Days 114 – 115: Luang Prabang

Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2058088&l=0e93c&id=1101094

For the second morning in a row I awoke to the crows of roosters outside my window, but luckily these roosters were in the right time zone and the crowing started at 6am instead of midnight.

I walked into town, and the food stalls from the night before were now filled with mountains of baguettes. It seems that due to the French colonial presence in Laos, bread managed to enter the local cuisine, and now everyone seems quite proud of their (mediocre) sandwiches. The baguettes, though, are quite good, and I ate one with strawberry jam for breakfast.

I spent the morning in the Royal Palace Museum brushing up on my Lao history. For those of you who aren’t Indochina experts, I’ll summarize: present-day Laos was never a true nation until Western intervention. Before the 18^th Century, a series of principalities ruled various regions of Lao, some more successfully than others, and then France, Siam (Thailand), and China drew a line around the territory, added a silent “s” to its name, and proclaimed the new territory Laos. France ruled Laos until 1953, during which time it did almost nothing to develop its new colony; it seems France had little hope for the territory and was far more concerned with neighboring Vietnam.

France granted Laos independence in 1953, and for the next twenty years a chaotic battle for control of the country raged between the communist forces, backed by the USSR and China, and the right wing parties, backed by the US. In 1973 the country was divided in half between the communists and the rightists, but by 1975 the communists had wrested control of the whole country and the Lao People’s Democratic Republic was born.

Since 1975 the Lao government has backed off from hard-line socialist economic policies, and private expenditure and foreign investment are now allowed. But the political scene is little changed—one-party rule still prevails, and political dissent is not tolerated.

Buddhism is the religion of choice for the majority of Lao people, but following the ascension of the communists in 1975 all religion was banned. But the party relented in 1992, and Buddhism has flourished since.

I ate lunch at a restaurant in town; I ordered a Lao noodle dish and sticky rice, and everything was good, but I’m still spoiled from Thai food.

I spent the afternoon wandering through the streets of colonial Luang Prabang; the town is nearly picture perfect. The one drawback is that, as I realized when it took me an hour to find a guesthouse vacancy, the place is packed with Westerners. The streets are now lined with adventure tour companies, trendy coffee shops, and expensive souvenir shops. I’d love to know what the place looked like before the influx of tourists.

I checked out a handful of wat (Buddhist Temples) over the course of the afternoon; they looked almost identical to Thai wat, except that Thai stupas have round bases, while Lao stupa bases are square. At this point I think it will take a lot for a temple to impress me—I’ve just seen so many of them.

It started raining in the late afternoon, so I headed back to my guesthouse. That night I ate dinner at the food stalls, which were fewer in number due to the rain. But the chicken-on-a-stick guy was still there.

The following morning I got up early and climbed Phu Si, the hill in the center of town that houses three different temples. The top of the hill is supposed to be the place to watch sunrises and sunsets, but with the cloud cover there was no sunrise. Still, the views of the Mekong and the Nam Khan (a smaller river that empties into the Mekong at Luang Prabang) were worth the climb.

I climbed back down from Phu Si and took the long way back to town, following the Nam Khan to where it met the Mekong. I climbed down the hill to the riverbank, hoping to cross to the other side of the Nam Khan via a bamboo bridge that I spotted from the road above. But when I got to the bridge, monks were selling tickets to cross it for 50,000 kip. Five dollars to cross a stupid bridge? Clearly, there are too many rich tourists in this town.

I had plans to visit a waterfall outside of town, but the cold drizzly weather made swimming in a waterfall a less-than-exciting prospect. Figuring that I’d spent long enough in Luang Prabang, I decided to catch a bus to Vientiane that evening instead of the following morning. How much farther would I have to go before I got off the tourist track? Cambodia?

Days 111 – 113: Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang

Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2058082&l=05451&id=1101094

The following morning I left Chiang Mai on a three day journey that would take me to Luang Prabang, in the heart of northern Laos. I’d spend the first day on a minibus bound for the Thai-Lao border and the following two days on a slow boat down the Mekong. I’d heard good and bad reviews of the slow boat ride, but I figured I couldn’t pass up at least one ride down the Mekong.

The first day on the minibus was unremarkable; nearly everyone on the bus was from either France or Holland, so the language of choice was French, and my activity of choice became plugging my ears with my iPod. There was one old British couple sitting behind me, but their conversation was far more painful to listen to than the French.

