exhausted

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Here it goes... the abridged version of the last 72 hours:

Last time I wrote we had arrived at our hostel in Chiang Mai and were excited for our big boat trip to Laos. As Adam kindly reminded me at dinner tonight, a week from now, we will look back on this experience entirely differently. Having said that, I thought I would post my raw "evening after feelings" here on the blog. A two day boat trip to Laos is code for two days in hell. Don't get me wrong, there were some definite positives to the whole experience: met a lovely Irish girl and an English couple who we stuck out the trip with, got ahead on my new book, saw some of the most amazing scenery I have ever seen, and developed some serious character. The rest was pretty much hell as I will describe below.

We took a minibus to a small town just outside the Laos border in Thailand where we would get the boat the next morning. We booked the entire ordeal through Roger, Adam's acquaintance/friend, at the Parami in Chang Mai. Roger has obviously never done the trip because he described our accommodations on the first night as "nice". I am being over generous when I say that we slept in a wood shed. It was incredibly hot, but we thankfully had a bug net and a fan, so we managed. All the showers and toilets were communal, so I felt like I was back at summer camp (except that I was there with a bunch of drunken Irish boys instead of polite girl guides). After what I thought was a horrible night sleep (wait for night 2), we made our way to the Laos border. We got through customs just fine and we now have a have a sticker the size of an entire passport page as our Laos Visa.

When we got to the boat, there were almost no seats left. I made my way to back and found some seats. The seats consisted of a couple of 2 X 4s nailed together, obviously not very comfortable. The real hell didn't begin until the engine at the back of the boat got started. The engine was so load that Adam and I couldn't hear each other talk. We wore earplugs for the 8 hour trip. We rotated between standing, sitting on the seat, and laying on the floor so that we could relieve different parts of our bodies that had fallen asleep. As beads of sweat rolled off our faces, I tried not to look at the time to see if that would make it go by faster. It didn't.

We eventually made it to Pak Beng, which is a remote town in Laos that is considered half way to Luang Prabang. This town doesn't have electricity and runs on generators. All the generators in the town get turned off at 10 pm (ie. be in bed at 10 pm because there is not running water, lights, fans, etc.) We made our way to our modest accommodations. There may have been 3 guest houses in the entire town, and they were all pretty much the same. Adam and I had a small room with an wood slat floor right behind one of the town generators. We thought our ears were still ringing from the boat, but it turned out it was the noise from the generator. Thankfully it got turned off at 10 pm.

After dinner we decided to get into bed because we had had a long day and the following day was going to be even longer. A couple of minutes after we turned off the light Adam jumped out of bed and said something had crawled across his back. We searched the bed with his flashlight (because there is no electricity). We didn't see anything, so we thought maybe he had dreamed it or it was the side effects of the malaria pills and went back to bed. An hour or so later, Adam jumped and I felt whatever it was he had described crawl across my back. We turned on the flashlight to do a second search. At this point, in desperation for sleep, we cocooned ourselves in our sleeping bags and tried to close our eyes. We were both ridiculously hot and uncomfortable. At 2:30 am finally a cockroach on the inside of our mosquito net that was draped over the bed. We both screamed and then Adam killed it. Neither of us slept another wink for the rest of the night. I initially tried to convince myself that it was not a cockroach, however after typing "cockroach" into wikipedia and being presented with an identical picture of what I saw last night, I now have confirmation that we slept with a roach. I am trying not to scream in the internet cafe as I type this right now. I know one day I'll get over it, until then all the hair on my arm will rise when I think about it.

Today the second part of the boat ride was much better. It rained in the morning so the weather was much cooler. We also got to the boat an hour early and got seats near the front of the boat. Overall, the ride was much more enjoyable. We checked into our hostel here in Luang Prabang. It is clean, has a functional fan, and a private bathroom. Luang Prabang is a beautiful little town with lots of character. We are supposed to spend 2 nights here, but we will see how things go, we may extend it. Tomorrow we are going to go and see some waterfalls just outside the town. I'm excited for that.

Well we are going to head back to our hostel and catch up on some much needed sleep. Thankfully Laos is so beautiful and after only a few hours here in Luang Prabang I have already had many good experiences to trump last night's creepy crawler.

Lots of love,

Poke/Nicole
xo

ps. Have decided that the pedicure that I wasn't sure was in the budget is now officially within the budget.

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