The ride from Rai Lay to KL was a long one. We started by taking an hour boat ride, which led us to a three or four hour mini bus ride. This led us to a town called Hat Yai, Thailand, where we waited four hours with a new German friend for our VIP bus to arrive to take us the remaining 12 hours to KL. We got to KL at five in the morning. Fortunately, our friend already had a place to stay so we were able to leave our bags at his place while we looked for a place. We were searching for what felt like an eternity before we finally landed on a place. It was 9:30 am when we finally checked in to a hotel. I fell on the bed and slept for half an hour exactly in the position I had fallen before I could muster the energy to go the 3 blocks to get our packs. When I finally was able to get up and face the hot day and the walking we would inevitably have to do, we went to the Ragea Mansion, which is where our packs were. On the way, we stopped for some cheap local food. We got a decent portion of food for less than $2 total, and getting a little fuel made all the difference in the world. We got our bags and returned to our hotel, which was right in the heart of Chinatown, and didn't reemerge for about four more hours. I don't know how Dustin stayed awake reading the whole time, but I was out like a light as soon as the A.C. came on and didn't wake up until I was a bit caught up on sleep. We went out to eat and explore the city a little bit using a crappy map we had picked up from on of the hotels when we were trying to find a place to stay. We saw a museum that I could not tell you what was in it, but it was air conditioned, so that was all that mattered. KL is HOT, if you hadn't gathered that already. We saw a giant field with a giant flagpole looming over it.
We didn't see much that first day because it was hot and we were tired. We went in after dinner for another break and went back out to the night market in Chinatown after dark. Booth after booth was selling "authentic" designer handbags, shoes, watches, wallets, underwear, etc. We didn't get much any of that except a watch for Dustin, b ut once we were able to find some stuff for sale that wasn't designer, we got some pretty cool souvenirs.
Our hotel room in KL was really dark with no windows and the only sliver of light coming from underneath the door. Because of adapting to a weird sleep schedule from the bus ride and not being woken up by the sun shine in the morning, we slept until 11 or 12 every days that we were there. Over the course of the few days we were there, we saw KL's twin towers in the Financial district, a little botanical gardens 'with tons of orchids and habiscus (sp?) plants, several museums, the lookout tower (which we didn't go up in) and a ton of tourist attractions that only cost us the energy it took to walk there in the heat. We would eat dinner at around 6 and go in to our hotel - where there was free internet and a really nice cafe restaurant - and read or chill out until it got dark and cool enough to go explore. It was raining buckets and thundering hard with crazy bolts of lightning for three of the four days we were there, so we tool vull advantage of the nice sheltered yet open air cafe there.
KL had a lot of homeless people. I mean more than I have seen in any other major city I have ever been to. They were everywhere. In American cities, as far as I have noticed, there may be a lot of homeless people and maybe they have some mental disorders or addictions that got them where they are but generally I haven't ever noticed too much else. In KL, as well as in many of the other major Asian cities we have been to, 90% of the people begging for money or sleeping on the street have some kind of visible physical disability, whether it be missing hands, deformed feet, hunched back, disfigured legs, etc. I definitely got the impression that there was no system put in place to help people like this with severe disabilities that were unable to work or feed themselves in any way other than begging, and if there was, maybe it was very expensive to use and most of the people in this condition would not have been able to afford it.
Overall, we had a good time in KL. It wasn't our favorite place, but that is no fault of the city itself. We just prefer smaller towns and a better landscape than a skyline filled with skyscrapers. When we woke up at 11 on our fourth day in KL, we talked about whether we should go to Melaka that day or stay in KL one more day. We had pretty much exhausted the main tourist attractions and so we made a spur of the moment decision to move on to Melaka. We walked to the metro station, took about half an hour to get past the confusion of two people who never use a metro, and took it to the bus station. There were buses leaving for Melaka every hour. We got there at 2:25 and the bus was leaving at 2:30, so we were just in time and it was an easy, short ride there without a hitch!
Catch the next post to read about Melaka, one of our favorite towns so far!
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Phuket, Kho Phi Phi, and Rai Lay, a few of the best islands EVER!
PHUKET --
Since Phuket was the first island we visited, I will start there. I believe I mentioned in the last post that Phuket is pronounced like "Poo-Ket", but I think it might be best to clarify again for obvious reasons. The first night we arrived in Phuket it was after dark and we were dropped off away from the main tourist area, in a more local part of the island. Fortunately, we were able to find super cheap internet to keep us occupied and a cheap hotel with a shared bathroom. This place didn't have the spotlessly clean and stylish feel that our hotel had had in Ranong. It was a bit dirty, but you get what you pay for, and we would rather have a cheap crappy room sometimes, for the sake of our budget, than the Ritz Carlton. The hotel had a book exchange where we were able to find a fairly recent (2009) copy of the Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Lonely Planet, which we didn't need for a few weeks after we got it, but now that we are in Malaysia we are finding it extremely useful.
The next morning we got up, checked out, and walked down the road to catch a bus to Patong, the nice, touristic section of Phuket located right next to the beach. We expected to pay about 100 Baht for a local public bus from where we were, but instead we were approached by a minibus. The driver said he knew a hotel we could stay at and he would take us there for 50 Baht total. We made a deal with him that this was fine, but if we didn't like the place he showed us, we were going to walk away. He agreed, and just as we had expected, the place he showed us was less than desirable. The rooms looked like they had been decorated by a 13 year old girl and her 7 year old sister, with ridiculous colored walls and some posters in each of the rooms that were just silly. Not to mention the overpowering foul odor of the entire place that made catching a full breath a challenge. We politely declined and started walking on our way. The reason that the driver had taken us to Patong for so cheap was because often if drivers take tourists directly to a hotel and the tourists stay there, the driver gets a commission or gas tokens. Our driver was disappointed that we didn't like his first choice, so as we walked down the street, he repeatedly pulled his van up 20 feet in front of us and begged us to let him show us another place. We told him no thank you and, as we were more patient than he was persistent, he gave up after a few minutes and went his own way. We were in high spirits, having successfully gotten where we wanted to go for cheaper than we expected, and we spent the next 20 minutes walking around looking for a cheap guesthouse that didn't have a smell to it. Finally, we came across the Seahorse Mansion. The receptionist was super friendly and, having a British husband and a job at a British hospital that she had temporarily taken leave of, she spoke clear English and there was almost no communication barrier. She showed us our room and we couldn't believe what we got for the price. The room was pristine, as far as cleanliness, there was a tv, air con, balcony, hot water, a fridge, and a safe. All the amenities we always look for in hotels, but never get all at once, with the exception of when my mom was with us. Besides being so wonderful, the hotel was the cheapest we had come across yet so we agreed to stay there.
Once we had a hotel, we set out to find some lunch. Dustin had a chicken kebab (his favorite) and I had corn on the cob (not my favorite). We checked out the beach and explored the overpriced tourist market. As cool as some of the clothes I saw were, Dustin doesn't like to shop and I didn't want to bore him to death, so even if I could have afforded the stuff I wanted, I would have had to leave Dustin somewhere to go pick it out. We spent the rest of the day laying on the beach and lounging in our icy cold air conditioned room. That night, while we were seeing what the nightlife was like, we stumbled upon a guy selling tickets and promoting a Muai Thai boxing fight the next night. The tickets, although heavily discounted, put us over budget for the next day before we even got a meal, so we quickly came to the realization that if there was ever a place to save money, Phuket was not it. Most of the bars also had a pretty high entrance fee, so we limited our evenings to seeing what was going on from the outside and not drinking anything but water.
The next day we spent at the beach again. However, the previous night there had been an outdoor base jumping/kayaking/mountain climbing race on tv just before we went to bed. Dustin was watching this so intently and got so excited about it that he didn't sleep hardly at all that night, so the next day was a bit wasted. We went to the beach for a bit, which was beautiful if you were looking out on the ocean, but all the trash scattered on the beach and in the water was hard to ignore. Every time we tried to swim, one of us would step in a plastic bag or encounter some large piece of trash that made us not want to swim there so much. When we got tired and hot on the beach we went back to the hotel and took a 4 hour nap. Much too long to be sleeping in the day time I think. By the time we got up, we had just enough time to get a bite to eat before going to see the fight. Street vendors and 7/11 were our caterers all day that day because of the pricey tickets and our reluctance to go any farther over budget than necessary. The guy who sold us our tickets said we would be picked up by a bus and taken to the arena before the fight and we waited and waited for the bus, but it never came. Finally, we asked the receptionist what she thought and she said "oh the bus not coming. You can walk, it's just five minutes!" That information would have been a little more useful YESTERDAY! So we walked quickly to the arena and got our seats about 15 minutes before the fight started. We lucked out with this because the ushers didn't know where the seats were that we had tickets for and, even though our tickets were bottom of the barrel stadium tickets, due to the usher's mistake we got to sit ringside!
The fight itself started out... strange. We were looking at the roster and the weight classes were like 60, 85, 100, 125, 135, 140, 145. We thought wow, 145 kgs? That's gonna be some big dudes! We quickly realized, however, upon the beginning of the first round, as two children stepped into the ring, that the weight classes were in pounds, not kg. Yes, that's right. We got to watch 60 lb. Thai kids knee each other in the ribs for 5 rounds. As the weight classes increased, the fights got better. The best fight was a Russian guy against an Australian guy in the 145 lb. class. It ended with a KO in maybe the 3rd or 4th round. The guy that got knocked out lied there in the ring on his back for at least a full two minutes before showing any signs of being capable of getting up. It was a bit scary, but previous to the KO, the fight seemed really evenly matched, so we were surprised when it ended the way it did. There were a couple fights, like one with a Thai girl against a Swedish girl, that got called because the opponents were just too unevenly matched as far as skill level and strength. About 10 minutes after we arrived at the stadium, a torrential downpour started outside and lasted until long after we had gone to bed. This made the walk back a little interesting as the streets were flooded and we had to walk past a large section of tile, instead of cement sidewalk that made remaining upright a difficult challenge.
The next day, although Phuket was really cool overall, we had had enough of the terribly high prices and dirty beach and so we hopped on a boat to Kho Phi Phi!
KHO PHI PHI--
We arrived in Kho Phi Phi (pronounced CO-PEE-PEE) in the early afternoon at about 1. The first place we saw was a travel agency with just a guy and his little girl there. We asked about ticket prices to go to Rai Lay Beach in a couple of days. He was eating the most enourmous portion of take out pad Thai I have ever seen at this point, so we also asked him to direct us to where he bought it. He was a really friendly guy and gave us a great first impression of the island.We had heard that this place was going to be expensive as well, especially for hotel and even more so if we hoped to have an air conditioned room. We got off the boat with not much hope of finding a cheap place, but determined to find the cheapest. We found this one place called the Bung House (funny name) that was advertising rooms for 700 Baht. The downstairs was a pool club and we spent a couple minutes looking for someone to show us the room before we gave up. As we were leaving, a lady came up to us and asked us if we needed a room. We said yes and she went to get the owner, Ali, who showed us the room. The room was ok, with air con, a fridge, and hot water and the cheapest rate we had heard of on the island. Generally, rooms can be cheap if you just want a fan, but air con can run you an extra $15. We agreed to take the room, and soon found out that Ali was quite the chatterbox. He had some kind of infection in his eye that, combined with his slow, distracted speech, gave him the appearance of being high as a kite. In the first few minutes, he told us he was Muslim and that he owed a restaurant and a bar on the island. He told us that at this bar, sometimes people get way too drunk and one time there was a girl that was running around naked and found a "boyfriend" on the dance floor. Some of the things Ali said about this girl are too inappropriate for this blog. Let's just say he was not her biggest fan. He told us he has 15 western promoters for his bar, every single one of which he hates.
With the hotel matter settled, we decided to go check out the beach. The beach, was not really what we expected. The tide was out and the water was so low that to put our feet in anything besides mud, we would have had to walk out at least 200 m. So after establishing that not much beaching would be done for a few hours at least, we walked around the island, which was very small, for a few hours to see what there was to do. We discovered a few cheap (enough) local restaurants and cooled off in about 4 different 7/11s. Although we have our bathing suits on, we never did get wet and walked around the island until dinner time. Just when we had started looking for a restaurant and hoping to find snorkeling tickets for the following day, we ran into Ali. Throughout our stay in the island, this happened several times. Dude was everywhere. We asked him where we should book our tour and where is good for dinner. He said, "Oh hold on! Don't move!" and disappeared for a few minutes. Coming back a little while later, out of breath and holding a roll of tape and some papers, he said "Ok, follow me," and we were off. We followed him to a tour agency that was selling snorkelling tours but the tours were all for lke 50 or more people, and we didn't want to be running into people in the water, so we decided we would book something else on our own after dinner. As we had been talking to the tour agent, Ali had been messing with his tape and papers, trying to hang an add for his hotel on the post nearby. We found this particularly hilarious, although we didn't show it at the time, because, first of all, it was a piece of printer paper with rainbow colored print on it that said "Bung House, 700 Baht." That was it. It was on the other side of the island from where we were, but the ad didn't say where or give any contact information. The second thing that was funny was that he had put rolled tape behind the poster and it looked good, but he wasn't satisfied that the sign would stay up, so he put tape on the corners of it, on the outside where everyone could see. It was the worst looking ad ever. Dustin tried to offer him some helpful suggestions without seeming critical, but I don't think they got through becuase twice more on the way to the restaurant Ali was taking us to, he hung his sign the same way in different places.
The name of the restaurant we went to was Papaya. Ali also owned hthis restaurant and gave us a discount on anything curry with rice, knocking off 30% of the price. The food was delicious and the portions were ridiculously huge. We definitely felt like we got our money's worth and were strating to feel like staying at the crappy old Bung House may not have been such a bad idea.
After dinner, we passed a place that did scuba diving and went in to see if they could take us snorkeling. I could dive because I was at the tail end of my second ear infection and the people working at the shop told me that if I were to dive, I would do so much damage that flying would be inpossible for several weeks. We checked out prices still and the shop emloyee told us, when we asked if there was any chance of a discount if Dustin dove and I snorkelled, that is was not possible because of a "shop agreement" on the island that no business on the island would give any discounts to any costomers because it would give them an unfair advantage over other businesses. This shop agreement was just blatant price fixing in order to jack up the prices of everything because it's an island and there is nothing tourists can do except pay high prices for stuff and activities, or go somewhere else. That information was a little frustrating, and made us feel like we were being cheated out of some money by the vendors, retaurants, and shops, since they weren't actually having to actively compete against each other for our business because they were all selling the exact same product for the exact same price. Anyway, we fount a tur agent that was selling tours that were no cheaper than anyone else's, but only took 25 people out at a time, so we didn't have to worry about crowds. We had been warned by the folks that the scuba diving place to make sure the boats were small because just the week before they had seen a snorkelling boat drop off 200 chinese people to snorkel and the water turned florescent orange from all their life vests.
Like everything else, alcohol on Phi Phi was really expensive (by Southeast Asian standards), especially if you drink at the bars, but we had heard Phi Phi has an awesome nightlife. Ali offered us a discount on a drink for staying at his hotel, but we didn't want to take too much advantage of him, so we decided to let 7/11 provide most of our drinks for the evening. We headed to the beach then where all the bars are and it was totally a different place than it had been during the day. Every bar had its name outlined in christmas lights and there was loud music blasting from every speaker. Every bar also had a huge platform, on whice 1 to 5 guys were performing fire shows with flaming batons and fireballs on chains. The tide was in and only about 3 feet from the platforms of the bars and to denote where the bar ended and the beach/ocean started, there were huge torches buried up to the flame in sand! For a while, all the bars were busy, but by the end of the night, everyone on the beach was at the Slinky Bar, the one owned by Ali. Some of the surrounding bars were trying to compete by offering a free whiskey shot to anyone who participated in the flaming jump rope on stage. There were a few people doing it, but the Slinky Bar's music was too loud, it's light was too bright, and the party happening on the dance floor was too crazy for the other bars to stand up next to. At one point during the evening, I went to the bathroom, which cost 10 Baht to use. I told the guy in charge of the bathroom a little white lie, that I had already spent a lot of money at the slinky bar and I really just wanted to pee. When I had gotten a free trip to the toilet and was coming back to my seat, I ran into Ali, who said "Hey, what do you want to drink? I discount for you, remember?" We bargained a little for the amount of the dicount and I convinced him to give us a bucket, which usually costs 600 baht, for 200 baht. He gave me a wink and a smile and disappeared to go get the drink, telling me he would bring it to Dustin and I on the dance floor. I didn't really care about the drink, and I was pretty sure we wouldn't see him again that night and that he was not actually going to discount it that heavily for us and actually deliver it. However, one song later, here comes Ali bumbling out to the dance floor with a bucket in his hand saying "ok, here you go, you pay with your room." We were pretty pumped.
The next day we got up around 8 to go snorkelling. We went downstairs to drop our key off with Ali so we didn't accidentally lose it in the water or something, and he was sleeping on a hard, thin matt on the floor next to one of the pool tables. He seemed very confused why we would be dropping the key off at the desk, and we were confused why he didn't want it, as every other hotel has requested that we drop off the key at the desk before we leave the hotel. We went on our way towards the tour agency that we had booked through and waited for the guy to come get us. We were the first ones he came to pick up and this meant we had to follow him on foot around the whole isalnd as he picked up people from almost every other tour agency there. Finally, after 30 minutes of walking, we ended up at a resort-looking place with a buffet spread. We were told we had 20 minutes to eat. The buffet didn't look great, but it didn't look horrible, and who's going to pass up a free breakfast if they can help it? I just stuck to rice, and a little bit later, we were getting in our boat.
The actualy snorkelling wasn't too great. Most of the reefs we went to were just gigantic piles of broken and dead coral with a few fish floating around here and there. It was still fun because the water felt nice and the few fish we saw were cool, but it was nothing like what we were hoping for. At one point, though we stopped for lunch on a beach and when we were done eating, Dustin and I pul our masks and finns on and just looked around by the shore and around the boat. It was amazing. We saw a school of probably 10,000 little shiny fish swimming around the boat. The coolest part was if you weren't looking at them from under water, you had no idea they were there. It was really impressive. Even better than that, though, was the group of about 6 baracudas that was there trying to get a snack out of the multitude of little glittering friends. They didn't want to get overly close to us, but they didn't seem particularly nervous amout us either. I was able to get within a foot or two of the baracudas and get in the middle of the huge school of fish. The tour was lame too because there were about 3 of the 10 stops listed, like a cave and a couple other things that the "stop" was literally just puling up next to it, shutting the boat's motor off for 5 seconds, and moving on. The last beach we stopped at before going back to Phi Phi was really pretty. However, A big booze cruise boat had pulled up at the same time as us. These 6 particularly annoying British folks, 5 guys and a girl got off the boat. The girl has ridiculously big fake boobies that seriously looked like someone had stuffed a could of volleyballs in her chest. She was laughing so loud at stupid, no funny things, trying to get attention from her group of guys. The most obnoxious of her followers was wearing a full suit of clothes, acting absurd, flopping in the water and walking around the beach with a huge blue starfish on his head that may have been dead or alive. At one point he found a sea cucumber, which keep in mind os a living animal, and proceeded to do some very inappropriate things with it, eventually killing it by somehow ripping it in half and turning it inside out. It was horrible and disgusting and annoying to watch. That was the only negative experience of the day though. On the way back to Phi Phi from there, a British guy we hd met on our boat apologized on their half and said it was always really embarassing to see other British people acting like that, misrepresenting their country. I have to admit, if I saw Americans there acting like that in public, I would be pissed that they were representing our country that way, so I understood where he was coming from. We kept talking to him and his German friend for the rest of the boat ride and when we got back, we met them at Papaya for dinner and hung out with them for a bit. The British guy, David was kind of a funny guy. He had a huge apetite and seemed somehow so innocent that he reminded me of a 14 year old boy. He was very enjoyable company while we were hanging out with him and his German friend was quite agreeable as well.
That night we decided not to drink, but still to go to the bar to watch the party. There was a giant pole, probably 15 feet high, with a small platform on top that drunk people were constantly climbing up on and dancing. This made us so nervous, and Ali said that sometimes, tourists get up there and break their necks. He said this so casually that it made me really uncomfortable.
The next day we got up for checkout so we coud go to Rai Lay beach that day. When I was downstairs with our bags and Ali waiting for Dustin to do a final check to make sure nothing was left in the room, Ali started talking to me. He told me that since I had a boyfriend that I was alright, but that he hates girls that come here alone or with other girls. He talked to me like this until Dustin came down and then still for another 5 minutes, all about how much he hates women. He told us then that his father is a very rich Pakistani man and that he had a house in Pakistan and in India. He gave us his website for a new guesthouse he was going to open and told us to keep in touch. Yeah right, psycho.
