Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

It’s night-time again and we’ve just had dinner, so here’s a quick update.

Incidentally, if some of the words in this e-mail have too many e’s in them, it’s because my keyboard has a dodgy ‘e’ key that keeps sticking.

Yesterday, we went on a couple of excursions, first to the Pak Ou caves and then to the Kuang Si waterfalls. Both were well worth the effort.

We chartered a local bloke and his jumbo (which is a larger version of the Thai tuk-tuk) and endured a noisy and bumpy ride about 27 km north of Luang Prabang. There, we took a ferry across to the caves, where many statues and other images of Budda have been placed there over the centuries. Very impressive.

After some lunch, our jumbo driver took us back along the road we had previously travelled, continuing past Luang Prabang until we were about 32 km south of the city. There, we visited the waterfalls, which were also very beautiful.

The bumpy and seemingly interminable ride made Sarah travelsick, but she felt better once we got out and after she had taken some ginger tablets.

Back in town, we went for dinner and called it a day. Our jumbo driver had driven us around the entire day, waiting for us wherever we got out to look around. The total cost of this day-long taxi service was $15, which is very little to us, but more than a month’s salary to the average Lao.

Today, we decided to spend the day walking around Luang Prabang in the scorching, searing heat of the cool season (hmm; cool, yeah, right). We visited a whole string of temples (known here as ‘wats’), went shopping at the town market (where my haggling skills came in very useful again), visited temples, temples and yet more temples, including one at the top of a steep flight of stairs, that afforded us a fantastic view of the city and the Mekong.

Lunch for me was fried Giant Mekong Catfish with garlic, an interesting dish, but not one I’d particularly feel inclined to order again.

We actually managed to find a sumptuous Lao restaurant this evening, with all the trappings one might expect in the west. Consequently, it was hugely expensive by Lao standards, so we ended up paying $5 for two main dishes, a starter and three drinks. That’s about twice what you’d normally expect to pay out here.

Tomorrow, we’re going to do some more shopping and looking around town, but then we’re off to the airport for our 17:00 flight to the capital, Vientiane (pronounced more like Wieng Chan — try saying Vientiane with a French accent and you’ll get an idea of where the Romanised spelling came from).

Fortune would have it that we’ll be arriving in Vientiane during Bun Pha That Luang, which is a festival that takes place annually. There should be lots of fireworks and music.

Nevertheless, the reports we’ve been hearing suggest that we won’t want to spend all that long in the city, so we have to decide what our next move will be. We’ll either book an onward flight to Hanoi, Vietnam or possibly book a domestic flight to Phonsavan, as we’d both really like to see the enigmatic Plain of Jars.

Phonsavan was incredibly heavily bombed by the US during the ‘Secret War’ of the late 60s and early 70s. The Lao PDR is so poor, that people have — quite incredibly — used the fallen ordnance to build homes, repair fences, etc. As such, that part of the country boasts a whole architecture of bomb material, that I think would be fascinating to see.

Apparently, it’s not uncommon for people to use entire unexploded bombs as girders, rafters, fenceposts, etc. in their home! Nothing is wasted in this country, not even instruments of death.

As you might expect, unexploded bombs account for countless casualties among the Lao every year, most of them children, who pick up the remnants of cluster bombs, because they look like tennis balls.

If we go to Phonsavan, the trick is to try and leave enough time to see Vietnam reasonably well. In reality, a month is way too short to cover the intinerary that we had envisaged. In hindsight, it would probably have been better to confine this trip to just Thailand and Laos, and see Vietnam on another trip. In fact, I could quite happily spend the whole month in just Laos, as the place is absolutely fascinating and huge areas of it have barely been touched by tourists. I already find myself trying to figure out how long it will be before I can engineer our return, as the Lao people are the friendliest, nicest people I have ever met and Luang Prabang is a wonderful town with a fascinating mix of native Lao and French influences.

The street-stall food treats continue to entice. Deep-fried chicken heads and chicken feet are the latest things to make it into my digital camera; I just can’t imagine how to eat something as hard and crunchy as a chicken’s head, but I don’t think I’d sample one even if I could. They simply don’t look appetising.

