Laos

Before i start this post I need to comment on the fact that there is a 75 year old woman on the computer next to me playing a game where she owns a farm and is collecting animals. The sound is on.

From Hanoi we took a flight to Vientiane, Laos. This time the plane was small and crowded. Ashley sat next to a boy named Oliver on the plane and we ended up going out with him, and a traveler he met once we landed, Matt. We went to dinner and to a bar that we chose out of lonely planet because its description read "Beward of the women sitting at the bar eating beetles who claim to be hairdressers." Yes, Lonely Planet is on crack. There were no people eating beetles and no one asked to cut my hair. We were very disappointed. (I just heard two horse 'nays' followed by an elephant sound. What kind of farm is she running??) In Vientiane we went to the Buddah park which is literally a park filled with buddah statues. We took a local bus there which was really just a van with a few seats. Somehow 6 Loatians managed to sit in each sit which would fit 1/4 of an american. We stood for a good hour. We decided to take a bus from Vientiane to Luang Prabang which we were told was an 8 hour bus ride on the "VIP bus." Stupidly I thought VIP was actually going to be a bus for Very Important People who chose to spend the extra 50 cents. BOY WAS I WRONG. Not only did the bus almost leave without us (with our bags already on board) but everyone around me threw up. And they knew they were going to. They boarded the bus with a roll of plastic bags. It was a disaster. The bus ride also lasted 10 1/2 hours. I wanted to die the entire time and swore I'd never get on a bus again. When we finally got to Luang Prabang I was very shaken up from my traumatic experience (apparently it was only the people on the back of the bus that felt the need to vomit for the entire time) and we set out to look for a hotel. We found one but once we went out we realized that we had forgotten to take the card of our hotel and had no idea what it was called or where it was. I'm usually the one with a great sense of direction and I was totally lost. Ashley is usually the one who walks the wrong way to the bathroom when we're in our hotel room but after an hour of walking around, her instincts finally led us the right we and miraculously we found out hotel. I think she must have blacked out because she had no idea how she knew it was the right way. Laos has an 11 oclock curfew so we went to dinner and called it an early night. It was just a few days till my birthday and Lance came to Luang Prabang to meet me. It was a nice birthday present on top of the beautiful hotel my mother so graciously set us all up in. The night before my birthday we all went out to a bar that we had been told was open until 1 am so we could ring in my birthday with a bang! The bar actually closed at 10:30 though so the girls sang happy birthday to me in the room. It was sweet and I didnt mind because I've realized over the past few years that my birthday is completely overated. (she just bought 8 sheep and 4 more elephants) The Chang Heritage where we stayed for my birthday was really beautiful and the staff was really nice. The beds were comfortable and my nightmares of vomiting Laotians started to subside. On the actual day of my birthday we woke up early to feed the monks who walk down the street in a line with metal containers that you fill with sticky rice and bananas. It was the longest line of bright orange I'd ever seen, but it felt nice to do something for other people on my birthday. Later we went to see the waterfalls and mistakingly took the path less taken to the top. It turned out to be quite a hike. That night Ashley and Mimi took me to dinner at a restaurant across the Mekong River. We sat in a private little hut and ordered Laos Fondue which was a mixture of Korean BBQ and sukiaki and very delicious. After dinner we were all so full that we didnt know how we were going to walk back to the hotel, but somehow made it.

A few days later we took a one day "cycling" trip through green discovery. Cycling turned out to be off road mountain biking, and probably some of the hardest biking I've ever done. It was all up and down hill, but it was so rocky that the down hill was even harder than the strenous peddling the uphill required. For lunch we treked across the river on foot and had lunch in a tree house which was really very nice until I realized we had to keep biking. We biked through a few very small villages and saw some of the local children playing games. We finally made it back and were so tired that we sat in the green discovery place for about an hour before we could walk back to the hotel. Lance and I decided to go out to a big Lao dinner from which I got food poisoning :(. The next day we went to Vang Vieng and this time we decided to take a "mini bus" also known as a van. There were only six of us in the van, Ashley Mimi Lance and myself and another couple also from the US. Everything was great. We eat got our own row and we left the bus station with no problems. We were comfortable. About 3 minutes after we left the bus station we came to an abrupt stop. 3 Laotians were standing on the side of the road, all carrying feed bags. We picked them up. Everyone groaned and rearranged positioning but I knew that something horrible had just happened. THEY THREW UP THE ENTIRE BUS RIDE. True, our driver drove like a mad man and I thought we were going to go flying off a cliff, but what was worse than that was all the vomit. The noises, the smells and the bags of vomit shifting violently from one side of the van floor to the other as we rounded each mountain bend. It was my nightmare part 2.

We finally arrived in Vang Vieng. Vang Vieng is a weird weird weird place. The restaurants all have the same menu and each have 2-3 tvs. Some restaurants play episodes of Friends, and some restaurants play episodes of Family Guy. No one talks while eating they just sit and watch tv. We didnt understand this until after we went tubing. We had been excited to go tubing down the river in Laos for a while and were told it was a lot of fun but we did not expect what it turned out to be. Tubing in Vang Vieng was the equivilent of Spring Break on crack. Its jsut bar after bar that you can float or walk to that serves buckets of alcohol. We also happened to go tubing on Australia day so the ordered chaos that usually went on was not so ordered. Each bar had very high rope swings where you could hurl your drunken body into the water. I felt like an old jewish mother saying "oh be careful!" or "that looks so dangerous should he be flipping like that?" every time anyone jumped. It was almost too much for me to handle. We went to one bar that had a Tug-O-War in which the losers were pulled into a mud pit. I actually enjoyed that a lot and it felt like good clean dirty fun. That night all we wanted to do was sit and watch Friends. I finally understood the appeal. There was one bar/restaurant in Vang Vieng that had a food menu and it also had a happy menu. The happy menu consisted of drugs. They were legal to buy and smoke/eat/drink in this venue. The main 3 offered were weed, shrooms and opium but they implied that if you asked for it they probably had it. It was weird and exciting but I decided not to experiment. While we were in Vang Vieng both Lance and Ashley became violently ill for days and once they were feeling better we decided it was time to leave. We took a bus to Vientiane (no one vomited tomy knowlegde) and then flew to Pakse. From Pakse we took a 3 day kayak trip to the 4000 Islands. The first day was great, and we kayaked 4 hours down the Mekong River. That night we stayed in bungalos near the river that had working bathrooms in room and mosquito nets for the beds. it also might have been a chicken farm. About 20 hens and their chicks were running around and about 10 roosters all having cock fights over their women. The roosters in Laos are also retarded and crow all night and never sleep so between that and the heat, neither did I. The next day we hiked to a water fall and then kayaked 1 hour over some mild rapids and saw some river dolpins swimming. That night we did a "home stay" which actually meant that we slept on a family's porch. We never met the family. They all slept behind a wall, I think there were about 10 of them. We slept on the porch. In bug nets. See-through bug nets. No privacy. It was about 100 degrees. There were lizards and frogs and mosquitos everywhere and at that point I wondered why the trip had cost so much money. There was one bathroom we could use but the woods were more sanitary. I cried myself to sleep. Camping? Bring it on! At least a tent has walls. The last day we kayaked over some more rapids and did a little ceremony with a tiny drunk man who gave us some rope bracelets for good luck.

SIDENOTE: the cats in Laos have short tails that look like they've been hacked off badly with a dull axe. I asked our tour guide on the kayak trip why they cut the cat's tails and he responded, shocked "NO ONE CUT TAILS HERE!" I'm still not convinced.

We spent one more day on the islands on our own before heading to cambodia where we crossed the boarder on foot which I will discuss in my next blog!