We still had a few hours between check out and pick up, so we decided to check out the view point of the island, which was supposed to be really beautiful. It was a pretty strenuous hike up about a million stairs, but we got some really nice pictures that we're excited to share with everyone.
We put Kho Phi Phi in our rear view and got on a boat to go to Rai Lay beach!!
RAI LAY --
The ride to Rai Lay was a short one on a long tail boat. When we got there, the tide was out and instead of letting us out on a pier or something reasonable like that, they just stopped the boat where the water was about knee deep and told us to get off. There was a very slippery, hard to see walk way to the island and the rocks on either side of it were sharp. We were barefoot and weighted down with our packs. Dustin was unfortunate enough to wipe out, banging his ankle, knee, hip, and elbow on the wet pavement. I'm sure he was not the first or the last to wipe out with all their stuff on and get a few bumps and bruises, and you would really think they would have something to bring tourists safely up to the island. Once we had gotten there, we set off to find the cheapest hotel possible. We ended up settling on a fan-cooled bungalow resort for just over $13 per night, including a private bathroom and hammock on the porch. There was an attached restaurant boasting 60 baht for any dish on the menu so, besides the endless stairs we had to walk up to actually get to the place, it was really convenient once we were there.
Once we had our hotel, we had no plans but we had heard the beach on the other side of the island, a ten minute walk from our hotel was a great place to watch the sunset.We showed up there about 30 minutes before sunset and there was a big dark cloud in front of the sun, so we were like "eh, they can't all be great ones." But we were pleasantly surprised when the sun sank just below the clouds and the sky lit up all different shades of orange and red. It was one of the most breath taking sunsets I have seen. It had been a long day but we hadn't spent much money, so we ordered a couple of expensive beers from the bar and got to watch an amazing sunset over crystal clear blue waters from a white sand beach while sipping some ice cold beer. If there is any way to start the summer, I would say that's it. We called it an early night after that and ate some dinner at the hotel restaurant before turning in and reading for a few hours in bed. The food at the restaurant was so delicious for the price. We were trying to eat on the cheap to balance out the price of the beers so we both got some 50 baht soup, expecting it not to be much and to be hungry later. The base of the soup, though was thick and creamy and took on the flavor of whatever was in it (tomato for me, mushroom for Dustin). We also got some yummy naan bread to dip in our soup. a filling and delicious meal for $2 a piece? I'll take it.
The next day we decided to just make it a beach day. We took our books to the beach. I was reading Great Expectations and Dustin was reading a collections of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle books. It was a nice relaxing day until the sun got on the wrong side of us and there was no more shade, at which point we went back to the hotel for some food and further relaxing. It was an uneventful day, but even when the distance isn't that far, travel days always wear us out, so it was nice to have the following day to chill. The following day, we got up late and went to a rock climbing school to sign up for some afternoon rock climbing. The guide was a Thai guy but from being outside so much his skin was black and he had huge dread locks. He looked more Jamaican in his rasta colors and his attitude than he did Thai. The climbing was really fun though. We climbed four routes each and it kicked our butts! When the climb started it was just us and another couple with their guide. The girl wasn't a very good climber, even for a beginner, and she made me so glad that we got the guide that we did. Her guide was yelling at her and telling her where to put her hands and feet, which is helpful and what they are supposed to do, but if she didn't immediately see where he was talking about, he got impatient really fast. When our guide gave me instructions sometimes it would take me a minute to see but he never raised his voice or seemed like he wasn't having fun. He acted like he was having just as much fun as we were. Sometimes you luck out. The hardest route we climbed was 6a by the French system, which is about V-10, for you climbing buffs reading this. The scale goes from V-5, which is like a steep hill, to V-15, which is only for the extremely skilled elite climbers. This route was probably the hardest I have ever climbed and I relied pretty heavily on the guide's instructions. But finishing something so challenging like that is the most satisfying thing in the world and, even though we didn't climb as long as we expected, we both left satisfied and feeling like we had gotten our money's worth.
That night, we went to see one Thai boxing fight at a bar that only cost the price of a beer to watch. The fight was lame, but we met some really cool Canadian girls that we hung out with for the rest of the night. The girl new the DJ at one of the bars we went to later and he got her a free bucket. She split it with her friend, Dustin and I, which was really nice. Then later at the same bar, the DJ announced that the first girls on the dance floor got a free bucket so the four of us got to split another one. That was a late night, but one of the most fun.
The day after that, Dustin and I (more so Dustin) were feeling the effects of the buckets the previous night. There was an international climbing competition that day so we chilled on the beach watching some of the best climbers we have ever seen besides on YouTube climbing some really tough routes. The strength these guys (and girls) have to have blows my mind. Dustin and I were exhausted after 4 routes that were easy compared to some that these guys were climbing. We met some Canadians that, about 2/3 of the way through the day had climbed 29 routes between them. That is a lot. That night after the competition had come to an end and the sun was down, there was an international fire show contest. We had left the rock climbing competition early to go swimming at the beach and we set our blanket right up against where people would be watching from. We had great spots to watch the show and when it started, we were really excited. However, two ladies with like 6 toddlers sat right next to us and these kids stood directly in our line of vision for the first half hour of the show. Kids that I know are cool. Other kids are annoying. So when the mom or caretaker or whatever she was with all these kids finally realized her kids were annoying and moved to another spot, one of the fire show competitors that had already gone sat directly in front of us! When we put our blanket down, we didn't think there would be room for anyone to sit between us and the rope, but these folks figured out how to squeeze in there! But, despite the annoying fellow spectators, the show was awesome. Anything you can think of to set on fire and spin around or throw in the air was being set on fire and spun and thrown. My favorite in the first round was a girl with a flaming hula hoop with really cool music. There was also a guy dressed like Michael Jackson that swallowed fire that was pretty cool. The best show was in the finals, when a guy set a ring of fire around himself in the sand. He got burned really badly though and I think he might have lost points for it because he got third. It was a really cool evening entertainment and I'm not sure about the quality of the pictures we took, but these people had a lot of skill and a lot of balls.
The next day there was another climbing competition but it was deep water soloing and we would have had to pay for a boat out to the venue, so we decided to go ahead and move on and begin our journey into Malaysia!
Ready about our stay in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia in the next post, which will be coming out shortly. Until then, facebook Dustin Lowry or Mariah Mahlendorf or email d.lowry11@gmail.com or mm1293@ship.edu
Since Phuket was the first island we visited, I will start there. I believe I mentioned in the last post that Phuket is pronounced like "Poo-Ket", but I think it might be best to clarify again for obvious reasons. The first night we arrived in Phuket it was after dark and we were dropped off away from the main tourist area, in a more local part of the island. Fortunately, we were able to find super cheap internet to keep us occupied and a cheap hotel with a shared bathroom. This place didn't have the spotlessly clean and stylish feel that our hotel had had in Ranong. It was a bit dirty, but you get what you pay for, and we would rather have a cheap crappy room sometimes, for the sake of our budget, than the Ritz Carlton. The hotel had a book exchange where we were able to find a fairly recent (2009) copy of the Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Lonely Planet, which we didn't need for a few weeks after we got it, but now that we are in Malaysia we are finding it extremely useful.
The next morning we got up, checked out, and walked down the road to catch a bus to Patong, the nice, touristic section of Phuket located right next to the beach. We expected to pay about 100 Baht for a local public bus from where we were, but instead we were approached by a minibus. The driver said he knew a hotel we could stay at and he would take us there for 50 Baht total. We made a deal with him that this was fine, but if we didn't like the place he showed us, we were going to walk away. He agreed, and just as we had expected, the place he showed us was less than desirable. The rooms looked like they had been decorated by a 13 year old girl and her 7 year old sister, with ridiculous colored walls and some posters in each of the rooms that were just silly. Not to mention the overpowering foul odor of the entire place that made catching a full breath a challenge. We politely declined and started walking on our way. The reason that the driver had taken us to Patong for so cheap was because often if drivers take tourists directly to a hotel and the tourists stay there, the driver gets a commission or gas tokens. Our driver was disappointed that we didn't like his first choice, so as we walked down the street, he repeatedly pulled his van up 20 feet in front of us and begged us to let him show us another place. We told him no thank you and, as we were more patient than he was persistent, he gave up after a few minutes and went his own way. We were in high spirits, having successfully gotten where we wanted to go for cheaper than we expected, and we spent the next 20 minutes walking around looking for a cheap guesthouse that didn't have a smell to it. Finally, we came across the Seahorse Mansion. The receptionist was super friendly and, having a British husband and a job at a British hospital that she had temporarily taken leave of, she spoke clear English and there was almost no communication barrier. She showed us our room and we couldn't believe what we got for the price. The room was pristine, as far as cleanliness, there was a tv, air con, balcony, hot water, a fridge, and a safe. All the amenities we always look for in hotels, but never get all at once, with the exception of when my mom was with us. Besides being so wonderful, the hotel was the cheapest we had come across yet so we agreed to stay there.
Once we had a hotel, we set out to find some lunch. Dustin had a chicken kebab (his favorite) and I had corn on the cob (not my favorite). We checked out the beach and explored the overpriced tourist market. As cool as some of the clothes I saw were, Dustin doesn't like to shop and I didn't want to bore him to death, so even if I could have afforded the stuff I wanted, I would have had to leave Dustin somewhere to go pick it out. We spent the rest of the day laying on the beach and lounging in our icy cold air conditioned room. That night, while we were seeing what the nightlife was like, we stumbled upon a guy selling tickets and promoting a Muai Thai boxing fight the next night. The tickets, although heavily discounted, put us over budget for the next day before we even got a meal, so we quickly came to the realization that if there was ever a place to save money, Phuket was not it. Most of the bars also had a pretty high entrance fee, so we limited our evenings to seeing what was going on from the outside and not drinking anything but water.
The next day we spent at the beach again. However, the previous night there had been an outdoor base jumping/kayaking/mountain climbing race on tv just before we went to bed. Dustin was watching this so intently and got so excited about it that he didn't sleep hardly at all that night, so the next day was a bit wasted. We went to the beach for a bit, which was beautiful if you were looking out on the ocean, but all the trash scattered on the beach and in the water was hard to ignore. Every time we tried to swim, one of us would step in a plastic bag or encounter some large piece of trash that made us not want to swim there so much. When we got tired and hot on the beach we went back to the hotel and took a 4 hour nap. Much too long to be sleeping in the day time I think. By the time we got up, we had just enough time to get a bite to eat before going to see the fight. Street vendors and 7/11 were our caterers all day that day because of the pricey tickets and our reluctance to go any farther over budget than necessary. The guy who sold us our tickets said we would be picked up by a bus and taken to the arena before the fight and we waited and waited for the bus, but it never came. Finally, we asked the receptionist what she thought and she said "oh the bus not coming. You can walk, it's just five minutes!" That information would have been a little more useful YESTERDAY! So we walked quickly to the arena and got our seats about 15 minutes before the fight started. We lucked out with this because the ushers didn't know where the seats were that we had tickets for and, even though our tickets were bottom of the barrel stadium tickets, due to the usher's mistake we got to sit ringside!
The fight itself started out... strange. We were looking at the roster and the weight classes were like 60, 85, 100, 125, 135, 140, 145. We thought wow, 145 kgs? That's gonna be some big dudes! We quickly realized, however, upon the beginning of the first round, as two children stepped into the ring, that the weight classes were in pounds, not kg. Yes, that's right. We got to watch 60 lb. Thai kids knee each other in the ribs for 5 rounds. As the weight classes increased, the fights got better. The best fight was a Russian guy against an Australian guy in the 145 lb. class. It ended with a KO in maybe the 3rd or 4th round. The guy that got knocked out lied there in the ring on his back for at least a full two minutes before showing any signs of being capable of getting up. It was a bit scary, but previous to the KO, the fight seemed really evenly matched, so we were surprised when it ended the way it did. There were a couple fights, like one with a Thai girl against a Swedish girl, that got called because the opponents were just too unevenly matched as far as skill level and strength. About 10 minutes after we arrived at the stadium, a torrential downpour started outside and lasted until long after we had gone to bed. This made the walk back a little interesting as the streets were flooded and we had to walk past a large section of tile, instead of cement sidewalk that made remaining upright a difficult challenge.
The next day, although Phuket was really cool overall, we had had enough of the terribly high prices and dirty beach and so we hopped on a boat to Kho Phi Phi!
KHO PHI PHI--
We arrived in Kho Phi Phi (pronounced CO-PEE-PEE) in the early afternoon at about 1. The first place we saw was a travel agency with just a guy and his little girl there. We asked about ticket prices to go to Rai Lay Beach in a couple of days. He was eating the most enourmous portion of take out pad Thai I have ever seen at this point, so we also asked him to direct us to where he bought it. He was a really friendly guy and gave us a great first impression of the island.We had heard that this place was going to be expensive as well, especially for hotel and even more so if we hoped to have an air conditioned room. We got off the boat with not much hope of finding a cheap place, but determined to find the cheapest. We found this one place called the Bung House (funny name) that was advertising rooms for 700 Baht. The downstairs was a pool club and we spent a couple minutes looking for someone to show us the room before we gave up. As we were leaving, a lady came up to us and asked us if we needed a room. We said yes and she went to get the owner, Ali, who showed us the room. The room was ok, with air con, a fridge, and hot water and the cheapest rate we had heard of on the island. Generally, rooms can be cheap if you just want a fan, but air con can run you an extra $15. We agreed to take the room, and soon found out that Ali was quite the chatterbox. He had some kind of infection in his eye that, combined with his slow, distracted speech, gave him the appearance of being high as a kite. In the first few minutes, he told us he was Muslim and that he owed a restaurant and a bar on the island. He told us that at this bar, sometimes people get way too drunk and one time there was a girl that was running around naked and found a "boyfriend" on the dance floor. Some of the things Ali said about this girl are too inappropriate for this blog. Let's just say he was not her biggest fan. He told us he has 15 western promoters for his bar, every single one of which he hates.
With the hotel matter settled, we decided to go check out the beach. The beach, was not really what we expected. The tide was out and the water was so low that to put our feet in anything besides mud, we would have had to walk out at least 200 m. So after establishing that not much beaching would be done for a few hours at least, we walked around the island, which was very small, for a few hours to see what there was to do. We discovered a few cheap (enough) local restaurants and cooled off in about 4 different 7/11s. Although we have our bathing suits on, we never did get wet and walked around the island until dinner time. Just when we had started looking for a restaurant and hoping to find snorkeling tickets for the following day, we ran into Ali. Throughout our stay in the island, this happened several times. Dude was everywhere. We asked him where we should book our tour and where is good for dinner. He said, "Oh hold on! Don't move!" and disappeared for a few minutes. Coming back a little while later, out of breath and holding a roll of tape and some papers, he said "Ok, follow me," and we were off. We followed him to a tour agency that was selling snorkelling tours but the tours were all for lke 50 or more people, and we didn't want to be running into people in the water, so we decided we would book something else on our own after dinner. As we had been talking to the tour agent, Ali had been messing with his tape and papers, trying to hang an add for his hotel on the post nearby. We found this particularly hilarious, although we didn't show it at the time, because, first of all, it was a piece of printer paper with rainbow colored print on it that said "Bung House, 700 Baht." That was it. It was on the other side of the island from where we were, but the ad didn't say where or give any contact information. The second thing that was funny was that he had put rolled tape behind the poster and it looked good, but he wasn't satisfied that the sign would stay up, so he put tape on the corners of it, on the outside where everyone could see. It was the worst looking ad ever. Dustin tried to offer him some helpful suggestions without seeming critical, but I don't think they got through becuase twice more on the way to the restaurant Ali was taking us to, he hung his sign the same way in different places.
The name of the restaurant we went to was Papaya. Ali also owned hthis restaurant and gave us a discount on anything curry with rice, knocking off 30% of the price. The food was delicious and the portions were ridiculously huge. We definitely felt like we got our money's worth and were strating to feel like staying at the crappy old Bung House may not have been such a bad idea.
After dinner, we passed a place that did scuba diving and went in to see if they could take us snorkeling. I could dive because I was at the tail end of my second ear infection and the people working at the shop told me that if I were to dive, I would do so much damage that flying would be inpossible for several weeks. We checked out prices still and the shop emloyee told us, when we asked if there was any chance of a discount if Dustin dove and I snorkelled, that is was not possible because of a "shop agreement" on the island that no business on the island would give any discounts to any costomers because it would give them an unfair advantage over other businesses. This shop agreement was just blatant price fixing in order to jack up the prices of everything because it's an island and there is nothing tourists can do except pay high prices for stuff and activities, or go somewhere else. That information was a little frustrating, and made us feel like we were being cheated out of some money by the vendors, retaurants, and shops, since they weren't actually having to actively compete against each other for our business because they were all selling the exact same product for the exact same price. Anyway, we fount a tur agent that was selling tours that were no cheaper than anyone else's, but only took 25 people out at a time, so we didn't have to worry about crowds. We had been warned by the folks that the scuba diving place to make sure the boats were small because just the week before they had seen a snorkelling boat drop off 200 chinese people to snorkel and the water turned florescent orange from all their life vests.
Like everything else, alcohol on Phi Phi was really expensive (by Southeast Asian standards), especially if you drink at the bars, but we had heard Phi Phi has an awesome nightlife. Ali offered us a discount on a drink for staying at his hotel, but we didn't want to take too much advantage of him, so we decided to let 7/11 provide most of our drinks for the evening. We headed to the beach then where all the bars are and it was totally a different place than it had been during the day. Every bar had its name outlined in christmas lights and there was loud music blasting from every speaker. Every bar also had a huge platform, on whice 1 to 5 guys were performing fire shows with flaming batons and fireballs on chains. The tide was in and only about 3 feet from the platforms of the bars and to denote where the bar ended and the beach/ocean started, there were huge torches buried up to the flame in sand! For a while, all the bars were busy, but by the end of the night, everyone on the beach was at the Slinky Bar, the one owned by Ali. Some of the surrounding bars were trying to compete by offering a free whiskey shot to anyone who participated in the flaming jump rope on stage. There were a few people doing it, but the Slinky Bar's music was too loud, it's light was too bright, and the party happening on the dance floor was too crazy for the other bars to stand up next to. At one point during the evening, I went to the bathroom, which cost 10 Baht to use. I told the guy in charge of the bathroom a little white lie, that I had already spent a lot of money at the slinky bar and I really just wanted to pee. When I had gotten a free trip to the toilet and was coming back to my seat, I ran into Ali, who said "Hey, what do you want to drink? I discount for you, remember?" We bargained a little for the amount of the dicount and I convinced him to give us a bucket, which usually costs 600 baht, for 200 baht. He gave me a wink and a smile and disappeared to go get the drink, telling me he would bring it to Dustin and I on the dance floor. I didn't really care about the drink, and I was pretty sure we wouldn't see him again that night and that he was not actually going to discount it that heavily for us and actually deliver it. However, one song later, here comes Ali bumbling out to the dance floor with a bucket in his hand saying "ok, here you go, you pay with your room." We were pretty pumped.
The next day we got up around 8 to go snorkelling. We went downstairs to drop our key off with Ali so we didn't accidentally lose it in the water or something, and he was sleeping on a hard, thin matt on the floor next to one of the pool tables. He seemed very confused why we would be dropping the key off at the desk, and we were confused why he didn't want it, as every other hotel has requested that we drop off the key at the desk before we leave the hotel. We went on our way towards the tour agency that we had booked through and waited for the guy to come get us. We were the first ones he came to pick up and this meant we had to follow him on foot around the whole isalnd as he picked up people from almost every other tour agency there. Finally, after 30 minutes of walking, we ended up at a resort-looking place with a buffet spread. We were told we had 20 minutes to eat. The buffet didn't look great, but it didn't look horrible, and who's going to pass up a free breakfast if they can help it? I just stuck to rice, and a little bit later, we were getting in our boat.
