The best laid plans of mice and men (and of course seppy)

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Its funny that no matter how much you plan and organise your time, that mother nature can whip you plans into something unrecognisable. At this point I thought we would be just about to start trekking up in northern Laos but actually we are now in Hanoi. We set off on Saturday for the airport to go to Udomxai which is a smallish city in the north of the country but the flight was cancelled due to (we think) the fact that we were the only people booked on it. You can imagine us - sitting in the airport trying to figure out how we would get up there (next flight was Tuesday and all other flights to cities up North were fully booked) , but thanks to my extreme personality transplant instead of freaking out and getting all upset , I shrugged my shoulders (which is a tough think to do when you are carrying a 20kg back pack) and decided it would all work out and it did.

I always believe that there are people who things always work out for in life - who always find a way to make lemonade (and some lemons. sugar etc), maybe I am finally becoming one of those people 😉

But back to the saga - we headed back into town and ended up getting a refund on our tickets (I think we made about $8 on exchange rates.... which made Jonathan happy). Then we went back to the greendiscovery office who had organised our trek and thank god that the plane was cancelled because the place we were due to stay in before the trek had been severely flooded due to a river breaking its banks and access to the NPA (National Protected Area) had been completely cut off due to the rains.

So we have a clean slate - we decided to go to Hanoi ( because we could get a flight there!) and we will figure out where we are going from there.

With respect to laos - its an interesting place, there is not a lot to do in Vientiane (which is a really chilled town) so it was some shopping, eating and drinking.

One really nice thing we did was visit a childrens book program called big brother mouse which translates childrens books from English to lao - its run by an american publisher and some student volunteers. The main reason I got hooked was that they explained that in Laos not every child has ever owned (or some never read) a book, the only access to books which a child may have is text books (fun, fun, fun) . They have different programs which you can donate towards - the one we chose was to host a village book party and establish a mini library (to put it into real terms - $10 can buy seven books - so a mini library can contain over 150 books. We will be mailed pictures of it once it is established. I looked at the books which have already been translated and they included title like "The wizard of oz" and tales of sherlock holmes, there was also a picture book for small children with cartoons explaining why it is important to brush your teeth. It was really nice to learn about the program and also a bit startling to realise that something which I take so much for granted in my life, the access to and money to buy books, is something which is still not a reality for some children.

Interestingly when we were on our way from the beach in Cambodia Jonathan met a Chinese man and his teenage son, it was the sons first trip out of China - Jonathan asked what he thought of Cambodia and the boy stated that he thought that Cambodian people were lazy - slightly taken aback at that comment Jonathan asked why he thought that whereby the boy explained that in China they harvest the rice crop three times a year whereas in Cambodia they only harvest once. It is interesting to hear different peoples perceptions of the same place.


But Laos definitely comes across as a country looking to the future, especially when you look at it with Cambodia as a comparison. From very fundamental things like the fact that in Phnom Penh there is literally rubbish all over the place, they don't seem (to my uninformed eye) to have instigated an organised method for rubbish collection and removal whereas Vientiane is a different story - street cleaners every morning and although I am unsure as to where the rubbish goes it is definitely removed from the city. Also from an infrastructure perspective the newspaper was full of the different projects which they were trying to either get funding for (new roads) or were in building phase (the new Dam due to be completed in 2009/10). Whilst it is evident that they have a lot of obstacles ahead, it was definitely good to come away from Vientiane positive feelings that they are going in the right direction for the future.

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