Anyway, I suspect we’ll write more from Vientiane, once we’ve found somewhere to stay and oriented ourselves a little. If not, the next message will either be from Phonsavan or Hanoi, assuming we can find Internet access there. So far, finding Net access hasn’t been a problem at all; only the speed in Laos leaves much to be desired.

ell, we’re still in Luang Prabang and are back in the same internet cafe after an attempt to try one that’s just 200 kip per minute. This one is 300 kip per minute, but worth the extra money since we can actually load a page here. That always helps. 100 kip = 1 cent.

Luang Prabang is a very nice town. Anyone making a Southeast Asia trip should definitely include it on their itinerary. It’s laid back, pretty, has lots of good food, lots of shopping and good sights to see.

We’ve spent the last two days doing standard tourist things. Yesterday, we hired a jumbo for the day. Picture a pick-up truck with benches along the sides of the bed and with a little roof. That’s a jumbo. We found a guy on the main street who would take us to both the Pak Ou caves and the big waterfall for $15. We took him up on it.

He drove us to the caves by way of some Hmong villages that are big on crafts. I can’t say specifically what type of crafts because Santa came with us and brought his wallet.

The second village was the ferry point for going across the river to the Pak Ou caves, which are big caves in a cliff face that have been used for centuries as an aging Buddha dumping ground. Basically, people take their old crappy Buddhas from temples and their homes and ditch them there. There are thousands of Buddhas. We had to climb a bunch of stairs. It’s hot here.

The guy who took us across the river charged us 50 cents each and waited while we looked around. We got our own boat. This seemed odd to me. I wonder why they guy doesn’t charge a one-way fare and go back and forth all day. There are plenty of boats so no one would get stranded on the wrong side.

We had lunch in the village once we got back and Ian made friends with a Lao guy who was acting as a tour guide for a bunch of Thais. This guy’s mother and sister live in San Diego and he was eager to talk about America.

Next, our driver took us back south past Luang Prabang and to this big waterfall, I’m sure Ian will provide the name. It was very pretty and very big. We climbed about half way up, which required stepping in a bunch of water and mud. We have one picture (staged) of me almost falling from a precipice into the roaring water. This is for my dad. He loves heights, especially slippery heights.

This whole trip took about 8 hours. All that for 15 bucks. Good deal. Incidentally, they’re way more into dollars here than they are in Bangkok. Nothing was quoted in dollars in Bangkok. Virtually everything of any significant value is quoted in dollars here.

Last night: hot shower, air conditioned room. Aaaahhhh.

Today, we did the walking tour in our book, which took us to about a gazillion temples. Look forward to many many pictures of glinty gold things and Buddhas in all three sanctioned positions. One of the wats (that’s temple, to you) is up on the very top of a hill. Thanks to Ian, we climbed the stairs to this hill three times. I was overjoyed. A monk made friends with us and offered to take us to see the relining Buddha and Buddha’s footprint. I have to admit that I suspected a scam, even from a monk. I don’t know why, but he just seemed too eager, and the monks are generally rather aloof. When we got to the reclining Buddha, he asked us how seeing Buddha made us feel. We both hemmed and hawed a bit over that one. Ian said “sleepy,” since it was a reclining Buddha. Clearly this monk wanted us to say how deeply spiritual we felt or something. Then he asked what religion we were. Ian said “I don’t really have religion” and the monk was clearly quite horrified. He was 28, I think. Either that or he was repeating back my age. No scam was forthcoming, but we did leave him before we got to the footprint since we’d seen that on the first of our three trips up the giant hill in the scorching heat.

We tried to go get a massage this evening from the Lao Red Cross, which, according to our book, gives the best massages in town, but it was booked solid so I’m going to go back in the morning. Ian claims that he’s going to skip it. We’ll see.

Anyway, we’re on to Vientiane tomorrow. After a bit more shopping with Santa in tow, we’ll head to the airport for our 5:00 flight.

irst of all, let me say how unbelievably slow Internet access is in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, or Lao PDR as it’s known in it’s short form. It’s as if each packet is being transported across the Mekong River by rice barge, carried over land to Thailand and reassembled there.

Well, the bus made it from Chiang Mai to Chiang Khong without incident. In fact, the bus was a nice air-conditioned affair with comfortable reclining seats, and it even arrived half an hour early at its destination. Some Western countries could learn a trick or two from the Thais in this regard.