The actualy snorkelling wasn't too great. Most of the reefs we went to were just gigantic piles of broken and dead coral with a few fish floating around here and there. It was still fun because the water felt nice and the few fish we saw were cool, but it was nothing like what we were hoping for. At one point, though we stopped for lunch on a beach and when we were done eating, Dustin and I pul our masks and finns on and just looked around by the shore and around the boat. It was amazing. We saw a school of probably 10,000 little shiny fish swimming around the boat. The coolest part was if you weren't looking at them from under water, you had no idea they were there. It was really impressive. Even better than that, though, was the group of about 6 baracudas that was there trying to get a snack out of the multitude of little glittering friends. They didn't want to get overly close to us, but they didn't seem particularly nervous amout us either. I was able to get within a foot or two of the baracudas and get in the middle of the huge school of fish. The tour was lame too because there were about 3 of the 10 stops listed, like a cave and a couple other things that the "stop" was literally just puling up next to it, shutting the boat's motor off for 5 seconds, and moving on. The last beach we stopped at before going back to Phi Phi was really pretty. However, A big booze cruise boat had pulled up at the same time as us. These 6 particularly annoying British folks, 5 guys and a girl got off the boat. The girl has ridiculously big fake boobies that seriously looked like someone had stuffed a could of volleyballs in her chest. She was laughing so loud at stupid, no funny things, trying to get attention from her group of guys. The most obnoxious of her followers was wearing a full suit of clothes, acting absurd, flopping in the water and walking around the beach with a huge blue starfish on his head that may have been dead or alive. At one point he found a sea cucumber, which keep in mind os a living animal, and proceeded to do some very inappropriate things with it, eventually killing it by somehow ripping it in half and turning it inside out. It was horrible and disgusting and annoying to watch. That was the only negative experience of the day though. On the way back to Phi Phi from there, a British guy we hd met on our boat apologized on their half and said it was always really embarassing to see other British people acting like that, misrepresenting their country. I have to admit, if I saw Americans there acting like that in public, I would be pissed that they were representing our country that way, so I understood where he was coming from. We kept talking to him and his German friend for the rest of the boat ride and when we got back, we met them at Papaya for dinner and hung out with them for a bit. The British guy, David was kind of a funny guy. He had a huge apetite and seemed somehow so innocent that he reminded me of a 14 year old boy. He was very enjoyable company while we were hanging out with him and his German friend was quite agreeable as well.
That night we decided not to drink, but still to go to the bar to watch the party. There was a giant pole, probably 15 feet high, with a small platform on top that drunk people were constantly climbing up on and dancing. This made us so nervous, and Ali said that sometimes, tourists get up there and break their necks. He said this so casually that it made me really uncomfortable.
The next day we got up for checkout so we coud go to Rai Lay beach that day. When I was downstairs with our bags and Ali waiting for Dustin to do a final check to make sure nothing was left in the room, Ali started talking to me. He told me that since I had a boyfriend that I was alright, but that he hates girls that come here alone or with other girls. He talked to me like this until Dustin came down and then still for another 5 minutes, all about how much he hates women. He told us then that his father is a very rich Pakistani man and that he had a house in Pakistan and in India. He gave us his website for a new guesthouse he was going to open and told us to keep in touch. Yeah right, psycho.
We still had a few hours between check out and pick up, so we decided to check out the view point of the island, which was supposed to be really beautiful. It was a pretty strenuous hike up about a million stairs, but we got some really nice pictures that we're excited to share with everyone.
We put Kho Phi Phi in our rear view and got on a boat to go to Rai Lay beach!!
RAI LAY --
The ride to Rai Lay was a short one on a long tail boat. When we got there, the tide was out and instead of letting us out on a pier or something reasonable like that, they just stopped the boat where the water was about knee deep and told us to get off. There was a very slippery, hard to see walk way to the island and the rocks on either side of it were sharp. We were barefoot and weighted down with our packs. Dustin was unfortunate enough to wipe out, banging his ankle, knee, hip, and elbow on the wet pavement. I'm sure he was not the first or the last to wipe out with all their stuff on and get a few bumps and bruises, and you would really think they would have something to bring tourists safely up to the island. Once we had gotten there, we set off to find the cheapest hotel possible. We ended up settling on a fan-cooled bungalow resort for just over $13 per night, including a private bathroom and hammock on the porch. There was an attached restaurant boasting 60 baht for any dish on the menu so, besides the endless stairs we had to walk up to actually get to the place, it was really convenient once we were there.
Once we had our hotel, we had no plans but we had heard the beach on the other side of the island, a ten minute walk from our hotel was a great place to watch the sunset.We showed up there about 30 minutes before sunset and there was a big dark cloud in front of the sun, so we were like "eh, they can't all be great ones." But we were pleasantly surprised when the sun sank just below the clouds and the sky lit up all different shades of orange and red. It was one of the most breath taking sunsets I have seen. It had been a long day but we hadn't spent much money, so we ordered a couple of expensive beers from the bar and got to watch an amazing sunset over crystal clear blue waters from a white sand beach while sipping some ice cold beer. If there is any way to start the summer, I would say that's it. We called it an early night after that and ate some dinner at the hotel restaurant before turning in and reading for a few hours in bed. The food at the restaurant was so delicious for the price. We were trying to eat on the cheap to balance out the price of the beers so we both got some 50 baht soup, expecting it not to be much and to be hungry later. The base of the soup, though was thick and creamy and took on the flavor of whatever was in it (tomato for me, mushroom for Dustin). We also got some yummy naan bread to dip in our soup. a filling and delicious meal for $2 a piece? I'll take it.
The next day we decided to just make it a beach day. We took our books to the beach. I was reading Great Expectations and Dustin was reading a collections of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle books. It was a nice relaxing day until the sun got on the wrong side of us and there was no more shade, at which point we went back to the hotel for some food and further relaxing. It was an uneventful day, but even when the distance isn't that far, travel days always wear us out, so it was nice to have the following day to chill. The following day, we got up late and went to a rock climbing school to sign up for some afternoon rock climbing. The guide was a Thai guy but from being outside so much his skin was black and he had huge dread locks. He looked more Jamaican in his rasta colors and his attitude than he did Thai. The climbing was really fun though. We climbed four routes each and it kicked our butts! When the climb started it was just us and another couple with their guide. The girl wasn't a very good climber, even for a beginner, and she made me so glad that we got the guide that we did. Her guide was yelling at her and telling her where to put her hands and feet, which is helpful and what they are supposed to do, but if she didn't immediately see where he was talking about, he got impatient really fast. When our guide gave me instructions sometimes it would take me a minute to see but he never raised his voice or seemed like he wasn't having fun. He acted like he was having just as much fun as we were. Sometimes you luck out. The hardest route we climbed was 6a by the French system, which is about V-10, for you climbing buffs reading this. The scale goes from V-5, which is like a steep hill, to V-15, which is only for the extremely skilled elite climbers. This route was probably the hardest I have ever climbed and I relied pretty heavily on the guide's instructions. But finishing something so challenging like that is the most satisfying thing in the world and, even though we didn't climb as long as we expected, we both left satisfied and feeling like we had gotten our money's worth.
That night, we went to see one Thai boxing fight at a bar that only cost the price of a beer to watch. The fight was lame, but we met some really cool Canadian girls that we hung out with for the rest of the night. The girl new the DJ at one of the bars we went to later and he got her a free bucket. She split it with her friend, Dustin and I, which was really nice. Then later at the same bar, the DJ announced that the first girls on the dance floor got a free bucket so the four of us got to split another one. That was a late night, but one of the most fun.
The day after that, Dustin and I (more so Dustin) were feeling the effects of the buckets the previous night. There was an international climbing competition that day so we chilled on the beach watching some of the best climbers we have ever seen besides on YouTube climbing some really tough routes. The strength these guys (and girls) have to have blows my mind. Dustin and I were exhausted after 4 routes that were easy compared to some that these guys were climbing. We met some Canadians that, about 2/3 of the way through the day had climbed 29 routes between them. That is a lot. That night after the competition had come to an end and the sun was down, there was an international fire show contest. We had left the rock climbing competition early to go swimming at the beach and we set our blanket right up against where people would be watching from. We had great spots to watch the show and when it started, we were really excited. However, two ladies with like 6 toddlers sat right next to us and these kids stood directly in our line of vision for the first half hour of the show. Kids that I know are cool. Other kids are annoying. So when the mom or caretaker or whatever she was with all these kids finally realized her kids were annoying and moved to another spot, one of the fire show competitors that had already gone sat directly in front of us! When we put our blanket down, we didn't think there would be room for anyone to sit between us and the rope, but these folks figured out how to squeeze in there! But, despite the annoying fellow spectators, the show was awesome. Anything you can think of to set on fire and spin around or throw in the air was being set on fire and spun and thrown. My favorite in the first round was a girl with a flaming hula hoop with really cool music. There was also a guy dressed like Michael Jackson that swallowed fire that was pretty cool. The best show was in the finals, when a guy set a ring of fire around himself in the sand. He got burned really badly though and I think he might have lost points for it because he got third. It was a really cool evening entertainment and I'm not sure about the quality of the pictures we took, but these people had a lot of skill and a lot of balls.
The next day there was another climbing competition but it was deep water soloing and we would have had to pay for a boat out to the venue, so we decided to go ahead and move on and begin our journey into Malaysia!
Ready about our stay in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia in the next post, which will be coming out shortly. Until then, facebook Dustin Lowry or Mariah Mahlendorf or email d.lowry11@gmail.com or mm1293@ship.edu
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Ranong for the Visa Renewal
So we got on the bus in Bangkok with not a moment to spare and hoped that we were actually going to be taken to Ranong and not somewhere totally opposite. This bus was similar to our bus before it. It had a lot of leg room, air con, and was overall very comfortable. We got seats almost in the back, but were lucky enough that there was no seat behind us so the people on the bench in the very back of the bus still had plenty of leg room if we reclined our seats all the way. It was a 10 hour ride to Ranong and when we started out the bus was almost full. However, so many people got off along the way that a few hours into it, Dustin and I and most of the other dozen or so people on the bus had who seats to themselves to stretch out on. There were only about 5 people on the bus for the last few hours of the ride including us, so we really had free reign. We acted like children, playing on the seats (not in a destructive way) and giggling. When we got to Ranong, however, the lack of people on the bus came back to bite us because there were no taxis or tuk tuks awaiting the bus's arrival.
The hotel we were planning to stay at (the Lonely Planet only listed 2) was 4 km away from the bus station and, seeing the complete lack of transportation around us, we braced ourselves for a very long walk. We had walked about a km when some kids that couldn't have been older than 16 approached us on a motorbike with a strange sidecar. This sidecar was like a weird platform on wheels and it had a roof, like a lean to on it with a bench on the side opposite the driver. One kid was on the motorbike and one was in a plastic chair on the platform. They spoke decent English and asked us where we were going and if we needed a ride. We said sure and asked them how much and they said "No money!" We figured we may as well trust them, since we were sick of walking and it was about 11:30 at this point. They took us to the hotel we wanted to stay at and kept their promise of not wanting any money. We gave them 20 Baht anyway, which is not very much, and they waved and smiled as they drove away. It was awesome that these kids were so honest and just trying to help us out, without trying to attain any personal gain. We haven't seen that very much here, but we were fortunate enough to run into it multiple times during our 16 hours in Ranong. When we walked into the hotel, they said they were sorry, but it was full, so we set out to find another place. The next place we looked at was entirely too expensive and, although we were tired, we're still on a budget, so we kept looking. We finally found a place that was only 500 baht for the night. The room was very clean with stark white walls, a black painting of a bird cage on one wall to keep the room from being to blank, and beautiful dark hardwood floors. The bathroom was shared between all the guests, but since we were the only guests there that night that was fine by us. Everything about this place was very clean and stylish. It was one of my favorite places we have stayed and it was relatively cheap.
The next morning we got up at 8:00, got dressed, grabbed some gourmet 7/11 breakfasts of coconut yogurt, bread, milk, and coffee for me, redbull for Dustin. We then hopped on some motorcycle taxis and went to the pier to get a boat ride to Myanmar. When we got to the pier there was no line and we were able to get our departure stamps from Thailand within 2 minutes. We were soon approached by a very nice boat driver, offering to take us over to Myanmar for 500 Baht round trip. This was about half what we expected to pay, so we jumped on it. He took us over to the other side quickly, walked us to the customs office, and helped us communicate with the people there. This Burmese town, Victoria's Point, was dusty and poor and smelled like fish. The Burmese passport stamps cost $10 per person and we had 2 twenty dollar bills, both with some tiny imperfection, so he wouldn't take either of them. Somehow, after 10 minutes of begging them to take our money, Dustin produced a perfect 20 and the guy looked at it for a solid 30 seconds before deeming it good enough and giving us our stamps. We were stamped in, stamped out, and sent on our way. On the way out, we bought some water from a local convenience store and then headed back to the boat. The boat driver brought us back, again in about half the time we anticipated, and dropped us off at our original pier. However, this time there was a line about a mile long at the arrival desk. We stood in this line for about 5 minute until we saw our boat driver standing near the front of the line with about a 5 foot gap around him, waving at us frantically to come up there. We felt bad cutting in line, but we also didn't want to wait in line for 2 hours, so we jumped up there, and 15 minutes later we were out of there! We caught a motorbike taxi to the bus station to book our tickets. We were completely blown away by how easy this whole process was. We were expecting to pay about $20 more than we did and to spend about 3 hours more than we did for this whole process. Thankfully, we got to deal with a series of really nice honest people, none of whom tried to rip us off.
When we got to the bus station we had a little trouble booking our ticket because the main bus terminal didn't sell tickets to Phuket. Phuket, by the bye, is pronounced Poo-Ket, just to avoid any Freudian slips there. Anyway, once we found the right bus station, we were told that the bus leaving in 5 minutes was full, so we would have to wait another 3 hours until we could get on the next bus. Since we didn't really have any other options, we said this was fine and set out to find a way to kill three hours. We found a nice cafe/restaurant that was not too outrageously priced and figured that since we saved so much dough on the border run and had 7/11 food for breakfast we could swing $7 or $8 for lunch. I went with the spicy lemongrass salad. Oh. My. God. This was almost the spiciest thing I have ever eaten. It was a tad confusing because the salad itself was chilled, but my mouth was completely on fire. It took me about 10 minutes to eat maybe a cup's worth of food and my mouth was on fire for about 30 minutes afterwards. Although it whooped my butt and had me sweating like a 400 lb. man on a treadmill, it was delicious and I would not hesitate to order it again. This place we had lunch had such a nice feel to it that we decided to stay there and read for a little longer, for lack of anything better to do. I am in the middle of Great Expectations (I LOVE it) and Dustin is reading a sci-fi book about crazy adventures. When we had about an hour left, we headed to a cheap internet cafe next to the bus station and I started the Bangkok blog while Dustin did G.A. stuff. Finally, the bus arrived and we got ready for our 5 and a half hour ride to Phuket.
About 20 minutes before the bus arrived, it started raining cats and dogs. Fortunately, we were just about 5 steps away from the bus, so we didn't get too wet walking there. However, The only two seats together on the bus were in the very back, with a very odorous bathroom on our right and a window that wasn't sealed on our left. This was not the best seat on the bus, to say the least, but it was not the worst either, because there were about 5 people who had to stand in the aisle for the first 4 hours of the trip before a few people got off the bus along the way. About 30 minutes into the ride, the window started leaking so bad that Dustin moved into the seat directly in front of us, which had miraculously just opened up for some reason, and I moved over to the dry seat. Throughout the course of the ride, this seat that I had been sitting on became a decent sized puddle. There was one lady that had been standing that saw the empty seat and tried to sit there. She lasted about 10 minutes before she decided standing was better. I felt bad for her, but not bad enough to give up my seat. About halfway into our ride, we stopped for dinner for only a couple of minutes and we got some spicy stuff with green beans and pork in it over rice. We had such a short time to eat it though, and were afraid of losing our seat that we scarfed it entirely too fast. This pretty much ruined the rest of the bus ride and our first couple hours in Phuket for me because of the horrible stomach ache and heartburn I got from it. Dustin has pretty frequent heartburn and I never really was able to sympathize with him because I had never had heart burn. I definitely feel for him now though. It was horrible! But besides the rain, the tummy ache, and the stinky bathroom, the ride went quickly and we were in Phuket Town before we knew it.
That's it for Ranong! We are in Phuket on Patong Beach, which you can read all about in the next post!
To contact us, use facebook, or email: d.lowry11@gmail.com or mm1293@ship.edu
=]
The hotel we were planning to stay at (the Lonely Planet only listed 2) was 4 km away from the bus station and, seeing the complete lack of transportation around us, we braced ourselves for a very long walk. We had walked about a km when some kids that couldn't have been older than 16 approached us on a motorbike with a strange sidecar. This sidecar was like a weird platform on wheels and it had a roof, like a lean to on it with a bench on the side opposite the driver. One kid was on the motorbike and one was in a plastic chair on the platform. They spoke decent English and asked us where we were going and if we needed a ride. We said sure and asked them how much and they said "No money!" We figured we may as well trust them, since we were sick of walking and it was about 11:30 at this point. They took us to the hotel we wanted to stay at and kept their promise of not wanting any money. We gave them 20 Baht anyway, which is not very much, and they waved and smiled as they drove away. It was awesome that these kids were so honest and just trying to help us out, without trying to attain any personal gain. We haven't seen that very much here, but we were fortunate enough to run into it multiple times during our 16 hours in Ranong. When we walked into the hotel, they said they were sorry, but it was full, so we set out to find another place. The next place we looked at was entirely too expensive and, although we were tired, we're still on a budget, so we kept looking. We finally found a place that was only 500 baht for the night. The room was very clean with stark white walls, a black painting of a bird cage on one wall to keep the room from being to blank, and beautiful dark hardwood floors. The bathroom was shared between all the guests, but since we were the only guests there that night that was fine by us. Everything about this place was very clean and stylish. It was one of my favorite places we have stayed and it was relatively cheap.
The next morning we got up at 8:00, got dressed, grabbed some gourmet 7/11 breakfasts of coconut yogurt, bread, milk, and coffee for me, redbull for Dustin. We then hopped on some motorcycle taxis and went to the pier to get a boat ride to Myanmar. When we got to the pier there was no line and we were able to get our departure stamps from Thailand within 2 minutes. We were soon approached by a very nice boat driver, offering to take us over to Myanmar for 500 Baht round trip. This was about half what we expected to pay, so we jumped on it. He took us over to the other side quickly, walked us to the customs office, and helped us communicate with the people there. This Burmese town, Victoria's Point, was dusty and poor and smelled like fish. The Burmese passport stamps cost $10 per person and we had 2 twenty dollar bills, both with some tiny imperfection, so he wouldn't take either of them. Somehow, after 10 minutes of begging them to take our money, Dustin produced a perfect 20 and the guy looked at it for a solid 30 seconds before deeming it good enough and giving us our stamps. We were stamped in, stamped out, and sent on our way. On the way out, we bought some water from a local convenience store and then headed back to the boat. The boat driver brought us back, again in about half the time we anticipated, and dropped us off at our original pier. However, this time there was a line about a mile long at the arrival desk. We stood in this line for about 5 minute until we saw our boat driver standing near the front of the line with about a 5 foot gap around him, waving at us frantically to come up there. We felt bad cutting in line, but we also didn't want to wait in line for 2 hours, so we jumped up there, and 15 minutes later we were out of there! We caught a motorbike taxi to the bus station to book our tickets. We were completely blown away by how easy this whole process was. We were expecting to pay about $20 more than we did and to spend about 3 hours more than we did for this whole process. Thankfully, we got to deal with a series of really nice honest people, none of whom tried to rip us off.
When we got to the bus station we had a little trouble booking our ticket because the main bus terminal didn't sell tickets to Phuket. Phuket, by the bye, is pronounced Poo-Ket, just to avoid any Freudian slips there. Anyway, once we found the right bus station, we were told that the bus leaving in 5 minutes was full, so we would have to wait another 3 hours until we could get on the next bus. Since we didn't really have any other options, we said this was fine and set out to find a way to kill three hours. We found a nice cafe/restaurant that was not too outrageously priced and figured that since we saved so much dough on the border run and had 7/11 food for breakfast we could swing $7 or $8 for lunch. I went with the spicy lemongrass salad. Oh. My. God. This was almost the spiciest thing I have ever eaten. It was a tad confusing because the salad itself was chilled, but my mouth was completely on fire. It took me about 10 minutes to eat maybe a cup's worth of food and my mouth was on fire for about 30 minutes afterwards. Although it whooped my butt and had me sweating like a 400 lb. man on a treadmill, it was delicious and I would not hesitate to order it again. This place we had lunch had such a nice feel to it that we decided to stay there and read for a little longer, for lack of anything better to do. I am in the middle of Great Expectations (I LOVE it) and Dustin is reading a sci-fi book about crazy adventures. When we had about an hour left, we headed to a cheap internet cafe next to the bus station and I started the Bangkok blog while Dustin did G.A. stuff. Finally, the bus arrived and we got ready for our 5 and a half hour ride to Phuket.
