North Thailand and Laos

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84 days and 4 countries in I have finally got round to doing this! I don't really know how to blog properly so I'm just going to pretty much mention where we've been and what we have been up to and all the little things we have found funny along the way.... Oh and Im writing this on my phone/iPad so please excuse the bad grammar!



After signing Joe's will at Gatwick our trip began with a 16 journey to Bangkok via Dubai. Due to some great initiative upon boarding both flights we managed to secure ourselves some emergency exits seats, a good omen for the rest of the trip! We met some great people in and around the Koh San road area and had some great nights out but we didn't get up to much in the day, mostly because of the heat which was suffocating. A few locals told us April is one of the worst times to visit Bangkok as the humidity and heat are so high. We sampled some of the local delicacies in the form of a scorpion on night 1 which just tasted like a really burnt chicken wing! We also met a Dutch girl called Marleen and took great pleasure in shouting her name at her in boycie from only fools and horses voice for most of the evening, she didn't have a clue what was going on but found us amusing anyway.



We went to Patpong for a Ping pong show which I can honestly say was one of the weirdest and least enjoyable experiences of my life, we had been pre warned to go with a group of girls but as we didn't spot any in the immediate area we just went for it. I expected it to be quite light hearted and just good fun but it was just horrible, as soon as we got in we were being hassled for more money and I've have never seen a more unhappy group of girls in all my life. We were also shocked at the clientele, We obviously expected to see plenty of weird old blokes but there was a lot of younger looking men who genuinely seemed to be rather aroused by what was on show. For the record I have never seen anything less arousing in my entire life than a couple of Ping pong balls and a few long bits of string being pulled out of an extremely miserable looking Thai woman's vagina!





Our 3rd day in Bangkok was our last day there and nearly our last day anywhere else, on our way to the floating markets on the outskirts of the city our minibus had to massively swerve to avoid a business front of us that had flipped over, we missed it by no more than a couple of foot! After a brief stop our driver got out and just screamed loads at the overturned bus and then hopped back in and carried on driving! The markets themselves were ok but not much more was on offer than we had seen in Patpong market the night before.





Our next stop was Chang mai, via a 12 hour bus journey which only cost just under £9! However the Bus did drop us in the middle of nowhere two hours early, luckily a tuk tuk drove past and took us to our hostel. We were greeted by a dead rigomortis rat lying on a can just outside the front door which was a delightful welcome! As we didn't let them know we were arriving the hostel was also shut but thankfully someone was just getting in and let us in and we slept in the lobby.





We visited an Elephant nature park where we fed and cleaned a few elephants which was a great experience. Two great things we learnt about elephants..

1: they eat for up to 18 hours a day

2: they have best mates

The park we visited was a reserve for injured elephants and we also learnt a lot about how badly elephants are treated in general in Thailand and it made us glad we choose to visit this park instead of one of the cheaper ones where the elephants are treated poorly. We also took a Thai Cooking course for a day where nick nearly blinded himself and our teacher mashing up chillies!





Onto Pai which has been one of our favourite places so far. Its a proper chilled out Thai hippy village, we rented mopeds and explored the Thai countryside which is stunning. We also went on a 3 day trek through the jungle, foolishly going out drinking the night before until 5am when we had to be up for 8! A hangover is really not what you want when climbing up steep cliffs with a big rucksack on in 38 degree heat! We somehow survived the first few hours though and all felt better by lunchtime, probably sweated it all out. The trek was a great experience though and our guide char was a hero. We stayed at his house with his family one night in a smal village and in a jungle hut in the middle of nowhere the next night. We made all of our cutlery from bamboo and pretty much lived off the land for the whole 3 days. We also went hunting at night and watched chars brother shoot a squirrel with his homemade rifle! Char then skinned and boiled it up and we had it for dinner, it was rally boney and didn't really taste of anything though. Going for the protein I grabbed the largest chunk of what looked like meat, unfortunately it was the head, you could still see the bullet hole through the eye! So rank.





After the trek we treated ourselves to a massage where nick was centimetres away from fully exposing himself to the whole room as he misunderstood the instructions of the masseuse! The shrieks from the 3 girls were unforgettable. Apart from this we mostly just chilled out at the jazz bars and ate street food.





We then took the slow boat from Thailand to Laos down the Mekong river (was half expecting Augustus gloop to poke his head up at any point as it looked like willy wonkas chocolate river). During this journey (10 hours) we witnessed a giant Filipino guy consume an entire 24 can crate of beer to himself and not go to the toilet once. A remarkable achievement.





First stop was luang probang where we spent a few days wondering about and going late night bowling and swimming in waterfalls. We also had quite a sobering experience when we came across a guy who had been knocked off his bike and looked in a rather bad way, by the time we had got our tuk tuk to stop further down the road and ran back he was being lifted into the back of another tuk tuk which then sped off. Was really horrible.





We spent our first night in our hostel with Jin, who is our new favourite Japanese Bob Marley impersonator. During our entire stay at the hostel he didn't leave it, except to smoke a joint by the river and he spent the majority of the time singing and playing his banjo whilst guzzling Lao Lao whiskey. We spent a remarkable amount of time in his company considering he spoke next to zero English and our Japanese isn't up to much either. Next stop was vang vieng, which is basically just a backpacker stop of point where there isn't really much to do apart from get really drunk and go tubing (floating in a rubber ring down a river and stopping off at bars along the way). We met some very interesting characters here, the first being a young chap named axel who we coined doctor op's due to his passion for consuming opium. Whilst walking down the high street one day he asked us if we were looking for someone to have breakfast with.... We politely declined his very strange offer. We also found out that he had spent the previous night in the company of a ladyboy, when we questioned him on the authenticity of these claims his only response was 'it was the best sexual experience of my life'.





We did have one cultural experience here as an annual rocket festival took place on the river. This festival signals the start of the rainy season and involves the locals firing giant homemade rockets of giant bamboo structures on the river to anger the gods to make it rain. We then headed to Vientiane, which is possibly one of the most boring places on earth. The only thing worth mentioning is that we took a wrong turn on our way home from dinner one night and ended up being chased by a group of prosititutes!





Budgeting has already been blown out of the window so the plan of not doing any work along the way might have to be reviewed at some point!





Vietnam and Cambodia to come shorty...

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Photos

Jin
Our favourite Japanese Bob Marley impersonator

Darlings in Pai
Not our finest accomadation of the trip