The Mighty, Mighty Mekong

Well it's been a little while since our last post, but wifi reception on a boat floating down the Mekong more than 100 km from nowhere isn't as good as you might expect. So here begins the account of our three days journey to Luang Prabang, Laos, one of the highlights of our trip.

We caught a bus early in the morning...Friday, I guess, from Chiang Mai to Chiang Khong. That wasn't very interesting, to be honest. Expect for the careening around switchback turns up and down mountains, well over 100 kph and 8" from the edge of the road and of course, certain death. Not alot goes on in Chiang Khong, so we crossed immediately into Huay Xai, leaving Thailand behind. Hello Laos! We celebrated with a piss warm bottle of Beerlao, the national pastime, because the power was out.

The next morning we awoke early to get a seat on the boat. They look like corrugated iron bananas to me.


Unfortunately, my precious punctuality didn't score us the best seats, or even the best boat this time. We were some of the first people on the banana, er, boat, and found some uncomfortable wooden benches with straight backs and about two microns of legroom that would be our home for the next 8 hours. Little did we know, they had WAY overloaded our boat, and eventually decided that the best way to fit 75 passengers on a 30 person boat would be to take two 30 person boats. Gotta hand it to those guys. Anyways it turns out that the second boat was far better. It had modified car seats for benches, more room, and actually left earlier. The boys would have to come of with some devious plan to ensure that THEY had those seats for the next day (foreshadowing...).

The first day of the ride was completely eye opening. I've never seen landscapes so incredibly beautiful in my whole life. I would upload picture after picture, but I'm using someone's card reader and he wants it back. That and the internet here is a touch slow, takes a few minutes to upload one picture. See how much we love you guys? Anyways, the geology is something else, it looks like thousands of flying saucers made of rock have just crashed one the riverbanks. I wish this picture did it more justice.


The river is full of water buffalo, fishermen, naked kids bathing (the sort you'd see in National Geographic), and of course cholera, liver flukes, E. coli, and all the other things we can't see. Needless to say, although it was a hot ride, we didn't go swimming.

We spent the first night in Pak Beng, who's existence is sustained entirely by travelers like ourselves in the same way that the river seems to sustain all the other villages along the way. It was here I had a bit of a revelation. Previously I'd felt kind of guilty about taking pictures of locals, etc, because I couldn't shake the feeling that we were taking advantage of them somehow. But of course I now realize that we, as farangs, are taken advantage of equally by those hocking goods for silly prices, dragging us to their guesthouses and the like. It's a two way street. And at least it clears my conscience a bit. Anyways, Pak Beng is certainly what you would call a hole. We ended up with a two bed room with mosquito nets and holes in the walls for about four USD. Not bad, but overpriced. What were we gonna do, hop back on the boat?

We had a nice meal and lots of Beerlao, cold this time, with some dudes we met on the boat. The older guy with the camera, Manfred, is cycling from Singapore to the motherland, Germany. He's 70. Held his own with us young whippersnappers as well.


So the next day we woke up uber-early to catch the sunrise over the Mekong, and make sure we had primo seats. We bought our ticket and then wrote our names on bits of paper, taping them to the best seats in the house on one of the boats. We felt pretty clever until people like Manfred and another old guy had to sit on wooden benches behind us. But this is no city bus, it's survival of the fittest out here! Besides if we can ride a bike across two continents he can endure a hard seat for a few hours. Anyways I'll save you the details of the second day of travelling, except for one stop we made. We ran ourselves onto a beach near a small village to give little Lao kiddies the opportunity to sell us silk scarves, smoked fish, giant lizards turned inside out and live rats suspended in the air by a string tied to one foot. Yep, we need to seriously re-evaluate our animal cruelty standards here. That and the little girl at our guesthouse in Huay Xai had found some beetles the size of small birds, and had torn off their legs to play with the and watch the try to helplessly scuttle about. There's a reason I'm not posing any pictures on the subject. Its a bit ironic that this sort of thing goes on in the same country that doesn't fix dogs and cats, because they consider it painful to the animal. Anyways here's that promised sunrise picture.


Yeah just imagine being there.