We stopped for refreshments after the 6.5 hour bus journey in Chiang Khong and then walked up the road to the Thai immigration office, where we surrendered our departure cards and then paid the 20 Baht to a ferryman to carry us across to Laos in his long-boat.

Once on the other side, we filled out the necessary Lao immigration forms and then headed up the hill into the Lao town of Huay Xai. We found a great guest-house for the very reasonable price of 10,000 Kip (10,000 Kip = US $1). There wasn’t much to do in town, but we found a good restaurant serving vegetarian food, so Sarah was happy. We paid in Thai Baht, as we didn’t yet have any Kip and the bank was closed, because it was Sunday.

With nothing much to do in town, we seized the opportunity for an early night and went to bed.

The next morning, we headed down to the bank to change $80 into Lao money, coming away with some 845,000 Kip as a result. We then headed down to the boat dock and bought tickets for the slow-boat to Luang Prabang, at a cost of 100,000 Kip each. Not bad for a two day trip.

At 10:30, we boarded the boat with a surprisingly high number of other tourists. The boat turned out to be a noisy and uncomfortable barge, but hey, there’s no point to complaining and it’s all part of the experience, anyway. Sarah didn’t like it much, though.

There were several Dutch people on board, so I got plenty of opportunity to practise my Dutch and discuss life in general, which was very nice.

At about 17:30, we arrived in Pak Beng, our port of call for the first night. This turned out to be a little more civilized than we had expected. The electricity ran until 18:00 and a couple of the guesthouses had rooms with a private cold shower and toilet, so we were pleased to be able to not have to share a bucket shower with other grimey tourists.

Once again, we found a pretty good restaurant and ate well. Lao food is quite a bit different to Thai, with lots of very pungent sauces and no end to the cuts of meat and types of animal they marinate in the stuff. My dinner was fairly mild, though, so I enjoyed it a lot.

Today, we were up at 06:00 to make sure we had enough time for a quick walk around Pak Beng before the boat’s departure. What we in the West think of as animal cruelty, is simply the way of life over here. Butcher’s shops and abattoirs are virtually non-existent, so people tend to the slaughter and processing and transportation of animal flesh themselves.

The Pak Beng village market was in full swing by 06:30, sporting some gruesome sights that might make a hardened carnivore seriously contemplate vegetarianism. I took a few photos to remind myself of the place.

After buying a few sandwiches for the long boat-ride, we headed down to the boat in good time to ensure seats well away from the hammering and grinding of the engine. Being close to the front has the added advantage that you can crawl through a small doorway onto the front of the boat and sit on deck, because there isn’t much of a view from inside. The reason for this is that the vessel is really a freight barge, not a passenger vehicle.

A few Lao people got on board, carrying some dead rats by their tails. These rats they later chopped up and fried as lunch. Yum, yum.

Sarah was offered Lao whiskey and fried worms by one of the Lao people on board. She partook of the whiskey (which I reckon must be 100% proof), but declined the worms. A Canadian girl had one, though, and said it tasted like popcorn. I was only offered the whiskey yesterday, but I declined.

We eventually arrived in Luang Prabang around 16:00 today. This town is on the World Heritage list and is thus very well preserved. It’s an interesting mix of old French colonial style housing and traditional Lao temples and shack accommodation.

As we’ll be staying here for a few days, we decided to go upmarket and book a room with a warm shower. It even has air-conditioning, so we’re living in the lap of luxury.

We only had a little time to look around before it went dark, so we went to a travel agent and bought plane tickets to Vientiane, the Lao capital, on Friday. We even managed to verify that we’ll be aboard an ATR-72 aircraft, so the pilot won’t need to rely solely on visual flying techniques. This is apparently the safest plane Lao Aviation has, so we’ll be putting the warnings about neglected maintenance out of our mind, crossing our fingers and our legs and hoping for the best on Friday 🙂

If all goes well, our 17:00 flight will put us in Vientiane at 17:40.

Tomorrow, we’re planning to head out of town up the Mekong River and visit some caves, called the Pak Ou. There are apparently some Buddha images worth seeing, located deep within these limestone formations. It should be very cool. On Thursday, we’ll probably head out to the Tat Kuang Si waterfall, which also looks beautiful in the photos.

