Hello all! I am writing from a little backpacker town in Laos called Luang Prabang, and lots has happened since I left Chiang Mai. First I went north to a little hippie town called Pai, which was lush and gorgeous and set in a little green valley. I stayed in the absolute lap of luxury (for about $10 a night)-- a bungalow with 24 hour electricity, a fan, a flush toilet (!!!), soap for hand washing, and a towel. I barely knew what to do with myself. In Pai I did a lot of eating, some walking through the rice-paddy filled landscape, and an elephant trek. Looking back, I've got to recommend that anyone faced with the choice should absolutely choose the shortest option possible. It's my own fault for chooosing the 3-hour option, which was about 2 hours and 45 minutes too long. The elephants are beautiful creatures, but once you've spent about 10 minutes with its poor spine wedged into your pelvis (because you're riding bareback, of course, with nothing to hold onto), moving at a very slow and lumbering pace, the novelty just about wears off. But it was fun, at the end, to get into the river with them and have them spray water at me through their trunks and see the little baby one play around in the mud. So all in all, it was a good time.
After I left Pai, I made my way east to the Thailand-Lao border and got on a bus to a town I needed to pass through to my ultimate destination, Muang Sing. I think the first sign that I wasn't in freaking Kansas anymore was when the bus driver careened, full speed, through a crowded construction sight, throwing his trash out the window as we sped by. The rest of the four hour ride was spent flying around tight curves and blaring the horn at everything and anything that got in our way-- small children, skinny cows, water buffalo, other cars, dogs, chickens, and more construction equipment. After this leg, I got into a songthaew for the 2 hour ride to Muang Sing (1 truck + 2 wooden benches in the back + seemingly limitless passenger capacity = songthaew). The first thing I knew, a hill tribe woman probably no older than me, in traditional dress (colorful headdress with bright silver coins and all), was insisting that I eat some of the sticky rice and unidentifable meat that her and her two adorable little boys were eating. We spent the rest of the ride smiling and nodding at each other, and she and her boys got off somewhere before Muang Sing, next to a steep path that led up to the hills.
I originally went to Muang Sing to join up with a 2 or 3-day trek up into the hills to see some of the countryside, but when I got there I found out that I was almost the only foreigner in town and that I would have to wait around until more people came if I wanted to go. I went back to my guesthouse to think about it (since I'm feeling a bit of a time crunch), where I immediately met two middle-aged crazy-talking Johnny Walker-drinking gonzo documentarists on a buddha pilgrimage. One of them had bought an old wooden carved buddha statue in Bangkok a few years ago and is obsessed with returning it to the temple from where it was stolen. From the style of the carving, he tracked it down to the Muang Sing region, and the next day he and his friend (a BBC producer, who was filming everything for the eventual documentary) had hired a songthaew for the next day and were going to drive around until they found the right temple. After dinner and lots of talking, it seemed only natural that I would go with them, and so I was officially christened the 'deputy de buddha.'
We left early the next morning and for the next 10 hours drove through the most beautiful countryside I think I have ever seen. We stopped at about 9 wats, met some monks and lots of curious young novice monks (who our guide told us never see foreigners, and it showed-- they followed our every move), and ended up picking up a ton of people on the side of the road.
Sharing a songthaew with all these local people was definitely the highlight of the day-- it felt like we were in National Geographic. The most interesting-looking were the hill tribe women-- Hmong and Akah-- some with the headdresses, some toting naked little children, and others carrying heavy baskets as big as them. We would pull over, they would jump in back with us, and we would proceed to smile and nod at each other until they got off. Most were very shy and didn't want their pictures taken, but I started showing the young mothers pictures of my neices and nephews from my camera and made friends pretty easily that way. In the end, we didn't find the home of the buddha, but we did see lots of interesting things and made it all the way to the Lao-Myanmar border (where I bought lunch for 7-- the two guys, me, our guide, our driver, his wife, and a random guy who was riding with us at the time-- for $5).
Other highlights: waving to packs of tiny little children along the road, who would wave back yelling "Sabaidee! Sabaidee!"; the enormous amount of animals on the road, most of which couldn't care less that we were trying to get by; seeing two very small boys (probably about 3 years old) riding together on a water buffalo; seeing young girls about 4 or 5 years old carrying tiny babies on their backs in cloth slings; the hilarious amount of potholes (it took us 10 hours to drive a total of 140 km). It was a good day!