One other thing I did notice on the boat was the universality of iPods. Dustin and I have been mentally keeping note of things we see here that appear to be universal. Like writing swear words inside bathroom stalls, inflated gasoline prices, and people trying to sell us dope because we look young. So like I said, iPods. I didn't actually count, but I'm sure that a third of the people on our boat had one. They were a great source of amusement for the kids, who took breaks from trying to sell us beer and chips to commandeer some poor dude's player for an hour or so. I had to get a picture.


Where would we be without little white earbuds.

So now we're in Luang Prabang, finally, and I'm sure there will be lots to say about this sleepy little town once we get a feel for it. Ta ta!

Last days in Chiang Mai

Today is our last day in Chiang Mai. We'll be taking off tommorow early to get to Huay Xai, on the other side of the Mekong river, separating Thailand and Laos. We have to get to the border crossing by 6 pm, or they will close. But, here's what happened to me over the last few days.

I went Rock Climbing! I'm somewhat of an experienced indoor climber (usually my par is 5.9 or 5.10) and although I have taken outdoor top-roping courses, I have never actually put them into practice. Apparently, rock climbing is really popular in Thailand thanks to Chiang Mai Rock Climbing Adventures. I booked a day trip with two guides to take me up to Crazy Horse Buttress. I don't really have any pictures because the camera was crapping up at this point and because most of the time I was suspended 30 feet up.



After being reviewed on how to clean a route of quick-draws and to do all the work at the top of the route, I went up and down on 4 climbs before lunch. Each climb was about 20-30 metres. I found outdoor climbing pretty exhilirating. All the rock at Crazy Horse Buttress is limestone, which means if there is any hint of acid in the rain it starts to erode in little concave bumps on any upwards-facing surface. This sort of looks like the enlarged surface of a golf ball. The edges of these were sharp, and cut my hand initially when I ran into them.

We broke for lunch, which was supplied by a nearby restaurant. During this I saw a bird that moved too fast for me to take a picture of, so I must announce the first

SOUTHEAST ASIA BIRD IDENTIFICATION CONTEST!!!!
The winner of which will get a prize that is undisclosed at this time.

The bird in question is 20 cm, 10 cm of which is tail. The guides who were with me told me they didn't know the English name, but they knew it migrated from Siberia. It was mostly blue, with black and white arrow-like markings on its back. Its belly was orange at the front, fading to white at the back. I knew it had some sort of call, but I can't really remember what.

During the afternoon I got much more relaxed talking to my guides. One of them was more of an expert, one was a novice. When I was resting between routes, the expert would send the novice up on routes that he hadn't been on yet. Somehow, we stumbled upon penis jokes, and I was taught all the neccesary equivalent in Thai. When we were talking about what was funny, I mentioned the Bodyguard 2, which they seemed to think was pretty low humour.

In the afternoon, I rappelled down into a cave, 57 metres down, in fact. It was pretty awesome, and there were some active stalactite/stalagmite pairs. I also did more advanced climbs up top as the guides guaged my skill level. One of the climbs had me hugging around a 3 foot diameter stalactite, but I wasn't flexible enough and too tired to get over top of.

At the end of the day, I got back into Chiang Mai to meet up to Taylor. I have to give a shout out to Courtney here, who introduced us to the Hash House Harriers. 'nuff said.

Dear John Beaty:

Hey John (or someone who feels like contacting him): I vaguely remember you demanding that I buy a gift for you, since you got one for me in Cuba. What do you want?

The next day, we ignored tourism and went to the mall to see spiderman 3. The mall was a really wierd experience - Taylor has more stuff to say about it than I do. I found that all the prices in the mall for imported goods were Western prices (not surprising I guess), but food prices were still pretty comparable to Thai prices, about 1/4th of Canadian. This makes for a pretty weird culture, and just again reminds me that I'm in a slightly incomprehensible place.

There are many things that don't line up in my mind, like the lack of free speech without any feeling of opression, the worship of the king and the incredible emphasis on fashion. I also felt very left out because everyone else is so polylinguistic.

On wandering back from the Mall, we were hungry and looking for a place to eat. Food is so shockingly cheap here 55 Baht = $1.50 Canadian for a GOOD meal, that we eat out all the time. We stopped at an incredibly chill and empty place called the Jade Garden. We were served by what I can best describe as an "Italian Hippie" who ended up talking to us for over two hours about travel, the world, spirituality, his life, etc. He lived for 15 years in Bali, India starting in 1974, and was bitten by a King Cobra. He also knows six languages and is an antique dealer. We keep meeting incredibly awesome people.