About 20 minutes before the bus arrived, it started raining cats and dogs. Fortunately, we were just about 5 steps away from the bus, so we didn't get too wet walking there. However, The only two seats together on the bus were in the very back, with a very odorous bathroom on our right and a window that wasn't sealed on our left. This was not the best seat on the bus, to say the least, but it was not the worst either, because there were about 5 people who had to stand in the aisle for the first 4 hours of the trip before a few people got off the bus along the way. About 30 minutes into the ride, the window started leaking so bad that Dustin moved into the seat directly in front of us, which had miraculously just opened up for some reason, and I moved over to the dry seat. Throughout the course of the ride, this seat that I had been sitting on became a decent sized puddle. There was one lady that had been standing that saw the empty seat and tried to sit there. She lasted about 10 minutes before she decided standing was better. I felt bad for her, but not bad enough to give up my seat. About halfway into our ride, we stopped for dinner for only a couple of minutes and we got some spicy stuff with green beans and pork in it over rice. We had such a short time to eat it though, and were afraid of losing our seat that we scarfed it entirely too fast. This pretty much ruined the rest of the bus ride and our first couple hours in Phuket for me because of the horrible stomach ache and heartburn I got from it. Dustin has pretty frequent heartburn and I never really was able to sympathize with him because I had never had heart burn. I definitely feel for him now though. It was horrible! But besides the rain, the tummy ache, and the stinky bathroom, the ride went quickly and we were in Phuket Town before we knew it.
That's it for Ranong! We are in Phuket on Patong Beach, which you can read all about in the next post!
To contact us, use facebook, or email: d.lowry11@gmail.com or mm1293@ship.edu
=]
Saturday, April 21, 2012
One Night in Bangkok and the World's Your Oyster!
After a full and delightful day spent exploring the city without getting buckets of water thrown in our faces, we headed to the bus station to catch the bus to Bangkok. The wait for the bus was slightly stressful because there were so many people trying to leave Chiang Mai and every bus we tried to get on said "next bust, next bus," but finally, at almost 10 pm, we boarded the bus. We were in the very back, but there was tons of leg room and air conditioning, and the bus provided us with blankets, so we were pretty comfortable. After a Valium a piece, we drifted off to sleep, and although it was a fitful sleep, we were in Bangkok before we knew it. We arrived in Bangkok at around 6:30 am, but the bus terminal was several km from where we planned to stay, so we had to get a taxi to the center of town. However, all of the taxis refused to turn on their meters and gave us flat rates soaring up into the $20 range. We decided maybe the best way to get a reasonably priced taxi would be to get as far away from the bus station as we could walk. So after walking for several minutes, we were approached by a tuk tuk, who gave us a price that was still outrageous, about $17, but it was hot and we knew we couldn't walk to the center of the city, so we decided to go ahead and pay the money and take the tuk tuk.
When we arrived in the center, we found a hotel that was almost reasonably priced, fully equipped with air con, tv, rooftop pool, and clean rooms. The combination of being sick of looking for hotels and having the rooftop pool made us decide to go with this place. By this time it was about 7:30 and we couldn't check in until 9, so we set out to find some breakfast. Somehow, the worst qualities in both of our personalities tend to come out when we get that perfect combination of tired, hungry, and hot, so the search for food (that didn't look like it would immediately kill us) was not he most fun hunt I have ever gone on. We had one Thai man approach us on the street and asked us if we were looking for food, and did we want to come get breakfast with him and his friends at city hall. He said he had a professor from Chicago. This, as we have read in the Lonely Planet, is the oldest scam in the book and, had we gone with him, we would have inevitably been out a lot of money, so we politely declined and kept searching. Finally, we found a soup vendor whose food looked semi-safe to eat and we decided to get food there.
When we finished eating and wondered back to our hotel, it was late enough that we could check in so we went up to our room, showered, and passed out. We slept from 10 to 2. Although it may have been a slight waste of part of the day we needed it to boost our moods and be able to have a good time for the rest of the day. When we came out of our hotel in the afternoon, it was like a different world. The street in front of our hotel, which had been empty, except for a few stray dogs and taxi drivers, was a bustling market with full bars and tons and tons and tons of clothes.we didn't shop, but we looked around (much to Dustin's dismay) for a while. We got some pad thai from a street vendor for lunch and, since it was about a trillion degrees F out, we decided it would be a good time to retreat to our hotel's pool for a swim. We swam for a couple of hours before we headed back to the room to clean up and get ready to go out. Unfortunately, while swimming, I got a lot of water in my ear again and my ear infection has returned.
We had heard that the red light district was a pretty entertaining place, that everyone coming to Bangkok has to see at least once. A tuk tuk driver approached us and told us he would take us there for 20 Baht (66 cents), so we hopped in and went. However, we should have guessed from the price of the ride that this was not a good idea. He took us to this unmarked back alley "club" where we were coerced into paying 800 baht total to get in. I will say now, and only once that this was a ping pong show. I will pause here to politely ask the people reading this not to ask me any questions about Bangkok's ping pong shows or make any reference to them in the future. If you are a peer you are welcome to send me a PRIVATE message on facebook and I will briefly explain it to you, however, if anyone asks me about it and I refuse to tell them, it is out of respect, not rudeness, and I would appreciate it if you would not press the issue.
That said, after the ping pong show, we walked around the red light district a little more and sat down at an out door bar to have a drink and people watch. Hookers wear really cute shoes. At a little after 11, there was a bar that was supposed to have a Thai boxing match, so we went to that bar to watch it. We only caught the last 5 minutes of it but it was very entertaining and ended with an impressive knock out by a guy that was about 10 years older than his aggressive opponent. The entry to the bar was free, but we had to buy a beer to stay and watch, so we watched them tear the ring down with great speed, and set up a bunch of poles for the ladies to dance on. Let me just add here that I have seen better dancing in Wibs.
We watched for a bit, but compared to the boxing, the "dancing" ladies were pretty boring, so we decided it was tie to go home. We encountered the same problem, however, of not being able to find a taxi who was willing to run his meter, despite the fact that the taxi says, in big English letters, "TAXI-METER". We walked a bit until we found a hotel where we asked them to call us a cab that would run the meter and after just a bit of hassle, we ended up saving about $13 by going this route. All night, we had been wondering where the party was because, while there was no shortage of things to see in the red light district, there were not a lot of tourists our age to hang out with. We found out, however, that to find the party, we didn't evern need to leave our street. We were so tired by this time though, that we decided we would catch the party the next night and we went upstairs to our room and to bed.
The next day we got up early to catch our ride to a town an hour and a half north to do the Flight of the Gibbons tour. The van was 45 minutes late but it was alright when we got on because we were the only people on it and the seats reclined all the way. We were able to pretty much sleep the whole way there so we were well rested and ready to zip line when we got there. We stopped at an office to sing some forms and pay for the tour and then we went to the actual venue to get harnessed up. The harnesses were comfortable enough and they gave us bandannas to wear under our helmets so that was a bit of a comfort (it's always a little gross wearing used helmets). We had short safety briefing and then a 10 minutes hike up a slight incline to the first platform, which was maybe 15 feet off the ground in a tree. There was an Israeli couple there and the girl was so terrified of heights that she couldn't even do the first zip line. They ended up going back and I felt really bad for her boyfriend, because he looked like he was really excited for the tour, and this tour was not cheap. After they left there were 6 of us left in the group: us, two Aussies, and two Danes, plus our two Thai guides. It was a really fun group of people and we enjoyed our two hours flying along a series of 25 zip lines, which were very high off the ground. The longest zip line was 300 meters, and the highest we were was about 50 meters. The better English speaker of the two guides was really fun and made the tour even better by joking with us and faking us out, saying things like "Oh no WAIT!!!" when we were already flying along the zip line, and then when we looked back at him in a panic he would be standing on the platform behind us just belly laughing. When we were done with the zip lining and back on the ground, we went on a 10 minute drive back to the office, where we were served a "5 star" lunch of chicken wings, rice, papaya salad (my favorite), soup, fruit, and drinks. Everything except the chicken wings was absolutely delicious, but I think it's probably best to leave the Thai cooking to the Thais and the American cooking to the Americans. Dustin and I had the bus to ourselves again on the way back to Bangkok and enjoyed another hour and a half nap!
When we got back, we swam for about an our and spent about an hour getting ready before going downstairs to meet up with Oat. Oat did a foreign exchange year at Keshequa (my high school) when I was a senior, so I was really excited to meet up with him on his turf. He took us out to dinner to a restaurant on the river. We had Tom yum soup (which I had never had before, but is now my favorite soup in the whole wide world and I order it everywhere), these lettuce rolls filled with minced pork, pad thai, fried lemon chicken, and rice served in a hollowed out pineapple. It was delicious, but we racked up quite a bill and Dustin and I picked it up, so it certainly put a dent in our budget for the next couple days. After dinner, Oat showed us his college. He is going to school for economics at the best economics school in Thailand so it was cool to see. For some reason I was surprised when, looking around his school, I was reminded quite a bit of Shippensburg. Next we continued our walk and he took us to a temple that was closed but we could see the outside and it was beautiful and glittery. There was a huge recreational area of all grass where people were juggling and playing different kinds of ball, and all the thins that are fun to do in open areas. Half of this park was available for everyone's use. The other half had an enormous memorial built to commemorate the king's cousin, who had just died. I don't know how to describe the scale of this memorial. It sprawled out in an expanse of several buildings and was lit up brighter than anything else around it. It took us about 20 minutes to walk around the outside of it. All for the king's cousin. crazy. After we saw some of the sights, Oat had to go meet a friend so we parted ways near our hotel. He had also had only an hour of sleep the night before, due to a big final project he had to finish. It was really nice to see him though and being near his home gave me a new perspective of what it must have been like for him when he lived in Nunda.
The next day we slept until we woke up and headed to the bus station to try to go to Ranong, a city on the Thailand/Myanmar border. We got to the bus station at about 1:25 and went up to the ticket window and she said there was a bus to Ranong leaving at 1:30 so we bought the ticket, ran to the bus, and boarded it with no problems whatsoever. We were so lucky to get there when we did!
That's the end of this one, check out the next post to hear about our visa renewing experience in Ranong!
When we arrived in the center, we found a hotel that was almost reasonably priced, fully equipped with air con, tv, rooftop pool, and clean rooms. The combination of being sick of looking for hotels and having the rooftop pool made us decide to go with this place. By this time it was about 7:30 and we couldn't check in until 9, so we set out to find some breakfast. Somehow, the worst qualities in both of our personalities tend to come out when we get that perfect combination of tired, hungry, and hot, so the search for food (that didn't look like it would immediately kill us) was not he most fun hunt I have ever gone on. We had one Thai man approach us on the street and asked us if we were looking for food, and did we want to come get breakfast with him and his friends at city hall. He said he had a professor from Chicago. This, as we have read in the Lonely Planet, is the oldest scam in the book and, had we gone with him, we would have inevitably been out a lot of money, so we politely declined and kept searching. Finally, we found a soup vendor whose food looked semi-safe to eat and we decided to get food there.
When we finished eating and wondered back to our hotel, it was late enough that we could check in so we went up to our room, showered, and passed out. We slept from 10 to 2. Although it may have been a slight waste of part of the day we needed it to boost our moods and be able to have a good time for the rest of the day. When we came out of our hotel in the afternoon, it was like a different world. The street in front of our hotel, which had been empty, except for a few stray dogs and taxi drivers, was a bustling market with full bars and tons and tons and tons of clothes.we didn't shop, but we looked around (much to Dustin's dismay) for a while. We got some pad thai from a street vendor for lunch and, since it was about a trillion degrees F out, we decided it would be a good time to retreat to our hotel's pool for a swim. We swam for a couple of hours before we headed back to the room to clean up and get ready to go out. Unfortunately, while swimming, I got a lot of water in my ear again and my ear infection has returned.
We had heard that the red light district was a pretty entertaining place, that everyone coming to Bangkok has to see at least once. A tuk tuk driver approached us and told us he would take us there for 20 Baht (66 cents), so we hopped in and went. However, we should have guessed from the price of the ride that this was not a good idea. He took us to this unmarked back alley "club" where we were coerced into paying 800 baht total to get in. I will say now, and only once that this was a ping pong show. I will pause here to politely ask the people reading this not to ask me any questions about Bangkok's ping pong shows or make any reference to them in the future. If you are a peer you are welcome to send me a PRIVATE message on facebook and I will briefly explain it to you, however, if anyone asks me about it and I refuse to tell them, it is out of respect, not rudeness, and I would appreciate it if you would not press the issue.
That said, after the ping pong show, we walked around the red light district a little more and sat down at an out door bar to have a drink and people watch. Hookers wear really cute shoes. At a little after 11, there was a bar that was supposed to have a Thai boxing match, so we went to that bar to watch it. We only caught the last 5 minutes of it but it was very entertaining and ended with an impressive knock out by a guy that was about 10 years older than his aggressive opponent. The entry to the bar was free, but we had to buy a beer to stay and watch, so we watched them tear the ring down with great speed, and set up a bunch of poles for the ladies to dance on. Let me just add here that I have seen better dancing in Wibs.
We watched for a bit, but compared to the boxing, the "dancing" ladies were pretty boring, so we decided it was tie to go home. We encountered the same problem, however, of not being able to find a taxi who was willing to run his meter, despite the fact that the taxi says, in big English letters, "TAXI-METER". We walked a bit until we found a hotel where we asked them to call us a cab that would run the meter and after just a bit of hassle, we ended up saving about $13 by going this route. All night, we had been wondering where the party was because, while there was no shortage of things to see in the red light district, there were not a lot of tourists our age to hang out with. We found out, however, that to find the party, we didn't evern need to leave our street. We were so tired by this time though, that we decided we would catch the party the next night and we went upstairs to our room and to bed.
The next day we got up early to catch our ride to a town an hour and a half north to do the Flight of the Gibbons tour. The van was 45 minutes late but it was alright when we got on because we were the only people on it and the seats reclined all the way. We were able to pretty much sleep the whole way there so we were well rested and ready to zip line when we got there. We stopped at an office to sing some forms and pay for the tour and then we went to the actual venue to get harnessed up. The harnesses were comfortable enough and they gave us bandannas to wear under our helmets so that was a bit of a comfort (it's always a little gross wearing used helmets). We had short safety briefing and then a 10 minutes hike up a slight incline to the first platform, which was maybe 15 feet off the ground in a tree. There was an Israeli couple there and the girl was so terrified of heights that she couldn't even do the first zip line. They ended up going back and I felt really bad for her boyfriend, because he looked like he was really excited for the tour, and this tour was not cheap. After they left there were 6 of us left in the group: us, two Aussies, and two Danes, plus our two Thai guides. It was a really fun group of people and we enjoyed our two hours flying along a series of 25 zip lines, which were very high off the ground. The longest zip line was 300 meters, and the highest we were was about 50 meters. The better English speaker of the two guides was really fun and made the tour even better by joking with us and faking us out, saying things like "Oh no WAIT!!!" when we were already flying along the zip line, and then when we looked back at him in a panic he would be standing on the platform behind us just belly laughing. When we were done with the zip lining and back on the ground, we went on a 10 minute drive back to the office, where we were served a "5 star" lunch of chicken wings, rice, papaya salad (my favorite), soup, fruit, and drinks. Everything except the chicken wings was absolutely delicious, but I think it's probably best to leave the Thai cooking to the Thais and the American cooking to the Americans. Dustin and I had the bus to ourselves again on the way back to Bangkok and enjoyed another hour and a half nap!
When we got back, we swam for about an our and spent about an hour getting ready before going downstairs to meet up with Oat. Oat did a foreign exchange year at Keshequa (my high school) when I was a senior, so I was really excited to meet up with him on his turf. He took us out to dinner to a restaurant on the river. We had Tom yum soup (which I had never had before, but is now my favorite soup in the whole wide world and I order it everywhere), these lettuce rolls filled with minced pork, pad thai, fried lemon chicken, and rice served in a hollowed out pineapple. It was delicious, but we racked up quite a bill and Dustin and I picked it up, so it certainly put a dent in our budget for the next couple days. After dinner, Oat showed us his college. He is going to school for economics at the best economics school in Thailand so it was cool to see. For some reason I was surprised when, looking around his school, I was reminded quite a bit of Shippensburg. Next we continued our walk and he took us to a temple that was closed but we could see the outside and it was beautiful and glittery. There was a huge recreational area of all grass where people were juggling and playing different kinds of ball, and all the thins that are fun to do in open areas. Half of this park was available for everyone's use. The other half had an enormous memorial built to commemorate the king's cousin, who had just died. I don't know how to describe the scale of this memorial. It sprawled out in an expanse of several buildings and was lit up brighter than anything else around it. It took us about 20 minutes to walk around the outside of it. All for the king's cousin. crazy. After we saw some of the sights, Oat had to go meet a friend so we parted ways near our hotel. He had also had only an hour of sleep the night before, due to a big final project he had to finish. It was really nice to see him though and being near his home gave me a new perspective of what it must have been like for him when he lived in Nunda.
The next day we slept until we woke up and headed to the bus station to try to go to Ranong, a city on the Thailand/Myanmar border. We got to the bus station at about 1:25 and went up to the ticket window and she said there was a bus to Ranong leaving at 1:30 so we bought the ticket, ran to the bus, and boarded it with no problems whatsoever. We were so lucky to get there when we did!
That's the end of this one, check out the next post to hear about our visa renewing experience in Ranong!
Monday, April 16, 2012
Chiang Mai, Thailand: Songkran and Segways!
After leaving Pai and returning to Chiang Mai on the same terribly windy road, we came back to the guesthouse that the guy had let us nap and shower in (we had made reservations for the water festival). We took a Songtheiu (sp?) from the bus station to the guesthouse and it was crazy getting there. The water festival was in full swing and everyone was pumped to soak the foreigners arriving in the truck. We were shielded from the sides, but the back to the truck was open and we just got totally soaked before we even got to our place. Fortunately, we were sitting nearest the front of the truck, so I was able to shield my pack (Dustin didn't need to since his is water proof) and keep things relatively dry. When we got to the hotel, the owner showed us to the room and we were settled immediately and ready to hit the town!
Chiang Mai has a wall around it and the area around the gate of this wall was crazy. People were everywhere with buckets and squirt guns waiting to drench passers by. Some people did it in a nice way, splashing us gently or pouring the bucket over our head. Some people were quite unnecessarily malicious about it, aiming their high powered squirt guns at our eyes or throwing the water in their buckets at us so hard that it actually hurt. Several companies set up stages and had DJs and dancing ladies promoting their businesses. It was mayhem but it was awesome. However, getting bucket after bucket of water thrown at you (and of course having a few beers) wears you out faster than you would expect. All three days that we were here for the festival, we were exhausted and needed a nap by like 5 in the afternoon. All this combined with the extreme heat made for some early nights.
At night there is a street blocked off to traffic with some really unique and cheap souvenirs. We were able to get over half of our gifts for friends and family in Chiang Mai for relatively cheap. We ate dinner most nights at street vendors who whipped us up delicious Pad Thai or chicken kebabs. On this trip we've found that a lot of the time, street food is the best food. The first night we just perused the street market and called it an early night because we were dead tired. The water festival was pretty much the same every day. The second day of it, I was wearing a bright blue tank top and we were watching Bangkok Airways dancers and DJ. Their colors are the same as my tank top and one of the guys came and got me and told me to come up on stage. I thought I heard him say free ticket if I came on stage so I was pumped and did it. That wasn't what he said, or if it was it wasn't true, but I still had a great time dancing on stage with Dustin (who got a free t shirt out of the deal) and the promoters of Bangkok Airways.
That second night we set out to find the Night Bazaar, a huge market that runs in the evening that's a little far from the center of town. We found it and had a great time (at least I did) continuing to shop for friends and family and haggling with vendors. It's funny because they will start off with a high price and even if I didn't try to argue with them, every step I took away from their booth made the price drop 30 Bat (a dollar). While we were at the night bazaar, we stumbled upon a cabaret drag show, which was hilarious. Beers were ridiculously expensive (by SE Asian standards) so we only stayed until the end of the show and then left. The next night we wanted to catch the show from the beginning but, even though it was advertised as a "free show," the waitress told us if we didn't both buy a drink she would charge us 200 Bat per person to see the show. We had already seen half of it once and we had spent a lot of money so we left. I'm sure Chiang Mai's night life is great if you can afford it, but we just don't like getting drunk enough to spend a large percent of our budget on it.
One of the nights (they are all kind of running together for me) we were on our way back to the guesthouse from the market and we saw this little girl singing on stage with a bunch of back up dancers. She had an amazing, adult sounding voice and was hitting some crazy notes. After the first song she sang, which was in Thai, all of her back up dancers left the stage and she was standing by herself. The music for Whitney's "I will Always love you" came on and this little girl, who we later found out was 7 years old sang this song like it was her own. She hit every single note perfectly and had such a strong, confident voice. By the time she was done, Dustin and I both had tears in our eyes and goose bumps on our skin, despite the fact that it was about 90 degrees F out still. It was amazing. We went back the next couple nights because the show was going on every night, but it was all other less talented little girls who didn't hold our attention as well as the first one did.