This evening was spent enjoying a pleasant meal along the side of the Mekong. Once again, Sarah found great vegetarian food. The Lonely Planet book claims that Laos is a real trial for a vegetarian, but so far it’s been easy going.

I, on the other hand, was not quite so lucky. I like to push my frontiers ever outward, so I opted for a wild boar dish. The wild boar itself was actually quite tasty (rather like minced meat), but the acrid sauce it had been smothered in was more than I could handle, so I left most of it. The sauce tasted like fermented lemon juice and vinegar, but I’m sure it was something entirely different. Oh well.

Now, we’re in one of the town’s several Internet cafes, who seemingly all share the same modem to connect to the outside world. Never mind; it’s more than fast enough for reading and sending a couple of e-mails.

OK, that’s it for now. More soon, either from Luang Prabang still or Vientiane at some point.

Well, after two days in the cargo hold of a big dirty boat, we have arrived in Luang Prabang.

After we last wrote, we took a bus to Chiang Khong at Thailand’s border with Laos. The bus ride was nice — there was good scenery and the bus was air conditioned and had reclining seats. When we arrived in Chiang Khong, we went to a guest house for a lime juice and ran into some Dutch people, which made Ian happy after three days with 10 Germans. Then we took a ferry across to Huay Xai in Laos.

Huay Xai is a cute little town. There were plenty of tourists there, almost all with the same intention as us: to take a boat to Luang Prabang. We had a nice room with a western toilet and a hot shower! This was a cause for much rejoicing.

In the morning, we bought our tickets to Luang Prabang. We expected a certain type of boat that we’d seen by the docking area and that we’d seen in pictures. What we got was a cargo ship and we literally sat in the cargo hold, which had short wide windows at the top of the walls so that you couldn’t see much but trees unless you stood up. I wasn’t psyched. There was a place at the bow where about 10 people could sit, so we spent some time out there too, but it got pretty uncomfortable since the bow points up and you had to sit sideways on the slope.

We spent last night in Pakbeng, a small town on the way. We expected this to be the low point of our journey from an accomodation and food perspective, but it was actually quite nice. We’ve found that our book is quite out-of-date; there is a lot more in Laos these days that it led us to believe. We spent the outrageous sum of $10 on our room, but I really wanted my own bathroom and shower (cold), so we did it anyway. In contrast, our room in Chiang Mai was about $4.

We walked around Pakbeng this morning and saw a market with lots of yummy food, like some sort of buffalo leg hanging from the ceiling (this generated a huge amount of interest from the locals) and another pig’s face, mmmmm. We also saw the monks going around for their alms rounds. This happens twice per day. The monks walk around with a big bowl and the people come out of their houses with an ornate bowl and they kneel on mats and say some sort of prayer-like thing over the food and then put some into each monk’s bowl as he passes.

Our boat ride today was somehow more bearable, despite being longer. I guess that was because this time the expectation was set correctly and the obnoxious band of Israeli backpackers were a bit more subdued today. I went up to the front of the boat in the afternoon and the guys driving the boat tried to get me to eat a fried worm. As you might have already guessed, they didn’t have much luck with that. However, they did get me to try some of the Lao whiskey (read: rubbing alcohol) that they were drinking all day. We arrived at Luang Prabang at about 4:00.

Luang Prabang is a nice town. On the main street where we are now, one could be convinced that he was on University Avenue in Palo Alto (the main street of the most affluent town in America, for those unfamiliar with it). This has been a surprise to both of us. We expected a much less developed atmosphere. On our walk after dinner, we saw another thing that our book told us that we’d see: fried chicken feet! I could hardly hold myself back. The kip were just flying out of my pocket. As a bonus, the feet were paired with, you guessed it, fried chicken heads. A culinary delight.

The plan for tomorrow is to go to the Pak Ou caves (yes, Mom, we’ll avoid the areas that the State Department said to avoid) and then come back to Luang Prabang for some Christmas shopping. We bought our ticket for Vientiane today, and we’ll be heading there on Friday afternoon.

That’s about all for now. I suspect that we’ll write again before we head to Vientiane.

No, we’re not dead. I’m sure you’ve all been glued to your computer screens, awaiting the next episode from us and wondering why we’ve been silent for the last few days. Well, this e-mail will bring you up to date.