CAMERA

The camera has been giving me bullshit issues for several days now. It would have problems such as being very slow, sometimes "freezing" and not turning off, etc. We weren't sure what the problem was at all, and have been confused for a while. This explains the lack of pictures. However, I managed to figure out that the two identical memory cards I got at Henry's in Kingston were the offenders. We tried the camera with a new Kingston one (the brand, not the city) and it works awesome. This is how Taylor and I felt when that happened:



Here is a picture of the offender:

asshole.

Doi Suthep

We had to get the camera fixed because we were heading up to Doi Suthep, the Wat on the Mountain outside Chiang Mai. We chartered a Song-thow using our now-expert bargaining skills for the 16 km ride.

On the way there:
Driver: "I'll offer you 300 baht"
Taylor: "No. How about 150."
Driver: "No. 250."
Taylor: "Fine. How about 200."
[Driver walks away for a bit without any warning. We stand there awkwardly for a minute, then he comes back and takes us up.]

On the way back:
Translator, speaking for the driver: "He offers 300 baht."
Taylor: "What? We got up here for 150."
etc.

Having the camera just returned to us, we were elated and took many pictures:




A monk on a cellphone:




Incomprehensible Thai Political Cartoon:

How I became Jamie Oliver

I cooked with a bunch of Brits. Signed up for a cooking class today since rock climbing's not my thing. It was pretty awesome, there were seven of us (three Brits, myself and three Americans). Everyone was super cool but two of the Americans sure didn't help their stereotype. I'll stop talking before I get myself in trouble. Obnoxious. Oops, I've gone and said it! Anyways we all rode out to this organic farm (stopping at a market along the way) in the countryside in a sawngtheaw (not even sure of spelling but its pronounced song-tau), which is a converted pickup with benches in the back. Allusion to Slim Pickens riding an atomic bomb. The ride did a real number on my hiney, but I lived to tell about it. So ya this farm essentially represents all that is tasty in the world. All of the ingredients we used, neglecting fish sauce and sesame oil, we either bought at the market or plucked from nature's sweet, sweet bosom during a walkabout through the field. The whole place was remarkably well set up actually, I wish I had some pictures to show but Dustin has the camera today. Roberta, whom I chatted up at length, said she'd email me something though so keep your eyes peeled. We made red curry paste (and then obviously red curry), phat thai, some kind of stir fry, som tam (papaya salad) and for dessert mango with sticky rice and coconut. All in all a delicious experience...probably nothing I couldn't have cooked at home but hey, they had gas burners. Now that's special. Plus the whole idea of walking out to a tree, picking a mango and cutting it up for dessert would appeal even to the most die hard meat and potatoes guys. This super cute Thai girly lead the pack, showing us all what to add when, how long to cook things for, etc. It was geared towards people who's culinary knowledge extends little beyond T.V. dinners, but a great place to be nonetheless. Here's where the farm was: N 18deg53'58.7" E 099deg04'32.0".

By the way would someone reply and let us know if anyone is interested in these coordinates? Or is it just dad. Keep it real.

Batman and Robin strike again!

Alright seroiusly, this picture upload thing is getting outta hand. I'll give it another try here, who knows what'll happen. Otherwise I know that my superb literary technique will paint such vivid images of sugar plums and mangosteens in your little heads that any picture will be a huge let down.Oh look it does work, except I don't know how to tell blogger where I want the pictures, so you'll just have to match them up in your mind.

I'm not sure how we got here alive, to be honest. Not that the roads are bad, au contraire mon frere, but we stopped to fill up with gas at a bus station about halfway. The happy looking fellow filling the tank puffed away on a cigarette about 3 feet from 30 cubic metres of gasoline. I needed a new pair of underpants.

We could spend some seroius time here in Chiang Mai. This ain't no Bangkok, a place that I, for one, feel is only suitable for flying into and out of. We experienced our first total downpour yesterday, and thought we'd show how manly we were by walking around for a few hours in it. Misconception 1: just because it rains a whole sh*t load in Thailand doesn't mean Thais like it. I had a rain coat on so they didn't laugh as hard at me as they did at Dusto, who was totally soaked to the bone.