The next day I left Muang Sing to begin a 2-day journey to my next destination, Nong Kiaw. The first leg was a 2-hour songthaew ride back to Luang Namtha, where I switched over to an actual bus for the next 4 hours to Udomxai. I thought this would be a major improvement over the songthaew (you know, cause I'd have an actual seat and all), but it really wasn't, seeing as how I had a Lao guy asleep on my shoulder for the entire 4 hours. I had heard that Udomxai described as 'a bus station and 10 brothels,' so I wasn't surprised to learn from a Swiss couple on my bus that you had to be very careful which guesthouse you stayed in, because many of them, even the nice-looking ones, are actually brothels. They gave me the names of a few that their guidebook said were safe, so I remembered one name and checked in. Though I could see it was a dump from the beginning, it wasn't until I returned from dinner that I realized just how bad it was: no windows, cigarette butts on the floor, wads of gum stuck to the floor and walls, horribly stained sheets, bugs crawling around on the pillowcases, stains on the walls, and this for a toilet
(oh- and they turned the water off after a certain time at night, so it was unusable anyway). Among all this squalor, however, and for no apparent reason, there was a TV in the room with HBO and movie channels. So I spread out my sleep sack over the bed (thank you Aunt Susan for recommending I bring one, and Elise and Chad for the gift!!), watched 2 movies, and spent the next few hours worrying about the flimsy doorlock, laying fully clothed on the bed with the lights on, just praying to God that I wouldn't roll off my sleep sack in my sleep. I got up at 6:00, walked back to the bus station, and spent the next 3 hours waiting for my bus there. An experience, for sure!
From Udomxai it was another 4 hours to get to Nong Kiaw, and the 'bus' we took was actually a passenger van with added seats-- a vehicle that probably was originally designed to fit 7 that somehow the bus officials managed to squeeze 17 adults into. That even wasn't so bad until the teenaged girls in the van took out their cell phones and started playing schmaltzy Lao pop music (3 at a time... different songs competing, of course). I have never been so grateful for my iPod than at that moment.
Along the way, we would pass little valley villages surrounded by corn that would have big official-looking signs in Lao but with one English phrase: "Project to plant replace the poppy." Apparently that area used to be a major drug producer, but the government has been cracking down on it in recent years. It must still grow somewhere, because I met very few Akah women who didn't try to sell me opium (don't worry, Mom, I just said no).
Once we got to Nong Kiaw, life improved immeasurably. It's a tiny little town surrounded by huge limestone peaks covered in green, right next to a brown river. I stayed in a nice bungalow and walked around a bit. The children in this country are so sweet and beautiful-- I passed two very little kids with umbrellas who yelled 'Sabaidee!' and waved their awkward little 2-year-old waves until I was out of sight. I had heard that there was an interesting cave nearby, so I started walking down the road to find it. I came across 2 little girls that pounced on me, asking 'cave? cave?', and they led me to it. What I thought would be an easy walk actually involved fording a river (where I picked up my first-ever leech) and literally crawling on my hands and knees under thick underbrush. The cave was very cool-looking, with lots of stalactites, and one of the little girls even brought a weak flashlight so I could poke around a bit.
The next morning I boarded a boat for the 5-hour ride down the river to Luang Prabang. We waited for a while at the dock, and a pack of little naked boys, about 4 years old, were swimming around us in the brown brown water, waving and yelling and showing off.
Some women were down there washing clothes, and when they would make suds with the detergent the little boys would grab handfuls of it to make beards for themselves. Kids are the same all around the world! Also on the dock was a man with a water buffalo and some little girls with nets, catching tiny fish. Quite the send-off!
Yesterday I went up to a set of waterfalls with a French girl I met, and we hiked to the very top for some gorgeous views. We looked down to the first basin and saw a bunch of people swimming, so we eventually found our way down there, too (but had to walk across the waterfall near the basin-- very wet and kind of scary). So we jumped off the rocks, swam around a bit, peeked over the side to the bottom, and basically got back to nature, which was really nice.
Tomorrow I'll leave for Vang Vieng, then head further south to the capital, Vientiane. From there I'll fly to the south of Cambodia, to Phnom Pehn, then make my way north to Siem Reap, then head back into Thailand to meet my friend Amy and her husband. Life is good and I'm having a blast, but I'm looking forward to seeing some familiar faces! Hope all is well with all of you, and thanks for all the emails and well wishes.
Today I'm off to hang out in the Vondelpark and take a stroll through the Van Gogh museum. Then tomorrow I'll take a train into Belgium. I love my life!! =)