Yesterday, we took a tuk tuk to the bus station to get tickets to Bangkok for tonight. On the way back, we were stopped at a traffic light and a food vendor came up to us with three Styrofoam carry-out boxes full of stir fried vegetables (one for each of us and one for the driver) and just gave them to us. "Free!" she said. We were amazed and a little dumbfounded that we had just been given completely free food for no apparent reason whatsoever. It was really generous and acts of kindness like that always help to brighten the day.
So that was the water festival. Today we woke up, thinking, for some reason, that it was still going on. We donned our bathing suits with t shirts and shorts (for me) over them and set out in the 100+ degree heat ready to get soaked. The water festival was completely over and there was nowhere except this internet cafe and the 7/11 on ever block to escape the heat. So we spent 2 hours on the computer blogging and doing business and then started walking around the city looking for something to do.We spent over an hour looking at books in some used book stores. These stores are pretty big with an awesome selection so it's easy to lose track of time looking at the shelves and trying to decide which book to read. I learned that as of 2008, according to Mr. Guinness, the world's longest dog was 91.3 inches from nose to talk. That's a long dog.
We finally decided it was time to move on and set out in search of AC. We stumbled upon this Gibbon Experience place that we had seen ads for everywhere that looked pretty dead so we decided to go in, half to see what the Gibbon Experience was all about, half to get into the cold. When we got in to the office, we saw about 10 segways lining the walls. The office had not appointments and were looking for some business so they said if we wanted to go immediately, we could. We spent 15 minutes learning how to drive a segway in an empty parking lot and then set off for a tour of the city. Our guide spoke amazing English and took us to probably a dozen temples and wats and told us all about them. It was really informative and the guides (there were two of them) were really sweet and fun to hang out with for a couple hours. Halfway through the tour we stopped at a coffee shop and were allowed to get 65 Bat each worth of food or drinks for free. Anything extra was on us. We hadn't eaten since early this morning so I was all about some seaweed soup, which was only $2 so we paid a little extra but it wasn't much. When we had visited all the temples on our agenda, we went back to a big open area just to enjoy the segways and have fun with them for about 20 minutes before we had to return them. Dustin fell off his from spinning in too many circles and bruised his shin and heel, but he's ok. I had fun chasing pigeons around. When we were driving back the last two minutes to the office, Dustin stopped kind of suddenly and I, not paying as close attention as I should have been, ran into him. I didn't realize that he had fallen off the segway when we were messing around earlier so I thought it was my fault that he hurt his leg and for about 10 minutes before I learned the truth I felt terrible. Fortunately, although there's a bump and a bruise on one of us, the segways were not damaged at all and we didn't have to pay any extra. Overall, the segway tour was one of the most fun things I think we've done and I can now cross riding a segway off my bucket list. This tour was worth every penny we paid for it! If you are ever in Thailand, PLEASE do yourself a favor and try it.
When we got back to the office, the receptionist said they could book a Flight of the Gibbon tour for us to go out of Bangkok on Wednesday. Flight of the Gibbon is a zip lining canopy tour that "includes 3-4 sizzling hours up in the canopy, 5 STAR lunch or dinner, and a 1 hour river or waterfall trek. The Sky Rangers accompany us and anticipate our needs - sharing their knowledge of local lore, flora, fauna, and geology. The unique system enables us to view jungle life from a perspective previously reserved for a group of researchers. They take us high into the canopy using an ingenious system of stations, tree houses, cables and sky bridges for over 5 km. For thrill seekers and nature lovers alike there has never been a more exciting way to explore the tropical rainforest!"
At lease that's what the brochure says. We were also fortunate enough to walk into the office while the CEO of the company was sitting there and meet the guy who runs the whole show. It was really cool and he was such a nice guy, we couldn't say no. So the day after tomorrow, we will be zip lining through the canopy, having the time of our lives! If you want to check out this company at all (especially anyone who has any interest in traveling to Thailand) look up the website: treetopasia.com
That has been our time in Chiang Mai. The north of Thailand is beautiful and the people are a pleasure to be around. We have not had one single bad experience with a local so far and also, not on single person has come up to us and directly begged for money. We've heard it's quite a bit different in Bangkok, but so far, WE LOVE THAILAND!!
To contact us we are both on facebook: Dustin Lowry and Mariah Mahlendorf, or you can email us at mm1293@ship.edu (that's me) or d.lowry11@gmail.com for Dustin.
Goodbye for now and make sure to follow our blog to find out about our time in Bangkok!!
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Pai, Thailand
So after the slight altercation with the booking agency, we had all of our money back, but no transportation out of Vang Vieng, and also no hotel room. Fortunately, Taylor and Kelsey had a room with two single beds and they were so generous that they offered to let us stay with them for the night. We crashed in their room and got up and out around 9:30 to go look for a ticket. The next day we were able to find a much more professional tour agency who, miraculously, was able to get us on a bus at 1:30 that afternoon to Pai, a city northwest of Chiang Mai, that we really wanted to see. We took a series of buses to the Laos/Thailand border. The border crossing was painless, and then we got on a VIP minibus for the remaining 14 hours of our trip. We were on this bus through the night, but fortunately, when they said VIP, they meant it. Many of the minibuses we have been on have been ratty with torn upholstery and seats too close together to put your knees straight out in front of you. This one was brand new with AC, leg room and soft seats. Dustin and I sat in the front row next to a very nice guy about our age. The guy sat in the seat the whole night, but Dustin and I took turns laying on the floor under the seat so we could stretch out. We were not exactly well rested when we arrived, but it definitely could have been worse. The bus stopped in Chiang Mai for a 4 hour "layover," I guess you could call it. We stopped for this layover at a guesthouse and the owner of the place was so nice he let us have a room for free to nap and shower in until the bus came. The room was disgusting, but the guy was so nice and spoke such good English (he's Thai, but grew up in California) that we decided to book a room there for when we returned for the water festival. Plus the rooms were only 200 Bat/night (about $7) so that's hard to beat, even if the room is nasty.
The final leg of our journey to Pai was a 4 hour bus ride on a not so VIP minibus. I was in the back next to a very hungover, very carsick English guy, who I half felt bad for, and half wanted to get as far away from as possible. His sickness was made worse by the fact that the road from Chiang Mai to Pai is the windiest road on the face of this earth. We stopped for lunch half way through the ride and when we got back on the bus (Dustin had been sitting in the front of the bus near the door) I told him he could switch with Dustin and sit in the front. I have never seen a more relieved look on his face or a more irritated look on Dustin's, haha. I was glad I offered though, because after that lunch stop, we had to stop 4 times for this poor kid to get out and toss his cookies.
When we got to Pai, we checked in to some decent bungalows. Dustin and I were really over tired and irritable and kind of just not being nice to each other so we decided it would be best to spend the afternoon exploring Pai separately and meet up for dinner when we had had a break from each other, since I don't think we've spent more than 30 seconds apart in the last 2 months. It was good in theory, but it didn't work out that way. Our prepaid money card we used for march finally ran out (halfway through April!! Hollaaaa!) so we agreed we were going to use our AAA prepaid cards for this month. I went to go get money out of the ATM, since I had no cash on me and it wouldn't work. I tried a different ATM, "you're card has been denied." A different one, still no money. After my 5th ATM, I realized something wasn't right and felt a little panicy. Despite needing our afternoon apart, I was very relieved to accidentally run into Dustin in the street and talk to him about the card situation. We got online and figured out that Thailand has some sanction or whatever so AAA cards don't work here. No worries, we have another prepaid card with the same amount of money on it that we can use in Thailand, but the panic of not being able to get money out made my alone time not so relaxing. Once we got back together to figure out what was going on with the card, we started to get along well like we always do and set out to find a place to eat. We found a great local place and I had the best noodles and kale I have had in my life. I don't know what these noodles were, but the texture of them was indescribable. I could eat those noodles every meal of every day of the rest of my life and be the happiest girl on earth. Dustin got some fried kale and rice, which was also delicious.
That night, we set out to find something to do in Pai for the next few days, since we had already booked a ticket to Chaing Mai and new the exact date we had to leave. We stumbled upon this place with a sign out front advertising a 3 day jungle trek with Mr. Chart. He showed us his website (trekpai.com seriously, check it out!) Mr. Chart himself came out and greeted us and was selling this trek so hard to us we couldn't resist. It was expensive, 4,500 bat per person for 3 nights, which is $150 and put is significantly over budget for those three days. However, when we were about to book our trip, 7 other Americans came to book the same trip and we were able to convince Mr. Chart to let us for for 3,700 ($123) each.
This trek was amazing. We were 9 Americans, 4 of which were teachers in Thailand, and 2 Isrealis (they were on their honeymoon!). Dustin and I and the honeymooners were a little faster than the rest of the group but that was perfectly ok with us because when you're the fastest in the group, you get the longest breaks waiting for everyone to catch up. The first day we stopped at this small waterfall to swim while the guides made lunch for us. The swimming was cool, but lunch was incredible. For our bowls, Mr, Chart chopped down bamboo trees and cut them where those separations are that mark a year of growth. For our spoons, he carved them out of the leftover bamboo. Our lunch was sticky rice cooked in a bamboo tube sitting in the fire, mango, and pork, also cooked over the fire. Delicious does not even begin to describe this meal.
After lunch we resumed the hike, which for the remainder was mostly up hill, and hiked several hours to a small village. Why these people decided to put their village in the least accessible place in Thailand, I have no idea. It was cool though. The bathroom was an outhouse with a squat toilet. The shower was a bucket (we stayed dirty) The bed was a rug on the bamboo floor. Before dinner he walked about a km down to another small waterfall. Dustin and I and Roey, the Israeli man, walked ahead and bonded a little. He was a really nice guy and an officer in the Israeli military. He had a lot of questions about the U.S. military and how it differed from his. He was really cool. His new bride was a little out of her element on the hike though. I definitely got the impression that the trek was not her idea. After the waterfall and some more swimming, we went back to the village for some more food. Dinner here was phenomenal . We had rice and soup and vegetables. Desert was some kind of sugary concoction with gummy bears in the bottom. mmm.
We had eaten dinner in an open air hut, but after dinner it started to rain pretty hard, so we were moved into one of the village resident's houses. I liked this because once we got in there the guides started cooking again. We asked them what they were making and they said "our dinner!" They let us try a bite of what they were eating when it was ready and we could understand why they made us different food. Theirs was unbelievably spicy! After the guides ate, some people played cards and some just chilled. Finally, at about 9 (it seemed like 3 in the morning, we were so tired) the group of 7 Americans went to bed in another house and Dustin and I and the Israeli couple went to bed in the place where we had been hanging out all night.
In the morning, the Israeli couple left (they only signed up for a 2 day trek) and another two Americans names Lindsay and Ali showed up. Ali was an English teacher in Thailand as well. The second day of hiking was short, but all down hill. When I say downhill, I don't mean a gentle slope. I did more sliding down this hill than walking, it was so steep. It didn't exhaust us as far as the cardio goes, but our legs were shaking pretty good by the time we were settled for the day. Near this camp there was a pretty big waterfall spilling icy water into a nice deep swimming hole. The sand here was filled with mica and I had fun sifting through the sand looking for shiny bits.
For camp, Mr. Chart and Co. built us a lean to out of bamboo and banana leaves. It was awesome. the stalks of the banana leaves in our backs were not the most comfortable and it got cold at night, but just the fact of where we were and how we were living for those couple days was worth the crappy sleep. The next day we hiked out. Remember how steep I said that hill down to camp was? Well we had to climb right back up it. It took what seemed like hours to get to the road. I was tired from lack of sleep and from the exhaustion of not being in the best physical shape but still pushing myself pretty hard for the previous two days. When we finally got to the road to get brought back to town in the beds of pick up trucks, I was pretty relieved. Mr. Chart had sliced watermelon waiting for us! As we got into the truck, he said cover your valuables, the water festival has started in Pai and everything is going to get wet. He was right. We got soaked on the way to Pai by people standing at the ends of their driveways with hoses ready to spray passing trucks and motorbikes.
When we got back it was still early so we rented some a motorbike and explored the surrounding area. It was annoying and kind of dangerous though, because as we were driving, people would throw buckets of water in our faces. Hard. We saw some cool things, like a decent sized canyon, and some not so cool things, like an elephant camp with elephants that were in very bad shape, neglected, scarred, and standing in their own excrement. It was heartbreaking. Although I really want to ride an elephant, my morals won't let me support any place that would treat such a gentle giant like that.
We returned the motorbike because we couldn't take getting splashed while driving anymore (although when we were out of town I learned how to drive for a little bit for my first time ever!) and got dinner at a very local place. This place saw so few tourists that the waiter actually took a picture of us eating with his cell phone. There was an abundance of ants crawling in the sugar and chili sauce (that's protein) but we ignored it and ate there anyway. I don't remember what we got, but I remember it being delicious. Local places are always better (and cheaper) than places that cater to tourists. Overall, Pai was a beautiful quaint little town, full of cafes and boutiques. I could have easily spent more time there if we had had more time to spend. However, the water festival was getting ready to be in full swing in Chiang Mai, so we had to go join the festivities!!
Read our next post about Chiang Mai to find out about the water festival and our last festival and our last new days!!
The final leg of our journey to Pai was a 4 hour bus ride on a not so VIP minibus. I was in the back next to a very hungover, very carsick English guy, who I half felt bad for, and half wanted to get as far away from as possible. His sickness was made worse by the fact that the road from Chiang Mai to Pai is the windiest road on the face of this earth. We stopped for lunch half way through the ride and when we got back on the bus (Dustin had been sitting in the front of the bus near the door) I told him he could switch with Dustin and sit in the front. I have never seen a more relieved look on his face or a more irritated look on Dustin's, haha. I was glad I offered though, because after that lunch stop, we had to stop 4 times for this poor kid to get out and toss his cookies.
When we got to Pai, we checked in to some decent bungalows. Dustin and I were really over tired and irritable and kind of just not being nice to each other so we decided it would be best to spend the afternoon exploring Pai separately and meet up for dinner when we had had a break from each other, since I don't think we've spent more than 30 seconds apart in the last 2 months. It was good in theory, but it didn't work out that way. Our prepaid money card we used for march finally ran out (halfway through April!! Hollaaaa!) so we agreed we were going to use our AAA prepaid cards for this month. I went to go get money out of the ATM, since I had no cash on me and it wouldn't work. I tried a different ATM, "you're card has been denied." A different one, still no money. After my 5th ATM, I realized something wasn't right and felt a little panicy. Despite needing our afternoon apart, I was very relieved to accidentally run into Dustin in the street and talk to him about the card situation. We got online and figured out that Thailand has some sanction or whatever so AAA cards don't work here. No worries, we have another prepaid card with the same amount of money on it that we can use in Thailand, but the panic of not being able to get money out made my alone time not so relaxing. Once we got back together to figure out what was going on with the card, we started to get along well like we always do and set out to find a place to eat. We found a great local place and I had the best noodles and kale I have had in my life. I don't know what these noodles were, but the texture of them was indescribable. I could eat those noodles every meal of every day of the rest of my life and be the happiest girl on earth. Dustin got some fried kale and rice, which was also delicious.
That night, we set out to find something to do in Pai for the next few days, since we had already booked a ticket to Chaing Mai and new the exact date we had to leave. We stumbled upon this place with a sign out front advertising a 3 day jungle trek with Mr. Chart. He showed us his website (trekpai.com seriously, check it out!) Mr. Chart himself came out and greeted us and was selling this trek so hard to us we couldn't resist. It was expensive, 4,500 bat per person for 3 nights, which is $150 and put is significantly over budget for those three days. However, when we were about to book our trip, 7 other Americans came to book the same trip and we were able to convince Mr. Chart to let us for for 3,700 ($123) each.
This trek was amazing. We were 9 Americans, 4 of which were teachers in Thailand, and 2 Isrealis (they were on their honeymoon!). Dustin and I and the honeymooners were a little faster than the rest of the group but that was perfectly ok with us because when you're the fastest in the group, you get the longest breaks waiting for everyone to catch up. The first day we stopped at this small waterfall to swim while the guides made lunch for us. The swimming was cool, but lunch was incredible. For our bowls, Mr, Chart chopped down bamboo trees and cut them where those separations are that mark a year of growth. For our spoons, he carved them out of the leftover bamboo. Our lunch was sticky rice cooked in a bamboo tube sitting in the fire, mango, and pork, also cooked over the fire. Delicious does not even begin to describe this meal.
After lunch we resumed the hike, which for the remainder was mostly up hill, and hiked several hours to a small village. Why these people decided to put their village in the least accessible place in Thailand, I have no idea. It was cool though. The bathroom was an outhouse with a squat toilet. The shower was a bucket (we stayed dirty) The bed was a rug on the bamboo floor. Before dinner he walked about a km down to another small waterfall. Dustin and I and Roey, the Israeli man, walked ahead and bonded a little. He was a really nice guy and an officer in the Israeli military. He had a lot of questions about the U.S. military and how it differed from his. He was really cool. His new bride was a little out of her element on the hike though. I definitely got the impression that the trek was not her idea. After the waterfall and some more swimming, we went back to the village for some more food. Dinner here was phenomenal . We had rice and soup and vegetables. Desert was some kind of sugary concoction with gummy bears in the bottom. mmm.
We had eaten dinner in an open air hut, but after dinner it started to rain pretty hard, so we were moved into one of the village resident's houses. I liked this because once we got in there the guides started cooking again. We asked them what they were making and they said "our dinner!" They let us try a bite of what they were eating when it was ready and we could understand why they made us different food. Theirs was unbelievably spicy! After the guides ate, some people played cards and some just chilled. Finally, at about 9 (it seemed like 3 in the morning, we were so tired) the group of 7 Americans went to bed in another house and Dustin and I and the Israeli couple went to bed in the place where we had been hanging out all night.
In the morning, the Israeli couple left (they only signed up for a 2 day trek) and another two Americans names Lindsay and Ali showed up. Ali was an English teacher in Thailand as well. The second day of hiking was short, but all down hill. When I say downhill, I don't mean a gentle slope. I did more sliding down this hill than walking, it was so steep. It didn't exhaust us as far as the cardio goes, but our legs were shaking pretty good by the time we were settled for the day. Near this camp there was a pretty big waterfall spilling icy water into a nice deep swimming hole. The sand here was filled with mica and I had fun sifting through the sand looking for shiny bits.
For camp, Mr. Chart and Co. built us a lean to out of bamboo and banana leaves. It was awesome. the stalks of the banana leaves in our backs were not the most comfortable and it got cold at night, but just the fact of where we were and how we were living for those couple days was worth the crappy sleep. The next day we hiked out. Remember how steep I said that hill down to camp was? Well we had to climb right back up it. It took what seemed like hours to get to the road. I was tired from lack of sleep and from the exhaustion of not being in the best physical shape but still pushing myself pretty hard for the previous two days. When we finally got to the road to get brought back to town in the beds of pick up trucks, I was pretty relieved. Mr. Chart had sliced watermelon waiting for us! As we got into the truck, he said cover your valuables, the water festival has started in Pai and everything is going to get wet. He was right. We got soaked on the way to Pai by people standing at the ends of their driveways with hoses ready to spray passing trucks and motorbikes.
When we got back it was still early so we rented some a motorbike and explored the surrounding area. It was annoying and kind of dangerous though, because as we were driving, people would throw buckets of water in our faces. Hard. We saw some cool things, like a decent sized canyon, and some not so cool things, like an elephant camp with elephants that were in very bad shape, neglected, scarred, and standing in their own excrement. It was heartbreaking. Although I really want to ride an elephant, my morals won't let me support any place that would treat such a gentle giant like that.
We returned the motorbike because we couldn't take getting splashed while driving anymore (although when we were out of town I learned how to drive for a little bit for my first time ever!) and got dinner at a very local place. This place saw so few tourists that the waiter actually took a picture of us eating with his cell phone. There was an abundance of ants crawling in the sugar and chili sauce (that's protein) but we ignored it and ate there anyway. I don't remember what we got, but I remember it being delicious. Local places are always better (and cheaper) than places that cater to tourists. Overall, Pai was a beautiful quaint little town, full of cafes and boutiques. I could have easily spent more time there if we had had more time to spend. However, the water festival was getting ready to be in full swing in Chiang Mai, so we had to go join the festivities!!
Read our next post about Chiang Mai to find out about the water festival and our last festival and our last new days!!
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Vang Vieng! Laos' Party Central!
Ok, so I am just going to dive right into this one. After we left Vientiane, we took a relatively short bus ride, only 5 or so hours, to Vang Vieng, the craziest party spot for tourists in Laos, and arguably in all of Southeast Asia. When we got there though, it felt like the twilight zone. It was about 2 in the afternoon and the streets were empty except for a few locals. Every restaurant had tables that you sit on the floor on cushions to eat at and they were all playing reruns of either Friends, Family Guy, or South Park. We found a guesthouse fairly quickly and started walking around town trying to figure out what the heck was going on. This place has a wild reputation among backpackers and we were so confused how it could be so dead in the middle of the day. Finally, after sucking down some beers and fruit shakes while watching a couple episodes of Friends, we decided we needed to find some other tourists and find out what was going on. We found some Australian guys having a beer outside on the street so we asked them what the deal was. We learned we had to take a 10 minute tuk tuk ride to the river, where there are about 8 bars that are packed with partiers from about 1 in the afternoon until they close at 8, at which time everyone comes back to an island closer to the guesthouse area to get even crazier.