We arrived in Chiang Mai three days ago and checked into the Chiang Mai Garden Guesthouse, a sober little affair with no air-conditioning and a freezing cold shower (not to mention the traditional Thai-style toilet, which requires one to crouch in a position simply unattainable for any fat-thighed, heavy-arsed Westerner such as I).

The next day, we set off on a trek into the rain forest about 80 km north of Chiang Mai. There we would remain for three days.

On the first day, we hiked to a waterfall, had lunch and then headed deeper into the forest until we reached a village consisting of a few straw and bamboo huts, home to the Karen hill-tribe people. These people speak no English whatsoever; in fact, they don’t even speak Thai.

The facilities were best described as basic. We slept on the floor of one of their huts under some flea-bitten blankets. The cold kept me awake (remember that this was up in the hills and that we are already in the north of the country) and when I finally did get to sleep, the cocks started crowing way before dawn had arrived and woke us up again. The less said about the toilet, the better, but I was brave enough to endure a freezing cold shower in the morning at the standing tap in the village.

Incidentally, it’s amazing how quickly you get tired when in a village with no electricity. The tribespeople all go to bed when the sun goes down and rise again at the crack of dawnn.

The next day, we trekked further into the forest until we reached an elephant camp, where we rode elephants downstream for a couple of hours. We finally arrived in a village populated by the Lahoe tribe. Again, they spoke no English or Thai; just their own tribal language. And again, the facilities were very basic and there was no electricity.

These people originated in Myanmar (Burma). What I think was the Burmese flag was hung across the doorway of their chicken coup. In fact, while trekking over the hills, the border with Myanmar could be observed in the distance. Many of these people used to grow opium (this is the infamous Golden Triangle area), but the government has started to crack down on their habit. We were told by our guide and interpreter that they are no longer allowed to grow opium or murder tourists. Hmm…

These people live at a lower elevation, so it wasn’t as cold on the bamboo floor of their huts, but the blankets were not the cleanest and the many dogs in the village were infested with fleas. Nevertheless, the food was great and we slept well, although there was no water to shower with, so we just had to grin and bare it (which actually isn’t that hard when the alternative is a dip in a murky brown river full of elephant turds the size of cannonballs).

Today, we left the Lahoe village and boarded a bamboo raft with our guide, and headed downstream for the end of our trek. This turned out to be quite the hair-raising experience, as it didn’t quite go according to plan.

To cut a long story short, we hit rocks and our guide was thrown into the river. He swam to the shore and ran back along the river bank, before jumping into the river again and allowing himself to be carried downstream to where we were helplessly hanging onto some bushes overhanging the river.

Somewhat bruised and cut, we eventually arrived at our destination, rather more thrilled than we’d expected to be. We went looking for an adventurous trek and certainly got it!

It’s around midnight now and we’re back in Chiang Mai. I could not have imagined that the cold shower of the Garden Guesthouse could feel as good as it did this afternoon, after three days without the kind of facilities we in the west are used to.

Tomorrow morning, we’ll be up again at 06:00 to collect our laundry and make our way down to the bus station, where we’ll catch a bus to Chiang Khong, which lies right on the border with Laos. We expect to cross the border into Laos by ferry and spend the night in Huay Xai.

We’re extremely unlikely to be able to send e-mail over the next few days, as Laos is very undeveloped. We expect to be without electricity for the next few days, as we take a slow-boat down the Mekong River, passing through Pak Beng until we reach the relative civilization of Luang Prabang. Expect to hear nothing more from us for several days. In fact, I’m not even sure whether we’ll be able to send e-mail from Luang Prabang, but we’ll try.

As a last interesting anecdote, we heard today that a guy we ran into upon arrival at Chiang Mai train station and who directed us to the Garden Guesthouse, turned out to be a good friend of our guide during our trek and was shot dead while serving as the guide to a bunch of trekkers out hiking close to the Myanmar border. They apparently encountered a bunch of rebels (or something like that) and he was not diplomatic in his choice of words when dealing with them, so they shot him dead on the spot, sending his panicking group of tourists scattering into the jungle. God only knows how they all made it back out without him.

Anyway, we’re not going any closer to Myanmar than we’ve already been, so not to worry.

We’ll write again when able.