Had coffee yesterday with a local named Bak, pretty nice dude. Of course as soon as anyone tried to stike up a conversatoin with me, my spidey sense goes wild and the scam alert beeps so loud I can't hear the traffic. But lo! we're not in Bangkok anymore! Bak was totally genuine, had lots to say for sure. He's a librarian here at the university, has a son, etc etc etc. It's hard to have a metaphysical conversaoin with someone who speaks less English than our late Italian neighbour back in K-Town. Oh but the coffee! I think it has something to do with the French influence in the whole region, but man I could drink it all day. Anyone heard of that Kopi coffee, or whatever it is? The stuff that little children pick out of cat dung in the jungle, then send it to Canada and sell it at 5,000,000 % markup. Anyways that stuff's all over here, and no way I'm paying $50 a cup for in in Canada. Speaking of expensive stuff, I bought about an ounce of saffrom yesterday for 20 baht. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it. Or stick that in your wok and cook it. Hopefully the dudes at the Lao border think the latter.

We continue to bump into Krysztof and his buddies Mike, Mike and Amy. I think they're stalking us, and guess where they're headed next. Yup.

The Chiang Mai Sunday night market. Enough said? Maybe not...in all my young young years I've never seen so much merchandise. It's like Walmart meets Times Warner meets Harmony (you know that alternative store that sells poorly carved wooden statues for a month's salary), but then put it outside. I don't know what I'm saying. Nothing does it justice. I picked up some sweet buffalo horn salad tongs for about $9, after some hard bargaining. I'm getting better at it but sill have alot to learn. A long way from my rose buying experience in Toronto, I'll say that. They sell cockroaches to eat that are the size of dogs here, calling them 'mackarels'. I'm not sure what that means, other than holy mackarel that's one big ass bug.

Nudo think's we're in the CIA for carrying around a GPS, but here goes anyways. Our guesthouse this time around (though we'll move in a day, its a bit pricey and we're living above our means) is at: N 18deg47'16.3" E 098deg59'28.6". Have fun with that.

Heading North (Relatively Speaking)

UPDATE: Now has pictures and other multimedia! May 7/2005

This is coming in from an internet cafe in Chiang Mai, Thailand's "second city". We'll stay here for a while, up to a week, then head off towards Laos.

First a quick video I took at the Democracy Monument in Bangkok.

Live From Bangkok Democracy Monument - Click here for another funny movie.

[N13deg45'24.1" E100deg30'06.8"]
I'm going to try to tag as much as possible with GPS coordinates. Its totally Web 3.0

After a few days around Bangkok, we headed North on May 5th, taking a bus during the day. Bangkok is a little intense - its sort of a machine for extracting money from tourists. Oh yeah, I'd like to give a shout out to Toby and Gareth for giving us a tour around the seedier areas of Bangkok on our final night there. I never thought I'd see a Thai Elvis impersonator, as well as other things I can't discuss around a dinner table.

There's a ton of pictures we took before we left from the Wats around Bangkok and other stuff, here's a few that I really liked:

Kao San Road Day/Night



Golden Mount


Palace Demons


Wall Murals from inside the Grand Palace

In this first picture we see two gods fighting, with the losing god protecting his people by leading them into his mouth, which is probably safe.

Some of the murals were chronological. Here's the same god later releasing the people by cutting open his stomach, which we can all agree is pretty badass.
The bus ride up to Chiang Mai was about 9 hours long, but it was more comfortable than any ride I've taking in Canada. And the road quality was suprisingly good too, unlike my expectations! I geuss I could chalk that up to the fact that there is no winter in Thailand, so the expanding and contracting doesn't destroy asphalt.

Part of what I like to do as part of my touring is cultural tourism. Not just seeing sights, but actually trying to determine what is the same/different about other cultures. So far, there seem to be certain universalities (getting drunk and meeting people/roads/graffiti/shitty bus or airplane food) but the differences are really fascinating. For example, in Thai architecture there seems to be no difference between "outside" and "inside". There really doesn't need to be anything more than a roof to keep rain out. I'm still finding this pretty alien. Motorcycles are everywhere too, unlike the traditional SUVs we're used to here. However, there seems to be no environmental standards since they all spew clouds of black smoke.