We arrived at Chiang Khong, situated right on the Mekong, just before dark and checked into the guesthouse that had been reserved for the whole minibus. That night I ate my final Thai dinner and watched Roger Federer lose in the Australian Open semifinals. Views of Laos over the Mekong were quite nice at sundown.

The following morning we all crossed the Mekong into Laos and went through a surprisingly streamlined process to obtain our visas. The visas cost $35, but we had to pay an extra dollar for “overtime” because it was Saturday.

We set off on the slow boat around 11, and immediately I realized that I had to adjust my expectations for the boat ride. I was hoping for a boat packed with locals, bikes, motorcycles, and farm animals; instead I was on a boat packed with Western tourists. We picked up a few locals along the way, but they stayed “out of the way,” at the front of the boat. I imagine they felt even more out of place than I did.

Some of the Westerners on the boat were the long-term backpacking variety, and I got along with them ok. But a surprisingly large minority, if not plurality, were middle-aged Europeans lugging hard suitcases. I hadn’t seen a hard suitcase since Ko Phi Phi, and I wasn’t thrilled to be reintroduced. Apparently I had left the backpacker tourist trail in Thailand and fallen onto the middle-aged hard suitcase tourist trail in Laos. Oops.

And one more thing about my fellow passengers: 95% of them chain-smoked all the way down the river. By the end of the day, I had secondhand smoked at least a few packs. I think my brand of choice is Marlboro Lights.

But aside from the clientèle, the boat ride was quite pleasant. The morning cloud cover left me digging up the fleece jacket from the bottom of my pack, but the clouds broke in mid-afternoon and the rest of the ride was warm and filled with many a breathtaking vista of green mountains, palm trees, and the mighty Mekong.

We arrived at Pak Beng, the approximate halfway point between Chiang Khong and Luang Prabang, just before sunset. A simple river outpost, the whole of Pak Beng now seems dedicated to housing Western travelers. Something like 90% of the buildings in town were either guesthouses or restaurants catering to Westerners. The upside was that I had no trouble finding a cheap bed for the night.

I ate dinner with a couple of Canadians I had met aboard the boat. They lived in Vancouver and were traveling for six months through Southeast Asia, so we had fun exchanging itineraries and travel stories. I ordered the chicken curry for dinner and was surprised when it was hardly spicy. I’d heard that Lao food was quite a bit more bland than Thai food, and so far that certainly seems to be the case.

That night, back at my guesthouse, I took my first hot shower since southern Thailand. It was glorious. I went to bed early, which was fortunate because by midnight roosters began crowing outside my window and I hardly slept for the rest of the night. I yelled “Shut up!” out my window quite a few times, but the confused roosters kept at it.

The following morning we climbed back aboard the boat and set off for our second day floating down the Mekong. The weather was considerably better, and I rode most of the way without my fleece. Between chapters of On the Road I talked with a German guy who was traveling through the region for a month. He told me a hilarious story about meeting a Thai girl in Chiang Mai who turned out to live in a huge house in a gated community; he ended up spending just short of a week staying at her house, swimming in her pool, and getting a VIP tour of Chiang Mai and environs. I immediately resolved to talk to more local girls.

We arrived in Luang Prabang just as the sun was setting, and I hurried to find a guesthouse before dark, but everywhere I went there were no rooms available. This annoyed me less because I had to keep walking from door to door, and more because I realized that the city must be packed with tourists. I finally found a vacant room—although it looked more like a prison cell, with cement walls, no windows, and a mattress on the floor. And at 70,000 kip (~$7), it was a bargain—Luang Prabang accommodation is not cheap.

I dropped my pack in my prison cell and went out in search of food. I passed a row of restaurants and cafés thronged with Westerners and headed for the night market, where food stalls serving meat-on-a-stick and other mystery foods lined the sidewalks. I paid 10,000 kip (~$1) for a huge chicken breast on a stick and 5,000 kip for half a pineapple and wandered around the colonial streets devouring the food. On the way back to the guesthouse I picked up a donut for 3,000 kip. How I love street food.

Days 109 – 110: Chiang Mai

My business in Chiang Mai was simple: book a minibus/slow boat ticket to Luang Prabang, in Laos; stop by Chiang Mai Rock Climbing Adventures, congratulate Josh Morris on his engagement, and ask for suggestions on where to go in Cambodia; get laundry done; and get a (much-needed) haircut.

