mean slow boat) to luand prabang. we signed up to share a room with the other girls before we even knew their names -fairly random really! had a night of entertainment courtesy of Joe and his guitar and his home grown songs - he was a bit of a dude! at this point the restaurant entertainment began, a man on an electro sounding keyboard, which was fairly painful!
We caught the slooooooow boat the next day, and it was eventful before we even left. They stuff these boats to capacity but ours was getting fairly ridiculous, and so a hippyesque german man with a beard like god's/rapunzel's hair said, "No No No! I make the leader now!" and encouraged us all to throw the plastic chairs off the boat. It all got a bit raucous but it was funny! And they did charter another boat because of it, so the peasants were victorious! The scenery was beautiful, the journey was long... we had a stopover in a place called Pak beng, where the rooms conjured up memories of trying to camp in our garden sheds aged 7. the woman running it called herself mama, though we're not sure that our own mothers would charge us for bed and breakfast.
The next day on the boat was much the same, although more crowded for some reason, so that at the end we just wanted to be there! at least a boat is fairly relaxing as regards travel for a long period of time! We arrived at our destination, luang prabang, at about 6pm on this day (18 hours of sitting on a crappy wooden bench altogether, not that we are pissed off at all). We began the search for accomodation... it was hard work because actually everywhere was full! We must have had about 10 rejections before we were given permission to sleep in the lobby of a hotel! It ended up being an outside corridor in a teak house again, but relatively fancy way of camping! we smothered ourselves in mosquito repellant and bedded down for the night, although actually the clean sheets they put on the mattresses and duvets are some of the best we've had anywhere! we stayed here the night after as a sort of repayment, but only one night, as an expensive place -15 US dollars for a twin room, which is quite a lot compared to what we have been paying! although it was totally worth it is it had a television. the fact that all channels were in lao is irrelevant and we thoroughly enjoyed Jackie Chan (probably more so than in english as he is actually rather rubbish).
Yesterday, we watched the sunset from a high point in the town, called Mount Phousi - many many steps up there! Although for once we got somewhere early, so that by the time it got to the actual sunset we were getting a bit impatient! We decided that we're not very good at this travelling malarkey sometimes! sunsets are sunsets whether they be over the mekong, the thames or fleet pond. Everyone else seemed fairly impressed though, so we reckon it must have been a good one... (we were more impressed by a face sized butterfly on a log)
Today, one of the English girls, Susie, wanted to cycle the 20 miles to the 'local' waterfall. we wanted to go there anyway and we had soon agreed ( Laura more reluctantly than Heloise) to join her on the bike ride... it was fairly eventful! Our best intentions to leave early were scuppered by sleeping in and so we ended up leaving at 11am. so that'll be the hottest time of the day then. Clever. I guess you could say it was a tad more hilly than we might have thought - it's all very well throwing yourself into stuff like this but then reality hits and you wonder if hell is actually perpetual cycling on a crappy bike with the sun beating down on you for ever and ever. We had one awful bike in particular, which, frankly, appeared to be a child's bike, and in addition, the pedals clunked, the seat was painful, the suspension awful, oh, and then the brakes stopped working. Laura began with this bike, but after an hour, Heloise made the sacrifice of a bike swap for the next two hours. Along the way, there were loads of kids who loved giving us high fives and shouting out hello, (sabaa dii)! Very cute. A lot of the kids round here look blank if you smile at them, maybe it's the difference that they notice rather than the smiling! At one point along the journey, (when we thought we were near the end, but then we did think this, or hope this at least, for most of the day...) we stopped by a roadside stall for a sprite, or in Heloise's case, bubblegum flavoured fanta. It may have been the best drink in the world ever.
After that, it was all downhill (although not literally unfortunately). Bubblegum flavoured fizzyness mixed with much exercise leads to sickness, more sweating and generally bad stuff. but we finally got there, and while susie raced on to get back to Luang Prabang in daylight, we lazed around in an absolutely freezing waterfall...it was lush! (it also had a clay bed which we figured is good for the skin... im sure you can picture what we did! we smothereed ourselves in skanky clay of goodness leading to many odd looks but we're used to them (we're getting a bit of a complex - people here stare at us all the time.. )
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steph
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HAHA you two are so funny!! so, did you cycle back? you know, that bike sounds like it has much the same problems as mine... people here in oxford stare and laugh at me too! lolo, what possessed you to buy a bubblegum flavoured drink? surely it was obvious it wouldn't be nice!! CAN'T WAIT to join you! (life here not amazing..! unsurprisingly) xx