I learned a little bit about Thai Humour on the Bus. Taylor, the snob over my shoulder, says "They don't have any." but I think he's just too sophisticated. Although the bus mostly played cheesy karaoke videos on the way up (I taped one with my camera), it played an action movie named The Bodyguard 2 and a wierd game/entertainment show called Ching Roi Ching Lan by Work Point Entertainment. The game show played first, with a pretty original format. It would have two hosts, and would start with a bunch of sketch comedy. Then, they would bring on contestants, who would get bet on the comedians who just performed in the sketches on certain challenges. One challenge, for example, was to kick a bunch of balloons filled with flour, which was demonstrated by some Muay Thai champion. This was pretty hilarious, from the slapstick sense. Thai humour seems to be incredibly low brow, with pain, cross-dressing, mistakes made while on drugs. Also, in the game show they seemed to have some wierd fetishization with being covered with flour, which happened continuously. Next, The Bodyguard 2 played, an incredibly low-budge piece of work. The humour here I found interesting in that the worst things seemed to happen to figures of authority, unlike what you'd find in Western Humour. The also would throw frustrating slapstick moments which would halt right in the middle of the action. I found this pretty funny because it was so awkward, but I imagine Thais would be used to this sort of thing. Sure enough, at the end of the movie a rocket launcher exploded a crate next to the leading lady and she got covered with flour. WEIRD.

We're staying at a place called Gap's guest house, which is pretty awesome. I was trying to take pictures of the jungle-like interior (interior being a loose term) but the rain brings all sort of diffuse light into the camera, so I might have to wait until a non-rainy day. Supposedly this is the start of monsoon season.

Coming up in the next few days.
I'm going on a day trip with Chiang Mai Rock Climbing, doing some top roping and rapelling. Taylor will be taking a cooking class.

Wake up, start sweating

You get used to it. Actually I can't really say that, since we've only been here a day or two. But at least I can SEE us getting used to it, sometime, hopefully, very very soon. No sunscreen for me today. Sorry mom, but suntans are like status symbols here. It's unbelievable. I'm convinced that half the stuff people try with us is because of my total whiteness.

Dustin and I figure that the best way to do this trip is get up early, see all we can see before 1pm(ish), then grab lunch and a beer before taking a siesta. Many of the locals seem to head for cooler climates around then too. When in Rome eh? It was nice though, we covered alot of ground before 10:30 this morning, which was nice. Alot cooler, a bit of rain, and far fewer farangs with cameras like ourselves.

Speaking of covering ground, though I hate to use that expression because it suggests that its our job to take in as many sights as possible, we really did see alot today. Let me tell you man, the Thais REDEFINE ornate. Every corner we round outdoes the last, its pretty off the wall. And totally overkill too, I mean even the stuff you can't see looks like it took some mosaic artist ten years to complete. Its pretty sweet that we can just take off from our guesthouse with no particular direction, and find our way around town via a series of increasingly sketchy alleys. Ah, that's a bit of a lie, alot of them are pretty tame.

We're starting to learn our way our of tight situations with scam artists...yes artists, they're veritable Michaelangelos too...but unfortunately learning for us means learning the hard way. We fell, or more like were pushed, into paying money for bird seed today, at some ridiculous price. We're embarassed to admit it. Some woman with no teeth, and another claiming to be pregnant literally threw bird seed at us and demanded we pay for it. Anyways, to deal with touts and the like we started out saying 'No thank you' and then proceeding to explain why we didn't want their services (ya, we're asking for it) but that's been whittled down in a short two days to 'No', and I'm sure in another few days, to 'Piss off'. I even said 'mai' (no) to a dog that came to beg while we were eating. Almost as bad as the tuk tuk drivers.

We'd like to post a video we took of the traffic around the Democracy monument today, but Youtube is banned in Thailand. I'm sure Dustin will figure a way around it. I figure in the next week or so the novelty of a blog will begin to wear, and posts will become more and more sparse as things that are better tasting take up our time. So don't be offended. But for now I'm cool with sitting here in an air conditioned cafe. Oh and Eve, check your mail silly girl!!

Pictures...soon? Having troubles here.

Correction

Sorry. Not Christophe, or Kristoff, but Krzysztof. Sue us.