Everything went according to plan except the haircut (I got butchered! And I got a haircut at the same place last time I was in town and it had turned out so well!) and the trip to Luang Prabang—everything was full for the following day, so I would have to wait until Friday to leave. Fortunately, Chiang Mai is a pleasant enough place to kill time.

Josh had plenty of advice on where to go in Cambodia, although I’m thinking that I might have a hard time getting around in small towns given that I don’t speak any Khmer. But that’s usually just when it starts to get fun.

Next stop, Luang Prabang, followed by more Laos and then Cambodia. Things should get more interesting from here.

Days 105 – 108: Bangkok

Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2057801&l=20629&id=1101094

I arrived in Bangkok freezing and sleep-deprived and took a taxi to Rambuttri Village Inn—the place with the pool that I had stayed in when I was here last year. Sure, Kendyl had been eaten alive by bedbugs at this place, but for a rooftop pool bug bites were a risk I was willing to take.

My few days in Bangkok were really quite uneventful—I spent my days reading by the pool, my evenings sampling the Thai cuisine which I seemingly never grow tired of, and my nights wandering Khao San Road, which is a tourist attraction in itself. I would attempt to describe Khao San Road to you in a long paragraph of colorful language, but instead I’ll just quote what I overheard one British guy say to another that sums it all up quite nicely: “Man, if we can’t take down any of these bitches, we’re getting whores!”

You’re probably asking why I spent any time in Bangkok at all—after all, I was there a few different times last year, and if I was looking to get off the tourist track, Bangkok certainly wasn’t the place to do it. But the fact is that with tourists come tourist services, such as travel agencies that can procure visas. I needed a visa to visit Vietnam, and Bangkok was by far the easiest place to get it.

I did play tourist for one day while I was in Bangkok and took a riverboat to visit the two most famous temples in the city. Wat Phra Kaew (Temple of the Emerald Buddha) and Wat Pho (site of a giant Reclining Buddha) were beautiful, but, as the saying goes, once you’ve seen one Buddhist temple you’ve seen them all. Plus, both temples were crawling with tourists, which didn’t help anything. Perhaps the highlight of the day was watching Thai monks take pictures in front of one of the temples. Huh? I snapped a few photos of my own and moved on.

Tuesday evening after I got my passport back (with my Vietnam visa in it) I headed for the bus station, where I’d catch the same overnight bus to Chiang Mai that I had three months before. I put all my warm clothes on and covered myself with blankets, and, as expected, it still wasn’t enough. I arrived in Chiang Mai a block of ice.

Day 104: Ko Phi Phi to Bangkok

I awoke the following morning to rain—the second time that foul weather had moved in on the morning I planned to leave an island. What timing I have.

The ferry ride to Phuket was uneventful with the exception of the loud, obnoxious British college students who were sitting a few rows in front of me. Oh, how I couldn’t wait to get to northern Thailand and never see a package tourist again.

I reached Phuket, looked at my map, and realized that the bus station was 3km from the pier, and that I wasn’t even sure how to get there. But I’d had it with having my hand held by English speakers—I was going to walk it. I asked for directions five times over the course of those three kilometers, and each time I was pleased to find that the person I asked spoke no English. I pulled out my glossary, spoke a little Thai, and patted myself on the back as the minibuses of tourists sped by me. It’s kind of sad that I had to manufacture a reason to speak some Thai, but the truth is that it’s impossible to force yourself to stumble through a foreign language when the other people speaks your native language perfectly well.

In Phuket town, I bought a bus ticket to Bangkok and then set out to find some food. Though the island of Phuket is probably the most touristy place in all of Thailand, the tourists tend to stay at the beach, and the inland Phuket town is really quite genuine. I ate a fine curry at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant just south of the bus station and then headed back to find my bus.

The ride from Phuket to Bangkok was 15 hours of pure pain—not because the road was bad (it wasn’t), and not because the bus was crap (it was actually quite nice), but because the air conditioning was cranked up so high that, no matter how many blankets I threw over me, I couldn’t sleep. I really think the temperature must have been 60 degrees Fahrenheit on that bus. Why do they do this? It must be insanely expensive to blow that much cold air, and everyone on the bus is covered in blankets and freezing, so why not just turn off the air for a few hours, make everyone a lot more comfortable, and save a few bucks? I’ll never understand why they keep those buses so cold.