We got a tuk tuk for 20,000 Kip, about $2.50, and headed down to see what the party was like. We were not expecting anything like what we say when we got there. These bars all have free or cheap "bucket" specials (I will elaborate on that in a moment) and everyone had amassed at the bar that at the moment had the specials. It was crazy. This place was completely open air. When I say that I don't mean like a lean to with no walls. It was just a pltform raised out of the water for people to go nuts on. English music was blairing on the stereo and probably 100 people were dancing their hearts out and getting astonishingly drunk for 3 in the afternoon. The buckets I mentioned earlier are literally like buckets that a child brings to the beach to make sand castles with. These buckets hold somewhere between 1.5 and 2 liters and the bartenders (who were all westerners who had moved to Vang Vieng) would fill the buckets half with the cheapest whiskey imaginable, and half with your choice of coke or sprite. The first night we were there we got 2 free buckets at that place, and then when we headed back to the island we continued to get free buckets. We got way more drunk than was reasonable for completely free. Didn't spend a dime.
The main activity, besides getting sloshed out of your mind, that draws people to Vang Vieng is the tubing. So the next day we rented innertubes, thinking we were going to float down the river. However, the bars on the river are at the beginning where the tubes are out in and every bar throws you a full water bottle on the end of a rope to drag you in to their bar. There were a couple bars where if we didn't take the water bottle, a member of the staff would swim out to us and literally drag up to their bar. Each of these bars gives you a free whiskey shot (with no chaser of course) as soon as you come in and a colorful string bracelet for taking the shot. Also, unlimited free shots once you are already at the bar. Needless to say, we, as well as most other tubers who try to float the river their first day, did not make it very far past the bars. We were hanging out with two girls named Carly and Meghan and after several hours of trying very hard to get past the bars and actually tube the river, we gave up and took a tuk tuk back to town to return our tubes.
The next day, we set out determined to finish tubing and make it to the point where you're actually supposed to get out of the river. We skipped most of the initial bars and slowly floated for about 5 hours. The river was so low that this 2 km flost took us an eternity. We had some adventures along the way though. The way the bars work is when they reel you in, they take your tube for you and put it on a stack and then when you leave the bar you just take a tube from the stack. It doesn't have to be the tube you came in on because they are all the same, or so we thought. Also, another detail I should mention is that almost every bar has a high platform to jump off of, a rope swing, a zip line, a waterslide, or some fun way of getting into the water. Well, after we had passed the mainstream bars, we decided to stop at one of the ones down the river to get some water. We got out water and drank it and went to leave. As we were floating away, the guy manning the platform to jump off of started waving and shouting at us. I thought he was inviting us to come jump off so we oth just shook our heads and kept floating. We were very surprised when he jumped off the platform and started swimming after us. He acted like he was trying to sit on Dustin's lap and of course Dustin was like "dude what are you doing?!?" The guys started screaming "YOU STOLE THE TUBE! YOU STOLE THE TUBE!" and actually succeeded in flipping Dustin off the tube. This tube that Dustin was on was identical to all the other tubes, except it had a different paint pattern on it. But the guy working at the bar handed the tube to Dustin as we were getting in the water so it was not his fault at all. But of course, if someone flips you off your tube and accuses you of something you didn't do, especially if you're Dustin, It's not gonna make for the best time. Dustin told him (excuse my language) to #&$% off and the guy said "$*%# you! I'll see you tomorrow!," meaning he was going fight him. I honestly thought this little Lao shit was going to try to fight Dustin right there in the water. It was absurd.
We finally got past that debacle and kept floating. We passed a group of kids swimming and one of them flipped my the bird, so that was nice. When we were almost done with our float, we passed another group of younger kids. One of them grabbed on to my tube and started floating with me and two kids grabbed Dustin's and floated with him. They floated with us the last half h our to the end and when we got there, they asked us for money! We were like, "for what? catching a ride on our tube? No way!" But thankfully, they realized that what they were asking for money for was stupid and left us alone after being told no once.
We met up that night for dinner with some Canadian friends we had met before named Taylor and Kelsey and hung out with them for the rest of the night at the bars. That night there was a terrible terrible storm. It was pouring rain and we were all at this open air bar, The rain was coming down in sideways torrents and just pelting us. It was the worst storm either of us have ever been in. After an hour of hunkering down with all the other people at the bar in this one lean to, we decided we were going to brave the storm and go back to our hotel. The rain was stinging our skin and we could see enormous lightning bolts every few seconds. There was one clap of thunder, the loudest we have ever heard, that made the power go out in the whole city for a few seconds. It was nuts. Finally wee got back to the hotel and the whole first floor, although the hallway is open at either ends, was completely flooded. Our friends Taylor and Kelsey were staying at the same hotel as us only they were on the first floor and water was all over their room. They were using blankets and towels to block the door to stop the water from coming in. Their room smelled terrible for the next few days, like wet fabric does when it sits for too long. The hallway of the second floor, where we were staying, was flooded as well, but no water came in our room fortunately. Although it was probably really stupid to walk home through that severe of a thunderstorm, we had a lot of fun and got home safely!
The next day we did a kayaking tour down the river. We weren't in the mood to drink that day and fortunately neither were any of the other people in our tour group so the tour went pretty quickly. In the description of the tour at the booking agency, the first paragraph has highlighted "easy to get drunk," so we were a little nervous that we would be spending all day waiting for people to finish their drinks so we could move on. The tour was really cool though. The first stop was a cave where we got on tubes and floated through it with powerful headlamps the tour guide had given us. It was a relatively young cave, with only a few small formations, but just the fact that we were floating through it in an inner tube was awesome. However, because of the storm the previous night, the water and the air were FREEZING! When we left that cave, some locals were making us lunch so we went and stood by the fire to get warm. After lunch, we took some rocks that were sitting almost in the fire and used them to hold to keep warm while we were walking to the kayaking spot.
The kayaking was significantly better than the tubing had been the previous day because the storm the night before made the river quite a bit higher. we finished the 10 km stretch in about 2 hours and got back to town much sooner than we had anticipated, which was ok for us because we wanted to shower and stuff before the bus got us later that night. We got showered and put on fresh clothes (straight out of the dryer, mmm) and met up with Taylor and Kelsey again for dinner, this time at a road side stand with some plastic chairs. We had some basic noodle soup and papaya salad, but it was really delicious. The Lonely Planet had recommended it as some of the best local food in Vang Vieng and I would agree with them. After dinner we were supposed to catch a bus at 8 and there was a bar attached to the place the bus was supposed to pick us up so our friends came to the place to wait for the bus with us and share a couple beers. Well we had a beer at 7:45, talked and talked, then looked at the clock and it was 8:30. This seemed strange, but the busses are usually a few minutes late so we didn't worry about it too much. 9:00 rolled around and we started to get a bit concerned. I went up to the guy working there and asked him what the situation was and he said "oh don't worry, the bus coming." Ok. 9:15, no bus. I went up to him again and asked him to call the bus company for us to see what the heck was going on and he did. He informed us that the bus had broken down on the way to Vang Vieng, and so the super VIP bus (which we had paid a super VIP price for) would not be coming, but we were welcome to take the entirely full minibus on the 22 hour ride to Chiang Mai. We, ahem, politely declined. However, he was at first completely unwilling to refund us any money. We had paid 300,000 kip ($40) for these tickets and were not willing to part with this money, as that is half a day's budget for us. He said, "ok, I'll give you 70,000 back. We insisted on a full refund. He said no. offered us 200,000, put it in my hand, but then changed his mind and snatched it back. Naturally at this point, the atmosphere of the place was not so cordial. He kept yelling at us saying it was not his fault it was not his fault, as if it were our fault, so we should have to assume the loss of the money for the ticket. Finally, our voices were raised to such a level that his sister, the woman who had sold us the tickets and who we had bonded with a little bit over the previous two days woke up (she had been sleeping behind the bar) and agreed without argument to give us the full refund and apologized for her brother.
Read about Pai in the next post!!
We got a tuk tuk for 20,000 Kip, about $2.50, and headed down to see what the party was like. We were not expecting anything like what we say when we got there. These bars all have free or cheap "bucket" specials (I will elaborate on that in a moment) and everyone had amassed at the bar that at the moment had the specials. It was crazy. This place was completely open air. When I say that I don't mean like a lean to with no walls. It was just a pltform raised out of the water for people to go nuts on. English music was blairing on the stereo and probably 100 people were dancing their hearts out and getting astonishingly drunk for 3 in the afternoon. The buckets I mentioned earlier are literally like buckets that a child brings to the beach to make sand castles with. These buckets hold somewhere between 1.5 and 2 liters and the bartenders (who were all westerners who had moved to Vang Vieng) would fill the buckets half with the cheapest whiskey imaginable, and half with your choice of coke or sprite. The first night we were there we got 2 free buckets at that place, and then when we headed back to the island we continued to get free buckets. We got way more drunk than was reasonable for completely free. Didn't spend a dime.
The main activity, besides getting sloshed out of your mind, that draws people to Vang Vieng is the tubing. So the next day we rented innertubes, thinking we were going to float down the river. However, the bars on the river are at the beginning where the tubes are out in and every bar throws you a full water bottle on the end of a rope to drag you in to their bar. There were a couple bars where if we didn't take the water bottle, a member of the staff would swim out to us and literally drag up to their bar. Each of these bars gives you a free whiskey shot (with no chaser of course) as soon as you come in and a colorful string bracelet for taking the shot. Also, unlimited free shots once you are already at the bar. Needless to say, we, as well as most other tubers who try to float the river their first day, did not make it very far past the bars. We were hanging out with two girls named Carly and Meghan and after several hours of trying very hard to get past the bars and actually tube the river, we gave up and took a tuk tuk back to town to return our tubes.
The next day, we set out determined to finish tubing and make it to the point where you're actually supposed to get out of the river. We skipped most of the initial bars and slowly floated for about 5 hours. The river was so low that this 2 km flost took us an eternity. We had some adventures along the way though. The way the bars work is when they reel you in, they take your tube for you and put it on a stack and then when you leave the bar you just take a tube from the stack. It doesn't have to be the tube you came in on because they are all the same, or so we thought. Also, another detail I should mention is that almost every bar has a high platform to jump off of, a rope swing, a zip line, a waterslide, or some fun way of getting into the water. Well, after we had passed the mainstream bars, we decided to stop at one of the ones down the river to get some water. We got out water and drank it and went to leave. As we were floating away, the guy manning the platform to jump off of started waving and shouting at us. I thought he was inviting us to come jump off so we oth just shook our heads and kept floating. We were very surprised when he jumped off the platform and started swimming after us. He acted like he was trying to sit on Dustin's lap and of course Dustin was like "dude what are you doing?!?" The guys started screaming "YOU STOLE THE TUBE! YOU STOLE THE TUBE!" and actually succeeded in flipping Dustin off the tube. This tube that Dustin was on was identical to all the other tubes, except it had a different paint pattern on it. But the guy working at the bar handed the tube to Dustin as we were getting in the water so it was not his fault at all. But of course, if someone flips you off your tube and accuses you of something you didn't do, especially if you're Dustin, It's not gonna make for the best time. Dustin told him (excuse my language) to #&$% off and the guy said "$*%# you! I'll see you tomorrow!," meaning he was going fight him. I honestly thought this little Lao shit was going to try to fight Dustin right there in the water. It was absurd.
We finally got past that debacle and kept floating. We passed a group of kids swimming and one of them flipped my the bird, so that was nice. When we were almost done with our float, we passed another group of younger kids. One of them grabbed on to my tube and started floating with me and two kids grabbed Dustin's and floated with him. They floated with us the last half h our to the end and when we got there, they asked us for money! We were like, "for what? catching a ride on our tube? No way!" But thankfully, they realized that what they were asking for money for was stupid and left us alone after being told no once.
We met up that night for dinner with some Canadian friends we had met before named Taylor and Kelsey and hung out with them for the rest of the night at the bars. That night there was a terrible terrible storm. It was pouring rain and we were all at this open air bar, The rain was coming down in sideways torrents and just pelting us. It was the worst storm either of us have ever been in. After an hour of hunkering down with all the other people at the bar in this one lean to, we decided we were going to brave the storm and go back to our hotel. The rain was stinging our skin and we could see enormous lightning bolts every few seconds. There was one clap of thunder, the loudest we have ever heard, that made the power go out in the whole city for a few seconds. It was nuts. Finally wee got back to the hotel and the whole first floor, although the hallway is open at either ends, was completely flooded. Our friends Taylor and Kelsey were staying at the same hotel as us only they were on the first floor and water was all over their room. They were using blankets and towels to block the door to stop the water from coming in. Their room smelled terrible for the next few days, like wet fabric does when it sits for too long. The hallway of the second floor, where we were staying, was flooded as well, but no water came in our room fortunately. Although it was probably really stupid to walk home through that severe of a thunderstorm, we had a lot of fun and got home safely!
The next day we did a kayaking tour down the river. We weren't in the mood to drink that day and fortunately neither were any of the other people in our tour group so the tour went pretty quickly. In the description of the tour at the booking agency, the first paragraph has highlighted "easy to get drunk," so we were a little nervous that we would be spending all day waiting for people to finish their drinks so we could move on. The tour was really cool though. The first stop was a cave where we got on tubes and floated through it with powerful headlamps the tour guide had given us. It was a relatively young cave, with only a few small formations, but just the fact that we were floating through it in an inner tube was awesome. However, because of the storm the previous night, the water and the air were FREEZING! When we left that cave, some locals were making us lunch so we went and stood by the fire to get warm. After lunch, we took some rocks that were sitting almost in the fire and used them to hold to keep warm while we were walking to the kayaking spot.
The kayaking was significantly better than the tubing had been the previous day because the storm the night before made the river quite a bit higher. we finished the 10 km stretch in about 2 hours and got back to town much sooner than we had anticipated, which was ok for us because we wanted to shower and stuff before the bus got us later that night. We got showered and put on fresh clothes (straight out of the dryer, mmm) and met up with Taylor and Kelsey again for dinner, this time at a road side stand with some plastic chairs. We had some basic noodle soup and papaya salad, but it was really delicious. The Lonely Planet had recommended it as some of the best local food in Vang Vieng and I would agree with them. After dinner we were supposed to catch a bus at 8 and there was a bar attached to the place the bus was supposed to pick us up so our friends came to the place to wait for the bus with us and share a couple beers. Well we had a beer at 7:45, talked and talked, then looked at the clock and it was 8:30. This seemed strange, but the busses are usually a few minutes late so we didn't worry about it too much. 9:00 rolled around and we started to get a bit concerned. I went up to the guy working there and asked him what the situation was and he said "oh don't worry, the bus coming." Ok. 9:15, no bus. I went up to him again and asked him to call the bus company for us to see what the heck was going on and he did. He informed us that the bus had broken down on the way to Vang Vieng, and so the super VIP bus (which we had paid a super VIP price for) would not be coming, but we were welcome to take the entirely full minibus on the 22 hour ride to Chiang Mai. We, ahem, politely declined. However, he was at first completely unwilling to refund us any money. We had paid 300,000 kip ($40) for these tickets and were not willing to part with this money, as that is half a day's budget for us. He said, "ok, I'll give you 70,000 back. We insisted on a full refund. He said no. offered us 200,000, put it in my hand, but then changed his mind and snatched it back. Naturally at this point, the atmosphere of the place was not so cordial. He kept yelling at us saying it was not his fault it was not his fault, as if it were our fault, so we should have to assume the loss of the money for the ticket. Finally, our voices were raised to such a level that his sister, the woman who had sold us the tickets and who we had bonded with a little bit over the previous two days woke up (she had been sleeping behind the bar) and agreed without argument to give us the full refund and apologized for her brother.
Read about Pai in the next post!!
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
So Many Cities!! Saigon, Mekong Delta, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, Don Det, Tha Khaek, Khong Lor, and Vientiane!
This is gonna be a long one folks!
The last time I wrote I think we were in Mui Ne, Vietnam, about 2 weeks ago. Since then we've been to Saigon, The Mekong Delta, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, Don Det, Tha Khaek, Khong Lor, and now we are in Vientiane!
I'll start with Saigon, Vietnam's bustling capital. We arrived there from Mui Ne at around 8 pm and immediately started looking for a hotel. We found a place that gave us free breakfast AND dinner with the room so needless to say, we took it. The hotel staff was kind of funny. Sitting there in the lobby for meals or to use the internet we had a great time listening to the two receptionists, who were sisters, confusing the crap out of just about every guest that asked a question. Part of it was due to insufficient English skills, but the blank stares they would give and the unrelated tangents they would go off on was quite comical. The next day, we met a girl we met on Couchsurfing that spoke very good English and she brought her cousin who was studying English at university so they were both eager to practice talking to us. We spent the morning exploring the city, going to museums and restaurants for food and drinks. The girls took us to the War Remnants Museum as one of our first stops. The museum was extremely sad, with pictures everywhere of agent orange victims and the kids who suffered birth defects from their parents' exposure to agent orange. There was one picture that was particularly gruesome and has unfortunately burned a permanent image on my mind. It was an American soldier standing on a battlefield picking up a Vietnamese corpse that had been exploded and was only identifiable as a human because his face was in the picture.
After that we went to lunch and got some xe om (motorcycle taxis) to Jenny, our couchsurfer's house. We spent the afternoon seeing her village and playing with some of the kids in the neighborhood. To our surprise, her house was actually huge and spacious and clean. In such a poor country I think we were expecting the whole family to live in one room but everyone in the house has their own room and lots of privacy. We had dinner that night with Jenny's cousin's family, none of whom spoke the first word of English. Her dad and uncle were force feeding Dustin beer after beer chanting "JO!", which means cheers, before every sip. It was quite funny to watch. For dinner we had this kind of pancake filled with vegetables and meat, which we broke pieces off of and rolled up in rice paper to make a sort of spring roll. It was called Bun Xeo and it some of the best food we've had, and eating it with our new Vietnamese friends was really memorable.
The next day we walked around the city some more and saw some of the local attractions we had missed the day before, like the presidential palace. This was one of the most expansive buildings I've been in, with 3 floors and probably 10 enormous rooms on each floor. That night we decided to go out to the bars and have a drink. The cheapest drinks were 10,000 dong beers (50 cents) and were served to us while we sat on little plastic chairs on the sidewalk. There were only two places like this that we could find so it got really busy and the lady with the beers and chairs started setting up chairs in the street to support more customers. A few minutes later, we we were in the middle of a sentence trying to order another beer and she just took off running away from us toward the street. We saw her snatching up the chairs as fast as she possibly could and then we saw the reason why following her closely. The police were driving behind her with one officer out of the truck chasing her! There were two chairs that she wasn't able to grab and the cops just grabbed them off the street, threw them in the back of their truck and started to drive away. This was already very funny, but then this old woman started chasing the truck down the street, caught up with it, and retrieved her chairs from the back of the truck without the cops noticing. As soon as the cops drove away, everyone at the bars on both sides of the street that had been watching erupted into applause. It was HILARIOUS!
The next day we took a bus to the Mekong Delta for a 3 day tour. We tried this tea made with honey, lime, and bee nectar that was really delicious. Dustin and I held a snake and a rack with hundreds of bees on it! We got to take a boat ride through some tributaries of the Mekong and visit several islands. One place showed us how they make coconut candy and all the different uses for coconuts. That was pretty neat. That night we stayed at a homestay with about 8 other tourists. The host took us on a tour of his property and showed us the rice paddies that his family owns. They had a pet monkey in a cage that wa going crazy with boredom. We felt pretty bad for the little guy. There was also a 9 year old kid that lived there that spoke unbelievably good English for being so young and he was begging us to play board games with him from the moment we got there. I spent most of the evening playing Parcheesi (sp???) with him and some British people that we met there. We went back the next morning to meet up with our tour group and complete the tour. We met a woman at lunch who was Vietnamese but had emigrated to Australia, and her Cambodia husband. We spent the rest of the day hanging out with them and that night we paid a few dollars to some tuk tuk drivers and had them take us all around the little town we were staying in for about an hour and a half.