Days 102 – 103: Ko Phi Phi

Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2057800&l=eb73c&id=1101094

My ferry from Krabi to Ko Phi Phi was packed with so many Westerners that, for a second, I forgot I was in Thailand. Then I heard stories of parting on Khao San Road in Bangkok and I remembered.

I got off the ferry and headed straight for Hat Yao, or Long Beach, which was supposedly the least touristy section of the island. Well, by less touristy, what I really mean is cheaper. There isn’t anywhere on Ko Phi Phi that isn’t touristy—the island is one big resort. So why did I come here? Well, after all, the place is popular for a reason—it’s totally gorgeous.

I managed to find a bungalow for 500B, which isn’t cheap, but which got a lot cheaper when the lady at reception told me that I would receive two 100B meal vouchers each day that I could use at the restaurant. Two hundred baht of free food per day? Why would they do that?

I spent the afternoon on the beach, along with the rest of the Western world. I did manage to find a little solitude by venturing off the beach to do some snorkeling—most people were swimming and snorkeling in small, roped off areas near the beach. I’m sorry, but there’s no way that you’re going to find good snorkeling in an area that’s roped off for swimming. Fish aren’t that stupid.

Once I got away from the crowds, I began to really like the place. The water was crystal clear—perhaps the clearest I’d ever seen—and the snorkeling was quite good, even close to the beach. And once I reached some rocks that were a couple hundred meters off the coast, it got even better—I saw far more fish than at Ko Adang, and the coral was in much better shape, too.

The following morning I hired a boat to take me to Ko Phi Phi Leh, and island off the coast of Ko Phi Phi that was the filming location for the movie The Beach. Unfortunately the weather was cloudy and cool, so by the time I got to the island I wasn’t much in the mood for lying on the beach, but I did do some decent snorkeling in the lagoon as well as around the sides of the island.

“The Beach” itself was a little disappointing, not least because it was packed with speedboats and tourists. It wasn’t quite as picturesque or as wide as in the movie, and the lagoon wasn’t quite as wide or as protected. Still, there’s no denying that the place is beautiful, and it certainly helps that the island remains uninhabited. At first I thought it was just a government-established national park, but it turns out that swiftlets are harvested on the island for medicinal purposes, and that business is far more profitable than tourism. So in the end, it is about the money.

I spent the afternoon back on the beach on Ko Phi Phi talking to a couple of Norwegian girls who were on a two week vacation from school. No one I met on Ko Phi Phi turned out to be particularly interesting, although the Norwegians probably came the closest. But, really, what am I complaining about? People come to Ko Phi Phi to lie on the beach, not to talk politics. I was the odd-ball here, not the other way around.

That night I finished up The God of Small Things and started The Kite Runner. I guess the one benefit to having no one to talk to is that you can get plenty of reading done.

By the end of my second day on Ko Phi Phi, I had established two facts: the place was totally beautiful, and I had to leave as soon as possible. I bought a ticket for the ferry to Phuket that left the following day.

Day 101: Ko Adang to Krabi

After yet another long night of sleep, I caught the ferry back to the mainland and bought a minibus ticket to Krabi, the jumping off point for the island of Ko Phi Phi. According to the lady who sold me the ticket, the minibus left in half and hour, but as anyone who’s traveled through a developing country knows, departure times are meaningless for minibuses. They leave when they’re full.

Unfortunately for me, this one didn’t fill up until the second ferry arrived at the mainland, two hours later. And to make matters worse, half way to Krabi the minibus driver pulled into a bus station and said, “OK, minibus finished, you take big bus from here.” But the whole reason I had bought a direct ticket to Krabi was so that I could go directly to Krabi. If I’d wanted to change halfway, I could have taken a minibus that left sooner. Grrr.

I didn’t reach Krabi until nearly 5pm, and by that time the ferry to Ko Phi Phi had stopped running for the day. So I dropped my pack in a cheap guest house and headed into town to find an ATM, eat dinner, and get a shave. The first two items on my list went fine, but the shave was a half hour from hell. The lady couldn’t have done more than two other shaves in her entire life—her hand was shaking the whole time, she kept cutting me, and when she was done she had missed about seven spots on my face and neck. Once again I vowed never to let my beard grow so long that I couldn’t shave it myself. And once again I knew I’d never keep my vow.

I bought a ferry ticket to Ko Phi Phi for the next morning, and after a few chapters of The God of Small Things I hit the sack.