The next day we got up early expecting to finish the tour that we had paid for, but instead were rushed on the the boat going to Phnom Penh. It was annoying not getting what we paid for, but at the same time, we got to go to Cambodia earlier so it wasn't all bad. We met an American couple on the boat from California and hit it off with him so we decided to hang out with them for the rest of the day. When we got off the boat, Dustin and I dropped our stuff off in their hotel room (they had reservations) and split the fare for a tuk tuk with them to go to the Killing Fields. At the entrance of the Killing Fields, we got audio tour head sets to lead us through the place and explain everything to us. It was very well done. There were stories from survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime and detailed explanations of some of the more horrible sites within the Killing Fields. Along a lot of the paths we could see bits of cloth and what looked like white rock s coming up through the dirt. It was clothes from the victims and human bones that get closer to the surface as the rainy season washes away the dirt every year. There were 2 or 3 cases of bones that had been excavated and another of clothes that had surfaced. At the front of the glass case of clothes, there was a pair of children's shorts. We saw mass graves of over 400 people, one including several hundred women and over 100 infants. There was a large tree next to this grave called the child beating tree. When we first saw the sign we figured the children were stood up against the tree and beaten by the guards, which is absolutely horrible. We never would have imagined that what actually happened there was the guards would take infants and toddlers, grab them by their feet, and swing them as hard as they could to the babies' heads exploded against the side of the tree. How a human could do something so atrocious to another human is just unfathomable to both of us. We wondered why they felt the had to kill infants, what danger babies' could possibly pose. Pol Pot (leader of Khmer Rouge and man responsible for the death of 3 million out of Cambodia's 8 million people) said that "to kill the grass you must remove the roots," meaning that if you killed the family of a child, the child might grow up and seek revenge, so it's best to just kill the entire family and make sure there are no survivors. Another Pol Pot quote was "It's better to kill a million innocent people than to let one guilty person live."
After the Killing Fields we went to the genocide museum, which used to be a prison where people were tortured and forced to write and sign confessions to crimes they didn't do. This was not was well done as the exhibit at the Killing Fields, but it was still very moving and upsetting.
The next day was a little bit less sad. We spent the morning doing a walking tour of the city, since Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia. We wrapped up our walking tour with a massage done by blind people. It was funny because we were changing into the loose clothes they give us and they walked in and the first thing they said was "don't worry, we can't see you."
Right now I am on a computer at our hotel in Vietniane, Laos. It's free, but I there are only two computers and guests are asked to limit their time on the computer to 20 minutes. Since I have been on for about an hour and a half, I think it would be a good idea to take a break from the blogging for a bit. I will write tonight or tomorrow about Siem Reap, our attempt at Ratanakiri, 4000 Islands, Tha Khaek, Khong Lor Cave, and Vientiane!
Our next stop was Siem Reap to the north. We arrived there late and a tuk tuk driver took us to a hotel he recommended. We liked him, so we hired him for the next few days to take us to the Angkor Wat temples. The hotel was really good though. The room wasn't much to write home about but it had a pool and it was so hot while we were there that we would have been miserable without it. The next morning we got picked up by the tuk tuk at our hotel in the morning to go to Angkor Wat. We got a three day pass to see all the temples and started looking right away. It's funny with meeting tourists while traveling because a lot of them are on the same route as us for a while at least so we end up seeing them again. We met the same American couple at the temples the first day and hung out with them for a bit. At Angkor Wat there is a main temple with walls around it and then temples all around it for miles and miles. We walked just outside the temple walls to another temple behind it and saw a ton of monkeys! I was afraid to get too close to them but there was one sitting next to some steps we needed to walk down so I got close enough to it for Dustin to take my picture with it. These temples were amazing. All the walls had carvings of buddhas and elephants and people and a lot more stuff. The carvings were so intricate and detailed. I can't imagine how much skill and practice someone would have to have for the king of Cambodia to have hem carve his temples. The age of the temples and the excellent condition they were in was part of what was so cool about them. They were all built over 1000 years ago and of course after 1000 years there are going to be some ruins, but for the most part they looked like they had been built maybe a couple hundred years ago because they were in such good shape and all the carvings and statues were so pristine.
When we got out of the main temple we drove to another one that didn't take up much space acreage-wise, but it was really really tall. We climbed to the top as the sky was getting darker and darker with rain clouds. When we got to the top in the place where they had a sweet Buddha statue, a torrential downpour started, accompanied, of course, by thunder and lightning. The storm was directly over us. It was by far the coolest place I have ever watched a thunderstorm from. We were stuck up there in the rain (with a roof over our heads) for about 30 minutes before it lightened up enough for us to make it safely down all the steep, narrow stone stairs. It was a really fun experience though, and if there was ever a time for bad weather it was then. There were actually about 5 or 6 other people in the temple with us during the storm and we talked to a few of them. It kind of made me think of Brad's Toweatherness project, because if it weren't for the storm all of us would have walked right by each other and never said a word but because of the crazy spontaneous thunderstorm we were all forced to hang out!
The next morning, we got up at 4:30 to watch to sun rise at Angkor Wat. Unfortunately it was really cloudy so it wasn't much of a sunrise, but I'm still glad we did it. We spent the second day looking at some more temples. We saw one that was like Tomb Raider. I actually think Tomb Raider may have been partially shot there. It was awesome. There were tons of ancient trees with roots that grew on and through the walls of the temples. It was by far the coolest temple we saw. At the end of the second day before we went back to our hotel, we were supposed to go see a floating village on the biggest lake in Southeast Asia, Tonle San. However, tickets to get on a boat to go see the village were $20 per person so we decided not to see it.
The next day we decided we had seen enough temples and had enough of hundreds of Cambodia kids trying to sell us post cards 10 for one dollar and making us feel guilty for not wanting more post cards, so even though we paid for 3 days of temple-seeing, we opted out. Instead we spent the day chilling out by the pool and exploring the city of Siem Reap. During the evenings at Siem Reap, we would have tons of kids, especially when we were eating dinner, come up and try to sell us the post cards or some crappy jewelry. This one little girl, when we didn't want post cards, said "If you won't buy my post cards than will you buy me food?" We didn't realize what she said until after we had said no to her and she went away. When we figured it out, I tried to find her, looking up and down the street, but she was nowhere to be found. We felt terrible though. Later that night we ran into a 14 year old girl with a baby on her hip saying that she didn't want money, just food. I'm sure many people reading this have seen this story on facebook. But we got her some baby formula and some water and she didn't ask for anything else. We asked her if she was hungry and she said yes so we got her, her grandma, and her 4 siblings some noodles. She also asked for some shampoo so she could go to school clean so we got her that too.
The night after that some more kids with post cards said if you wont buy my post cards, buy me food. They were brothers so we let them sit with us at dinner and got them some soup. It was actually not very good to do it that way though because then kids started coming all around asking for food and we just didn't have enough money to buy food for everyone. Unfortunately, we had to tell a lot of then no.
Besides all the hungry kids though, Siem Reap was really fun. The first night we got what's called a Dr. Fish massage. We ust stuck our feet in big tanks of water and hundreds of fish started nibbling out feet to suck off the dead skin. It was so weird but so fun. At one of the Dr. Fish places we met a girl that was 22 and her 19 year od friend so after the massage we got a few more drinks and then went back to hang out with them when they got off work. There was a street called Pub Street with lit up signs that pointed to the street from all directions and almost every place had 50 cent beers. We went with them to the Temple Bar, which got really busy and everyone was dancing. Although we have gone out drinking in every city, it was the first time there was anywhere to dance. It was really a great time.
We left Siem Reap at about 5:30 in the morning to go to Ratanakiri. This bus ride to Ratanakiri was supposed to be about an 8 hour ride, giver or take an hour. After riding on the bus all day, after about 13 hours, the bus stopped and people started getting off. The driver said we were at the Laos border and the bus to Ratanakiri had already left because our bus was late, so we could either pay $12 more each and just go to Laos in the morning or backtrack in the morning and keep trying to go to Ratanakiri. And Oh by the way, you also have to find somewhere to sleep tonight. Good luck! So we ended up finding a guest house with some of the other people that were on our bus and hanging out with them for the night. Ratanakiri would have been cool because it is supposed to have some really big volcanic craters and elephants are still their main mode of transportation, but we weren't overly disappointed that we didn't get to go. The next morning we just paid the extra morning and got on a bus to go to 4000 Islands in Laos.
The island we stayed on was called Don Det and had a little more tourist action. We got there in the early afternoon and after walking around for a bit fund a nice cheap bungalow almost on the river, with a private bathroom and some hammocks. We were so hot that after lunch we immediately changed into our bathing suits and jumped into the Mekong! Later that evening we walked to the northern tip of the island where there is an actually swimming beach instead of just some shotty bamboo stairs. We swam there until sunset and got to watch a brilliant sunset over the Mekong.
The next day we did a kayaking tour! We started at 8:30 with a free breakfast provided by the booking company. After that we kayaked a couple of kms to our first stop. There, we got out of the boats, took a nice walk throgh some woods, and saw a "small" waterfall that was still quite large. We walked some more down to a beach with a ton of limestone and met our boats, which had been carried around to meet us. From there, we kayaked to a little concrete ledge that had been built, really in the middle of nowhere. The guide said the water was 50 m deep there. We didn't believe it was that deep but it was too deep for us to touch, no matter how far down we swam. We spent about 20 minutes climbing on the ledge and jumping into the water. It was so hot outside and the water was so nice and cool, it felt great! After we got back in our boats, we kayaked to Cambodia and had lunch there. The company has some kind of contract set up so they are allowed to bring tourists to the Cambodia side just for lunch with no hassle. After lunch we got back in the kayaks and stated watching for Irriwaddy dolphins. We say probably 7 or 8 of them coming up for air. It was really neat to see, definitely not something we see every day. When we had had our fill of dolphin watching, we went to see the biggest waterfall in Southeast Asia! It was really impressive seeing just the power of all that water coming down through such a small channel. It wasn't a particularly tall waterfall, but it was still amazing to see. From the waterfall, we took a bus to one more beach where we put in our boats and kayaked beach to Don Det, where we started. Overall, it took about 8 hours ad made for a crazy, action-packed day.
We booked tickets to go to Pakse the next day but we weren't feeling very well when we woke up so we decided to just cancel the tickets and stay at Don Det for another day. The third day there we rented innertubes for a dollar each and put them in at the northern tip of the island. From there, we lazily drifted south to where our bungalow was and got out. We always thought of the Mekong as so powerful, and in places it is, but the water was so slow that it took us about 45 minutes just to go about 500 m down the river.
When we were done with the tubing, we got out and met a really nice French couple that was staying in the room next to us. We gave them our tubes since we had them for 24 hours and didn't plan on using them anymore. That night we ate dinner and had a few drinks with them and a Finnish couple that we met at the restaurant connected to our bungalow.
Don Det was really nice and relaxing, but the people were so different from Cambodian people. Cambodians were always smiling, always happy to see us and eager for our business. The Lao people at Don Det wouldn't even hardly crack a smile at us when we sat down at their restaurants. Lao is a very laid back country, but it times, it felt more to us like a lack of ambition. It was funny, though, on the island, there were about 10 white people that had moved there with huge long dreadlocks that owned restaurants or bungalows that just smoked weed all day.
My blogging time is running short but I just have one more anecdote from Don Det. We had gone to explore the island a little bit and we were walking back to our hotel when this lad stopped us and told us we couldn't walk any farther. We immediately saw why. A bunch of guys were trying to chop down an enormous tree just down the path from us. Well, they chopped it down, but it didn't go where they thought it was going to. Instead, the thickest part of the trunk landed on a little shack and just blew it to smitherines. We hope it wasn't important to anybody, but it was pretty funny to watch.
Also, I got a shit that says "Been There Don Det"
The last time I wrote I think we were in Mui Ne, Vietnam, about 2 weeks ago. Since then we've been to Saigon, The Mekong Delta, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, Don Det, Tha Khaek, Khong Lor, and now we are in Vientiane!
I'll start with Saigon, Vietnam's bustling capital. We arrived there from Mui Ne at around 8 pm and immediately started looking for a hotel. We found a place that gave us free breakfast AND dinner with the room so needless to say, we took it. The hotel staff was kind of funny. Sitting there in the lobby for meals or to use the internet we had a great time listening to the two receptionists, who were sisters, confusing the crap out of just about every guest that asked a question. Part of it was due to insufficient English skills, but the blank stares they would give and the unrelated tangents they would go off on was quite comical. The next day, we met a girl we met on Couchsurfing that spoke very good English and she brought her cousin who was studying English at university so they were both eager to practice talking to us. We spent the morning exploring the city, going to museums and restaurants for food and drinks. The girls took us to the War Remnants Museum as one of our first stops. The museum was extremely sad, with pictures everywhere of agent orange victims and the kids who suffered birth defects from their parents' exposure to agent orange. There was one picture that was particularly gruesome and has unfortunately burned a permanent image on my mind. It was an American soldier standing on a battlefield picking up a Vietnamese corpse that had been exploded and was only identifiable as a human because his face was in the picture.
After that we went to lunch and got some xe om (motorcycle taxis) to Jenny, our couchsurfer's house. We spent the afternoon seeing her village and playing with some of the kids in the neighborhood. To our surprise, her house was actually huge and spacious and clean. In such a poor country I think we were expecting the whole family to live in one room but everyone in the house has their own room and lots of privacy. We had dinner that night with Jenny's cousin's family, none of whom spoke the first word of English. Her dad and uncle were force feeding Dustin beer after beer chanting "JO!", which means cheers, before every sip. It was quite funny to watch. For dinner we had this kind of pancake filled with vegetables and meat, which we broke pieces off of and rolled up in rice paper to make a sort of spring roll. It was called Bun Xeo and it some of the best food we've had, and eating it with our new Vietnamese friends was really memorable.
The next day we walked around the city some more and saw some of the local attractions we had missed the day before, like the presidential palace. This was one of the most expansive buildings I've been in, with 3 floors and probably 10 enormous rooms on each floor. That night we decided to go out to the bars and have a drink. The cheapest drinks were 10,000 dong beers (50 cents) and were served to us while we sat on little plastic chairs on the sidewalk. There were only two places like this that we could find so it got really busy and the lady with the beers and chairs started setting up chairs in the street to support more customers. A few minutes later, we we were in the middle of a sentence trying to order another beer and she just took off running away from us toward the street. We saw her snatching up the chairs as fast as she possibly could and then we saw the reason why following her closely. The police were driving behind her with one officer out of the truck chasing her! There were two chairs that she wasn't able to grab and the cops just grabbed them off the street, threw them in the back of their truck and started to drive away. This was already very funny, but then this old woman started chasing the truck down the street, caught up with it, and retrieved her chairs from the back of the truck without the cops noticing. As soon as the cops drove away, everyone at the bars on both sides of the street that had been watching erupted into applause. It was HILARIOUS!
The next day we took a bus to the Mekong Delta for a 3 day tour. We tried this tea made with honey, lime, and bee nectar that was really delicious. Dustin and I held a snake and a rack with hundreds of bees on it! We got to take a boat ride through some tributaries of the Mekong and visit several islands. One place showed us how they make coconut candy and all the different uses for coconuts. That was pretty neat. That night we stayed at a homestay with about 8 other tourists. The host took us on a tour of his property and showed us the rice paddies that his family owns. They had a pet monkey in a cage that wa going crazy with boredom. We felt pretty bad for the little guy. There was also a 9 year old kid that lived there that spoke unbelievably good English for being so young and he was begging us to play board games with him from the moment we got there. I spent most of the evening playing Parcheesi (sp???) with him and some British people that we met there. We went back the next morning to meet up with our tour group and complete the tour. We met a woman at lunch who was Vietnamese but had emigrated to Australia, and her Cambodia husband. We spent the rest of the day hanging out with them and that night we paid a few dollars to some tuk tuk drivers and had them take us all around the little town we were staying in for about an hour and a half.
The next day we got up early expecting to finish the tour that we had paid for, but instead were rushed on the the boat going to Phnom Penh. It was annoying not getting what we paid for, but at the same time, we got to go to Cambodia earlier so it wasn't all bad. We met an American couple on the boat from California and hit it off with him so we decided to hang out with them for the rest of the day. When we got off the boat, Dustin and I dropped our stuff off in their hotel room (they had reservations) and split the fare for a tuk tuk with them to go to the Killing Fields. At the entrance of the Killing Fields, we got audio tour head sets to lead us through the place and explain everything to us. It was very well done. There were stories from survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime and detailed explanations of some of the more horrible sites within the Killing Fields. Along a lot of the paths we could see bits of cloth and what looked like white rock s coming up through the dirt. It was clothes from the victims and human bones that get closer to the surface as the rainy season washes away the dirt every year. There were 2 or 3 cases of bones that had been excavated and another of clothes that had surfaced. At the front of the glass case of clothes, there was a pair of children's shorts. We saw mass graves of over 400 people, one including several hundred women and over 100 infants. There was a large tree next to this grave called the child beating tree. When we first saw the sign we figured the children were stood up against the tree and beaten by the guards, which is absolutely horrible. We never would have imagined that what actually happened there was the guards would take infants and toddlers, grab them by their feet, and swing them as hard as they could to the babies' heads exploded against the side of the tree. How a human could do something so atrocious to another human is just unfathomable to both of us. We wondered why they felt the had to kill infants, what danger babies' could possibly pose. Pol Pot (leader of Khmer Rouge and man responsible for the death of 3 million out of Cambodia's 8 million people) said that "to kill the grass you must remove the roots," meaning that if you killed the family of a child, the child might grow up and seek revenge, so it's best to just kill the entire family and make sure there are no survivors. Another Pol Pot quote was "It's better to kill a million innocent people than to let one guilty person live."
After the Killing Fields we went to the genocide museum, which used to be a prison where people were tortured and forced to write and sign confessions to crimes they didn't do. This was not was well done as the exhibit at the Killing Fields, but it was still very moving and upsetting.
The next day was a little bit less sad. We spent the morning doing a walking tour of the city, since Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia. We wrapped up our walking tour with a massage done by blind people. It was funny because we were changing into the loose clothes they give us and they walked in and the first thing they said was "don't worry, we can't see you."
Right now I am on a computer at our hotel in Vietniane, Laos. It's free, but I there are only two computers and guests are asked to limit their time on the computer to 20 minutes. Since I have been on for about an hour and a half, I think it would be a good idea to take a break from the blogging for a bit. I will write tonight or tomorrow about Siem Reap, our attempt at Ratanakiri, 4000 Islands, Tha Khaek, Khong Lor Cave, and Vientiane!
Our next stop was Siem Reap to the north. We arrived there late and a tuk tuk driver took us to a hotel he recommended. We liked him, so we hired him for the next few days to take us to the Angkor Wat temples. The hotel was really good though. The room wasn't much to write home about but it had a pool and it was so hot while we were there that we would have been miserable without it. The next morning we got picked up by the tuk tuk at our hotel in the morning to go to Angkor Wat. We got a three day pass to see all the temples and started looking right away. It's funny with meeting tourists while traveling because a lot of them are on the same route as us for a while at least so we end up seeing them again. We met the same American couple at the temples the first day and hung out with them for a bit. At Angkor Wat there is a main temple with walls around it and then temples all around it for miles and miles. We walked just outside the temple walls to another temple behind it and saw a ton of monkeys! I was afraid to get too close to them but there was one sitting next to some steps we needed to walk down so I got close enough to it for Dustin to take my picture with it. These temples were amazing. All the walls had carvings of buddhas and elephants and people and a lot more stuff. The carvings were so intricate and detailed. I can't imagine how much skill and practice someone would have to have for the king of Cambodia to have hem carve his temples. The age of the temples and the excellent condition they were in was part of what was so cool about them. They were all built over 1000 years ago and of course after 1000 years there are going to be some ruins, but for the most part they looked like they had been built maybe a couple hundred years ago because they were in such good shape and all the carvings and statues were so pristine.
When we got out of the main temple we drove to another one that didn't take up much space acreage-wise, but it was really really tall. We climbed to the top as the sky was getting darker and darker with rain clouds. When we got to the top in the place where they had a sweet Buddha statue, a torrential downpour started, accompanied, of course, by thunder and lightning. The storm was directly over us. It was by far the coolest place I have ever watched a thunderstorm from. We were stuck up there in the rain (with a roof over our heads) for about 30 minutes before it lightened up enough for us to make it safely down all the steep, narrow stone stairs. It was a really fun experience though, and if there was ever a time for bad weather it was then. There were actually about 5 or 6 other people in the temple with us during the storm and we talked to a few of them. It kind of made me think of Brad's Toweatherness project, because if it weren't for the storm all of us would have walked right by each other and never said a word but because of the crazy spontaneous thunderstorm we were all forced to hang out!
The next morning, we got up at 4:30 to watch to sun rise at Angkor Wat. Unfortunately it was really cloudy so it wasn't much of a sunrise, but I'm still glad we did it. We spent the second day looking at some more temples. We saw one that was like Tomb Raider. I actually think Tomb Raider may have been partially shot there. It was awesome. There were tons of ancient trees with roots that grew on and through the walls of the temples. It was by far the coolest temple we saw. At the end of the second day before we went back to our hotel, we were supposed to go see a floating village on the biggest lake in Southeast Asia, Tonle San. However, tickets to get on a boat to go see the village were $20 per person so we decided not to see it.
The next day we decided we had seen enough temples and had enough of hundreds of Cambodia kids trying to sell us post cards 10 for one dollar and making us feel guilty for not wanting more post cards, so even though we paid for 3 days of temple-seeing, we opted out. Instead we spent the day chilling out by the pool and exploring the city of Siem Reap. During the evenings at Siem Reap, we would have tons of kids, especially when we were eating dinner, come up and try to sell us the post cards or some crappy jewelry. This one little girl, when we didn't want post cards, said "If you won't buy my post cards than will you buy me food?" We didn't realize what she said until after we had said no to her and she went away. When we figured it out, I tried to find her, looking up and down the street, but she was nowhere to be found. We felt terrible though. Later that night we ran into a 14 year old girl with a baby on her hip saying that she didn't want money, just food. I'm sure many people reading this have seen this story on facebook. But we got her some baby formula and some water and she didn't ask for anything else. We asked her if she was hungry and she said yes so we got her, her grandma, and her 4 siblings some noodles. She also asked for some shampoo so she could go to school clean so we got her that too.
The night after that some more kids with post cards said if you wont buy my post cards, buy me food. They were brothers so we let them sit with us at dinner and got them some soup. It was actually not very good to do it that way though because then kids started coming all around asking for food and we just didn't have enough money to buy food for everyone. Unfortunately, we had to tell a lot of then no.
Besides all the hungry kids though, Siem Reap was really fun. The first night we got what's called a Dr. Fish massage. We ust stuck our feet in big tanks of water and hundreds of fish started nibbling out feet to suck off the dead skin. It was so weird but so fun. At one of the Dr. Fish places we met a girl that was 22 and her 19 year od friend so after the massage we got a few more drinks and then went back to hang out with them when they got off work. There was a street called Pub Street with lit up signs that pointed to the street from all directions and almost every place had 50 cent beers. We went with them to the Temple Bar, which got really busy and everyone was dancing. Although we have gone out drinking in every city, it was the first time there was anywhere to dance. It was really a great time.
We left Siem Reap at about 5:30 in the morning to go to Ratanakiri. This bus ride to Ratanakiri was supposed to be about an 8 hour ride, giver or take an hour. After riding on the bus all day, after about 13 hours, the bus stopped and people started getting off. The driver said we were at the Laos border and the bus to Ratanakiri had already left because our bus was late, so we could either pay $12 more each and just go to Laos in the morning or backtrack in the morning and keep trying to go to Ratanakiri. And Oh by the way, you also have to find somewhere to sleep tonight. Good luck! So we ended up finding a guest house with some of the other people that were on our bus and hanging out with them for the night. Ratanakiri would have been cool because it is supposed to have some really big volcanic craters and elephants are still their main mode of transportation, but we weren't overly disappointed that we didn't get to go. The next morning we just paid the extra morning and got on a bus to go to 4000 Islands in Laos.
The island we stayed on was called Don Det and had a little more tourist action. We got there in the early afternoon and after walking around for a bit fund a nice cheap bungalow almost on the river, with a private bathroom and some hammocks. We were so hot that after lunch we immediately changed into our bathing suits and jumped into the Mekong! Later that evening we walked to the northern tip of the island where there is an actually swimming beach instead of just some shotty bamboo stairs. We swam there until sunset and got to watch a brilliant sunset over the Mekong.
The next day we did a kayaking tour! We started at 8:30 with a free breakfast provided by the booking company. After that we kayaked a couple of kms to our first stop. There, we got out of the boats, took a nice walk throgh some woods, and saw a "small" waterfall that was still quite large. We walked some more down to a beach with a ton of limestone and met our boats, which had been carried around to meet us. From there, we kayaked to a little concrete ledge that had been built, really in the middle of nowhere. The guide said the water was 50 m deep there. We didn't believe it was that deep but it was too deep for us to touch, no matter how far down we swam. We spent about 20 minutes climbing on the ledge and jumping into the water. It was so hot outside and the water was so nice and cool, it felt great! After we got back in our boats, we kayaked to Cambodia and had lunch there. The company has some kind of contract set up so they are allowed to bring tourists to the Cambodia side just for lunch with no hassle. After lunch we got back in the kayaks and stated watching for Irriwaddy dolphins. We say probably 7 or 8 of them coming up for air. It was really neat to see, definitely not something we see every day. When we had had our fill of dolphin watching, we went to see the biggest waterfall in Southeast Asia! It was really impressive seeing just the power of all that water coming down through such a small channel. It wasn't a particularly tall waterfall, but it was still amazing to see. From the waterfall, we took a bus to one more beach where we put in our boats and kayaked beach to Don Det, where we started. Overall, it took about 8 hours ad made for a crazy, action-packed day.
We booked tickets to go to Pakse the next day but we weren't feeling very well when we woke up so we decided to just cancel the tickets and stay at Don Det for another day. The third day there we rented innertubes for a dollar each and put them in at the northern tip of the island. From there, we lazily drifted south to where our bungalow was and got out. We always thought of the Mekong as so powerful, and in places it is, but the water was so slow that it took us about 45 minutes just to go about 500 m down the river.
When we were done with the tubing, we got out and met a really nice French couple that was staying in the room next to us. We gave them our tubes since we had them for 24 hours and didn't plan on using them anymore. That night we ate dinner and had a few drinks with them and a Finnish couple that we met at the restaurant connected to our bungalow.
Don Det was really nice and relaxing, but the people were so different from Cambodian people. Cambodians were always smiling, always happy to see us and eager for our business. The Lao people at Don Det wouldn't even hardly crack a smile at us when we sat down at their restaurants. Lao is a very laid back country, but it times, it felt more to us like a lack of ambition. It was funny, though, on the island, there were about 10 white people that had moved there with huge long dreadlocks that owned restaurants or bungalows that just smoked weed all day.
My blogging time is running short but I just have one more anecdote from Don Det. We had gone to explore the island a little bit and we were walking back to our hotel when this lad stopped us and told us we couldn't walk any farther. We immediately saw why. A bunch of guys were trying to chop down an enormous tree just down the path from us. Well, they chopped it down, but it didn't go where they thought it was going to. Instead, the thickest part of the trunk landed on a little shack and just blew it to smitherines. We hope it wasn't important to anybody, but it was pretty funny to watch.
Also, I got a shit that says "Been There Don Det"
We caught a boat at 11 am from Don Det to take us to the mainland to get a bus to Tha Khaek. The first bus we got on was without air conditioning and completely packed. Some people that had tickets for that bus had to take another bus because ours was full. We were somewhat lucky though, because we were the last people on the bus that got seats. However, those seats were on the very back of the bus and we were crammed between the window, which wasn't so bad because it opened, and a sweaty shirtless guy drinking a beer, which wasn't so good because he smelled. we rode this bus for a couple hours in extreme discomfort when finally we pulled into a bus station. A guy got on the bus and yelled Tha Khaek and got off again, so we just assumed that was the place to switch busses. This bus we were already on had run out of room for luggage on the bottom, so the isle of the bus was packed with peoples' bags and stuff. We had an interesting time trying to climb over everything all the way from the back of the bus. One guy actually threw his stuff out the window and then climbed out the window, only to find out it wasn't actually his stop or his place to change busses so he had to get back on. How embarrassing! The next bus wasn't as bad though. It wasn't full so we could spread out a bit and the air conditioning worked so we weren't so unbearably hot. It was very funny though because the bus kept stopping about once an hour and people with food would get on to sell us stuff. We had a sliced up mango with chili salt for a snack and our dinner was chicken livers on a stick and a whole chicken (neck and everything), also on a stick. For a pee break, we stopped in the middle of empty roads and the men went to the left of the bus and the women went to the right and everyone just peed right there in the grass off the side of the road. Also, there was a lady with a huge cooler of beer and this kid (about 15 years old) that she was traveling with had a water bottle with the top cut off and he kept filling it with beer and giving one glass to the guy sitting across the isle from us and one glass to Dustin. Neither of them asked for it but they both got about 8 "glasses" or beer. We were expecting the kid to ask us for money for the beer when we got off but he never did. It was strange. Overall, though, the trip was not too bad.
We got to Tha Khaek at about 10 pm and had a really hard time finding a hotel. Everything shuts down so early, especially in small towns, so just nothing was open. We finally found a place with a restaurant attached so we stayed there. Eating dinner, I got 12 fresh mosquito bites so that was fun. The room was... interesting, to say the least. The bed felt like just a piece of plywood with a blanket over it. The toilet seat was not attached to the toilet. In fact when we got there it was lying on the ground next to the toilet. The pipes of the sink weren't connected so when water went down the sink drain, it drained directly onto to floor. But really we didn't need anything fancy, just a place to crash for the night. We got there so late that any place we would have gone to book our bus ticket for the next day was closed so we just went to bed and hoped for the best in the morning.
When we got up the next day we had a hard time finding anywhere that was serving food. It took about 30 minutes to find a place at all. The hotel restaurant was closed. There was one place serving a bunch of people but they said we weren't allowed in and then finally, after walking and walking and walking, we found a place that would make us a simple bowl of noodle soup.
We went to a tourist information place to try to figure out how to get to Khong Lor to see a cave we really wanted to see. The guy at the tourist office told us it would be 1 million kip (about $125) each to get there. So we left that place thinking we were going to have to spend a lot of money to get where we wanted to go. We decided to go to the bus station and see what prices were like there. We got a tuk tuk and told him we wanted the bus station. He asked us where we were going and when we told him he said "Oh Oh Ok!" and started to drive. A couple km into the drive, this tuk tuk started rattling and shaking like nothing I've ever seen. We had to go up a very slight incline and this thing honestly felt like the wheels were going to fall off and the whole thing was going to fall apart. However, where he took s was much closer than where we were expecting to go. We pulled into a parking lot with a bunch of trucks. These trucks all had roofs over the beds of them and in the beds were two long benches on either side. He looked at us, smiled, pointed at these trucks, and said "Khong Lor!" At first we were a little bit alarmed until he told us that it would only cost 100,000 kip each to go on one of these. Obviously we much preferred paying this price (about $12) to paying a million kip. The Songtheiu (those trucks) ride was about 4 hours on 3 different trucks. surprisingly, it wasn't that bad, especially considering that our first leg of the trip had 19 people on the truck with all their stuff. Most of them had huge bags of rice or other goods. One lady actually brought live chickens on the truck with her (although they were in really rough shape and I'm not sure how much longer they were gonna be "live" for).
Our third leg of our trip was much different. The back of the truck was filled with bags of concrete mix so Dustin and I hopped in the cab. We were the only two passengers. When we got the Khong Lor, we came to a tiny little village with a bunch or huts elevated on stilts to keep them safe during the rainy season. We told the driver we wanted to stay at a homestay. He took us to a random (or so we thought) house and told us to put our bags inside, that the lady that lived there would be back in an hour. We put our bags in and hoped that the lady wouldn't be freaked out when she saw our stuff in her house. When she finally got home she greeted us with a friendly Sabadii (hello). Unfortunately, there was quite a huge conversation barrier there. It was 5 then and she say "Dinner 7". we asked what we should do until then. She gave us a bottle of wine and pointed to the road and said "walking walking dinner 7". We took that to mean go for a walk until dinner. We did. When we got back, the oldest lady I have ever seen was hunched over a fire making us some dinner. We had chicken, rice, and pumpkin soup! It was fantastic. After dinner, our host told us to grab our flash lights and follow her. She led us out into some dried up rice paddies and kept shining her light at the ground. We had no idea what we were looking for until finally, we found a cricket! She picked it up and then we found two more, one for Dustin and I to catch each. We carried them back to the house in our hands and put them in a water bottle. When we got back to her house, she said "Lao-Lao!" and then ran to get a water bottle full of some mysterious clear liquid. She got a glass, put a little of this liquid in, and drank it like a shot. Then she filled the glass up a little more and handed it to me. It was a rice wine, like some kind of liquor. It was pretty strong. After I drank, she filled the glass up even more and gave it to Dustin to drink. She kept doing this until the Lao-Lao was gone. While we were drinking, a kid, we're assuming her nephew, came in with a big closed basked filled with over 100 crickets. Our host took the crickets we had caught, put them in the basket with their friends, and put the basket in the fridge. More about that later. Also while we were drinking, we were trying to figure out how we were going to get out of Khong Lor the following day because besides the cave, there is nothing to do there. She was trying to explain it to us and kept saying the same thing over and over again: "tomollo walking walking, take boat and walking walking and eat and slee tomollo take ba (this means bus, we figured out) seven" What she meant was tomorrow walk to the cave, take the boat, come back here, walk around until dinner, sleep here again, and then take a bus a 7 the next morning. This took a long time to figure out though! Fortunately, there were about 9 other tourists staying at the guesthouse downthe street that wanted to leave at the same time we did so we got together with them and took another songtheiu to the junction of the only two highways in Laos. From there we took a bus about 5 hours to Vientiane!
We had met a German guy at Khong Lor that was also going to Vientiane and he stuck with us for the rest of the day. When we got to the capital, we found a hotel. We're staying in a really really nice place here for $25 per night. We don't do this all the time but after the intensive traveling that we've done for the last few days, we really needed this. So after we took showers (amazing water pressure and when we turn the nob the the left, the water actually gets HOTTER!!) and felt a little refreshed we met up with the German guy, Daniel for dinner. We had quite the feast, sharing seaweed soup, a whole grilled fish, vegetables with curry, fried mushrooms, and sticky rice. Also at dinner we were sitting next to a couple of people and about a half an hour into the meal they asked us where we were from because they noticed our accents. They were not only Americans, but they were also from Western and upstate New York! The lady was born in Rochester and moved to the finger lakes region and the guy was from Albany. We really didn't expect to meet too many Americans period, let alone anyone form the same area of NY State as me!
Today we slept in until about 9. When we got up and going we rented some bicycles (they were in rough shape) and took the Lonely Planet bike tour of the city. Vientiane is the least busy capital ever. I'll take Lonely Planet's word to describe it and call it underwhelming. But overall, it was a nice day to chill, see some sights and finally get caugt up on this gosh-darn blog!
Now, I am about to get kicked off the computer unless I buy more time, which I don't want to do. Thanks for reading! to contact us use facebook or email d.lowry11@gmail.com or mm1293@ship.edu
Adios amigos!!
We got to Tha Khaek at about 10 pm and had a really hard time finding a hotel. Everything shuts down so early, especially in small towns, so just nothing was open. We finally found a place with a restaurant attached so we stayed there. Eating dinner, I got 12 fresh mosquito bites so that was fun. The room was... interesting, to say the least. The bed felt like just a piece of plywood with a blanket over it. The toilet seat was not attached to the toilet. In fact when we got there it was lying on the ground next to the toilet. The pipes of the sink weren't connected so when water went down the sink drain, it drained directly onto to floor. But really we didn't need anything fancy, just a place to crash for the night. We got there so late that any place we would have gone to book our bus ticket for the next day was closed so we just went to bed and hoped for the best in the morning.
When we got up the next day we had a hard time finding anywhere that was serving food. It took about 30 minutes to find a place at all. The hotel restaurant was closed. There was one place serving a bunch of people but they said we weren't allowed in and then finally, after walking and walking and walking, we found a place that would make us a simple bowl of noodle soup.
We went to a tourist information place to try to figure out how to get to Khong Lor to see a cave we really wanted to see. The guy at the tourist office told us it would be 1 million kip (about $125) each to get there. So we left that place thinking we were going to have to spend a lot of money to get where we wanted to go. We decided to go to the bus station and see what prices were like there. We got a tuk tuk and told him we wanted the bus station. He asked us where we were going and when we told him he said "Oh Oh Ok!" and started to drive. A couple km into the drive, this tuk tuk started rattling and shaking like nothing I've ever seen. We had to go up a very slight incline and this thing honestly felt like the wheels were going to fall off and the whole thing was going to fall apart. However, where he took s was much closer than where we were expecting to go. We pulled into a parking lot with a bunch of trucks. These trucks all had roofs over the beds of them and in the beds were two long benches on either side. He looked at us, smiled, pointed at these trucks, and said "Khong Lor!" At first we were a little bit alarmed until he told us that it would only cost 100,000 kip each to go on one of these. Obviously we much preferred paying this price (about $12) to paying a million kip. The Songtheiu (those trucks) ride was about 4 hours on 3 different trucks. surprisingly, it wasn't that bad, especially considering that our first leg of the trip had 19 people on the truck with all their stuff. Most of them had huge bags of rice or other goods. One lady actually brought live chickens on the truck with her (although they were in really rough shape and I'm not sure how much longer they were gonna be "live" for).
Our third leg of our trip was much different. The back of the truck was filled with bags of concrete mix so Dustin and I hopped in the cab. We were the only two passengers. When we got the Khong Lor, we came to a tiny little village with a bunch or huts elevated on stilts to keep them safe during the rainy season. We told the driver we wanted to stay at a homestay. He took us to a random (or so we thought) house and told us to put our bags inside, that the lady that lived there would be back in an hour. We put our bags in and hoped that the lady wouldn't be freaked out when she saw our stuff in her house. When she finally got home she greeted us with a friendly Sabadii (hello). Unfortunately, there was quite a huge conversation barrier there. It was 5 then and she say "Dinner 7". we asked what we should do until then. She gave us a bottle of wine and pointed to the road and said "walking walking dinner 7". We took that to mean go for a walk until dinner. We did. When we got back, the oldest lady I have ever seen was hunched over a fire making us some dinner. We had chicken, rice, and pumpkin soup! It was fantastic. After dinner, our host told us to grab our flash lights and follow her. She led us out into some dried up rice paddies and kept shining her light at the ground. We had no idea what we were looking for until finally, we found a cricket! She picked it up and then we found two more, one for Dustin and I to catch each. We carried them back to the house in our hands and put them in a water bottle. When we got back to her house, she said "Lao-Lao!" and then ran to get a water bottle full of some mysterious clear liquid. She got a glass, put a little of this liquid in, and drank it like a shot. Then she filled the glass up a little more and handed it to me. It was a rice wine, like some kind of liquor. It was pretty strong. After I drank, she filled the glass up even more and gave it to Dustin to drink. She kept doing this until the Lao-Lao was gone. While we were drinking, a kid, we're assuming her nephew, came in with a big closed basked filled with over 100 crickets. Our host took the crickets we had caught, put them in the basket with their friends, and put the basket in the fridge. More about that later. Also while we were drinking, we were trying to figure out how we were going to get out of Khong Lor the following day because besides the cave, there is nothing to do there. She was trying to explain it to us and kept saying the same thing over and over again: "tomollo walking walking, take boat and walking walking and eat and slee tomollo take ba (this means bus, we figured out) seven" What she meant was tomorrow walk to the cave, take the boat, come back here, walk around until dinner, sleep here again, and then take a bus a 7 the next morning. This took a long time to figure out though! Fortunately, there were about 9 other tourists staying at the guesthouse downthe street that wanted to leave at the same time we did so we got together with them and took another songtheiu to the junction of the only two highways in Laos. From there we took a bus about 5 hours to Vientiane!
We had met a German guy at Khong Lor that was also going to Vientiane and he stuck with us for the rest of the day. When we got to the capital, we found a hotel. We're staying in a really really nice place here for $25 per night. We don't do this all the time but after the intensive traveling that we've done for the last few days, we really needed this. So after we took showers (amazing water pressure and when we turn the nob the the left, the water actually gets HOTTER!!) and felt a little refreshed we met up with the German guy, Daniel for dinner. We had quite the feast, sharing seaweed soup, a whole grilled fish, vegetables with curry, fried mushrooms, and sticky rice. Also at dinner we were sitting next to a couple of people and about a half an hour into the meal they asked us where we were from because they noticed our accents. They were not only Americans, but they were also from Western and upstate New York! The lady was born in Rochester and moved to the finger lakes region and the guy was from Albany. We really didn't expect to meet too many Americans period, let alone anyone form the same area of NY State as me!
Today we slept in until about 9. When we got up and going we rented some bicycles (they were in rough shape) and took the Lonely Planet bike tour of the city. Vientiane is the least busy capital ever. I'll take Lonely Planet's word to describe it and call it underwhelming. But overall, it was a nice day to chill, see some sights and finally get caugt up on this gosh-darn blog!
Now, I am about to get kicked off the computer unless I buy more time, which I don't want to do. Thanks for reading! to contact us use facebook or email d.lowry11@gmail.com or mm1293@ship.edu
Adios amigos!!
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